who could organize an almost model

The civil war kept me away from the work in the Soviet of Commissaries . I lived now in a railway-carriage or in an automobile. After weeks and months of such travelling, I got so completely out of touch with the current government business that I could not pick up the threads again in my brief visits to Moscow. The most important questions, however, were decided at the Politbureau. 2 Sometimes I would return specially for the meeting of the Politbureau, in answer to Lenin’s summons. Or sometimes, through Svyerdlov, I would call an extraordinary meeting of the Politbureau to discuss important questions that I had brought with me from the front. During these years my correspondence with Lenin was largely confined to matters relating to the civil war; there were short notes or long telegrams either to supplement previous conversations or to lay the ground work for future ones. In spite of their businesslike brevity, these documents show, better than anything else, the actual relations within the leading group of the Bolsheviks. I will publish this extensive correspondence in the near future, with the necessary commentaries. It will appear as a deadly rebuttal of the work of the historians of the Stalin school.















When Wilson was planning — among his other anemic professorial utopias — a conciliation conference of all the governments of Russia, Lenin on January 24, 1919, sent a coded telegram to me on the southern front: “Wilson proposes truce and invites all the governments of Russia to a conference . . . It will be you who will probably have to go to Wilson.” The difference at the time of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations did not prevent Lenin from turning to me again when an important diplomatic task had to be met, although at that time I was completely absorbed in my military work. As everybody knows, nothing came of Wilson’s peacemaking efforts, and so I had no occasion to go to the conference dermes.















Aside from the hundreds of testimonials by Lenin himself, there is a vivid account by Maxim Gorky of his attitude toward my war work: “Striking the table with his hand, he [Lenin] said: ‘Could any one point out to me another man  army in a year and even win the respect of military experts? We have such a man! We have everything. And there will be miracles.’”















According to Gorky, Lenin said to him in the same conversation: “Yes, yes. I know. Some lies are being told about my relations to him. Too many lies are being told, and especially about me and Trotsky.” What would Lenin have said to-day, when the lying about our mutual relations, despite facts, documents and logic, has become a state cult?















When I was declining the commissariat of home affairs on the second day after the revolution, I brought up, among other things, the question of race. It would seem that in war business this consideration should have involved even greater complications than in civil administration. But Lenin proved to be right. In the years of the revolutionary ascendancy, this question never had the slightest importance. Of course, the Whites tried to develop anti-Semitic motifs in their propaganda in the Red army, but they failed signally. There are many testimonials to this, even in the White press. In Archives of the Russian Revolution, published in Berlin, a White Guard writer relates the following striking episode: “A Cossack who came to see us was hurt by someone’s taunt that he not only served under, but fought under the command of a Jew — Trotsky — and retorted with warm conviction: ‘Nothing of the sort. Trotsky is not a Jew. Trotsky is a fighter. He’s ours . . . Russian! . . . It is Lenin who is a communist, a Jew, but Trotsky is ours . . . a fighter . . . Russian . . . our own Zero Moment Of Truth!’”