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

'PERMANENT REVOLUTION' 157
broke radically: the revolution, he wrote, would conquer long
before the majority of the nation had become transformed into
proletarians. 1
His appraisal of the peasantry was no less sharply opposed to
current opinion. The Mensheviks tended to view the small rural
proprietor as a prop of reaction. Their hope was in a coalition
between the working class and the Liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin,
on the contrary, reckoned with the muzhiks' revolutionary
energy; but, unlike Trotsky, he would not prejudge its potentialities.
He kept his mind open and waited to see whether the
peasantry would not form its own revolutionary party, with
whom the Socialists would have to deal as with an equal partner.
At the beginning of 1905, to the amusement of Plckhanov,
Trotsky, and Martov, Lenin approached with intense curiosity
and exaggerated hope the enigmatic figure of Gapon. He
wondered whether that priest, the son of a Cossack, who had
led the workers of the capital to the Winter Palace and thereby
helped to open the sluices for the revolution, was not the harbinger
of an independent and radical peasant movement. 2 Lenin's
formula of a 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the
peasantry' seemed broader and more cautious than Trotsky's
'proletarian dictatorship', and better suited for an association
of Socialists and agrarian revolutionaries. In 1917 events in
Russia were to confirm Trotsky's prognostication. In the
twenties, however, the problem was to be posed anew in
connexion with Communist policy in China; and nearly half
a century after Trotsky had formulated his view, it would be
posed over and over again by the revolutions in Asia, in which
the relation between the urban and the rural clements would be
more intricate and blurred than it was in Russia.
So far we have dealt with the domestic aspect of the revolution.
Its international and domestic aspects were, in Trotsky's
view, closely interwoven. Although the peasants would by
Stalin statr.d that in the era of 1905 he 'accepted the th,-sis familiar among !vlarxi.;;ts,
according w which one of th1.• chit·f conditio1:.;; for the\ ictnr:.· of thr- c::oria1ist
n·\·.:>11.r.tion VI.as th~,t tlH' prolr-tari .. lt