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

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 253
he openly pledged government and country to the pursuit of
the Tsarist war aims, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
jumped up: 'Enough of patience! We have exhausted all our
patience! And, anyhow, if we do not act soon, the masses will
not listen to us any longer.' The masses would not have listened
to them any longer if they had left the whole business of government
to the leaders of those classes that had used the February
Revolution but not made it.
The first coalition between the Cadets and the moderate
Socialists thus came into being. When Trotsky appeared at the
session of the Soviet Executive, the new partners were just
sharing out the governmental seats. There were to be 'ten
capitalist and six socialist ministers'. The Cadets were the senior
partners; and so the programme of the new government was in
essentials indistinguishable from that of its predecessor. The six
Socialist ministers could only dilute it to make it more palatable
to the Soviet. Kerensky, who had a connexion with the Social
Revolutionary party, succeeded Guchkov as Minister of War.
Tseretelli, the most eminent Menshevik leader of this period, a
former deputy and hard-labour convict, became Minister of
Posts and Telegraphs. Chernov, chief of the Social Revolutionaries
and a participant in the Zimmerwald conference, was
appointed Minister of Agriculture. Skobelev, Trotsky's former
pupil and editorial assistant, was Minister of Labour.
On 5 May, the day after Trotsky's arrival, the Socialist
ministers stood before the Soviet, asking it to support the coalition.
When Trotsky appeared he was greeted with loud applause,
and Skobelcv addressed him as 'dear and beloved teacher'.
From the floor Trotsky was asked to state his view on the day's
event. He 'was visibly nervous over the debut, under the ...
stare of an unknown mass and the hostile glances ... of "social
traitors" '. 2 Cautiously he felt his way. He began by extolling
the grandeur of the revolution, and he so described the impression
it had made upon the world that by implication he at once
reduced that day's event to modest proportions. If only, he said,
they could see and gauge, as he had done abroad, the impact
of the revolution upon the world, they would know that Russia
'had opened a new epoch, an epoch ofblood and iron, a struggle
no longer of nation against nation, but of the suffering and
1
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