Stalin’s strength lay in his serenity and patience. He watched Trotsky’s actions, studied his movements and followed in his quick, irresolute, nervous steps at his own pace, which was that of a peasant, heavy and slow. Stalin was reticent, cold, and obstinate; Trotsky proud, violent, egoistic, impatient, governed by his ambition and his imagination. He was passionate, bold, and aggressive by nature. “A wretched Jew,” says Stalin, speaking of him. “A miserable Christian,” says Trotsky of Stalin.

Stalin stood aside during the October insurrection when Trotsky, unknown to the Central Committee or the Commission, suddenly set his Red Guards on to the capture of the State. Stalin alone understood the failings and mistakes of Trotsky and foresaw the remote consequences they would have. When Lenin died and Trotsky abruptly, brought up the problem of the succession as a political, economic, and doctrinal question, Stalin had already taken over the Party machinery and stood at the helm of the State. When Trotsky accused Stalin of having tried to solve the problem of the succession to his own advantage long before Lenin’s death, he made an accusation which no one can refute. And yet, it was Lenin himself who, during his illness, gave Stalin a position of authority within the Party. Stalin, confronted with his adversary’s accusations, played a strong card when he said that he had to take timely precautions against the dangers which Lenin’s death would inevitably produce.

“You took advantage of his illness,” Trotsky accused him. “To prevent you from taking advantage of his death,” answered Stalin.

Trotsky describes his struggle against Stalin with great skill. In his memoirs nothing transpires of the real nature of that controversy. He is chiefly and constantly intent on proving both to the international Proletariat and especially to the Russian Proletariat that he is not the man he is accused of being, the man whom they would like to make him out to be: a Bolshevik Catiline ready for any adventure or intrigue. According to Trotsky, that which people have called his heresy is only the attempt to interpret Lenin’s doctrine according to Lenin’s own dictates. His theory of “permanent revolution” could not be a danger either to the doctrinal unity of the Party or to the security of the State. He was not trying to be either a Luther or a Bonaparte.

As an historian, his interest is entirely of a controversial order. Both Trotsky and Stalin seem to be bound by tacit agreement when they endeavour to represent what is in reality a fight for power as a conflict of ideas. Moreover, Trotsky has never officially been accused of Bonapartism. Such an accusation would have shown the international Proletariat only too clearly that the Russian revolution was heading for that bourgeois degeneration of which Bonapartism is one of the most obvious characteristics. In his preface to the pamphlet entitled Towards October, Stalin writes: “The theory of permanent revolution is another version of Menshevism.” Such was the official accusation: Trotsky is held guilty of having fallen into the Menshevik heresy. But if the international Proletariat could be easily misled as to the real nature of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, the real situation could not long be concealed from the Russian people. Everyone understood that, in Trotsky, Stalin was not fighting a kind of doctrinary Menshevik who had lost his way in a maze of interpretations of Lenin, but a red Bonaparte, the only man capable of transforming Lenin’s death into a coup d’Etat and of placing the problem of the succession on an insurrectional basis.

From 1924 to the end of 1926 the struggle continued to be a controversy between the partisans of the “permanent revolution” theory and the official guardians of Leninism, those whom Trotsky called the guardians of Lenin’s embalmed corpse. As War Commissary, Trotsky could count on the army and the trade unions led by Tomski who was hostile to Stalin because the latter sought to subject the trade unions to Party interests. Tomski vindicates the autonomous action of the trade unions in their relations with the State. Ever since 1920, Lenin envisaged the possibility of an alliance between the Red Army and the trade unions with some anxiety. After his death the personal agreement between Trotsky and Tomski bore its fruit, and soldiers and workers joined in a united front against the decadent influence on the Revolution of the peasants and lower middle classes and against the Thermidor of Stalin, as Trotsky called it.

Stalin had the G.P.U. and the officials both of the Party and of the Government on his side and he foresaw the danger of an 18th of Brumaire. The tremendous popularity which surrounded the name of Trotsky; the glory which he brought back from his victorious campaigns against Yudenitch, Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel; and his overweening and cynical pride turned him into a kind of Red Bonaparte backed by the army, the working masses, and the young communists’ spirit of revolt against Lenin’s Old Guard and against the hierarchy of the Party. The famous trio, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev employed the most subtle kinds of simulation, intrigue, and deceit in order to compromise Trotsky in the eyes of the masses, to provoke discord among allies, spread doubt and discontent in the ranks of his partisans, throw discredit and suspicion upon his words, his actions and his intentions.

