Concluding Remarks

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Comrades, the analogy has been drawn here which, on a first, superficial view, suggests itself – between the Left SR revolt or, rather, parody of a revolt, and the July days of last year in Petrograd. Twelve months have passed since those days, but the very name of the present month, July, gives rise to a natural association of resemblance and analogy. The representative of one of the groups spoke to us here about the July days. I remember those days very well: there are here present not a few comrades who experienced them along with us, and the memory of those days is lodged firmly in their minds. What happened in July of last year? The working class, in the persons of their vanguard, were striving for power. They realized clearly that the rule of the bourgeoisie and the compromisers could not fail to bring Russia to ruin. The Petrograd workers were the vanguard of the working class, and this vanguard rushed ahead. This was, on the one hand, the fulfillment of its mission, but, on the other, an absolute tragedy, due to the fact that the vanguard had not yet secured for itself substantial reserves in the provinces – even in the working-class provinces, let alone the peasant ones – and that they came up against the enemy’s resistance and exposed themselves to his blows.

Naturally, when this vanguard, impelled forward by its political sense, but not backed by the provinces, fell under those blows, our party said to itself: where blows are raining down upon the working class, there must we be alongside them, taking these blows upon ourselves.

That was the significance of the July days of last year: and I ask you, what new class is fighting for power now? Let them tell us what new class is fighting for power in Moscow in July 1918 against the power of the Petrograd and Moscow workers, because, with all our respect, with all our ardent fraternal sympathy with the working peasantry, none of you peasants will assert that the peasantry is today the most conscious element in the revolution. Any one of you who thinks honestly about the conditions of the current moment must recognise that in 1905 and in 1917-1918 the workers of Petrograd and Moscow were the vanguard, that they were saying: ‘The land to the peasants’ before you peasants said it yourselves. They came out on January 9, 1905 under the slogan: ‘The land to the peasants’, and the Tsar shot them down, and the peasantry did not support them. In that fact, of course, was shown the influence of age-old slavery, ignorance, rural isolation, rural illiteracy: it was not the peasants’ fault, it was their misfortune – but such is the fact. And now, I ask, when Soviet power has been established in the country, when it lives and breathes in unison with the advanced proletariat of Petrograd and Moscow, I ask those who presume to evoke the ghost of July last year – what new class is fighting for power now? The Left SRs are not a class, they are fellow-travellers who merely attached themselves to the working class and who at first showed no confidence in it: when the working class, together with us, smashed in October the foundations of the compromisers’, the bourgeois power, they moved away, they stood aside. When the working class took power, they joined us for the time being: the task seemed to them to have become easier. First they underestimated the strength of the working class, then they underestimated the strength of our adversaries, and each time, whenever a particularly dangerous conjuncture was created, they with drew to the wings and started singing their critical tune against us, taking up the position of spectators, observers. The SRs are petty-bourgeois intellectuals. They have always based themselves on those sections of the petty bourgeoisie for whom it is hard to march with the working class along its thorny path.

This is the sort of ‘class’ that we can speak of in this connection. We can speak only of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, which is trying, in the persons of a small section of itself, to cast off the yoke of the proletariat and Soviet discipline: they find it too hard to share the struggle of the working class, with all its sufferings and difficulties, to share this struggle in those circumstances when it is necessary temporarily to reconcile oneself to foreign coercion. The intellectuals say: would it not be better for us to step aside and adopt the standpoint of an observer, criticising and grumbling? If the working class comes out on top, we’re with it: if it is defeated, we’ll say that we always foretold that that would happen.

This, comrades, is the psychology on the basis of which a small group of fanatics and madmen ... from whom broad circles of the intelligentsia are now recoiling, a group of responsible people, could conceive the idea of such a monstrous experiment as the events of July 6 and 7.

