Our Revolution

Our Revolution, essays on working-class and international revolution, 1904-1917, by Leon Trotsky, was collected and translated, with biography and explanatory notes, by Moissaye J. Olgin. The preface says that the world has not known us Russian revolutionists, and that friends of freedom in Europe and America were keenly anxious to see the victory of the cause yet were concerned with material results. A passage says that its subject, in a series of essays in the Social-Democratic Iskra, unremittingly branded the Liberals for lack of revolutionary spirit, for cowardice in face of a hateful autocracy, and for failure to frame and to defend a thoroughly democratic program.

An essay says that the proletariat will be compelled to introduce class struggle into the village and thus to destroy that slight community of interests which undoubtedly unites the peasants as a whole. The text also says that the democratization of the country and liberation of the peasants turned out to be a slow process, and that neither the Tzar, nor the nobility, nor the bureaucracy were willing to yield any of their prerogatives.