TBR News December 7, 2017

Dec 07 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., December 7, 2017: “Bumperstickers:

1.Jesus loves you… but everyone else thinks you are an asshole

  1. Impotence… Nature’s way of saying “No hard feelings”
  2. The proctologist called… they found your head
  3. Everyone has a photographic memory…some just don’t have any film
  4. Save your breath…You’ll need it to blow up your date
  5. Some people are only alive because it is illegal to shoot them
  6. I used to have a handle on life… but now it is broken
  7. WANTED: Meaningful overnight relationship
  8. Hang up and drive
  9. If you can read this… I can slam on my brakes and sue you
  10. Heart Attacks… God’s revenge for eating His animal friends
  11. Your ridiculous little opinion has been noted
  12. Try not to let your mind wander… It is too small to be out by itself
  13. Some people just don’t know how to drive… I call these people “Everybody But Me”
  1. Don’t like my driving… Then quit watching me
  2. Guys… just because you have one… doesn’t mean you have to be one
  3. Welcome to America… NOW speak English
  4. Hire the Handicapped: They’re fun to watch!
  5. Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.
  6. Asians don’t drive cars, they aim them ,,,,”

 

Table of Contents

  • The Curtain Rises On Trump Theater
  • Trump’s Jerusalem move undermines U.S. interests and credibility, analysts say
  • California fire burns Bel-Air mansions as spread continues
  • Not So Great: Britain Grows Increasingly Hostile to EU Citizens
  • Ukraine police fail to find Saakashvili in protest camp raid
  • US troops may become targets after US Jerusalem decision – Iraqi paramilitary group
  • Coup D’Etat: The Technique Of Revolution

 

The Curtain Rises On Trump Theater

Trumpism as performance art

December 7, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

The pundits are up in arms over President Trump’s announcement that he intends to “recognize” Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – and on the eve of the supposed renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” What, they cry, can he be thinking?! Is he crazy? (Of course he is!) Are we to be spared nothing? (Of course we aren’t.)

Oh yes, the pundits are up in arms a lot these days: attacks of hysteria, on an almost daily basis, are one of the major symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And so when the President goes into one of his stream of consciousness riffs – will Joyce scholars ever recognize their literary provenance? – they take to Twitter, alarm bells ringing.

Ignore them.

As Trump would put it, it’s “fake news!” Because “recognizing” Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a concept without content: Congress has already voted on several occasions over the years to proclaim such “recognition,” and to demand that the US embassy be moved there from Tel Aviv. Every president since Reagan has vowed to do precisely that – and wound up leaving the embassy right where it is. Trump will prove to be no exception, and here’s why:

“President Donald Trump will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on Wednesday, while also delaying moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city, officials said.

“Though Trump will not relocate the embassy any time soon – one White House official told reporters it could take years – the president still intends to fulfill that promise made early in his administration.

“Senior administration officials called Trump’s expected recognition of Jerusalem an affirmation of ‘reality’ – both historical and current, pointing out that the city is already home to Israel’s parliament, supreme court and other government sites.”

What in the real, actual, physical world will change as a result of this empty “recognition”? The answer is: nothing. The embassy will stay where it is. The Palestinians will remain in their prison-like condition, and their Israeli jailers will continue to praise the President in public while continuing to guard their own interests even when it comes at the expense of the Americans.

Any questions?

The same people who scoffed at the very idea that Trump could ever be the GOP nominee, and then confidently foretold Hillary Clinton’s victory, have predicted disaster at every turn in the road to the end of the first year of his presidency. Remember how his election meant an inevitable war with China? The doomsayers couldn’t explain his recent love-fest with Hu Jinping, so they just ignored it and moved on to the next bloodcurdling and equally wrong prognostication – war with North Korea. Trump’s fire-and-fury rhetoric was so incandescently hot that his words alone would ignite a war on the Korean peninsula. Except it hasn’t happened, and it isn’t going to happen, for the same reason the Korean stalemate has persisted since 1953. For both sides, the price of aggression is too high – war means millions dead, and the Korean peninsula rendered virtually uninhabitable.

Oh, and don’t forget the war with Iran that was supposed to be already in progress by this time because Trump was going to rip up the Iran deal. Except that never happened, either. Despite all the election-year rhetoric, the solemn vows that the “bad, very bad” deal – the “worst deal in our history, folks, the absolute worst” – was going to be rectified and even nullified, upon taking office Trump simply kicked the issue over to Congress, where it will be kept in reserve for the Israel lobby to exploit at their convenience. In any case, the Iran deal is intact, and is very likely to remain so the longer the issue sits on the back burner.

By now the wrong predictions of the Trumpocalypse school of recent history are piling up so high that they overshadow whatever credibility these people once had. In the foreign policy realm their record is especially abysmal, and I’m not just talking here about the neocons, the Clinton gang, and the Davos crowd, but also some prominent anti-interventionists, such as Stephen Walt and the Beltway libertarians largely funded by Charles and David Koch. These armchair anti-interventionists, perhaps thinking of their long-term economic prospects, not only stayed on the sidelines while Trump made “isolationist” noises, they openly disdained his candidacy. After the election they joined the chorus of disaster-mongers, their voices indistinguishable from the bipartisan Washington consensus that decried Trump precisely for his virtues. That these people could have made a difference inside the Trump administration is one of the great tragedies of the Trump era.

So the pundits were wrong – but why? What is it about Trump that they have consistently missed that has caused them to miscalculate at every crucial turn where real judgment was called for? The irony is that it’s an element of the Trump-haters’ own critique of the President’s character, which they fail to give the prominence it deserves: he’s full of hot air. He’s a narcissist who likes to hear loves the sound of his own voice. He’s an actor, at heart, and both his critics and his fans mistake his theatrical performances for policy pronouncements. He actually has both his supporters and his enemies taking even his most casual off-the-cuff words literally – and remembering them selectively – and for both friend and foe that has proved to be a major mistake.

In the balance of things, his foes suffered the most from their self-induced blindness: it made them badly overstate the alleged dangers of a Trump presidency. I mean, by this time, according to the Future History imagined by the NeverTrumpers, shouldn’t we all be living under martial law, with Russian tanks rolling through the streets of Washington? According to them, we should already be at war with China, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps even NATO. Sadly, that last possibility never came about, but then again the good news is that neither did any of the others, despite the supposed immediacy of these alleged serial crises.

Yesterday, the world was ending: today, not so much. Was it Gore Vidal who called us the United States of Amnesia? I think this applies especially and specifically to the political class, i.e. the President’s mortal enemies, whom America’s premier historical novelist wrote about with such brutally insightful realism.

No doubt the capacity for self-deception is unlimited in some elements of #TheResistance, but even the strongest faith is shaken by repeated debunking. The inevitable end to this process of being consistently wrong is that the popularity of what started out as a widespread misconception begins to shrink, until its adherents are marginalized to the point of being reduced to the status of a tiny idiosyncratic cult.

This pattern is dramatized by the history of those millennialist cults that have prophesized the end of the world occurring on a specific day and even predicting the exact time. When the destiny of the universe failed to conform to their precise requirements, and the end failed to come, disenchanted believers began to leave. In response, the church’s top theologians conferred in solemn conclave until they could pluck a rationalization out of a hat.

The doomsayers’ great problem was that there were only two possible explanations consistent with their worldview for why the prophesized end failed to manifest itself, neither of which boded well for recruitment purposes. First, because they got the date wrong, due to a technical issue too intricate for the mere layman to understand. So they moved the date up – ah, but they could never move it up enough. There were only so many times they could get away with this tactic, and so eventually these cults went kaput, or nearly so. I say nearly because the second possible explanation – that the end of the world had come, but we’re too sinful and/or deluded to notice it – takes us into Louise Mensch territory.

The prophets of doom mistake belligerent words and style for action and substance, and this is the worst error our would be Doctors of Trumpology fall into. These literalists fail to see the Trumpian usage of language as negotiation, as a starting point rather than the final word, with his more “extreme” pronouncements meant to stretch the limits of what can be debated as well as to throw “red meat” to his base.

As an example, take Trump’s long distance “dialogue” with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un, widely misinterpreted as the rhetorical prelude to war. From calling down fire and fury to speculating as to whether Kim wants to be his friend, Trump’s side of the conversation certainly describes a range of possibilities, rather than a fixed position. Yet the bombast drowned out the more conciliatory overtures and the pundits heard only what they wanted to hear. Their one-dimensional analysis also ignored the realities on the ground, which effectively rule out war as a death sentence for millions of Koreans, South and North, as well as Japanese and quite possibly others. Yet the very scope of such a disaster is precisely what convinces the ultra-alarmist faction of our Trump-hating doomsday cult that it’s inevitable.

That’s because, according to their religion, Trump is the equivalent of Satan, whose reappearance on earth is a sign of the End Times. Oh, but don’t worry, folks: if you’re Saved, and you’re With Her, after Saint Michael Mueller corners the Devil in a courtroom called Armageddon and a Democratic House draws up a Bill of Excommunication, you’ll be Raptured up into the Kingdom of Eternal Hillary alongside the blessed ranks of #TheResistance.

As time goes on, even the congenital hysterics among the NeverTrumpers are going to have to come down to earth, stop with the virtue-signaling hyperbole, and come to grips with really existing Trumpism, which is neither fascism triumphant nor the restoration of our old republic but an ambiguous mix of new and old, the revolutionary and the counterrevolutionary, embodying both continuity and change. It is, in short, like most important shifts in the American political landscape, not enough to bring down the house, but in Trump’s case enough to shake up a complacent, hideously wealthy, and brazenly decadent ruling class that had long since lost contact with the rest of the country.

What has been brought down is the house of the two-party monopoly, the political and operational linchpin of our foreign policy of global intervention, which has always been predicated on solidly bipartisan support. What Trump has done is to found a de facto third party, separate from and opposed to the old GOP Establishment as well as the Democrats, both of which have effectively marginalized their “isolationist” wings. If there is to be any challenge to the interventionist consensus, which currently dominates Washington, this third force in American politics is bound to be its vehicle and voice.

