Letter to Shatunovsky, September 12, 1928

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A Heart-to-Heart Talk with a Well-meaning Party Member

Dear Comrade:

I have received your August 6 letter from Zaporozhye, where you are staying temporarily. I have no reason to doubt that you wrote with the best of intentions. I have even less reason to doubt that the road straight to Thermidor is paved with just such intentions. A good deal more energetic work is being done today on fixing up the roads to Thermidor than on our "good old Russian" country roads.

You would like to convince me of the harmfulness of the Opposition in general and of "superindustrialism" in particular. As a graphic example you cite the Dneprostroi project [at Zaporozhye], where you now happen to be. You write: "Striking proof of this (that is, the harmfulness of excessive industrialization), may be found in your decision (?) to force the pace of the Dneprostroi project, which will not really be needed for a long time to come and which, besides, is being built according to a plan that is absolutely illiterate."

You then bring in a large number of other considerations, piling them on top of one another and making your whole letter (if I may speak frankly) a rather chaotic mess. But in every case you come back to this same Dneprostroi, which has proven to be, as you put it, a "litmus paper, an infallible means of determining exactly what it is that you" – that is, I – "propose to do."

I am answering your letter because it seems to me typical in the highest degree of the present party philistine's way of thinking, which has two characteristic traits: an inability to put two and two together in theoretical matters; and as a result, a careless attitude toward the facts.

The Marxist method of thinking is very rigorous and demanding: it does not tolerate gaps, omissions, or the crude fitting together of parts. That is why it pays such strict attention to facts, does not take things on say-so or rely on memory, but checks the primary sources. The philistine way of thinking, on the other hand, is trivial and approximative; it wanders and gropes around without looking ahead and naturally has no need of great factual accuracy. Especially not in politics; least of all in factional politics. And if you're caught red-handed, you can always say you heard it from the grapevine, from one of your cronies, and heard it with your very own ears. Unfortunately, your letter falls into this category.

It is obvious that everything you say about Dneprostroi you have heard from a gossipy friend, who is obviously anything but reliable. You write that my "decision to force the pace of the Dneprostroi project is being carried out." What decision is that? In what capacity and by what authority could I put through such a decision? Especially in 1925, when all decisions were made behind my back by the factional Septemvirate and then went through the Politburo purely for the sake of form.

Listen to what actually happened. In the summer of 1925, the Council of Labor and Defense passed a decree – which I had nothing to do with – naming a Dneprostroi commission under my chairmanship. In principle, the question of building a hydroelectric station had been decided two or three years earlier. The appropriate agency had done a great deal of work in drawing up estimates and making other preparations and had submitted a finished plan. I had absolutely no connection with all that. My commission, according to the decree of the Council of Labor and Defense, had the task of checking the agency's plan and its estimates over a period of two or three months, so that the budget for 1925-26 could include the first expenditures required for this project. In this case, as in many others, I defended the viewpoint that, given our poverty, it was better to spend two extra years estimating and double-checking than to spend two extra months on construction. Precisely for that reason I sought and managed to obtain a one-year extension on the deadline fixed for my commission's work. As you can see, this hardly resembles "forcing the pace." The best personnel, nationally and internationally, were brought in to check the estimates for the project. A wide exchange of views took place in the press among technicians and economists. For my part, I put no pressure on the commission, in which all Soviet economic institutions were represented, still less on the press; nor could I have exerted such pressure, in view of the overall situation in the top circles of the party and the Soviets. After all, this was in 1925-26, when the history of the party and the October Revolution had already been rewritten, when Molotov had become a theoretician, and Kaganovich was running the Ukraine.

It is true that both in the press and at Central Committee meetings I opposed the banal arguments, based on purely Philistine reasoning, that in general Dneprostroi was more than we could handle. This is the same kind of argument the moss-backed "Friends of the People" used in their day against building the Trans-Siberian Railway, which it may be said in passing was an infinitely more difficult enterprise for Russia at that time than Dneprostroi is for us. Nevertheless, the solution to the general problem of the pace of industrialization cannot by itself resolve the particular question of when and in what proportions Dneprostroi ought to be built and, in general, whether it should be attempted. The commission I led was assigned only to prepare the information required to resolve this question. But it did not even get that far. One of the sidelines in the struggle against "Trotskyism" was the struggle against Dneprostroi. The directors of various institutions, especially the railways, of which you speak so unfavorably, considered it their duty to use every means to sabotage the commission's work. The only rule guiding certain sages of the state, as you undoubtedly know, is to say "shaven" when I say "shorn." Because of the early stage the work was in I had not stated a definite opinion on the project or on the period of time in which Dneprostroi should be finished. So the agencies simply dragged things out, created disruptions, engaged in sabotage, and spread "rumors." In the end I asked to be relieved of the functions of chairman of the commission. The request was granted. After that, within an extraordinarily short time, in a few weeks, the commission carried out all its work, formulated its conclusions, and had them adopted by the Council of Labor and Defense.

It is quite possible that the commission allowed itself to be guided by the noble desire to show that it did know what it was doing. Probably it also received an encouraging word from on high. At that point things actually did move at a "forced pace." But I had nothing to do with the final checking of the plans and figures, still less with the schedule that was set.

While I was chairman of the commission, Stalin, and consequently Molotov, intervened as resolute opponents of Dneprostroi. Speaking in the tone of the "peasant philosophers," Stalin uttered axioms of this type: for us, building Dneprostroi would be like a poor peasant buying a gramophone. When after my resignation, a 180-degree turn occurred, and I expressed my surprise at this in the Central Committee, Stalin explained that earlier a half-billion rubles were involved, whereas now it was a question of no more than 140 million. All this is recorded in the transcript of one of the plenums of the Central Committee. Stalin showed quite simply in this way that he understood nothing about the actual fundamentals of the problem and that the interest he showed in Dneprostroi was limited to considerations of personal combinations. Comrades had talked of the half-billion rubles in regard to new factories which were to consume the energy from Dneprostroi. In round numbers, their cost was fixed at that time at 200-300 million. Adding on Dneprostroi, the total was about a half-billion. But these factories were themselves part of the construction plans of the respective branches of industry. It was not Dneprostroi that needed them, but they that needed Dneprostroi.

