The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? () is a book published in 1936 by the exiled Soviet Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. This work analyzed and criticized the course of historical development in the Soviet Union following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and is regarded as Trotsky's primary work dealing with the nature of Stalinism. The book was written by Trotsky during his exile in Norway and was originally translated into Spanish by Victor Serge. The most widely available English translation is by Max Eastman.
Historical background
Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879–1940) was one of the leaders of the October Revolution in 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. In 1900, as the leading Marxist theoretician and revolutionary, Trotsky was exiled to Siberia for his socialist activities against the Russian Empire. In 1905, after a European exile, Trotsky returned to Russia for the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, where his oratory made him a leading figure in the Saint Petersburg Soviet, until the Tsarist police arrested him in December. After again escaping Tsarist Russia for continental Europe, for a decade Trotsky politically transitioned from supporting the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP to advocating for the unity of the warring factions in 1913 with the establishment of the Mezhraiontsy, the Interdistrict Organization of United Social Democrats.
The virtual collapse of the old regime during the latter part of World War I helped to motivate the Mezhraiontsy to make amends with their Bolshevik rivals, headed by Vladimir Lenin, and early in 1917 Trotsky returned from exile in New York City by way of Canada to join forces as a member of the Bolshevik party's governing Central Committee. Trotsky was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the seizure of power from the Russian Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, on 7 November 7 , 1917, taking over as head of the Petrograd Soviet early in October and building that institution's Military-Revolutionary Committee into a revolutionary fighting force.
Following the successful overthrow of the Kerensky government, Trotsky was named the first People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR of Soviet Russia. In April 1918, Trotsky was named People's Commissar for War and the Navy, in which capacity he helped to construct the Red Army that would defend the new regime against anti-Bolshevik factions in the Russian Civil War.
Lenin's retirement from active political life in the aftermath of a series of strokes in 1923 followed by his death in January 1924 ushered in an interregnum during which several leading candidates jockeyed for supremacy. Lenin's longtime associate and Communist International chief Grigory Zinoviev, Moscow party leader Lev Kamenev, nationalities expert and party organization secretary Joseph Stalin, and military leader Trotsky represented the leading contenders for party and state primacy. The eloquent Trotsky was identified by the three other leading contenders to the throne as a most serious political threat and a temporary alliance was formed by the trio against Trotsky.
Over the next several years Trotsky and his supporters were successively marginalized and isolated by the evolving Soviet leadership group, with Trotsky vilified as a political oppositionist and his supporters atomized by political and police pressure. This process was accentuated by successive exiles of Trotsky, first in 1928 to the remote city of Alma Ata in Soviet Central Asia followed the next year by Trotsky's physical expulsion from the Soviet Union to Turkey.
Although separated from his dwindling band of committed followers in the USSR, Trotsky continued to function as an opposition political leader from exile throughout the rest of his life. This ongoing political activity against the regime headed by Joseph Stalin led to ongoing political pressure by the Soviet government against a series of host countries in which Trotsky had sought exile.