The Revolution Betrayed – a Marxist masterpiece¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Alan Woods presents The Revolution Betrayed as the indispensable Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union’s degeneration after Lenin’s death, arguing that Trotsky’s 1936 text alone explains both the rise of Stalinism and the eventual collapse of the USSR. Woods insists that the October Revolution was historically justified: it demonstrated socialism’s viability through rapid industrialisation, transforming a backward semi-feudal economy into the world’s second most powerful state. However, the revolution occurred in conditions of extreme material privation—six million starved in 1920 alone—which fatally undermined the workers’ democracy Lenin had designed.
Woods draws heavily on Lenin’s The State and Revolution and the 1919 Party Programme, which mandated elected and recallable officials, wages no higher than a skilled worker’s, the armed people replacing a standing army, and the rotation of all administrative tasks among workers. This programme, Woods claims, was the most democratic in history, but could not survive prolonged isolation and backwardness. After Lenin’s death, bureaucrats reasserted themselves, abolishing every democratic safeguard by the early 1930s and establishing a totalitarian regime that physically annihilated the Leninist party.
The chapter’s core polemic is directed against two targets. First, the Stalinist bureaucracy itself, which Woods characterises as a parasitic caste that, while preserving nationalised property and planning, destroyed proletarian democracy. Second, and more sharply, Woods attacks the “so-called Communists and fellow travellers” who defended Stalin and ridiculed Trotsky, only to abandon socialism entirely after 1991. He argues that these figures cannot provide a Marxist explanation for the USSR’s collapse, whereas Trotsky predicted it sixty years in advance.
Woods develops Trotsky’s argument that a nationalised planned economy requires democracy “as the human body needs oxygen.” The bureaucracy developed productive forces at three times the cost of capitalism, generating colossal waste. This contradiction grew unbearable until the system broke down. Crucially, Woods emphasises Trotsky’s warning that the bureaucracy would eventually seek to convert state property into private property to secure hereditary privilege—exactly what occurred after 1989.
The chapter acknowledges that events diverged from Trotsky’s expectation of a civil war preceding capitalist restoration. Instead, the Stalinist regime collapsed “like a rotten apple,” with the “Communist” Party itself—a bureaucratic club of careerists, not a revolutionary vanguard—leading the restoration. Woods cites Yeltsin and the party leadership as the first to embrace capitalism, plundering state assets to become billionaires. The masses, demoralised by decades of totalitarian rule and the physical extermination of the Leninist Old Guard, lacked leadership and were caught by surprise.
Woods concludes that the capitalist restoration has not developed the economy but produced regression: gangster capitalism, oligarchic plunder, and social decay. He invokes Trotsky’s prediction that the bureaucracy’s fall, if not replaced by socialist power, would mean “a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.” The chapter ends by asserting that Russia’s modern industrial base and educated working class provide the material basis for a new October Revolution, which would transform the world situation far more radically than 1917.