The last word on the subject of these new factories ought to have been left to the chemical industry, the metallurgical industry, etc. In my time, the commission had only begun to examine this problem. As soon as I had left, it was resolved instantly; obviously someone sprinkled magical waters on the commissioners' heads.

From this short sketch, which is easy to check against documents, it becomes evident how lightmindedly you have taken the road of myth-making

There is no reason for you to be especially embarrassed, however. You are not the first, and you will not be the last. There are dozens and hundreds of other … myth-makers The most striking example – the classical example, it might be said – is the myth about the Putilov works. Almost every educated person in the world now knows that in 1923 I wanted to "close" this establishment. It would appear that this crime is the opposite of the one you accuse me of: on the Dnepr River I am supposed to have decided to "build" what we didn't need, and on the Neva River I am supposed to have decided to close something that was indispensable to us. I think you know that the Putilov question played an enormous role throughout what was called the struggle against "Trotskyism," especially in its first phase. Many reports and resolutions, not only of our congresses and conferences, but also of the Communist International, contain allusions tosthis. At the Fifth Congress, the French delegation, during a private meeting with me, questioned me closely about why I wanted to close a factory that constituted one of the iron ramparts of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even a resolution of the Fifteenth Congress once again mentions the Putilov works.

The following is what actually happened. Rykov, the newly appointed chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy – Rykov, and not I – came to the Politburo with the proposal that this establishment be closed down; according to the figures of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, he said, this factory would not be needed during the decade to come and consequently would be an intolerable burden upon our metallurgical industry. The Politburo voted in favor of closing it down, I along with the others. I had no connection with the Supreme Council of the National Economy, or the State Planning Commission, or Leningrad industry. I made no proposal of my own on this point. As a member of the Politburo, I was obliged to make a decision on the basis of Rykov's report. The general problem of industrialization cannot by itself resolve the particular question of Putilov any more than it can the question of Dneprostroi. Stalin too voted for closing the Putilov works on the basis of Rykov's report. Later however, because of a protest by Zinoviev, the question was reconsidered and a new decision reached, outside the Politburo, by use of factional methods. In any case, at a subsequent Politburo meeting Rykov accused Stalin of making a deal with Zinoviev on the basis of considerations having nothing to do with economic efficiency.

That is the real story of my "attack on the Putilov works." What is remarkable is that the resolution of the Fifteenth Congress, repeating the Putilov legend, was adopted on a report by Rykov. And yet my whole "crime" had been to vote for a proposal made by him, Rykov! Incredible, you say? But really, it's nothing compared to everything else that has gone on.

While writing this letter, I happened to look at a pamphlet published by the State Publishing House, written by a certain Shestakov and entitled, To the Peasants: On the Resolutions of the Fifteenth Congress. There on page 49 I learn that Trotsky "submitted a statement to the Central Committee of the party, when he was on it, demanding the closing down of the huge Putilov and Bryansk factories." It does not state why he demanded this. The fact is merely asserted to unmask the Opposition's pretended "love for the workers." As if to say: this is what they're really like, these superindustrializers; they want to hurt the workers, and so they demand the closing of the "huge Putilov and Bryansk factories." In regard to Putilov, I have told you what I know. As for the Bryansk matter, never having heard of it, I can enlighten you no further. Perhaps it was simply added to round out the collection. In general, it would be difficult to imagine any more insolent and wanton libel than is found in this semi-official pamphlet on the resolutions of the Fifteenth Congress. A great many literary scoundrels, capable of anything, have sprung up in our times. In 1882, Engels wrote to Bernstein, "That is what our literary gentlemen are like. Exactly imitating the bourgeois men of letters, they believe that they have the privilege to study nothing and give their opinions on everything. They have created for us a literature that, in its ignorance of economics, its pure greenhorn utopianism, and its brazen arrogance, has no equal." This has a horribly up-to-date sound. But the Shestakovs have left even the literary men of that epoch far behind both in their ignorance and in their official utopianism, and above all in their arrogance. At the moment of danger, these gentlemen without honor or conscience will be the first to betray; and in the event of the defeat of the proletariat, in the same style with which they prettify the official line, they will sing the praises of the conquerors.

★ ★ ★

You are opposed to taking any measures on a large scale. "Ours are not the times for great tasks," you say. And with a certain irony you write: "The only major reforms now under way are in transport, where our reforms have destroyed the tracks, are destroying the locomotives, and have put the railroad cars on the list to be destroyed next." Further you write: "All of this is called 'depersonalized dispatch,' centralization of repair shops, etc."

One could conclude from the text of your letter that here too the guilty party is … the Opposition. It's like the refrain in that old song, remember? "Who's always to blame? It's always Paulina."

OK. We are responsible for the closing or near closing of Putilov and even of the Bryansk factory. And we are also to blame for inaugurating or nearly inaugurating the Dneprostroi project. But how in the world can we be responsible for Rudzutak's "depersonalized dispatch"? Isn't it possible that there's a direct line of descent here from order No. 1042, which according to Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, saved the locomotives and the cars, but which, in 1924, that is, four years later, was denounced as having caused, or almost caused, the destruction of the railways? Don't you think you could demonstrate that it was I who "lured" Rudzutak onto the path of constant "depersonalized dispatch" to and fro? If your own resources aren't sufficient to carry out this historico-philosophical task, you can turn to Yaroslavsky, Gusev, and the other "keepers of the heritage"; they will furnish you immediately with everything you need – and more!

