At the same time, the twentieth century was an era of disappointed hopes, bitter exploitation and murderous war, racism and genocide, repressive bureaucracies, ruthless dictatorships, and the triumphant power of global business operations securing enormous profits for a few at the expense of the many. That has shaped the reality inherited by those of us making our way through the twenty-first century. One is reminded of a 22-year-old activist at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the backwaters of the Russian Empire, who wrote these brave, angry words:

Leon Trotsky became one of the most impressive revolutionaries of the twentieth century, and his example and ideas have profoundly attracted successive generations of labour and socialist activists. He was certainly one of the finest writers associated with the Marxist movement. But Trotsky was also one of the central leaders of the Russian Revolution of October/November 1917, second only to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin when they led the revolutionary Bolshevik Party (soon to be renamed the Russian Communist Party) in the attempted creation of a radical workers’ and peasants’ republic that would be governed by democratic soviets (the Russian word for councils). It was Trotsky who became the organiser of the Red Army that defended the Soviet Republic in the face of civil war and foreign invasions, as well as a founder and leader of the Communist International. After Lenin’s death in 1924, he became one of the foremost defenders of the original ideas and ideals of the 1917 Revolution and of the early Communist movement. He was compelled to carry out such a defence within the Communist movement that he had helped to create – against the bureaucratic tyranny that gave its own poisoned meaning to the word ‘Communism’ with the crystallisation of the Stalin dictatorship in the 1920s and 1930s.³

Although Trotsky was an original thinker, much of his theory and analysis stand as a creative elaboration – or in some cases a parallel development – of ideas that we can find in the contributions of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin.⁴ He is best known for his classic three-volume History of the Russian Revolution (1932–33), insightful elaborations of his distinctive ‘theory of permanent revolution’, and a critical analysis of the Stalin regime, The Revolution Betrayed (1936–37).⁵ He also made substantial contributions in his analyses of fascism and anti-fascist strategies, in developing a ‘transitional programme’ for socialist revolution, and in employing Marxist theory to deal with a remarkable range of social, political, economic, and cultural realities.

The present collection of Trotsky’s writings is drawn from the final phase of his life, from 1929 to 1940, when he lived in exile after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. We have excluded his major book-length works (since excerpts do not provide a full sense of his ideas), as well as all his pre-1929 writings. And yet we believe these selections, drawn from the rich pool of his mature shorter works, provide a comprehensive introduction to his essential theoretical and political perspectives. They were composed at a time in which Trotsky was engaged in an intense, heroic, desperate effort to recompose a revolutionary vanguard layer that could withstand the murderous policies of fascist and Stalinist tyrannies, the global economic collapse of the Great Depression, and a second world war – far more destructive than the first – that Trotsky could see approaching with terrifying velocity.

Despite the calamities engulfing humanity, there was some cause for hope. In this period, handfuls of dissident Communists were rallying to Trotsky from various countries.

The writings in this volume are drawn from this incredibly complex and tumultuous period. In them we see Trotsky seeking to distil all that he knew into a concentration of revolutionary analysis, strategy, and tactics that could guide Marxist activists and insurgent workers in the life and death struggles of the 1930s – and of the immediate future.

At the conclusion of this introductory essay, we will want to consider the contemporary relevance of these remarkable writings. But first we should give more detailed attention to the biographical and historical contexts that gave rise to the ideas that Trotsky offers us here.

In contrast, the early Russian Marxists saw capitalism as inevitably taking hold of Russia, and they looked to the emerging urban working class as the force that would be the key to transforming Russia. The workers would form trade unions and other organisations to defend their rights in their work places and communities, just as had been the case in Western Europe, becoming the base for a mass socialist party – the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which actually came into being (more as an embryo and promise of what might be possible) in 1898. Marxists tended to see this workers’ movement as playing a central role in a hoped-for democratic revolution that would overthrow the absolute monarchy and stultifying feudal vestiges of Tsarism. A democratic republic and the development of industrial capitalism, in the opinion of most Marxists, would set the stage for the future working-class socialist revolution.

Trotsky was won to Marxism under the influence of Alexandra Sokolovskaya. A major figure in the underground South Russian Workers’ Union, he was arrested in 1898, imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia. In prison he married Alexandra, and their daughters, Nina and Zina, were born in exile. In Siberia, he became an influential Social Democratic figure. When the Marxist journal Iskra (the Spark) appeared, he felt a need to join in its work, and escaped with a forged passport and the pseudonym Trotsky, which became his surname for life. Alexandra remained behind, and the separation became permanent.

