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Between the lines certain hints slipped through of a struggle at the top over the question of my deportation. The Stalin faction was in a hurry. And they had reason enough: there were not only political difficulties to overcome but physical ones as well. The steamer Kalinin had been assigned to take us from Odessa, but it had been frozen in. All the efforts of the icebreakers were in vain. Moscow was standing at the telegraph wire, urging haste. The steamer Ilyich was made ready on short order.

During his visit to Moscow in 1924, Herriot, as I understood him at the time, tried a more sympathetic, though even then not very clear-cut, approach toward the Soviets. But now that a de­ cade has passed, he considers it timely to withdraw his credit from the October Revolution. I confess I do not understand the political thinking of the Radical very well. Revolutions have never issued short-term promissory notes to anyone. 38 Nevertheless it remains beyond dispute that if the Jacobins had not taken reprisals against the Girondists and had not shown the world an example of how to deal radically with the old order, all of humanity today would have been shorter by a head.

The open ballot was introduced in order to keep the enemy in hand through the pressure of the public opinion of the workers and above all their vanguard. But at present the party bureaucracy is using this instrument against the masses in the party and, in the unions, turns it against the mass of workers in general. We can clearly see where things have come to, thanks to the following fact: in a whole number of regions, the party masses had understood for one, two, or three years that at the head of the regional committee of the party and of the regional executive committee of the soviets were to be found adventurers, disloyal elements, future traitors; they knew it and yet they kept silent.