Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), including the doctrines of the degenerated workers' state, the bureaucracy as a social caste, the Soviet Thermidor, the call for political revolution, and the influence of the analysis on twentieth-century anti-Stalinist Marxism

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to outline the major arguments of The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and to assess its significance as Trotsky's mature analysis of Stalinism. Strong answers integrate the Norway composition, the framework of the degenerated workers' state, the analysis of the bureaucracy as a social caste, the Soviet Thermidor analogy, the call for political revolution, and the later influence on the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition.

The answer

Composition

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. Victor Serge, exiled to Belgium, read the proofs.

The book was published in France (Editions Grasset) in 1937. Max Eastman's English translation appeared with Faber and Faber in London and Doubleday in New York in 1937.

The framework: a workers' state in transition

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.

The Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state because the working class had been politically expropriated by the bureaucracy. The Soviets, the trade unions, and the Communist Party had become organs of the bureaucratic apparatus rather than of working-class self-rule. The dictatorship of the proletariat had become the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy as a privileged social layer

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

• Wage differentials: skilled workers earned three to four times unskilled, and senior officials earned ten to twenty times unskilled, in cash and in non-monetary benefits (housing, food rations, holiday access).
• The Stakhanovite movement (from August 1935) as a piece-rate intensification of work.
• The 1932 reintroduction of the internal passport and the 1934 criminalisation of family flight from collectivisation.
• The reintroduction of conservative family law in 1936 (criminalisation of abortion, restriction of divorce).
• The Stalin Constitution of 1936 as ideological cover for bureaucratic privilege.

The bureaucracy was not a class because its privileges depended on access to state office rather than on legal ownership of property and were not yet inheritable. It was a caste in the historical sense: a privileged layer with a distinctive social position.

Soviet Thermidor

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.

In the Soviet case, Trotsky dated the Thermidor to the mid-1920s, with the consolidation of the bureaucracy under Stalin between 1923 and 1928. Socialism in One Country was the Thermidorian doctrine. The 1928-1932 industrialisation and collectivisation were not a renewal of the revolution but a violent acceleration of bureaucratic methods.

Political revolution

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 political revolution would:

• Restore the soviets as organs of working-class power.
• Restore inner-Party democracy and a multi-party socialist regime.
• Subject planning to democratic working-class control.
• Liquidate the privileges of the bureaucracy.
• Restore internationalism in foreign policy.

A counter-revolution by the bureaucracy, on the other hand, would restore capitalism. Trotsky thought a bureaucratic counter-revolution was possible but unlikely in the short term.

Foreign policy and the Comintern

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.

Influence

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 book is also a major source for the late 1980s Soviet revisionist historiography. Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge (1971), Vadim Rogovin's Was There an Alternative? (1992-2002), and the Memorial historians of the 1990s and 2000s drew on the framework even when they disagreed with the political conclusion.

Limits of the analysis

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.

The framework's strength is its location of the major political phenomena of Soviet history (the bureaucracy, the privileges, the Stakhanovism, the family code, the foreign policy) in a single integrated analysis rather than as separate symptoms.

How to read a source on this topic

Read The Revolution Betrayed in the Pathfinder edition (1972) with its appendices. Compare to Bukharin's 1928 "Notes of an Economist" and to Christian Rakovsky's 1928 "Letter on the Causes of the Degeneration of the Party and Government Apparatus" for the earlier Bolshevik diagnosis.

Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia (1955) is the major alternative analysis from within the Trotskyist tradition. Hillel Ticktin's Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (1992) is the major late twentieth-century extension.

Common exam traps

Treating the book as polemic rather than analysis. It is a systematic theoretical work with statistical apparatus.

Confusing political and social revolution. Trotsky distinguished them sharply.

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

In one sentence

The Revolution Betrayed (1936), written in Norway and published in France in 1937, was Trotsky's mature analysis of Stalinism as a "degenerated workers' state" in which the bureaucracy had politically expropriated the working class while preserving state property, occupied a Thermidorian position in the revolution's life cycle, and could be overthrown by a political revolution by the working class that would restore soviet democracy, an analysis that became the canonical framework of twentieth-century anti-Stalinist Marxism.