The Sixth Congress and the Opposition's Tasks

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Dear Friend:

Almost all of the newspaper accounts of the congress have been received. Still lacking are the theses of rotten Kuusinen's rotten report. Evidently, they are still mulling over these theses in order to give them a more "uplifting" appearance. The general picture of the congress is becoming clearer and clearer, but that does not make it more comforting. The cutting edge of the congress was, of course, not the eclectic, hastily worked-out program, which will need to be radically revised, but the resolution regarding the Opposition. We didn't expect anything else. It was clear to us that the leadership would attempt to seal its handiwork beneath the heaviest of "tombstones." Now this attempt has been made. The prediction has become a fact. Conclusions must be drawn.

I made some general remarks regarding the congress in the previous letter. Now I want to fill them out. Of course we're not speaking here of a thorough balance sheet. That task will demand substantial time from all of us, for it will be necessary to say everything that the interests of the Communist movement require but the congress did not say. Here I want to confine myself to what seem to me to be some indisputable considerations flowing from the central resolution of the congress on the Opposition.

What was the leadership's scheme in relation to the Opposition on the eve of the "era" of repression? To eliminate the Opposition with one swift blow. "We'll expel the leaders, a hundred people, then exile twenty, and that will be the end of it." A typical mistake for bureaucrats: overestimating the power of the apparatus to influence events.

There was an additional part of the scheme, one that was deliberately provocative in nature: to use repression and slander to bring the leaders of the Opposition to the point where they would make statements or take actions that, if only after the fact, would "justify" reprisals against them in the eyes of the masses of workers and would establish an impassable barrier between the Opposition and the working class core of the party.

Neither part of the scheme was realized. There have been thousands of expulsions, hundreds of arrests and deportations. But the end is not in sight, for the Opposition continues to come forward in speech and in print. The capitulations have had a purely individual character. From below there is an influx of fresh elements. On the other hand, even the provocation failed to work. The Opposition did not take the road of "ultimatism" toward the party, did not turn its back on it, and when the "left" shift was projected said: We are honestly ready to help the party, i.e., the proletarian core, turn this left shift into a correct Bolshevik course.

Then there followed the right turn of July, which revealed how totally unsound conciliationism was and which rendered completely hopeless the perspective of smashing the ranks of the Opposition and isolating its leadership.

These were the conditions under which the congress convened. In the debit column of the ECCI there were: the most brutal defeats worldwide, gross miscalculations flowing from the false line, the necessity on the eve of the congress to convulsively change policies in France and Britain in the direction of the Opposition, the two-way zigzag in domestic policy – as if on orders – exactly on the eve of the congress. (This February-July zigzag looks terribly like a diagram to illustrate the Platform of the Opposition.) An extremely unfavorable situation had developed for the Central Committee of the AUCP. Only a strong and authoritative leadership, capable of thinking about the future, could have reversed itself, i.e., reopened the door for the Opposition and thus corrected the mistake of the Fifteenth Party Congress, which had by no means produced the results expected. But the weak Central Committee, politically compromised, devoid of moral authority, had need of "strong" measures. What was extorted from the congress through the strong-arm methods of Bukharin, Kuusinen, and Manuilsky, a threesome personifying every kind of weakness, was in its own way quite symbolic. The reckless resolution regarding the Opposition – they were going for broke – is the very clearest expression of the weakness and ideological bankruptcy of the leadership.

There was one other circumstance calling for an "irreversible" decision. In the party and the working class a strong protest has been growing against the deportations, which turn the notorious "self-criticism" into half-comedy and half-provocation. The leadership, devoid of authority, wants something to hide behind in advance of this growing wave of protest. "Until the next congress," they want to say, "nothing can be done." Yet everyone knows from the experience of the past four years that when necessary a decision of a Comintern congress is more easily annulled than a decision of a provincial Soviet Executive Committee.

One question remains: How is it that the congress agreed to such a decision? And this question has two sides: (1) the composition and level of the congress, and (2) the situation in which it was held.

