In October, a rigorous change in our situation took place. Communication with our personal and political friends, even with our relatives in Moscow, ceased abruptly; letters and telegrams no longer reached us. The Moscow telegraph office, as we learned through special channels, accumulated several hundred telegrams for me, especially telegrams on the anniversary of the October Revolution. The ring around us was closing in tighter and tighter.
During 1928, the opposition, in spite of the unbridled persecution, obviously was growing, especially in the large industrial plants. This was responsible for the increase of reprisals, including even the complete suppression of correspondence among the exiles themselves. We expected other measures of the same sort to follow, and we were not mistaken.
On December 16, a special representative of the GPU, coming from Moscow, in the name of that institution handed me an ultimatum: I must stop directing the opposition; if I did not, measures would be taken “to isolate me from political life.” The question of deporting me abroad, however, was not raised then; the measures under consideration, as far as I understood, were simply of a domestic character. I replied to this ultimatum with a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the party and the presidium of the Communist International. I think it necessary to quote the main points of this letter here:
Today, December i6, the representative of the collegium of the GPU, Volynsky, acting in the name of the collegium, delivered the following verbal ultimatum to me:
“The work of your political sympathizers throughout the country” (almost word for word) “has lately assumed a definitely counter revolutionary character; the conditions in which you are placed at Alma-Ata give you full opportunity to direct this work; in view of this, the collegium of the GPU has decided to demand from you a categorical promise to discontinue your activity; failing this, the collegium will be obliged to alter the conditions of your existence to the extent of completely isolating you from political life. In this connection, the question of changing your place of residence will arise.”
I informed the representative of the GPU that I can only give him a written reply provided I receive from him a written statement of the GPU’s ultimatum. My refusal to give any oral reply was based on my belief, derived from all my past experience, that my words would again be viciously distorted to mislead the working masses of the USSR and of the rest of the world.
But regardless of further action by the collegium of the GPU— which in this case is playing no independent r?le but is only mechanically executing the old decision, long familiar to me, of Stalin’s narrow faction — I think it necessary to bring the following to the notice of the Central Committee of the All-union Communist Party and of the Executive Committee of the Communist International:
The demand that I abstain from political activity is a demand that I renounce the struggle for the interests of the international pr?letariat, a struggle which I have been waging continually for thirty-two years, throughout all of my conscious life. The attempt to represent this activity as “counter-revolutionary” comes from those whom I charge, before the international pr?letariat, with violating the fundamental principles of the teachings of Marx and Lenin, with infringing on the historical interests of the world revolution, with renouncing the traditions and precepts of October, and with unconsciously, but all the more menacingly, preparing the Thermidor.
To abstain from political activity would be tantamount to ending the struggle against the blindness of the present direction of the Communist Party, which adds to the objective difficulties of the constructive Socialist work an ever-increasing number of political difficulties caused by its opportunist inability to conduct the pr?letarian policy on a large, historical scale.
It would be tantamount to renouncing the struggle against a strangling party régime that reflects the growing pressure of the enemy classes on the pr?letarian vanguard; it would be tantamount to passively acquiescing in that economic policy of opportunism which is undermining and shaking the foundations of the dictatorship of the pr?letariat, retarding the latter’s material and cultural progress, and at the same time dealing severe blows at the union of the workers and the toiling peasants — the foundation of the Soviet power.
The Lenin wing of the party has been under a hail of blows ever since 1923, that is, ever since the unexampled collapse of the German Revolution. The increasing force of these blows keeps pace with the further defeats of the international and Soviet pr?letariat as a con sequence of opportunist leadership.
Theoretical reasoning and political experience attest that a period of historical recoil or reaction can follow not only a bourgeois, but a pr?letarian revolution, as well. For six years, we have been living in the USSR under the conditions of a growing reaction against October, and, consequently, of a clearing of the way for the Thermidor.
The most obvious and complete expression of this reaction within the party is the savage persecution and routing of the Left wing in the party organization.
