dimensions and growth of this officialdom may be learned from the following figures, which are taken from Olshevsky’s book Bureaucracy. In Austria, in the year 1874, they numbered in round figures 27,000; in 1891, they numbered 36,000; in 1900, they numbered 169,000. In France, the number of officials in the year 1891 was 1,500,000, this being approximately 4 per cent. of the population. In Britain, in the same year, there were about 1,000,000 officials [civil servants], this being approximately 2.6 per cent. of the population. In the United States, in the year 1890, there were 750,000 officials. Olshevsky, himself a bourgeois, tells us that the bureaucracy is characterised by the following traits: routinism, redtapism, overbearing manners, pettiness. In all capitalist countries, administrative work is actually in the hands of an officialdom of this character. We must repeat that the highest officials are mainly recruited from the wealthier bourgeoisie, and from the circles of the nobility and the great landowners. This is inevitable in capitalist society, where the bourgeoisie rules.
In the Soviet Republic, the masses do not merely elect (electing, not venal lawyers, but their own folk), but they participate in the work of administration, for the soviets and the other organisations of the working masses are actually engaged in administrative work.
As far as the soviets are concerned, the elections are of such a character as will retain close contact between these bodies and the masses. For the elections to the soviets are not territorial in the residential sense, but are based upon the places where people work (factories, workshops, etc.); they are based, as the phrase runs, upon “productive units.” Those who are united in their working life elect from among their number, as their delegates, the persons in whom they have the greatest confidence.
Thus the Soviet Power realises an enormously higher form, a far more genuinely popular form, of democracy — proletarian democracy.