MIA > Archive > Cliff > Trotsky 2
The southern front
The Red cavalry
The defence of Petrograd
The march on Warsaw
THE EIGHTH CONGRESS did not put an end to the opposition to Trotsky’s military policy. Stalin continued with his intrigues against army specialists who Trotsky supported. In a letter to Lenin of 4 June 1919 he complained about Okulov, who had been appointed by Trotsky to the Petrograd sector of the western front. He claimed that Okulov and his ilk ‘urged the military specialists on against our commissars’. [1] He also stated that the all-Russian general staff was ‘working for the Whites’, a fact which documents at his disposal would make ‘obvious’. [2] He demanded the removal of Okulov. [3] Stalin won. The politburo, in Trotsky’s absence, supported Stalin and Okulov was removed. [4]
On 16 June, at the end of a really not too significant victorious military operation on the Petrograd front, which Stalin trumpeted, he wrote to Lenin that success had been secured by not hesitating to oppose mistaken orders of the professional experts. [5] Then again, in the notes exchanged between Lenin and Skliansky on the situation in Petrograd, Zinoviev’s name crops up as an advocate of those rejecting the War Commissariat and the ‘specialists’. [6] On 18 June Stalin again told Lenin that high-ranking officers had been hatching a plot. [7]
Following this sniping, a real crisis faced Trotsky in his leadership of the Red Army. After the Eighth Congress, the opposition shifted its attack from the organisation of the Red Army to a discussion of the strategy used in the civil war.
It was after the Eighth Congress that Lenin for the first time took an intense and direct interest in the military strategy of the Red Army. Thus he communicated directly with the military authorities in the Ukraine on the delay in the operations against White forces in the Donets Basin. [8] He sent orders mobilising the Ukraine against Denikin, [9] and issued directives to military commanders from the western front to the Caspian. [10]
An acute disagreement took place in the summer of 1919 about the strategy needed on the eastern front. Towards the end of April, the commander on this front, S.S. Kamenev, a former colonel on the Tsarist general staff, carried out a successful outflanking manoeuvre against Kolchak’s southern flank. Soon the White troops began to fall back in disorder toward the Urals. At this point a controversy broke out between Kamenev and the commander-in-chief, Vatsetis. Kamenev was confident he could inflict final defeat on Kolchak if he pursued him: Vatsetis vetoed the plan. He suggested that Kolchak had strong reserves in Siberia, that once Kolchak was pushed to the east of the Urals, the Red Army should not pursue him further, but should stay in the mountains for the winter. This would have enabled the Red Army to withdraw a few divisions from the east and switch them to the south, where Denikin was becoming very dangerous.
This plan, however, met with vigorous opposition from S.S. Kamenev, as well as from the three commissars of the eastern front – Smilga, Lashevich and Gusev. They insisted that Kolchak was so near to being defeated that only a few men were needed to follow him, and the most important thing was that he be prevented from taking a breathing spell, because in that case he would recover during the winter, and the eastern campaign would have to start all over again in the spring.
On 15 June the central committee, including Lenin, gave its backing to the plan elaborated by S.S. Kamenev, Smilga, Lashevich and Gusev. Trotsky supported Vatsetis, opposing the pursuit of Kolckak beyond the Urals. [11] Trotsky’s decision to dismiss Kamenev from his position as commander of the eastern front was overturned. [12] At the end of June, in a letter to the eastern front military council, Lenin strongly argued the need to conquer the Urals as soon as possible by pushing on with the attack. [13]
In fact life itself proved that Trotsky was wrong, as he did not hesitate to admit later. He wrote:
It proved to be the command of the eastern front that was right in appraising Kolchak’s army ... The eastern armies released some troops for the southern front and continued, at the same time, their advance on the heel of Kolchak into the heart of Siberia. [14]
Being in the wrong on the issue of the eastern front weakened Trotsky in the face of his opponents. On 3-4 July, at a meeting of the central committee, Stalin proposed that Vatsetis, Trotsky’s chosen commander-in-chief since September 1918, be replaced by S.S. Kamenev. The central committee agreed. [15] Trotsky resisted the change, but as he himself wrote later, Kamenev’s ‘success on the eastern front bribed Lenin and broke down my resistance.’ [16] The Military Revolutionary Council of the Republic was reconstituted. It was now to be made up of Trotsky, Skliansky, Gusev, Smilga, Rykov and the new commander-in-chief, S.S. Kamenev. Thus Trotsky’s friends, Smirnov, Rozengolts and Raskolnikov, were replaced with Stalin’s protégés, Smilga and Gusev.
