Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 5 -- The Spring
Leon Trotsky's
1905
CHAPTER 5
The Spring
* * *
General Dragomirov, now deceased, once wrote in a private letter about Sipyagin, then Minister of
Internal Affairs: "What sort of internal policies can he possibly have? He's only a cavalry n.c.o. and a
blockhead at that." This description is so cor rect that we can overlook its rather mannered
rough-and-ready soldier's tone. After Sipyagin we saw the same position occupied by Plehve, then by
Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, then Bulygin, then Witte-Durnovo. Some of these differed from Sipyagin
only by the fact that they were not cavalry n.c.o.'s, while others were intelligent men, in their way. But all
of them, one after the other, abandoned the scene, leaving behind them alarm and be wilderment above
and hatred and contempt below. The cavalry n.c.o. of little brain, the professional detective, the
benevolent but dim-witted gentleman, the stockbroker devoid of conscience and honor, all of them, one
after the other, arrived with the firm intention of putting an end to sedition, restoring the lost prestige of
authority, maintaining the foundations of the state -- and every one of them, each in his own way, opened
the floodgates of revolution and was himself swept away by its current.
Sedition grew as though according to a majestic plan, constantly expanding its territory, reinforcing its
positions and demolishing obstacle after obstacle; while against the backdrop of this tremendous effort,
with its inner rhythm and its unconscious genius, appeared a series of little mannikins of state power,
issuing new laws, contracting new debts, firing at workers, ruining peasants -- and, as a result, sinking
the governmental authority which they sought to protect more and more deeply into a bog of frantic
impotence.
Reared in an atmosphere of office conspiracies and depart mental intrigues, where insolent ignorance
vies with bare-faced perfidy; having not the smallest notion of the course or meaning of contemporary
history, the movement of masses, or the laws of revolution; armed with two or three pathetic
programmatic ideas for the information of Paris stockbrokers, such men try -- harder and harder as time
goes on -- to combine the methods of eighteenth-century mercenaries with the manners of the
"statesmen" of the parliamentary West. Abjectly hoping to ingratiate themselves, they chat with
newspaper correspondents from the Europe of the stock exchanges, expound to them their "plans," their
"forecasts," their "programs," and each one presses the hope that he, at last, will succeed in solving the
problem against which his predecessors' efforts were in vain. If only, before anything else, they can stop
the sedition! They all start differently, but they all end up by issuing the order to fire point blank on
sedition. But, to their horror, sedition remains unkillable. It is they who end in shameful collapse. If a
terrorist's obliging bullet does not release them from their sorry existence, they survive to see sedition,
with that elemental genius which is its own, turn everything they planned and forecast to its own
triumphant advantage.
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