The Chief of the G. P. U., the fanatical Dzerjinski, surrounded Trotsky with a net of spies and paid agents. The mysterious and terrible machinery of the G. P. U. was set in motion to cut the adversary’s tendons one by one. Dzerjinski worked in the dark, while Trotsky worked in broad daylight. In fact, while the trio impaired his prestige, tarnished his reputation, made a great effort to present him as a disappointed climber, a profiteer of the revolution and a traitor to Lenin’s memory, Trotsky pounced on Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, on the Central Committee, on Lenin’s Old Guard, on the bureaucrats of the Party. He denounced the danger of a “Thermidor” reaction by the shopkeeping and peasant class; and he called Communist youth to his aid against the tyranny of the revolutionary hierarchy. The trio’s answer took the form of a campaign of fierce libel. The whole press had its orders from Stalin. Little by little, Trotsky found himself isolated. Many of those concerned were timid, undecided, or withdrew from the struggle altogether; but the more obstinate, radical, and courageous fought strenuously, though each on his own account and entirely out of touch with one another. They fought blindly against the coalition, getting caught up in a network of intrigues, plots, and treachery, and ending by mistrusting each other. Soldiers and workers looked on Trotsky as the man who created the Red Army, as the man who overthrew Kolchak and Wrangel, as the upholder of free trade unions and of the dictatorship of the workers versus the reaction which was threatening from the N. E. P. and the peasants: the workers and soldiers remained loyal to the hero of the October insurrection and to his ideas. Their loyalty however was quite passive: it became inactive through long waiting, and was a dead weight in Trotsky’s violent and aggressive game.

During the first phases of the controversy, Trotsky actually believed that he could cause a Party split, overthrow the “troika” with the help of the army and the trade unions and forestall Stalin’s Thermidor with an eighteenth Brumaire of his own. The Party and the State would be captured and he could then translate his programme of integral Communism into actual fact. But speeches, pamphlets, and discussions on the interpretation of Lenin’s thought were not strong enough to cause a split in the Party. Action was necessary. It only remained for Trotsky to choose his time. Circumstances favoured his plans. Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were already beginning to disagree. Why did Trotsky not take some action? While he might have come into action and deserted the field of argument for insurrection, he was losing time in the study of the social and political situation in Great Britain, teaching English communists how they should set about the capture of the State, and trying to draw comparisons between Cromwell’s Ironsides and the Red Army, between Lenin, Cromwell, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Mussolini. “Lenin,” wrote Trotsky, “cannot be compared either to Bonaparte or to Mussolini, but to Cromwell and Robespierre. Lenin is a Proletarian Cromwell of the Twentieth Century. To define him thus is to make the finest possible defence of the little bourgeois of the Seventeenth Century that Cromwell was.”

Meanwhile Trotsky, instead of applying his tactics of October 1917 against Stalin, was busy advising the crews of British ships, the seamen, stokers, engine-room switchboard staffs how they should co-operate with the working classes to bring about the capture of the State. He was analysing the psychology of British sailors and soldiers so that he might gauge their behaviour once they had received orders to shoot on the working man: he was busy dissecting the mechanism of mutiny in order to see, as though in slow motion, each gesture of the soldier who refuses to shoot, the soldier who hesitates, and the soldier who is ready to shoot his comrade if the latter refuses to shoot. These were three essential moves in the whole mechanism: which one was going to decide the outcome of the mutiny? In those days Trotsky was thinking only of England: he was far more concerned about MacDonald than about Stalin. “Cromwell did not form an army but a Party: his army was an armed Party and therein lay his power.” In battle Cromwell’s soldiers had been nicknamed Ironsides. Trotsky remarks, “Ironsides are always useful to a Revolution. In that respect the British workman has a great deal to learn from Cromwell.” If that was so, why did Trotsky not decide to act? Why did he not hurl his “Ironsides,” the soldiers of the Red Army, at Stalin’ s supporters?

