Now I am approaching the last period of my collaboration with Lenin, a period deriving further importance from the fact that it contained the foundations of the subsequent victory of the epigones. After the death of Lenin, a complicated and many-branched organization of an historical and literary nature was established for the sole purpose of distorting the history of our mutual relations. It has been done chiefly by painting a picture of a constant struggle between two “principles,” by isolating from the past the moments when we disagreed, by making a great deal out of individual polemical expressions, and most of all, by sheer invention. The history of the church as written down by the medieval apologists is a model of scientific treatment compared with the historical investigations of the epigones. Their work was somewhat facilitated by the fact that when I disagreed with Lenin, I mentioned it aloud, and, when I thought it necessary, even appealed to the party. Whereas the epigones, when they disagreed with Lenin, which happened much more often than in my case, usually either kept silent about it, or, like Stalin, sulked and hid away for a few days in the country, somewhere near Moscow.
In most cases, the decisions that Lenin and I arrived at independently of each other were identical in all essentials. A few words would bring about a mutual understanding. When I thought the decision of the Politbureau or of the Soviet of People’s Commissaries might turn out wrong, I would send Lenin a brief note on a slip of paper. He would answer: “Absolutely right. Submit your proposal.” Sometimes he would send me an inquiry whether I agreed with his proposal, and a demand that I speak in his support. Time and again he would arrange with me by telephone the manner in which some matter was to be handled, and if it was important he would insist: “Please come without fall.” In cases where we worked hand in hand — the usual thing with us on questions of principle — those who were dissatisfied with the decision, among them the present epigones, remained silent. Many a time Stalin, Zinoviev, or Kamenev disagreed with me on some question of great importance, but as soon as they learned that Lenin shared my opinion they lapsed into silence. We may regard the readiness of the “disciples” to renounce their own ideas in favor of Lenin’s in any way we choose, but this readiness clearly contained no guarantee that without Lenin they were capable of arriving at the same conclusions. In this book my disagreements with Lenin assume an importance that they never actually had. There are two reasons for this: our disagreements were the exception and as such attracted attention; after Lenin’s death they were magnified by the epigones to astronomic proportions and became an independent political factor in no way connected with either of us.
In a separate chapter, I gave a detailed account of my disagreements with Lenin in regard to the Brest-Litovsk peace. Now I will mention another disagreement that set us against each other for a couple of months at the close of 1920, on the very eve of the transition to the New Economic Policy.
One cannot deny that the so-called discussion of trades-unions clouded our relationship for some time. Each of us was too much the revolutionary and too much the politician to be able or even to want to separate the personal from the general. It was during that discussion that Stalin and Zinoviev were given what one might call their legal opportunity to bring their struggle against me out into the open. They strained every effort to take full advantage of the situation. It was for them a rehearsal of their future campaign against “Trotskyism.” But it was just this aspect of the thing that disturbed Lenin most, and he tried in every way to paralyze it.
The political content of the discussion has had so much refuse heaped upon it that I do not envy the historian of the future who tries to get to the truth of the matter. Long after the event, that is, after Lenin died, the epigones discovered that my stand at that time was one of “under — appreciation of the peasantry,” and one almost hostile toward the New Economic Policy. This was really the basis of all the subsequent attacks on me. In point of fact, of course, the roots of the discussion were quite the opposite, and to unmask this fact, I must go back a little way.
In the fall of 1919, when 60% of our locomotives were “diseased,” it was thought that by the spring of 1920 the figure would inevitably rise to 75%. That was the expressed opinion of our best experts. Under such conditions, the railway traffic was be coming a senseless affair, because the 25% of locomotives in half-health was only enough for the transport needs of the railways, since they depended on bulky wood for fuel. Engineer Lomonosov, who was actually in charge of the transport system during those months, made a diagram of the locomotive epidemic for the government. Indicating a mathematical point in the year1920, he declared: “Here comes death.”
“What is to be done then?” asked Lenin.
“There are no such things as miracles,” Lomonosov replied. “Even the Bolsheviks cannot perform miracles.” We looked at each other, all the more depressed because none of us knew the technical workings of the transport system, nor the technical workings of such gloomy calculations. “Still, we’ll try to perform the miracle,” Lenin muttered dryly through his teeth.
But during the following months the situation grew steadily worse. There was cause enough in actual conditions, but it is also very probable that certain engineers were making the transport situation fit into their diagrams. I spent the winter months of 1919-20 in the Urals directing the economic work. Lenin telegraphed me a proposal that I take charge of transport and try to lift it by emergency measures. I replied stating my acceptance.
From the Urals I brought with me a store of economic observations that could be summed up in one general conclusion: war communism must be abandoned. My practical work had satisfied me that the methods of war communism forced on us by the conditions of civil war were completely exhausted, and that to revive our economic life the element of personal interest must be introduced at all costs; in other words, we had to restore the home market in some degree. I submitted to the Central Committee the project of replacing the food levy by a grain-tax and of restoring the exchange of commodities.
“The present policy of equalized requisition according to the food scale, of mutual responsibility for deliveries, and of equalized distribution of manufactured products, tends to lower the Status of agriculture and to disperse the industrial proletariat, and threatens to bring about a complete breakdown in the economic life of the country.” In these words, I formulated my view in the statement submitted to the Central Committee in February, 1920.
“The food resources,” the statement continued, “are threatened with exhaustion, a contingency that no amount of improvement m the methods of requisition can prevent. These tendencies toward economic decline can be counteracted as follows: (1) The requisition of surpluses should give way to payment on a percentage basis (a sort of progressive income tax in kind), the scale of payment being fixed in such a way as to make an increase of the ploughed area, or a more thorough cultivation, still yield some profit; (2) a closer correspondence should be established between the industrial products supplied to the peasants and the quantities of grain they deliver; this applies not only to rural districts (volosts) and villages, but to the individual peasant households, as well.”
These proposals are very guarded. But the basic propositions of the New Economic Policy adopted a year later did not at first go any farther. Early in 1920, Lenin came out firmly against my proposal. It was rejected in the Central Committee by a vote of eleven to four. The subsequent course of events proved the decision of the Committee to be a mistake. I did not carry it to the party congress, which was conducted throughout under the slogan of war communism. For the entire year following, the economic life of the country struggled along in a blind alley. My quarrel with Lenin grew out of this blind alley. When the change to the market system was rejected, I demanded that the “war” methods be applied properly and with system, so that real economic improvements could be obtained. In the system of war communism in which all the resources are, at least in principle, nationalized and distributed by government order, I saw no independent role for trades-unions. If industry rests on the state’s insuring the supply of all the necessary products to the workers, the trades-unions must be included in the system of the state’s administration of industry and distribution of products. This was the real substance of the question of making the trades-unions part of the state organizations, a measure which flowed inexorably from the system of war communism, and it was in this sense that I defended it.
The principles of war communism approved by the ninth congress were the basis of my work in the organization of transport. The trade-union of railway men was closely bound to the administrative machinery of the department. The methods of military discipline were extended to the entire transport system. I brought the military administration, the strongest and best disciplined at that time, into close connection with the transport administration. This yielded certain important advantages, especially since military transport again assumed first importance with the beginning of war with Poland. Every day I went from the war commissariat, whose operations destroyed the rai............