That declared purpose makes one aspect of Reds: A Global
History of Communism especially revealing: Leon Trotsky’s absence from its
public-facing genealogy of communism. This point must be made carefully. No
evidence currently available shows who chose the figures on the book's cover or
in its promotional material, let alone that Paul Mason personally instructed
his publisher to exclude Trotsky. Any such claim would go beyond the evidence. However,
the omission still has political significance worth examining. The question is
not what a designer or marketing department had in mind, but why Leon
Trotsky—and, above all, the historical movement associated with his name—poses
such profound difficulties for any narrative that presents twentieth-century
communism as a broadly continuous movement from revolutionary aspirations to
totalitarian dictatorship.
What happens when we restore Leon Trotsky to his proper
place in this history? The supposedly self-evident progression from the Russian
Revolution to Stalinism immediately becomes a matter of political dispute. We
must reckon with the Left Opposition and the struggle over the nationalist
doctrine of “socialism in one country”. We must also explain the political
extermination of the generation associated with the October Revolution, the
Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, the formation of the Fourth International,
and, ultimately, Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Above all, we must address
the historical claim made by Leon Trotsky and the movement he founded:
Stalinism was not the inevitable fulfilment of Marxism and Bolshevism, but a
bureaucratic reaction against the international socialist programme on which
the October Revolution was based. That is no minor historiographical
disagreement. It goes to the heart of Reds: A Global History of Communism.
From revolution to “totalitarian nightmare”
The book's declared scope could scarcely be broader. Paul
Mason deliberately begins in antiquity rather than in 1917, tracing communal
and egalitarian movements through ancient and medieval society, the French
Revolution, nineteenth-century anti-capitalist movements, and twentieth-century
revolutionary upheavals. He says the book examines how Vladimir Lenin’s
movement defeated its ideological rivals because, “for a time”, it seemed to
work, before turning to what Paul Mason describes as the transformation of the
twentieth-century communist experiment into a “totalitarian nightmare”.
The American promotional description is scarcely less
explicit. It promises to trace communism's development from a political idea to
a mass movement and, ultimately, to totalitarian regimes. The story
acknowledges the genuine heroism of workers and peasants resisting
exploitation, but ultimately foregrounds repression, famine, and authoritarian
rule. At a time when capitalism appears increasingly unstable and communist
ideas may therefore attract renewed interest, the book is marketed as a warning
against the resurgence of an “authoritarian left” and as an appeal for an
anti-capitalism grounded in “universal human values”.
There is nothing objectionable in documenting the immense
crimes committed by Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Marxists have no political
interest in concealing them. Indeed, the strongest Marxist indictment of
Stalinism was written while the liberal intelligentsia and substantial sections
of the bourgeois political establishment were accommodating themselves to the
Soviet bureaucracy. The issue is therefore not whether Stalinist repression
should be exposed. It is how Stalinism itself is explained.
Did the bureaucratic dictatorship headed by Joseph Stalin
arise organically from Marxism and the October Revolution? Was Stalinism
essentially Leninism carried through to its logical conclusion? Or did a
bureaucratic caste emerge under historically specific conditions of economic
backwardness, revolutionary isolation, exhaustion and international defeat,
eventually destroying the Marxist leadership through which the working class
had taken power? Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition make it impossible to
evade this question.
The historical problem of Trotsky
Leon Trotsky matters not because socialists require an
alternative personality cult with which to counter that surrounding Joseph
Stalin. Nor can the historical argument be reduced to the claim that everything
done under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was democratic and everything done
afterwards was bureaucratic. Such an account would collapse under serious
historical examination. The Bolsheviks confronted civil war, foreign military
intervention, famine and the economic disintegration of an already backward
society. During that struggle, their government employed coercive measures that
remain the subject of legitimate historical and political controversy.
But this makes the subsequent conflict within the Soviet state even more important. For whatever judgement one reaches concerning Bolshevik policies during the Civil War, the Soviet Union of the late 1930s was not simply the political regime of 1917 grown older. An immense transformation had taken place. Bureaucracy had gutted the revolutionary party. Oppositionists had been expelled, imprisoned and killed. Many of the best-known figures associated with the October insurrection were accused of fantastic conspiracies, subjected to show trials and executed. The revolutionary history of the Soviet Union itself was systematically rewritten. The fundamental question therefore becomes: what social and political processes produced this transformation?
Leon Trotsky’s answer was developed over years of political
struggle and reached its most systematic expression in The Revolution
Betrayed. Russia's backwardness, compounded by economic devastation and,
above all, the Soviet state's isolation after revolutions failed elsewhere,
created conditions in which an administrative bureaucracy gained an
increasingly privileged social position. That bureaucracy did not openly
abandon the property relations established by October. Instead, it
progressively monopolised political power while transforming Marxism into an
ideological justification for its own interests.
