Letter to Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, February 1928

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The International Factor

Dear Ivan Nikitich:

Today I received your postcard and sent you a telegram. Your letter is the first I have gotten here. Whether this is because the postal service takes a more attentive attitude toward the former commissar of posts and telegraph or for some other reason – I don't know. Immediately upon arrival here [January 25] I wrote you a postcard addressed to Zangezury. I also wrote to the other hermits whose addresses I know, but have had no answer yet. The mail is generally slow here too, and right now the February snowdrifts add to the problem. I have received answering telegrams from Rakovsky, Kasparova, Sosnovsky, and Muralov. They have all settled in, are in good spirits, and are working, Sosnovsky and Muralov in local planning agencies; as for Rakovsky, I don't know … I haven't received an answer to my telegram to Serebryakov, in Semipalatinsk. They haven't moved him somewhere else, have they? I haven't received an answer from Radek – "no address indicated." Apparently Radek has not yet visited his local telegraph office or perhaps he too has been sent somewhere else?

Your invitation to visit Novo-Bayazet is very tempting, but to accomplish that would involve some difficulties. The journey here was very fatiguing, and to top it all off, our traveling companions contrived to lose two of our suitcases, one with my most precious and necessary books … Going by the technical appearance of this letter, you might perhaps think that I had a secretary here but that is absolutely, absolutely not so. True, I have a typewriter, but the work on it has had to be organized on a new basis.

There is hunting and fishing here, so I can return your kind invitation. Although we will soon have lived here for three weeks, I have not yet gone hunting. The reasons for this are many, but the main reason, if you will, has been the high temperature which I have had and which never left me during the trip here. Natalya Ivanova and Lyova have had to make a lot of complaints, because we still have not been provided with living quarters. We are living in a hotel left over from Gogol's era.

You of course have read the two musketeers' [Zinoviev and Kamenev] letter to the editors. It would be hard to imagine a more pitiful and worthless little document. Now it turns out that the Contre le courant group is the farthest of all from Bolshevism. What kind of Bolshevism? The kind our two unfortunate musketeers preached until yesterday? Or the kind they attacked? Not a word about that, and no wonder. Their flattering, deceitful, fawning, and obscene document is based entirely on avoiding the most fundamental issues at the heart of the argument.

The international situation and the international revolutionary movement promise much that is new and important in the near future. Pravda is correct when it writes: "The period of a certain apathy and discouragement, which began after the 1923 defeat and which allowed German capital to strengthen its position, is beginning to pass away" (January 28, 1928). Nowadays this kind of statement, about the apathy and discouragement since late 1923, is repeated at every turn. Yet at one time, those who didn't understand the meaning and importance of the 1923 defeat accused those who predicted the inevitability of such a period of – liquidationism! Without an understanding of the international character of this period, it is impossible to understand our internal affairs properly. The 1923 defeat had a weaker effect on England than it did on the Continent, and a new upsurge began there in 1926, but was broken off by the defeat of that movement. The most profound effects of the 1923 defeat were felt, of course, in Germany itself, and – if you will – in our own country. Pravda is correct when it says that the apathy and discouragement are beginning to pass away in Germany. Unfortunately, I do not get German periodicals here, or the foreign press in general. And yet they must be followed more closely now than ever before, because the entire course of events is bringing the international questions more and more to the fore.

It is useful to go over in one's mind the old disputed questions in the light of the new events. Our evaluation of the European situation after the 1923 defeat was linked with the question of America's role in Europe. By now our view has already gained the strength of a prejudice – that to look at the fate of Europe without looking at the role of the United States is like trying to keep accounts without listing the owner's transactions. The so-called "normalization of Europe" was accomplished with American aid. On this basis Social Democracy revived, with its new religion (which now is already on its way out) of American democratic pacifism. The European proletarian vanguard would be stronger right now if it had foreseen this period of apathy and discouragement, Americanism and pacifism, etc., if it had not been instilled with the idea that such a prediction was "liquidationism." This was the fundamental error of the Fifth [Comintern] Congress. The mistakes of the Maslow-Ruth [Fischer] leadership already had a derivative character. People thought that the rungs of the ladder led up and not down and so they lifted their feet instead of stepping down. In such cases one inevitably bumps one's nose. The period of downturn, and the strengthening of Social Democracy within the German working class, lasted four years, according to Pravda. Only now is it "beginning to pass away." But we never predicted such a long period. The truth is that the period was prolonged because of an incorrect evaluation of our era in general and the incorrect strategic orientation resulting from that.

Right now America is much more the master of Europe than it was four years ago, when we first raised this question in theoretical terms. Too much steam has built up in the American boiler, however. Of course, the financial might of the United States and its monopoly organizations, makes "planning" and "regulation" possible to an unprecedented extent (for capitalism). This allows particular crises to be mitigated, postponing them, while the internal contradictions mount up. Apparently the situation in the United States has now reached the point of a general commercial-industrial crisis, a crisis of the economy as a whole. How deep, severe, or prolonged it will be is difficult to predict. But it's not at all difficult to predict that America will rectify matters for itself at Europe's expense, and that means, first and foremost, at England's expense. Already the Anglo-American antagonism has emerged from the slightly masked forms of Anglo-American "cooperation." In the coming period this antagonism will be the axis of world politics. And for Europe this will mean everything except "democratic pacifism." The whole problem now is to evaluate this correctly, both the process as a whole and each successive stage in particular. In the coming years the international factor will dominate everything.

In India significant events seem to be in preparation. I must confess, however, that I know very little about India, much less even than I know about China, which is the main thing I'm working on now. Unfortunately, my books on India were in one of the lost suitcases. Right now, I am attempting to get a new package of books from Moscow. Unfortunately, all this involves quite a few difficulties, particularly in terms of wasted time.

As I understand it, what you mail to me goes through Baku and Krasnovodsk. If this is true, it may turn out that you and I are more like neighbors to each other than either of us is to Moscow. But all this remains to be tested out empirically.