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

188 THE PROPHET ARMED
hurt Russian amour propre too strongly. The occasion was a
celebrated book by Ivan Razumnik, which extolled the exceptional
virtues and the historical role of the Russian intelligentsia.
In h!s criticism of this book Trotsky elaborated some of
the views on Russian history he had formulated earlier and tried
to explain the pt>culiar role of the Russian intelligentsia against
a wide historical background.
'\Ve arc poor', he wrote, 'with the accumulated poverty of
over a thousand years .... History has shaken us out of her
sleeve into a severe environment and scattered us thinly over a
vast plain.' Only a Leviathan-like state could defend that plain
against Asiatic invasion and withstand the pressure of wealthy
and powerful Europe. To feed itself the Leviathan starved the
nation, crippled the growth of its social classes and institutions
and atrophied its civilization. 'The Russian people was not less
heavily opprcsst>d by nobility and Church than were the peoples
of the West. But that complex and rounded-offwayoflifewhich,
on the basis of feudal rule, grew up in Europe-that gothic
lacework of feudalism-has not grown on our soil. We lacked
. the life-matter for it, we could not afford it .... A thousand
years we have lived in a humble log cabin and filled its crevices
with moss-did it become us to dream of vaulting arcs and
gothic sp;rcs?'
'How miserable', he went on, ' ... was our gentry! Where
were its castles, where were its tournaments? Its crusades, its
!shield bearers, its minstrels and pages? Its chivalrous love?'
The Russian gentry was coarse, barbarous, vulgar. Nor did
Russia go through the purifying experience of the Reformation;
and so she had no inkling of the western burgher's 'human
personality, which strove to establish more intimate relations
between itself and its God'. In the medieval European town,
that 'stone cradle of the third estate', there had grown up a
striking diversity of cultural types,· and a whole new epoch
had been prepared there. 'In the crafts, guilds, municipalities,
uni\'ersitics, academic assemblies, elections, processions, fetcs,
and disputes there crystallized the precious habits of selfgoverninent;
there grew the human personality-a bourgeois
personality, of course, but still a personality, not a snout which
every policeman could kick and punch.' All that the third
estate, as it grew, needed to do was to transfer the new human