Social Democracy and Wars of Intervention in Russia, 1918-21

In the years following the October Revolution Soviet Russia fought for its life against the White Guards and the armies of fourteen capitalist powers. This book by Trotsky, Commissar for War, is an indispensable account of the Civil War in the Caucasus. It is a textbook of the experience of the Bolsheviks in the fight to defend the first workers’ state. Labour leaders like the Snowdens and ‘Marxists’ of the Kautsky school here stand revealed as the accomplices of imperialist violence, prepared in their hatred of communism to tolerate such atrocities as the murder of the Baku Commissars. Trotsky’s exposure of reformism and centrism is vital to the understanding of the struggle against the Mensheviks and Labourites of today. Re-published for the first time since 1922, this new edition contains many rare contemporary photographs, maps, a glossary and a new foreword.