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

THE DOLDRUMS: 1907-1914 205
European politics. Through the Balkan prism he saw the
alignment of the great powers as it was to appear in 1914; and
he saw it with great clarity, dimmed only by the wishful belief
that the French, Austrian, and German Socialists, the latter
with their 'eighty-six dailies and millions of readers', would
defend to the end 'the cause of culture and peace against the
onslaught of chauvinist barbarism'.'
Back in Vienna, he was soon again engrossed by the party
cabal, protesting in private letters against the undisguised relish
of his Menshevik friends at their separation from the Bolsheviks
and against the ascendancy of the liquidators in the August
Bloc. He quietly resigned from one Menshevik paper and
growled against another, to which he continued to contribute.
He was too much attached to the Mensheviks to part company
and too restive to stay with them. 'Trotsky', Martov sneered in
a private letter, 'while he was in the Balkans missed the evolution
of the entire [August) Bloc'; the Mensheviks had in the
meantime finished with talk of unity and with that 'empty,
verbal conciliationism' which had been in vogue in the dubious
hey-day of the Bloc. 'I think', Martov added, and he repeated
this advice right and left, 'that we ought to show him
[Trotsky] our "teeth" (of course, in the softest and politest
manner).' 2
It was therefore without regret that Trotsky again left Vienna
to watch the second Balkan war. This time Serbia and Greec~·
defeated Bulgaria, and Trotsky, the supposed enemy of the
Bulgarians, turned into their defender. He described the plunde
and violence of which the new victors were guilty; he visited
the territories they annexed, and depicted the political unsettlement,
the human misery, and the ethnographical nonsense
entailed by hostilities 'conducted in the manner of the
Thirty Years War' and by the shifting of frontiers and populations.
He wrote a study of Romania, a classic of descriptive
reporting, reprinted many times after 1917. 'Whereas Bulgaria
and Serbia', he summed up, 'emerged from Turkish domination
as primitive peasant democracies, without any survivals of
serfdom and feudalism, Romania, in spite of decades of spurious
constitutionalism, even now keeps its peasantry in the grip of
1
L. Trotsky, Sochinmya, vol. vi, p. 302.
2
Pirma Axelroda i Martora, pp. 262 ff. and 274.