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

THE PROPHET ARMED
how, or by means of what industrial resources they would be
able to do this. They only knew that they had embarked upon a
complex, paradoxical, and dangerous course: they had made
one agrarian revolution with the avowed purpose of undoing
it by means of another.
'Bread' means to the industrial worker and the city dweller
at large the growth and the development of industry. To the
Russian worker in 1917 it also implied the elimination from
industry of private ownership and control. In the theoretical
conception of socialism, which the leaders of the revolution had
imbibed from early youth, national and ultimately international
ownership and central planning of production and distribution
held a crucial place. Russia's industry, as the Bolsheviks found
it, even if it had not been further destroyed through civil war,
was too small and poor to serve as a basis for socialism. It
provided only a starting-point for evolution towards socialism.
Despite the fact that they had proclaimed the Socialist purpose
of their revolution, the Bolsheviks could ill afford an attempt to
bring Russian industry under public ownership or management
at once. The resources, the administrators, the technicians, and
the techniques needed were not available. They hoped to be
able to seek an unhurried solution of the problem by trial and
error. They were at first as reluctant to dispossess the industrialists
and merchants as they had been cager to dispossess the
landlords.
But in the course of 191 7 a state of affairs had spontaneously
come to prevail, under which the owners of factories had already
been more than half dispossessed. Just as in the barracks the
elective soldiers' committees had deprived the commissioned
officers of all authority and function, even before they tore off
their epaulettes, so in the factories and mines the elected works
committees had appropriated most of the rights and privileges
of owners and managers, even before the latter were dispossessed
or dismissed. The duality of power which, from February to
October, ran through Russia's system of government ran also
through Russian industry, even after October. The popular
instinct was a mixture of anarchism and socialism. In part
naturally and in part because of the prevalent chaos, it tended
to destroy the national coherence of industry, without which
there could be no evolution towards socialism. Each works