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

THE PROPHET ARMED
class, and amid which it was extremely difficult to build up the
new army they all wanted. He did not urge the congress to
refuse ratification; but there ought to be a limit to surrenders:
they must not gi\'.e in to Lenin and sign a treaty with Germany's
Ukrainian puppets.' And here he made a remark hinting at a
most ominous contingency. If, he said, the party was so powerless
that it had to let down the Ckrainian workers and peasants,
then it might be its duty to declare: ' ... we have come before
our time, we withdraw into the underground, and we let
Chernov, Guchkov, and Miliukov settle accounts with ... the
Ckraine .... But I think that even if we should be compelled so
to withdraw, we must still act as a revolutionary party and fight
for every position to the last drop of our blood." This was his
strongest intimation so far that the Russian Revolution might
have been a false spring; and to Marxist ears his words carried
the grimmest connotation: Marx and Engels had repeatedly
written about the tragic fate which overtakes revolutionaries
who 'come before their time' . 3 Finally, recalling Dzerzhinsky's,
Yoffe's, Krestinsky's, and his own 'great act of self-restraint'
and his 'sacrifice of the Ego' on the altar of Bolshevik unity, he
told Lenin that there were as many dangers as opportunities in
Lenin's policy, and that the peace faction might be 'sacrificing
life's only end for the sake of mere living' .1
Lenin once again used the threat of resignation: he would
resign, he said, if the congress limited his freedom of action with
regard to the Ukraine. There is, he pleaded, no treason in the
behaviour of soldiers who refuse to come to the rescue of surrounded
comrades in arms, when they know that they are too
weak to rescue those surrounded and that they themselves will
perish in the attempt. Such was the position of the Soviets in relation
to the Ukraine. This time a large majority agreed with Lenin.
1
'Lenin knows no limit to surrender and retreat, even though Trotsky tries to
catch him by his coat-tails and stop him", Ryazanov said in the dchatc. Sedmoi
Syez.d RKP, p. 9. ' Ibid., p. 85.
> 'The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled
to take over a Government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the
domination of the class which he represents and for the realization of the measures
which that domination would imply ... he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma.
What he can do is in contrast to all his previous actions, to all his principles and
to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot he achieved ....
Whoev~r puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.' Engels, The
Peasant War in Germany, pp. 135-6. • Sedmoi Sye~d RKP, p. 86.