Our new issue — looking at what the Bernie campaigns accomplished — is out this week. Subscribe in print today! This is an unconventional stance. Trotsky had a specific, unique take on permanent revolution. Finally, Trotsky made original contributions to Third International Marxism, notably the united front theory and its political relevance to the struggle against the rise of Nazism in Germany.
General Pages on the Russian Revolution
Navigation menu
Republished here with permission. Comrades, sisters and brothers: The great and central political goal of every revolutionary party is to conquer political power. In the Second International, this goal was, to use philosophical language, a regulative idea, that is, a rather flimsy thing that has little relationship to practice. Only in the last few years have we begun to learn on an international scale to make the conquest of political power a practical goal. And the degree to which this goal is no mere philosophical notion but a practical matter is shown by the fact that we in Russia have a definite date, 7 November , on which the Communist Party, at the head of the working class, conquered political power in the state. To tell the story of how power was won would take hours and hours, and that is certainly not my intention. But this story shows that we are dealing here not with events taking place automatically, by objective logic, but with entirely practical political efforts and measures. In the moment of conquest of political power, our political tactics were heightened to revolutionary strategy in the most concrete sense of the word.
Hunger, War, Rage
Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. Historian and Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher writes,. Trotsky, the commander of the October insurrection, had acted on this principle; and Trotsky the historian does the same. He achieves in his image of the revolution the unity of the subjective and objective elements. Of such men, even though they may be illiterate and crude, he is proud; and he wants us to be proud of them. The revolution is for him that brief and pregnant moment when the humble and downtrodden have their say. The massive History of the Russian Revolution was written in one year while Trotsky was in exile in Prinkipo, an island off the coast of Turkey. His exile followed years of battling the rising Stalinist bureaucracy inside Russia, culminating in his expulsion from the Bolshevik Central Committee in , removal to Alma Ata Kazakhstan in , and final removal from the USSR in
All rights reserved. Its events paved the way for the Soviet Union. It dominated the politics of the 20th century, and it has left an indelible mark on the contemporary world. Crowds of female factory workers gathered in the center of Petrograd, the Russian capital formerly known as St. Even as disaffected and hungry workers, male and female, joined in the protests, some revolutionaries remained skeptical. Aleksandr Shlyapnikov was a leading figure of the Bolshevik movement, whose leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, had been living outside Russia for long periods of time since
