Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir LeninThe Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution
Written : April 4, 1917First Published : Pravda No. 26, April 7, 1917This article contains Lenin’s famous April Theses read by him at two meetings of the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, on April 4, 1917.
[Introduction]I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4, I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.
The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself — and for honest opponents — was to prepare the theses in writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli. I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.

THESES1) In our attitude towards the war, which under the new [provisional] government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.
In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.
The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front.
Fraternisation.
2) The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution — which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie — to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.
This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.
This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.
3) No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.
4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.
The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.
As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.
5) Not a parliamentary republic — to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step — but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.
Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. [*1]
The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.
6) The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.
Confiscation of all landed estates.
Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines, according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.
7) The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
8) It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.
9) Party tasks:(a) Immediate convocation of a Party congress;(b) Alteration of the Party Programme, mainly:(1) On the question of imperialism and the imperialist war,(2) On our attitude towards the state and our demand for a “commune state”[*2];(3) Amendment of our out-of-date minimum programme;(c) Change of the Party’s name.[*3]
10. A new International.
We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the “Centre”. [*4]
In order that the reader may understand why I had especially to emphasise as a rare exception the “case” of honest opponents, I invite him to compare the above theses with the following objection by Mr. Goldenberg: Lenin, he said, “has planted the banner of civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy” (quoted in No. 5 of Mr. Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo)
Isn’t it a gem ?
I write, announce and elaborately explain: “In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism ... in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them....”
Yet the bourgeois gentlemen who call themselves Social-Democrats, who do not belong either to the broad sections or to the mass believers in defencism, with serene brow present my views thus: “The banner [!] of civil war” (of which there is not a word in the theses and not a word in my speech!) has been planted(!) “in the midst [!!] of revolutionary democracy...”.
What does this mean? In what way does this differ from riot-inciting agitation, from Russkaya Volya ?
I write, announce and elaborately explain: “The Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and therefore our task is to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.”
Yet opponents of a certain brand present my views as a call to “civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy”!
I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible.
And the view is attributed to me that I am opposed to the speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly!
I would call this “raving”, had not decades of political struggle taught me to regard honesty in opponents as a rare exception.
Mr. Plekhanov in his paper called my speech “raving”. Very good, Mr. Plekhanov! But look how awkward, uncouth and slow-witted you are in your polemics. If I delivered a raving speech for two hours, how is it that an audience of hundreds tolerated this “raving”? Further, why does your paper devote a whole column to an account of the “raving”?
Inconsistent, highly inconsistent!
It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain, to recall what Marx and Engels said in 1871, 1872 and 1875 about the experience of the Paris Commune and about the kind of state the proletariat needs. [See: The Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Programme]
Ex-Marxist Mr. Plekhanov evidently does not care to recall Marxism.
I quoted the words of Rosa Luxemburg, who on August 4, 1914, called German Social-Democracy a “stinking corpse”. And the Plekhanovs, Goldenbergs and Co. feel “offended”. On whose behalf? On behalf of the German chauvinists, because they were called chauvinists!
They have got themselves in a mess, these poor Russian social-chauvinists — socialists in word and chauvinists in deed.

Editor’s Footnotes [1] i.e. the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people.
[2] i.e., a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype.
[3] Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party.
[4] The “Centre” in the international Social-Democratic movement is the trend which vacillates between the chauvinists (=“defencists”) and internationalists, i.e., Kautsky and Co. in Germany, Longuet and Co. in France, Chkheidze and Co. in Russia, Turati and Co. in Italy, MacDonald and Co. in Britain, etc.

Sealed Car

Stefan T. Possony :Lenin : The Compulsive Revolutionary
The Sealed Car

In Zurich, Lenin knew nothing about these momentous changes. The morning of March 15, as he was leaving for the library and Krupskaya had finished washing the breakfast dishes, a friend ran into their apartment and reported that the revolution had begun. Lenin and Krupskaya proceeded to read the newspapers which were hung up in display boxes. On March 16 the Tsar’s abdication was confirmed.
But Lenin belittled the event : the bourgeoisie had legalized the political power that it already possessed de facto. He did not expect that a labor party would be legalized. If it were, the unification of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks would be unavoidable !
The news had been electrifying to the revolutionaries. Some Bolsheviks living in Sweden had started for home already. Lenin’s initial response was a strengthening of his belief that the Bolsheviks would have to continue existence as an independent party. He did not consider returning to Russia. Lenin wrote to one of the Bolshevik Duma deputies who had been arrested in 1914 that, upon his release, he was to go to Scandinavia in order to organize Lenin’s liaison with Russia. On March 17 Lenin proposed the establishment of a communication point in Norway and called for the organization of revolutionary cells within the army. This demand could not but curry favor with the Germans, who were reading Lenin’s mail. On March 18 Lenin calmly traveled to western Switzerland, met Inessa, and gave his customary talk on the Paris Commune.
Lenin assumed that “it will not be possible to get away early from this damned Switzerland.”(1) Yet German diplomats already were planning the return of Lenin to Russia. A few weeks later, the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, reported to the Emperor that “immediately” upon learning of the Russian revolution—he received this news during the afternoon of March 14—he instructed the German Minister to Switzerland to offer the Russian exiles passage through Germany. It is not clear which channels were to be used ; the Germans had a large number of contacts. These included Dr. Kornblum who participated in the Bolshevik conference of 1915, and who at that time apparently was in contact with von Bismarck ; Buchholz, whom Lenin had known from Samara and Berlin ; Bagocki, who had been involved at Cracow and who soon became the executive secretary of a committee working for the return of the revolutionaries from Switzerland to Russia ; Shklovsky, who during 1916 was one of the persons who transmitted money to Lenin. Also of importance in such work were the correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Dr. Deinhard ; the German left-socialist Paul Levi ; the promotor of the Youth International and Lenin’s young German adherent, Willi Muenzenberg ; the Polish socialist and former German journalist, Karl Radek ; a Swiss socialist, Hermann von Boetticher ; finally, the several contacts which the military attach? had among the international Mensheviks ; and, of course, Kesk?la and Moor.
It was indeed simple to plant the idea. Already in 1915 Parvus had dispatched Russian revolutionaries through Germany. The German military wanted Lenin to organize sabotage campaigns. On December 29, 1916, Okhrana agent “Gretchen” reported that Lenin was still in Switzerland and would not leave via Germany : even if he were able to obtain the visa he would not use it—to avoid giving for a second time the impression of collusion with the Central Powers. It would be interesting to know the background of this perplexing “premature” document.
Financial support to Lenin was probably resumed before the overthrow of the Tsar : the Germans knew through their intelligence service that major changes were impending. On February 17, Lenin wrote that numbers three and four of Sbornik Sotsialdemokrata (a collection of theoretical articles) were ready, but “how sad—we have no money.”(2) During that period, surviving witnesses have reported, Zinovyev often paid Lenin’s restaurant bill. On March 10, however, the German Minister dispatched to Berlin the two previous Sbornik issues (which Kesk?la secured and which the experts in the Foreign Office never read) and added, “I hear that publication of numbers three and four is assured.” On March 17 money was available and was offered to the comrades in Scandinavia.
The Petrograd bureau of the Central Committee sent a telegram through Norway on March 18 which Lenin presumably received on March 19. It stated : “Ulyanov must come immediately.” The revolution had been underway for more than a week and the Tsar had abdicated three days earlier, but only now did the Bolsheviks remember their leader who had not yet bestirred himself. He had merely tried to establish contact through Alexandra Kollontai, a woman comrade in Stockholm, but she had returned to Russia without waiting for the leader’s advice.
Despite this invitation, and another to go at least to Finland, Lenin took no serious action. Unlike other revolutionaries he did not go to the British and French consulates. He asked Safarov to lend him his passport so that he could travel through France under a false name. Yet Safarov had been disseminating defeatist propaganda to the French army. With his passport Lenin would have met with more trouble with the French authorities than if he had been traveling under his own name ; preparations for the trip were discontinued.
But presently, Lenin’s old enemy, Martov, suggested at a meeting at Geneva with Bolsheviks on March 19, that the revolutionaries be permitted to pass through Germany in exchange for Austrian and German prisoners of war.(3) This proposal was contingent upon approval by the Petrograd government.
Martov made the unfounded assumption that France and Britain would deny passage. It was not unreasonable to expect difficulties, but the proper course of action would have been to request in structions and diplomatic and consular assistance from Petrograd. Yet Lenin and his temporary allies of Menshevik loyalty did not even consider applying for passage through allied territory, despite the fact that many Russian ?migr?s were returning home via the West, usually in allied ships.
The Bolsheviks and international Mensheviks, as well as the left Social Revolutionaries, the Jewish Bund, Polish socialists, and other defeatist groups had had dealings with the Central Powers.(4) The key men in these groups, uncertain as to what extent their secret contacts had been detected, did not wish to risk indictment for espionage. The German legation believed, however, that the revolutionaries feared the sea voyage with its peril of submarine attack.
The revolutionaries resolved to contact Berlin through the Swiss government and requested that the Swiss socialist deputy, Robert Grimm, act as negotiator in their behalf. Grimm was leading the Zimmerwald movement. The revolutionaries probably suspected that he maintained close contacts with the German legation. In Lenin’s judgment (expressed in January, 1917), Grimm had gone over to the “social patriots” and was destroying the movement;(5) Grimm was guilty of “complete treason.” Yet he was now chosen to conceal the true nature of the transaction—or selected with the expectation that he would do nothing.
On March 20, Lenin resumed a rather desultory literary effort. On March 21 Parvus saw in Copenhagen Brockdorff-Rantzau to whom he proposed mobilization of the more radical socialists against the new Russian government which was democratic, pro-Entente, and “defeatist.” The next day Parvus transmitted to Adolf M?ller, the Bavarian socialist who had excellent connections with the Berlin government, a program which was to be accomplished by their Russian “party friends.” It called for the arming of workers, indictment of the Tsar, proclamation of a republic, confiscation of crown lands, convocation of a constituent assembly, partition of large land holdings, eight-hour workdays, and peace. Parvus’ prodding forced Rantzau to formulate a new strategy of revolution which was to replace conventional warfare. Parvus was sent to explain the concept to the German Chancellor shortly after March 21. (Subsequently, Rantzau demanded that Parvus be received by the unsympathetic Secretary of State.) Crucial was the return of Lenin to Russia. Berlin approved and Parvus’ agents (notably Hanecki, who was then at Christiana) undertook the task of persuading Lenin. A German apparatus in Scandinavia also accelerated its operations.
On either March 22 or 23, the Swiss Foreign Minister informed the German legation that “outstanding Russian revolutionaries desire to return to Russia via Germany since they are afraid to go through France on account of the submarine risk.”6 This was the first official communication.
Lenin knew that the revolutionaries in Denmark—Parvus and Hanecki—had established a close rapport with the Germans and were in possession of substantial financial resources. On March 24 he wrote to Hanecki.(7) There were earlier communications, perhaps through intermediaries, and it seems that this message to Hanecki was preceded by a receipt of money, but this is the earliest letter published. With his customary caution, Lenin spoke mainly of better communications with Pravda, a problem of secondary importance. But in Aesopian language he informed Hanecki that he was willing to cooperate : he pointedly ended his letter by employing a slogan which Parvus had just expounded to the Germans : “Long live the proletarian militia which is preparing peace and socialism.”(8)
Opposition still existed in Berlin. But on March 24 Lenin acquired a new “ally” when the German Emperor let it be known that he intended to support the socialists against the new Russian government, and the High Command informed the Foreign Office(9) that they had no objections to the passage of Russian revolutionaries through Germany.
To this point, Lenin’s interest in returning to Russia had been weak. Because many revolutionaries were on their way home and virtually all exiles were talking about their return, Lenin, who was supposed to be an active revolutionary leader, was forced to go through some motions, but he was play-acting. On March 25, however, he informed his comrades in Copenhagen that he was unhappy about the delay. Still, he found time for doing what he liked best—to attack other socialists : as though it were a matter of the greatest urgency, he polemically argued against Gorky.
On March 27 Parvus’ emissary, who also was an agent of the German General Staff,(10) visited Lenin and suggested a solution. Passage through Germany would pose no difficulties ; the real task was to smuggle Lenin and Zinovyev through Denmark and Sweden into Russia. The German Bolshevik organization in Scandinavia had been smuggling literature and merchandise into Russia for years. Hence it undoubtedly was able to transport Lenin into the country without danger. This project, it seems, had been suggested earlier and apparently Lenin had sent passport photos of himself and Zinovyev. Now the false Swedish passports were being delivered by Parvus’ agent but Lenin was not willing to take the “risk.” The risk was merely that the Swedish border officials might have noticed that these alleged citizens did not speak Swedish and they might not have believed the cover story that the bearers of these authentic-looking passports were deaf-mutes. The risk actually involved was only detention for a few hours or days.(11)
Lenin telegraphed Hanecki that he could not agree to the plan. Instead, Lenin wanted an entire Swiss railway carriage to transport him to Copenhagen, or an agreement about the exchange of Russian refugees for interned Germans. The exchange agreement would have required lengthy negotiations between Berlin and Petrograd through a neutral power and would have entailed inordinate delays. Hanecki, who was then in Stockholm, could do little to obtain a Swiss railroad carriage. Lenin probably knew that the Swiss would not agree to such a transaction in order to preserve their neutrality. In sum, Lenin was procrastinating.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen on March 28, 1917, Sazonov talked to Siegfried Goldberg, who was an agent of Matthias Erzberger and, as a German Reichstag member of the Catholic Center party who was amply supplied with funds, guided many psychological and political warfare campaigns outside the Foreign Office structure. Sazonov and Goldberg discussed methods of achieving peace. Sazonov, who was about to leave for Russia, told Goldberg that Lenin was the real revolutionary leader and promised to contact him. It is believed that Erzberger then applied pressure on the Wilhelmstrasse to get Lenin underway.
On March 29 Lenin again changed his mind. He wrote to Hanecki asking him to spare no costs and go to Petrograd, adding that the first bourgeois government to be eliminated was that of Russia. An agent of the German military attach? assisted at a Bolshevik meeting and reported that Lenin now was willing to pass through Germany without the permission of the Russian government ; Lenin’s comrades remained entirely unconvinced.
The Germans discussed the technicalities of the proposed trip. The military, foolishly fearing that the Russians might agitate while passing through Germany, suggested that the revolutionaries travel under escort in a collective transport. This notion was transmitted to the revolutionaries ; whether it was a feedback from Lenin’s suggestion to Hanecki is difficult to determine. On March 30 an agent of the General Staff, in a report to his superiors, suggested that the trip be authorized without delay.
Alleging that England would not allow him to pass through, Lenin wanted the soviet to arrange an exchange with interned Germans, a time-consuming project. However, on March 30, Lenin again desired approval from Petrograd.(12) On the same day, the German legation at Berne received an agent’s report which stated that Lenin had delivered a speech lasting two-and-a-half hours in which he called for the liberation of colonies and oppressed nations, opposition against bourgeois governments, notably in Russia, and revolutionary war. This type of language conformed well with the supposed needs of German strategists.
On March 31 Lenin and Zinovyev wrote to Martov and Natanson (who then used the name of “Bobrov”). They objected to the hesitancy shown by the other revolutionary groups ; they affirmed that they wished to proceed. It was the first forceful insistence on departure. It also represented one time when Lenin did not want a split, for he needed support for purposes of self-justification. Significantly, the letter added that Grimm’s proposal—to pass through Germany—was acceptable, but Grimm had insisted that Petrograd be contacted and permission secured. Lenin, Zinovyev, and Krupskaya immediately wired Grimm from Zurich notifying him that they would assume no responsibility for further postponement : “We absolutely cannot agree to further delay . . . Send us decision tomorrow.”(13) They added that they numbered “over ten passengers” and would be traveling “alone,” that is, without waiting for the revolutionaries from other parties.
But the genuineness of the hurry seems doubtful. On the previous day Grimm had informed the revolutionaries that he could not continue to negotiate. Yet, after receiving the telegram, he spoke again with the Swiss Foreign Minister. This time he advised against contacts with Petrograd. The Minister told Grimm to stay out of the affair and informed the German legation that the revolutionaries would make contact the following day.(14) Grimm telephoned (it is not known to whom) to say that his mission was terminated ; he proposed finding another intermediary. In the meantime, the legation waited. It was as though Lenin became active at the moment he lacked an intermediary. Yet two weeks after the Tsar’s abdication it was obvious that no serious risk was involved in a return to Russia.
On April 1 the Wilhelmstrasse requested five million marks for political use within Russia—a major decision had been made.
On April 2 the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries stated that without the approval of the Petrograd government, passage through Germany would be a mistake ; they would not move before it was clear that proper authorization was unattainable.
If Lenin had been anticipating such a declaration in the hope that it would provide an excuse for his own inaction, he had miscalculated. On the morning of April 2, the German Minister in Berne received a peremptory communication from Berlin ordering him to expedite the transport of Russian revolutionaries through Germany :(15) clearly Berlin thought that the deepening of the Russian Revolution should no longer be delayed. The means were available but the actors were still wanting.
Romberg, seeking an excuse to explain the loss of tempo, answered that some ?migr?s were awaiting instructions from Russia and “others still seem uncertain as to whether or not they wish to avail themselves of our offer”(16) (which had not yet been made officially). He recommended waiting, but sprung into action and contacted Lenin through Paul Levi. Within a few hours, Lenin liquidated his household furnishings and proceeded to Bern.
In the evening of the same day, Anna (Lenin’s sister in Petrograd) received a telegram from her brother informing her that he would arrive on the evening of April 11.(17) The telegram must have been dispatched on the morning of April 2, almost immediately after the German Minister had been told by Berlin that Lenin should depart without delay. At that time the Bolsheviks had not even initiated formal negotiations with the Germans. The telegram has been available for years : if interpreted through the background of the German files, it proves that, far from acting like a tiger in a cage, Lenin started to move only after the Germans forced him.
Fritz Platten, a Swiss socialist who had participated in the Russian revolution of 1905 and who was married to a Russian, was the new intermediary recommended by Grimm. Lenin had described Platten as a “good for nothing” in February, 1917.18 Now he found him acceptable, partly because his views were similar to Lenin’s and partly because he was a political weakling. Platten may not have been a German agent, but he was a corrupt individual seeking personal gain and notoriety.19
On April 3, Lenin conferred with Platten who then went to the German legation for a preliminary contact. Platten proposed to the Germans the establishment of an intelligence service in Stockholm. His suggestion was not accepted, although the Germans later used him as an occasional communications channel.20
In the evening of April 3 Lenin wrote to the Bolshevik section in Zurich that he was in possession of “a fund of over 1,000 francs to cover the cost of the journey”; he enclosed 100 francs to be loaned to an unnamed comrade.21 On April 4 Platten held a long conference with the German Minister. On April 5 an “agreement” was worked out ; it was approved by Berlin on April 7. Also on April 5, the German Foreign Office had reported agreement among the General Staff and their promise that an “understanding officer” would accompany the train. But there were further delays. The Germans attempted to persuade a number of the unwilling revolutionaries to accompany Lenin ; they also negotiated the transit through Sweden.
Lenin, on April 7, asked a few international socialists to compose a statement “approving” of the trip ; this act, according to Russian law, constituted high treason. He also requested the approval of the well-known writer Romain Rolland but failed to gain it.22 Finally on Monday, April 9, the revolutionaries and their friends consumed a farewell luncheon at the Z?hringer Hof. Lenin read the draft of a letter to the Swiss workers23 saying that while “the Russian proletariat has the great honor to commence a series of revolutions engendered by the imperialist war . . . socialism cannot win immediately” in Russia, “one of the most backward countries of Europe.” The task was to give impetus to the bourgeois-democratic revolution and to make a “small step” toward the socialist revolution. Lenin concluded : “The German proletariat is the best and most reliable ally of the proletarian revolution in Russia and of the world revolution.”
The travelers left the restaurant at 2:30 P.M. In the station, there were shouts and unrest. Lenin, with Platten and Zinovyev, walked solemnly to the train through a cort?ge.24 Shortly after boarding, he bodily evicted Oscar Blum, a socialist from Riga, whom he suspected of being an Okhrana agent. Thereupon the train with thirty-two revolutionaries and fifteen minutes delay, left Zurich at 15:10 o’clock.25
The Germans had expected sixty travelers. According to Communist count there were nineteen Bolsheviks. Actually, there were not more than about a dozen true Bolsheviks, almost all of them members of Lenin’s “enlarged” family : Krupskaya, Inessa Armand (whom an Okhrana report of November 16, 1916, described as Lenin’s “right hand”), her former and perhaps current boyfriend, Georg Safarov, and his brother, Zinovyev, with his wife and child, and Olga Ravich, a friend of Krupskaya.26 There were two other reasonably prominent Bolsheviks present : G.Y. Sokolnikov and the Caucasian, Mikha C. Tskhakaya,27 Chairman of the Third Congress and later President of the Central Executive Committee of Transcaucasus and finally of Georgia. There were also two Russian workers who had joined the Bolsheviks in Zurich, a Bolshevik of the criminal type and one other revolutionary, “A. Linde,” who either was a German agent or the brother of one (or both). The total is thus thirteen ; Radek may be added to the list of Bolsheviks,28 but Radek’s relations with Lenin had not been close. The rest of the group consisted of persons who then and now remain totally unknown. Some, to judge from the signatures, were quite old. It is apparent that the supposed number of the “revolutionaries” was padded to impress the Germans.
The trip was uneventful. Krupskaya said that the “cook served up good square meals to which our emigrant fraternity was hardly accustomed.”29 Lenin, who disliked the odor of smoke, severely rationed cigarette smoking. The train, incidentally, was not “sealed”; nor was it a box car, but rather a wagon. The revolutionaries, however, were separated from the other passengers.
The train was given such high traffic priority that it delayed the train of the German Crown Prince for two hours.30 Yet a connection was missed at Frankfurt and a few hours delay resulted. It was reported that a British spy was evicted from the train, but this probably occurred without loss of time, either after crossing the border or, according to interview information, at Celle. The train was scheduled to arrive at the Baltic port of Sassnitz on April 11 at 1:00 P.M.31 Due to the delay the train was not expected to connect with the ferry to Sweden and plans were made to quarter the revolutionaries overnight in Sassnitz. However, the train remained overnight in Berlin, departing on April 12 at 7:15 A.M. It arrived at Sassnitz at 3:15 P.m.—a delay of twenty-six hours. Apparently the train stood for at least twelve hours and possibly as many as twenty hours in Berlin. Strangely enough, this fact is seldom noted. Reports of other passengers state that the train stood for a “few hours” on a Berlin siding. The official report of the escort officer, Cavalry Captain von der Planitz, was delivered to army intelligence.32 If there existed a copy, it has vanished from the files of the Foreign Office.
Time and again, the German documents refer to the need not to compromise the passengers. Still, there are vague hints about chance conversations in Frankfurt. It is said that in Berlin, Platten was not allowed to leave the platform “without permission”—implying that he did leave, even if only after obtaining approval. Krupskaya reported that just before they came to Berlin, “several German Social Democrats” entered a special compartment but “none of us spoke to them.”(33) Zinovyev told Fedor Raskolnikov that Scheidemann, the leading German Social Democrat, tried to see Lenin on the trip. Platten disclosed that three representatives of the German government accompanied the train and that Jansson brought greetings from the trade unions but added that Lenin did not meet Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg or Scheidemann.(34)
The train would not have been delayed in Berlin without compelling reason. The rumors that Lenin met Bethmann-Hollweg or even Scheidemann seem far-fetched indeed. It is conceivable that Lenin, alleging upon disembarking from the platform that he was Platten, did confer with German officials. If so, it is possible that he saw Kurt Riezler, Bethmann’s assistant for political warfare. Riezler later told a friend that he had sent an emissary to the train but that the talk took place only on the ferry between Germany and Sweden.
The Germans, pretending to act upon a suggestion by Swiss trade unions, had insisted on Jansson joining the transport. When Berlin accepted Platten’s “conditions” concerning the modalities of the trip, they added that Jansson would have to be among the passengers. Whether Lenin and the others were told about this modification is not clear. Jansson, a few days earlier, had returned from Sweden where he had spoke with Russian revolutionaries and, together with Parvus, had “briefed” the socialist leaders on the Russian problem.(35) He entered the train, presumably at Stuttgart, but it is said that Lenin refused to talk to him. Incidentally, the delay at Berlin violated Article Six of the agreement which Platten had negotiated with the Germans. What happened on the siding at Berlin is one secret that may never be pierced. As will appear presently, however, Lenin changed his mind about the Russian revolution after he left the Z?hringer Hof, at Zurich, and before he arrived at the Finland Station at Petrograd.
Late on April 12 the revolutionaries passed into Sweden and were in Stockholm on April 14. Parvus had planned to meet the party at Malm? ; he had expected Axelrod and Martov to be accompanying Lenin. The meeting did not occur. Lenin refused to be seen with Parvus, and Parvus probably did not care to meet only Lenin. Instead, the arrivals were met by Hanecki, who commented on the unexplained delays in his memoirs. But Parvus did negotiate with “the Russian ?migr?s from Switzerland” and reported upon his conversations to the German Social Democratic party and to the Foreign Office.(36)
Upon his arrival in Stockholm, Lenin spoke with Swedish socialists, asking them to “approve” the passage through Germany ; he also requested money to continue the trip. The travelers had signed a statement confirming that Platten had “guaranteed” the trip only to Stockholm. Money was granted by the Swedes but Lenin asked for an additional 1,000 kroners for himself.(37) Thereupon he took time to buy himself shoes and pants which he needed badly, protesting all the while that he was not going to Russia to open a haberdashery. He then made a public statement to the effect that he had negotiated with Social Democrats “of various countries” and that the German Social Democrats would send representatives to a peace conference in Stockholm. Although the statement may have been based upon his conversations with Hanecki, it is likely that this declaration was preceded by contacts with German socialists. Since he had not negotiated with German socialists in Switzerland, contacts must have taken place elsewhere.
Before leaving Sweden, Lenin appointed Hanecki to be the foreign representative of the Bolshevik Central Committee ; thus, in essence, Hanecki inherited Lenin’s position. Lenin knew full well, of course, that Hanecki was working closely with and through the Germans and that he belonged to Parvus’ organization. Karl Radek, who as an Austrian citizen was not permitted to enter Russia, became Hanecki’s assistant. V.V. Vorovsky also was in Sweden to help.38
Upon entering Finland at Torneo, Lenin completed a form in which he stated that he was a Russian Orthodox, a political refugee, and a journalist. Furthermore, he stated that he was traveling on a certificate issued by the Russian Consulate General in Sweden. Platten was turned back by the British officers who were then in control of the Russian border crossings. The Germans made a feeble attempt to put the Danish socialist Borgbjerg on the train : a contact of Parvus, he had been traveling to Russia but had just been turned back by the well-informed British. Russian counter-intelligence later believed that a German military agent named “M?ller” did get through with the transport.
Finally Lenin and his group arrive at Petrograd’s Finland Station, several hours late, at 10:30 P.M. on Monday, April 16, 1917. They were greeted by a huge crowd of workers, soldiers and revolutionaries, an honor guard of Kronstadt sailors, and an official reception committee of the Petrograd soviet. Accompanied by the sounds of the “Marseillaise,” Lenin was guided to an armored car which had been brought by the Bolshevik military organization.(39) He mounted it and made a short speech of congratulations and of warnings about the possibility of becoming slaves of capitalism. The crowd howled and carried him into the Tsar’s reception room where he was presented with a large bouquet of flowers. He held the flowers clumsily in his hands as he listened to a speech by Menshevik N.S. Chkeidze, who spoke in the name of the soviet and expressed the “hope” that Lenin would not split the ranks of the revolutionary democracy. Lenin turned away. Pointedly ignoring Chkeidze, he made a sharply radical speech before exiting. He stopped again to speak before the station and then stepped into an automobile.
The crowd, however, was so large that the car could not begin to move. Lenin climbed upon the hood, spoke, and then tried again to get into the car, but Podvoisky asked him to mount upon a second armored car that the Bolsheviks had brought. Clad in a dark suit, white shirt, blue tie, black hat and shining shoes, Lenin, standing on top of the tank and overcome by emotion, presented a fiery speech calling for action. Then, illuminated by searchlights from the Peter and Paul Fortress, Lenin rode in the armored car to Kshezhinskaya Palace, formerly the home of the Tsar’s mistress,(40) and now headquarters of the Bolsheviks. (They had secured the palace by tolerated expropriation.) The rest of his party, including Krupskaya, presumably followed by car after the crowd had dispersed. Lenin again addressed the “masses” from the balcony and talked to his friends inside. To get a merry party underway, he proposed the singing of revolutionary songs.(41) After 3:00 A.M. he and Krupskaya went to the rich bourgeois apartment of Yelizarov, where the Lenins were given a spacious room.(42) A servant girl stood ready for their use.
To everybody’s surprise, Lenin, before he even reached the streets of Petrograd, had advocated a second revolution. His listeners thought the job was to turn the first revolution into success. It was this “second revolution” theme which induced one of the German political warfare managers to telegraph, on April 17, from Stockholm to Berlin : “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we would wish.”(43)

