Trotsky scorned historians who sought to “stand on the wall” observing both sides dispassionately he believed such an “objective” view inevitably threw support to the reactionary forces.īeyond the analytical incisiveness of the History, it is a work of great emotion and poetry, and Trotsky’s success at communicating the sweep of the revolution is often achieved through the tiniest detail depicting the psychological transformation of the masses. He achieves in his image of the revolution the unity of the subjective and objective elements. Trotsky, the commander of the October insurrection, had acted on this principle and Trotsky the historian does the same. To the good soldier nothing is of greater importance than to get a realistic picture of the ‘other side of the hill,’ unclouded by wishful thinking or emotion. Historian and Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher writes,Īs in the best military thinking, extreme partisanship and scrupulously sober observation indeed go hand in hand. Trotsky’s personal involvement in no way inhibits his scientific view.
Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution chronicles the revolutionary process of 1917, the challenges for the young working class, its “successive approximations,” as it forged a course through first overthrowing the ancient rotten monarchy of the tsar in February, then casting off the newborn, rotten bourgeois democracy of the Provisional Government in October.ĭozens of histories of the Russian Revolution have been written what makes Trotsky’s History unique is its uncompromisingly working-class, Marxist account of the totality of the process, made all the more tangible from the point of view of a participant. Revolutions, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote, “must not by any means be regarded as a single act…but as a series of more or less powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with periods of more or less intense calm.” To understand and navigate this process, revolutionaries must understand both the objective possibility of working-class rule, and the specific opportunities and challenges at every given moment. The fundamental political process thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis-the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations.”-Introduction to Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. “The history of a revolution is for us first of all the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of their own destiny.… The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime.
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