Who is Leon Trotsky and what struggle is symbolized by his name ?

Who is Leon Trotsky and what struggle is symbolized by his name ?

Rosa Luxemburg on the October Revolution :

"The most important problem of socialism is precisely the burning question of the moment : [...] the proletariat’s capacity for action, the fighting spirit of the masses, the will to realize socialism. In this respect, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first to set an example to the world proletariat ; they are so far the only ones who can cry out, ’I dared !’ This is what is essential, what is lasting in the policy of the Bolsheviks."

L. Trotsky - Constantinople October 17, 1929 :

"We repent of nothing and we renounce nothing. We live by the ideas and the spirit that animated us during the days of October 1917. Through temporary difficulties, we can see ahead. However marked the meanders of the river, the river flows towards the ocean."

André Breton

in "For the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution" :

"And that same gaze, that of Leon Trotsky, which I find fixed on me during our daily meetings twenty years ago in Mexico, alone would be enough to enjoin me ever since to maintain complete fidelity to a cause, the most sacred of all, that of the emancipation of man, and this beyond the vicissitudes that it may know and, as far as he was concerned, the worst human denials and disappointments. Such a gaze and the light that rises from it, nothing will succeed in extinguishing it, any more than Thermidor could alter the features of Saint-Just. May it be what scrutinizes us and sustains us this evening, in a perspective where the October Revolution smoulders within us the same inflexible ardour as the Spanish Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution and the struggle of the Algerian people for its liberation."

Trotsky , in "Their Morality and Ours" :

"To participate in the historical process with eyes wide open, with a tense will, is the satisfaction par excellence that can be given to a thinking being..."

Victor Serge in “From Lenin to Stalin” (1936) :

"(…) When an idea is in the air of an era, that is to say when the general conditions are in place for it to be born and live, it happens that it is conceived at the same time by several people. The truth of a time thus comes at its time. This is true of science and politics, which is also, in certain respects, both a science and an art. Darwin and Wallace discovered natural selection almost simultaneously, the image of which the young, booming capitalist society also offered them. Joule and Meyer discovered almost simultaneously the same law of the conservation of energy. Marx and Engels arrived together at the same conclusions on the foundations of modern society and, in twenty-five years of admirable intellectual collaboration, founded scientific socialism. The Russian Revolution would achieve in action—but an action nourished by very firm thought—an equally astonishing collaboration : that of Lenin and Trotsky.

Expelled from France in 1917, by an order signed by M. Malvy – Jules Guesde being a minister – following a provocation, expelled from Spain as undesirable, Trotsky went to New York, resumed his militant activity there, then went to Canada to return to Russia. Interned in a concentration camp, with his wife and children, he finally regained his freedom thanks to the demands of the Petrograd Soviet. He arrived in the capital on May 5 and his first speech, upon disembarking, was to advocate the seizure of power. His personality as an orator, journalist and organizer sometimes seems to prevail, from this moment on, over that of Lenin, which is less prominent at first glance. (…) But the important thing is that Trotsky had waited for, foreseen, and desired the hour that struck on the clock all his life. In the Social Democratic Party, he is the theoretician of permanent revolution, which means a revolution that cannot and will not die out before having completed its work, and which can therefore only be conceived as international.

Lenin, however, has an incontestable superiority over him : his party, formed in fourteen years of struggle and labor, since 1903. We saw this party change its state of mind and program upon Lenin’s arrival in Russia : one could say that it came to Trotsky’s conceptions ; and Trotsky and his friends entered it. The documents of the time will no longer separate, for years, the names of these two men, who will have, in short, only one thought and one action, translating the thought and action of millions of men. They are the two heads of the revolution. On them is concentrated all the popularity, on them is directed all the hatred. (…) They are not, however, leaders in the sense that this word has revealed since there has been the Duce, the Ghazi, the Führer and the Brilliant Leader in the USSR. Their popularity is neither manufactured nor imposed ; it imposed itself, they owe it to the trust they deserve. Their actions and their words are highly debated. They go further. They are scolded. (…) The Political Bureau and the Central Committee have a collective life at all times. The party discusses, tendencies appear and disappear, and the opposition elements in the country, which should not be confused with the elements of the counter-revolution, are constantly agitated in broad daylight during the civil war, that is to say until 1921. They will not disappear completely until 1925-1926, when all internal life vanishes in the party. Lenin has his old adversaries Martov and Dan, Menshevik leaders, invited to discuss at the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. Anarchists are part of this Committee. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries collaborate with the first power for several months, at the beginning of the regime. They will only be eliminated for having attempted an uprising and fired cannons in the streets of Moscow in July 1918. No one dreams of fighting for a totalitarian state ; they fight and die for a new freedom. Bolshevism triumphs by announcing to the masses and to the world a democracy of free workers such as has never been seen before. (…) “Every group of citizens must have access to printing presses and paper,” said Trotsky. (…) Thus began the great years. (…) The Communist International was founded in 1919 in Moscow. (…) I am today the only survivor of the services of the leadership of the CI in its early days. (…) The early days of the International were those of valiant comradeship. People lived in boundless hope. Revolution was rumbling throughout Europe. (…) The Third International of the early days, for which many fought, for which many died, which filled the prisons with martyrs, was, in truth, a great moral and political power, not only because in the aftermath of the war, the workers’ revolution was rising in Europe and almost won in several countries, but also because it brought together passionate minds,sincerity, devotion, a crowd of men determined to live and fall if necessary for communism. Today its leaders from all countries have been excluded and assassinated by Stalinism. (…) In a few years, the NEP had given Russia a prosperous, but sometimes unpleasant and often worrying aspect. (…) A persistent disquiet was born among us, communists. We had accepted all the necessities of the Revolution, including the harshest and most repulsive (…) And now the cities where we were the masters took on a foreign aspect, now we felt overwhelmed, bogged down, paralyzed, corrupted… (…) The worst thing was that we no longer recognized the old party of the revolution. The militants of the past, those who had experience of prisons and a love of ideas, were now only a few men out of a thousand, placed moreover in positions that isolated them from the rank and file. Even the militants of the Civil War felt drowned in the mass of latecomers, the well-established, the new conformists whose future of the revolution was, in the end, the least of their worries. They only wanted to live well without any problems ; short-sighted and unintelligent like all petty profiteers, they did not understand that this leads to the worst problems.

Our concern, at observing this fouling of the State and these first symptoms of the bourgeoisification of Soviet society, was not emotional, it goes without saying, but considered and even fueled by economic data. Lenin died – on January 21, 1924 – haunted by this concern expressed in his last writings : "Is the rudder, he asked himself, not slipping from our hands ?" . Ill, he had used all his last strength to seek weapons against the worst and most immediate evil : the bureaucratic fouling of the party. Already the offices were replacing the party ; the worker, the activist no longer had much right to speak. One could sense the coming omnipotence of the civil servants. Shortly before his death, Lenin had proposed to Trotsky – hostile to the bureaucratic system – a joint action for the democratization of the party. In the general secretariat, the Georgian Stalin, obscure during the civil war, was becoming increasingly influential by taking advantage of his technical functions to populate the services with his creatures. It was he who clashed with the failing Lenin. (…) It was necessary to foresee and react, there was still time. Three solutions : 1) democratize the party, so that the real influence of the workers and revolutionaries could be felt and air out the offices of the State ; this was the obvious condition for the success of all economic measures ; 2) Adopt an industrialization plan and significantly retool industry in a few years. 3) To find the resources necessary for industrialization, force the wealthy peasants to deliver their wheat to the State. In general, limit the enrichment of the privileged, combat speculation, restrict the power of civil servants.

This was to be the opposition’s program within the party. Hence its slogan : "Against the mercantilist, the wealthy peasant, and the bureaucrat !"

By 1923, the opposition had found a leader in Trotsky. The bureaucratic system was beginning to take shape in Stalin.

From 1923 onwards, an agitation campaign of boundless violence was being waged against Trotsky, who was denounced in every circumstance as the anti-Lenin, the evil genius of the party, the enemy of the Bolshevik tradition, and the enemy of the peasants. His old disagreements with Lenin, dating from 1904 to 1915, exploited on orders by all-round polemicists, made it possible to forge under the name of Trotskyism a whole ideology distorted to the max, which was made into the most criminal heresy. (…) At first, the organizer of the Red Army, whom Pravda had called a few months earlier “the organizer of victory,” who had remained president of the Supreme War Council, enjoyed such popularity in the army and the country that, hoping for success, he could attempt a coup. But that would mean, the next day, replacing the bureaucracy with that of the military, and setting the socialist revolution on the path followed until now by bourgeois revolutions. Now, it is not a question of playing Bonaparte, even with the best intentions in the world, but of preventing, on the contrary, Bonapartism. It is not by a pronunciamiento that the opposition will attempt to impose its policy of internal renewal of the revolution, but according to the socialist methods of always, by the appeal to the workers. Trotsky leaves his command posts, allows himself to be dismissed without resistance, resumes his place in the ranks and his struggle continues. Everything depends, according to him, on the world revolution…. But revolutions fail one after the other.
From Lenin to Stalin, everything changed.

The goals : from international socialist revolution to socialism in one country.

The political system : from the workers’ democracy of the Soviets, desired and affirmed from the beginning of the revolution, to the dictatorship of the general secretariat, of the civil servants, of the Security (GPU).

The party : from the freely disciplined, thinking, and living organization of Marxist revolutionaries to the hierarchy of offices, self-interested and subject to passive obedience.

The Third International : from the propaganda and combat training of the great years to the maneuvering servility of the Central Committees appointed to approve everything without retching or shame.

The defeats : from the heroism of the defeats in Germany and Hungary, where Gustave Landauer, Léviné, Liebnecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Ioguichés, Otto Corvin died, to the sad underbelly of the Canton Commune (a Stalinist maneuver).

The leaders : the greatest of the October fighters leave for exile or prison.

Ideology : Lenin said : "We will witness the progressive withering away of the State, and the Soviet State will not be a State like the others, moreover, but a vast commune of workers." Stalin will proclaim that "we are moving towards the abolition of the State by strengthening the State" (sic).
The condition of the workers : egalitarianism, Soviet society will move towards the formation of a privileged minority, increasingly privileged, vis-à-vis the disinherited and disenfranchised masses.

Morality : from the great, austere, and sometimes implacable honesty of the Bolshevism of the past, we arrive, little by little, at nameless deceit.

From Lenin to Stalin, everything changed.

Exiled to Alma-Ata, banished to Prinkipo, interned in Norway, after years of insults and systematic revision of history, erased from dictionaries, chased from museums, all his political friends in prison – perhaps massacred tomorrow, this way or that – the Old Man (LT) remains, as he was in 1903 with Lenin, in 1905 as president of the first Soviet, of the first revolution, in 1917 beside Lenin at the head of the masses, in 1918 at the Battle of Sviyazhsk, in 1919 at the Battle of Petrograd, throughout the civil war, at the head of the Red Army that he formed, at the head of a true party of the irreducibly persecuted, at the head of an international party without money or masses, but which guards tradition, maintains and renews doctrine, lavishes devotion. As long as the Old Man lives, there is no security for the triumphant bureaucracy. One head remains from the October Revolution, and it happens to be the highest.

Leon Trotsky in “France at a Turning Point” (March 28, 1936) :

“A clear understanding of the social nature of modern society, its state, its law, its ideology, constitutes the theoretical foundation of revolutionary politics. The bourgeoisie operates through abstraction (“nation,” “fatherland,” “democracy”) to camouflage the exploitation that is the basis of its domination. (…) The first act of revolutionary politics consists of unmasking the bourgeois fictions that poison the popular masses. These fictions become particularly harmful when they amalgamate with the ideas of “socialism” and “revolution.” Today, more than at any other time, it is the makers of this kind of amalgamation who set the tone in French workers’ organizations.”

Excerpts from Leon Trotsky in "The Decisive Stage" (June 5, 1936) :

"The slogan of committees can only be addressed by a true revolutionary organization, absolutely devoted to the masses, to their cause, to their struggle. The French workers have just shown once again that they are worthy of their historical reputation. We must trust them. Soviets were always born of strikes. The mass strike is the natural element of the proletarian revolution. From workshop to workshop, from factory to factory, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from city to city, the action committees must establish close liaison among themselves, meet in conferences by city, by branch of production, by district, in order to crown it all with a congress of all the action committees of France."

Leon Trotsky in "My Life" :

"I participated in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 ; I was chairman of the Petersburg Soviet of Deputies in 1905 and again in 1917. I took an active part in the October Revolution and was a member of the Soviet government. As People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, I conducted the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk with the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Bulgarian delegations. As People’s Commissar for War and the Navy, I devoted about five years to organizing the Red Army and rebuilding the Red Fleet. During 1920, I added to this work the management of the railway network, which was in disarray.

Apart from the years of the Civil War, the bulk of my life was spent as a party activist and writer. In 1923, the State Publishing House began publishing my complete works. They managed to publish thirteen volumes, not counting the five volumes of military works that had been published previously. Publication was interrupted in 1927 when the persecution of "Trotskyism" became particularly fierce.

In January 1928, I was deported by the present Soviet government and spent a year on the border of China ; I was expelled to Turkey in February 1929 ; I am writing these lines in Constantinople.

Even presented in its abbreviated form, my life could not be called monotonous. On the contrary, if we consider all the twists and turns, the unexpected, the acute conflicts, the ups and downs, we can affirm that this existence has been rather overabundant in "adventures." However, I will allow myself to say that, in my inclinations, I have nothing in common with adventure seekers.

Trotsky’s speech during Lenin’s illness :

"If the alarm bells ring again in the West, and they will, we may be up to our necks in our calculations, in our balance sheets, in the NEP, but we will answer the call without hesitation and without delay : we are revolutionaries from head to toe, we have been, and we will remain so to the end."

Leon Trotsky in "Their Morality and Ours" :

"To participate in the movement with open eyes, with a tense will, such is the moral satisfaction par excellence that can be given to a thinking being !"

Leon Trotsky’s Testament (extracts) :

"I need not refute once again here the stupid and vile slanders of Stalin and his agents : there is not a single stain on my revolutionary honor. I have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any backroom agreements, or even negotiations, with the enemies of the working class. (....)
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionary ; for forty-two of these years I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to start all over again, I would certainly try to avoid this or that mistake, but the general course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently an intractable atheist. My faith in the communist future of humanity is no less ardent, quite the contrary, it is firmer today than it was in the days of my youth. (...) Life is beautiful. Let future generations cleanse it of everything evil, from all oppression and violence, and enjoy them to the fullest."

André Breton for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution (October 1957) :

"This look, that of Leon Trotsky, which I find fixed on me during our daily meetings twenty years ago in Mexico, alone would be enough to enjoin me ever since to maintain complete fidelity to a cause, the most sacred of all, that of the emancipation of man, and this beyond the vicissitudes that it may know and, as far as he was concerned, the worst denials and human disappointments."

Simone Weil (who was not a Trotskyist) wrote in the summer of 1932 in "Libres propos" (Free Remarks), when Stalinism was destroying the entire meaning of the October Revolution, demoralizing the most conscious worker militants, when revolutionary communists were permanently cut off from the workers’ movement by the Stalinist wall, when German fascism was threatening and the social-democratic and Stalinist parties were demonstrating their criminal passivity :
"In the midst of disarray and discouragement, Trotsky remains isolated, slandered in all countries by all parties, the few friends who remained to him in Russia almost all dead, deported or in prison, he has managed to keep intact his courage, his hope and that heroic lucidity which is his own mark."

Who is Leon Trotsky ?

Pero’s (Adalbert Gottlieb) response :

1907-1917

The trial of the Soviet leaders lasted a month and was exceptional, thanks to the attitude of the accused. It was not until January 1907 that the convoy of deportees set off for Siberia, towards the Arctic Circle. But the Tsar’s police had not reckoned with the young revolutionary’s fierce will to fight. Once again, through a daring raid that would deserve the admiration of all sportsmen, he managed to escape the Siberian jail.

After 33 days of travel, the convoy arrived in Berezov ; from there, there were still about 500 km to go to the destination of the journey. The prisoners were allowed to walk freely in the village ; from here, far from the confines of civilization, no escape was to be feared ; any attempt at escape was doomed from the start. But Trotsky did not shrink from the impossible. He set off on a reindeer sleigh, guided by an old drunkard from Yakut, across the desert of ice and snow—and this in the middle of winter—in February.

The police quickly abandon all pursuit : there is a 99-in-100 chance that the escapee will perish. But for a Trotsky, a one-in-100 chance is enough. He crosses 700 km of Siberian taiga, buried in snow, where for thousands of kilometers there is not a single Russian, not a single policeman, and where, from time to time, only a few wintering Ostyak yurts stand.

In the Urals, he posed as a member of a polar expedition, then in Siberia, and continued his flight to the West. He arrived in Petrograd, from where he went to Finland, where Lenin and Martov were already. He visited both of them. The 1905 revolution had resulted, among other things, in the merger of the two factions at the Stockholm Congress in April 1906. But this merger was artificial and could not last. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks were already preparing for future battles, while on the other, the Mensheviks even regretted their "revolutionary madness" of 1905 and were rapidly sliding to the right.

When Trotsky arrived in Finland, this fusion was already well understood. He spent a few weeks in Finland with his wife and child, born while he was in prison, and then left for abroad. It was not until ten years later that he would set foot on Russian soil again.

Barely having arrived abroad, Trotsky immediately plunged into the revolutionary work of the emigration. The congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, in 1907, took place in London... in a socialist church. This would not be the only curiosity of this congress, for, in the middle of the congress, it was realized that the party coffers were empty and that all the money, both for the return journey of the delegates and for the continuation of the congress itself, was missing. What to do ? An unexpected solution presented itself. The revolution of 1905 had had a profound echo among English liberals. Thanks to this sympathy, the Russian socialists were able to escape the embarrassment caused by the lack of money. Trotsky writes :

"One of the English liberals granted the Russian revolution a loan, which, I remember, was for 3,000 pounds sterling. But he demanded that the acknowledgment be signed by all the delegates to the congress. The Englishman received a document bearing several hundred signatures, written in the characters that belong to all the languages ​​of Russia. He had, however, to wait a long time for the payment of the sum marked on this instrument. During the reaction and the war, the party could not think of paying such sums. It was only the Soviet government that redeemed the draft signed by the London congress. The revolution honors its commitments, although usually with a certain delay."

Thus it happened that the socialist congress was able to complete its work thanks to the money of an English bourgeois who, although reimbursed in 1917, had to, at that date, regret his action, as well as the fact that his debtors were in the position to reimburse him.

At this congress, Trotsky had two interesting encounters : with Gorky and Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish socialist who would play a major role in the Socialist Party.

From London, Trotsky, after a short stay in Berlin and Bohemia, went to the congress of the Socialist International which took place that same year in Stuttgart.

In Russia, the workers’ movement is in decline. The repression of reaction is coming down hard and is taking back one by one the few freedoms that Russian workers had won through hard struggle during the years 1905-1906.

But the Socialist International was still influenced by these events. The Stuttgart Congress was held under the banner of the left wing’s offensive within the International. Alongside the Bolshevik faction were other revolutionaries, such as Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Christian Rakovsky, and others. It was in Stuttgart that the most progressive and revolutionary resolutions of the workers’ struggle against the war were passed. It was also in Stuttgart that Karl Liebknecht launched his battle cry :

"The main enemy is in your own country. The proletarian must fight against his own bourgeoisie."

Seven years later, in August 1914, few "socialist" leaders would recall these words and the resolutions passed at the Stuttgart Congress. Trotsky would find himself in the revolutionary minority, which had not forgotten.

In October 1907, Trotsky moved to Vienna. This was rather surprising, as Russian emigration was concentrated in Switzerland and Paris. Trotsky himself gave the answer in his memoirs, where he said :

"It was because at that time I was particularly drawn to German political life. I couldn’t have settled in Berlin because of the police. So we opted for Vienna."

He joined the Austrian Social Democratic Party and attended socialist meetings fairly regularly. He naturally became acquainted with the Austrian socialist leaders, but had little sympathy with them. Those who knew the leaders of Austro-Marxism can hardly be surprised by this fact.

Trotsky said of them with contempt that they lived off the interests of Capital.

The years from 1907 to 1912 were the worst for the Russian emigration. Counter-revolution was unleashed in Russia, and the workers’ movement was reduced to the most basic revolutionary cadres. This situation of the workers’ movement in Russia naturally had its immediate repercussions abroad, in the Russian emigration. These years were even more than before years of factional struggles, quarrels, and negotiations between the different factions and sub-factions of the emigration.

It was during these years that Trotsky most emphasized his position as a centrist and conciliator. He attacked from both the right and the left, which earned him the combined discontent of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. His criticism was harsh on both sides. On the occasion of the Copenhagen Congress, he published an article in Vorwaerts on Russian social democracy, distributing his blows, as usual, to both the right and left wings. This article caused great agitation among both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Plekhanov, the Menshevik, organized a sort of "disciplinary council" against Trotsky ; Zinoviev, the Bolshevik, also called for sanctions. Other revolutionaries such as Riazanov and Lunacharsky defended Trotsky, and the Russian delegation, after reading the article, rejected any demand for sanctions by a large majority.

Time serves to study the past and especially to learn lessons from the 1905 revolution. Trotsky gave several lectures on this subject in the Russian émigré community. From October 1908, he edited a Russian newspaper in Vienna, called Pravda. His closest collaborator and companion during this period was A. Joffé, who remained his loyal supporter until his death. When Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party on Stalin’s orders, Joffé, suffering from an incurable illness, committed suicide in protest.

But Trotsky’s journalistic activity was not limited to editing Pravda, which, at its best, appeared only bimonthly. He helped the illegal Black Sea Sailors’ Union produce their newspaper and collaborated with the radical newspaper Kievskaya Mysl, a collaboration that enabled him to earn his living.

Trotsky still had not lost hope that the unification of the two factions would one day be achieved. He was not the only one at that time to hold this position. Rosa Luxemburg, in 1911, wrote along similar lines, and many worker activists in Russia were not bothered by these factional distinctions. In 1917, it would be seen that most of the provincial sections of the Social Democratic Party were composed of unified Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

Still mesmerized by his desire for unification, Trotsky convened a conference of all factions of Russian social democracy in Vienna in August 1912. He hoped to persuade Lenin to attend this conference, but despite the strong conciliatory tendencies within the Bolshevik faction, the latter refused to consider unification once again. He opposed unification with all his might, considering a fusion of the two tendencies as a marriage between water and fire.

And so Trotsky found himself at this conference alone with the Mensheviks and a few small dissident Bolshevik groups. This has since become known as the famous "August Bloc," which, by Trotsky’s own admission, was an "unprincipled bloc," since no common political basis existed between him and the Mensheviks. In the early years of Stalin’s struggle against Trotsky, the former would use the "August Bloc" as the ultimate argument to prove Trotsky’s anti-Bolshevik activity.

This mishap somewhat dampened Trotsky’s unifying efforts, and he eagerly accepted Kievskaya Mysl’s offer to go to the Balkans as a war correspondent. Trotsky thus distanced himself for a time from the inner life of the Russian émigrés. The years 1912-1913 found him traveling through Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania.

The outbreak of the World War took him by surprise in Vienna. Trotsky, in My Life, wrote some excellent lines about the patriotic impulse that seized the peoples of Europe on this occasion :

"The patriotic surge of the workers in Austria-Hungary was, of all, the most unexpected. What could possibly have driven the Vienna shoemaker, Pospezil, half German, half Czech, or our vegetable seller, Frau Maresch, or the coachman Frankl, to demonstrate in the square in front of the War Ministry ? A national idea ? What was it ? Austria-Hungary was the very negation of the idea of ​​nationality. No, the driving force was elsewhere.

There are many people like this, whose entire lives, day after day, pass in hopeless monotony. Contemporary society rests on them. The tocsin of general mobilization intervenes in their existence like a promise. Everything that one is used to and nauseous of is rejected ; one enters the realm of the new and the extraordinary. The changes that must occur afterward are even less predictable. Can one say that it will get better or worse ? Better, of course... How could Pospezil find anything worse than what he has known in normal times ?

Once again, Trotsky was abruptly torn from his preoccupations. Without waiting a minute, he had to leave Austria for Switzerland, facing the threat of an internment camp. He was forced to leave his library, his archives, and his manuscripts in Vienna. The life of a professional revolutionary often experienced such upheavals ; Trotsky was already used to them.

Neither Lenin nor Trotsky had any illusions about the revolutionary value of international social democracy. But the extent of its collapse still surprised them ; they had expected a failure, but not a betrayal of this magnitude.

Trotsky notes in his autobiography :

"When the issue of "Vorwaerts" was received in Switzerland, which reported on the Reichstag session that took place on August 4, Lenin decided without hesitation that it was a forgery, a document invented by the German GHQ to deceive and terrify the enemy. Such was still – despite Lenin’s critical faculty – the faith that was kept in German social democracy."

The Second International had collapsed ; Lenin and Trotsky quickly realized this and were already thinking of replacing it with another.

Already on August 11, Trotsky wrote :

"Only a revival of the socialist revolutionary movement – ​​which must immediately take extremely violent forms – will lay the foundations of the new International. The coming years will be the epoch of social revolution."

A breath of social-patriotic chauvinism passes through the socialist ranks and does not spare Russian socialism either. With the exception of Martov, all the Mensheviks take their place in the camp of delusional chauvinism ; Kropotkin, the leader of Russian anarchism, does the same, and even the ranks of the Bolsheviks are not spared. However, the Bolshevik faction is the only bastion resisting social-patriotism. The Bolshevik deputies in the Duma will be deported to Siberia for their resolutely revolutionary attitude towards the war. Lenin immediately launches the slogans of revolutionary defeatism, which means : "Fraternization of soldiers beyond the trenches" and "transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war."

Trotsky unhesitatingly sides with the internationalists and fights social patriotism with all his might. Soon the voice of Karl Liebknecht rises in Germany ; he has not forgotten what he preached.

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P. Monatte

Trotsky’s exile

Comrades, the leaders of Russian politics have achieved the result they were seeking : to soften the blow that the news of Trotsky’s expulsion was expected to inflict on working-class opinion, on public opinion.

We can now learn that Trotsky landed in Constantinople on February 12 ; the journalistic preparation was so well done, curiosity so skillfully blunted, emotion so artfully dissociated in advance that an important event in revolutionary history, perhaps in history in general, is regarded as a vulgar news item, picturesque certainly, but banal.

A year ago, the Russian Revolution deported several hundred of its founders to Siberia. Today, several thousand are deported.

A year later, deportations not being enough, exile followed. Trotsky was thrown out of Russia. He was "returned to the bourgeois world to which he belonged" ; but it was up to which bourgeois governments would refuse him access. Stalin found only his friend Mustafa Kemal, a friend in the vein of Chiang Kai-shek, to accept the Soviet exile.

Trotsky exiled, the best fighters of 1917 deported, is this not communism repressed, as capitalism re-establishes itself and is offered the concessions of public services ?

What reasons are given to justify these thousands of deportations and the expulsion of Trotsky ?

It is convenient to speak of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization, of Trotsky and his supporters who have openly gone over to the camp of the enemies of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International, supporting the external capitalist assault by actions inside the USSR, and who have absolutely nothing more in common with the international revolutionary proletariat. This is within the intelligence of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party. This aviary of parrots has not failed to do so ; see its resolution in L’Humanité of February 23.

Two days earlier, hiding behind Izvestia, L’Humanité wrote : "We can see that Trotsky’s new program is contained in the following months of order : secret ballot, freedom of strikes and preparation of cadres for a possible new civil war... It proves that Trotsky has become the true spokesman of the counter-revolution, because it was precisely around the slogan of the "secret ballot" that the White Guards, the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks grouped during the Kronstadt insurrection in 1921."

Thus, the slogan of the "secret ballot" would have the same meaning in 1929, in the twelfth year of the Revolution, as in 1921, in the midst of the painful and heroic struggle to establish the Revolution ? Shouldn’t the necessary dictatorship of a moment ever be loosened and finally allow, not the bourgeois classes but the working class itself to express its true thoughts, in the party which is apparently its thing, in its unions, in its soviets ? I find, on the contrary, that the Trotskyist opposition has been too slow to say : "For self-criticism to exist, the gag must be removed ; let us vote according to our convictions, without fear of being dismissed, that is to say, by secret ballot." I find that it is singularly cautious when it adds : "We must begin with the party and end with the unions." As for the Soviets, where different classes participate in elections, this question will have to be asked thirdly, after experience has been accumulated.

Freedom of strikes ? Russian workers, like workers everywhere, have no other weapon than the strike to make themselves heard by state industry. Why don’t they resort to it more often ! Scandals like those in the Donets would have been avoided. In his letter of October 21, 1928, what did Trotsky say ? "The strike, as indicated by the resolution of the 11th Party Congress, is an extreme measure, but it is neither illicit, nor anti-Soviet, nor directed against the Party. Participating in a strike, or even leading one, can be a duty for a Bolshevik-Leninist, if all other possibilities have been attempted to achieve the legitimate, that is, the actually achievable, aspirations of the masses."

What is meant by this "preparation of cadres for a new civil war" ? Nothing other than the preparation, yesterday within the Russian party, today necessarily outside, of the resumption of control of the Revolution by the revolutionaries, by the workers, despite the bureaucratic apparatus and if necessary against it.

To make this action "guilty," a simple legal sleight of hand, a party jurisdiction, was enough : to exclude from the party those who supported this action. As long as they were members of the Russian party, they could raise these demands. From the day they, excluded, continue to say the same words and demand the same acts of revolutionary salvation, they are branded enemies of the Soviet regime.

The explanation seems so flimsy that Thorez, the International’s new trusted man in the French party, feels the need to emphasize, by having it typed in italics (Humanité of February 22), as the principal crime of the opposition the attempted demonstration on the tenth anniversary of October. My poor little Thorez, if the revolutionaries of 1789 were to resurrect and venture into the streets of Paris on the 14th of July and wish to remind the crossroads dancers of the historical significance of that day, they would be almost as well received as Preobrazhensky and Trotsky were. With the simple difference that the GPU would not need to send its counter-demonstrators to these crossroads.

In recent days, two men, returning from Russia, published their impressions : Albert Thomas and Panait Istrati, a statesman and a poet.

The statesman who wants to integrate the new forces into the capitalist regime, to bring the finally tamed revolutionary beast into the old menagerie, finds that the moment is near when Soviet Russia will take its place in the League of Nations. We have often wondered among ourselves at the stubbornness that our reformers continued to show against the Russian Revolution and its men of today. It should finally please them, we thought. Albert Thomas, the most understanding among them, has just shown that it does not displease him. After so many others, this is a sign of Russia’s adaptation that deserves to be noted.

And the poet ? I am a born revolutionary, a revolutionary by temperament, declares Istrati. He is not wrong. But the poet in him often speaks before his eyes have seen and his head has judged. More than a year ago, he left for Russia and no sooner arrived than he telegraphed his wonder to the world and decided to live there from now on. Sixteen months have passed ; he has traveled from one end of Russia to the other ; he knows what the people are, he is part of it, he can understand it. He has seen behind the official curtain the real life of the worker and the peasant. It is no longer a song of wonder that he sings, it is a cry of alarm. The great leaders of the Revolution are true revolutionaries, but a formidable bureaucratic apparatus stifles and poisons the Revolution. The best are hunted down. Is Trotsky exiled so that some Wrangellite can assassinate him ? - The hypothesis of a Wrangellite being pushed by a Chekist provocateur is no more to be dismissed. - For him, Trotsky and the opposition are the gold reserve of the Russian Revolution.

A year ago, the deportations found neither in the Communist parties nor in the working class everywhere the vigorous disapproval they deserved.

It was not understood that defending the Russian Revolution, in the present period, consisted of defending it against itself, of preventing it from tearing itself apart, of preventing it from slipping into the blood of its true defenders.

Our professional revolutionaries regarded the Russian divisions as vulgar quarrels between politicians, incapable as they are of imagining what a revolutionary fire can be and of understanding in the light of the French Revolution what the Russian Revolution is.

Under pressure from the external bourgeoisie, grappling with the difficulties of internal economic organization, the Russian Revolution is losing ground, retreating, and slipping. If it were to collapse, there is no revolutionary, whatever his school of thought, who could not foresee the certain repercussions, that is to say, a wave of frenzied reaction throughout the entire world. From 1795 to 1848, Europe experienced a fifty-year period of white restoration. If the Russian Revolution were to collapse, the entire world would experience a similar period.

It is a poor consolation to think, as some Marxists do, that the movement, temporarily exhausted in Russia, would revive in other countries, that other hotbeds would flare up. In the meantime, the universal proletariat, which the momentum of revolutionary Russia had aroused, would fall heavily, shattering all hope in it for a time.

