The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk

By Leon Trotsky

“Tens of thousands of people beat in huge waves against the walls of the People’s Palace... The air seemed impregnated with an electric current, such as is felt at the most critical moments of a revolution.”

The Russian October Revolution, for the first time, placed power in the hands of the working class and changed the course of world history. A succinct first-hand account, this text was written to answer the distortions of bourgeois apologists and reformists, and arm the revolutionary workers of Europe and elsewhere with a real understanding of these historic events.

At this time, the Revolution was in a precarious position, threatened by the various imperialist powers. In fact, The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk was drafted by Trotsky between sessions of the Peace negotiations between representatives of the Soviet Government and those of the German High Command in December 1917 and January 1918.

The Bolsheviks never held the view that socialism could be established in a backward semi-feudal country like Russia. Rather, the Russian Revolution was simply meant to be the opening shot of the world revolution. This masterly work was part of the Bolshevik leaders’ appeal to workers internationally. In the centenary of the Revolution, Trotsky’s first-class account is an excellent answer to the lies systematically spread by its enemies and should be given the widest possible readership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wellred
• Release date: Oct 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005180133

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was one of the most prominent leaders of the Russian Revolution in 1917. He was one of the primary contenders for the leadership of the Bolshevik Party in 1922 after the death of Lenin. When Stalin took this post, Trotsky swiftly concluded that the Revolution had been undermined. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and subsequently went into exile in Mexico, where he was assassinated by Soviet agents in 1940.

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Preface

Leon Trotsky was one of the two most outstanding Marxists of the 20th century. Together with Lenin he played the decisive role in carrying out the victorious October Revolution in 1917. So closely identified were the two men that at the time, and for years after the Revolution, the Bolshevik party was universally known as the party of Lenin-Trotsky.

The writings of Trotsky about the Russian Revolution therefore assume a colossal importance. His three-volume masterpiece The History of the Russian Revolution is the greatest work that has ever been written on the subject. Published in 1931, when Trotsky had been exiled to Turkey by Stalin, it remains the most comprehensive and thorough study of the Revolution, and it is compulsory reading for anyone that wishes to understand the events of this great historical drama.

The tremendous authority of this monumental work has tended to overshadow the existence of a far shorter, but nevertheless highly significant history of the Revolution published only months after the Bolsheviks took power. Together with two other short works – The Lessons of October (1924) and In Defence of October (the Copenhagen speech of 1932) – it offers the reader a concise account of the Russian Revolution that is a most valuable work in its own right.

The present work was written in 1918 at a time when Leon Trotsky was in charge of the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk between the newly formed Soviet government and German imperialism. At a time when the Russian front was falling apart and the Revolution was in extreme danger, Trotsky, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was chosen for this vital task. Trotsky skilfully utilised the negotiations to carry on propaganda aimed at the German workers and soldiers.

This booklet formed an integral part of Trotsky’s revolutionary tactics, which were very successful. The message of Bolshevism was received with enthusiasm by the workers in the factories of Germany and Austria and by the war weary soldiers in the trenches. In January 1918 some 400,000 workers were on strike in the munitions and metal plants of Berlin. Within days, the strike had spread to other industrial centres, from Kiel and Hamburg to Mannheim and Augsburg. The army arrested the strike’s leaders and dispatched many of them to the front.

The Austro-Hungarian proletariat followed their example. For five days, work came to a halt in all the factories in Vienna, Budapest and other cities – in the whole empire. In Vienna, the workers shut down the tram system; even the railway system was partly shut down; not a single newspaper appeared; and workers occupied the bridges in order to prevent the police from invading working-class districts.

This was a striking confirmation of the perspective of European revolution that Lenin and Trotsky defended but the German General Staff was well aware of the tactics that Trotsky was pursuing. They abruptly put an end to the proceedings at Brest-Litovsk by issuing an ultimatum, quickly followed by a new offensive against the disintegrating Russian forces. The Bolsheviks were compelled to accept peace on Germany’s terms.

But within a question of months the war was ended by a revolution in Germany that could have led to the establishment of a German workers’ republic and laid the basis for a Soviet federation of Germany and Russia. This would have changed the whole course of human history. But the German Revolution lacked one fundamental factor, the subjective factor – a revolutionary party and a revolutionary leadership.

Historical materialism by no means denies the important role played by individuals in history. In the case of the Russian Revolution of 1917, it can be stated with absolute certainty that the October Revolution would never have succeeded without the presence of the Bolshevik Party, and would never have succeeded without the presence of two men: Lenin and Trotsky. The Russian Revolution proves this in a positive sense, whereas the German Revolution of 1918 proves the same thing in a negative sense.

