In January, 1925, I was relieved of my duties as the People’s Commissary of War. This decision had been carefully prepared for by the preceding struggle. Next to the traditions of the October Revolution, the epigones feared most the traditions of the civil war and my connection with the army. I yielded up the military post without a fight, with even a sense of relief, since I was thereby wresting from my opponents’ hands their weapon of insinuation concerning my military intentions. The epigones had first invented these fantasies to justify their acts, and then began almost to believe them. Ever since 1921, my personal interests had shifted to another field. The war was over; the army had been reduced from five million, three hundred thousand men to six hundred thousand. The military work was entering bureaucratic channels. Economic problems were of first importance in the country; from the moment the war ended they had absorbed my time and attention to a far greater extent than military matters.

I was made chairman of the Concessions Committee in May, 1925, head of the electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board of industry. These three posts were in no way connected. Their selection was made behind my back and determined by certain specific considerations: to isolate me from the party, to submerge me in routine, to put me under special control, and so on. Nevertheless I made an honest attempt to work in harmony with the new arrangements. When I began my work in three institutions utterly unfamiliar to me, I naturally plunged in up to my ears. I was specially interested in the institutes of technical science which had developed in Soviet Russia on quite a large scale, because of the centralized character of industry. I assiduously visited many laboratories, watched experiments with great interest, listened to explanations given by the foremost scientists, in my spare time studied textbooks on chemistry and hydro-dynamics, and felt that I was half-administrator and half-student. Not for nothing had I planned in my youth to take university courses in physics and mathematics. I was taking a rest from politics and concentrating on questions of natural science and technology. As head of the electro-technical board, I visited power stations in the process of construction, and made a trip to the Dnieper, where preparatory work on a large scale was under way in the construction of a hydro-electric power station. Two boatmen took me down the rapids in a fishing-boat, along the ancient route of the Zaporozhtzi-Cossacks. This adventure of course had merely a sporting interest. But I became deeply interested in the Dnieper enterprise, both from an economic and a technical point of view. I organized a body of American experts, later augmented by German experts, to safeguard the power station from defective estimates, and tried to relate my new work not only to current economic requirements but also to the fundamental problems of socialism. In my struggle against the stolid national approach to economic questions (“independence” through self-contained isolation) I advanced the project of developing a system of comparative indices of the Soviet and the world economy. This was the result of our need for correct orientation in the world market, being intended on its part to serve the needs of the import and export trade and of the policy of concessions. In essence, the project of comparative indices which grew inevitably from a recognition of the productive forces of the world as dominating those of a single nation, implied an attack on the reactionary theory of “socialism in a single country.”

I made public reports on matters connected with my new activity, and published books and pamphlets. My opponents neither could nor cared to accept battle on this ground. They summed up the situation in the formula: Trotsky has created a new battlefield for himself. The electro-technical board and the scientific institutions began now to worry them almost as much as the war department and the Red Army previously had. The Stalin apparatus followed on my heels. Every practical step that I took gave rise to a complicated intrigue behind the scenes; every theoretical conclusion fed the ignorant myth of “Trotskyism.” My practical work was performed under impossible conditions. It is no exaggeration to say that much of the creative activity of Stalin and of his assistant Molotov was devoted to organizing direct sabotage around me. It became practically impossible for the institutions under my direction to obtain the necessary wherewithal. People working there began to fear for their futures, or at least for their careers.

My attempt to win a political holiday for myself was patently a failure. The epigones could not stop half-way. They were too afraid of what they had already done. Yesterday’s slander weighed heavily on them, demanding double treachery today. I ended by insisting on being relieved of the electro-technical board and the institutions of technical science. The chief con cessions committee did not provide the same scope for intrigue, since the fate of each concession was decided in the Politbureau.

Meanwhile, party affairs had reached a new crisis. In the first period of the struggle, a trio had been formed to oppose me, but it was far from being a unit. In theoretical and political respects, both Zinoviev and Kamenev were probably superior to Stalin. But they both lacked that little thing called character. Their international outlook, wider than Stalin’s, which they acquired under Lenin in foreign exile, did not make their position any stronger; on the contrary, it weakened it. The political tendency was toward a self-contained national development, and the old formula of Russian patriotism, “We’ll bury the enemy under a shower of our caps,” was now assiduously being translated into the new socialist language. Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s attempt to uphold the international viewpoint, if only to a limited degree, turned them into “Trotskyists” of the second order in the eyes of the bureaucracy. This led them to wage their campaign against me with even more fury, so that they might win greater confidence from the apparatus. But these efforts were also vain. The apparatus was rapidly discovering that Stalin was flesh of its flesh. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon found themselves in hostile opposition to Stalin; when they tried to transfer the dispute from the trio to the Central Committee, they discovered that Stalin had a solid majority there.

