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

234 THE PROPHET ARMED
'social-patriotic opportunists'. They had begun their political
and literary careers with a critique of the voluntarist Utopias of
the Narodniks; and this left a lasting impression on their outlook.
In their polemics against the Narodniks they had concentrated
so exclusively on 'objective conditions', on what was and what
was not historically possible in Russia, that they became the
slaves of their own determinism. The Menshcviks had indubitable
merits in analysing the social conditions of Russia and in
attempting to Europeanize the movement (merits, the writer
added, which Trotsky's Pravda shared with them). But they completely
neglected to cultivate the revolutionary will, which
changes the social conditions within which it works. The principle
of will and action was as much essential to the Marxist
doctrine as was its determinism; and this principle, so the writer
concluded, was embodied in Lenin's group. That was why the
Mcnshcviks had floated with the tide of events to their socialpatriotic
debacle, while the Bolsheviks had the strength to
resist the tide.'
Manuilsky and Lozovsky, especially the former, argued along
the same lines. Still refusing to accept Leninism as the 'ready
made and rounded off form of the new internationalist ideology',
still criticizing its 'national narrow-mindedness and angular
crudity', Manuilsky, nevertheless, insisted that Bolshevism,
because of its emphasis on will and action, had legitimately
become the core of the Russian revolutionary movement.
'History', he wrote, 'has placed the Russian working class in
a position more favourable for revolutionary initiative than that
in which the western proletariat has found itself .... It has imposed
higher duties and obligations on us than on European
labour.' All the more urgent was it to find a common language
with Lenin's group. Discreetly, Manuilsky criticized Trotsky,
without mentioning him by name, for his attempts to excuse
the ambiguous conduct of Chkheidze and of the other Menshevik
dcputics. 2
Quite perceptibly these influences worked on Trotsky. If
a distaste for the 'sectarian' and distinctly Russian side of
1
The author of this article was K. Zalewski, a Polish Socialist, who had before
the war sided with the Menshevik liquidators. Nashe Sbn·o, nos. 35, 36, 11 and l 2
February 1916.
2
Nashe S/ovo, nos. 75-78, 29 March-1 April 1916. In the same issues Trotsky
went on defending Chkheidze in unsigned editorials.