Revolution betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?

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Revolution betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and where is it going? is the title of a work written by Leon Trotsky in 1936 on the essence of the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule.

La Révolution trahie (1936) 13th edition.jpg

Emergence

In September 1935, while in exile in Norway, Leon Trotsky began work on a current foreword for the new edition of his story of the Russian Revolution planned by the American publishing house Simon & Schuster . This resulted in the title Tschto takoe SSSR i kuda on idet? (What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?) A manuscript that was considerably larger than originally intended and was therefore issued as a stand-alone publication. The publisher of the first edition, which was published by Grasset in Paris in October 1936, translated by Victor Serge , gave the book the title La Révolution trahie, which was adopted from all later editions. In the same year a Czechoslovak edition appeared; In 1937 an American, an Argentine, a Chilean, a German, an English and a Japanese edition followed. The German edition could not appear in Germany due to the rule of the National Socialists. As “a classic work of Marxist literature” ( Isaac Deutscher ), the Revolution Betrayed, written before the Moscow Show Trials and the Great Purges , is Trotsky's most thorough and comprehensive analysis of Soviet society and the Stalinist dictatorship.

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Trotsky's book begins with an analysis of what has been achieved with regard to industry, its production, and generally the state of the development of productive forces since the October Revolution . He compares the official Soviet data with those of the developed capitalist countries and finds that the Soviet Union is not keeping pace with their development. The industrialized countries had a development lead not only in industrial goods production, but also in agriculture; in the longer term, however, the Soviet Union would have to prove its superiority in terms of productivity if it were to survive.

Trotsky also traces the course of economic development since the October Revolution (“ war communism ”, NEP , the forced collectivization of agriculture initiated in 1928 and forced industrialization) and analyzes the victorious (from the internal struggles of the CPSU ) and after the elimination the left as well as the “right” opposition as the only remaining group) Stalin faction, especially with regard to the maintenance and expansion of its own power position political and economic decisions made.

Trotsky describes the Soviet Union as standing between capitalism and socialism - and in the meantime stuck due to the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy - a regime of transition between capitalism and socialism, the future of which is open on two sides, to the restoration of capitalist relations of production and the establishment of socialist relations.

The "totalitarian bureaucracy" ruling all levels of society, of which Stalin is as leader as well as its product, has become an almost omnipotent force that can only be disempowered in the course of a new (this time political - as opposed to a social) revolution . In contrast to social classes, which are rooted in the production relations of a given society, the Soviet bureaucracy is not an independent class. Trotsky evaluates the Soviet Union as a “transitional or interim regime”, the social character of which history has not yet finally decided; For him, however, it is clear that as a workers' state it can only be saved for the socialist future by means of a new revolution.

literature