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

THE PROPHET ARMED
the eyes of the world he therefore bore a major share ofresponsibili
ty for the invasion of Georgia.
In the Politbureau's behaviour over Poland and Georgia
Trotsky saw mistakes, into which the party had blundered as if
in a fit of absent-mindedness. He set his face against both
'mistakes', but he saw no inner connexion and no deeper significance
in them. Up to a point he was right, because the party
as a whole had entered the road of revolutionary conquest
neither consciously nor deliberately. The invasion of Georgia
was its only successful step on that road, and there was no lack
of mitigating circumstances. Georgia had, after all, been part of
Russia: it could not survive as a little 'bourgeois island' in the
Soviet Caucasus. Yet there was an inner connexion between the
Polish and the Georgian ventures, for both marked the initiation
of a new current in Bolshevism.
The revolutionary cycle, which the First World War had set
in motion, was coming to a close. At the beginning of that cycle
Bolshevism had risen on the crest of a genuine revolution;
towards its end Bolshevism began to spread revolution by conquest.
A long interval, lasting nearly a quarter of a century,
separates this cycle of revolution from the next, which the
Second World War set in motion. During the interval Bolshevism
did not expand. \Vhen the next cycle opened, it started where
the first had ended, with revolution by conquest. It is a commonplace
in military history that there exists a continuity
between the closing phase of one war and the opening phase of
the next: the weapons and the ideas on warfare invented or
formed towards the end of one armed conflict dominate the
first stage of the next conflict. A similar continuity may be seen
to exist between the two cycles of revolution. In 1945-6 and
partly even in 1939-40 Stalin began where he, and in a sense he
and Lenin, had left off in 1920-1. Trotsky did not live to witness
the momentous chapter which Stalin's revolutionary conquest
has since written in modern history. His attitude towards the
early symptoms of the trend was inconclusive. He was for
revolution and against conquest; but when revolution led to
conquest and conquest promoted revolution, he was confronted
with a dilemma which, from his viewpoint, admitted no satillfactory
solution. H~ did not pre11s his oppositWn to revolutionary
conquest to the point-of an open &reach. -On the other hand, he