The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

The Bolsheviks were already attacking the national Constituent Assembly of Ukraine. If the Germans were to evacuate the Baltic, the same would happen there. But Trotsky was unabashed. His retort was a classic dose of Marxist state theory: ‘... the General is completely right when he says that our government is founded on power. All history has known only such governments. So long as society consists of warring classes the power of the government will rest on strength and will assert its domination through force.’ What the Germans were objecting to in Bolshevism was ‘the fact that we do not lock up the strikers, but the capitalists who lock out the workers, the fact that we do not shoot the peasants who raise their claim to the land, but that we arrest the large landowners and officers who want to shoot the peasants . . .’ And, Trotsky went on, the ‘violence’ that Bolshevism applied, ‘the violence that is supported by millions of workers and peasants and that is directed against a minority which seeks to keep the people in servitude; this violence is a holy and historically progressive force.’