from the practical standpoint of international capital, the sound establishment of trade relations. But they will be unable to prevent it. There are now in Moscow representatives of big capital, who did not believe these rumors, and they have told us how in America a certain group of citizens carried on an unprecedented agitation for Soviet Russia. This group made extracts of everything printed about Russia for a few months in newspapers of the most diverse kinds—about the flight of Lenin and Trotsky, about Lenin's shooting Trotsky and vice-versa, and they published all this in the form of a pamphlet. Better agitation for the Soviet power cannot be imagined. The contemporary American bourgeois press has completely described itself. …
Was there ever a wilder farrago of gross exaggeration and misstatement? A few foolish rumors are taken from thousands of substantiated dispatches and reproduced as giving a fair picture of the American press on Russia! But we must note, especially, that Lenin appreciates the aid he is getting in his propaganda from "a certain group" of American citizens, while at the same time he openly boasts of the British trade agreement from the practical standpoint as a defeat of international capital, i.e., a defeat of all existing governments (all regarded as capitalistic by Lenin) and of the existing social system.
A part of the so-called trade agitation has been the claim that the Soviets were abandoning Communism not only in making trade agreements with capitalists but in other directions. Such changes as have in fact taken place could be so absurdly misinterpreted and misunderstood only by those who have made no effort to follow the Bolshevist policy. The Bolshevist chiefs, and especially their foreign diplomats, have never hesitated
