Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October - Platypus

38 The Lessons of Octoberthe revolutionary party during the preparatory epoch. The consequencesentailed by this or that careless or premature act serve each time as mostcruel reminders of the enemy’s strength.But a moment comes when this habit of regarding the enemy as strongerbecomes the main obstacle on the road to victory. Today’s weakness of thebourgeoisie seems to be cloaked by the shadow of its strength of yesterday.”You underestimate the strength of the enemy!” This cry servesas the axis for the grouping of all elements opposed to the armedinsurrection. ”But everyone who does not want merely to talkabout uprising,” wrote the opponents of insurrection in our owncountry, two weeks before our victory, ”must carefully weighits chances. And here we consider it our duty to say that atthe present moment it would be most harmful to underestimatethe forces of our opponent and overestimate our own forces.The forces of the opponent are greater than they appear. Petrogradis decisive, and in Petrograd the enemies of the proletarianparty have accumulated substantial forces: 5,000 militarycadets, excellently armed, organized, anxious (because of theirclass position) and able to fight; also the staff, shock troops, Cossacks,a substantial part of the garrison, and very considerableartillery, which has taken up a position in fan-like formationaround Petrograd. Then our adversaries will undoubtedly attempt,with the aid of the All-Russian Central Executive Committeeof the Soviets, to bring troops from the front.” 1In a civil war, to the extent that it is not a question of merely counting battalionsbeforehand but of drawing a rough balance of their state of consciousness,such an estimate can, of course, never prove completely satisfactoryor adequate. Even Lenin estimated that the enemy had strong forces in Petrograd;and he proposed that the insurrection begin in Moscow where, ashe thought, it might be carried out almost without bloodshed. Such partialmistakes of forecast are absolutely unavoidable even under the mostfavorable circumstances and it is always more correct to make plans in accordancewith the less favorable conditions. But of interest to us in thegiven case is the fact that the enemy forces were monstrously overestimatedand that all proportions were completely distorted at a time when the enemywas actually deprived of any armed force. This question — as theexperience of Germany proved — is of paramount importance. So long asthe slogan of insurrection was approached by the leaders of the GermanCommunist Party mainly, if not solely, from an agitational standpoint, they1 ”On the Current Situation”