Preface¶
Core Argument¶
The preface situates Trotsky’s 1918 pamphlet From October to Brest-Litovsk as a concise but vital companion to his monumental History of the Russian Revolution, written while he conducted the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with German imperialism. The core argument is that the Bolsheviks’ success in October 1917 was not a conspiratorial coup but the culmination of nine months of revolutionary agitation and propaganda that won the overwhelming majority of workers, soldiers, and peasants to the demand “All Power to the Soviets.” Trotsky’s pamphlet demonstrates the precise mechanisms by which the Bolsheviks, advancing slogans corresponding to the objective necessities of peace, bread, and land, transformed the masses’ actual experience into revolutionary consciousness. The preface stresses that the transfer of power in October was relatively peaceful because nine-tenths of the insurrectionary work had already been accomplished through agitation.
The preface draws a sharp contrast with the German Revolution of November 1918, where power also fell into the hands of the working class but was betrayed by the Social Democratic leadership. This is presented as a negative proof of the Marxist theory of the subjective factor: without a revolutionary party and leadership, objective conditions alone cannot secure workers’ power. The German Social Democrats, like the Mensheviks and SRs in Russia, hid behind the slogan of “democracy” while handing power to the bourgeoisie, with catastrophic consequences—the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, and fifty-five million deaths. The isolation of the Russian Revolution, compounded by this betrayal, led to the bureaucratic degeneration that produced Stalinism.
The preface engages in a sustained polemic against the Stalinist falsification of revolutionary history. It quotes Stalin’s own 1918 acknowledgment that Trotsky was “primarily and principally” responsible for organising the insurrection and winning over the garrison, then contrasts this with Stalin’s later erasure of Trotsky’s role and eventual accusation that Lenin’s entire general staff were Hitler’s agents. The irony is underlined: it was Stalin’s heirs who liquidated the USSR in 1991, fulfilling Trotsky’s prediction. The preface thus defends the historical record against systematic distortion and reasserts the indispensability of Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership for the October Revolution’s success. The pamphlet’s republication on the centenary of 1917 is presented as a weapon in the ongoing struggle for world socialism.