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

THE PROPHET ARMED
Differences on broader issues still separated Trotsky from Lenin.
There was, first, the disagreement over revolutionary drfeatism.
'The revolution is not interested in any further accumulation of
defeats', Trotsky wrote, while Lenin expounded the view that
Russia's military defeat would favour revolution. On the face
of it, two extremely opposed views seem to clash here; and so the
Stalinist historians present the story. Actually the difference was
one of propagandist emphasis, not of policy. Both Lenin and
Trotsky urged Socialists to turn the war into a revolution and to
spread their ideas and views among workers and in the armed
forces, even if this should weaken their country militarily. Both
agreed that the fear of national defeat should not defiect the
Socialist from doing his duty. For all the provocative emphasis
which Lenin gave to his defeatism, he did not ask his followers
to engage, or to encourage others to engage, in sabotage,
desertion, or other strictly defeatist activities. He merely argued
that although revolutionary agitation would weaken Russia's
military strength, Russian Socialists were bound in duty and
honour to take this risk in the hope that German revolutionaries
would do the same so that in the end all the imperialist governments
would be vanquished by the joint efforts of the internationalists.
The defeat of any one country would thus prove
only an incident in the revolution's advance from country to
country. Trotsky, and with him many of Lenin's own followers,
refused to tie the fortunes of revolution so exclusively to defeat. 1
It was enough, Trotsky argued, to preach and prepare revolution,
no matter what the military situation. Each attitude had,
from the viewpoint of those who held it, its advantages and
disadvantages. Trotsky's non-defeatism did not in advance
expose the internationalist to the charge that he was giving aid
and comfort to the enemy. Lenin's attitude, for all its obvious
tactical inconvenience, was better calculated to make the
revolutionary immune from warlike patriotism and to erect an
insurmountable barrier between him and his adversaries. In
I