Will Trotsky’s exile strike people hard enough to force them to see the dangers that threaten the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary movement throughout the world ?

Are you then mere Trotskyists to attach so much importance to this event ? There have been other expulsions. We know that. There was that of Lazarevitch, two years ago. Lazarevitch was one of us, perhaps more than Trotsky, because he was a trade unionist, and because he was not a leader. It is precisely through Lazarevitch’s case that we have measured the danger for the Russian working class of administrative justice.

Trotsky is a leader, a great revolutionary leader ; through his example we have better understood how much the working class needs such leaders to achieve its destiny. In this month of March, when we are about to celebrate the anniversary of the Commune, we who are not Blanquists think once again that if Blanqui had not been in a provincial prison, if he had been free on March 18, 1871, the Commune would probably not be called the third defeat of the French proletariat, but its first victory.

Texts by Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky, the film

From the leader of the Russian workers’ revolution of 1905 (president of the Petrograd Soviet) to the leader of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, and then to the leader of the Red Army that fought imperialism, Leon Trotsky leaves us a revolutionary figure of great political courage, but this is still only the first part of his life. The second is that of the fight in Russia and throughout the world against the hideous deformation that struck the Russian revolution and the communist parties : Stalinism. It was the Stalinists who broke with the revolution and, to hide it, denigrated Trotsky, inventing the term Trotskyism.

Even today, the political capital left by this revolutionary activist remains of great importance, all the more so because the false image of socialism propagated by Stalinism must still be fought.

Leon Trotsky and the Russian Revolution

Excerpt from "My Life" by Leon Trotsky : }
"Trotskyism" in 1917

Since 1904, I had been outside the two factions of the Social Democracy. I had lived through the years of the first revolution, 1905-1907, side by side with the Bolsheviks. During the years of reaction, I defended the methods of the revolution against the Mensheviks in the international Marxist press. However, I did not lose hope that the Mensheviks would move to the left and I made a series of attempts at unification. It was only during the war that I realized that these attempts would be useless. In New York, at the beginning of March, I wrote a series of articles devoted to the study of class forces and the perspectives of the Russian revolution. At the same time, Lenin was sending his Letters from Geneva to Petrograd. Written at two points on the world separated by an ocean, these articles give an identical analysis of the situation and express identical forecasts. All the essential formulas—on the attitude to be taken toward the peasants, the bourgeoisie, the Provisional Government, the war, the international revolution—are absolutely identical. On the whetstone of history, the relations between "Trotskyism" and Leninism were then verified. This verification took place under the conditions of a pure chemistry experiment. I did not know Lenin’s judgment. I started from my own premises and my own revolutionary experience. And I indicated the same perspectives, the same strategic line that Lenin gave.

But perhaps, at that time, the question was clear to everyone and the solution just as well foreseen for everyone. No ! On the contrary ! Lenin’s judgment was in that period—until April 4, 1917, that is, until his appearance on the Petrograd arena—a personal, individual judgment. Not one of the party leaders then in Russia—not one !—had even the idea of ​​governing towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, towards the socialist revolution. The party conference which, on the eve of Lenin’s arrival, had brought together a few dozen Bolsheviks, had shown that none of them went in thought beyond democracy. It is not without intention that the minutes of this conference remain hidden to this day. Stalin was of the opinion of supporting the Provisional Government of Guchkov-Miliukov and of achieving a fusion of the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. The same attitude was adopted (or an even more opportunistic attitude) by Rykov, Kamenev, Molotov, Tomsky, Kalinin, and all other current leaders or semi-leaders. Yaroslavsky, Ordzhonikidze, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, Petrovsky, and others, published, during the February Revolution, in Yakutsk, together with the Mensheviks, a newspaper called the Social-Democrat, in which they developed the most vulgar ideas of provincial opportunism. If one were to reprint at present certain articles from the Yakutsk Social-Democrat, of which Yaroslavsky was the editor, one would be ideologically killing this man, assuming, however, that it were possible to execute him ideologically.

Such is the current guard of "Leninism." That on various occasions these men repeated Lenin’s words and imitated Lenin’s gestures, I know. But at the beginning of 1917 they were left to their own devices. The situation was difficult. It was then that they should have shown what they had learned in Lenin’s school and what they were capable of without Lenin. Let them point out only one among them who of his own accord was able to approach the position that was identically formulated by Lenin in Geneva and by me in New York. They will not find a name. The Petrograd Pravda, whose editors, before Lenin’s arrival, were Stalin and Kamenev, has remained forever a monument to narrow-mindedness, blindness, and opportunism. Meanwhile, the mass of the party, like the working class as a whole, was spontaneously moving toward the struggle for power. There was, in short, no other way, neither for the party nor for the country.

To defend the perspective of permanent revolution during the years of reaction, theoretical foresight was necessary. To launch the slogan of the struggle for power in March 1917, political flair was sufficient, it seems to me. The faculties of foresight and even flair have not been revealed in any—not one !—of the current leaders. Not one of them, in March 1917, had risen above the position of the petty bourgeois left democrat. Not one of them has adequately passed the examination of history.

I arrived in Petrograd a month after Lenin. Exactly the same length of time as I had been detained in Canada by Lloyd George. I found the situation in the party essentially changed. Lenin had appealed to the masses of partisans against their sad leaders. He waged a systematic struggle against these "old Bolsheviks," he wrote, "who have already played a sad role more than once in the history of our party, repeating without understanding a formula learned by heart, instead of studying the peculiarities of the new and lively situation."

Kamenev and Rykov attempted to resist. Stalin silently withdrew. There is not a single article from the period in which he made an effort to judge his previous policy and open a path towards the Leninist position. He simply kept quiet. He had compromised himself too much by the disastrous direction he had taken during the first month of the revolution. He preferred to withdraw into the shadows. He did not publicly defend Lenin’s ideas anywhere. He evaded and waited. During the months when the theoretical and political preparations for October were being made, when responsibilities were most seriously assumed, Stalin simply had no political existence.

When I arrived in the country, a good number of Social-Democratic organizations still united Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. This was the natural consequence of the position that Stalin, Kamenev, and others had taken not only at the beginning of the revolution, but also during the war, although, it must be admitted, Stalin’s wartime attitude remained unknown to everyone : he did not write a single line on this question, which is not of minor importance.

Currently, the manuals of the Communist International throughout the world—for the Young Communists in Scandinavia and the Pioneers in Australia—repeat ad nauseam that Trotsky, in August 1912, made an attempt to unite the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. On the other hand, it is nowhere stated that Stalin, in March 1917, preached an alliance with Tseretelli’s party and that, in fact, until the middle of 1917, Lenin did not succeed in freeing the party from the quagmire into which it had been dragged by the then temporary leaders, now the epigones. The fact that not one of them understood, at the beginning of the revolution, its meaning and direction is now interpreted as proceeding from particularly profound dialectical views, opposed to the heresy of Trotskyism, which dared not only to understand the facts of the day before, but also to foresee those of the day after.

When, having arrived in St. Petersburg, I declared to Kamenev that I had no objection to Lenin’s famous "April Theses," which determined the new course of the party, Kamenev only replied :
"I think so !"

Even before I had formally joined the party, I contributed to the drafting of the most important documents of Bolshevism. It never occurred to anyone to ask whether I had renounced "Trotskyism," as the epigones Cachin, Thaelmann, and other parasites of the October Revolution have wanted to know a thousand times since, during the decadent period of the epigones, the Cachins, the Thaelmanns, and other parasites of the October Revolution. If, at that time, Trotskyism could be seen as opposed to Leninism, it was only in the sense that, in the upper spheres of the party, during April, Lenin was accused of Trotskyism. Kamenev spoke of it thus, openly and persistently. Others said the same, but more circumspectly, behind the scenes. Dozens of "old Bolsheviks" declared to me, after my arrival in Russia :

— Now it’s a party on your street !...

I was forced to demonstrate that Lenin had not adopted my position, that he had simply extended his own, and that, as a result of this development, in which algebra was simplified into arithmetic, the identity of our ideas had become manifest. This was indeed the case.

From our first meetings, and even more so after the July Days, Lenin gave the impression of extreme inner concentration, of self-absorption pushed to the utmost degree—beneath an appearance of calm and prosaic simplicity. The Kerenskyist regime seemed, in those days, all-powerful. Bolshevism was represented only by a “small, insignificant band.” This was how it was officially treated. The party itself did not yet realize the strength it would have the next day. And yet, Lenin led it, with all assurance, toward the highest tasks. I set to work and helped Lenin.

Two months before October, I wrote :

"For us, internationalism is not an abstract idea, existing only to be betrayed at the first opportunity (which it is for a Tseretelli or a Chernov) ; it is a principle that guides us immediately and is profoundly practical. A lasting, decisive success is inconceivable for us outside of a European revolution."

Alongside the names of Tseretelli and Chernov, I could not yet include that of Stalin, the philosopher of socialism in one country. I ended my article with these words :

"Permanent revolution against permanent carnage ! This is the struggle whose stake is the fate of humanity."

This was printed in the central organ of our party on September 7 and reproduced in a pamphlet. Why then did my present critics remain silent about the heretical slogan of a permanent revolution ? Where were they ? Some, like Stalin, were waiting for events, looking this way and that ; others, like Zinoviev, were hiding under the table.

But the biggest question is this : how could Lenin tolerate my heretical propaganda ? When it came to theory, he knew neither condescension nor indulgence. How could he bear to have "Trotskyism" preached in the central organ of the party ?

On November 1, 1917, at a meeting of the Petrograd Committee (the minutes of this meeting, historic in all respects, are kept secret to this day), Lenin declared that since Trotsky had become convinced of the impossibility of an alliance with the Mensheviks, "there was no better Bolshevik than he." He thus clearly showed, and not for the first time, that if anything separated us, it was not the theory of permanent revolution, but a more limited, though very important, question of the relationship to be maintained toward Mensheviks.

Looking back two years after the October Revolution, Lenin wrote :

"At the time of the conquest of power, when the republic of soviets was created, Bolshevism had attracted to itself all that was best in the tendencies of socialist thought close to it."

Can there be a shadow of a doubt that, in speaking so markedly of the tendencies of socialist thought closest to Bolshevism, Lenin had in mind first of all what is now called "historical Trotskyism" ? Indeed, what other tendency could be closer to Bolshevism than the one I represented ? Who could Lenin have in mind ? Marcel Cachin ? Thaelmann ? For Lenin, when he reviewed the development of the party as a whole, Trotskyism was not something alien or hostile ; on the contrary, it was the current of socialist thought closest to Bolshevism.

The true march of ideas, as we see, had nothing in common with the lying caricature made of it by the epigones, taking advantage of Lenin’s death and the wave of reaction.

TROTSKY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

PRESENTED FOR HER DEFENSE

IN THE FACE OF STALINIST SLANDERS

Leon Trotsky
April 17, 1937

Autobiography

In his final speech of January 28, 1937 [1] Vishinsky said : "Trotsky and the Trotskyists have always been the agents of capitalism within the workers’ movement." Vishinsky denounced "the real face, the true face of ’Trotskyism - this old enemy of the workers and peasants, this old enemy of Socialism, loyal servant of capitalism." He outlined the history of ’Trotskyism’ which spent the greater part of its thirty-odd years of existence in preparing for its final conversion into a rabid detachment of fascism, into one of the services of the fascist police."

While the foreign journalists of the GPU (in the "Daily Worker," the "New Masses," etc.) were wasting their energy trying to explain, with the help of hollow hypotheses and historical analogies, how a revolutionary Marxist can turn into a fascist in the sixth decade of his life, Vishinsky approaches the question in an entirely different way : Trotsky has always been an agent of capitalism and an enemy of the workers and peasants ; for thirty-odd years he has been preparing to become an agent of fascism. Vishinsky is now saying what the journalists of the "New Masses" will also say, but later. That is why I prefer to deal with Vishinsky. To the categorical assertions of the Prosecutor of the USSR, I oppose the equally categorical facts of my life.

Vishinsky is mistaken when he speaks of my thirty years of preparation for fascism. But it is neither facts, nor arithmetic, nor chronology, and still less logic, that are the strong points of this accusation. In reality, since last month, it has been forty years since I have participated uninterruptedly in the movement of the working class under the banner of Marxism.

At eighteen, I organized the South Russian Workers’ Union, an underground organization that included more than 200 workers. I edited a mimeographed revolutionary newspaper, "Nache Delo" (Our Cause). During my first exile in Siberia (1900-1902), I participated in the creation of the Siberian Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. After my first escape abroad, I became a member of the social-democratic organization "Iskra," led by Plekhanov, Lenin, and several others. In 1905, I assumed leading functions in the first Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. I spent four and a half years in prison and was twice exiled, to Siberia, where I spent about two and a half years. I escaped twice from Siberia. In two periods, I spent some twelve years in exile under Tsarism. In 1915, in Germany, I was sentenced to prison in absentia for my anti-war activities. I was expelled from France for the same "crime," arrested in Spain, and interned by the British government in a Canadian concentration camp. This was how I fulfilled my duties as "an agent of capitalism."

The version of Stalinist historians, according to which I was a Menshevik until 1917, is only one of their usual falsifications. From the day when Bolshevism and Menshevism took political and organizational form (1904), I formally remained outside both parties, but, as the three Russian Revolutions show, my political line – despite polemics and conflicts – coincided in all fundamental questions with Lenin’s line.

The most important disagreement between Lenin and me during these years was my hope that through unification with the Mensheviks the majority of them could be pushed onto the path of revolution. On this burning question, Lenin was entirely right. However, it must be said that in 1917 the tendencies toward "unification" were very strong among the Bolsheviks. On November 1, 1917, at the meeting of the Petrograd Party Committee, Lenin said in this connection : "Trotsky has long said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this, and since then there has been no better Bolshevik than he."

From the end of 1904, I defended the opinion that the Russian Revolution could only be completed by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, in turn, must lead to the socialist transformation of society, within the framework of the victorious development of the world revolution. A minority of my current opponents considered this perspective fantastic until April 1917 and attached the pejorative label of "Trotskyism" to it in opposition to the program of the bourgeois-democratic republic. As for the overwhelming majority of the present bureaucracy, it gave its support to the power of the soviets only after the victorious end of the civil war. During my years of exile, I participated in the workers’ movement of Austria, Switzerland, France, and the United States. I look back on the years of my exile with gratitude. They gave me the opportunity to learn more about the life of the global working class and to transform my internationalism from an abstract concept into a driving force for the rest of my life.

During the war, first in Switzerland and then in France, I carried out active propaganda against the chauvinism that was eating away at the Second International. For more than two years, I published in Paris, under military censorship, a Russian daily newspaper in the spirit of revolutionary internationalism. I was in close contact in my work with the internationalist elements of France and took part with their representatives in the international conference of opponents of chauvinism at Zimmerwald (1915). I continued to work in the same way during the two months I spent in the United States.

After my arrival in Petrograd (May 5, 1917) from the Canadian concentration camp where I had been teaching the ideas of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg to imprisoned German sailors, I took an active part in the preparation and organization of the October Revolution, especially during the four decisive months when Lenin was forced into hiding in Finland.

In 1918, in an article in which he sought to limit my role in the October Revolution, Stalin was nevertheless forced to write : "All the practical work of organizing the insurrection was carried out under the effective leadership of the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. We can say with certainty that the rapid transition of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the bold execution of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Party owes primarily and above all to Comrade Trotsky." ("Pravda," No. 241, November 6, 1918)

This did not prevent Stalin from writing six years later : "Comrade Trotsky, a relatively new man in our Party in the October period, did not and could not play a special role either in the Party or in the October Revolution." (J. Stalin, Trotskyism and Leninism)

Now the Stalinist school, with the help of its own scientific methods by which judges and prosecutors are educated, considers it indisputable that I did not lead the October Revolution, but that I opposed it. In any case, these historical falsifications do not concern my autobiography but Stalin’s biography.

After the October Revolution, I assumed state responsibilities for about nine years. I took an active part in building the Soviet state, revolutionary diplomacy, the Red Army, economic organization, and the Communist International. For three years, I effectively directed the civil war. In carrying out this heavy task, I was obliged to resort to rigorous measures. For this, I take full responsibility before the world working class and before history. The justification for these measures lies in their historical necessity and progressive character, in their concordance with the fundamental interests of the working class. I gave all the repressive measures dictated by the conditions of the civil war their real designation and publicly accounted for them before the working masses. I had nothing to hide from the people, just as today I have nothing to hide from the commission.

When, in certain Party circles, not without Stalin’s covert participation, opposition to my methods of leading the civil war arose, Lenin, in July 1919, on his own initiative and in a manner entirely unexpected for me, handed me a sheet of white paper at the bottom of which he had written : "Comrades, having become acquainted with the strictness of Comrade Trotsky’s orders, I am so convinced, so absolutely convinced of the correctness, timeliness, and necessity—for the good of our cause—of the orders he has given, that I give his orders my full adherence." There was no date on this paper. If necessary, the date was to be affixed by me. Lenin’s prudence in everything that concerned his relations with the workers is well known. Nevertheless, he considered it possible to countersign an order coming from me in advance, although the fate of a large number of people often depended on these orders. Lenin had no fear that I might abuse my powers. I must add that not once did I use the "carte blanche" he gave me. But this document is a testament to the exceptional confidence of a man I consider the most perfect model of revolutionary morality.

I participated directly in the preparation of the programmatic documents and tactical theses of the Third International. The main reports to these congresses on the international situation were made by Lenin and me. The programmatic manifestos of the first four congresses were written by me. I leave it to Stalin’s prosecutors to explain what place this activity may have in my path to fascism. For my part, I continue to firmly defend today the principles that, hand in hand with Lenin, I put forward as the basis of the Communist International.

I broke with the ruling bureaucracy when, for historical reasons that cannot be adequately analyzed here, it transformed itself into a privileged caste imbued with conservatism. The reasons for the break are set out and established once and for all in official documents, books, and articles accessible for general verification.

I defended Soviet democracy against bureaucratic absolutism ; the raising of the living standards of the masses against the excessive privileges of the top ; systematic industrialization and collectivization in the interests of the working people ; and, finally, an international policy in the spirit of revolutionary internationalism against nationalist conservatism. In my last book, "The Revolution Betrayed," I tried to explain theoretically why the isolated Soviet state, on the basis of a backward economy, gave rise to the monstrous pyramid of bureaucracy, which, almost automatically, was crowned with an uncontrolled and "infallible" leader. Having strangled the Party and crushed the opposition by means of the police apparatus, the ruling clique exiled me at the beginning of 1928 to Central Asia. Upon my refusal to cease my political activity in exile, she deported me to Turkey in 1929. There I began to publish the "Bulletin of the Opposition" on the basis of the same program that I had defended in Russia, and I entered into relations with ideological companions, still very few in number at that time, in all parts of the world.

On February 20, 1932, the Soviet bureaucracy deprived me and my family members who were abroad of Soviet citizenship. My daughter Zinaida, who was temporarily abroad for medical treatment, was thus deprived of the opportunity to return to the USSR to join her husband and children. She committed suicide on January 5, 1933.

I have presented a list of my most important books and pamphlets, which were written in whole or in part during the last period of my exile and deportation. According to the calculations of my young collaborators, who, for all my work, gave me and continue to give me devoted and irreplaceable help, I have written 5,000 printed pages since I have been abroad, not counting my articles and letters, which together would make several thousand additional pages.

May I add that I don’t write with ease ? I make numerous checks and corrections. Consequently, my literary work and my correspondence have constituted the main content of my life for the past nine years. The political line of my books, articles, and letters speaks for itself. The quotations from my works that Vishinsky provides constitute, as I shall prove, a gross falsification, that is, a necessary element of the entire judicial staging.

During the years 1923 to 1933, with regard to the Soviet state, its leading party, and the Communist International, my view can be expressed in these lapidary words : Reform but not revolution. This position was nourished by the hope that, with favorable developments in Europe, the Left Opposition could regenerate the Bolshevik Party by peaceful means, effect a democratic reform of the Soviet state, and put the Communist International back on the road to Marxism. It was only Hitler’s victory, prepared by the Kremlin’s fatal policy, and the Comintern’s absolute inability to learn any lessons from the tragic experience of Germany, that convinced me and my ideological companions that the old Bolshevik party and the Third International were indeed dead as far as the cause of socialism was concerned. Thus disappeared the only legal lever with which one could hope to effect a peaceful democratic reform of the Soviet state. Since the latter part of 1933, I have become increasingly convinced that, in order to emancipate the Soviet working masses and the social base established by the October Revolution from the new parasitic caste, a political revolution is historically inevitable. Naturally, a problem of such enormous magnitude provoked a passionate ideological struggle on an international scale.

The political degeneration of the Comintern, completely enchained by the Soviet bureaucracy, created the necessity of launching the slogan of the Fourth International and of drafting the foundations of its program. The books, articles, and bulletins relating to them are at the disposal of the Commission and constitute the best proof that this is not a matter of "camouflage" but of a passionate ideological struggle based on the traditions of the first Congresses of the Communist International. I have been in continuous correspondence with dozens of old friends and hundreds of young friends in all parts of the world, and I can say with assurance and pride that it is precisely from this youth that the firmest and most reliable proletarian fighters of the new epoch that has just opened will emerge.

Renouncing the hope for a peaceful reform of the Soviet state, however, does not mean renouncing the defense of the Soviet state, as is particularly demonstrated by the collection of excerpts from my articles over the past ten years ("The Defense of the Soviet Union") which recently appeared in New York. I have invariably and implacably fought any hesitation on the question of the defense of the USSR. I have broken with friends more than once on this issue. In my book "The Revolution Betrayed," I have theoretically proven the idea that war threatens not only the Soviet bureaucracy, but also the new social basis of the USSR, which constitutes an enormous step forward in the development of humanity. From this follows the absolute duty of every revolutionary to defend the USSR against imperialism, despite the Soviet bureaucracy. My writings from the same period present an unequivocal picture of my attitude toward fascism. From the very first period of my exile abroad, I sounded the alarm on the question of the rising tide of fascism in Germany. The Comintern accused me of "overestimating" fascism and of being "panicked" by it. I launched the slogan of a united front of all working-class organizations. To this, the Comintern opposed the idiotic theory of "social fascism." I launched the slogan of the systematic organization of workers’ militias. The Comintern responded with boasts about future victories. I demonstrated that the USSR would be seriously threatened in the event of Hitler’s victory. The well-known writer Ossietzky printed my articles in his journal and commented on them with great sympathy. All this was to no avail. The Soviet bureaucracy usurped the authority of the October Revolution only to convert it into an obstacle to the victory of the revolution in other countries. Without Stalin’s policies, we would not have had Hitler’s victory. The Moscow trials, to a large extent, arose from the Kremlin’s need to force the world to forget its criminal policy in Germany. "If it is proven that Trotsky is an agent of fascism, who will then take into consideration the program and tactics of the Fourth International ?" Such were Stalin’s calculations.

It is a well-known fact that, during the war, every internationalist was declared to be an agent of the enemy government. This was the case in the case of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Otto Ruehle and others in Germany, of my French friends (Monatte, Rosmer, Loriot, etc.), of Eugene Debs and others in the United States, and finally of Lenin and myself in Russia. The British government imprisoned me in a concentration camp in March 1917, accusing me, at the instigation of the Tsarist Okhrana, of having, in collusion with the German high command, attempted to overthrow the Provisional Government of Miliukov-Kerensky. Today this accusation seems a plagiarism of those of Stalin and Vishinsky. In reality, it was Stalin and Vishinsky who plagiarized the Tsarist counter-espionage system and the British Intelligence Service.

On April 16, 1917, while I was in a concentration camp with the German sailors, Lenin wrote in Pravda : "Who can believe for a single moment in the validity of the statement... that Trotsky, former chairman of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in 1905—a revolutionary who devoted decades to the selfless service of the revolution—that this man could have had anything to do with a plan subsidized by the German government ? This is obviously a monstrous and unscrupulous slander against a revolutionary." ("Pravda," No. 34)

"How relevant these words are now," I wrote on October 21, 1927—I repeat, 1927 !—"in this era of despicable slander against the Opposition, which differ in no essential way from the slander against the Bolsheviks in 1917."

Thus, ten years ago – that is, long before the creation of the "unified" and "parallel" centers and before Pyatakov’s "trip" to Oslo – Stalin was already hurling against the Opposition all the insinuations and slanders that Vishinsky was later to convert into accusations before the judges. However, if Lenin in 1917 thought that my twenty years of revolutionary past were in themselves a sufficient refutation of these filthy insinuations, I take the liberty of believing that the twenty years that have passed since then – important enough in themselves – give me the right to cite my autobiography as one of the most important arguments against Moscow’s accusations.

Note

[1] At the 2nd Moscow trial, that of the seventeen.

