Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 1-- Russia's Social Development and Tsarism
The more centralized a state is, and the more independent from the ruling classes, the more rapidly it is
transformed into a self-contained organization placed above society. The greater the military and
financial forces of such an organization, the more prolonged and more successful its struggle for
existence. A centralized state with a budget of two billion roubles, a national debt of eight billion and
with a million men under arms could have maintained itself for a long time after it had ceased to satisfy
the most elementary needs of social development -- including the need for military security, for the sake
of which had originally been formed.
Thus the administrative, military, and financial might of absolutism, which enabled it to continue
existing despite and against social development, not only did not exclude the possibility of revolution --
as the liberals thought -- but, on the contrary, made revolution the only possible way of development;
moreover, the fact that the growing power of absolutism was constantly widening the gulf between itself
and the popular masses engaged in the new economic development guaranteed that the revolution would
bear an extremely radical character.
Russian Marxism can be truly proud of the fact that it was alone in pointing out how things were likely to
develop, and predicted the general forms of that development[Even so reactionary a bureaucrat as
Professor Mendeleyev is unable to deny this fact. Speaking of the development of industry, he remarks,
"The socialists saw something in this, and even, up to a point, understood something of it, hut they went
astray because they clung too closely to their dogma, recommended violence, encouraged the animal
instincts of the mob and strove for revolution and power.] at a time when Russian liberalism was living
on a diet of the most utopian of "realisms" and Russia's revolutionary populists nourished themselves on
fantasies and a belief in miracles.
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