When I arrived in Petrograd in the early part of May, 1917, the campaign about the “sealed car” in which Lenin had made his way through Germany was in full blast. The new Socialist ministers were in alliance with Lloyd George, who had refused to let Lenin pass into Russia. And the same gentlemen were hounding Lenin for passing through Germany. My own experience on the return journey supplemented Lenin’s experience with a proof from the contrary. But that didn’t save me from being made the butt of the same slander. Buchanan was the first to set the ball rolling. In an open letter to the minister of foreign affairs (in May, it was no longer Miliukoff, but Teryeschenko) I described my Atlantic Odyssey. My argument culminated in this question: “Do you, Mr. Minister, consider it in order that England should be represented by a man who has disgraced himself by such shameless calumny and who has not moved a finger to rehabilitate himself?”

There was no answer, nor did I expect one. But Miliukoff’s paper stepped in to defend the ambassador of an ally, and repeated the charge on its own behalf. I decided to brand the calumniators as solemnly as I could. The first all-Russian congress of Soviets was then in session. On June 5, the hall was full to the brim. At the dose of the meeting I rose to make a personal statement. Gorky’s paper, which was hostile to the Bolsheviks, next day reported my concluding words and the scene as a whole as follows:

“‘Miliukoff charges us with being hired agents of the German government. From this tribunal of the revolutionary democracy, I ask the honest Russian press [Trotsky here turns to the press table] to reproduce my exact words: Until Miliukoff with draws his accusation, the brand of a dishonorable slanderer will remain on his forehead.’”

“Trotsky’s statement,” the report continues, “uttered with force and dignity, was received with a unanimous ovation from the entire gathering. The whole congress, without distinction of faction, applauded stormily for several minutes.”

And nine-tenths of the congress were our opponents. But this success, as subsequent events proved, was fleeting. It was one of the paradoxes peculiar to parliamentarism. Next day the Rech (The Speech) tried to pick up the glove by publishing the statement that the German patriotic Verein in New York had given me $10,000 to overthrow the Provisional government. This at least was plain speaking. I must explain that two days before I left for Europe, the German workers in New York, to whom I had lectured many times, together with my American, Russian, Lettish, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Finnish friends and followers, had given me a farewell meeting at which a collection was taken up for the Russian revolution. The sum collected amounted to $310, of which $100 was contributed by the German workers through their chairman at the meeting. On the following day, with the consent of those who organized the meeting, I distributed the $310 among five emigrants who were returning to Russia and were short of money for the trip. That was the history of the $10,000. I recounted it at the time in Gorky’s paper, the Novaya Zhizn (June 27), ending the article with this moral:

“To provide the necessary corrective for future occasions, I feel that it is pertinent for me to state, for the benefit of liars, slanderers, Kadet 1 reporters and blackguards in general, that in my entire life I have not only never had at my disposal, at one time, $10,000, but even a tenth of that sum. Such a confession, I am afraid, may ruin my reputation among the Kadet public more completely than all the insinuations of M. Miliukoff, but I have long since become reconciled to the thought of living without the approval of the liberal bourgeois.”

After this, the slanderous tales died down. I summed up the whole campaign in a pamphlet, To the Slanderers, and sent it to the printers. A week later, the July days were upon us, and on the 23rd of July I was imprisoned by the Provisional government on the charge of being in the service of the German Kaiser. The investigation was in the hands of practitioners of justice seasoned under the regime of the Czar. They were unaccustomed to treating facts or arguments honestly. This was a turbulent time, too. When I learned what the prosecution’s material was, I was so amused at its helpless stupidity that it took the edge off my wrath at the villainy of the accusation itself. I wrote in the record of the preliminary investigation of September 1:

“In view of the fact that the very first document produced (the deposition of corporal Yermolyenko, which so far has played the leading role in the persecution of my party and me, a persecution undertaken with the aid of members of the Department of Justice) is unquestionably a purposely fabricated document, not intended to clear up the case, but maliciously to cloud things over; in view also of the fact that M. Alexandrov, the court-examiner, has wilfully ignored the most important questions and circumstances concerning this document, the examination of which would inevitably expose the falsity of the evidence submitted by Yermolyenko, a person whom I do not know; in view of all this, I consider it morally and politically debasing for me to take any part in the procedure of investigation, while I reserve the right to expose the true meaning of the accusation before the public by every means at my disposal.”

The accusation was soon lost in the larger events that swallowed up not only the investigators but all of old Russia, with her “new” heroes, like Kerensky.

I did not think that I should have to return to this subject. But there is a writer who in 1928 picked up and supported the old slander. His name is Kerensky. In 1928, eleven years after the revolutionary happenings that lifted him so suddenly to the crest and washed him as inevitably away, Kerensky assured us that Lenin and other Bolsheviks were agents of the German government, were connected with the German general staff, were receiving sums of money from it, and were carrying out its secret instructions with a view to bringing about the defeat of the Russian army and the dismemberment of the Russian state. This is all told in great detail in his amusing book, 2 I had formed a pretty dear idea of Kerensky’s intellectual and moral stature from the events of 1917, but I never would have thought it possible that at this time, after all that has happened, he could have the audacity to repeat the accusation. But that is exactly what he did.

He writes: “Lenin’s betrayal of Russia, at the most crucial moment in the war, is an indubitable, established historical fact.” Who, then, supplied these indubitable proofs, and when? Kerensky starts off with a pretentious story about how the German general staff recruited candidates for its espionage among the Russian prisoners of war and shoved them into the Russian armies. One of these spies, either actual or self-constituted (often they themselves did not know), presented himself to Kerensky to tell him of the entire espionage system. But, remarks Kerensky with a melancholy air, “these disclosures had no particular importance.” Precisely. Even from his own account one can see that some petty adventurer tried to lead him by the nose. Did this episode have any relation to Lenin or to the Bolsheviks in general? None whatsoever. The episode, as Kerensky himself admits, had no particular importance. Then why does he tell it? Only because he wants to fill in his narrative and make his further disclosures appear more important. Like his informer, Kerensky simply wants to lead the reader by the nose.

