Leon Trotsky¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter digest, drawn from a 1944 issue of Socialist Appeal, presents a polemical defence of Leon Trotsky’s revolutionary legacy against the systematic falsifications of Stalinist historiography. Its core argument is that Trotsky was not merely a leading organiser of the October 1917 insurrection and founder of the Red Army, but the sole guardian of authentic Marxism after Lenin’s death. The text insists that Stalin’s bureaucratic counter-revolution could only sustain itself by erasing Trotsky’s role, a project requiring seventeen revisions of official party history and the liquidation of authors like Popov when they fell out of favour.
The digest deploys a devastating piece of evidence: a biographical note from the 1921 State Publishing House edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, edited under Lenin’s own supervision. This entry confirms Trotsky’s early exile, his chairmanship of the 1905 Petersburg Soviet, his clear internationalist position from the start of the imperialist war, and his central role in organising the October insurrection. The text then juxtaposes this with Stalin’s own self-contradictory account in October Revolution, where on one page Stalin credits Trotsky with the practical organisation of the uprising, and on another denies Trotsky played any particular role. This internal contradiction is presented as definitive proof of Stalinist mendacity.
The chapter draws heavily on the theoretical and historical context of the defeats of the international working class after 1917. It argues that Trotsky’s greatest work came not during the victories of the Russian Revolution, but during the years of defeat—the failed German revolution of 1923, the catastrophe of Hitler’s rise, the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Trotsky’s analysis of these events, particularly his 1931 warnings that Hitler’s victory would mean war against the USSR and his insistence on a united front with social democratic workers against fascism, is presented as a prophetic indictment of Stalinist policy. The text explicitly argues that the Comintern’s criminal refusal to form a united front in Germany handed the workers “bound hand and foot” to the Nazis.
The polemic is directed squarely at Stalin and the Stalinist bureaucracy, but also at the British Stalinist historian Page Arnot, whose two contradictory histories of the Russian revolution are cited as local examples of the same falsification. The digest concludes by framing Trotsky’s murder by a GPU assassin as a terrible blow, but insists that his ideas survive in the Fourth International. The final message, Trotsky’s own—“Go forward! I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International!”—is used to assert that the cleansing wave of revolution will vindicate his theory of permanent revolution and destroy both capitalism and the Stalinist bureaucracy.