Kamenev was considered the official leader of Moscow. But after the routing with Kamenev’s participation of the Moscow party organization in 1923, when the party came out in its majority to support the opposition, the rank-and-file of the Moscow communists maintained a grim silence. With the first attempts to resist Stalin, Kamenev found himself suspended in air. The situation in Leningrad 1 was different. The Leningrad communists were protected from the opposition of 1923 by the heavy lid of Zinoviev’s apparatus. But now their turn came. The Leningrad workers were aroused by the political trend in favor of the rich peasants — the so-called kulaks — and a policy aimed at one-country socialism. The class protest of the workers coincided with the high-official opposition of Zinoviev. Thus a new opposition came into existence, and one of its members in the first stages was Nadyezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. To every one’s utter surprise, their own most of all, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves obliged to repeat word for word the criticisms by the opposition, and soon they were listed as being in the camp of the “Trotskyists.” It is little wonder that in our circle, closer relations with Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed, to say the least, paradoxical. There were among the oppositionists many who opposed such a bloc. There were even some, though only a few, who thought it possible to form a bloc with Stalin against Zinoviev and Kamenev. One of my closest friends, Mrachkovsky, an old revolutionary and one of the finest commanders in the civil war, expressed himself as opposed to a bloc with anyone and gave a classic explanation of his stand: “Stalin will deceive, and Zinoviev will sneak away.” But such questions are finally decided not by psychological but by political considerations. Zinoviev and Kamenev openly avowed that the “Trotskyists” had been right in the struggle against them ever since 1923. They accepted the basic principles of our platform. In such circumstances, it was impossible not to form a bloc with them, especially since thousands of revolutionary Leningrad workers were behind them.

I had not met Kamenev outside the official meetings for three years, that is, since the night on the eve of his trip to Georgia, when he promised to uphold the stand taken by Lenin and me, but, having learned of Lenin’s grave condition, went over to Stalin. At our very first meeting, Kamenev declared: “It is enough for you and Zinoviev to appear on the same platform, and the party will find its true Central Committee.” I could not help laughing at such bureaucratic optimism. Kamenev obviously underestimated the disintegrating effect on the party of the three years’ activity of the trio. I pointed it out to him, without the slightest concession to his feelings. The revolutionary ebb-tide that had begun at the end of 1923, that is, after the defeat of the revolutionary movement in Germany, had assumed international proportions. In Russia, the reaction against October was proceeding at full speed. The party apparatus more and more was lining itself up with the right wing. Under such conditions, it would have been childish to think that all we need do was join hands and victory would drop at our feet like a ripe fruit. “We must aim far ahead,” I repeated dozens of times to Kamenev and Zinoviev. “We must prepare for a long and serious struggle.” On the spur of the moment, my new allies accepted this formula bravely. But they didn’t last long; they were fading daily and hourly. Mrachkovsky proved right in his appraisal of their personalities. Zinoviev did sneak away after all, but he was far from being followed by all of his supporters. At any rate, his double about-face inflicted an incurable wound on the legend of “Trotskyism.”

In the spring of 1926, my wife and I made a trip to Berlin. The Moscow physicians, at a loss to explain the continuance of my high temperature, and unwilling to shoulder the entire responsibility, had been urging me for some time to take a trip abroad. I was equally anxious to find a way out of the impasse, for my high temperature paralyzed me at the most critical moments, and acted as my opponents’ most steadfast ally. The matter of my visit abroad was taken up at the Politbureau, which stated that it regarded my trip as extremely dangerous in view of the information it had and the general political situation, but that it left the final decision to me. The statement was accompanied by a note of reference from the GPU indicating the inadmissibility of my trip. The Politbureau undoubtedly feared that in the event of any unpleasant accident to me while abroad, the party would hold it responsible. The idea of my enforced exile abroad, and in Constantinople at that, had not yet dawned with in the policeman’s skull of Stalin. It is possible that the Politbureau was also apprehensive of my taking action abroad to consolidate the foreign opposition. Nevertheless, after consulting my friends, I decided to go.

Arrangements with the German embassy were completed with out difficulty, and about the middle of April my wife and I left with a diplomatic passport in the name of Kuzmyenko, a member of the Ukrainian collegium of the commissariat of education. We were accompanied by my secretary, Syermuks, by the former commander of my train, and by a representative of the GPU. Zinoviev and Kamenev parted from me with a show of real feeling; they did not like the prospect of remaining eye-to-eye with Stalin.