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1 Krupskaya, p. 337.
2 Letters of Lenin, p. 411 ; also Werner Hahlweg, Lenin’s R?ckkehr nach Russland 1917, die Deutschen Akten (Leiden : Brill, 1957), p. 10.
3 Krupskaya, p. 338.
4 The leader of the left Social Revolutionaries was the veteran revolutionary Mark A. Natanson. He was the subject of an Okhrana report of February 20, 1905, which stated that he was in close contact with police agents with whom he sometimes spoke quite candidly. Victor Chernov, leader of the Social Revolutionaries and their foremost Zimmerwaldian defeatist, was in contact with the Austrians and later with the Germans through Alexander Evgenevich Zivin, whose role was partly confirmed by an Okhrana report of September 28, 1916. Zivin also was known as “Pyatnitsky,” and was associated with Natanson. There were several channels into the “international Mensheviks,” including Axelrod, probably via Moor.
5 See, for example, Letters of Lenin, p. 406. On Grimm, see Hahlweg, p. 51.
6 Text of this telegram in Hahlweg, p. 65.
7 Hanecki, after a short term of imprisonment, had been expelled from Denmark for smuggling and was now operating from Christiana (now Oslo), Malm?, and Stockholm. On Hanecki’s trial in Denmark, see the fascinating account by Futrell, pp. 179-190.
8 Letters of Lenin, p. 417.
9 Zeman, p. 26.
10 This probably was Georg Sklarz, one of the financiers of Hanecki’s trade in contraceptives and after the war exposed as a racketeer (Futrell, p. 190 and Hahlweg, 15).
11 Hanecki found a way to utilize Lenin’s picture : He inserted it in the Stockholm daily Poliliken, with the caption : “The leader of the Russian revolution” (Walter, p. 260).
12 Letters of Lenin, p. 421.
13 Ibid., p. 421.
14 Zeman, p. 29.
15 Ibid., p. 33.
16 Ibid., p. 34.
17 Letters of Lenin, p. 421.
18 On Platten, see Hahlweg, pp. 18 and 77.
19 There is no record that Platten was paid before this transaction, but on May 29, 1918, “Friedrich” informed the German legation at Berne that Platten was in financial trouble. It appears that he was helped within five days, with Nasse acting as intermediary.
20 Platten’s expressed wish to die in Russia was fulfilled when he succumbed in one of Stalin’s slave labor camps. He moved to Russia permanently in 1924, lectured at an agricultural school, was arrested in 1939, died in 1942 in a camp near Arkhangel, and was rehabilitated under Khrushchev. He once made a speech to the effect that hundreds of thousands of corpses meant nothing if the happiness of the proletariat was at stake. Neue Z?rcher Zeitung, October 9, 1956.
21 Letters of Lenin, p. 422.
22 Walter, p. 276f.
23 Ibid., p. 277f.
24 Communist writers stress the dignity of this departure, yet German eye-witnesses described an unruly scene, with the Leninists and their opponents calling each other dirty names (see Walter, p. 278; Hahlweg, p. 96f. and contra p. 101).
25 Krupskaya (op. cit., p. 345), playing tricks with the two calendars, after she had given dates according to the Western calendar, suddenly switched to the Russian practice and put the departure date on March 27. Even then she cut one day : Lenin departed on March 28 (Old Style). The effect of this manipulation is to advance Lenin’s return by fourteen days.
26 Krupskaya describes the little boy as the son of a Bundist woman, but from the list of signatures it is clear that it was the son of Zinovyev’s wife. Yet the relations between the Lenins and the Zinovyevs supposedly were very close !
27 A Caucasian agent of the Germans, Keresselidze, informed Romberg that he wanted to ensure further contacts with the Georgian who was traveling with Lenin. There also was a Soulichvili on the train but he apparently did not belong to the Bolshevik group. Keresselidze participated in the German financial support to the Bolsheviks during the summer of 1917. He and his brother, with the relative of another German agent, Dumbadze, had implicated the Russian Minister of War in an espionage charge. The checkered career of Keresselidze cannot be detailed here, but one fact is noteworthy : according to an Okhrana letter of May 21, 1907, it appears that the brothers Keresselidze were given money by the police to be paid to a revolutionary committee but that a portion of the amount was embezzled by them and banked in Switzerland. “So are they all, all honorable men.”
28 During the purge trials, Sokolnikov, Radek, and Rakovsky, all of whom took part in the German-Bolshevik operation, were practically the only prominent Bolsheviks who received relatively light prison terms.
29 Krupskaya, p. 345.
30 Hahlweg, p. 23.
31 The scheduled travel time of thirty-two hours was quite long, an average speed of only twenty-two miles per hour for an express train. However, wartime conditions may explain this schedule.
32 German military files, it seems, have not been preserved.
33 Krupskaya, p. 345.
34 Magdeburger Volkstimme, May 16, 1917. Scheidemann had returned to Berlin from Scandinavia on April 10.
35 Philipp Scheidemann, Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten (Dresden : Reissner, 1928), I. 421.
36 Hahlweg, p. 22 ; Zeman, pp. 42, 45f., 50.
37 Paul Olberg, Vorw?rts, May 1, 1957.
38 Vorovsky was employed by the German industrial concern of Siemens-Schuckert ; of that firm’s Petrograd branch, Krassin was then the managing director (Futrell, p. 156).
39 G.V. Yelin, the Bolshevik headquarters commander, had to be persuaded to release the armored cars for this social occasion. He thought tanks were needed for other purposes. The government did not bestir itself to disarm the private armies of the various parties. See N.I. Podvoisky “V.I. Lenin v 1917 gody,” Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 1956, V. 6.
40 This relation had occurred many years earlier.
41 Yelena Stassova reported that he asked for the singing of the “Internationale” but the comrades did not know this song and just mumbled something.
42 Yelizarov apparently had participated on the Russian end in the Parvus-Hanecki smuggle operation, largely in partnership with the left Social Revolutionary Spiro, who at one time had been connected with the Okhrana and who later served for a few weeks as Commissar of Post and Telegraph. (General A. Niessel, Le triomphe des bolsh?viks et la paix de Brest-Litovsk, souvenirs 1917-1918 (Paris : Plon, 1940), p. 122).
43 Zeman, p. 51.
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Lenin : The Compulsive Revolutionary
Sudden Prominence

Lenin had expected to be arrested for treason. Instead he received a hero’s welcome—except that his well-wishers did not know for which heroic deeds and social accomplishments he was to be praised. He was acclaimed as the “leader of the Petrograd masses, workers, soldiers and sailors,” yet he had never led them. Lenin’s mystique was born during those hours of darkness in the parade which started at the Finland station and which the Mensheviks of the soviet had helped to organize in the naive hope that a triumphal reception would soften the radicalism of the nostalgic homecomer.
But Lenin could not be bribed by flattery so transparent in purpose. The entire Russian Bolshevik organization, at the time of the overthrow of the Tsar, had not numbered more than 5,000 members and 100 to 200 trained “cadres” and propagandists. There were at first only thirty Bolsheviks in the Petrograd soviet and most of these had not been elected but were co-opted by the members of the soviet. Such prominent leaders as Kamenev and Stalin arrived by the end of March from Siberia. Though membership had climbed to about 25,000, and soon was to reach 40,000, the question of seizure of power was considered untimely, and was conceived, in the image of the American spoils system, as seizure of the state apparatus by the socialists. There was some confusion, but most of the Bolsheviks, while debating within the soviet, gave qualified support to the government. For a few days, though they asked for immediate peace negotiations, the Bolsheviks even advocated measures of defense. One revolutionary asserted that the Bolsheviks had become “de-bolshevized.”(1) Lenin’s first words at the Finland Station, so much at variance with his last public words in Switzerland, should have destroyed the illusion that he would support a moderate policy. But it was thought he would soon learn more about the “situation.”(2) In the meantime, his new views shocked even Krupskaya who reportedly exclaimed : “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy.”(3) Pravda described Lenin’s view as “unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois democratic revolution is ended.”(4)
Still, sudden glory endowed Lenin with immunity. On the day after his arrival, the Petrograd soviet, albeit by implication, sanctioned Lenin’s trip. His case was ably defended by Zurabov, who for years had been connected with the Germans in Denmark. He was on the allied “control list” but returned to Russia as soon as the new government cleared him. Masquerading as a left Menshevik, Zurabov now functioned as a deputy in the soviet.
The soviet’s acquiescence to Lenin’s trip was not surprising. All the delegates were socialists, and they were not about to oppose one of their prominent comrades, irrespective of his lack of loyalty. The fear of helping the “counter-revolution” was an overriding consideration. But there was another point : the Germans had pumped money into several socialist groups and they had maintained contacts with others. These transactions were secret, but the politicians on the Executive Committee—the soviet’s only functioning body—knew enough not to take chances.
Still, the government could and should have taken forceful action. But it was composed of impractical “idealists” who had destroyed the counter-intelligence organization. Hence they were not equipped to prepare a strong case. The Minister of justice harbored sentiments of socialist solidarity. He was Alexander F. Kerensky, son of the Simbirsk school principal who had helped young Lenin to graduate after his brother’s execution. There also existed some reluctance to initiate an open fight with the soviet. The moderates in the government expected Lenin to discredit radicalism. Since he could be relied upon to resort to his favorite splitting tactics, he might weaken the soviet which prevented the cabinet from governing by functioning as a second government.
Lenin struck as soon as the soviet had accepted his explanations of the trip through enemy territory. He vehemently opposed “defencism,” though he carefully avoided offending the “defencist” socialists. The revolution had to be propelled immediately into its second phase : the state was not to be simply “taken over” but demolished. Lenin hinted, without making the point explicit, that the socialist revolution would mean seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.
Lenin proclaimed that Russia was under a regime of “dual power”—that of the government and of the soviet.(5) The Bolsheviks must run the soviet, directly or indirectly. The soviet would have to be developed primarily as an “organ of uprising.” It would assume full political power and create a new form of state (a parliamentary republic would be “a step back”). To begin with, agitation should be based upon the slogan “all power to the soviets” (i.e., destroy the government). The Bolsheviks were to strengthen their positions within the soviet while agitating for power to the soviet as a whole.
The idea expressed tactical genius but it shocked the party. The members thought that the notion of “smashing the state apparatus” constituted anarchism—which it was—and that Lenin’s tactics of “permanent revolution” were unrealistic—which they were not. The Petrograd party committee voted down his proposals. Against his opposition, a strong part of the Bolshevik Central Committee came out for reunification with the Mensheviks.(6) Lenin was more or less isolated, but he remained unperturbed. He called Sverdlov from the Urals to Petrograd and they combined with Zinovyev in using their excellent knowledge of pre-war party membership to rebuild an organization loyal to Lenin. He did not neglect to establish “shock units” in Kronstadt, Petrograd, and Helsingfors, recruiting or hiring radical Social Revolutionaries, anarchists, and criminals.
After some delay Lenin succeeded in drawing Stalin to his side, gaining a majority of one with a five to four edge in the Central Committee. This control enabled Lenin to select the delegates for the so-called April party conference and to gain a clear mandate for his policy. Initially he achieved this victory through his tactical skill and his abuse of intra-party democracy, but by the end of April or early May money became available.(7) This helped enormously, especially in the hurried recruiting of goon squads.
Lenin entered what might be considered the most satisfying three months of his life. Shortly after his arrival he became editor of Pravda, which had started publication again on March 18. Lenin could indulge in venting his hatreds against other socialists, and, he venomously attacked those who were accusing him of subversive dealings with the Germans. Though a pedantic writer when discussing theoretical problems, Lenin was a gifted journalist. Some of the fiery short articles he wrote were examples of prime polemic writing.
Lenin’s private life was quiet, however. Inessa had gone to Moscow, which suggests that love had abated and that, perhaps, she took the initiative in terminating the affair.(8) In any event, too obvious a relation was not advisable. Since at long last Lenin was able to operate as he wished, politics was now of overriding and absolute importance.
By_ early May Lenin had acquired enormous authority and personal prestige. He was treated as the formal and undisputed head of the Bolshevik party. He opened and closed party conferences. However interminably and rudely he spoke to the soviet of peasants and at the All-Russian soviet, he was listened to with respect. Opposing the government, he incessantly called for “all power to the soviets.” Indefatigably he agitated for national self-determination of the non-Russian peoples, the dissolution of the army, fraternization at the front,(9) the immediate termination of the war, and a de facto truce on the front ; to keep face, he protested against separate peace with Germany. At this point the Germans had adopted a strategy of virtual inaction but had increased propaganda at the battlefront. Parvus was one of the instigators of this strategy. Thus advanced the world revolution.
These exhortations and hopes had become meaningful to millions of Russians. It so happened that Lenin’s slogans coincided with German interests except, of course, for his muted calls for a revolution in Germany. Since the summer of 1915 the Germans had been particularly interested in defeatist “disorganizing” and “disintegrating” propaganda within the Russian army. Now the tempo of this effort increased. On April 28, a few days after Lenin’s arrival, Soldiers’ Pravda (shortly afterwards renamed Trench Pravda) began publication. Lenin’s confidant during the publication period of the first Pravda, Podvoisky, took charge of the operation which gave fraternization at the front a clear political meaning. The paper, which was officially issued by the Social Democratic military organizations in the Latvian region, rapidly achieved wide circulation at the front but, on June 17, the editor, a certain Khaustov, was arrested as a German spy. (Even before Lenin’s return, a member of the Pravda staff had been arrested as an enemy agent.) Little incidents like this passed unnoticed in the general enthusiasm for the new political life. Lenin’s socialist comrades had decided that the opposition to Leninism should be based purely on ideological differences.(10)
Though Lenin was the formal leader of his party, there exists ample evidence that outside forces were agitating. Lenin’s interests did not entirely coincide with those of the Germans. The latter, vitally concerned about the military effort of Russia, were anxious to create unrest to as great a degree and as rapidly as possible. Lenin, by contrast, was anxious to seize power, but for this very reason had to be careful not to undertake premature moves. His timing had to be in harmony with the attitudes of the masses rather than with the interests of the Germans. He later commented that the existing government, though it would eventually have to topple, could not be overthrown immediately. “We are no Blanquists. We do not want to rule with a minority . . . against the majority.”(11)
In April, 1917, Lenin favored peaceful demonstrations as a means to strengthen the party and spread his slogans. Yet, early in May, the government announced its loyalty to the Allies and supported national defense. This created a sore point with the Germans. There was little spontaneous unrest, but German agents rapidly got busy. On May 7 Riezler received a report from “Uno” (probably Jansson) advising means of aiding the “activists” in Petrograd. On May 14 the Wilhelmstrasse was told that Jansson and Steinwachs had established contacts with all groups of the Social Democratic party. Bolsheviks had built up cells in two or three regiments by incessantly delivering speeches to soldiers in their barracks. A Bolshevik specialist in military work, F.F. Linde of the Finland Guard Reserve Regiment,(12) led the rebellious soldiers into the streets.(13) Investigation showed that the demonstrations were prepared in advance : there were banners and placards, many with expertly executed drawings. The demonstrators were led by agitators and accompanied by armed men. “Provocative shots” were fired and casualties resulted.(14) The government’s palace was surrounded and the mutinous soldiers were preparing to arrest the government. Such a step would have boomeranged. After a few shots were fired, the soviet, which had full authority, called a halt to the operation. The military wanted to suppress the demonstration, but the leaders of the democratic government, G.E. Lvov and A.F. Kerensky, decided to rely on “moral influence.”
An insurrection attempt would also have been a grave mistake from the Bolshevik point of view. Later Lenin, who had been surprised, counseled moderation and admitted that this operation “was not organized by the party.” He asserted that those who stood to the left of the Central Committee were “crazy.” He reminisced later that this upsurge—“somewhat more than an armed demonstration and somewhat less than an armed uprising”—opened his eyes to the potentialities of a popular insurrection.(14a)
Lenin’s behavior was unusual and did not quite fit the legend. It could not but disappoint the Germans who expected more than agitation for an international socialist conference. Lenin turned to the land question and sometimes obliquely, other times vehemently, suggested to the peasants that they should set up committees and seize land : there was no risk of prematurity in localized rural uprisings. This tactic (which can be traced back to Bakunin) was well coordinated with the Germans who in their front propaganda were telling the Russian soldiers the same thing as Lenin and, to induce mass desertions, were spreading the rumor that the land was being grabbed by those who had stayed at home. This propaganda technique had been suggested to the Germans, not by a revolutionary but, on April 17, 1917, by an otherwise unknown Count Corvin Milewsky, who during World War I was a resident of Holland. This effort was most effective in revolutionizing Russia.
The Bolsheviks were flourishing. Under Vyacheslav M. Molotov, a press bureau (byuro pechati) was established and with “special funds”(15) furnished by the Central Committee it financed and enlarged ten provincial party papers plus Trench Pravda and the chief organ, Pravda, in Petrograd. The considerable source of the “special funds” which supported a dozen papers is unrecorded, but the historian of this effort was I.S. Sazonov, who participated in the labors of the bureau. This fact suggests that Berlin was the main source of the funds.(16) However, given Sazonov’s contacts with an agent of Erzberger rather than the Foreign Office, presumably these funds were funneled through Erzberger’s organization which did specialize in “press work.” These funds would have been used in addition to those budgeted by the Foreign Office. Incidentally, the first issue of the bureau’s Bulletin contained an article by Stalin. It is open to speculation if he and Molotov knew or surmised the financing of the bureau’s farflung operations.(17)
When Shotman visited Lenin by the end of May or early June, Lenin proudly showed him a new and modern press which was capable of increasing the output of Pravda. Lenin related that the printing press had been made available by the Finnish party, a most unlikely source of such supplies.(18) In any event, on June 3, 1917, Berlin informed Romberg that Lenin’s peace propaganda was getting stronger and that the disorganization of the Russian army was progressing.
To disprove this kind of talk, the Russian government again felt the need to display its army’s power and the firmness of Russia’s alliance with France, Britain, and the United States. They decided upon a military offensive. This decision soon was known and openly debated in the press. A victorious Russian offensive might have changed the entire military situation. German propaganda outlets immediately became active. Lenin, maintaining that an offensive would entail the slaughtering of Russian workers and peasants, demanded an immediate peace offer to the suppressed classes of all countries, a peace anchored to the destruction of capitalism.
At the beginning of June the Petrograd municipal elections were held on the basis of universal suffrage and the Bolsheviks polled one-sixth of the vote. This percentage was still quite small, but on June 4, Lenin declared in the All-Russian soviet that the Bolsheviks were prepared to assume power, a declaration that was received with some applause and much laughter. Pravda, the Germans reported, was selling 300,000 copies daily(19)—a large circulation, especially when one considers the other subsidiary organs.(20) But trouble was brewing : one of the Bolsheviks who had returned with Lenin through Germany was implicated in a criminal affair (theft of jewelry) and the Malinovsky story broke. The debate about the offensive was an excellent diversion but the Germans, who had determined the approximate battle date through radio intelligence, desired action.
On June 19 the Bolshevik military organization of Petrograd, over which Lenin exercised little control, began preparations for an ostensibly peaceful—but actually armed—demonstration. Austrian diplomats in Stockholm were told by one of their academic agents that Olof Aschberg, director of Nya Banken, had discovered that Lenin was preparing to strike within a few days.(21) If successful he would take power, but it was likely that the attempt would fail. On June 21 Lenin was prevailed upon to approve of the planned demonstration. The plan envisaged that in case of popular support, the main government buildings were to be occupied, the government arrested, and power seized by the Central Committee. A lengthy proclamation was issued, the substance of which was that the soldiers should join the workers in the streets and that not a single regiment or division should remain in the barracks. It called for the control and organization of industry, for the concentration of all power in the soviet, and for “bread, peace, liberty.” The text emphasized that there were to be no secret treaties with the allies and no separate peace with Germany. This phrase was telegraphed by a Pravda editor, Bronislav Veselovski, to Hanecki and thereupon was published in the German press.(22)
The demonstration took place on June 23, but there was little support. The All-Russian soviet, thirteen per cent of whose delegates were Bolsheviks, asked the Bolsheviks to end the operation. The Bolsheviks rejected the request. Thereupon the Petrograd soviet forbade demonstrations for three days. The Bolshevik military leaders wanted a “test of strength” but Lenin interfered and cancelled the operation. Chernov, a Social Revolutionary leader of strong Zimmerwald convictions who enjoyed direct or indirect Austrian and German support,(23) commented that Lenin was shrewd enough to avoid political suicide.
It was suggested in the soviet that the Bolsheviks be disarmed and the mutinous regiments disbanded. Martov, who had recently arrived via Germany, protested that there was no enemy on the left and that the most important task was to prevent a counter-revolution. The Menshevik Weinstein alleged that, lest the counter-revolution win, Bolshevik force should be subdued by non-violence. Of course, Weinstein was in communication with German socialists in Stockholm.
On June 25 the soviet, surprisingly, announced open support of the offensive. This meant that the Germans were forced to create unrest again. A revolutionary center was formed inside the Bolshevik party to put pressure on Lenin. However, countermoves were made and, on June 29, the Bolshevik military organization decided to restrain from demonstrating as yet.
On July 1 the Russian military offensive began. The event rapidly swelled the Bolshevik ranks. The Bolsheviks proposed a demonstration. Partly to neutralize this effort and partly to bring about reconciliation, the Mensheviks decided to join with the Bolsheviks in this demonstration. The Bolsheviks stole the show with greater numbers, large quantities of streamers and leaflets, and forceful slogans, but the demonstration had no national impact. The Germans were so worried about Lenin’s failure to stop the offensive that they established relations with the anarchists, who attacked the main prison, liberating criminals and deserters. Bolshevik and anarchist agitators, propagandizing military units, advocated rebellion and mutiny. The Germans and Austrians increased their front propaganda and stepped up distribution of their own Russian language publications. Fraternization was reoriented to conduct “peace negotiations” from regiment to regiment.
The Russian offensive soon weakened. According to Lenin’s interpretation, a turning point in the revolution had been reached ; but he feared a blood bath in which the groups which wanted to advance the revolution would be exterminated. Kamenev and Stalin supported him against Raskolnikov, a lieutenant and Bolshevik leader of the Kronstadt naval base, and Ensign A.Y. Semashko,(24) both of whom were insisting on an uprising. On July 5, Bolsheviks from the Central Committee, the Petrograd committee, and the military organizations resolved to begin the uprising. Lenin undoubtedly disagreed with the decision. Though the uprising was expected to spark a German counterblow at the front, it was politically premature.
By July 11 the Russian offensive had turned into defeat and a German counteroffensive was about to be initiated. The next day Lenin went to Finland, accompanied by Demyan Bedny, the poet, to take a summer rest with his sister Maria in Bonch-Bruyevich’s dacha in the village of Naivola—a vacation “in a sea of trouble.” He was completely exhausted and suffered from such insomnia that sleeping pills were prescribed.
The uprising started late on July 15.(25) It was launched by a machine gun regiment following Semashko’s orders. Other military units, notably a sailor detachment from Kronstadt, and a few civilian groups joined.(26) There was a fair amount of popular unrest. Yet to get large masses of demonstrators and soldiers into the streets, money was necessary. And indeed, German agents were distributing money freely in 5, 10 and 25-ruble notes.(27)
The rising really got under way in the afternoon of July 16. In the evening the soldiers and workers of Petrograd were called into the streets. The soviet was surrounded and vainly was requested by the demonstrators to assume governmental power. The Central Committee had very little control. The insurgent troops (altogether five reserve regiments) were firmly in the hands of the Bolshevik military leaders. Lenin returned early on July 17 and made an insipid speech but did not call a halt to the uprising.
By the evening of July 17, despite government counteractions, the Bolsheviks, for all practical purposes, still controlled Petrograd. Yet there was no real mass support ; the operation was in the nature of a putsch rather than an uprising. The continuing lack of visible success, as well as food, water, and other bodily needs caused restlessness among the masses.
At this time, some enterprising souls disseminated information demonstrating “definite proof of Bolshevik treason.” Yet before the insurgents were handed newspapers and leaflets accusing Lenin of being a German agent, an assistant of the Minister of Justice, N.S. Karinsky, secretly informed Bonch-Bruyevich that there was a plan underway to indict Lenin. He warned that there was adequate evidence. Between seven and eight o’clock that night, the Central Committee, with Lenin’s approval, called off the “manifestation.” Lenin went into hiding. The government deployed loyal military forces ; many Bolshevik units, shocked by the disclosures, were easily disarmed. Other Bolshevik troops inadvertently began to fire upon each other. Panic ensued, and immediately thereafter a thunderstorm followed by a heavy downpour emptied the streets. Within a few weeks the party was to lose half of its membership. Bolshevism seemed to be crushed forever.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Walter, p. 286ff.
2 Shub, p. 190 ; also Schapiro, p. 161f.
3 Raphael R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution 1917-1939, (New York : International Universities Press, 1962), p. 80.
4 Quoted from Schapiro, p. 164.
5 This was not original with him. The formula was first expressed by Y.M. Steklov on March 17, 1917. See The Russian Provisional Government 1917, documents, ed. Robert P. Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky (3 Vols., Hoover Institution, Stanford University Press, 1961), III, 1224.
6 Many local party organizations until the Bolshevik seizure of power remained, despite Lenin’s efforts, jointly Bolshevik-Menshevik in their composition (Schapiro, p. 164).
7 On April 25 Lenin wrote to Hanecki and Radek complaining that so far “exactly nothing” had been received ; “no letters, no packages, no money from you.” Letters of Lenin, p. 424. On May 4, he confirmed receipt of “2000” from Kozlovsky (Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, No. 9 (21), 1923, p. 231).
8 “During the war Lenin wrote more letters to Inessa Armand than to any other person, whether relative or disciple . . . Lenin wrote more frequently and at greater length to her than to anyone else.... From November 20, 1916, to ... the February revolution in 1917, he wrote . . . more to her than to all the rest put together. In his letters to Inessa, as always, preoccupation with politics is uppermost. But tone and depth reveal facets of his nature exhibited in no other letters.” (Wolfe, “Lenin and Inessa Armand”, p. 104f.) During January 1915, Inessa sent Lenin the outline for a pamphlet on the women’s question which elicited a critical reaction by Lenin on the subject of “free love” and “freedom of adultery.” Inessa was deeply hurt (Wolfe, p. 109) but Lenin succeeded in explaining himself. In his last letter to her written in Switzerland between March 25 and 31, 1917, he still assumed they would be unable to go to Russia (Sochineniya, 4th ed., Vol. 35, p. 248). Although he chided her for being nervous, the relationship appears to have remained intact. (In his wartime letters, Lenin no longer addressed her by ty but by vy; Wolfe interprets this, correctly, as a conspiratorial move to deceive wartime censorship.) There are no data to indicate the reasons why, upon arriving in Russia, the two separated.
9 Lenin’s first article on this subject appeared in Pravda on April 28.
10 For an example, see Browder-Kerensky, op. cit., 11, 1094.
11 Lenin mainly criticized Blanqui’s disregard for the importance of the masses. His main statements on Blanqui appear in Sochineniya, 4th ed., Vols. 10, p. 360; 12, p. 88f.; 15, p. 337ff.; 17, p. 129f.; 24, pp. 21, 29, 119, 186f., 206, 233, 288f.; 25, pp. 282, 406; 26, pp. 4f., 181; 28, p. 281; 29, p. 132; 30, p. 458; and 31, pp. 48, 69.
12 Abramovitch, (p. 37) described “Fedor Linde” as a teacher of mathematics and philosophy, then serving as a private.
13 Linde poses an interesting puzzle. On March 24, 1916, the Paris Okhrana agency reported to Petrograd on a German secret agent, von der Linde, who was working against Russia and was then in Switzerland. A “Linde” returned with Lenin on the sealed train. This may have been the same Linde whose archive Shotman in 1913 brought to Lenin in Poronin (Shotman, op. cit., p. 300f). Another “Linde” sometimes also described as “F.F. Linde” was in Petrograd on March 14. He was one of the first soldier delegates to the soviet, and apparently had a hand in drafting the soviet’s Order No. 1 which, by instituting soviets throughout the army, greatly weakened Russia’s military strength. The above Linde was identified as a Social Democrat and left intellectual who was a member of the soviet’s executive committee by April, 1917, and later became a political commissar and was killed on the front in 1918. A Fritz Linde, also known as Karl Y. Pechak, was arrested in November, 1914, together with several Bolshevik Duma members, and, was sent to Siberia because of “cooperation with German and Austrian military interests” (Tsiavlovsky, op. cit., p. 156). One element of confusion is that “Fritz” also seems to have used “Alexander” as his first name. The odds are, however, that there were two Lindes. There were quite a few teams of brothers and cousins acting in unison.
14 Browder-Kerensky, op. cit., II, 1242. The examining magistrate requested the soviet to make available the results of their finding on this unrest. This request was complied with only after long delays. Hence the organizers were not identified. In September the prosecutor dropped the case. This example of inefficiency, procrastination, and unwillingness to stop subversion was typical of the way “Russian democracy” handled the “internal threat.”
14a “Noviye dokumenty V.I. Lenina,” Voprosy Istorii KPSS, No. 5, Moscow, 1958, p. 16.
15 Istoricheskii Arkhiv (1955), No. 5, p. 200f.
16 See also Schapiro, p. 177.
17 It is not a foregone conclusion that all this financing was done with genuine money. There are indications that forged rubles were used also, though apparently largely in connection with “demonstrations.” It will be recalled that Parvus proposed an ambitious “strategic” scheme for money forging. Perhaps the Germans followed up this suggestion, but only on a “tactical” level. The Russian government had been informed to the effect that the Germans possessed plates for the printing of 10-ruble notes. B.V. Nikitine, The Fatal Years (London : Hodge, 1938), p. 114.
18 Shotman, p. 386. The Finnish socialists did make available paper to Bolshevik and other socialist newspapers. On two or three occasions they reportedly also gave the Bolsheviks several thousands of rubles (Futrell, p. 159f.). This money, which came through Karl Wiik who in turn was tied in with Hanecki, may have been of German origin. Naturally, small Finnish collections may have been used to cover up for the larger sums.
19 Austrian documents put this figure at 400,000.
20 On December 3, 1917, the German Secretary of State, Richard von Kuehlmann, stated in a report for the German military High Command, “It was not until the Bolsheviki had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under varying labels that they were in a position to be able to build up their main organ, Pravda, . . . and appreciably to extend the originally narrow basis of their operation.” (Zeman, p. 94) Unfortunately, there are no exact figures. From related data in the German file it would appear that a paper with a printing of 400,000 would run a deficit of at least 500,000 dollars annually. This would be equivalent to close to 100,000 rubles per month (pre-war parity).
21 Austrian Archives, Politisches Archiv, Rot 834, Krieg 3, Russland, June-September, 1917.
22 Browder-Kerensky, op. cit., III, 1369. The Russian government established that there was only one outgoing telegram discussing Bolshevik slogans.
23 Through Zivin, his intermediary with the Germans.
24 This was not Dr. Semashko, Lenin’s medical friend and party treasurer after Victor Taratuta, but presumably his cousin. Semashko was ordered to go to the front in April but refused and concentrated on organizing Bolshevik cells in the Petrograd garrison.
25 The timing was in accord with German tactical requirements. The Bolsheviks were well informed on events at the front because of their infiltration into the communication and telegraphic services. Through these same infiltrators rumors were spread to the front that the Bolsheviks had assumed power in Petrograd and were calling off the war.
26 According to the London Times of July 19, 1917, there were also demonstrations by national groups clamoring for self-determination.
27 Nikitine, p. 111f.