Since you are trying to approach general economic questions by taking up particular cases (and I have no objection to this method in principle), I propose that you focus your attention on one other example. Industrialization is intimately linked with the policy of concessions. Lenin attributed enormous importance to concessions policy. But in fact the results obtained have been modest to say the least. There are obviously objective reasons for that. But in this area as well, methods of leadership play a not insignificant role, a role that is undoubtedly not of the last rank in importance. Here is an example that I advise you to research well (better than you did the Dneprostroi question). Moreover, you could make use of the era of self-criticism to place this case before the court of party opinion. But you will have to hurry: self-criticism is already on the way out.

My example has to do with our extraction of manganese. Our largest deposits of this metal, those at Chiatura, are, as you know, leased to the American Harriman, as a concession. The ones at Nikopol we exploit ourselves. As a person familiar with metallurgical questions, you probably know that manganese has a very particular application, and as a result its market is strictly limited. Manganese from Nikopol is of a completely inferior quality, is much more difficult to extract, and costs a great deal to transport. According to the rough calculations that I made at one time in collaboration with the most qualified experts in the matter, the profit differential per ton of manganese compared to Chiatura is about eight to ten rubles. That means that when a ton from Chiatura yields a profit of four to five rubles, a ton from Nikopol incurs a loss of about four to five rubles. In accordance with the concession contract, we receive a certain amount of money for each ton sold by the concession-holder. With each ton from Nikopol that we sell ourselves we lose money. If the state considers it necessary to keep the entire manganese industry in its own hands without leasing out concessions (the late Krasin defended this thesis, and he may have been correct), it is necessary to reduce the work at Nikopol to the minimum and develop Chiatura to the maximum. Then we would be assured of large profits. But we have acted in exactly the opposite way: after leasing out Chiatura, we have begun to develop Nikopol, investing some of the millions that, as everyone knows, are burning holes in our pockets. In this way we achieve a dual purpose: we sell the Nikopol manganese at a loss and, by exporting this unprofitable product, we shrink the overall manganese market and thus reduce our profit on each ton of Chiatura manganese sold by the concession-holder. In a word, through our loss at Nikopol we cause ourselves a further loss at Chiatura.

How did this complex system of self-sabotage arise? In such cases, there is much talk among us about miscalculations or oversights, and. it always turns out that some distant relative is to blame, and wherever possible, someone from the poor side of the family. However, there was no error in this case. All the calculations had been done in advance. All the institutions had been informed. The documents related to this question, with the exact mathematical computations, are there in the appropriate archives. It was our Soviet "feudalism" that played a fatal role here; just as we have been taught concerning China, feudalism inevitably intermingles with bureaucratism and mandarinism and sometimes even originates out of them. Chubar and other mandarins of the Ukraine persisted in developing the Nikopol manganese because they viewed it from their own local standpoint. The Kharkov point of view came into conflict with that of the state as a whole. In a regime of centralized proletarian dictatorship, the question could have been resolved easily enough for the good of the entire Soviet Union, and consequently for the good of the Ukraine. But when methods of bureaucratic feudalism are applied, everything is turned upside down. Due to considerations that had nothing to do with manganese, it proved to be quite impossible to do anything that might upset Chubar; that might have changed the "relationship of forces." What was involved here was not an economic miscalculation, but a political calculation that had only one fault: it was rotten to the core.

At the moment I have no information on the work at Nikopol or its relationship to the work at Chiatura. But the general situation on the world market, as I understand it, can hardly have produced the miracles for Nikopol that the Kharkov leadership counted on, in defiance of all good sense. This can only mean losses in the millions. That is only a supposition on my part. Perhaps you will check into it and publish your results? If it turns out that I am mistaken, I will be the first to be pleased.

But let us return to Dneprostroi. In view of your slovenly approach to the facts, I have no reason to believe you when you say that Dneprostroi was begun prematurely. Your second assertion, that it is being constructed badly, is much more plausible. But what do I have to do with that? You shouldn't go anticipating the Gusevs, Kuusinens, Manuilskys, Peppers, Lyadovs, and other political leeches, who will demonstrate that I am responsible, not only for the errors at Dneprostroi, but also for those on the Turkestan-Siberia railway, which is being built in the vicinity of where I live now.

You keep saying, "Think about it, reflect on Dneprostroi, and revise your industrialization program, into which you have unfortunately lured the party."

"Lured"? How? Superindustrialism has been condemned by every august assemblage. The party has rejected it with all the required monolithism. The literary leeches have written hundreds of pamphlets about this. Mountains of "study outlines" have been distributed throughout the country and, it might be said, throughout the world. They are always on the same theme: "Trotskyism" equals robbing the peasant for the sake of superindustrialization. Now, all of a sudden, it seems that Trotsky has "unfortunately" lured the party into supporting this criminal program. Allow me to ask you: in that case, what are you, an opponent of the Opposition, implying about the party, especially its leadership? How could you give a vote of confidence to such a leadership?

Further on you write: "Attempts have been made to speak your language to the peasants. What is the result? The smychka between the peasants and workers has been disrupted for years to come. But the army is peasant, and the country is peasant; collectivization is a screen for getting loans from the peasants; industrialization will require a century."

These few candid lines contain a whole program – more than that: a whole conception of the world. Only … what stray breeze could have blown you into the party of Marx and Lenin, with this world outlook? But don't worry; you are virtually the hero of our times. You put down in writing exactly what is in the hearts of tens of thousands in the upper circles. A profound alteration has taken place in the party of Marx and Lenin, and your reactionary, philistine letter is just one of the innumerable manifestations of this.

