Document 44

Excerpt from minutes of party purge committee within Narkomput', 11 October 1933

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 100, d. 64890, ll. 8-8 (vo.). Typed original.

Question: Where exactly did you go through the Bolshevik hardening process?

Answer: I was hardened as a Bolshevik while working in America since I had close ties with the newspaper New World. Comrade Bukharin came to America and also worked for this newspaper.

Q: How did you master the theoretical principles of Bolshevism, by reading Lenin?

A: I've read Lenin, but not everything he wrote of course.

Q: What is the main tenet of Leninism?

A: Leninism is the extension of Marxism in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (When the question "What is the main tenet of Leninism?" was repeated, Freiman said he didn't understand.)

Q: What is the dictatorship of the proletariat?

A: It is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasants.

Q: What is the difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry?

A: It is power held jointly and equally by the proletariat and the peasantry.

Q: What is Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution?"

A: I don't know.

Q: What is the difference between the American Communist Party and our Bolshevik Party?

A: The American socialist party was created out of fragments of the Russian Party and from Russian emigrants who fled to America during the reactionary period, but I don't know what the ideological difference is.