The Soviet hears the slander against Lenin but nobody, except relative newcomers to
revolutionary work, believes it. Tseretilli and Cheidze, leaders of the
Central Executive Committee and the Menshevik party, rejected the story out of hand,
and asked the papers not to print it. But a publication known for yellow
journalism did. The Minister of Justice, one of the socialist ministers in the
Coalition Government, resigned on this account.
The slander had
its origins in the circumstance that Lenin passed through Germany when he
travelled to Petrograd in April. A former police spy and prisoner of war, one
Ermolenko, made up the rest: Lenin had contacts with the German General
Staff and was acting as their agent; German money was propping up the Bolshevik
party with a view to destabilizing the dual government.
A discredited
journalist and operative of the Intelligence Service, one Alexinsky, became the
spokesman for the slander. He had passed Ermolenko’s fabricated report to the
papers. The Menshevik Dan had already denounced him in Izvestia. Now Zinoviev demanded that the Central Executive conduct an immediate investigation with a view to exonerating Lenin and
neutralizing the slander, but this gained little traction.
Trotsky records
that Lenin then asked him, “Aren’t they getting ready to shoot us all?” So
Lenin went back into hiding, at first in a Petrograd worker’s apartment.
Zinoviev and others went underground too.
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