isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

AT THE DOOR OF HISTORY 97
or at any rate seriously enough to plunge into the history of
Jacobinism and to explore it avidly with an eye to the parallel.
His imagination, inflamed by the Jacobin tragedy and overflowing
with the freshly absorbed images, projected these upon
the groups and individuals with whom he was in daily contact
and-upon Russia's indefinite future. In the light of a strictly
rational analysis, this projection may have been gratuitous and
erratic. A cooler and better disciplined mind would not have
lent itself to such visionary anticipations. But Trotsky was
possessed of a sixth sense, as it were, an intuitive sense of history,
which singled him out among the political thinkers of his
generation, sometimes exposed him almost to derision, but more
often found triurriphant, if much delayed, vindication.
Behind his polemical pursuits and imaginative projections
there was the pent-up emotion of the romantic revolutionary,
who, much as he himself may have argued about the need for
a closely-knit and disciplined party, broke into individualistic
protest against the reality of that party as soon as he was
confronted by it. His inclinations, his tastes, his temperament
revolted against the prosaic and business-like determination
with which Lenin was setting out to bring the party down from
the clouds of abstraction to the firm ground of organization.
Trotsky's present protest was little different from that which, as
a boy of seventeen, he had, with so much ill temper, thrown at
Sokolovskaya, the first Marxist he had met: 'A curse upon all
of you who want to bring dryness and hardness into all the
relations oflife !'The cry into which he had burst at Shvigovsky's
orchard on the last night of 18g6, reverberated in his anti­
Leninist philippic of 1904.