The number of workers in each unit (factory, professional group, or village) determines the number of delegates to be elected. But a deliberate disparity exists between urban workers and peasants. The former were the more reliable fighting ele ment in the class struggle. One urban elector has, in the higher soviets, five times the voting power of each inhabitant of a village. Actually the advantage is as three to one.
Only the soviets at the base of the system, those of the town and village, are directly elected. Village soviets are grouped to elect the soviet of the volost (parish), while the volost soviets elect that of the uyezd (county). The important unit is, as in the old days, the Gubernia (Government), and its soviet, or congress of soviets, is chosen by the soviets of the towns and volosts in its area. The sovereign body in each of the republics which form the Soviet Union, is a Congress of Soviets, chosen by the soviets of the "Governments" and larger cities. The Union Congress in the same way represents the congresses of the component republics. The national and federal congresses are big,. unwieldy bodies (in the case of the Union including 1,500 members) which meet only once a year for about ten days. The real legislative body is a central executive committee, which meets at least three times a year. The chief power, that is to say, resides in a body chosen indirectly at six removes from the electorate. The will of the proletariat passes through a highly elaborate sieve.
After I I years, the revolution is in process, perpetually on the alert against its foes at home and abroad; there is no relaxa tion of the dictatorship first proclaimed in Nov. 1917. For two or three years after that date certain Socialist parties, other than the ruling Communist Party, were tolerated (the Left Revolu tionary Socialists and the Mensheviki or Minority Social Demo crats), but even these have now ceased to exist as legal groups. The Communist Party is to-day, and for long has been, the only organized political group. It alone enjoys the right of meeting; it alone may use the printing press, the wireless and the cinema ; it alone may present its lists of candidates at elections. Even within this party, though informal groups exist and differences of opinion are freely debated at conferences and in the press, any organization of sectional tendencies is regarded as disloyal.
The case only becomes worse when one takes into account the tight discipline of this party, a survival from the days when it lived underground as a secret organization. It could survive only by cultivating the austerer virtues, by claiming from its adherents a devotion which over-rode all ties of business or family, and by imposing monastic vows of poverty and obedience. Even to-day no member may draw more than a fixed maximum income, which in Moscow is limited to 225 roubles per month (about $112 or about £25). Entry to this party is hedged by rigid tests of char acter and orthodoxy; the conduct of the novice is scrutinized dur ing a period of probation; expulsions, and even wholesale purges, on account of lack of zeal or heretical opinions, occur frequently. This party has always possessed, and still nominally possesses, the democratic organization usual in all Socialist parties. It elects its officers and governing committees, and decides its policy at rep resentative conferences. But, especially since the death of Lenin, its central machine, under the control of its secretary, Stalin, has attained an overgrown authority; it may even seek to nom inate the officials of local branches, and to control the voting at conferences by the admission and expulsion of members.
The institution of the dictatorship means, primarily, that all important decisions of policy are made by the Communist Party, and especially by its standing political committee ("Politburo"). The soviets, even those at the apex of the system, do little more than register the previous decisions of the governing party. There may be a hot and prolonged debate within the party over each new departure of policy, accompanied by frank polemics in the press. But when once the final vote is taken at a party congress, it becomes binding upon every member of the party. A defeated minority must sit silent, when the same topic comes before a soviet. This system eliminates from the soviet apparatus any possibility of an organized opposition. There are, indeed, in every soviet a number of non-party deputies, who even form the majority in the village soviets, and about half the membership of the volost and uyezd soviets. But they possess no organization, and do not challenge the established principles of the Communist regime.