The “socialism in one country” programme gave this
bureaucracy its nationalist outlook. Against it, Leon Trotsky defended the
conception that animated the October Revolution itself: that victory in Russia
could not be seen as a nationally self-sufficient socialist development, but as
the opening stage of the international socialist revolution. This political
conflict cannot be removed from the history of communism without fundamentally
changing that history's meaning.
Why the omission matters
That brings us back to the cover and promotional
presentation surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. The
argument should not be reduced to alleging an editorial conspiracy for which
there is no evidence. Covers are marketing objects, and the personalities
selected for them may reflect numerous editorial, aesthetic and commercial
considerations. But historical representation is never entirely innocent, especially
when the book is presented not merely as a history of communism but as an
intervention in contemporary arguments over whether capitalism can and should
be transcended.
Trotsky’s absence therefore matters less for explaining why
someone left him off the cover than for asking what happens to history once he
disappears. Trotsky does not fit easily into a straightforward genealogy in
which revolutionary communism develops progressively into Stalinist
dictatorship. His presence immediately introduces another history: the Left
Opposition's struggle against the emerging Soviet bureaucracy, the conflict
between permanent revolution and “socialism in one country”, the expulsion and
persecution of oppositionists, the Moscow Trials, the founding of the Fourth
International, and Trotsky's eventual assassination in 1940. The road from
October to Stalin suddenly ceases to appear inevitable.
Put Trotsky back into the picture and Stalinism itself
becomes a historical problem requiring explanation. If Stalin merely completed
what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had begun, why was it necessary to politically
suppress the Left Opposition and eventually destroy so much of the generation
associated with the October Revolution? Why did Stalinism have to rewrite the
history of 1917, erase political opponents from the revolutionary record and
transform “socialism in one country” into communist orthodoxy? Whatever
conclusions one reaches about these questions, their existence disrupts any
seamless identification of Bolshevism with Stalinism.
This is precisely why the representation matters. Trotsky's
significance does not lie in portraying him as an infallible democratic
alternative to Stalin. Rather, it lies in the historical fact that Stalinism
faced an organised opposition that claimed the legacy of revolutionary Marxism
and socialist internationalism. The dispute, then, was not between communism
and its liberal critics, but within the revolutionary movement itself, over the
meaning and future of October.
The missing face consequently represents something much
larger than a publishing decision. It symbolises a missing historical
possibility. Restore Trotsky and the Left Opposition to the picture, and
twentieth-century communism no longer appears as a single road running
inexorably from revolution to dictatorship. It becomes a history of competing
programmes, social forces and political struggles whose outcome was fought
over, not predetermined. That is the history a new generation contemplating
alternatives to capitalism.
Trotsky complicates the picture.
Return Leon Trotsky to the centre of twentieth-century
communist history, and the reader encounters not one communist tradition
marching inexorably towards dictatorship, but an enormous, ferocious struggle
over what communism was to become. Instead of a simple chronological sequence
ending in the gulag, one encounters competing programmes, different social
interests and irreconcilable international strategies.
Joseph Stalin then ceases to appear merely as the next name
in a succession beginning with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The Stalinist
bureaucracy's decision to destroy the political tendency represented by Leon
Trotsky requires explanation. Why was the Left Opposition suppressed? Why did
“socialism in one country” have to defeat the internationalist perspective of
permanent revolution? Why did so many leaders associated with October disappear
into prisons, executions and exile? Why was the historical record of 1917
itself repeatedly falsified?
Whatever one's ultimate judgement of Leon Trotsky's answers,
these questions cannot be dismissed without impoverishing history. This is
especially true because Paul Mason presents Reds: A Global History of Communism
as having an explicitly contemporary purpose. His own description links the
history of the twentieth-century communist experience with present political
questions surrounding China, Russia, the crisis of Western democracy, climate
change and what he calls new forms of “techno-egalitarianism”. Paul Mason says
that, as China and Russia challenge the democracies and a new “authoritarian
left” attempts to displace social democracy, liberalism and anarchism, his book
should be understood not only as history but as “a political intervention”. The
history is therefore inseparable from the politics.
From revolutionary politics to radical social democracy
This gives Paul Mason’s own political evolution particular
significance. He approaches Marxism neither as a conventional Cold War liberal
nor as a conservative historian who has always regarded socialism with
hostility. He travelled politically from the revolutionary left towards what he
has described as radical social democracy. He now frames the central
contemporary political division increasingly as democracy versus
authoritarianism, while supporting the defence of the Western democratic order
against Russia and China.
