“Worker-Communists,” he wrote, “you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for any place; there are not enough passports for you. 216-17). The struggle of the International Left Opposition to reform the Comintern assumed the greatest political urgency in Germany, where the working class was confronted with the menace of fascism. “The school and the social life of the student,” he wrote, “are saturated with formalism and hypocrisy” (p. 137). The falsification and degradation of Marxism by the Stalinists has played the decisive role in the intellectual and political impoverishment of the workers’ movement in the capitalist countries, above all in the centers of world imperialism. The Revolution Betrayed. The majority cannot concern itself with the privileges of the minority. The form assumed by that degeneration was the massive growth of the bureaucracy in the apparatus of the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party and the extraordinary concentration of power in its hands. Share . Therefore, in spite of and in opposition to the Stalinists, the Fourth International unconditionally defended the degenerated workers’ state against imperialism precisely because a military defeat raised the danger of the complete destruction of the remaining social conquests of the October Revolution. Genre/Form: History: Additional Physical Format: Online version: Volin, 1882-1945. Living in a remote village in already remote Norway, cut off from all direct contact with Soviet citizens, compelled to follow events as best he could through the press, Trotsky nevertheless succeeded in producing an amazingly detailed, comprehensive, and enduring analysis of the Soviet Union. © In words that brooked no misinterpretation, except by those who did not agree with what they read, Trotsky wrote: “All indications agree that the further course of development must inevitably lead to a clash between the culturally developed forces of the people and the bureaucratic oligarchy. This fantastic conception, like all the other ideas hatched by the Pablo-Mandel faction, was completely alien to the scientific analysis of the Stalinist regime presented by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. To peasants? However, this was hardly reassuring for Lenin, whose worst fears as expressed in his Testament were beginning to come true. Its further development and completion depended upon the efforts of the world proletariat. However, and here he was answering the numerous intellectual sycophants of the Kremlin, the policies of the Stalinist regime, despite the short-term successes, were intensifying the contradictions of the Soviet state and leading toward its destruction. However, though not a class, Trotsky conceded that the Soviet bureaucracy could not be simply compared to state bureaucracies within other societies: “the very fact of its appropriation of political power in a country where the most important means of production are concentrated in the hands of the state, creates a new and hitherto unknown relation between the bureaucracy and the riches of the nation. And this shameful interdiction was not violated or overthrown. After they were apprehended, the burglars claimed that they had discovered material proving that Trotsky had violated the terms of his Norwegian exile. In the concluding volume of his later biography of Trotsky, Deutscher acknowledged that he had authored the arguments against the founding of the Fourth International advanced by two Polish delegates at the 1938 conference. His former deputy, AA Kuznetsov, was also brought to Moscow as a secretary of the Party Central Committee. As late as November 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a televised speech on the seventieth anniversary of the revolution in which he did not shrink from lying shamelessly about Trotsky’s role in 1917 and the early years of the Soviet state. [1] A serious examination of the structure of Trotsky’s analysis is sufficient to expose the shallowness of this criticism. There were also unsubstantiated rumours that Empress Alexandra, a German by origin, betrayed military secrets to the enemy. From 1918 to 1926, moreover, it was the power base of Grigorii Zinoviev, one of Stalin's main rivals to succeed Lenin. Having starkly posed the political and historical alternatives, the task of the Fourth International was to show the working class the way out of the impasse created by the betrayals of its old organizations and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. News about Leningrad's ordeal was totally censored. On numerous occasions he strenuously objected to popular definitions of the bureaucracy as a new ruling class. Rather, he sought to formulate a concept of the Soviet Union which reproduced its dynamic features and indicated the possible forms of their further development. written 1936 first published 1937 Translated by Max Eastman Transcribed for the Internet by Zodiac between August 1993 and March 1996. Was Stalin to blame for the destruction wrought by the Wehrmacht? Led by the proletariat, the democratic revolution inevitably assumed a socialist character: that is, the wiping out of all remnants of feudalism in the countryside was accompanied by deep inroads into bourgeois property forms and the socialization of the means of production. Though a loyal Stalinist, Kirov may well also, in turn, have come to be seen as a threat. Thus, we