I have no concrete material about Tula and cannot speak on this as authoritatively as the preceding comrades. But I do know the political complexion of the newspaper “Always Forward!”. It is nothing but incitement to strikes. It is connivance towards our enemies, the Mensheviks, who are inciting strikes. Someone put a question to me: has this been proved? I answer that if I were a lawyer, a barrister or a parliamentarian, I should be obliged to prove it. I am neither one, nor the other, nor the third, and I shall not do it, and I have no need to. Let us assume that the Central Committee of the Mensheviks is better than those Mensheviks who have been directly caught inciting in Tula—I do not even doubt that some of the closest members of the Menshevik committee are better—but in the political struggle, when the White Guards are gripping you by the throat, can one make such a distinction? Do we have time for that? Fact is fact. Even if they did not actively connive, they proved weak in relation to the right-wing Mensheviks. What is there to discuss? The right-wing Mensheviks agitate for a strike; Martov or others condemn these right-wingers in their paper. What does that teach us? We receive a slip of paper on which is written: I also condemn, but... (A voice: “What is to be done?”). We must do the same as the Bolshevik Party—take its stand not in words but in deeds. Does not the agitation abroad exploit the behaviour of the Mensheviks here? Did not the Berne Conference support all the imperialists when they said that the Bolsheviks are usurpers? We say: you have taken up a position at a time when Kolchak’s bands are striking a blow, because of which thousands of Red Army men have perished in a country upon which the imperialists of the whole world are bearing down. Perhaps in two years’ time, when we have defeated Kolchak, we shall sort this out, but not now. Now we must fight in order to defeat the enemy within a few months—an enemy who, as you know, condemns the workers to what. You know this from the example of Ivashchenkovo{68}, and you know what Kolchak is doing.