This is what they told the congress: The fate of the Comintern depends on the fate of the USSR, and the fate of the USSR is connected with the leadership of the ruling party; support this leadership to the end, close your eyes, and vote.

If the Sixth Congress had risen to its tasks and had taken into account the lessons of the Fifth Congress, when the Zinoviev group had already performed this sort of experiment on the Comintern, the congress would have understood that its task is not to save the "prestige" of any given leadership, but to help the ruling party reestablish a leadership capable of coping with the historical tasks. But this is where the question of the Comintern itself comes in, and of the level of the Sixth Congress. In what condition has it emerged from the right-centrist laboratory of the last five years?

From Pyatnitsky's report we finally learn that in the Comintern there are four million members. Of them, there are 1.75 million in the parties and 2.25 million in the Communist Youth. At first glance the figures don't seem too discouraging. But it soon becomes clear that of the total number of party members the USSR accounts for 1.2 million, so that in all the remaining parties in the world there are fewer than 600,000. In the Communist Youth in the USSR, membership has surpassed two million, so that in the remaining countries in the world the Communist Youth has fewer than 200,000. Thus all the parties of the capitalist world account for about one-third of the Comintern, while the AUCP accounts for two-thirds. The Communist Youth outside the USSR makes up about one-twelfth of the Communist Youth International. The last figure is absolutely devastating; the progress of the movement, the progress of revolutionary ideas, is always measured by the influx of youth. For youth is – no offense to the bureaucrats and philistines – the barometer of its class. If one keeps in mind the above figures on the Comintern and the Youth International, which have finally been stated for all to hear, and the degree of their thorough dependence on the AUCP, then it is not hard to understand how much the Comintern, with its present composition, is prevented from taking an independent position with respect to each succeeding leadership of the AUCP.

The fact is that the first congresses were immeasurably more independent with respect to the Leninist leadership than the Fifth Congress was with respect to the Zinovievist leadership, or the Sixth Congress with respect to Bukharin and Manuilsky. It is enough to recall that during the Third Congress Lenin, greatly alarmed, discussed with me (in a "factional" manner) the question of what tactics we would hold to in case we were to find ourselves in the minority at the congress on the basic strategic question of the moment. And this danger did threaten us. Now, Manuilsky runs no risk at all of being left in the minority. In order to achieve such a happy result, it was necessary over the course of five years to systematically disorganize and remove from power the leadership of the Communist parties.

In Germany the Brandler Central Committee was removed. Later, the Maslow-Fischer Central Committee was expelled. Both of these Central Committees were far from irreproachable. A leadership could have been fashioned out of them only by a process of long experience. Still, both of them were far superior to the Central Committee of Thälmann.

In France the central groups of several Central Committees were expelled – Loriot, Souvarine, Rosmer, Monatte, Treint, Suzanne Girault, and others. Again in France, a Central Committee could be formed only as the result of a serious party selection on the basis of the party's own experience and with the careful and thoughtful assistance of the Comintern. The present Central Committee headed by Semard is incomparably inferior to the ones which came before it.

In Belgium on the eve of the Sixth Congress an outright party coup was carried out, banishing from the party the founding group of Overstraeten, around which the party was created. Vujovic had told me that on the eve of the Fifth Congress everything possible was done to overturn the Overstraeten group: but it was so intimately linked with the party that even the Zinoviev leadership did not succeed with a coup. Now the Belgian party is shattered and Overstraeten has been replaced by Jacquemotte, who recently emerged from the Social Democracy.

In Italy the single serious leadership put forward was the group of Bordiga, the virtual founder of the party. How many times have I heard from so many of the current Poloniuses testimonials about Bordiga as a "true leader." Now "Bordigism" is said to have been "overcome," i.e., the party leadership has been shortened by a head, if not worse. In Italy, as everywhere, the bets are placed on the obedient and, consequently, mediocre bureaucrat. But the mediocre bureaucrat won't conquer the world. All too often what he worries about is not so much conquering the world as not losing his post.

