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

Igo
THE PROPHET ARMED
vigilant watchiug over their own purity .. .', at the prier, that is,
of an orthodoxy in rcbrllion opposrd to official orthodoxy.
Thus they came to develop 'that zeal for the letter, which can
sometimrs be observed in our intellectuals of the most extreme
wing'. It was the misfortune of the intelligentsia that they had
always had to act as proxy for undeveloped and passive social
forces. Herc Trotsky set in a long historical perspective the
phrnomenon of 'substitutism' about which he had first written
in his polemics against Lenin in 1904. 1 He now saw the intelligentsia's
'substitutism' running like a thread through Russian
history. First, the leaders of the Deccmbrist rising of 1825
represented the ideas of an as yet unborn middle class. Then the
Narodrziks tried to speak for a mute and dumb peasantry. Lastly
the Marxist intellectuals set themselves up as the spokesmen
of a weak, only just awakening industrial working class. To all
of them the idea of the class was more important than the class
itself. He rounded off this gloomy survey in a more hopeful
tone, saying that the revolution of 1905-6 had set in motion
the mass of the workers and that henceforward nobody could
act as their proxy: this was the end of substitutism. 2
' We shall see later whether or to what extent this optimistic
conclusion was justified; substitutism was to reassert itself with
unparalleled strength after the revolution, and the idea of the
class was then to become for a long time more important than
the class itself. Some of the other long trends of Russian history,
which Trotsky grasped here with such mastery, were also
to come overwhelmingly to the surface after the revolution.
What is at this stage of our narrative more relevant is the selfrevealing
acuteness with which Trotsky contrasted the 'sunlit
zone of European ideology', 'the vaulting arcs' and 'the gothic
spires and lacework' of western civilization with the barbarous
'log cabin' of Russian history. This contrast was greatly overdrawn,
not in historical perspective, where it was broadly true,
but in its concluding and contemporary part. The lacework
fac;ade of European civilization before 191