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1 - Bequeathals of the revolution, 1918–1920
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
Summary
From capitalism we inherited not only a ruined culture, not only wrecked factories, not only a despairing intelligentsia; we inherited a disunited and backward mass of individual proprietors; we inherited inexperience, an absence of the team spirit and of an understanding that the past must be buried.
(V. I. Lenin, speech of 6 November 1920, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1963), vol. 42, p. 5)But the question of the transition period from capitalism to socialism, i.e., the period of the proletarian dictatorship, is far more difficult. The working class achieves victory, although it is not and cannot be a unified mass. It attains victory while the productive forces are going down and the great masses are materially insecure. There will inevitably result a tendency to “degeneration,” i.e., the excretion of a leading stratum in the form of a class-germ.
(Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology (Ann Arbor, 1969), pp. 310–11, originally published in 1921)“At the very pinnacle of power Trotsky, like the protagonist of a classical tragedy, stumbled. He acted against his own principle and in disregard of a most solemn moral commitment.” Thus begins the final chapter of Isaac Deutscher's The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921, a chapter that he entitled “Defeat in victory.”
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992