“The second attack of L.D.’s illness,” writes N.I. Sedova, “coincided with a monstrous campaign of persecution against him, which we felt as keenly as if we had been suffering from the most malignant disease. The pages of the Pravda seemed endless
youfind, and every line of the paper, even every word, a lie. L.D. kept silent. But what it cost him to maintain that silence! Friends called to see him during the day and often at night. I remember that some one once asked him if he had read that day’s paper. He replied that he no longer read the newspapers. And it is true that he only took them up in his hands, ran his eyes over them, and then threw them aside. It seemed as if it were enough for him merely to look at them to know all that they contained. He knew only too well the cooks who had made the dish, and the same dish every day, to boot. To read the papers at that time was exactly, he would say, like pushing a funnel brush into one’s own throat. It might have been possible to force himself to read them if L.D. had decided to reply. But he remained silent. His cold lingered on, thanks to his critical nervous condition. He looked pale and thin. In the family we avoided talking about the persecution, and yet we could talk of nothing else. I remember how I felt when I went to my work every day at the Commissariat of Education; it was like running a gauntlet. But never once did any one permit himself an unpleasant insinuation. Side by side with the inimical silence of the small ruling group, there was unquestionable sympathy from most of my colleagues. The life of the party seemed to be split in half: the inner, hidden life and the outward life for show only, and the two lives were in absolute contradiction to each other. Only a few brave souls ventured to reveal what was latent in the minds and hearts of most of those who concealed their sympathies under a ’monolithic’ vote.”
My letter to Chiedze against Lenin was published during this period. This episode, dating back to April, 1913, grew out of the fact that the official Bolshevik newspaper then published in St. Petersburg had appropriated the title of my Viennese publication, The Pravda — a Labor Paper. This led to one of those sharp conflicts so frequent in the lives of the foreign exiles. In a letter written to Chiedze, who at one time stood between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, I gave vent to my indignation at the Bolshevik centre and at Lenin. Two or three weeks later, I would undoubtedly have subjected my letter to a strict censor’s revision; a year or two later still it would have seemed a curiosity in my own eyes. But that letter was to have a peculiar destiny. It was intercepted on its way by the Police Department. It rested in the police archives until the October revolution, when it went to the Institute of History of the Communist party. Lenin was well aware of this letter; in his eyes , as in mine, it was simply “the snows of yesteryear” and nothing more. A good many letters of various kinds had been written during the years of foreign exile! In 1924, the epigones disinterred the letter from the archives and flung it at the party, three-quarters of which at that time consisted of new members. It was no accident that the time chosen for this was the months immediately following Lenin’s death. This condition was doubly essential. In the first place, Lenin could no longer rise to call these gentlemen by their right names, and in the second place, the masses of the people were torn with grief over the death of their leader. With no idea of the yesterdays of the party, the people read Trotsky’s hostile remarks about Lenin and were stunned. It is true that the remarks had been made twelve years before, but chronology was disregarded in the face of the naked quotations. The use that the epigones made of my letter to Chiedze is one of the greatest frauds in the world’s history. of the French reactionaries in the Dreyfus case are as nothing compared to the political forgery perpetrated by Stalin and his associates.
Slander becomes a force only when it meets some historical demand. There must have been some shift, I reasoned, in social relations or in the political mood, if slander could find such an endless market. It is necessary to analyze the content of this slander
youfind. As I lay in bed, I had plenty of time to do so. From what does this accusation of Trotsky’s wishing “to rob the peasant” derive — that formula which the reactionary agrarians, the Christian socialists, and the Fascists always direct against socialists and against communists in particular? Whence this bitter baiting of the Marxist idea of permanent revolution, this national bragging which promises to build its own socialism? What sections of the people make demands for such reactionary vulgarity? And lastly, how and why this lowering of the theoretical level, this retrogression to political stupidity? Lying in bed, I went over my old articles, and my eyes fell on these lines written in 1909, at the peak of the reactionary regime under Stolypin.