It is one of the surprising things in contemporary political science that at a time when what is known as “the pragmatic revolt in politics” is an outstanding phenomenon, and when lavish attention is being bestowed upon the histrionic adventures of Italy into the fields of political realism, the experiments of the Spanish Directory tend to be passed over without serious investigation. Spain has been treated as though her experiment were only a futile or less meaningful, slavish imitation of the work of Il Duce, as though the Iberian peninsula were witnessing only in parvo the monumental experiments of Fascism. This easy dismissal of the work of the Directory in Spain may be comforting in its simplicity, but it is a distinct over-simplification and an attempt to argue from analogy where the basic and essential elements of a similar situation are lacking. Merely the fact of dictatorship, merely the supposed association of an armed partisan force with the dictator in power, merely the fact of the abrogation of public liberties in each instance have been taken to constitute the essential elements of comparison and identification. The less dramatic character of the events in Spain has tended to obscure the far-reaching differences between the régimes centering in Rome and Madrid.

The system of soviet federation established by the constitution of 1923 represents a peculiar inversion of the federative idea. The framers of this instrument of government were faced with the solution of a problem of a complex and conflicting nature. The creators of the new Russian government, the leaders of the Communist party, desired to secure, on the one hand, the establishment of the rule of the proletariat; they hoped to build up a government that should develop into “a complete unity of workingmen of various nations” in “one centralized democratic republic.” On the other hand, the former Russian Empire had been made up of numerous nationalities. These distinct nationalities remained under the new Soviet régime and were insistent in their claims to self-government. The creators of the Soviet constitution were, therefore, confronted with the reconciliation of the principle of the rule of the proletariat with the principle of the freedom and self-determination of nationalities. In terms of governmental structure, they attempted to fit together these two incompatible political ideas: the practice of absolutism with the idea of federalism. The bolshevist oligarchs, rabid adepts of centralization, were obliged to acknowledge the rights of the nationalities to a certain amount of independence within the soviet state. The resulting system of soviet federation was written into the constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which was approved by the Central Executive Committee of the Union on July 3, 1923, and which was ratified by the Second Congress of Soviets in January of the next year.