We are told: yes, but you say that the whole Left SR party is guilty, you bring down on the entire party the thunder of your anger and your repression. And one of the speakers here, Lozovsky, allowed himself, in a public statement, to commit an absolute and, I say, a malicious distortion of the facts, when he presented them in this way: first, the murder of Ambassador Mirbach, and then the arrest of the whole Left SR fraction. [A. Lozovsky had been expelled from the Bolshevik Party early in 1918 as a result of differences on trade union questions. He headed the right wing of the Internationalist Social-Democrat group until he was readmitted to the Bolshevik Party in late 1919.] This speaker declared that the second event was the consequence of the first: as though what actually happened was that some Blyumkin and some Andreyev or other killed Mirbach, and we, in response to this, arrested the Left SR party. But this arrangement of the facts is a malicious lie. What happened was something different.

When the terrorist act was committed, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars telephoned me at the Commissariat for Military Affairs, told me what had occurred, and read me his order in which he said that some White Guards or Anarchists, as we then believed, had, in order to draw Russia into war, committed the act of terrorism, and that they must be hunted down everywhere. I, on my part, ordered the appropriate measures to be taken. We were sure that we had to do with an open and direct adversary, an honest enemy of the Soviet power. But some time later we received information that, judging by the number of the motor-car that was used, or for some other reason, it was to be presumed that the Left SRs had done the deed. We did not know that it was an action ordered by the Central Committee, or of the Left SR party itself, even though warnings had been given from this rostrum. Even though Spiridonova, when she spoke here, played with a revolver and threatened with a bomb, we stayed calm, seeing this as just her personal behaviour, and not suspecting that there was any real threat directed against the peaceful existence of the Soviet Republic. When we learnt from the first, unconfirmed reports, that what had happened was the work of Left SRs, we still felt sure that not only the party but also the Central Committee could certainly not want this deed, and could not associate itself with it, that they had nothing to do with it. It was that idea which determined the step which Comrade Dzerzhinsky took when he learnt that the killer was Blyumkin, that he it was who had committed the act of terrorism. What did Dzerzhinsky do? He went not to the Left SR fraction but to Popov’s unit. Dzerzhinsky had information that the killer, who was a servant of the Soviet power, had hidden himself there. Dzerzhinsky thought that he would be able to clarify the question without any conflict. That was what happened. And it was not because of the terrorist act that we arrested the Left SR fraction. Later, when we learnt that Dzerzhinsky could not be reached on the telephone, that he had not reported, and that, consequently, he must have been arrested, and when we began to be informed that Popov’s patrols were seizing Soviet motor-cars and Soviet representatives, we took measures to have the whole theatre surrounded, because we thought the rebel unit was going to lay siege to the place where the All-Russia Congress was in progresss. As a guarantee, we locked up the Left SR fraction and surrounded them with a wall of secure defence. That is what happened.

We thought that, since what was going on was a revolt, the rebels’ first intention would be to capture the citadel of the Soviet power. Usually, this citadel is the Kremlin, but at the moment it is the Bolshoi Theatre, where the All-Russia Congress is in session. And we said: ‘The conspirators may get into this place, or they may want to get their accomplices out of here, so let us keep the latter under lock and key for a few hours and surround the place with secure defences, until the situation has been clarified.’ Later, when we learnt that the Central Committee of the Left SR party not only associated itself with this dishonorable murder, but even accepted responsibility for it, we were unwilling to believe this. I am no Left SR, and you know and heard how we spoke here before the event in question, but nevertheless it was a cruel blow to me that such crazy and criminal perfidy could be resorted to by the Central Committee of a party calling itself a Soviet party. Even then we hoped that, in the end, the Left SR fraction would dissociate itself from its Central Committee. That was how the matter stood where the actions of the Left SRs were concerned.

But we are asked: why did you not simply release the Left SRS? Do that, when, armed from head to foot with bombs, they were arresting and holding Latsis in Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane, shooting at our patrols and training their guns on the Kremlin, when the Central Committee of their party was sitting there and directing operations against the Soviet power? Well, and what if among the members of that fraction were some tens or hundreds who were involved in the rising, and we released them to go and help fire on the Kremlin, or the Bolshoi Theatre, or our Red Army men?

