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

THE PROPHET ARMED
home missed the thrill of rubbing shoulders with an uncouth
revolutionary demagogue. 'I mentioned my name and I was
most politely shown in. Drawing back the drapery, I saw a
gathering of sixty or seventy persons ... on one side of the
passage-thirty senior military men, among them resplendent
Guards officers; on the other side sat the ladies. In the forefront
there was a group of black tailcoats', the leading lights of
liberalism. Peter Struve, the ex-Marxist, was just urging the
Guards officers to defend the Tsar's October Manifesto against
attacks from right and left; and as he listened to Struve, Trotsky
recalled the words written by Struve himself only seven years
before: 'The farther we go to the east in Europe, the more
slavish, cowardly and mean is the political conduct of the
bourgeoisie.' Then it was Trotsky's turn to address the officers.
He told them that the working class, and with it freedom itself,
was unarmed. They, the officers, had the keys to the nation's
arsenals. It was their duty at the decisive moment to hand these
keys to whom they belonged by right, to the people. 1 That
senior Guards officers should even have listened to such talk
was a measure of the political unsettlement. All the same, his
appeal must have sounded to them like a desperate joke. The
pyramid of Tsardom could be destroyed, if at all, from its base,
not from its top.
From the meetings he hurried to his editorial desks, for he
edited and co-edited three papers. The Soviet's/zvesrya appeared
at irregular intervals and was produced with naive bravado.
Each copy was set in the printing shop of another extreme rightwing
newspaper, which a Soviet squad raided and requisitioned
for the occasion. Apart from this, Trotsky contrived, with the
help of Parvus, who had come to Petersburg, to obtain control
of a radical Liberal daily Russkaya Gaze ta (The Russian Gazette),
which he transformed into a popular organ of militant socialism.
Somewhat later he founded, with Parvus and Martov, a great,
solid daily Nachalo (The Start), which was nominally the mouthpiC'ce
of l\fcnslwvism. In fact, Nachalo was mainly Trotsky's
paper, for he dictated his terms to the Mensheviks: the paper
would advocate his and Parvus's 'permanent revolution'; and
it would have no truck with the Constitutional Democrats
(Liberals). '\Ve shall have to agree', so Martov wrote to Axel-
• L. Trotsky, Sochinenya, vol. ii, book 2, p. 73,