Radek and the Bourgeois Press

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

That publication by a proletarian revolutionary in the bourgeois press is the exception and not the rule, that this exception must be completely justified by the importance of the circumstances — of that there can be no argument. But it is necessary to add at once: there scarcely ever have been in the history of revolutionary struggle more exceptional circumstances than those for which Comrade Trotsky told through the bourgeois press about the terms of his exile, its causes, the relations of the Opposition to the Soviet government, and so on.

Today, Radek enlists to help Yaroslavsky in condemning collaboration with the bourgeois press. We shall not stop to give examples from the rich past; we recall only one short episode which took place at the beginning when Comrade Trotsky was being sent from Moscow to Alma-Ata. Radek, who always had an inclination to move in the world of bourgeois journalists, came to Comrade Trotsky with the proposal that the latter write an account of the views of the Opposition and the reason for his being deported for the correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt [Berlin Daily News], Mr. Scheffer. Radek’s proposal was discussed by the leading members of the Opposition and it was unanimously agreed that Radek should bring Scheffer to the apartment to see Comrade Trotsky, who gave his statement to the German correspondent. In principle, this episode was in no way different from the appeal to the bourgeois press issued by Comrade Trotsky a year later, from Constantinople. What is more. If the use of a German bourgeois publisher was permissible in 1928, it was ten times more permissible to use an American agency in 1929.

But the point is this. In 1928 Radek still followed in the wake of the Opposition; in 1929 he is being towed by Yaroslavsky.