No, comrades, as responsible Soviet politicans, we could not act like that, and we said: this is an open revolt against the Soviet power, and in these circumstances there are only two answers – yes and no.

The Central Committee of the Left SR party said ‘yes’, it was for the revolt. We wanted the Left SR fraction to say, openly, whether they were for the revolt against the Soviet power, with those who want to bring war upon us, or for the Soviet power which was defending itself against the rebels. There was fighting here in the streets of Moscow, the sound of it reached you here. Peaceful bystanders, peaceful citizens ran the risk of getting shot, events had drawn them into civil war, put them in danger. We had to ensure that this party’s fraction, headed by the Central Committee, which had approved and organized everything, was not going to stand aloof and say neither yes nor no. We demanded an answer: are you going to defend the Soviet power or are you going to fire on it? We acted rightly, for we were defending the power of the working class against a handful of dishonest and treacherous rebels.

We are told that the whole party is not guilty, and the Soviet power also says that the whole party is not guilty. In my speech I said, indeed, that it was behind the backs of probably 90, possibly 98, per cent of their own party that the Central Committee of the Left SRs carried out this crazy adventure, and many representatives of the party have indignantly dissociated themselves from this disgraceful act. We have heard the representative of the Left SR organization at Yelets speaking here to that effect. It is clear that the party as a whole, its entire membership and all its organizations, cannot be held responsible for what the Central Committee did. These madmen are sinister individuals. But a party is a party: it is differentiated from a crowd by the fact that it is, in fact, a spiritual organization and not a physical one. A party is an organization of minds. And we wish to know from the Left SRs: are they going to continue to be organized under the banner of the Central Committee which has played such a provocational role. Or are they going to be organized on the Soviet platform? That has to be decided by every group that marches with us, every organization, every individual member of the party. Where attempts have been made to take unfortunate German soldiers prisoner under the banner of the Left SR party – and there have been such attempts – we shall ruthlessly punish them and put a stop to them. The action launched by the Central Committee provided abundant grounds for such attempts. Where declarations have been issued stating that a group associates itself with the Central Committee and maintains the right at any moment to violate the decisions of the Soviet power, we saw: there is no place within the framework of the existing state for this group, and there cannot be. The Soviet power is a ruling power. What is involved here is not a struggle between parties or small groups (as was said here by the representative of the worst of these groups, the Maximalists [The Maximalists were a semi-anarchist group which broke away from the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1904.]) but the right of the working class and of the many-millioned peasantry to hold power. Power is not a club or a meeting, it is state organization. If people obey it, it is a ruling power, if they don’t it ceases to be that. At a given moment the ruling power finds itself faced with the most crucial of questions – the question of peace and war. If this question cannot be decided by the ruling power, but it can be decided by a group, a handful of rogues, then we have no ruling power here: therefore the ruling power also says that it will seize in an iron grip all those rogues who want to decide matters instead of the Soviet power – and the will to power is one of the most important conditions for holding power.

