Leon Trotsky and his supporters—including many of the most important leaders of the Russian Revolution—formed the Left Opposition in October 1923, during the last period of Vladimir Lenin’s life and amid the aborted 1923 German revolution. The aim of the Left Opposition was to reform Communist Party policy in the Soviet Union and fight for a correct line in the Communist International, in opposition to the rising conservative and nationalist bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin. The Stalinist bureaucracy assumed a consciously counterrevolutionary role in the 1930s, carrying out a political genocide against its left-wing opponents in the Soviet Union and collaborating with world imperialism in the suppression of revolutionary struggles internationally.
The conflict that emerged between Stalin and Trotsky was not a subjective fight between two individuals over personal power, but a fundamental battle waged between irreconcilable political programs. The consolidation of power by Stalin, and the bureaucratic dictatorship that he personified, was not the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. It developed out of the conditions of an economically backward workers’ state that was surrounded by world imperialism and isolated by the delay of the international and European revolution. A series of revolutionary upheavals were defeated due to the political immaturity of the revolutionary leadership internationally.
In his critique of Stalinism, Trotsky developed a theory of world socialist revolution that proved immeasurably more far-sighted than the pragmatic nationalist maneuvers of the Stalinist bureaucrats. The struggle waged by the Left Opposition concentrated on the most decisive questions of revolutionary policy for the international working class.
The following is the introduction to the recently translated Turkish edition of In Defense of Leon Trotsky, written by the book’s author, David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site. The book was originally published in 2013.
October 1993 marked the seventieth anniversary of the formation of the Left Opposition. The vital contemporary relevance of the struggle which Leon Trotsky initiated in 1923 against growing bureaucratism within the Russian Communist Party and Stalin’s national opportunism is borne out by the recent tumultuous political developments in the former USSR.
The discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts of the Soviet Left Opposition is a blow to all attempts to falsify, belittle and slander the struggle of the Trotskyist movement against Stalinism.
The role that Snyder is playing in justifying the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the alliance of US imperialism with the Ukrainian far right make it imperative to investigate his book more closely.
By David North
It is not hard to understand why the historical role of Trotsky presented such difficulties to the Soviet bureaucracy. The record of his work constituted an unanswerable indictment of the entire Stalinist regime, summed up in the title of his political masterpiece, The Revolution Betrayed.
By Peter Schwartz
Trotsky later spoke of “a classic demonstration of how it is possible to miss a perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of world-historic importance.”
By Bill Van Auken
This lecture was delivered by Bill Van Auken to a Socialist Equality Party (US) Summer School in 2005. “The essential theoretical issues that arose in the struggle over these two opposed perspectives were not only fought out by Trotsky against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the latter half of the 1920s,” Van Auken said, “but have reemerged as the subject of repeated struggles within the Fourth International itself.”
By Nick Beams
The historical legitimacy of the Russian Revolution derived not from the possibility of creating an isolated socialist Russia but from the fact that it was the opening shot of the world socialist revolution.
By Nick Beams
Trotsky’s analysis in Towards Capitalism or Socialism, one of the fruits of his intellectual labours while working in the Concessions Commission and on other economic projects, is one of the most concentrated and far-reaching summaries of his perspective on the development of the Soviet economy.
By David Walsh
The notion that Trotsky’s intervention on art and culture was a reckless excursion, a diversion from the political and ideological struggle, is deeply mistaken. With the failure of the German revolution in October 1923, in particular, Trotsky recognized that there was a colossal shift in the world situation. He argued that there was the short lever of correct policy and the longer lever of international revolution.
By Chris Marsden
It was the rejection by the Communist Party of a revolutionary perspective, in favour of tailing the Trade Unions Congress General Council and the lefts, in particular, which politically disarmed the working class and facilitated this historic betrayal. The Stalin faction of the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern imposed this line on the Communist Party of Great Britain.
By John Chan
The perspective for the Chinese revolution was at the heart of Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. In this struggle, his theory of permanent revolution was put to a gigantic test—for the second time. With the support of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus Stalin prevailed, leading to the betrayal of one of the most promising revolutionary opportunities since 1917.
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
To make an assessment of Deng Xiaoping, it is necessary to examine the course of the Chinese Revolution and its relation to the strategic problems of the struggle for socialism in the 20th century.
By David North
Between 1931 and 1933, Trotsky sought to arouse the most politically conscious sections of the German working class and the socialist intelligentsia to the immense danger posed by fascism and the urgent necessity for a unified struggle of the proletariat to prevent a Nazi victory. Trotsky’s writings on German fascism rank among the greatest works of political literature in the 20th century. No one else wrote with such prescience, precision and passion on the German events and their world historic implications.
By Peter Schwartz
The Germany Communist Party had a perspective and a political line which completely misjudged the political situation, disoriented and paralysed the working class, and finally allowed Hitler to take power without meeting any organized working class resistance—and this despite the fact that both the Social Democrats and the Communists had their own armed detachments who were more than willing to fight the Nazis.
By David North
A little more than a half-century has passed since the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich, and mankind is still struggling to come to grips with its legacy of horror and bestiality.
