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equate the power of their party with the interests of the proletariat.
Trotsky, flushed with the conquest of power, had replied: "You are
bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now
on-into the rubbish-can of history! " Sad words, from the man who
in a few years would himself be harried into exile; sad words, as
they reflect a failure to see that it is not always the least intelligent
or good or even politically "correct" who are cast into that rubbish–
can.
In the years after the revolution, Lenin was more flexible, less
doctrinaire than Trotsky. He opposed Trotsky's scheme for labor
battalions and argued against a facile identification of the Bolshevik
state with the proletariat; he described the regime as a
"deformed
workers' state" in which the workers' organization had to defend
not only the state against its enemies but themselves against the
state. But while this led him to propose an easing of economic life,
he did not urge a parallel easing of political life. On the contrary,
the turn toward the NEP in 1921, with its attendant threat to the
Communist political monopoly, became for Lenin an argument
against the reintroduction of even limited political freedoms.
In a speech before the Third Congress of the Comintern ( 1921),
Lenin repeated the assumption that had been common to all the
Bolshevik leaders:
It was clear to us that without aid from the international
world revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution [in
Russia] is impossible. Even prior to the Bolshevik revolution,
as well as after it, we thought that the revolution would also
occur either immediately or at least very soon in other back–
ward countries and in the more highly developed capitalist
countries. Otherwise we would perish.
Russia, Lenin kept insisting, was a backward peasant land that
lacked technology, industry and the accumulated culture required for
surpassing the achievements of the Western capitalist countries. Con–
sequently the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the ability
of the Communist movement to achieve power in at least one major
advanced country, so that assistance could come for besieged Rus–
sia. With the defeat of the 1919-1921 revolutions in Western Europe,
however, there were already signs that Lenin's prophecy-"otherwise