Trotsky’s adversaries benefitted by his delay. They dismissed him from his post of People’s Commissary of War, and deprived him of the control of the Red Army. Soon after, Tomski lost his leading position in the trade unions. The great heretic and formidable Catiline had been disarmed, and the two chief accessories of this Bolshevik Bonaparte’s plan for an eighteenth Brumaire were now hostile to him. The G. P. U. gradually undermined his popularity. And the majority of his supporters, disillusioned by his ambiguous behaviour and unaccountable weakness, discreetly faded away. Trotsky’s health failed him and he left Moscow. In May 1926 he was to be found in a Berlin nursing home: the news of the General Strike in England and Pilsudski’s coup d’Etat made his temperature rise. He had. to go back to Russia and keep up the struggle. “So long as everything is not lost, nothing is lost.” Dzerjinski, the cruel and fanatical man who created the G. P. U., died in July 1926 while engaged in making a violent speech against Trotsky before the Central Committee. But the alliance of Kamenev and Zinoviev against Stalin suddenly revealed the discord that had long been simmering among the three members of the “‘troika.” The battle between the three defenders of Lenin’s corpse began. Stalin called Menjinski (Dzerjinski’s successor as Director of the G. P. U.) to his aid: Kamenev and Zinoviev went over to Trotsky. The moment for action had come. The tide of sedition rose around the Kremlin.

Early in the struggle against Stalin, Trotsky noted in connection with England that revolutions are not arbitrary occurrences. “If they could be made to develop logically, they would probably be avoided.” But, in point of fact, it was Trotsky himself who established a logical sequence in the preparation of a revolution, by his principles and rules for the modern tactics of insurrection. It was Stalin who reaped the benefit of this teaching in 1927 and thus showed the Governments of Europe that it was possible to protect the bourgeois State against the danger of a Communist insurrection.

In two of the most fully policed and best organized countries in Europe, i.e., Holland and Switzerland, where law and order are not merely the products of bureaucratic and political machinery but a natural characteristic of the people, the difficulty of applying the Communist tactics of insurrection would be no greater than it was in the Russia of Kerenski. On what grounds can such a paradox be stated? It is because the problem of the modern coup d’Etat is a technical problem. “Insurrection is an engine,” said Trotsky: “technical experts are needed to start it and they alone can turn it off.” The starting of the engine is independent of the country’s political, social or economic situation. Not the masses make a revolution, but a mere handful of men, prepared for any emergency, well-drilled in the tactics of insurrection, trained to strike hard and quickly at the vital organs of the State’s technical services. These shock troops should be recruited from among specialized workmen: mechanics, electricians, telegraph and radio operators acting under orders of technical engineers who understand the technical working of the State.

At one of the Comintern meetings in 1923, Radek suggested that in every European country a special corps should be trained in the art of capturing the State. He held that a thousand men, well-drilled and trained, would be able to seize power in any European country, be it France, England, Germany, Switzerland, or Spain. Radek suspected the revolutionary quality of Communists in other countries. In his criticism of the men and methods of the Third International, he does not even spare the memory of Rosa Luxembourg or of Liebknecht. Radek was the only one who fought the widespread optimism that reigned in 1920, while Trotsky was engaged in his offensive against Poland. The Red Army was getting nearer the Vistula and the news of the fall of Warsaw was expected in the Kremlin at any moment. Trotsky’s success largely depended on the support of Polish Communists. Lenin blindly and confidently expected a proletarian revolution to break out in Warsaw as soon as the Red soldiers had reached the Vistula. Radek said, “The Polish Communists cannot be relied upon. They are Communists but not revolutionaries.” Shortly afterwards Lenin said to Clara Zetkin, “Radek foresaw what would happen. He warned us. I was very angry with him and treated him as a defeatist. But he was right, not I. He knows the situation outside of Russia, and especially in the West, better than we do.”

