Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?

Mikhail Basmanov's Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth? is the fullest surviving specimen in English of official Soviet anti-Trotskyism written for a student audience.

Progress Publishers issued it in 1973, at the height of the radicalisation that followed 1968, and its intended reader is the Western student who has just met a Trotskyist group on campus. That makes it a primary source of unusual directness: a state publishing house setting out at length, and for young readers, exactly how the Soviet Union wanted the history of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International understood.

It is accurate on a number of verifiable particulars. Its account of the founding of the Fourth International in September 1938 gets the essentials right: roughly twenty delegates, a single day's session, a private house in a Paris suburb, and a communique that named Lausanne instead. Basmanov quotes his opponents at length and names the organisations, congresses and publications he is arguing against, which makes the book usable as a guide to what the Soviet apparatus knew, and chose to say, about the movement it was attacking.

This edition carries a new critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which supplies the history the book leaves out, beginning with why that 1938 conference met in secret, and sets out what the volume is and is not evidence for.