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

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 277
subject to arrest .... You can have no reason to doubt that I am
just as irreconcilable an opponent of the general policy of the Provisional
Government as the above-mentioned Comrades. My
exemption only underlines more graphically the counter-revolutionary
and 'wanton character of the action you have taken against
them. 1
For two or three days, while the terror against the Bolsheviks
was at its peak, Trotsky did not appear at the Soviet. He spent
the nights at the home of Larin, the former Menshevik who was
about to join the Bolsheviks. But after the publication of the
'Open Letter to the Provisional Government' Trotsky, full of
fight and defiance, reappeared in the limelight. He defended
Lenin and the Bolshevik party in the Soviet, on the Executive
of the Soviets, and on the Executive of the peasant Soviets.
Everywhere he spoke amid continuous uproar. 'Lenin', he
exclaimed, 'has fought for the revolution thirty years. I have
fought against the oppression of the popular masses twenty
years. We cannot but hate German militarism. Only he who
does not know what a revolutionary is can say otherwise ....
Do not allow anybody in this hall to say that we arc German
mercenaries, for this is the voice ... ofvillainy.' 2 He warned the
Mensheviks, who were washing their hands of the affair, that
this would be their own undoing. Chcrnov, the 'social patriot',
had already been compelled to resign from the ministry, because
he had participated in the Zimmerwald movement. The
counter-revolution had chosen the Bolsheviks as its first targets;
the moderate socialists would be its next victims.
Even in those days of hysteria and panic he was listened to
with attention and respect. His appeals, however, had little or
no effect.. The moderate Socialists knew that it was preposterous
to accuse Lenin and Zinoviev of being German agents; burthcy
were convinced that the Bolshevik agitation against the war had
gone too far; and they suspected that in the July days Lenin, or
perhaps Lenin and Trotsky, had attempted to seize power;
1
Loe. cit. At the same time Trotsky wrote a letrn to (;,ffky. (-;nrky, who had
been Lenin's dose friend, behaved (in