IN MEMORY: L. D. TROTSKY
389
his life. (We all knew it, as did he, who spoke of it to me.) He
had come to beiieve that it was once more on the order of the day
to win over the workers one by one, as in the old days of illegality
under the Czar, if revolutionary democracy was to be saved. And
so thirty or forty poor workers listened to him, one or two of them
perhaps sitting on the floor at his feet, asking questions and pon·
dering his replies. We knew that we were more likely to fail than
to conquer, but that too, we felt, would be useful.
If
we had not at
least put up a fight, the revolution would have been a hundred
times more defeated.
The greatness of Trotsky's personality was a collective rather
than an individual triumph. He was the highest expression of
a human type produced in Russia between 1870 and 1920, the
flower of a half-century of the Russian intelligentsia. Tens of
thousands of his revolutionary comrades shared his traits-and I
by no means exclude many of his political opponents from this
company. Like Lenin, like certain others whom the chances of the
struggle left in obscurity, Trotsky simply carried to a high pitch
of individual perfection the common characteristics of several
generations of Russian revolutionary intellectuals. Glimpses of
the type appear in Turgenev's novels, notably Bazarov, but it comes
out much more clearly in the great revolutionary struggles. The
militants of the Narodnaya Volya were men and women of this
stamp; even purer examples were the Social-Revolutionary terror–
ists of the 1905 period, and the Bolsheviks of 1917. For a man
like Trotsky to arise, it was necessary that thousands and thousands
of individuals should establish the type over a long historical
period. It was a broad social phenomenon, not the sudden flashing
of a comet, and those who speak of Trotsky as a "unique" per–
sonality, conforming to the classic bourgeois idea of the " Great
Man," are much mistaken. The characteristics of the type were:
a personal disinterestedness based on a sense of history;
a complete absence of individualism in the bourgeois sense
of the word;
a strong impulse to place one's individuality at the service of
society, amounting to a kind of pride (but quite without vanity or
desire to "shine") ;
the capacity for personal sacrifice, without the least
desire
for such sacrifice;