"Attempts have been made to speak your language to the peasants." Who attempted? The Central Committee. Then permit me to ask you: Why did it "attempt" this? It started out by condemning, rejecting, expelling, and deporting. Then it changed its mind: "What the hell, let's give it a try." Again I ask you, what are you implying about the Central Committee? How do you view its policy? Its political morality? Your position is not so good. Or is it that the position of the Central Committee is not so good? But that is precisely what we have been saying.

You say: "Attempts have been made to speak your language to the peasants. What is the result? The smychka between the peasants and workers has been disrupted for years to come." Permit me: it is precisely on the question of the smychka that our whole discussion has revolved. It is the Opposition "that does not want a smychka with the peasantry." The first Manuilsky to come along could prove that to you. And all of a sudden, we find that the leadership has supposedly disrupted this smychka for years to come, simply because it wanted to indulge itself in a little "Trotskyism." What a confused mess.

Your misfortune is that the continual, dreary, endlessly repeated, and fundamentally unprincipled sessions where people are "worked over" have made you unaccustomed to thinking things through, being accurate, and reasoning in an honest way. Just as the Ford assembly line wears on the nervous system, the mass-produced "study outlines" wear down one's ability to think. You round out the confusion of your politics with a jumble of high-sounding commentaries. Yet you can't get around the fact that the Opposition published its Platform and its countertheses for the Fifteenth Congress. All these questions were analyzed quite clearly and in as concrete a way as was possible in such documents. Instead, you attribute to us, as though it were our program, those panicky "measures," accompanied by fits of administrative ecstasy, which were the product of the entire preceding wrong course. Is that not so? If not, then what did bring them about? If it were admitted that as a result of a correct socialist policy it was really necessary, ten years after October, to resort to such destructive and arbitrary measures (which are said to be the same as "war communism," for what reason I do not know), that would mean there is no way out of the situation. That would be a condemnation of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a whole and of socialist methods for running an economy. That would mean handing all the cards over to the Mensheviks and the retainers of the bourgeoisie in general. That is exactly what our entire crowd of ideological leeches tend to do, despite their intentions. As they would have it, everything is fine, everything is excellent, right up to the moment when suddenly everything goes badly. Why does the trouble arise so suddenly in the middle of smooth sailing; why, when the smychka between the peasants and the workers is being systematically consolidated, do these "measures" appear out of nowhere and disrupt the smychka "for years to come"? Our leeches don't worry about that question. It is nevertheless the question that decides the fate of socialism.

You are talking nonsense, sir, when you say that attempts have been made to speak our language to the peasants. These measures of desperation did not come from our Platform but from that fact that you did not listen to our Platform when you should have. And there are still blowhards and underhanded types who tell the workers that "the Opposition obstructed" the grain collections, that it "distracted people's attention." What did it distract people's attention from? From the grain collections? But it was precisely the Opposition that talked about them; it was you who distracted the party's attention from the grain problem to the Wrangel officer! Watch out that tomorrow you won't be forced to repeat this "maneuver" on a much broader scale.

"The army is peasant and the country is peasant; collectivization is a screen for getting loans from the peasantry; industrialization will require a century." In these few words your whole foundation is exposed to the world. Why don't you finish what you are saying? The logical conclusion of your argument goes like this: "We were a little early, a wee bit premature, in undertaking the October Revolution. We should have waited roughly another century. To establish Soviet power only to end up with a peasant army in a peasant country and a collectivization that is only a screen for getting loans from the peasants? No. For results like that, the costs were far too great. We were too hasty, much too hasty, alas, with the October Revolution."

That's the point of view that comes out ever so clearly, once you throw off the tangled mass of "study outline" verbiage and start speaking from the heart.

In conformity with your whole manner of thinking, you immediately add: "I think that now you yourself doubt that the necessary conditions exist for the establishment of Soviet power in China."

On that I can give you one reply: the philistine has grown bold and scratches his belly in public. Of course, philistinism remained unextinguished within many revolutionaries not only after October but even before as well. Until now it merely stayed hidden; now it comes back to the surface, not only among the intellectuals, but also among many former workers who have raised themselves above the masses, received titles, made names for themselves, and can look down on the masses, whether Russian or Chinese.

"But with our population," they say, "is anything else possible? What kind of industrialization can you have with a bunch of peasants? As for the Chinese, isn't Soviet power more than those ugly mugs can handle?" The reactionary philistine has devoured the revolutionary; all that's left of some are the horns and hooves; of others, not even that.

Honorable comrade, you are repeating the wise maxims that the philistines of every stripe threw at us thousands and thousands of times; not only before the October Revolution, not only ten or twelve years before, when we said that in tsarist, slave, peasant, backward Russia, the revolution could lead to proletarian power earlier than in the most advanced capitalist countries; not only then, but even in 1917, after February, on the eve of October, during October, and during the first hard years that followed. Just count on your fingers: nine-tenths of the current "optimistic" leaders, builders of "full socialism," did not even believe in the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia; and to support their lack of faith, they cited the ignorance of the Russian peasants, exactly as you do for industrialization and for Soviets in China.

Do you know what that is called? How it could be characterized in one word? Degeneration. For others, however, for many others, it is rebirth, a return to their original petty-bourgeois nature, which was temporarily driven down by the hammer of the October Revolution.

The petty bourgeois cannot engage in politics without myths, legends, and even gossip. Invariably, facts turn on him in their most unexpected and disagreeable form; he is organically incapable of embracing great ideas; he has no staying power; therefore he sets to plugging the holes with conjecture, fabrication, and myth. With the backsliding from the proletarian line to that of the petty bourgeois, myth-making becomes even more indispensable, for in this process one must work without letup to camouflage oneself, to make some slapdash connection between yesterday and today, to trample on traditions while pretending to preserve them. In such periods theories are created to compromise ideological adversaries on the personal level; at the same time masters of this art emerge. Faith in the political omnipotence of slander flowers in full glory. Gossip multiplies, develops more and more details and categories, and is canonized. A body of authors of study outlines is created, strong in the knowledge of their own irresponsibility. From the external point of view, this all gives truly miraculous results. In reality, these results are due to the pressure of other classes, transmitted by the intermediary of the "masters" of the apparatus, intriguers, and authors of scholastic documents that lull the consciousness of their own class and thus diminish its force of resistance.

