Leon Trotsky: A Wretched Document

July 27, 1929

[Writings of Leon Trotsky. Vol 1, 1929, New York 1975, p. 198-212]

The capitulatory statement of Preobrazhensky, Radek, and Smilga of July 10 is a unique document of political and moral degeneration, and the Opposition can only congratulate itself on the desire of its authors to show themselves in their true colors. For the uninitiated, i.e., for those who are kept artificially in the twilight in which the members of the party and the Comintern find themselves, the “trio’s” letter can create a sensation.

As far as the Opposition is concerned, each of its members knew and knows that Preobrazhensky, Radek, and Smilga had long since shown themselves to be dead souls. Before the Sixth Comintern Congress the trio had engaged in important activity inside the Opposition, contributing to its internal purification, i.e., to the departure of its weak and accidental members. The surrender by Oppositionists who support the trio is certainly at this moment a trump card in the hands of the apparatus. The functionaries, the idle windbags, and guttersnipes speak of “the collapse of the Trotskyist Opposition.” Yaroslavsky speaks of “the twilight” of Trotskyism. Three, even four years ago, the death of Trotskyism was recorded. Then came its destruction. Then, in Molotov’s immortal phrase, “the coffin” and “[nailing down] the lid” of Trotskyism. Now it’s back to the twilight of Trotskyism and its disintegration. And this after the death, after the coffin, and after the lid! There is an old popular saying which says: Anyone buried who is alive lives a long time. This saying is highly pertinent.

But what do you make of the tens or hundreds who capitulated? It would have been surprising had there been none. Eighteen months ago, according to Yaroslavsky’s statistics, about twelve thousand Oppositionists were expelled. In the speech he made after the July plenum last year, Stalin gave approximately this account: ten thousand Trotskyists were expelled; let us admit that double this number still remain in the party. .After that, expulsions did not stop for a single day. All told, at least fifteen to twenty thousand must have been expelled from the CPSU. Among them were not a few accidental, young, and immature elements. Also not a few old, worn-out elements. Deported, the members of the Opposition find themselves in terrible conditions of most complete isolation. Their families are in a state of total destitution. Ideological separation, political isolation, and material oppression cannot fail to provoke their effects of decomposition, and the “authoritative” trio is palmed off as the ready-made formula of this decomposition. What is there surprising in their getting some hundreds of signatures — even some thousands? It is only in this way that the selection and political tempering of revolutionaries is produced.

We don’t see under the trio’s letter the signatures of Rakovsky, Mrachkovsky, Beloborodov, Sosnovsky, Muralov, Kasparova, Boguslavsky, Rafail, and many other lesser-known comrades who in fact were the real leaders of the Opposition. It is possible, obviously, that there were other individuals who left. It is possible that there were also tens and hundreds more signatures. All that will only delay for a time the Opposition’s struggle; it will not stop it. A long time ago, we declared we were conducting a long-term policy. Now — more than ever — we are sure of this. For a long time the “trio” needed only the opportunity to renounce their past and to move over to the positions of Zinoviev, but with the possibility of saving face. The USSR’s new five-year plan supplied the bridge to the trio for retreat from Marxist positions.

The capitulators began by asserting that “the concrete figures of the five-year plan” in themselves express the program of socialist construction. That is the point of departure taken in this letter, its guiding thought, its one and only argument.

For six years we had waged a pitiless struggle against Stalin’s centrist faction on the fundamental questions of world proletarian revolution: socialism in one country; the independence of the class party of the proletariat or a workers’ and peasants’ government; the policy of “the bloc of four classes”; the united front with strikers or with strikebreakers; the danger of Thermidor and its connection with the progress of the workers' international movement and the orientation of the Comintern leadership, etc., etc. However, all this is surrendered and is replaced by “the concrete figures of the five-year plan.”

There is absolutely no doubt: the new five-year plan presents an attempt to express in figures the Opposition’s criticism, and thereby to weaken it. In this sense, the five-year plan presents a kind of zigzag towards the Opposition, like the resolution on party democracy. But one would have to be a political simpleton to think the question is resolved even one part in a hundred or even one part in a thousand because of the circumstance that in counterbalance to the old five-year plan opposed to “Trotskyism” and “superindustrialization,” the same functionaries have now put together a new five-year plan built on principles condemned as “superindustrialization” and directed — in. a new direction — against the Right.

