A highly original and controversial examination of events in Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1927 in which Professor Day challenges both the standard Trotskyite and Stalinist interpretations of the period. At the same time he rejects the traditional emphasis on Trotsky's concept of Permanent Revolution and argues that a Marxist theorist is essential. Professor Day concentrates upon the economic implications of revolutionary Russia's isolation from Europe. How to build socialism - in a backward, war-ravaged society, without aid from the West: this problem lay behind many of the most important political conflicts of Soviet Russia's formative years.

The theory of Permanent Revolution has been associated with Leon Trotsky for more than a century since the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Trotsky was the most brilliant proponent of Permanent Revolution but by no means its sole author. The documents in this volume, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was one of several participants in a debate from 1903-7 that involved numerous leading figures of Russian and European Marxism, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus and David Ryazanov. This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.

Was the Soviet Union a superpower? Red Globalization is a significant rereading of the Cold War as an economic struggle shaped by the global economy. Oscar Sanchez-Sibony challenges the idea that the Soviet Union represented a parallel socio-economic construct to the liberal world economy. Instead he shows that the USSR, a middle-income country more often than not at the mercy of global economic forces, tracked the same path as other countries in the world, moving from 1930s autarky to the globalizing processes of the postwar period. In examining the constraints and opportunities afforded the Soviets in their engagement of the capitalist world, he questions the very foundations of the Cold War narrative as a contest between superpowers in a bipolar world. Far from an economic force in the world, the Soviets managed only to become dependent providers of energy to the rich world, and second-best partners to the global South.

On 20th August 1940 Trotsky’s life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin. Trotsky’s Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events. How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Was this something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions. In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.

Since My Life was first published it has been regarded as a unique political, literary and human document. Written in the first year of Trotsky's exile in Turkey, it contains the earliest authoritative account of the rise of Stalinism and the expulsion of the Left Opposition, who heroically fought for the ideas and traditions of Lenin. Trotsky's exile is the culmination of a narrative which moves from his childhood, his education in the "universities" of Tsarist prisons, Siberia and then foreign exile - to his involvement in the European revolutionary movement and his central role in the tempestuous 1905 revolution and the Bolshevik victory in October 1917 and the civil war which followed. The work concludes with his deportation and exile. With an introduction by Alan Woods and a preface by Trotsky's grandson, Vsievolod Volkov.

In response to criticism from Soviet politician Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky wrote the essay "The Permanent Revolution". Following Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927, The Left Opposition released the text in Russian. This was written following the death of Vladimir Lenin, which started a power struggle among the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's military, bureaucratic, and legislative branches. General Secretary Joseph Stalin created a political partnership with Trotsky opponents Lev Kamenev, Zinnoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin inside The Politburo and The Central Committee. Stalin's bloc followed an isolationist ideology known as Socialism in One Country, which prioritized economic growth above global upheaval.

"Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) ranks among the greatest and most controversial figures in the political history of the 20th century. During his lifetime, he was the target of a vicious campaign of lies orchestrated by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, which culminated in the assassination of the exiled revolutionary leader. In this essay, David North subjects Robert Service's 'Trotsky' -- the latest addition to the post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification -- to a detailed analysis and critique."--Publisher's website.

Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

Soviet Politics in Perspective is a new edition of Richard Sakwas successful textbook Soviet Politics: an introduction. Thoroughly revised and updated it builds on the previous editions comprehensive and accessible exploration of the Soviet system, from its rise in 1919 to its collapse in 1991. The book is divided into five parts, which focus on key aspects of Soviet politics. They are: * historical perspectives, beginning with the Tsarist regime on the eve of Revolution, the rise and development of Stalinism, through to the decline of the regime under Brezhnev and his successors and Gorbachev's attempts to revive the system * institutions of Government, such as the Communist Party, security apparatus, the military, the justice system, local government and participation * theoretical approaches to Soviet politics, including class and gender politics, the role of ideology and the shift from dissent to pluralism * key policy areas: the command economy and reform; nationality politics; and foreign and defence policy * an evaluation of Soviet rule, and reasons for its collapse. Providing key texts and bibliographies, this book offers the complete history and politics of the Soviet period in a single volume. It will be indispensable to students of Soviet and post-Soviet politics as well as the interested general reader.