Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: Preface to the First Edition
of principle. In 1917 we were infinitely far removed from the mystique of democracy; we envisaged the
progress of revolution, not as the putting into operation of certain absolute democratic norms, but as a
war between classes which, for their temporary needs, had to make use of the slogans and the institutions
of democracy. At that time, we directly advanced the slogan of the seizure of power by the working
class, and we deduced the inevitability of this seizure of power, not from the chances of "democratic"
election statistics, but from the correlation of class forces.
Even in 1905 the workers of Petersburg called their Soviet a proletarian government. The name became
current and was entirely consistent with the program of struggle for the seizure of power by the working
class. At the same time we opposed to Tsarism a developed program of political democracy (universal
suffrage, republic, militia, etc.). And indeed we could not have done otherwise. Political democracy is an
essential phase in the development of the working masses -- with the important proviso that in some
cases the working masses may remain in this phase for several decades, whereas in another case the
revolutionary situation may enable the masses to liberate themselves from the prejudices of political
democracy even before its institutions have come into being.
The state regime of the socialist revolutionaries and Mensheviks (March -- October 1917) completely
and utterly compromised democracy, even before it had time to be cast in any firm bourgeois-republican
mold. And during that time, although having inscribed on our banner: "All power to the Soviets," we
were still formally supporting the slogans of democracy, unable as yet to give the masses (or even
ourselves) a definite answer as to what would happen if the cogs of the wheels of formal democracy
failed to mesh with the cogs of the Soviet system. During the time in which this book was written, and
also much later, during the period of Kerensky's rule, the essence of the task for us consisted in the actual
seizure of power by the working class.
The formal, legalistic aspect of this process took second or third place, and we simply did not take the
trouble to disentangle the formal contradictions at a time when the physical onslaught on the material
obstacles still lay ahead.
The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly was a crudely revolutionary fulfillment of an aim which might
also have been reached by means of a postponement or by the preparation of elections. But it was
precisely this peremptory attitude towards the legalistic aspect of the means of struggle that made the
problem of revolutionary power inescapably acute; and, in its turn, the dispersal of the Constituent
Assembly by the armed forces of the proletariat necessitated a complete reconsideration of the
interrelationship between democracy and dictatorship. In the final analysis, this represented both a
theoretical and a practical gain for the Workers' International.
The history of this book, very briefly, is as follows. It was written in Vienna in 1908 -- 1909 for a
German edition which appeared in Dresden. The German edition included certain chapters of my Russian
book Our Revolution (1907), considerably modified and adapted for the non-Russian reader. The major
part of the book was specially written for the German edition. I have now been obliged to reconstruct the
text, partly on the basis of sections of the Russian manuscript still in existence, and partly by means of
re-translating from the German. In this latter task I have been greatly helped by Comrade Ruhmer, who
has done his work with extreme conscientiousness and care. I have revised the whole text and I hope that
the reader will not be plagued with those innumerable mistakes, slips, misprints, and errors of all kinds
which today are a constant feattire of our publications.
L. Trotsky
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1905/pre.htm (3 of 6) [06/06/2002 13:41:26]