Trotsky made his way to London, where he met and was befriended by Vladimir Lenin, and worked with the Iskra editors, as a young and talented addition to their group. Personally, he was closest to older comrades Pavel Axelrod, Vera Zasulich and Julius Martov. In Paris, he met and married Natalya Sedova, and subsequently had two sons, Lev and Sergei. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Trotsky held a Siberian mandate. A staunch defender of Iskra’s draft programme, he became known as ‘Lenin’s cudgel’. But in the later part of the congress, the Iskra group split, and Trotsky sided with Axelrod, Zasulich, and Martov. The incident, often portrayed as a struggle between democratic and authoritarian socialism, was actually a sentimental response to Lenin’s businesslike proposal for a smaller Editorial Board for the party paper, excluding the relatively underperforming Axelrod, Zasulich, and Alexander Potresov, and including only three members – George Plekhanov, Lenin, and Martov. The original split between ‘Bolsheviks’ (majority-ites) and ‘Mensheviks’ (minority-ites) was thus not over fundamental principles. But what characterised Trotsky was the vehemence with which he attacked Lenin over these issues.

Soon after the Party Congress, Plekhanov broke with Lenin, and invited the minority, who had been boycotting party institutions, into the Editorial Board. Thus, it was not Lenin’s authoritarianism but the minority’s insistence on flouting democratic decisions that deepened the split. Trotsky, as part of the minority, joined the now Menshevik-dominated Iskra. But he quickly left the Mensheviks, partly because of Plekhanov’s hostility to him, and partly because of emerging political differences. In 1904 his pamphlet appeared, Our Political Tasks, strongly criticising Lenin.

In 1905, when the revolution broke out in Russia, Trotsky was the first of the émigré intellectuals to return. Inside Russia, he collaborated with both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. He wrote leaflets for the Bolshevik Central Committee and also influenced Menshevik activists in St Petersburg. After a general strike in October, when the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was formed in the capital, he became the guiding figure in it, and after the arrest of its first chair, Khrustalev-Nosar, he also became the chairperson, at the age of 26. After the defeat of the revolution he was tried and sentenced to Siberian exile, from which he escaped en route. At the beginning of 1905, in a number of essays, he had been arguing that the working class would play the leading role in the revolution. He also opposed strongly any alliance with the pro-capitalist liberals. After his arrest, he wrote a major essay, Results and Prospects. Subsequently, he wrote a brilliant account of the revolution, in a book entitled 1905. In both writings, he developed his concept of permanent revolution.

In the theory of permanent revolution, we see the dynamic interplay of democracy and class struggle, the self-activity of the masses of labouring and oppressed people reaching for their own liberation within, while at the same time straining beyond, the context of global capitalism. Three elements can be found in Trotsky’s theory: (a) the possibility and necessity under the right circumstances, of democratic and immediate struggles spilling over into the struggle for working-class political power, (b) culminating in a transitional period going in the direction of socialism, (c) which can be realised only through the advance of similar struggles around the world. In fact, these elements permeate Trotsky’s orientation from his youth to his death.

Between 1907, when the revolutionary wave gave way to counter-revolution, and 1914, Trotsky remained outside the two major factions. He was the most influential ‘conciliationist’, seeking to keep the party united while also defending, against right-wing Mensheviks, the need for the underground party. This current was quite influential, and his role in it was reflected at the January 1910 meeting of the Central Committee, where a key resolution was drafted by him, as well as in the popularity of the Vienna-based Pravda edited by him. But when he refused to publicly criticise Mensheviks who had violated the party line, Lenin pressed for a break with him, and decided to launch a paper named Pravda inside Russia.

During the Balkan Wars, Trotsky served as a correspondent for a liberal Russian newspaper, an experience that served him well when he was Commissar for War. When the First World War broke out, he took a revolutionary anti-war stand, along with the majority of Russian Social Democrats. He participated in the first international meeting of anti-war Social Democrats at Zimmerwald, and drafted the Zimmerwald manifesto. He disagreed with Lenin on the call for ‘revolutionary defeatism’, arguing for anti-war formulations designed to draw broader working-class support in the struggle for peace. In Paris, he was the most influential figure of the internationalist daily Nashe Slovo. Expelled from France, and then from Spain, he went to the United States of America. There, he collaborated with Nikolai Bukharin in the journal Novy Mir.