Writings of Leon Trotsky [1929]

The first six articles in this selection of seventy-seven articles, pamphlets, interviews, and letters of 1929 were written immediately after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union and arrival in Turkey in February, the first time he could speak publicly about the post-Lenin struggle in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Trotsky's main objevtives in 1929 were to circulate his version of the facts of the struggle inside the CPSU and the Communist International from 1923 to 1929; to stem the tendencies amongst important leaders of the Russian Left Opposition to surrender to the Stalinist bureaucracy; to promote the consolidation, on a programmatic basis, of Oppositional groups around the world as a faction of the Comintern.

The meaning of the Stalinist "left turn" to the "third period"; the irreconcilability between the Left Opposition and the Bukharinite Right Opposition; answers to arguments of capitulators among the Left Oppositionists; the Sino-Soviet conflict that almost led to war in Manchuria; a constitutional crisis that almost brought Austria to the verge of civil war; and "disarmament" proposals that were to proliferate up until the start of World War II are among the subjects of Writings (1929).

This volume is the first, chronologically, of the twelve volume series Writings of Leon Trotsky (1929-1940), covering the period of his third and last exile from 1929 to his assassination in Mexico in 1940. Considerably more than half its contents have been translated into English for the first time, primarily from the Left Opposition journal Biulleten Oppozitsii and material at the Harvard College Library.