evidence where it leads. Events can never refute the creed of historical materialism: it is necessary only to interpret them properly. The scientific historian, however, must bow before the stubborn fact. We shall show that what his creedal soul proposes is at odds with what his empirical investigation discloses.
Trotsky’s empirical analysis does establish on the basis of incontestable evidence, the powerlessness of the Czarist system to survive any large-scale war. Even without a war, it was rotten ripe for collapse. It would probably have gone under in the next wave of internal disturbance. And by the end of the first year of war, even the nobility was already drawing lots to determine who was to kill Nicholas II. and his entourage. But there is still a long way to go from the doom of Czarism to the inevitability (or overwhelming probability) of the October Revolution. Trotsky attempts to bridge this gap by showing that Russia in 1917, under any régime, was unable to continue fighting and that, without the solution of the land problem, the country, whether at peace or war, could not escape chaos. Here, too, the contentions are amply supported by evidence. Yet it still does not follow from them that the triumph of the Bolshevik Party was historically necessary.
After all, we have already seen that an early peace and the division of the landed estates were a part of the programme of the Social Revolutionary Party. Had the October Revolution failed, the physical inability to continue the war, as well as the necessity of safeguarding the country from possible new uprisings by the followers of Kornilov on the one hand and Lenin on the other, would have compelled the Constituent Assembly to come to terms with Germany. And as for satisfying the peasantry, there was no arrière pensée behind the concern of the Social Revolutionary Party with giving land to the peasants, as there was with the Bolsheviks. Despite its heterogeneous social composition, the Social Revolutionary Party was primarily a peasant party. It refused to countenance seizure of land out of hand because of its desire to regularize division of the estates. It waited for the Constituent Assembly to do this. But the peasants were tired of waiting for land, the soldiers were tired of waiting for peace, and the workers were tired of food shortages and rising prices.
Without challenging a single one of his facts (and some are not above challenge), one may say that all Trotsky has proved