Radek’s proposal roused the opposition of Lenin and all the members of the Comintern. Lenin said: “If we want to help foreign Communists to seize power in their countries, we must try to create a situation in Europe that bears comparison with the condition of Russia in 1917.” Lenin was remaining true to his idea of strategy and forgot the lesson taught by Polish events. Trotsky alone approved of Radek’s proposal. He even went so far as to show the need for a Technical Instruction school in Moscow for Communists who would afterwards form the core of a special corps in each country to seize power. Hitler has recently revived this idea and is at present organizing a similar school in Munich for his shock troops. “If I can have a troop of men, a thousand strong, recruited among Berlin workmen and fortified by Russian Communists,” said Trotsky, “I will undertake to get control of Berlin within twenty-four hours.” He never relied on the enthusiasm of the people or on the participation of the masses in an insurrection. “The intervention of. the masses may be useful,” he said, “but only in the second instance when the counter-offensive of the counter-revolutionaries has to be repulsed.” He also said that Communists in Germany would always be defeated by the Schutzpolizei (State police) and by the Reichswehr (army) if they postponed the application of the tactics of October 1917. Trotsky and Radek had actually decided on a plan for the Berlin coup d’Etat. And, when Trotsky was in the German capital in May 1926 for an operation on his throat, he was accused of coming to Berlin for the purpose of organizing a Communist rebellion. But by 1926 he had already lost interest in European revolutions. The news of the General Strike in England and of Pilsudski’s coup d’Etat in Poland made him feverish and hastened his return to Moscow. It was the same fever that possessed him in those great October days, when he was turned into a “live wire,” as Lunacharski put it. Meanwhile, Trotsky returned to Moscow, pale and feverish, to organize the shock troops for the overthrow of Stalin and for the capture of the State.

Stalin however knew how to turn the lesson of October 1917 to good account. With the help of Menjinski, the new Chief of the G. P. U., he organized a special corps for the defence of the State. The headquarters of this special corps were in the Lubianka Palace, the home of the G. P. U. Menjinski personally supervised the choice of his Communist recruits from the workers in the State’s Public Services, among railwaymen, mechanics, electricians, and telegraphists. Their only weapons were hand grenades and revolvers so that they might move about quickly. The special Corps consisted of a hundred squads of ten men each, reinforced by twenty armoured cars. Each detachment was provided with a half-company of machine-gunners: communications between the various squads and the Lubianka headquarters were kept open by despatch riders. Menjinski took complete charge of the whole organization and divided Moscow into ten sectors. A network of secret telephone lines connected up the sectors with each other and with the Lubianka. Apart from Menjinski, it was only the men who had laid the secret wires, who knew of their existence. Thus all the vital centres in the technical organization of Moscow were telephonically connected with the Lubianka. At strategic points in each sector some houses were occupied by a number of “cells” or centres of observation, for control and resistance, and these provided links in the chain of the whole system.

The squad was the fighting unit in this special corps: each squad had to keep in training with a view to coming into action independently of its fellow-squads, on the piece of ground allotted to it. Each man had to be thoroughly acquainted with the work of his own squad and with that of the other nine in his sector. The organization, according to Menjinski, was “secret and invisible.” Its members wore no uniform and could not be recognised by any badge. Even their membership of the organization was pledged to secrecy. They underwent both technical, military and political instruction; and they were bred to hatred of their adversaries known and unknown, whether Jews or followers of Trotsky. No Jews could belong to the Organization. The school in which the members of the special corps learned the art of defending the State against Trotsky’s insurrectional tactics was definitely anti-Semitic. The origin of Stalin’s anti-Semitism has been widely discussed in Europe and some have attributed it to a concession to peasant prejudices and a necessity of political opportunism. Others have considered it as a part of Stalin’s struggle against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, all of whom were Jews. Stalin has been accused of violating the law (since anti- Semitism was declared a counter-revolutionary crime severely: punishable by law), but such an accusation does not consider Stalin’s anti-Semitism in relation to the urgent need for defending the State, and as a part of his tactics against Trotsky’s attempt at insurrection.

