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

18o
THE PROPHET ARMED
still cast his vote now for a Bolshevik and now for a Menshevik
motion; but on several occasions he burst out against Lenin
with ill feeling for which the records offer no explanation.'
The quarrel over the fighting-squads was superseded by a
wider controversy concerning the character of the movement.
The so-called liquidators tried to justify their opposition to
clandestine work as part of an endeavour to reform Russian
socialism in a European spirit. European Socialist parties,
they argued, worked in the open, and so should the Russian
organization. The argument appealed to a sentiment which had
been strong in all sections of the party because, since the days
of the struggle against the Narodniks, all Marxists had seen their
mi~sion as the 'Europeanization' of Russian socialism. But now
rnch faction gave a different meaning to the term. The liquidators
saw the essence of European socialism in its democratic
mass organizations, the open work of its growing parliamentary
representations, the peaceful bargaining of the trade unions:
briefly, in its reformist practice. To the Bolsheviks 'Europeanization'
meant what at the beginning it had meant to the party as
a whole: the transplantation to Russia of Marxist proletarian
socialism, the combined product of German philosophy, French
socialism, and English political economy. But they could not see
how they could go beyond that and imitate the open and lawful
methods of western socialism; the Russian police state, especially
under Stolypin, refused to allow even a Liberal party to exist
openly, let alone a Socialist. If socialism did no more than what
the law allowed, the law dictated by triumphant autocracy, it
would in effect efface itself.
Trotsky glorified the underground struggle, its heroism and
its martyrdom, with all the romantic zest peculiar to him. But
he also responded keenly to the watchword of Europeanization.
What he meant by it he never made quite clear. For him it
summed up an emotional and cultural attitude rather than a
clear-cut political concept. It expressed in a positive form his
dislike of the 'dryness and hardness' of the clandestine organization,
a,s Lenin conceived it. He knew that under Tsardom a
' Shortly after the congress Lenin wrote to Maxim Gorky (who had been
present at the congress and tried to reconcile Lenin with Trotsky), that Trotsky
behaved 'like a pooeur'. Lenin, Sochinenya, vol. xxxiv, p. 33,;. See also Pyatyi Syu:.d,
RSDRP, pp. 5o6, 6o2, 619, and Medem, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 187--9.