In its latest attempts at resistance to the out-and-out Thermidorians, the Stalin faction is living on the chips and fragments of the ideas of the opposition. Creatively, it is impotent. The struggle against the Left deprives it of stability. Its practical policy has no backbone, being false, contradictory and unreliable. The noisy campaign against the danger from the Right is three-quarters sham, and serves first of all as a screen before the masses for the war of real extermination against the Bolshevik-Leninists. The world bourgeoisie and the world Menshevism have equally blessed this war; these judges have long since recognized “historical rightness” as being on Stalin’s side.
But for this blind, cowardly and utterly inept policy of adaptation to bureaucracy and philistinism, the position of the working masses in the twelfth year of the dictatorship would be infinitely more favor able, the military defense much stronger and more reliable, and the Communist International would be standing upon a higher level, in- stead of retreating step by step before the treacherous and venal Social Democracy.
The incurable weakness of the reaction headed by the apparatus, in spite of its apparent power, lies in the fact that “they know not what they do.” They are executing the orders of the enemy classes. There can be no greater historical curse on a faction, which came out of the revolution and is now undermining it.
The greatest historical strength of the opposition, in spite of its apparent weakness, lies in the fact that it keeps its fingers on the pulse of the world historical process, that it sees the dynamics of the class forces clearly, foresees the coming day and consciously prepares for it. To abstain from political activity would mean to abstain from getting ready for tomorrow.
The threat to change the conditions of my life and isolate me from political activity sounds as if I had not already been banished to a place 4,000 kilometres distant from Moscow, 250 kilometres distant from the railway, and about as far from the borders of the western desert provinces of China — a region where malignant malaria, leprosy, and plague hold dominion. It sounds as if the Stalin faction, whose direct organ is the GPU, had not already done everything it could to isolate me from political as well as from any other life. The Moscow newspapers take from ten days to a month or more to reach here. Letters come to me, with few exceptions, only after resting for one, two or three months in the files of the GPU and the secretariat of the Central Committee.
Two of my closest co-workers from the time of the civil war, Comrades Syermuks and Poznansky, who ventured of their own accord to accompany me to my place of exile, were arrested immediately on their arrival, incarcerated in a cellar with criminals, and then exiled to distant parts of the north country. A letter from my daughter, fatally ill, whom you expelled from the party and removed from her work, took seventy-three days to reach me from the Moscow hospital, so that my reply found her no longer living. A letter about the serious illness of my other daughter, who was also expelled from the party by you and removed from work, was delivered to me a month ago, forty-three days after leaving Moscow. Telegraph inquiries about my health in most cases never even reach their destination.
Thousands of irreproachable Bolshevik-Leninists whose services to the October Revolution and the international pr?letariat far surpass the services of those who have imprisoned and banished them, are in the same situation, or worse.
In planning increasingly severe reprisals against the opposition, the narrow faction of Stalin — whom Lenin in his “Will” called “rude and disloyal” at a time when those characteristics had not been revealed in even one hundredth part of their present degree — is constantly endeavoring, with the aid of the GPU, to plant upon the opposition some “connection” with the enemies of the pr?letarian dictatorship. Within their small circle, the present leaders say: “This is necessary for the masses”; sometimes, even more cynically: “This is for the fools.” My closest co-worker, Gegórgy Vasiliyevich Butov, who had been in charge of the secretariat of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic during all the years of civil war, was arrested and held under intolerable conditions. From this pure and modest man, this irreproachable party worker, they tried by force to extort a confirmation of charges in the spirit of the Thermidorian fabrications, charges known in advance to be false and counterfeit. Butov’s answer was a heroic hunger strike that lasted about 50 days; in September of this year he died in prison. Violence, beatings, torture — both physical and moral — are infficted on the best Bolshevik workers for their adherence to the precepts of October. Such are the general conditions which, in the words of the collegium of the GPU, “present no obstacle” at present to the political activity of the opposition in general, and to mine in particular.
The sorry threat to change these conditions for me in the direction of further isolation is nothi............