The War with Poland

Order No.232

By the Chairman of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic, July 31, 1920, No.232, Moscow


Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive by David Walters

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Citizen Ernest Lafont [Lafont, a Socialist member of the French Chamber of Deputies, joined the French Communist Party in 1920, but left it in 1923. – B.P.], who has come to Soviet Russia, via Poland, together with his wife Zinaida Lafont, visited while in Warsaw the French military mission, which is the centre of all the hostile activity of the imperialist counter-revolution directed against the socialist republic. Having arrived in Russia, Deputy Lafont offered no explanation, on his own initiative, to the government of the Soviet Republic, nor did he take, immediately and urgently, any steps to facilitate the Soviet Government’s conduct of the war against the bourgeois counter-revolution. In a private conversation which took place in the presence of Comrade Jacques Sadoul, Deputy Lafont communicated a number of extremely interesting pieces of information connected with his stay in Warsaw – information which, in the view of Jacques Sadoul, whose competence and conscientiousness is not open to suspicion, possessed a clearly defined significance, which he has set forth in a letter. The significance of what Deputy Lafont said, as this is set forth by Comrade Sadoul, is that the social-chauvinist Daszynski, one of those most guilty of the Polish attack, and now a member of the Polish Government, looks on an armistice with Russia as a breathing-space that will serve to facilitate the concentrating of armed forces for a fresh onslaught on Soviet Russia.

When questioned by me, Deputy Lafont, while not rejecting such an estimation of the ‘peaceful’ steps taken by the Polish Government, insistently denied that what was said by Daszynski (whose party Lafont, as we know, regards as a socialist party) bore the meaning alleged. Regardless of what may account for the statement made by Deputy Lafont, the fact remains fully established that a deputy who considers himself a French Socialist, during a war between a socialist republic and a bourgeois republic which is acting as a mere tool in the hands of the imperialists of the country in whose parliament Deputy Lafont sits – that Deputy Lafont has travelled, as a neutral observer, from Paris to Warsaw and from Warsaw to Moscow, has engaged in ‘comradely’ discussion with Daszynski, with members of the French military mission and other organisers of the rotten, dishonourable attack on the Soviet Republic, and has deliberately refrained from denouncing before the Polish, French and Russian proletariats those who are their most inveterate enemies.

In view of all the above and in order to safeguard the interests of the Russian Socialist Republic against ‘socialists’, Deputy Ernest Lafont and his wife, Citizeness Zinaida Lafont, who is politically in solidarity with him, are to be expelled from the territory of the Soviet Republic, and the reasons for this exceptional measure are to be made widely known both in Russia and throughout the world, for the information of the worker masses.

Their expulsion is to be effected by the Special Section of the All-Russia Cheka.


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Last updated on: 26.12.2006