Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: Preface to the First Edition
Leon Trotsky's
1905
Preface to the First Edition
The events of 1905 formed a majestic prologue to the revolutionary drama of 1917. For a number of
years, when the reaction was triumphant, the year 1905 appeared to us as a completed whole, as the
Russian revolution. Today it has lost that independent nature, without at the same time forfeiting any of
its historical significance. The revolution of 1905 grew directly out of the Russo -- Japanese war, just as
the revolution of 1917 was the direct outcome of the great imperialist slaughter. In this way, both in its
origins and in its development the prologue carried within it all the elements of the historical drama
whose witnesses and participants we are today. But in the prologue these elements appeared in a
compressed, not as yet fully developed form. All the forces engaged in the struggle of 1905 are today
illuminated more clearly than before by the light cast back on them by the events of 1917. The Red
October, as we used to call it even then, grew after twelve years into another, incomparably more
powerful and truly victorious October.
Our great advantage in 1905 was the fact that even during this phase of revolutionary prologue, we
Marxists were already armed with the scientific method of comprehending historical processes. This
enabled us to understand those relations which the material process of history revealed only as a series of
hints. The chaotic July strikes of 1903 in the south of Russia had sup plied us with material for
concluding that a general strike of the proletariat with its subsequent transformation into an armed rising
would become the fundamental form of the Russian revolution. The events of January 9, a vivid
confirmation of this prognosis, demanded that the question of revolutionary power be raised in concrete
fashion. From that moment on, the question of the nature of the Russian revolution and its inner class
dynamic became a burning issue among the Russian social democrats of that time.
It was precisely in the interval between January 9 and the October strike of 1905 that those views which
came to be called the theory of "permanent revolution were formed in the author's mind. This rather
high-flown expression defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with
bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate,
bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its
hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the
contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of
its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property
relations. While doing so it would enter into hostile conflict, not only with all those bourgeois groups
which had supported it during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses
of the peasantry, with whose collaboration it -- the proletariat -- had come into power.
The contradictions between a workers' government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a
backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian
revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of
the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state
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