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

THE PROPHET ARMED
'Our rising', he went on, 'has been victorious. Now they tell us:
Renounce your victory, yield, make a compromise. With whom?
With whom, I am asking, shall we make this compromise? With
those miserable little groups that have left or with those that
make these proposals? But we have seen them in their full
stature. Nobody in the whole of Russia follows them any more,
and is it with them as with equal partners that the millions of
workers and peasants ... should conclude an agreement? ...
You are miserable, isolated individuals. You are bankrupt.
You have played out your role. Go where you belong: to the
dustheap of history!' 1 This Vae Victis! pierced the ears of Martov
and of his followers as they made their way out of the hall,
through the serried ranks of soldiers and workers, who indignantly
reminded them of all the misdeeds of the Provisional
Government, of the people's hunger and cold, of the senseless
and bloody offensives, of the July days, of the proscription of
the Bolsheviks, and of the peasants' craving for land. Pent-up
emotion burst from the victors.
Nemesis stalked the halls of the Smolny. She was only
beginning her work.
Never before had any body of men seizing power assumed so
prodigious a burden of commitments as that which the Bolshevik
leaders shouldered when they read out to the Congress
their first hastily scribbled decrees. They promised to give the
people Peace, Land, and Bread. The distance from promise to
fulfilment was immeasurable. The peace was to be just and
democratic. It was to admit no annexations or indemnities,
none of the injuries and insults which victors impose upon
vanquished. Lenin and Trotsky had said over and over again
that such a peace could not be expected from the absolutist or
even the bourgeois parliamentary governments-it could only
be achieved by proletarian revolutions in the belligerent countries.
Yet the armies of the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs stood
on lands wrested from the Russian empire; and as long as they
had not renounced their emperors and their rulers and had not
disavowed their rapacious ambitions, the Bolsheviks were in a
sense committed to go on waging war, the revolutionary war for
a just peace. But they were also, and in the popular mind even
1
Sukhanov, op. cit., vol. vii, pp. 202-4. John Reed, op. cit., p. 79.