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

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 293
only by verbal rcsolutions.' 1 'The international situation', he
argued on another occasion, 'gives us a number of objective data
showing that if we act now we shall have on our side the whole
of proletarian Europe.'' This belief governed not only Trotsky's
but also Lenin's entire view of the situation, and Lenin insisted
that a Soviet government ought to be prepared to wage a
revolutionary war to help the German proletariat in its
rising.
Zinoviev and Kamenev, on the other hand, said: 'If we
should come to the conclusion ... that it is necessary to wage
a revolutionary war, the masses of the soldiers will rush away
from us.' This was a precise anticipation of the developments
which led to the peace of Brest Litovsk. 'And here we come',
they argued further, 'to the second assertion-that the majority
of the international proletariat is, allegedly, already with us.
Unfortunately, this is not so. The revolt in the German navy has
immense symptomatic significanse .... But it is a far cry from
that to any sort of active support of the proletarian revolution
in Russia, which is challenging the entire bourgeois world.
It is extremely harmful to overestimate [our] forces.'
Thus those who were supreme realists when summing up the
Russian situation became illusionists when they turned towards
the broader international scene; and those who saw Russia only
dimly through a mist of timid scepticism became then the
realists. To be sure, the advocates of insurrection embodied
the energy and the indomitable courage of the revolution, while
their opponents voiced the revolution's faint doubt of itself.
Yet it may be wondered whether Lenin and Trotsky would
have acted as they did, or whether they would have acted with
the same determination, if they had taken a soberer view of
international revolution and foreseen that in the cours