Excerpts from "My Life", autobiography of Leon Trotsky

My first revolutionary organization

In the fall of 1896, I did go to see my village. But it was all a brief respite from my family. My father wanted me to become an engineer. However, I was still hesitating between pure mathematics, to which I was very inclined, and the revolution that was gradually taking hold of me. Whenever this question was raised, there was a serious crisis in the house. Everyone grew gloomy, everyone suffered, my older sister wept secretly, and no one knew what to do. An uncle who came to visit, an engineer and owner of a factory in Odessa, persuaded me to spend some time with him. It was at least a temporary way out of this impasse.
I lived with the uncle for several weeks. We discussed profits and capital gains. The uncle was better at making profits than explaining them. I was delaying enrolling at the Faculty of Science. I lived in Odessa and was searching. What was I searching for ? Above all, I was searching for myself. I occasionally made friends with workers, procured illegal literature, gave lessons, gave clandestine lectures to the upper grades of a vocational school, discussed with Marxists, still trying not to surrender. I took the last boat leaving in the autumn for Nikolayev and settled down again in Shvigovsky’s garden.
Everything began again as before. We examined the latest issues of radical journals together, argued about Darwinism, made indefinite preparations, and waited. What was the immediate impulse that drew us into revolutionary propaganda ?
It is difficult to answer this question. The impulse was internal. In the intellectual circles I frequented, no one was engaged in genuine revolutionary work. We realized that there was a huge gap between our endless chats over glasses of tea and a revolutionary organization. We knew that to establish contact with the workers, a great conspiracy was necessary. We spoke this word seriously, in a grave, almost mystical tone. We had no doubt that in the end, from the tea sessions, we would arrive at a conspiracy, but none of us could say clearly when and how this would happen. Most often, to justify our delays, we said to each other : "We must prepare ourselves first..." And that was not so bad.
But there was, of course, something inappropriate in the atmosphere, which suddenly pushed us onto the path of revolutionary propaganda. The shock occurred not immediately in Nikolayev, but throughout the country, above all in the capitals, and it had its repercussions here.
In 1896, the famous mass weavers’ strikes broke out in St. Petersburg. This revived the intellectuals. Sensing the awakening of their strong reserves, the students became bolder. During the summer holidays, at Christmas and Easter, dozens of students, returning to Nikolaev, brought echoes of the struggles underway in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. Some had been expelled from the university ; young people, still recently students at the gymnasiums, returned with the halo of fighters.
In February 1897, Vetrova, a student of the advanced courses, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, committed suicide by setting fire to her clothes. This tragedy, which has never been explained, shook everyone. There were disturbances in the university towns. Arrests and deportations became more and more numerous.
I entered revolutionary work accompanied by the demonstrations provoked by the Vetrova affair.
This is how it happened :
I was walking down a street with the youngest person in our commune, Grigory Sokolovsky, who was about my age.
We should start too, I told him.
"We should start," Sokolovsky replied.
But how ?
That’s exactly it : how ?
You have to find workers, not wait for anyone, not ask anything from anyone, but find workers and start.
"I think we can find some," said Sokolovsky. "I used to know a watchman on the boulevard, a Bible scholar. I’m going to see him."
That same day, Sokolovsky went to the Bible scholar’s house. He had long since left the place. Sokolovsky found only a woman who also had an acquaintance : another cultist. Through this individual, known to a woman we didn’t know, Sokolovsky, that same day, became acquainted with several workers, among them the electrician Ivan Andreevich Mukhin, who soon became the main figure in the organization.
Sokolovsky returned from his search with shining eyes :
These are men, these are men !...
The next day, we were in a tavern, forming a group of five or six. The mechanical music rumbled furiously over us, veiling our conversation to foreign ears.
Mukhin, a thin man with a pointed goatee, winks mischievously with his left eye, which is full of intelligence, considers my face, devoid of mustaches and beard, in a friendly but not fearful manner, and in circumstantial terms, making malicious pauses, explains this to me :
The Gospel, for me, in this matter, is like a hook. I start with religion, I end with life. A few days ago, I discovered the whole truth to the Stundists [Sects that devote hours to the study of the Bible. There are such sects among the Jews as well as among the Germans who colonized Russia. -Ed.] with beans...
What, with beans ?
It’s very simple : I put a bean on the table, it’s the Tsar ; around it, other beans : these are the ministers, the bishops, the generals ; then, the nobles, the merchants ; and this pile of beans is the common people. And now I ask : where is the Tsar ?
The speaker points to the middle bean.
Where are the ministers ?
He points to what surrounds the middle bean.
It’s like I said, he continues, and the other agrees, But wait... wait now...
He closes his left eye completely. A pause.
There, I mix all the beans together with my hand... Well, I say, where is the Tsar ? Where are the ministers ? -How can we find our way around ? he replies. We can’t see them anymore... -That’s right, I say, we can’t see them anymore... We just have to mix all the beans...
I was sweating with enthusiasm, listening to Ivan Andreevich. That was the real thing, and we were there, the rest of us, acting smart, trying to guess, without success. The music box is playing ; we are in the middle of a conspiracy ; Ivan Andreevich, with his beans, is destroying the class mechanism : revolutionary propaganda...
Only, how do you mix them ? Flies eat them, that’s the thing, Mukhin told me, in a completely different tone, and he looked at me sternly, with both eyes this time. They’re not beans, are they ?...
And it’s he, now, who’s waiting for an answer from me. From that day on, we threw ourselves into the work wholeheartedly. We had neither elders to guide us, nor personal experience ; but, I don’t think, we experienced a single difficulty or embarrassment. One thing emerged from another, as irresistibly as everything had emerged from the conversation we had conducted in a tavern with Mukhin.
The economic life of Russia, towards the end of the last century, was shifting abruptly to the southeast. In the South, large factories were springing up one after the other, two of them in Nikolayev. In 1897, there were about eight thousand factory workers and about two thousand artisans in this city. The cultural level of the workers, like their wages, was relatively high. The illiterate constituted a tiny minority. The revolutionary organizations were supplemented, to a certain extent, by religious sects that effectively combated official orthodoxy. Not experiencing any major alerts, the Nikolayev gendarmerie dozed peacefully. The state it was in served us well. If police surveillance had been exercised seriously, we would have been arrested in the first weeks. But we were only pioneers and had all the advantages of this situation. We only set the gendarmes in motion after we had set the Nikolayev workers in motion.
When I met Mukhin and his friends, my name was Lvov. This first conspiratorial lie was not easy for me : it was truly painful to "deceive" people with whom I had gotten along for such a great and good cause. But this pseudonym of Lvov soon stuck to my person, and I got used to it.
The workers came to us of their own accord, as if we had been expected for a long time in the factories. Everyone brought a friend ; several brought their wives ; some older workers entered our circles with their sons. However, it wasn’t we who were looking for the workers ; it was they who were looking for us. As young, inexperienced leaders, we soon lost our breath in the movement we had stirred up. Every word had its echo. At our clandestine lessons and talks, which took place in lodgings, in the woods, on the banks of the river, we gathered twenty to twenty-five people, and sometimes more. The majority were highly skilled workers, who earned a fairly good living. At the Nikolayev shipyards, the eight-hour day was already the rule. The workers in these workshops were not concerned with strikes ; they sought only to establish justice in social relations. Some of them called themselves Baptists, Stundists, Evangelical Christians. But these were not members of dogmatic sects. Simply moving away from Orthodoxy, these workers took baptism as a step on a short journey towards the path of revolution. During the first weeks of our conversations, some of them still used formulas from Christian sects and sought analogies with primitive Christianity. But almost all of them soon got rid of this phraseology, which was unceremoniously mocked by younger workers.
Even today, the most remarkable figures stand before me as if alive. The carpenter Korotkov, wearing a bowler hat, who had long ago renounced all mysticism, fanciful and versifying.
I am a rationalist (rationalist), he would say solemnly.
And when Taras Savelyevich, an old follower of the Gospel, who had grandchildren, began for the hundredth time to speak of the first Christians whose meetings, like ours, had been held in secret, Korotkov would abruptly interrupt him :
Your good Lord stories, that’s what I do with them !
And, indignantly, undoing his hair, he would throw his bowler hat somewhere in the air among the trees. A moment later, he would go and look for his headgear. This happened in a wood, on a sandy patch of ground.
Many workers, carried away by new feelings, began to compose verses. Korotkov wrote a "proletarian march" which began thus : "We are the alphas and the omegas, the beginnings and the ends..."
Nesterenko, who was also a carpenter, and who had joined Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya’s circle with his son, composed in Ukrainian a dumka [A kind of recitative, or chanson de geste, or ballad usually devoted to historical facts or figures. The root of the word is duma, thought, meditation, reverie. -Ed.] about Karl Marx. It was sung in chorus. But Nesterenko was to turn out badly : he made friends with the police and handed over the entire organization to them.
Young Yefimov, a laborer, a giant with blond hair and blue eyes, from a family of officers, who knew how to read and write well, and had even read a lot, lived in the slums of the city. I discovered him in a street dive. He worked at the port as a docker, neither drank nor smoked, was reserved and polite, but within him lived some secret that made him morose, although he was only twenty-one years old.
Yefimov soon confided in me that he had become acquainted with a mysterious organization of narodovoltsy [Supporters of "People’s Freedom." - Ed.] and offered to put us in touch with them.
The three of us, Mukhin, Yefimov, and I, were drinking tea in the noisy tavern "Russia," listening to a deafening music machine and waiting. Finally, Efimov pointed out to us, with a single glance, a tall, sturdy man with a merchant’s beard. It was "him." The man drank tea for a long time at a separate table, then put on his overcoat and, with an automatic gesture, crossed himself in the direction of the icons.
That, for example, for a revolutionary !... exclaimed Mukhin in a low voice.
The supporter of "people’s freedom" avoided any connection with us, transmitting, through Efimov, I no longer know what confused explanation. This story remained forever obscure. As for Efimov, he was soon to settle his accounts with existence ; he asphyxiated himself with gas.
It may be that the blue-eyed giant was only a toy in the hands of a police bloodhound ; but one can still assume the worst...
Mukhin, who was an electrician, as I said, had established in his lodgings a complicated signaling system in case of a police incursion.
He was twenty-seven years old, he coughed up a little blood ; he was rich in experience, full of practical wisdom, and almost gave me the impression of an old man. He remained a revolutionary all his life. After his first deportation, he found himself in prison, then was deported again. I saw him again twenty-three years later, in Kharkov, at the conference of the Ukrainian Communist Party. We stayed in a corner for a long time, stirring up the dust of old memories, recalling certain episodes, and telling each other what had become of several of those with whom we had been in contact at the dawn of the revolution. Mukhin, at this conference, was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the Ukrainian party. He had well deserved this distinction by the example of his entire life. But, shortly after, he took to his bed and was not to get up again.
Hardly had we become acquainted than Mukhin put me in touch with a friend of his, who was also a member of a religious sect. His name was Babenko. He owned a small house and a few apple trees in his garden. Lame, slow of movement, always sober, he taught me to drink tea with apples and not with lemon.
At the same time as others, he was arrested, spent a long time in prison, and then returned to Nikolayev. It was our destiny to be completely separated. In 1925, I read by chance in a newspaper that a former member of the Southern Workers’ Union, Babenko, was living in the Kuban province. Around that time, he lost the use of both legs. I managed to get (in 1925, it was already not very easy for me) the old man transferred to Essentuki for treatment. Babenko was able to walk again. I went to see him at the sanatorium. He had no idea that Trotsky and Lvov were one and the same person. We drank tea with apples again, reminiscing about the past. It was he who must have been surprised to learn soon after that Trotsky was a counter-revolutionary !
There were many interesting figures ; it is impossible to list them all. Among the young people, we had a highly cultured elite who had attended the shipyard technical school. They understood their instructor perfectly. Thus, revolutionary propaganda proved incomparably easier than we had imagined. We were surprised and intoxicated by the exceptional results of our work. From what we had heard about the militants’ activity, we knew that, ordinarily, the number of workers won over to the cause was expressed in a few units. A revolutionary who had persuaded two or three workers counted that as a significant success. Now, among us, the number of workers who had joined our circles or wished to join them seemed practically unlimited. The only thing lacking was leaders. Literature too. Among the instructors, we fought over a single, well-worn copy of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, a handwritten copy, a copy made by several hands in Odessa, containing many gaps and alterations.
Soon, we ourselves took it upon ourselves to create a literature. This was, strictly speaking, the beginning of my work as a writer. It almost coincided with the beginning of my revolutionary activity. I wrote proclamations, articles ; I then copied them in printed characters for the hectograph. At that time, no one had heard of typewriters. I designed the letters with the greatest care. I made it a point of honor to ensure that even a nearly illiterate worker could easily decipher the proclamation coming out of our hectograph. Each page required at least two hours of work. I sometimes spent a whole week on it, my back bent, only straightening up to go to the meetings and activities of the circles. But what a satisfaction it was when we learned from the factories and corporations how the mysterious sheets with the purple letters had been eagerly read, passed on, and ardently discussed by the workers. They imagined the author of the proclamations as a powerful and mysterious personage who penetrated all the factories, knew what was happening in the corporations, and was able to respond to events within twenty-four hours with brand-new sheets.
At first, we melted the material for the hectograph and printed the proclamations in our room at night. Someone stood sentry in the courtyard. In the open stove, there was oil and matches to destroy the evidence of the crime in case of danger. All this was extremely naive. But Nikolayev’s gendarmes were hardly more experienced than we were.
Later, we moved our printing press into the home of an elderly worker who had accidentally lost his sight. He didn’t hesitate to give us his premises.
For a blind man, he said with a quiet smile, it’s like prison everywhere...
Little by little, we managed to build up a large supply of gelatin, glycerin, and paper at his place. We worked at night. The dilapidated room, whose ceiling weighed down on your head, had a truly miserable, destitute air. We prepared the revolutionary porridge on a cast-iron stove, then poured it onto a tin plate. The blind man was the most sure of his movements in the semi-darkness of the room, and helped us. A young worker and a woman worker looked at each other, filled with respect, when I lifted the freshly printed sheet from the hectograph.
If someone had cast a glance "from above," the glance of a "reasonable" man, on this youth who were bustling about in the darkness, around a miserable copying machine, how fanciful and ridiculous would have seemed to him the idea we had of overthrowing a powerful regime that had lasted for centuries ! Now, this plan was put into execution in the time assigned to a generation : from the nights of which I speak, until 1905, only eight years had passed ; until 1917, not quite twenty years.
Oral propaganda did not give me, it seems to me, as great satisfaction as that which I could give in writing. My knowledge was insufficient and I did not yet know how to present it in a suitable manner. We did not yet make speeches in the true sense of the word.
Only once, in the forest, for May Day, did I have to speak. This troubled me deeply. Every word, as it was about to pass through my throat, seemed intolerably false. But our talks in the circles sometimes succeeded quite well. On the whole, the revolutionary work was in full swing. I maintained and developed my relations with Odessa. One evening, I went to the port of Nikolayev, bought a third-class ticket for a ruble, sat down on the deck of the steamer, as close as possible to the funnel, rolled my jacket under my head, and covered myself with my overcoat. In the morning, when I awoke, I was in Odessa, and I went to the addresses I knew.
I spent the following night, back home, on the ship. In this way, I had lost no time.
My relationship with Odessa was enriched in an unexpected way. At the entrance to the public library, I met a worker wearing glasses : we looked at each other and guessed who we were. He was Albert Poliak, a worker-typesetter who organized a central printing press, later famous, for the party. Our relationship with him was an epoch-making event in the life of our organization. A few days later, I brought Nikolayev a suitcase full of illegal literature, published abroad. They were small, brand-new pamphlets with brightly colored covers. We opened the suitcase more than once to admire our treasure. These pamphlets were quickly distributed and greatly increased our authority in working-class circles.
I learned by chance from Poliak, while chatting, that the technician Schrenzel, who passed himself off as an engineer and who had been circling around us for a long time, was an old agent provocateur. Stupid and troublesome, Schrenzel wore a cap with a cockade [the badge of state officials]. Instinctively, we had distrusted him, but he was well-informed about certain people and facts. I invited him to Mukhin’s. There, I explained in detail Schrenzel’s career, without naming him, and thus drove him to complete panic. We threatened him with summary execution if he handed us over. This warning apparently had its effect, for we were not troubled for three months. On the other hand, after our arrest, Schrenzel piled horror upon horror in his depositions.
We had named our organization the Workers’ Union of South Russia, hoping to enlist other cities. I drafted the statutes of the Union in the spirit of social democracy. The administration [In old Russia, this word referred to the authorities, and more specifically the police. -Ed.] tried to combat our influence in the factories by making speeches. But the very next day, we responded with proclamations. This duel stirred up emotion not only in working-class circles, but throughout the city’s population. Everywhere, in the end, there was talk of these revolutionaries who were spreading their papers profusely in the factories. We were mentioned by name on all sides. But the police were slow to act, not believing that "the kids from the gardener’s" were capable of leading such a campaign and imagining that more experienced leaders were hiding behind us. They probably suspected the former deportees. This is how we gained two or three months. However, in the end, the surveillance that was being carried out became too obvious, and the gendarmerie managed to get to know all our circles, one after the other. We decided to disperse for a few weeks and leave Nikolayev, in order to track down the police. I was to go to my parents in the village ; Sokolovskaya and her brother would go to Yekaterinoslav, etc. At the same time, we firmly decided that in the event of mass arrests, we would not hide and let ourselves be caught, so that the gendarmes could not tell the workers that their leaders had "abandoned" them.
Before I left, Nesterenko absolutely insisted that I hand him a bundle of proclamations. He arranged to meet me, very late in the evening, behind the cemetery. There was a thick layer of snow. Moonlight. Beyond the resting place, a wasteland, absolutely deserted. I found Nesterenko at the indicated spot. But, just as I was passing him the package, which I was pulling from under my overcoat, an individual detached himself from the cemetery wall, passed very close to us and brushed Nesterenko with his elbow.
Who is it ? I asked, surprised.
"I don’t know," Nesterenko replied, following the stranger with his eyes. "
He was already in contact with the police. But it didn’t even occur to me to suspect him."
On January 28, 1898, mass arrests were carried out. More than two hundred people were apprehended. And the repression began. One of the prisoners, Private Sokolov, was so terrified that, from the top of a corridor of the remand center, on the first floor, he threw himself onto the pavement ; he escaped with serious bruises. Another inmate, Levandovsky, suffered a cerebral derangement. There were other victims.
Many of those who were caught were caught by accident. Some of those we were counting on abandoned us, or even betrayed us. On the other hand, others who had remained in the shadows showed strength of character. Among those imprisoned, and for a long time, was a turner, the German Auguste Dorn, about fifty years old ; arrested for no one knew why, for he had only come twice to take a look in a circle. He behaved wonderfully, singing, so that the whole prison could hear him, little German ditties, which, to tell the truth, were not always the most virtuous, joking in Russian that he was crippling, keeping up the courage of the young people. At the Deportation Depot in Moscow, we found ourselves together in a common room ; Dorn had his way of calling the samovar and ended his monologue thus : "Ah ! You don’t want to come ! Well, Dorn will get you !" Although this scene was repeated from day to day, we all laughed heartily.
Nikolayev’s organization had been badly hit, but was not destroyed. We were soon replaced. Both the revolutionaries and the gendarmes were becoming more experienced.
(…)

1905

The October strike had begun, one might say, without any plan. It began with a typographical strike in Moscow, then subsided. The political parties were planning the decisive battles for January 9/22. That is why, without much haste, I was finishing my work in my asylum in Finland. But the occasional strike, which was already being liquidated, suddenly moved on to the railways, and then it took the bit between its teeth. From October 10, the strike, with slogans that already concerned politics, spread from Moscow to the entire country. Throughout the world, no strike like it had ever been seen. In many cities, there were clashes with troops in the streets. However, overall and in total, the events of October remained at the level of a political strike ; there was no armed insurrection yet. Nevertheless, absolutism, losing its head, gave way. The constitutional manifesto of October 17/30 was promulgated. In truth, the wounded tsarism still held the machinery of power in its hands. Government policy, according to Witte’s assessment [S.J. Witte (1849-1915). One of the leading statesmen during the reign of the last two emperors. -Ed.], was more than ever "a combination of cowardice, blindness, perfidy, and stupidity."
And the revolution had won a first victory, incomplete, but promising.
"The most serious argument of the Russian revolution of 1905," Witte later wrote, "consisted, of course, in this slogan of the peasants : Give us the land." On this point, one could agree with him. But Witte continued : "As for the workers’ soviet, I did not attribute much importance to it. And it did not deserve it." This only proves that the most eminent of the bureaucrats did not understand the meaning of events which were a final warning to the ruling classes. Witte died in time to avoid being forced to revise what he had thought of the workers’ soviets.
I arrived in St. Petersburg at the height of the October strike. The movement continued to expand, but there was a danger that it would fail, not being framed by a mass organization. I arrived from Finland having drawn up a plan for a non-party electoral organization, which would have one delegate for every thousand workers. The writer Iordansky, who was later to be Soviet ambassador to Italy, informed me on the very day of my arrival that the Mensheviks had already launched the slogan of a revolutionary electoral body with one delegate for every 500 workers. This was correct. Those members of the Bolshevik Central Committee who were then in St. Petersburg resolutely opposed an electoral organization independent of parties, fearing that it would compete with Social Democracy. The Bolshevik workers did not have the same apprehension at all. The upper spheres of Bolshevism behaved like sectarians toward the Soviet until Lenin’s arrival in November. An edifying chapter could be written on the leadership the "Leninists" gave in Lenin’s absence. He was so superior to his disciples that, in his presence, they felt as if exempted from the necessity of solving problems of theory and tactics for themselves. Their communication with Lenin had been cut off at a critical moment ; they were astoundingly helpless. This was so in the autumn of 1905. This was so in the spring of 1917. In both these periods, as in many other cases of less historical importance, the masses of the party grasped the line to be followed much more accurately, intuitively, than the half-leaders left to their own devices. If Lenin returned a little too late from abroad, this was one of the reasons why the Bolshevik faction failed to take a leading position in the events of the first revolution.
I have already noted that N.-I. Sedova was surprised by an encirclement of cavalry troops on May 1st at a meeting in the forest. She remained imprisoned for six months and was then sent to Tver, under heavy police surveillance. When the October Manifesto was promulgated, she returned to Petersburg. Under the name of Vikentiev, we rented a room from a gentleman who, as we learned, speculated on the Stock Exchange. His business was not doing well. Many speculators were then forced to live in more cramped conditions. Every morning, a salesman brought us all the newspapers that came out. The main occupant of the house sometimes asked his wife for them, read them, and... gnashed his teeth. His business was getting worse and worse. One day he invaded our room, shaking a leaf in the air :
Look at this, he yelled, his finger planted on the article I had just written : Hello, dvornik from Petersburg ! [In Moscow and Petersburg, as well as in the main provincial towns, the dvornik (court boy) was one of the most discreet and important figures in a building. The vast majority of dvorniki were appointed by the police. The revolutionaries therefore had an interest in circumventing them. The court boy, half-janitor and half-sweeper, was, moreover, a poor fellow. -Ed.] Look ! Now they’re starting to stir up the court boys ! If I had that convict here, I’d shoot him with this !...
He took a revolver from his pocket and brandished it in the air. He looked like a madman. He needed approval. My wife came to the editorial office to tell me this disturbing news. We would have had to look for another place to live. But we didn’t have a minute of freedom. And we left it to fate. This is how we lived with the distressed scholarship holder until the day I was arrested. Luckily, neither our landlord nor the police ever learned who the man was who had lived under the name Vikentiev. After my arrest, there was not even a search of our apartment.
In the Soviet, I spoke under the name "Yanovsky," in memory of the village where I was born. I signed my articles "Trotsky." I had to collaborate on three newspapers. With Parvus, we took over the small Russkaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette), which we turned into a fighting organ for the masses. In a few days, the circulation rose from 30,000 to 100,000 copies. A month later, the demand was half a million. But our technology could not keep up with the demand. We were only able to finally emerge from this difficulty thanks to the governmental collapse. On November 13, we joined forces with the Mensheviks to launch a major political organ, Natchalo [Nachalo : The Beginning, The Beginning. -Ed.]. The circulation of this newspaper increased not daily, but hourly. The Bolsheviks’ Novaya Zhizn [Novaya Zhizn : The New Life. -Ed.] was rather dull in Lenin’s absence. On the other hand, Natchalo enjoyed tremendous success. I think that this publication, more than any other in the space of half a century, came closer to its classic prototype, Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx had edited in 1848. Kamenev, who was then on the editorial staff of Novaya Zhizn, told me later that, traveling by train, he had observed, at the stations, the progress of the sale of the latest newspapers received. When the train from St. Petersburg arrived, endless queues of customers formed. The buyers wanted only revolutionary publications.
Natchalo ! Natchalo ! Natchalo ! they shouted.
Then
Novaya Zhizn !
And again :
Natchalo ! Natchalo ! Natchalo !...
And Kamenev then made this confession to me :
I said to myself, with disappointment : definitely, those from Natchalo write better than we do...
I didn’t only contribute to Russkaya Gazeta and Natchalo. I also wrote editorials for Izvestia [The News. The same title was adopted after the 1917 revolution. -Ed.] the official organ of the Soviet. I also wrote numerous appeals, manifestos, and resolutions. The fifty-two days during which the first Soviet existed were overloaded with work to the point of exhaustion : Soviet meetings, executive committee, incessant meetings, and three newspapers. I myself don’t see very clearly how we lived in this whirlpool of great waters. But in the past, many things seem inconceivable because memories have lost all trace of activity. We only see ourselves from a distance. However, during those days, we were sufficiently active. Not only were we swirling around in the turmoil, but we were provoking it. Everything was done quickly, but not too badly, and sometimes very well. The editor in charge, an old democrat, Dr. DM Herzenstein, visited the editorial office from time to time ; dressed in an impeccable black frock coat, he would stop in the middle of the workroom and survey with curiosity the chaos in which we were struggling. A year later, he had to answer before the courts for the revolutionary excesses of the newspaper over which he had had no influence. This old man did not disown us. Far from it ! With tears in his eyes, he told the judges how, while editing the most popular newspaper of all, we fed ourselves in the meantime with dry pies that the warden brought us, wrapped in paper, from the neighboring bakery. The old man had to do a year in prison for the revolution that had not won, for the brotherhood of émigrés, and for the dry pies.
In his memoirs, Witte later wrote that in 1905 "the immense majority of Russia lost its minds in some way." Revolution appears, in the eyes of a conservative, as collective madness only because it pushes the "normal" insanity of social antagonisms to the utmost extremes.
Thus, people refuse to recognize themselves in a bold caricature. However, all modern developments aggravate, strain, sharpen antagonisms, make them intolerable and, consequently, prepare a situation in which the immense majority "loses its minds." But in such cases, it is the insane majority that straitjackets the wise minority. And this is how history can move forward.
The chaos of a revolution is not at all that of an earthquake or a flood. In revolutionary disorder, a new order immediately begins to form ; people and ideas naturally spread out along new axes. The revolution appears to be absolute madness only to those it sweeps away and overthrows. For us, the revolution was the native element, albeit a very agitated one. Everything found its time and place there. Some even managed to continue living their individual lives, to fall in love, to make new acquaintances, and even to frequent revolutionary theaters. Parvus enjoyed a new satirical play that was being performed so much that he bought fifty tickets at once for the next performance, with the intention of sending them to friends. It should be explained that the day before, he had received his royalties for his books. He was arrested and fifty theater tickets were found on him. The gendarmes racked their brains for a long time to decipher this revolutionary enigma. They were unaware that Parvus always did things broadly.
The Soviet stirred up formidable masses. All the workers, as one, stood for the Soviet. In the countryside, there was unrest, as well as among the troops returning from the Far East after the Peace of Portsmouth. But the guard regiments and the Cossacks were still firm supporters of the regime. All the elements of a victorious revolution existed potentially, but they were not yet mature.
On October 18/31, the day after the day the manifesto was promulgated, there were, in front of the University of Petersburg, many thousands of demonstrators, still hot from the struggle and intoxicated by the first victory. I shouted to them, from the balcony, that the half-success achieved was not certain, that we had before us an irreconcilable enemy, that there was a trap to be foreseen ; I tore up the Tsar’s manifesto in front of this crowd and threw the pieces to the wind. But such political warnings only make light scratches on the feelings of the masses. They must pass through the school of greater events.
I recall, on this occasion, two scenes from the life of the Petersburg Soviet.
The first took place on October 29. All the talk in town was of a pogrom prepared by the Black Hundreds. The workers’ deputies who came directly from the factories to the soviet showed on the podium models of weapons manufactured to fight the reactionaries. They brandished Finnish knives, cudgels, daggers, wire skewers, but all this rather cheerfully, and even with jokes and popular antics. They seemed to believe that their will to resist was enough to resolve the problem. The vast majority of them had not yet understood that it was a fight to the death. The December days were to teach them that.
On the evening of December 3, the Petersburg soviet was surrounded by troops. All the exits were closed. From the top of a gallery where the executive committee was holding its session, I shouted to those below (there were already hundreds of deputies there) :
Do not offer resistance ; do not surrender weapons to the enemy !
We had pocket weapons : revolvers. And then, in the meeting hall, already blocked on all sides by detachments of guard infantry, cavalry, and artillery, the workers began to break these weapons. Expert hands ground Brownings against Mausers and Mausers against Brownings. And these were no longer jokes and banter like those of October 29. In the clinking, clicking, and grinding of the metal being broken, one could also discern the gnashing of teeth of a proletariat experiencing for the first time, as it should, that something else would be needed, a more powerful and implacable effort to overthrow and crush the enemy.
The half-victory of the October strike, apart from its political importance, had for me an inestimable theoretical significance. It was neither the opposition of the liberal bourgeoisie, nor the spontaneous uprisings of the peasants, nor the acts of terrorism of the intellectuals that forced tsarism to its knees : it was the workers’ strike. The revolutionary hegemony of the proletariat proved incontestable. I considered that the theory of permanent revolution had just successfully emerged from its first great test. Clearly, the revolution opened up to the proletariat the prospect of conquering power. The years of reaction that were soon to follow could not force me to abandon this point of view. But I also drew conclusions for the West. If such was the strength of the young proletariat in Russia, what would not be the revolutionary power of the other proletariat, that of the most cultivated countries ?
Lunacharsky, with his characteristic inaccuracy and negligence, later characterized my revolutionary outlook as follows :
"Comrade Trotsky had adopted - in 1905 - the view that the two revolutions - bourgeois and socialist - without coinciding, are linked together, so that we have before us a permanent revolution. Having entered the revolutionary period by a coup d’état of the bourgeoisie, the Russian portion of humanity, and with it the whole world, will not be able to emerge from this period before the completion of the social revolution. It cannot be denied that Comrade Trotsky, in formulating such ideas, showed great perspicacity, although he was mistaken for about fifteen years."
The remark made about my error regarding fifteen years has not become more profound because it was reproduced by Radek. In 1905, all our forecasts, all our slogans were calculated on a perspective of victory, not defeat, of the revolution. We then failed to realize either the republic, nor an agrarian reform, nor the eight-hour day. Does this mean that we were mistaken when we formulated such demands ? The failure of the revolution closed all perspectives, and not only the one I have indicated. It was not a question of setting deadlines ; it was a question of analyzing the inner forces of the revolution and predicting its overall progress.
What were my relations with Lenin in 1905 ? After his death, official history was rewritten : even for 1905, it was established that a struggle had taken place between two principles, that of good and that of evil. What was the reality ? Lenin did not participate directly in the work of the Soviet, he did not speak in it. Needless to say, he followed attentively every step of the Soviet, that he influenced its policy through the representatives of the Bolshevik faction, that he explained the action of the Soviet in his newspaper. On no question did Lenin find himself in disagreement with the policy of the Soviet. Moreover, as the documents prove, all the decisions of the Soviet, except perhaps a few occasional and unimportant ones, were drafted by me, submitted by me to the Executive Committee, and reported by me, in the name of the Committee, before the Soviet. When a federated commission of delegates from the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was formed, it was still I who was responsible for speaking on behalf of the commission before the executive committee. And no conflict arose then.
The first president of the soviet was elected on the eve of my arrival from Finland : it was the young lawyer Khrustalev, an episodic figure in the revolution, who occupied an intermediate position between that of Gapon and the social democracy. Khrustalev presided, but did not provide political direction. After his arrest, a new bureau was elected, at the head of which I found myself.
Sverchkov, one of the most prominent members of the Soviet, wrote in his memoirs :
"The ideological leadership of the Soviet came from L.D. Trotsky. The chairman, Nosar-Khrustalev, served more as a screen, for he was not capable of personally resolving a single question of principle. Suffering from a pathological pride, he took a hatred of L.D. Trotsky precisely because he constantly had to ask the latter for advice and guidance."
On the other hand, Lunacharsky relates this in his memoirs :
"I remember that when someone said in Lenin’s presence :
’Khrustalev’s star is on the wane, and the strong man of the Soviet is currently Trotsky,’ Lenin seemed to darken for a second, then said : ’Why not ? Trotsky has conquered this situation by tireless and brilliant work.’
Relations between the two editorial boards were extremely friendly. There was no polemic between them. The Bolsheviks’ Novaya Zhizn read :
’The first issue of Natchalo has just appeared. Our congratulations to our comrade in arms. It is worth noting that in this first issue there is a brilliant description of the November strike by Comrade Trotsky."
This is not how one writes when one is in battle. But we were not fighting each other. Quite the contrary, our newspapers defended each other against bourgeois criticism. Lenin had already arrived when Novaya Zhizn defended my articles on the permanent revolution. Our newspapers, like our factions, were tending towards fusion. The Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, with Lenin’s participation, unanimously adopted a resolution in which it was stated, in substance, that the split could only have been the result of the special conditions of emigration and that the events of the revolution had destroyed any basis for struggle between factions. This was also the line that I defended in Natchalo, against Martov’s passive resistance.
Under pressure from the masses, the Menshevik members of the Soviet, during the first period, aligned themselves as much as they could with the left wing. They only reversed course after the first blow of reaction. In February 1906, the leader of the Mensheviks, Martov, lamented in a letter to Axelrod :
"For two months now... I have not been able to complete any of the work I have started... I cannot say whether it is neurasthenia or mental fatigue, but I have not been able to control my thoughts."
Martov did not know what to call his illness. However, it had a definite name : Menshevism. In times of revolution, opportunism is expressed above all by dismay and by the inability to "control ideas."
When the Mensheviks publicly declared their repentance and condemned the policy that had been followed by the Soviet, I defended this policy in the Russian press, then in the German press and in Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish magazine. From this struggle for the methods and traditions of 1905 resulted a book that I first entitled : Russia in Revolution and which was later republished, both in Russia and in various countries, under the title : 1905. After the October Revolution, this work became a kind of history textbook not only in Russia, but also in the Communist parties of the West. It was only after Lenin’s death, when a carefully prepared campaign against me began, that my book on the year 1905 fell under firing squad. At first, people confined themselves to making certain observations, to picking on me about poor, uninteresting things. But, little by little, criticism grew bolder, spread, multiplied, became more complicated, became insolent and all the more noisy because it had to drown out the voice of its own anxieties. Thus, afterward, the legend was created of a conflict between Lenin and Trotsky over the lines to be followed during the 1905 revolution.
This revolution caused a break in the life of the country, in the life of the party, and in my personal life. A break in the direction of greater maturity.
My first revolutionary work, in Nikolayev, had been a provincial experience, done by trial and error. Yet this test was not without profit. Perhaps never, in all the years that followed, did I have the opportunity to make contact with the rank-and-file workers as intimately as in Nikolayev.
I did not yet have what is called "a name" and nothing distinguished me from them. The principal types that characterize the Russian proletariat were then imposed on my mind, and this was forever. In the following years, I encountered hardly anything but varieties of the species. In prison, I had to undertake the study of revolutionary doctrines, starting almost from the ABC. Two and a half years of detention, two years of deportation gave me the opportunity to establish the theoretical foundations of a revolutionary philosophy. The first emigration was a high school for me in politics. Under the direction of eminent revolutionary Marxists, I learned to consider events from broad historical perspectives and in relation to international relations. Towards the end of this period of emigration, I separated myself from both the leading Bolshevik and Menshevik groups. I returned to Russia in February 1905 ; the others. The émigré leaders did not return until October and November. Among the Russian comrades, not one who could then teach me anything. On the contrary, I found myself in the position of a master. The events of this tumultuous year rushed forward one after the other. It was necessary to take a position immediately. Hardly written, a proclamation was taken to the clandestine printing press. The theoretical principles established in prison and at the places of deportation, the political methods acquired in emigration now found, for the first time, their immediate application in the fight. I felt within me a confidence in the face of events. I understood their mechanism, - or so it seemed to me, - I imagined what their action would be on the workers’ consciousness and I foresaw in broad outline what the next day would be. From February to October my participation was mainly of a literary nature. In October, I suddenly threw myself into the formidable turmoil, which, for me personally, was the most serious test. It was under fire that decisions had to be made. I cannot refrain from noting here that I succeeded in making them as self-evident determinations. I did not turn around to see what others would say, I rarely had the opportunity to consult anyone - everything was done in haste. Later, it was with astonishment and disgust that I saw the most intelligent of the Mensheviks, Martov, constantly allowing himself to be surprised by major events and remaining disconcerted by them. Without thinking about it (I had too little time left to examine myself), I organically felt that I had passed the age of schooling. Not in the sense that I had then ceased to study : not because the need to learn and the zeal have remained with me, in all their intensity and freshness to this day. But, from a certain moment on, I continued my studies as a teacher, and no longer as a student.When I was arrested for the second time I was twenty-six years old. And it was old Deutch who recognized my maturity : in prison with me, he solemnly renounced calling me "young man" and called me by my first and last name.
Lunacharsky, in a book entitled Silhouettes, which I have already quoted, and which is now banned, assesses the role of the leaders of the first revolution as follows :
"His [Trotsky’s] popularity among the Petersburg proletariat was very great at the time of his arrest and increased as a result of his exceptionally brilliant [?] and heroic [?] conduct before the tribunal. I must say that Trotsky, of all the Social-Democratic leaders of 1905-1906, showed himself undoubtedly, despite his youth, the best prepared ; least of all, he bore the mark of a certain narrow-mindedness due to emigration, a narrow-mindedness from which Lenin, as I have already said, had not yet been able to shake off ; Trotsky felt better than others what a political struggle is. And he emerged from the revolution with the greatest acquisition of popularity : in short, neither Lenin nor Martov had gained anything in this sense. Plekhanov had lost a lot, as a result of the semi-Cadet tendencies he had manifested. Trotsky was, from then on, in the first rank."
These lines drawn in 1923 are all the more significant since Lunacharsky, at the present time, writes exactly the opposite ; conduct which on his part has nothing very "brilliant" or very "heroic."
It is inconceivable that a great work can be accomplished without intuition, that is to say, without that subconscious perspicacity which theoretical and practical work can develop and enrich, but which must above all be a gift of nature. Neither theoretical instruction nor routine in practice can replace the insight which allows the politician to unravel a situation, to appreciate it as a whole and to foresee its consequences. This special faculty acquires a decisive importance in periods of violent upheavals, of upheavals, in other words, in times of revolution. The events of 1905 revealed, it seems to me, in me that revolutionary intuition on which I was thus to be able to rely in the future. I will note here that the errors I committed, however serious they were - and there were some of very great importance - always related to subsidiary questions of organization or tactics, but not to the essential problems, not to strategy. In the assessment of a political situation as a whole and its revolutionary perspectives, I cannot, in conscience, reproach myself for any serious error.
For Russia, the revolution of 1905 was the dress rehearsal for 1917. And it had the same significance for me personally. I engaged in the events of 1917 with determination and complete assurance because I saw in them only the continuation and development of the work interrupted by the arrest of the members of the Petersburg Soviet,December 3, 1905.
We were arrested the day after the publication of what was called our "financial manifesto," which announced the inevitable bankruptcy of the Tsarist regime : it was categorically made clear that the Romanov debts would not be recognized by the people on the day they won victory.
The manifesto of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies clearly stated :
"The autocracy has never enjoyed the confidence of the people and was not founded by them in power. Consequently, we decide that we will not admit the payment of debts on any loans that the Tsar’s government has concluded while it was in open and declared war with the entire people."
The Paris Stock Exchange was to respond, a few months later, to our manifesto by granting the Tsar a new loan of 750 million francs. The reactionary and liberal press mocked the Soviet’s impotent threats to the Tsarist finances and the bankers of Europe. Afterwards, attempts were made to forget the manifesto. But it was bound to be remembered of its own accord. The financial bankruptcy of Tsarism, prepared by the entire past, erupted at the same time as the military debacle. And, after the victory of the revolution, a decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, dated February 10, 1918, declared all the Tsar’s debts purely and simply canceled. This decree is still in force. Those who claim that the October Revolution recognizes no obligations are wrong. The revolution recognizes its own obligations perfectly well. The commitment it made on December 2, 1905, it fulfilled on February 10, 1918. It has every right to say to the creditors of Tsarism, "Gentlemen, you have been warned in good time !"
In this respect as in all others, 1905 had prepared the way for 1917.