Comrades, many people have uttered in this place lying phrases about civil strife, about all-embracing unity, and so on and so forth, with those who considered it possible to raise the banner of revolt during the Congress of Soviets. Did I not warn the Left SRs, did I not come to this rostrum and say that there are ‘dangerous elements’ about? I did not want the Left SRs to play again the role they played on the Kursk front. I said that so as to give them the chance to come to their senses. I warned them generally, as comrades, not to engage in such actions against the Soviet power. Comrade Lenin said here that Spiridonova is a most honorable person, a sincere person. [Speaking of Spiridonova Lenin said: ‘It must be a bad party indeed whose sincerest people stoop to spreading fairy-tales for propaganda purposes.’ (Collected Works, Vol.27, p.527.)] But woe to a party whose most honorable persons are obliged to resort, in their struggle, to slander and demagogy! We warned them, on the eve of an action which we did not and could not foresee. Remember, didn’t the Left SRs come up here to hurl accusations at the workers of Petrograd and Moscow and attribute all sorts of vile actions to the Soviet power? The most dishonest baiting of the Soviet power took place here, so as to make you more receptive to the adventure they were preparing behind your backs. And now they talk to us about reconciliation – with whom? They mentioned the name of Aleksandrovich, who has been shot, and said: ‘This is cruel terror.’ But remember this: Aleksandrovich was Deputy-Chairman of the Extraordinary Investigative Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage. I knew him and when I met him I never asked whether he was a Left SR or a Bolshevik: he was a trusted member of the Commission, and that was enough for me. This Commission was one of the most important organs, an organ of struggle directed against counter-revolution. And since the counter-revolution had long since wanted to kill Count Mirbach, the Commission had as one of its tasks the investigation of that matter. We engaged in this activity because we are obliged to protect the persons of the representatives of foreign powers generally the German ambassador equally with the American or the British, for a blow at him is a threat to peace and violation of the authority of the Soviet power. Aleksandrovich was engaged in investigating the threads of the plot against Mirbach. He worked hand in hand with Dzerzhinsky. And Aleksandrovich turned this Commission into the organ for murdering Count Mirbach. He embezzled 500,000 roubles and handed it over to the Central Committee of the Left SRs, for the purpose of organizing the revolt. He was a revolutionary, and I have been told that he died bravely: he was a revolutionary, but what we are concerned with here is not the evaluation of individuals, but the conduct of a ruling power which wants to survive. You must realize that the deputy-chairman of the Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution cannot transform the apparatus of power into an instrument for revolt against the Soviet power, and cannot steal money for the organizing of such a revolt. He cannot organize a revolt and he cannot arrest representatives of the Soviet power. But he did arrest Dzerzhinsky, his immediate superior, who trusted him. One cannot conceive of greater perfidy, dictated by party discipline, or greater dishonesty! We are forced to say: in such a case there is one remedy only, a white-hot iron, cauterising with a white-hot iron, so that there should be no more such cases, and the white-hot iron was set to work. Was that cruel? Life is a cruel business generally, and revolutions, as the old revolutionary Mirabeau put it, are not made with butter. If, yesterday, the Left SRs had been victorious, aided by our soft heartedness, they would nevertheless not have been in power. And every one of you ought to understand that. The Left SRs have no backing, especially not in Moscow. Here there are only two parties: the leading Soviet party, the Bolsheviks, on the one hand, and on the other, the counter-revolution. And if the Left SRs had proved to be that cherry-stone of which the Anarchist Karelin spoke, and we had slipped up on it, then power would have passed to the counter-revolution. [The Anarchist Karelin is A.A. Karelin, leader of the Anarchist-Communist group, not to be confused with the Left SR: A. Karelin.] You would all have fallen victims to the counter-revolution: there would have been real brutality here, an iron roller would have passed over you.

