Quick questions on Trotsky on Stalinism: The Revolution Betrayed: HSC Modern History Personality

was written by Trotsky at Wexhall in Norway between February and August 1936. Trotsky drafted the book in Russian from his daily reading of the Soviet press (Pravda, Izvestia, Trud, Pravdivye Slova) and the Soviet statistical handbooks. Natalia Sedova prepared the manuscript.

The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? was written by Trotsky at Wexhall in Norway between February and August 1936. Trotsky drafted the book in Russian from his daily reading of the Soviet press (Pravda, Izvestia, Trud, Pravdivye Slova) and the Soviet statistical handbooks. Natalia Sedova prepared the manuscript.

The opening chapters set out Trotsky's framework. The Soviet Union remained, in Trotsky's analysis, a workers' state because state property in the means of production survived as the dominant property form. The October Revolution's economic conquests (nationalisation of land, banking, industry, transport) had not been reversed.

Trotsky devoted central chapters to the analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy as a privileged social layer. He used the official Soviet press to document:

Trotsky used the analogy of Soviet Thermidor to date the consolidation of the bureaucracy's political power. The French Revolution's Thermidor (the 9 Thermidor coup of 27 July 1794 that overthrew Robespierre) had been the bourgeoisie's conservation of the revolution's economic conquests under reactionary political forms; the Jacobin dictatorship had been replaced by the Directory.

The book's most influential single claim was that the bureaucracy could be overthrown by a "political revolution" rather than a "social revolution." Because state property remained the dominant property form, a working-class movement against the bureaucracy would not need to overturn the social regime; it would need to restore workers' democracy on the existing socialist property basis.

The book devoted a chapter to Stalinist foreign policy as the projection of bureaucratic conservatism. The Comintern had been transformed from the general staff of the world revolution into the diplomatic auxiliary of the Soviet bureaucracy. The 1935 Comintern Seventh Congress, with its turn to the Popular Front and the alliance with the bourgeois Left, was the major evidence.

The Revolution Betrayed established the framework of every later Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism. The Fourth International (1938), the post-1945 Trotskyist tradition, and the New Left of the 1960s all worked within or against its categories. The major rival frameworks (Tony Cliff's "state capitalism," Castoriadis's "bureaucratic class") were developed against The Revolution Betrayed, not independently of it.

The Revolution Betrayed has dated in specific ways. Trotsky underestimated the duration of the bureaucracy: he expected its overthrow within a generation. He underestimated the possibility of a peaceful capitalist restoration: the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union did not require the "civil war between counter-revolution and political revolution" that he expected. He overestimated the political weight of the European Left.

It is a systematic theoretical work with statistical apparatus.

Trotsky distinguished them sharply.

Trotsky placed it in the mid-1920s, not 1929 or 1937.