1917

From July to October

On June 4 [Here and below, the dates are those of the old Russian calendar. The 1st Congress of Soviets opened on June 3/16, and it was the next day, June 4/17, that the event in question occurred. —Ed. note], the Bolshevik faction read at the Congress of Soviets a statement submitted by me concerning the offensive Kerensky was preparing at the front. We pointed out that this offensive was an adventure that threatened the very existence of the army. But the Provisional Government was intoxicated with idle eloquence. The ministers regarded the mass of soldiers, shaken to their core by the revolution, as clay from which one could make anything one wanted. Kerensky roamed the front, conjured, threatened, knelt, kissed the ground, and, in a word, indulged in every kind of antics, without giving the slightest answer to all the questions that tormented the soldiers. Deceiving himself with facile effects, and with the support of the Congress of Soviets, he gave the order for the offensive. When the disaster predicted by the Bolsheviks broke out, it was the latter who were blamed. They were hunted down with renewed ferocity. The reaction, under the cover of the Cadet Party, was pushing from all sides and demanding our heads.

The masses’ confidence in the Provisional Government was irretrievably compromised. In this second stage of the revolution, Petrograd again showed itself to be, and by far, the vanguard. During the July Days, this advanced post had a skirmish with Kerensky’s government. It was not yet an insurrection ; it was only a thoroughgoing reconnaissance. But, from this open conflict, it became clear that Kerensky had no "democratic" army at his disposal, that the forces supporting him against us were those of the counter-revolution.

I was in session at the Tauride Palace on July 3 when I learned of the demonstration by the machine-gun regiment and the appeal it had made to other troops and factories. This news was unexpected for me. The demonstration was spontaneous, it came from the rank and file, on an anonymous initiative. The next day, it grew in scale, and our party was already part of it. The Tauride Palace was invaded by the people. There was only one slogan : "Power to the Soviets !" In front of the palace, a small group of suspicious individuals who were keeping away from the crowd arrested the Minister of Agriculture, Chernov, and forced him into an automobile. The multitude remained indifferent to the minister’s fate, and, in any case, their sympathies were not with him. The news of Chernov’s arrest and the sad fate that threatened him reached the interior of the palace. The populists decided to use armored cars with machine guns to save their leader. Their declining popularity was making them nervous : they wanted to show they had some clout. I decided to get into the car where Chernov was, try to pull him out of the crowd, and then set him free. But the Bolshevik Raskolnikov, a lieutenant in the Baltic Fleet, who had brought the sailors from Kronstadt to the demonstration, demanded with extreme emotion the immediate release of the minister, not wanting it to be claimed later that the sailors had arrested him. I decided to try to help Raskolnikov.

For the rest, I give him the floor :

“It would be difficult to say how long the tumult would have lasted,” the expansive lieutenant notes in his Memoirs, “if Comrade Trotsky had not come to the rescue. With one leap, he was on the hood of the car and, with a broad, energetic gesture like a man tired of waiting, called for calm. In a second, everything was quiet, a deathly silence reigned. In a strong, distinct, metallic voice... Lev Davidovich delivered a short harangue” [which ended thus : “Whoever wants to do violence to Chernov, raise your hand !”] “No one,” Raskolnikov continues, “even dared to open their mouths, no one uttered a word of objection. “Citizen Chernov, you are free !” Trotsky uttered solemnly, turning to his full height toward the minister and inviting him with a gesture to get out of the car. Chernov was neither dead nor alive.” I helped him down, and, his face haggard and ravaged, with a faltering, irresolute step, he climbed the steps and disappeared into the vestibule of the palace. Satisfied with his victory, Lev Davidovich went away with him.

Leaving aside the excessive pathetic coloring, the scene is accurately rendered. This did not prevent the hostile press from claiming that I had arrested Chernov to have him lynched. Chernov himself maintained an embarrassed silence : it is embarrassing, indeed, for a "popular" minister to admit that he saved his head not by his popularity, but thanks to the intervention of a Bolshevik.

One after another, deputations came, on behalf of the demonstrators, to demand that the Executive Committee seize power. Chkheidze, Tseretelli, Dan, and Gotz occupied the seats in the bureau like gods. They did not respond to the deputations, gazed vaguely ahead, or exchanged worried and mysterious glances among themselves. The Bolsheviks spoke, supporting the delegations of workers and soldiers. The members of the bureau were silent. They waited. What were they waiting for ? Hours passed like this. It was late night when the vaults of the palace resounded with the victory blasts of bugles. The bureau revived, as if galvanized by an electric current. Someone came to solemnly announce that the Volhynian regiment had arrived from the front to place itself at the disposal of the Executive Committee. It so happened that, in the entire formidable garrison of Petrograd, "democracy" had not found a single body of troops on which it could rely. It had to wait for armed force to arrive from the front. The whole situation changed immediately. The delegations were expelled, the Bolsheviks were refused a chance to speak. The leaders of democracy decided to take revenge on us for the terror the masses had inspired in them. From the tribune of the executive committee came speeches about the riot of armed men that had just been crushed by troops loyal to the revolution. It was declared that the Bolsheviks constituted a counter-revolutionary party. All this thanks to the arrival of a single regiment, that of the Volhynians. However, three and a half months later, this same regiment helped to overthrow Kerensky’s government.

On the morning of the 5th, I had a meeting with Lenin. The mass offensive had already been suppressed.
"Now," Lenin told me, "they’re going to shoot us all. This is the right moment for them."

But Lenin overestimated the enemy’s decisiveness and capacity for action, if not his hatred. Our adversaries did not shoot us, although they were quite willing to do so. In the streets, Bolsheviks were beaten and killed. Junkers came to ransack the Kszesinska Palace and the Pravda printing press. The entire street in front of this establishment was littered with manuscripts. Among other things, my pamphlet, "To Slanderers," was lost. The in-depth exploration of July was reduced to a one-sided battle. The enemy won easily because we had not entered into a struggle. The party paid dearly for this. Lenin and Zinoviev had to go into hiding. There were countless arrests, accompanied by beatings. The Cossacks and Junkers stole the money of those they arrested, under the pretext that it was "German" money. Many of our fellow travelers and half-declared friends turned their backs on us. At the Tauride Palace, we were declared counter-revolutionaries and, in fact, outlawed.

In the upper echelons of the party, the situation was not great. Lenin had disappeared. Kamenev’s group raised its head. Many, including Stalin, remained silent, aloof from events, waiting to demonstrate their wisdom at a better opportunity. The Bolshevik faction of the Central Executive Committee felt orphaned in the Tauride Palace. It sent a delegation to ask me if I would not report on the new situation, although I was not yet a member of the party : the act that was to formally consecrate our union had been postponed until the party congress, which was to take place soon. Of course, I very willingly agreed to speak. The conversation I had with the Bolshevik faction established those moral bonds that are formed only under the hardest blows of the enemy. I declared that after this crisis, we could expect a rapid recovery ; that the masses would become doubly attached to us when they had verified our loyalty by the facts ; that it was necessary, in these days, to observe closely each revolutionary, because it is in such moments that people are weighed on a scale that does not deceive. And I still remember, with joy, the warm and grateful welcome that the fraction gave me.

Lenin is not here, said Muralov, but among the others, Trotsky is the only one who has not lost his mind.

If I were writing these Memoirs under other conditions—it is doubtful, moreover, that I could have written them under other circumstances—I would feel embarrassed to relate many of the things I report in these pages. But I cannot distract myself from this vast, well-organized falsification of the past, which is one of the main concerns of epigones. My friends are imprisoned or deported. I am forced to say about myself what in other circumstances I would never have said. For me, it is not only a question of historical truth ; it is a question of a political struggle that continues.

It is from this time that my indissoluble combative and political friendship with Muralov dates. About this man, at least a few words must be said here. An old Bolshevik, he participated in the 1905 revolution in Moscow. In 1906, in Serpukhov, he was caught up in a pogrom of Black Hundreds which took place, as always, under the protection of the police. Muralov is a magnificent giant whose intrepidity finds its balance in magnanimous kindness. He found himself with some left-wing men surrounded by the enemy, in the house of the zemstvos. He left the building, revolver in hand and, with an even step, marched towards the crowd. But a group of Black Hundreds, a shock brigade, blocked his path, and some coachmen began to shout.

Place ! shouted the giant, without stopping, and he raised his revolver.

They jumped on him. He shot one man dead on the spot and wounded another. The crowd suddenly parted. Without hurrying, cutting through the multitude like an icebreaker, Muralov left and walked to Moscow.

His trial lasted two years and, despite the reaction that was raging at the time, ended in acquittal.
He had studied as an agronomist, he had been a soldier in a company of automobile crews during the imperialist war, he led the October battles in Moscow and became the first commander of the Moscow military district after the victory. He was the intrepid marshal of the revolutionary war, always true to himself, simple, without posing. In the countryside, he carried out tireless propaganda, through useful acts : he gave advice to farmers, reaped wheat, cared for people, medicated livestock, in his leisure hours. In the most difficult circumstances, he emanated serenity, assurance and warmth of feeling.

After the war, Muralov and I tried to spend our free days together. We were bound by a passion for hunting. We traveled together through the North and the South, sometimes chasing bears or wolves, sometimes looking for pheasants and bustards. Currently, Muralov is hunting... in Siberia, as a deported oppositionist.

During the July Days, Muralov did not waver and supported many of us. Each of us needed to control himself to walk through the corridors and halls of the Tauride Palace without bending, without lowering his head, through a hedge of furious stares, among people who whispered hatefully, who nudged each other with their elbows, with affectation, saying "Look at this, look at this !" and among some who simply ground their teeth. No one is more furious than the arrogant and proud "revolutionary" philistine when he begins to see that the revolution, having suddenly lifted him to great heights, is now threatening his temporary prosperity. To get to the Executive Committee’s buffet in those days, one had to follow a little path of Calvary.
At the buffet, tea and butterbrots of black bread with cheese or red caviar were distributed : caviar was plentiful in Smolny and, later, there was plenty of it in the Kremlin. For dinner, there was chtchi [cabbage soup. —Ed.] with a piece of beef.

The buffet was run by a soldier named Grafov. At the time when we were most hunted, while Lenin, declared a German spy, remained hidden in a hut, I observed that Grafov always offered me the hottest of his glasses of tea, the best of his butterbrots, without looking me in the face. It was clear : Grafov’s sympathies lay with the Bolsheviks, but he hid it from his superiors. I looked more closely. Grafov was not alone in feeling this way. All the small staff at Smolny—guards, couriers, sentries—were obviously inclined toward the Bolsheviks. I told myself then that our cause was already half won. But it was still only half won.

The press waged a campaign against the Bolsheviks that was unprecedented in its relentlessness and dishonesty, and was only surpassed in this respect years later by Stalin’s campaign against the opposition.

Lunacharsky made several ambiguous statements in July, which were interpreted, not without reason, in the press as a renunciation of Bolshevism. Some newspapers attributed identical statements to me. On July 10, I sent a letter to the Provisional Government in which I declared my complete solidarity with Lenin and which ended as follows :

"You have no grounds for excluding me from the arrest decree issued against Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev... You have no reason to doubt that I am an opponent of the general policy of the Provisional Government, just as irreconcilable as these comrades are..."

The ministers acted accordingly : they had me arrested as a German spy.

In May, when Tseretelli was hunting down sailors and disarming machine gunners, I predicted to him that the day might not be far off when he would have to ask the sailors for help against a general who would take it upon himself to grease the rope intended to hang the revolution.

In August, this general appeared : it was Kornilov. Tseretelli asked the sailors of Kronstadt for help. They did not refuse. The cruiser Avrora entered the waters of the Neva. It was in the prison of "Kresty" that I was to learn of such a rapid realization of my prognosis. The sailors of the Aurora sent me a delegation to seek advice : should they protect the Winter Palace or storm it ? I advised them to wait to settle accounts with Kerensky and to get rid of Kornilov first.

We won’t lose anything, I told them.

Nothing ?

Nothing.

My wife and my boys came to see me at visiting time. By that time, the children had already acquired some political experience. They were spending the summer in a villa with people we knew, the family of retired Colonel V***. Guests came there, mostly officers, who, while sipping vodka, insulted the Bolsheviks. During the July Days, the insults went to extremes. One of these officers soon left for the South where the cadres of the future White armies were already being formed. Another, a young patriot, declared at the table that Lenin and Trotsky were German spies. My eldest, arming himself with a chair, threw himself on him ; the younger ran to the rescue, armed with a table knife. The adults made them let go. Sobbing hysterically, our boys locked themselves in their room. They planned to escape secretly, to return to Petrograd on foot to find out what was happening with the Bolsheviks there. Luckily, their mother arrived, calmed them down, and took them away.

But things weren’t going very well in town either. The newspapers were railing against the Bolsheviks. Father was in prison. The revolution definitely didn’t live up to expectations. That didn’t stop our boys from being delighted when, right before their eyes, my wife slipped me a penknife through the visiting room gate... I persisted in consoling them by telling them that the real revolution was a thing of the future.

My daughters were already entering political life more seriously. They attended the meetings of the Modern Circus and participated in demonstrations. In July, they got into a fight ; they were jostled, one lost her glasses, both left their hats behind. And both were afraid they would never see their father again, whom they had only just met from a distance.

During the days when Kornilov led his offensive against the capital, the prison regime was very threatened. Everyone understood that if Kornilov took the city, he would first have the throats cut of the Bolsheviks whom Kerensky had arrested. The Executive Committee also feared that the White Guards who were in the capital might make a raid on the prison. A strong detachment of troops was sent to protect "Kresty." This force, of course, turned out to be animated not by "democratic" ideas, but by Bolshevik ones, and was quite willing to release us at the right moment. But this action would have been the signal for an immediate insurrection, and the time for that had not yet come.
In the meantime, the Provisional Government itself took the initiative of releasing us—prompted by the same motives that had prompted it to request the help of the Bolshevik sailors to defend the Winter Palace.

As soon as I left prison, I went to the committee for the defense of the revolution which had recently been created, and where I met with the same gentlemen who had locked me up as an agent of the Hohenzollerns, and had not even had time to exonerate me.

To be honest, the Narodniks and Mensheviks, by their countenance, inspired only the desire to see them seized by the collar by Kornilov and shaken vigorously in the air. But this was an impious desire, and above all, an unpolitical one.

The Bolsheviks had taken up the defense and had occupied the outposts everywhere. The experience of the Kornilov rebellion had complemented that of the July Days. It turned out once again that Kerensky and Co. had no forces of their own. The army that had risen against Kornilov was the future October Army. We took advantage of the danger to arm the workers whom Tseretelli had constantly disarmed with the greatest zeal.

In those days, the city was silent. People waited for Kornilov, some in hope, others in terror.

Our boys had heard, "He might arrive tomorrow." In the morning, before they got dressed, they looked with all their eyes out of the window : had he arrived, yes or no ?

But Kornilov had not arrived. The revolutionary impulse of the masses was so powerful that the general’s rebellion melted away of its own accord, vanished. Not without utility : it was all to the benefit of the Bolsheviks.
I wrote at the time of Kornilov’s attempt :

"Revenge was not long in coming. Hunted, persecuted, slandered, our party has never grown as rapidly as in recent times. And from our capitals, it will quickly spread to the provinces, from the cities it will soon go to the countryside and the armies... Without ceasing for a minute to be the class organization of the proletariat, our party, under the fire of repression, will become the true leader of all the oppressed, crushed, deceived, and persecuted masses."

We could hardly keep up with the rising tide. The number of Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet was growing day by day. We were already at half strength. However, there was not yet a single Bolshevik in the bureau. The question of re-election was raised. We proposed a coalition bureau to the Mensheviks and the Narodniks. Lenin, as we learned later, was dissatisfied with this : he feared that conciliatory tendencies were hidden beneath it.

But there was no compromise. Although only recently we had fought together against Kornilov, Tseretelli rejected the idea of ​​a coalition bureau.

That was exactly what we wanted.

All that remained was to vote on the lists.

I asked this question :

Is Kerensky included in the list of our adversaries, yes or no ?

Formally, he was a member of the bureau, but he never came to the soviet and, in any case, showed disdain towards it.

The question puzzled the members of the office.

No one liked or respected Kerensky. But it was impossible to disavow the Minister-President who was counted among their own.

After whispering among themselves, the members of the office replied :

But of course it’s included...

That was what we wanted.

Here is a fragment of the minutes :

"We were convinced that Kerensky was no longer a member of the Soviet. (Storm of applause.) But it turns out we were mistaken. Between Chkheidze and Zavadei hovers the shadow of Kerensky. When you are asked to approve the political line of the bureau, remember, do not forget that you are thus asked to approve Kerensky’s policy. (Storm of applause.)"

This threw more than a hundred hesitant delegates to our side. The soviet had many more than a thousand members. Voting was done as we left the door. The emotion in the room was extreme. It was no longer about the bureau. It was about the revolution. I walked back and forth in the corridors with a small group of friends. We estimated that we would not quite get half the votes, and we were ready to consider this result a success. It turned out that we had obtained a majority of more than a hundred votes over the coalition of Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. We were victorious. I became chairman of the soviet. Tseretelli, as he left us, wished us to remain in the soviet for at least half the time that they, the socialists, had spent leading the revolution. In other words, our adversaries were only giving us credit for three months. They were sorely mistaken. We were marching confidently towards power.

The Decisive Night

The twelfth hour of the revolution was approaching. Smolny was turning into a fortress. In the attic, there were about twenty machine guns, a legacy of the old executive committee. The commandant of Smolny, Captain Grekov, was a declared enemy. On the other hand, the head of the machine gun detachment came to tell me that his men were rooting for the Bolsheviks. I sent someone—was it Markin ?—to check the condition of the machine guns. They were in poor condition : no one was bothering to polish them. The soldiers had neglected this work precisely because they were not prepared to defend Kerensky. I brought a new detachment of machine guns to Smolny, which could be relied upon. It was a gray October morning, the 24th [According to the "old-style" calendar then official in Russia. According to the European calendar, it was November 6. This explains why we sometimes speak of the October Revolution, sometimes of the November Revolution. —Note from Trotsky.] I went from floor to floor, firstly to avoid staying still, then to see if everything was in order and to boost the morale of those who might need it. Through the endless tiled corridors, still plunged into semi-darkness, the soldiers rolled valiantly, with a crash, with the sound of boots, their machine guns. It was the new detachment I had called out. At the doors of the rooms appeared the drowsy and terrified faces of some Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who were still at Smolny. This music did not bode well for them. One after the other, they hurried to leave Smolny. We remained the masters of an edifice that was about to raise its Bolshevik head above the city and the country.

Early in the morning, I met a male and female worker on the stairs who were running out of breath from the party printing press. The government had closed the central organ of the party and the newspaper of the Petrograd Soviet. The seals had been placed on the printing press by government agents who had arrived accompanied by Junkers. At first, this news made an impression : such is the influence of formalities on the mind !

"Can’t we tear off the seals ?" the worker asks.

"Tear them out," I replied, "and so that nothing happens, we will give you safe custody."

"There is a battalion of sappers next to us, the soldiers will support us," the worker said confidently.

The Revolutionary War Committee immediately took the following decision :

"1. Reopen the printing houses of revolutionary newspapers. 2. Invite the editorial offices and typesetters to continue publication. 3. The duty of honor to protect the revolutionary printing houses against the attacks of the counter-revolution is imposed on the valiant soldiers of the Litovsky Regiment and the 6th Reserve Sapper Battalion."

After that, the printing press worked without interruption, and both newspapers were able to appear.

At the telephone exchange, on the 24th, difficulties arose : the Junkers had entrenched themselves there and, under their protection, the telephone ladies and young ladies began to oppose the Soviet. They stopped giving us calls altogether. This episode was the first manifestation of sabotage. The Revolutionary War Committee sent a detachment of sailors to the telephone exchange who set up two small cannons in front of the entrance. The telephone began to work again. This is how we began to seize the organs of management.
On the third floor of Smolny, in a small corner room, the committee sat permanently. This was where all the information received about troop movements, the mood of the soldiers and workers, the agitation in the barracks, the designs of the pogrom instigators, the maneuvers of bourgeois politicians and foreign embassies, life in the Winter Palace, and the conferences and consultations of the old Soviet parties were concentrated. Informants arrived from all sides. They were workers, soldiers, officers, courtiers, socialist Junkers, servants, and the wives of minor officials. Many brought ridiculous news, but some gave serious and valuable information. During the last week, I hardly left Smolny ; I slept fully clothed on a leather couch, sleeping only occasionally, constantly awakened by couriers, scouts, chauffeurs, telegraph operators, and incessant telephone calls. The decisive moment was approaching. It was clear there was no going back.

Toward the night of the 24th, the members of the revolutionary committee dispersed into the departments. I remained alone. Later, Kamenev arrived. He was opposed to the uprising. But he came to spend the night with me, and the two of us stayed in the small corner room on the third floor, which resembled a ship’s captain’s watch room on that decisive night of the revolution. In the large adjoining room, which was empty, was the telephone. It rang at every moment, to communicate important or insignificant matters. The ringing emphasized even more clearly the silence kept awake. It was easy to imagine that night in a deserted Petersburg, dimly lit, traversed by the autumnal breaths of the sea. The bourgeoisie and the officials must have shrunk in their beds, trying to guess what was happening in the mysterious and dangerous streets. The working-class districts slept the tense sleep of a bivouac ready for battle. The commissions and conferences of the government parties are witnessing their impotence in the Tsar’s palaces, where the living ghosts of democracy clash with the ghosts of the monarchy that have not yet dissipated. At times, the silks and orphreys in the halls are plunged into darkness : it is the lack of coal. In the aisles, detachments of workers, sailors, and soldiers continue to keep watch. Young proletarians carry rifles and machine-gun belts slung over their shoulders. Squads assigned to guard the streets warm themselves in front of bonfires in the open air. Twenty or so telephones concentrate the spiritual life of the capital, which, on this autumn night, raises its head, seeking the passage from one era to the next.

In the room on the third floor, news comes from every department, every suburb, every approach to the capital. As if everything had been planned, the leaders are at their posts, the liaison services are assured, it seems that nothing has been forgotten. Another mental check is needed. This night is decisive. The day before, I had said, perfectly convinced, in my report to the delegates of the Second Congress of Soviets : "If you do not give in, there will be no civil war, our enemies will capitulate immediately, and you will occupy the place that rightfully belongs to you." There can be no doubt about victory. It is guaranteed to the full extent that one can generally guarantee the victory of an insurrection. And all these hours are full of deep alarm, of tension, for the coming night will decide.

By mobilizing the junkers, the government had ordered the cruiser Avrora (Aurora) the day before to leave the waters of the Neva. These were the same Bolshevik sailors that Skobelev had come to find in August, hat in hand, begging them to protect the Winter Palace against Kornilov’s people. The sailors had asked the Revolutionary War Committee what they should do. And the Aurora is, tonight, where it was yesterday. I’ve been called from Pavlovsk that the government is bringing artillerymen from there ; from Tsarskoye Selo, that it’s calling it an elite battalion ; from Peterhof, that it’s asking for a school for second lieutenants. At the Winter Palace, Kerensky has gathered junkers, officers, and female soldiers. I give the commissars orders to place absolutely reliable cover troops on the roads leading to Petrograd and to send agitators to meet the troops called up by the government. All negotiations are taking place by telephone and can be completely overheard by government agents. Are they capable, however, of still controlling our negotiations ? "If you cannot stop them by persuasion, use arms. You answer with your heads !" I repeat this phrase several times. But I do not yet fully believe in the effectiveness of my order. The revolution is still too trusting, too generous, too optimistic, and giddy. It threatens to use arms rather than using them. It still hopes that all questions can be resolved with words. It is succeeding for the time being. Gatherings of hostile elements are vaporized under the sole influence of its burning breath. As early as the 24th, orders had been given to use weapons at the first attempt at street pogroms and to act relentlessly. But the enemy doesn’t even think of acting in the streets. They’ve hidden. The streets are ours. Our commissars are keeping watch at all access points to Petrograd. The second lieutenants’ school and the artillerymen did not respond to the government’s call. Only a portion of Oranienbaum’s junkers managed to slip past our covering troops during the night, and I was informed by telephone of their further movements. They finally sent parliamentarians to Smolny. The Provisional Government sought support in vain. The ground was slipping away from under its feet.
The outer guard of Smolny was reinforced by a new detachment of machine gunners. Communication remained constant with all the troops of the garrison. The service companies kept watch in all the regiments. The commissars were at their posts. There were delegates from each formation in Smolny, at the disposal of the Revolutionary War Committee, in case communication was interrupted. From various departments, armed detachments advanced through the streets, ringing the doors of public buildings or opening them without ringing and occupying the establishments, one after the other. These detachments found friends almost everywhere who eagerly awaited them. At the stations, specially appointed commissars closely monitored the arrival and departure of trains, especially those transporting soldiers. Nothing alarming. All the most important points of the city passed to us almost without resistance, without battle, without casualties. The telephone calls us : "We are here."

Everything’s fine. It couldn’t get any better. We can put down the phone. I sit down on the couch. The tension in my nerves eases. And that’s precisely why a dull surge of fatigue rises in my head. "Give me a cigarette," I say to Kamenev. In those years, I still smoked, although not regularly. I inhale twice and barely have time to say to myself, "As if that weren’t enough," before I lose consciousness. I inherited from my mother this tendency to faint when I experience physical pain or discomfort. This is what prompted the conclusions of an American doctor who mistook me for an epileptic. I come to, I see Kamenev’s frightened face leaning over me.

— Perhaps we should go get some medicine ? he said.

"It would be better," I replied, after thinking about it, "to find some food."

I’m trying to remember when I last ate, and I can’t. It certainly wasn’t yesterday.

When morning came, I threw myself on the printed matter of the bourgeoisie and the conciliators. The newspapers had so wildly and so wildly howled about the impending attack of armed soldiers, about the rampage, about the rivers of blood that would inevitably flow, about a coup d’état, that they had simply failed to notice the insurrection that was actually taking place. The press took our talks with the General Staff as hard currency and our diplomatic declarations as irresolution. Meanwhile, without any disorder, without any street skirmishes, almost without a single shot and without bloodshed, public establishments, one after another, were occupied by detachments of soldiers, sailors, and Red Guards on the orders of the Smolny Institute.

The petty bourgeoisie, in terror, rubbed their eyes under this new regime. Was it really possible ? Could it be that the Bolsheviks had seized power ? A delegation from the City Duma came to me and asked me several inimitable questions : did we intend to act, they said, and how, and when ? The Duma needed to know "within twenty-four hours." What measures had been taken by the Soviet to ensure order and security ? Etc., etc. I replied by giving a rather "dialectical" opinion on the revolution and invited the City Duma to participate in the work of the Revolutionary War Committee by sending a delegate. This frightened them much more than the coup d’état itself. I ended the conversation, as always, in the spirit of armed defense : "If the government uses iron against us, it will be steel that answers it."

— Will you dissolve us because we are opposed to the transfer of power to the Soviets ?
I replied :

— The current Duma represents yesterday ; if a conflict arises, we will invite the population to re-elect a Duma by voting on the question of power.

The delegation left as it had come, having gained nothing. But it left behind, for us, a feeling of sure victory. Something had changed that night. Three weeks earlier, we had won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. We were then little more than a mere flag : we had no printing press, no cash register, no services. That night again, the government had ordered the arrest of the Revolutionary War Committee and had our addresses taken down. Now, a deputation from the City Duma appeared before the "arrested" Revolutionary War Committee to learn its fate.
The government, as before, held its sessions in the Winter Palace, but it was now only a shadow of its former self. Politically, it no longer existed. During the day of October 25, the Winter Palace was gradually surrounded by our troops. At one o’clock in the afternoon, I reported to the Petrograd Soviet on the situation. This is how this report was reproduced in several newspapers :
“In the name of the Revolutionary War Committee, I declare that the Provisional Government no longer exists. (Applause.) Certain ministers have been arrested. (Bravo !) The others will be arrested any hour now or very soon. (Applause.) The revolutionary garrison, which is at the disposal of the Revolutionary War Committee, has dispersed the assembly of the pre-parliament. (Loud applause.) We have been keeping watch here all night and monitoring by telephone wire to find out how the detachments of revolutionary soldiers and the workers’ guard were quietly carrying out their task. The inhabitants slept peacefully and did not know that, during this time, one power was being replaced by another. The railway stations, the post office, the telegraph office, the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, and the State Bank are occupied. (Loud applause.) The Winter Palace has not yet been taken, but its fate will be decided in the next few minutes.” (Applause) . »

This dry account could give a false idea of ​​the state of mind of the assembly. Here is what comes to mind : when I gave my report on the change of power that had taken place during the night, the silence of tense minds reigned for a few seconds. Then came the applause, but not tumultuous, rather thoughtful. The entire room pondered its emotions and waited. Preparing for the struggle, the working class was seized by an indescribable enthusiasm. But when we crossed the threshold of power, the unreasoned enthusiasm gave way to anxious meditations. And, in this, a correct historical instinct was expressed. For we could encounter formidable resistance from the old world ; there were to be expected struggles, hunger, cold, destruction, blood, deaths. Many were those who asked themselves : will we be strong enough ? And that is why we were worried and reflected. All replied : we will be strong enough. New dangers were looming in the distant future. For the moment, there was a sense of great victory, and this feeling was in your blood. It found its outlet in the tumultuous reception given to Lenin when, for the first time, he appeared at this session, after having hidden for almost four months.

Late in the evening, while waiting for the opening of the session of the Congress of Soviets, Lenin and I were resting next to the meeting hall, in an empty room with only chairs. Someone spread a blanket on the floor for us ; someone—Lenin’s sister, I think—found us some pillows. We lay side by side, body and soul springing back like an overstretched spring. It was a well-deserved rest. We couldn’t sleep. We talked in hushed voices. Lenin had only just fully accepted the idea of ​​delaying the insurrection. His apprehensions had dissipated. There were accents of rare intimacy in his voice. He questioned me about the squads of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers that had been placed everywhere.

— What a magnificent picture : the worker armed with a rifle next to the soldier warming himself at the pyre in the street ! he repeated with deep feeling. The soldier and the worker have finally been connected !
Then, suddenly, he corrected himself :

— But the Winter Palace ? Isn’t it taken yet ? Hasn’t something happened ?

I got up to ask by telephone how things were going ; but he stopped me :
"Stay down, I’ll send someone to take care of it."

We couldn’t stay in bed for long. In the next room, the session of the Congress of Soviets was opening. Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, came running to get me :

— This is Dan speaking, we’re calling you.

In a cracking voice, Dan settled the score with the conspirators and prophesied the inevitable collapse of the uprising. He demanded that we form a coalition with the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. The parties that, just the day before, while in power, had persecuted and imprisoned us, demanded an agreement with us when they were overthrown by us.

I replied to Dan and, in his person, to the yesterday of the revolution :

— What happened was an insurrection, not a conspiracy. The insurrection of the popular masses needs no justification. We have tempered the revolutionary energy of the workers and soldiers. We have openly forged the will of the masses for insurrection. Our uprising has won the victory : and now we are being asked to renounce this victory, to make agreements. With whom ? You are poor units, you are bankrupt, your role is played. Go where you belong : to the basket of history.

This was the last line in the great dialogue that had begun on April 3, the day and hour of Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd.

"Trotskyism" in 1917

Since 1904, I had been outside the two factions of the Social Democracy. I had lived through the years of the first revolution, 1905-1907, side by side with the Bolsheviks. During the years of reaction, I defended the methods of the revolution against the Mensheviks in the international Marxist press. However, I did not lose hope that the Mensheviks would move to the left and I made a series of attempts at unification. It was only during the war that I realized that these attempts would be useless. In New York, at the beginning of March, I wrote a series of articles devoted to the study of class forces and the perspectives of the Russian revolution. At the same time, Lenin was sending his Letters from Geneva to Petrograd. Written at two points on the world separated by an ocean, these articles give an identical analysis of the situation and express identical forecasts. All the essential formulas—on the attitude to be taken toward the peasants, the bourgeoisie, the Provisional Government, the war, the international revolution—are absolutely identical. On the whetstone of history, the relations between "Trotskyism" and Leninism were then verified. This verification took place under the conditions of a pure chemistry experiment. I did not know Lenin’s judgment. I started from my own premises and my own revolutionary experience. And I indicated the same perspectives, the same strategic line that Lenin gave.