Like any new party, especially those of a populist bent, this “America First Party” starts out as an ideologically ambiguous formation. Every successful political group is necessarily a coalition, the broader the better. And the bigger and more successful it is, the more the opportunities for disagreement and debate present themselves. Political movements don’t exist in a vacuum: they react, change, and evolve in response to events. The Trump voters who cheered his disdainful dismissal of George W. Bush as a warmonger – and who made the difference in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – will be the biggest and best bulwark against the drive for yet another Middle Eastern war, this time with Iran. These people have a prominent place in this new Trump party, and many of them have found their way to Antiwar.com. We welcome them and are grateful for their support, which was a factor in the relatively early conclusion of our recent fundraising campaign.

Speaking of which: I have to say that I am bowled over by the success of our winter 2017 fundraiser, as well as by the incredible outpouring of support for me personally over my recent cancer diagnosis. Many thanks to all of you: I know “words fail me” is not a good line coming from a writer, but I have to be honest: in this case words do fail me.

My gratitude is heightened by the certainty that a good deal of this surge of support is motivated by the message I’ve been emphasizing to a great degree recently, and certainly one that has been a constant theme of this column and of Antiwar.com’s editorial policy in general since the very beginning, and it is this: we will never bow to the consensus, the conventional wisdom, or the fashion of the moment. The pious little orthodoxies of left and right don’t enter into our editorial judgments. We don’t care what “everyone says” or “all the experts” agree on. Our approach to any assertion of fact is to ask: where’s the evidence?

Adherence to this principle has generally kept Antiwar.com from falling into any of several deep potholes on the long road from 1995, the year of our founding, to 2017. A radical skepticism of the conventional wisdom is what kept us on the straight and narrow, and it continues to animate my own personal crusade to get my readers – particularly the libertarians among them – to think outside the box, and, in the process, see new opportunities rather than the same old obstacles.

One a personal note: Looks like I’m back to my twice a week schedule: Mondays and Thursdays. If my optimism about my cancer treatment turns out to be justified – and things are looking good – I’ll be back to my thrice weekly schedule soon. In any case, that’s the goal. Yesterday I had my third Keytruda-chemo combo treatment and today I have so far written more than  2,000 words in this space.

So, yes, things are looking up. Which has been my consistent message to my fellow libertarians, some of whom have joined the doomsayers’ cult and characterized the Trump era as a new Dark Ages.

They are wrong, and every day offers more evidence that the opposite is the truth. The emergence of a third ostensibly populist party in American politics gives space for the development of a genuinely libertarian populism. A variety of populism, in short, that rejects the welfare-warfare state, makes a clear the distinction between the nation and the government, and recognizes that American nationalism insofar as it represents the American revolutionary tradition is not the enemy but rather the essential complement to liberty.

The Beltway types and some elements in the Libertarian Party reject the populist label as utterly antithetical to libertarianism, but this is ahistorical nonsense. The actual founders of the Libertarian Party, David F. Nolan and Don Ernsberger, were prominent supporters of the old Liberty Amendment Committee, a right-wing populist movement that proposed to get rid of 90 percent of the federal government by passing a constitutional amendment. A number of state legislatures approved it, mostly in the west and the south. And this nascent libertarian movement could trace its lineage all the way back to the anti-Federalists, the Jeffersonian radicals, the Whiskey Rebellion, and, in modern times, the Old Right and Midwestern progressive opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Thus the original America First movement in opposition to foreign wars was born – the biggest antiwar movement in our history. The Ron Paul movement that brought libertarianism into the spotlight was surely a populist phenomenon in the classic sense that it spoke to large numbers of previously nonpoliticized individuals who were suddenly brought into a radical movement for social change.

I can’t resist making this final point: how ironic that some alleged libertarians are making the case that we must ally with the left and even construct a “liberal-tarian” agenda at precisely the moment when liberals have turned their backs on their best traditions. Just when leading liberals have become raving neo-McCarthyites openly calling for censorship of the internet, a CIA-FBI -led coup, and a showdown with nuclear-armed Russia, we’re supposed to join hands with them and sing “kumbaya” – what a sense of timing some people have!

 

 

Trump’s Jerusalem move undermines U.S. interests and credibility, analysts say

December 7 2017

by Saphora Smith

nbcnews

One of the guiding principles of international relations is that nations act out of their own self-interest.

So how does President Donald Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and eventually move the U.S. Embassy to the city advance American foreign policy objectives?

It doesn’t, according to analysts. Some also warned Trump’s decision could damage peace-building efforts in the Middle East as well as America’s credibility as a respected world power.

“It’s very difficult to imagine what U.S. interest it serves if you assume it has a basic interest in promoting a peaceful settlement to the conflict,” said Dana Allin, a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

“It flies in the face of his other goal of peace in the region,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, associate fellow in U.S. and Americas program at the London-based Chatham House think tank. “If he does make this announcement it’s going to undermine U.S. interests to bring peace and stability to the region.”

Recognizing Jerusalem upends decades of American policy.

Trump has spoken of his desire for a “deal of the century” that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His announcement on Wednesday afternoon came at a time when his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is trying to nurture a new peace process into existence.

But analysts suggested Trump’s move will make it harder for the U.S. to claim neutrality.

The United States has never endorsed Israel’s claim of sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem.

Since the 1979 Camp David Accords, American presidents have refused to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or move the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. approach has been that Jerusalem’s status should be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinians seek the city’s eastern sector, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as the capital of a future independent state. They fear that Trump’s declaration essentially imposes on them a disastrous solution for one of the core issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If Trump goes ahead and reverses this policy then the semblance of the U.S. as an “honest broker” in any future peace initiative is “completely out the window,” said Yossi Mekelberg, head of the International Relations and Politics Program at Regent’s University London.

“You’ve prejudiced one of the most sensitive, most delicate, one of the most explosive issues between the Israelis and Palestinians, in the Arab World, in the Muslim world, and all three monotheistic religions in one go. So, well done, Mr. President,” he said

The announcement has alarmed world leaders and led some to warn that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital could even trigger violence.

Analysts said it was likely to also undermine American influence and respect around the world.

“It’s another weight in the baggage that the U.S. is going to be carrying around the world diplomatically after four or eight years of the Trump administration, and it will be difficult to unload it,” said Allin of IISS.

So why would Trump consider such a move?

“The timing of it, the need for it, baffles most of us,” said Mekelberg, who is also a senior consulting research fellow on the Middle East and North Africa at Chatham House. “I think we are in a completely in uncharted territory with the Trump administration and that rationality and logical decisions are hard to come by.”

Allin agree, adding that Trump’s decision appeared more impulsive than methodical.

“I think he promised to do so in his presidential campaign, and he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t go through it,” he said.

Vinjamuri said she thought the expected announcement was aimed at Trump’s pro-Israel voters and his desire to deliver a “blockbuster message” as he approached his one-year anniversary in office.

“He’s made these pledges on the campaign trail and he’s had a lot of criticism that he’s not delivering,” she said. “It’s driven by domestic politics, he’s speaking to his base.”

It also feeds into his desire to be seen as the anti-Obama by evangelicals and hardliners who saw Obama as too pro-Palestine, she said.

“He wants to say to his base that he is bringing America back to before Obama,” she said. “But of course he’s not, because all presidents have recognized the complexity of Jerusalem.”

 

California fire burns Bel-Air mansions as spread continues

December 7, 2017

BBC

Residents of Los Angeles’ wealthy Bel-Air neighbourhood have found their homes under threat after another wildfire erupted in California.

The so-called Skirball Fire destroyed several homes in the exclusive area, quickly spreading over 150 acres.

It is the latest eruption of wildfire in the state, which has already seen widespread destruction from a series of uncontrolled blazes.

The largest, named the Thomas Fire, has covered some 90,000 acres.

By Wednesday night local time, California’s fire service said it had threatened 12,000 buildings, destroyed 150, and was only “5% contained”.

Mandatory evacuation orders remained in several areas, as strong winds helped to spread the flames.

Authorities issued a purple alert – the highest level warning ever issued in the state – amid what it called “extremely critical fire weather”.

Ken Pimlott, head of California’s fire response, told reporters: “There will be no ability to fight fires in this kind of wind.”

He said evacuations would be prioritised.

The nearby University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) cancelled all classes on Thursday, despite the university campus lying outside the evacuation zone on the city’s west side. It said it had taken the decision “given the array of uncertainties”.

Many schools have also been closed.

In Bel-Air on Wednesday, firefighters were seen removing artwork from opulent homes as they attempted to contain the fire.

The neighbourhood is home to celebrities and business leaders including Beyoncé and Elon Musk.

Singer Lionel Richie cancelled a Las Vegas performance that had been scheduled for Wednesday evening, saying he was “helping family evacuate to a safer place”.

A large estate and vineyard owned by billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch was also threatened, and suffered some damage.

The Los Angeles Times said Mr Murdoch had paid $28.8m (£21.5m) for the estate four years ago – a sum 12 times the average family home price in Bel-Air of $2.45m.

The Getty Museum, which is also at risk, said it would remain closed on Thursday. It said it had not removed its artworks and that air filtration systems were protecting its collection – which includes pieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh and Turner – from smoke damage.

The Thomas Fire in Ventura County remains the largest of the current blazes, having spread as far as the Pacific coast, with satellite images showing large areas of scorched earth.

Another blaze north of Los Angeles, named the Creek Fire, was also only 5% contained and covered some 12,600 acres. But it has only destroyed four buildings in the more sparsely populated area.

Across the entire state, more than 200,000 people have been evacuated.

One LA resident, 84-year-old Patricia Moore, was loading her belongings into her car when she told the AFP news agency: “Yesterday it was further north, but this morning we woke up and it was east of us.

“We heard the fire engines before six o’clock this morning, and we said, ‘Maybe we should start getting our stuff into the car.'”

 

Not So Great: Britain Grows Increasingly Hostile to EU Citizens

Ever since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, European Union citizens in the UK have felt increasingly unwelcome. Harrassment is on the rise and the government itself has fed the hate.

