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

THE PROPHET ARMED
leadership and no plan of action; and after two days of skirmishing
they surrendered.
On gJuly the Congress of the Soviets reassembled and Trotsky
reported the .suppression of the rising. He said that the government
had been surprised by the attack. It had denuded the
capital of the few reliable detachments it had possessed, sending
them to fight against the Czechoslovak Legion in the cast. For
its own security the government had relied mainly on that same
Red Guard, consisting of Left Social Revolutionaries, which
staged the rising. All that Trotsky could oppose to the insurgents
was a Latvian rifle regiment commanded by Vatzetis, a former
Colonel of the General Staff, who was presently to become
Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army; and a detachment of
revolutionized Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, led by Bela
Kun, the future founder of the Communist party of Hungary.
But the rising had an almost farcical character, from the
military if not from the political \'iewpoin t. The insurgents were
a band of brave but undisciplined partisans. They failed to
co-ordinate their attacks; and eventually they yielded more to
Bolshevik persuasion than to force. Trotsky, who was just then
disciplining the Red Guards and guerillas into a centralized
Red Army, used the rising as an object lesson demonstrating
the correctness of his military policy. Even now he spoke of the
insurgents half-pityingly saying that he and others had defended
them in the government as 'children who had run amok'; but
he added that there could .Pe 'no room for such children'.' The
leaders of the rising were arrested; but they were amnestied a
few months later. Only some of those who had abused positions
of trust inside the Cheka were executed.
Thus, with Trotsky hurling back the stubborn echo of his
own passionate protests against the peace, ended the great controversy
over Brest Litovsk.
1 Trotsky, Kak Vooru;:halas Revolutsia, \'OI. i, pp. 276 ff.