In Pravda of July 2, Yaroslavsky unmasks Trotsky who, he says, called the Five Year Plan a “deception” in the bourgeois press and predicted the speedy fall of Bolshevism. In Yaroslavsky’s article is published the reproduction of the first page of the Polish paper to which, it is claimed, Trotsky sent his article. In this connection, they speak once more of renegade etc.

As a matter of fact, I never gave any article on the Five Year Plan to any bourgeois paper with the exception of an interview which I gave at the beginning of this year to the Manchester Guardian. The content and the sense of this interview, emphasizing the enormous successes of socialist methods of economy and defending the necessity of economy collaboration of England with the U.S.S.R., is in direct and irreconcilable contradiction with the articles of the world bourgeois press which base themselves upon fraudulent falsification and upon perversions. Riga and Warsaw have long been laboratories of false information, directed against the U.S.S.R. and against Communism. Probably, my alleged article in the Polish Illustrated Courier was supplied by the same blackguards who at one time manufactured the telegrams on: How Lenin and Trotsky are arresting each other, who subsequently manufactured the “Zinoviev letter”, and dozens of other forged documents. To fight against these falsifications in the columns of the bourgeois papers is exceedingly difficult, because most of them cover up each other and are certainly not inclined to fall out among themselves in order to lend assistance to a proletarian revolutionist.

The Messrs. Yaroslavskys know this very well, but they hold the interests of their clique higher than the interests of the Soviet Union. While the counter-revolutionary blackguards fabricate false documents and forged articles, the Yaroslavskys photograph these documents as authentic. What then is the political role of the Yaroslavskys? Assistants to bourgeois blackguards – one cannot define this role otherwise.