Leon Trotsky: Letter to the Central Committee of the

Russian Communist Party

[Secret. True Copy. (File: “Party correspondence for 1919”, part II, pages 9-10) The Trotsky Papers 1917-1922, edited and annotated by Jan M. Meijer, The Hague. 1964, Vol. 2., p. 205, 207, 209]

December [25], 1918

To the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.

Dear Comrades,

The discontent of certain elements in the Party with the general policy of the War Department has found expression in an article by a member of the Central Executive Committee, Comrade A. Kamenskij, in issue No. 281 of the central organ of our Party, “Pravda”, The article contains a wholesale denunciation of the use of military specialists, they being “Tsarist counter-revolutionaries” and so forth. I believe it to be in the highest degree improper to designate persons who have been appointed to posts of authority by the Soviet regime in such terms. The issue has to be settled either on an individual basis or by Party action, and not by means of wholesale accusations which poison the atmosphere in the military establishments concerned and have the most harmful effect on the conduct of work. But in the article there are, apart from this, the most damning accusations leveled at me, although I am not directly named in it. Thus, it is announced that for the desertion of seven officers on the Eastern Front “two of our best comrades, Zalutsky and Bakay (evidently Bakaev)⁵ were all but shot, as had iu fact happened to Panteleyev, and only the steadfastness of Comrade Smilga saved their lives. It goes on to speak of the shooting without trial of the best comrades.

The Central Committee has already had occasion to hear inter alia a statement on the subject of the supposed attempt to have Zalutsky and Bakaev shot. The fact of the matter was as follows. On learning from third parties, from the newspapers in particular, of the treachery committed by some of the officers on the strength of the Third Army and going on the order previously issued by virtue of which commissars were required to keep a record of the families of officers and admit them to posts of authority provided it were possible in the event of a betrayal of faith to detain the family in question, I sent off a telegram to Comrades Lasevic and Smilga in which I drew their attention to the desertion of these officers and to the total absence of any reports on this subject from the commissars concerned, who had failed to keep any check or to administer punishment, and I concluded the telegram with a phrase to the effect that commissars who let White Guard supporters slip through their hands should be shot. It stands to reason that this was not an order for the shooting of Zalutsky and Bakaev (I was completely unaware as to which commissars headed the division, all the more so as it was not the commissars of the division that were the subject of discussion but those of the lower units), but I had sufficient reason to suppose that Smilga and Lasevic would shoot on the spot only those who needed to be shot. The incident had no serious consequences, apart from the mere fact of Lasevic and Smilga declaring in ultra-official language that if they were considered poor commissars they ought to be replaced, to which I replied by telegraph that in our army as a whole there could be no better commissars than Lasevic and Smilga and requested them to stop posing. It could never have occurred to me that a legend might arise out of this exchange of telegraph messages to the effect that only the steadfastness of Smilga had saved two of the best comrades from the shooting I had decreed for them, “as had happened to Panteleyev”. Panteleyev was shot in accordance with the courts’ findings, and I had appointed the court not for the purpose of trying Panteleyev, – I did not know of his presence among the deserters, nor his name – but to try the deserters who had been captured aboard the steamship, and the court sentenced Panteleyev to be shot along with the others. As far as I remember, there have been no other cases of commissars being shot that have taken place with my, even indirect, participation. Such shootings have, however, occurred in a considerable number of cases where there proved to be bandits, drunkards, traitors and so on among the commissars.

I have never heard of a single case of proceedings having been initiated by any authoritative body over the illegal shooting without trial of any comrade, unless one counts the statements of the Western Regional Committee of the Party on the subject of this same case of Panteleyev.

In view of the foregoing, I ask the Central Committee:

1) To declare publicly as to whether the policy of the War Department is my personal policy, the policy of some group or other, or the policy of our Party as a whole.

2) To establish for the benefit of the public opinion of the entire Party the grounds which Comrade Kamenskij had for his assertion about the shooting of the best comrades without trial.

3) To point out to the editorial board of the central organ the total inadmissibility of printing articles which consist not of a criticism of the general policy of the department or even of the Party, but of direct, damning charges of actions of the most damning character (the shooting of the best comrades without trial) without making preliminary inquiries of Party establishments as to the grounds for these charges, since it is clear that were there any sort of grounds for these charges, the matter could not rest at Party polemics, but must become a subject for judicial investigation by the Party.

Trotsky