[tchaika]

From the memoirs of artist Yuri Annenkov:

"A day later, at the appointed hour, I was sent from RWC car, and I went to the U.S., taking with them everything necessary for painting. The bet is placed in the richest nationalized estate Yusupov - Arkhangelsk. It was a brilliant winter, snow and frost sparkled under the bright sun. Near the gate of the estate stood watch. Seeing a familiar car, they stretched out in front, and saluted, watching me.

But getting there is one thing surprised me: the edges of the road, almost the entire distance between Moscow and the stakes - rusty carcasses of armored cars and broken shells, the memories of the Civil War, protruded from the snow drifts. Have passed a full three years since the fighting (and whether they were in the suburbs?). Foreign diplomats and military officials frequently traveled to the headquarters to Trotsky. What impression would make them similar landscape? Somehow, in one of our conversations, I expressed my surprise to Trotsky about the so gloomy and so easy uprazdnimogo border road.

- Strategic disguise, - said Trotsky - albeit capitalists think that we have - complete bedlam that our revolution - no more than a temporary local crisis caused by military setbacks, and that foreign capitalists have nothing to worry about. That's it. Tactics, comrade!
And with a smile, he added:
- But soon the same tactics will require feedback masking. When it becomes clear that our bedlam did not cease, but expanding geographically, it will be necessary to make the capitalist countries was afraid to go against us. And now, by accepting the representatives of the capitalist world, the rotting of the West, we will show them the grand parade, the strength of our military power and its organization, demonstrating the tools and all sorts of tanks, purchased at the same rotting in the West.

Such "backward masking" has occurred under Stalin and swells so far every day to incredible sizes. In both cases, the "capitalists" believe, so that from year to year and continue to lose their positions.

I have been to a rate five times, if not more, and twice there all night. In the lavishly furnished rooms, I admired the works of Tiepolo, Boucher, Fragonard and other masters of the same era. I met with Trotsky also in the room the Revolutionary Military Council, where he met and became friends with his deputy as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of Ephraim Sklyansky, with whom I also had to paint a portrait, reproduced in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1926, v. 2. In later editions of this encyclopedia of every trace of me was thrown. "