And to think that Bukharin was incautious enough, for his own private reasons, to present to this very congress the quotation from an unpublished letter in which Lenin warned Zinoviev and Bukharin that if they were to expel intelligent, but not necessarily obedient people, replacing them with "obedient idiots," they would ruin the Comintern for sure. But the very plan that Lenin outlined in his letter, presented as a reductio ad absurdum, has now been carried out three-quarters of the way. Right now Smeral is one of the leading figures of the Comintern. The devastating experience of "Red Day" has shown what the Smeral leadership of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party is like. "What brought this person to us?" Lenin once asked me about Smeral, having in mind my close acquaintance with the internal life of the old Austrian Social Democracy. (I lived in Austria from 1907 to 1914.) "Smeral turned out to be a Communist," I answered, "only because during the war he, together with Renner, had placed all their bets on the Habsburg monarchy, not on a Czech republic. When the republic was founded nevertheless, he found himself in a desperate position in the face of national 'public opinion,' and so he bought a train ticket to Moscow." "That is very, very likely," Lenin repeated, in reply to my explanation. Smeral was tolerated as a temporary foothold. Now, a chief leader of the Comintern, he is expelling Rakovsky, Radek, and others. But he remains the very same Smeral, and events will show this to be so.

The provincial Social Democrat Kuusinen, who knifed the Finnish revolution in 1918 and learned nothing from the experience; Rafes, a former minister under Petlyura, now a "director" of the Chinese revolution; Martynov, who needs no references – these are the permanent central officials and day-to-day inspirers of the Comintern. The politics of backsliding are inevitably linked with reliance on lesser figures.

Thälmann, Semard, Jacquemotte, Smeral, Ercoli [Togliatti], and the rest, are aware of their own weakness, of course, and know that – as a result of the struggle for self-preservation in the AUCP leadership – the strong groups in all of the parties have been thrown out of leading positions and even out of the Comintern. The newly appointed leaders understand that they can hold on to their posts only by piling on the "extraordinary measures." That is why they themselves have a "material interest" in decisions which seem to be "irreversible." Here their inner weakness comes to the assistance of the present weak leadership of the AUCP. And the result is clear: weakness multiplied by weakness has given the Sixth Congress the false appearance of "iron strength."

Much was said at the congress about the disproportion between the political influence of the Communist parties and their numerical size. Insofar as such a disproportion exists (and it is grossly exaggerated, in order to disguise the terrible numerical weakness of the Communist parties) it does require explanation. The fact is that there is a fundamental disproportion between the tasks and opportunities of the Comintern, on the one hand, and the character of its leadership, on the other. The Comintern is living off the capital accumulated by the October Revolution. The pull of the masses toward communism is great (although it does not increase continuously, as the official optimists would portray it). Objective contradictions push the masses toward communism. But the false course, the worthless regime, the bureaucratic boasting, the unwillingness and inability of the bureaucrats to learn, the substitution of orders for ideological life – these are the reasons for the stagnation, even the outright decline in membership and, in many cases, in the political influence of the Communist parties.

The difficulty with which an authentic leadership cadre is formed is too well known. Bourgeois society rescued itself after the imperialist war, first of all, because the revolutionary movement had insufficient Communist parties and, secondly, because the Communist parties had insufficiently mature leaderships. Thoroughly false and simply stupid catch-phrases are now being circulated to the effect that the problem is not in the leaders but in the masses and that we are putting our hopes in "collective leaderships," etc. This way of counterposing leaders and masses has nothing in common with Marxism. The proletariat needed Marx and Engels and Lenin. No bureaucratic party collective of any sort could have replaced them. It took more than a week, even more than a year, for the Second International to produce such leaders as Bebel, Jaurès, Victor Adler, etc. It is not by chance that during the imperialist war, partly even before the war, people such as Loriot, Monatte, Rosmer, Souvarine, Brandler, Bordiga, Overstraeten, etc., came forward. It is possible to back them into a corner and cause them to make mistakes. But to replace them through Pyatnitsky's organizational department is an impossible task. After all, the overwhelming majority of the delegates to the Sixth Congress – i.e., the chosen of the chosen – came to communism (for the most part from the Social Democracy) after the October Revolution, and many of them in just the last few years. A majority of the delegates, 278 people, were present for the first time at a Communist congress. The policy of banking on the bureaucrat is supplemented by banking on inexperience, unpreparedness, immaturity, and blissful trust. All of this passes for "collective leadership." But over this atomized "collective" rises one-man rule, which bases itself not on representation of the correct line but on the apparatus.

