Trotskyists

The Trotskyists are presented as a revolutionary opposition whose program was defeated politically and then appropriated by the regime that persecuted them. Their history makes visible a paradox in the book’s account of Stalinism: a ruling power can suppress an opposition while carrying out, in a more brutal form, the changes that opposition demanded.

Position Within the United Opposition

In 1927, the ruling coalition of Stalinists and Bukharinists pursued appeasement of private farmers and attacked the United Opposition, including Trotskyists and Zinovievists. The opposition called for accelerated industrialization and a struggle against rich peasants through higher taxes and collectivization. The conflict was therefore not simply between supporters and opponents of revolutionary change; it concerned the direction and pace of transformation, and which political force would define the revolution’s next tasks.

The Trotskyists’ program placed them against the ruling coalition at a moment when it was still resisting the measures that would soon become state policy. Their position was vulnerable to a reversal: once Stalin adopted those measures, the opposition’s criticism of him as a right-wing Thermidorian ceased to fit the new political situation.

The 1928 Reversal

In 1928, Stalin abruptly imposed a leftward turn: rapid industrialization and the brutal collectivization of land. The new policy did more than borrow the United Opposition’s agenda. It enacted that agenda more violently than the opposition itself had dared to imagine. A program that had marked its advocates as enemies of the ruling coalition became the basis of a campaign against them.

The result was a sharp political contradiction. As the Trotskyist faction was ruthlessly exterminated, some Trotskyists recanted and joined the Stalinists, whose regime was now realizing the opposition’s program. The episode shows how adopting an opponent’s demands can disarm its criticism while leaving the opponent exposed to persecution. The book describes this as a tragic reversal: the policy victory did not restore the Trotskyists’ political standing or protect their faction.

Social Transformation and Revolutionary Momentum

The reversal belongs to a larger account of how Soviet society changed. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s chronology, discussed in the book, distinguishes the difficult but energetic revolutionary years of 1917 to 1921 from the Soviet New Economic Policy period, which consolidated state power while leaving much of the social texture intact. The decisive assault on that texture began in 1928. The drive aimed to liquidate peasants as a class of individual owners and replace the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians with a new one.

The scale of change is conveyed through a comparison of Moscow across time. An emigrant who left in 1914 and returned in 1924 could still recognize the city, its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, the people in charge. Returning in 1934, the same person would encounter a social world transformed beyond recognition. The book presents the years from 1928 to 1933 as both terrible and animated by a sincere, forceful drive to remake society and create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system. That transformation gives historical weight to the policies for which the Trotskyists had argued, without erasing the coercion through which they were carried out.

Trotskyism and the Tragedy of the Revolution

The book resists two simplifying accounts of the relationship between the October Revolution and Stalinism. It rejects the Trotskyist view that Stalinism was ultimately a contingent deviation, but also rejects the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Instead, it asks readers to hold together the revolution’s distinctive emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. In that argument, the Trotskyists matter not only as defeated opponents but as a test of how revolutionary aims can persist within a regime that betrays and transforms them.

Isaac Deutscher’s interpretation helps explain the inward turn. When revolutionary expansion failed and the Soviet Union remained confined within its own borders, the force of the revolution, in his account, turned inward to reshape Soviet society. Forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution abroad; the liquidation of the Russian kulaks stood in for the overthrow of bourgeois rule elsewhere. This framework clarifies why the policies associated with the opposition could be enacted by its persecutors: the regime redirected revolutionary energy rather than simply abandoning it.

The book also qualifies the standard Trotskyist description of Stalinism as the Napoleonic Thermidor of the October Revolution. It places the Napoleonic moment instead in the failed attempt at the end of the civil war in 1920 to export revolution by military means, an effort that ended with the defeat of the Soviet Red Army in Poland. In this reading, the later inward transformation cannot be reduced to a simple restoration or rightward retreat. The Trotskyists’ history thus illuminates the book’s central tension: revolutionary continuity and political defeat can occur together, as a regime takes up a rival program while destroying the people and faction who advanced it.