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

THE DOLDRUMS: 1907-1914
defeated and must retreat. 1 There is some truth in this. Trotsky's
mental and moral constitution was such that he received the
strongest impulses from, and best mobilized his resources amid,
the strains and stresses of actual upheaval. On a gigantic stage,
which dwarfed others, he rose to the giant's stature. Amid the
roar and din of battle, his voice attained full power; and when
he faced multitudes in revolt, absorbing from them their despair
and hope and imparting to them his own enthusiasm and faith,
his personality dominated men and, within limits, events. When
the revolution was on the wane, however, he was out of his
element and his strength sagged. He was equal to herculean,
not to lesser, labours.
On his return from the far north, Trotsky stopped for a few
days in Petersburg, and then, before the police were on his
track, crossed into Finland. A new stream of revolutionary
ernigrcs was moving westward, and Finland was their first
halting-place. The chief of the police at Helsinki, a Finnish
patriot, was only too glad to offer shelter to the Tsar's enemies.
Lenin and Martov had already arrived there. They warmly
welcomed Trotsky and congratulated him on his behaviour in
the dock. His sojourn in Finland lasted a few weeks, during which
he prepared for publication a description of his escape from the
tundra. At the end of April, he was in London to attend a congress
of the party.
This was in many respects a strange assembly. Attended by
about 350 dclegates--nearly ten times as many as in 1903-it
was the last congress of the united party. The delegates, although
they met on the eve of Stolypin's coup d' ital, had no clear awareness
that the revolution had suffered defeat. On the contrary,
the party still seemed to them to be at the zenith of its strength.
I ts membership was still nominally very large, and not only did
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks work together, but even the Polish
and the Latvian parties had joined the Russian mother-partyhitherto
they had kept aloof so as not to become identified with
either of its two factions. The party was, however, so poor that
it had to borrow money from a liberal English business man to
enable the congress to proceed in a Brotherhood Church m
London.
1
Stalin, Sochintnya, vol. vi, pp. 32g-31.