By its policies and regime during the past years the Comintern has systematically cleared the way for the Social Democracy, helped it to consolidate, and rendered immeasurable services to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress [in Britain] and to Amsterdam. When we point this out, the perpetrators of this historic crime dare to speak of our "Social Democratic deviation." The Social Democracy could not wish for any better helpers than those in the present leadership. Following this course there is no way out. But the expulsion of the Opposition has only strengthened this course.

The "irreversible" decision of the Sixth Congress shows how far things have gone, how badly the wagon is stuck, and how deep the processes from below must be in order to drag the Comintern's wagon out of the swamp onto the road – through open, systematic, and uncompromising struggle against the official leadership.

Under difficult circumstances there is nothing more dangerous than illusions, than prettifying the situation, cheap conciliationism, or a lulling reliance on the "objective course of events." If the Opposition did not now render all necessary aid to this objective course of events, with all its energy, fully conscious of its responsibility, then it would itself become only a pitiful relief valve for the centrist bureaucrats, who are bringing the Comintern and the October Revolution to ruin.

A process of leftward movement by the working masses in Europe could be of decisive significance for the tempo of our successes within the USSR and, considered more broadly, for the entire fate of the proletarian dictatorship. We expected a right-ward domestic shift immediately after the Fifteenth Party Congress (see "At a New Stage" [in Challenge 1926-27]). That was a partial mistake of ours, one of a completely secondary character, within a correct overall prediction. After the party congress, on the contrary, a left zigzag ensued and lasted about half a year, although the zigzag in the international arena has not concluded, even now. The "leftism" very likely reached its highest point in February, as shown not only by the February editorial in Pravda but also by the decisions of the February plenum of the ECCI. There is a most immediate connection between the two. The first stage of the leftward movement of the workers in Europe has already made the Stalin-Martynov policy of "united front" impossible once and for all for the Communist Party. Regular praise on the part of the Social Democracy and bourgeoisie for Stalin's "realism" was embarrassing to the official Communist position. It became necessary to prove that the Opposition was not being exiled for being leftist. This sectarian and factional requirement coincided with the exacerbation of the grain collections crisis. A quick way out of this crisis could have been found toward the right, i.e., by beginning "July" in February. As we have said, that is what we expected, underestimating to a certain degree the difficulties we ourselves had created for any turn to the right. Moreover, we did not pay enough attention to the conjunctural "international" needs of the ruling centrist group, which were intensified greatly by the leftward movement of the European workers, especially on the very eve of the congress.

The leadership's domestic course and its international course in February were of the same kind, mainly left-centrist. In July came a divergence: the domestic course turned rightward while the course of the Comintern remained left-centrist, combining within it, as has been the custom, all of the gradations from open opportunism to ultraleftism. That is what the program is like also. The continuing link between the domestic and international courses is the deadly hostility toward the left, genuinely Bolshevik wing, which finds its expression in the crucially important resolution of the congress dealing with the Opposition.

The Sixth Congress, despite all the work of preparation, selection, and camouflage, despite the compulsory unanimity, revealed a deepgoing process of differentiation within its ruling stratum. In the period ahead this process will deepen further in connection with the general course of the class struggle and the leftward movement of the working masses. The "July" duality in relation to the domestic and international courses will loom larger and larger and become evident to all. The factional groupings in the Comintern will grow stronger, not weaker. All this will create a great receptivity within the proletarian vanguard to both our ideas and our slogans. The Sixth Congress has not concluded the history of the Opposition, but has instead begun a new and more significant chapter.

