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

226 THE PROPHET ARMED
citizens of belligerent countries to be in contact with one another,
the mere fact that well-known labour leaders 'shook hands
across the barbed wire and bleeding trenches' was an unheardoff
challenge to all warring governments.
The participants in the conference were, however, less united
in purpose than their resolutions implied. The majority were
pacifists, cager to reassert their faith, but not inclined to go
farther. A minority, grouped around Lenin, who for the first
time now came forward as the protagonist of an international
and not merely of a Russian trend in socialism, urged the conference
to adopt a defeatist attitude towards all warring governments,
to call upon the peoples to 'turn the imperialist war into
civil war', and to proclaim the need of a new International. This
the majority refused to do. On most points Trotsky was in
agreement with the minority, although he would not endorse
Lenin's revolutionary defeatism. (It was, he wrote, in the interest
of socialism that the war should end 'without victors and vanquished'.)
He held, moreover, that these differences should be
transcended so as to enable the conference unanimously to
condemn the war. In this everybody concurred, and Trotsky was
asked to draw up a statement of principles, which was soon to
become famous as the Zimmcrwald Manifesto. In it he stirringly
described the plight of embattled Europe, placing the responsibility
on the capitalist order, the governments, and the sclfbctraycd
Socialist parties; and he called upon the working
people to recover from their intoxication with chauvinism and
to put an end to the slaughter. Rousing though it was, the
Manifesto was vague in its conclusions. It did not call for civil
war that would put an end to the imperialist war; and it did not
envisage the new International. The conference adopted the
Manifesto unanimously, but Lenin's group placed its reservations
on record. Finally, an international committee was elected which,
although it was not yet nominally opposed to the second International,
was nevertheless to become the nucleus of the third.
Only good luck enabled Trotsky safely to return to France.
On the frontier his luggage was opened for examination, and in
it he carried all the Zimmerwald documents. An inspector picked
them up, but seeing on top of them a sheet of paper with a conspicuous,
patriotic inscription Vive le Tsar!, he did not bother to
examine them further. At Zimmcrwald during the sessions,