Keeping Clio Honest: Leon Trotsky and the Great October Socialist Revolution

Abstract

Revolution can be defined as the use of violence or other illegal means in order to attain control of governmental power and alter the socio-economic structure of society. Rebellions of this nature have rocked the globe over the past several hundred years: the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the Chinese Revolution of the twentieth century. One of the most important modern upheavals broke out in Russia in 1917, ushering into power a regime asserting that the social structures of the advanced, and smug, Western countries were unjust and doomed to collapse from their own internal contradictions. The survival of a Marxist government in underdeveloped Russia exerted enormous influence on the people of Third World nations, and stirred up leftist elements in the industrial democracies. It also frightened Western policy makers, who, after attempting to strangle the Soviet fledgling in the Russian Civil War, isolated and ignored the U.S.S.R. during the first five to ten years of her existence•