The destruction of the 1925-1927 Chinese revolution is one of Stalinism’s greatest crimes. A young working class, supported by a peasantry in revolt, tried to emulate the Russian workers’ seizure of power a decade earlier. But the revolution was defeated by the leadership of the Communist International: the body founded to help lead world revolution to success had, under Stalin’s leadership, driven the Chinese workers into a dead-end alliance with bourgeois nationalists that ended in a massacre of the revolutionary workers’ movement in China.
This collection of Trotsky’s works, produced between 1927 and 1931, provides enormous insight into a crucial and tragic episode in the history of the working class movement. Trotsky’s analysis of revolutionary tactics and strategy remain brilliant applications of Marxism full of contemporary relevance, and represent a high point in the fight to defend revolutionary Marxism against Stalinist distortions and betrayals.