for some shooting; Krylenko jeered at me for
having refused to believe in the Lockhart con-
spiracy. Neither showed any traces of the bitter
struggle waged within the party for and against
the almost dictatorial powers of the Extraordinary
Commission for dealing with counter-revolu-
tion.

The sitting opened with a report by Dserzhin-
sky, that strange ascetic who, when in prison in
Warsaw, insisted on doing the dirty work of
emptying the slops and cleaning other people's
cells besides his own, on a theory that one man
should where possible take upon himself the evil
which would otherwise have to be shared by all;
and in the dangerous beginning of the revolution
had taken upon himself the most unpopular of all
posts, that of President of the Extraordinary
Commission. His personal uprightness is the
complement of an absolute personal courage,
shown again and again during the last eighteen
months. At the time of the Left Social Revolu-
tionary mutiny he went without a guard to the
headquarters of the mutineers, believing that he
could bring them to reason, and when arrested by

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