Contemporary Trotskyism

A Moscow attack on Trotsky, the Fourth International and the far left, published in English in 1972 - and unusually, a book whose author quotes the people he is attacking.

Mikhail Basmanov was a professional in the genre, and the genre had just received its instructions: in Kommunist no. 18 of 1971, Boris Ponomarev, Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, directed cadres to expose Trotskyism's kinship with open anti-communism and with opportunism of right and left persuasions. This is that directive executed at book length, with some 70,000 words and several hundred footnotes.

Why a fresh anti-Trotsky book in 1972, forty years after the Left Opposition was destroyed? Basmanov answers the question himself, and the answer is the most reliable thing in the book. Trotskyism was routed in the twenties and thirties and lingered long in the backwaters of history, he writes, but since the fifties and early sixties the Trotskyists have begun to raise their heads. Nobody devotes a book and several hundred footnotes to a movement that does not exist. The energy of the polemic is a measure of what it is answering: the real growth of the Fourth International and the far left among the students and workers of the post-1968 years. This is a defensive book about a revival, and its anxiety is its most candid witness.

It is also the best documented Soviet source on that revival, citing the far-left press of several countries - Workers' Press, Sous le drapeau du Socialisme and others - at a level of detail no other Moscow volume attempts.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, written from inside the tradition the book sets out to bury.