Till now, we had thought all five-year plans were valuable insofar as their roots lay in correct methods of economic leadership, particularly in the political leadership of the party and the Comintern. That is why, for a Marxist, what is decisive is the expression of the principled aims of the party and the party’s political methods, not “the concrete figures of the five-year plan” whose fate is still altogether in the future.

But let us admit for the moment that the five-year plan is really the expression of the self-styled general line, that it won't be canceled tomorrow but will actually come into being. That would only mean that as a result of six years of merciless struggle, rejecting any capitulation, the Opposition has imposed on the party leadership a more correct projection of economic work. On pages 30 and 31 of our platform, printed illegally, was to be found a criticism of the first five-year plan, which really expressed the Stalin-Bukharin line. But in order to reach an understanding of the ABC of the question, i.e., the decisive role of the rate of industrialization, there was needed the courageous struggle of the Opposition — with its illegal meetings, print shop, and demonstrations against the arrest, physical attacks, and deportation of Bolshevik-Leninists. “The concrete figures” of the new Stalinist five-year plan turn out to be a secondary product of this struggle. If Radek, Smilga, and Preobrazhensky deny their past, if they withdraw their signatures to this same platform which engendered the Stalinist five-year plan, it is because they are politically bankrupt.

“The Fifteenth Party Congress was correct,” write the capitulators, “to condemn the platform.” The learned economists and politicians are trying with all their might to destroy the roots which gave birth to the five-year plan. This is not new. Once Krylov told in a fable of an economist (or could it have been of a naturalist?) who in a certain year had a great liking for concrete acorns (“I don't get fat on them”) but thought they had nothing to do with roots and oak trunks — they were even a hindrance on the road to socialist construction. But that was really all about acorns whereas, in regard to the five-year plan, the better case, the question is about the statistical shell.

But what if tomorrow there is a turn to the right? Who will resist it? “The party”? That is too unconcrete. The party as a whole has twice undergone in silence a change of line which, on each occasion, was announced to it administratively (or, if you prefer, the party gave its answer through the Opposition). But who would have expressed resistance and led it, if the capitulators had succeeded in breaking up the Opposition? What could have given flavor to the salt if it had lost its saltiness? Tomorrow the salt will be more necessary than yesterday.

With Stalin and Yaroslavsky, the trio “condemns” the publication of my articles in the bourgeois press. To the whole world, to the face of friend and foe, I said the Stalinists lie when they dare to accuse the Opposition of counterrevolution. I said the Opposition defends the October Revolution to the last drop of its blood. The whole world knows this now, and draws its own conclusions. Yaroslavsky declares in this connection that I work hand in hand with Chamberlain. The Radeks, tumbling down the stairs, howl in their weak voices with the Yaroslavskys. But the facts bring their confirmations. The bourgeois governments of all Europe have refused me a visa; not only Chamberlain but also MacDonald. The Soviet diplomats, defending the interests of the Stalinist faction, make a bloc with the capitalist diplomats and police to make my stay in any of the countries of Europe impossible. That is the political reality, which has a much deeper significance than questionable figures. Stalin’s bloc, his united front with Stresemann, with the German police, with Hermann Mueller, with Hilferding, with the Norwegian conservatives, with the French bourgeois republicans, with MacDonald and Thomas, with the British Intelligence Service, this united front against me, and in my person against the Opposition, is the incontestable reality, is the symbolic expression of the political groupings in the world arena. He who, in face of these facts, howls with Yaroslavsky on the subject of the bourgeois press deserves only contempt.

The central question is not the figures of the bureaucratic five- year plan themselves but the question of the party as the main weapon of the proletariat. The party regime is not something autonomous: it expresses and reinforces the party’s political line. It corrects itself or degenerates, depending on the extent to which the political line corresponds to the objective historical situation. In this sense, the party regime is, for a Marxist, an indispensable control over the political line, now called the “general line” in order to show it is not the line of the party but of the general secretary.