Stalin’s hatred of the three Jews, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, did not of itself justify the reappearance, ten years after the revolution of October 1917, of a national anti-Semitism reminiscent of the days of Stolypine. Nor can the origin of Stalin’s struggle against the Jews be reasonably attributed to religious fanaticism or traditional prejudice, but rather to the struggle which had to be waged against Trotsky’s dangerous confederates. Menjinski had said that nearly all the chief supporters of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were Israelites; and indeed all the Jews in the Red Army, the trade unions, and factories were on Trotsky’s side. In the Moscow Soviet where Kamenev enjoyed a majority and in the Leningrad Soviet which was heart and soul for Zinoviev, the pith of the opposition to Stalin was Jewish. All that was required in order to draw the army, trade unions and working-class masses in Moscow and Leningrad away from Trotsky, from Kamenev and Zinoviev was to kindle all the old anti-Semitic prejudices and instinctive hatred of the Russian people for the Jews. In his struggle against the “permanent revolution,” Stalin relied on the common selfishness of the “kulaks” and on the ignorance of the peasant masses, neither of whom had relinquished any of their age-long hatred of the Jews.

By kindling this anti-Semitism, Stalin was able to form a united front of soldiers, workers, and peasants, against the dangers of Trotskyism. Menjinski was successfully hunting down the members of a secret society organized by Trotsky for the purpose of getting into power. In every Jew, Menjinski suspected and persecuted a Catiline. Thus, the struggle against Trotsky’s party soon came to possess all the characteristics of a policy of anti-Semitism, definitely sponsored by the State. Jews were systematically removed from the Army, from trade unions, Government and Party offices, and from industrial and commercial Trust administrations. Trotsky’s party, which had crept into all the political, economic and administrative bodies of the State, was gradually broken up. Many of the Jews persecuted by the G. P. U., deprived of their living, their work and salaries, imprisoned, exiled, scattered or compelled to live beyond the pale of Soviet society, had nothing to do with Trotsky’s plot: “They must suffer for the others and the others suffer for everyone,” said Menjinski. Trotsky was nonplussed by Stalin’s tactics: he was impotent against-the people’s instinctive hatred of him. All the prejudices of old Russia were turning against this Catiline who was “as courageous as a Tartar and as mean as a Jew.” What could Trotsky do in the face of this unexpected renewal of the instinct and prejudices of the Russian people? All his followers deserted him, from the poorest and most faithful, the workers who had acknowledged him as their leader in October 1917 to the soldiers whom he had led to victory against the Cossacks of Kolchak and Wrangel. In the eyes of the masses, Trotsky had become a mere Jew.

Meanwhile Zinoviev and Kamenev were beginning to lose faith in Trotsky and his violent fearlessness, his will power, his pride, his hatred of anyone who betrayed him, and in his contempt of anyone who opposed him. Kamenev was the weaker of the two, more lacking in decision and more of a coward than Zinoviev, but he did not betray Trotsky: he deserted him. On the eve of the insurrection against Stalin, Kamenev treated Trotsky as he had treated Lenin on the eve of the October insurrection in 1917. Later, to justify himself, he would say, “I did not believe in insurrectional methods.” “He did not even believe in treason,” was Trotsky’s reply, for he never forgave Kamenev the lack of courage in not openly betraying him. Zinoviev, however, did not desert Trotsky. He betrayed him at the last moment when he knew that the sudden attack on Stalin had already failed. “Zinoviev is no coward; he only runs away when there is danger.”

Trotsky had told Zinoviev to go to Leningrad and organize the capture of the town by workers’ squads as soon as he should hear that the insurrection in Moscow had met with success. Thus Trotsky had avoided Zinoviev’s proximity at the crucial moment. But Zinoviev was no longer the idol of the masses in Leningrad. When demonstrations were organized in the former capital in honour of the Party’s Central Committee which met there in October 1927, the demonstrators suddenly turned the whole thing into a display of loyalty to Trotsky. Had Zinoviev still enjoyed a measure of influence among the Leningrad workers, that incident alone would have given rise to a revolt. Later on, he claimed to have been responsible for the seditious demonstration, but in point of fact, neither he nor Menjinski had foreseen it. Even Trotsky had been taken by surprise, but he was wise enough not to take advantage of it. The working masses of Leningrad were no longer those of ten years ago. And what had become of the Red Guards of October 1917?