In the years before the war, I had known Hohenzollern Berlin very well. It had then its own peculiar physiognomy, which no one could call pleasant but which many thought imposing. Berlin has changed. It has now no physiognomy at all, at least none that I could discover. The city was slowly recovering from a long and serious disease whose course had been accompanied by many surgical operations. The inflation was already over, but the stabilized mark served only as a means of measuring the general an?mia. In the streets, in the shops, on the faces of the pedestrians, one sensed the impoverishment, and also that impatient, often avid desire to rise again. The German thoroughness and cleanliness during the hard years of war, of the defeat and the Versailles brigandage, had been swallowed up by dire poverty. The human ant-hill was stubbornly but joylessly restoring the passages, corridors, and storerooms crushed by the boot of war. In the rhythm of the streets, in the movements and gestures of the passers-by, one felt a tragic undercurrent of fatalism:

“Can’t be helped; life is an indefinite term at hard-labor; we must begin again at the beginning.”

For a few weeks I was under medical observation in a private clinic in Berlin. In search of the roots of the mysterious temperature, the doctors shunted me from one to another. Finally, a throat specialist advanced the hypothesis that the source was my tonsils, and advised having them removed in any case. The diagnosticians and therapeutists hesitated, being middle-aged medical base men. But the surgeon, with the experience of the war behind him, treated them with a devastating contempt. He implied that tonsils were now removed as easily as shaving off a moustache. I was obliged to consent.

The assistants were getting ready to tie my hands, but the surgeon decided to accept moral guarantees. Behind his encouraging jocosity, I could feel the tension and controlled excitement. It was a most unpleasant sensation to lie on the table and choke in one’s own blood. The proceeding lasted from forty to fifty minutes. Everything went off well — if one overlooks the fact that the operation was apparently useless, as the temperature set in again some time later.

But my time in Berlin, at least that spent in the clinic, was not wasted. I immersed myself in the German press, from which I had been almost completely cut off ever since August, 1914. Every day I was provided with a score of German and a few foreign publications, and after reading them I would throw them on the floor. The specialists who visited me had to walk on a carpet of newspapers of all shades of political opinion. It was really my first opportunity to listen to the entire range of German republican politics. I must confess that I did not find any thing unexpected there. The republic as the foundling of the military debacle, the republicans as creatures of the Versailles compulsion, the Social Democrats as the executors of the November revolution which they themselves had smothered, Hindenburg as a democratic president — in general, it was just as I had imagined it. And yet it was very instructive to be able to view it at close range.

On May 1, my wife and I went out for a drive around the city in an automobile. We visited the principal districts, watched processions, read placards, listened to speeches, drove to the Alexanderplatz, and mingled with the crowd. I had seen many Mayday processions that were more imposing and more decorative, but it was long since I had been able to move about in a crowd without attracting anyone’s attention, feeling myself a part of the nameless whole, listening and observing. Only once did our companion say to me cautiously: “There they are selling your photographs.” But from those photographs no one would have recognized the member of the collegium of the commissariat of education, Kuzmyenko. In case these lines should meet the eyes of Count Westarp, of Hermann Müller, Stresemann 2, Count Reventlow, Hilferding, or of any others who opposed my admission into Germany, I think it necessary to inform them that I did not proclaim any reprehensible slogans, stick up any outrageous posters, that in general I was merely an observer waiting to undergo an operation a few days later.

We also attended the “wine festival” outside the city. Here were hordes of people, but in spite of the spring mood, enhanced by sun and wine, the gray shadow of past years lay over the merry-making, as well as over those who were trying to make merry. You had only to look closer and they all seemed like slowly recovering convalescents; their gaiety still cost them a great effort. We spent a few hours in the thick of the crowd, observed, talked, ate frankfurters from paper plates, and even drank beer, the very taste of which we had forgotten since 1917. I was recovering from the operation quickly, and was considering the date of our departure. At this point, an unexpected thing happened, which even today is still something of a puzzle to me. About a week before my intended departure, there appeared in the corridor of the clinic two gentlemen of that indefinite appearance which so definitely proclaims the police profession. Looking into the courtyard from the window, I discovered below me about half a dozen men like them, who, though differing somewhat among themselves, still resembled each other remarkably. I drew Krestinsky’s attention to it. A few minutes later, one of the assistant-doctors knocked on the door and excitedly announced — at the request of his chief — that I was in danger of an attempt on my life. “Not by the police, I hope?” I asked, pointing to the many agents. The doctor hazarded a suggestion that the police were there to prevent the attempt. Two or three minutes later a police-inspector (polizeirat) arrived and told Krestinsky that the police had actually received information about an attempt on my life, and had taken extraordinary protective measures. The entire clinic was agog. The nurses told each other and the patients that the clinic was harboring Trotsky, and because of that several bombs were going to be thrown at the building. The atmosphere created was little suited to a curative institution. I arranged with Krestinsky to go at once to the Soviet embassy. The street in front of the clinic was barricaded by the police. I was escorted by police motor-cars.

