Preface to the second English edition¶
Core Argument¶
In this preface to the second English edition, Alan Woods reasserts the Bolshevik Revolution as the greatest single event in world history, precisely because it marked the first occasion on which the masses, excluding the Paris Commune, overthrew the old order and undertook the socialist transformation of society. The chapter’s core argument is that Bolshevism is not a closed historical episode but a living weapon for contemporary revolutionary struggle. Woods frames the book as a corrective to both bourgeois historiography and Stalinist distortions, insisting that the genuine traditions of Bolshevism — democratic centralism, internal debate, and the leading role of a Marxist party — must be recovered from beneath a heap of lies.
Woods polemicises sharply against bourgeois academics, recounting a debate with Orlando Figes. He dismisses the claim that October was a coup by a tiny conspiratorial clique as childish, countering that it was a mass movement of workers and peasants won by the Bolsheviks’ slogans of Peace, Bread and Land. He cites Figes’ own description of the insurrection as a “police operation” to underscore its near-bloodless character, and redirects attention to the civil war, when twenty-one foreign armies invaded. The bloodshed, Woods argues, was the work of counter-revolution, not Bolshevik design.
The preface draws heavily on Trotsky’s recently restored biography of Stalin, which Woods edited. He quotes Trotsky at length on the dynamics of revolution: the objective crisis, the psychological regroupment of classes, the necessity for the revolutionary vanguard to win the majority of intermediate layers, and the isolation of the old ruling class. This theoretical framework underpins Woods’ insistence that the Bolshevik Party was not improvised but built over twenty years in underground conditions, and that its internal democracy — vibrant debates, learning from mistakes — was essential to its success.
Woods also recounts his meetings with Hugo Chávez, who credited Plekhanov’s The Role of the Individual in History and Woods’ own works with pushing him toward socialist conclusions. The presentation of Bolshevism at the Havana Book Fair, where Trotsky’s role was explained to Cuban militants for the first time, illustrates the book’s function as a tool for party-building in Latin America. The preface concludes by rejecting the notion that the collapse of the USSR discredited socialism; what failed was a caricature, the antithesis of Bolshevik democracy. Bolshevism, Woods insists, is the future.