Yes, he says, the first case had no importance, but then, from another source, they received information of “great value,” and that information “proved beyond the possibility of a doubt that the Bolsheviks were in contact with the German general staff.” Please note that “beyond the possibility of a doubt.” Next follows: “The ways and means, too, by which this contact was maintained, could be established.” Could be established? This sounds equivocal. Were they established? We will know presently. Let us be patient: it took eleven years for the disclosure to ripen in the depths of its creator’s soul.

“In April, a Ukrainian officer by the name of Yarmolyenko came to General Alexeyev at Headquarters.” We had heard this name. He is the decisive figure in all this business. One notes too that Kerensky cannot be exact even when he has no interest in being inexact. The name of the petty rogue whom he brings out on the stage is not “Yarmolyenko,” but “Yermolyenko.” 3 This, at least, was the name under which he was listed by Mr. Kerensky’s court investigators.

And so, corporal Yermolyenko (Kerensky refers to him as “officer” with intentional vagueness) presented himself at headquarters as a pretended German agent, to expose the real German agents. The evidence given by this great patriot, whom even the bourgeois press — bitterly hostile to the Bolsheviks — was soon obliged to characterize as a dark and suspicious person, proved conclusively, once and for all, that Lenin was not one of history’s greatest figures, but only a paid agent of Ludendorff’s. How did corporal Yermolyenko discover this secret, and what proofs did he submit to captivate Kerensky? Yermolyenko, according to his statement, had received instructions from the German staff to carry on separatist propaganda in the Ukraine. “He was given,” Kerensky relates, “all (!) the necessary information regarding the ways and means of maintaining contact with the directing (!) German representatives, regarding the banks (!) through which the necessary funds had been forwarded, and the names of the more important agents, which included several Ukrainian separatists and Lenin.”

All this is printed word for word on pages 295-296 of the great opus. Now we at least know how the German general staff behaved toward its spies. When it found an unknown and semi-literate corporal as a candidate for espionage work, it did not put him under the observation of a junior officer of the German intelligence service, but connected him with the “directing German representatives,” acquainted him at once with the entire network of German agents and even gave him the list of banks — not one, but all the banks — through which it forwarded its secret German funds. Say what you will, you cannot dispel the impression that the German staff acted with arrant stupidity. This impression is the result, however, of our seeing the German staff not as it really was, but as pictured by “Max and Moritz,” the two corporals — the military corporal Yermolyenko and the political corporal Kerensky.

But, in spite of his being unknown, unintelligent, and low in rank, could Yermolyenko perhaps have held some high post in the German espionage system? Kerensky would like to make us think so. But we happen to know not only Kerensky’s book but his sources as well. Yermolyenko himself is simpler than Kerensky. In his evidence, given in the tone of a stupid little adventurer, Yermolyenko himself quotes his price: The German general staff gave him exactly 1,500 roubles — the highly depreciated roubles of that time — for all the expenses incurred in arranging for the secession of the Ukraine and Kerensky’s overthrow. He candidly adds in his evidence (it has now been published) that he had complained bitterly but in vain about the stinginess of the Germans. “Why so little?” protested Yermolyenko, but the “directing personages” were deaf to all his pleas. Yermolyenko does not tell us, however, whether he conducted his negotiations with Ludendorif, Hindenburg, the Crown Prince, or the Kaiser himself. He stubbornly refrains from naming the “directing” gentlemen who had given him his 1,500 roubles for the breaking up of Russia, travelling expenses, tobacco, and liquor. We venture the hypothesis that the money was spent mostly on liquor, and that after the German funds had melted from the corporal’s pockets, without resorting to the banks of which he had been told in Berlin, he bravely presented him self at the headquarters of the Russian general staff to find further patriotic help. It is quite probable that on his way there he was picked up by some officer of the Russian intelligence service engaged in hounding out Bolsheviks, and it was from just such an officer that he probably got his inspiration. As a result, two views of life, so to speak, were lodged in the corporal’s incapacious head: on the one hand, he could not suppress his sense of injury against the German lieutenant who had thrown down 1,500 roubles and not a kopeck more; on the other, he did not dare forget that he had been initiated by the “directing German representatives” into the whole German espionage system, including all its agents and banks.

And who were the “several Ukrainian separatists” whom Yermolyenko disclosed to Kerensky? Kerensky’s book says nothing about this. To give additional weight to some of Yernmlyenko’s sorry lies, Kerensky simply adds a few of his own. According to his testimony, the only separatist Yermolyenko mentioned was Skoropis-Ioltukhovksy. But Kerensky is silent about this name, because his very mention of it would have compelled him to admit that Yermolyenko had no disclosures to make. The name of Ioltukhovksy was no secret to any one. During the war, the papers had mentioned it several times. And he himself did not try to conceal his connection with the German general staff. In the Paris Nashe Slovo, as early as the close of 1914, I had branded that small group of Ukrainian separatists who associated them selves with the German military authorities. I named all of them, including Ioltukhovksy. But we are also told that Yermolyenko had mentioned not only “several Ukrainian separatists,” but Lenin as well. Why separatists were mentioned, one can perhaps understand; Yermolyenko himself was being sent for separatist propaganda. But why mention Lenin to him? Kerensky does not answer that; and it is not through oversight, either.

Yermolyenko drags the name of Lenin in senselessly and without any connection. The man who inspired Kerensky tells how he was recruited as a paid German spy with “patriotic” aims; how he demanded an increase in his ............