Leon Trotsky
If, in the first period of the Soviet revolution, the principal ire of the bourgeois world was directed against our savagery and blood-thirstiness, later, when that argument, from frequent use, had become blunted, and had lost its force, we were made responsible chiefly for the economic disorganization of the country. In harmony with his present mission, Kautsky methodically translates into the language of pseudo-Marxism all the bourgeois charges against the Soviet Government of destroying the industrial life of Russia. The Bolsheviks began socialization without a plan. They socialized what was not ready for socialization. The Russian working class, altogether, is not yet prepared for the administration of industry; and so on, and so on.
Repeating and combining these accusations, Kautsky, with dull obstinacy, hides the real cause for our economic disorganization: the imperialist slaughter, the civil war, and the blockade.
Soviet Russia, from the first months of its existence, found itself deprived of coal, oil, metal, and Cotton. First the Austro-German and then the Entente imperialisms, with the assistance of the Russian White Guards, tore away from Soviet Russia the Donetz coal and metal working region, the oil districts of the Caucasus, Turkestan with its Cotton, Ural with its richest deposits of metals, Siberia with its bread and meat. The Donetz area had usually supplied our industry with 94 per cent of its coal and 74 per cent of its crude ore. The Ural supplied the remaining 20 per cent of the ore and 4 per cent of the coal. Both these regions, during the civil war, were cut off from us. We were deprived of half a milliard poods of coal imported from abroad. Simultaneously, we were left without oil: the