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

THE DRAMA OF BREST LITOVSK 357
To sum up, the Bolsheviks were enmeshed in the following
intertwined dilemmas: They had to resolve whether they could
wait for peace until the revolution had spread; or whether they
would try to spread the revolution by concluding peace? If the
road to European revolution were to lead through peace, would
it be universal or separate peace? And if the terms of a separate
peace were to prove so onerous and humiliating as to be unacceptable,
could they wage a revolutionary war against Germany?
If driven to war, could they, as a matter of principle,
accept assistance from the Entente? And would the Entente be
willing to grant them assistance? If not, should they strive for
separate peace at any price? Or was there perhaps some way
of escaping these dilemmas?
On 8 December, the day before the inauguration of the
actual peace talks at Brest Litovsk, Trotsky addressed a joint
session of the government, the Central Executive of the Soviets,
the Soviet and town council of Petrograd, and leaders of trade
unions. This was one of his most remarkable speeches, not only
because of its rhetorical excellence and its soaring revolutionary
humanitarian ethos, but also because it vibrated with his own
mental wrestlings:
Truly this war has demonstrated man's power and resilience,
which enables him to endure unheard of sufferings. But it has also
shown how much barbarity is still preserved in contemporary man .
. . . He, king of nature, has descended into the trench-cave, and there,
peeping out through narrow holes, as from a prison cell, he is lurking
for his fellow man, his future prey .... So low has mankind fallen .
. . . One is oppressed by a feeling of shame for man, his flesh, his
spirit, his blood, when one thinks that people who have gone through
so many phases of civilization-Christianity, absolutism, and parliamentary
democracy-people who have imbibed the ideas of socialism,
kill each other like miserable slaves under the whip of the ruling
classes. Should the war have this outcome only that people return to
their mangers, to pick the miserable crumbs thrown from the tables
of the propertied classes, should this war finish with the triumph of
imperialism, then mankind would prove itself unworthy of its own
sufferings and of its own prodigious mental effort, which it has
sustained over thousands of years. But this will not happen-it
cannot happen.
Having risen in the land of Europe's former gendarme, the Russian
people declares that it desires to speak to its brothers under arms ...