December 7, 2017

by Jörg Schindler

Spiegel

Whenever Agnieszka Pasieczna opens the curtains of her children’s bedroom, she finds herself facing four electronic eyes staring at her. The cameras, each around the size of a fist, are mounted on a gray wall around eight meters away, like silent witnesses for the prosecution. “I see you, I see everything,” her English neighbor once shouted over at her. Since then Agnieszka has kept her curtains closed even during the day.

The 39-year-old Polish woman lives with her husband and five children in Great Yarmouth, a town on England’s eastern periphery. It has 40,000 residents and a gaudy strip of amusement park rides along the beach front, referred to with no small degree of hyperbole as “The Golden Mile.” A character in the Charles Dickens classic “David Copperfield” once described the town as “the finest place in the universe.” But that was over 150 years ago.

The Pasieczna family moved to Great Yarmouth 12 years ago from their hometown of Wroclaw. There were jobs here, with the rural hinterlands dotted with farms, feed lots and meat processing plants. The Polish newcomers felt welcome and settled in quickly. They painted their living room mint green, hung deer antlers on the wall and bought two Yorkshire terriers. When Agnieszka gave birth to a daughter, she named her Diana, “like the princess.” Life was good – until the summer of 2016.

It started with little things. “This is England, speak English,” said one woman to Agnieszka as she was speaking Polish with her children. “Go back to your own country,” Diana was told in school. Then, this spring, her neighbor mounted the first of the cameras on the wall and said: “I’m going to take care of this damn Polish problem!” After several instances of intimidation, Agnzieszka called the police. She was told: “If you don’t like the cameras, maybe you should move away.”

It’s been like this for the past 18 months – and not just for the Pasiecznas, and not just in Great Yarmouth, where almost three out of four voters backed Brexit in June 2016, almost the highest result in the country. Since the Brexit referendum, there has been a significant rise in reports of abuse, threats and harassment against EU citizens. Some of them have been bizarre, some shocking. And others simply ridiculous.

Windows Smashed

In Stockport, a car dealership wouldn’t let a German who had lived in the town for 20 years to test drive a car, arguing that the man’s driver’s license was no longer valid due to Brexit. Universities are refraining from hiring professors from Spain or the Netherlands in anticipation of Brexit. Banks are refusing loans, landlords are illegally demanding to see British passports. Across the country, people with Romanian, Lithuanian or other accents have had their windows smashed.

The number of documented “hate crimes” against foreigners, or those who look like they might be, has spiked. It is almost as if those who promised that Brexit would mark Britain’s return to greatness have unleashed a poison that is now spreading across the country.

And the British government is doing nothing to stop that spread. Since the start of the Brexit negotiations, Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet have used the 3.2 million EU citizens living in Britain as bargaining chips.

“We want them to stay,” the prime minister said in her landmark Florence speech in September. But no one knows under what conditions. And who will guarantee them? How long will they be valid? The answers to those questions will depend on whether Brexit negotiations even make it to the next phase. There was supposed to be an agreement on the remaining issues on Monday but then May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker were forced to announce they were still lacking a deal after the intervention of the Northern Irish unionist party, the DUP.

And clarity on the issue of EU citizens has not been forthcoming. Instead, there have been countless cases of the British interior ministry, the Home Office, harassing respectable EU citizens or demanding that they leave. Every single one of those instances, the Home Office insists, has been the result of a regrettable “error.” But neither those affected nor the European Parliament, which has now launched an investigation, believe such claims.

“Many of us are very unsettled,” says Maike Bohn, a German education expert. “When we moved here, we all had a lot of trust in this fair, funny, intelligent people. That, though, has now vanished.”

Growing Uncertainty

Bohn, a lively 49-year-old, moved to Oxford in the early 1990s, fell in love and stayed. She’s the spokesperson for an initiative representing EU citizens called the3million, formed after the Brexit vote once it became clear that the once so cosmopolitan kingdom was no longer quite so welcoming.

“The uncertainty grows with every passing day,” Bohn says.

And that seems to be intentional. Indeed, the tone is coming directly from Downing Street. Theresa May, in her previous role as interior minister, made it abundantly clear that she intended to reduce net immigration to “below 100,000.” And she was willing to use any means necessary to achieve that, those close to her said, adding that it seemed to be the only issue she was really passionate about.

May announced back then that she wanted to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. The residency permit application form was bloated from 12 to 85 complicated pages and the process was made more expensive. In 2013, she sent out billboard vans onto the streets of Britain reading: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest!” It was the same tune that the Brexiteers played three years later: Foreigners, whether they were from Brussels or Bratislava, made things in the UK worse than they should be. In future it should be Britain First.

At first, EU citizens in the UK assumed such campaigns had nothing to do with them. As long as the UK was still an EU member, their rights would be just as protected as the 1.2 million Britons living in the other 27 EU member states. Then, in the autumn of 2016, cabinet members held speeches at the Conservative Party conference that sounded like declarations of war. Among many measures mentioned was a move to force companies to provide lists of foreign employees. “That’s when we realized that things were getting serious,” Maike Bohn says.

When May again refused to guarantee that EU citizens would be allowed to continue living in the country after Brexit took hold in 2019, their anger turned to fear. And the question regarding the rights of EU citizens already living in Britain still has not been resolved. Instead, harassment continues to increase.

‘This Is Our Country’

When representatives from the3million went to Westminster to lobby parliamentarians there, a Conservative MP said: “Why don’t you put pressure on your own countries.” Their answer was: “This is our country.” Or at least it was.

Many EU citizens seeking certainty have been applying for residency permits since 2016. UK law holds that such an application should be a mere formality for those who have lived in the country for more than five years. In practice, however, things look quite a bit different – as can be seen in the case of Klaudia Orska, a Polish woman who has remained remarkably cheerful despite the bureaucratic odyssey she’s been forced to go through.

The 45-year-old has lived for 11 years in the UK. She works for an apartment realtor, pays her taxes and speaks perfect English. In May, she sent off her application for a residency permit to the Home Office. It consisted of hundreds of pages, including notarized documents, photographs, spreadsheets – an entire life reduced to 3 kilograms of paper.

The package arrived and the application fee was deducted from her account. Then nothing happened. Radio silence. After three months, she was sent back all the documents along with a rejection notice and was told to prepare to leave the country. The justification cited for the rejection was her alleged failure to send passport photographs. Even though the photographs were attached to the pile of papers – a pile that seemed to not have been touched.

Orska sent the package back with a complaint, and reapplied. Three weeks later, she was rejected again, this time because her bank account details were allegedly missing and it was not possible to deduct the fee. “It’s like Monty Python,” she says and even manages to laugh about it. Who knows for how much longer, though. She now finds herself threatened with deportation to Poland. “We left the country back then because we wanted to escape the narrow-mindedness of the politicians there.”

It is cases like this that prompted a group of European parliamentarians to write letters to Theresa May and the Home Office several months ago. “It’s obvious that the authorities have been instructed to reject as many applications as possible,” said one of the authors of the letter, Sophia in ‘t Veld, from the Netherlands. “The British government is deliberately instilling fear in people. What have these people done? Where does this hatred come from? It’s a mystery to me.” She doesn’t feel much the wiser after May’s vague response.

‘Colonial Occupiers’

It isn’t the only question on which the prime minister has waffled. Thus far, she has sought to placate the Brexit hardliners in her own party, who refuse to budge an inch. If EU citizens are allowed to hold on to all their rights, arch-conservative Jacob Rees-Mogg has argued, then they’d have more rights than Britons. “That would give them the status of colonial occupiers.”

As such, the government has said it intends to give EU citizens in the UK the same access to the education and social system as British citizens. But they must apply for that access individually and would lose all further rights they once held as EU citizens. It is a horror scenario for those affected, and not just because of the “errors” the British authorities have made thus far.

It would mean that the 3 million EU citizens would only have recourse to British law, which the government can change any time it likes. There would be countless hardship cases created, with no way of appealing to a supranational court.

Would an Italian woman who grew up in Great Britain be allowed back into the country if she had to go to Italy for two years to care for her sick mother? What about a German academic in Cambridge who takes a two-year posting in France? And will everyone who forgets to include their passport photographs really be deported? These are the kinds of existential questions facing many people who have lived in Britain for many years and who feel British even if they don’t hold a British passport.

May sought to calm their nerves recently in a letter sent out to 100,000 people. “We want people to stay and we want families to stay together,” she wrote. She told her negotiating partners in the EU this summer that there was no need to concerned: “No one is being deported.”

Except, that’s not actually true. Eastern European governments in particular have been complaining that Great Britain is increasingly deporting their citizens in contravention of EU law. According to research carried out by the British non-profit Bail for Immigration Detainees (BiD), around 5,300 EU citizens were expelled between July 2016 and June 2017, often as the result of a court order and without being allowed to appeal. Those deported were disproportionally from Poland and other Eastern European countries.

‘Turned My Life Upside Down’

That is a clear violation of EU law, but it appears to be the only way the British have found to reduce the number of foreigners in their midst. In response to a request for comment, the Home Office claimed that only “criminals” who posed a “serious and ongoing” threat were being deported. Those who obeyed the law had nothing to fear.

A government that is systematically creating a hostile environment. Citizens who believe the Brexit vote has given them carte blanche for hate and discrimination. Bogged down negotiations in Brussels. For many EU citizens, that has been enough to prompt them to turn their backs on a country they had thought would be their permanent home. According to the Office for National Statistics, more than 120,000 left in 2016 and the trend has continued this year.

One of those is Murielle Stentzel, who lived in Kent for eight years before returning to France in September. “Brexit turned my life upside down,” she says.

Stentzel, who is in her late 40s, worked for an auditing center that had to cut jobs because it lost two big contracts after Brexit. Shortly afterwards, she was sitting in a bus in Herne Bay where she lived and asked another passenger to close the window.

Instead, says Stentzel, the man turned around and barked at her: “You know what you slut, if you don’t like it here you can go back to frog land!” When the local paper, the Kentish Gazette, reported on the incident, the comments started coming in by the minute. One reader wrote: “I’ll even help pay to get you out of my country.” “Go find her then?” another wrote.

