ABSTRACT
In the Bolshoi Theater on the night of 4 July 1919, Lenin gave an address on the state of the war that Trotskiy was supposed to have given to the Central Committee and the Moscow Soviet. Trotskiy was in bed under doctors’ care and did not appear outside his Kremlin apartment for the next several days. His sudden illness terminated in a sudden departure from Moscow. He insisted later that what had occurred at the Central Committee meeting was merely a ‘small episodic disagreement … of a practical nature’, one of many Stalin engineered against him and a not very successful one because it ‘had not the slightest bearing’ on his relations with Lenin.1 His reaction at the time, however, strongly indicates more than just annoyance at one of Stalin’s petty intrigues against him. The Central Committee, he must have realized, had not only decided against him on the practical issues, the plans and the commander in chief, but had as well profoundly altered the principles governing the military system. And Lenin had voted with the majority on all the questions, giving him only a private assurance of support in disciplinary matters. The Politburo and the Orgburo unanimously refused to accept his resignation, at the same time advising him that should he wish to alter the Central Committee’s ‘line on the military question’, he would have to call for a party congress and suggesting that he might do well to reduce his other functions ‘with a view to concentrating on his work at the South Front’.2