But perhaps, at that time, the question was clear to everyone and the solution just as well foreseen for everyone. No ! On the contrary ! Lenin’s judgment was in that period—until April 4, 1917, that is, until his appearance on the Petrograd arena—a personal, individual judgment. Not one of the party leaders then in Russia—not one !—had even the idea of ​​governing towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, towards the socialist revolution. The party conference which, on the eve of Lenin’s arrival, had brought together a few dozen Bolsheviks, had shown that none of them went in thought beyond democracy. It is not without intention that the minutes of this conference remain hidden to this day. Stalin was of the opinion of supporting the Provisional Government of Guchkov-Miliukov and of achieving a fusion of the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. The same attitude was adopted (or an even more opportunistic attitude) by Rykov, Kamenev, Molotov, Tomsky, Kalinin, and all other current leaders or semi-leaders. Yaroslavsky, Ordzhonikidze, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, Petrovsky, and others, published, during the February Revolution, in Yakutsk, together with the Mensheviks, a newspaper called the Social-Democrat, in which they developed the most vulgar ideas of provincial opportunism. If one were to reprint at present certain articles from the Yakutsk Social-Democrat, of which Yaroslavsky was the editor, one would be ideologically killing this man, assuming, however, that it were possible to execute him ideologically.

Such is the current guard of "Leninism." That on various occasions these men repeated Lenin’s words and imitated Lenin’s gestures, I know. But at the beginning of 1917 they were left to their own devices. The situation was difficult. It was then that they should have shown what they had learned in Lenin’s school and what they were capable of without Lenin. Let them point out only one among them who of his own accord was able to approach the position that was identically formulated by Lenin in Geneva and by me in New York. They will not find a name. The Petrograd Pravda, whose editors, before Lenin’s arrival, were Stalin and Kamenev, has remained forever a monument to narrow-mindedness, blindness, and opportunism. Meanwhile, the mass of the party, like the working class as a whole, was spontaneously moving toward the struggle for power. There was, in short, no other way, neither for the party nor for the country.

To defend the perspective of permanent revolution during the years of reaction, theoretical foresight was necessary. To launch the slogan of the struggle for power in March 1917, political flair was sufficient, it seems to me. The faculties of foresight and even flair have not been revealed in any—not one !—of the current leaders. Not one of them, in March 1917, had risen above the position of the petty bourgeois left democrat. Not one of them has adequately passed the examination of history.

I arrived in Petrograd a month after Lenin. Exactly the same length of time as I had been detained in Canada by Lloyd George. I found the situation in the party essentially changed. Lenin had appealed to the masses of partisans against their sad leaders. He waged a systematic struggle against these "old Bolsheviks," he wrote, "who have already played a sad role more than once in the history of our party, repeating without understanding a formula learned by heart, instead of studying the peculiarities of the new and lively situation."

Kamenev and Rykov attempted to resist. Stalin silently withdrew. There is not a single article from the period in which he made an effort to judge his previous policy and open a path towards the Leninist position. He simply kept quiet. He had compromised himself too much by the disastrous direction he had taken during the first month of the revolution. He preferred to withdraw into the shadows. He did not publicly defend Lenin’s ideas anywhere. He evaded and waited. During the months when the theoretical and political preparations for October were being made, when responsibilities were most seriously assumed, Stalin simply had no political existence.

When I arrived in the country, a good number of Social-Democratic organizations still united Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. This was the natural consequence of the position that Stalin, Kamenev, and others had taken not only at the beginning of the revolution, but also during the war, although, it must be admitted, Stalin’s wartime attitude remained unknown to everyone : he did not write a single line on this question, which is not of minor importance.

Currently, the manuals of the Communist International throughout the world—for the Young Communists in Scandinavia and the Pioneers in Australia—repeat ad nauseam that Trotsky, in August 1912, made an attempt to unite the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. On the other hand, it is nowhere stated that Stalin, in March 1917, preached an alliance with Tseretelli’s party and that, in fact, until the middle of 1917, Lenin did not succeed in freeing the party from the quagmire into which it had been dragged by the then temporary leaders, now the epigones. The fact that not one of them understood, at the beginning of the revolution, its meaning and direction is now interpreted as proceeding from particularly profound dialectical views, opposed to the heresy of Trotskyism, which dared not only to understand the facts of the day before, but also to foresee those of the day after.

When, having arrived in St. Petersburg, I declared to Kamenev that I had no objection to Lenin’s famous "April Theses," which determined the new course of the party, Kamenev only replied :
"I think so !"

Even before I had formally joined the party, I contributed to the drafting of the most important documents of Bolshevism. It never occurred to anyone to ask whether I had renounced "Trotskyism," as the epigones Cachin, Thaelmann, and other parasites of the October Revolution have wanted to know a thousand times since, during the decadent period of the epigones, the Cachins, the Thaelmanns, and other parasites of the October Revolution. If, at that time, Trotskyism could be seen as opposed to Leninism, it was only in the sense that, in the upper spheres of the party, during April, Lenin was accused of Trotskyism. Kamenev spoke of it thus, openly and persistently. Others said the same, but more circumspectly, behind the scenes. Dozens of "old Bolsheviks" declared to me, after my arrival in Russia :

— Now it’s a party on your street !...

I was forced to demonstrate that Lenin had not adopted my position, that he had simply extended his own, and that, as a result of this development, in which algebra was simplified into arithmetic, the identity of our ideas had become manifest. This was indeed the case.

From our first meetings, and even more so after the July Days, Lenin gave the impression of extreme inner concentration, of self-absorption pushed to the utmost degree—beneath an appearance of calm and prosaic simplicity. The Kerenskyist regime seemed, in those days, all-powerful. Bolshevism was represented only by a “small, insignificant band.” This was how it was officially treated. The party itself did not yet realize the strength it would have the next day. And yet, Lenin led it, with all assurance, toward the highest tasks. I set to work and helped Lenin.

Two months before October, I wrote :
"For us, internationalism is not an abstract idea, existing only to be betrayed at the first opportunity (which it is for a Tseretelli or a Chernov) ; it is a principle that directs us immediately and is profoundly practical. A lasting, decisive success is inconceivable for us outside of a European revolution."
Alongside the names of Tseretelli and Chernov, I could not then yet place that of Stalin, philosopher of socialism in one country. I ended my article with these words :
"Permanent revolution against permanent carnage ! Such is the struggle in which the fate of humanity is at stake."
This was printed in the central organ of our party on September 7 and reprinted in a pamphlet. Why did my current critics then remain silent about the heretical slogan of a permanent revolution ? Where were they ? Some, like Stalin, waited for events to unfold, looking from side to side ; others, like Zinoviev, hid under the table.

But the biggest question is this : how could Lenin tolerate my heretical propaganda ? When it came to theory, he knew neither condescension nor indulgence. How could he bear to have "Trotskyism" preached in the central organ of the party ?

On November 1, 1917, at a meeting of the Petrograd Committee (the minutes of this meeting, historic in all respects, are kept secret to this day), Lenin declared that since Trotsky had become convinced of the impossibility of an alliance with the Mensheviks, "there was no better Bolshevik than he." He thus clearly showed, and not for the first time, that if anything separated us, it was not the theory of permanent revolution, but a more limited, though very important, question of the relationship to be maintained toward Mensheviks.

Looking back two years after the October Revolution, Lenin wrote :

"At the time of the conquest of power, when the republic of soviets was created, Bolshevism had attracted to itself all that was best in the tendencies of socialist thought close to it."

Can there be a shadow of a doubt that, in speaking so markedly of the tendencies of socialist thought closest to Bolshevism, Lenin had in mind first of all what is now called "historical Trotskyism" ? Indeed, what other tendency could be closer to Bolshevism than the one I represented ? Who could Lenin have in mind ? Marcel Cachin ? Thaelmann ? For Lenin, when he reviewed the development of the party as a whole, Trotskyism was not something alien or hostile ; on the contrary, it was the current of socialist thought closest to Bolshevism.

The true march of ideas, as we see, had nothing in common with the lying caricature made of it by the epigones, taking advantage of Lenin’s death and the wave of reaction.
In power

These were extraordinary days in the life of the country as in my personal existence. The tension of social passions as well as individual forces had reached its utmost. The masses were creating a new epoch, the leaders felt that they were marching, step by step, with history. In those days, decisions were made, orders were given on which the fate of the people depended for a long period. However, these resolutions were hardly debated : I would feel some embarrassment in saying that they were weighed and pondered as befits. They improvised. It was no worse for that. The pressure of events was so powerful, the tasks were so clear that the most responsible decisions were given without any difficulty, as if in passing, as something self-evident, and were accepted just the same. The path to follow was determined in advance. It was only necessary to designate each task by its name ; there was no need to demonstrate ; there was almost no need to make appeals. Without hesitation, without uncertainty, the masses seized what was imposed on them by the situation. Under the weight of events, the "leaders" simply formulated what would meet the needs of the masses and the demands of history.

Marxism is to be regarded as the conscious expression of an unconscious historical process. But the "unconscious" process in the historical-philosophical, and not the psychological, sense coincides with its conscious expression only at its highest peaks, when the masses, by the thrust of their elemental forces, force open the gates of social routine and give victorious expression to the deepest needs of historical evolution. The highest theoretical consciousness of the epoch merges, at such moments, with the direct action of the deepest strata, of the oppressed masses furthest removed from any theory. The creative fusion of the conscious with the unconscious is what is ordinarily called inspiration. Revolution is a moment of exalted inspiration in history.

Every true writer knows moments of creation when someone stronger than he guides his hand. Every true orator has known minutes when something stronger than he was at his ordinary times expressed itself through his lips. This is "inspiration." It is born of a supreme creative tension of all forces. The unconscious rises from its deep lair and subordinates the conscious work of thought to itself, assimilating it into a kind of higher unity.

The hours when the tension of spiritual forces is pushed to its highest degree sometimes take hold of individual activity in all its aspects, for it is linked to the movement of the masses. Such were the October days for the "leaders." The latent forces of the organism, its deep instincts, all the flair inherited from wild ancestors, all this rose up, broke through the gates of psychic routine and, — alongside the highest historical-philosophical generalizations, — placed itself at the service of the revolution.

Both these processes, that of individuals and that of the masses, were based on a combination of the conscious with the unconscious, of instinct, which gives spring to the will, with the highest generalizations of the mind.

Outwardly, it didn’t look pathetic at all : men were walking around, tired, hungry, unwashed, with inflamed eyes, their cheeks bristling with hair because they hadn’t shaved. And each of them was later able to tell very little about the most critical days and hours.

Here is an excerpt from my wife’s notes, taken much later :
"We spent the last days of preparation for October on Tauride Street. LD [Lev Davidovich Trotsky. —Ed.] spent whole days at the Smolny Institute [A huge building which, after having been, for many years, an educational institute for young women of the nobility in Petrograd, became, in 1917, the headquarters of the Bolsheviks. —Ed.] I continued my work at the union of joiners and cabinetmakers whose leaders were Bolsheviks, and the atmosphere was heated. All working hours were spent in discussions about the insurrection. The chairman of the union was "of the Lenin-Trotsky point of view" (that’s what it was called then), and we carried on agitation with him. There was talk of an uprising everywhere, in the street, in the cafeteria, when we met on the stairs of the Smolny Institute.

“We ate poorly, we slept little. We worked about twenty-four hours a day. We were separated from our boys, and the October days were also days of anguish for their fate for me. Of the entire school where they were placed, there were just two “Bolsheviks,” our Liova and our Seryozha, and a third, a “sympathizer,” as they called it. Against these three children stood the compact group of offspring of the ruling democracy, cadets and revolutionary socialists. As always, when disagreements became serious, the criticism was accompanied by striking arguments. The headmaster more than once had to rescue my sons from the hands of a band of young “democrats” who had fallen upon them. In short, the children were only doing what their fathers did. The headmaster was a cadet. That is why he never failed to punish my son :

“—Take your hat and go home...

"After the coup, it would have been completely unreasonable to leave our children in that establishment. We sent them to a popular school. The environment was simpler and harsher, but one could breathe there.

“LD and I were never at home. Our boys, when they came home from school and didn’t find us, didn’t think it was useful to stay locked up between four walls either. The demonstrations, the fights, the frequent gunshots gave us, in those days, great worries about them : their state of mind was arch-revolutionary... In the hasty interviews we had, they told us about their joys : one day, on the tram, they had found themselves with Cossacks who were reading Papa’s appeal : Cossack Brothers !...

"—Well ! So what ?...

"They read it and passed it around. It was good !"

“Was it good ?”

“—Oh ! Yes !”

"An acquaintance of LD, the engineer K***, who had a large family and children of all ages, as well as a maid and other servants, offered to take our boys into his home for a while to provide them with some supervision. We had to cling to this invitation, which saved us. Charged with various errands by LD, I went to the Smolny Institute up to five times a day. Late at night, we returned to Tauride Street, and in the morning, we separated. LD went to Smolny ; I went to the union. As events became more important, we could hardly leave Smolny. LD, for several days, did not come to Tauride Street, even to sleep there. Often, I stayed at Smolny myself. Without undressing, we spent the night on couches, in armchairs. The temperature was quite cool, but dry, like autumn weather, overcast, with gusts of cold wind blowing through it. In the streets of the center, everything was silent and deserted. There was something terribly vigilant in this calm. Smolny was seething. The immense festival hall sparkled with thousands of lights from its magnificent chandeliers and was, every day, every evening, more than full of people. Life was intense in the factories and mills. But the streets had cowered, had fallen silent, as if the city, terrified, had withdrawn its head into its shoulders...

"I remember that one morning the day after or the day after the coup d’état, I entered a room in Smolny where I saw Vladimir Ilyich, Lev Davidovich and, I think, Dzerzhinsky, Joffé and many others. All had a greenish-grey complexion, the complexion of men who had not slept, sunken eyes, dirty collars ; the room reeked of tobacco... Someone was sitting at a table ; near him stood a crowd waiting for orders. Lenin and Trotsky were surrounded. It seemed to me that the instructions were being given as if in a dream. There was something somnambulistic in the movements, in the words ; It seemed to me, for a moment, that I myself was asleep when I saw all this and that the revolution could be lost if "they" did not sleep well and put on clean false collars : this dream vision was closely connected with a matter of false collars... I remember that, the next day, I met Marie Iliinichna, Lenin’s sister, and pointed out to her, in all haste, that Vladimir Ilyich would need to change his collar...

“Yes, yes,” she replied, laughing.

"But, in my eyes too, the question of clean collars had already lost its nightmare significance."
Power has been conquered, at least in Petrograd. Lenin hasn’t yet had time to change his collar. On a weary face, it is indeed Lenin’s eyes that are always watching. He looks at me friendly, with a kind look, expressing with a certain embarrassment, with an angular air, what makes him inwardly close to me.

"You know," he said to me hesitantly, "after the prosecutions and this underground life... coming to power..."

There he searched for his expression and, suddenly switching to German, with a gesture of his hand around his head :

— I’m dizzy !... [I’m dizzy. —NdT]

We look at each other, laughing almost imperceptibly : it lasts a minute or two, no more... Then, quite simply, we move on to dealing with current affairs.

We need to form a government. We are here, a few members of the Central Committee. A brief deliberation in a corner of the room.

"What should I call it ?" Lenin thought aloud. "Above all, no ministers ! The title is abject ; it’s been everywhere."

— We could say "commissioners," I suggested ; but there are far too many commissioners now... Perhaps "high commissioners"... No, "high commissioner" sounds bad... What if we put : "people’s commissioners" ?...

— "People’s Commissar ?" Well, I think that might be okay... Lenin continued. And the government as a whole ?

— A soviet, of course, a soviet... [Soviet means council. —NdT] The soviet of people’s commissars, eh ?

"The Soviet of People’s Commissars ?" Lenin exclaimed. "That’s perfect. It smells terribly of revolution !"

— Lenin was little inclined to concern himself with the aesthetics of the revolution or to savor its "romanticism." He only felt the revolution as a whole more deeply and defined its "odor" all the more unerringly.

"Say," Vladimir Ilyich said to me suddenly one day during these days, "say, if the White Guards kill us, do you think Sverdlov and Bukharin will be able to get out of this mess ?"

— Well, maybe they won’t kill us, I replied, laughing.

— Ah ! the devil knows them ! [A colloquial expression corresponding to : "you never know !" —Ed.] replied Lenin, laughing in his turn.

I first recorded this episode in my memoirs on Lenin in 1924 [Leon Trotsky : Lenin (French translation, p. 121 ; in the Librairie du Travail, 1925). —Ed.]. As I learned later, the members of the then "triumvirate," Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, took this reference given by me as a bloody affront, the authenticity of which, however, they did not dare to dispute. Facts are facts : Lenin had named only Sverdlov and Bukharin. No other names came to mind.

Lenin, who had twice lived in exile, where he had spent fifteen years, except for a short interval, knew the principal non-exiled cadres of the party, through correspondence or through the rare interviews he had with them abroad. It was only after the revolution that he had the opportunity to observe them closely, at work. He then had to revise his judgments or modify those he had formed based on the words of others. As a man passionately enamored of morality, Lenin could not regard anyone with indifference. It was in the nature of this thinker, observer, and strategist to take a keen interest in people. Krupskaya [Lenin’s wife. —Ed.] says this in her Memoirs. Lenin never immediately formed a moderately weighted judgment about someone. His eye was like a microscope. He enormously magnified the feature which, in a given circumstance, fell within his field of vision. It was not uncommon for Lenin to fall genuinely in love with certain people. In such cases, I would tease him :

— I know, I know... You have a new novel...

Lenin himself knew this trait of character, and he laughed in response, a little confused, a little annoyed.

Lenin’s attitude toward me during 1917 went through several phases. At first, he received me with reserve, remaining expectant. The July Days brought us suddenly closer together. When, against the majority of the leading Bolsheviks, I launched the slogan of boycotting the pre-parliament, Lenin wrote from the asylum where he was hiding : "Bravo, Comrade Trotsky !" Despite certain
fortuitous and deceptive appearances, it later seemed to him that, on the question of armed insurrection, I was behaving too much like a procrastinator. This fear came to light in several letters written by Lenin during October. His attitude toward me was all the more manifest, warmer, more intimately affectionate during the coup d’état, when, lying on the floor in the semi-darkness of an empty room, we rested together.

The next day, at the meeting of the party’s central committee, Lenin proposed that I be appointed chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars. I jumped up to protest, as this proposal seemed so unexpected and inappropriate.

Lenin insisted :

— Why ? You were the head of the Petrograd Soviet that took power...

I asked that the proposal be rejected without debate. This was done.

On November 1, during a heated discussion in the Petrograd party committee, Lenin exclaimed :

— There is no better Bolshevik than Trotsky !

Coming from Lenin, this word meant a lot. And it is no coincidence that the minutes of the session where it was spoken have not yet been made public.

After the conquest of power, the question of my functions in the government arose. Strangely enough, I had never thought about it. Not once, despite the experience of 1905, had I connected the question of my future with the problem of power. From my earliest years, I might say from my childhood, I dreamed of becoming a writer. In the years that followed, I subordinated this profession, like everything else, to revolutionary ends. I always had in mind the conquest of power by the party. I had written and spoken dozens and hundreds of times about a program of revolutionary government. But I had never asked myself what my personal work would be when power was conquered. I was taken by surprise. After the coup d’état, I tried to stay outside the government, asking to take over the direction of the party press. It may be that in doing so, I was under the influence of a certain nervous reaction following the victory. The preceding months had been too deeply absorbed by the preparation of the coup d’état. Every fiber of my being was stretched to excess. Lunacharsky reported somewhere in the press that Trotsky moved around like a Leyden jar, and that the slightest contact with him caused a shock. November 7 brought the denouement. I was in the state of a surgeon who has just finished a difficult and dangerous operation : one washes one’s hands, takes off one’s coat, and goes to rest.

Lenin, on the other hand, had only just returned from his refuge, where he had spent three and a half months, tormented by living apart from immediate and practical leadership. His return coincided with my fatigue, and I was all the more willing to return, at least for a while, to the wings. But Lenin would not even hear of it. He demanded that I take over as Director of the Interior ; the main task then was to combat the counter-revolution. I raised objections to him and, among other arguments, I raised the question of nationalities : was it, I said, very useful to give our enemies this additional weapon, my Jewish origin ?

Lenin was almost indignant.

— We are making a great international revolution. What importance can such trifles have ?...

On this subject a half-comical argument ensued between us.

— The revolution is great, I replied, but there are still a lot of imbeciles...

— Are we following in the footsteps of fools ?

— Follow in their footsteps, certainly not ! But sometimes you have to make small concessions to stupidity... Why should we seek, from the very beginning, superfluous complications ?...

I have already mentioned that the question of nationality, so important in the life of Russia, played almost no role in my personal life. From my earliest youth, national prejudices or biases provoked in me the discomfort that a rationalist must feel, which sometimes became disgust, even moral nausea. My Marxist education gave depth to this state of mind, from which emerged an active internationalism. The life lived in different countries, whose languages, politics, and culture I learned, helped me to assimilate internationalism in the flesh. If, in 1917 and later, I sometimes argued against this or that appointment based on my Jewish origin, it was exclusively out of political calculation.

I had won over Sverdlov and a few other members of the Central Committee. Lenin remained in the minority. He shrugged his shoulders, sighed, nodded his head reproachfully, and resigned himself only to the idea that we would fight the counterrevolution anyway, without administrative distinctions.

However, Sverdlov resolutely opposed my appointment to the press service :

— We’ll put Bukharin there, he said. We must oppose Lev Davidovich to Europe. Let him take over Foreign Affairs...

— What will our foreign affairs be like now ? replied Lenin.

But he reluctantly agreed. Reluctantly, I agreed too. And so, for a quarter, on Sverdlov’s initiative, I found myself at the head of Soviet diplomacy.

The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs meant that, in essence, I was exempt from ministerial work. To the comrades who offered me their assistance, I almost invariably suggested that they seek a career less thankless to their abilities. One of them, later, recounted rather amusingly in his memoirs the interview he had with me shortly after the formation of the Soviet government.

"What can our diplomatic work be," I said to him, "as he tells it ? I’ll publish a few revolutionary proclamations and then I’ll just have to close up shop."

My interlocutor was sincerely upset by this lack of diplomatic sense in me. Of course, I had deliberately exaggerated the expression of my point of view, wanting to emphasize that the center of gravity was not then on diplomacy.

The main task was, in fact, to develop the October Revolution, to extend it throughout the country, to repel the incursion of Kerensky and General Krasnov marching on Petrograd, to combat the counter-revolution. We fulfilled these tasks outside of ministerial attributions, and my collaboration with Lenin was at all times the closest and incessant.

Lenin’s office and my own, at the Smolny Institute, were connected, or rather separated, at opposite ends of the building by a corridor so long that Lenin, jokingly, suggested establishing communication by bicycle. We had a telephone between us. Several times a day, I ran through the interminable corridor, a veritable anthill, to join Lenin in his office and hear him. A young sailor, who was called Lenin’s secretary, was constantly running to bring me the chief’s notes, which consisted of two or three solidly constructed sentences, in which the most important words were underlined two or three times ; and each note ended with a question posed bluntly. Often, the little papers were accompanied by draft decrees that urgently required an assessment. In the archives of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, a significant quantity of documents from this period survives, written partly by Lenin, partly by me, Lenin’s texts to which I made corrections, my proposals supplemented by Lenin.
During the first period, roughly until August 1918, I participated actively in the work of the Council of People’s Commissars. During the time we spent at Smolny, Lenin, with impatient eagerness, endeavored to respond with decrees to all the questions posed on the economic, political, administrative, and cultural planes. What guided him was not a passion for bureaucratic regulation ; it was the design to give the party program the extension it should have in the language of power. He knew that revolutionary decrees are implemented only to a very small extent. But to guarantee execution and verification, it would have been necessary to rely on a precisely functioning apparatus, on experience, and on time. Now, no one could have said how much time we had. The decrees, in the early days, were more important as propaganda pieces than as administrative texts. Lenin hurried to tell the people what the new power was, what it wanted, and how it intended to accomplish its designs. He moved from one question to another, marvelously tireless, convened small conferences, asked specialists for references, and searched the books himself. I helped him.
Lenin had a very strong sense of the hereditary nature of the task he had undertaken. As a great revolutionary, he understood what a historical tradition was. It was impossible to predict whether we would remain in power or be thrown out of it. In any case, it was necessary to bring as much clarity as possible to the revolutionary experience of humanity. Others will come and, taking advantage of what we have indicated and begun, will take a new step forward. Such was the meaning of the legislative work of the first period.

Along the same lines, Lenin impatiently demanded the publication in Russian of the classics of socialism and materialism. He tried to ensure that as many revolutionary monuments as possible were erected, even the simplest ones, busts, commemorative plaques, in all cities and even in small towns ; it was necessary to fix in the imagination of the masses what had happened and to leave as deep a furrow as possible in the memory of the people.

Each session of the Council of People’s Commissars, whose composition changed quite often in the early days, partially, presented a picture of the greatest legislative improvisation. Everything had to be started from the beginning. There was no need to look for "precedents" because history had none. Tireless, Lenin presided over this council for five or six hours at a time, and the council met every day. As a rule, questions were asked without any preparation, almost always urgently. Very often, the substance of the matter was unknown to the members of the council, as well as to their chairman, until the beginning of the session. The time allowed for debate was always limited ; barely ten minutes were given for the first report. Nevertheless, Lenin, groping his way, always found the right line to follow. To save time, he passed on briefly drafted notes to the commissars during the session, requesting this or that information. These writings constituted a very extensive and very interesting epistolary documentation of the legislative technique of the council of commissars presided over by Lenin. Most of these papers, unfortunately, have not been preserved : almost always, one’s answer was written on the back of the question posed and, most often, the note was immediately destroyed by the president. When the time came, Lenin read out his resolutions, always conceived with intentional rigidity ; after which, the debates either ceased or took the form of practical proposals. The "points" indicated by Lenin usually constituted the bulk of the text of the decree.

To direct this work, one needed, among other abilities, a formidable creative imagination. One of the most valuable qualities of such an imagination is that it can represent people, things, and phenomena as they are in reality, even when one has never seen them. Using one’s life experience, as well as theoretical foundations, to join together small, distinct features caught on the fly, to complete them according to the as yet unformulated laws of correspondence and plausibility, and to recreate in such a way, in a very concrete way, a definite sphere of human life—such is the imagination needed by the legislator, the administrator, the leader, especially in times of revolution. Lenin’s strength was, to a huge extent, that of a realistic imagination.

Needless to say, in the feverish haste of legislative creation, a good many mistakes were made, and contradictory measures were taken. But, on the whole, the decrees issued by Lenin in the Smolny era, that is, in the most agitated and chaotic period of the revolution, will forever be recorded by history as the proclamation of a new world. Not only sociologists and historians, but also future legislators will turn to this source more than once.

At that time, practical tasks were the most pressing issue, especially the problems of the civil war, supplies, and transport. In response to such needs, extraordinary commissions were created to closely consider the new tasks and to set in motion certain departments that were uselessly marking time at the very beginning of the undertaking. In those months, I had to head several of these commissions : the supply commission, of which Tsiorupa, called to work for the first time, was a member, the transport commission, the publishing commission, and many others.

As for diplomacy, with the exception of the Brest-Litovsk talks, it took me only a short time. However, the matter was a little more complicated than I had anticipated. From the very first days, I had to engage in some very unexpected diplomatic conversations with... the Eiffel Tower...

During the insurrection, we had other things to do than listen to foreign radio stations. But when I was People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, I had to find out what the capitalist world thought of our coup d’état. Needless to say, congratulations were nowhere to be heard. However much the Berlin government was inclined to flirt with the Bolsheviks, it sent out a hostile wave from the Nauen station when the Tsarskoye Selo station transmitted my communiqué reporting our victory over Kerensky’s troops. But if Berlin and Vienna were still hesitating between their hatred of the revolution and the hope of an advantageous peace, all the other countries, not only the belligerents, but even the neutrals, were expressing in various languages ​​the feelings and reflections of the ruling classes we had just overthrown in old Russia.

In this chorus, the Eiffel Tower stood out for its fury ; it even began to speak Russian, evidently hoping in this way to reach the consciences of the Russian people directly. When I read the "radios" from Paris, it sometimes seemed to me that Clemenceau himself was perched at the top of the tower. I knew him well enough, as a journalist, to recognize, if not his style, at least his inspiration. Hatred rose to the point of suffocating itself in these "radios," fury reached its highest pitch. It sometimes seemed that at the top of the tower a scorpion was going, of its own accord, to plant its sting in its head.

We had the Tsarskoye Selo station at our disposal, and we had no reason to remain silent. For several days, I dictated replies to Clemenceau’s insults. I had sufficient knowledge of French political history to provide unflattering information about the principal figures and to recall certain features of their biographies that had been forgotten since the Panama affair. For several days, it was a close duel between the towers of Paris and Tsarskoye Selo : the ether, the neutral fluid among all, conscientiously transmitted the arguments of both parties. And what happened ? I myself did not expect such rapid results. Paris abruptly changed its tone : it explained itself later with hostility, but politely. Later, I recalled many times with pleasure that I had begun my diplomatic career by learning good manners at the Eiffel Tower.

On November 18, General Judson, head of the American mission, came to see me suddenly at Smolny. He began by telling me that he did not yet have the opportunity to speak on behalf of the United States, but that he hoped that everything would go all right. Did the Soviet government intend to try to liquidate the war in agreement with the Allies ? I replied that the talks that would take place should be made entirely public and that, consequently, the Allies would be able to follow their development and join in at a stage of their choosing. In conclusion, the pacifist general told me :

— The time for protests and threats against the Soviet government is over, if indeed such a time ever came.

But we know that one swallow, even with a general’s stripes, does not make a summer.
At the beginning of December, my first and last interview took place with the French ambassador, Noulens, a former radical deputy, sent for a rapprochement with the February Revolution, to replace Paléologue, who was openly monarchist, Byzantine not only by his surname, and whom the republic had used for its friendships with the tsar. Why Noulens was chosen, and not another, I do not know. But he did not enhance the opinion I had of those who rule the destinies of humanity. The interview had taken place on Noulens’s initiative and yielded nothing. After some procrastination, Clemenceau definitively opted for the barbed wire regime.
With General Niessel, head of the French mission, I had, within the walls of Smolny, an explanation that was far from friendly. This senior officer practiced satisfying his taste for the offensive through rear-front operations. In Kerensky’s time, he had become accustomed to commanding and refused to give up his bad habits. At the beginning of our relationship, I had to invite him out of the Smolny Institute. Soon our relations with the French military mission became even more complicated. This mission had an information bureau that was transformed into a factory of infamous insinuations against the revolution. All the hostile newspapers published daily telegrams "from Stockholm," each more fanciful, more hateful, more stupid than the last. The newspaper editors, when questioned about the source of the telegrams "from Stockholm," indicated the French military mission. I officially put the question to General Niessel. He replied to me on December 22 with a truly remarkable document :

He wrote :
"Many journalists of various persuasions come to the mission to ask for information. I have full authority to inform them about the war operations on the Western Front, in Salonika, in Asia, and about the situation in France. During one (?) of these visits, a (?) young officer took the liberty of reporting a rumor that is now circulating in the city (?) and whose origin is attributed to Stockholm..." [The French text, by the general, is not in our possession, so we can only give a translation from the Russian. —Ed.]
In conclusion, the general promised to "take measures so that in the future such blunders (?) cannot be repeated."

This was too much. It wasn’t for nothing that we had reminded the Eiffel Tower of its propriety. We were not going to allow General Niessel to build his own tower, an auxiliary tower of falsification, in Moscow.

I wrote to Niessel the same day :
"1. Considering that the propaganda office of the French military mission, called the information office, has served as a source of knowingly false rumors, with the aim of sowing confusion and chaos in public opinion, this office must be closed immediately. — 2. The "young officer" who fabricated false information is invited to leave Russia immediately. I beg you to give me the name of this officer without delay. — 3. The receiver of radio dispatches attached to the mission is detached from it. — 4. The French officers who are in the theater of operations of the civil war must be immediately recalled to Moscow by a special order to be published in the press. — 5. Please keep me informed of all the steps taken by the mission on the occasion of this letter. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, L. Trotsky."

The "young officer" had to emerge from his anonymity ; he was forced to leave Russia as a scapegoat. The radio station employee changed positions. The information bureau was closed. The French officers were recalled from the periphery to the center. But all this was just outpost skirmishes.

Shortly after, when I took over as War Commissar, an unstable truce followed. Niessel, the overly categorical general, was replaced by the insinuating General Lavergne. The truce did not last long. The French military mission, like all diplomacy, soon found itself at the center of all plots and armed actions against the power of the Soviets. But this only became apparent after Brest, in the Moscow period [On this period, see Trotsky’s book : Lenin, pages 91 et seq. (Librairie du Travail). —NdT], in the spring and summer of 1918.
(…)

The Epigones’ Plot

It was the first weeks of 1923. The 12th Congress was approaching. There was almost no hope of seeing Lenin there. The question arose of who would report on general policy. Stalin said at a meeting of the Politburo :

— Of course, Trotsky !

