156
GEORGE LICHTHEIM
followers were being expelled from the party and shipped off to
Siberia-he no longer gave the impression of aiming at anything
beyond a moral victory in the distant future. Yet unlike some of
the earlier oppositionists-notably those who left the party, or were
driven out, after the Kronstadt rising of 1921-he obstinately clung
to the notion that the regime was inherently socialist and only
needed to be reformed politically. From the viewpoint of those
earlier exiles who had already written the entire Bolshevik dictator–
ship off as the hopelessly corrupt reign of a new exploiting class,
the Trotskyist newcomers of 1928 were but a dissident faction of
the "Establishment"; and most of them in the end confirmed this
analysis by making their peace with Stalin.
The description of this process, whereby the majority of Trot–
sky's followers were reluctantly brought to accept the "temporary"
necessity of Stalin's personal rule, forms the most instructive part
of Mr. Deutscher's final chapter. Earlier he devotes a good deal of
space to the rather scholastic disputation over the supposed "Ther–
midorian," or counter-revolutionary menace on which Trotsky and
Zinoviev fell back in 1926-7, when they had run out of more con–
vincing and less academic arguments. It is revealing to learn that
as late as July 1927, five months before his expulsion, Trotsky was
able to shake the morale of the Old Bolsheviks on the Central Con–
trol Commission with a lengthy disquisition on the fall of Robes–
pierre. A year earlier, Bukharin-then under suspicion of favoring a
"Soviet Thermidor"-reacted with hysterical rage against the
ac–
cusation. All the factions operated with historical analogies; and
all the leading figures-with the noteworthy exception of Stalin–
were genuinely in the grip of fear that they might be re-enacting
some disastrous episode from the earlier drama. When the ruling
group tried to discredit Trotsky in 1924 they established a prece–
dent by muttering that he might have Bonapartist ambitions (a
grotesque suggestion to which Mr. Deutscher unaccountably lends
some indirect support by affecting to take it seriously, instead of
dismissing it as the obvious humbug it was.); in 1927 Trotsky un–
nerved the Control Commission with memories of Jacobin disin–
tegration after Robespierre's fall. But the weapon was two-edged:
