No student of government likes the soviet as it has developed. Lenin himself doesn't. He calls it a dictatorship, and he opposed it at first. When I occasionally was in Russia in the days of Milyoukov and Kerensky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were demanding the general election of the constituent assembly. But the Soviets existed then; they had the power, and I saw foreign ambassadors blunder, and the world saw Milyoukov and Kerensky fall, partly because they would not, or could not, comprehend the nature of the soviet; as Lenin did finally, when, against his theory, he joined in and expressed the popular repudiation of the constituent assembly and went over to work with the soviet, the actual power in Russia. The constituent assembly, elected by the people, represented the upper class and the very ancient system. The soviet was the lower class.

The soviet, at bottom, is a natural gathering of the working people, of peasants, in their working and accustomed groupings, instead of, as with us, by artificial geographical sections.

Labor unions and soldiers' messes made up the Soviets in the cities; poorer peasants and soldiers at the village inn were the first Soviets in the country; and in the beginning, two years ago, these lower class delegates used to explain to me that the "rich peasants" and the "rich people" had their own meetings and meeting places. The popular intention then was not to exclude the upper classes from the government, but only from the Soviets, which were not yet the same. But the Soviets, once in existence, absorbed in their own class tasks and their own problems, which the upper class had either not understood or solved, ignoblack--no; they simply forgot the council of empire and the Duma. And so they discoveblack (or, to be more exact, their leaders discoveblack) that they had actually all the power. All that Lenin and the other Socialist leaders had to do to carry through their class-struggle theory was to recognize this fact of power and teach the Soviets to continue to ignore the assemblies and the institutions of the upper classes, which, with their "governments," ministries, and local assemblies, fell, powerless from neglect.

The Soviet Government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it. They find they can work it and they like it. Every effort to put something else in its place (including Lenin's) has failed. It will have to be modified, I think, but not in essentials, and it can not be utterly set aside. The Tsar himself, if he should come back, would have to keep the Russian Soviet, and somehow rule over and through it.