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

THE PROPHET ARYIED
Kerensky's attempt to recapture Petrograd, who had then
distinguished himself fighting in the south and who had been
appointed commander of the eastern front. Muraviev was, or
claimed to be, in sympathy with the Left Social Re\·olutionaries;
and the Bolsheviks accused him of collusion with the Czechs
and Kolchak. According to one version, he committed suicide
after he had been unmasked; according to another, he was
executed. In the meantime the Czechs seized Ufa, Simbirsk, and
Ekaterinburg.
In Ekaterinburg the Bolsheviks had kept in internment the
Tsar and his family: they had intended to let a revolutionary
tribunal try the Tsar, as Charles I and Louis XVI had been
tried; and Trotsky had chosen for himself the role of the Tsar's
Chief Prosecutor. But the advance of the Czechs and ofKolchak
had so surprised the Bolsheviks on the spot that, so they daimcd,
they had no time to arrange for the safe evacuation of the Tsar
and his family. They feared that the Tsar might be rescued by
the Whites and rally all the forces of the counter-revolution,
hitherto divided because of the lack of any unifying authority.
Remembering perhaps i\1arat's dictum: '\Voe to the revolution
which has not enough courage to behead the symbol of the
ancien regime', the Bolsheviks, before their hasty withdrawal,
executed the Tsar and his whole family. The official Bolshevik
version claims that the execution was decided upon by the
local Bolsheviks but approved after the event by !-.loscow. There
arc reasons to doubt the veracity of this version. It seems that
the local Bolsheviks first asked the Politbureau for a decision,
that Trotsky still counselled evacuation so that the Tsar might
be placed in the clock; but that the Polit bureau refused to take
any risk and ordered the execution. Thus the world was deprived
of the spectacle of a most dramatic trial, in which Trotsky and
the Tsar would have faced each other.
The advance of the Czechs and of the \\'hite Guards continued.
On 6 August the Red Army withdrew in panicky haste
from Kazan, the last important town on the eastern bank of
1hc upp