Red Symphony

RED SYMPHONY
J. LandowskyTranslator : George Knupffer
FOREWORD

The material here given is a translation of Ch. XL of a book which appeared in Madrid in Spanish as “Sinfonia en Rojo Mayor,” and is now past its 11th Edition, produced by Editorial E.R.S.A. under the well-known publisher Senor Don Mauricio Carlavilla, who has very kindly agreed to this English translation and publication. As soon as possible the full book of over 800 pp. will follow.
The given chapter is of immense importance. It is here translated from a Russian edition as well as from the Spanish. It is a complete material on its own.
The translator’s own book on “The Struggle for World Power” also deals with the whole problem of super-power and global enslavement through the masters of both usury-Capitalism and terroristic Communism, which are both the tools of the same forces and serving the same purpose. The book has been published in Madrid in Spanish by Senor Carlavilla as “La Lucha por el Poder Mundial.”
In the present work we see this whole story brilliantly described and proved by one of the major exponents of the subversive take-over of the world, Christian G. Rakovsky, one of the founders of Soviet Bolshevism and also a victim of the show trials just before the last war under Stalin. This is a document of historical importance and nobody who wants to be well-informed should fail to read and recommend it. Not to know the thesis here described is to know and understand nothing concerning the chief events and prospects of our time.
In the Spanish book Senor Carlavilla explains the origin of the material in question. He says :
“This is the result of a painstaking translation of several copybooks found on the body of Dr. Landowsky in a hut on the Petrograd front (Leningrad) by a Spanish volunteer.
“He brought them to us. In view of the condition of the manuscripts, their restoration was a long and tiring job, lasting several years. For a long time we were not sure if they could be published.. So extraordinary and unbelievable were his final disclosures that we would never have dared to publish these memoirs if the persons and events mentioned had not accorded fully with the facts.
“Before these reminiscences saw the light of day we prepared ourselves for proofs and polemics. We answer fully and personally for the veracity of the basic facts.
“Let us see if anyone will be able to disprove them. . .”
Dr. Landowsky was a Russianized Pole and lived in Russia. His father, a Colonel of the Russian Imperial Army, was shot by the Bolsheviks during the 1917 revolution. The life-story of Dr. Landowsky is astonishing. He finished the Faculty of Medicine in Russia before the revolution and then studied two years at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he spoke fluent French. He was interested in the effects of drugs on the human organism, to help surgeons in operations. Being a talented doctor, he carried out experiments in this field and had achieved considerable results.
However, after the revolution all roads were closed to him. He lived with his family in great need, earning a living by chance jobs. Not being able to publish learned papers in his own name, he permitted a more fortunate colleague to publish them in his own name.
The all-seeing NKVD (secret police) became interested in these works and easily discovered the real author. His speciality was very valuable for them. One day in 1936 there was a knock at the doctor’s door. He was invited to follow, and he was never again allowed to rejoin his family. He was placed in the building of the chemical laboratory of the NKVD near Moscow. He lived there and was forced to carry out various jobs given him by his masters, he was a witness at questionings, tortures and the most terrible happenings and crimes. Twice he was abroad, but always under control, as a prisoner. He knew and suffered much, especially as he was a decent and religious man. He had the courage to keep notes of what he has seen and heard, and he kept whenever possible such documents and letters as passed through his hands, hiding all this in the hollow legs of his table in the chemical laboratory. So he lived until the Second World War. How he came to Petrograd and how he was killed is not known.
The document given below is an exact recorded report of the questioning of the former Ambassador in France, C.G. Rakovsky during the period of the trials of the Trotzkyists in the USSR in 1938, when he was tried together with Bukharin, Rykoff, Yagoda, Karakhan, Dr. Levin and others.
Insofar as the accused Rakovsky made it clear, having in mind the sparing of his life, that he could give information about matters of very special interest, Stalin gave orders to his foreign agent to carry out the questioning.
It is known that Rakovsky was sentenced to be shot, like the others, but was reprieved and given 20 years of prison.
Very interesting is the description of the above mentioned agent. This was a certain Ren? Duval (also known as Gavriil Gavriilovitch Kus’min), the son of a millionaire, very good looking and talented. He studied in France. His widowed mother adored him. But the young man was carried away by Communist propaganda and fell into the hands of their agency. They suggested that he should study in Moscow, and he gladly accepted the proposal. He passed through the severe school of the NKVD and became a foreign agent, and when he wanted to change his mind, it was too late. They do not let people out of their grip. By the exercise of will-power he reached the “heights of evil,” as he called it, and enjoyed the full confidence of Stalin himself.
The questioning took place in French by this agent. The doctor was present in order to put drug pills unnoticed into the glass of Rakovsky, to induce energy and a good mood. Behind the wall the conversation was registered on apparatus, and the technician who operated it did not understand French. Then Dr. Landowsky had to translate into Russian, with two copies, for Stalin and Gabriel. Secretly he dared to make a third carbon copy, which he hid away.
* * *
XL
X-RAY OF REVOLUTION
I returned to the laboratory. My nervous system bothered me and I prescribed myself complete rest. I am in bed almost the whole day. Here I am quite alone for already four days.
Gabriel enquired about me every day. He has to reckon with my condition. At the mere thought that they could again send me to the Lubianka (Moscow HQ of the secret police) to be present at a new scene of terror I become excited and tremble. I am ashamed of belonging to the human race. How low have people fallen ! How low have I fallen !
* * *
These lines are all I was able to write after five days following my return from the Lubianka, when trying to describe on paper the horror, and thereby interrupting the chronological order of my notes. I could not write. Only after several months, when Summer began, I was able calmly and simply to set out all that I had seen, disgusting, vicious, evil.
During these past months I asked myself a thousand times the same question : “Who were the people who were anonymously present at the torture?” I strained all my intuitive and deductive capabilities. Was it Ezhov ? It is possible, but I see no reason why he should have concealed himself. Officially he is responsible and the fear which made him hide does not lead to a logical explanation. Even more : if I have any reason for describing myself as a psychologist, then this fanatic, the chief of the NKVD, with signs of abnormality, would be certain to enjoy a criminal display. Such things as the expression of haughtiness in front of a humbled enemy, who had been converted into a wreck psychologically and physically, should have given him an unhealthy pleasure. I analyzed still further. The absence of prior preparation was obvious ; evidently the decision to call this satanic session had been taken in a hurry. The circumstance that I had been appointed to be present was the result of a sudden agreement. If Ezhov had been able to chose the time freely, then timely preparations would have been made. And then I would not have been called ; that general of the NKVD who was hardly able to come in time, for the purpose of being present at the torture, would have known about this beforehand. If this was not Ezhov, then who had decided on the time ? Which other chief was able to arrange it all ? However poor are my informations about the Soviet hierarchy, but above Ezhov in affairs along the line of the NKVD there is only one man — Stalin. Therefore it was he ?
Asking myself these questions, which arose from my deductions, I remembered yet other facts in support of my opinion. I remembered that when I looked from the window over the square a few minutes before we went down to the “spectacle” I saw how there drove across it four large identical cars ; all we Soviet people know that Stalin travels in a caravan of identical machines, so that nobody would know in which he is sitting, to make attack more difficult. Was he there?. .
But here I came across another mystery : according to the details which Gabriel gave me, the hidden observers were to sit behind our back. But there I could only see a long mirror, through which nothing could be seen. Perhaps it was transparent ? I was puzzled.
* * *
Only seven days passed when one morning Gabriel appeared in the house. I found that he had an energetic and enthusiastic appearance and was in an optimistic mood. Yet these flashes of happiness which lit up his face at first, did not return later. It seemed as if he wanted chase away the shadows which passed over his face by increased activity and mental exertion. After lunch he told me :
“We have a guest here.”
“Who is it” I asked.
“Rakovsky, the former Ambassador in Paris.”
“I do not know him.”
“He is one of those whom I pointed out to you on that night ; the former Ambassador in London and Paris. . . Of course a big friend of your acquaintance Navachin. . . Yes, this man is at my disposal. He is here with us ; he is being well treated and looked after. You shall see him.”
“I, why ? You know well that I am not curious about matters of this kind. . . I would ask you to spare me this sight ; I am still not quite well after what you had forced me to see. I cannot guarantee my nervous system and heart.”
“Oh, do not worry. Now we are not concerned with force. This man has already been broken. No blood, no force. It is only necessary to give him moderate doses of drugs. Here I have brought you details : they are from Levin [1], who still serves us with his knowledge. Apparently there is a certain drug somewhere in the laboratory, which can work wonders.”
“You believe all this?”
“I am speaking in symbolic form. Rakovsky is inclined to confess to everything he knows about the matter. We have already had a preliminary talk with him, and the results are not bad.”
“In that case why is there a need for a miraculous drug?”
“You will see, doctor, you will see. This is a small safety measure, dictated by the professional experience of Levin. It will help to achieve that our man being questioned would feel optimistic and would not lose hope and faith. He can already see a chance of saving his life as a long shot. This is the first effect which we must attain. Then we must make sure that he would all the time remain in a state of the experience of the decisive happy moment, but without losing his mental capacities ; more exactly, it will be necessary to stimulate and sharpen them. He must have induced in him a quite special feeling. How can one express it ? More exactly a condition of enlightened stimulation.”
“Something like hypnosis?”
“Yes, but without sleepiness.”
“And I must invent a drug for all this ? I think you exaggerate my scientific talents. I cannot achieve it.”
“Yes, but it is unnecessary to invent anything, doctor. As for Levin, he asserts that the problem has already been solved.”
“He always left me with the impression of being something of a charlatan. .
“Probably yes, but I think that the drug he has mentioned, even if it is not as effective as he claims, will still help us to achieve the necessary ; after all, we need not expect a miracle. Alcohol, against our will, makes us speak nonsense. Why cannot another substance encourage us to say the reasonable truth ? Apart from that, Levin had told me of previous cases, which seem to be genuine.”
“Why do you not want to force him to take part in this affair once more ? Or will he refuse to obey?”
“Oh no, he would like to. It is enough to want to save or to extend your life with the help of this or another service, for not refusing. But it is I myself who does not want to use his services.
He must not hear anything of that which Rakovsky will tell me. Not he, not anyone. . .
“Therefore I . . .”
“You — that is another matter, doctor. You are a deeply decent person. But I am not Diogenes, to rush to look for another over the snowy distances of the USSR.”
“Thank you, but I think that my honesty. ..”
“Yes, doctor, yes ; you say that we take advantage of your honesty for various depravities. Yes, doctor, that is so. . . ; but it is only so from your absurd point of view. And who is attracted to- day by absurdities ? For example such an absurdity as your honesty ? You always manage to lead one away towards conversation about most attractive things. But what, in fact, will take place ? You must only help me to give the correct doses of Levin's drug. It would appear that in the dosage there is an invisible line which divides sleep from a state of activity, a clear condition from a befogged one, good sense from nonsense. . . ; there can come an artificial excessive enthusiasm.”
“If that is all. . .”
“And yet something else. Now we shall speak seriously. Study the instructions of Levin, weigh them, adapt them reasonably to the condition and strength of the prisoner. You have time for study until nightfall ; you can examine Rakovsky as often as you wish. And that is all for the moment. You would not believe how terribly I want to sleep. I shall sleep a few hours. If by evening nothing extraordinary happens then I have given instructions that I am not to be called. I would advise you to have a good rest after dinner, because after that it will not be possible to sleep for a long time.”
We entered the vestibule. Having taken his leave from me he quickly ran up the stairs, but in the middle he halted.
“Ah, doctor — he exclaimed — I had forgotten. Many thanks from Comrade Ezhov. Expect a present, perhaps even a decoration.”
He waved me goodbye and rapidly disappeared on the staircase landing of the top floor.

