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

DEFEAT IN VICTORY
normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any
work at any place of its choosing.
We are now heading towards the type of labour [he stated] that
is socially regulated on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory
for the whole country, compulsory for every worker. This is the
basis of socialism .... The militarization of labour, in this fundamental
sense of which I have spoken, is the indispensable basic
method for the organization of our labour forces .... Is it true that
compulsory labour is always unproductive) ... This is the most
wretched and miserable liberal pr~judice: chattel sla\'ery, too, was
productive .... Compulsory serf labour did not grow out of the
feudal lords' ill-will. It was [in its time] a progressive phenomenon.'
Carried away by his desire to justify the measures he sponsored,
he, the rebel par excellence, the expounder of permanent revolution,
came very near to talking like an apologist for past systems
of coercion and exploitation.
For a time the Polish war blunted the edge of this controversy.
Peril from without once again induced people to accept
without murmur policies which, before, had aroused their
intense resentment. At the height of the war, Trotsky, surrounded
by a team of technicians, made a determined effort to set the
railways in motion. By this time the stock of locomotives had
been almost entirrly wasted. Engineers forecast the exact date-­
only a few months ahead-when not a single railway in Russia
would be working. Trotsky placed the railway mrn and the
personnel of the repair workshops under martial law; and he
organized systematic and rapid rehabilitation of the rollingstock.
He went into the repair workshops to tell the workers
that the country was paying for their slackness in blood:
the paralysis of transport had encouraged the Poles to attack.
'The situation of the worker', he declared, 'is grievous in e\·cry
respect ... it is worse than ever. I would deceive you if I were
to say that it will be better to-morrow. '.\o, ahead of us arc
months of heavy struggle until we can lift our country out of
this terrible misery and uttt>r exhaustion, until wt' can stop
weighing our bread ration on the dwmist';; scales.'" \\'ht'll 1he
railwaymen's trade union raised objections to his action, he
I Ibid., pp. 87-g6.
1 See his speech at the ~iuromsk workshops of 2 1 .J unc 1920 in Sorhinenya, vol. xv,
p. 368.