Where does the “trio” of capitulators stand in face of the present party regime? They are well satisfied. They “support the struggle against bureaucratism in the apparatus of the government and of the party.” They support self-criticism — as against “the demand for the right of criticism put forward by Trotsky.” They reject the demand for “the legitimization of factions” and the slogan of the secret ballot which “opens the door to Thermidorean forces.” We heard all this from Yaroslavsky and Molotov three, four, five, and six years ago. The trio hasn’t added a word. Renegades are always distinguished by short memories or assume that other people have short memories. Revolutionaries, on the contrary, enjoy good memories, which is why it can be truthfully said the revolutionary party is the memory of the working class. Learning not to forget the past in order to foresee the future is our first, our most important task.

It is not difficult to show that, as they bow before the party, the capitulators despise it. The trio, as we have heard, is for self-criticism as against the abstraction of freedom of criticism. But is it possible in the party to subject to criticism the activities of the Central Committee? Is it, or is it not? Is this an abstract or a concrete question? Let the “trio” not pretend that it depends on the kind of criticism. We know it as well as they do. The limits of criticism inside the party can be broader or narrower; but it exists, it should exist, it cannot not exist in a party of revolutionary action. If you please, don’t shrink; we aren’t talking about that. We are talking about the decisions of 1928 on self-criticism in which there is a secret paragraph exempting the Central Committee, or, more exactly, the upper strata of the Stalinist faction, from criticism in general. The Stalinists think that in a party of a million and a half members, for the most part politically immature, the authority of the Central Committee must be beyond criticism. By the way, it was for this purpose that they crowded the party with politically immature people. We, the Opposition, think that under these conditions the “general” line is the line of the general secretary. The party exists only to support him, just as, for example, the trio now supports the struggle of Yaroslavsky and Molotov against bureaucratism.

The Opposition has put forward the slogan of the secret ballot in the party. The trio says this demand “opens the door to Thermidorean forces.” But this quite simply means that the trio admits the existence of such powerful Thermidorean forces inside the party that they must be feared! Can there be a clearer condemnation not only of the party regime but of the party itself? What, then, in the trio’s view, is the revolutionary value of the party if the general line is supported not by the goodwill of the party but by a regime of terror directed against Thermidorean forces inside the party? Is it not clear that the secret ballot, which is aimed against these forces, can be important for saving the revolutionary norms of the party? How is it this unfortunate trio does not notice the monstrous character of this argument? It is very simple: political stupidity always accompanies political degeneration.

The trio rejects the abstract “right of criticism” in favor of Yaroslavsky’s self-criticism. Very well. Was the Wrangel officer something abstract or something concrete? In any case, it was because Preobrazhensky, Radek, and Smilga together with us sinners demanded three years ago a struggle against the kulaks, acceleration in industrialization, and improvement in the party regime that they were accused of “concrete” connections with counterrevolutionaries through the Wrangel officer, who in fact operated as a concrete agent of the GPU. What is the relation between the Wrangel officer and the system of self-criticism now approved by the trio? And what will they say of Stalin’s attempts to compromise the Opposition through an agent provocateur, military conspiracies, and terrorist attacks? Or is that too “abstract”?

The trio teaches: “The demand for the legitimization of factions in the party put forward by Trotsky is non-Bolshevik.” Admirable frankness! As if it were a question of legitimization in general, of factions in general in the party in general. What can one do with former Marxists who have relapsed into their infancy? It was at the Tenth Congress of the ruling Bolshevik Party, in the extremely difficult conditions of the economic turn, that factions were prohibited. But it was precisely in the ruling party, precisely at a definite period, and precisely in consideration of the sufficiently liberal regime in the party, under the conditions of friendship between all the responsible elements of the party, that it was possible to proceed with a minimum of factionalism which, within certain limits, is inevitably bound up with the life and development of a party. What have the wretched epigones done? They have transformed the prohibition of factions into an absolute, they have extended it to all the parties of the Comintern, i.e., even to those taking only their first steps, they have raised the leadership of the Comintern above criticism and have put before every Communist the alternative: either bow down to some Yaroslavsky or Gusev, or — find themselves outside the party. And the results? Abused inside, ideological life emerges outside and engenders the appearance of the break-up of the Comintern. All the leading elements of the first five years are expelled from the Comintern. That is the fundamental fact, more important and instructive than the retailing of all Yaroslavsky’s stupid thoughts about “self-criticism” in his own words. The delegates to the first four congresses of the Comintern, i.e, the principal ones, the pioneers, Lenin’s disciples in all parties, are expelled from the Comintern. Why? In order to struggle — against “Trotskyism.” In essence — “Leninism.” But on this, the eloquent capitulators keep silent.

