Tanroop’s Reviews > The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 > Status Update
Tanroop
is 90% done
A panicked Bukharin told Kamenev that "Stalin drew the conclusion that the further socialism advanced, the stronger would popular resistance to it become, a resistance which only firm leadership could hold down. 'This meant a police state', Bukharin commented...the party was on the brink of an abyss: if Stalin were to win, not a shred of freedom would be left... 'He will slay us, He will strangle us'."
— Apr 21, 2025 03:14PM
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Tanroop’s Previous Updates
Tanroop
is 95% done
Trotsky's errors in judgement came from the fact that he "still envisaged all social classes and groups in action and motion, in a state of self-reliance and animation, ready to jump at one another and fight their titanic battles. His thought was baffled at the sight of Titans drowsy and indolent whom a bureaucracy could tame and tie hand and foot."
— Apr 22, 2025 02:33AM
Tanroop
is 80% done
"Surrounded by a hostile or, at best, indifferent world Russia stood alone, bled white, starving, shivering with cold, consumed by disease, and overcome with gloom. In the stench of blood and death her people scrambled wildly for a breath of air, a faint gleam of light, a crust of bread. 'is this', they asked, 'the realm of freedom? Is this where the great leap has taken us?'"
— Apr 03, 2025 12:59PM
Tanroop
is 77% done
Defending the Opposition at a Party Conference, Kamenev "broke into these words, part warning and part self-consolation: 'You may accuse us, comrades, of what you like, but we do not live in the middle ages! Witch trials cannot be staged now...You cannot burn us at the stake.'..Exactly ten years later Kamenev was to sit in the dock at a witch trial", and was executed by firing squad shortly after
— Mar 22, 2025 07:22AM
Tanroop
is 75% done
"The issues were further confused by the peculiar, scholastic style in which the controversies were conducted. For parallels we should have to look at that medieval literature where theologians argued how many angels could sit on a pin-head or to the Talmudic disputes over which came first, the egg or the hen."
— Mar 22, 2025 05:46AM
Tanroop
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"Bolshevism has no enemy more fundamental and irreconcilable than American capitalism.' These were 'the two basic and antagonistic forces of our age'. Whenever communism might advance, it would run into barriers set up by American capitalism; and in whatever part of the world the United States might seek to expand, it would be confronted by the threat of proletarian revolution"
— Mar 06, 2025 08:00AM
Tanroop
is 50% done
"We are still soldiers on the march. We have a day of rest. We must wash our shirts, cut and brush our hair, and first of all clean and grease our rifles. All our present economic and cultural work is nothing but an attempt to bring ourselves into some sort of order between two battles and two marches...Our epoch is not the epoch of a new culture. We can only force open the gate to it."
— Feb 02, 2025 08:36AM
Tanroop
is 30% done
"The Party was in danger of losing its proletarian-socialist outlook, in danger of 'degeneration', no matter whether it entrusted its future to the mass of members or to the Old Guard. The predicament arose from the fact that the majority of the nation did not share the socialist outlook, that the working class was still disintegrated, and that, the revolution [had] failed to spread to the West."
— Dec 13, 2024 04:09PM
Tanroop
is on page 110 of 464
"Lenin had said that N.E.P. had been conceived 'seriously and for long'; and the opponents of planning often quoted the saying. 'Yes, seriously and for a long time', Trotsky retorted, 'but not for ever. We have introduced N.E.P. in order to defeat it on its own ground and largely by its own methods. By making effective use of the laws of the market economy...and also by intervening through our state-owned industry"
— Sep 27, 2024 04:42AM
Tanroop
is on page 20 of 464
Deutscher might just be one of the best writers I've ever read
— Sep 14, 2024 02:54PM
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Jan-Maat
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Apr 25, 2025 02:46AM
Would it really have been very different if Trotsky had won out and become top dog after Lenin's death?
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I think it's an open-question. One thing Deutscher is good at is impressing upon the reader just how many structural constraints there were on the revolution, how limited their room for maneuver was. Stalin's politics were better suited to that. At the same time, Stalin adopted- in the drive against Kulaks and the push for industrialization - policies that the Left Opposition had been arguing for. Still, he did that without adopting any of their calls for inner-party democracy and freedom (still limited to the party though). I think you can reasonably make the case that things would have unfolded without as much brutality and speed, but beyond that I'm not sure. Will need to read the final entry in the trilogy :)
Tanroop wrote: "I think it's an open-question. One thing Deutscher is good at is impressing upon the reader just how many structural constraints there were on the revolution, how limited their room for maneuver wa..."Sounds like good reading, raising questions, showing the constraints
