There is no October Revolution without Trotsky!

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the October Revolution.

From what I can see, Stalinist circles now confine themselves, in their messages about the revolution, to phrases such as “the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership”. They no longer dare to openly push the falsehood that Stalin led the revolution alongside Lenin.

Instead, they make a systematic effort to render Trotsky’s decisive role in the October Revolution invisible. They add to their messages the artistically banal canvases of Stalinist, so-called “socialist realist” painters, in an attempt to give their claims an “aesthetic” veneer of legitimacy. In doing so, they try once again to reproduce the great Stalinist falsehood about the October Revolution, albeit in a more veiled and faint-hearted fashion.

Yet just as the truth did not change in the years when the machinery of falsehood was working at its most ruthless and powerful, it has not changed in the face of today’s comparatively timid Stalinist propaganda either: Trotsky, together with Lenin, was one of the two great leaders of the October Revolution! (See: Who were the true leaders of the October Revolution?)

While today’s Stalinists try to erase Trotsky’s role in the October Revolution through silence, they are walking in the footsteps of those who once doctored photographs to efface historical truth.

The October Revolution and the rise of the proletariat to power did not permit the full realisation of the social transformation envisaged by the socialist programme within a single country, particularly one encircled by the devastation of world war and economic collapse, and burdened by backwardness. The proletarian power established in 1917 entered, in the years that followed, a process of bureaucratic degeneration. This process increasingly took on a counter-revolutionary character, culminating in the physical liquidation of the most advanced elements of the revolution under Stalin’s repressive regime. This historical development, however, is of course a subject for separate inquiry.

On the anniversary of the revolution, it is time to look back at that brief moment in history when the idea that “the earth might truly belong to the poor” appeared as a tangible possibility, a moment that stands as historical proof that the working class could, in practice, take hold of political power.

On the 108th anniversary of the October Revolution, I salute the workers, soldiers, and sailors who took part in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. They were the bearers of a revolutionary tradition that ran from Spartacus’s revolt against the Roman Empire, through the German peasant uprisings, the Diggers of the English Revolution, the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, and the martyrs of the Paris Commune.

Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, they were the driving force of the revolution, its true locomotives.

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In closing, a small reminder: today, 7 November, is also the birthday of Leon Trotsky, one of the two great leaders of the October Revolution. (See: A birthday celebrated at Smolny, the headquarters of the October Revolution)

May both be marked with celebration!