TROTSKY
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twentieth century. The vexing problem of the relation between back–
wardness and industrialization, which today preoccupies all serious
political thinkers, was to be solved, as Trotsky saw it, by the historical
audacity of the barely-developed proletariat in the colonial coun–
tries. For the Mensheviks, who believed that the bourgeoisie would
have to lead the forthcoming bourgeois revolution, Trotsky's theory
was an absurdity. Lenin, though agreeing with Trotsky as to the
historical impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie, felt that the Russian
working class was still too weak and inexperienced to play the
grandiose role assigned to it by Trotsky and that the revolution
would have to be carried through by an alliance between proletariat
and peasantry, whose exact relationship he refused to specify or pre–
dict. Later, after the Russian Revolution, Lenin acknowledged the
prescience of Trotsky's theory, and in retrospect it seems no exaggera–
tion to add that of all the Marxists it was Trotsky who best foresaw
the course of events in Russia.
But not entirely. There were at least two crucial respects in
which history would cross his expectations. Like most Marxists,
Trotsky did not foresee the extent to which the working class in
Western Europe, increasingly absorbed into national life and having
won for itself major economic and political benefits, would choose
parliamentarism, rather than revolution, as the way to realize its
aims. The help from a victorious European proletariat which Trotsky
hoped would salvage the Russian Revolution was not to be forth–
coming. Secondly, he failed to anticipate certain consequences of an
isolated revolution in a backward country. He knew it might col–
lapse or be overthrown, but he did not imagine that a consolidation
of power from within its ranks might undo its original values. That
the working class in a backward country, or a party acting in its
name, could in moments of crisis approach and even take power,
but that it would then reveal a fundamental incapacity to recon–
struct economic and cultural life on a level high enough for achieving
socialism- all this he foresaw brilliantly. But what he did not count
on was that in such a debacle the revolutionary party, or a bona–
partist sector of it, would concentrate power in its upper ranks and
establish itself as a bureaucratic elite above all classes-above ex–
hausted proletariat, supine peasantry, dispersed bourgeoisie. The re–
sult would be a new, collectivist mode of authoritarianism, neither
