Name: The Revolution Betrayed
Price: 40.35 NZD
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Author: Leon Trotsky
ISBN: 9781900007542

Type

Physical Book

Author

Leon Trotsky

Publisher

Wellred

Year

2015

Language

English

Pages

252

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9781900007542

Synopsis "The Revolution Betrayed "

The Revolution Betrayed is one of the most important Marxist texts of all time. It is the only serious Marxist analysis of what happened to the Russian Revolution after the death of Lenin. In this book, Trotsky provided a brilliant and profound analysis of Stalinism, which has never been improved upon, let alone superseded. With a delay of 60 years, it was completely vindicated by history. Without a thorough knowledge of this work, it is impossible to understand the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the events since then in Russia and on a world scale. This remarkable work predicted the fate of the USSR down to the last detail. In the period of so-called market reform, Russia experienced the biggest collapse in world economic history. Just in the first five years alone, the economy contracted by a staggering sixty percent. Such a drop is unprecedented in economic history. It was like a catastrophic defeat in war. The collapse of the USSR has led to social disintegration. The elements of barbarism have all reappeared. Poverty, beggary, drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution, crime, epidemics have spread to an unparalleled degree. Sections of the youth are affected by lumpenisation. At the same time, the mafia capitalists have accrued massive wealth by plundering the former nationalised industries as well as the rich sources of oil and other resources. The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and its eventual fall must be carefully studied, if we are to be able to answer the questions of the workers and youth. And the best explanation that can be found is in the pages of this wonderful classic of Marxism. Only the restoration of a nationalised planned economy can create the conditions for a revival of Russia's colossal productive potential. But this cannot mean a return to the old Stalinist regime. Only a regime of real workers' democracy, along the lines of October 1917, can provide Russia with a way out of the present impasse. As Trotsky points out in a most graphic and profound passage from The Revolution Betrayed, a nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen.

Leon Trotsky

(Author)

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Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a politician and revolutionary of Russian origin

Although he initially sympathized with the Mensheviks[4] and had ideological and personal disputes with the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky was one of the key organizers of the October Revolution, which allowed the Bolsheviks to take power in November 1917 in Russia. During the subsequent civil war, he served as the commissioner of military affairs

He negotiated Russia's withdrawal from World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was in charge of creating the Red Army which would definitively consolidate the revolutionary achievements by defeating poor support from foreign armies and the White armies during the Russian civil war; he supported the Red Terror and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner

Subsequently, he politically and ideologically confronted Joseph Stalin, leading the left opposition, which caused him exile and later assassination. After his exile from the Soviet Union, he was the leader of an international left-wing revolutionary movement identified with the name of Trotskyism and characterized by the idea of the "permanent revolution". In 1938, he founded the Fourth International

He was assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish agent of the Soviet NKVD, by order of Stalin.

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