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

200 THE PROPHET ARMED
situation provided the protagonists with new arguments. The
liquidators pointed to the government's growing tolerance as
proof that it was possible to Europeanize the party and to lead
it out of the recesses of the underground. In the years of the
terror their argument had sounded unreal; now it was based on
facts. Yet the political revival also brought new vigour into the
clandestine organization, and the young revolutionaries who
were now entering it were not content with that cautious expression
of opposition which the police tolerated in the legal
clubs and trade unions. The government itself was the more
inclined to put up with legal forms of opposition the more it was
afraid of the illegal ones. This gave the Bolsheviks a powerful
argument: we must, they said, intensify our clandestine efforts
even if only to gain more elbow-room for open work. 1
In these circumstances, Trotsky set out to pursue once again
the will-a' -the-wisp of unity. He induced the Organization
Committt·c to com·enc in Vienna a conference of all Social
Democrats for August 1g1 2. He hoped that the rise of the
revolutionary temper in Russia would now, as in I 905, help to
bring about a reconciliation. This was not to happen. In 1905
the strong tide of rn·olutionary events could still stop or delay
incipient schism. In 1912 the cleavage had become so wide that
the new political revival could only widen it further. Moreover,
Lenin was now reaping the fruits of his labours: his men led the
Social Democratic underground, while l\knshcvism was a
farrago of weak and disconncctt:d groups. The Lcninists refused
to attend the conference in Vienna; and so Menshe\·iks, ultralcft
Bolsheviks, boycottcrs, the Jewish Bund, and Trotsky's
group came together and formed a confederation, known in the
annals of Russian socialism as the August Bloc. Trotsky was that
bloc's chief mouthpiece, indefatigable at castigating Lenin's
'disruptive work'. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of
the apologia in which he claimed that he had never intended to
turn the confrrence against the Bolsheviks, and that only Lenin's
refusal to attend it or to countenance any attempt to re-establish
unity had driven him into his anti-Bolshevik position. This
apologia is amply borne out by the private correspondence of
the Menshevik leaders; but it also shows how thoroughly
Trotsky had misjudged the outcome of a decade of controversy.
1
F. Dan, Proiskho,,hdenie Bo/.rheuisma, pp. 440-2.