Statement to the Presidium of the Ninth Party Conference, September 23, 1920

Source: Tom 17

Certain passages in the speeches delivered yesterday by Comrades Trotsky and Lenin may have given the conference delegates cause to suspect me of having misrepresented the facts. In the interest of truth, I must declare the following:

1) Comrade Trotsky's assertion that I painted the state of our fronts in rosy colors does not correspond to reality. I was, I believe, the only member of the CC who ridiculed the fashionable slogan of a "march on Warsaw" and who openly in the press warned comrades against being carried away by our successes and against underestimating Polish forces. It suffices to read my articles in Pravda.

2) Comrade Trotsky's assertion that my calculations regarding the capture of Lvov did not materialize contradicts the facts. In mid-August our forces approached Lvov to within eight versts, and they would certainly have taken Lvov, but they did not take it because the high command deliberately gave up the capture of Lvov and, at the very moment when our forces stood eight versts from Lvov, transferred Budyonny from the Lvov area to the Western Front to rescue the latter. What have Stalin's calculations got to do with it?

3) Comrade Lenin's assertion that I am biased against the Western Front, that strategy did not let the CC down -- this does not correspond to reality. No one has refuted the fact that the CC had a telegram from the command about the capture of Warsaw on August 16. The point is not that Warsaw was not taken on August 16 -- that is a minor matter -- but that the Western Front was, it turned out, on the brink of catastrophe owing to the exhaustion of the soldiers and the failure to bring up the rear, while the command did not know this, did not notice it. If the command had warned the CC about the real state of the front, the CC would certainly have abandoned the offensive war temporarily, as it is doing now. The fact that Warsaw was not taken on August 16 is, I repeat, a minor matter, but the fact that this was followed by an unprecedented catastrophe that cost us 100,000 prisoners and 200 guns -- that is already a major blunder of the command that cannot be left without attention. That is why I demanded in the CC the appointment of a commission that, by clarifying the causes of the catastrophe, would insure us against a new defeat. Comrade Lenin is apparently sparing the command, but I think it is the cause that should be spared, not the command.

23/9

I. Stalin.

Source: Bolshevik Leadership. Correspondence. 1912-1927, pp. 160-161.

RGASPI. F. 558. Op. 1. D. 5570. L. 2.