* * *
The notes of Levin were short, but clear and exact. I had no difficulty in finding the medicine. It was in doses of a milligram in tiny tablets. I made a test and, in accordance with his explanation. they dissolved very easily in water and better still in alcohol. The formula was not indicated there, and I decided later to make a detailed analysis, when I shall have the time.
Undoubtedly it was some substance of the specialist L?menstadt, that scientist of whom Levin had spoken to me during the first meeting. I did not think I would discover during analysis something unexpected or new. Probably again some base with a considerable amount of opium of a more active kind than tebain. I was well acquainted with 19 main types and some more besides. In those practical conditions in which my experiments were conducted I was satisfied with those facts which my investigations had yielded.
Although my work had an altogether different direction, yet I was quite at home in the realm of hallucinatory substances. I remembered that Levin had told me of the distillation of rare types of Indian Hemp. I was bound to be dealing with opium or hashish, in order to penetrate the secret of this much praised drug. I would have been glad to have had the opportunity of coming across one or more new bases which gave rise to his “miraculous” qualities. In principle I was prepared to assume such a possibility. After all the work of investigation in conditions of unlimited time and means, while not having to reckon with economic limitations, which was possible in conditions of the NKVD, provided unlimited scientific possibilities. I flattered myself with the illusion of being able to find, as the result of these investigations, a new weapon in my scientific fight against pain.
I could not give much time to the diversion of such pleasant illusions. I concentrated my thoughts in order to think how and in what proportion I shall have to give Rakovsky this drug. According to the instructions of Levin, one tablet would have to produce the desired result. He warned that if the patient had any heart weakness there could follow sleepiness and even complete lethargy, with a consequent dimming of the mind. While bearing all this in mind, I had first of all to examine Rakovsky. I did not expect to find the internal condition of his heart to be normal. If there were no damage, then surely there would be a lowering of tone as the result of the nervous experiences, as his system could not have remained unchanged after a long and terrifying torture.
I put off the examination until after lunch. I wanted to consider everything, both for the case that Gabriel would want to give the drug with the knowledge of Rakovsky, as also without his knowledge. In both cases I would have to busy myself with him, insofar as I myself would have to give him the drug of which I had been told concretely. There was no need for the participation of a professional, as the drug was given by mouth.
After lunch I went to visit Rakovsky. He was kept locked up in one room of the ground floor and was guarded by one man, who did not take his eyes off him. Of furniture there was only one small table, a narrow bed without ends and another small, rough table. When I entered Rakovsky was sitting. He immediately got up. He looked at me closely and I read in his face doubt and, it seemed, also fright. I think he must have recognized me, having seen me when he sat that memorable night at the side of the generals.
I ordered the guard to leave and told him to bring me a chair. I sat down and asked the prisoner to sit. He was about 50 years old. He was a man of medium height, bald in front, with a large, fleshy nose. In youth his face was probably pleasant. His facial outlines were not typically semitic, but his origin was nevertheless clear. Once upon a time he was probably quite fat, but not now, and his skin hung everywhere, while his face and neck were like a burst balloon, with the air let out. The usual dinner at the Lubianka was apparently too strict a diet for the former Ambassador in Paris. At that moment I made no further observations.
“You smoke?” I asked, opening the cigarette case, with the intention of establishing somewhat more intimate relations with him.
“I gave up smoking in order to preserve my health” he replied with a very pleasant tone of voice, “but I thank you ; I think I have now recovered from my stomach troubles.”
He smoked quietly, with restraint and not without some elegance.
“I am a doctor” I introduced myself.
“Yes I know that ; I saw how you acted 'there' ” he said with trembling voice.
“I came to enquire about the state of your health. How are you ? Do you suffer from any illness?”
“No, nothing.”
“Are you sure ? What about your heart?”
“Thanks to the results of enforced dieting I do not observe in myself any abnormal symptoms.”
“There are some which cannot be noticed by the patient himself, but only by a doctor.”
“I am a doctor” he interrupted me.
“A doctor?” I repeated in surprise.
“Yes, didn't you know?”
“Nobody had told me of it. I congratulate you. I shall be very glad to be of use to a colleague and, possibly, a fellow student. Where did you study ? In Moscow or Petrograd?”
“Oh no! At that time I was not a Russian subject. I studied in Nancy and Montpellier ; in the latter I received my doctorate.”
“This means that we may have studied at the same time ; I did several courses in Paris. Were you French?”
“I intended to become French. I was born a Bulgarian, but without asking my permission I was converted into a Rumanian. My province was Dobrudga, where I was born, and after the peace treaty it went to Rumania.”
“Permit me to listen to your chest” — and I put the stethoscope in my ears.
He took off his torn jacket and stood up. I listened. The examination shewed nothing abnormal ; as I had assumed, weakness, but without defects.
“I suppose one must give food for the heart.”
“Only the heart, comrade?” he asked ironically.
“I think so” I said, pretending not to have noticed the irony, “I think your diet, too, should be strengthened.”
“Permit me to listen to myself.”
“With pleasure”—and I gave him the stethoscope.
He quickly listened to himself.
“I had expected that my condition would be much worse. Many thanks. May I put my jacket on?”
“Of course. Let us agree, then, that it is necessary to take a few drops of digitalis, don't you think?”
“You consider that absolutely essential ? I think that my old heart will survive the few days or months which remain to me quite well.”
“I think otherwise ; I think that you will live much longer.”
“Do not upset me, colleague. . . To live more! To live still longer! . . . There must be instructions about the end ; the court case cannot last longer... And then, then rest.”
And when he said this, having in mind the final rest, it seemed that his face had the expression of happiness almost. I shuddered. This wish to die, to die soon which I read in his eyes, made me faint. I wanted to cheer him up from a feeling of compassion.
“You have not understood me, comrade. I wanted to say that in your case it may be decided to continue your life, but life without suffering. For what have you been brought here ? Does one not treat you well now?”
“The latter, yes, of course. Concerning the rest I have heard hints, but...”
I gave him another cigarette and then added :
“Have hope. For my part and to the extent which my chief will allow, I shall do everything that can depend on me, to make sure that you come to no harm. I shall begin immediately by feeding you, but not excessively, bearing in mind the state of your stomach. We shall begin with a milk diet and some more substantial additions. I shall give instructions at once. You may smoke . . . take some . . .” and I left him everything that remained in the packet.
I called the guard and ordered him to light the prisoner’s cigarette whenever he wants to smoke. Then I left and before having a couple of hours rest I gave instructions that Rakovsky was to have half a litre of milk with sugar.

* * *
We prepared for the meeting with Rakovsky at midnight. Its “friendly” character was stressed in all the details. The room was well warmed, there was a fire in the fire-place, soft lighting, a small and well-chosen supper, good wines ; all had been scientifically improvised. “As for a lovers meeting,” observed Gabriel. I was to assist. My chief responsibility was to give the prisoner the drug in such a manner that he would not notice it. For this purpose the drinks had been placed as if by chance near me, and I shall have to pour out the wine. Also I would have to observe the weakening of the drug's effect, so as to give a new dose at the right moment. This was my most important job. Gabriel wants, if the experiment succeeds, to get already at the first meeting real progress towards the essence of the matter. He is hopeful of success. He has had a good rest and is in good condition. I am interested to know how he will struggle with Rakovsky who, it seems to me, is an opponent worthy of him.
Three large arm-chairs were placed before the fire. The one nearest the door is for me, Rakovsky will sit in the middle, and in the third will be Gabriel, who had shown his optimistic mood even in his clothes, as he was wearing a white Russian shirt.
It had already struck midnight when they brought the prisoner to us. He had been given decent clothes and had been well shaved. I looked at him professionally and found him to be livelier.
He asks to be excused for not being able to drink more than one glass, mentioning the weakness of his stomach. I did not put the drug into this glass and regretted it.
The conversation began with banalities . . . Gabriel knows that Rakovsky speaks much better French than Russian and begins in that language. There are hints about the past. It is clear that Rakovsky is an expert conversationalist. His speech is exact, elegant and even decorative. He is apparently very erudite ; at times he quotes easily and always accurately. Sometimes he hints at his many escapes, at exile, about Lenin, Plekhanov, Luxemburg, and he even said that when he was a boy he had shaken the hand of the old Engels.
We drink whisky. After Gabriel had given him the opportunity of speaking for about half an hour, I asked as if by chance : “Should I add more soda water?” “Yes, add enough” he replied absentmindedly. I manipulated the drink and dropped a tablet into it, which I had been holding from the very beginning. First I gave Gabriel some whisky, letting him know by a sign that the job had been done. I gave Rakovsky his glass and then began to drink mine. He sipped it with pleasure. “I am a small cad” I told myself. But this was a passing thought and it dissolved in the pleasant fire in the fire-place.
Before Gabriel came to the main theme, the talk had been long and interesting.
I had been fortunate in obtaining a document which reproduces better than a shorthand note all that had been discussed between Gabriel and Rakovsky. Here it is :

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1 Former NKVD doctor, was a co-defendant with Rakovsky at the trial.
Informationthe questioning of the accusedChristian Georgievitch Rakovskyby Gavriil Gavriilovitch Kus’minon the 26th january, 1938.