This double reproof was too much for Trotsky. He resigned on the spot from the politburo, the Commissariat of War and the Military Revolutionary Council of the Republic. On 5 July the politburo met and categorically rejected Trotsky’s resignation. On Lenin’s proposal it adopted, unanimously, a resolution assuring Trotsky of its deep respect and confidence:
The orgburo and politburo of the CC will do all in their power to provide for the work on the southern front – the most difficult, dangerous and important of the fronts at the present time – which Comrade Trotsky chose for himself, to be so arranged as to best suit Comrade Trotsky and to yield the greatest benefit to the republic. [17]
It was on this occasion that Lenin, obviously disturbed by the incident, handed to Trotsky as a token of his confidence a blank sheet as endorsement of any order Trotsky might issue. At the bottom of the blank sheet Lenin wrote:
Comrades! Knowing the strict character of the instructions issued by Comrade Trotsky, I am so convinced, supremely convinced that the instruction issued by Comrade Trotsky is correct, to the point, and essential for the good of the cause, that I wholly support this instruction. V. Ulianov (Lenin) [18]
This carte blanche was testimony to the exceptional confidence Lenin had in Trotsky.
The beginning of July 1919 was the low point in Trotsky’s standing as head of the Red Army. The events of these days left deep traces in the relationship between Trotsky and many of the people at the centre. It was also a point when tension between Trotsky and Lenin revealed itself clearly. Probably an important element in the relationship was the fact that Trotsky saw Lenin only seldom, being almost always at the front.
Trotsky had to go on fighting against his opponents, who maintained their surreptitious attacks on the military specialists. Thus on 9 July 1919 he issued an order that was really an answer to Stalin’s slander of the military specialists on the Petrograd front:
In connection with the treacherous conspiracy by sections of the commanding personnel on the Petrograd front articles have appeared in the press which are being interpreted as a sign of change in Soviet policy in military matters, particularly where the military specialists are concerned ... I therefore consider it necessary to make clear that Soviet policy in military matters remains unchanged, for it is not the product of the fantasy of particular individuals or groups but results from the collective experience of many hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants.
The honourable commanders of the Red Army – and they are the overwhelming majority – will, as before, enjoy the confidence and backing of the Soviet power, as its valued collaborators in most responsible posts. [19]
On 12 July a letter by Trotsky to the revolutionary war councils of the armies and the fronts made a sharp attack on the Military Opposition. [20]
On 17 July, in an article published in a Ukrainian newspaper, Trotsky furiously attacked the military political administration of Kharkov, where Voroshilov had his headquarters. He accused the group formed round Voroshilov of taking advantage of military difficulties in the south to pander to the unwillingness of Ukrainian Communists to take orders from Moscow and to encourage guerrillaism. Trotsky did not spare Voroshilov and company, accusing them of ignorance and crass conceit:
Here again we see a criminally demagogic distortion of the facts in the interests of a lying argument ... The worst-organised part of the southern front, in all respects, was the Ukrainian corner ...
It is true that in the Kharkov sector a considerable number of betrayals occurred. But we have often observed on other fronts as well, during their infancy, how the work of sham-revolutionary demagogues has been complemented by treachery on the part of commanders ...
...our party programme speaks clearly and precisely of the method by which the working class can and must make use of the experience of the military specialists.
There are Communists of a poor sort; who treat military specialists as though they were accursed persons, or simply persons under arrest, imagining that this is how to safeguard the interests of the revolution.
Guerrillaism, with its traces, vestiges and survivals, has caused both our republic and the Ukrainian republic incomparably more disasters, collapses, catastrophes and losses of war materials than all the betrayals by military specialists.
...Our party combats and will ‘carry on a merciless struggle against the seemingly radical but actually ignorant and conceited opinion that the working people can overcome capitalism and the bourgeois order without learning from bourgeois specialists, without utilising them, without undergoing a long schooling through work alongside them.’ ...The central committee calls for ‘merciless struggle’ against this ignorant conceit. [21]
After the disagreement on the strategy towards Kolchak on the eastern front a conflict arose in the central committee over strategy on the southern front.
