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

THE DOLDRUMS: 1907-1914 191
the other hand, Trotsky did not do justice to the creative energies
with which nineteenth-century and contemporary Russia was
boiling over, the energies with which his own personality and
activity were merged. He sometimes seemed to view Russia's
past and present almost as a vacuum. This was the weakness
underlying his call for Europeanization and also the flaw in his
attitude towards Bolshevism. It was Lenin's strength that he
took Russian reality as it was, while he set out to change it.
Lenin's party had its roots deep in Russian soil; and it absorbed
all that that soil could yield in revolutionary strength and
harshness, in world-shaking courage and in primitive crudity.
Bolshevism had its thinkers, its Lenin and Bukharin and others,
who drew from European socialism whatever could be transplanted
to Russia; but it also had its tough committee-men, its
Stalins, who worked in the depths of a semi-European and semi­
Asiatic proletariat, and to whom Europeanization meant little.
Trotsky did not and could not really abandon the humble
Russian 'log cabin'. In October 1908 he began to edit the socalled
Viennese Pravda. An insignificant paper, published since
1905 by Spilka, a small Ckrainian Menshevik group, Pravda
was completely run down, and its publishers hoped that Trotsky
would put new life into it. The first few issues he edited still
bore the imprint of the Ukrainian group; but at the end of 1908,
the group disbanded itself and left Trotsky as Pravda's sole
master. For lack of money, he published it very irregularlyonly
five issues appeared in the first year of his editorship. 1 But
it was less difficult to bring out the paper than to transport it
clandestinely to Russia. The editor often appealed to readers for
help, complaining that 'several poods' of the paper got stuck on
the Russian frontier and could not be forwarded because of the
lack of fifty roubles; that manuscripts for a new issue had piled up
on his desk and he could not send them to the printers; or that
Pravda was compelled to stop correspondence with readers in
Russia because it could not afford the postage. 2 Trotsky's
1
At this time this was the lot of all emigre publications, and most of them
appeared even more rarely. !\. Popov, Out/int Hist-Ory of the C.P.S.U., vol. i, p. ~33·
Trotsky's Prai:da is cmnmon1y referred to as the Viennese Pravda, to distinguish it
from the Bolshevik Prarda which began to appear much later. The Viennese Pravda
was at first published in Lrnv, in Austrian Galicia, and only in November 1909,
with its sixth issue, was it transfcrr~d to Vienna. a Pravda, nos. 3 and 5.