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

THE DRAMA OF BREST LITOVSK
was inescapable; and more than once he recalled the peace of
Tilsit which '.\iapoleon had dictated to Prussia in 1807 and which
the progressive Prussian statesmen, von Stein and Gneisenau,
had used to modernize their country and army and to prepare
revenge. He was following their example; and he also hoped
that during the respite revolution might mature in Germany and
renounce and annul the Kaiser's conquests.
Against this the war faction argued that the central powers
would not permit Lenin so to use the respite: they would cut
off Russia from the grain and coal of the Ukraine and the petrol
of the Caucasus; they would bring under their control half the
Russian population; they would sponsor and support counterrevolutionary
movements and throttle the revolution. :'.\!or
would the Soviets be able to build up a new army during any
respite. They had to create their armed strength in the very
process of the fighting; and only so could they create it. True,
the Soviets might be forced to evacuate Petrograd and even
Moscow; but they had enough space into which to rt>treat and
gather strength. Even if the people were to prove as unwilling
to fight for the revolution as they were to fight for the old
regime-and the leaders of the war faction refust>d to take this
for granted-then every German advance, with all the accompanying
terror and pillage, would shake the people from
weariness and torpor, force them to resist, and finally generate
a broad and truly popular enthusiasm for revolutionary war.
On the tide of this enthusiasm a new and formidable army
would rise. The revolution, unshamed by sordid surrender,
would achieve its renaissance; it would stir the souls of the
working classes abroad; and it would finally dispel the nightmare
of imperialism.
Each faction was convinced that the policy proposed by the
other was pernicious, and the debates were charged with
emotional tension. Trotsky, it seems, was alone in holding that
much could be said from a realistic standpoint for and against
each of the proposed courses of action, and that neither was
inadmissible on grounds of principle and revolutionary morality.
It has since become the historian's commonplace, a commonplace
which after the event Trotsky himself did much to establish,
that Lenin's policy had all the merits of realism and
that the war faction represented an utterly quixotic aspect of