At this moment, the Comintern as a whole is composed of factions in struggle. The fact that the trio does not wish to “legitimize” them is of little importance, especially since the trio hasn’t had time to legitimize themselves, but only hopes to; that is why they have taken a horizontal position. There can be no doubt that after their admission into the party, the faction of three (each sector of the capitulators has its own faction) will whisper in corners, will break up while waiting for better days, and will have discussions with the faction of the Zinovievites, which has by now succeeded in reaching a more advanced stage of decomposition. Certainly, that will not prevent one or the other from supporting the “general” line, with all the surprises to come.

“The demand for legitimizing factions is non-Bolshevik.” The Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU as well as the Sixth Congress of the Comintern was right. That is what the trio teaches us. Very good. But the president of the Fifteenth Party Congress was Rykov, while Bukharin directed the Sixth Congress. At the time, both were in a faction. Is that concrete or abstract? Rykov, until yesterday, was head of the government. Until yesterday, Bukharin headed the Comintern. That seems to be concrete. Both were in a faction with international sections in almost all countries of the world. Did the CPSU pronounce judgment on Rykov and Tomsky? No; at the Fifteenth Congress they didn’t even speak about them. Did the Sixth Congress judge Bukharin? No; an ovation was organized for him. How are we to understand this? It’s very simple: it is concrete self-criticism as opposed to abstract freedom of criticism.

The trio claims, “We support the policy of the Comintern which is waging a merciless struggle against the social democracy.” How new, how profound, and, above all, how “concrete” this is! And what are we to say of such a struggle that has resulted in the social democracy increasing its numbers and strengthening its positions while the Communist parties lose ground and break up increasingly into fresh factions? All that is lacking as reply to our observation is for the trio to pronounce something abominable against our pessimism. As is known, capitulators in general do not invent gunpowder. They borrow snuff from Yaroslavsky’s snuffbox and pass it off as gunpowder. As has long been established, the optimists without parallel are the people who adopt a horizontal position, i.e., who stick their noses into the ground and sing with choirboy voices praises to the general line. But life verifies the line, particularly through parliamentary elections. The greatest verification took place only a few days ago in Britain. In a country where capitalism is gravely ill and where there is chronic unemployment, in a country going through great social upheavals and equally great betrayals by the reformists, the Communist Party collected fifty thousand votes against seven and a half million for the social democracy. That is the most concrete result of the Comintern policy during the last six years!

The whole Comintern policy is built today on the philosophy of “the third period, ''1 ^promulgated by the Sixth Congress without the slightest theoretical preparation in the press. There are no stupidities or crimes committed against Marxism which are not covered by the sacramental formula of “the third period.” What does this mean? We heard it for the first time from Bukharin’s mouth. Even the obedient Sixth Congress resisted because it did not understand. Bukharin swore that the CPSU delegation had unanimously instituted the third period. The congress surrendered. But to what? According to Bukharin, it turned out like this: till then the stabilization of capitalism had been conjunctural; now it was organic; consequently, the revolutionary situation was postponed to the indefinite future. But in the first report to the congress the illustrious expert in Marxism and international politics hiding under the modest pseudonym of Molotov declared, as against Bukharin’s schematism, that the third period was in existence — how could it not be? — but only for something quite different: the third period meant an extreme sharpening of the contradictions and imminence of the revolutionary situation. Although the Sixth Congress had appeared to be all for Bukharin, after the congress the Comintern was all for Molotov. That is the dialectic! I sent a letter to the Sixth Congress, “What Now?" In that letter I warned against unprincipled charlatanism on the indications of a revolutionary situation. I emphasized that as a result of the fatal errors of the preceding period we were passing through a new period of the growth of the social democracy. Consequently, after the entire period of revolutionary situations neglected and ruined by the Comintern, a period of preparation had begun again, i.e., of struggles to regain lost influence, to enlarge and strengthen it. To shout with eyes shut that “the situation is becoming more revolutionary every day," as did the unfortunate Thälmann at the Sixth Congress, means confusing the party and pushing the honest proletarian youth onto the road of adventurism. This prevision was confirmed word for word by the May Day events in Berlin. To be sure, after the inevitable hesitations and equivocations, Radek, Preobrazhensky, and Smilga signed my appeal to the Sixth Congress together with all the other Oppositionists. Who was right in this fundamental question? The Sixth Congress or the Opposition? The results of the British elections and the fruits of Thälmann's line constituted in themselves political facts a thousand times more important than the second (while we await the third) edition of the five- year plan. These are political facts of world importance, but at the moment all we get is bureaucratic shuffling of statistical forms. The penitents, however, keep silent about this as they kept silent about the shameful, adventurist appeal of the West European Bureau of the Comintern on May 8. This appeal follows entirely from the philosophy of the third period, according to Molotov and not according to Bukharin.