★ ★ ★

Our foremost responsibility is to understand that we represent an international current, and that only as such do we have the right to exist and to count firmly on victory. In connection with this it will be necessary, though annoying, to dwell on the latest discoveries of the ultraleft theoretician V. Smirnov. A letter of his, which is circulating hand to hand and which I received several days ago, has so much the flavor of unbridled Safarovism that one's natural desire is to dismiss it. But in the letter there are some points of principle which are deeply hostile to Marxism and require elucidation in the interest of those few, but nevertheless healthy, revolutionary workers who still follow Smirnov.

In his letter Smirnov attempts to scoff at my contention that the defeats of the German revolution, the General Strike in Britain, the Chinese revolution, etc., are "directly and immediately" – as he writes – reflected in our proletariat, intensifying the centrist tendencies in it. "How? In what way?" asks the bewildered ultraleft critic. It would seem to any conscious revolutionary, more so to a Marxist, that there just isn't any question here. For a long time our party trained the workers to consider the October Revolution a part of the world revolution, and to count upon imminent aid from the Germans and the British, who have a higher level of technology and culture. "Endure" and "hold out" – these were the kinds of slogans we had in the early years. In 1923, especially the second half, the expectation of a revolutionary outcome in Germany was at its highest intensity. Our newspapers, our orators, spoke of nothing else. To think that the expectation of a German revolution did not touch to the quick all that was most advanced and thoughtful in our working class is to look upon the masses with the arrogant eyes of the old radical student who in his soul thinks that only the collective-bargaining agreement interests the worker. In fact the very question of the improvement of the workers' collective-bargaining agreements in 1923 was connected with the victory of the German proletariat. The smashing of the German revolution was a most severe blow to our workers, weighed down upon them, put off their hopes for a change in their destinies until a more distant future. It intensified a narrow concern with local job issues, increased atomization and passivity, and allowed a regurgitation of chauvinism, Black Hundredism, etc., to occur. And in response to this (although not only to this, to be sure) there came down from on high the theory of socialism in one country.

The bloc with the General Council was long touted as a means of salvation. Purcell was elected an honorary machinist and many other things. The British General Strike again raised the hopes of our workers – and again disappointed them. All of this was a blow to the revolutionary consciousness of the masses in the most direct and immediate way. A deep psychological reaction affecting the masses becomes a political factor of great significance. Domestic failures – the living standard, the regime, the growing elements of dual power – are amplified by blows which are international in character and reduce the vigor of the proletariat as a class.

The Chinese revolution, as far as one can tell, because of its massive size, scope, and duration, once again seized our masses with the tensest expectations. Its horrendous defeat was a domestic catastrophe here. Though perhaps invisible to the superficial view, it was no less real a catastrophe for our proletariat. How can one fail to understand this? How can one fail to see it? How could one conceive of a revolutionary leadership that failed to take account of the deep molecular processes going on among the masses themselves?

Can it be, however, that the rotten leadership is a justifiable explanation for these processes? Only a fatalistic metaphysician who thinks that the leadership only "reflects" the processes at work in the masses could argue like that. The dialectician knows that the leadership, within very broad but still finite limits, affects these processes, can accelerate, decelerate, or divert them. This can be seen most clearly from the single fact that these same defeats in Britain, Germany, and China were the immediate results of opportunist leadership. The centrifugal processes within the working class, which have intensified because of these defeats, do not alleviate the responsibility of the leadership to the slightest degree; nor do they in the least release us, the Oppositionists, from the necessity of actively counteracting the hostile tendencies, i.e., from the obligation to swim against the stream. However, these processes also explain the temporary, but still rather prolonged, "successes" of the right-centrist, nationally limited leadership and the very possibility of the "triumphant" organizational defeats of the Opposition. On the other hand, only a clear understanding of the objective processes on an international scale (and the consequences of defeats become in the consciousness of the workers an "objective" factor themselves) – only that understanding can provide the necessary orientation for victory over centrism and the most rapid possible means of overcoming the present deepgoing centrifugal tendencies in the working class of the USSR.

