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

THE PROPHET ARMED
among them-replied that there should be room in the party
for dissenters. The general principle that dissent was permissible
was not questioned by Lenin. He merely argued that this
particular dissent could not be tolerated, because the opponents
of clandestine work could not be effective clandestine workers.
Since, from one angle, this difference could be seen as a conflict
between the upholders of discipline and the defenders of the
right to dissent, Trotsky took his stand against the disciplinarians.
Having done so, he involved himself in glaring inconsistencies.
He, the fighter for unity, connived in the name of
freedom of dissent at the new breach in the party brought about
by the Menshcviks. He, who glorified the underground with
zeal worthy of a Bolshevik, joined hands with those who longed
to rid themselves of the underground as a dangerous embarrassment.
Finally, the sworn enemy of bourgeois liberalism allied
himself with those who stood for an alliance with liberalism
against those who were fanatically opposed to such an alliance.
So self-contradictory an attitude brought him nothing but
frustration. Once again to the Bolsheviks he appeared not just
an opponent, but a treacherous enemy, while the Mensheviks,
though delighted to oppose to Lenin a man of Trotsky's radicalism
and record, regarded him as an unreliable ally. His long
and close association with Martov made him turn a blind eye
more than once on.Menshevik moves which were repugnant to
him. His long and bitter quarrel with Lenin made him seize
captiously on every vulnerable detail of Bolshevik policy. His
disapproval of Leninism he expressed publicly with the usual
wounding sarcasm. His annoyance with the Mensheviks he
vented mostly in private argument or in 'querulous' letters, with
which he bombarded Martov and Axelrod. Consequently, he
appeared in public not quite the same man as he was in private.
The longer this state of affairs lasted, the more did he become
Martov's political prisoner. Martov's correspondence throws
an instructive light on this:
I have answered him [Trotsky] with a more ironical than angry
letter (Martov wrote on one occasion], although I admit that I have
not spared his amour propre. I have written him that he can escape
nowhere from the liquidators and ourselves, because it is not his
magnanimity that compels him to defend the right of the liquidators
to remain in the party ... but the correct calculation that Lenin