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The Revolution Betrayed

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Considering that the Soviet Union has fallen apart, that Leningrad has changed back to St. Petersburg, and that "communism" is discredited in the eyes of the pundits of the world, why would anyone want to read a book about the Soviet Union published in 1937? I'll tell you why. Because this book explains like no other book I've ever read what actually happened in the Soviet Union between the original Bolshevik Revolution and its total degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy; and WHY it happened. With plenty of concrete detail, it explains that Stalin and his henchmen took over the Russian Revolution NOT because revolutions are always bound to fail; and not because people are inherently corrupt; or that socialism is doomed. But because of a specific set of historical circumstances that faced the young Soviet workers' state and overwhelmed it. From this situation came Stalin and his fake version of Marxism, which Trotsky does a great job of blowing apart. For anyone who believes that there must be a better way than the dog-eat-dog system of capitalism that we live in, read this book!

Reading Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed", I can see where George Orwell got the idea for "1984" from. In Stalin's world, Trotsky says, black is white, war is peace, and if you repeat today what The Great Leader said yesterday, you could be arrested for being a counter-revolutionary -- because His policy may be different today. Trotsky offers both statistics and anecdotal info to show that Russia was going in completely the wrong direction. The Stalinst system, if it can be called a system, is unstable, says Trotsky, and will either undergo yet another revolution to true socialism or backslide into capitalism. Hmm.

Karl Marx had said that government is the tool of the ruling class. So come the revolution, in the first stage of socialism, which we can call communism, the tools of production would be redistributed and economic classes would disappear as everyone becomes all one class. With no classes, there'd be no need for government, which would wither away as the society progressed through the further stages of socialism.

This was... optimistic. Clearly, the Soviet Union not only never got out of the first stage, but Stalin did everything he could to keep in that stage, replacing the old ruling class with a new one, the bureaucracy. Trotsky clearly identifies how all this had been happening. So this is the best book I've seen on how the Soviet Union completely turned its back on the ideals of the Revolution.

But... this was hardly all Stalin's doing. What Trotsky doesn't do -- and neither does Kerensky in "Catastrophe" or probably any politician -- is ever admit he made any mistakes. Trotsky talks about how the revolutionary mindset requires dissent. Dissent within the Party and dissent within the system from other parties. Yet, this is the guy who led the attack on Kronstadt when the mutinous sailors dared to call for "All power to the soviets" instead of all power to the Party. Not to mention the thousands of political dissenters and starving protestors who were arrested, tortured, and executed without trial by Lenin and Trotsky.

So, if you read this, and are inclined to think that Trotsky was a great guy, you also need to read something like Emma Goldman's "Two Years in Russia" or Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism", both written around 1921, long before Stalin took control, to realize that the Bolsheviks were going wrong from the getgo. "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" said the early Bolsheviks. To which fellow revolutionary Victor Serge responded: "I see the broken eggs, but where's the omelette?"

This is Trotsky's masterpiece work taking apart Stalinism piece by piece is his analysis of how Stalin betrayed the socialist revolution in Russia. If you want to know why the USSR has not been 'revolutionary' in the past 70 years.... here are your answers...

This book is a classic of the 20th century, for the excellent job it does of describing what the Soviet Union was, as well as predicting what it might become. Trotsky describes it as a state halfway between Socialism and Capitalism, which could be either transformed to the former through worker action or perverted into the latter by counter-revolutionaries. As we see from the USSR, it is indeed the latter that prevailed. There are a lot of great questions which Trotsky anwers authoritatively. Get this book!!

First published over 60 years ago, this definitely is a book for today. Leon Trotsky, a central leader of Russian revolution and commander of the Red Army offers an insightful analysis of what led to the rise of the Stalinist Bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union.

War weariness, scarcity of the necessities of life, and the retreat of the world revolution created conditions for career seekers, faint hearts, dogmatists and bullies to thrive, and slowly but surely drive the Russian workers and peasants out of politics.

The idea that the fall of the Stalinist regimes in the late 1980's and early 90's would usher in a new prolonged period of prosperity for capitalism has proven to be wishful thinking at best. As Trotsky painstakingly details in the book, the workers states is stronger than the Bureaucracy that sits and feeds upon it.

The present US led invasion of Iraq is partly due to the failure to save it's declining empire through the Moscow route.

Trotsky, objectively an enemy to socialism who allied with the Nazis against the USSR, apparently has no idea what he is talking about. Among all the lies and exaggerations are some facts too, but he interpretes them in an obviously tendentious manner and takes every mistake Stalin did as a proof of his counter-revolutionary character. For example. The 30's saw an increased productivity because of the need to prepare for the fascist war. Trotsky sees in this nothing else than an exploitation of the workers! I won't waste more of my time now, but it's also interesting to note that Trotsky actually says that under SOCIALISM, there will be no state! And also that the formula "By each after ability, to each after work" is NOT valid under socialism. A man who so completely has misunderstood the fundaments of Marxism can not be taken seriously.