To be sure, matters can in no way be reduced solely to the effects of the defeats of the foreign proletariat, which, as has been said, are causally connected to our domestic leadership. Our Platform and a series of other documents of the Opposition have pictured domestic social and political shifts in the USSR as being at one and the same time both the causes and the results of the ruling policy. Related to this is the problem which for the sake of brevity I tentatively designated the political mobilization by the right-centrist "head" of a "tail" consisting of petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic, and newly propertied elements (especially in the struggle against the Opposition), which would inevitably have as a consequence that the bourgeois "tail" would strike increasingly heavy blows at the centrist apparatus, the "head." Connected with this, in particular, is the problem of Soviet bureaucratism. Here too V. Smirnov, just like Safarov or Slepkov, tries to discover on our part a wish to hide behind the "imagery" of head and tail, that is, of this condensed representation, a kind of mnemonic device, symbolizing the class relations which we have already analyzed. In this he discovers an attempt by us to retreat from class analysis. Doesn't this border on buffoonery? After all, has V. Smirnov himself added anything, however small, to the analysis made by the Opposition – other than his own increasing "abstraction from the international factor"?

An exceptionally interesting and significant letter from Comrade Rakovsky to Comrade Valentinov dated August 2, 1928, is devoted to the question of the special mechanics of degeneration and the methods of leadership under the dictatorship, i.e., to internal, "superstructural," but directly decisive factors. In a word, this letter maps out for investigation some topics of exceptional importance.

The point is, however, that the domestic processes in our country since the end of the civil war have been evolutionary in character. The accumulating changes have taken place more or less unnoticed. The upheavals in the world were, on the one hand, shocks that revealed or disclosed "all at once" the changes that had taken place, including ideological changes; on the other hand, those shocks greatly accelerated or decelerated the pace of change. In order to understand the dialectical interaction between "internal" and "external" factors, it is enough to imagine what impact a war would have on our internal relations, what political shifts it would disclose, and what realignments of forces it would produce.

The history of the Democratic Centralism group, which in its majority consists of staunch revolutionaries, has its own "dialectic." Separated from the Opposition and compelled to turn in upon itself ideologically, because of the inadequacy of its leadership forces, it began to turn its back on international questions. Some of its representatives directly accused us of "distracting" people's attention from domestic problems to Chinese questions.

So the theoreticians of the group, having fallen into introversion and sectarianism, are, as the German expression goes, trying to make a virtue of their own misfortune. Now V. Smirnov has gone so far as to refuse to understand how and in what way the defeats of the international proletariat can have an effect on our proletariat, i.e., he refuses to understand why major revolutionary, as well as counterrevolutionary, successes always produce powerful international ripples, why victory for a revolution in one country encourages revolutions in other countries and conversely. You can go no farther down the line of ultraleft nationalist narrow-mindedness. To top it all off, after backing himself into a corner, Smirnov has completely lost his spiritual equilibrium and seeks to find in a Marxist explanation of the processes at work in the proletariat a "justification" for centrism or the makings of a path to capitulation. This is already the purest Safarovism, though turned inside out. But we have already seen the outside and the inside of Safarov and found nothing of worth.

★ ★ ★

But let us return to more important questions.

As a result of four years of struggle we compelled the ECCI at the very last moment, right before the raising of the curtain, to hastily alter the draft program from one of a national type to one of an international type. At the congress Bukharin explained that the reason for this catastrophic (even if purely superficial) capitulation to the Opposition was the circumstance that, after all, for the first time delegates from Africa and South America had come to a Comintern congress and that this was no joke, and that accordingly the program had to be given African-American scope. It seems that Bukharin first learned from these newly arriving delegates that in the age of imperialism it is less permissible than ever to "abstract from the international factor." The world hegemony of the United States was also "noted," after a delay of several years, and mechanically included in the program. As with the history of all the domestic questions, this shows that the initiative for research on worldwide economic and political processes and on the interaction of these processes with the social and political shifts in the USSR continues to be the responsibility of the Opposition.