In the south, the enemy fortes were composed of two separate and antagonistic groups: the Cossacks, particularly in the province of Kuban, and the Whites’ volunteer army. Trotsky believed that it was necessary to use the antagonism between the two uneasy partners. S.S. Kamenev, the newly appointed commander-in-chief, however, thought only in logistic terms, without taking into account the socio-political implications, and suggested that the decisive blow should be delivered at the base of the volunteer army. Lenin and all other members of the central committee, except Trotsky, supported Kamenev, so that Trotsky was completely isolated. The adoption of Kamenev’s plan unanimously by the central committee seems to point to quite widespread hostility to Trotsky there, as many of those involved could not have judged the issue at stake. [22] Trotsky’s offer of resignation from all his posts, already referred to, was, as he wrote a few years later, ‘intimately linked up with the question of the southern strategic plan’. [23]
Trotsky did not abide by the central committee decision without continuing to argue against Kamenev’s strategy vis-à-vis Denikin. He also proceeded to sound out opinion among the armies immediately after the setback he had received at the hands of the central committee. He asked leading members of the Red Army whether they supported his military policy.
On 11 July Trotsky wired Skliansky with a report for the central committee:
Today at a conference of political workers of the Eighth Army, the following question was put to the vote after a general discussion: should the present policy of the War Department remain in force or should changes be made in it. Forty-one voted in favour of retaining the present policy and two of making changes. [24]
Three days later, on 14 July, he again wired Skliansky for the central committee:
At a meeting of senior political workers of the Thirteenth Army a resolution was unanimously adopted with one abstention (those taking part numbering 60) on the biased and unfounded nature of the criticism of military policy made by a section of the party, and demanding the retention and further development of the same methods. [25]
But the central committee did not budge. A telegram appointing three new members to the military revolutionary council of the southern front – Smilga, Serebriakov and Lashevich (two of them members of the central committee) – was a further reprimand for Trotsky’s stand. [26]
As late as 6 September Lenin cabled Trotsky, Serebriakov and Lashevich expressing the politburo’s support for Kamenev, and its ‘astonishment at the attempts [by Trotsky] to revise the basic strategic plan decided upon.’ [27]
In this case, however, events proved without doubt that Kamenev’s strategy was completely wrong and Trotsky’s right. On 25 June 1919 the volunteer army occupied Kharkov, the chief city of the Ukraine. By the end of the month the Don Cossack army had cleared the Don country of Soviet forces, and the Kuban Cossacks had captured Ekaterinoslav on the lower Dnieper. On 30 June Denikin, with the help of British planes and tanks, captured Tsaritsin. On 31 July Poltava was captured. Kherson and Nikolaev on the Black Sea coast were taken on 18 August, and five days later Odessa fell. On 31 August the volunteer army marched into Kiev. Throughout September Denikin’s army continued to advance. On 20 September it occupied Kursk; on 6 October Voronezh; on 13 October Orel, less than 250 miles from Moscow. E.H. Carr described those weeks as ‘the crucial point at which the continued existence of the regime hung by a thread.’
After Denikin had seized Kiev and nearly the whole of the Ukraine, and pursued the Red Army towards Voronezh and Kursk, along the shortest line to Moscow, Trotsky demanded a change in the plan of operation. Again and again he repeated his demand, and again and again the politburo rejected it. Only when the threat to Moscow became imminent and Denikin’s forces broke through towards Tula, the last important town before Moscow, while at the same time Iudenich, armed by the British and supported by the British navy, rapidly advanced from Estonia towards Petrograd and reached the outskirts of the city, only then was the politburo as well as S.S. Kamenev convinced of Trotsky’s strategic plan. At the meetings of the central committee on 21 and 26 September Trotsky’s plan for the southern front was accepted.
Trotsky commented in September on Kamenev’s strategy:
The plan drawn up in advance for operations on the southern front has proved to be absolutely incorrect. Our defeats on the southern front are due primarily to the errors in the basic plan.
Fundamental to the plan was the identification of the threat from Denikin’s White Guards with the Don and Kuban Cossack communities.
...Denikin’s tasks are offensive, whereas those of the Don and Kuban Cossacks are confined to the defence of their own regions. When Denikin advanced into the Donets area and the Ukraine, elementary considerations urged the need to separate his westward-moving forces from the original base, the Cossacks. A blow struck from Kharkov towards Taganrog or towards Berdiansk represented the shortest trajectory across a territory inhabited not by Cossacks but by workers and peasants, and gave promise of maximum success with minimum expenditure of forces.
As against this:
By our direct offensive against the Kuban we are bringing about a rapprochement between the Kuban Cossacks and the Denikinites ...
