What We Intend to Publish First

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The press has already made it known that Comrade Trotsky has established a fund for the publication of works by Lenin and important party documents whose publication is forbidden in the Soviet Union by the Stalin apparatus and punished as a “counterrevolutionary” crime. Here is a list of the works that will appear first. This is by no means a complete list. But we hope to be able to complete it in the very near future.

1. Proceedings of the Bolshevik Party Conference in March 1917. This is a historic document of immeasurable importance. It portrays the positions of Stalin, Molotov, Rykov, and others among the present leadership on the eve of Lenin's arrival in Russia. These proceedings contain an unpublished speech by Lenin delivered on the day of his arrival at the last session of the conference. In this speech Lenin adopted an intransigent stance against the conference, threatening to break with its leaders, i.e., Stalin, Rykov, Kamenev, and others. In the years 1923-27, Stalin repeated almost literally all of the arguments he had developed during the March Conference in order to defend an opportunist political line and applied them to the German revolution,™ the Anglo-Russian Committee, and the Chinese revolution. Thus one can clearly see the enormous theoretical and political interest of this document from the historic past of our Russian party.

2. Proceedings of the November 1, 1917, meeting of the Petro- grad Committee. This meeting was devoted to the question of the coalition with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. Lenin and Trotsky spoke at this meeting. The proceedings contain the stenogram of a speech by Lenin of programmatic importance and catch the essence of two key speeches by Trotsky. It was in this very speech of Lenin’s that he stated there has been “no better Bolshevik” than Trotsky. These proceedings had already been set in type, but then, on Stalin’s orders, they were removed from the volume of proceedings of the Petrograd Committee for the year 1917. We have in our possession the corrected proofs with annotations by the leaders of the Bureau of Party History. We hope to publish a photographic reproduction of this remarkable document, which has been maliciously concealed from the International.

3. Proceedings of the Conference of Military Delegates to the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. This conference was devoted to a discussion of the fundamental questions of military policy and organization of the Red Army. Opponents of Trotsky’s policy line, directed from the wings by Stalin, subjected the military leadership to severe criticism. At the time, Trotsky was at the front. Lenin intervened in order to resolutely defend Trotsky’s military policy. All this adequately explains why the proceedings of this historic session are hidden both from the International and the CPSU.

4. Correspondence of Lenin, Trotsky, and others active in military work during the civil war — and after it, on economic questions, etc. Although Lenin’s notes and rough drafts of an incidental character, which are often devoid of political importance, are published, his letters from the time of the civil war are carefully hidden from the party because, on the basis of these letters, one could determine with certainty the relative importance and political role of many of the present leaders. There are countless letters of this sort. We hope to publish several hundred of them in the very near future as well as Lenin’s notes and telegrams, along with the necessary commentary.

5. Lenin’s letters on the nationalities question, directed against Stalin’s national policy.

6. Lenin’s letters on the questions of the monopoly of foreign trade, the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), etc. All of these letters are either clearly directed against Stalin’s political line, or else strike at the roots of the legends about “Trotskyism” created by Stalin.

7. Speeches and fragments of speeches by delegates to the Fifteenth Congress, censored from the proceedings by the Stalinists for the simple reason that the majority of these speeches constitute a total justification (devastating to Stalin) of the correctness of the Opposition’s point of view on the Chinese question and others.

8. Articles and speeches by Stalin 1917-23, suppressed by Stalin himself after 1923.

These are the first of our projected publications. They will run to several hundred pages. But this is only the beginning. From friends in the USSR we hope to receive supplementary documents, which we will discuss in due time. These publications will appear in Russian and in the principal languages of the world.