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

WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL
have been published, Trotsky says that Chicherin's correspondence
from London was written in a vaguely social-patriotic
spirit, but was so uncommonly subtle and original that he,
Trotsky, was glad to have it in the paper. 1 Later in the war
Chicherin was interned in Britain as an anti-war propagandist.
From Sweden and Denmark Alexandra Kollontai and Moissei
U ritsky, both former Mensheviks, disgusted with 'social-patriotism'
and rapidly evolving towards Bolshevism, contributed
more or less regularly. Kollontai was to be Commissar of Social
Welfare in Lenin's first government, while Uritsky-he had
worked for the Viennese Pravda too-was to become one of the
foremost Bolshevik leaders in 1g1 7. The list of contributors
included Theodore Rothstein, the Anglo-Russian historian of
Chartism and future Soviet Ambassador in Persia; Radek,
Rakovsky, and Maisky the future Soviet Ambassador in
London. Rarely has any paper had so brilliant a galaxy of
contributors.
The members of the editorial team were at one in their
opposition to war and 'social-patriotism'; but, apart from this,
they represented various shades of opinion. The editorial conferences,
which took place every morning in the printing shop,
developed into lively disputes which in their turn were reflected
in the columns of the paper. As is usual in cases in which
outward agreement conceals differences in frame of mind and
approach, the controversies were involved and seemingly
irrelevant; and often they degenerated into bitter wrangling.
We might well ignore these wranglings were it not for the fact
that they manifested the re-alignment of groups and individuals
who were soon to come forward as leaders of great parties and
mass movements. Next to Lenin's Social Democrat, Trotsky's
paper was at this juncture the most important laboratory of the
revolution. The issue passionately debated in it concerned the
demarcation line that was to be drawn between the internationalists
and the social-patriots. Where, how firmly, with
what degree of finality should it be drawn? In their attempts to
answer this question groups and individuals either drew closer
to, or drifted away from, one another, until eventually some of
those who at first seemed of one mind found themselves on
different sides of that line.
' Tlie Trotsky Archfres.