Vorwort zur türkischen Ausgabe von Verteidigung Leo Trotzkis
Trotzkis Schicksalsjahre auf Prinkipo: 1929–1933
Dieses Vorwort verfasste der Autor von Verteidigung Leo Trotzkis für die türkische Ausgabe, die vor Kurzem erschienen ist.
Since the founding of the Left Opposition in 1923, Trotsky had insisted, despite the crimes of the Stalinist leadership, that the fight to reform the Communist International and win its parties back to the revolutionary program of its first four congresses could not be prematurely abandoned. But the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, facilitated by Stalin’s disastrous policies, demanded a reconsideration of this policy.
In the months that followed, Trotsky waited to see if any criticism of Stalin's policies would emerge from any of the parties of the Comintern. On April 7, 1933 the Comintern endorsed the policies of the German Communist Party. Trotsky concluded that a new course was necessary. A new world revolutionary party was an historical necessity. He devoted the remainder of his life to this struggle.
This conception was substantiated further by his analysis of the Soviet regime, contained in the monumental work, The Revolution Betrayed. The material interests of the Soviet bureaucracy were irreconcilably opposed to those of the working class. It could not be reformed, but had to be overthrown by means of a political revolution.
The five years between 1933 and the founding of the Fourth International in September 1938 were marked by a continuous struggle against centrist political organizations, particularly in Europe, many of which professed sympathy with Trotsky’s perspective and some of which declared themselves for the Fourth International.
Dieses Vorwort verfasste der Autor von Verteidigung Leo Trotzkis für die türkische Ausgabe, die vor Kurzem erschienen ist.
Die Entdeckung bisher unbekannter Dokumente der Linken Opposition in der Sowjetunion ist ein Schlag gegen alle Versuche, den Kampf der trotzkistischen Bewegung gegen den Stalinismus zu verfälschen, kleinzureden und zu verleumden.
75 Jahre nach seinem Tod ist Trotzki mehr denn je eine welthistorische Persönlichkeit: Nicht nur hat er den Lauf des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts mitgeprägt, sondern seine Schriften und Ideen sind eine wichtige Orientierungsgrundlage für die Arbeiterklasse von heute.
79 Jahre nach seiner Ermordung durch einen stalinistischen Agenten bleibt Trotzki eine überragende historische Figur von großer aktueller politischer Bedeutung.
Niemand, der den Ursprung des stalinistischen Terrors studiert und sich ernsthaft mit seinen Konsequenzen befasst hat, wird die politisch reaktionären und gesellschaftlich zerstörerischen Auswirkungen historischer Fälschung unterschätzen.
By Bill Van Auken
On principle, many centrist groups were even prepared to accept the necessity for a new international. But in practice they maintained that the time was not right, that Trotsky’s call was premature or that a new international could not be created in a period of defeats.
By Peter Daniels
An understanding the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state—their rise and subsequent degeneration—is critical in politically arming the working class by learning the lessons of the twentieth century in order to prepare for the struggles of the twenty-first.
By Ann Talbot
In Spain, Trotsky wrote, two irreconcilable programmes confronted one another. There was the programme that consisted of “saving at any cost private property from the proletariat, and saving as far as possible, democracy from Franco; and on the other hand, the programme of abolishing private property through the conquest of power by the proletariat.
By David North
As far back as 1936, writing as an isolated political exile in Norway (from which he was soon to be deported on the orders of a Social Democratic government), Leon Trotsky warned that the policies of the Stalinist regime, far from having assured the triumph of socialism in the USSR, were actually preparing the ground for the restoration of capitalism.
In this 1938 recorded speech, Trotsky addresses the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, the American section of the Fourth International, and speaks on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, from the founding of the Communist League of America in 1928.
By Leon Trotsky
This is the founding document of the Fourth International, published in September 1938. Assessing the historical lessons of the betrayal of the working class by both the Second and Third Internationals, Trotsky outlines the principles upon which to build a new proletarian leadership for the struggles against world imperialism and Stalinism.
Trotsky delivered this speech, denouncing the Stalinist Moscow Trials and publicizing the calling of the independent Dewey Commission to investigate the charges, from Mexico in January, 1937. “Stalin’s trial against me is built upon false confessions, extorted by modern Inquisitorial methods, in the interests of the ruling clique,” he said. “These trials develop not from communism, not from socialism, but from Stalinism, that is, from the unaccountable despotism of the bureaucracy over the people!”
In carrying out these trials, Joseph Stalin was launching an assault on the legacy and the leaders of the first successful socialist revolution.
This essay was first published on the sixtieth anniversary of the convening of the Dewey Commission. The commission, whose official name was the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, was established in 1937 by supporters of the exiled revolutionary to establish the truth about Joseph Stalin's purge trials. It was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey.
This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, on June 3, 1996
This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at the University of Melbourne in Australia on May 28, 1996.
By Leon Trotsky
Written in the midst of Stalin's Terror, which exterminated the Old Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution, this pamphlet by Trotsky analyzes Stalin's claim to be the continuator of Bolshevism.
By Vadim Rogovin
Never before in history were hundreds of thousands of people torn away from their apartments, thrown into prison, subjected to torture, made to confess to crimes, and then either exterminated or sent to concentration camps.
Vadim Rogovin’s greatest work was accomplished in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR. Beginning in 1992, he began intensive work on what would become a seven-volume history of the revolutionary Marxist opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, to the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR.
Covering the years from 1923 to 1940, Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative? is an unsurpassed work of historical scholarship, indispensable for an understanding of the Stalinist regime and the deep-rooted socialist opposition to its betrayal of the principles and program of the October Revolution.
Rogovin documented the immense popularity of Trotsky, even after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, and established that the principal purpose of Stalin’s bloody terror in the 1930s was the eradication of Trotsky’s political influence.