By chance I have come across some lines that I wrote almost twenty years ago (in 1909):

"When the curve of historical development rises, public thinking becomes more penetrating, braver, and more ingenious. It learns to distinguish immediately the essential from the insignificant and to evaluate the proportions of reality at a glance. It grasps facts on the wing and links them with the thread of generalization. … But when the political curve indicates a drop, public thinking succumbs to stupidity. It is true that daily life contains persisting debris of general phrases that are reflections of past events. … But the internal content of these phrases flies to the winds. The priceless gift of political generalization vanishes somewhere without leaving a trace. Stupidity grows in insolence and, baring its decayed teeth, heaps insulting mockery on every attempt at a serious generalization. Feeling that it is in command of the battlefield, it begins to resort to its own methods."

There is no need to hold it against me if your letter has produced this association of ideas. But since the shoe fits, you should wear it.

To explain his confusion, his blunders and errors, the petty bourgeois needs not only myths in general, but also a constant source of evil. You probably know that the Evil One is the mythological incarnation of human weakness. In the present world situation, who is weaker ideologically than the petty bourgeois? He sees demonic forces in various things, depending on his national conditions, his historical past, and the place destiny has accorded him. When he is, if we may express ourselves in this way, an unadulterated bourgeois, the source of all the trouble in his view is the Communist who wants to rob the peasants and all the honest toilers in general. If he is a democratic philistine, the universal evil seems to him to be fascism. In a third case, it is the Krauts, the foreigners, the meteques, as they say in France. In a fourth case, it is the Jews, etc., and so on ad infinitum. In our country, for the average apparatchik, the petty bourgeois armed with a briefcase, this universal source of evil is "Trotskyism." Personally, you represent simply a "well-meaning" variety of this type. If Dneprostroi is being built badly; if Rudzutak is carried away with "depersonalized dispatch"; if quite a few dangerous complications have been created in the process of using Article 107 to hurriedly correct the errors made year after year – "Trotskyism" is guilty. What else? Engels once wrote that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. Applying this term to our conditions, "anti-Trotskyism" is the communism of … people who are not terribly bright. In other words, the authors of the anti-"Trotskyist" mythology know perfectly well what's really going on, but their hope is that the simple people's attention can be distracted from the errors of the leadership and turned toward the universal source of evil in the world, that is, toward "Trotskyism." What place do you personally occupy in this machinery of deceivers and deceived? You are somewhere in the middle, functioning as a transmission belt.

★ ★ ★

You write: "As a friend I fervently urge you to stop. Don't be wiser than the party. Make mistakes along with the majority, this same majority of functionaries, apparatchiks, and philistines, corrupt and degenerate; even if this majority really was degenerate and corrupt, you would not, in any case, be able to transform it, or to replace it with anything else."

What amazing lines! It would be impossible to make up better ones. And you didn't even have to make them up. You simply let your inner self, the party philistine, speak up. So allow me to remind you that the spirit of revolutionary collective work is one thing, and the philistine herd mentality is another. The spirit of revolutionary collective work must be conquered ever anew; the herd mentality is there to be taken, ready made, from the past. You have certainly heard the talk about [Trotsky's] "individualism," "aristocratic behavior," etc.? This is the vicious, gossipy expression of the philistine herd mentality, on the one hand, and of bureaucratic cronyism, on the other.

Above all, the party needs a correct line. It is necessary to know how and to dare to defend this line against the majority of the party if necessary – even against a real majority – and thus to help this majority correct its errors. If worse comes to worst, it is not even so shameful to be wrong with the majority if the majority makes its mistakes on its own, if it checks itself in the light of experience and learns. But there isn't the slightest hint of that. For a long time now the apparatus has made the mistakes for the majority and has not allowed the majority to correct itself. Here lies the quintessence of the present "leadership"; that is the heart and soul of Stalinism.

You think that the existing majority must simply be taken as it is. If the party had been infused with this spirit, would it have been able to make the October Revolution? Could it have even dreamed of that? No. This spirit is the product of the last five years. Before the October Revolution the collaborationist elements, conciliators, and opportunists, with their limp and worthless petty-bourgeois spirit, attached themselves to other forces: the liberal cultural movement, legal educationism, the patriotism of the war period, and "revolutionary defensism" after February. At present all those elements protrude from beneath the banner of apparatus "Bolshevism"; they have been welded together and trained in the work of baiting the Opposition, that is, proletarian Bolshevism.

How many of the present venerable defenders of October, who are "protecting" the revolution against the "anti-Soviet" [Left] Opposition, were on the other side of the barricades during the October Revolution? And after it, during the civil war, how many of them disappeared to parts unknown? Count them. Opportunism invariably tries to base itself on an already constituted force. Soviet power is such a force. Every opportunist, petty bourgeois, or philistine is drawn toward it, not so much because it is Soviet as because it is power. Pseudorevolutionaries of every stripe, former revolutionaries who have been devoured by the philistine dormant within them, former workers who have become swaggering dignitaries, the Martynovs and Kuusinens past and present, by holding fast to the status quo, can present themselves, and even think of themselves as the direct heirs of October.

