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.

NOTE

The reference is to speeches by Lenin and Trotsky at the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the RCP(b) on September 22, 1920. In the political report of the Central Committee, Lenin, touching on the results of the unsuccessful Polish campaign, said in particular: "Where, then, are we to look for the mistake? Possibly it was a political mistake, possibly a strategic one.

...The Central Committee examined this question and left it open. In order to put this question under investigation, in order to decide it properly, we must assign great forces for this, and we do not have them, because the future absorbs us completely, and we decided: let historians decide the past; let them later sort out this question... The mistake is either in policy or in strategy, either there or here.

A mistake may have been possible in the reply to Curzon's note of June 12, when we said: simply, to hell with the League of Nations, we are going forward.

...Another explanation is possible, namely that insofar as the Central Committee defined the line of policy... it defined limits beyond which our command could not go... Here strategy may perhaps make us understand and say: but we did not have enough forces to advance and, having gone 50 or 100 versts, having stopped there, we would have stood in ethnographic Poland, we would have had a sure and secure victory.

If we had stopped then, we would now certainly have peace, an absolutely victorious peace, preserving all that halo and all that influence on international politics. It is possible that there was a strategic mistake.

...In the Central Committee the prevailing opinion was that no, we shall not create a commission to study the conditions of the offensive and the retreat..." (Lenin, V.I. Unknown Documents. 1891-1922. Moscow, 1999, pp. 382-383).

For his part, Trotsky, in his concluding speech on the report on the military situation, accused Stalin. "Concerning intelligence," he began his speech, "it is quite true that our intelligence is not brilliant, especially our agent intelligence.

It is based among us on the enthusiasm and devotion of the finest Party workers, who provide excellent political information, but who give us extremely insufficient and militarily illiterate military information.

We received much more information about complete disintegration, about general panic, that nothing would come of the attempt to strengthen the army, and if we are to speak of someone having misled the Central Committee, then it was rather the Party-political information of the period when we were approaching Warsaw... Now another objection.

I ask: did you know that the living forces of the Polish army had not been broken? Comrades, I shall permit myself to say that I was more skeptical than many other comrades, because it was precisely on this question that I had to dwell more than others, that is, whether the military forces of the white Polish army had been broken or not.

On this subject I had conversations with Comrade Stalin, and I said that one must not be reassured by all sorts of reports that the forces of the Polish army had been broken, because the forces of the Polish army had not been broken, since we had too few prisoners compared with our successes and had captured too little materiel.

Comrade Stalin said: 'No, you are mistaken. We have fewer prisoners than might be expected in accordance with our successes, but the Polish soldiers are afraid to surrender; they scatter through the forests. Desertion in Poland is taking on the character of an enormous phenomenon that is decomposing Poland, and this is the chief cause of our victories.'

What, then, am I to say, that Comrade Stalin misled me and the Central Committee? Comrade Stalin was a member of one of the two Revolutionary Military Councils that were beating white Poland. Comrade Stalin was mistaken, and he brought this mistake into the Central Committee, where it also entered as a basic fact for determining the policy of the Central Committee. Comrade Stalin at the very same time says that the Revolutionary Military Council of the Western Front misled the Central Committee. I say that there is an assessment of this by the Central Committee. Comrade Stalin presented the matter as if we had had an ideally correct line, but the command misled us by saying that Warsaw would be taken on such-and-such a date.

This is untrue. The Central Committee would have been an arch-frivolous institution if it determined its policy by the fact that those comrades who spoke about when Warsaw would be taken were misleading us, because their data were the same as ours" (Ninth Conference of the RCP(b). Minutes. Moscow, 1972, pp. 76-77).

These statements by Lenin and Trotsky served as the basis for Stalin's address to the Presidium of the conference and for his speech.