The History of the Russian Revolution
THE Russian revolution had the quality of falsifying all the best predictions. It was a revolution made—or at any rate stage-managed—by Marxists. Marx had proved conclusively that the proletarian revolution, being a direct product of capitalism, must break out first where the capitalist system was most highly developed. The Russian revolutionaries of - the Pre-War decade accepted this diagnosis without question. Their objective was not primarily a Russian revolution, but a European revolution which would envelop Russia in a general conflagration. When the bourgeois revolution broke out in Russia in March 1917, the Bolsheviks hailed it as a necessary step in the revolutionary evolution of the country ; and those who were on the spot—notably Kamenev and Stalin—declared in favour of supporting the new regime. It was Lenin who, returning in April in the Gentian" sealed train," first proposed to fight the bourgeois revolution and to work for the immediate realization of the proletarian revolution. For the next six months he strove continuously—against the scepticism of many of his colleagues —to hasten the new revolutionary outbreak.
The success of Lenin was the first shock for those who thought that revolutions were in duty hound to follow the lines laid down for them once for all by the infallible Karl Marx. But even Lenin did not venture so far to differ from his master as to believe in the possibility of a proletarian revolution in Russia alone. Ile believed that Russia had, at best, only preceded the rest of Europe on the revolutionary path by a few weeks or months. Unless revolution broke out in Europe, the Russian revolution was doomed. Again and again, during the first years of the Soviet regime, both Lenin and Trotsky returned to this fundamental assumption. It was an axiom which nobody questioned.
The second great surprise came therefore when, about 1923, it finally dawned on the Soviet leaders (Lenin had perhaps already divined it when he introduced the Nep in 1921) (a) that the Soviet regime had come to last, (b) that there was no early prospect of revolution anywhere else in Europe. The axiom had been found wanting ; and there was a flurry among the leaders to readjust their ideas. Lenin's death facilitated a change of front. The " Zinoviev letter" affair in 1924 threw into relief the- incompatibility of the two courses open to them—the active promotion of world revolu- tion, or the consolidation of their position by friendly relations with the capitalist world. Trotsky, faithful to the old tradition, clung to the former alternative. But the majority of the party, cunningly organized by Stalin, swung ro to the latter. Henceforward the maintenance of the Soviet regime in Russia was to be the prime factor in Bolshevik policy ; and in 1926 Trotsky was expelled from the party for upholding the thesis which had formerly been that of every Bolshevik, i.e., that the proletarian revolution could not maintain itself if confined to a single State. It was, of course, a crying injustice ; but it was a necessary piece of political opportunism. Had Lenin lived, the change of front would still have taken place ; but Trotsky would have obeyed Lenin where he revolted against Stalin.
Such is the background against which the two last volumes of Trotsky's History of the Russian Resolution should be read. The narrative retains all the masterliness of the first volume, and—on the whole—its amazing objectivity. There is, it is true, more " theory " in these later volumes ; and the bitterness of subsequent controversies will keep breaking in, But for the discerning reader this merely adds a new spice of interest, and will lead him even to the appendices, where 'I'rotsky argues certain aspects of his case in detail. This is one of the rare books which the reviewer can, and should, recommend without any reservation whatever.
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