Apologists for the Russian bureaucracy, as well as representatives of the Western capitalist nations, distort the actual events and its lessons. These lessons are especially relevant for today. Both capitalism and Stalinism, facing deepening crisis, fear the traditions of the revolution and their respective working class moving once again along the same road.

In Russia the revolution will be celebrated with a grand parade in Red Square. Much more valuable than such a lavish spectacle, for the youth and the working class will be the re-publication of this pamphlet, which is a testament to the October revolution and the Method of Marxism.

Trotsky, the speaker at the lecture from which this pamphlet was taken, was, with Lenin, the co-leader of the revolution, that for the first time in history gave the majority control over its own destiny.

The speech was delivered 15 years after the events of 1917. Trotsky by this time had been expelled from the Communist Party and excluded from the Soviet Union. Although the purge trials were still some four years hence, many opponents to Stalin's bureaucratic rule were imprisoned, in internal exile or persecuted for their political ideas.

Despite the persecution he had faced Trotsky stood in front of a Social Democratic student audience and defended the revolution, showing the enormous advances that the planned economy had made possible. Today, the USSR is the second mightiest nation in the world and in many spheres such as oil and steel production it has outstripped its number one rival, the USA.

The revolution, along with the political writings of the great teachers act as an anchor for any student of Marxism today, so for Trotsky also: "the Russian revolution has been the practical and theoretical axis of my thoughts and my actions."

Trotsky had spent nearly the whole previous four years, while exiled in Turkey, devoted to writing his History of the Russian Revolution. This, the most authoritive book on the event that shook the world, is brilliantly summarized in this pamphlet.

In this work Trotsky starts with some "elementary sociological principles." These developments Trotsky writes about are once again maturing. The productive forces that are so important for the development of any society are stagnating: "social regimes are not eternal. They arise historically, and then become fetters on further progress. All that arises deserves to be destroyed."

Certainly, the autocratic regime of the Tsar needed to be pushed from the scene of history. Today the overwhelming population of the world live under similar barbaric regimes. The dictators, and the generals keep the world's peoples in prison camps for the interest of a few families and imperialism.

As in Russia, a revolution which means "a change of social order" is absolutely imperative if their bondage is to be smashed. Russia then was below the level of India today. In the 70 years since the revolution the USSR has made enormous advances in the economical sphere, from a backward, semi-feudal nation to the second world power. This was not the case at the time of this lecture.

Trotsky asks three questions which he believes, "the October Revolution raises in the mind of a thinking man."

1) Why and how did the revolution take place?

2) What have been the results of the October Revolution?

3) Has the October Revolution stood the test of time?

The peasantry outnumbered the workers by 100 million to four million and agriculture remained at the level of the seventeenth century. While numerically small, the working class was enormously concentrated. Forty-one percent of all workers were employed in "gigantic enterprises" of over 1,000. The corresponding figure in the USA was 18 percent. It was the working class that led the revolution, followed by the peasants to victory.

This process, of the working class playing the leading role, and why in the words of Lenin, "the chain broke at its weakest link" was a confirmation of the theory of "permanent revolution", originally worked out by Trotsky in 1905. The revolution and subsequent events has vindicated these ideas which retain all their validity even 70 years later.

The specter of revolution is again haunting the rulers of the world. In 1917 the revolutionary wave was primarily a European affair. Now all areas, the advanced capitalist countries, the undeveloped countries and the Stalinist states face massive upheavals.

Throughout the world, we are entering a period of revolutions.

The boom years of the 1950s and 1960s have dissappeared and will never return. World trade is now stagnant. Even three years of upswing to 1985 hasn't restored it to the level of 1980. Capitalism is unable to use the new technology: "Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system."

The bureaucracy in the Stalinist states always was a fetter on developing society. But nevertheless the benefits of the planned economy drove the productive forces forward as basic heavy industries were developed. In the decade of the 1950s industrial production grew in Russia by 230 percent. However, it is impossible for a handful of bureaucrats to organize an economy as large as that of the Soviet Union. As the economy becomes more developed, so it becomes more complex, and the bureaucracy, from being a relative fetter on development becomes an absolute obstacle.