“This didn’t happen overnight,” Stentzel says. “Brexit opened a door for these people.”

Before long, she couldn’t take it anymore. Leaving her daughter and grandchild behind, she moved to La Rochelle in northern France, to a country she barely knew any longer after all these years. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do there, and she secretly hopes that the British will come to their senses. She says: “Every day I miss England – but not the England of 2017.”

 

 

Ukraine police fail to find Saakashvili in protest camp raid

December 6, 2017

by Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets

Reuters

KIEV (Reuters) – Dozens of Ukrainian police in riot gear raided a protest camp outside parliament on Wednesday in a failed attempt to detain former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who was freed from custody by supporters a day earlier.

Saakashvili later said police had searched the wrong tent at the camp, continuing a surreal hide-and-seek game between him and Ukrainian law enforcement ever since he barged across the border from Poland three months ago.

Saakashvili was granted Ukrainian citizenship and invited by President Petro Poroshenko to become governor of the Odessa region after the “Maidan” protests ousted a pro-Russian president in early 2014, but the two later fell out.

The saga threatens to embarrass the pro-Western leadership in Kiev, although Saakashvili’s party, which is now seeking to unseat Poroshenko at the ballot box, does not have nationwide support, opinion polls show.

Protesters defended the camp, which was set up in September, leading to clashes in which four policemen and an unknown number of civilians were wounded, Kiev police said in a statement.

General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko later acknowledged that the operation could have been carried out more effectively, but said police had acted in accordance with the law.

“Saakashvili will be detained and the best thing he could do, if he were a man, if he really loved Ukraine even a little, would be to come today to Volodymyrska Street (security service headquarters) to testify to investigators,” he told parliament.

The situation near parliament was calm at around 1230 GMT, although an increased number of armored police stood guard around the building, according to a Reuters witness.

Lutsenko has vowed to make all efforts to regain custody of Saakashvili, who was freed by his supporters from a police van in a chaotic scene on Tuesday after being detained on suspicion of assisting a criminal organization

In a televised briefing on Wednesday, Saakashvili — supporters see him as a fearless crusader against corruption — said he would not present himself to law enforcement officials, as requested by the General Prosecutor’s office.

“I am prepared to meet an investigator of the prosecutor in the tent city,” he said.

His detention was the latest twist in a prolonged feud between the Ukrainian authorities and Saakashvili, who has turned on his one-time patron Poroshenko, accusing him of corruption and calling for his removal from office.

Poroshenko’s office said prosecutors have evidence to back up the claims against Saakashvili, whom they accuse of receiving financing from criminals linked to former president Viktor Yanukovich who planned to overthrow the current government.

Saakashvili was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko in July while abroad and is now stateless. The 49-year-old is facing the threat of possible extradition to Georgia, where he is wanted on criminal charges he says were trumped up for political reasons.

Additional reporting by Sergei Karazy; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Matthias Williams and Catherine Evans

 

US troops may become targets after US Jerusalem decision – Iraqi paramilitary group

December 7, 2017

RT

The US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital may become a “legitimate reason” to attack American troops in Iraq, Shia paramilitary group Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba said.

“Trump’s stupid decision… will be the big spark for removing this entity [Israel] from the body of the Islamic nation, and a legitimate reason to target American forces,” said Akram al-Kaabi, the Iraqi organization’s leader, as cited by Reuters.

The US, which is leading a large-scale operation against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in Iraq, has about 5,200 troops in the country, according to the latest statement from the US Defense Department.

Nujaba, mostly made up of Iraqis, has about 10,000 fighters, according to Reuters data. Being a part of the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the group is considered to be one of the most important militias in Iraq.

In November, Ted Poe from the US House of Representatives proposed imposing “terrorism-related sanctions” on Nujaba. The text of the document says Nujaba is “an affiliated faction” of the US-designated foreign terrorist organization Kata’ib Hezbollah, which also fights with the PMF.

Nujaba’s leader Akram al-Kaabi was earlier designated by the Department of the Treasury “for threatening the peace and stability of Iraq.” The bill claims Kaabi took part in “multiple mortar and rocket attacks” on the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2008.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump officially announced his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, where he plans to relocate the US Embassy. The president admitted the move will cause dissent, but says it could help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

A number of world powers, including Germany, Turkey, and Russia, expressed grave concern over the Trump administration’s decision.

On Thursday, the Iraqi government demanded the US reverse its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “We caution against the dangerous repercussions of this decision on the stability of the region and the world,” a government statement reads. “The US administration has to backtrack on this decision to stop any dangerous escalation that would fuel extremism and create conditions favorable to terrorism.”

 

 

Coup D’Etat: The Technique Of Revolution

by Curzio Malaparte

Chapter I, THE BOLSHEVIK COUP D’ETAT AND TROTSKY’S TACTICS

While the strategy of the Bolshevik revolution was due to Lenin, the tactician of the October coup d’Etat in 1917 was Trotsky.

When I was in Russia early in 1929, I had the opportunity of talking to a large number of people, from every walk of life, about the part played by Trotsky in the Revolution. There is an official theory on the subject which is held by Stalin. But everywhere, and especially in Moscow and Leningrad where Trotsky’s party was stronger than elsewhere, I heard judgments passed on Trotsky which differed altogether from those enunciated by Stalin. The only refusal to answer my questions came from Lunacharski, and Madame Kamenev alone, gave me an objective justification of Stalin’s theory, which ought not to be surprising, considering that Madame Kamenev is Trotsky’s sister.

We cannot enter here into the Stalin – Lenin controversy on the subject of the “permanent revolution” and of the part played by Trotsky in the coup d’Etat of October 1917. Stalin denies that Trotsky organized it: he claims that merit for the Commission on which Sverdlov, Stalin, Boubrov, Ouritzki, and Dzerjinski sat. The Commission, to which neither Lenin nor Trotsky belonged, was an integral part of the Revolutionary Military Committee presided over by Trotsky. But Stalin’s controversy with the upholder of the theory of the “permanent revolution” cannot alter the history of the October insurrection, which, according to Lenin’s statement, was organized and directed by Trotsky. Lenin was the “strategus,” idealist, inspirer, the deus ex machina of the revolution, but the man who invented the technique of the Bolshevik coup d‘Etat was Trotsky.

The Communist peril against which governments in modern Europe have to defend themselves lies, not in Lenin’s strategy, but in Trotsky’s tactics. It would be difficult to conceive of Lenin’s strategy apart from the general situation in Russia in 1917. Trotsky’s tactics, on the contrary, were independent of the general condition of the country; their practical application was not conditioned by any of the circumstances which were indispensable to Lenin’s strategy. In Trotsky’s tactics is to be found the explanation why a Communist coup d‘Etat always will be a danger in any European country. In other words, Lenin’s strategy cannot find its application in any Western European country unless the ground is favorably prepared and the circumstances identical with those of Russia in 1917. In his Infantile Disease of Communism, Lenin himself noted that the novelty in the Russian political situation in 1917 “lay in four specific circumstances, which do not at present obtain in Western Europe, and doubtless never will develop either on exactly the same, or even analogous, lines.” An explanation of these four conditions would be irrelevant here. Everyone knows what constituted the novelty of the Russian political situation in 1917. Lenin’s strategy does not, therefore, present an immediate danger to the Governments of Europe. The menace for them, now and always, is from Trotsky’s tactics.

In his remarks on The October Revolution and the Tactics of Russian Communists, Stalin wrote that whoever wished to form an estimate of what happened in Germany in the Autumn of 1923, must not forget the peculiar situation in Russia in 1917. He added: “Comrade Trotsky ought to remember it, since he finds a complete analogy between the October Revolution and the German Revolution and chastises the German Communist party for its real or supposed blunders.” For Stalin, the failure of the German attempt at revolution during the Autumn of 1923 was due to the absence of those specific circumstances which are indispensable to the practical application of Lenin’s strategy. He was astonished to find Trotsky blaming the German Communists. But for Trotsky the success of an attempt at revolution does not depend on circumstances analogous to those obtaining in Russia in 1917. The reason why the German revolution in the Autumn of 1923 failed was not because it was impossible at that time to put Lenin’s strategy into operation. The unpardonable mistake on the part of the German Communists lay in their neglect of the insurrectional tactics of Bolshevism. The absence of favorable circumstances and the general condition of the country do not affect the practical application of Trotsky’s tactics. In fact, there is no justification of the German Communists’ failure to reach their goal.

Since the death of Lenin, Trotsky’s great heresy has threatened the doctrinal unity of Leninism. Trotsky is a Reformer who has the odds against him. He is now a Luther in exile, and those of his adherents who were not so rash as to repent too late, have hastened to repent- officially-too early. Nevertheless, one still frequently meets with heretics in Russia who have not lost the taste for criticism and who go on drawing the most unexpected conclusions from Stalin’s argument. This argument leads to the conclusion that without Kerenski there could be no Lenin, since Kerenski formed one of the chief elements in the peculiar condition of Russia in 1917. But Trotsky does not recognize that there is any need for Kerenski; any more than for Stresemann, Poincaré, Lloyd George, Giolitti, or MacDonald, whose presence, like that of Kerenski, has no influence, favorable or unfavorable, on the practical application of Trotsky’s tactics. Put Poincaré  in the place of Kerenski and the Bolshevik coup d’Etat of 1917 would prove to be equally successful. In Moscow, as in Leningrad, I have sometimes come across adherents of the heretical theory of the “permanent revolution” who virtually held that Trotsky could do without Lenin, that Trotsky could exist without Lenin; which is equivalent to saying that Trotsky might have risen to power in October 1917 if Lenin had stayed in Switzerland and taken no part whatever in the Russian revolution.