As befits all self-respecting bankrupts, the trio certainly could not fail to cover themselves from the permanent revolution side. Of this powder, there is an inexhaustible supply in Yaroslavsky’s snuffbox. What is most tragic in all the new historical experience of the defeats of opportunism — the Chinese revolution — the three capitulators dismiss with a cheap oath in which they declare they have nothing in common with the theory of permanent revolution. It would be more correct to say that these gentlemen have nothing in common with Marxism on the fundamental questions of world revolution.

Radek and Smilga stubbornly supported the subordination of the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang, and this not only before Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d'état but also after the coup d'état Preobrazhensky mumbled something vague, as he usually does on political questions. A remarkable fact: all those in the Opposition who had supported the subordination of the Communist Party to the Kuomintang have become capitulators. Not one of the Oppositionists who remained faithful to their banner carries this mark, a mark of notorious shame. Three- quarters of a century after the Communist Manifesto came into the world, a quarter of a century after the foundation of the Bolshevik Party, these unfortunate “Marxists” thought it possible to defend the Communists being in the Kuomintang cage! In reply to my accusation, Radek, as he now does in his letter of surrender, raised the fear of “the isolation” of the proletariat from the peasantry should the Communist Party leave the bourgeois Kuomintang. Shortly before that, Radek described the Canton government as a workers’ and peasants’ government, helping Stalin to camouflage enslavement of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. How cover oneself from these shameful acts, consequences of this blindness and stupidity, this betrayal of Marxism? How? With an indictment of the permanent revolution! Yaroslavsky’s snuffbox is at your service.

As early as 1928, having begun to look for arguments in order to capitulate, Radek associated himself immediately with the resolution of the February 1928 plenum of the ECCI on the Chinese question. This resolution described the Trotskyists as liquidators because they called a defeat a defeat and did not agree to describe the victorious Chinese counterrevolution as the highest stage of the Chinese revolution. In this February resolution the course toward armed insurrection and soviets was proclaimed. For anyone with the slightest political sense helped by revolutionary experience, this resolution offered itself as a sample of disgusting, irresponsible adventurism. Radek associated himself with it. Smilga was thoughtfully silent because what was the Chinese revolution to him when he had already begun to smell the “concrete” odor of the figures of the five-year plan? Preobrazhensky involved himself in the matter in a no less subtle manner than Radek, but from the opposite end. The Chinese revolution is defeated, he wrote, and will be for a long time. A new revolution won’t come soon. In that case, is it worthwhile quarreling with the centrists over China? Preobrazhensky sent lengthy messages on the subject. Reading them at Alma-Ata, I had a feeling of shame. What had these people learned in the school of Lenin? I asked myself several times. Preobrazhensky’s premises were completely the opposite of Radek’s, yet their conclusions were identical: both would have liked very much for Yaroslavsky to embrace them fraternally, through the mediation of Menzhinsky. Oh, to be sure, it’s for the good of the revolution. They aren’t careerists; no, they aren’t careerists — they are simply people without hope, exhausted of ideas.