Among all these former revolutionaries an especially significant place is now held by certain onetime Bolsheviks. It would be good to take a census of them some day. These are people who adhered to Bolshevism around 1905 as revolutionary democrats; who left the party when the counterrevolution came along; who tried, with some success, to become part of the June 3 regime; who rose to prominence as engineers, physicians, and businessmen; who became cronies and relatives of the bourgeoisie; who went into the imperialist war as patriots, together with the bourgeoisie; who were carried by the wave of military defeats into the February revolution; who tried to make the largest possible place for themselves in the "democratic" regime; who showed their teeth to the Bolshevik disrupters of "law and order"; who were furious enemies of October; who put their hopes in the Constituent Assembly; but who – when the Bolshevik regime began to consolidate itself in spite of everything – suddenly remembered 1905, reestablished their "party record," took up the defense of the new order and the old traditions; and who now are abusing the Opposition with the same expressions they employed against the Bolsheviks in 1917. There are many people like that. Just take a look at the Society of Old Bolsheviks; a good half of it, to say the least, is made up of such intransigent "militants," who have behind them a brief interim of some eight, ten, or twelve years spent among the bourgeoisie.

What is most unbearable to all these bureaucrats, who have found a stable situation for themselves, gained weight, and become somewhat dull, is the idea of "permanent revolution." They are not thinking of 1905, of course, or artificially resurrecting old faction fights long relegated to the archives. What is Hecuba to them? The problem is definitely of our era, of the here and now; for them it is a question of breaking free from the chain of events shaking the world. They want to secure their positions through a "prudent" foreign policy, to build what can be built, and to call it socialism in one country. The philistine wants order, tranquillity, and a more moderate pace, both in economics and in politics. The quieter you go, the easier things are. So don't get all excited; we'll get there on time. Don't go leaping over stages. The country is peasant. And in China there are four hundred million "ignorant" peasants. It will take a century to industrialize. Is it worth knocking our heads against the wall over platforms? Live and let live. That is what underlies the hatred of "permanent revolution." When Stalin said that nine-tenths of socialism had already been built here, he gave supreme satisfaction to the narrow-minded and self-satisfied bureaucracy: we've built nine-tenths; and the one-tenth that's left – we'll certainly finish building that. During the last years of his life, Lenin feared above all this mutual reassurance of the apparatchiks and bureaucrats armed with all the resources of the leading party and the state apparatus.

And you urge us to capitulate to these philistine elements, to this enormous historical regurgitation produced by the as-yet-poorly digested October Revolution? Well, you are addressing the wrong people. You say, "Rethink your position." Well, we have thought it over again. Your letter only reveals once again the immense historical superiority of the several thousand persecuted Bolshevik-Leninists over the flabby, formless, mindless mass of functionaries, bureaucrats, and, to put it simply, leeches. If we had reached your conclusion that "it is impossible to transform" the existing structure, we would not have resigned ourselves; we would have started building anew, that is, taken the good bricks out of the old walls, hardened new ones in the kiln; and used both to erect a new edifice in a new location. But, luckily for the revolution, your successes have not proceeded that far. We will find the means to make an alliance with the proletarian core of the party, with the working class, no matter how much you persecute us and no matter how much you try to fence us off. We abandon to you neither the Bolshevik tradition nor the proletarian cadres of Bolshevism.

★ ★ ★

By the way: a day or two before my departure from Moscow, I received a visit from one of the philistines of exalted rank, who wanted to express his sympathy and condolences in some way, or rather sought to compensate for his sad-sack, philistine impotence and discomfort in face of the ominous processes under way in the party and in the country. This exalted party man stated during this farewell visit that he considered all the policies of the Central Committee correct; as for the view that the party regime has its faults, "that," he said, "is true. And deportation is completely scandalous." That is pretty much how the brave official expressed himself. Of course, it must be admitted, there were no witnesses. When I asked him, "How has a bad regime carried out a good policy?" my guest replied: "You see, there have been isolated errors, but 'we' will rectify these things. Everyone, really everyone, that I have talked with," the dignitary confided, "of course condemns the Opposition, but is outraged by the deportations. We will get them reversed." I laughed at my visitor and spoke a few harsh words to him, as I recall, the same kind you have obliged me to use with you. "You won't get them reversed; in fact, tomorrow you will endorse the deportations, because you don't have any fight left in you." Naturally, that is what happened.

I recently received a letter from another, slightly less important "official"; this one, you see, complained that I wasn't keeping up an amiable correspondence with him. To be sure, he doesn't "agree" with me, he says, but that's not a good reason. Then he immediately changed the subject and began telling about the changes at the office and about how Ivan Kirylych had gained weight and was playing the violin.

One other "favorably disposed" official communicated her advice to me: "You only live once," she said, "so you shouldn't put up all kinds of opposition and get yourself sent into exile." The wives of the ex-Jacobins of the Directory period reasoned exactly the same way – though more with their hips than with their heads, it's true. If you tell this official, who is only going to "live once," that she stinks of Thermidor, she will recite such a lovely quotation from the collected works of Vretsky or Brekhetsky that Yaroslavsky himself would be moved.

And now you come along, you who in your way speak more "ideologically" and even with a certain elan, and at once you want to correct my ways by citing Dneprostroi. All of you – I say "all," because your names are legion – seem to forget completely that it is you, precisely you, who have sent hundreds of my comrades and myself to prison and exile. If you were told that to your face, you would look surprised. "Yes, certainly we voted for something. True, we didn't protest. But to say that we sent you – really, that's exaggerating." The party philistine prefers in such cases to play the role of Pontius Pilate, benevolently picking his nose. If hundreds of excellent revolutionists, sturdy, tenacious, committed to their principles, most of them heroes of the civil war, have recently been sitting in the same jail cells as embezzlers, speculators, and in general, sinister scum of every kind; if they are now warming up the old tsarist exile colonies with their bodies – then according to you it is simply a sad circumstance, an imperfection of the mechanism, a misunderstanding, an excess of zeal by the lower echelons. No, dear friends, you will not escape! You are responsible for that and you will have to answer for it yet.

