The Revolution Betrayed

The Revolution Betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and where they are doing? is the title of a work written by Leon Trotsky in 1936 on the nature of the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule.

Formation

Leon Trotsky began in September 1935 at the Norwegian exile to work on a recent preface to the planned by the American publishing house Simon & Schuster edition of his History of the Russian Revolution. It was created under the title chto takoe SSSR i kuda on idet? (What is the Soviet Union and where they doing? ), A manuscript that was originally intended as a significantly larger and was therefore published as a separate publication. The publisher of the first edition, which was in October 1936, translated by Victor Serge in Paris came out at Grasset the book as adopted by all later editions title La Révolution trahie. In the same year appeared a Czechoslovakian edition; 1937 was followed by an American, an Argentine, a Chilean, a German, an English and a Japanese edition. The German edition was published only in exile due to the rule of the National Socialists in Germany; a wider reception it was therefore denied. " A classic work of Marxist literature " ( Isaac German ), is the written even before the Moscow show trials and purges Revolution Betrayed Trotsky's most thorough and comprehensive analysis of Soviet society and the Stalinist dictatorship.

Content

Trotsky's book begins with an analysis of in terms of the industry, its production, and in general the state of development of productive forces since the October Revolution achieved. He compares the official Soviet records with those of the developed capitalist countries and notes that the Soviet Union does not keep pace with their development. A lead in development of the industrialized countries could be observed not only in the industrial production of goods, but also in agriculture; in the longer term but should the Soviet Union, would they have on hand, put their superiority on the issue of productivity to the test.

In other Trotsky characterized the course of economic development since the October revolution after ( " War Communism ", NEP, 1928 initiated forced collectivization of agriculture and forced industrialization ) and analyzed those taken from the ( out of the inner struggles of the CPSU as the winner and after the elimination the left as the " right-wing" opposition group as the only remaining ) Stalin faction, especially in regard to the maintenance and expansion of its own power position taken political and economic decisions.

Trotsky describes the Soviet Union as between capitalism and socialism standing - and due to the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy now stuck retarded - regime of transition between capitalism and socialism, whose future on two sides, for the restoration of capitalist relations of production, such as the establishment of socialist relations, be open.

The rule performers at all levels of society ' totalitarian bureaucracy " whose leader Stalin also had as their product was to become an almost all-powerful force that a renewed (this time political - as opposed to a social ) only in the course could be disempowered Revolution. In contrast to social classes that are rooted in the relations of production in a given society, it was not a question in the Soviet bureaucracy but a stand-alone class. Trotsky rated the Soviet Union as a " transitional or interim regime " over its social character of the story have not decided yet final; for it is certain, however, that it was to save as a workers' state just down the road a new revolution to the socialist future.