to use any and all methods for their purposes. In a letter which appeared in Pravda on December 10th, 1920, addressed to the Italian Socialists at a moment which Lenin thought to be "the eve of the revolution," the Bolshevist leader thus advised the Italian revolutionists:
The Italian party, in order to carry out the revolution successfully, must still take a certain number of steps to the Left without tying itself down and without forgetting that circumstances may very well demand some steps to the Right.
This advice is typical. Foreign trade agreements and other negotiations regarded abroad as compromises are not only presented to the Russian people as victories but are evidently so considered by the Bolshevist chiefs. The apparent concessions made to capitalism by the Russian Communist Congress about the time of the British Trade Agreement are explained by Krassin, the chief negotiator, as follows:
As we recede from wartime conditions and advance toward reconstruction and peace, we proceed toward a business-like adaptation of our methods to those of real life. We call it neither going to the right nor to the left. Whatever reports we may receive here, I am sure that Lenin will never abandon his communistic principles, but as he is a practical man with a practical mind, he may decide in one matter or another to take a practical course with regard to present-day conditions.
A Moscow wireless (April 16th, 1921) cynically and frankly states the Bolshevists' plan to repudiate any