The advances are generally overshadowed in the capitalist media by the lack of democracy. The revolution that captured the imagination of workers throughout the world is viewed differently now. Even in 1932 Trotsky commented: "with all the greater absence of ceremony our enemies reveal their malicious joy over the fact that the land of the Soviets even today, bearrs little resemblance to a realm of general well being."

Any weakness is constantly highlighted by the Western media. The lack of freedom illustrated by invasions and the statements and actions of dissidents, is ruthlessly exploited by the enemies of socialism from the West.

Gorbachev has recently released Dr. Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. The attitude toward other famous dissidents is being softened. Behind the confused ideas of the dissidents stands the power of a working class now the most numerous and well educated in the world. It is this power that really frightens the regime. It is a giant that when it awakes will sweep away the parasites, who live a luxurious life from the labor of the working class.

Gorbachev is proposing a number of reforms, the purpose of which is to try and get the economy moving again. These reforms include a drive against corruption, to alter the present single candidate election procedures and to set up factory councils, which would have the right to elect directors.

The scale of the reforms and the way in which they have been posed goes beyond anything seen in the last two generations. This is because of the crisis facing the Russian bureaucracy, with growth rates in the economy down to one percent in the early 1980s.

But, while some minor successes will probably be achieved, they will only be short lived as the fundamental contradiction of a bureaucracy running a planned economy, remains untouched.

There will undoubtedly be purges, the removal of a few caught with their "fingers in the till", but the reforms are not a decisive challenge to the position of the bureaucracy.

Gorbachev is the new broom that will sweep away the 'excesses' of the Brezhnev era (1964-82). Pravda recently complained about the Brezhnev period for its "lack of consistent democracy, openess, criticism and self-criticism."

Yet when Brezhnev took over he promised much the same and Kruschev before him was to end the cult of personality of Stalin's days.

The Morning Star, the paper of the pro-Moscow wing of the British Communist Party reported under the heading "Soviet War on Corruption" that leading party officials were decorating stastics on cotton production. Hundreds of millions of roubles were paid between 1978 and 1983 for 4.5 million tons of raw cotton that never existed. After investigations "all sorts of other unsavoury elements came to light. Bribe-taking, embezzlement and misappropriation, favouritism and the Turkman equivalent of the old-school tie network."

The article finishes, "so it is not surprising that as more nasty stews come to the boil the anti-reformers are desperately trying to clamp the lids down."

What is so surprising is that the Morning Star cannot see the contradiction in publishing such an article and calling the country socialist. The incredible depth to which sections of the bureaucracy will sink to protect its privileges was shown when leading Communist Party officials kept children in the cotton fields to give the impression that it was still being harvested. It appears the fraud only came to light after tests by a spy satelite gave different data than the figures published by the officials in the region.

The pamphlet also shows the vital role played by the working class even in such a backward country as Russia, and the necessity for the vanguard to be united: "The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on unity of doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership."

The revolution was not expected to last: "The rulers of the whole world armed themselves against the first workers' state: Civil war was stirred up, interventions again and again, blockade. So passed year after year. Meantime, history has recorded fifteen years of existence of the Soviet Power."

That is now 70 years and a third of the world is no longer under the control of capitalism and imperialism. The pamphlet does not explain the reason for the rise of the bureaucratic caste, which can be found in other writings by Trotsky such as Stalinism and Bolshevism and Revolution Betrayed.

The working class of the Soviet Union will once again enter the field of struggle. This time their task will not be a social revolution - the nationalized planned economy is the one remaining gain of 1917 - but a political revolution to wrest power from the bureaucracy into the hands of the working class. While Gorbachev's reforms fundamentally change nothing, they mark a qualitative step in the crisis of the bureaucracy, and the opening up of the era of the political revolution.

The victory of the Russian working class, re-establishing a regime of genuine workers' democracy would remove one of the main threats used by capitalism to deter workers in the West from participating on the struggle for socialism. It will be a short step from there to the fall of Stalinism throughout Eastern Europe and capitalism worldwide, and to the completion of the process which Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks saw the Russian revolution as the beginning of - the establishment of a harmonious world socialist federation.

January 1987