Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Report of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (1921).pdf/25

 the indirect help of Serati and his partisans he suppressed the movement by homoeopathy, and then began to resort to surgery. The fascisti are very good surgeons, indeed, who are carrying on their surgical operations upon the Italian working class very well.

The role of the party, and especially of Serati, consisted in the fact that they overlooked the situation, and delivered the working class into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The latter was given a whole year to recover itself, to improve its organisation, to accomplish the transition from homeeopathy to surgical operations; and let the working class become deteriorated and disorganised.

Then the congress at Livorno came. Comrades, you know that the Executive had tried hard to send Bucharin and myself to that Congress. This, however, could not be done. The Italian Party, especially Serati, did not move a finger to render this possible. We had to form a different delegation, and sent as our representatives the Bulgarian Comrade Kabaktschiew and the Hungarian Comrade Rakosi.

Much nonsense and gossip has been circulated in the international press on the subject of both these comrades. The mover of all this was Serati: it is his method. There are some good comrades who think that matters would have been quite different in Livorno if Kabaktschiew and Rakosi had acted with more diplomacy and cunning. An attempt was made to represent Kabaktschiew as a savage dictator. Whoever knows him knows that this is altogether false. He is one of the most cultured Marxists and a very quiet comrade, with none of the passions that Serati ascribes to him, a man who has worked for years in the Bulgarian Party as a theorist, and of whom nothing but good can be said.

The comrades who were there must tell how matters looked to the outsider. The congress in Livorno was literally transformed into a circus. When