Gavriil G. Kus’min. In accordance with our agreement at the Lubianka, I had appealed for a last chance for you ; your presence in this house indicates that I had succeeded in this. Let us see if you will not deceive us.
Christian G. Rakovsky. I do not wish and shall not do that.
G.—But first of all : a well-meant warning. Now we are concerned with the real truth. Not the “official” truth, that which is to figure at the trial in the light of the confessions of the accused. . . This is something which, as you know, is fully subject to practical considerations, or “considerations of State” as they would say in the West. The demands of international politics will force us to hide the whole truth, the “real truth” . . . Whatever may be the course of the trial, but governments and peoples will only be told that which they should know. But he who must know everything, Stalin, must also know all this. Therefore, whatever may be your words here they cannot make your position worse. You must know that they will not worsen your crime but, on the contrary, they can give the desired results in your favour. You will be able to save your life, which at this moment is already lost. So now I have told you this, but now let us see : you will all admit that you are Hitler’s spies and receive wages from the Gestapo and OKW [1].
Is that not so?
Rakovsky—Yes.
G.— And you are Hitler’s spies?
Rakovsky—Yes.
G.—No, Rakovsky, no. Tell the real truth, but not the court proceedings one.
Rakovsky—We are not spies of Hitler, we hate Hitler as you can hate him, as Stalin can hate him ; perhaps even more so, but this is a very complex question.
G.—I shall help you. . . By chance I also know one or two things. You, the Trotzkyists, had contacts with the German Staff. Is that not so ?
Rakovsky—Yes.
G.—From which period ?
Rakovsky—I do not know the exact date, but soon after the fall of Trotzky. Of course before Hitler’s coming to power.
G.—Therefore let us be exact : you were neither personal spies of Hitler, nor of his regime.
Rakovsky—Exactly. We were such already earlier.
G.—And for what purpose ? With the aim of giving Germany victory and some Russian territories ?
Rakovsky—No, in no case.
G.—Therefore as ordinary spies, for money ?
Rakovsky—For money ? Nobody received a single Mark from Germany. Hitler has not enough money to buy, for example, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, who has at his disposal freely a budget which is greater than the total wealth of Morgan and Vanderbilt, and who does not have to account for his use of the money.
G.—Well, then for what reason?
Rakovsky—May I speak quite freely?
G.—Yes, I ask you to do so ; for that reason you have been invited.
Rakovsky—Did not Lenin have higher aims when he received help from Germany in order to enter Russia ? And is it necessary to accept as true those libellous inventions which had been circulated to accuse him ? Was he not also called a spy of the Kaiser ? His relations with the Emperor and the German intervention in the affair of the sending to Russia of the Bolshevik destroyers are quite clear.
G.—Whether it is true or not does not have any bearing on the present question.
Rakovsky—No, permit me to finish. Is it not a fact that the activity of Lenin was in the beginning advantageous to the German troops ? Permit me. . . There was the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk, at which huge territories of the USSR were ceded to Germany. Who had declared defeatism as a weapon of the Bolsheviks in 1913 ? Lenin. I know by heart his words from his letter to Gorky : “War between Austria and Russia would be a most useful thing for the revolution, but it is hardly possible that Francis-Joseph and Nicholas would present us with this opportunity.” As you see, we, the so-called Trotzkyists, the inventors of the defeat in 1905, continue at the present stage the same line, the line of Lenin.
G.—With a small difference, Rakovsky ; at present there is Socialism in the USSR, not the Tsar.
Rakovsky—You believe that ?
G.—What ?
Rakovsky—In the existence of Socialism in the USSR ?
G.—Is the Soviet Union not Socialist ?
Rakovsky—For me only in name. It is just here that we find the true reason for the opposition. Agree with me, and by the force of pure logic you must agree, that theoretically, rationally, we have the same right to say—no, as Stalin can say—yes. And if for the triumph of Communism defeatism can be justified, then he who considers that Communism has been destroyed by the bonapartism of Stalin and that he betrayed it, has the same right as Lenin to become a defeatist.
G.—I think, Rakovsky, that you are theorizing thanks to your manner of making wide use of dialectics. It is clear that if many people were present here, I would prove this ; all right, I accept your argument as the only one possible in your position, but nevertheless I think that I could prove to you that this is nothing other than a sophism. But let us postpone this for another occasion ; some day it will come. And I hope that you will give me the chance to reply. But at the present moment I shall only say this : if your defeatism and the defeat of the USSR has as its object the restoration of Socialism in the USSR, real Socialism, according to you—Trotzkyism, then, insofar as we have destroyed their leaders and cadres, defeatism and the defeat of the USSR has neither an objective nor any sense. As a result of defeat now there would come the enthronement of some F?hrer or fascist Tsar. Is that not so ?
Rakovsky—It is true. Without flattery on my part—your deduction is splendid.
G.—Well, if, as I assume, you assert this sincerely, then we have achieved a great deal : I am a Stalinist and you a Trotzkyist ; we have achieved the impossible. We have reached the point at which our views coincide. The coincidence lies in that at the present moment the USSR must not be destroyed.
Rakovsky—I must confess that I had not expected to face such a clever person. In fact at the present stage and for some years we cannot think of the defeat of the USSR and to provoke it, as it is known that we are at present in such a position, that we can not seize power. We, the Communists, would derive no profit from it. This is exact and coincides with your view. We can not be interested now in the collapse of the Stalinist State ; I say this and at the same time I assert that this State, apart from all that has been said, is anti-Communistic. You see that I am sincere.
G.—I see that. This is the only way in which we can come to terms. I would ask you, before you continue, to explain to me that which seems to me a contradiction : if the Soviet State is anti- Communistic to you, then why should you not wish its destruction at the given moment ? Someone else might be less anti-Communistic and then there would be fewer obstacles to the restoration of your pure Communism.
Rakovsky—No, no, this deduction is too simple. Although the Stalinist bonapartism also opposes Communism as the napoleonic one opposed the revolution, but the circumstance is clear that, nevertheless, the USSR continues to preserve its Communistic form and dogma ; this is formal and not real Communism. And thus, like the disappearance of Trotzky gave Stalin the possibility automatically to transform real Communism into the formal one, so also the disappearance of Stalin will allow us to transform his formal Communism into a real one. One hour would suffice for us. Have you understood me ?
G.—Yes, of course ; you have told us the classical truth that nobody destroys that which he wants to inherit. Well, all right ; all else is sophistical agility. You rely on the assumption which can be easily disproved : the assumption of Stalin’s anti-Communism. Is there private property in the USSR ? Is there personal profit ? Classes ? I shall not continue to base myself on facts — for what ?
Rakovsky—I have already agreed that there exists formal Communism. All that you enumerate are merely forms.
G.—Yes ? For what purpose ? From mere obstinacy ?
Rakovsky—Of course not. This is a necessity. It is impossible to eliminate the materialistic evolution of history. The most that can be done is to hold it up. And at what a price ? At the cost of its theoretical acceptance, in order to destroy it in practice. The force which draws humanity towards Communism is so unconquerable that that same force, but distorted, opposed to itself, can only achieve a slowing down of development ; more accurately—to slow down the progress of the permanent revolution.
G.—An example ?
Rakovsky—The most obvious — with Hitler. He needed Socialism for victory over Socialism : it is this his very anti-Socialist Socialism which is National-Socialism. Stalin needs Communism in order to defeat Communism. The parallel is obvious. But, notwithstanding Hitler’s anti-Socialism and Stalin’s anti-Communism, both, to their regret and against their will, transcendentally create Socialism and Communism. . . ; they and many others. Whether they want it or not, whether they know it or not, but they create formal Socialism and Communism, which we, the Communist-Marxists, must inevitably inherit.
G.—Inheritance ? Who inherits ? Trotzkyism is completely liquidated.
Rakovsky—Although you say so, you do not believe it. However great may be the liquidations, we Communists will survive them. The long arm of Stalin and his police cannot reach all Communists.
G.—Rakovsky, I ask you, and if necessary command, to refrain from offensive hints. Do not go too far in taking advantage of your “diplomatic immunity.”
Rakovsky—Do I have credentials ? Whose ambassador am I ?
G.—Precisely of that unreachable Trotzkyism, if we agree to call him so.
Rakovsky—I cannot be a diplomat of Trotzkyism, of which you hint. I have not been given that right to represent it, and I have not taken this role on myself. You have given it to me.
G.—I begin to trust you. I take note in your favour that at my hint about this Trotzkyism you did not deny it. This is already a good beginning.
Rakovsky—But how can I deny it ? After all, I myself mentioned it.
G.—Insofar as we have recognized the existence of this special Trotzkyism by our mutual arrangement, I want you to give definite facts, which are necessary for the investigation of the given coincidence.
Rakovsky—Yes, I shall be able to mention that which you consider necessary to know and I shall do it on my own initiative, but I shall not be able to assert that this is always the thinking also of “ Them.”
G.—Yes, I shall look on it like that.
Rakovsky—We agreed that at the present moment the opposition cannot be interested in defeatism and the fall of Stalin, insofar as we do not have the physical possibility of taking his place. This is what we both agree. At present this is an incontrovertible fact. However, there is in existence a possible aggressor. There he is, that great nihilist Hitler, who is aiming with his terrible weapon of the Wehrmacht at the whole horizon. Whether we want it or not, but he will use it against the USSR ? Let us agree that for us this is the decisive unknown fact or, do you consider that the problem has been correctly stated ?
G.—It has been well put. But I can say that for me there is no unknown factor. I consider the attack of Hitler on the USSR to be inevitable.
Rakovsky—Why ?
G.—Very simple; because he who controls it is inclined towards attack. Hitler is only the condottiere of international Capitalism.
Rakovsky—I agree that there is a danger, but from that to the assumption on this ground of the inevitability of his attack on the USSR — there is a whole abyss.
G.—The attack on the USSR is determined by the very essence of Fascism. In addition he is impelled towards it by all those Capitalist States which had allowed him to re-arm and to take all the necessary economic and strategical bases. This is quite obvious.
Rakovsky—You forget something very important. The re-armament of Hitler and the assistance he received at the present time from the Versailles nations (take good note of this) — were received by him during a special period, when we could still have become the heirs of Stalin in the case of his defeat, when the opposition still existed. . . Do you consider this fact to be a matter of chance or only a coincidence in time ?
G.—I do not see any connexion between the permission of the Versailles Powers of German re-armament and the existence of the opposition. . . The trajectory of Hitlerism is in itself clear and logical. The attack on the USSR was part of his programme already a long time ago. The destruction of Communism and expansion in the East — these are dogmas from the book “Mein Kampf,” that Talmud of National-Socialism..., but that your defeatists wanted to take advantage of this threat to the USSR that is, of course, in accordance with your train of thought.
Rakovsky—Yes, at a first glance this appears to be natural and logical, too logical and natural for the truth.
G.—To prevent this happening, so that Hitler would not attack us, we would have to entrust ourselves to an alliance with France . . ., but that would be a naivete. It would mean that we believe that Capitalism would be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of saving Communism.
Rakovsky—If we shall continue the discussion only on the foundation of those conceptions which apply for use at mass meetings, then you are quite right. But if you are sincere in saying this then, forgive me, I am disappointed ; I had thought that the politics of the famous Stalinist police stand on a higher level.
G.—The Hitlerist attack on the USSR is, in addition, a dialectical necessity ; it is the same as the inevitable struggle of the classes in the international plane. At the side of Hitler, inevitably, there will stand the whole global Capitalism.
Rakovsky—And so, believe me, that in the light of your scholastic dialectics, I have formed a very negative opinion about the political culture of Stalinism. I listen to your words as Einstein could listen to a schoolboy talking about physics in four dimensions. I see that you are only acquainted with elementary Marxism, i.e. with the demagogic, popular one.
G.—If your explanation will not be too long and involved, I should be grateful to you for some explanation of this “ relativity ” or “ quantum ” of Marxism.
Rakovsky—Here there is no irony ; I am speaking with the best intentions. . . In this same elementary Marxism, which is taught even in your Stalinist University, you can find the statement which contradicts the whole of your thesis about the inevitability of the Hitlerist attack on the USSR. You are also taught that the cornerstone of Marxism is the assertion that, supposedly, contradictions are the incurable and fatal illness of Capitalism . . . Is that not so ?
G.—Yes, of course.
Rakovsky—But if things are in fact such that we accuse Capitalism of being imbued with continuous Capitalistic contradictions in the sphere of economics, then why should it necessarily suffer from them also in politics ? The political and economic is of no importance in itself ; this is a condition or measurement of the social essence, but contradictions arise in the social sphere, and are reflected simultaneously in the economic or political ones, or in both at the same time. It would be absurd to assume fallibility in economics and simultaneously infallibility in politics — which is something essential in order that an attack on the USSR should become inevitable — according to your postulate — absolutely essential.
G.—This means that you rely in everything on the contradictions, fatality and inevitability of the errors which must be committed by the bourgeoisie, which will hinder Hitler from attacking the USSR. I am a Marxist, Rakovsky, but here, between ourselves, in order not to provide the pretext for anger to a single activist, I say to you that with all my faith in Marx I would not believe that the USSR exists thanks to the mistakes of its enemies. . . And I think that Stalin shares the same view.
Rakovsky—But I do think so. . . Do not look at me like that, as I am not joking and am not mad.
G.—Permit me at least to doubt it, until you will have proved your assertions.
Rakovsky—Do you now see that I had reasons for qualifying your Marxist culture as being doubtful ? Your arguments and reactions are the same as any rank and file activist.
G.—And they are wrong ?
Rakovsky—Yes, they are correct for a small administrator, for a bureaucrat and for the mass. They suit the average fighter. . . They must believe this and repeat everything as it has been written. Listen to me by way of the completely confidential. With Marxism you get the same results as with the ancient esoteric religions. Their adherents had to know only that which was the most elementary and crude, insofar as by this one provoked their faith, i.e. that which is absolutely essential, both in religion and in the work of revolution.
G.—Do you not now want to open up to me the mystical Marxism, something like yet another freemasonry ?
Rakovsky—No, no esoterics. On the contrary, I shall explain it with the maximal clarity. Marxism, before being a philosophical, economic and political system, is a conspiracy for the revolution. And as for us the revolution is the only absolute reality, it follows that philosophy, economics and politics are true only insofar as they lead to revolution. The fundamental truth (let us call it subjective) does not exist in economics, politics or even morals : in the light of scientific abstraction it is either truth or error, but for us, who are subject to revolutionary dialectic, it is only truth. And insofar as to us, who are subject to revolutionary dialectic, it is only truth, and therefore the sole truth, then it must be such for all that is revolutionary, and such it was to Marx. In accordance with this we must act. Remember the phrase of Lenin, in reply to someone who demonstrated by way of argument that, supposedly, his intention contradicted reality : “I feel it to be real” was his answer. Do you not think that Lenin spoke nonsense ? No, for him every reality; every truth was relative in the face of the sole and absolute one: the revolution. Marx was a genius. If his works had amounted to only the deep criticism of Capitalism, then even that would have been an unsurpassed scientific work; but in those places where his writing reaches the level of mastery, there comes the effect of an apparently ironical work. “ Communism ” he says “ must win because Capital will give it that victory, though its enemy.” Such is the magisterial thesis of Marx....
Can there be a greater irony ? And then, in order that he should be believed, it was enough for him to depersonalize Capitalism and Communism, having transformed the human individual into a consciously thinking individual, which he did with the extraordinary talent of a juggler. Such was his sly method, in order to demonstrate to the Capitalists that they are a reality of Capitalism and that Communism can triumph as the result of inborn idiocy ; since without the presence of immortal idiocy in homo economico there could not appear in him continuous contradictions as proclaimed by Marx. To be able to achieve the transformation of homo sapiens into homo stultum is to possess magical force, capable of bringing man down to the first stage of the zoological ladder, i.e. to the level of the animal. Only if there is homo stultum in the epoch of the apogee of Capitalism could Marx formulate his axiomatic proposition : contradictions plus time equal Communism Believe me, when we who are initiated into this, contemplate the representation of Marx, for example the one which is placed above the main entrance to the Lubianka, then we cannot prevent the inner explosion of laughter by which Marx had infected us ; we see how he laughs into his beard at all humanity.
G.—And you are still capable of laughing at the most revered scientist of the epoch ?
Rakovsky—Ridicule, me ? . . . This is the highest admiration ! In order that Marx should be able to deceive so many people of science, it was essential that he should tower above them all. Well : in order to have judgements about Marx in all his greatness, we must consider the real Marx, Marx the revolutionary, Marx, judged by his manifesto. This means Marx the conspirator, as during his life the revolution was in a condition of conspiracy. It is not for nothing that the revolution is indebted for its development and its recent victories to these conspirators.
G.—Therefore you deny the existence of the dialectical process of contradictions in Capitalism, which lead to the final triumph of Communism ?
Rakovsky—You can be sure that if Marx believed that Communism will achieve victory only thanks to the contradictions in Capitalism, then he would not have once, never, mentioned the contradictions on the thousands of pages of his scientific revolutionary work. Such was the categorical imperative of the realistic nature of Marx : not the scientific, but the revolutionary one. The revolutionary and conspirator will never disclose to his opponent the secret of his triumph... He would never give the information ; he would give him disinformation which you use in counter-conspiracy. Is that not so ?
G.—However, in the end we have reached the conclusion (according to you) that there are no contradictions in Capitalism, and if Marx speaks of them then it is only a revolutionary — strategical method. That is so ? But the colossal and ever-growing contradictions in Capitalism are there to see. And so we get the conclusion that Marx, having lied, spoke the truth.
Rakovsky—You are dangerous as a dialectician, when you destroy the brakes of scholastic dogmatism and give free rein to your own inventiveness. So it is, that Marx spoke the truth when he lied. He lied when he led into error, having defined the contradictions as being “ continuous ” in the history of the economics of capital and called them “ natural ” and “ inevitable,” but at the same time he stated the truth because he knew that the contradictions would be created and would grow in an increasing progression until they reach their apogee.
G.—This means that with you there is an antithesis ?
Rakovsky—There is no antithesis here. Marx deceives for tactical reasons about the origin of the contradictions in Capitalism, but not about their obvious reality. Marx knew how they were created, how they became more acute and how things went towards general anarchy in Capitalistic production, which came before the triumph of the Communist revolution. . . He knew it would happen because he knew those who created the contradictions.
G.—It is a very strange revelation and piece of news, this assertion and exposal of the circumstance that that which leads Capitalism to its “ suicide,” by the well-chosen expression of the bourgeois economist Schmalenbach, in support of Marx, is not the essence and inborn law of Capitalism. But I am interested to know if we will reach the personal by this path ?
Rakovsky—Have you not felt this intuitively ? Have you not noticed how in Marx words contradict deeds ? He declares the necessity and inevitability of Capitalist contradictions, proving the existence of surplus value and accumulation, i.e. he proves that which really exists. He nimbly invents the proposition that to a greater concentration of the means of production corresponds a greater mass of the proletariat, a greater force for the building of Communism, is that not so ? Now go on : at the same time as this assertion he founds the International. Yet the International is, in the work of the daily struggle of the classes, a “ reformist,” i.e. an organization whose purpose is the limitation of the surplus value and, where possible, its elimination. For this reason, objectively, the International is a counter-revolutionary organization and anti-Communist, in accordance with Marx’s theory.
G.—Now we get that Marx is a counter-revolutionary and an anti-Communist.
Rakovsky—Well, now you see how one can make use of the original Marxist culture. It is only possible to describe the International as being counter-revolutionary and anti-Communist, with logical and scientific exactness, if one does not see in the facts anything more than the directly visible result, and in the texts only the letter. One comes to such absurd conclusions, while they seem to be obvious, when one forgets that words and facts in Marxism are subject to strict rules of the higher science : the rules of conspiracy and revolution.
G.—Will we ever reach the final conclusions ?
R.—In a moment. If the class struggle, in the economic sphere, turns out to be reformist in the light of its first results, and for that reason contradicts the theoretical presuppositions, which determine the establishment of Communism, then it is, in its real and true meaning, purely revolutionary. But I repeat again : it is subject to the rules of conspiracy, that means to masking and the hiding of its true aims... The limitation of the surplus value and thus also of accumulations as the consequence of the class struggle — that is only a matter of appearances, an illusion, in order to stimulate the basic revolutionary movement in the masses. A strike is already an attempt at revolutionary mobilization. Independently of whether it wins or not, its economic effect is anarchical. As a result this method for the improvement of the economic position of one class brings about the impoverishment of the economy in general; whatever may be the scale and results of the strike, it will always bring about a reduction of production. The general result : more poverty, which the working class cannot shake off. That is already something. But that is not the only result and not the most important one. As we know, the only aim of any struggle in the economic sphere is to earn more and work less. Such is the economic absurdity, but according to our terminology, such is the contradiction, which has not been noticed by the masses, which are blinded at any given moment by a rise in wages, which is at once annulled by a rise in prices. And if prices are limited by governmental action, then the same thing happens, i.e. a contradiction between the wish to spend more, produce less, is qualified here by monetary inflation. And so one gets a vicious circle: a strike, hunger, inflation, hunger.
G.—With the exception when the strike takes place at the expense of the surplus value of Capitalism.
R.—Theory, pure theory. Speaking between ourselves, take any annual handbook concerning the economics of any country and divide rents and the total income by all those receiving wages or salaries, and you will see what an extraordinary result emerges. This result is the most counter-revolutionary fact, and we must keep it a complete secret. This is because if you deduct from the theoretical dividend the salaries and expenses of the directors, which would be the consequence on the abolition of ownership, then almost always there remains a dividend which is a debit for the proletariat. In reality always a debit, if we also consider the reduction in the volume and quality of production. As you will now see, a call to strike, as a means for achieving a quick improvement of the well-being of the proletariat is only an excuse; an excuse required in order to force it to commit sabotage of Capitalistic production. Thus to the contradictions in the bourgeois system are added contradictions within the proletariat; this is the double weapon of the revolution, and it — which is obvious — does not arise of itself : there exists an organization, chiefs, discipline, and above that there exists stupidity. Don't you suspect that the much-mentioned contradictions of Capitalism, and in particular the financial ones, are also organized by someone? . . . By way of basis for these deductions I shall remind you that in its economic struggle the proletarian International coincides with the financial International, since both produce inflation, and wherever there is coincidence there, one should assume, is also agreement. Those are his own words.
G.—I suspect here such an enormous absurdity, or the intention of spinning a new paradox, that I do not want to imagine this. It looks as if you want to hint at the existence of something like a Capitalistic second Communist International, of course an enemy one.
R.—Exactly so. When I spoke of the financial International, I thought of it as of a Comintern, but having admitted the existence of the “ Comintern,” I would not say that they are enemies.
G.—If you want to make us lose time on inventions and phantasies, I must tell you that you have chosen the wrong moment.
R.—By the way, are you assuming that I am like the courtesan from the “ Arabian Nights,” who used her imagination at night to save her ...... No, if you think that I am departing from the theme, then you are wrong. In order to reach that which we have taken as our aim I, if I am not to fail, must first of all enlighten you about the most important matters, while bearing in mind your general lack of acquaintance with that which I would call the “ Higher Marxism,.” I dare not evade these explanations as I know well that such lack of knowledge exists in the Kremlin. . . Permit me to continue.
G.—You may continue. But it is true that if all this were to be seen to be only a loss of time to excite the imagination, then this amusement will have a very sad epilogue. I have warned you.
R.—I continue as if I have heard nothing. Insofar as you are a scholastic with relation to Capital, and I want to awaken your inductive talents, I shall remind you of some very curious things. Notice with what penetration Marx comes to conclusions given the then existence of early British industry, concerning its consequences, i.e. the contemporary colossal industry: how he analyses it and criticizes; what a repulsive picture he gives of the manufacturer. In your imagination and that of the masses there arises the terrible picture of Capitalism in its human concretization: a fat-bellied manufacturer with a cigar in his mouth, as described by Marx, with self-satisfaction and anger throwing the wife and daughter of the worker onto the street. Is that not so ? At the same time remember the moderation of Marx and his bourgeois orthodoxy when studying the question of money. In the problem of money there do not appear with him his famous contradictions. Finances do not exist for him as a thing of importance in itself; trade and the circulation of moneys are the results of the cursed system of Capitalistic production, which subjects them to itself and fully determines them. In the question of money Marx is a reactionary; to one’s immense surprise he was one; bear in mind the “ five-pointed star ” like the Soviet one, which shines all over Europe, the star composed of the five Rothschild brothers with their banks, who possess colossal accumulations of wealth. the greatest ever known. . . And so this fact, so colossal that it misled the imagination of the people of that epoch, passes unnoticed with Marx. Something strange... Is that not so ? It is possible that from this strange blindness of Marx there arises a phenomenon which is common to all future social revolutions. It is this : we can all confirm that when the masses take possession of a city or a country, then they always seem struck by a sort of superstitious fear of the banks and bankers. One had killed Kings, generals, bishops, policemen, priests and other representatives of the hated privileged classes; one robbed and burnt palaces, churches and even centres of science, but though the revolutions were economic-social, the lives of the bankers were respected, and as a result the magnificent buildings of the banks remained untouched. . . According to my information, before I had been arrested, this continues even now...
G.—Where?
R.—In Spain. . . Don't you know it ? As you ask me, so tell me now : Do you not find all this very strange ? Think, the police. . . I do not know, have you paid attention to the strange similarity which exists between the financial International and the proletarian International. I would say that one is the other side of the other, and the back side is the proletarian one as being more modern than the financial.
G.—Where do you see similarity in things so opposed ?
R.—Objectively they are identical. As I had proved, the Comintern, paralleled, doubled by the reformist movement and the whole of syndicalism, calls forth the anarchy of production, inflation, poverty and hopelessness in the masses. Finances, chiefly the financial international, doubled, consciously or unconsciously by private finances, create the same contradictions, but in still greater numbers... Now we can already guess the reasons why Marx concealed the financial contradictions, which could not have remained hidden from his penetrating gaze, if finances had not had an ally, the influence of which — objectively revolutionary — was already then extraordinarily important.
G.—An unconscious coincidence, but not an alliance which presupposes intelligence, will and agreement...
R.—Let us leave this point of view if you like. Now let us better go over to the subjective analysis of finances and even more: let us see what sort of people personally are at work there. The international essence of money is well known. From this fact emerges that the organization which owns them and accumulates them is a cosmopolitan organization. Finances in their apogee — as an aim in themselves, the financial International — deny and do not recognise anything national, they do not recognize the State; and therefore it is anarchical and would be absolutely anarchical if it — the denier of any national State — were not itself, by necessity, a State in its own basic essence. The State as such is only power. And money is exclusively power.
This communistic super-state, which we are creating already during a whole century, and the scheme of which is the International of Marx. Analyse it and you will see its essence. The scheme of the International and its prototype of the USSR — that is also pure power. The basic similarity between the two creations is absolute. It is something fatalistic, inevitable, since the personalities of the authors of both was identical. The financier is just as international as the Communist. Both, with the help of differing pretexts and differing means, struggle with the national bourgeois State and deny it. Marxism in order to change it into a Communist State; from this comes that the Marxist must be an internationalist: the financier denies the bourgeois national State and his denial ends in itself; in fact he does not manifest himself as an internationalist, but as a cosmopolitan anarchist. . . That is his appearance at the given stage, but let us see what he really is and what he wants to be. As you see, in rejection there is a clear similarity individually between Communist-internationalists and financial-cosmopolitans; as a natural result there is the same similarity between the Communist International and the financial International...
G.—This is a chance similarity subjectively and objective in contradictions, but one easily eroded and having little significance and that which is most radical and existing in reality.
R.—Allow me not to reply just now, so as not to interrupt the logical sequence. . . . I only want to decipher the basic axiom: money is power. Money is today the centre of global gravity. I hope you agree with me?
G.—Continue, Rakovsky, I beg of you.
R.—The understanding of how the financial International has gradually, right up to our epoch, become the master of money, this magical talisman, which has become for people that which God and the nation had been formerly, is something which exceeds in scientific interest even the art of revolutionary strategy, since this is also an art and also a revolution. I shall explain it to you. Historiographers and the masses, blinded by the shouts and the pomp of the French revolution, the people, intoxicated by the fact that it had succeeded in taking all power from the King and the privileged classes, did not notice how a small group of mysterious, careful and insignificant people had taken possession of the real Royal power, the magical power, almost divine, which it obtained almost without knowing it. The masses did not notice that the power had been seized by others and that soon they had subjected them to a slavery more cruel than the King, since the latter, in view of his religious and moral prejudices, was incapable of taking advantage of such a power. So it came about that the supreme Royal power was taken over by persons, whose moral, intellectual and cosmopolitan qualities did allow them to use it. It is clear that this were people who had never been Christians, but cosmopolitans.
G.—What is that for a mythical power which they had obtained ?
R.—They had acquired for themselves the real privilege of coining money. . . Do not smile, otherwise I shall have to believe that you do not know what moneys are... I ask you to put yourself in my place. My position in relation to you is that of the assistant of a doctor, who would have to explain bacteriology to a resurrected medical man of the epoch before Pasteur. But I can explain your lack of knowledge to myself and can forgive it. Our language makes use of words which provoke incorrect thoughts about things and actions, thanks to the power of the inertia of thoughts, and which do not correspond to real and exact conceptions. I say : money. It is clear that in your imagination there immediately appeared pictures of real money of metal and paper. But that is not so. Money is now not that; real circulating coin is a true anachronism. If it still exists and circulates, then it is only thanks to atavism, only because it is convenient to maintain the illusion, a purely imaginary fiction for the present day.
G.—This is a brilliant paradox, risky and even poetical.
R.—If you like, this is perhaps brilliant, but it is not a paradox. I know — and that is why you smiled — that States still coin money on pieces of metal or paper with Royal busts or national crests; well, so what? A great part of the money circulating, money for big affairs, as representative of all national wealth, money, yes money — it was being issued by those few people about whom I had hinted. Titles, figures, cheques, promissory notes, endorsements, discount, quotations, figures without end flooded States like a waterfall. What are in comparison with these the metallic and paper moneys? . . . Something devoid of influence, some kind of minimum in the face of the growing flood of the all-flooding financial money. They, being the most subtle psychologists, were able to gain even more without trouble, thanks to a lack of understanding. In addition to the immensely varied different forms of financial moneys, they created credit-money with a view to making its volume close to infinite. And to give it the speed of sound ... it is an abstraction, a being of thought, a figure, number, credit, faith. .
Do you understand already? .. . Fraud; false moneys, given a legal standing . . . , using other terminology, so that you should understand me. Banks, the stock exchanges and the whole world financial system — is a gigantic machine for the purpose of bringing about unnatural scandals, according to Aristotle's expression; to force money to produce money — that is something that if it is a crime in economics, then in relations to finances it is a crime against the criminal code, since it is usury. I do not know by what arguments all this is justified : by the proposition that they receive legal interest. . . Even accepting that, and even that admission is more than is necessary, we see that usury still exists, since even if the interest received is legal, then it invents and falsifies the non-existent capital. Banks have always by way of deposits or moneys in productive movement a certain quantity of money which is five or perhaps even a hundred times greater than there are physically coined moneys of metal or paper. I shall say nothing of those cases when the credit-moneys, i.e. false, fabricated ones, are greater than the quantity of moneys paid out as capital. Bearing in mind that lawful interest is fixed not on real capital but on non-existing capital, the interest is illegal by so many times as the fictional capital is greater than the real one.
Bear in mind that this system, which I am describing in detail, is one of the most innocent among those used for the fabrication of false money. Imagine to yourself, if you can, a small number of people, having unlimited power through the possession of real wealth, and you will see that they are the absolute dictators of the stock-exchange; and as a result of this also the dictators of production and distribution and also of work and consumption. If you have enough imagination then multiply this, by the global factor and you will see its anarchical, moral and social influence, i.e. a revolutionary one... Do you now understand?
G.—No, not yet.
R.—Obviously it is very difficult to understand miracles.
G.—Miracle?
R.—Yes, miracle. Is it not a miracle that a wooden bench has been transformed into a temple? And yet such a miracle has been seen by people a thousand times, and they did not bat an eyelid, during a whole century. Since this was an extraordinary miracle that the benches on which sat the greasy usurers to trade in their moneys, have now been converted into temples, which stand magnificently at every corner of contemporary big towns with their heathen colonnades, and crowds go there with a faith which they are already not given by heavenly gods, in order to bring assiduously their deposits of all their possessions to the god of money, who, they imagine, lives in the steel safes of the bankers, and who is preordained, thanks to his divine mission to increase the wealth to a metaphysical infinity.
G.—This is the new religion of the decayed bourgeoisie?
R.—Religion, yes, the religion of power.
G.—You appear to be the poet of economics.
R.—If you like, then in order to give a picture of finance, as of a work of art which is most obviously a work of genius and the most revolutionary of all times, poetry is required.
G.—This is a faulty view. Finances, as defined by Marx, and more especially Engels, are determined by the system of Capitalistic production.
R.—Exactly, but just the reverse : the Capitalistic system of production is determined by finance. The fact that Engels states the opposite and even tries to prove this, is the most obvious proof that finances rule bourgeois production. So it is and so it was even before Marx and Engels, that finances were the most powerful instrument of revolution and the Comintern was nothing but a toy in their hands. But neither Marx nor Engels will disclose or explain this. On the contrary, making use of their talent as scientists, they had to camouflage truth for a second time in the interests of the revolution. And that both of them did.
G.—This story is not new. All this somewhat reminds me of what Trotzky had written some ten years ago.
R.—Tell .....
G.—When he says that the Comintern is a conservative organization in comparison with the stock-exchange in New York; he points at the big bankers as being the inventors of the revolution.
R.—Yes, he said this in a small book in which he foretold the fall of England. . . Yes, he said this and added : “ Who pushes England along the path of revolution? ” . . . and replied : “ Not Moscow, but New York.”
G.—But remember also his assertion that if the financiers of New York had forged the revolution, then it was done unconsciously.
R.—The explanation which I had already given in order to help to understand why Engels and Marx camouflaged the truth, is equally applicable also to Leo Trotzky.
G.—I value in Trotzky only that he in a sort of literary form interpreted an opinion of a fact which as such was too well known, with which one had already reckoned previously. Trotzky himself states quite correctly that these bankers “ carry out irresistibly and unconsciously their revolutionary mission.”
R.—And they carry out their mission despite the fact that Trotzky has declared it? What a strange thing! Why do they not improve their actions?
G.—The financiers are unconscious revolutionaries since they are such only objectively, as the result of their intellectual incapacity of seeing the final consequences.
R.—You believe this sincerely? You think that among these real geniuses there are some who are unconscious? You consider to be idiots people to whom today the whole world is subjected? This would really be a very stupid contradiction!
G.—What do you pretend to?
R.—I simply assert that they are revolutionaries objectively and subjectively, quite consciously.
G.—The bankers! You must be mad?
R.—I, no . . . But you? Think a little. These people are just like you and me. The circumstance that they control moneys in unlimited amounts, insofar as they themselves create them, does not give us the opportunity of determining the limits of all their ambitions. . . If there is something which provides a man with full satisfaction then it is the satisfaction of his ambition. And most of all the satisfaction of his will to power. Why should not these people, the bankers, have the impulse towards power, towards full power? Just as it happens to you and to me.
G.—But if, according to you — and I think the same — they already have global political power, then what other power do they want to possess ?
R.—I have already told you : Full power. Such power as Stalin has in the USSR, but world-wide.
G.—Such power as Stalin's, but with the opposite aim.
R.—Power, if in reality it is absolute, can be only one. The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity. For that reason the power sought by the Comintern and “ Comintern,” which are things of the same order, being absolute, must also in politics be unique and identical : Absolute power has a purpose in itself, otherwise it is not absolute. And until the present day there has not yet been invented another machine of total power except the Communist State. Capitalistic bourgeois power, even on its highest rung of the ladder, the power of Caesar, is limited power since if, in theory, it was the personification of the deity in the Pharaohs and Caesars in ancient times, then nevertheless, thanks to the economic character of life in those primitive States and owing to the technical under-development of the State apparatus, there was always room for individual freedom. Do you understand that those who already partially rule over nations and worldly governments have pretensions to absolute domination? Understand that that is the only thing which they have not yet reached.
G.—This is interesting : at least as an example of insanity.
R.—Certainly, insanity in a lesser degree than in the case of Lenin, who dreamt of power over the whole world in his attic in Switzerland or the insanity of Stalin, dreaming of the same thing during his exile in a Siberian hut. I think that dreams of such ambitions are much more natural for the moneyed people, living in the skyscrapers of New York.
G.—Let us conclude : Who are they?
R.—You are so naive that you think that if I knew who “ They “ are, I would be here as a prisoner?
G.—Why?
R.—For a very simple reason, since he who is acquainted with them would not be put into a position in which he would be obliged to report on them. . . This is an elementary rule of every intelligent conspiracy, which you must well understand.
G.—But you said that they are the bankers?
R.—Not I; remember that I always spoke of the financial International, and when mentioning persons I said “ They ” and nothing more. If you want that I should inform you openly then I shall only give facts, but not names, since I do not know them. I think I shall not be wrong if I tell you that not one of “ Them ” is a person who occupies a political position or a position in the World Bank. As I understood after the murder of Rathenau in Rapallo, they give political or financial positions only to intermediaries. Obviously to persons who are trustworthy and loyal, which can be guaranteed a thousand ways : thus one can assert that bankers and politicians - are only men of straw . . . even though they occupy very high places and are made to appear to be the authors of the plans which are carried out.
G.—Although all this can be understood and is also logical, but is not your declaration of not knowing only an evasion? As it seems to me, and according to the information I have, you occupied a sufficiently high place in this conspiracy to have known much more. You do not even know a single one of them personally?
R.—Yes, but of course you do not believe me. I have come to that moment where I had explained that I am talking about a person and persons with a personality . . . how should one say? . . . a mystical one, like Ghandi or something like that, but without any external display. Mystics of pure power, who have become free from all vulgar trifles. I do not know if you understand me? Well, as to their place of residence and names, I do not know them. . . Imagine Stalin just now, in reality ruling the USSR, but not surrounded by stone walls, not having any personnel around him, and having the same guarantees for his life as any other citizen. By which means could he guard against attempts on his life ? He is first of all a conspirator, however great his power, he is anonymous.
G.—What you are saying is logical, but I do not believe you.
R.—But still believe me; I know nothing; if I knew then how happy I would be ! I would not be here, defending my life. I well understand your doubts and that, in view of your police education, you feel the need for some knowledge about persons. To honour you and also because this is essential for the aim which we both have set ourselves. I shall do all I can in order to inform you. You know that according to the unwritten history known only to us, the founder of the First Communist International is indicated, of course secretly, as being Weishaupt. You remember his name? He was the head of the masonry which is known by the name of the Illuminati; this name he borrowed from the second anti-Christian conspiracy of that era — gnosticism. This important revolutionary, Semite and former Jesuit, foreseeing the triumph of the French revolution decided, or perhaps he was ordered (some mention as his chief the important philosopher Mendelssohn) to found a secret organization which was to provoke and push the French revolution to go further than its political objectives, with the aim of transforming it into a social revolution for the establishment of Communism. In those heroic times it was colossally dangerous to mention Communism as an aim; from this derive the various precautions and secrets, which had to surround the Illuminati. More than a hundred years were required before a man could confess to being a Communist without danger of going to prison or being executed. This is more or less known.
