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

THE PEOPLE'S COMMISSA)l 335
As in October, so now, Lenin did not question the right of
Kamenev and his friends to dissent. But he denied them the
right to act against the party's declared policy beyond the confines
of the party. When they demonstratively left office, he
branded them once again as 'deserters'. Kamenev and his
friends eventually surrendered, as they had done in October.
Their roles had been played out when it became clear that
neither of the opposed parties was in a mood for conciliation.
Zinovicv was the first to change sides and to declare that the
Mensheviks had made a compromise impossible. 1 In words
foreshadowing his future and more tragic surrenders, he appealed
to his friends: 'We remain with the party; we prefer to err with
the millions of workers and to die with them than to stand
aside in this decisive, historical moment.' Within a few days the
'conciliators' were routed. Kamenev was deposed from his high
office on the Executive of the Soviets; and at a session of the
Executive Trotsky sponsored Sverdlov as Kamenev's successor.
The only positive outcome of the negotiations was that the Left
Social Revolutionaries, resentful at the attitude of the anti­
Holshevik parties, joined Lenin's government.
Y ct Lenin's and Trotsky's opponents in the party were not
quite as wrong as they presently professed. Their forecast that
'a purely Bolshevik government could be maintained only by
means of political terror' and that it would result in an 'irresponsible
regime', was eventually to come true. For the moment,
Lenin and Trotsky repudiated this forecast with sincere indignation,
reiterating the assurance that the Soviets could overthrow
the government by a simple majority vote. 2 But history
was to justify the warning though, when it was made, no basis
for it was apparent. Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik
leadrs undoubtedly had every intention of governing the
country in a spirit of genuine responsibility to the Soviet electorate.
But the fact that their party alone was to embrace Soviet
constitutionalism wholeheartedly could not but lead them to
identify the policies of their party with Soviet constitutionalism,
then to substitute the party's wishes and desires for the principles
of that constitutionalism, and in the end to abandon those principles
altogether. To put it more broadly, the circumstance that
the Bolsheviks were the party of the revolution impelled them
I Ibid., p. 177. z Ibid., pp. 171-5.