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

102 THE PROPHET ARMED
admired in Parvus his 'virile, muscular style', which he was to
remember hankeringly long after their break. In brief, Parvus
still towered above Trotsky in erudition, experience, and
literary taste. It is not easy, however, to define the extent of his
influence on Trotsky. To this day Trotsky's detractors attribute
the exclusive authorship of the theory of 'permanent revolution',
the hallmark of Trotskyism, to Parvus, and suggest either
that Trotsky copied or plagiarized it or that a theory coming
from so contaminated a source must be worthless. Trotsky himself
never denied his debt to Parvus, although the warmth with
which he acknowledged it varied with times and circumstances.
What they both wrote in the hey-day of their association reveals
how many of the ideas and views first formulated by Parvus left
a deep mark on Trotsky, and how many of them he was to
repeat through his life in a form not very different from that in
which his older friend had first put them.
But Trotsky was possessed of certain qualities which enabled
him to be from the outset more than Parvus's mere disciple.
He had the fresh experience of Russia and of the underground
struggle, which Parvus had not. He had an incandescent
political imagination, while Parvus's analyses and prognostications
sprang from a bold but cold mind. He had the revolutionary
fervour which gave wings to his ideas, while Parvus was the
cynical type of revolutionary. Trotsky, then, had his own
individual contribution to make to their common fund of ideas.
As in most associations of this sort, the respective shares of the
partners cannot be unscrambled, not even by the partners
themselves. The thinking is done in common; and even if sometimes
it is possible to say who has first formulated in print this
or that part of a theory, the invisible, two-way traffic of suggestions
and stimuli that has passed between the partners can never
be traced. All that can be said of Parvus and Trotsky is that at
first the older of the two was well ahead, leading with ideas and
formulas. At the next stage both seemed to advance pari passu.
In the end the junior leapt forward with a contribution which
was distinctly his own, and which made and rounded off a new
political doctrine; and with this doctrine he came to the fore
on the vast and confused stage of the revolution. It should be
added that the whole process developed and was concl_uded
rapidly. It began in the summer of 1904. It was consummated