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and the Mensheviks agreed that it would be a middle-class demo–
cratic regime, which would not, could not abolish private property.
It seemed logical that, after feudal Czarism had been overthrown,
backward Russia would first have to go through a bourgeois demo–
cratic stage of evolution before it would be ripe for socialist revo–
lution. Trotsky, however, insisted that precisely because Russia was
so extremely backward the revolutionary tasks that would arise
after the Czar's downfall would prove too enormous to be coped
with by the weak Russian bourgeoisie within the framework of
middle class property relations. Just as the "law of combined
development" had enabled such Russian big industry as there was
to leap over all historical intervening stages and at one bound to
reach a level of technology and concentration equal to the most
advanced European industry, so the same law would operate
in
politics, and backward, primitive "holy Russia" would overleap
bourgeois democracy and make the transition in one mighty bound
from feudalism to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was a
daring conception and it is not surprising that no one took it very
seriously-until it happened.
When the 1917 revolution came, Lenin, who had fought
Trotsky's permanent-revolution theory for years, quickly came to
see it was correct and adopted it, while Trotsky, who had long
opposed Lenin's organizational views, saw that Lenin had built
the political instrument to make the revolution and at once joined
the Bolshevik Party. (One wishes, indeed, that Trotsky, whose pre-
1917 objections to the undemocratic, bureaucratic features of
Leninism sound prophetic today, had not accepted Leninism so
uncritically, had not tried to become the firmest of firm Bolshe–
viks.) When Lenin produced his famous "April Theses" soon after
his arrival in Russia, the Old Bolsheviks quite correctly scented
in
them more than a whiff of "Trot.,kyism." For a time Lenin was as
isolated as Trotsky had been for years, and, like him, considered
an ultra-left dreamer. But events moved fast, even the Old Bolshe–
viks saw the drift, Trotsky appeared on the scene and joined
Lenin's party, and the two leaders went on together to organize and
lead to victory the October revolution.
Now the other part of the "permanent revolution" theory
came into play. Trotsky never attempted to deny that Russia was
too backward to maintain for very long a political form so ad-
