“The winners are right and the losers are wrong and belong in the dustbin of history”

The maxim “the winners are right and the losers are wrong and belong in the dustbin of history” is presented as one of the words of Leon Trotsky that most appeals to Eduard Limonov. Its force lies in its blunt reversal of moral judgment: victory becomes the measure by which the past is sorted, while defeat consigns its subjects to oblivion. For Eduard, the line offers both a theory of history and an image of the decisive, victorious life he wants for himself.

Attribution and Context

Eduard encounters the saying through the collected works of Leon Trotsky, lent to him by Carol after he begins attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party and handing out leaflets. The book presents him as increasingly drawn to Trotsky, whose directness contrasts with the pious speeches about the sacred value of human life that Eduard disdains. The maxim belongs to this cluster of admired statements, alongside Trotsky’s declaration, “Long live civil war!”

The passage does not treat the words as an abstract political proposition alone. An older man at Novoye russkoye slovo has told Eduard that the person who spoke them went, in a few short months, from being a down-and-out émigré in New York to becoming generalissimo of the Red Army, moving from one front to another in an armored train. The remembered ascent gives the maxim a biographical charge: its speaker appears to have passed from marginality to command, the kind of destiny Eduard wants for himself.

Victory as Historical Judgment

The sentence compresses a brutal logic into a balanced opposition. Winners are not merely more powerful; in the maxim’s formulation, they are right. Losers are not merely overcome; they are wrong and destined for history’s dustbin. The phrasing makes the outcome of conflict seem to settle the argument, collapsing the distinction between possessing power and possessing moral or historical legitimacy.

That compression helps explain why Eduard admires the saying. He is attracted to its refusal to soften conflict with appeals to universal human value, and to its promise that history can be shaped by forceful action rather than cautious discussion. Its confidence is also its danger: the defeated have no standing in the verdict it describes, and the victor’s success appears to authorize the victor’s account.

Eduard’s Revolutionary Ideal

For Eduard, the maxim is bound to an imagined personal future. The armored train and the rapid rise to command make revolutionary politics look like a route from obscurity to historical consequence. He wants a destiny on that scale, but the American Trotskyists around him seem to offer no path toward it. In his view, they can speak at length about oppressed minorities and political prisoners while remaining afraid of the streets, the ghettos, and the poor.

The gap between the maxim’s violent decisiveness and the group’s cautious political practice leaves Eduard dissatisfied. He has sought a community and briefly joins its meetings and leaflet work, yet he judges its members by whether they will confront what he considers real poverty and danger. The saying thus functions in the passage as more than a slogan he likes: it measures the distance between the revolutionary grandeur he imagines and the restrained activism he encounters.