Kalinin and Rykov immediately agreed, as did Kamenev, the latter visibly reluctantly. I objected. The party would be shocked if one of us tried, in some way personally, to replace the ailing Lenin. This time, we had to do without an introductory report. It would seem what should have been said on each of the items on the agenda. Besides, I added, we disagree with you on certain economic questions.

"What disagreements are we talking about ?" Stalin exclaimed.

Kalinin added :

— In the political bureau, on almost all issues, we always adopt your solutions.

Zinoviev was on leave in the Caucasus. No decision was made. In any case, I took charge of the report on industry.

Stalin knew that a storm was threatening him on the side of Lenin, and he tried by every means to flatter me. He repeated that the political report should be made by the most influential and popular member of the Central Committee after Lenin, that is, by Trotsky, that the party expected nothing else and would not understand. When he indulged in these displays of false friendship, he inspired in me even more aversion than when he openly displayed his hatred, all the more so because his motives appeared too obvious.

Zinoviev returned from the Caucasus. Behind my back, there were incessant consultations between the factions, which at that time were still very closely united. Zinoviev asked to give a political report. Kamenev questioned the most reliable of the "old Bolsheviks," the majority of whom had left the party ten or fifteen years ago :

— Will we tolerate Trotsky becoming the sole leader of the party and the state ?

More and more often, in corners, people delved into the past, recalling the quarrels I had once had with Lenin. This became Zinoviev’s specialty.

However, Lenin’s health had seriously deteriorated, and there was no "danger" in that regard. The "troika" decided that the political report would be made by Zinoviev. I made no objections when the matter, after the necessary preparation behind the scenes, was brought to the Politburo. Everything bore the stamp of the provisional situation. There were no stated disagreements, since the "troika" had no line of its own. My theses on industry were at first adopted without debate. But when it became clear that there was no hope of Lenin returning to his work, the "troika" changed course abruptly, fearing that the party congress had been prepared too peacefully. From then on, it sought the opportunity to oppose me in the leading sphere of the party. At the last minute before the congress, Kamenev added to my already approved resolution an addition concerning the peasant class. There would be no point in dwelling here on the very substance of this amendment, which had no theoretical or political significance, and was simply intended as a provocation. This text was intended to accuse me, still behind the scenes for the time being, of having "underestimated" the peasant class. Three years after his break with Stalin, Kamenev, in his characteristically cynical good-natured tone, confessed to me how this accusation had been cooked up, which, of course, none of the authors took seriously.

We know that it would be futile to operate in politics with abstract moral criteria. Political morality proceeds from politics itself ; it is one of its functions. Only a policy placed at the service of a great historical cause can ensure morally irreproachable methods of action. On the other hand, when the level of political tasks lowers, we inevitably arrive at a moral decline. Figaro, as we know, generally refused to distinguish between politics and intrigue. And yet he lived before the era of parliamentarism. When the moralists of bourgeois democracy claim to see in revolutionary dictatorship, as such, the source of bad political morals, we can only shrug our shoulders and feel sorry for them. It would be very instructive to watch a film about contemporary parliamentarism, if only for a year. Only, the camera should not be set up next to the chair of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, at the moment when a patriotic resolution is being proclaimed ; it should be placed in completely different places : in the offices of bankers and industrialists, in discreet editorial corners, in the homes of princes of the Church, in the salons of ladies who deal with politics, in ministries ; and, at the same time, photographs would be taken of the secret correspondence of party leaders...
But, on the other hand, it would be entirely fair to say that with regard to the political morals of a revolutionary dictatorship, very different requirements must be made than those that are made for the morals of parliamentarism. Since the instruments and methods of dictatorship are very sharp, close attention must be paid to their antisepsis. There is nothing to fear from a dirty slipper. A badly held razor is very dangerous. The methods of the "troika" themselves marked, in my eyes, a political shift.

The main difficulty for the conspirators was to act openly against me before the masses. The workers knew Zinoviev and Kamenev and listened willingly to them. However, the latter’s conduct in 1917 was still too clearly imprinted on everyone’s memory. They had no moral authority in the party. As for Stalin, beyond the narrow circle of old Bolsheviks, he was completely unknown. Some of my friends said : "They will never dare act openly against you. In the consciousness of the people, your name is too indissolubly linked with that of Lenin. Neither the October Revolution, nor the Red Army, nor the Civil War can be erased with a stroke of the pen." I did not agree. Individual authorities in politics, especially in revolutionary politics, play a great, even a gigantic, role, but it is not decisive. Deeper processes, mass processes, ultimately determine the fate of individual authorities. Slander directed against the leaders of Bolshevism during the rise of the revolution could only strengthen the Bolsheviks. Slander against the same people at a time when the revolution was in decline could become an instrument of victory in the hands of the Thermidorian reaction.

What was happening, objectively, in the country and on the world stage was beneficial to my opponents. However, their task was not so easy. Party literature, the press, and the propagandists were still living off the impressions of the previous day, received under the banner of Lenin and Trotsky. It was necessary to give all this a 180-degree turn, not all at once, of course, but by repeating it several times. To show the magnitude of this conversion, it is essential to quote here a few texts that demonstrate the dominant tone used in the party press when speaking of the leaders of the revolution.

On October 14, 1922, that is, when Lenin, after his first crisis, had returned to his work, Radek wrote in Pravda :

"If one can say of Comrade Lenin that he is the reason for the revolution, governing it by the transmission of will, one can characterize Comrade Trotsky as a will of steel restrained by reason. Trotsky’s words rang out like the call of a bell to work. The whole significance of this voice, its whole meaning, and the very meaning of our work in the coming years become perfectly clear from it..." etc. It is true that Radek’s expansive character has become proverbial ; he can do this, but he can do otherwise. What is much more important is that these lines were printed in the central organ of the party, during Lenin’s lifetime, and that no one took them for a dissonance.

In 1923, since the "troika" conspiracy already existed, Lunacharsky was one of the first to assert Zinoviev’s authority. But how was he to begin this undertaking ?
"Of course," he wrote in his portrait of Zinoviev, "Lenin and Trotsky have become the most popular personalities, in love or in hatred, of our time, almost throughout the globe. Zinoviev remains somewhat behind, but it must be noted that Lenin and Trotsky had long been counted among our ranks as men of such exceptional talent, as such incontestable leaders, that their prodigious rise during the revolution could not have aroused any particular astonishment in anyone."
If I quote these pompous panegyrics of dubious taste, it is only because I need them as elements for the overall picture, or, if you like, as testimonies in a trial.

It is with genuine disgust that I must cite a third witness, Yaroslavsky, whose praises are, to tell the truth, more intolerable than his diatribes. This man currently plays a very important role in the party, giving, by the insignificance of his spiritual worth, the measure of the fall of the leaders. Yaroslavsky has risen to play his present role only by the degrees of the slanders he has leveled against me. As the official falsifier of party history, he represents the past as an incessant struggle of Trotsky against Lenin. Needless to say, Trotsky "underestimated," "ignored" the peasant class, that he did not "notice" it. Yet, in February 1923, at a time when Yaroslavsky must already have been fairly familiar with my relationship with Lenin and my views on the peasant class, he characterized my past, my first steps in literary activity (1900-1902) in the following terms in a long article :
"Comrade Trotsky’s brilliant activity as a literary and publicist has made him a world name as the ’king of pamphleteers’ : this is what the English writer Bernard Shaw calls him. Anyone who has been aware of this activity for a quarter of a century must be convinced that this particularly brilliant talent..." etc., etc.

"Many, probably, have seen a photograph of Trotsky as a teenager, which is quite common, etc. ; beneath that high brow, there was already boiling a torrent of images, thoughts, feelings which sometimes led Comrade Trotsky a little off the historical highway, which sometimes forced him to choose either too sharp detours or too recklessly abrupt a path to an unattainable point. But in all these searches we see a man deeply devoted to the revolution, who grew up to play the role of tribune, whose extremely sharp language, flexible as steel, breaks the adversary..." etc., etc.
Yaroslavsky continues, drunk with words, thus :
"The Siberians read these brilliant articles with enthusiasm and eagerly awaited others. Few knew the author, and those who knew Trotsky did not in the least think that he would be one of the recognized leaders of the most revolutionary army and the greatest revolution in the world."
Things are even worse, if possible, with Yaroslavsky when he claims that I wanted to "ignore" the peasant class. The beginning of my literary activity was devoted to the countryside. Here is what Yaroslavsky says about it :
"Trotsky could not spend a certain time in a Siberian village without entering into all the details of its life. And, above all, his attention is focused on the administrative apparatus of the Siberian village. In a series of correspondences, he gives a brilliant description of this apparatus..." Further : "Trotsky saw only the village around him. He suffered seeing such needs. He felt crushed by the powerlessness of the rural people, by the denials of rights that affected them. "
Iaroslavsky then asked that my articles on rural life be included in a chrestomathy. All this in 1923, in February, the month in which the legend was created that I had no concern for rural people. But Iaroslavsky was in Siberia and, consequently, was not yet aware of "Leninism."

The last example I want to give concerns Stalin.

On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, he had written an article directed, in a disguised manner, against me. To explain this, it must be remembered that, during the period of preparation for October, Lenin was hiding in Finland, that Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Kalinin opposed the insurrection and that no one knew anything about Stalin. As a result, the party connected the October coup d’état primarily with my name. On the first anniversary of October, Stalin tried to soften this impression, protesting against me that there was a general leadership of the Central Committee. But, in order to make his statement more or less acceptable, he was forced to write this :
"All the practical organizational work of the insurrection was done under the immediate direction of Trotsky, president of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be said with complete confidence that the party owes first and foremost to Comrade Trotsky the rapid adhesion of the Soviet garrison and the skillful organization of the Revolutionary War Committee."
If Stalin wrote thus, it was because, in that period, it was impossible, even for him, to write otherwise. It took years of unbridled attacks before Stalin had the audacity to say aloud :
"Comrade Trotsky has not played and could not play any special role either in the party or in the October Revolution."
When it was pointed out to him that he was contradicting himself, he replied by redoubling his vulgarities, simply.
The "troika" could not, under any circumstances, oppose me. It could only oppose Lenin to me. But, for that to happen, Lenin would have had to have lost all possibility of opposing the "troika." In other words, for the success of the "troika" campaign, it was necessary either that Lenin be ill beyond recovery, or that his embalmed corpse be buried in a mausoleum. And even that was not enough. It was necessary that, while the campaign was being waged, I should have stepped out of the ranks. This is what happened in the autumn of 1923.

I am not dealing here with a philosophy of history ; I am showing what my life has been like against the background of the events to which it has attached itself. But it is impossible not to note in passing how chance comes to the aid of what is the correct rule. Speaking more broadly, the entire historical process is the prism of the correct rule seen through the fortuitous. If we use the language of biology, we can say that the rational rule of history is realized by a natural selection of accidental facts. It is on this basis that conscious human activity develops, which subjects the accidental to artificial selection...
*
**
But here I must interrupt my talk to talk about my friend Ivan Vasilyevich Zaitsev, from the village of Kalochino, which is located on the Dubna River. The region is called Zabolotye and, as its name indicates, is rich in waterfowl. The Dubna River, at this point, overflows over large areas. The marshes, lakes, and small pools, framed by reeds, form a wide ribbon that stretches for almost forty kilometers. In spring, there are flocks of wild geese, cranes, ducks of all kinds, woodcocks, snipes, and snipes, the whole brotherhood that haunts the marshes. Two kilometers away, in thickets, among patches of moss, on the red cranberry, the wood grouse make their toc-toc. Ivan Vasilyevich moves his light skiff, dug from a tree trunk, through a narrow channel between the marshy edges with a single short oar. The passage was opened no one knows when, perhaps two or three hundred years ago or more, and it is necessary, every year, to dredge it to keep it from silting up. You have to leave Kalochino at midnight to reach the hut in time, before dawn. The bog, with every step you take, lifts its undulating belly. It used to frighten me. But Ivan Vasilyevich, on my first visit, said to me :

— Go boldly. People have drowned in the lake, but no one has ever been lost in the swamp.

Our boat is so light and unstable that it’s best to lie on your back, without moving, especially when it’s windy. The boatmen usually kneel for safety. Only Ivan Vasilyevich, although lame, stands up to his full height ; he is the great master of duck hunting in these parts. His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather were duck specialists. It seems that their ancestor supplied ducks, geese, and swans to Ivan the Terrible’s table. Zaitsev is not interested in hunting grouse, grouse, or woodcock.

"That’s not my area of ​​expertise," he said shortly.

On the other hand, he knows the duck inside out, its feather, its voice, its soul. Standing in our boat, Ivan Vasilyevich picks up a feather from the water from time to time, another, examines it and says :

— We’ll go with you to the Gushchino area ; yesterday evening, the duck landed there...

— And how do you know that ?

— The feather, you see, it’s standing on the water, it’s not wet ; it’s a fresh feather, it flew yesterday, and it couldn’t fly anywhere other than on Gushchino.

And here are the results : while other researchers bring back only a pair or two of ducks, Ivan Vasilyevich and I brought back a dozen, sometimes even fifteen. To him the credit, to me the honor. It is often like this in life. In the reed hut, Ivan Vasilyevich raises a calloused palm to his lips and quacks so tenderly on behalf of the female that the most cautious of the males, even after having endured many other shots, cannot resist this seduction and comes to describe a circle around the hut, or even lands on the water five paces away, so close that one is ashamed to shoot. Zaitsev notices everything, knows everything, smells everything.

"Get ready," he whispers to me. "There’s one coming right for you."

I see in the distance, above a wood, the two commas of the wings, but I cannot guess that this male is of the species named by Ivan Vasilyevich ; no, only he, grand master of the duck-breeding brotherhood, is capable of that. However, the bird comes directly to me. If I miss it, Ivan Vasilyevich emits a very slight grunt, imperceptible, polite. But it would be better never to have been born than to hear that squeaking sound behind you.

Before the war, Zaitsev worked in a textile factory. Even now, he goes to spend the winter in Moscow, working sometimes in a boiler room, sometimes in a power station. In the first years after the revolution, fighting was fought in Ivan Vasilyevich’s country ; the woods and peat bogs burned ; the fields remained bare ; the ducks no longer came. And Zaitsev doubted the new regime. But from 1920 onwards, the ducks reappeared, or more accurately speaking, arrived en masse, and Ivan Vasilyevich wholeheartedly recognized the power of the Soviets.

For a whole year, two kilometers from his home, there was a small Soviet lampwick factory. The director was the former driver of my military train. Zaitsev’s wife and daughter each brought home thirty rubles a month from the factory. It was unheard-of opulence. But soon, having supplied lampwicks to the entire district, the factory had to close. And so it was the duck that once again became the basis of the family’s well-being.

On May 1st, Ivan Vasilyevich was given a seat at the Grand Theatre in Moscow, in a tub overlooking the stage, where honored guests are seated. He sat in the front row, tucking his lame leg under him, a little flustered, but maintaining, as always, his dignity, and he listened to my report. It was Muralov who had brought him, Muralov with whom we usually shared the joys and unpleasantness of hunting. Ivan Vasilyevich was pleased with the report ; he had understood absolutely everything and he explained it in his own way to Kalochino. This further strengthened the friendship of the three of us. It must be said that old huntsmen, especially those from around Moscow, are a depraved people ; they have rubbed shoulders too closely with the lords, they know how to flatter, distort the truth, and boast. But Ivan Vasilyevich is not one of them. There is in him a great deal of simplicity, a great capacity for observation, and personal dignity. This is because, at heart, he is not an industrialist, but an artist by profession.

Lenin, too, went hunting at Zaitsev’s, and Ivan Vasilyevich always pointed out the spot, in a wooden shed, where Lenin had slept on the hay. Lenin was a passionate hunter, but he rarely hunted. He brought too much passion to the exercise, although he was extremely measured in great matters. It happens that great strategists are usually bad chess players ; similarly, men who have a genius for political aim can be mediocre hunters. I remember that it was almost with despair, as if he had committed something forever irreparable, that Lenin complained to me about having missed, in a hunt, a fox at twenty-five paces. I understood him and my heart filled with sympathy for him.

I never once had the opportunity to go hunting with Lenin ; yet we had agreed on it many times and had made the final arrangements. In the first years after the revolution, we hardly had time to concern ourselves with this. Lenin rarely left Moscow to go to sea ; as for me, I knew little more than my railway carriage, the headquarters, the automobile, and I never had a single opportunity to pick up a hunting rifle. But in the later years, after the Civil War was over, there were always some unforeseen circumstances that prevented one or the other of us from going hunting together. Then Lenin fell ill. Shortly before he took to his bed, we had agreed to meet on the Shocha River, in the Tver Governorate. But Lenin’s car broke down on a side road and was unable to reach me. When Lenin recovered from his first attack, he insisted that he be allowed to hunt. In the end, the doctors gave in, on the condition that he would not tire himself out.

During a conference, on agronomy I believe, Lenin went to sit next to Muralov :

— Do you go hunting with Trotsky quite often ?

— It happens.

— So, does it work ?

— Sometimes.

— Take me, huh ?

— But can you ? Muralov asks cautiously.

— Yes, yes, I was allowed... So you’ll take me ?

— How can I not take you, Vladimir Ilyich ?

— That way I’ll fire the shot, eh ?

– We’ll see.

However, Ilyich was not supposed to fire his shot. It was illness that shot him a second time. Then came the fatal shot.

All this digression was necessary for me to explain how and why, one Sunday in October 1923, I found myself in Zabolotye, on the marsh, among the reeds. It was night, it was a little frosty, and I was sitting in the hut, wearing felt boots. But in the morning the sun was warm, the marsh ice melted. A little higher up, the car was waiting. The chauffeur Davydov, with whom we had passed, shoulder to shoulder, through the Civil War, was burning as always with impatience to know what our goal would be. From the boat to the car, it was only a hundred steps, no more. But no sooner had I plunged my boots into the marsh than my legs found themselves in the cold water. As I skipped along, running to the car, they became completely frozen. I sat down next to Davydov and, taking off my shoes, warmed my feet with the heat of the engine. However, the cold won. I had to take to my bed. After the influenza, a pernicious fever broke out. The doctors forbade me to get up. So I stayed in bed for the rest of the autumn and winter. As a result, I was ill during the entire 1923 debate against "Trotskyism." One can predict a revolution, a war, but it is impossible to foresee the consequences of an autumn duck hunt.
*
**
Lenin was lying in Gorky ; I in the Kremlin. The epigones were widening the circles of conspiracy. In the early days, they acted circumspectly, slyly, mixing their praise with ever-increasing doses of poison. Even Zinoviev, the most impatient among them, wrapped the slander in many reservations.
"Comrade Trotsky’s authority is known to all," he said on December 15, 1923, at a party meeting in Petrograd, "just as we know his merits. In our circles, one can avoid dwelling on this. However, mistakes are mistakes. When I happened to make a mistake, the party shook me up quite seriously..."
And so on, in the same tone of cowardly offensive that was long that of the conspirators. It was only to the extent that they had tested the ground and seized positions that they became bolder.

A whole new science was created : the fabrication of artificial reputations, the writing of fanciful biographies, and publicity stunts for pre-designated leaders. A special, less important discipline was instituted to study the question of an honorary presidium. Since October, it had been customary in countless assemblies to elect Lenin and Trotsky as honorary members of the bureau. These two names were usually mentioned together in conversations, articles, poems, and chastushki. Now it was a matter of separating the two names, if only mechanically, in order to then oppose them politically. First, all members of the Politburo were listed as members of the presidiums. Then, the lists were drawn up in alphabetical order. Later, this distribution was modified to benefit the new hierarchy of leaders. Zinoviev was placed at the head of the list. The example was set by Petrograd. And some time later, the honorary members of the presidiums no longer included Trotsky among them. Vehement protests always arose in the ranks of the assemblies. Frequently, the chairman of the bureau was forced to explain the omission of my name by a misunderstanding. But the press report said nothing about it, of course. Then Stalin was given first place in the lists. When an assembly chairman had failed to do what was expected of him, his negligence was invariably corrected by the press report. Careers were built or broken depending on how well or poorly the lists of honorary bureaus had been established. This work, which was, of all, the most persistent and systematic, was motivated by the need to combat "the cult of leaders." At the Moscow Conference in January 1924, Preobrazhensky told the epigones : "Yes, we are against the cult of leaders, but we also do not want that instead of the cult of a single leader, there should be that of several others of lesser stature."

“Those were hard days,” my wife says in her memoirs, “days of fierce struggle by LD within the political bureau, against its members. LD was alone against everyone and he was ill. Because of his health, the sessions were held in our home, I stood nearby in the bedroom and heard what he said. He spoke with all his soul ; it seemed that with each speech he lost some of his strength, so much “of his blood” did he put into it. And I heard, in response, cold, indifferent replies. For everything had been decided in advance. Why would anyone be upset ? After each of these sessions, LD would develop a fever, he would leave his office soaked to the skin, undress, and go to bed. His linen and clothes had to be dried as if he had been caught in a downpour.” The sessions were then frequent, in LD’s room, whose old carpet with faded colors appeared to me, every night, in dreams like a living panther : the sessions held during the day became nocturnal nightmares. Such was the first stage of the struggle before it broke out outside...

When, later, Zinoviev and Kamenev fought Stalin, the secrets of this first period were revealed by the very accomplices of the plot. For it was indeed a plot. A secret politburo (the Semiorka) was created, which included all the members of the official politburo, except me, but with, in addition, Kuibyshev, currently chairman of the Supreme Council of Public Economy. All questions were resolved in this secret center, whose participants were bound by mutual responsibility. They had undertaken not to polemicize among themselves and, at the same time, to seek opportunities to act against me. In the lower organizations there existed similar secret centers, which were attached to the Moscow "semiorka" by strict discipline. For correspondence, they had special ciphers. It was an illegal organization firmly established within the party and which, at the beginning, was directed against only one man. Officials in the party and the state were systematically chosen according to a single criterion : "against Trotsky." During the long "interregnum" caused by Lenin’s illness, this work was carried out tirelessly, but at the same time cautiously, behind a mask, in order to be able to preserve, in the event of Lenin’s return to health, the bridges that had been undermined. The conspirators acted by hints. Candidates for this or that office were required to guess what was expected of them. The one who "guessed" correctly was promoted. This is how a certain kind of "careerism" was determined, which later came to be openly called "anti-Trotskyism." It took Lenin’s death to give this conspiracy a free hand and allow it to manifest itself in broad daylight. The process of personnel selection reached the lower ranks. It was no longer possible to hold the position of factory director, secretary of a corporate cell, president of a cantonal executive committee, accountant, or typist, if one did not advocate anti-Trotskyism.

Party members who raised their voices against this cabal became victims of treacherous attacks, motivated by arguments completely foreign to the cause and frequently invented. On the other hand, the elements of unsafe morale, who had been relentlessly expelled from the party in the first five years of Soviet power, now secured themselves by means of a single rejoinder launched somewhere against Trotsky.

The same work was carried out, since the end of 1923, in all sections of the Communist International : leaders were dismissed, others took their places, according to the attitude they had been able to adopt towards Trotsky. An intensive artificial selection of workers was carried out, taking not the best, but the most adapted. The general trend was to replace independent and talented men with mediocrities who owed their situation only to the good pleasure of the apparatus.

The most prominent expression of mediocrity in the apparatus was then Stalin who rose.

Lenin’s Death and the Shift of Power

I have been asked more than once, and I am still being asked : How could you have lost power ? Most often, this question shows that the interlocutor naively imagines power as a material object that has been dropped, like a lost watch or notebook. In reality, when revolutionaries who have led the conquest of power manage to lose it "without a fight" or by catastrophe at a certain stage, this means that the influence of certain ideas and certain moods is decreasing in the leading sphere of the revolution, or that the decadence of the revolutionary spirit is taking place in the masses themselves, or finally that both environments are in decline.

The leading cadres of this party, who emerged from clandestine action, were animated by revolutionary tendencies which the leaders of the first period of the revolution formulated most clearly and best, and which they put into practice most completely and most successfully. It was precisely this which made them leaders of the party, and through the party, leaders of the working class, and through the working class, leaders of the country. It was by this means that certain men concentrated power in their hands.

But the ideas of the first period of the revolution were gradually losing their influence on the minds of the party sphere, which possessed the immediate power to govern the country. Within the country itself, processes were taking place that can be included under the general term of reaction. These processes reached more or less the working class, and in particular, the working-class elements of the party. The sphere that composed the apparatus of power then had new, distinct designs, to which it strove to subordinate the revolution. Between the leaders who traced the historical line of the class and who knew how to see beyond the apparatus, and this apparatus itself—enormous, unwieldy, of heterogeneous composition, which easily absorbs the average communist—a disjunction began to take shape. At first, it was more psychological than political in character. The days before were still too recent. The slogans of October had not yet faded from memory. The personal authority of the leaders of the first period was great. But, under the cover of traditional forms, a new psychology was forming. International perspectives were fading. Daily work was completely absorbing people. New methods, which were to serve to achieve the goals set long ago, created new designs and, above all, a new psychology. For many, a temporary situation appeared as a terminal station. A new type was formed.

Revolutionaries, in the end, are made of the same social material as all other men. But they must have certain salient personal characteristics that have enabled the historical process to distinguish them from others and group them separately. Common life, theoretical work, struggle under a certain banner, collective discipline, temper acquired under fire of dangers gradually form the revolutionary type. One has every right to speak of the psychological type of the Bolshevik in contrast, for example, to that of the Menshevik. With sufficient experience, one can even distinguish, at first glance, a Bolshevik from a Menshevik, and the percentage of errors is not high.

This does not mean, however, that everything in a Bolshevik has always been Bolshevism.

To transform a certain world outlook into flesh and blood, to subordinate all aspects of one’s consciousness to it, and to combine with it a world of personal feelings—this is not given to everyone ; rather, it is the privilege of a few. Among the working masses, this is compensated by the class instinct, which, in critical epochs, attains great subtlety.

There are, however, in the party and in the state, a large number of revolutionaries who, although they have emerged for the most part from the masses, have long since detached themselves from them and who, by their situation, oppose them. The class instinct in them has already evaporated. On the other hand, they lack theoretical stability and the breadth of vision to embrace the process as a whole. In their psychology, there remain a good number of undefended areas, through which—when the situation changes—heterogeneous and hostile ideological influences freely penetrate.

In periods of clandestine struggle, uprisings, and civil war, elements of this kind were merely party soldiers. In their consciousness, only one string resonated, and it was in tune with the party. But when the tension was lessened, when the nomads of the revolution began to settle in one place, the character traits of the common man, the sympathies and tastes of self-satisfied functionaries, were awakened, animated, and developed within them.

Frequently, certain observations that escaped Kalinin, Voroshilov, Stalin, and Rykov caused concern. Where does this come from ? I wondered. What hole does this come from ? Arriving at this or that meeting, I found groups in conversations that often stopped in my presence. In these chats there was nothing directed against me. There was nothing contrary to the principles of the party. But the mood was one of moral tranquilization, self-satisfaction, and trivial contentment. People suddenly felt the need to confess this new state of mind to each other, and it is fair to say that malicious chatter took its place there. Previously, these men would have felt embarrassed not only in front of Lenin and me, but in front of themselves. When vulgarity was revealed, for example in a statement by Stalin, Lenin, without raising his head, which was bent low over a piece of paper, would glance from side to side, as if to see if anyone else had understood how intolerable Stalin’s remarks were. In such cases, a brief glance or a change of tone was enough for our solidarity with Lenin and me to appear incontestable in these psychological judgments.
If I did not take part in the distractions that were increasingly becoming part of the customs of the new ruling sphere, it was not out of morality ; it was simply because I did not want to undergo the trials of the worst boredom. Visiting each other’s homes, attending ballet performances, attending collective drinking sessions where absentees were gossiped about, these things did not appeal to me at all. The new higher sphere felt that this kind of life did not suit me. They did not even try to engage me in it. It is for this same reason that many group chats stopped as soon as I appeared and the talkers separated, a little confused for themselves, with a certain hostility towards me. And this marked, if you will, that I was beginning to lose power.

I will confine myself here to the psychological side of the matter, leaving aside the social undercurrents, that is, the anatomical changes in revolutionary society. In the end, it is, of course, these changes that decide. But one is obliged to make immediate contact with their psychological reflections. Internal events developed relatively slowly, facilitating the molecular processes of degeneration in the upper sphere and leaving almost no room for the two irreconcilable positions to confront each other before the masses. To this must be added that the new state of mind remained for a long time and still remains masked by traditional formulas. This made it all the more difficult to determine how deep the process of degeneration went. The Thermidor plot, at the end of the 18th century, prepared by the very march of the revolution, had burst forth suddenly and taken the form of a bloody denouement. Our Thermidor dragged on. The guillotine was replaced, at least for a period of time that cannot be determined, by lies. The systematic falsification of the past, organized according to the "chain" method, became the instrument for a transformation of the ideological armament of the official party. Lenin’s illness, and the expectation in which people maintained themselves in case he returned to the leadership, created an indeterminate temporary situation which lasted, with an interval, nearly two years. If the revolutionary movement had been in an ascendant period, the procrastination would have benefited the opposition. But the revolution was then, on the international level, suffering defeat after defeat, and the postponements benefited national reformism, automatically strengthening Stalin’s bureaucracy against me and my political friends. The campaign waged against the theory of permanent revolution, a campaign due to real philistines, to ignoramuses, a simply stupid persecution, came from precisely these psychological sources. Chattering over a bottle or returning from a ballet performance, one self-satisfied functionary would say to another, no less satisfied : "Trotsky has nothing in mind but the permanent revolution." This is connected with the accusations that have been made against me of lacking team spirit, of being an individualist, an aristocrat. "One cannot do everything and act all the time for the revolution ; one must also think of oneself"—this state of mind was expressed thus : "Down with the permanent revolution !" The protest raised against the theoretical demands of Marxism and the political demands of the revolution gradually took, for these people, the form of a struggle against "Trotskyism." Under this banner, the petty bourgeois emerged in the Bolshevik. This is what my loss of power consisted of,and what determined the forms in which this loss took place.

I have recounted how, on his deathbed, Lenin directed his attack against Stalin and his allies, Dzerzhinsky and Ordzhonikidze. Lenin highly regarded Dzerzhinsky. There was a cooling between them when Dzerzhinsky realized that Lenin did not consider him capable of leading economic work. This was precisely what pushed Dzerzhinsky in Stalin’s direction. Then Lenin deemed it necessary to strike at Dzerzhinsky as Stalin’s supporter. As for Ordzhonikidze, Lenin wanted to expel him from the party for having demonstrated the qualities of a governor-general. The note in which Lenin promised the Georgian Bolsheviks unreserved support against Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Ordzhonikidze was addressed to Mdivani. The fate of these four most clearly shows what a turnaround the Stalinist faction in the party had made. After Lenin’s death, Dzerzhinsky was placed at the head of the High Council of Public Economy, that is, at the head of all state industry. Ordzhonikidze, whom Lenin wanted to expel from the party, was put at the head of the Central Control Commission. Stalin not only remained, despite Lenin, General Secretary of the party, but he obtained unprecedented powers from the apparatus. Finally, Budu Mdivani, with whom Lenin stood in solidarity against Stalin, is currently imprisoned in Tobolsk prison. The same "regroupment" has taken place throughout the party leadership, from top to bottom. What’s more : in all the parties of the International without exception. Between the era of the epigones and that of Lenin, there is not only an ideological abyss, there is also a very complete organizational change.

Stalin was the main instrument of this transformation. He possessed practicality, perseverance, and persistence in pursuing the goals he had set for himself. The scope of his political views was extremely limited. His theoretical level was quite primitive. His compilation work, The Foundations of Leninism, in which he attempted to pay tribute to the theoretical traditions of the party, was full of schoolboy errors. Since he did not know foreign languages, he was forced to follow the political life of other countries solely from what was reported to him. By his mental training, this stubborn empiricist lacked creative imagination. To the upper sphere of the party (in wider circles, he was generally unknown), he always seemed created to play second- and third-rate roles. And the fact that he is now playing the leading role is characteristic, not so much for him as for the transitional period of the political shift. Helvétius already said : "Every era has its great men, and when it doesn’t have them, it invents them." Stalinism is, above all, the automatic work of an apparatus without personality at the decline of the revolution.

