On the day following, July 26th, _Izvestia_ published an article to the effect that “after minute questionings and full inquiry” a special commission of inquiry appointed to investigate the Jaroslav insurrection had listed three hundred and fifty persons as having “taken an active part in the insurrection and had relations with the Czechoslovaks,” and that the commissioners had ordered the whole three hundred and fifty to be shot.
Throughout the summer the struggle went on, and in the _Severnaya Communa_, September 10, 1918, the following despatch from Jaroslav was published:
JAROSLAV, _9th September_.--In the whole of the Jaroslav government a strict registration of the bourgeoisie and its partizans has been organized. Manifestly anti-Soviet elements are being shot; suspected persons are interned in concentration camps; non-working sections of the population are subjected to forced labor.
Here is further evidence, from official Bolshevist sources, that when the Soviet elections went against them the Bolshevist Government simply dissolved the offending Soviets. Here are two despatches from _Izvestia_, from the issues of July 28 and August 3, 1918, respectively:
KAZAN, _July 26th_.--_As the important offices in the Soviet were occupied by Socialists-Revolutionists of the Left, the Extraordinary Commission has dissolved the Provisional Soviet. The governmental power is now represented by a Revolutionary Committee._
KAZAN, _August 1st_.--The state of mind of the workmen is revolutionary. _If the Mensheviki dare to carry on their propaganda death menaces them._
By way of confirmation we have the following, from _Pravda_, August 6, 1918:
KAZAN, _August 4th_.--The Provisional Congress of the Soviets of the Peasants has been dissolved because of the absence from it of poor peasants and _because its state of mind is obviously counter-revolutionary_.
Whenever a city Soviet was thus suppressed a military revolutionary committee, designated by the Bolsheviki, was set up in its place. To these committees the most arbitrary powers were given. Generally composed of young soldiers from distant parts, over whom there was practically no restraint, these committees frequently indulged in frightful acts of violence and spoliation. Not infrequently the Central Government, after disbanding a local Soviet, would send from places hundreds of miles away, under military protection, members of the Communist Party, who were designated as the executive committee of the Soviet for that locality. There was not even a pretense that they had been elected by anybody. Thus it was in Tumen: Protected by a convoy of eight hundred Red Guards, who remained there to enforce their authority, a group of members of the Communist Party arrived from Ekaterinburg and announced that they were the executive committee of the Soviet of Tumen where, in fact, no Soviet existed. This was not at all an unusual occurrence.