Leon Trotsky: Letter to A. G. Ishchenko

March 17, 1928

[Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-1929), New York 1981, p. 64-66, title: “Pyatakov: A Politically Finished Man”]

Dear Aleksandr Gavrilovich:

I received your letter of March 2 yesterday, March 16. It's a new speed record. And here's the best evidence of that: your letter referred, "on the basis of Pravda," to Pyatakov's little letter of confession; yet we did not receive the issue of Pravda containing his letter until today. You speak of Pyatakov's deceitful and stupid document with indignation. I can fully understand that, but I must confess that I don't feel that way myself, because for a long time I have considered Pyatakov to be a politically finished man. In moments of frankness he told me more than once, with a tired and skeptical tone, that politics did not interest him and that he wanted to change his status to that of a "specialist." More than once I told him, half-jokingly, half-seriously, that if one fine morning, he awoke to find himself under a Bonaparte, he would still take his briefcase and head for the office, inventing on the way some miserable pseudo-Marxist "theory" to justify himself …

When you and I entered into sharp, but transitory, debate, what distressed me most was the fact that some comrades did not want to see, as it were, that Pyatakov is a political corpse who pretends to be alive and invents all sorts of slapdash sophisms to give himself the appearance of a revolutionary politician. Of course, some great European or worldwide revolutionary wave might bring even Pyatakov back to life; after all, they say Lazarus rose from the dead, although he already stank … In that event, Pyatakov, left to himself, would inevitably make ultra-left blunders. In short, Lenin was right again when he wrote that in a serious political matter Pyatakov cannot be relied upon [see Lenin's Collected Works, vol. 36, p. 595].

Of course, I do not mean to say that Pyatakov's defection, or Zinoviev's or Kamenev's, does not matter from the point of view of the development of Bolshevik ideas. I have never expressed such an opinion. Every individual who stands for anything represents a tiny counterweight, or even an entire pendulum, within the clockwork of the class struggle. I have had occasion to speak and debate with Pyatakov hundreds of times, in company as well as tete-a-tete. This alone testifies that I was in no way indifferent to the question of whether Pyatakov would be with us or against us. But it was precisely these numerous talks and debates that convinced me that Pyatakov's thinking, despite all his abilities, is absolutely devoid of dialectical force and that there is much more insolence than willpower in his character. For me it has long been clear that at the first test of a "split" this material would not hold.

It distresses me very much that you are obliged to devote such a substantial part of your time to pure office work. You are, after all, one of the youngest in our ranks and you very much ought to utilize the present suspension from real work for arming yourself theoretically. However, it's evident from your letter that you don't need this advice. What you need is free time, which is eaten up entirely at your office. How vexing it is! That your office is smoke-filled and stuffy is an additional outrage. If I were in your place, I would demand that the local Soviet executive committee, or party committee or Rabkrin [the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection], instead of jawing about rationalizing work processes in general, make the elementary improvement of forbidding smoking in workplaces during working hours.

I complained to you about not receiving foreign newspapers, and in your letter you responded to this. But just yesterday afternoon I began to receive a few foreign newspapers, first of all from Rakovsky in Astrakhan, but apparently also from Moscow. (I haven't yet gone through the past few days' mail properly; I have been absent for five days.)

You tease me with [stories about] the ducks, geese, and swans at Kainsk. Well, I just returned yesterday from a hunt for ducks, geese, and swans. I went hunting with my son for the first time since we came here. We went to the Hi River, about one hundred versts [sixty-six miles] from here. The hunting there was very good, although we went too soon; the migratory flights have barely begun. But the worst thing was the difficult physical conditions on the hunt. At Iliysk, seventy-three versts from here [forty-eight miles], there is still some sort of shrubbery, but beyond that stretches bare steppe, with saline soil in which only wormwood grows, or in flooded areas, reeds. Only Kirgiz inhabit these areas, the majority of them extremely poor. Our first night was spent, believe me, in the hut of the local representative of the Soviet meat-procurement agency Myasoprodukt. The hut was like a dungeon, with little windows barely above the ground and no furniture other than a felt mat. There were fourteen of us on a floor that was sixteen arshins square [thirty-seven square feet]. Right there in the room was the hearth on which muddy water was boiled for tea. The second night was spent in a Kirgiz yurt, even smaller in size, even dirtier, and even more confining. As a result I bagged only fourteen ducks in all, but to make up for it, I got a much larger quantity of insects. Nevertheless, I am planning to repeat the trip in a day or two, since the hunting season ends on April 1. But this time I will get a commitment from my companions to spend the night outdoors: it's immeasurably more pleasant.