Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35]

The French fascists, encouraged by Hitler's victory in Germany, made a bid for power in 1934. How could the French workers be mobilised to defeat the fascists? The revolutionary forces in France were small and isolated. What tactics could strengthen them?

Sergei Kirov, a lieutenant of Stalin, was assassinated in Leningrad at the end of 1934, and the Soviet government tried to implicate Trotsky in the crime. How to expose the charges as a frame-up? How to explain the processes of degeneration inside the first workers' state?

France and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in 1935, and Stalin announced his approval of French imperialism's re-armament program. How to create an international movement capable of leading a revolutionary struggle against the approaching World War II?

The lastest developments inside the Soviet Union had compelled Trotsky to rethink his views on a complex historical-theoretical dispute. How to sort out what was correct and what was incorrect in the "Thermidor-Bonapartism analogy" derived from the Great French Revolution?

These were the questions, among others, that Trotsky was grappling with during the second half of his two-year exile in France and that he deals with in the forty-seven pamphlets, articles, letters and statements to the press contained in this volume. Many of them are translated into English here for the first time, while others, unisgned when first published or signed with pen names, are included here for the first time under Trotsky's name. This second edition contains fourteen new articles.