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

THE PROPHET ARMED
about to leave with him. A collection was made on the spot
which yielded 310 dollars to which the German-American part
of the audience contributed JOO. The sum was handed to
Trotsky, and he divided it equally among the n:turning cmigrcs.
The meeting and the collection were reported in American
newspapers. He concluded with a good-humoured 'confession'
which, as he knew, would discredit him in the eyes of the bourgeois
public even more than being in the pay of the German
General Staff: never in his life, he wrote, had he at one time
possessed 10,000 dollars or even one-tenth of that sum. 1
In another Open Letter he related the story of his friendship
and break with Parvus, since this connexion was also brought
up against him. He exposed Alexinsky, the former Bolshevik
deputy turned renegade, as chief inspirer of the calumny.
Alexinsky, he wrote, had been expelled as a slanderer from all
journalistic organizations in Paris, and the Mcnsheviks had, on
moral grounds, refused to admit him to the Petrograd Soviet.
And this was the man now promoted to be the guardian of
patriotic morality. 2
This attempt at involving Trotsky having failed, intrigue
was started from the opposite angle. The press was full of stories
alleging that Trotsky had broken with Lenin, the German
agent. On 10 July, four days after Lenin had gone into hiding,
Trotsky therefore addressed the following Open Letter to the
Provisional Government:
Citizen Ministers-I understand that you have decret>d the arrest
... of Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, but that the writ of
arrest does not concern me. I therefore think it necessary to bring
these facts to your attention: 1. I share in principle the attitude of
Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, and I have expounded it in the
journal Vperyod and in all my public speeches. 2. My attitude
towards the events of 3 and 4July was uniform with that of the abovementioned
Comrades.J
He gave an account of those events and explained that the fact
that he did not belong to the Bolshevik organization was due to
outdated and now meaningless diffrrenccs.
You can have no logical grounds for exempting me from the effect
of the decree by dint of which Lenin, Zinovicv, and Kamenev are
1
Trotsky, Sochintnya, vol. iii, book 1, pp. 150-4.
' Ibid., pp. 165--0.
' Ibid., pp. 155--g.