The assertion is a risky one but only those who magnify the importance of strategy in a revolution will deem it arbitrary. What matters most are insurrectional tactics, the technique of the coup d’Etat. In a Communist revolution Lenin’s strategy is not an indispensable preparation for the use of insurrectional tactics. It cannot, of itself, lead to the capture of the State. In Italy, in 1919 and 1920, Lenin’s strategy had been put into complete operation and Italy at that time was, indeed, of all European countries, the ripest for a Communist revolution. Everything was ready for a coup d‘Etat. But Italian Communists believed that the revolutionary state of the country, the fever of sedition among the proletarian masses, the epidemic of general strikes, the paralyzed state of economic and political life, the occupation of factories by the workers, and of lands by the peasants, the disorganization of the army, the police and the civil service, the feebleness of the magistrature, the submission of the middle classes, and the impotence of the government were conditions sufficient to allow for a transference of authority to the workers. Parliament was under the control of the parties of the Left and was actually backing the revolutionary activities of the trade unions. There was no lack of determination to seize power, only of knowledge of the tactics of insurrection. The revolution wore itself out in strategy. This strategy was the preparation for a decisive attack, but no one knew how to lead the attack. The Monarchy (which used then to be called a Socialist Monarchy) was actually talked of as a serious obstacle to an insurrectional attack. The parliamentary majority of the Left was very much concerned with the activities of the trade unions, which gave it reason to fear a bid for power out- side the sphere of Parliament and even directed against it. The trade unions suspected Parliament of trying to convert the proletarian revolution into a change of ministry for the benefit of the lower middle classes. How could the coup d‘Etat be organized? Such was the problem during the whole of 1919 and 1920; and not only in Italy, but in almost every Western European country. Trotsky said that the Communists did not know how to benefit by the lesson of October 1917, which was not a lesson in revolutionary strategy but in the tactics of an insurrection.

This remark of Trotsky’s is very important for an understanding of the tactics used in the coup d‘Etat of October 1917, that is, of the technique of the Communist coup d’Etat.

It might be maintained that the tactics of insurrection are a part of revolutionary strategy, and indeed its aim and object. Trotsky’s ideas on this point are very definite. We have already seen that he considers the tactics of insurrection as independent of the general condition of the country or of a revolutionary state of affairs favorable to insurrection. The Russia of Kerenski offers no more of a problem than Holland or Switzerland for the practical application of the October tactics of 1917. The four specific circumstances as defined by Lenin in The Infantile Disease of Communism (i.e., the possibility of combining the Bolshevik revolution with the conclusion of an imperialist war; the chance of benefiting for a short while, by a war between two groups of nations who, except for that war, would have united to fight the Bolshevik revolution; the ability to sustain a civil war in Russia lasting long enough in relation to the immense size of the country and its poor means of communications; the presence of a democratic middle-class revolutionary movement among the peasant masses) are characteristic of the Russian situation in 1917, but they are not indispensable to the successful outcome of a Communist coup d‘Etat. If the tactics of a Bolshevik revolution were dependent upon the same circumstances as Lenin’s strategy, there would not be a Communist peril just now in all the states of Europe.

Lenin, in his strategic idea, lacked a sense of reality; he lacked precision and proportion. He thought of strategy in terms of Clausewitz, more as a philosophy than as an art or science. After his death, among his bedside books, a copy of Clausewitz’s Concerning War was found, annotated in his own writing; and his marginal notes to Marx’s Civil War in France show how well- founded was Trotsky’s challenge of his rival’s strategic genius, It is difficult to see why such importance is officially given to Lenin’s revolutionary strategy in Russia unless it is for the purpose of belittling Trotsky. The historical part played by Lenin in the Revolution makes it unnecessary for him to be considered as a great strategist.

On the eve of the October insurrection Lenin was hopeful and impatient. Trotsky’s election to the Presidency of the Petrograd Soviet and to the Revolutionary Military Committee, and the winning over of the Moscow Soviet majority, had finally set his mind at rest about the question of a majority in the Soviets, which had been his constant thought since July. All the same, he was still anxious about the second Soviet Congress which was due in the last days of October. “We need not get a majority,” Trotsky said, “it will not be the majority that will have to get into power.” And Trotsky was not mistaken. “It would be simply childish,” Lenin agreed, “to wait for a definite majority.” He would have liked to rouse the masses against Kerenski’s government; he wanted to bury Russia under the proletariat; to give the signal for insurrection to the entire Russian People; to appear at the Soviet Congress and override Dan and Skobelov, the two leaders of the Menshevik minority; and to proclaim the fall of Kerenski’s government and the advent of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Insurrectional tactics did not enter into his mind, he thought only in terms of revolutionary strategy. “All right,” said Trotsky, “but first of all, you must take possession of the town, seize the strategic positions and turn out the Government. In order to do that, an insurrection must be organized and storming parties trained. Few people are wanted; the masses are of no use; a small company is sufficient.”

But, according to Lenin, the Bolshevik insurrection must never be accused of being a speculation. “The insurrection,” he said, “must not rest on a plot nor on a party, but on the advanced section of the community.” That was the first point. The insurrection must be sustained by the revolutionary impulse of the whole people. That was the second point. The insurrection must break out on the high-water mark of the revolutionary tide: and that was the third point. These three points marked the distinction between Marxism and mere speculation. ‘‘Very well,” said Trotsky, “but the whole populace is too cumbersome for an insurrection. There need only be a small company, cold- blooded and violent, well-trained in the tactics of insurrection.”

Lenin admitted: “We must hurl all our units into the factories and barracks. There they must stand firm, for there is the crucial spot, the anchor of the Revolution. It is there that OK program must be explained and developed in fiery, ardent speech, with the challenge: Complete acceptance of this program, or insurrection !”

“Very good,” said Trotsky, “but when our program has been accepted by the masses, the insurrection still remains to be organized. We must draw on the factories and barracks for reliable and intrepid adherents. What we need is not the bulk of workers, deserters and fugitives, but shock troops.”

“If we want to carry out the revolution as Marxists, that is to say as an art,” Lenin agreed, “we must also, and without a moment’s delay, organize the General Staff of the insurrectional troops, distribute our forces, launch our loyal regiments against the most salient positions, surround the Alexandra theatre, occupy the Fortress of Peter and Paul, arrest the General Staff and the members of the Government, attack the Cadets and Cossacks with detachments ready to die to the last man, rather than allow the enemy to penetrate into the center of the town, We must mobilize the armed workers, call them to the supreme encounter, take over the telephone and telegraph exchanges at the same time, quarter our insurrectional General Staff in the telephone exchange and connect it up by telephone with all the factories, regiments, and points at which the armed struggle is being waged.”

“Very good,” Trotsky said, “but . . .”

“All that is only approximate,” Lenin recognized, “but I am anxious to prove that at this stage we could not remain loyal to Marx with- out considering revolution as an art. You know the chief rules of this art as Marx laid them down. When applied to the present situation in Russia, these rules imply: as swift and sudden a general offensive on Petrograd as possible; at- tacking both from inside and out, from the workers’ districts in Finland, from Reval and from Kronstadt; an offensive with the whole fleet; the concentration of troops greatly superior to the Government’s forces which will he 20,000 strong (Cadets and Cossacks). We must rally our three chief forces, the fleet, the workers, and the military units to take over the telephone and telegraph offices, the stations and the bridges and to hold them at any cost. We must recruit the most tenacious among our storming parties for detachments whose duty it will be to occupy all the important bridges and to take part in every decisive engagement. We must also form gangs of workers armed with rifles and hand grenades who will march on enemy positions, on the officers’ training schools and on the telephone and telegraph exchanges, and surround them. , The triumph of both the Russian and the world- revolution depends on a two or three days’ struggle.”

“That is all quite reasonable,” said Trotsky, “but it is too complicated. The plan is too vast and it is a strategy which includes too much territory and too many people. It is not an insurrection any longer, it is a war. In order to take possession of Petrograd it is needless to take the train in Finland. Those who start from too great a distance often have to stop halfway. An offensive of 20,000 men from Reval or Kronstadt for the purpose of seizing the Alexandra theatre is rather more than is required; it is more than an assault. As far as strategy is concerned, Marx himself could be outdone by Kornilov. One must concentrate on tactics, move in a small space with few men, concentrate all efforts on principal objectives, strike hard and straight. I don’t think it is so complicated. Dangerous things are always extremely simple. In order to be successful, one must not challenge an unfavorable circumstance nor trust to a favorable one. Hit your adversary in the stomach and the blow, will be noiseless. Insurrection is a piece of noiseless machinery. Your strategy demands too many favorable circumstances. Insurrection needs nothing. It is self-sufficient.”

“Your tactics are extremely simple,” said Lenin: “There is only one rule: succeed, You prefer Napoleon to Kerenski, don’t you?”

The words which I attribute to Lenin are not invented. They are to be found, word for word, in the letters he wrote to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in October 1917.

Those who are acquainted with all Lenin’s writings, and especially with his notes on the insurrectional technique of the December Days in Moscow during the Revolution of 1905, must be rather surprised to find how ingenuous his ideas about the tactics and technique of an insurrection are on the eve of October 1917. And yet it must not be forgotten that he and Trotsky alone, after the failure of the July attempt, did not lose sight of the chief aim of revolutionary strategy, which was the coup d‘Etat. After some vacillation (in July the Bolshevik Party had only one aim and it was of a parliamentary nature: to gain the majority in the Soviets), the idea of insurrection, as Lunacharski said, had become the driving power of all Lenin’s activities. But during his stay in Finland where he had taken shelter after the July Days to avoid falling into the hands of Kerenski, all his activity was concentrated on the preparation of the revolution in theory. There seems to be no other explanation for the ingenuousness of his plan to make a military offensive on Petrograd that was to be backed up by the Red Guards within the town. The offensive would have ended in disaster. With Lenin’s strategy checkmated, the tactics of an insurrection would have failed and the Red Guards have been massacred in the streets of Petrograd. Because he was compelled to follow the course of events from a distance, Lenin could not grasp the situation in all its details. Nonetheless, he visualized the main trend of the revolution far more clearly than certain members of the Central Committee of t he party who objected to an immediate insurrection. “It is a crime to wait,’’ he wrote to the Bolshevik Committees in Petrograd and Moscow.

