expanding organisation. "Any Socialist Soviet Republic in the world can enter the U.S.S.R.," says the professional exponent of Bolshevism; "and not only those already existent, but those capable of springing into existence."

The name of Russia has been omitted from the official style of the Marxian State, simply for convenience' sake. "Should all the countries in the world join the alliance it would not be necessary to change the present name."

The republics at present included in the U.S.S.R. number twenty, of which may be mentioned: Russia, Little Russia, White Russia, Moldavia, Karelia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, TransCaucasia, Bokhara (Uzbek), Armenia, Crimea, Turkestan, Eastern Siberia. Besides these, various nomadic tribes, such as the Kirghiz and the Bashkirs, have been nominally organised as republic, and various mountain races, such as the Ossetines and the Abkhastsi, are supposed to enjoy federal autonomy. These are represented in an All-Russian Soviet at Moscow, the president of which at present is M. Rikof, from the republic of Little Russia.

The local authority of the various Soviet republics is strictly subordinate to the universal Soviet in Moscow. Naturally enough in an

international State, nationalist tendencies are not encouraged in Little Russia, Georgia, and the rest, unless they serve higher purposes. At present Moldavian nationalism is being encouraged in order to foment trouble in Rumanian Bessarabia, where a large percentage of the population is Moldavian. Once, however, Bessarabia were wrested from King Karl, a stopper would be put on Moldavian excitement, and the new enlarged republic would be forced into the colourless obedience to the powers in the Kremlin which characterises the Ukraine and White Russia. Similarly Karelia is encouraged to be Karelian largely with a view to infecting the large Karelian population in North-eastern Finland.

But it is not true to say that the U.S.S.R. Government in Moscow is the ultimate authority in Russia. It, in its turn, is dominated by another organisation known commonly as the R.K.P., the Russian Communist Party, the president of which is Zinovief and the secretary Stalin. As a Russian writer puts it very effectively:

"There is the Ts.I.K. with its president Kalinin; there is the Sovnarkom and its president Rikof; besides Comrades Kamenef and Zurinja there are the military and naval commissariats with Trotsky, president of the revolutionary war

council;1 there is the Cheka, now re-named the Chief Political Bureau (G.P.U.), with the heedful Djerzhinski and Unslicht; but above all there is the general secretary of the Russian Communist Party (R.K.P.)—the president of its political bureau, Stalin, dictating to all his will in the name of the party, suffocating all Russia, not even from the Kremlin, but by telephone call from the Varvarka Street from the premises of the Ts.K. party."

We have therefore a form of political Catholicism of which there have been as yet only two Popes, namely, Karl Marx and Lenin. The Cheka or G.P.U. is their Holy Inquisition, and the Communist Party takes the position of a conclave or synod dictating to all administrators and governors the esoteric policy of universal atheism and proletarian revenge. The Com

munist emissaries to various lands remind one of the activity of the early Jesuits, the system of Jesuitry applied to the creed of atheism.

The dead are being used for the creation of a new myth. Hence the "martyrs' funerals " accorded Vorovsky and other Communists who have been killed. The sepulture of Lenin in the Red Square at Moscow is the new " sepulchre

1 Written before Trotsky's dismissal.

for which they hope to obtain the veneration of ante-Christian crusaders and pilgrims. The Lenin shrines in the factories and "Lenin corners in workmen's dwellings are indications of the new significance for Lenin which Communists are seeking.

II

THE SCHISM

WHEN Lenin died there were some Bolsheviks who hoped that a compromise might be effected. Trotsky had been banished to the Caucasus as "not a good Communist "; he was recalled. A nonentity in the person of Rikof was made president of the Sovnarkom. This seemed to make it possible for Trotsky, Zinovief, and Kamenef to rule together without unbearable rivalry. Trotsky, however, is an aloof personality, a man who makes few friends. He has an almost unbearable reserve. At the same time he has an oriental love of show and power. He likes to live in state, to be driven in an old automobile of the Tsar with Cheka guards on the step. He inhabits Yusupof's palace for preference. He is most unlike the clothcap Stalin, or that garrulous son of the Ghetto, the noisy Zinovief.

Trotsky, moreover, has talent. He is at least