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

REVOLUTION AND CONQUEST 473
the Polish war, he warned against the temptation to carry
revolution abroad by force of arms. The warning runs indeed
like a red thread through his writings and speeches of this
period. 1 His rational opposition to revolution by conquest was in
a sense merely the obverse side of his almost irrational belief
in the craving of the western working classes for revolution and
in their ability to make it. He was so unshakably confident that
the proletarians of Europe and America were already impelled
by their own circumstances to follow in the footsteps of Bolshevism
that he was firmly convinced of the absolute harm
latent in any attempt to make the revolution for them or to
probe and prod them with bayonets. He saw the world pregnant
with socialism; he believed that the pregnancy could not last
long; and he feared that impatient tampering with it would
result in abortion. The solidarity which the Russian Revolution
owed to the working classes of other countries, he maintained,
should express itself mainly in helping them to understand and
interpret their own social and political experience and their
own tasks, not in trying to solve those tasks for them. In one
controversy he angrily remarked of anyone who thought of
replacing revolution abroad by the Red Army's operations that
'it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his
neck and h~ cast into the sea'. 2
Yet such was the strength of the new Bolshevik proclivity that
it could not be altogether suppressed. It soon manifested itself
again in the Red Army's invasion of Georgia.
Up to February 1921 Georgia had been ruled by a Menshevik
government, with which the Soviets had signed a treaty during
the Polish war. Nearly the whole of the Caucasus was already
under Soviet control; and Menshevik Georgia was a thorn in its
flesh. The claim of the Georgian Mensheviks to independent
nationhood was rather spurious: before the October Revolution
they themselves had ardently advocated Georgia's unity with
Russia and had asked only for a degree of local autonomy.
Their present separatism was a convenient pretext. The mere
existence of Menshevik Georgia made it more difficult for the
Bolsheviks to consolidate their regime in the rest of the Caucasus;
and the Bolsheviks had not forgotten that the Georgian
1
Kale Vooru~hala.r Ret'olutsia, vol. iii, book 2, pp. 114, 124, 142-3, 2o6, 225-7 and
passim. • Trotsky, op. cit., p. 225.