Foreword¶
Core Argument¶
This foreword, penned by Vsievolod Volkov, situates Ted Grant and Alan Woods’s Lenin and Trotsky – What they really stood for as a weapon of urgent contemporary relevance, not a mere historical relic. Its core argument is that the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was not a personal feud but the central ideological battle of the twentieth century: a fight to defend genuine revolutionary Marxism-Leninism against a bureaucratic counter-revolution. Volkov presents Trotsky as the head of a principled minority wielding “the sharply-edged weapon of the truth” against an organised apparatus of falsification.
The key claim is that the Stalinist bureaucracy, having destroyed the Soviet workers’ democracy established by the Bolsheviks, ultimately achieved the complete restoration of capitalism. Volkov draws directly on Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, written over sixty years prior, asserting that its analysis of bureaucratic Bonapartism and its prediction of capitalist restoration have been “confirmed down to the last detail.” The only alternative to this outcome, he insists, was a political revolution to return power to the working class.
The foreword’s polemical thrust is directed against two interconnected targets. The first is the original Stalinist apparatus: the “hired assassins” and, more pointedly, the “immense army of intellectual criminals,” “literary mercenaries,” and “falsifiers of history” who acted as auxiliaries to the terror, repeating Kremlin instructions. These elements are held “personally responsible for the betrayal of the October Revolution.” The second target is the contemporary chorus, composed of many of these same falsifiers, who now proclaim Marxism obsolete. Volkov dismisses this as a grotesque category error—judging Marxism by the “horrible caricature” of Stalinism, akin to rubbishing Rubens and Rembrandt by reference to a poor imitation. Neither Marx, Engels, Lenin, nor Trotsky can be held accountable for the distortions used to justify bureaucratic oppression. The book’s task, therefore, is to unmask the “Big Lie” and demonstrate that Marxism as interpreted by Lenin and Trotsky remains entirely valid. The foreword closes with Trotsky’s aphorism that “the truth, and not lies, is the locomotive of history,” framing the work as a contribution to that locomotive’s forward motion.