What is not known are the relations between Weishaupt and his followers with the first of the Rothschilds. The secret of the acquisition of wealth of the best known bankers could have been explained by the fact that they were the treasurers of this first Comintern. There is evidence that when the five brothers spread out to the five provinces of the financial empire of Europe, they had some secret help for the accumulation of these enormous sums : it is possible that they were those first Communists from the Bavarian catacombs who were already spread all over Europe. But others say, and I think with better reason, that the Rothschilds were not the treasurers, but the chiefs of that first secret Communism. This opinion is based on that well-known fact that Marx and the highest chiefs of the First International—already the open one—and among them Herzen and Heine, were controlled by Baron Lionel Rothschild, whose revolutionary portrait was done by Disraeli (in Coningsby—Transl.) the English Premier, who was his creature, and has been left to us. He described him in the character of Sidonia, a man, who, according to the story, was a multi-millionaire, knew and controlled spies, carbonari, freemasons, secret Jews, gypsies, revolutionaries etc., etc. All this seems fantastic. But it has been proved that Sidonia is an idealized portrait of the son of Nathan Rothschild, which can also be deduced from that campaign which he raised against Tsar Nicholas in favour of Herzen. He won this campaign.
If all that which we can guess in the light of these facts is true, then, I think, we could even determine who invented this terrible machine of accumulation and anarchy, which is the financial International. At the same time, I think, he would be the same person who also created the revolutionary International. It is an act of genius : to create with the help of Capitalism accumulation of the highest degree, to push the proletariat towards strikes, to sow hopelessness, and at the same time to create an organization which must unite the proletarians with the purpose of driving them into revolution. This is to write the most majestic chapter of history. Even more : remember the phrase of the mother of the five Rothschild brothers : “ If my sons want it, then there will be no war.” This means that they were the arbiters, the masters of peace and war, but not emperors. Are you capable of visualizing the fact of such a cosmic importance ? Is not war already a revolutionary function ? War—the Commune. Since that time every war was a giant step towards Communism. As if some mysterious force satisfied the passionate wish of Lenin, which he had expressed to Gorky. Remember : 1905-1914. Do admit at least that two of the three levers of power which lead to Communism are not controlled and cannot be controlled by the proletariat.
Wars were not brought about and were not controlled by either the Third International or the USSR, which did not yet exist at that time. Equally they cannot be provoked and still less controlled by those small groups of Bolsheviks who plod along in the emigration, although they want war. This is quite obvious. The International and the USSR have even fewer possibilities for such immense accumulations of capital and the creation of national or international anarchy in Capitalistic production. Such an anarchy which is capable of forcing people to burn huge quantities of foodstuffs, rather than give them to starving people, and is capable of that which Rathenau described in one of his phrases, i.e. : “ To bring about that half the world will fabricate dung, and the other half will use it.” And, after all, can the proletariat believe that it is the cause of this inflation, growing in geometric progression, this devaluation, the constant acquisition of surplus values and the accumulation of financial capital, but not usury capital, and that as the result of the fact that it cannot prevent the constant lowering of its purchasing power, there takes place the proletarization of the middle classes, who are the true opponents of revolution. The proletariat does not control the lever of economics or the lever of war. But it is itself the third lever, the only visible and demonstrable lever, which carries out the final blow at the power of the Capitalistic State and takes it over. Yes, they seize it, if “ They ” yield it to them. . .
G.—I again repeat to you that all this, which you have set out in such a literate form, has a name which we have already repeated to excess in this endless conversation: the natural contradictions of Capitalism and if, as you claim, there is yet someone else’s will and activity apart from the proletariat, then I want you to indicate to me concretely a personal case.
Rakovsky—You require only one? Well, then listen to a small story:
“They” isolated the Tsar diplomatically for the Russo-Japanese War, and the United States financed Japan; speaking precisely, this was done by Jacob Schiff, the head of the bank of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., which is the successor of the House of Rothschild, whence Schiff originated. He had such power that he achieved that States which had colonial possessions in Asia supported the creation of the Japanese Empire, which was inclined towards xenophobia; and Europe already feels the effects of this xenophobia. From the prisoner-of-war camps there came to Petrograd the best fighters, trained as revolutionary agents; they were sent there from America with the permission of Japan, obtained through the persons who had financed it. The Russo-Japanese War, thanks to the organized defeat of the Tsar’s army, called forth the revolution of 1905, which, though it was premature, but was very nearly successful; even if it did not win, it still created the required political conditions for the victory of 1917. I shall say even more. Have you read the biography of Trotzky? Recall its first revolutionary period. He is still quite a young man; after his flight from Siberia he lived some time among the emigres in London, Paris, and Switzerland; Lenin, Plekhanov, Martov and other chiefs look on him only as a promising newcomer. But he already dares during the first split to behave independently, trying to become the arbiter of the reunion. In 1905 he is 25 years old and he returns to Russia alone, without a party and without his own organization. Read the reports of the revolution of 1905 which have not been “pruned” by Stalin; for example that of Lunatcharsky, who was not a Trotzkyite. Trotzky is the chief figure during the revolution in Petrograd. This is how it really was. Only he emerges from it with increased popularity and influence. Neither Lenin, nor Martov, nor Plekhanov acquire popularity. They only keep it and even lose a little. How and why there rises the unknown Trotzky, gaining power by one move greater than that which the oldest and most influential revolutionaries had? Very simple: he marries. Together with him there arrives in Russia his wife—Sedova. Do you know who she is? She is associated with Zhivitovsky, linked with the bankers Warburg partners and relatives of Jacob Schiff, i.e. of that financial group which, as I had said, had also financed the revolution of 1905. Here is the reason why Trotzky, in one move, moves to the top of the revolutionary list. And here, too, you have the key to his real personality. Let us jump to 1914. Behind the back of the people who made the attempt on the Archduke there stands Trotzky, and that attempt provoked the European War. Do you really believe that the murder and the war are simple coincidences? ... as had been said at one of the Zionist congresses by Lord Melchett. Analyze in the light of “non-coincidence” the development of the military actions in Russia. “Defeatism” is an exemplary word. The help of the Allies for the Tsar was regulated and controlled with such skill that it gave the Allied ambassadors the right to make an argument of this and to get from Nicholas, thanks to his stupidity, suicidal advances, one after another. The mass of the Russian cannon fodder was immense, but not inexhaustible. A series of organized defeats led to the revolution. When the threat came from all sides, then a cure was found in the form of the establishment of a democratic republic, an “ambassadorial republic” as Lenin called it, i.e. this meant the elimination of any threat to the revolutionaries. But that is not yet all. Kerensky was to provoke the future advance at the cost of a very great deal of blood. He brings it about so that the democratic revolution should spread beyond its bounds. And even still more: Kerensky was to surrender the State fully to Communism, and he does it. Trotzky has the chance in an “unnoticed manner” to occupy the whole State apparatus. What a strange blindness! Well that is the reality of the much praised October revolution. The Bolsheviks took that which “They” gave them.
G.—You dare to say that Kerensky was a collaborator of Lenin?
Rakovsky—Lenin—no. Of Trotzky—yes: it is more correct to say—a collaborator of “Them.”
G.—An absurdity!
Rakovsky—You cannot understand ... precisely you? It surprises me. If you were to be a spy and, while hiding your identity, you were to attain the position of commander of the enemy fortress, then would you not open the gates to the attacking forces in whose service you actually were? You would not have become a prisoner who had experienced defeat? Would you not have been in danger of death during the attack on the fortress if one of the attackers, not knowing that your uniform is only a mask, would have taken you for an enemy? Believe me: despite the statues and mausoleum, communism is indebted to Kerensky much more than to Lenin.
G.—You want to say that Kerensky was a conscious and voluntary defeatist?
Rakovsky—Yes to me that is quite clear. Understand that I personally took part in all this. I shall tell you even more: Do you know who financed the October revolution? “They” financed it, in particular through those same bankers who had financed Japan in 1905, i.e. Jacob Schiff, and the brothers Warburg; that means through the great banking constellation, through one of the five banks who are members of the Federal Reserve, through the bank of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; here there took part also other American and European bankers, such as Guggenheim, Hanauer, Breitung, Aschberg, the “Nya Banken” of Stockholm. I was there “by chance,” there in Stockholm, and participated in the transmission of funds. Until Trotzky arrived I was the only person who was an intermediary from the revolutionary side. But at last Trotzky came: I must underline that the Allies had expelled him from France for being a defeatist. And the same Allies released him so that he could be a defeatist in allied Russia... “Another chance.” Who arranged it? The same people who had succeeded that Lenin passed through Germany. Yes, “They” were able to get the defeatist Trotzky out of a Canadian camp to England and send him on to Russia, giving him the chance to pass freely through all the Allied controls; others of “Them”—a certain Rathenau—accomplishes the journey of Lenin through enemy Germany. If you will undertake the study of the history of the revolution and civil war without prejudices, and will use all your enquiring capabilities, which you know how to apply to things much less important and less obvious, then when you study informations in their totality, and also study separate details right up to anecdotal happenings, you will meet with a whole series of “amazing chances.”
G.—Might, let us accept the hypothesis that not everything was simply a matter of luck. What deductions to you make here for practical results?
Rakovsky—Let me finish this little story, and then we shall both arrive at conclusions. From the time of his arrival in Petrograd Trotzky was openly received by Lenin. As you know sufficiently well, during the interval between the two revolutions there had been deep differences between them. All is forgotten and Trotzky emerges as the master of his trade in the matter of the triumph of the revolution, whether Stalin wants this or not. Why? This secret is known to the wife of Lenin—Krupskaya. She knows who Trotzky is in fact; it is she who persuaded Lenin to receive Trotzky. If he had not received him, then Lenin would have remained blocked up in Switzerland; this alone had been for him a serious reason, and in addition he knew that Trotzky provided money and helped to get a colossal international assistance; a proof of this was the sealed train. Furthermore it was the result of Trotzky’s work, and not of the iron determination of Lenin that there was the unification round the insignificant party of the Bolsheviks of the whole Left-wing revolutionary camp, the social-revolutionaries and the anarchists. It was not for nothing that the real party of the “non-party” Trotzky was the ancient “Bund” of the Jewish proletariat, from which emerged all the Moscow revolutionary branches, and to whom it gave 90% of its leaders; not the official and well-known Bund, but the secret Bund, which had been infiltrated into all the Socialist parties the leaders of which were almost all under its control.
G.—And Kerensky too?
Rakovsky—Kerensky too..., and also some other leaders who were not Socialists, the leaders of the bourgeois political fractions.
G.—How is that?
R —You forget about the role of freemasonry in the first phase of the democratic-bourgeois revolution?
G.—Were they also controlled by the Bund?
Rakovsky—Naturally, as the nearest step, but in fact subject to “Them.”
G.—Despite the rising tide of Marxism which also threatened their lives and privileges?
Rakovsky—Despite all that; obviously they did not see that danger. Bear in mind that every mason saw and hoped to see in his imagination more that there was in reality, because he imagined that which was profitable for him. As a proof of the political power of their association they saw that masons were in governments and at the pinnacle of the States of the bourgeois nations, while their numbers were growing all the time. Bear in mind that at that time the rulers of all the Allied nations were freemasons, with very few exceptions. This was to them an argument of great force. They fully believed that the revolution would stop at the bourgeois republic of the French type.
G.—In accordance with the picture which was given of the Russia of 1917 one had to be a very naive person to believe all this...
Rakovsky—They were and are such. Masons had learned nothing from that first lesson which, for them, had been the Great Revolution, in which they played a colossal revolutionary role; it consumed the majority of masons, beginning with the Grand Master of the Orleans Lodge, more correctly the freemason Louis XVI, in order then to continue to destroy the Girondistes, the Hebertistes, the Jacobins etc., and if some survived it was due to the month of Brumaire.
G.—Do you want to say that the freemasons have to die at the hands of the revolution which has been brought about with their cooperation?
Rakovsky—Exactly so. You have formulated a truth which is veiled by a great secret. I am a mason, you already knew about that. Is that not so? Well, I shall tell you this great secret, which they promise to disclose to a mason in one of the higher degrees, but which is not disclosed to him either in the 25th, nor the 33rd, nor the 93rd, nor any other high level of any ritual. It is clear that I know of this not as a freemason, but as one who belongs to “Them”...
G.—And what is it?
Rakovsky—Every masonic organization tries to attain and to create all the required prerequisites for the triumph of the Communist revolution; this is the obvious aim of freemasonry; it is clear that all this is done under various pretexts; but they always conceal themselves behind their well-known treble slogan. (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—Transl.) You understand? But since the Communist revolution has in mind the liquidation, as a class, of the whole bourgeoisie, the physical destruction of all bourgeois political rulers, it follows that the real secret of masonry is the suicide of freemasonry as an organization, and the physical suicide of every more important mason. You can, of course, understand that such an end, which is being prepared for every mason, fully deserves the secrecy, decorativeness and the inclusion of yet another whole series of secrets, with a view to concealing the real one. If one day you were to be present at some future revolution then do not miss the opportunity of observing the gestures of surprise and the expression of stupidity on the face of some freemason at the moment when he realises that he must die at the hands of the revolutionaries. How he screams and wants that one should value his services to the revolution? It is a sight at which one can die ... but of laughter.
G.—And you still deny the inborn stupidity of the bourgeoisie?
Rakovsky—I deny it in the bourgeoisie as a class, but not in certain sectors. The existence of madhouses does not prove universal madness. Free-masonry is also a madhouse, but at liberty. But I continue further: the revolution has been victorious; the seizure of power has been achieved. There arises the first problem: peace, and with it the first differences within the party, in which there participate the forces of the coalition, which takes advantage of power. I shall not explain to you that which is well known about the struggle which developed in Moscow between the adherents and opponents of the peace of Brest-Litovsk. I shall only point out to you that which had already become evident then and was later called the Trotzkyist opposition, i.e. these are the people, a part of whom have already been liquidated and the other part is to be liquidated: they were all against the signing of the peace treaty. That peace was a mistake and an unconscious betrayal by Lenin of the International Revolution. Imagine to yourself the Bolsheviks in Versailles at the Peace Conference, and then in the League of Nations, finding themselves inside Germany with the Red Army, which had been armed and increased by the Allies. The Soviet State should have participated with arms in the German revolution... Quite another map of Europe would then have emerged. But Lenin, intoxicated with power, with the help of Stalin, who had also tasted the fruits of power, supported by the national Russian wing of the party, having at their disposal the material resources, enforced their will. Then was born “Socialism in one country,” i.e. National-Communism, which has to-day reached its apogee under Stalin. It is obvious that there was a struggle, but only in such a form and extent that the Communist State should not be destroyed; this condition was binding on the opposition during the whole time of its further struggle right up to the present day. This was the reason for our first failure and all those which followed. But the fight was severe, cruel, although concealed in order not to compromise our participation in power. Trotzky organized, with the help of his friends, the attempt on Lenin’s life by Kaplan. On his orders Blumkin killed the ambassador Mirbach. The coup d’etat which was prepared by Spiridonova with her social-revolutionaries had been co-ordinated with Trotzky. His man for all these affairs, who was immune from all suspicions, was that Rosenblum, a Lithuanian Jew, who used the name of O’Reilly, and was known as the best spy of the British Intelligence. In fact he was a man from “Them.” The reason why this famous Rosenblum was chosen, who was known only as a British spy, was that in case of failure the responsibility for assassinations and conspiracies would fall not on Trotzky, and not on us, but on England. So it happened. Thanks to the Civil War we rejected conspiratorial and terrorist methods as we were given the chance of having in our hands the real forces of the State, insofar as Trotzky became the organizer and chief of the Soviet Army; before that the army had continuously retreated before the Whites and the territory of the USSR was reduced to the size of the former Moscow Principality. But here, as if by magic, it begins to win. What do you think, why? As the result of magic or chance? I shall tell you: when Trotzky took over the top command of the Red Army then he had by this in his hands the forces necessary to seize power. A series of victories was to increase his prestige and forces: it was already possible to defeat the Whites. Do you think that that official history was true which ascribes to the unarmed and ill-disciplined Red Army the fact that with its help there was achieved a series of victories?
G.—But to whom then?
Rakovsky—To the extent of ninety per cent they were indebted to “Them.” You must not forget that the Whites were, in their way, democratic. The Mensheviks were with them and the remnants of all the old Liberal parties. Inside these forces “They” always had in their service many people, consciously and unconsciously. When Trotzky began to command then these people were ordered systematically to betray the Whites and at the same time they were promised participation, in a more or less short time, in the Soviet Government. Maisky was one of those people, one of the few in the case of which this promise was carried out, but he was able to achieve this only after Stalin had become convinced of his loyalty. This sabotage, linked with a progressive diminution of the help of the Allies to the White generals, who apart from all that were luckless idiots, forced them to experience defeat after defeat. Finally Wilson introduced in his famous 14 Points Point 6,[1] the existence of which was enough in order to bring to an end once and for all the attempts of the Whites to fight against the USSR. The Civil War strengthens the position of Trotzky as the heir of Lenin. So it was, without any doubt. The old revolutionary could now die, having acquired fame, if he remained alive after the bullet of Kaplan, he did not emerge alive after the secret process of the forcible ending of his life, to which he was subjected.
G.—Trotzky shortened his life? This is a big favourable point for our trial! Was it not Levin who was Lenin’s doctor?
Rakovsky—Trotzky? ... It is probable that he participated, but it is quite certain that he knew about it. But as far as the technical realization is concerned ... that is unimportant: who knows this? “They” have a sufficient number of channels in order to penetrate to wherever they want.
G.—In any event the murder of Lenin is a matter of the greatest importance and it would be worth while to transfer it for examination to the next trial... What do you think, Rakovsky, if you were by chance to be the author of this affair? It is clear that if you fail to achieve success in this conversation... The technical execution suits you well as a doctor.
Rakovsky—I do not recommend this to you. Leave this matter alone; it is sufficiently dangerous for Stalin himself. You will be able to spread your propaganda as you wish; but “They” have their propaganda which is more powerful and the question as to qui podest—who gains, will force one to see in Stalin the murderer of Lenin, and that argument will be stronger than any confessions extracted from Levin, me or anyone else.
G.—What do you want to say by this?
Rakovsky—That it is the classical and infallible rule in the determination of who the murderer is to check who gained ..., and as far as the assassination of Lenin is concerned, in this case the beneficiary was his chief—Stalin. Think about this and I very much ask you not to make these remarks, as they distract me and do not make it possible for me to finish.
G.—Very well, continue, but you already know.
Rakovsky—It is well known that if Trotzky did not inherit from Lenin then it was not because by human calculations there was something missing in the plan. During Lenin’s illness Trotzky held in his hands all the threads of power, which were more than sufficient to enable him to succeed Lenin. And measures had been taken to declare a sentence of death on Stalin. For Trotzky the dictator it was enough to have in his hands the letter of Lenin against his then chief—Stalin, which had been torn from her husband by Krupskaya, to liquidate Stalin.[2] But a stupid mischance, as you know, ruined all our chances. Trotzky became ill unexpectedly and at the decisive moment, when Lenin dies, he becomes incapable of any action during a period of several months. Despite his possession of enormous advantages, the obstacle was our organization of the affair, i.e. its personal centralization. It is obvious that such a person as Trotzky, prepared in advance for his mission, which he was to realise, cannot be created at once, by improvisation. None among us, not even Zinoviev, had the requisite training and qualities for this undertaking; on the other hand Trotzky, being afraid of being displaced, did not himself want to help anybody. Thus, after the death of Lenin, when we had to be face to face with Stalin, who commenced a feverish activity, we foresaw then already our defeat in the Central Committee. We had to improvise a decision: and it was to ally ourselves with Stalin, to become Stalinists more than he himself, to exaggerate in everything and, therefore, to sabotage. The rest you know already: that was our uninterrupted subterranean struggle and our continuous failure to Stalin’s advantage, while he displays police talents of genius, having absolutely no equals in the past. And even more: Stalin, possessing national atavism, which had not been uprooted in him by his early Marxism, apparently for that reason underlines his pan-Russianism, and in this connexion resurrects a class which we had to destroy, that is the class of National-Communists, as opposed to the Internationalist-Communists, which we are. He places the International at the service of the USSR and it already accepts his mastery. If we want to find an historical parallel, then we must point to bonapartism, and if we want to find a person of Stalin’s type, then we shall not find an historical parallel for him. But perhaps I shall be able to find it in its basic characteristics by combining two people: Fouch? and Napoleon. Let us try to deprive the latter of his second half, his accessories, uniforms, military rank, crown and such like things, which, it seems, do not tempt Stalin, and then together they will give us a type identical with Stalin in the most important respects: he is the killer of the revolution, he does not serve it, but makes use of its services; he represents the most ancient Russian Imperialism, just as Napoleon identified himself with the Gauls: he created an aristocracy, even if not a military one, since there are no victories, then a bureacratically-police one.
G.—That is enough. Rakovsky. You are not here to make Trotzkyist propaganda. Will you at last get to something concrete?
Rakovsky—It is clear that I shall, but not before I had reached the point at which you will have formulated for yourself an at least superficial conception concerning “Them,” with whom you will have to reckon in practice and in concrete actuality. Not sooner. For me it is far more important than for you not to fail, which you must, naturally, understand.
G.—Well, try to shorten the story as far as possible.
Rakovsky—Our failures, which get worse every year, prevent the immediate carrying out of that which “They” have prepared in the after-war period for the further leap of the revolution forward. The Versailles Treaty, quite inexplicable for the politicians and economists of all nations, insofar as nobody could guess its projection, was the most decisive precondition for the revolution.
G.—This is a very curious theory. How do you explain it?
Rakovsky—The Versailles reparations and economic limitations were not determined by the advantages of individual nations. Their arithmetical absurdity was so obvious that even the most outstanding economists of the victorious countries soon exposed this. France alone demanded as reparations a great deal more than the cost of all her national possessions, more than one would have had to pay if the whole of France had been converted into a Sahara; even worse was the decision to impose on Germany payment obligations which were many times greater that it could pay, even if it had sold itself fully and given over the whole of its national production. In the end the true result was that in practice Germany was forced to carry out a phantastic dumping so that it could pay something on account of reparations. And of what did the dumping consist? An insufficiency of consumer goods, hunger in Germany and in corresponding measure unemployment in the importing countries. And since they could not import there was also unemployment in Germany. Hunger and unemployment on both sides; all this were the first results of Versailles... Was this treaty revolutionary or not? Even more was done: one undertook an equal control in the international plane. Do you know what that undertaking represents in the revolutionary plane? It means to impose an anarchical absurdity to force every national economy to produce in sufficient volume all that it needs, while assuming that to attain that one does not have to take account of climate, natural riches and also the technical education of directors and workers. The means for compensation for inborn inequalities of soil, climate, availability of minerals, oil, etc., etc., in various national economies, were always the circumstance that poor countries had to work more. This means that they had to exploit more deeply the capacities of the working force in order to lessen the difference which arises from the poverty of the soil; and to this are added a number of other inequalities which had to be compensated by similar measures; let us take the example of industrial equipment. I shall not expand the problem further, but the control of the working day carried through by the League of Nations on the basis of an abstract principle of the equality of the working day, was a reality in the context of an unchanged International Capitalist system of production and exchange and established economic inequality, since here we had to deal with an indifference to the aim of work, which is a sufficient production. The immediate result of this was an insufficiency of production, compensated by imports from countries with a sufficient natural economy and an industrial self-sufficiency: insofar as Europe had gold, that import was paid by gold. Then came the apparent boom in America which exchanged its immense production for gold and gold certificates, of which there was plenty. On the model of any anarchy of production there appeared at that period an unheard-of financial anarchy. “They” took advantage of it on the pretext of helping it with the aid of another and still greater anarchy: the inflation of the official money (cash) and the a hundred times greater inflation of their own money, credit money, i.e. false money. Remember how systematically there came devaluation in many countries; the destruction of the value of money in Germany, the American crisis and its phenomenal Consequences..., a record unemployment; more than thirty million unemployed in Europe and USA alone. Well, did not the Versailles Peace Treaty and its League of Nations serve as a revolutionary pre-condition?
G.—This could have happened even if not intended. Could you not prove to me why the revolution and Communism retreat before logical deductions; and more than that: they oppose fascism which has conquered in Spain and Germany... What can you tell me?
Rakovsky—I shall tell you that only in the case of the non-recognition of “Them” and their aims you would be right ..., but you must not forget about their existence and aims, and also the fact that in the USSR power is in the hands of Stalin.
G.—I do not see the connexion here....
Rakovsky—Because you do not want to: you have more than sufficient deductive talents and capabilities of reasoning. I repeat again: for us Stalin is not a Communist, but a bonapartist.
G.—So what?
Rakovsky—We do not wish that the great preconditions which we had created at Versailles for the triumph of the Communist revolution in the world, which, as you see, have become a gigantic reality, would serve the purpose of bringing victory to Stalin’s bonapartism... Is that sufficiently clear for you? Everything would have been different if in this case Trotzky had been the dictator of the USSR; that would have meant that “They” would have been the chiefs of International Communism.
G.—But surely fascism is totally anti-Communist, as in relation to the Trotzkyist and the Stalinist Communism ... and if the power which you ascribe to “Them” is so great, how is it that they were unable to avoid this?
Rakovsky—Because it were precisely “They” who gave Hitler the possibility of triumphing.
G.—You exceed all the boundaries of absurdity.
Rakovsky—The absurd and the miraculous become mixed as the result of a lack of culture. Listen to me. I have already admitted the defeat of the opposition. “They” saw in the end that Stalin cannot be overthrown by a coup d’etat, and their historical experience suggested to them the decision of a repetition (repris) with Stalin of that which had been done with the Tsar. There was here one difficulty, which seemed to us insuperable. In the whole of Europe there was not a single aggressor-State. Not one of them was geographically well placed and had an army sufficient for an attack on Russia. If there was no such country, then “They” had to create it. Only Germany had the corresponding population and positions suitable for an attack on the USSR, and it was capable of defeating Stalin; you can understand that the Weimar republic had not been invented as an aggressor either politically or economically; on the contrary, it was suited to an invasion. On the horizon of a hungry Germany there sparkled the meteor of Hitler. A pair of penetrating eyes fixed their attention on it. The world was the witness to his lightning rise. I shall not say that all of it was the work of our hands, no. His rise, uninterruptedly increasing in extent, took place as the result of the Revolutionary-Communist economy of Versailles. Versailles had had in mind not the creation of preconditions for the triumph of Hitler, but for the proletarization of Germany, for unemployment and hunger, as the result of which there should have triumphed the Communist revolution. But insofar as, thanks to the existence of Stalin at the head of the USSR and the International, the latter did not succeed, and as a result of an unwillingness to give up Germany to bonapartism, these preconditions were somewhat abated in the Davis and Young Plans, in expectation that meanwhile the opposition would come to power in Russia ...; but that, too, did not happen, but the existence of revolutionary preconditions had to produce its results. The economic predetermination of Germany would have forced the proletariat into revolutionary actions. Through the fault of Stalin the Social-International revolution had to be held up and the German proletariat sought inclusion in the National-Socialist revolution. This was dialectical, but given all the preconditions and according to common sense the National-Socialist revolution could never have triumphed there. That was not yet all. It was necessary that the Trotzkyists and Socialists should divide the masses with an already awakened and whole class consciousness—in accordance with instructions. With this business we concerned ourselves. But even more was needed: In 1929, when the National- Socialist Party began to experience a crisis of growth and it had insufficient financial resources, “They” sent their ambassador there. I even know his name: it was one of the Warburgs. In direct negotiations with Hitler they agreed as to the financing of the National-Socialist Party, and the latter received in a couple of years millions of Dollars, sent to it from Wall Street, and millions of Marks from German financiers through Schacht; the upkeep of the S.A. and S.S. and also the financing of the elections which took place, which gave Hitler power, are done on the Dollars and Marks sent by “Them.”
G.—Those who, according to you, want to achieve full Communism, arm Hitler, who swears that he will uproot the first Communist nation. This, if one is to believe you, is something very logical for the financiers.
Rakovsky—You again forget the Stalinist bonapartism. Remember that against Napoleon, the strangler of the French revolution, who stole its strength, there stood the objective revolutionaries—Louis XVIII, Wellington, Metternich and right up to the Tsar-Autocrat... This is 22 carat, according to the strict Stalinist doctrine. You must know by heart his theses about colonies with regard to imperialistic countries. Yes, according to him the Kings of Afghanistan and Egypt are objectively Communists owing to their struggle against His Britannic Majesty; why cannot Hitler be objectively Communist since he is fighting against the autocratic “Tsar Koba I”? (Meaning Stalin—Transl.) After all there is Hitler with his growing military power, and he already extends the boundaries of the Third Reich, and in future will do more... to such an extent as to have enough strength and possibilities to attack and fully destroy Stalin... Do you not observe the general sympathy of the Versailles wolves, who limit themselves only to a weak growl? Is this yet another chance, accident? Hitler will invade the USSR and as in 1917, when defeat suffered by the Tsar then gave us the opportunity of overthrowing him, so the defeat of Stalin will help us to remove him... Again the hour of the world revolution will strike. Since the democratic States, at present put to sleep, will help to bring about the general change at that moment, when Trotzky will take power into his hands, as during the Civil War. Hitler will attack from the West, his generals will rise and liquidate him... Now tell me, was not Hitler objectively a Communist? Yes or no?
G.—I do not believe in fairy tales or miracles...
Rakovsky—Well if you do not want to believe that “They” are able to achieve that which they had already achieved, then prepare to observe an invasion of the USSR and the liquidation of Stalin within a year. You think this is a miracle or an accident, well then prepare to see and experience that... But are you really able to refuse to believe that of which I have spoken, though this is still only a hypothesis? You will begin to act in this direction only at that moment when you will begin to see the proofs in the light of my talk.
G.—All right, let us talk in the form of a supposition. What will you say?
Rakovsky—You yourself had drawn attention to the coincidence of opinions, which took place between us. We are not at the moment interested in the attack on the USSR, since the fall of Stalin would presuppose the destruction of Communism, the existence of which interests us despite the circumstance that it is formal, as that gives us the certainty that we shall succeed in taking it over and then converting it into real Communism. I think that I have given you the position at the moment quite accurately.
G.—Splendid, the solution....
Rakovsky—First of all we must make sure that there would be no potential possibility of an attack by Hitler.
G.—If, as you confirm, it were “They” who made him F?hrer, then they have power over him and he must obey them.
Rakovsky—Owing to the fact that I was in a hurry I did not express myself quite correctly and you did not understand me well. If it is true that “They” financed Hitler, then that does not mean that they disclosed to him their existence and their aims. The ambassador Warburg presented himself under a false name and Hitler did not even guess his race; he also lied regarding whose representative he was. He told him that he had been sent by the financial circles of Wall Street who were interested in financing the National-Socialist movement with the aim of creating a threat to France, whose governments pursue a financial policy which provokes a crisis in the USA.
G.—And Hitler believed it?
Rakovsky—We do not know. That was not so important, whether he did or did not believe our explanations; our aim was to provoke a war ... and Hitler was war. Do you now understand?
G.—I understand. Consequently I do not see any other way of stopping him as the creation of a coalition of the USSR with the democratic nations, which would be capable of frightening Hitler. I think he will not be able to attack simultaneously all the countries of the world. The most would be—each in turn.
Rakovsky—Does not a simpler solution come to your mind, I would say a counter-revolutionary one ?
G.—To avoid war against the USSR ?
Rakovsky—Shorten the phrase by half ... and repeat with me “avoid war” ... is that not an absolutely counter-revolutionary thing? Every sincere Communist imitating his idol Lenin and the greatest revolutionary strategists must always wish for war. Nothing is so effective in bringing nearer the victory of revolution as war. This is a Marxist-Leninist dogma, which you must preach. Now further: Stalin’s National-Communism, this type of bonapartism, is capable of blinding the intellect of the most pure-blooded Communists, right up to the point at which it prevents their seeing that the transformation into which Stalin has fallen, i.e., that he subjects the revolution to the State, and not the State to the revolution, it would be correct...
G.—Your hate of Stalin blinds you and you contradict yourself. Have we not agreed that an attack on the USSR would not be welcome?
Rakovsky—But why should war be necessarily against the Soviet Union?
G.—But on what other country could Hitler make war? It is sufficiently clear that he would direct his attack on the USSR, of this he speaks in his speeches. What further proofs do you need?
Rakovsky—If you, the people from the Kremlin, consider it to be quite definite and not debatable, then why did you provoke the Civil War in Spain. Do not tell me that it was done for purely revolutionary reasons. Stalin is incapable of carrying out in practice a single Marxist theory. If there were revolutionary considerations here, then it would not be right to sacrifice in Spain so many excellent international revolutionary forces. This is the country which is furthest from the USSR, and the most elementary strategical education would not have allowed the loss of these forces... How would Stalin be able in case of conflict to supply and render military help to a Spanish Soviet republic? But this was correct. There we have an important strategic point, a crossing of opposing influences of the Capitalist States ... it might have been possible to provoke a war between them. I admit that theoretically this may have been right, but in practice—no. You already see how the war between the democratic Capitalist and fascist States did not begin. And now I shall tell you: if Stalin thought that he was capable of himself creating an excuse sufficient in order to provoke a war, in which the Capitalist States would have had to fight among themselves, then why does he not at least admit, if only theoretically, that others, too, can achieve the same thing, which did not seem impossible to him?
G.—If one is to agree with your assumptions then one can admit this hypothesis.
Rakovsky—That means that there is yet a second point of agreement between us: the first—that there must be no war against the USSR; the second—that it would be well to provoke it between the bourgeois States.
G.—Yes, I agree. Is that your personal opinion, or “Theirs”?
Rakovsky—I express it as my opinion. I have no power and no contact with “Them,” but I can confirm that in these two points it coincides with the view of the Kremlin.
G.—That is the most important thing and for that reason it is important to establish this beforehand. By the way, I would also like to know on what you base yourself in your confidence that “They” approve this.
Rakovsky—If I had the time in order to explain their full scheme, then you would already know about the reasons for their approval. At the present moment I shall condense them to three:
G.—Just which ?
Rakovsky—One is that which I had already mentioned. Hitler, this uneducated and elementary man, has restored thanks to his natural intuition and even against the technical opinion of Schacht, an economic system of a very dangerous kind. Being illiterate in all economic theories and being guided only by necessity he removed, as we had done it in the USSR, the private and international capital. That means that he took over for himself the privilege of manufacturing money, and not only physical moneys, but also financial ones; he took over the untouched machinery of falsification and put it to work for the benefit of the State. He exceeded us, as we, having abolished it in Russia, replaced it merely by this crude apparatus called State Capitalism; this was a very expensive triumph in view of the necessities of pre-revolutionary demagogy... Here I give you two real facts for comparison. I shall even say that Hitler had been lucky; he had almost no gold and for that reason he was not tempted to create a gold reserve. Insofar as he only possessed a full monetary guarantee of technical equipment and colossal working capacity of the Germans, his “gold reserve” was technical capacity and work ..., something so completely counter-revolutionary that, as you already see, he has by means of magic, as it were, radically eliminated unemployment among more than seven million technicians and workers.
G.—Thanks to increased re-armament.
Rakovsky—What does your re-armament give? If Hitler reached this despite all the bourgeois economists who surround him, then he was quite capable, in the absence of the danger of war, of applying his system also to peaceful production... Are you capable of imagining what would have come of this system if it had infected a number of other States and brought about the creation of a period of autarky... For example the Commonwealth. If you can, then imagine its counter-revolutionary functions... The danger is not yet inevitable, as we have had luck in that Hitler restored his system not according to some previous theory, but empirically, and he did not make any formulations of a scientific kind.[3] This means that insofar as he did not think in the light of a deductive process based on intelligence, he has no scientific terms or a formulated doctrine; yet there is a hidden danger as at any moment there can appear, as the consequence of deduction, a formula. This is very serious. Much more so that all the external and cruel factors in National-Socialism. We do not attack it in our propaganda as it could happen that through theoretical polemics we would ourselves provoke a formulation and systematization of this so decisive economic doctrine.[4] There is only one solution—war.
G.—And the second motive?
Rakovsky—If the Termidor triumphed in the Soviet revolution then this happened as the result of the existence of the former Russian nationalism. Without such a nationalism bonapartism would have been impossible. And if that happened in Russia, where nationalism was only embryonic in the person of the Tsar, then what obstacles must Marxism meet in the fully developed nationalism of Western Europe? Marx was wrong with respect to the advantages for the success of the revolution. Marxism won not in the most industrialized country, but in Russia, where the proletariat was small. Apart from other reasons our victory here is explained by the fact that in Russia there was no real nationalism, and in other countries it was in its full apogee. You see how it is reborn under this extraordinary power of fascism, and how infectious it is. You can understand that apart from that it can benefit Stalin, the need for the destruction of nationalism is alone worth a war in Europe.
G.—In sum you have set out, Rakovsky, one economic and one political reason. Which is the third?
Rakovsky—That is easy to guess. We have yet another reason, a religious one. Communism cannot be the victor if it will not have suppressed the still living Christianity. History speaks very clearly about this: the permanent revolution required seventeen centuries in order to achieve its first partial victory—by means of the creation of the first split in Christendom. In reality Christianity is our only real enemy, since all the political and economic phenomena in the bourgeois States are only its consequences. Christianity, controlling the individual, is capable of annulling the revolutionary projection of the neutral Soviet or atheistic State by choking it and, as we see it in Russia, things have reached the point of the creation of that spiritual nihilism which is dominant in the ruling masses, which have, nevertheless, remained Christian: this obstacle has not yet been removed during twenty years of Marxism. Let us admit in relation to Stalin that towards religion he was not bonapartistic. We would not have done more than he and would have acted in the same way. And if Stalin had dared, like Napoleon, to cross the Rubikon of Christianity, then his nationalism and counter-revolutionary power would have been increased a thousandfold. In addition, if this had happened then so radical a difference would have made quite impossible any collaboration in anything between us and him, even if this were to be only temporary and objective ... like the one you can see becoming apparent to us.
G.—And so I personally consider that you have given a definition of three fundamental points, on the basis of which a plan can be made. That is what I am in agreement about with you for the present. But I confirm to you my mental reservations, i.e. my suspicion in relation to all that which you have said concerning people, organizations and facts. Now continue to follow the general lines of your plan.
Rakovsky—Yes, now this moment has arrived. But only a preliminary qualification: I shall speak on my own responsibility. I am responsible for the interpretation of those preceding points in the sense in which “They” understand them, but I admit that “They” may consider another plan to be more effective for the attainment of the three aims, and one quite unlike that which I shall now set out. Bear that in mind.
G.—Very well, we shall bear it in mind. Please speak.

