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

DEFEAT IN VICTORY
his mind's eye he had no cold machine of coercion slowly and
remorselessly grinding its human material, but the monumental
and evanescent outlines of a 'Proletarian Sparta', the austere
rigours of which were part of the pioneering adventure in socialism.
The very absurdity of his behaviour contained its own
antidote. In his candour he gave the people ample notice of the
danger threatening them. He indicated the limits to which he
was prepared to go. He submitted his policies to public control.
He himself did everything in his power to provoke the resistance
that frustrated him. To keep politically alive he needed broad
daylight. It took Stalin's bat-like character to carry his ideas
into execution.
The Bolshevik party still defended the principle of proletarian
democracy against Trotsky; but it continued to depart from it
in practice.
It was only in r92r that Lenin's government proceeded to ban
all organized opposition within the Soviets. Throughout the
civil war the Bolsheviks had harassed the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries, now outlawing them, now allowing them to
come into the open, and then again suppressing them. The
harsher and the milder courses were dictated by circumstances
and by the vacillations of those parties in which some groups
leaned towards the Bolsheviks and others towards the White
Guards. The idea, however, that those parties should be suppressed
on principle had not taken root before the end of the
civil war. Even during the spells of repression, those opposition
groups which did not plainly call for armed resistance to the
Bolsheviks still carried on all sorts of activities, open and clandestine.
The Bolsheviks often eliminated them from the Soviets
or reduced their representation by force or guile. It was through
the machinery of the Soviets that Lenin's government organized
the civil war; and in that machinery it was not prepared to
countenance hostile or neutral elements. But the government
still looked forward to the end of hostilities when it would be able
to respect the rules of Soviet constitutionalism and to readmit
in an industrialized country and to shift workers, say, from Manchester to Birmingham
or from Stuttgart to Essen, and quite another to.direct Ukrainian peasants or
Petrograd workers to factorie3 and mines in the Urals and in Siberia, or in the
Far North. Direction of labour in a more or less uniform industrial environment
may involve a minimum of compulsion. It required a maximum in Russia.