*
**

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Death was for him only a deliverance from his physical and moral pain. He could only experience his helplessness, above all the deprivation of speech while he was fully conscious, as an intolerable humiliation. Already, he could no longer bear doctors, their patronizing tone, their banal little jokes, the mendacious phrases they uttered to give hope. As long as he was able to speak, he indifferently asked the doctors questions to verify ; he surprised them without their noticing, in their contradictions, obtained further explanations, and himself took a look at medical books. As in all other matters, he strove above all to achieve clarity. The only doctor he tolerated well was Fyodor Alexandrovich Guetier. He was a good doctor, absolutely devoid of the spirit of courtship ; he had for Lenin and Krupskaya a true affection of man to man. At that time, when Lenin did not admit other doctors to his company, Guétier found no obstacle when he came to see him. Guétier was also the close friend and doctor of our family during all the years of the revolution. Thanks to which we always had the most conscientious and thoughtful reports on the state of Vladimir Ilyich’s health, reports which supplemented and corrected the dull official bulletins.

I asked Guétier more than once whether, if Lenin were to recover, his mental faculties would retain their vigor. Guétier answered something like this : the tendency to fatigue would be greater, the clarity of work would not be what it once was, but the virtuoso would remain a virtuoso.
In the interval between the first and second crises, this diagnosis was entirely confirmed. At the end of the Politburo meetings, Lenin gave the impression of an absolutely exhausted man. All the muscles of his face were relaxed, the brilliance of his eyes was extinguished, and even his powerful forehead was dulling, his shoulders slumped heavily ; the expression of his face and of his whole body could be summed up in a single word : weariness. In those disturbing minutes, Lenin seemed to me doomed. But when he had had a good night’s sleep, he regained all his strength of thought. The articles he wrote from one crisis to the next are on a par with his best writings. The lymph that nourished the spring was the same, but it was becoming scarce. However, even after the second crisis, Guétier did not take away our last hope. But his assessments became increasingly saddening. The illness dragged on. Without hatred but without pity, the blind forces of nature plunged the seriously ill man into a hopeless helplessness. Lenin could not and should not live as an invalid. Yet, all of us did not lose hope of seeing him heal.

His poor health, however, continued.

“At the doctors’ insistence,” writes N.I. Sedova, “LD was transferred to the countryside. There, Guetier visited him often, treating him with sincere care and tenderness. Guetier was not interested in politics, but he suffered deeply for us, not knowing how to express his sympathy. The persecution against us took him by surprise. He did not understand, waited, and tormented himself. At Arkhangelskoye, he spoke to me with emotion about the need to take LD to Sukhum. In the end, we decided to do so. It was a long journey, via Baku, Tiflis, Batum ; it was even longer because the railway was clogged with snow. But the journey acted rather as a sedative. As we moved away from Moscow, we became somewhat detached from the painful circumstances we had experienced in recent times. However, my feeling was that I was taking a seriously ill person. I was in a state of overwhelming uncertainty, wondering what our life would be like in Sukhum, whether those around us would be friends or enemies ?
January 21 found us at the Tiflis station, on our way to Sukhum. I was with my wife in the work compartment of my carriage and, as always at that time, I had a fever. After knocking, my faithful colleague Sermux, who was accompanying me to Sukhum, entered. From the way he entered, from his greenish-gray face, from his glassy eyes that avoided me, from the way he handed me a piece of paper, I sensed catastrophe. It was a deciphered telegram from Stalin, announcing Lenin’s death. I passed the paper to my wife, who had already had time to understand everything...
The authorities in Tiflis soon received the same telegram. The news of Lenin’s death was spreading rapidly by waves. I got a direct connection to the Kremlin. I received this reply : "Funeral on Saturday, won’t happen anyway, we advise you to follow treatment." So there was no longer any choice. In reality, the funeral didn’t take place until Sunday, and I could have arrived in Moscow perfectly well on time. As improbable as it may seem, I was deceived about the date of the funeral. The conspirators had rightly calculated that it wouldn’t occur to me to check their claims and that, later, an explanation could always be invented. I recall that I was not informed of Lenin’s first bout of illness until the day after. It was a method. The goal was to gain time.

The comrades in Tiflis asked me to immediately say my word on Lenin’s death. But I had only one need : to be alone. I could not take up my pen. The brief text of the telegram from Moscow buzzed in my head. The comrades who had gathered, however, were waiting for an echo. They were right. I wrote farewell lines : Lenin is dead. Lenin is no more... I transmitted these few handwritten lines by direct wire.

"We arrived completely exhausted," my wife wrote. "It was the first time we had seen Sukhum. The mimosas were in bloom, there were lots of them. Superb palm trees. Camellias. It was January, and the harshest frosts were reigning in Moscow. The inhabitants of Abkhazia welcomed us very warmly. In the dining room of the rest home, two portraits hung side by side, one wrapped in crepe, that of Vladimir Ilyich, the other being that of LD. We wanted to take the latter down, but we didn’t decide to, fearing to do something like a demonstration."

In Sukhum, I lay for long days on a balcony facing the sea. Although it was January, the sun shone bright and warm in the sky. Between the balcony and the sparkling sea rose palm trees. The constant sensation of fever was added to the buzzing thought of Lenin’s death. I reviewed in my mind the stages of my life, my meetings with Lenin, the disagreements, the polemics, the rapprochements, the joint work. Certain episodes returned, with fantastic clarity. Little by little, the whole picture took shape with greater and greater clarity. I pictured much more clearly the "disciples" who had been faithful to the master in small things but not in great things. With the breath of the sea, with my whole being, I was imbued with the assurance of the correctness of my historical views against the epigones...

January 27, 1924. Above the palm trees, above the sea, a calm reigned beneath the blue vault. Suddenly, salvos burst forth. The hurried firing came from somewhere below, from the direction of the sea. It was Sukhum’s greeting to the leader whose funeral was being celebrated at that hour. I thought of him, and of the woman who had been his companion for many years and who had assimilated the whole world through him ; now she was burying him and could not feel other than very alone among the millions of men who grieved around her, but other than her, not like her. Yes, I thought of Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. I wanted to say to her, from where I was, a word of affectionate greeting, of sympathy, a caressing word. But I did not bring myself to do so. Any words seemed too light in the face of the weight of the event. I feared that it would sound conventional. I was deeply moved by a feeling of gratitude when, a few days later, unexpectedly, I received the following letter from Nadezhda Konstantinovna :

“Dear Lev Davidovich,

"I am writing to tell you that about a month before his death, while reading your book, Vladimir Ilyich stopped at the passage where you give a characterization of Marx and Lenin, and asked me to read these lines to him once more, and listened to them very attentively, and then wanted to see them again with his own eyes.

"And here is what I want to tell you : the feelings Vladimir Ilyich had for you when you came to us in London from Siberia did not change until his death.
"I wish you, Lev Davidovich, continued strength and health, and I send you my love. N. Krupskaya."

In the little book that Vladimir Ilyich examined a month before his death, I drew a parallel between Lenin and Marx. I knew only too well Lenin’s attitude toward Marx, an attitude full of the grateful affection of the disciple and of ardor in the sense of distance. The relationship of master to pupil became, through the march of history, that of the precursor theoretician to the first practitioner. In my article, I modified what was traditional in the sense of distance. Marx and Lenin, who are, historically, so closely linked and, at the same time, so different, were for me two summits of the spiritual power of man. And I was happy to learn that Lenin, shortly before his death, had read with attention, perhaps with emotion, what I had written about him, for the dimensions of Marx were in his eyes those of a Titan when it came to measuring a personality.

It was with no less emotion that I read Krupskaya’s letter. It evoked two extreme points in my connection with Lenin : the day in October 1902 when, after my escape from Siberia, early in the morning, I dragged Lenin from his hard little London bed, and the end of December 1923, when Lenin, twice, read my assessment of his life’s work. Between these two extremes, twenty years had passed, first of joint work, then of bitter factional struggle, and then again of joint work on a higher historical basis. According to Hegel : thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And Krupskaya certified that Lenin’s attitude toward me, despite a prolonged period of antithesis, remained what it had been in London : that is, warm support, friendly attachment. But, already, on a higher historical basis. Even if no other documents existed, all the volumes piled up by forgers would not outweigh the judgment of history over the little note Krupskaya wrote to me a few days after Lenin’s death.

I still find this in my wife’s notes :

"The newspapers arrived with considerable delays because of snow congestion, and they brought us mourning speeches and obituaries. Friends were waiting for LD in Moscow, thinking he would retrace his steps ; it never occurred to anyone that Stalin, by his telegram, had cut off his return. I remember a letter from my son that we received in Sukhum. He had been completely shaken by Lenin’s death ; with a cold and a fever of 40°C, he had gone, covered in a jacket that was not at all warm, to the Hall of Columns to say goodbye and he had waited, waited endlessly, impatient for us to arrive. One could sense, in his letter, astonishment, bitterness, and a certain tone of reproach."

A delegation from the Central Committee, consisting of Tomsky, Frunze, Pyatakov, and Gusev, came to see me in Sukhum to agree on certain changes in the personnel of the War Commissariat. In essence, it was nothing more than pure comedy. The renewal of the War personnel had been carried out long ago, at full speed, behind my back, and it was only a matter of maintaining a certain decorum.

The first blow within the War Commissariat fell on Skliansky. It was primarily through him that Stalin made up for his failures under Tsaritsyn, his defeat on the Southern Front, and his adventure under Lvov. The hydra of chicanery raised its head. To undermine the positions under Skliansky, and mine were in mind, Unschlicht, an ambitious and talentless intriguer, had been placed in the War Commissariat a few months earlier. Skliansky was removed. He was replaced by Frunze, who until then had commanded the troops in Ukraine. Frunze was a serious character ; his authority in the party, as a result of the years he had previously spent in penal servitude, was greater than Skliansky’s very young authority. Moreover, during the war, Frunze had demonstrated undeniable qualities as a war captain. As a military administrator, he was incomparably weaker than Skliansky. He was carried away by abstract schemes, he misunderstood people, and easily fell under the influence of specialists, especially second-rate specialists.

But I would like to say what else I know about Skliansky. He was abruptly sent back to economic work—abruptly, that is, in pure Stalinist fashion, without even having been heard. Dzerzhinsky, who was happy to get rid of Unschlicht, his deputy at the GPU, and to acquire for industry a first-class administrator like Skliansky, put the latter in charge of the cloth trust. Skliansky simply shrugged his shoulders and plunged headlong into his new task. A few months later, he decided to go on a tour of the United States to see, learn, and buy machinery. Before leaving, he came to my house to say goodbye and ask for advice. We had worked side by side during the years of the Civil War. But we had talked much more about marching companies, military statutes, accelerated promotions in command, copper and aluminum reserves for war factories, military jackets, and the seasoning of army dishes than about purely party matters. Neither of us had enough time. When Lenin fell ill, when the intrigues of the epigones extended their tentacles to the War Commissariat, I avoided conversations on topics of interest to the party, especially with the workers of the said commissariat. The situation was too vague, the disagreements were still too insignificant, the creation of factions in the army carried too great a danger. Then I fell ill. During the interview I had with Skliansky in the summer of 1925, when I was no longer head of the War Commissariat, we talked about many things, if not everything.

— Tell me, Skliansky asked me, what is Stalin ?

— Skliansky knew Stalin well enough himself. He wanted me to define him and explain his successes. I thought.

— Stalin, I said, is the most eminent mediocrity in our party.

This definition, for the first time, during this conversation, appeared to me in all its significance, not only psychological but also social. From Skliansky’s expression, I saw at once that I had helped my interlocutor to perceive something important.

— Do you know, he said to me, what is striking in the last period is to see, in all areas, the emergence of gilded and self-satisfied mediocrity. And all this finds its leader in Stalin. Where does this come from ?

— It’s a reaction to the great social and psychological tension of the early years of the revolution. The victorious counterrevolution may have its great men. But at its first stage, at Thermidor, it needs mediocrities who can’t see beyond the end of their noses. Their strength lies in their political blindness ; it’s like the millhorse that thinks it’s going uphill when in reality it’s only turning the millstone up and down. A horse without blinkers is incapable of this work.

In this conversation, I arrived for the first time with complete clarity, I would even say with complete physical certainty, at the problem of Thermidor. Skliansky and I agreed to resume our conversation when he returned from America. A few weeks passed and a telegram was received announcing that Skliansky, during a boat trip, had drowned in a lake in America. Life is inexhaustible in wicked inventions.

The urn containing Skliansky’s ashes was brought to Moscow. No one doubted that it would be placed in the Kremlin wall, on Red Square, which has become the Pantheon of the Revolution. But the secretariat of the Central Committee decided to place it in a suburban cemetery. Thus, Skliansky’s farewell visit to me had not been forgotten and was taken into account. Hatred had been transferred to the funeral urn. Moreover, diminishing Skliansky’s importance was part of the general struggle against the leadership that had ensured victory in the Civil War. I don’t think Skliansky, during his lifetime, considered where he would be buried. But the Central Committee’s decision took on a character of political and personal villainy. Overcoming my repugnance, I telephoned Molotov. However, the order was implacably maintained. History will return in its own way to this question as to others.

*
**

The fever returned to me during the autumn of 1924. Around that time, the discussion resumed with renewed vigor. This time it was provoked from above, according to a plan drawn up in advance. In Leningrad, in Moscow, in the provinces, there were hundreds and thousands of secret conferences to prepare what was called "the discussion," that is, to systematically and methodically initiate a persecution which, from that moment on, was aimed not at the opposition but at myself personally. When the clandestine preparatory work was completed, at a signal given by Pravda, the campaign against Trotskyism opened simultaneously in all parts of the country, from the top of all the platforms, on all the pages and in all the columns of the press, in all the corners, in the smallest cracks. It was, in its kind, an imposing spectacle. The slander took on the appearance of a volcanic eruption. The broad mass of the party was shaken. I lay there, gripped by fever, and kept silent. The press and the orators did nothing but denounce Trotskyism. No one could say exactly what the word meant. Day after day, episodes from the past were brought up, polemical articles by Lenin written twenty years earlier were quoted, confusing, distorting, and altering the texts, and above all, presenting them as if they were from yesterday. No one understood a thing. If all this had been reality, Lenin should have known something about it. Hadn’t the October Revolution happened after all that ? And after our coup d’état, hadn’t there been the civil war ? Hadn’t Trotsky been, with Lenin, the founder of the Communist International ? And weren’t portraits of Trotsky everywhere alongside those of Lenin ? And so many more, so many other questions... Yet the slander poured out like cold lava. Mechanically, it weighed on consciences and, in an even more crushing way, on wills.

Lenin was no longer considered a revolutionary leader, but was seen only as the head of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. Despite my protests, a mausoleum was erected on Red Square, unworthy and offensive to revolutionary consciousness. The official books published about Lenin became so many mausoleums. His thought was cut into quotations intended for the preaching of lies. With the help of the embalmed corpse, the living Lenin was fought and Trotsky was fought. The masses were stunned, stunned, and terrorized. What the ignorant cooked up was served in such abundance that, by its sheer quantity, it acquired a certain political value. It deafened, it crushed, it demoralized. The party saw itself condemned to silence. A regime of pure dictatorship over the party was established. In other words, the party ceased to be a party.

In the morning, the newspapers were brought to me in bed. I skimmed through the telegrams, the headlines, and glanced at the signatures. I knew these people well enough ; I knew what they thought of themselves, what they were capable of saying, and what they were ordered to say. For the most part, they were men whom the revolution had already completely exhausted.

Among them were narrow-minded fanatics who allowed themselves to be deceived. There were young people who, eager to make a career, hurried to prove that they were indispensable. All contradicted each other and themselves. But the slander never stopped roaring furiously in the newspapers, howling with rage, thus covering up its contradictions and its futility. It won by the power of numbers.

“LD’s second bout of illness,” writes NI Sedova, “coincided with the monstrous persecution that was waged against him and which we experienced as the most terrible illness. The pages of Pravda seemed immense, endless ; every line, every letter of that newspaper brought a lie. LD remained silent. But how much this silence cost him ! Friends came to see him during the day and, sometimes, at night. I remember someone asking LD if he hadn’t read the morning paper. He replied that he generally didn’t read newspapers. In fact, he would take them in his hands, glance at them distractedly, and throw them away. It seemed that just looking at them was enough for him to know their contents. He knew only too well the cooks who prepared this dish, which, moreover, was always the same, every day.” Reading a newspaper from that period, he said, was like trying to "stuff a lamp-glass brush down your throat." This effort could have been made if LD had decided to respond. But he remained silent. His bronchitis was prolonged because of his painful nervous state. He had lost a lot of weight and paled. As a family, we avoided talking about the persecution, but we were also incapable of talking about anything else. I remember the feeling I felt as I went to work every day at the Commissariat of Public Instruction. It was as if I had to go under the rod. However, not once was an attack or an unpleasant allusion made against me : If I encountered the hostile silence of a small number of higher authorities, I undoubtedly had the sympathies of the majority of the workers there. In the party, there were as it were two distinct existences : an inner life, hidden, and another one entirely in appearances, in demonstrations, which was in complete contradiction with the first. Few were those who had the audacity to manifest what felt and thought the overwhelming majority, which hid its sympathies under monolithic votes.

The same period also saw the publication of a letter I had addressed to Chkheidze against Lenin. This episode dates back to April 1913 : it was caused by the fact that the legal Bolshevik newspaper published in St. Petersburg had appropriated the title of my Vienna periodical : Pravda, rabotchaia gazeta. This led us to one of the sharp conflicts with which emigration life is so rich. I wrote to Chkheidze, who for a time had occupied an intermediate position between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, a letter in which I gave vent to my indignation against the Bolshevik center and against Lenin. Two or three weeks later, I would undoubtedly have censored my letter myself, which, a year or two later, was for me nothing more than a mere curiosity. But this letter had its fate. The police department intercepted it. My epistle remained in the police archives until the October Revolution. After our coup d’état, it was transferred to the archives of the Institute of Party History. Lenin was perfectly aware of this letter. For him, as for me, it was old snow, and nothing more. Had enough been written, of all kinds of letters, during the years of emigration ! In 1924, the epigones took this document from the archives and threw it at the head of the party, which, at that time, was composed of three-quarters of newcomers. It was no accident that the months immediately following Lenin’s death were chosen for this purpose. This condition was indispensable for two reasons : first, Lenin could no longer rise again to give these gentlemen the names they deserved ; second, the popular masses were all filled with the grief caused them by the death of the leader. Having no idea of ​​the party’s past, the masses read Trotsky’s hostile statements about Lenin. They were stunned. It is true that this was twelve years old, but chronology was nothing compared to quotations taken out of context. The use made by the epigones of my letter to Chkheidze constitutes one of the greatest deceptions recorded in history. The apocryphal documents drawn up by the French reactionaries during the Dreyfus Affair are nothing compared to this political forgery of which Stalin and his accomplices were guilty.

Slander can only be a force if it corresponds to a historical need. I said to myself : something must have changed in social relations or in political opinions if slander finds such formidable outlets. The content of slander must be analyzed thoroughly. Being bedridden, I had enough time. Why was it that Trotsky was accused of seeking to "rob the muzhik"—a phrase that reactionary agrarians, Christian socialists, and fascists always direct against socialists and, even more so, against communists ? Where did this furious persecution of the Marxist idea of ​​permanent revolution come from ? Where did this nationalist boasting, the promise of building socialism in one country ? Which sections of the population were demanding such reactionary nonsense ? Finally, where did this lowering of the theoretical level, this political stupefaction, come from, and why ? I am leafing through my old articles in bed and come across the following lines, written by me in 1909, when the Stolypin reaction was in full swing :

"When the curve of historical development is ascending, public opinion becomes more penetrating, more daring, more intelligent. It seizes facts on the fly and it is on the fly that it connects them by the thread of generalization... But when the political curve is decreasing, stupidity takes hold of public opinion. The precious talent of political generalization disappears who knows where, without leaving a trace. Stupidity becomes insolent, bares its teeth and mocks any attempt at generalization. Sensing that it has room to maneuver, it begins to use its own means." One of the principal means it employs is slander.

I say to myself : we are going through a period of reaction. What is taking place is a political shift of classes, a change in class consciousness. After the great tension, there is a reflux. How far will it go ? In any case, it will not go to the extreme. But no one can indicate the limit in advance. It will be determined in the struggle of internal forces. It is important above all to understand what is happening. The deep molecular processes of reaction are coming to light. They are trying to liquidate or at least weaken the state of dependence of public opinion on the ideas, slogans, and living figures of October. This is the meaning of what is happening. Let us not fall into subjectivism. Let us not be capricious, let us not be offended to note that history conducts its business by complicated and tangled paths. Understanding what is happening is already halfway to ensuring victory. He who laughs last laughs best.

The final period of the struggle within the party

In January 1925, I was relieved of my duties as People’s Commissar for War. This decision had been carefully prepared by the preceding struggle. Fearing the traditions of October, the epigones were especially afraid of allowing the traditions of the Civil War and my connection with the army to persist. I relinquished my military post without a fight and even with a feeling of relief, thinking of depriving my adversaries of the means of insinuating that I was planning to use the army for my own ends. To justify their actions, the epigones had first attributed fantastic designs of this sort to me, and then ended up half-believing them. By 1921, however, I was personally interested in another area. The war was over ; the army, which had numbered 5,300,000 men, now had only 600,000. War work was reduced to bureaucratic routine. The first place in the country was taken by economic questions which, at the time when hostilities ended, absorbed my time and attention much more than military problems.

In May 1925, I was appointed chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the Electrotechnical Directorate, and chairman of the Scientific and Technical Directorate of Industry. These three areas had nothing in common. They had been assigned to me without my knowledge, and for specific reasons : to isolate me from the party, to overload me with routine work ; to place me under special supervision, etc. However, I conscientiously tried to enter into my task on these new bases. Applying myself to work in three institutions I was unfamiliar with, I threw myself into them head first. What interested me most were the scientific and technical institutes, which, thanks to the centralization of industry, achieved a fairly considerable expansion in our country. I diligently inspected the countless laboratories, I attended the experiments with great interest, I listened to the explanations of elite scientists, I studied, in my leisure hours, chemistry and hydrodynamics manuals and I felt half administrator, half student.

It was not for nothing that in my early years I had prepared to enter the Faculty of Sciences. I took a break from politics, so to speak, by studying natural sciences and technology. As head of the Electrotechnical Directorate, I visited the power stations that were being built and, in particular, I made a trip to the Dnieper, where extensive preparatory work for the future hydroelectric station was being carried out. Two boatmen, in a light fishing boat, took me down the rapids of the river through the whirlpools, by the route taken in the old days by the Zaporozhian Cossacks. This was, of course, only of sporting interest. But I was deeply attracted by the Dnieper project itself, both from the economic and technical points of view.

To prevent miscalculations in the construction of this power station, I organized an American expert appraisal, which was followed by a German one. I tried to connect my new work not only to current economic problems, but to the essential tasks of socialism. Struggling against a nationalist mindset obtuse to economic problems ("independence" through isolation where one is master of one’s fate), I proposed the development of a system of comparative coefficients, concerning our economy and the world economy. This problem arose as a result of the need to orient oneself properly on the world market, which would serve to resolve the questions of import, export, and the policy of concessions. In essence, the problem of relative coefficients, posed if one admitted the preponderance of world productive forces over all national production, indicated that I was launching a campaign against the reactionary theory of socialism in a single country.

On the new problems I had to solve, I gave lectures, published books and pamphlets. My adversaries could not accept the battle on this terrain, and did not want to. They formulated the situation for themselves thus : Trotsky had built a new citadel for himself. The electro-technical directorate and the scientific institutes worried them from then on almost as much as the War Commissariat and the Red Army had alarmed them. Stalin’s apparatus followed me closely. Every practical step on my part gave rise to a complicated intrigue behind the scenes. Every theoretical generalization provided fodder for the mythology of the ignorant inventors of "Trotskyism." My practical work was placed in impossible conditions. I will not be exaggerating if I say that a good part of the creative work of Stalin and his deputy Molotov was aimed at organizing real sabotage around me. It became almost impossible to obtain the necessary resources for the institutions that depended on me. The people who worked in these establishments feared for their fate, or at least for their careers.

My attempt to obtain a political holiday had obviously failed. The epigones could no longer stop halfway. What they had already done inspired too much fear in them. The slanders launched the day before weighed heavily on them and demanded from them, for today, a redoubled perfidy. I finally asked to be relieved of the electro-technical management and that of the scientific and technical institutes. The main concessions committee, however, gave less scope for intrigue, the fate of each concession being decided by the political bureau.

Meanwhile, the life of the party had reached a new crisis. In the first period of the struggle, I had been opposed by the "troika." But this triumvirate itself was far from unity. Kamenev, like Zinoviev, were, let us admit, more capable than Stalin theoretically and politically. But both lacked that little something called character. The international views, broader than Stalin’s, which they had acquired in emigration under Lenin’s leadership, had weakened them, instead of strengthening them. The current adopted was in the direction of autonomous national development, and the old formula of Russian patriotism, "we will cover them with the cap," was now zealously translated into neo-socialist language. The attempt made by Zinoviev and Kamenev to maintain at least partially international ideas made them, in the eyes of the bureaucracy, second-rate "Trotskyists." They only became more relentless in their campaign against me, in order to consolidate the confidence the apparatus had in them in this direction. But these efforts were in vain. The apparatus was discovering more and more clearly in Stalin the most solid of its representatives. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon found themselves in direct hostility with Stalin, and when they tried to submit the internal discussion of the "troika" to the Central Committee, it turned out that Stalin possessed an unshakeable majority there.

Kamenev was officially considered the leader of Moscow. But since the crushing of the Moscow party organization in 1923 (with Kamenev’s collaboration) when the organization declared itself overwhelmingly in favor of the opposition, the mass of communist activists in Moscow had maintained a gloomy silence. From the moment Kamenev made his first attempts to resist Stalin, he remained between heaven and earth. It was different in Petrograd. The communists of that capital were protected against the opposition of 1923 by the heavy roof of Zinoviev’s apparatus. But now their turn had come. The workers of Leningrad were disturbed to see the current taken in the direction of the kulak and socialism in one country. The class protest of the workers coincided with the declared Fronde of the high dignitary Zinoviev. Thus a new opposition was formed, of which Nadezhda Kontantinovna Krupskaya was even a member in the early days.

To the great astonishment of all, and above all of themselves, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves forced to take up, one after the other, the critical arguments of the opposition and were soon relegated to the camp of the "Trotskyists." It is not surprising that, in our circles, the rapprochement made with Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed, to say the least, paradoxical. Among the oppositionists, a good number declared themselves against this bloc. Some of them, even—in truth, very few—considered it possible to form a bloc with Stalin against Zinoviev and Kamenev. One of my close friends, Mrachkovsky, an old revolutionary and one of the best army commanders in the Civil War, declared himself against any bloc with anyone, giving the classic explanation for his attitude : "Stalin will deceive, Zinoviev will shirk." "But, in the end, questions of this order are resolved by political, not psychological, assessments. Zinoviev and Kamenev openly acknowledged that the "Trotskyists" had been right in the struggle waged against them since 1923. They adopted the basics of our platform. In such conditions it was impossible not to form a bloc with them, especially since they had behind them the thousands of revolutionary workers of Leningrad.

Kamenev and I did not meet outside of official meetings for three years, that is, from the night when Kamenev, leaving for Georgia, promised to support Lenin’s point of view and mine, but, having learned that Lenin was in a serious condition, sided with Stalin. At his first meeting with me, Kamenev said :

— All you have to do is stand with Zinoviev on the same platform : the party will immediately find its true central committee.

I could only laugh at this bureaucratic optimism. Kamenev, obviously, underestimated the work of decomposition of the party that the "troika" had accomplished over three years. I pointed this out to him without any indulgence.

The ebb of the revolutionary movement that had begun at the end of 1923, that is, after the defeat of the German Revolution, took on an international dimension. In Russia, the reaction against October was in full swing. The party apparatus was moving more and more to the right. In such conditions, it would have been childish to believe that all we had to do was unite for victory to fall at our feet like a ripe fruit.

"We must aim far ahead," I repeated dozens of times to Kamenev and Zinoviev. "We must prepare for a serious struggle, and for a long time."

In their initial eagerness, my new allies bravely accepted this formula. But they were not to be enough for long. Their confidence was waning, not from day to day, but from hour to hour. Mrachkovsky, in his judgments of people, had been absolutely right : Zinoviev ultimately backed down. But he did not bring with him all those who thought like him, far from it. Zinoviev’s double about-turn had, in any case, dealt an irreparable blow to the legend of Trotskyism.
*
**
In the spring of 1926, my wife and I went to Berlin. Exhausted by the persistent fever that gripped me, the doctors in Moscow, in order not to take all the responsibility upon themselves, had long insisted on the necessity of a trip abroad. I, too, wanted to break the impasse : the fever paralyzed me at the most critical moments and was a sure ally for my adversaries. The question of this trip was examined by the Politburo. The bureau decided that, based on all the data it possessed and the overall political situation, it considered my trip to be extremely dangerous, while granting me the freedom to decide. Attached to the resolution was a note from the GPU drafted to the effect that my trip abroad could not be permitted. The Politburo undoubtedly feared that if unpleasant adventures happened to me abroad, the responsibility would be shifted to it by the party. The idea of ​​sending me abroad by force, and even to Constantinople, had not yet entered Stalin’s police brain. It is also possible that the Politburo feared, on my part, an action abroad, for the tightening of the opposition from outside. In any case, after consulting my friends, I decided to leave.

At the German embassy, ​​an agreement was reached without difficulty, and in mid-April, I left with my wife, armed with a diplomatic passport issued in the name of Kuzmenko, a member of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Public Education. We were accompanied by my secretary Sermux, the former head of my train, and by the GPU’s attorney. Zinoviev and Kamenev bade me farewells that were almost touching : they had no desire at all to remain alone with Stalin.

In the pre-war years, I had known Hohenzollern Berlin quite well. It had its own physiognomy, which no one said was pleasant, but which many declared imposing. Berlin had changed. It no longer had any physiognomy at all, or at least, I did not find it. The city was slowly recovering from a long and serious illness which had been accompanied by a series of surgical operations. Inflation had already been liquidated, but the stabilized mark was still only a means of estimating the general anemia. In the streets, in the shops, on the faces of passersby, one felt the penury and the impatient, sometimes consuming, desire for recovery. German punctuality and cleanliness, during the hard years of the war, after the defeats and the brigandage of Versailles, had been overcome by poverty. The human anthill repaired its passages, its corridors, its warehouses with perseverance, but without joy, crushed under the boot of war. In the rhythm of the street, in the movements and gestures of the passersby, one felt a tragic nuance of fatalism : nothing to be done ; life is forced labor in perpetuity, one must start everything from the beginning.

For several weeks I was subjected to the observation of doctors in one of Berlin’s private clinics. Searching for the mysterious origins of my fever, the doctors passed me around. In the end, a throat specialist suggested that the cause of the problem might well be in the tonsils and recommended that they be removed in any case. The diagnosticians and therapists hesitated : they were elderly men who had remained behind during the war. The surgeon, who had all the war experience on his side, regarded them with crushing contempt. According to him, tonsils are removed these days as easily as mustaches are shaved. They had to accept.

The assistants wanted to tie my arms, but the operator was satisfied with the assurance I gave him of my firmness. While telling me encouraging jokes, the surgeon, I felt, was concentrating on himself, controlling an emotion. The most unpleasant thing was remaining motionless, lying on my back, and choking on my own blood. The operation lasted forty to fifty minutes. Everything went very well, if we do not take into account the fact that it was useless : some time later, the fever returned.

The time I spent in Berlin, or more precisely at the clinic, was not wasted on me. I threw myself into the German press, which I had almost completely missed since August 1914. Every day they brought me about twenty German publications and a few periodicals from other countries, which I dropped on the floor as I read them. The professors who came to see me had to walk on a carpet made of newspapers of every possible persuasion. For the first time, in short, I had the full range of German republican politics in my ears. To tell the truth, I discovered nothing unexpected there. The republic was like the foundling of military defeat ; the republicans were so by necessity, by virtue of the Treaty of Versailles ; the social democrats were the universal legatees of the November revolution, which they themselves had suppressed ; Hindenburg was a democratic president. This was more or less how I had pictured things. It was no less instructive to see all this up close...
On May 1st, my wife and I traveled around the city by car, we went to the main districts, looking at the processions, the placards, listening to the speeches ; we reached Alexanderplatz, we mingled with the crowd. I have seen many May Day processions, more imposing, more numerous and more decorative, but it had been a long time since I had the opportunity to advance in the mass without attracting attention, feeling like a part of an anonymous whole, listening and observing. Only once did the colleague who accompanied us say to me with a circumspect air :

— Look, we’re selling your portraits...

But in these portraits, no one would have recognized Kuzmenko, a member of a police station of public education.

In case these lines should fall under the eyes of Count Westarp, Hermann Müller, Stresemann, Count Reventlow, Hilferding or other opponents of my admission to Germany, I believe it is necessary to bring to their attention that at that time I did not issue any reprehensible slogans, that I did not post any subversive posters, and that I was, in short, only an observer who, a few days later, was to undergo an operation.