A direct offensive along the line of most resistance proved, as had been forecast, wholly to Denikin’s advantage. The Cossacks of Veshenskaia, Migulinskaia and Kazanskaia stanitsas mobilised to a man, swearing never to surrender. In this way, by our very offensive we provided Denikin with a substantial number of soldiers. [28]
Once Trotsky’s perceptive strategy was adopted, the situation on the southern front improved radically. On 20 October the Red Army captured Orel, and four days later Budenny defeated Denikin’s cavalry forces. On 15 November Denikin was defeated at Kastornaia, near Voronezh; on 17 November at Kursk; during December the retreat of his armies continued unabated. On 3 January 1920 Denikin lost Tsaritsin, on 8 January Rostov. After a closely fought battle round Rostov, it fell into Denikin’s hands again on 20 January, but was recaptured three days later. The White armies continued to retreat. On 15 March Denikin lost Ekaterinodar; on 4 April he gave up the command of the Whites and left for Britain.
In the final stage of the fight against Denikin Trotsky launched the slogan ‘Proletarians, to horse!’ Cavalry troops dated back to the partisan period at the beginning of the Red Army. When the army was put on a regular footing, relatively little attention was paid to cavalry. However, the success of the White cavalry brought home the necessity to revise this attitude. After the Denikin offensive, accompanied by the raids of Mamontov, Trotsky issued in September 1919 the call for all-out mobilisation of cavalry forces:
PROLETARIANS, TO HORSE!
The Red Army’s principal misfortune is its shortage of cavalry. Our war is a war of manoeuvre and calls for the maximum mobility. This assigns a big role to the cavalry ... Our shortage of cavalry is not accidental. The homeland of Russia’s old cavalry was the steppes, and the Cossack communities settled there. The revolution of the proletariat came to birth in the great industrial centres. We have no shortage of machine-gunners and gunners, but we are experiencing a great lack of horsemen. The steppes, remote from the centres, were the hotbeds of counter-revolution. From the Don and the Urals came the Kaledins, Krasnovs and Durovs. Denikin found his most important support on the Don and the Kuban. As for the non-Cossack cavalry units, these were, from time immemorial, the appanage of the privileged and titled officers. An ultra-reactionary spirit always prevailed in the cavalry ...
Now, in the conditions of our civil war, we see the cavalry becoming ever more important ...
The Soviet Republic needs cavalry. Red cavalrymen, forward! To horse, proletarians! [29]
Trotsky’s initiative and daring improvisations were crucial to the victorious advance of the Red Army.
Besides the dispute with Lenin over the fight against Kolchak in the east and Denikin in the south, Trotsky had a disagreement with him over policy for the defence of Petrograd.
In October 1919, while Denikin was threatening Moscow, Iudenich, backed by the British navy in the Bay of Finland, was advancing rapidly from Estonia towards Petrograd. On 12 October his troops captured Iamburg, ten miles from Petrograd. By 16 October they had reached Gatchina, and shortly afterwards they were in Tsarskoe Selo, a suburban resort near Petrograd. The White generals were so confident that their operational commander is said to have declined an offer to look at Petrograd through field glasses, saying that next day he would be walking down Nevsky Prospekt, the central thoroughfare of the city.
On 15 October the politburo met. Facing the threat to both capitals, Lenin proposed to abandon Petrograd and gather all available strength round Moscow. He even envisaged the possibility of giving up Moscow and withdrawing to the Urals. Trotsky disagreed, and after some discussion the central committee, including Zinoviev and Stalin, sided with him. On 16 October Trotsky rushed in his armoured train to Petrograd. He believed they might have to defend the city street by street.
If they broke into this gigantic city, the White Guards would find they had fallen into a stone labyrinth in which every building would be for them either a riddle, or a threat, or a mortal danger. From which direction should they expect the shot to come? From the window? From the attic? From the basement? From round the corner? From every direction! We have machine guns, rifles, revolvers, hand grenades ... We can cover some streets with barbed wire entanglements, while leaving others open and turning them into traps. For this purpose all that is needed is for a few thousand men to decide firmly that they will not surrender Petrograd ...
Two or three days of street fighting like this would suffice for the invading bands to be transformed into a terrified, hunted herd of cowards who would surrender in groups or as individuals ... [30]
If Iudenich had entered Petrograd Trotsky’s urban battle programme would have been put to the test. But Trotsky’s forces succeeded in holding the Whites outside the city.
All Trotsky’s driving energy, all his gifts of organisation and oratory were put into effect. ‘The city which has suffered so much, which has burnt with so strong an inward flame, this beautiful Red Petrograd remains what it has been, the torch of the revolution’, he proclaimed to the Petrograd soviet. [31] On horseback he personally stopped retreating soldiers and led them back into line.
