Russia under the Old regime

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passing year the mechanism of repression was perfected until under Stalin's dictatorship it attained a level of wanton destructiveness never before experienced in human history.

Lenin and his fellow-revolutionaries who so quickly on taking power began the reconstruction of the police state certainly regarded these moves as emergency measures, exactly as in its day did the imperial government. The Cheka and the 'Revolutionary Tribunals', the mass executions, forced labour camps, exile, censorship and all the other repressive measures which they instituted were conceived by them as necessary to uproot what was still left of the old regime. This done, they were to be dissolved. But the same fate befell communist 'temporary' repressive measures as their predecessors: regularly renewed, the indiscriminate application of their violence came to overshadow the order they were meant to protect. Had they read more history and fewer polemical tracts the Bolshevik leaders might have been able to foresee this outcome. For the very idea that politics can be isolated from the vicissitudes of life and monopolized by one group or one ideology is under conditions of modern life unenforceable. Any government that persists in this notion must give ever wider berth to its police apparatus and eventually fall victim to it.