Page:The Hero in History.djvu/150

150 If one were to ferret out a meaning from the twists and turns of this passage, it would seem to support the conclusion we previously reached. But that impression is immediately cancelled by Trotsky’s refusal to dissociate Lenin from the situation in which he found himself. He tells us that it is mechanical and one-sided to juxtapose Lenin, on the one hand, “the person, the hero, the genius,” and the objective conditions on the other, “the mass, the party.” In order to keep his doctrinal piety unflecked by the stain of heresy, Trotsky unknowingly reverts to the position of Herbert Spencer. Spencer dismissed the question of the relation between the outstanding individual and his time on the ground that a man and his period had to be considered together and that both were determined by the antecedent state of culture.

Trotsky, too, disallows any comparison between Lenin and the conditions of his time, including the masses and party, because they are all explained by something else. He assures us that Lenin was not an accidental element in the historical development of Russia and that both Lenin and his party were “a product of the whole past of Russian history.” Naturally! Of what else could they be a historical product? But what bearing has this tautology on the question: would the Bolshevik Party have found its way to October without Lenin? No matter what historical events had happened from February to October, we would still be able to say, with as much reason as Trotsky, that it was a product of the whole past of Russian history. Since such a phrase could “explain” both the success of the Bolsheviks with Lenin and their failure without him, it is completely irrelevant to the question. To relapse into outright mysticism, all Trotsky need do is to assert that the existence of a Lenin in Russia in 1917 was assured by the whole past of Russian history. Providence sends us the Man of God, and the Mephistophelean dialectic, der Geist der stets verneint, sends us the Man of the People.

The phrase “product of the whole past of Russian history” can be given a definite meaning. In this sense, anything is a “product” of past Russian history, if, before its occurrence, it can be, or could have been predicted on the available historical evidence as the only likely alternative of future development. In this use of the phrase we are justified in concluding that the best evidence, including the evidence presented by Trotsky, shows that the Russian Revolution of October, 1917, was not