We, the Opposition, are now in the process of training a new historic levy of true Bolsheviks. And you, through dishonest slander and repression, are putting them to the test, helping us make the selection. There are those who are afraid to be in the same cell with embezzlers and speculators. These are the ones who "repent," who confess their errors. For them the guards open the prison doors. Are these the best elements? Are these revolutionists? Are these Bolsheviks? Yet these are the ones who will occupy the posts from which authentic revolutionists have been pulled.

More and more a selection of conformists is taking place in the party. The Opposition is abandoned by skeptics, tired people, people of little faith, bargain-rate diplomats, or simply people overwhelmed by family problems. They swell the number of hypocrites and cynics who think one thing and say something else out loud. Some justify this with the argument of "state necessity." Others simply toil away in harness, poisoned forever because it is impossible to express their opinions in their own party. In the meantime, Yaroslavsky and the other gravediggers draw up the statistics on "Bolshevization." The real mass of workers, in the party and outside it, inwardly take their distance from the apparatus, keeping to themselves, growing bitter. That is the most threatening process, the main process, the decisive one. More than anything else the Stalinist faction is now working to the advantage of the Mensheviks and anarcho-syndicalists, preparing the ground for them in the working class. Trying to keep the workers tied to the apparatus by allowing them a teaspoonful of self-criticism once a year is a hopeless business. Only the Opposition, which fights to the death not only against Menshevism and anarcho-syndicalism – that goes without saying – but also against Stalinist centrism and the officious spirit of the apparatus, is able to express the needs and aspirations of the best part of the working class, keeping it under the banner of Lenin.

★ ★ ★

You are certainly aware of the Malakhov affair: for several years, this member of the Central Control Commission carried out thefts and took bribes in grand style. There are black sheep in the best of families, you will say. Undoubtedly, a philistine inclined to philosophize will always try to get out of a difficult spot with some familiar saying. I venture to think, however, that the Central Control Commission, as it was conceived, is too distinguished a family and the "black sheep's" presence in it was of too long duration for that explanation to work. Another thing. The entire trust of the Kardo-Lenta, at least the top officials, must have known about Malakhov's escapades. Surely those who were linked with him in daily life also knew about them. Or can it be that Malakhov had neither friends, nor relations, nor intimates in the Central Control Commission? In that case, how could he have gotten to such an elevated institution? He didn't fall from the sky, did he? There were those, then, who knew and who kept quiet, and they were pretty numerous. Colleagues and subordinates kept quiet: the first profited, the others were afraid. They were doubly afraid, because Malakhov was a member of the Central Control Commission. He could affect people's fates. That is why Malakhov was able to steal for so long and with so much ingenuity and success: precisely because he was a member of the supreme tribunal judging the morals of the party. That is the dialectic of bureaucratism!

And yet, you know, this very same Malakhov judged and expelled us, the Oppositionists? In between a bribe of several thousand rubles and an orgy in the company of speculators, he took part in the judgment against Rakovsky, I. N. Smirnov, Preobrazhensky, Mrachkovsky, Serebryakov, Muralov, Sosnovsky, Beloborodov, Radek, Griunshtein, and many others, and found them to be "traitors to the cause of the proletariat." Malakhov also expelled Zinoviev and Kamenev and, after their "repentance," pardoned them, and sent them to work at Centrosoyuz. What a turn the dialectic takes!

I hardly doubt that when Rakovsky or Mrachkovsky was being judged a traitor to the proletariat, it was Malakhov who made the most sanguinary comments. As early as the Fourteenth Congress, when I was seated at the presidium, I first noticed Moiseyenko. He had been placed in the first row with several other Ukrainian ventriloquists to sabotage the Leningrad Oppositionists' speeches with their shouts. I expressed the following hypothesis to my neighbor Kalinin: "I do not know why he (Moiseyenko) is so zealous; I wonder if he has something to be ashamed of!" At that time this was only a very uncertain intuition, a "working hypothesis," so to speak, but later came verification; it turned out that in fact, Moiseyenko, who enriched the transcripts of conferences and plenums with phrases from the garbage pail hurled against the Opposition, indeed belongs to the same Malakhovist religion. More than once, in the last few years, in letting myself be guided by the same psychological intuition, I have succeeded in touching the essence of things. If an apparatchik brays too arrogantly, lies, slanders, and raises his fist against the Opposition, in nine cases out of ten it is a Malakhovist bluffing to distract attention from his own guilt. That's the kind of dialectic we have here.

You have the audacity to argue that that's the way things are and that's the way they always will be. "It didn't start with us; it won't end with us either." Not so, good sir! We are the ones who started it. Or more exactly you, that is, the party regime that you support. It is the self-sufficient regime of bureaucratism, rude and disloyal. Do you remember who gave this definition? It was not some impotent moralist, but the greatest revolutionist of our century. A disloyal regime – that is the greatest of all dangers. Of course, we do not recognize immutable norms of morality nor those imposed from outside. The end justifies the means. But the end must be a class end, a revolutionary, historic one; for that the means cannot be either disloyal, dishonest, or repugnant. This is because disloyalty, bad faith, and dishonesty can temporarily bring very "useful" results, but they undermine the very basis of the revolutionary power of the class and the internal confidence of its vanguard if they are applied over a long period of time. Thus we pass from trick quotations, and the suppression of authentic documents, to the Wrangel officer and Article 58. Once again, what is involved here is politics, above all preserving the political "prestige" that has been shaken by a whole series of opportunist fiascos. Of course, in the Kardo-Lenta case, the stakes are lower and the means in relation to the end are different. But the Malakhovs from the Kardo-Lentas protect themselves by staring deeply into official eyes and saying: "Look, I'd give my life to help you, but you've got to look out for me too." The seeds of rudeness and disloyalty, if they are sown so methodically, will sprout. Whoever sows the Wrangel officer will reap Malakhov. If only the number were limited to one! But this harvest yields a hundredfold, even a thousandfold.