In his autobiography Trotsky describes the event:
In this brief episode, for the one and only time during the entire war I had to play the role of a regimental commander. When the retreating lines came up against the division headquarters at Alexandrovka, I mounted the first horse I could lay my hands on and turned the lines back. For the first few minutes there was nothing but confusion. Not all of them understood what was happening, and some of them continued to retreat. But I chased one soldier after another, on horseback, and made them all turn back. Only then did I notice that my orderly, Kozlov, a Muscovite peasant, and an old soldier himself, was racing at my heels. He was beside himself with excitement. Brandishing a revolver, he ran wildly along the line, repeating my appeals, and yelling for all he was worth: ‘Courage, boys, Comrade Trotsky is leading you’. The men were now advancing at the pace at which they had been retreating before. Not one of them remained behind. After two versts the bullets began their sweetish, nauseating whistling and the first wounded began to drop. The regimental commander changed beyond recognition. He appeared at the most dangerous points, and before the regiment had recovered the position it had previously abandoned he was wounded in both legs. I returned to the staff headquarters on a truck. On the way we picked up the wounded. The impetus had been given, and with my whole being I felt that we would save Petrograd. [32]
With determination and daring the Red soldiers routed Iudenich’s army. As it happened, the turning point on the Petrograd front occurred on the same day as that on the southern front: on 20 October the Red Army captured Orel.
Another strategic question on which Trotsky found himself in conflict with Lenin and initially in a minority in the politburo was the march on Warsaw.
On 25 April 1920 Poland started a military offensive against Soviet Russia and invaded the Ukraine. The Polish troops advanced rapidly. On 6 May they entered Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, and occupied the whole of the western part of the country. On 26 May the Soviet counter-offensive started and on 5 June Budenny’s Red cavalry broke through. On 12 June the Poles evacuated Kiev, and afterwards they were quickly pushed back to the border with Poland.
Up to this point, so long as the war was defensive, there were no differences between Trotsky and the rest of the party leadership regarding its conduct. Now the question was posed: should the Red Army go on to invade and occupy Poland. Lenin said ‘Yes’, Trotsky ‘No’. Lenin’s enthusiasm was fired by the desire to encourage the revolution in Germany. The march on Warsaw was to effect a junction between the Russian and German revolutions. He wanted ‘to probe Europe with the bayonets of the Red Army’. [33] This wish reflected Lenin’s anguish at the isolation of the Russian revolution and his desire to break out of it. The majority of the party leadership on the whole sided with Lenin. Stalin, who showed no enthusiasm for the war on Poland so long as it was not going too well [34], now, as a result of success, became quite euphoric.
The Polish Communist leaders were split. Dzerzhinsky, Markhlevsky and above all Radek argued against the Soviet advance into Poland. Unschlicht, Lensky and Bobinsky took the opposite standpoint. Lenin showed no hesitation. Indeed, so long as the Polish war was progressing favourably his confidence increased. On 17 July he forced on the politburo, without much difficulty, a decision that the Red Army should march on to Warsaw. He overruled Trotsky’s advice, proffered on behalf of the supreme command, that the offensive be halted. Lenin carried the five other members of the politburo with him.
Lenin’s policy turned out to be wrong and costly. Radek argued that the Red Army would not be welcomed by the workers and peasants of Poland. Trotsky agreed with Radek. On 15 August the Soviet troops were beaten at the gates of Warsaw and were rapidly pushed back 400 kilometres, out of Polish territory.
There were other factors that played a part in this Soviet defeat. For instance, there was an astonishing absence of co-ordination between the Soviet western and south-western commands: despite an order to the south-western command on 13 August to join the western front it played no significant part in the battle at all. Trotsky’s explanation for the behaviour of the south-western command was simple and convincing: the private ambitions of Stalin, political commissar of the south-western army. Stalin was jealous of Tukhachevsky, the former Tsarist officer who commanded the western army, and of his political commissar, Smilga. Not willing to be overshadowed by their success, he wanted at all costs to capture Lvov at the same time as Tukhachevsky and Smilga entered Warsaw.