To the adventurist resolution of the plenum of the ECCI of February 28, I had already counterposed at the time the course of mobilizing the Chinese masses around democratic slogans, including the slogan of a Chinese Constituent Assembly. But here the unfortunate trio rushed into ultraleftism; that was cheap and committed them to nothing. Democratic slogans? Never. “It is a gross mistake by Trotsky.” Only Chinese soviets, and not a penny less. It is difficult to invent anything more stupid than this apology for a position. To use the slogan of soviets in a period of bourgeois reaction is to trifle, i.e., to make a mockery of soviets. Even at the time of the revolution, i.e., in the period of directly building soviets, we didn’t withdraw democratic slogans. We withdrew them only when the real soviets, which had already captured power, clashed, before the eyes of the masses, with the real institutions of democracy. In the language of Lenin (and not in the mishmash of Stalin and his parrots) that meant: not jumping over the democratic stage in the development of the country.

Without a program for democracy — the Constituent Assembly, the eight-hour day, national independence for China, confiscation of the land, the right of nationalities to self-determination, etc. — without this program for democracy, the Chinese Communist Party would find itself bound hand and foot and would be obliged passively to clear the ground for the Chinese social democracy which, helped by Stalin, Radek, and Company, might supplant it.

So: when he followed in the wake of the Opposition, Radek missed what was most important in the Chinese revolution, for he defended the subordination of the Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang. Radek missed the Chinese counterrevolution, supporting the course to armed insurrection which followed the Canton adventure. Now, Radek jumps over the period of the counterrevolution and the struggle for democracy, keeping himself apart from the tasks of the transition period by the abstract idea of soviets outside of time and place. But in compensation, Radek swears he has nothing in common with permanent revolution. That is gratifying. That is comforting. It is true that Radek does not understand the motive forces of revolution; he does not understand its changing periods; he does not understand the role and meaning of the proletarian party; he does not understand the relation between democratic slogans and the struggle for power; but in compensation — oh, supreme compensation! — he takes no strong drink and if he comforts himself on difficult days, it is not with the alcohol of permanent revolution but with innocent pinches from Yaroslavsky’s snuffbox.

But, no, these “pinches” are not so innocent. On the contrary, they are very dangerous. They bear in themselves a very great threat for the coming Chinese revolution. The anti-Marxist theory of Stalin-Radek bears in itself a repetition, changed but not improved, of the Kuomintang experiment, for China, for India, and for all the other countries of the East.

On the basis of all the experiences of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, on the basis of the teachings of Marx and Lenin, having thought the matter out in the light of these experiences, the Opposition affirms:

A new Chinese revolution can overthrow the existing regime and hand power over to the mass of the people only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

“The democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” — substituting for the dictatorship of the proletariat leading the peasantry and carrying out the democratic program — is a fiction, a self-deception, or, worse still, Kerenskyism or Kuomintangism.

Between the regime of Kerensky or Chiang Kai-shek on the one hand and the dictatorship of the proletariat on the other, there is not nor can there be any intermediate revolutionary regime, and whoever puts forward such a naked formula shamefully deceives the workers of the East and prepares fresh catastrophes.

The Opposition says to the workers of the East: the machinations of the capitulators gnawing within the party help Stalin to sow the seeds of centrism, to throw sand in your eyes, to stop up your ears, to befog your minds. On the one hand, you are weakened in the face of the regime of an oppressive bourgeois dictatorship because you are forbidden to develop the struggle for democracy. On the other hand, there is drawn for you a perspective of some kind of dictatorship, cheap and non-proletarian, thus facilitating the future reshaping of the Kuomintang, i.e., the future defeat of the revolution of the workers and peasants.

Such forecasters utter treacheries. Workers of the East, learn to distrust them, learn to despise them, learn to drive them out of your ranks!

