The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification - Chapter 5
relation of the workers to the peasantry. That policy-against petty bourgeois guerrilla and amateur
methods (Stalin, Voroshilov and Co.) I carried out hand in hand with Vladimir Ilyich.
I cite, for example, a whole series of my telegrams from Simbirsk and Ruzaevka (March 1919)
stressing the necessity of applying energetic measures in order to improve relations with the
middle peasantry. I demanded that an authorized commission be sent to the Volga region for the
purpose of checking up on the activities of local authorities and of making a study of the causes of
peasant dissatisfaction. My third telegram-by direct wire to Stalin, Kremlin, Moscow
(urgent)-reads as follows:
"The Commission's task should be to strengthen the faith of the Volga peasantry in the Central
Soviet Government, to remove the most crying cases of local maladministration and to punish the
guilty representatives of the Soviet power; to gather all complaints and materials to be used as a
basis of demonstrative decrees in favor of the middle peasants. Smilga could be appointed a
member on this commission; Kamenev is likewise desirable, or some other authoritative
figure."(March 22, 1919, No.813.)
It was not Stalin who sent me this telegram-one of many-stressing the necessity of decrees to
benefit the middle peasants, but it was I who sent it to Stalin. This took place not during the period
of the Fourteenth Congress but at the beginning of the year 1919 when Stalin's views on the
middle peasants were still unknown to anyone.
Indeed, every page of the old records-without the slightest attempt at selection-rings today like a
scathing exposure of the twaddle invented at this late date regarding my "underestimation of the
peasantry" or the "underestimation of the middle peasants!"
(h) At the beginning of 1920, basing myself on an analysis of the condition of peasant economy, I
introduced in the Political Bureau the proposal of a series of measures similar to the N.E.P. That
proposal could not possibly have been dictated by a "disregard"for the peasantry.
(i) The trade union discussion was, as I said, a search for a way out of an economic blind alley.
The transition to the N.E.P. was carried out in complete unanimity.
36. All this can be proved on the basis of indisputable documents. Some day it will be. Here I limit
myself to two quotations.
In answer to questions asked by peasants as to our relation to the kulaks, the middle and the poor
peasants, and as to alleged disagreements between Lenin and Trotsky on the peasant question, I wrote in
1919:
"No disagreement upon this question in the centers of the Soviet Government have existed or exist. The
counter-revolutionists, whose cause is getting more and more hopeless, have nothing left hut to deceive
the toiling masses as to a pretended conflict supposed to be dividing the Council of People's Commissars
within."(Izvestia, Feb. 7, 1919.)
Lenin wrote upon this theme, in answer to a question from the peasant Gulov, the following words:
"In Izvestia for February 2, there appeared a letter from Gulov, a peasant, who asks about the relation of
the workers' and peasants' government to the middle peasantry and speaks of rumors to the effect that
Lenin and Trotsky are not in harmony; that there are big disagreements between them, and especially
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