And although the Central Committee in its meeting on October 10, at which Lenin, just returned from Finland, was present, voted almost unanimously for an insurrection (only Kamenev and Zinoviev dissenting), yet there was still a secret opposition among certain members of the Committee. Kamenev and Zinoviev were the only members who had publicly protested against an immediate insurrection, but their objections were the very same as those fostered by many others in secret. Those who disagreed, in secret, with Lenin’s decision brought all their hatred to bear on Trotsky, “the unattractive Trotsky,” a new recruit to the ranks of Bolshevism whose pride was beginning to arouse a good deal of jealousy and attention among Lenin’s old life guards.

During those days Lenin hid away in a suburb of Petrograd and, without losing touch with the situation as a whole, he carefully watched the machinations of Trotsky’s adversaries. At a moment like this, indecision in any form would have been fatal to the revolution. In a letter to the Central Committee, dated October 17, Lenin resisted most energetically the criticisms of Kamenev and Zinoviev whose arguments were intended to expose Trotsky’s mistakes. They said that “without the collaboration of the masses and without the support of a general strike, the insurrection will only be a leap in the dark and doomed to failure. Trotsky’s tactics are a pure gamble. A Marxist party cannot associate the question of an insurrection with that of a military conspiracy.”

In his letter of October 17, Lenin defended Trotsky’s tactics: “Trotsky is not playing with the ideas of Blanqui,” he said. “A military conspiracy is a game of that sort only if it is not organized by the political party of a definite class of people and if the organizers disregard the general political situation and the international situation in particular. There is a great difference between a military conspiracy, which is deplorable from every point of view, and the art of armed insurrection.” Kamenev and Zinoviev might answer: “Has Trotsky not constantly been repeating that an insurrection must disregard the political and economic situation of the country? Has he not constantly been stating that a general strike is one of the chief factors in a communist coup d’Etat? How can the co-operation of the trade unions and the proclamation of a general strike be relied upon if the trade unions are not with us, but in the enemy’s camp? They will strike against us. We do not even negotiate directly with the railway men. In their Executive Committee there are only two Bolsheviks to forty members. How can we win without the help of the trade unions and without the support of a general strike?”

These objections were serious: Lenin could only meet them with his unshakable decision. But Trotsky smiled: he was calm. “Insurrection,” he said, “is not an art, it is an engine. Technical experts are required to start it and they alone could stop it.”

Trotsky’s storming party consisted of a thousand workmen, soldiers and sailors. The pick of this company had been recruited from workmen of the Putilov and Wiborg factories, from sailors of the Baltic fleet and soldiers of the Latvian regiments. Under the orders of Antonov- Ovseienko, these Red Guards devoted themselves for ten days to a whole series of “invisible maneuvers” in the very center of the town. Among the crowd of deserters that thronged the streets, in the midst of the chaos that reigned in the government buildings and offices, in the General Headquarters, in the Post Offices, telephone and telegraph exchanges, in the stations, barracks, and the head offices of the city’s technical services, they practiced insurrectional tactics, unarmed and in broad daylight. And their little groups of three or four men passed unnoticed.

The tactics of “invisible maneuvers” and the practice of insurrectional action which Trotsky demonstrated for the first time during the coup d‘Etat of October 1917 is now a part of the revolutionary strategy of the Third International. The principles which Trotsky applied are all stated and developed in the handbooks of the Comintern. In the Chinese University in Moscow, among the subjects taught, there is “the tactics of invisible maneuvers,” which Karakan, with Trotsky’s experience for guidance, applied so successfully in Shanghai. In the Sun-Yat-Sen University in Moscow, the Chinese students learn the same principles which German Communist organizations put into practice every Sunday in order to get into training for the tactics of insurrection; and they do it in broad daylight, under the very nose of the police and of the sober citizens of Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg.

In October 1917, during the days prior to the coup d‘Etat, the Reactionary, Liberal, Menshevik and Socialist revolutionary press never ceased to enlighten public opinion as to the activities of the Bolshevik Party, which was openly preparing an insurrection. It accused Lenin and Trotsky of seeking to overthrow the democratic republic in order to set up a dictatorship of the proletariat. They were not trying to disguise their criminal intentions, said the middle-class press, the proletarian revolution was being organized in broad daylight. When Bolshevik leaders made speeches to the masses of workers and soldiers gathered in the factories and barracks they loudly proclaimed that everything was ready and that the day for revolution was drawing nearer. What was the Government doing? Why had Lenin, Trotsky and the other member: of the Central Committee not been arrested? What measures were being taken to protect Russia from the Bolshevik danger?

It is incorrect to say that Kerenski’s Government did not take the measures needed for the defense of the State. Kerenski must be given due credit for having done everything in his power to prevent a coup d‘Etat. If Poincarié, Lloyd George, MacDonald, Giolitti, or Stresemann had stood in his place, they would not have acted otherwise.

Kerenski’s system of defense consisted in using the police methods which have always been relied upon and are still relied upon today by absolute as well as by liberal governments. But these police methods can no longer adequately defend the State from the modern technique of insurrection. Kerenski’s mistake was the mistake of all governments that regard the problem of the defense of the State as a police problem.

Those who accuse Kerenski of a lack of foresight and of incompetence forget the skill and courage he showed in the July Days against the workers’ and deserters’ revolt, and again in August against Kornilov’s reactionary venture. In August he did not hesitate to call in the Bolsheviks themselves in order to prevent Kornilov’s Cossacks from sweeping the democratic victories of the February revolution overboard. On this occasion he astonished Lenin: “We must beware of Kerenski,” he said, “he is no fool.” Kerenski must have his due: it was impossible for him, in October, to act differently from the way he did. Trotsky had said that the defense of the State was a matter of method. Moreover, in October 1917 only one method was known, only one could be applied whether by Kerenski, Lloyd George, Poincaré , or Noske: the classical method of relying on the police.

In order to meet the danger, Kerenski took care to garrison the Winter Palace, the Tauride Palace, the Government offices, the telephone and telegraph exchanges, and the General Headquarters with military Cadets and loyal Cossacks. The 20,000 men on whom he could count inside the capital were thus mobilized to protect the strategic points in the political and bureaucratic organization of the State. (This was the mistake by which Trotsky would benefit.) Other reliable regiments were massed in the neighborhood at Tsarkoié Selo, Kolpino, Gatchina, Oboukhovo, and Pulkovo-an iron ring which the Bolshevik insurrection must sever if it was not to be stifled. All the measures which might safeguard the Government had been taken, and detachments of Cadets patrolled the town day and night. There were clusters of machine-guns at the crossroads, on the roofs, all along the Nevski Prospect, and at each end of the main streets, to prevent access to the squares. Military patrols passed back and forth among the crowds: armored cars moved slowly by, opening up a passage with the long howl of their hooters. The chaos was terrible. “There’s my general strike,” said Trotsky to Antovov Ovseienko, pointing to the swirling crowds in the Nevski Prospect.

Meanwhile, Kerenski was not content with mere police measures; he set the whole political machine in motion. He not only wanted to rally the Right but to make assurance doubly sure by agreement with the Left. He was most concerned about the trade unions. He knew that their leaders were not in agreement with the Bolsheviks. That fact accounted for the Kamenev-Zinoviev criticism of Trotsky’s idea of insurrection. A general strike was an indispensable factor for the insurrection. Without it the Bolsheviks could not feel safe and their attempt was bound to fail. Trotsky described the revolution as “hitting a paralyzed man.” If the insurrection was to succeed, life in Petrograd must be paralyzed by a general strike. The trade union leaders were out of sympathy with the Bolsheviks, but their organized rank and file inclined towards Lenin. If the masses could not be won over, then Kerenski would like to have the leaders on his side: he entered into negotiations with them and finally, but not without a struggle, was successful in obtaining their neutrality. When Lenin heard of it he said to Trotsky: “Kamenev was right. Without a general strike to support you, your tactics can but fail.” ‘‘I have disorganization on my side,” Trotsky answered, “and that is better than a general strike.”

In order to grasp Trotsky’s plan one must appreciate the condition of Petrograd at that time. There were enormous crowds of deserters who had left the trenches at the beginning of the February revolution and had poured into the capital and thrown themselves on it as though they would destroy the new temple of liberty. During the last six months they had been camping in the middle of the streets and squares, ragged as they were, dirty, miserable, drunk or famished, timid or fierce, equally ready to revolt or to flee, their hearts burning with a thirst for vengeance and peace. They sat there in a never- ending row, on the pavement of the Nevski Prospect, beside a stream of humanity that flowed on slowly and turbulently. They sold weapons, propaganda leaflets and sunflower seeds, There was chaos beyond description in the Zramenskaia Square in front of the railway station of Moscow: the crowd dashed against the wall, surged back, then forward again with renewed vigor until it broke like a foaming wave on a heap of carts, vans, and tramcars piled up in front of the statue of Alexander III, and with a deafening din which, from afar, sounded like the outcry of a massacre.

Over the Fontanka bridge at the crossroads between the Nevski and Liteyni Prospects, newsboys sold their papers: they shouted the news at the top of their voices, about the precautions taken by Kerenski, the proclamations of the Military Revolutionary Committee, of the Soviet and of the Municipal Duma, the decrees of Colonel Polkovnikov, who was in command of the square and who threatened to imprison all deserters and forbade manifestations and meetings and brawls. Workers, soldiers, students, clerks, and sailors at the street corners debated at the top of their voices and with sweeping gestures. In the cafés and stalovaie everywhere, people laughed at Colonel Polkovnikov’s proclamations which pretended that the 200,000 deserters in Petrograd could be arrested and that brawls could be forbidden. In front of the Winter Palace there were two 75 cm. guns, and behind them the Cadets in their long greatcoats, were nervously pacing up and down. In front of the General Staff building two rows of military motorcars were drawn up. Near the Admiralty, in the Alexander Gardens, a battalion of women sat on the ground around their stacked rifles.

