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TROTSKY'S REPEATED FAILURE AS A POLITICAL PROPHET DOES not seem to have damaged his reputation among his devoted followers. The very pivot of Trotsky's faith – that socialism in one country is doomed to failure unless supported by revolution in other countries – has been proved palpably wrong. The only reason why 'socialist' countries like the Soviet Union or Poland, for example, survive at all is that they are able to bolster their own inefficient systems by vast loans and imports of food and technology from states where a free economy exists. In The Revolution Betrayed, in 1937, Trotsky foretold that a defeat of Germany by the Soviet Union would result in the crushing not only of Hider, 'but of the capitalist system'; while in the Soviet Union one of two things would happen. The first possibility was that a revolutionary party would take over which would restore freedom in the trade unions and the Soviets, as well as the liberty of Soviet parties. It would purge the apparatus, abolish all privileges and limit inequality of payment to the minimum. It was a belated conversion to freedom by Trotsky. In 1921 the sailors and garrison of Kronstadt had risen and called for every one of these reforms. They were not only mown down as 'counter-revolutionaries' with Trotsky's full support, and under his overall command, but his action was unequivocally justified by him years later in exile, on the grounds that failure to crush Kronstadt in 1921 would have opened the gates to 'counterrevolution' – in plain words, would have put an end to communist monopoly of power. The second hypothetical future of a Soviet Union victorious in a war against Germany, according to Trotsky, was the victory of a bourgeois party, which would restore private property. Of course, all political prophets go wrong more often than not. But this particular failure reveals two characteristic weaknesses of Trotsky's power of analysis.

Intro -- Copyright -- Contents -- Part I: The Young Lenin -- Foreword by Max Eastman -- Foreword by Maurice Friedberg -- 1 Homeland -- 2 The Family -- 3 The Revolutionary Path of the Intelligentsia -- 4 The Elder Brother -- 5 The 1880s -- 6 The First of March, 1887 -- 7 Childhood and School Years -- 8 The Stricken Family -- 9 The Father and His Two Sons -- 10 The Preparations Begin -- 11 Under the Cover of Reaction -- 12 In Samara -- 13 A Year of Famine. Law Practice -- 14 Landmarks of Growth -- 15 The Young Lenin -- Part II: On Lenin -- Introduction -- Publishing History -- Foreword -- 1 Lenin and the Old Iskra -- 2 On the Eve -- 3 The Uprising -- 4 Brest-Litovsk -- 5 The Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly -- 6 The Business of Government -- 7 The Czechoslovaks and the Left Social Revolutionaries -- 8 Lenin on the Rostrum -- 9 Lenin's National Characteristics -- 10 The Philistine and the Revolutionary -- 11 The True and the False -- 12 Children on Lenin -- 13 Lenin Wounded -- 14 Lenin Ill -- 15 Lenin Is Dead -- Notes -- Index -- Back Cover.