When you have thought about all this, and understood it all, we will be able to chat in a different manner.

★ ★ ★

Since you have shown so much interest in my situation in relation to the party, allow me to become a little bit interested in yours. You speak continually about the party and its majority. But the ideas that you yourself express are those of a clandestine faction. You accuse the Central Committee of taking the "Trotskyist" road in industrialization. This is the voice of the "Rykovist" faction, the right-wing faction. You assert that in agrarian policy, the Central Committee spoke the language of the Opposition at the beginning of this year. Those are the very words of Rykov. You think that such ventures as Dneprostroi constitute "criminal destruction of our resources." But it is the Central Committee, that is, its majority, that is responsible for these ventures. The extraordinary measures applied in the countryside have disrupted the smychka between the peasants and workers for years to come, according to you. Therefore the policy of the present majority of the Central Committee is worth absolutely nothing. In other words, you are openly undermining the party leadership. Only your undermining leads toward the right, in the spirit of the political people whom Stalin has begun to designate vaguely by the term "peasant philosophers." I do not know if you officially belong to this faction. But no adult will doubt that your letter is entirely imbued with the opinions and state of mind of this grouping and that it is completely oppositional, that is, right oppositional. You are a Rykovist. As a Rykovist, you attack the Opposition, but you are aiming at Stalin. As the proverb says: "Strike one to hurt the other."

How then do you picture future relations between the Rykovist faction of "peasant philosophers," deeply rooted in the country, and the Stalinist faction of the golden mean, which holds the reins of the apparatus in its hands? Stalin's secret polemic with Frumkin calls to mind the first steps in the struggle between the lefts and the right-center bloc. Officially, of course, total unanimity reigns. It is said that, as proof of this unanimity, the authorities even distributed a notice to the [Comintern] congress delegations explaining that the rumors concerning "so-called" differences within the Politburo were invented by the "Trotskyists." But that is only a schoolboy imitation of more illustrious models. In April 1925, the Central Committee sent all the party organizations a circular stating that the rumors of differences on the peasant question within the "Leninist nucleus" were put into circulation by the same "Trotskyists." Only by this circular, however, did the majority of Oppositionists learn that the differences were rather serious if they required disavowal by this means. The author of this circular, as I recall, was Zinoviev, who several months later was to sign documents of quite a different nature. Don't you think that here too history might repeat itself a little? A certain wise person once said that when history goes to the trouble of repeating itself, it usually replaces drama with farce, or at least introduces farcical elements.

It must be said that however dramatic the general situation may be, the rehashed statements about monolithism sound like a rather pitiful comedy, in which no one believes, neither actors nor spectators. This is all the more true inasmuch as the denouement is bound to take place not so many months from now. The faction of "peasant philosophers" is strong in the country, but it is afraid of the party and its proletarian core. It does not talk out loud; not publicly, at least. Up to now, the Thermidorians take this liberty only in private conversation or in letters; yours, for example.

I do not know if the fight will break into the open in the near future or if for the time being it will develop quietly within the monolithic bureaucratic regime. That is also the reason why I do not presume to guess what the "majority" will be at the next stage. Do you, on the other hand, promise to line up with whatever "majority" exists, even if this majority has disrupted the smychka between the peasants and the workers for years to come? Or do you intend to seriously struggle against superindustrializing, even at the risk of an abrupt change in your place of residence? Because the Yaroslavskys are vigilant. They have great resources in their hands, not in the domain of ideas, of course, but resources that in their own way are also effective, at least for now. They will try to strangle you, while in essence carrying out your policies, although only by installments. And on this path, against you or even with you, they could perhaps expect complete success if the Opposition did not exist. But it does exist. And you will have more than one occasion to see this.

★ ★ ★

You will ask: "But what are your conclusions, then?" We have explained the essential conclusions elsewhere; I will not repeat them here. But I will draw some partial conclusions here.

The regime existing in the party in the last several years has brought the whole party into a state of illegality, so to speak. The Stalinist faction clandestinely decides all the most important party matters. Your faction, Rykov's, also operates by these underground methods. As for the Opposition, it is not necessary to say anything. This whole situation is the reason why the Opposition exists. The only righteous souls who still adhere to legality, presumably, are Zinoviev and Safarov. But if these are the saints, then who are the sinners? So then, shouldn't we restore the ruling party to a condition of legality in a common effort? How? you will ask. Very simply: by giving the party back its rights.

It is necessary to begin by sharply reducing to about one-twentieth the party budget, which has grown monstrously, and which has become the financial basis for the bureaucratic arbitrariness that is dominant in the party. The party must have a budget that is strictly controlled and accounted for. Secret revolutionary expenditures should be checked each year by a special commission of the congress.

Preparations for the Sixteenth Congress should be organized in such a way that, unlike the Fifteenth, Fourteenth, and Thirteenth, it would be a congress of the party and not of the factional apparatus. Before the congress, the party should hear all the factions into which it has been splintered by the regime of the last few years. The whistle-blowers, disrupters, and fascists should by common agreement be sent to work on the new state farms, but without Article 58 being applied to them. Since there is still a good way to go before achieving a true liberation of the party, it is necessary to introduce the secret ballot into all elections leading up to the Sixteenth Congress.

These are strictly practical proposals. On the basis of these proposals we would even be willing to negotiate with the rights, because the implementation of these elementary preconditions of party principle would give the proletarian core the opportunity to really call to account not only the rights but also the centrists, i.e., the main support and protection for opportunism in the party.

Those are some of the conclusions that unexpectedly come from … Dneprostroi.