“Those elements we are dispatching or will dispatch are in themselves politically worthless,” Trotsky told a leftist foreign journalist, Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed, who published the interview in Pravda (August 30, 1922). “But they are potential weapons in the hands of our possible enemies. In the event of new military complications . . . we would be compelled to shoot them according to the regulations of war.” Here is the view later attributed to Stalin that the Soviets could not tolerate potential enemies in their midst, because their presence would encourage and facilitate foreign
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