Comrades, I reject the statement that after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Soviet power found itself in a shameful situation, as one of the speakers here declared. Only bourgeois philistines can see something shameful in the fact that an oppressed class is too weak to overthrow all its oppressors. What does the shame of the Russian working class consist in? In the circumstance that it is not at present strong enough to cast off all its oppressors. Is this a matter for shame? Those who see shame in the peace treaty we signed are miserable windbags. It is a misfortune, a calamity, and it can be seen as shameful only by those who are either direct agents of the bourgeoisie or miserable windbags. Another argument which was brought up here was that by making peace with the Germans we are giving encouragement to patriotic feelings among the proletariat of the Allied countries. These are well-known arguments which are repeated day after day by people, miserable people, who do not read the papers, who do not know what is going on in Europe, who do not read documents, and who keep repeating the same phrase over and over again. During the last few days there took place the congress of the British Labor Party, which by a majority of votes, for the first time during the war, declared that it was terminating its union sacrée with its own bourgeoisie. The voting was 1,100,000 to 700,000. [The Labor Party Conference held in June 1918 did indeed vote to end the political truce (by 1,704,000 to 951,0000, but this merely meant that the party would now stand candidates at by-elections. Representatives of the Labor Party continued to serve in the Government.] In this way the union sacrée which chained the working class of Britain to its own bourgeoisie, to bourgeois patriotism, was ended. And in France the organization to which I belonged, together with Lozovsky, the organization for re-establishing international relations, the organization in which our friends Merrheim, Saumoneau and others worked, this organization issued only a few days ago its ardent protest against Allied intervention in Russian affairs and voiced its fraternal greetings to the Russian revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks. And in Germany? Whereas earlier, owing to the censorship, they knew and understood nothing about us, during the past week we have received dozens of resolutions, numerous documents, in which the best representatives of German socialism declare their solidarity with us and say that it would, of course, be better if we were strong enough to throw off the yoke of imperialism both within and without, but they understand very well that the policy that we are pursuing has been imposed on us by the fact that the working class of all countries has not yet smashed the chains of militarism. We ask too much of the Russian working class. But we cannot demand that it do the work of the proletariat of all countries. Yet that is what is demanded by those who talk of our shame. They say: the German working class is held fast in the clutches of imperialism: so, then, Russian working class, take up arms and go forth to liberate all Europe. But we say: no, this is a task too great for our strength. We shall try to defend ourselves, to hold on in expectation of the moment when, inevitably, over there, too, will begin the cleansing of the Augean stables of imperialism. Our brothers hail us and call on us for aid and support.

I will say only a few words in conclusion. In the first days of the Congress a comrade was present who came to us from captivity: he is a foreigner and at the same time a Russian, and, above all, he is our brother, because he is an international revolutionary socialist. He heard our debates with the Left SRs and said: ‘Is there any sense in concerning yourselves with this, is there any sense in all this at such a time, in such tragic conditions?’ This was the first impression that he obtained here. And, following him, one might perhaps ask if it would not really be simpler to throw all this aside and move on? But that’s just it: that the revolution is a big and serious machine. What today is a difference of opinion, a perplexity, will tomorrow be transformed into a civil war. Spiridonova wrote to Comrade Lenin a day or two before the Congress in a spirit of closest comradely solidarity: she came to see me at the Commissariat for Military Affairs, and we talked together like close comrades, like brothers-in-arms, even though I knew very well how unstable the Left SR party was in its politics. This party had departed further and further from us, especially after its representatives left the Council of People’s Commissars and fell there after more and more under the influence of the bourgeois democrats. We had to say at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee: ‘Comrade Left SRs, cast off this miserable and shameful influence of bourgeois psychology! We have to drag you with a lasso at every sharp turn, because you have not yet risen above bourgeois public opinion, and its screams signify for you no less than the moral law. Get rid of it. >I said this more than once, and not just to individual members of the Left SR party. There is only one way of keeping check on the consciousness of intellectual groups, and that is firm control by the organized working class. It is organized in the Soviets. So long as the Left SRs followed, hobbling, the majority in the Soviets, their true visage was hidden. But when they took to themselves the right to break away and act as they chose, they thereby broke away from the working class and fell under the influence of the bourgeoisie, which hurled them in armed revolt against the Soviet power.

On the contrary, comrades, do not at this time treat lightly any question of politics which the Soviet power is deciding or considering, for through internal struggle, open conflict, it will discover the best and most assured solution for the working class. And particular dissident groups, especially those composed of intellectuals, must examine their luggage before they raise their flag to call openly for struggle. Today it is criticism, tomorrow – civil war. We do not want that. We want to issue one slogan everywhere. Explain to the peasants the dangerousness of a split, safeguard the Soviet power through firm discipline, and tell our friends and co-thinkers in the provinces everything. At the same time we say this: when you, our comrades, members of the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, and you, our opponents, come to this rostrum, be careful in your choice of expressions. Why did Lozovsky, in explaining the repression of the Left SRs as a response to the killing of Count Mirbach, say: ‘We insist on being told the demands that were put to the Soviet power by Germany regarding the work of the Left SRs’? I do not know with what dishonest aim in view he uttered this new slander and falsehood.

