ABSTRACT
The Cheka-Ogpu is a disastrous legacy to the bolsheviks from tsarism. The tsarist Ohrana had the same sort of powers as the Cheka, and worked on similar lines. This fact should prevent Europeans from taking, as they are apt to do, a rosy view of the conditions that prevailed in Old Russia. Police terror, a network of espionage, a ferreting into the opinions of private persons, and secret jurisdiction are characteristic both of barbarism and of weakness in governments. The system is one of mass terror, and whatever has been given that name in other parts of the world is a trifle in comparison. Penal servitude, as ordinarily understood, prevails widely in the Soviet State. In the prisons for persons on remand and undergoing preliminary examination the conditions are likewise extremely unsatisfactory, in large measure because these places are so overcrowded. Very little that is good can be said of civil legal procedure in Soviet Russia.
