My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those
near me about my actual condition. I am active and able to work but the outcome
is evidently near. These lines will be made public after my death.
I have no need to refute here once again the stupid and vile slander of
Stalin and his agents: there is not a single spot on my revolutionary honour. I
have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any behind-the-scenes
agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class.
Thousands of Stalin’s opponents have fallen, victims of similar false
accusations. The new revolutionary generations will rehabilitate their
political honour and deal with the Kremlin executioners according to their
deserts.
I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to
me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in
particular because I cannot name them all.
However, I consider myself justified in making
an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition
to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate has given
me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our
life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and
tenderness. She underwent great suffering, especially in the last period of our
lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of
happiness.
For forty-three years of my conscious life I
have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the
banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try and
avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain
unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical
materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the
communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than
it was in the days of my youth.
Natasha has just come up to the window from the
courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my
room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear
blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the
future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy
it to the full.
Leon Trotsky,
Member of Polite Bureau, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) exiled in Mexico
A coda was added later dated March 3rd 1940.
Mainly dealing with what should happen should he be involved in a serious drawn
out illness, it ends with the following words:
“... But whatever may be the circumstances of my
death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in
man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be
given by any religion.”
