This method is not new

The military oppositionists included, for example, Pyatakov, the present director of the State Bank. He usually joined every opposition, only to wind up as a government official. Three or four years ago, when Pyatakov belonged to the same group as I did, I prophesied in jest that in the event of a Bonapartist coup d’état, Pyatakov would go to the office the next day with his briefcase. Now I can add more earnestly that if this fails to come about, it will be only through lack of a Bonapartist coup d’état, and not through any fault of Pyatakov’s. In the Ukraine, he enjoyed considerable influence, not by accident but because he is a fairly well-educated Marxist, especially in the realm of economics, and is undoubtedly a good administrator, with a reserve of will. In the early years, Pyatakov showed revolutionary energy, but it later changed to a bureaucratic conservatism. In fighting his semi-anarchist views, I resorted to giving him an important post from the very outset, so that he would have to change from words to deeds. but often is very efficacious. His administrative sense soon prompted him to apply the very methods against which he had been waging his war of words. Such changes were common.































All the best elements of the military opposition were soon drawn into the work. At the same time I offered the most implacable an opportunity to organize a few regiments according to their own principles, promising for my part to give them all the necessary resources. Only one district group on the Volga accepted the challenge, and organized a regiment that was in no way different from the rest. The Red army was winning on all the fronts, and the opposition eventually melted away.































Tsaritsin, where the military workers were grouped around Voroshiov, held a special place in the Red army and in the military opposition. There revolutionary detachments were headed chiefly by former non-commissioned officers from among the peasants of the northern Caucasus. The deep antagonism between the Cossacks and the peasants of the southern steppes imparted a vicious ferocity to the civil war in that region ; it penetrated far into the villages and led to the wholesale extermination of entire families. This was a peasant war with its roots deep in local soil, and, in its mouzhik ferocity, it far surpassed the revolutionary struggle in all other parts of the country. This war brought forward a good many stalwart irregulars who excelled in local skirmishing but usually failed when they had to undertake military tasks of larger scope.































The life of Voroshilov illustrates the career of a worker-revolutionist, with its leadership in strikes, underground work, imprisonment, and exile. Like many of the other rulers of to-day, Voroshilov was merely a national revolutionary democrat from among the workers, nothing more; this was most apparent in the imperialist Great War, and later on in the February revolution. In the official biographies of Voroshilov, the years 1914-17 are a great blank, as is true of most of the present leaders. The secret of this blank is that during the war most of these men were patriots, and discontinued their revolutionary work. In the February revolution, Voroshilov, like Stalin, supported the government of Guchkov and Miiukoff from the left. They were extreme revolutionary democrats, but in no sense internationalists. As a rule, the Bolsheviks who were patriots during the war were democrats after the February revolution, and are to-day followers of Stalin’s national socialism. Voroshilov is no exception.































Although he was one of the Lugansk workers, from their privileged top section, in his habits and tastes Voroshilov always resembled a small proprietor more than he did a proletarian. After the October revolution, he became the natural centre of the opposition of non-commissioned officers and irregulars against a centralized military organization demanding military knowledge and a wider outlook. Such was the origin of the Tsaritsin opposition.































In Voroshilov’s circles, “specialists,” graduates of the military academy, high staffs, and Moscow were mentioned with hatred. But since the chiefs of the irregulars had no military knowledge of their own, every one had close at hand his own “specialist” who, being naturally of the second order, held tenaciously to his post against the more capable and better informed. The attitude of the Tsaritsin military heads toward the command of the southern military front scarcely differed from their attitude toward the Whites. Their contact with the Moscow centre did not go beyond a constant demand for munitions. Our resources were very slight; everything produced by the factories was immediately sent to the armies. Not one of them, however, absorbed as many rifles or cartridges as the Tsaritsin army. Whenever its demands were refused, Tsaritsin would raise the cry of “treason by the Moscow specialists.” It kept a special representative in Moscow, a sailor named Zhivodyor, to extort supplies for its army. When we tightened up on the discipline, Zhivodyor turned bandit. I believe that later he was caught and shot.