There is not a single dishonest invention that the Lozovskys come upon somewhere or other that they would not repeat from this rostrum, before the workers and peasants. Be careful where such dishonest provocation is concerned. Do not become, even unconsciously, transmitters of this sort of dishonest slander. However, from this dishonest slander, from this grave lesson we have received, we can derive some benefit for ourselves. A certain boil ripened at the periphery of the Soviet power. It burst comparatively painlessly because it burst in Moscow, the centre wherein the most conscious part of the population is concentrated and where the best military units are stationed. (In the future we must pay special attention to the question of whether there is an organization inside them.) And when, somewhere or other, they incite the ignorant peasants against the Soviet power, when they say that we are bullies who rob the working peasants, pay money to the German imperialists, send them all our manufactures, while our peasants fare going about naked – if that sort of agitation is being carried on, they know that this is nothing other than a presage of the outbreak, very soon afterward, of a new civil war. For this reason you, the representatives of the ruling class, bear a great responsibility, when you, on the instructions of that ruling class, create the Soviet power, our responsible political organ. And when you hear malicious, slanderous attacks, when a prejudiced person disseminates lying rumours, take him by the arm and say: ‘The Soviet power came out of the October Revolution, and it wants only the best for us. If it makes mistakes, we shall calmly put them right at the All-Russia Congress of Soviets.’

The Soviet power, which you created, has to be potected, and we shall firmly see that that is done, under the banner which you have entrusted to us.

NOTE: The attack by the Left SRs on the Soviet power on July 6, 1918 put an end to the political bloc which, after October (and to some extent before it) was formed by the Communists, the Left SRs and the Anarchists, on the platform of Soviet power and struggle against the bourgeoisie and the compromisers.

This conditional and temporary coalition was bound to break up in the course of the revolution, owing to the complete social difference between the programs of the parties which it brought together.

It suffered its first failure already in April 1918, when the Soviet power, forced to take this action by their disorganizing activity, disarmed the Anarchist organizations and called them to order.

So that, as well as evaluating the attack launched by the Left SRs when they formed part of the post-October bloc, I may explain how it came about that the Soviet power, in the shape of the Communist Party which was dominant in the Soviets, also broke with its other companion, the Anarchists – so that I may establish the general fact that the Soviet bloc had broken up in July1918, I quote below the relevant passage from my speech of April 14, 1918, delivered at a workers’ meeting and published under the title A Word to Russia’s Workers and Peasants, published by Life and Knowledge, Moscow 1918.

(For details of the break with the Anarchists see ‘Proceedings of the 4th All-Russia Central Executive Committee’, published by the All-Russia CEC, Moscow, 1918.) [Another translation of Trotsky’s remarks about the Anarchists on April 14, 1918, will be found in the pamphlet giving the whole of his speech on that occasion, and entitled A Paradise in This World, published by the British Socialist Party in 1920 (pp.21-24). This translation is reproduced, under its original titles: A Word to the Russian Workers and Peasants on Our Friends and Enemies, in Leon Trotsky Speaks, New York 1972.]

I am asked: ‘You consider yourselves socialist-Communists, and yet you are shooting and imprisoning your Communist Anarchist comrades. How do you explain that?’

This, comrades, is indeed something that deserves explanation. We Marxist Communists are profoundly opposed to the Anarchist doctrine. This doctrine is erroneous, but one cannot arrest and imprison people, and still less can one shoot them, merely on that account.

First, I will say in a few words why the Anarchist doctrine is wrong. The Anarchists say that the working class does not need a government: what it needs is to organize production. Government, they say, is a bourgeois invention, a bourgeois machine of compulsion, and the working class does not need to take governmental power. This is wrong from beginning to end. For organizing the economy in the village of Neyelovka, and, in general, on little patches of ground, governmental power is indeed unnecessary. But for organizing the economy of all Russia, of a large country – and, plundered as we are, ours is still a large country – a state apparatus is needed, the apparatus which has hitherto been in the hands of the enemy class, the class which exploited and robbed the working people. We say: in order that the economy may be organized in a new way, the machinery of government has to be torn from the enemy’s hands and taken in our own. Otherwise, nothing will be achieved. What is the source of exploitation and oppression? Private ownership of the means of production. But who maintains and upholds this private ownership? The state power, so long as it remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Who can abolish private ownership? The state-power, as soon as it falls into the hands of the working class.

