PARTISAN REVIEW
31
below. Isolated actions. Self-help. Setting up of advisory councils.
Now we come along. Our achievement: to bring the innumerable
spontaneous actions together. To merge them into the Bolshevik ef–
fort. We have the overall vision. See the immediate possibilities. Put
into concrete fonn what was present in the raw. Restrict ourselves to
a single military operation. Carried out by a limited number of Red
Guards. The masses are not fighting now. Only the proletariat avant–
garde. How many of us are there? Five thousand, ten thousand. His–
tory will remember the names of a few dozen. The millions of the
nameless are now asking: will we do justice to all their efforts?
LENIN: And the quarrel between us? Over now?
TR.OTSKY: Was it a quarrel? Not rather a mutual testing of strength?
We pushed each other forward. Took over each other's ideas. Ironed
out differences of opinion. The revolution was still untried. Different
views and possibilities had to clash and be proved in practice. In the
future too there'll be controversy, contradictions. Would we be Marx–
ists otherwise?
LENIN: Ha. Ha ha ha. My rage against you was often violent. Because
you held fast to those false humanists. Were you trying to outplay
me, perhaps? To grab the leadership yourself?
TROTSKY: Maybe the impulse was there. Somewhere in me there's still
that poor young Jewish lad Lev Bronstein from Yanofska. This fan–
tastic urge for power and influence. Difficult to appreciate that none
of it exists for you. Ambition. The need to prove oneself. None of it
exists for you.
LENIN: We are worthy of each other. But I've got only a few more years.
There are times now when for an hour or so I am gone, blotted out.
The others, they won't put up with you when I'm no longer here.
Your self-assurance, your international interests. They'll call it ar–
rogance, vanity. They'll band together and throw you out. Then we'll
see what the revolutionary masses are worth. Whether they'll come
out on your side.
Machine-gun fire. Enter the participants at the all-Russian con–
gress, among them
SVERDLOV, SMIRNOV, KAMENEV, ZrNOVIEV, DZER–
ZHINSKY, RYKov, RAKOVSKY, SHLYAPNIKOV, MRACHK.OVSKY, MAR–
TOV, KHINCHUK, ABRAMOVICH, ARKADI KREMER, DEUTSCH, Ku–
CHIN, PETERSON.
They sit down at and around the desk. It
is
a large
gathering. A babble of voices.
TR.OTSKY, LENIN, KAMENEV, SVERD–
LOV
sit at the middle of the desk. A soldier gives
TROTSKY
a mes–
sage.
TROTSKY: In the name of the military revolutionary committee I declare
that the provisional government has ceased to exist.
Cheers and protests.