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

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 287
again a revolutionary army .... This was now Trotsky's guard,
ready at a wink from him to storm the coalition, the Winter
Palace and all the fortresses of the bourgeoisie .... The only
question was whither Trotsky would lead them.'' In his presidential
address, he recalled 1905 and expressed the hope that
this time he would lead the Soviet towards a different destiny.
He gave a solemn and emphatic pledge, on which later evrnls
were to throw a melancholy shadow: '\V c arc all party men,
and more than once we shall clash with one another. But we
shall conduct the work of the Petrograd Soviet in a spirit of
lawfulness and of full freedom for all parties. The hand of tlie
Presidium will never lend itself lo the suppression of a minority."
On behalf of the new Soviet he sounded the first summon.> to
the second revolution, calling for Kerensky's resignation and
the transfer of governmental power to the Congress of Soviets.
He argued against the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
as trenchantly as ever, but without ill feeling, without a trace of
the craving for revenge which might have been expected from a
leader of a party so recently proscribed.J
Despite Lenin's objections, all parties were represented in the
new Presidium of the Soviet in proportion to their strcngth. 4
Was this display of scrupulous respect for the rights of the
minority merely a tactical stratagem, designed to deceive the
minority's vigilance? Hardly so. Sukhanov relates that three
years later, after the Bolsheviks had banned all the parties of
the opposition, he reminded Trotsky of his pledge not to lend
himself to the suppression of any minority. Trotsky lapsed into
silence, reflected for a while, and then said wistfully: 'Those were
good days.'s They were indeed. The revolution was still taking
seriously its own assurance that it would widen and make real
the freedoms which bourgeois democracy only promised or
which it granted with a niggardly hand.
Trotsky now referred to himself in public without inhibition
as a Bolshevik. He accepted tht> label he had so long considered
as little better than a slur. While in prison he had been elected
to the Central Committee of the party. In the seven weeks that
1
Sukhanov, op. cit., vol. vi, pp. 188 ff.
' Loe. cit. 3 Ibid., p. 194.
• Even a group like Gorky's which was too small to clairn representation, was
alloca1ed scats. 5 Sukhanov, ibid., p. 190.