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instrumental in bringing this failure about. Before the congress the Right Independents tried to assert that they had nothing in common with the Russian Mensheviks. They asserted this even at the congress. Hilferding protested against my statement that the Right Independents formed part and parcel of international Menshevism. He tried to pour ridicule on my seeing the whole world through Russian spectacles.
Every position, however, has its logic. In fighting the Third International and Soviet Russia, the Right Independents were naturally driven into the arms of Martov. And Martov supported them with all his might, just as the rope supports a hanging man.
Of course, I did not expect anything pleasant from the speech of Martov. I understood that Martov did not go to Halle in order to support the Soviet Government and the Third International, but in order to attack them. We never expected, however, that he would stoop to such meanness as he did. He not only described the "horrors" of the Bolshevik regime, the vile persecutions to which Tchernov had been subjected at the hands of the Soviet Government, and the cruel persecutions of the Mensheviks, etc. This in itself would not have been too bad. But Martov reached such depths of depravity that at Halle, at the International Congress, he supported the Polish bourgeoisie against Soviet Russia, and in an interview published at the time of the congress in the "Freiheit," announced to Millerand and Lloyd George that the peace concluded at Riga between Soviet Russia and Poland was a military trick on the part of Soviet Russia, that it was a temporary armistice, which would be violated by Soviet Russia in the spring.
Martov described in glowing terms the Vladivostock government, and gave the whole world to understand that the setting up of the Far-Eastern Republic as a buffer state between ourselves and Japan was the result of some secret convention, etc.
Martov showed himself a brazen-faced renegade, vilely calumniating the Russian Workers' Revolution in a "black hundred" speech. Some "neutral" people, who up till now treated Martov with a certain degree of confidence, and thought we were too severe in our treatment of him, made the following remark to us: "We expected from Martov anything but such
