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pletely with either of the factions that were hardening into shape, the
Bolsheviks led by Lenin and the Mensheviks led by Martov. This
I
division can now be seen as a partial anticipation of the great split that
would come during the First World War between revolutionists and re–
formists within the socialist movement, but at the time the issues
were still murky, and Trotsky, disinclined in his earlier years to tie
himself to a party apparatus, sided now with one group and now
with the other. At stake, apparently, was a bit of phrasing as to who
could be considered a member of the party: someone who "person–
ally participates in one of its organizations" (Lenin), or someone
prepared to "cooperate personally and regularly under the guidance
of one of the organizations" (Martov). Scholastic as this difference
might seem-two years later the Mensheviks virtually took over
Lenin's phrasing-it was nevertheless a sign of a divergence in po–
litical outlook that went deeper than the participants could yet grasp.
Immediately after the Congress Trotsky sided with the Menshe–
viks, composing vitriolic attacks on what he regarded as Lenin's
dictatorial and "Jacobin" views concerning party organization. In
a pamphlet he wrote denouncing Lenin there appeared a sentence
that has since been quoted many times as a prophetic anticipation,
ignored by the later Trotsky himself, of the decline of the Russian
Revolution:
Lenin's methods lead to this: the party organization at first
substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central
Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a
single "dictator" substitutes himself for the Central Committee.
The remark is a striking one, of course, in its anticipation of
the ways in which the highly centralized structure of the Bolshevik
party would encourage an authoritarian psychology among the lead–
ers and intellectual dependence among the followers. As a sociological
insight, it remains valuable for the study of modern politics and
political organization. Yet it is hardly as prescient as some historians
have supposed, and it certainly is not sufficient evidence for the
claim
that in his youth Trotsky grasped the causes of the degenera–
tion of the Russian Revolution in a way that the older Trotsky,
even after his downfall, refused to acknowledge. Though anticipating
the debacle of the Bolshevik party in the era of Stalinist totalitarian-