The Marinskaia Square overflowed with ragged and haggard workers, sailors, deserters. The entrance of the Maria Palace, where the Republican Council sat, was guarded by a detachment of Cossacks, their tall black chapkas tilted over one ear. They talked in loud voices, smoking and laughing. A spectator from the top of the Isaac Cathedral could have seen heavy smoke clouds over Putilov’s factories where the men worked with loaded rifles slung round their shoulders; beyond that, the Gulf of Finland; and, behind the island of Rothine, Kronstadt, “the red fortress,” where the blue-eyed sailors were waiting for Dybenko’s signal to march to the aid of Trotsky and slaughter the Cadets. On the other side of the town, a reddish cloud brooded over the countless chimneys of the Wiborg suburb where Lenin was in hiding, rather pale and feverish, wearing that wig which made him look like a little provincial actor. No one could have taken this man, without his beard and with his false hair well glued on to his forehead, for the terrible Lenin who could make Russia tremble. It was there, in the Wiborg factories, that Trotsky’s Red Guard’s expected Antonov Ovseienko’s signal. The women in the suburbs had sad faces and their eyes had become hard. Towards evening, as soon as darkness had swept the streets, parties of armed women moved towards the center of the town. These were days of proletarian migration: enormous masses passed from one end of Petrograd to the other, then came back to their quarters after hours and hours of walking to and from meetings, demonstrations and riots. There was meeting after meeting in barrack and factory. “All power to the Soviets!” The hoarse voices of the orators were smothered in the folds of red flags. Kerenski’s soldiers, manning the machine-guns on the housetops, listened to the hoarse voices below as they chewed their sunflower seeds and threw the shells on to the crowds thronging the streets.

Darkness descended on the city like a black cloud, In the huge Nevski Prospect the stream of deserters flowed towards the Admiralty. There were hundreds of soldiers, women, and workmen camping in front of the Kazan Cathedral, lying full length on the ground. The whole town was in the throes of fear, disorder, and frenzy. And all of a sudden, out of this crowd, men would spring up, armed with knives and mad with sleeplessness, and throw themselves on the Cadet patrols and the female battalions de- fending the Winter Palace. Others would break into the houses to fetch the bourgeois out of his own dwelling, catching him in bed and wide awake. The city was sleepless with the fever of insurrection. Like Lady Macbeth, Petrograd could no longer sleep. Its nights were haunted with the smell of blood.

Trotsky’s Red Guards had been rehearsing in the very center of the town during the past ten days. Antonov Ovseienko it was, who organized these tactical exercises, this sort of dress rehearsal of the coup d’Etat, in broad daylight, wherever the streets were thronging with movement, and round buildings which were of the greatest strategic importance in the govern- mental and political strongholds. The police and military authorities were so obsessed by the idea of a sudden revolt by the proletarian masses, and so concerned with meeting the danger, that they failed to notice Antonov Ovseienko’s gangs at work. Amid such widespread disorder, who should notice the little groups of unarmed workers; the soldiers and the sailors who wandered about in the corridors of the telephone and telegraph exchanges, in the Central Post Office, in the Government offices and General Headquarters, taking note of the arrangement of the offices and seeing how the telephones and lights were fitted? They visualized and remembered the plan of these buildings and studied the means of getting into them suddenly and at a moment’s notice. They reckoned with their chances of success, estimating the opposition, and looking for the places of least resistance, the weakest and most vulnerable places in the defensive organization of the technical, military, and secretarial services of the State. In the general con- fusion, who should notice some three or four sailors, a couple of soldiers, or a stray workman wandering round some buildings, going in and climbing the stairs; people who did not even look at each other when they met? No one even suspected these people of obeying precise and detailed orders, of carrying out a plan or of undergoing exercises directed against the strategic points in the State’s defense. Later the Red Guards would strike effectively because they had conducted their invisible maneuvers on the very ground where the battle would shortly begin.

Trotsky succeeded in getting hold of the plan of the town’s technical services. Dybenko’s sailors, aided by two engineers and engine-room artificers, mastered the underground gas and water piping, the electric power cables and the telephone and telegraph system. Two of them explored the drains under the Headquarters of the General Staff. The isolation of a whole district or even of a mere group of houses had to be made practicable within a few minutes; so Trotsky divided the town into sections, deter- mined which were the strategic points, and allotted the work, section by section, to gangs of soldiers and skilled workers.

Technical experts were necessary as well as soldiers. The capture of the railway station in Moscow was allotted to two squads consisting of 25 Latvian soldiers, 2 sailors, and 10 railway men. Three gangs of sailors, workmen, and railway officials, 160 men in all, were ordered to take over the station in Warsaw. For the capture of other stations Dybenko assigned a number of squads of 20 men each . A telegraphist attached to every squad control1ed movements on the rail- way lines. On October 21, acting under orders from Antonov Ovseienko, who was in close touch with the maneuvers, all the gangs rehearsed the capture of the railway stations, and the general rehearsal was perfectly well-ordered and precise in every detail. On that day, three sailors went to the Main Electricity  Plant near the port: the Plant, run by the city ’s technical services, was not even guarded. The manager asked the sailors whether they were the men whom he had asked the Commander of the Square to send him. He had been wanting a guard for the last five days. The three sailors took over the defense of the Electric Plant, in case of insurrection, they said. In the same way, a few gangs of engineroom artificers took over the other three municipal plants.

Kerenski’s police and  the military authorities were especially concerned with the defense of the State’s official and political organizations: the Government offices , the Maria Palace where the Republican council sat, the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma, the Winter Palace, and Genera1 Headquarters. When Trotsky discovered this mistake he decided to attack only the technical branches of the national and municipal Government. Insurrection for him was only a question of technique. “In order to overthrow the modern State,” he said, “you need a storming party, technical experts and gangs of armed men led by engineers.”

While Trotsky was organizing the coup d‘Etat on a rational basis, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was busy organizing the proletarian revolution. Stalin, Sverdlov, Boubrov, Ouritzki, and Dzerjinski, the members of this committee who were developing the plan of the general revolt were nearly all openly hostile to Trotsky. These men felt no confidence in the insurrection as Trotsky planned it, and ten years later Stalin gave them all the credit for the October coup D’Etat.

What use were Trotsky’s thousand men? The Cadets could so easily deal with them. The task surely was to rouse the proletarian masses, the thousands upon thousands of employees from the works of Putilov and Wiborg, the huge crowd of deserters and the Bolshevik sympathizers in- side the garrison of Petrograd, it was these who ought to be stirred up against the Government. A great rebellion must be started. Trotsky, with his storming parties, seemed both a useless and a dangerous ally.

The Commission considered the revolution much in the same way as Kerenski, as a matter chiefly concerning the police. And, strangely enough, the man who later on created the Bolshevik police (afterwards known as the G. P.U.) belonged to this Commission. Dzerjinski, pale and anxious, studied the defense of Kerenski’s government and decided on the plan of attack. He was the most formidable and the most treacherous of all Trotsky’s critics, and he was as bashful as a woman in his fanaticism. He even denied himself a glance at his hands to see whether they were stained with his deeds. Dzerjinski died at the Bench during his prosecution of Trotsky in 1926.

On the eve of the coup d’Etat, Trotsky told Dzerjinski that Kerenski’s government must be completely ignored by the Red Guards; that the chief thing was to capture the State and not to fight the Government with machine-guns; that the Republican Council, the Ministries and the Duma played an unimportant part in the tactics of insurrection and should not be the objectives of an armed rebellion; that the key to the State lay, not in its political and secretarial organizations nor yet in the Tauride, Maria or Winter Palaces, but in its technical services, such as the electric stations, the telephone and telegraph offices, the port, gasworks and water mains. Dzerjinski answered that the insurrection must be planned to anticipate the enemy’s movements and that the latter must be attacked in his strongholds. “We must attack the Government and beat it on the very ground where it is defending the State. If the enemy withdraws to the Government offices, to the Maria, Tauride, or Winter Palaces, he must be hounded out of them. In order to get possession of the State,” said Dzerjinski, “we must hurl the masses against the Government.”

All important in the Commission’s plan for the Insurrection was the neutrality of the Trade Unions. Could the State really be overthrown without the assistance of Genera1 Strike? “No,” said both the Central Committee and the Commission, ”the strike must be started by getting the masses to take part in the insurrection itself. The tactics of a general insurrection and not those of isolated revolts are going to make it possible for us to hurl the masses against the Government and to promote a Genera1 Strike. “A General Strike is unnecessary,” Trotsky replied. “Chaos in Petrograd is more useful for our purpose than a General Strike. The Government cannot cope with an insurrection when a general disorganization paralyses the State. Since we cannot rely on the Strike, we will rely on the chaos.”

The Commission is said to have objected to Trotsky’s tactics on the ground that his view of the situation was too optimistic. Trotsky, as a matter of fact, was inclined to be pessimistic; he judged the situation to be more serious than most people thought. He did not trust the masses and knew very well that the insurrection would have to be made by a minority. The promotion of a General Strike with the idea of enlisting the masses in a real battle against the Government was an illusion. The insurrection could only be made by a minority. Trotsky was convinced that if a General Strike broke out it would be directed against the Bolsheviks and that in order to prevent such a General Strike, power must immediately be seized. Subsequent events have proved that Trotsky was right. By the time the railway men, the postal, telegraph, and telephone clerks, the secretariats in the Government offices and the employees in public services had left their work, it was too late. Lenin was already in power: Trotsky had broken the back of the general strike.

The Central Committees’ objections to Trotsky’s tactics was a paradox which might have jeopardized the success of the insurrection. On the eve of the coup d‘Etat there were two Headquarters, two plans of action, and two different aims. The Commission, relying on the mass of workers and deserters, wanted to capture the Government in order to seize the State. Trotsky, who relied on about a thousand men, wanted to capture the State in order to overthrow the Government. Marx himself would have considered the circumstances more favorable to the Commission’s plan than to Trotsky’s. But Trotsky had said: “An insurrection does not require favorable circumstances.”

On October 24th, in full daylight, Trotsky launched the attack. The plan of operations had been drawn up by a former officer of the Imperial army, Antonov Ovseienko, who was also known as a mathematician, a chess player, a revolutionary, and an exile. Lenin, referring to Trotsky’s tactics, once said of Antonov Ovseienko that only a chess player like him could organize the insurrection.

