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By In Defence of Marxism
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Wednesday, 07 November 2007 |
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We are providing here links to some interesting video clips of Lenin and Trotsky speaking, as well as from the revolutionary events of 1917.
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By Dmitry Davydov
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Wednesday, 07 November 2007 |
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Today is the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution. In an attempt to bury the memory of that revolution, bourgeois writers and commentators have poured mountains of filth over it. The truth is that the world is pregnant with revolution and the bourgeoisie fears that the lessons of October 1917 can be used by the workers and youth of today to put an end to this rotten system once and for all.
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By Leon Trotsky in 1932
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Wednesday, 07 November 2007 |
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Seventy-five years ago Leon Trotsky delivered a speech in Copenhagen (Denmark). It was the 15th anniversary of the revolution. In defending the October revolution he set the record straight on the real processes that unfolded in Russia 1917, as opposed to the doctored version presented by the Stalinists.
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By Terry McPartlan
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Wednesday, 29 August 2007 |
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The July days in Russia in 1917 were crucial. Without the Bolshevik Party the outcome could have been a devastating defeat. The reaction could have gained more ground. Thanks to the Bolsheviks the events after the July days illustrated the weakness of the reaction and the role of the reformists and prepared the ground for the events up to October
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By Ted Grant in 1988
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Friday, 24 August 2007 |
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Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union, Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials – including those accused of “Trotskyism”. But Trotsky was not rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they feared the ideas he represented.
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By Ted Grant in 1944
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
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Four years after the death of Leon Trotsky, Ted Grant wrote the following: "Leon Trotsky has been more vilified and slandered by the hired pen men
of Stalin than any man in the whole of history. But in spite of all the
lies and perversions, in the long run the truth will make its way. The
liars serve reactionary ends but those who died for the cause of the
working class have always been restored to a position of honour in the
memory of mankind."
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By Rob Sewell
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
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Leon Trotsky's murder was no accident or spontaneous action by the dictator Stalin, but
a monstrous preconceived act that was the culmination of a murder campaign against
the whole of the old Bolshevik leadership of the revolution and those who stood
by the genuine ideas of Marxism. We republish this article published in Militant in 1985.
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By Alan Woods
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Friday, 29 June 2007 |
The bourgeoisie and its ideological spokesmen and women (including the right wing Social Democrats and some so-called Left Socialists) have a vested interest in falsely identifying Bolshevism and Stalinism. It was to demolish this falsehood that Ted Grant and Alan Woods wrote Lenin and Trotsky, what they really stood for back in 1969. We are pleased to announce that this will shortly also be available in Danish.
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By Darrall Cozens
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Wednesday, 13 June 2007 |
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In
his article The significance of Lenin's April Theses 1917 Darrall
Cozens explained how Lenin rearmed the Bolshevik Party in 1917. Continuing our
series on the Russian Revolution, he tells how the revolutionaries developed
from being a small group when the February Revolution broke out to become the main alternative to the new
establishment by June of that year.
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By Bukharin and Preobrazhensky
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Wednesday, 13 June 2007 |
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After Chavez refused to renew the licence for the RCTV channel a hue and
cry has been raised throughout the bourgeois media about so-called "freedom of
the press". Here we provide a quote from The ABC
of Communism, Chapter Three, by N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky which
eloquently puts the Marxist case.
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By Wellred Publications - wellred.marxist.com
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Thursday, 19 April 2007 |
 Trotsky's
History of the Russian Revolution is a classic. Published originally in
1932, it was the first time that an in-depth history had been written
of the Revolution by such a leading participant. It is not simply a
dramatic narrative, but a profound analysis of the inner forces of the
Revolution. It is fitting that Wellred has issued the book on the 90th
anniversary of these world-shattering events. Buy volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3 from Wellred Publications.
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By Darrall Cozens, Coventry Labour Party and UCU (Personal capacity)
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Tuesday, 17 April 2007 |
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This month marks 90 years since Lenin returned to Russia from
exile. He immediately embarked on the task of convincing not only the mass of
workers, but also the Bolshevik leadership, that the tasks of the revolution
were socialist, that what was needed was for power to pass to the hands of the
Soviets.
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By V. D. Bonc-Brujevic
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Wednesday, 28 February 2007 |
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In
May 1919 Lenin met Kropotkin in the Kremlin. Lenin admired Kropotkin,
especially for his book The Great French
Revolution, but the conversation
revealed how the anarchist leader was more interested in this or that
cooperative being set up and had lost the general picture of where the
revolution was going.
