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

THE DRAMA OF BREST LITOVSK
barracks during a calm respite, was, paradoxically, realistic.
This was how the Red Army was eventually built up; and
Bukharin's and Radek's speeches at the seventh congress of the
party anticipated on this point the military policy which
Trotsky and Lenin were to adopt and pursue in the coming
years.' Precisely because Russia was so extremely war weary,
she could not raise a new army in relatively calm times. Only
severe shocks and the ineluctable necessity to fight, and to fight
at once", could stimulate the energies hidden in the Soviet regime
and bring them into play. Only thus could it happen that a
nation which had under the Tsar, Prince Lvov, and Kerensky
been too exhausted to fight, went on fighting under Lenin and
Trotsky in civil wars and wars of intervention for nearly three
yl"ars.
The weakness of the war faction lay not so much in its case
as in its lack of leadership. I ts chiefa were Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky,
Radek, Yoffe, Uritsky, Kollontai, Lomov-Oppokov, Bubnov,
Pyatakov, Smirnov, and Ryazanov. All were eminent members
of the party. Some of them had great intellectual gifts and were
brilliant spokesmen and pamphleteers. Others were courageous
men of action. Y ct none of them possessed the indomitable will,
the moral authority, the political and strategic talents, the
tactical flexibility, and the administrative capacity required of
a leader in a revolutionary war. As long as the war faction had
no such leader, it represented merely a state of mind, a moral
ferment, a literary cry of despair, not a policy, even though at
first a majority of the party was drawn into the ferment and
echoed the cry of despair. The leadership of the war faction was
vacant, and the faction cast inviting glances at Trotsky. Incidentally,
in their ranks were many of his old friends who had
joined the Bolshevik party together with him. On the face of it,
there was little to prevent him from responding to their expectations.
Although he held that Lenin's policy, like that of
the adherents of war, had its justification, he did not conceal
his inner revulsion against it. All the more astounding was it
that at the most critical moments he threw the weight of his
influence behind Lenin.
He shrank from assuming the leadership of the war faction
because he realized that this would have transformed at a
1
Sedmoi Syezd RKP, pp. 32-50, 6g-73 and passim.