Stalin realized the weakness of Trotsky’s secret organization as he watched the procession of workers and soldiers who marched, whistling, past the Tauride Palace under the stand of the Central Committee and flocked over to the stand where Trotsky was, cheering the hero of the October insurrection, founder of the Red Army, and defender of freedom in the trade unions. That day a mere handful of determined men might have captured the city without a shot being fired. But there was no longer an Antonov Ovseienko to take command of the workers’ squads and of the shock troops of insurrection: Zinoviev’s Red Guards were afraid lest their leader should betray them. If Trotsky’s faction should prove no stronger in Moscow than in Leningrad, Menjinski believed that the fight was already as good as won. The ground was slipping under Trotsky’s feet. For a considerable time he had watched his followers being persecuted, arrested, reduced to inactivity and exiled, and too many of those whose courage and reliability had hitherto been unquestionable were now daily deserting him. He threw himself into the fight with desperate courage, with all the unconquerable pride of the persecuted Jew in his blood, and with that cruel and vindictive will power of his which sometimes gave his voice a kind of Biblical accent of despair and revolt.

The speaker who addressed the meetings in those days, in factory and barrack-yard, and faced the crowds of mistrustful and recreant soldiers and workers, was pale, shortsighted, his eyes dilated by fever and sleeplessness. It was no longer the Trotsky of 1922, 1923, and 1924, so amusing, clever, and ironical, who stood before them now, but the Trotsky of 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1921, of the October Revolution and the Civil War, the Bolshevik Catiline; Trotsky of the Smolny and the battlefields, the Great Mutineer. The working masses of Moscow recognized him by his pallor and violence as the Trotsky of Lenin’s reddest days. The flame of rebellion was already lit in factory and barracks, but Trotsky stood by his tactics. Not the crowds but the secretly organized shock troops were to be sent out to capture the State. He sought the road to power not by means of an insurrection or rebellion of the working masses, but by a scientific organization of the coup d’Etat.

The tenth anniversary of the Revolution was to be celebrated in a few weeks’ time. Representatives from every country in Europe, the members of different sections of the Third International, were due to arrive in Moscow. But Trotsky was preparing a celebration of the tenth anniversary of his victory over Kerenski by a victory over Stalin. The workers’ delegations should witness a violent revival of the proletarian revolution against the Thermidor of the narrow-minded bourgeois inside the Kremlin. “Trotsky is cheating,” smiled Stalin. He was closely watching each one of his adversary’s moves.

About a thousand workers and soldiers, former partisans of Trotsky, loyal still to the revolutionary idea of Bolshevism, were standing by in readiness for the great day. Squads of technical experts and specialized workmen had long been engaged in “invisible manoeuvres.” Menjinski’s men in their special corps heard the throb of Trotsky’s insurrectional machine wherever they listened for it; and a hundred small portents suggested there was danger ahead. Menjinski tried to embarrass his adversaries’ movements by every means in his power, but the sabotage on the railways, in electric power stations and in post and telegraph offices increased from day to day. Trotsky’s agents had gained an entry everywhere; they tested every spoke in the wheel of the State’s public services and from time to time they prevented it from spinning altogether. These were mere skirmishes leading up to the insurrection itself. Meanwhile Menjinski’s technical experts were permanently mobilized and kept watch over the machinery of the State. They too were constantly testing its efficiency, its reactions and its power of resistance, Menjinski would have wished for the immediate arrest of Trotsky and of his most dangerous confederates, but Stalin denied his request. The arrest of Trotsky on the eve of the tenth birthday of the October Revolution would produce an unfavorable impression on the masses and on the workers’ delegations which had arrived in Moscow from every corner of Europe to take part in the official ceremonies. Trotsky could hardly have chosen a more suitable moment for his attempt on the State. His tactical wisdom had shown him how to cover his position. Stalin would never dare to arrest him for fear of tyrannical appearances. If and when he should dare to do so, it would surely be too late, said Trotsky. By then the bonfires of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution would have burnt out and Stalin would no longer stand at the helm of the State!

