Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

76 The Soviet Thermidor
leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference fb r
the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and
in the last analysis is not decisive. Each of the struggling
camps moreover demands leaders in its own image.
The February Revolution raised Kerensky and Tseretelh"
to power, not because they were "cleverer" or "more astute"
than the ruling tsarist clique, but because they represented,
at least temporarily, the revolutionary masses of the people
in their revolt against the old regime. Kerensky was able to
drive Lenin underground and imprison other Bolshevik
leaders, not because he. excelled them in personal qualifications,
but because the majority of the workers and soldiers
in those days were still following the patriotic petty
bourgeoisie. The personal "superiority" of Kerensky, if it is
suitable to employ such a word in this connection, consisted
in the fact that he did not see further than the overwhelming
majority. The Bolsheviks in their turn conquered the
petty-bourgeois democrats, not through the personal superiority
of their leaders, but through a new correlation of social
forces. The proletariat had succeeded at last in leading the
discontented peasantry against the bourgeoisie.
The consecutive stages of the great French Revolution,
during its rise and fall alike, demonstrate no less convincingly
that the strength of the "leaders" and "heroes" that replaced
each other consisted primarily in their correspondence to the
character of those classes and strata which supported them.
Only this correspondence, and not any irrelevant superiorities
whatever, permitted each of them to place the impress
of his personality upon a certain historic period. In the
successive supremacy of Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre,
Barras and Bonaparte, there is an obedience to objective law
incomparably more powerful than the special traits of the
historic protagonists themselves.
It is sufficiently well known that every revolution up to
this time has been followed by a reaction, or even a
counterrevolution. This, to be sure, has never thrown the
nation all the way back to its starting point, but it has always
taken from the people the lion's share of their conquests. The
victims of the first reactionary wave have been, as a general
rule, those pioneers, initiators, and instigators who stood at