The Russian anarchist, whose pseudonym was Voline, recounts a meeting with Trotsky in New York in April 1917. Both men were discussing revolutionary conditions in Russia at the time. After listening to Voline's warning about how the Bolsheviks would, once in power, start persecuting the anarchists, Trotsky replied in reassuring tones of comradely conviviality: ‘“Can you really, for a single instant, entertain such nonsense: leftwing socialists in power turning their guns on the anarchists! Come, come, what do you take us for? Anyway, we are socialists, comrade Voline. So we are not your enemies …”.’ Two years after this encounter, in 1919, Voline finds himself arrested by the Bolshevik military authorities, who notified Trotsky by telegram, asking what should be done with him. Trotsky replied in his telegram: ‘Shoot out of hand. – Trotsky.’ Fortunately, for Voline, he was not shot, due to intervening circumstances that he does not elaborate on. But this anecdote illustrates, in darkly comic tones, the fraught relationship between the authoritarian and libertarian strands of revolutionary politics – a conflict which goes back to the old debates between Marx and Bakunin, the conflict which split the First International in 1872 and whose impact on radical politics has never ceased to reverberate.