The insurrection proper was to begin by capturing the head offices of the State’s public services, after which the People’s Commissaries and the members of the Central Committee and of the Commission for Party Control were to be arrested. But Menjinski was well prepared for this: when Trotsky’s Red Guards came, the houses were empty. All the heads of the Stale party had taken refuge inside the Kremlin where

Stalin was patiently and quietly awaiting the result of the struggle between the shock troops of the insurrection and Menjinski’s special corps. The date was November 7, 1927. Moscow seemed to be arrayed in scarlet. Processions of delegates from the Federal Republics of the U. S. S. R. from every part of Russia and from remotest districts of Asia were marching past the Savoy and Metropole Hotels where the European delegates were staying. Thousands upon thousands of crimson flags waved over Lenin’s mausoleum under the walls of the Kremlin in the Red

Square. At the end of the Square, near the Vassili Blayenni Church, Budyonni’s cavalry was drawn up and beside it Tukachevski’s infantry and the veterans of 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1921, all of them soldiers whom Trotsky had once led to victory on the various fronts of the Civil War. While Voroshilov, the People’s War Commissary, was reviewing the military forces of the U. S. S. R., Trotsky attempted to capture the State with a thousand men.

Menjinski took his precautions. His defensive tactics lay, not in the protection of threatened buildings by a great display of troops but rather in their defence with a mere handful of men stationed inside the walls. He parried Trotsky’s invisible attack by an invisible defence. No attempt was made to scatter his troops around the Kremlin, the People’s Commissariats, the head offices of industrial and commercial trusts, or round the syndicates and government administrations. He concentrated his special corps in the defence of public services, while detachments of the G. P. U. police watched over the political and administrative organization of the State. Trotsky had not foreseen Menjinski’s tactics and it was already too late when he discovered that his adversaries had learnt their lesson in October 1917. When told that his sudden attacks on telegraph, telephone, and railway stations were a failure and that things unexpected and unexplained were happening, he at once realized that his insurrection had met with an organized defence far more complicated than mere police measures. But as yet he was unaware of the real situation. When news of the failure to seize the main electric power station finally reached him, he suddenly changed his plan and decided to seize the political and administrative organization of the State. Seeing that his shock troops had been routed and scattered in every direction by their opponents’ sudden and violent attack, he abandoned his tactics and concentrated all his efforts on a supreme attempt at popular insurrection.

Trotsky’s appeal to the proletarian masses in Moscow that day was only heard by a few thousand students and workers. While a huge crowd filled the Red Square in front of Lenin’s tomb and thronged round Stalin, round the Party and Government chiefs. and round the foreign representatives of the Third International, Trotsky’s adherents rushed into the University hall, warded off an attack by the police and set out for the Red Square at the head of a column of students and workers.

Trotsky’s conduct was easily open to criticism. The appeal to the populace, the street corner tactics amounting to a kind of unarmed riot, were all a mad adventure. But, it so happened that with the failure of the insurrection, Trotsky lost control, In the past, and especially at the turning points in his life, his cool intelligence had tempered his vivid imagination with foresight and his great passions with a certain cynicism; but now he seemed drunk with despair. Having let the situation get out of hand, he gave way to his passionate nature and it spurred him on to that hopeless attempt to overthrow Stalin by means of a riot. Perhaps he knew that the game was up, that the masses had lost faith in him and that only very few friends were still loyal to him. He must have felt that now he could rely only on himself, although the game is not lost while there is yet a card to be played.

Trotsky was even accused of a rash design to seize Lenin’s embalmed body from its glass coffin in the gloomy mausoleum at the foot of the Kremlin. Then he would call the people round the fetish of the Revolution and use it as a battering ram. against Stalin’s tyranny. The idea, if gruesome, had elements of grandeur in it. Possibly the idea of seizing Lenin’s body did cross Trotsky’s feverish mind as he heard the yells of the crowd and watched his little army of students and workers singing the International as they marched into the Red Square filled with soldiers and people, bristling with bayonets and flaming with flags.

At the first encounter, the little procession was repulsed and scattered. Trotsky looked round him. Where were his loyal friends, the heads of his faction, the generals of that small army which was supposed to capture the State? Jews are not suited for real battles, for hand-to-hand fights or insurrection. The only Jew who stood his ground in that affray was Trotsky, the Great Mutineer and Catiline of the Bolshevik Revolution. “A soldier fired at my car as though to warn me,” writes Trotsky. ‘Someone else was aiming his rifle. Those who had eyes to see on that seventh day of November witnessed an attempt at another Thermidor in the streets of Moscow.”

In his weary exile, Trotsky believes that proletarian Europe may learn its lesson from these events. He forgets that middle-class Europe might equally well profit by them.