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1 Wilson’s Point 6 read: “The evacuation of all Russian territory, and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest co-operation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy, and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing, and more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.”—Transl.
2 It will be observed that twice Rakovsky states that Stalin had been Lenin’s chief; this may be a misunderstanding. —Transl.
3 Rakovsky is wrong; as he mentions in “Mein Kampf” Hitler had read the works of Gottfried Feder—Transl.
4 The problem of a scientific formulation of this question and the propounding of a corresponding programme has engaged the active attention of the publishers of this book and their associates for some years. Their conclusions have been published. In the translator’s book “The Struggle for World Power,” second edition 1963, p. 79 a full solution of the monetary problem is set out, and on p. 237 there is a full economic, political and social programme. These conclusions can be obtained on application.Rakovsky—We shall simplify. Insofar as the object is missing for which the German military might had been created — to give us power in the USSR — the aim now is to bring about an advance on the fronts and to direct the Hitlerist advance not towards the East, but the West.
G. — Exactly. Have you thought of the practical plan of realization ?
Rakovsky—I had had more than enough time for that at the Lubianka. I considered. So look: if there were difficulties in finding mutually shared points between us and all else took its normal course, then the problems comes down to again trying to establish that in which there is similarity between Hitler and Stalin.
G. — Yes, but admit that all this is problematical.
Rakovsky—But not insoluble, as you think. In reality problems are insoluble only when they include dialectical subjective contradictions; and even in that case we always consider possible and essential a synthesis, overcoming the “morally-impossible” of Christian metaphysicians.
G. — Again you begin to theorize.
Rakovsky—As the result of my intellecutal discipline — this is essential for me. People of a big culture prefer to approach the concrete through a generalization, and not the other way round. With Hitler and with Stalin one can find common ground, as, being very different people, they have the same roots; if Hitler is sentimental to a pathological degree, but Stalin is normal, yet both of them are egoists: neither one of them is an idealist, and for that reason both of them are bonapartists, i.e. classical Imperialists. And if just that is the position, then it is already not difficult to find common ground betveen them. Why not, if it proved possible between one Tsarina and one Prussian King ...
G. — Rakovsky, you are incorrigible ...
Rakovsky—You do not guess ? If Poland was the point of union between Catherine and Frederick — the Tsarina of Russia and the King of Germany at that time, then why cannot Poland serve as a reason for the finding of common ground between Hitler and Stalin ? In Poland the persons of Hitler and Stalin can coincide, and also the historical Tsarist Bolshevik and Nazi lines. Our line, “Their” line — also, as Poland is a Christian State and, what makes the matter even more complex, a Catholic one.
G. — And what follows from the fact of such a treble coincidence ?
Rakovsky—If there is common ground then there is a possibility of agreement.
G. — Between Hitler and Stalin ? ... Absurd ! Impossible.
Rakovsky—In politics there are neither absurdities, nor the impossible.
G. — Let us imagine, as an hypothesis: Hitler and Stalin advance on Poland.
Rakovsky—Permit me to interrupt you; an attack can be called forth only by the following alternative: war or peace. You must admit it.
G. — Well, and so what ?
Rakovsky—Do you consider that England and France, with their worse armies and aviation, in comparison with Hitler's, can attack the united Hltler and Stalin ?
G. — Yes, that seems to me to be very difficult ... unless America ...
Rakovsky—Let us leave the United States aside for the moment. Will you agree with me that as the result of the attack of Hitler and Stalin on Poland there can be no European war ?
G. — You argue logically; it would seem impossible.
Rakovsky—In that case an attack or war would be useless. It would not call forth the mutual destruction of the bourgeois States: the Hitlerist threat to the USSR would continue in being after the division of Poland since theoretically both Germany and the USSR would have been strengthened to the same extent. In practice Hitler to a greater extent since the USSR does not need more land and raw materials for its strengthening, but Hitler does need them.
G. — This is a correct view ..., but I can see no other solution.
Rakovsky—No, there is a solution.
G. — Which ?
Rakovsky—That the democracies should attack and not attack the aggressor.
G. — What are you saying, what hallucination ! Simultaneously to attack and not to attack ... That is something absolutely impossible.
Rakovsky—You think so ? Calm down ... Are there not two aggressors ? Did we not agree that there will be no advance just because there are two ? Well ... What prevents the attack on one of them ?
G. — What do you want to say by that ?
Rakovsky—Simply that the democracies will declare war only on one aggressor, and that will be Hitler.
G. — Yes, but that is an unfounded hypothesis.
Rakovsky—An hypothesis, but having a foundation. Consider: each State which will have to fight with a coalition of enemy States has as its main strategical objective to destroy them separately one after another. This rule is so well known that proofs are superfluous. So, agree with me that there are no obstacles to the creation of such conditions. I think that the question that Stalin will not consider himself aggrieved in case of an attack on Hitler is already settled. Is that not so ? In addition geography imposes this attitude, and for that reason strategy also. However stupid France and England may be in preparing to fight simultaneously against two countries, one of which wants to preserve its neutrality, while the other, even being alone, represets for them a serious opponent, from where and from which side could they carry out an attack on the USSR ? They have not got a common border; unless they were to advance over the Himalayas ... Yes, there remains the air front, but with what forces and from where could they invade Russia ? In comparison with Hitler they are weaker in the air. All the arguments I have mentioned are no secret and are well known. As you see, all is simplified to a considerable extent.
G. — Yes, your arguments seem to be logical in the case if the conflict will be limited to four countries; but there are not four, but more, and neutrality is not a simple matter in a war on the given scale.
Rakovsky—Undoubtedly, but the possible participation of many countrie does not change the power relationships. Weigh this in your mind and you will see how the balance will continue, even if others or even all European States come in. In addition, and this is very important, not one of those States, which will enter the war at the side of England and France will be able to deprive them of leadership; as a result the reasons which will prevent their attack on the USSR will retain their significance.
G. — You forget about the United States.
Rakovsky—In a moment you will see that I have not forgotten. I shall limit myself to the investigation of their function in the preliminary programme, which occupies us at present, and I shall say that America will not be able to force France and England to attack Hitler and Stalin simultaneously. In order to attain that the United States would have to enter the war from the very first day. But that is impossible. In the first place because America did not enter a war formerly and never will do so if it is not attacked. Its rulers can arrange that they will be attacked, if that will suit them. Of that I can assure you. In those cases when provocation was not successful and the enemy did not react to it, aggression was invented. In their first international war, the war against Spain, of the defeat of which they were sure, they invented an aggression, or, more correctly, “They” invented it. In 1914 provocation was successful. True, one can dispute technically if there was one, but the rule without exceptions is that he who makes a sudden attack without warning, does it with the help of a provocation. Now it is like this: this splendid American technique which I welcome at any moment, is subject to one condition: that aggression should take place at a suitable moment, i.e. the moment required by the United States who are being attacked; that means then, when they will have the arms. Does this condition exist now ? It is clear that it does not. In America there are at present a little less than one hundred thousand men under arms and a middling aviation: it has only an imposing fleet. But you can understand that, having it, it can not persuade its allies to decide on an attack on the USSR, since England and France have preponderance only at sea. I have also proved to you that from that side there can be no change in the comparative strengths of the forces.
G. — Having agreed with this, I ask you again to explain once more the technical realization.
Rakovsky—As you have seen, given the coincidence of the interests of Stalin and Hitler with regard to an attack on Poland, all comes down to the formalization of this full similarity of aims and to make a pact about a double attack.
G. — And you think this is easy ?
Rakovsky—Frankly, no. Here we need a diplomacy which is more experienced than that of Stalin. There ought to have been available the one which Stalin had decapitated, or the one which now decays in the Lubianka. In former times Litvinov would have been capable, with some difficulties, although his race would have been a great obstacle for negotiations with Hitler; but now this is a finished man and he is destroved by a terrible panic; he is experiencing an animal fear of Molotov, even more than of Stalin. His whole talent is directed towards making sure that they should not think that he is a Trotzkyist. If he were to hear of the necessity of arranging closer relations with Hitler, then that would be enough for him to manufacture for himself the proof of his Trotzkyism. I do not see a man who is capable of this job; in any event he would have to be a pure-blooded Russian. I could offer my services for guidance. At the present moment I would suggest to the one who begins the talks, that they should be strictly confidential, but with great open sincerity. Given a whole wall of various prejudices only truthfulness can deceive Hitler.
G. — I again do not understand your paradoxial expressions.
Rakovsky—Forgive me, but this only appears to be so; I am forced by the synthesis to do so. I wanted to say that with Hitler one must play a clean game concerning the concrete and most immediate questions. It is necessary to shew him that the game is not played in order to provoke him into war on tvo fronts. For example, it is possible to promise him and to prove at the most suitable moment that our mobilization will be limited to a small number of forces, required for the invasion of Poland, and that these forces will not be great. According to our real plan we shall have to place our main forces to meet the possible Anglo French attack. Stalin will have to be generous with the preliminary supplies which Hitler will demand, chiefly oil. That is what has come to my mind for the moment. Thousands of further questions will arise, of a similar character, which will have to be solved so that Hitler, seeing in practice that we only want to occupy our part of Poland, would be quite certain of that. And insofar as in practice it should be just like that, he will be deceived by the truth.
G. — But in what, in this case, is there a deception ?
Rakovsky—I shall give you a few minutes of time so that you yourself can discover just in what there is a deception of Hitler. But first I want to stress, and you should take note, that the plan which I have indicated here, is logical and normal and I think that one can achieve that the Capitalistic States will destroy each other, if one brings about a clash of their two wings: the fascist and the bourgeois. I repeat that the plan is logical and normal. As you have slready heen able to see, there is no intervention here of mysterious or unusual factors. In short in order that one should be able to realize the plan, “Their” intervention is not required. Now I should like to guess your thoughts: are you not now thinking that it would be stupid to waste time on proving the unprovable existence and power held by “Them.” Is that not so ?
G. You are right.
Rakovsky—Be frank with me. Do you really not observe their intervention ? I informed you, wanting to help you, that their intervention exists and is decisive, and for that reason the logic and naturalness, of the plan are only apparances ... Is it really true that you do not see “Them” ?
G. — Speaking sincerely, no.
Rakovsky—The logic and naturalness of my plan is only an appearance. It would be natural and logical that Hitler and Stalin would inflict defeat on each other. For the democracies that would be a simple and easy thing, if they would have to put forward such an aim, for them it would be enough that Hitler should be permitted, make note “permitted” to attack Stalin. Do not tell me that Germany could be defeated. If the Russian distances and the dreadful fear of Stalin and his henchmen of the Hitlerite axe and the revenge of their victims will not be enough in order to attain the military exhaustion of Germany, then there will be no obstacles to the democracies, seeing that Stalin is losing strength, beginning to help him wisely and methodically, continuing to give that help until the complete exhaustion of both armies. In reality that would be easy, natural and logical, if those motives and aims which are put forward by the democracies and which most of their followers believe to be the true ones, and not what they are in reality — pretexts. There is only one aim, one single aim: the triumph of Communism; it is not Moscow which will impose its will on the democracies, but New York, not the “Comintern,” but the “Capintern” on Wall Street. Who other that he could have been able to impose on Europe such an obvious and absolute contradiction ? What force can lead it towards complete suicide ? Only one force is able to do this: money. Money is power and the sole power.
G. — I shall be frank with you, Rakovsky. I admit in you an exceptional gift of talent. You possess brilliant dialectic, persuasive and subtle: when this is not enough for you, then your imagination has command of means in order to extend your colourful canvas, while you invent brilliant and clear perspectives; but all this, although it provokes my enthusiasm, is not enough for me. I shall go over to putting questions to you, assuming that I believe all that you have said.
Rakovsky—And I shall give you replies, but with one single condition, that you should not add anything to what I shall say, nor deduct.
G. — I promise. You assert that “They” hinder or will hinder a German-Soviet war, which is logical from the point of view of the Capitalists. Have I explained it correctly ?
Rakovsky—Yes, precisely so.
G. — But the reality of the present moment is such that Germany has been permitted to re-arm and expand. This is a fact. I already know that in accordance with your explanation this was called forth by the Trotzkyist plan, which fell through thanks to the “cleanings-out” now taking place; thus the aim has been lost. In the face of a new situation vou only advise that Hitler and Stalin should sign a pact and divide Poland. I ask you: how can we obtain a guarantee that, having the pact, or not having it, carrying out, or not carrying out the partition, Hitler will not attack the USSR ?
Rakovsky—This cannot be guaranteed.
G. — Then why go on talking ?
Rakovsky—Do not hurry. The magnificent threat to the USSR is real and exists. This is not an hypothesis and not a verbal threat. It is a fact and a fact which obliges. “They” already have superiority over Stalin, a superiority which cannot be denied. Stalin is offered only one altemative, the right to choose, but not full freedom. The attack of Hitler will come in any case of its own accord; “They” need not do anything to make it happen but only leave him the chance of acting. This is the basic and determining reality, which has been forgotten by you owing to your excessively Kremlin-like way of thinking ... Egocentrism, Sir, egocentrism.
G. — The right to choose ?
Rakovsky—I shall define it exactly once more, but shortly: either there will be an attack on Stalin, or there will come the realization of the plan I have indicated, according to which the European Capitalistic States will destroy each other. I drew attention to this alternative, but as you see it was only a theoretical one. If Stalin wants to survive then he will be forced to realize the plan which has been proposed by me and ratifed by “Them.”
G. — But if he refuses ?
Rakovsky—That will be impossible for him. The expansion and re-armament of Germany will continue. When Stalin will be faced by this gigantic threat ..., then what will he do ? This will be dictated to him by his own instinct of self-preservation.
G. — It seems that events must develop only according to the orders indicated by “Them.”
Rakovsky—And it is so. Of course, in the USSR to-day things still stand llke this, but sooner or later it wili happen like that all the same. It is not difficult to foretell and to suggest for carrying out something, if it is profitable for the person who must realize the matter, in the given case Stalin, who is hardly thinking of suicide. It is much more difficult to give a prognosis and to force to act as needed someone for whom that is not profitable, but who must act nevertheless, in the given case the democracies. I have kept the explanation for this moment to give a concrete picture of the true position. Reject the wrong thought that you are the arbiters in the given situation, since “They” are the arbiters.
G. — “They” both in the first and the second case ... Therefore we rnust deal with shadows ?
Rakovsky—But are facts shadows ? The international situation will be extraordinary, but not shadowy; it is real and very real. This is not a miracle; here is predetermined the future policy ... Do you think this is the work of shadows ?
G.—But let us see; let us assume that your plan is accepted ... But we must have something tangible, personal, in order to be able to carry out negotiations.
Rakovsky—For example ?
G. — Some person with powers of attorney and representation.
Rakovsky—But for what ? Just for the pleasure of becoming acquainted wlth him ? For the pleasure of a talk ? Bear in mind that the assumed person, in case of his appearance, will not present you with credentials with seals and crests and wlll not wear a diplomatic uniform, at least a man from “Them”; if he were to say something or promise, then it wlll have no Juridical force or meaning as a pact ... Understand that “They” are not a State; “They” are that which the International was before 1917, that which it still is nothing and at the same time everything. Imagine to yourself if it is possible that the USSR would have negotiations with freemasonry, with an espionage organiation, with the Macedonian Komitadgi or the Croatian Ustashi. Would not some Juridlcal agreement be written ? ... Such pacts as the pact of Lenin with the German General Staff, as the pact of Trotzky with “Them” — are realized without written documents and without signatures The only guarantee of their execution is rooted in the circumstance that the carrying out of that which has been agreed is profitable for the parties to the pact, this guarantee is the sole reality in the pact, however great may be its importance.
G. — From what would you begin in the present case ?
Rakovsky—Simple; I should begin already from to-morrow to sound out Berlin ...
G. — In order to agree about the attack on Poland ?
Rakovsky—I would not begin with that ... I would display my willingness to yield and would hint about certain disappointments among the democracies, I would soft-pedal in Spain ... This would be an act of encouragement; then I would drop a hint about Poland. As you see — nothing compromising, but enough so that a part of the OKW (German High Command — Transl.), the Bismarckists, as they are called, would have some arguments to put before Hitler.
G. — And nothing more ?
Rakovsky—For the beginning, nothing more; this is already a big diplomatic task.
G. — Speaking frankly, having in mind the aims which have been dominant in the Kremlin until now, I do not think that anyone would at present dare to advise such a radical change in international policy. I propose to you, Rakovsky, to transform yourself in imagination into that person at the Kremlin which will have to take the decision ... On the basis only of your disclosures, arguments, your hypotheses and persuasion, as I see it, it would be impossible to convince anyone. I personally, after having listened to you and at the same time, I shall not deny it, having experienced a strong influence from your explanations, of your personality, have not for a single moment experienced the temptation to consider the German-Soviet pact to be something realizable.
Rakovsky—International events will force with irresistible strength ...
G. — But that would be a loss of valuable time. Consider something concrete, something which I could put forward as a proof of your veracity and credibility ... In the contrary case I should not dare to transmit your information about our conversation; I should edit it with all accuracy, but it would reach the Kremlin archives and stay there.
Rakovsky—Would it not be enough to bring about that it is taken into consideration if someone, even in a most official manner, were to have a talk with some very important person ?
G. — It seems to me that this would be something real.
Rakovsky—But with whom ?
G. — This is only my personal opinion, Rakovsky. You had mentioned concrete persons, big financiers; if I remember correctly, you had spoken about a certain Schiff, for example; then you mentioned another who had been the go-between with Hitler for the purpose of financing him. There are also politicians or persons with a blg position, who belong to “Them” or, if you like, serve “Them.” Someone like that could be of use to us in order to start something practical ... Do you know someone ?
Rakovsky—I do not think it is necessary ... Think: about what will you be neootiating ? Probably about the plan which I have set out, is that not so ? For what ? At the present moment “They” need not do anything in this context; “Their” mission is “not to do.” And for that reason you would not be able to agree about any positive acton and could not demand it ... Remember, consider well.
G. — Even if that is so, yet in view of our personal opinion there must be a reality, even if a useless one ..., a man, a personality which would confirm the credibility of the power, which you ascribe to “Them.”
Rakovsky—I shall satisfy vou, although I am sure of the uselessness of this. I have already told you that I do not know who is a part of “Them,” but have assurances from a person who must have known them.
G. — From whom ?
Rakovsky—From Trotzky. From Trotzky I know only that one of “Them” was Walter Rathenau, who was well known from Rapallo. You see the last of “Them” who occupied a political and social position, since it was he who broke the economic blockade of the USSR. Despite the fact that he was one of the biggest millionaires; of course, such also was Lionel Rothschild. I can with confidence mention only these names. Naturally I can name still more people, the work and personality of whom I determine as being fully “Theirs,” but I cannot confirm what these people command or whom they obey.
G. — Mention some of them.
Rakovsky—As an institutions — the Bank of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., of Wall Street; to this bank belong the families of Schiff, Warburg, Loeb and Kuhn; I say families in order to point out several names, since they are all connected among themselves by marriages; then Baruch, Frankfurter, Altschul, Cohen, Benjamin, Strauss, Steinhardt, Blom, Rosenman, Lippmann, Lehman, Dreifus, Lamont, Rothschild, Lord, Mandel Morgenthau, Ezekiel, Lasky. I think that that will be enough names; if I were to strain my memory, then perhaps I would remember some more but I repeat, that I do not know who among them can be one of “Them” and I cannot even assert, that any one of them is definitely of their number; I want to avoid any responsibility. But I certainly think that any one of the persons I have enumerated, even of those not belonging to “Them,” could always lead to “Them” with any proposition of an important type. Of course, independently of whether this or that person does or does not belong to “Them,” one cannot expect a direct reply. The answer will be given by facts. That is the unchangeable tactic which they prefer and with which they force one to reckon. For example, if you would risk beginning diplomatic initiatives, then you would not need to make use of the method of a personal approach to “Them”; one must limit oneself to the expression of thoughts, the exposition of some rational hypothesis, which depends on unknown definite factors. Then it only remains to wait.
G.—You understand that I have not ot a card-index at my dispesal at the moment, in order to establish all the men yvou have mentioned: I assume that they are probably somewhere far away. Where ?
Rakovsky—Most of them in the United States.
G. — Plese understand that if we were to decide to act, then we would have to devote much time to it. But the matter is urgent, and urgent not for us, but for you. Rakovsky.
Rakovsky—For me ?
G. — Yes. for you. Remember that your trial will take place very soon. I do not know, but I think it will not be risky to assume that if all that had been discussed here were to interest the Kremlin, then it must interest them before you appear before the tribunal: that would be for you a decisive matter. I think it is in your personal interests that you should propose something quicker to us. The most important thing is to get proofs that you spoke the truth, and to do this not during a period of several weeks, but during several days. I think that if you were to succeed in this, then I could nearly give you fairly solid assurances concerning the possibility of saving your life ... In the contrary case I answer for nothing.
Rakovsky—In the end I shall take the risk. Do you know if Davis is at present in Moscow ? Yes, the Ambassador of the United States.
G. — I think he is; he should have returned.
Rakovsky—Only an exceptional situation gives me the right, as I see it, against the rules, to make use of an official intermediary.
G. — Therefore we can think that the American Government is behind all this ...
Rakovsky—Behind — no under all this ...
G. — Roosevelt ?
Rakovsky—What do I know ? I can only come to conclusions. You are all the time obsessed with the mania of political espionage. I could manufacture, in order to please you, a whole history; I have more than sufficient imagination, dates and true facts in order to give it veracity in appearance, which would be close to looking obvious. But are not the generally known facts more obvious ? And you can supplement them with your own imagination, if you wish. Look yourself. Remember the morning of the 24th October 1929. The time will come when this day will be for the history of the revolution more important than October, 1917. On the day of the 24th October there took place the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, the beginning of the so-called “depression,” a real revolution. The four years of the Government of Hoover — are years of revolutionary progress: 12 and 15 millions on strike. In February, 1933 there takes place the last stroke of the crisis with the closing of the banks. It is difficu1t to do more than capital did in order to break the “classical American,” who was still on his industrial bases and in the economic respect enslaved by Wall Street. It is well known that any impoverishment in economics, be it in relation to societies or animals, gives a flourishing of parasitism, and capital is a large parasite. But this American revolution pursued not only the one aim of increasing the power of money for those who had the right to use it, it pretended to even more. Although the power of money is political power, but before that it had only been used indirectly, but now the power of money was to be transformed into direct power. The man through whom they made use of such power was Franklin Roosevelt. Have you understood ? Take note of the following: In that year 1929, the first year of the American revolution in February Trotzky leaves Russia; the crash takes place in October ... The financing of Hitler is agreed in July, 1929. You think that all this was by chance ? The four years of the rule of Hoover were used for the preparation of the seizure of power in the United States and the USSR; there by means of a financial revolution and here with the help of war and the defeat which was to follow. Could some good novel with great imagination be more obvious to you ? You can understand that the execution of the plan on such a scale requires a special man, who can direct the executive power in the United States, who has been predetermined to be the organizing and deciding force. That man was Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. And permit me to say that this two-sexed being is not simply irony. He had to avoid any possible Delilah.
G. — Is Roosevelt one of “Them” ?
Rakovsky—I do not know if he is one of “Them,” or is only subject to “Them.” What more do you want ? I think that he was conscious of his mission, but cannot assert whether he obeyed under duress of blackmail or he was one of those who rule; it is true that he carried out his mission, realized all the actions which had been assigned to him accurately. Do not ask me more, as I do not know any more.
G. — In case it should be decided to approach Davis, in which form would you do it ?
Rakovsky—First of all you must select a person of such a type as “the baron”; he could be useful ... Is he still alive ?
G. — I do not know.
Rakovsky—All right, the choice of persons is left to you. Your delegate must present himself as being confidential or not modest, but best of all as a secret oppositionist. The conversation must be cleverly conducted concerning that contradictory position into which the USSR has been put by the so-called European democracies, by their union against National-Socialism. This is the conclusion of an alliance with the British and French Imperialism, the contemporary real Imperialism, for the destruction of the potential Imperialism. The aim of the verbal expressions must be to conjoin the false Soviet position with an equally false one of American democracy ... It also sees itself forced to support Colonial Imperialism for the defence of democracy within England and France. As you see, the question can be put onto a very strong logical foundation. After that it is already very easy to formulate an hypothesis about actions. The first: that neither the USSR, nor the United States are interested in European Imperialism and thus the dispute is brought down to the question of personal hegemony; that ideologically and economically Russia and America want the destruction of European Colonial Imperialism, be it direct or oblique. The United States want it even more. If Europe were to lose all its power in a new war, then England, not having its own forces, with the disappearance of Europe as a force, as power, would from the first day lean, with all its weight and with the whole of its Empire, speaking the English language, on the United States, which would be inevitable both in the political and economic sense ... Analyze what you have heard in the light of the Left conspiracy, as one might say, without shocking any American boureois. Having got to this point, one could have an interval for a few days. Then, having noted the reaction, it will be necessary to move further. Now Hitler comes forward. Here one can point to any aggression: he is fully an aggressor and of this there can be no doubt. And then one can go over to asking a question: What common action should be undertaken by the United States and the Soviet Union in view of the war between the Imperialists, who want it ? The answer could he — neutrality. One must argue again: yes, neutrality, but it does not depend on the wish of one side, but also of the aggressor. There can be a guarantee of neutrality only when the aggressor cannot attack or it does not suit him. For this purpose the infallible answer is the attack of the aggressor on another Imperialist State. From this it is very easy to go over to the expression of the necessity and morality, with a view to guaranteeing safety, for provoking a clash between the Imperialists, if that clash were not to take place of its own accord. And if that were to be accepted in theory, and it will be accepted, then one can regulate the question of actions in practice, which would be only a matter of technique. Here is a scheme: (1) A pact with Hitler for the division between us of Czechoslovakia and Poland (better the latter). (2) Hitler will accept. If he is capable of backing a bluff for the conquest, i.e. the seizure of something in alliance with the USSR, then for him there will be full guarantee in that the democracies will yield. He will be unable to believe their verbal threats as he knows that those who try to intimidate by war threats are at the same time partisans of disarmament and that their disarmament is real. (3) The democracies will attack Hitler and not Stalin; they will tell the people that although both are guilty of aggression and partition, but strategical and logical reasons force them to defeat them one by one: first Hitler and then Stalin.
G. — But will they not deceive us with truth ?
Rakovsky—But how ? Does not Stalin dispose of freedom of action in order to help Hitler in sufficient measure ? Do we not put in his hands the possibility of continuing the war between the Capitalists until the last man and the last pound ? With what can they attack him ? The exhausted States of the West will already have enough on their hands with internal Communist revolution, which in the other case may triumph.
G. — But if Hitler achieves a quick victory and if he, like Napoleon, mobilizes the whole of Europe against the USSR ?
Rakovsky—This is quite improbable ! You forget about the existence of the United States. You reject the power factor, a greater one. Is it not natural that America, imitating Stalin, would on its part help the democratic States ? If one were to co-ordinate “against the hands of the clock” the help to both groups of fighters, then thus there will be assured without failure a permanent extension of the war.
G. — And Japan ?
Rakovsky—Is not China enough for them ? Let Stalin guarantee them his non-intervention. The Japanese are very fond of suicide, but after all not to such an extent as to be capable of simultaneously attacking China and the USSR. Any more objections ?
G. — No, if it were to depend on me, then I would try ... But do you believe that the delegate ... ?
Rakovsky—Yes, I believe. I was not given the chance of speaking with him, but note one detail: the appointment of Davis became known in November, 1936; we must assume that Roosevelt thought of sending him much sooner and with that in mind began preliminary steps; we all know that the consideration of the matter and the official explanations of the appointment take more than two months. Apparently his appointment was agreed in August ... And what happened in August ? In August Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot. I am willing to swear that his appointment was made for the purpose of a new involvement of “Them” in the politics of Stalin. Yes, I certainly think so. With what an inner excitement must he have travelled, seeing how one after another there fall the chiefs of the opposition in the “purges” which follow one on another. Do you know it he was present at trial of Radeck ?
G. — Yes.
Rakovsky—You will see him. Have a talk with him. He expects it already for many months.
G. — This night we must finish; but before we part I want to know something more. Let us assume that all this is true and all will be carried out with full success. “They” will put forward definite conditions. Guess what they might be ?
Rakovsky—This is not difficult to assume. The first condition will be the ending of the executions of the Communists, that means the Trotzkyists, as you call them. Then, of course, they will demand the establishment of several zones of influence, as I had mentioned. The boundaries which will have to divide the formnal Communism from the real one. That is the most important condition. There will be mutual concessions for mutual help for a time, while the plan lasts, being carried out. You will see for example the paradoxial phenomenon that a whole crowd of people, enemies of Stalin, will help him, no they will not necessarily be proletarians, nor will they be professional spies. There will appear influential persons at all levels of society, even very high ones, who will help the Stalinist formal Communism when it becomes if not real, then at least objective Communism. Have you understood me ?
G. — A little; you wrap up such things in such impenetrable casuistry.
Rakovsky—If it is necessary to end, then I can only express myself in this way. Let us see if I shall not be able yet to help to understand. It is known that Marxism was called Hegelian. So this question was vulgarised. Hegelian idealism is a widespread adjustment to an uninformed understanding in the West of the natural mysticism of Baruch Spinosa. “They” are spinosists: perhaps the matter is the other way round, i.e. that spinosism is “Them,” insofar as he is only a version adequate to the epoch of “Their” own philosophy, which is a much earlier one, standing on a much higher level. After all, a hegelian and for that reason also the follower of Spinosa, was devoted to his faith, but only temporarily, tactically. The matter does not stand as is claimed by Marxism, that as the result of the elimination of contradictions there arises the synthesis. It is as the result of the opposing mutual fusion, from the thesis and anti-thesis that there arises, as a synthesis, the reality, truth as a final harmony between the subjective and objective. Do you not see that already ? In Moscow there is Communism: in New York Capitalism. It is all the same as a thesis and anti-thesis. Analyze both. Moscow is subjective Communism, but Capitalism objective — State Capitalism. New York: Capitalism subjective, but Communism objective. A personal synthesis, truth: the Financial International, the Capitalist-Communist one. “They.”