must first and foremost establish that the extension of the territory dominated by bureaucratic autocracy and parasitism, cloaked by ‘socialist’ measures, can augment the prestige of the Kremlin, engender illusions concerning the possibility of replacing the proletarian revolution by bureaucratic maneuvers, and so on. BBC © 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. The Revolution Betrayed The Russian Revolution 1917 2. Shortly before his death, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan. Neither the pragmatic bourgeois nostrums broadcast by the mass media nor the insipid existential fatalism cultivated in the universities are capable of satisfying the demands of the working masses for a way out of the social catastrophe to which capitalism is leading. By the 1950s Stalin was in ill health, but the cult of personality surrounding him grew The leaders of the minority furiously objected to Trotsky’s characterization of their views as anti-Marxist. The political conclusions upon which Trotsky based his call for the founding of the Fourth International were theoretically substantiated and given a finished programmatic form with the writing of The Revolution Betrayed. Thus, the fate of the USSR—towards capitalism or towards socialism—depended upon, as Trotsky so clearly foresaw, “a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena” (p. 216). Hoping that it would have a calming effect, Krupskaya told him that the resolutions had been approved unanimously by the Party Conference. In spring 1948 his son, a Central Committee official, was severely criticised for ideological errors. To Mensheviks? The leaders of the Communist parties affiliated to the Comintern were hired flunkeys of the GPU-NKVD, prepared to carry out whatever instructions they received from the Kremlin. Though the state created by the first workers’ revolution did not collapse, it began to degenerate. It was not the fresh betrayal of the working class that offended liberal and democratic public opinion; rather, it was that the Soviet Union had deserted the camp of democratic imperialism and, therefore, placed itself in opposition to the foreign policy of the United States. Or, as Trotsky stated so succinctly, “on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy.”. The defeats suffered by the international working class discouraged the Soviet workers, undermined their confidence in the perspectives and prospects of world socialism, and, therefore, strengthened the bureaucracy. Whereas for bourgeois scholars and journalists the definition of the Soviet Union as a “socialist state” has generally been the assumed and unquestioned premise of their works, Trotsky rejected the facile use of the term “socialist” to describe the Soviet reality. The development leads obviously to the road of revolution” (p. 245). Historians agree that blame for the USSR's disastrous unpreparedness for war must be laid at Stalin's door. Transcribed for the Internet: by Zodiac between August 1993 and March 1996. [6] Despite the hardships of exile, the endless stream of political analysis that flowed from Trotsky’s pen, combined with a voluminous correspondence, transformed the Left Opposition into an international movement. Should Fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Basing themselves entirely on the theoretical conceptions elaborated in The Revolution Betrayed 17 years earlier, the orthodox Trotskyists who founded the International Committee succeeded in producing an analysis of Stalinism in the aftermath of World War II and the death of Stalin whose remarkable prescience can best be appreciated in the light of recent developments. When this struggle began, Trotsky still enjoyed immense prestige within the Bolshevik Party and among the Soviet masses. In the late 1920s the KPD surrendered to a blind Stalinism which rejected (until it was too late) a common front against Hitlerism with the ‘Social Fascists’ – Moscow’s prescribed description of the SPD. Though he did not realize this himself, Stalin was articulating the views of an expanding bureaucracy which saw the Soviet state not as the bastion and staging ground of world socialist revolution, but as the national foundation upon which its revenues and privileges were based. It is the only serious Marxist analysis of what happened to the Russian Revolution after the death of Lenin. The Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, or Tiurk newspapers and books are only translations of the bureaucratic imperatives into the language of the corresponding nationality” (p. 150). Anticipating by several decades the present political situation in the USSR, Trotsky declared that the program of capitalist restoration “would find no small number of ready servants among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in general” (p. 216). That the development of socialism in the Soviet Union depended ultimately upon the victory of the socialist revolution in the advanced European centers of world capitalism had always been, as we have already noted, an unquestioned premise of the Bolshevik, i.e., Marxist, perspective. We might add that if Lenin and Trotsky had behaved in 1917 as “respectable” social democrats, collaborated with the Provisional Government, cleared the way for Kornilov’s victory and then perished in a fascist debacle, liberal historians today would no doubt write of them as sympathetically as they