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By V. I. Lenin in January 1923
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Wednesday, 28 February 2007 |
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As the number of occupied factories in Latin
America spreads, so does the number of cooperatives. Are
cooperatives an alternative to socialist revolution? Can we build a new society
gradually through the cooperative movement? The central question is: who holds
state power, the working class or the capitalists? Here Lenin deals with the
question in the first period after the Russian Revolution.
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By Alan Woods
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Monday, 29 January 2007 |
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Shortly Wellred Books will be publishing a new edition of
Trotsky’s masterpiece The History of the Russian Revolution. The year
2007 is the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution, an event
that, from a Marxist point of view, was the greatest single event in history.
Alan Woods has written a new introduction to the book which we publish here.
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By Darrall Cozens, Coventry Labour Party and UCU (personal capacity)
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Friday, 26 January 2007 |
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There are enormous lessons to be learned
from the Russian Revolution. We therefore celebrate this key anniversary by
publishing an article on the need for young people and trade unionists to study
theory. We need to learn the lessons of the past in order not to repeat the
mistakes in the future.
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By Leon Trotsky
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Friday, 26 January 2007 |
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“The masses
go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but
with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old régime. Only the guiding
layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the
test of events, and the approval of the masses.” (Leon Trotsky)
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By In Defence of Marxism
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Tuesday, 07 November 2006 |
On the 89th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, we commemorate this great event by republishing three works of Ted Grant and Alan Woods.
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By Esteban Volkov, interviewed by Alan Woods
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Monday, 21 August 2006 |
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In 1988 Alan Woods interviewed Esteban Volkov in a room in the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacan, of
which he is the curator. On the night of 24 May 1940, Esteban Volkov, then only
14 years old, was wounded in a brutal machine-gun attack by Stalinist supporters,
from which the Trotsky family miraculously escaped alive. Sixty-six years after the murder on Leon Trotsky, we republish this interview dealing with the various assassination attempts on Trotsky and his family.
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By Paul Dixon
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Thursday, 11 May 2006 |
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Following on from
Part One, this concluding section looks at how the hierarchy of the
Russian Orthodox Church adapted to the regime under Stalin and in
fact became a privileged layer of Russian society. The hierarchy of
other religious groups followed suit. Under Stalin, far from
withering away, the influence of the Church began to increase. It was
first published in Workers
International News, November 1945.
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By Paul Dixon
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Monday, 17 April 2006 |
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This article written in
1945 analyses the relationship between the Soviet state and the
Russian Orthodox Church. There was a clear dividing line between
Lenin’s approach to this question and the zig-zag policy later
adopted by Stalin. First published in Workers International News,
October 1945.
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By In Defence of Marxism
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Monday, 07 November 2005 |
Today marks the 88th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. To commemorate this great historical event we remind our readers of some of the articles we have published on this.
The Meaning of October by Alan Woods (November 1992)
Russian revolution: 50 Years after by Ted Grant (November 1967) |
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By Jake Cooper
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Thursday, 08 September 2005 |
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Following our previous
article on the 65th anniversary of
the assassination of Leon Trotsky
we publish this interview with Jake Cooper. He was one of Trotsky’s
guards in Mexico who was present in the house at the time of the
assassination. |
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By Rob Sewell
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Monday, 22 August 2005 |
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Yesterday marked the 65th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky. He
had been brutally struck down on August 20, 1940 by the hand of an
assassin, an agent of Joseph Stalin, and rushed to hospital where he
died at 7.25 p.m. the following day. He was sixty years old. On this
commemoration, Rob Sewell takes a look at Trotsky’s life. |
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By Natalia Sedova
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Monday, 22 August 2005 |
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To commemorate the 65th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky, we
publish this piece by Natalia Sedova Trotsky about the assassination of
her husband. (November, 1940)
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By Wellred Publications
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Friday, 17 June 2005 |
 Wellred is proud to announce the publication of 1905
by Leon Trotsky, which has been out of print for thirty years. 1905 was
the year of the first Russian Revolution: the year of the “Bloody
Sunday” massacre, the storming of the Winter Palace, of the Potemkin
mutiny and of the Odessa strike. 1905, which was one of
Trotsky’s early masterpieces, is a series of essays based on the events
of that year, and also contains the first formulation of his celebrated
theory of Permanent Revolution. Order the book here! |
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By Alan Woods
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Sunday, 10 April 2005 |
