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

WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL 221
for the meagre supply of paper. Yet, Nashe Slovo had a remarkable
circle of contributors, nearly every one of whom was to
inscribe his name prominently in the annals of the revolution;
and as, a journalistic venture it was much superior to the
Viennese Pravda, and much more influential. If a Parisian
journalist or politician had been told that this obscure Russian
daily was politically weightier than all the French boulevard
press, he would have taken this as a joke. Yet in less than three
years the ideas expounded in Nashe Slovo would resound from
Petrograd and Brest Litovsk throughout the world.
The chief organizer of the paper was Antonov-Ovseenko, a
Menshevik of long standing and a former officer in the Tsarist
army, who had rebelled in 1905 at the head of his detachment,
had been sentenced to death, but escaped and joined in the
clandestine struggle. In October 1917 he was to lead the Red
Guards in the attack on the Winter Palace, arrest Kerensky's
ministers, and thus bring the Bolshevik insurrection to success.
Small, lean, short-sighted, of mercurial temper and imagination,
the future Commissar now used his inventiveness to secure,
against all odds, the existence of the paper. He 'showed a
tenacity and an optimism which astonished even Trotsky, who
was by no means devoid of these qualities' . 1 This was one of the
new tics of friendship which were replacing the old ones in
Trotsky's life: between 1923 and 1925 Antonov-Ovseenko was
to be one of the leaders of the Trotskyist opposition.
It was apparently Antonav-Ovsecnko who invited Trotsky
and Martov to be joint editors of Nashe Slovo. Trotsky at first
refused, suspecting that the paper was meant to serve a narrowly
Menshevik purpose. 2 But eventually he assumed the co-editorship
and, in constant controversy with Martov, so strongly
impressed his own outlook on Nashe Slovo that the paper came to
be considered his personal domain. Lunacharsky, the God-seeking
Bolshevik, •Nho had broken away from Lenin and who was
to become the revolution's great Commissar of Education,
worked for the daily and sometimes acted as peacemaker
between Trotsky and l\fartov. Ryazanov, wlto had also (">me
from Vienna to Paris, was one of the pillars of Nashe .'Slovo.
Lozovsky, the future chiefofthe Red trade unions' International,
1
A. Rosmcr, u Mouuement outTier pendant la guerrt, pp. 24.4-9.
• Pisma A:u/roda i Alartova, p. 319.