It’s 1918 and the freshly minted Russian Soviet republic is facing invasion, sabotage, and rebellion. The monarchists, landowners, capitalists, and imperialists are incensed by the revolutionary conquest of power by the Russian workers and peasants. They’re dead set on crushing it.
20 August marks the anniversary of the attack by a GPU assassin, on the orders of Stalin, against Leon Trotsky, which led to his death the following day. This article by Alan Woods, commemorating Trotsky, was originally published in the year 2000. We share it today in memory of a revolutionary titan whose work and sacrifices preserved the authentic traditions of Marxism and Bolshevism for future generations.
To mark the anniversary of the death of the great revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, we are republishing this article, which was originally written to commemorate the Lenin centenary in 1970. The early symptoms of bureaucratic degeneration in Russia were already noted by Lenin in the last two years of his politically active life. He spent his last months fighting against these reactionary tendencies, leaving behind a vital heritage of struggle in his last letters and articles. The struggle of the anti-Stalinist Left Opposition, led by Trotsky after Lenin's death, really begins here.
Today, 4 January 2023, marks the centenary of Lenin’s dictation of his postscript to his ‘Letter to the Congress’, also known as his ‘Testament’. In it, Lenin took up the struggle against the bureaucratisation of the Soviet state, which was threatening to derail all the gains of the revolution. Suppressed for decades by Stalin, this Testament dispels the slander that Stalinism was the continuation of Leninism.
One hundred and five years ago, the Russian working class seized power. To celebrate the anniversary of these remarkable events, we are excited to make the following eye-witness account of revolutionary Russia in 1920 available to an online audience. Many of these astonishing articles and photographs have not been seen since their publication over a century ago. They are a priceless panorama of the Russian Revolution in its third year.
For a century, the ruling class has produced industrial quantities of lies and distortions about Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party and of the October Revolution of 1917. This article, therefore, sheds an important light on the life of this revolutionary giant. Covering the formative years of Lenin’s life, the following article – first published in issue 36 of In defence of Marxism magazine, gives a portrait of Lenin in his youth: from his boyhood years, to his making as a revolutionary, the founding of Iskra up until the eve of the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, out of which the Bolshevik faction would first begin to emerge.
On the occasion of May Day we republish the below May Day leaflet written by Lenin in 1904
One hundred and four years ago, the Russian working class seized power. To celebrate the anniversary of these remarkable events, we are excited to make the following eye-witness account of revolutionary Russia in 1920 available to an online audience. Many of these astonishing articles and photographs have not been seen since their publication over a century ago. They are a priceless panorama of the Russian Revolution in its third year.
7 November is the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which altered the entire course of human history. The below article by Alan Woods (originally published in 1992) gives an excellent overview of the revolution as well as highlighting its main lessons. If you want to learn even more, check out our special page www.bolshevik.info for detailed analysis, reading guides, videos and much more about this momentous event.
In 1988 Alan Woods interviewed Esteban Volkov (Leon Trotsky's grandson) in a room in the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacan, of which he is the curator. On the night of 24 May 1940, Esteban Volkov, then only 14 years old, was wounded in a brutal machine-gun attack by Stalinist supporters, from which the Trotsky family miraculously escaped alive. Sixty-six years after the murder of Leon Trotsky (20 August 2006), we republished this interview dealing with the various assassination attempts on Trotsky and his family.
We publish here an interview with Alan Woods, conducted by a Russian news source, about the legacy of Vladimir Lenin, 150 years after his birth.
Today, 22 April, marks the 150th birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the great revolutionary leader. Whilst the bourgeois historians and liberals slander him, we celebrate the life and ideas of Lenin – ideas that are more relevant now than ever.
