Letter to Leon Trotsky, March 2, 1926

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Moscow, 2 March 1926

Dear comrade Trotsky,

At the current enlarged Executive, during a meeting of the delegation of the Italian section with comrade Stalin, certain questions were posed about your preface to the book The Lessons of October and about your criticisms of the October 1923 events in Germany. Comrade Stalin argued that there was a contradiction in your attitude to this point.

To avoid the risk of quoting comrade Stalin’s words with the slightest inaccuracy, I will refer to the formulation of this same observation which is contained in a written text, i.e. the article by comrade Kusinen published in the French edition of International Correspondence, no 82, 17 December 1924. This article was published in Italian during the discussion for our IIIrd Congress (Unita, 31 August 1925). Here it is argued that:

before October 1923 you supported the Brandler group and you accepted the line decided on by the leading organs of the CI for the action in Germany;

in January 1924, in the theses drawn up with comrade Radek, you affirmed that the German party should not have launched the struggle in October;

it was only in September 1924 that you formulated your criticism of the errors of the KPD and the CI, which resulted in a failure to seize the most favourable moment for the struggle in Germany.

With regard to these supposed contradictions, I polemicised with comrade Kusinen in an article which appeared in Unita in October, basing myself on the elements that were known to me. But you alone can throw full light on the question, and I ask you to do this through a brief note of information that I will use for personal instruction. It would only be with the authorisation of the party organs that I would in the future use this to examine the problem in the press.

With communist greetings,

Amadeo Bordiga

🔍 See also : Letter to Karl Korsch, October 28, 1926.