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

THE PROPHET ARMED
doctrine'. That doctrine, they held, should meet the needs of the
revolutionary class and suit its mentality: It must disdain defence
and static warfare and favour mobility and the offensive. Only
decaying classes, retreating in all fields, favoured the defensive
attitude. The 'proletarian style of warfare' appealed to commanders
who had risen from the ranks. I ts most gifted· expounders were
Tukhachevsky and Frunze, while Voroshilov and Budienny also
counted among its adherents. With Tukhachevsky the offensive
doctrine logically supplemented 'revolution from without'; and in
advocating both he remained within the Napoleonic tradition. But
being of a more modern outlook than his colleagues, he saw the future
offensive warfare as conducted by means of mass formations of tanks
and armoured vehicles co-operating with air forces. (He was also
the originator of parachute troops, whom he intended to use far
behind the enemy lines, in areas engulfed by civil war.)
Trotsky's polemic against this school of thought is perhaps the
most instructive part of his military writings. He dismissed 'proletarian
strategy', just as in another field he disavowed 'proletarian
culture' and 'proletarian literature'. 'War bases itself on many
sciences', he wrote, 'but war itself is no science-it is a practical art,
a skill ... a savage and bloody art .... To try to formulate a new
military doctrine with the help of Marxism is like trying to create
with the help of Marxism a new theory of architecture or a new
veterinary text-book.' 1 He protested, often with biting derision,
against the trnatment of Marxist dialectics as the philosopher's
stone; and he demanded respect for a certain continuity of experience
and cultural tradition. He saw in the 'proletarian' innovations a
cover for intellectual crudity and conceit. He constantly drew the
attention of his military audiences to the barbarous poverty,
uncouthness, and dirt of the Red Army, to be mitigated only by
hard work and attention to detail, from which the Russian only too
frequently sought to escape into the realm of abstract doctrine.
The adherents of the 'proletarian doctrine of the offensive'
theorized from their own experience in the civil war, in which rapid
mancruvre predominated. Trotsky replied that the Red Army had
learned mancruvrability, allegedly the exclusive virtue of a rising
social class, from the White Guards, just as the latter had borrowed
methods of propaganda from the Red Army. Whites and Reds had
become mutually assimilated in military matters: 'Fighting one
another over a long time, enemies come to learn from one another.''
1 From a speech to the military delegates at the eleventh party congress. Op.
cit., vol. iii, book '" p. 244.
• Trotsky, op. cit., vol. ii, book 1, pp. 61-62.