I have recently stated to the representatives of the bourgeois press, in reply to their questions, that in the event of war being forced on the Soviet republic because of the Sino-Soviet conflict, every Oppositionist will do his duty in the struggle for the Soviet republic. That is too obvious to dwell on. But that is only half the duty. The other half is no less important; it is to tell the truth about the party. Chiang Kai-shek’s provocation is the settlement of expenses incurred by Stalin in the defeat of the Chinese revolution. We gave warning hundreds of times: after Stalin has helped Chiang Kai-shek to settle in the saddle, Chiang Kai-shek would, at the first opportunity, draw his whip on him, That is what has happened. Pick up the check and pay it!

The capitulators not only renounce the platform; in passing they falsify it with a view to making capitulation easier for others. Thus, on the question of the workers, the capitulators deliberately falsify passages from the platform and pass them off as the official formulations. In the meantime, already deported, Preobrazhensky recently showed correctly that if the Opposition's economic policy had been applied from 1923 the situation would be incomparably better, as well as the situation of the toiling masses. This means not only the workers but also the overwhelming majority of the peasantry.

The road to a future rise in the economy passes in the present period through a serious, obvious, and tangible improvement in the material situation of the workers and not through bald bureaucratic instructions to raise the productivity of labor. The capitulators — especially Radek — always insisted in the past on this point in the Opposition's platform, more than on any other. Now they reject the very ABC of the Opposition the more truly to follow the analphabetism of Stalinism.

With complete brazen-faced hypocrisy, the trio condemns “the creation of the Soviet Bolshevik-Leninist center” which, according to them, is “another step towards the formation of a new party.” The indecency of this accusation lies in the fact that the three accusers were for years members of the Bolshevik-Leninist center. When they speak of the creation of this center, they simply deceive public opinion. The question doesn’t lie in the creation of the center but in its being proclaimed publicly. Of course, this step wasn't accidental. While the struggle was going on in the party, while hope remained that the struggle would be resolved without a split, the center faction had no intention of proclaiming itself publicly. But now the Opposition has been put outside the party, not only outside the CPSU but also outside the whole Comintern, and since the Opposition takes its tasks and obligations seriously, it can struggle to carry them out only in organized fashion, i.e., by creating a serious and competent faction. The trio speaks of a second party without remarking that, if this terminology is used, we have to speak not of two but of three parties, including among them the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Rykov, yesterday’s leader of the Comintern, Bukharin, and yesterday’s leader of the trade unions, Tomsky. Such short formulations are good for the newly born or for old people relapsed into babyhood. The question is not resolved by counting “parties.” We are dealing with the historical succession of Bolshevism. With the regime before which the trio crawls, the party will go through not a few splits in the future. Nevertheless, basically proletarian ranks gather around our banner. How bureaucrats count parties is a matter of tenth-rate importance. The historian of the future will say that the cause of Marx and Lenin was continued by the Opposition.

Of course, the pious trinity triumphantly announces that the main danger in the Comintern is “the Right danger.” The struggle against this danger, as is known, now assumes an administrative character. The Thälmanns, the Semards, and all their cothinkers gather to form and strengthen Right factions, the point of entry toward the social democracy. That the centrists now struggle in their own way against the Right is a fact we foresaw a long time ago. Right at the end of 1926 and at the beginning of 1927, when Radek and Smilga — precisely these two — more than the others opposed a second party, I warned them more than once: the Right tail will strike at the centrist head and provoke a split in the ruling bloc. The facts confirmed our prognosis. Now the impatient left centrists in the Opposition ranks clear off. They will do more harm to the Stalinists than they were ever of use to us. Good riddance.

We remain what we were. Every blow we strike at the centrists is a double blow at the Right. In the new Stalinist five-year plan we see confirmed the correctness and insight of the Opposition. Through the concrete official figures we see the face of tomorrow. The centrists will move over to the left only under our whip. That is why there is no reason to give up the whip in our hands. On the contrary, we have to use three whips. As in the past we foresaw the split between the Right and the center, so we now see an inevitable differentiation among the centrists. After its victories, the Stalin faction will enter a period of great tests, shocks, and crises. We shall continue to keep our hand on the pulse of the party. We shall point out the danger from the Right, not following the stupid bureaucrats, but two or three years in advance. We shall support every centrist step to the left, but not by softening our struggle against centrism, the main danger in the party. Our fidelity to the October Revolution remains unshakable. It is the fidelity of fighters, not of parasites.