As I recall, both Lenin and Trotsky were certain that the revolution could not possibly survive if the working class in West Europe - especially Germany - didn't take power and assist backward, isolated Russia. They had no doubt that soon it would be extinguished by the small size of the proletariat, mass illiteracy, and the huge loss of life and economic decimation caused by WW1 and the civil war, aided by half a dozen imperialist countries. No one spoke of "socialism in one country" until the Stalin faction in the mid 1920s sought to prettify the reality and appeal to patriotism to sell the country's condition as positive and not nearly hopeless. "We don't need the assistance of outsiders - we can build socialism by ourselves!" was their thinking which ultimately led to Popular Frontism and alliances with the British/French/US imperialists to convince them to leave the USSR alone in exchange for class collaboration. Trotsky criticized this as a denial of material reality and never expected it to survive, even in a deformed and degenerated state, stressing that the only force that the USSR could really rely upon and trust was the working class of other countries.
On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 10:56 AM Marv Gandall via groups.io <marvgand2= gmail....@groups.io> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 01:00 AM, John Edmundson wrote: > > Trotsky died 50 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Any > 'expectations' he might have had in the1940s for a progressive result in > the USSR have absolutely no bearing on what happened in 1989. > > Neither his nor our expectations right through to 1989 bore any relation > to what actually happened, John. I was replying to Artesian's comment > that, unlike Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks who took power, a true > historical materialist would have understood from the outset that the USSR > could not survive in a predominantly peasant economy lagging the more > advanced industrialized West. In fact, that was what Plekhanov and the > Mensheviks warned against, as Gojko pointed out here: > https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29566 > > _._,_._,_ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#32939): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/32939 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109032615/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