The bourgeoisie says: don’t touch the state power, it is the sacred hereditary privilege of the educated classes. But the Anarchists say: don’t touch it, it is an infernal invention, a diabolical device, don’t have anything to do with it. The bourgeoisie says: don’t touch it, because it’s sacred. The Anarchists say: don’t touch it, because it’s sinful. Both say: don’t touch it. But we say: don’t just touch it, take it in your hands, and set it to work in your own interests, for the abolition of private ownership and the emancipation of the working class.

But, comrades, however mistaken the teachings of the Anarchists, that would in no case justify persecuting them. Many Anarchists are very honest supporters of the working class: they merely don’t know how to unlock the door to open the way into the realm of freedom – they hang about by the door, shifting from one foot to the other, but haven’t a clue how to turn the key. This is their misfortune but not their guilt, it is not a crime and they cannot be punished for it.

However, comrades, during our revolution, as everyone knows, and the honest ideological Anarchists know it better than anyone else, very many hooligan-type carrion-crows, robbers and night-prowlers of all sorts have gathered under the flag of Anarchism. Yesterday this man was serving a sentence of hard labor for raping a woman, or was in prison for theft, or in exile for robbery, but today he says: ‘I’m an Anarchist from the “Black Crow” club’ – or from the ‘Storm’ club, or the ‘Attack’, or the ‘Charge’, or whatever: they have many different names.

I have talked about this, comrades, with ideological Anarchists, and they themselves say: A great many of these black crows, these hooligans, all sorts of crooks, have attached themselves to us. You know very well what has been happening in Moscow. The Anarchists have laid whole streets under tribute, or seized buildings, regardless of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, regardless of the workers’ organizations, and it has happened that Soviet organizations were in occupation of a building, and hooligans, calling themselves Anarchists, have broken into this building, mounted machine-guns and seized armoured cars and even artillery. When we arrested them we found on them a mass of things they had stolen, heaps of gold. The Moscow Anarchists are nothing but burglars and thugs who bring discredit on the ideological Anarchists. Anarchism is an ideology, even though a wrong one. But hooliganism is hooliganism. And we said to the ideological Anarchists: you must strictly dissociate yourselves from these thugs, for nothing worse can happen to a revolution than to start rotting from one or other of its extremities. The whole fabric of the revolution then comes unravelled at a touch. Soviet order must be a sound fabric. We took power not so as to rob, behave like hooligans and brigands, or get drunk, but in order to introduce general labor discipline and honest working life.

I consider that the Soviet power acted quite correctly when it said to the pseudo-Anarchist gentry: ‘Don’t imagine that your kingdom has come, don’t imagine that the Russian people and the Soviet state are now carrion that crows can settle on and tear to pieces. If you want to live together with us, in accordance with the principles of labor, then submit yourselves, along with us, to the common Soviet discipline of the working class but if you get in our way, then, by your leave, we’ll show you the iron fist of the workers’ government, the Soviet power!’

If the sham Anarchists, who are really thugs, try to go on acting along the same lines as before, then the second showdown will be three times, ten times, harsher than the first. It is said that some honest Anarchists were present among the hooligans: if that it true – and, obviously, it can be true only of a relatively few persons – it is very regrettable, and they must be released at once. We must express to them our great regret, but at the same time we must say: comrade Anarchists, in order that such unpleasantness may not happen in the future, you must erect a watershed between yourselves and the hooligans, you must draw a firm line, so that you cannot be mixed up, so that it may be known once and for all that this man is a thug but that one is an honest man with an ideology. – L.T.