Michael Sayers: Fom the beginning, the Left Opposition had functioned in two ways. Openly, on public platforms, in its own newspapers and lecture halls, the oppositionists brought their propaganda to the people. Behind the scenes, small clandestine factional conferences of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Radek, Pyatakov and others mapped out the over-all strategy and planned the tactics of the Opposition. With this opposition movement as a base, Trotsky built a secret conspiratorial organization in Russia based on the "fives system" which Reilly had developed and which the Social Revolutionaries and other anti-Soviet conspirators had used. wordsmith.social/protestation/…