Foreword¶
Core Argument¶
In this foreword, written from exile on Prinkipo island in 1929, Leon Trotsky establishes the political and methodological foundations for his autobiography. He frames the work not as a detached memoir but as an active continuation of the revolutionary struggle—a polemical weapon forged in the interval forced upon him by political defeat. The core argument is that the writing of a revolutionary’s life is inseparable from the writing of revolutionary history, and that objectivity is achieved not through pretended indifference but through the frank expression of partisanship.
Trotsky makes several key claims. First, he asserts that the struggle of the epigones (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) against “Trotskyism” was not merely a clash of personalities but represented “a new political chapter—the reaction against October, and the preparation of the Thermidor.” This is the book’s central historical thesis: the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state is a counter-revolutionary process analogous to the Thermidorian reaction that followed the French Revolution. Second, he identifies the theory of permanent revolution as the “remote leitmotif” running through the narrative, promising a separate theoretical work to elaborate its conclusions. Third, he defends the legitimacy of polemics as the natural mode of expression for an epoch built on contradictions, ranging from parliamentary clashes to civil war.
The foreword draws heavily on the historical context of Trotsky’s own life as a condensed illustration of the revolutionary epoch: four years in tsarist prisons, two Siberian exiles, twelve years as a foreign émigré, leadership of the 1905 and 1917 Soviets, the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, five years organising the Red Army, and finally exile to Turkey after the defeat of the Left Opposition. He notes the ironic coincidence that his fiftieth birthday coincides with the anniversary of the October Revolution.
The polemical target is twofold. Externally, Trotsky argues against those who would reduce the struggle for power to personal ambition rather than recognising its social and political content. Internally, he addresses the “mass desertion of the banner” by former comrades who vacillate under pressure of material reprisals—a phenomenon he claims to have witnessed twice before, after 1905 and at the outbreak of the World War. He concludes with a statement of revolutionary fatalism: the task is to understand the causal sequence of events and find one’s place within it, not to measure history by personal fate.