* * *

The meeting had lasted about six hours. I once more gave some drug to Rakovski. The drug it was obvious, worked well, although I was only able to observe this by certain symptoms of animation. But I think that Rakovsky would have spoken just the same in a norrnal condition. Undoubtedly the theme of the conversation concerned his speciality and he had the passionate will to epose that, about which he spoke. Since, if all this is true then an energetic attempt had been made to enforce the triumph of his idea and plan. If this was untrue, then there was an extraordinary phantasy and this was a wonderful manoeuvre for saving his already lost life.
My opinion of all that had been heard can not be of any importance. I have not got a sufficient erudition in order to understand its universality and horizons. When Rakovsky touched on the most important part of the theme I had the same feeling as at that moment when I saw myself for the first time on the X-ray screen. My surprised eyes saw something diffuse and dark, but real. Something like an apparition; I had to co-ordinate his figure and movements, corelations and actions to the degree to which it was possible to guess with the help of logical intuition.
I think that I had observed during several hours the “radiograph of revolution” on a world-wide scale. It is possible that in part lt failed, was deformed, thanks to circumstances or personalities which reflected it, it is not for nothing that the lie and dissimulation are permitted in the revolutionary struggle and are accepted as moral. And Rakovsky, a passionate dialectician of great culture and a first-class orator, is first of all and above all a revolutionary fanatic.
I re-read the conversation many times, but each time I felt how there rose in me the feeling of my incompetence in this respect. That which until then had seemed to me, and to the whole world, to be the truth and obvious reality, like blocks of granite, where the social order stands as on a rock, immovable and permanent, all that became transformed into a thick fog. There appear colossal, unmeasurable, invisible forces with a categorical imperative, disobedient, sly and titanic at the same time, something like magnetism, electricity or the attraction of the earth. In the presence of this phenomenal disclosure I felt like the man from the stone age, whose head was still full of primitive superstitions concerning the phenomena of nature, and who had been suddenly transposed one night into the Paris of to-day. I am amazed even more than he would have been.
Many times I disagreed. At first I convinced myself that everything which Rakovsky was telling was the product of his extraordinary imagination. But even having convinced myself that I was a toy in the hands of the biggest of all the writers of novels, I tried in vain to find enough strength, logical reasons and even people with a sufficient personality, who would have been able to explain this gigantic progress of the revolution.
I must confess that if only those forces participated here, as also reasons and people, which are mentioned officially in written histories, then I must declare that the revolution is a miracle of our age. No, when I was listening to Rakovsky, I could not admit that a small group of Jews, who emigrated from London, had achieved that this “apparition of revolution,” which had been called forth by Marx in the first lines of the Manifesto, had become to-day a gigantic reality and a universal threat.
Whether what Rakovsky told is true or not, whether the secret and real streneth of Communism is International Capital, it is the obvious truth for rne that Marx, Lenin, Trotzky and Stalin are an insufficient explanation for that which is happening.
Whether these people are real or phantastic, whom Rakovsky calls “Them” with an almost religious tremor in his voice, is the question. But if “They” do not exist then I shall have to say of them what Voltaire said of God: “He will have to be invented,” since only in that case can we explain the existence, extent and force of this world-wide revolution.
After all, I have no hope of seeing it. My position does not allow me to view with great optimism the possibility that I shall survive until the near future. But this suicide of the bourgeois European States, of which Rakovsky spoke, and which he proves as being inevitable, would be for me, who has been initiated into the secret, the magisterial and definite proof.

* * *

When Rakovsky had been led away to his place of imprisonment Gabriel remained some time immersed in himself.
I looked at him, not seeing him; and in fact my own ideas and conceptions had lost the ground under their feet and were somehow suspended.
“How do you look on all this” asked Gabriel.
“I do not know, I do not know” I replied, and I spoke the truth; but I added “I think that this is an amazing man and if we are dealing with a falsification, then it is extraordinary; in any event it is a piece of genius.”
“As a result, if we shall have the time, we must have an exchange of views ... I am always interested in your opinion of the profane, a doctor. But now we must agree about our programme. I need you as a professional, but as a modest man. That which you have heard, as the result of your peculiar function, can be wind and smoke which is carried by the wind, but it can also be something, the importance of which cannot be exceeded by anything else. Here a moderate terminology is inappropriate. Given this last possibility, a strong feeling of precaution forces me to limit the number of people who know ahout it. For the moment only you and I know. The man who manipulated the recording machine does not know any French. The fact that we did not speak in Russian was not my caprice. In short: I shall be grateful to you if you will be the translator. Sleep for some hours. I shall now give the necessary instructions so that the technician would agree the time with you, and as soon as possible you must translate and write down the conversation, which he will reproduce for you to hear. It will be a hard job; you cannot use a typewriter and the recorder will have to move very slowly. When you will have done the French version I shall read it. A few remarks and epigraphs will be necessary, and I shall add them. You can use a typewriter ?”
“Very badly, very slowly, only with two fingers.”
“Well arrange it somehow. Please make few mistakes.”
Gabriel called the man. We arranged to begin work at eleven o'clock and it was already almost seven. We went to sleep a little.
I was called punctually. We sat down in my small study.
Gabriel had asked me to make two copies of the translation. I made three, in order to hide one for myself. I took the risk as he went to Moscow. I am not sorry that I had had the courage for this.

* * *

EPILOGUE

As is well known, Stalin followed the advice of Rakovsky. There was a pact with Hitler. Also the Second World War served solely the interests of the revolution.
The secret of these changes of policy can be understood from a further conversation between Gabriel and Doctor Landowsky, which is given in a later chapter of “The Red Symphony.” Here are some extracts from it:
GABRIEL — Do you remember the conversation with Rakovsky ... Do you know that he was not condemned to death ? Well knowing all this you need not be surprised that Comrade Stalin had thought it to be wise to try that apparently so unlikely plan ... Here nothing is risked and, on the contrary, one can gain a great deal ... If you will strain your memory you will be able to understand several things.
DOCTOR — I remember everything rather well. Do not forget that I heard the conversation twice, then both times I wrote it, and in addition I translated it ... May I find out if you know the people whom Rakovsky called “Them” ?
G. — In order to shew you my confidence I shall tell you — no ! We do not know for sure who “They” are, but at the last moment there was confirmed a great deal of what Rakovsky had told; for example it is true that Hitler was financed by the Wall Street bankers. Much else is also true. All these months during which I have not seen you, I devoted to an investigation, connected with Rakovsky's information. It is true that I was not able to establish just which people are such remarkable personages, but it is a fact, that there is a kind of entourage which consists of financiers, politicians, scientists and even ecclesiastical persons of high rank, wealth and power, who occupy high places; if one is to judge their position (mostly as intermediaries) by the results, then it seems strange and inexplicable, at least in the light of ordinary conceptions ... since in fact they have a great similarity with the ideas of Communism, of course with very special Communist ideas. But let us leave all these questions aside, concerning complexion, line and profile; objectively, as Rakovsky would have said, they, imitating Stalin blindly in actions and errors, are building Communism. They followed the advice of Rakovsky almost to the letter. There was nothing concrete, but there was no refusal and no tearing of mantles. On the contrary, they displayed great attention to everything. The Ambassador Davis carefully hinted at the past trials and even went so far as to hint that much would be gained in the public opinion in America, in case of an amnesty for Rakovsky in the near future. He was well watched during the trials in March, which is natural. He was himself present at all of them; we did not allow him to bring any technicians so as to prevent any “telegraphing” with the accused. He is not a professional diplomat and does not know the specific techniques. He was obliged to look on, trying with his eyes to say much, as I thought; we think that he raised the spirits of Rosenholz and of Rakovsky. The latter confirmed the interest which had been displayed at the trial by Davis and confessed that he made him a secret sign of masonic greeting.
There is yet another strange matter, which cannot be falsified. On the 2nd March at dawn there was received a radio message from some very powerful station: “Amnesty or the Nazi danger will increase” ... the radiograrnme was encyphered in the cypher of our own embassy in London. You can understand that that was something very important !
Dr. — But the threat was not real ?
G. — How not ? On the 12th March there ended the debates of the Supreme Tribunal and at 9 in the evening the tribunal began its considerations. And on that same day of the 12th March, at 5.30 o'clock a.m. Hitler ordered his armoured divisions to enter Austria. Of course this was a miliiary promenade ! Were there sufficient reasons for thinking about that ! Or we had to be so stupid as to consider the greetings of Davis, the radioprogramme, the cypher, the coincidence of the invasion with the verdict, and also the silence of Europe as being only accidental chances ? No, in fact we did not see “Them,” but we heard their voice and understood their language.

* * *

Translator’s note: It would be quite supererfluous to write a long commentary on this remarkable material. It should suffice to say the obvious — this is one of the most important political documents of the century.
Many of us have known the facts here brought out for decades, but for the first time we get a brilliant, detailed statement from an insider. Obviously Rakovsky was one of “Them.”
Both the internal evidence of this document, as well as the circumstance that all subsequent events went exactly according to the formulae indicated, proves the truth of the story.
This book should be essential reading for all who wish to know what is happening and why, throughout the world, and also what alone can be done to stop the conquests of the revolution: the power of monetary emission must be returned to the States everywhere. If that is not done in time, Communism will win.

George Knupffer.