With the victory of the October 1917 Russian revolution, the exploited toilers established a workers and peasants government that led the process of overturning capitalist property relations and building the world's first workers state. The Russian revolution soon came under direct military assault by imperialist troops from Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and the United States, combined with attacks by remnants of the tsarist armies.

After years of hardship and famine stemming from the 1918-20 civil war, the Bolsheviks launched the New Economic Policy (NEP) in early 1921, to restore production and trade. The government authorized a private market for peasants to sell produce, and foreign capitalists were encouraged to invest in small industry. Lenin, the central leader of the revolutionary regime, explained that the NEP was a necessary retreat to establish a link with the peasant economy. Under these conditions a layer of petty bourgeois bureaucrats developed, many of them former counterrevolutionaries, who began to join the Communist Party as a way to advance careers. And some of the old Bolsheviks in the government and party apparatuses began to adapt their political views to adjust their lives to these new conditions.

Trotsky pointed out how "Lenin was horrified at the growth of bureaucratism" and began a struggle to confront it before his death in 1924. One of the measures Lenin proposed was "electing 75 to 100 new members to the Central Control Commission. They should be workers and peasants." The purpose of the Control Commission was to combat the bureaucratism and careerism that had crept into the party. It investigated the misuse of positions by party members both in the party and in the soviets, or workers councils, as well as violations of comradely relations and other excesses.

The soviet republic during these years faced tremendous obstacles. The revolutionary workers movement had sustained defeats in Hungary, Italy, and Germany. In Germany, a third attempt at revolution was defeated in 1923 due to weaknesses of communist forces in building a party strong enough to lead the toilers to victory. A restabilization of world capitalism, the imperialist blockade of Russia, the economic toll of the civil war, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives - including many vanguard workers - led to a retreat in class conscious fighters and revolutionaries. This situation favored tendencies toward conservatism and nationalism.

These pressures and the death of Lenin made possible the consolidation of a bureaucratic caste, which had a petty- bourgeois outlook and promoted its power and relative material privileges against the interests of the working class. Stalin, general secretary of the party, presided over the degeneration of the party and the rise of this parasitic cancer. He sought to justify conservatism tendencies to advance the interest of the bureaucracy.

Trotsky noted that the revolutionary defeats in Europe suggested to Stalin the idea that "the historic mission of the Soviet bureaucracy was to build socialism in a single country." He answered this "theory" in his book The Revolution Betrayed, explaining that a "prolonged isolation of the Soviet Union would not end in national communism but in a restoration of capitalism.... If a bourgeoisie cannot peacefully grow into a socialist democracy, it is likewise true that a socialist state cannot peacefully merge with a world capitalist system. On the historic order of the day stands not the peaceful socialist development of `one country' but a long series of world disturbances: wars and revolutions. Disturbances are inevitable also in the domestic life of the Soviet Union."

Trotsky formed the Left Opposition in 1923 and continued Lenin's antibureaucratic struggle based on revolutionary internationalism, opposing the privileged bureaucracy and their abuse of state resources, mismanagement, and chauvinism against oppressed nations.

The Stalinist murder machine organized the extermination of virtually the entire generation of the Communist Party that led the Russian revolution. Workers and peasants were driven out of politics and bloody purge trials were organized, while censorship and the falsification of history were institutionalized in every aspect of social, political, and cultural life. Trotsky was hounded from country to country before he was finally granted asylum in Mexico. In August 1940, an agent of Stalin's secret police murdered Trotsky in Mexico.

- MAURICE WILLIAMS  
 
 
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