After the Civil War and the death of Lenin, unfortunately the Soviet Union remained isolated. One revolution after another (Germany 1918, Hungary 1919, Italy 1920 and so on...) was defeated. The economy the Bolsheviks had inherited from Tsarism was extremely underdeveloped. And in isolation from the rest of the world, this meant that the material conditions for a rapid advance towards socialism did not exist. In this situation a bureaucratic counter-revolution took place. A bureaucratic elite raised itself above the working class.

Stalin and his regime represented the interests of this bureaucracy. But in order to consolidate their control over society this bureaucracy had to eliminate the genuine traditions of Bolshevism. Thus the struggle between Stalin's faction and the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, was a struggle between the genuine representatives of the working class and the up-and-coming bureaucratic elite.

Trotsky led an implacable struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. The Stalinist regime's response was to expel him from the Soviet Communist Party and then exile him from the Soviet Union itself. Huge numbers of his supporters inside the Soviet Union ended up in Stalin's camps from which they were never to return. From exile Trotsky gathered supporters inside the Communist Parties with which he built the International Left Opposition.

Trotsky alone defended the genuine traditions, ideas and methods of Marxism. This in itself was a great achievement. But he went further: he was able to analyse and explain the phenomenon of Stalinism and offer an alternative to this terribly deformed caricature of what a genuinely healthy workers' state should be.

Today the fall of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe has led to confusion and demoralisation among many left activists, especially those from the Communist Parties. A reading of Trotsky, especially his classic, The Revolution Betrayed, can offer all these honest worker and youth activists an explanation of what has happened and also a way out. On this site we provide on-line versions of many of Trotsky's works (courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive who have allowed us to mirror their site) together with more recent articles and documents on the various aspects of Trotsky's ideas.

For a more general application of Trotsky's method to the world of today, you should also consult our In Defence of Marxism web site.