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Lenin stated that the October Revolution of 1917 could never have taken
place without the previous experience of the Revolution of 1905. A
study of this remarkable event is therefore of great importance for
anyone who wishes to understand the dynamics of revolution in general,
and not just in the particular case. We publish here Alan Woods’
introduction to the forthcoming Spanish edition of Trotsky’s 1905. |
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By Nadim al-Mahjoub
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Thursday, 07 April 2005 |
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On March 22 and 29, in two parts, the British Channel Five TV showed a documentary on the Russian Revolution entitled The Russian Revolution in Colour. Far from being an objective account of the events that took place in 1917, it belongs to that long series of cheap misrepresentation of historical fact. Its purpose is to present the revolution as a cunning plot of Lenin and the Bolsheviks intent on imposing a bloody dictatorship on the Russian masses. But as Lenin always said, "the truth is always concrete". Nadim al-Mahjoub looks at the distortions and lies and puts the record straight. |
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By Rob Sewell
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Monday, 10 January 2005 |
The 9th January (22th January in the Gregorian calendar) marks the
centenary of one of the greatest events of the twentieth century. The
stormy events of 1905 formed the majestic prologue to the revolutionary
drama of 1917, and were described famously by Lenin as the “dress
rehearsal” for the October revolution. Revolution puts parties and
individuals to the acid test and clarifies programmes, ideas and
perspectives. In reality, the success of 1917 was due in very large
measure to the experience acquired by the generation in the 1905
revolution. |
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By MB
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Wednesday, 15 December 2004 |
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As the year draws to an end we would like to remember all those
thousands of genuine Communists who perished in Stalin’s camps,
butchered simply for defending the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. Old
Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were forced to confess
to crimes they had not committed. These famous victims were only the
tip of the iceberg. Not remembered are the thousands of Trotskyists who
languished in brutal concentration camps. They were brave and defiant
to the end. The difference with the Trotskyists was that Stalin’s
agents could not get them to confess to false crimes, so they were
never brought to trial but just callously executed and buried in the
wastes. |
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By A. Kramer
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Wednesday, 17 November 2004 |
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As the old Soviet archives are opened up and studied, more material is
being made available about what happened in Russia immediately after
the revolution. Myths have been created about events like the Kronstadt
“rebellion”, the peasant revolts, the anarchists, etc. The new material
available confirms what Lenin and Trotsky explained about these
events. In spite of all attempts to slander the Bolsheviks, the truth
is always concrete. |
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By Ted Grant
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Friday, 07 November 2003 |
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Today, November 7, marks 86 years since the 1917 Russian Revolution. The bureaucracy that usurped power from the working class (embodied in the Stalinist regime) has finally come full circle and completely capitulated to capitalism. We are here republishing an article by Ted Grant, originally published in 1967 on the 50th anniversary of the revolution. Even when the bureaucracy seemed almighty and irremovable the article was confidently predicting the downfall of the Stalinist regime. (November 1967.) |
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By Phil Mitchinson
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Thursday, 17 January 2002 |
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The year 1927 marked a decisive turning point in the struggle of Leon Trotsky
and the Left Opposition to defend the ideas of Marx and Lenin inside the Russian
Communist Party. On the Tenth anniversary of the October revolution, almost to
the day, the co-leader of that most momentous event was expelled from the party.
Soon after the creator of the Red Army was expelled from the country.
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By Alan Woods
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Tuesday, 12 September 2000 |
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On Thursday 7 September, Channel Four broadcast a fascinating
programme as part of its series Secret History, entitled Mutiny -
the true story of Red October. This remarkable documentary for
the first time gave us the true story behind the 1990 Hollywood movie
The Hunt for Red October a film version of a 1984 novel by Tom
Clancy.
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By Afansy Matushenko
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Wednesday, 06 September 2000 |
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The revolt on the armoured cruiser "Potemkin" was but one of the links in the
long chain of the development of the first Russian Revolution—the Revolution of 1905.
This revolution was the first lesson, and a tremendous object lesson it was, in the study
of the struggle, for the broad masses of workers and peasants.
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By Alan Woods
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Monday, 24 January 2000 |
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Lev Davidovich Trotsky was, alongside Lenin, one of the two greatest Marxists of the
twentieth century. His whole life was entirely devoted to the cause of the working class
and international socialism. And what a life!
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By Alan Woods
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Saturday, 07 November 1992 |
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"75 years ago this month, an event took place which altered the entire course of human history. For the first time - if we exclude the brief but glorious episode of the Paris Commune - the working people took power into their own hands and began the gigantic task of the socialist re-construction of society." Alan Woods wrote this article for in November 1992 to conmemorate the 75th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. |
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Marxist Theory 
