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

THE PROPHET ARMED
situation and the balance of the forces inside the country with
penetrating clear-sightedness. They detected the illusion in the
appearance of strength with which the Kerensky regime was
endowed by the mere fact of its existence; and they based their
optimism about the outcome of the insurrection on an almost
mathematically accurate survey of the forces arrayed against
each other. Against this optimism, Zinoviev and Kamenev
placed on record this warning: 'Before history, before the international
proletariat, before the Russian revolution and Russian
working class, we have no right to stake the whole future on the
card of an armed uprising .... There are historical situations
when an oppressed class must recognize that it is better to go
forward to defeat than to give up without battle. Does the
Russian working class find itself at present in such a situation?
No, and a thousand times no! !!' 1
Zinoviev and Kamenev saw nothing ahead but debacle; and
for the rest of their tragic lives they were to burn with shame
whenever they were reminded of these words. But the advocates
of the rising, in the first instance Lenin and Trotsky, based their
arguments not merely and not even mainly on their view of the
balance of strength inside Russia. Even more emphatically they
pointed to the imminence of European revolution, to which the
Russian insurrection would be the prelude, as Trotsky had
maintained since 1905-6. In the motion which Lenin submitted
to the Central Committee on IO October, he put first among the
motives for insurrection: 'the international positiof\ of the
Russian revolution (the revolt in the German navy, which is an
extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of the
world socialist revolution) .' 2 He repeated this in almost every
subsequent statement, public and private. 'The ripening and
inevitability of world socialist revolution can be under no
doubt.' 3 '\Ve stand on the threshold of world proletarian revolution.'4
'We shall be genuine traitors to the International', he
wrote in a letter to party members, 'if, at such a moment, under
'such propitious conditions, we answer such a summons from
,the German revolutionaries [i.e. the revolt in the German navy]
1 Protokoly T