2 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LETTER FROM LEON TROTZKY Moreover, even though the reasons for this action against me have not been communicated to me, whom they above all concern, these reasons have been stated by Mr. Briand to the deputies and to the journalists.
In Marseilles last August a number of Russian mutineers killed their colonel. court investigation is alleged to have disclosed that a number of these soldiers were in possession of several numbers of the Nashe Slovo. At least this is the explanation given by Mr. Briand in an interview with Deputy Longuet and with the president of the Chamber Committee of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Leygues, who, in turn, transmitted this version to the journalists of the Russian bourgeois press. To be sure, Mr. Briand did not possess the audacity to claim that the Nashe Slovo, which stood subject to his own censorship, was directly responsible for the killing of the officer.
It is likely that his thoughts were somewhat along the following lines. In view of the presence of Russian soldiers in France, it is necessary to weed out the Nashe Slovo and to banish its editors from the soil of the Republic. For a Socialist newspaper that refuses to spread illusions and lies may, according to the memorable doctrine of Mr. Renaudel, open the eyes of the Russian soldiers to hypocrisies and lead them into dangerous paths of reflection and meditation. Unfortunately, however, for Mr. Briand, this explanation of his is based upon a very vexatious anachronism. year ago Gustav Hervé, at that time still member of the permanent administrative committee of your party, wrote that the forcible removal from France of Russian refugees guilty of revolutionary internationalism would be accepted by public opinion without protest or resistance. Obviously Hervé received the inspiration for this prophecy from ministerial sources.
At the end of July this same Hervé whispered, officiously, that would be expelled from France; at about the same timei. e. still before the killing of the colonel in Marseilles Professor Dürkheim, the President of the Commission for Russian immigrants, established by the Government, informed a representative of these immigrants of the impending suppression of the Nashe Slovo and the expulsion of its editors (vide, Nashe Slovo, July 30, 1916. Everything had been prearranged, even the public opinion of the slaves of Mr. Hervé. They waited only for a pretext to strike the final blow. And the pretext was found. The unfortunate Russian soldiers killed their colonel at a moment that was most opportune to the interests of certain people. This happy coincidence invites a suspicion that may, fear, penetrate the invulnerable skin of even your ministerial shame. Russian journalists who made a special investigation of the case in Marseilles have established the fact that in this case, as in so many similar cases, the leading role was played by an agent provocateur. What was his aim, or rather what were the aims of the well paid rascals who directed this agent is not difficult to comprehend. An excess of some kind among the Russian soldiers was necessary not only to justify the rule of the knout against them, which was still somewhat offensive to the French authorities, but in order to create a pretext for repressive measures against the Russian immigrants, accused of abusing French hospitality by demoralizing Russian soldiers during the war. To their credit we will assume that the instigators of this project did not themselves believe that the matter would assume such a fatal aspect, that they did not intentionally desire what actually occurred from the very beginning. It is probable that they hoped great gains by small sacrifices.
But all undertakings of this sort involve an element of business risk. In this case the provocateur himself went unmolested, but Colonel Krause and his assassins were the victims. Even the patriotic Russian journalists, who are openly hostile to the Nashe Slovo, expressed the suspicion that copies of our paper were given to the soldiers, at the most auspicious moment, by the agent provocateur.
May beg of you, Mr. Minister, to institute, through the services. of Mr. Malvy an investigation of this matter?
You do not see that anything could be gained by such an investigation? Neither do Because let us speak openly agents provocateur are at least as valuable for national defense as Socialist ministers. And you, Jules Guesde, having so generously assumed responsibility for the foreign policy of the Third