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

520 THE PROPHET ARMED
animated by 'bureaucratic and bourgeois hostility towards
the masses' could hardly refrain from concerting their efforts
against what they considered to be a sinister and formidably
organized influence within the party. The ban on factions
could thus at first delay a split only to accelerate it later.
Barely two years were to elapse before Trotsky was to take
up and give a powerful resonance to many of the criticisms and
demands made by the less articulate leaders of the Workers'
Opposition and of the Decemists, whom he now helped to defeat,
and before he, too, was to cry out for a return to proletarian
democracy.
It was only a few years since Trotsky had, as an emigre in
Vienna, drawn that impressive vista of Russia's past, in which
he showed how history had thrown the Russian people into a
'severe environment', exposed them to pressures from wealthy
and powerful Europe and to invasions from all directions, and
let a Leviathan-like state mould their destinies for them. To feed
itself, he then wrote, the Leviathan starved the nation, retarded
or accelerated the growth of its social classes, and atrophied
its civilization. 1 The revolution was in one of its aspects the
people's triumph over the Leviathan. The triumph had seemed
complete, for the old state had been reduced to dust and ashes.
Yet the revolution, too, had to draw its nourishment and its
vitality from that same 'severe environment'. From this it
absorbed all its severity. Rich in world-embracing ideas and
aspirations, the new republic was 'poor with the accumulated
poverty of over a thousand years'. It mortally hated that poverty.
But that poverty was its own flesh and blood and breath.
Trotsky had contrasted 'the spires and the vaulting arches
and the gothic lacework' of western European feudalism with
the coarse and barbarous vulgarity of Russian feudalism, which
could only fill the crevices of its log cabin with moss. He had
juxtaposed the rich and complex growth of the Third Estate in
Europe with the Russian police-sponsored crafts; the free and
cultivated 'bourgeois personality' of the West with the 'snout
which every policeman could kick and punch'. Yet from that
same log cabin, shattered by revolution and war, he set out with
the Bolshevik party to pioneer for socialism. Against all ex-
' See above, chapter VII.