This means that we must get down to serious work. A proper division of labor should be carried out – in the sense of a detailed, concrete, day-to-day study of all the basic aspects of our domestic life, of the life of various capitalist countries, the colonial countries, their economics, politics, trade union movements, national struggles, militarism, etc. We must make proper use of our time to train skilled cadres for the AUCP and the Comintern. Accurate, well-organized correspondence with all the local areas, accurate reading of the newspapers, including provincial newspapers, with the aim of selecting materials on particular questions and from a particular point of view – all this will bear invaluable fruit. It will be necessary for comrades who have a predisposition for this or who have relevant facts to get to work on foreign languages. To be sure, this division of labor must have an international character. All "sentinels" should attentively follow unfolding processes and alert one another in good time.

Of course, even in exile this work must not have an archival or academic character, but must be intimately joined with the activity of the Communist parties and the struggle of the working masses. On every major question a firm Bolshevik notch must be made in the consciousness of the vanguard workers. Something has already been done in this regard, of course, on the questions of industrialization, the kulak and the grain collections, the bureaucratic regime, the events in Germany, Britain, China, etc. But life doesn't stand still. It is impossible to continue to live on interest from capital, as does the current leadership of the Comintern, which squanders the fixed capital of the Bolshevik Party. Intense, systematic, collective work is needed. Revolutionary tenacity must now manifest itself in such work, regardless of the unfavorable conditions. Without a correct orientation there can be no correct political line. Moreover, only a correct line will allow the Bolshevik-Leninists, on every major question that affects the masses, to make ever deeper notches in the consciousness of ever broader circles of advanced workers.

On the one hand, this work thus assumes the character of theoretical research in the very broadest sense of the word, i.e., within the reach, however limited, of the very youngest and least trained Oppositionist, and on the other hand, this work will acquire a propagandistic character, again in the very broadest sense of the concept, including militant agitation. At a certain stage theoretical research and propagandistic work must completely cross over into politically effective, i.e., mass work, or to put it differently, merge with the party and the working class. When and at what stage? Of course, this can't be predicted. In different countries at different stages. Our epoch is one of sharp turns. This applies to the workers' movement as a whole, and, consequently, to the Opposition – and to it especially. In order that we do not miss the moment when our ideas can be linked with a mass shift in the Comintern and the working class, it will be necessary to observe the basic rule of all politics, all the more of revolutionary politics: our voice must be heard on every immediate or general historical question which affects the interests of the working class.

In his concluding speech at the congress, Bukharin declared that the resolution on the Opposition signifies our "political death." These brave words are the product of cowardice, weakness, and a need for self-consolation. In politics no one ever took Bukharin seriously; he never took and never will take himself seriously; these "intimidating" words of his can be taken seriously least of all. It was not without reason that Zinoviev himself with great accuracy – he should be awarded this justice-called Bukharin a hysteric and stated that anything could be expected from him, up to and including the taking of monastic vows.

When Tseretelli was thundering at the Kronstadters in the early summer of 1917, I warned him that when some White general started soaping the rope intended for Tseretelli's own neck, it would be the Kronstadt sailors that he would call upon for help. As is known, during Kornilov's uprising this prediction came true with far greater accuracy than we could have supposed at the time.

The policies of the current leadership are leading to greater complications. The bourgeois Ustryalovist noose is being braided tirelessly for the neck of the proletarian dictatorship. When the matter becomes serious – and I fear that this will happen sooner than it seems – the best elements of the current apparatus will have to summon us to help. We forewarn them of this. There is no need to say that we will find our way even without their summons. All that is necessary is that the proletarian vanguard hear our voice day after day and know that in spite of the hysterical howling we are more alive than ever. It is also necessary at the same time not to allow ourselves to become isolated for even an hour from the centers of the workers' movement and to join in the life and struggle of the revolutionary vanguard. And for this we need to do continuous systematic work on ourselves and for others, on the basis of a correct division of labor and firm ideological cohesion.

Best regards, L. Trotsky