The Revolution Betrayed

The Revolution Betrayed
What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?
Leon Trotsky
Translated by Max Eastman
The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? is a book published in 1937 by the exiled Soviet Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. This frequently reprinted work analyzed and criticized the course of historical development in the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin in 1924 and is regarded as Trotsky's primary work dealing with the nature of Stalinism. The book was written by Trotsky during his exile in Norway and was originally translated into French by Victor Serge. The most widely available English translation is by Max Eastman.
The bourgeois world at first tried to pretend not to notice the economic successes of the soviet regime - the experimental proof, that is, of the practicability of socialist methods. The learned economists of capital still often try to maintain a deeply cogitative silence about the unprecedented tempo of Russia's industrial development, or confine themselves to remarks about an extreme "exploitation of the peasantry." They are missing a wonderful opportunity to explain why the brutal exploitation of the peasants in China, for instance, or Japan, or India, never produced an industrial tempo remotely approaching that of the Soviet Union.