ABSTRACT
But I must finish Sklyanskii’s story. With that rudeness characteristic of Stalin, without even being consulted about it, he was transferred to economic work. Dzerzhinskii, who was glad to get rid of Unschlicht, his deputy at the GPU, and secure for industry such a first-class administrator as Sklyanskii, put him in charge of the cloth trust. With a shrug of his shoulders, Sklyanskii plunged into his new work. A few months later he decided to visit the United States, to look about, study, and buy machinery. Before he left he called on me to say good-by and to ask my advice. We had worked hand in hand during the years of civil war. But our talk had usually been about troop units, military rules, speeding up the graduation of officers, supplies of copper and aluminium for military plants, uniforms and food, rather than about the party. We were both too busy for that. After Lenin was taken ill, when the plots of the epigones began to force their way into the war commissariat, I refrained from discussing party matters, particularly with the military staff. The situation was very indefinite, the differences were then only beginning to crop up, and the forming of factions in the army concealed many dangers. Later on I was ill myself. At that meeting with Sklyanskii in the summer of 1925, when I was no longer in charge of the war commissariat, we talked over almost everything.