By Leon Trotsky
In these essays written between 1931 and 1937, Trotsky examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods for the defense of the working class against this deadly menace.
Rogovin’s greatest work was accomplished in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR. Beginning in 1992, he began intensive work on what would become a seven-volume history of the revolutionary Marxist opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, to the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR.
Covering the years from 1923 to 1940, Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative? is an unsurpassed work of historical scholarship, indispensable for an understanding of the Stalinist regime and the deep-rooted socialist opposition to its betrayal of the principles and program of the October Revolution.
Rogovin documented the immense popularity of Trotsky, even after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, and established that the principal purpose of Stalin’s bloody terror in the 1930s was the eradication of Trotsky’s political influence.
The expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929 failed to silence the great revolutionary and his followers. Trotsky’s exposure of Stalin’s betrayals encouraged the emergence of a broad network of oppositional groups, which the regime met with intensifying political repression. In this introduction to the book, Rogovin raises the seminal question answered in the remaining pages: Why, on the ground prepared by the October Revolution, did there appear a phenomenon such as Stalinism?
In this 1998 tribute to Vadim Z. Rogovin, David North explains what made this Soviet historian a remarkable “prophet of historical truth.”
Rogovin insisted that without understanding the Terror—its origins and its consequences—it was impossible to make sense of either the nature of Soviet society or the ultimate dissolution of the USSR at the hands of the Communist Party during the final decade of the 20th century. For him, 1936–1938 and 1989–1991 were indissolubly connected periods of Soviet history. The restoration of capitalism demanded new falsifications of Soviet history.
This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, on June 3, 1996
The split with the Workers' Revolutionary Party in 1985-86 enabed the ICFI to intervene in the crisis of Stalinism in 1985-1991. For the first time since the Stalinist terror of the 1930s half a century earlier, the Trotskyist movement could fight for its program and the reestablihment of the continuity of Marxism within the Soviet working class. Out of this intervention, the ICFI established contact with Vadim Rogovin as well as several figures who had either fought directly in the Left Opposition - like Nadezhda Ioffe - or whose parents had been members of the opposition. Below are several interviews and memoirs with Left Oppositionists and their descendentants that grew out of this work.
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing interviews with three children of Soviet Left Oppositionists—Tatiana Smilga, Zorya Serebryakova and Yuri Primakov—and with Tatiana Isaeva, granddaughter of the outstanding Marxist literary critic, Alexander Voronsky.
Zorya Leonidovna Serebryakova’s father, Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov, was a leading Bolshevik and Left Oppositionist. One of the main defendants in the Second Moscow Trial, he was found guilty and shot on February 1, 1937.
Tatiana Smilga-Poluyan (May 1919-September 2014) came from a remarkable family with longstanding revolutionary traditions. Not only her parents, but also her uncles and aunts were active participants in the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War.
Tatiana Ivarovna Smilga-Poluyan, daughter of the Left Oppositionist Ivar Smilga, dedicated her life to restoring historical truth about those who had been murdered and whose names had been besmirched by Stalinist reaction.
Tatiana Isaeva is the granddaughter of the Marxist literary critic Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky, a Bolshevik from 1904 and participant in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 who later became an important figure in the Left Opposition.
Vitaly Markovich Primakov was a hero of the October Revolution and the Civil War and later an important member of the Left Opposition.
Veteran German socialist Nathan Steinberger died in Berlin February 26. See accompanying article for an appreciation of his extraordinary life. For the benefit of our readers, we are reposting below an interview with Steinberger conducted in April 1997.
On February 26 Nathan Steinberger died at the age of 94 in a hospital in Berlin. His wife Edith died four years ago. Nathan and Edith Steinberger were among the last members of a generation who lived through an epoch marked by revolutionary upheavals and the tragic defeats of the workers movement. Their lives were inextricably bound up with the terrible experiences of fascism and the Stalinist terror, during which, as members of the German Communist Party (KPD) living in the Soviet Union, they barely escaped with their lives. [See also: An interview with Nathan Steinberger (1997)]
WSWS : Obituary
This is the only memoir to be written in the post-Stalin Soviet Union by a member of the Left Opposition, which was formed under the leadership of Leon Trotsky in 1923. Nadezhda Joffe was the daughter of Adolf Abramovich Joffe, the Bolshevik leader and Left Oppositionist who committed suicide in 1927 to protest the expulsion of Trotsky from the Bolshevik Party.
In this document, written just months after the failure of the Communist Party to take power in Germany in the fall of 1923, Trotsky analyzes the struggle that unfolded within the Bolshevik Party from February 1917 through the October Revolution of 1917.
This work concisely explains the fundamentals of a Marxist approach to culture and art, explaining the link between the growth of technological culture and mass acquisition of artistic and spiritual culture in the 1920s USSR.
Delivered before a meeting of Social-Democratic students in Copenhagen on November 27, 1932, this is a concise presentation of the main driving forces of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky defends the gains of October 1917, explains how it occurred, and addresses those who doubt the revolution because of its great costs.
Written in the midst of Stalin’s Terror, which exterminated the Old Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution, this pamphlet by Trotsky analyzes Stalin's claim to be the continuator of Bolshevism.