Trotsky explains that the Russian working class already had power in its hands in February 1917. The only reason that the bourgeois provisional government was allowed to take control of the situation was that the reformist leaders of the Mensheviks and SRs refused to take power and handed it to the Provisional Government, although the latter had no real basis in society.

The Russian workers and peasants had to pass through the painful experience, including the defeat of the July Days and the threat of Kornilovite reaction in August, in order to learn the necessary lessons that enabled them to take power in October. The key role played by the Bolsheviks was to advance slogans that corresponded to the objective necessities of the workers and peasants (peace, bread and land), linking these demands to the central demand: All Power to the Soviets.

The whole process was compressed into a nine-month period. A combination of the actual experience of the masses and the skilful tactics and appropriate slogans of the Bolsheviks enabled the latter to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the Soviets by September-October. Only then did Lenin launch the slogan of insurrection. This fact in itself is a sufficient answer to the ridiculous slander so often repeated by the enemies of socialism that the October Revolution was a coup organised by a small group of conspirators.

The present work accurately describes the precise mechanisms whereby the Bolsheviks succeeded in winning over the masses in such a short space of time. The growth of the Bolshevik Party during this period is surely unparalleled in the history of all political parties. A key part in this was played by Leon Trotsky whose tireless work insured the winning over of the decisive sections of the workers and soldiers, such that the actual transfer of power in October was a relatively peaceful and painless affair. The reason for this was that nine tenths of the task of the insurrection had already been completed in the previous nine months of revolutionary agitation and propaganda.

If we compare the experience of the Russian Revolution to the German Revolution of 1918, the contrast becomes immediately evident. Like the Russian Mensheviks and SRs, the leaders of the German Social Democracy were firmly convinced that the workers could never take power; that power had to be in the hands of the bankers and capitalists. Hiding behind the slogan of democracy these leaders relegated the prospect of socialism to a dim and distant future. The fact of the matter is that these people had long since ceased to believe in socialism at any time.

In November 1918 power was in the hands of the German working class. It would have been a simple matter to have completed the revolution by establishing a regime of workers’ power. If this was not done, it was not for any objective reason (the reformists always have one thousand objective reasons for not taking power) but purely because of the cowardly and treacherous conduct of the Social Democratic leadership. The consequences of this betrayal are well known. In little more than a decade, the bourgeois democratic regime of the Weimar Republic lay in ruins and Hitler moved to take power.

The crimes of the Social Democratic leaders led directly to the horrors of Nazism and the Second World War that brought civilisation to the brink of annihilation and led to the deaths of fifty-five million people. The betrayal of the German Revolution also had the most serious consequences for the fate of the Russian Revolution. Isolated in conditions of frightful economic and cultural backwardness, the Russian Revolution suffered a process of bureaucratic degeneration that ended in the totalitarian monstrosity of Stalinism.

After the death of Lenin in 1924 the Stalinists began a process of systematic falsification of the history of the Russian Revolution. Twelve months after the Bolsheviks came to power Stalin had written the following:

All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised.

Later the same Stalin could write: Comrade Trotsky played no particular role either in the party or the October insurrection, and could not do so being a man comparatively new to our party in the October period.

Later still, not only Trotsky but all of Lenin’s general staff were accused of being agents of Hitler, bent on restoring capitalism in the USSR. In the event, seventy-four years after October, as predicted by Trotsky, it was the heirs of Stalin who carried out the liquidation of the USSR and all the political gains of the Revolution.

The present booklet suffered the fate of all of Trotsky’s works in the period of the Stalinist political counter-revolution. During Lenin’s lifetime the Communist International translated and distributed this book throughout the world. It was regarded as required reading for Communists everywhere. But under Stalin it was suppressed, together with all the works of the man who together with Lenin was the main leader of the October Revolution, the creator and leader of the Red Army during the Civil War and the co-founder of the Communist International.

For many years it was a little known work that was difficult to obtain. Its publication on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore a timely and most useful addition to the arsenal of Marxism. We are proud to recommend this book, which will be an extremely important aid to those who wish to understand the truth about the October Revolution and fight for the cause of world socialism today.

Alan Woods

London, 1st February, 2017

Introduction

The present booklet was, for the most part, written in snatches, in circumstances but little favourable to concentrated works. It was at Brest-Litovsk, between the sittings of the Peace Conference, that the different chapters of this sketch, which has for its main purpose to acquaint the workers of the world with the causes, progress, and meaning of the Russian November Revolution, were put together. History willed it that the delegates of the most revolutionary regime the world has ever known had to sit at the same diplomatic table with the representatives of the most reactionary caste among all the ruling classes. At the sittings of the Peace Conference we did not for one moment forget that we were the representatives of a revolutionary class. We addressed our speeches to the war-weary workers of all countries. Our energies were sustained by the profound conviction that the final word in ending the war, as