Stalin was waging his own war. When the danger to Tukhachevsky’s army became clearly evident, and the commander-in-chief ordered the south-western front to shift its direction sharply toward Zamostye-Tomashev, in order to strike at the flanks of the Polish troops and Warsaw, the command of the south-western front, encouraged by Stalin, continued to move to the west: Was it not more important to take possession of Lvov itself than to help ‘others’ to take Warsaw? For three or four days our general staff could not secure the execution of this order. Only after repeated demands, reinforced by threats, did the south-western command change direction, but by then the delay of several days had already played its fatal role. On 16 August the Poles took the counter-offensive and forced our troops to roll back. If Stalin and Voroshilov and the illiterate Budenny had not had their own war’ in Galicia and the Red cavalry had been at Lublin in time, the Red Army would not have suffered the disaster. [35]
The whole concept of the march on Warsaw was a political mistake. After its failure Lenin said: Our offensive, our too swift advance almost as far as Warsaw, was undoubtedly a mistake.’ [36] The Poles were bound to see in this invasion an attack by their hereditary enemies. Lenin was not one to hide his mistakes. He told Klara Zetkin:
In the Red Army the Poles saw enemies, not brothers and liberators ... The revolution in Poland which we counted on did not take place. The workers and peasants, deceived by Pilsudski and Daszynski, defended their class enemy and let our brave Red soldiers starve, ambushed them, and beat them to death ... Radek predicted how it would turn out. He warned us. I was very angry and accused him of ‘defeatism’ ... But he was right in his main contention. [37]
In retrospect Trotsky compared the difference between himself and Lenin over the march on Warsaw with those over the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and he drew a sharp lesson from the mistakes made in both cases:
In contrast with the Brest-Litovsk period, the roles had been completely reversed. Then it was I who demanded that the signing of the peace be delayed: that even at the price of losing some territory, we give the German proletariat time to understand the situation and get in its word. Now it was Lenin who demanded that our army continue its advance and give the Polish proletariat time to appraise the situation and rise up in arms. The Polish war confirmed from the opposite side what was demonstrated by the Brest-Litovsk war: that the events of war and those of the revolutionary mass movement are measured by different yardsticks. Where the action of armies is measured by days and weeks, the movement of masses of people is usually reckoned in months and years. If this difference in tempo is not taken fully into account, the gears of war will only break the teeth of the revolutionary gears, instead of setting them in motion. At any rate, that is what happened in the short Brest-Litovsk war and in the great Polish war. We passed over and beyond our own victory to a heavy defeat. [38]
Thus we have seen that Trotsky and Lenin disagreed on four strategic issues: the first the war against Kolchak on the eastern front, the second the war against Denikin on the southern front, the third the war against Iudenich outside Petrograd, and finally the march on Warsaw. On all except the first Trotsky was proved right. In passing, let us imagine what the Stalinists would have made of it had it been Trotsky who had suggested withdrawal from Petrograd. Clear proof of defeatism, even treason, they would have claimed. Whereas if Trotsky, not Lenin, had proposed the march on Warsaw, this would have been cited as evidence of the folly of the theory of permanent revolution and Trotsky’s ‘Bonapartist’ plans to export revolution by arms.
Top of the page
<< Last Chapter | Next Chapter >>
1. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 521.
2. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 521.
3. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 523.
4. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 525.
5. Stalin, Works, volume 4, page 271.
6. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 523.
7. Stalin, Works, volume 4, page 273.
8. Lenin to Sokolnikov, 20 April 1919, quoted in Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 369.
9. Lenin to Antonov-Ovsienko, 22 April 1919, quoted in Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 373.
10. 24 April-1 May 1919, quoted in Trotsky Papers, volume 1, pages 377-87.
11. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, pages 566-7.
12. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, pages 581-2, note 4.
13. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 483.
14. Trotsky, My Life, page 452.
15. Minutes of the central committee, quoted in Trotsky Papers, volume 1, pages 578-81.
16. Trotsky, Stalin, page 313.
17. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, pages 591 and 593.
18. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 589.
19. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, page 135.
20. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 70-78
21. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 334-9
22. Meijer’s comment in Trotsky Papers, volume 1, pages 587-8.
23. Trotsky, Stalin School, page 222.
24. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 597.
25. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 599.
26. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 611.
27. Trotsky Papers, volume 1, page 667.
28. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 429-30.
29. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 412-14.
30. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 540-1; Trotsky, Sochineniia, volume 17, book 2, pages 266-7.
31. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, page 565; Trotsky, Sochineniia , volume 17, book 2, page 287.
32. Trotsky, My Life, page 429.
33. Klara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (London 1929), pages 19-21.
34. Stalin, Works, volume 4, pages 345-6.
35. Trotsky, Stalin, pages 329 and 322.
36. Lenin, Works, volume 32, page 173.
37. Zetkin, page 20.
38. Trotsky, My Life, pages 457-8.
Last updated on 28 July 2009