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

16o
THE PROPHET ARMED
Not for a moment did Trotsky imagine, however, that the
Russian Revolution could survive in isolation for decades. It
may therefore be said, as Stalin was to say twenty years later,
that he 'underrated' the internal resources and vitality of
revolutionary Russia. The miscalculation, obvious in retrospect,
is less surprising when one considers that the view
expressed by Trotsky in 1906 was to become the common
property of all Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, in the years
between 1917 and 1924. Hindsight, naturally, dwells on this
particular error so much that the error overshadows the forecast
as a whole. True enough, Trotsky did not foresee that Soviet
Russia would survive in isolation for decades. But who, apart
from him, foresaw, in 1906, the existence of Soviet Russia?
Moreover, Trotsky himself, indirectly and unknowingly, provided
in advance the clue to his own error-it is found in his
appraisal of the Russian peasantry. I ts political helplessness and
lack of independence best account for the survival of a collectivist
regime in a country in which the individualistic peasantry
formed the overwhelming majority, and also for the forcible
and relatively successful imposition of collectivism upon it.
In apparent contradiction of his own view, Trotsky then
stated that the proletarian regime would break down as soon
as the muzhiks turned against it. This error, if an error it was,
was intimately bound up with his conception of the revolution,
as he stated it in 1905-6. It did not occur to him that a proletarian
party would in the long run rule and govern an enormous
country against the majority of the people. He did not
foresee that the revolution would lead to the prolonged rule ofa
minority. The possibility of such a rule was implicit in his
theory; but its actuality would still have appeared to him, as to
nearly all his contemporaries, incompatible with socialism. In
fact, he did not imagine, in spite of all he had written about
Lenin's 'Jacobinism', that the revolution would seek to escape
from its isolation and weakness into totalitarianism.
If the trend of his thought is considered as a whole, then it
may be said that k1rdly