We also went to the "wine festival" in the suburbs... There was an incalculable multitude there. Despite the spring-like disposition of the crowd, sustained by the sun and the wine, the gray shadow of years gone by stretched over the strollers, over those who were having fun or trying to have fun. One only had to look a little more closely and everyone seemed to be emerging from a slow convalescence : gaiety still demanded too much effort from them. We spent several hours in the crowd, observing, chatting with people, eating sausages served on paper plates, and we even drank beer, the taste of which I had had time to forget since 1917.

I was quickly returning to health after the operation and was already planning the day of my departure. But then an unexpected incident occurred which, until now, has not become entirely clear to me. About eight days before departure, two gentlemen in civilian clothes appeared in a corridor of the clinic, the kind whose indeterminate appearances quite clearly mark the profession of police officers. Glancing through the window into the courtyard, I saw at least half a dozen completely identical gentlemen, who, while very different from each other, at the same time had a perfect resemblance to each other. I drew this to the attention of Krestinsky, who was at my house at the time. A few minutes later, one of the interns knocked at my door and announced, quite moved, that his professor had instructed him to warn me : an attempt on my life was being prepared.

"I hope it’s not being prepared by the police ?" I asked, indicating the numerous officers.

The doctor suggested that the police had come to prevent the attack.

Two or three minutes later, a commissar arrived ; he told Krestinsky that the police had indeed been informed of the preparations for an attempt on my life and had taken extraordinary protective measures. The whole clinic became agitated. The nurses passed the news on to each other, telling the patients over and over again that Trotsky was in the clinic and that, for this reason, bombs would be thrown into the establishment. The result was an atmosphere that was hardly that of a place of treatment. I agreed with Krestinsky for my immediate transfer to the Soviet embassy. The street in front of the clinic was blocked by the police. When I was transported, my car was accompanied by police cars.

The official version was roughly this : a new plot by German monarchists had been discovered, and one of the arrested conspirators had reportedly told the investigating judge that the Russian White Guards were soon planning an assassination attempt on Trotsky, who was in Berlin. It must be said that the German diplomats with whom we had agreed on my trip had intentionally omitted to inform the police of our agreement, considering that they had too many monarchists in their ranks. The police received the statement of the monarchist they had arrested with suspicion, but finally carried out checks on my presence in the clinic : to their great astonishment, it turned out that the information was true. As the investigation was also being carried out among the professors, I received two warnings simultaneously : one from the intern and one from the commissioner. To this day, of course, I do not know whether an attack was truly being prepared and whether the police were indeed informed of my presence through the remarks of a monarchist they had arrested. But I suspect that things were done more simply. The diplomats, one must assume, did not keep the "secret," and the police, vexed by a lack of trust, decided to show either Stresemann or me that, without his cooperation, the tonsils could not be properly removed. Whether this was the case or not, the clinic was turned upside down, and I, powerfully protected against problematic enemies, went to settle in the embassy. There were later faint echoes in the German press, given without any certainty, of this story ; obviously, no one wanted to believe it.

The days of my stay in Berlin coincided with major European events : the general strike in England and Pilsudski’s coup d’état in Poland. These two events extremely aggravated my disagreements with the epigones and determined a more violent development of the struggle that we were to wage subsequently.

On this subject, a few words must be said here. Stalin, Bukharin, and, in the first period, even Zinoviev, believed that they were crowning their policy with a diplomatic bloc between the leaders of the Soviet trade unions and the General Council of British trade unions. Narrow-minded as a provincial, Stalin imagined that Purcell and other leaders of the trade unions were willing and capable of providing support to the Soviet Republic against the British bourgeoisie at a difficult moment. As for the leaders of the trade unions, they rightly believed that, faced with the crisis of British capitalism and the growing discontent of the masses, they would be well advised to provide themselves with cover on the left, in the form of an official friendship with the leaders of the Soviet trade unions, a friendship that did not oblige them to anything. On both sides, care was taken to proceed only by twists and turns, and they were more afraid than anything to call things by their proper names. Rotten politics had already broken down more than once in major events. The general strike of May 1926 was a fact of the highest importance not only in the life of England, but also in the inner life of our party.

The fate of England since the war was of exceptional interest. A considerable change in its world situation could not fail to provoke equally abrupt modifications in the balance of its internal forces.

It was perfectly clear that, even if Europe, including England, were to achieve a certain social equilibrium again for a more or less long period, Great Britain could only achieve this equilibrium through a series of very serious conflicts and upheavals. I judged it likely that the conflict in the coal industry could lead to a general strike in England. From this, I concluded that inevitably, in the near future, profound contradictions between the old organizations of the working class and its new historical tasks would become apparent. During the winter of 1924 and the spring of 1925, I wrote a pamphlet on this subject in the Caucasus (Where is England Going ?). Basically, the work was directed against the official conception of the Politburo, which hoped to see the General Council evolve to the left and communism gradually and painlessly penetrate the ranks of the Labour Party and the trade unions. To some extent, to avoid unnecessary complications, but also to check the state of mind of my opponents, I submitted the manuscript to the Politburo for examination. Since it was a forecast, and not a critique of the past, none of the members of the Politburo dared to express an opinion. The work passed without difficulty through the censorship and was printed as it had been written, without the slightest modification. It appeared soon after in English. The official leaders of English socialism considered this pamphlet to be the fanciful work of a foreigner who knew nothing of English life and who dreamed of bringing the general strike "Russian style" to the territory of Great Britain. Judgments of this sort have been formulated by the dozens, if not hundreds, and it is necessary to mention first of all MacDonald who, in the competition of political banalities, incontestably deserves first place.

Now, barely a few months had passed before the coal strike became a general strike. I had not at all counted on such a rapid confirmation of my predictions. If the general strike demonstrated the correctness of a Marxist judgment opposed to the arbitrary assessments of British reformism, the conduct of the General Council during this strike marked the failure of the hopes placed by Stalin in Purcell. At the clinic, I gathered with the greatest avidity and collated all the information that characterized the progress of the general strike and, particularly, the relations of the masses and the leaders. What incensed me most was the character of the articles in the Moscow Pravda. Its main task was to conceal the failure and save face. To achieve this, it could do nothing but cynically distort the facts. There can be, for a revolutionary politician, no greater ideological downfall than to deceive the masses !

Upon my arrival in Moscow, I demanded an immediate break from the bloc formed with the General Council. Zinoviev, after the inevitable procrastination, joined me. Radek was of the opposite opinion. Stalin clung to the bloc, even to the appearance of a bloc, with all his might. The British trade unionists waited until their grave internal crisis was over and then pushed their generous but inept ally aside with a discourteous kick.

No less notable events were taking place at the same time in Poland. The petty bourgeoisie, desperately seeking a way out, had embarked on the path of insurrection and had raised Pilsudski on its shield. The leader of the Communist Party, Warski, decided that, before his eyes, "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants" was developing, and he called on the Communist Party to help Pilsudski. I had known Warski for a long time. While Rosa Luxemburg was alive, he could still occupy his place in the ranks of the revolution. By himself, he had never been anything but an empty seat. In 1924, Warski, after much hesitation, declared that he had finally understood how harmful "Trotskyism" was, as it underestimated the peasant class in the matter of the democratic dictatorship. As a reward for his docility, he was given the role of leader and eagerly awaited the opportunity to show off the stripes he had received so late. In May 1926, Warski did not fail to take advantage of such an exceptional opportunity to brand himself and soil the party flag. Of course, he was not punished for this : Stalin’s apparatus protected him from the indignation of the Polish workers.

The struggle during 1926 became increasingly fierce. Toward the autumn, the opposition made an open incursion into the party cell meetings. The apparatus put up a frenzied resistance. The ideological struggle was replaced by the administrative mechanism : telephone calls from the party bureaucracy to the workers’ cell meetings, furious traffic jams, honking horns, well-organized whistles, and shouts as the oppositionists took to the podium. The ruling faction won through the mechanical concentration of its forces, through threats, and through repression. Even before the mass of the party had time to listen, understand, and speak, it became frightened by the idea of ​​a split and a catastrophe. The opposition was forced to retreat. On October 16, we made a declaration stating in substance that, considering our ideas to be correct and retaining the right to fight for them within the ranks of the party, we renounced actions that could lead to a danger of a split. The declaration of October 16 was made not for the apparatus but for the mass of the party. It was a demonstration of our desire to remain in the party and to serve it. Although the Stalinists, the very next day, began to break the truce, we had gained time. The winter of 1926-1927 allowed us to catch our breath, to be able to theoretically deepen our ideas on a series of questions.
By the beginning of 1927, Zinoviev was ready to capitulate, if not all at once, then at least in stages. But then, devastating events occurred in China. The criminal nature of Stalin’s policy was evident. This delayed for some time the capitulation of Zinoviev and all those who followed him a little later.

The leadership of the epigones in China marked the trampling of all the traditions of Bolshevism. The Chinese Communist Party was, against its will, incorporated into the bourgeois Kuomintang and subjected to military discipline. The creation of soviets was prohibited. The Communists were advised to contain the agrarian revolution and not to arm the workers without the authorization of the bourgeoisie. Long before Chiang Kai-shek crushed the Shanghai workers and concentrated power in the hands of the military clique, we had announced that this outcome was inevitable. As early as 1925, I demanded that the Communists leave the Kuomintang. The policy of Stalin-Bukharin prepared and facilitated the crushing of the revolution ; moreover, with the repressions carried out by the state apparatus, it ensured Chiang Kai-shek’s counterrevolutionary work against our criticism. In April 1927, Stalin, at a party meeting in the Hall of Columns, was still defending the policy of coalition with Chiang Kai-shek and asking for trust in him. Five or six days later, Chiang Kai-shek drowned the Shanghai workers and the Communist Party in blood.

A wave of indignation ran through the party. The opposition raised its head. Despite all the rules of conspiracy—and, at that time, we were forced in Moscow to defend the Chinese workers against Chiang Kai-shek by conspiratorial methods—the oppositionists came by the dozens to my house, to the premises of the Main Concessions Committee. A good number of young comrades believed that such an obvious failure of Stalin’s policy must bring victory closer to the opposition. In the first days after Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état, I poured more than one bucket of cold water over the heads of my young friends, and not only over these young people. I demonstrated that the opposition could in no way rise again thanks to the defeat of the Chinese revolution. Whether our predictions were justified will attract a thousand, five, or ten thousand new members to us. For millions of people, what has decisive significance is not the forecast, but the very fact of the crushing of the revolutionary proletariat. After the crushing of the German revolution in 1923, after the failure of the English general strike in 1926, the new defeat in China can only reinforce the discouragement of the masses with regard to the international revolution. Now, it is this very discouragement which is the essential psychological source of Stalin’s policy, made up of nationalo-reformism.

It soon turned out that, as a faction, we had indeed become stronger, that is, ideologically better grouped and more numerous. But the umbilical cord that connected us to power was cut by Chiang Kai-shek’s sword. His Russian ally, Stalin, who was definitively compromised, had only to complete the crushing of the Shanghai workers with the organizational crushing of the opposition. The core of the opposition was a group of old revolutionaries. But we were no longer alone. Around us were gathered hundreds and thousands of revolutionaries of the new generation, which had been called to political life for the first time by the October Revolution, had lived through the Civil War, had sincerely aligned itself before the gigantic authority of Lenin’s Central Committee, and which, only from 1923 onwards, had begun to think independently, to criticize, to apply the methods of Marxism to the new conversions of the movement and which, even more difficult, had learned to assume responsibility for a revolutionary initiative. Currently, thousands of these young revolutionaries are deepening their political experience by studying theory in the prisons and places of deportation of the Stalinist regime.

The main opposition group was marching towards this outcome with open eyes. We understood only too clearly that if we wanted to make our ideas those of the new generation of workers, it was not through diplomacy and quibbles, but only through open struggle without stopping before any practical consequences. We were heading towards an immediate defeat, confidently preparing our ideological victory in the more distant future.

The use of material force has played and still plays an immense role in human history : sometimes in a progressive sense, more often for reaction ; it depends on the class that applies the measures of violence, it also depends on the goals pursued. But from there, it is a long way to conclude that, by violence, one can resolve all questions and overcome all obstacles. One can hold back the development of progressive historical tendencies for a certain time by arms. It is impossible to cut off the road to progressive ideas once and for all. That is why, when it comes to the struggle for great principles, the revolutionary can have only one rule : "Do what must, come what may."
*
**
As the Fifteenth Congress, which was set for the end of 1927, approached, the party felt itself increasingly at a historical crossroads. A profound anxiety had passed through its ranks. However monstrous the terror, the desire to hear the opposition had been awakened in the party. This goal could only be achieved illegally. In various parts of Moscow and Leningrad, there were secret meetings of workers, men and women, and students, who gathered in groups of twenty, one hundred, and even two hundred, to hear one of the representatives of the opposition. In the course of a day, I visited two or three, sometimes four of these meetings. They usually took place in workers’ lodgings. Two small, crowded rooms ; the speaker stood in the doorway. Sometimes everyone sat on the floor ; more often, due to lack of space, everyone had to converse standing up. Representatives of the Control Commission frequently appeared at such meetings, demanding that the assembly be dispersed. They were invited to take part in the discussion. When they caused a disturbance, they were thrown out. In total, about twenty thousand people passed through these assemblies in Moscow and Leningrad. The current was rising. The opposition very skillfully prepared a large meeting in the hall of the Higher Technical School, which had been seized from the inside. More than two thousand people attended. A large crowd remained in the street. The administration’s attempts to prevent us from speaking were powerless. Kamenev and I spoke for about two hours. At the end, the Central Committee issued an appeal to the workers, indicating the need to disperse the opposition meetings by force. This appeal was only to serve as a cover-up for the carefully prepared attacks against the opposition by combat groups under the leadership of the GPU. Stalin desired a bloody outcome. We gave the signal for a temporary suspension of the large meetings. But this only happened after the demonstration of November 7.
In October 1927, the session of the Central Executive Committee was held in Leningrad. In honor of the session, there was a mass demonstration. By a fortuitous coincidence, this demonstration took on a completely unexpected meaning. With Zinoviev and a few others, I drove around the city to see the number and mood of the demonstrators. We finally passed the Tauride Palace, where stands had been set up on motor trucks for the members of the Central Executive Committee. Our car stopped at a barrier : no one was letting us through. We hadn’t had time to wonder how we would get out of this impasse when the troop commander rushed to our car and, without malice, offered to take us to the stand. We hadn’t had time to shake off our own hesitation when two lines of militiamen had already cleared a path for us to the last of the trucks that was still free. As soon as the masses learned that we were on the far platform, the demonstration abruptly changed its appearance. The masses passed indifferently in front of the first trucks, without responding to the greetings thrown at them, and hurried towards us. Soon, around our truck, a human dike of thousands of men was formed. The workers and soldiers of the Red Army stopped, looked up, shouted a welcome, and advanced only under the impatient pressure of the multitude behind them. A detachment of the militia, which was sent towards our truck to restore order, was itself seized by the atmosphere and showed no activity. Hundreds of the most loyal agents of the apparatus were thrown into the crowd. They tried to whistle, but the isolated whistles were inevitably lost in the cheers of the sympathizers. The more this went on, the more unbearable it became for the official leaders of the demonstration. Finally, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and some of the most prominent members of this committee came down from the empty platform around which the emptiness had formed, and climbed onto ours, which occupied the last place and was intended only for the least noticed speakers. However, this audacious move did not save their situation : the masses impatiently recalled names that were not those of the official masters of the moment.
Zinoviev immediately became full of optimism and hoped for the greatest consequences from the demonstration. I did not subscribe to his impulsive assessment. The working masses of Petrograd were showing their discontent in the form of platonic sympathies for the opposition leaders, but they were not yet capable of preventing the apparatus from settling our accounts with us. In this respect, I had no illusions. On the other hand, the demonstration was intended to suggest to the ruling faction the need to put an end to the opposition as soon as possible in order to present the masses with a fait accompli.

The next stage was the Moscow demonstration in honor of the tenth anniversary of October. As organizers of this demonstration, authors of articles on it, and speakers, one saw everywhere men who, during the October Revolution, had been on the other side of the barricade or had simply lurked under the family roof, waiting to see how events would turn out, and who had joined the revolution only after its decisive victory. It was with humor rather than bitterness that I read the articles or heard on the radio the speeches in which these parasites accused me of betraying the October Revolution. When you understand the dynamics of a historical process and see how your adversary is moved by the strings held by a hand about which he himself knows nothing, the most odious infamies and perfidies no longer have any hold on you.

The oppositionists decided to participate in the procession with their placards. The slogans thus presented were in no way directed against the party : "Let’s shoot the right wing, the kulak, the nepman, the bureaucrat." "Let’s carry out Lenin’s will." "Against opportunism, against the split, for the unity of the Leninist party." Today, these slogans constitute the official credo of the Stalinist faction in its struggle against the right wing. On November 7, 1927, the opposition placards were torn from the bearers and torn to pieces ; the bearers themselves were subjected to the abuse of teams specially recruited for this purpose. The experience of the Leningrad demonstration had benefited the official leaders. This time, they had prepared themselves infinitely better. One could sense unease among the masses. They participated in the demonstration with profound anxiety. Above the immense, disoriented and anxious multitude rose two active groups : the opposition and the apparatus. Volunteers for the fight against the "Trotskyists," elements well known as non-revolutionaries, some even fascist elements from the Moscow streets, came to the aid of the apparatus. A militiaman, under the pretext of a warning, publicly fired at my car. Someone had aimed his arm. A drunken functionary from a fire brigade jumped onto the running board of my car, uttering the most vulgar insults, and smashed a window. For anyone who can see, November 7, 1927, in Moscow was a repeat of Thermidor. There was a similar demonstration in Leningrad. Zinoviev and Radek, who had gone there, were attacked by a special detachment which, claiming to protect them against the crowd, locked them in a building for the duration of the demonstration. Zinoviev wrote to us the same day in Moscow :

"All information indicates that these repugnant facts will be very useful to our cause. We are concerned to know what happened among you. The liaisons [illegible chats with the workers] are going very well. There is a great turnaround in our favor. For the moment, we have no intention of leaving the place."

This was the last outburst of Zinoviev’s oppositional energy. The next day he returned to Moscow and insisted on capitulating.

On November 16, Ioffé committed suicide, leaving a deep mark on the developing struggle.
Ioffé was very seriously ill. From Japan, where he had been ambassador, he had been brought back in the worst possible condition. It was very difficult to get him sent abroad. This trip was too short. The results were good but insufficient. Ioffé became my deputy on the main concessions committee. All current affairs depended on him. The party crisis was very painful for him. What upset him most was the perfidy. On several occasions, he had impulses to commit himself fully to the struggle. I dissuaded him, fearing for his health. What particularly outraged Ioffé was the campaign waged against the theory of permanent revolution. He could not stomach the base persecution of those who had foreseen the course and character of the revolution from afar, this persecution coming from men who only profited from the results obtained. Ioffé had told me of a conversation he had had with Lenin, in 1919, I believe, on the theme of the permanent revolution. Lenin had said to him :

— Yes, Trotsky was right.

Ioffé wanted to publish this conversation. I did everything to dissuade him. I could see in advance what an avalanche of infamous accusations would fall on him. Ioffé knew how to insist, he had his own way, gentle in form but unshakeable at heart. With each new outburst of aggressive ignorance and political felony, he would come back to me, dejected and indignant, and repeat :

— No, we have to publish the conversation.

I demonstrated to him once again that such "testimony" would not change anything, that it was necessary to re-educate the new generation of the party and aim high.

Ioffe’s physical condition, which had been unable to complete his treatment abroad, worsened day by day. Toward the autumn, he was forced to give up his work and then to take to his bed completely. Friends once again raised the question of sending him abroad. But this time, the Central Committee refused outright. The Stalinists were already preparing to send the oppositionists in a completely different direction. My exclusion from the Central Committee and then from the party upset Ioffe more than anyone. Added to the indignation he felt as a politician and personally was the keen sense of his physical impotence. He was not mistaken when he felt that the fate of the revolution was at stake. He was incapable of struggle. But apart from struggle, life, for him, had no meaning. And he came to the latter conclusion.

I was no longer living in the Kremlin ; I was staying with my friend Beloborodov, who still held the title of People’s Commissar of the Interior, although he himself was constantly being followed by GPU agents. At that time, Beloborodov was in his native Urals, where, in his struggle against the apparatus, he was trying to find a way to the workers.

I called Ioffe’s lodgings to inquire about his health. He answered himself : the telephone was at his bedside. There was in the tone of his voice—I realized this only later—something extraordinary, tense, and alarming. He asked me to come and see him. A circumstance prevented me from complying with his request immediately. Those were very hectic days : comrades constantly came to Bieloborodov’s to consult me ​​on urgent matters. An hour or two later, a voice I didn’t recognize said to me over the telephone :
"Adolf Abramovich has just shot himself. There is a letter for you on his table."
Several oppositionists from the army were always on guard at Bieloborodov’s. They accompanied me when I went into town. We hurried to Ioffe’s. When we rang the bell and knocked on the door, a voice from the other side asked the visitor’s name, and they didn’t open the door right away : something fishy was going on inside.

On a bloody pillow lay the calm face, imbued with the greatest gentleness, of Adolphe Abramovich. B***, a member of the GPU, was rummaging around in his office as he pleased. The letter was not on the table. I demanded that it be returned to me immediately. B*** muttered that there had been no letter. His expression and accent left no doubt : he was lying. A few minutes later, friends arrived from all over the city. Official representatives of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and party institutions found themselves isolated in the mass of oppositionists. That night, several thousand people visited the apartment. The news of the stolen letter spread throughout the city. Foreign journalists made it known in their telegrams. It became impossible to hide the document any longer. In the end, Rakovsky was given a photographic reproduction of the paper. I do not undertake to explain why a letter, which Ioffe had written for me and in a sealed envelope bearing my name, was delivered to Rakovsky, and not in the original but as a photographic copy. Ioffe’s letter gives a faithful image of my deceased friend to the end, but it is an image taken half an hour before his death. Ioffe knew how I regarded him, he had a deep moral trust with me and he gave me the right to delete from the letter anything that might be superfluous or unsuitable for publication. Having failed to steal the letter from the whole world, the cynical adversary tried in vain to use for his own purposes the very lines that were not intended for publication.

Ioffé tried to ensure that his death served the cause to which he had given his entire life. The hand that would, in half an hour, pull the trigger of the weapon, had written a final testimony, giving a friend some final advice. Here is what Ioffé said, addressing me personally, in his farewell letter :
"We are, you and I, dear Lev Davidovich, bound by decades of work together, and, I dare hope, by personal friendship. This gives me the right to tell you, as I leave you, what seems to me to be wrong in you. I have never doubted the correctness of the path you have traced and you know that, for more than twenty years, I have been walking with you, since the days of "the permanent revolution." But I have always felt that what you lacked was the intransigence, the stubbornness of Lenin, who was always ready to remain even alone on the path he believed to be the right one, foreseeing that he would later obtain a majority, that later the full correctness of the path followed would be recognized. You have always been right in politics, since 1905, and I have repeated to you more than once what I heard with my own ears : Lenin recognized that even in 1905 it was not he who was right, that it was you. At the moment of death, one does not lie, and I repeat the same thing to you once again... But you have often given up supporting the correctness of your point of view, seeking an agreement, a compromise that you overestimated. This is a mistake. I repeat, in politics, you have always been right, but now you are more right than ever. A day will come when the party will understand this and history will necessarily appreciate it. So do not be alarmed now if someone even distances himself from you or, even more so, if those who come to you are not as numerous and do not come as quickly as we would all like. You see correctly, but the guarantee of the victory of your correctness of ideas is precisely in the maximum intransigence, in the most rigorous continuity, in the complete absence of any compromise, exactly in the same way that this was the secret of Ilyich’s victories. I wanted to tell you this many times, but I decided to do it only now, in farewell.

Ioffe’s funeral was scheduled for a working day, during the busy hours, to prevent Moscow workers from attending. However, it was attended by no fewer than ten thousand people and was a massive demonstration of opposition.

Meanwhile, Stalin’s faction busied itself with preparing the congress, hastening to present it with the fait accompli of the split. The so-called elections for the local conferences that were to send delegates to the congress took place before the official announcement of a completely distorted "discussion" during which militarily organized detachments of whistleblowers prevented the meetings from being held properly, by purely fascist means. It would be difficult to conceive of anything more infamous than the preparations for the 15th congress. Zinoviev and his group had no difficulty in guessing that the congress would only complete in politics the material crushing that had begun in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.

The only concern of Zinoviev and his friends was therefore this : to capitulate in a timely manner. They could not fail to understand that Stalin’s bureaucrats saw the enemy not in themselves, second-rate oppositionists, but in the core of the opposition that was linked to me. They hoped, if not to earn favor, at least to obtain their forgiveness by an ostensible break with me at the time of the 15th Congress. They had not calculated that when one commits a double betrayal, one is politically finished with oneself. If, by their stab in the back, they temporarily weakened our group, they condemned themselves to political death. The 15th Congress decided to exclude the opposition as a whole. Those excluded were placed at the disposal of the GPU.

November 16, 1927

Adolf Joffé to Leon Trotsky

Adolf Joffé’s last letter : "For us, humanity is this infinity"

To Leon Trotsky
Dear Leon Davidovich,
All my life I have been of the opinion that a politician must understand when the time has come to leave, just as an actor leaves the stage, and that it is better for him to leave too soon than too late.
For more than thirty years I have accepted the idea that human life has meaning only as long as and to the extent that it is in the service of something infinite. For us, humanity is this infinity. Everything else is finite, and working for this remainder is meaningless. Even if humanity were one day to know a meaning placed above itself, this meaning would become clear only in a future so distant that for us humanity would nevertheless be something completely infinite. If one believes, as I do, in progress, one can admit that when the time comes for our planet to disappear, humanity will have long before found the means to emigrate and settle on younger planets. It is in this conception that I have, day after day, placed the meaning of life. And when I look back today at my past, at the twenty-seven years I have spent in the ranks of our party, I believe I can rightly say that, throughout my conscious life, I have remained faithful to this philosophy. I have always lived according to the precept : work and fight for the good of humanity. Also, I believe I can rightly say that every day of my life has had its meaning.
But it seems to me now that the time has come when my life loses its meaning, and that is why I feel it my duty to put an end to it.
For several years, the current leaders of our party, faithful to their policy of not giving members of the opposition any work, have not allowed me any activity, either in politics or in Soviet work, that corresponds to my abilities. For a year now, as you know, the Politburo has forbidden me, as a member of the opposition, any political work. My health has continued to worsen. On September 20, for reasons unknown to me, the medical commission of the Central Committee had me examined by specialists. They categorically told me that my health was much worse than I supposed, and that I should not spend another day in Moscow, nor remain another hour without treatment, but that I should immediately leave for a suitable sanatorium abroad.
To my direct question, "What chance do I have of being cured abroad, and can I not be treated in Russia without giving up my work ?" the doctors and assistants, the active doctor of the Central Committee, Comrade Abrossov, another Communist doctor, and the director of the Kremlin hospital unanimously replied that Russian sanatoriums could absolutely not treat me, and that I would have to undergo treatment in the West. They added that if I followed their advice, I would still undoubtedly be unfit to work for a long time.
After this, the medical commission of the Central Committee, although it had decided to examine me on its own initiative, took no steps either for my departure abroad or for my treatment in the country. On the contrary, the Kremlin pharmacist, who, until then, had supplied me with the remedies prescribed for me, was forbidden to do so. I was thus deprived of the free remedies I had previously enjoyed. This happened, it seems, at the moment when the group in power began to apply its solution against the comrades of the opposition : to strike the opposition in the stomach. As long as I was well enough to work, all this mattered little to me ; but as I was going from bad to worse, my wife addressed herself to the medical commission of the Central Committee, and, personally, to Dr. Semachko, who has always publicly affirmed that nothing should be neglected to "save the old guard" ; but she received no reply, and all she could do was obtain an extract from the commission’s decision. It listed my chronic illnesses, and it stated that I should go to a sanatorium like Professor Riedländer’s for about a year. "It has now been eight days since I had to take to my bed permanently, because my chronic ailments, in such circumstances, have naturally worsened considerably, and especially the worst of them, my old polyneuritis, which has become acute again, causing me almost intolerable suffering, and even preventing me from walking.
For nine days I have remained without any treatment, and the question of my trip abroad has not been taken up again. None of the doctors from the Central Committee has visited me. Professor Davidenko and Doctor Levine, who were summoned to my bedside, prescribed trifles, which obviously cannot cure, and acknowledged that nothing could be done and that a trip abroad was urgent. Doctor Levine told my wife that the matter was aggravated by the fact that the commission evidently thought that my wife would want to accompany me, "which would make the matter too costly." My wife replied that, despite the lamentable state in which I found myself, she would not insist on accompanying me, neither she nor anyone else. Doctor Levine then assured us that, under these conditions, the matter could be settled. He repeated to me today that the doctors could do nothing, that the only remedy left was my immediate departure abroad. Then, this evening, the Central Committee doctor, Comrade Potiomkrin, notified my wife of the Central Committee’s medical commission’s decision not to send me abroad, but to treat me in Russia. The reason was that the specialists anticipated a long treatment abroad and considered a short stay unnecessary, but the Central Committee could not give more than $1,000 for my treatment and considered it impossible to give more.
During my stay abroad some time ago, I received an offer of $20,000 for the publication of my memoirs ; but since these must pass through the censorship of the Politburo, and since I know how much the history of the party and the revolution is falsified in our country, I do not want to lend a hand to such falsification. All the censorship work of the Politburo would have consisted in forbidding me a truthful assessment of the people and their deeds—both of the real leaders of the revolution and of those who boast of having been so. Therefore, today I have no possibility of receiving treatment without obtaining money from the Central Committee, and the latter, after my twenty-seven years of revolutionary work, does not believe it can value my life and health at a price higher than $1,000. That is why, as I have said, it is time to end my life. I know that the general opinion of the party does not admit suicide ; but I nevertheless believe that no one who understands my situation will be able to condemn me. If I were in good health, I would certainly find the strength and energy to fight against the situation existing in the party ; but, in my present state, I cannot bear a state of affairs in which the party silently tolerates your exclusion, even though I am deeply convinced that, sooner or later, a crisis will occur which will force the party to expel those who have been guilty of such ignominy. In this sense, my death is a protest against those who have led the party so far that it cannot even react against such shame.
If I may compare a great thing with a small one, I will say that the historical event of the highest importance constituted by your expulsion and that of Zinoviev, an expulsion which must inevitably open a Thermidorian period in our revolution, and the fact that, after twenty-seven years of activity in responsible positions, there is nothing left for me to do but shoot myself in the head, these two facts illustrate one and the same thing : the present regime of our party. And these two facts, the small and the large, both contribute to pushing the party onto the road to Thermidor.
Dear Leon Davidovitch, we are united by ten years of work together, and I believe also by the bonds of friendship ; and this gives me the right, at the moment of parting, to tell you what seems to me to be a weakness in you.
I have never doubted that you were on the right path, and, as you know, for more than twenty years, including on the question of the "permanent revolution," I have always been on your side. But it has always seemed to me that you lacked that inflexibility, that intransigence shown by Lenin, that ability to stand alone when necessary, and to continue in the same direction, because he was sure of a future majority, of a future recognition of the correctness of his views. You have always been right in politics since 1905, and Lenin, too, recognized this ; I have often told you that I heard him say myself : in 1905, it was you and not he who was right. At the hour of death, one does not lie, and I repeat it to you today.
But you have often departed from the correct position in favor of a unification, of a compromise whose value you overestimated. This was a mistake. I repeat : in politics, you have always been right, and now you are right more than ever. One day, the party will understand this, and history will be forced to recognize it. So do not worry if some abandon you, and especially if the majority does not come to you as quickly as we would like. You are right, but the certainty of victory can only lie in resolute intransigence, in the refusal of all compromise, as was the secret of Vladimir Ilyich’s victories.
I have often wanted to tell you the above, but I have only decided to do so at the moment when I bid you farewell. I wish you strength and courage, as you have always shown, and a speedy victory. I embrace you. Farewell.

A. JOFFÉ.

P.S. - I wrote this letter during the night of the 15th to the 16th, and today, November 16, Maria Mikhailovna went to the medical commission to insist that I be sent abroad, even for a month or two. She was told that, according to the specialists’ opinion, a short stay abroad was completely useless ; and she was informed that the commission had decided to transfer me immediately to the Kremlin hospital. So they are refusing me even a short trip abroad to improve my health, while all the doctors agree in considering that a cure in Russia is useless.
Farewell, dear Leon Davidovitch, be strong, you must be, and you must be persevering too, and do not hold a grudge against me.