After rapidly accelerating phases it settled into the situation which has endured from the early part of 1918 to the present day. In the towns the freely-elected Parliament was repudiated and a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was declared. The workshops were in future to be run by Committees, in the Russian "Soviets," and similar organizations were to control agriculture in the villages, where the peasants had already seized the land and were streaming back from the dissolved armies to their homes.
In practice, of course, what was set up was no proletarian Government, still less anything so impossible and contradictory in terms as a "dictatorship" of proletarians. The thing was called "The Republic of the Workmen and Peasants." It was, in fact, nothing of the sort. It was the pure despotism of a clique, the leaders of which had been specially launched upon Russia under German direction in order to break down any chance of a revival of Russian military power, and all those leaders, without exception, were Jews, or held by the Jews through their domestic relations, and all that followed was done directly under the orders of Jews, the most prominent of whom