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

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 315
more strongly, committed to achieve an immediate peace, which
could be neither just nor democratic. This was their first
dilemma. Its solution would be dictated to them by weary
peasant-soldiers, who were all the more eager to turn their guns
into ploughs now that all the land to plough was at last theirs.
But the tenuous peace, attained under their pressure, would not
avert from Russia the long ordeal of foreign intervention and
civil war.
The Bolsheviks shared the land among the peasants, or,
rather, they sanctioned the share-out accomplished by the
peasantry itself. No great country can go through an agrarian
revolution of this scale and momentum without its entire
economy being shaken and weakened, if only temporarily. The
old links between town and country were loosened or broken;
the old channels of exchange shrank and became clogged; the
old obsolete and inadequate yet automatic, and in its way
effective, manner of running the body politic was rendered
impossible. In the most favourable circumstances, even without
a civil war, it would have taken time before new links, new
channels, and a new way of managing the nation's existence
replaced the old ones. Before that happened, so elementary
a process as the flow of food from country to town, the precondition
of modern civilization, was bound to be disrupted.
The demands for land and bread were not quite compatible.
After the large estates had been split, less, not more, bread was_
available to urban workers. To the peasants the agrarian
revolution was a boon at first. It not only gave them landit
relieved them of the burdens of age-old servitude and
debt. But to the nation as a whole the prospect looked less
promising. Rural Russia was now broken up into 25,000,000
smallholdings, most of which were tiny and worked with antediluvian
tools. The Bolshevik leaders knew that in the long run
this spelt economic and social stagnation. They had to encourage
and then to sanction the share-out of the land, because this was
preferable to the old semi-feudal system of tenure, and because
otherwise they would have suffered the fate of their predecessors
in government. But they were from the beginning broadly
committed to fos-ter collective ownership in land, to regroup
and merge the 25,000,000 smallholdings into relatively few
large, modern, and efficient farms. They could not say when,