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

THE PROPHET ARMED
balance under the Peace of Versailles, just concluded. These
events coincided with the worst predicament of the civil war:
British and French intervention reached its height, and Denikin
seized the.Ukraine and advanced towards Moscow.
This was a strange moment in the history of Bolshevism. Not
only did the anti-Soviet intervention gather strength and
momentarily meet with little or no effective counteraction from
the western working classes. Not only had the revolution lost its
footholds in central Europe. Even in Russia it stood in the gravest
danger of forfeiting the relatively wealthy and civilized western
and central provinces and of having to draw back into the
wastes of the east, for only there did the course of the war favour
the Red Army. But while fortune frowned upon the Bolsheviks
from the West, it enticed them with new opportunities in the
East. Not only did the wild mountain ranges of the Urals offer
hospitality and security to the Soviets. Beyond the Urals and
Siberia, Asia stirred in rebellion against the bourgeois West.
In India these were the days of Amritsar, when Gandhi's
campaign of civil disobedience all but transformed itself into
a nation-wide anti-British rising. This concatenation of events
set in motion Trotsky's political imagination and impelled it
in a curious direction.
On 5 August 1919 Trotsky sent from the front a secret memorandum
to the Central Committee, urging a radical 'reorientation'
in international affairs. He argued that the revolution had
been thrown back eastward and-eastward it must face. He still
assumed that the delay in European revolution would last from
one to five years only; and he did not believe that Denikin would
consolidate his hold on the Ukraine. Yet for the time being, he
wrote, the Red Army could play only a minor part in Europe,
whether as an offensive or a defensive force. But the gates to
Asia were open before it! There the Red Army would have to
contend only with Japanese forces which were too small for
Siberian spaces and which would be hampered by American
jealousy of Japanese expansion.' The weight of the Soviet
regime in Asia was such that the Bolsheviks were in a position
1
Trotsky remarked that the L'nited States was so frightened of Japanese
domination in Siberia that the 'Washington wretches' (although they were still
using Kolchak as their agent) might yet resolve to back the Soviets againstjapan.
Some time later Lenin similarly set store by the rivalry between America andjapan.
Lenin, Sochinm•a, vol. xxxi, pp. 433-40.