do of Salvador Allende. But he had underestimated Trotsky’s ability to command the attention of a world audience. It did not call for the formation of a new International, but fought for the reform of the Comintern and its national sections. If the correspondence from Soviet workers and intellectuals that now streams into the offices of the International Committee of the Fourth International on an almost daily basis can be taken as an indication of the political renaissance of the Soviet masses from the Stalinist Dark Ages, then there can be no doubt that The Revolution Betrayed is destined to play a gigantic role in the Soviet revolution’s resurgence. Had the Bolsheviks failed to seize power in October, the events of 1917 would have in all likelihood concluded with a successful replay of the counterrevolution which General Kornilov had attempted in August. But the state, so to speak, ‘belongs’ to the bureaucracy. Little more than one year after the founding of the Fourth International, the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the eruption of the Second World War, and the Soviet invasion of Finland led to a sharp conflict within the Trotskyist movement over the validity of the analysis presented in The Revolution Betrayed. After his deportation from Norway in December 1936, Trotsky did not conceal his disgust with the cowardice of the Norwegian Social Democrats: “When I look back today on this period of internment, I must say that never, anywhere, in the course of my entire life—and I have lived through many things—was I persecuted with as much miserable cynicism as I was by the Norwegian ‘Socialist’ government. But if the Soviet Union was not socialist, could it then be defined as capitalist? A mass solidarity rally with Soviet Jewry … Trotsky, living in Norway, completed the introduction of The Revolution Betrayed and sent the final portions of the manuscript to the publishers barely two weeks before the beginning of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev in Moscow. 565-66). Furthermore, the extreme backwardness of Russian society—the legacy inherited by the Bolshevik regime from the tsarist past—was compounded by the economic devastation produced first by the world war and then by the civil war which erupted in 1918. Did this not mean that the Soviet bureaucracy could still play a historically progressive and even revolutionary role? For example, when the leadership of the French section refused to carry out IS instructions to liquidate the organization into the French Communist Party, Pablo and Mandel peremptorily expelled the section’s majority from the Fourth International. However, for someone looking for the opposite, a reasonable place to begin may be some of Trotsky’s writings—for example, My Life, The History of the Russian Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed. This was followed within a few months by the arrest of the leaders of the Opposition and their exile to the distant reaches of the USSR. In Russia the problem could only be posed. In the “classic” democratic revolutions of England and France, the bourgeoisie established its political hegemony in the struggle against feudalism and for national unification under conditions in which a proletariat, in the modem sense of the term, either did not exist or was only in the formative stages of its development as a distinct social class. And among their first actions would be the reinvestigation of the Leningrad Affair, leading to its denunciation as pure fabrication. Zhdanov was recalled to Moscow to become, by 1946, the leading figure in the party hierarchy after Stalin himself. It was rooted in an entirely opposed appraisal of the nature of the Stalinist regime. The behavior of the Norwegian government was made all the more scandalous by the way it proceeded to organize the deportation of Trotsky from the country. 21-22). Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847-1922) and Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850-1910) on 7 November 1879, the fifth child of a Ukrainian-Jewish family of wealthy farmers in Yanovka or Yanivka, in the Kherson governorate of the Russian Empire (now Bereslavka, in Ukraine), a small village 24 kilometres (15 mi) from the nearest post office. Even in Moscow he left it to others to preside at the Council of Ministers or Secretariat of the Party Central Committee. There was yet another and more profound aspect of the debate over the class nature of the Soviet state. Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II who was shot dead by the Bolsheviks together with his family, could have escaped this grim fate and left Russia after the abdication in March 1917. Free download or read online The Revolution Betrayed pdf (ePUB) book. Such is the social diagnosis. Burnham’s political evolution vindicated the warning which he received from Trotsky during the polemic of 1939-40: “Anyone acquainted with the history of the struggles of tendencies within workers’ parties knows that desertions to the camp of opportunism and even to the camp of bourgeois reaction began not infrequently with rejection of the dialectic.”. Georgii Zhukov was dispatched to galvanise Leningrad's demoralised defenders. Due in part to the deliberate inactivity of his closest comrades, he died five days later at the age of 74. Read more. Oct 9, 2016 - Costume Research. 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