The official version of the episode was something like this: One of the German monarchists arrested in connection with a newly discovered conspiracy made a statement to the court examiner — or so it was alleged — that the Russian White Guards were arranging for an early attempt on the life of Trotsky, who was stated to be in Berlin. The German diplomacy, through which my trip had been arranged, had deliberately refrained from informing its police because of the considerable number of monarchists among the ranks. The police did not give much credence to the report of the arrested monarchist, but nevertheless checked up on his statement about my staying at the clinic. To their great amazement, the information proved correct. As inquiries had been made of the physicians as well, I received two simultaneous warnings — one from the assistant-doctor, the other from the police-inspector. Whether an attempt had really been planned, and whether the police really learned of my arrival through the arrested monarchist, are questions that even today I cannot answer.

But I suspect that the case was much simpler. One may assume that the diplomatic circles failed to keep the “secret,” and the police, hurt by the lack of confidence in them, decided to demonstrate, either to Stresemann or to me, that tonsils could not be removed without their aid. Whatever the explanation, the clinic was turned upside down, while under this mighty protection against my hypothetical enemies, I moved over to the embassy. Vague and feeble echoes of this story later found their way into the German press, but it seems that no one was inclined to believe them.

The days of my stay in Berlin coincided with certain important events in Europe: the general strike in England, and Pilsudski’s coup d’état in Poland. Both these occurrences greatly accentuated my disagreements with the epigones, and determined in advance the stormier development of our later struggle. A few words on that subject should be included here.

Stalin, Bukharin, and — in the first period — Zinoviev as well, saw the crowning achievement of their policy in the diplomatic bloc between the higher groups of the Soviet trades-unions and the General Council of the British trades-unions. In his provincial narrowness, Stalin imagined that Purcell and other trades-union leaders were ready or able, in a difficult moment, to lend support to the Soviet republic against the British bourgeoisie. As for the British union leaders, they believed, with some justification, that in view of the crisis in British capitalism and the increasing discontent of the masses, it would be politic for them to be covered on their left by means of an official but actually non-committal friendship with the leaders of the Soviet trades-unions. Both sides did a great deal of beating about the bush, for the most part avoiding calling things by their real names. A rotten policy has more than once been wrecked on great events. The general strike in England in May, 1926, proved to be a great event not only in English life, but also in the inner life of our party.

England’s fate after the war was a subject of absorbing interest. The radical change in her world position could not fail to bring about changes just as radical in the inner correlation of her forces. It was clear that even if Europe, including England, were to restore a certain social equilibrium for a more or less ex tended period, England herself could reach such an equilibrium only by means of a series of serious conflicts and shake-ups. I thought it probable that in England, of all places, the fight in the coal industry would lead to a general strike. From this I assumed that the essential contradiction between the old organizations of the working class and its new historical tasks would of course be revealed in the near future. During the winter and spring of 1925, while I was in the Caucasus, I wrote a book on this — Whither England? The book was aimed essentially at the official conception of the Politbureau, with its hope of an evolution to the left by the British General Council, and of a gradual and painless penetration of communism into the ranks of the British Labor Party and trades-unions. In part to avoid unnecessary complications, in part to check up on my opponents, I submitted the manuscript of the book to the Politbureau. Since it was a question of forecast, rather than of criticism after the fact, none of the members of the Politbureau ventured to express himself. The book passed safely by the censors and was published exactly as it had been written. A little later, it also appeared in English. The official leaders of British Socialism treated it as the fantasy of a foreigner who did not know British conditions, who could dream of transferring the “Russian” general strike to the soil of the British Isles. Such estimates could have been counted by the dozens, even by the hundreds, beginning with MacDonald himself, who in the political-banalities contest indisputably carried off first prize. But within a few months the strike of the coal miners became a general strike. I had not expected such an early confirmation of my forecast. If the general strike proved the rightness of the Marxist forecast against the home-made estimates of the British reformists, the behavior of the General Council during the general strike signified the collapse of Stalin’s hopes of Purcell. I eagerly gathered and collated in the clinic all the information about the course of the general strike and especially about the relations between the masses and their leaders. The thing that made my gorge rise was the nature of the articles in the Moscow Pravda. Its chief concern was to screen bankruptcy and save its face. This could be achieved only by a cynical distortion of the facts. There can be no greater proof of the intellectual downfall of a revolutionary politician than deception of the masses.

Upon my return to Moscow, I demanded an immediate breaking up of the bloc with the British General Council. Zinoviev, after the inevitable vacillation, sided with me. Radek was opposed. Stalin clung to the bloc, even to the semblance of one, for all he was worth. The British trades-unionists waited until their acute inner crisis was at an end, and then uncivilly kicked their generous but muddle-headed ally away.

Events just as significant were taking place in Poland at the ............