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

212 THE PROPHET ARMED
internationalism, and anti-militarism until the first day of war,
when the International crumbled.
Of the great European nations, Russia was the only one
that had participated but little in the peaceful progress of the
preceding era. Her economic advance, indubitable though it
had been, was insignificant in comparison with the acrumulalation
of wealth in western Europe. It had, at any rate, bct'n
insufficient to implant in the nation habits of peaceful bargaining
and compromise and to foster belief in a gradual progress
from which all classes would bent'fit. Parliamcntarianism, and
all the institutions for social conciliation and arbitration which
usually cluster around it, had taken no roots in Russian soil.
Class struggle, in its most violent and undisguised form, had btTll
raging from one encl of the empire to the other; and Tsardom
had not left the workers and peasants cvt'n the illusion that it
was allowing them any influence on the nation's dcstinics. In
the Socialist International, the Russian party had IJ