Antonov Ovseienko had a melancholy and unhealthy expression. He looked rather like Napoleon before the 18th of Brumaire, with his long hair falling on his shoulders: but his eyes were lifeless and his thin pale face was that of a sad and unhealthy man.

Antonov Ovseienko was playing chess on a topographical map of Petrograd in a small room on the top floor of the Smolny Institute, the General Headquarters of the Bolshevik Party. Below him, on the next floor, the Commission was met to fix the day for the general insurrection. Little the Commission imagined that Trotsky had already launched the attack. Lenin alone had been informed, at the last minute, of Trotsky’s sudden decision. The Commission stood by Lenin’s word. Had he not said that both the 2lst and the 24th would be too early and the 26th too late? No sooner had the Commission met to decide definitely on the date, than Podvoisky came in with unexpected news. Trotsky’s Red Guards had already seized the main telegraph office and the Neva bridges. These bridges had to be held in order to insure the lines of communication between the center of the city and the workmen’s district of Wiborg. Dybenko’s sailors already held the municipal electricity stations, gasworks, and railway stations. Things had happened with unimagined speed and orderliness. The main telegraph office was being defended by some fifty police and soldiers, lined up in front of the building. The insufficiency of police measures was evidenced by those tactics of defense called “service of order and protection,’’ which may give good results when directed against a crowd in revolt but not against a handful of determined fighters. Police measures are useless in the face of a surprise attack. Three of Dybenko’s sailors, who had taken part in the “invisible maneuvers” and knew the ground already, got in among those who were defending, right into the offices; and by throwing a few hand grenades from the window on to the street, they succeeded in creating chaos among the police and the soldiers. Two squads of sailors took up their positions with machine-guns in the main telegraph office. A third squad, posted in the house opposite, was ready to meet a possible counter-attack by shooting in the rear of the assailants. Communications between the Smolny Institute and the various groups working in different districts of the town were assured by armoured cars. Machine-guns were concealed in the houses at the chief crossroads: flying squads watched the barracks of those regiments which had remained loyal to Kerenski.

About six o’clock that evening Antonov Ovseienko, paler than usual but smiling, went into Lenin’s room at the Smolny Institute. “It is over,” he said. The members of the Government, taken unawares by these events, sought refuge in the Winter Palace, defended by a few Cadet companies and a battalion of women. Kerenski had fled. They said he was at the Front to collect troops and march on Petrograd. The entire population poured into the streets, anxious for news. Shops, cafés, restaurants, cinemas, and theatres were all open; the trams were filled with armed soldiers and workers and a huge crowd in the Nevski Prospect flowed on like a great river. Everyone was talking, discussing and cursing either the Government or the Bolsheviks. The wildest rumors spread from group to group: Kerenski dead, the heads of the Menshevik minority shot in front of the Tauride Palace; Lenin sitting in the Tsar’s room in the Winter Palace.

A great crowd surged continuously towards the Alexander Gardens from the Nevski Prospect, the Gorokovskaia and Vosnessenski Streets (those three great roads that meet at the Admiralty), to see whether the Red Flag was already flying on the Winter Palace. When the crowd saw the Cadets defending the Palace, it drew back. The machineguns, the lighted windows, the deserted square, and the motors drawn up in front of the General Headquarters were a disturbing sight. The crowd watched from a distance without grasping the situation. And Lenin? Where was he? Where were the Bolsheviks ?

Meanwhile none of their opponents, whether Liberal, Reactionary, Menshevik, or Socialist Revolutionary, could grasp the situation. They refused to believe that the Bolsheviks had captured the State. These rumors they argued had probably been circulated by paid agents of the Smolny Institute: in point of fact the Government offices had only been moved into the Winter Palace as a precautionary measure; if the day’s news was correct, then there had not been a coup d‘Etat, but rather, a series of more or less successful armed attacks (nothing definite was yet known) on the organization of the State’s and the town’s public services. The legislative, political, and administrative bodies were still in Kerenski‘s hands. The Tauride and Maria Palaces, and the Ministries had not even been attacked. The situation was certainly paradoxical : never before had an insurrection claimed to have captured the State without even attacking the Government. It looked as though the Bolsheviks did not care about the Government. Why were the Government offices not taken over? Could one master the State and govern Russia without even controlling the State’s administration? The Bolsheviks had, of course, captured all the public services, but Kerenski had not resigned. He was still the head of the Government, even if, for the present, the public services, the railways, electric plants, telephone, telegraph, and Post Offices, the State Bank, and the coal, petroleum and grain depots were not under his control. If in actual fact, the Ministers in the Winter Palace were unable to govern ; Government offices were not working, the Government had been cut off from the rest of Russia and every means of communication was in the hands of the  Bolsheviks. All the roads in the suburbs were barricaded; no one might leave the town. General Headquarters were cut off. The Bolsheviks had taken over the main wireless telegraphy station ; Red Guards were quartered in the fortress of Peter and Paul and a number of regiments belonging to the garrison of Petrograd were already acting under orders from the Revolutionary Military Committee. Action must be taken at once. Why was the General Staff idle? It was said to be waiting for Krasnov’s troops which were marching on the capital. All measures necessary for the defense of the Government had been taken. If the Bolsheviks had not yet decided to attack the Government it must mean that they did not yet feel their position to be powerful enough to do so. All was not yet lost.

The next day, on October 25th, during the opening of the second Pan-Russian Soviet Congress in the Smolny Institute, Trotsky ordered Antonov Ovseienko to attack the Winter Palace where Kerenski’s ministers had taken refuge, and now the question was, would the Bolsheviks win a majority in the Congress?

The Soviets of all Russia would not believe that the insurrection has been successful on the mere announcement that the Bolsheviks had captured the State. They must be told that the Red Guards had captured the Members of the Government. Trotsky said to Lenin: “That is the only way of convincing the Central Committee and the Commission that the coup d‘Etat has not been a failure.”

“You have made up your mind rather late,” answered Lenin.

“I could not attack the Government before I was convinced that the garrison would not come to its rescue,” Trotsky answered, “I had to give the soldiers time to come over to our side. Only the Cadets have remained loyal.”

Then Lenin, in his wig, beardless and disguised as a workman, left his hiding-place for the Smolny Institute to take part in the Soviet Congress. It was the saddest moment in his life for he thought the insurrection had failed. Like the Central Committee, the Commission. and the greater part of the delegates at the Congress, Lenin needed proof of the Government’s fall and of the capture of Kerenski’s Ministers by the Red Guards. He distrusted Trotsky’s pride, his self- assurance and his reckless wiles. Trotsky was no member of the Old Guard , he was not an absolutely reliable Bolshevik but a new recruit who joined the Party after the; July Days. “I am not one of the Twelve,” said ’ Trotsky, “but I am more like St. Paul who was the first to preach to the Gentiles.”

Lenin was never greatly attracted by Trotsky. Trotsky was generally unpopular. His eloquence was suspect. He had that dangerous gift of swaying the masses and unleashing a revolt. He could split a Party, invent a heresy – but, however formidable, he was a man they needed. Lenin had long ago noticed that Trotsky relished historical comparisons. When he spoke at meetings or assemblies or took part in one of the Party’s debates, he constantly referred to Cromwell’s Puritan Revolt or to the French Revolution. One must beware of a man who judges and estimates the men and the events of the Bolshevik Revolution by the standard of the men and events of the French Revolution. Lenin could never forget how Trotsky, as soon as he came out of the Kresty prison where he had been shut up after the July Days, went into the Soviet in Petrograd and, in the course of a violent speech, advocated the need for a Jacobine reign of terror. “The guillotine leads to a Napoleon,” the Mensheviks shouted at him. “I prefer Napoleon to Kerenski,” Trotsky answered back. Lenin was never going to forget that answer. Dzerjinsky later on used to say of Trotsky: “He likes Napoleon better than Lenin.”

The second Pan-Russian Soviet Congress was meeting in the main hall of the Smolny Institute, and in the room adjoining it, Lenin and Trotsky sat at a table heaped with papers and journals.

A curl of Lenin’s wig dangled on his forehead. Trotsky could not help smiling at the sight of such an absurd disguise. He thought the moment had come for Lenin to take off his wig, since there was no longer any danger. The insurrection had triumphed and Lenin was virtually the ruler of Russia. Now at least, he could let his beard grow, take his wig off, and make an appearance in public. Dan and Skobelov, the two leaders of the Menshevik majority, passed in front of Lenin on their way to the Congress Hall. They exchanged a look and grew paler at the sight of the little provincial actor in his wig, whom they seemed to recognize as the man who could utterly annihilate Holy Russia.

“It is all over,” Dan said softly to Skobelov. “Why are you still disguised?” Trotsky asked Lenin. “Those who have won do not usually conceal themselves.” Lenin scrutinized him, his eyes half-closed, with an ironic smile just playing on his lips. Who had won? That was the question. From time to time the rumble of artillery and the rat-tat-tat of machine-guns could be heard in the distance. The cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva, had just opened fire on the Winter Palace to support the Red Guards who were attacking it.

They were now joined by Dybenko, very tall, blue-eyed, his face framed in soft fair hair: both the Kronstadt sailors and Madame Kollontai loved him for his transparent eyes and for his cruelty. Dybenko brought the news that Antonov-Ovseieniko’s Red Guards had broken into the Winter Palace, that Kerenski’s Ministers were the prisoners of the Bolsheviks, and that the Government had fallen. “At last!” cried Lenin. “You are 1 twenty-four hours late,” answered Trotsky. Lenin took his wig off and passed his hand across his forehead. (H. G. Wells once said of Lenin that his skull was the same shape as that of Lord Balfour.) “Come on,” said Lenin, walking into the Congress Hall. Trotsky followed in silence. He looked tired and a kind of drowsiness dimmed his steely eyes. Lunacharski declares that Trotsky, during the insurrection, reminded him of a Leyden Jar. But now the Government had fallen, Lenin took his wig off, as one lays down a mask. The coup d‘Etat was Trotsky’s feat. The man who profited by it, the Chief and the Dictator, was Lenin.

Trotsky followed him in silence, with a doubtful smile that never grew to gentleness until Lenin died.

 

 

 

 

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