The institutional evolution accompanying this change is
noteworthy. The promotional material for an October 2026 appearance identifies
Paul Mason as a writer, broadcaster and “political strategist”, and as an
adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. This does not prove anyone
dictated the contents of Reds: A Global History of Communism, nor is such an
argument necessary. The point is political rather than conspiratorial. The
framework through which Paul Mason now examines the twentieth century has
shifted profoundly from that of revolutionary Marxism.
That helps explain the extraordinary contemporary burden this
history bears. The book is concerned not simply with why communist regimes
emerged, developed bureaucratic dictatorships and ultimately collapsed or
transformed themselves. Its lessons directly address the political choices
people face today. Paul Mason acknowledges that Western democracies are
stagnating, that an impending climate disaster requires radical economic
solutions, and that millions elsewhere may see China's authoritarian, state-led
model as a viable alternative. Under these conditions, he says the history of
communism must warn a new generation against repeating the twentieth century.
But this formulation itself raises the decisive question:
What exactly would count as repeating the twentieth century? Would it mean
overthrowing capitalism, building a revolutionary workers' party, or
establishing working-class political power? Or would it mean repeating
Stalinism’s nationalist and bureaucratic repudiation of socialist
internationalism? These are not remotely the same propositions.
Ethics against historical materialism
Paul Mason’s answer increasingly rests upon an ethical
conception of socialism. The alternative to authoritarianism must be grounded
in democracy and universal human values. The attraction is obvious. Against
dictatorship, democracy; against brutality, humanity; against lies, truth. But
moral categories cannot substitute for an analysis of the social forces that
created the historical phenomena under discussion.
Marxism does not oppose democracy or human emancipation. Its
distinctive contribution is to ask under what material conditions democracy
exists, what classes exercise power, what social relationships sustain
political institutions, and why political forms change. Without that approach,
Stalin becomes primarily the representative of a disastrous political idea
rather than the head of a definite bureaucratic social formation emerging under
historically identifiable circumstances.
There is a further difficulty. If communism can be traced
backwards through millennia as an essentially timeless desire for equality and
communal existence, it becomes possible to detach it from the specific
contradictions of capitalist society that produced modern Marxism. Paul Mason
explicitly argues that the desire to live without hierarchy and property is
deeply rooted in human nature and begins his story in antiquity rather than in
1917.
At first, this sounds like an extraordinarily generous
concession to communism. Instead of communist aspirations being unnatural, they
become almost universal. But the price is considerable. Communism ceases to be
understood primarily as the political programme associated with a historically
specific class relationship generated by capitalism itself and instead becomes
an ancient human aspiration that repeatedly assumes different forms.
The specificity of Marxism is thereby weakened. Marx did not
derive communism from an abstract human desire for fairness. His critique began
with definite material relations of production and with the contradictions of
capitalist development. The modern working class occupied a unique position not
because workers were morally purer than everybody else, but because capitalist
production created a social class compelled to sell its labour power while
simultaneously concentrating it within increasingly socialised processes of
production. Once communism is removed from that material framework, its
recurrent defeats can take on the appearance of an eternal human tragedy: noble
aspirations repeatedly descending into coercion when someone tries to implement
them.
International revolution or socialism in one country
Here the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin
assumes its full significance. Its leaders did not conceive the October
Revolution as the beginning of a self-contained Russian road to socialism.
Russia's enormous economic backwardness made such a conception particularly
implausible. The Bolsheviks understood their seizure of power as part of an
international revolutionary crisis generated by the First World War. They
expected the Russian Revolution to spark revolutionary struggles abroad,
especially in Europe.
The isolation of the Soviet state was therefore not a minor
complication. It transformed the conditions under which the revolutionary
government had to develop. Defeats in revolutionary struggles elsewhere
strengthened conservative pressures within Soviet society. After years of war,
famine, civil conflict, and economic collapse, the working class that had
provided the revolution's social base was exhausted. Administrative layers
acquired increasing power. Political life within the revolutionary party
deteriorated.
Joseph Stalin’s emergence must be placed within this process.
The resulting conflict was not simply a contest between two ambitious
politicians. Behind it were opposed political programmes. The theory of
“socialism in one country” rationalised an increasingly nationalist orientation
in which preservation of the Soviet bureaucracy's position became paramount.
Leon Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution insisted that the fate of the
Soviet workers' state remained inseparably connected to the development of
world revolution.
These competing strategic perspectives had international
consequences. They shaped controversies over the Chinese Revolution, the rise
of fascism in Germany, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. Anyone
attempting a global history of communism must therefore confront Trotskyism not
simply as another branch of the communist family tree but as an organised
Marxist challenge to the political foundations of Stalinism.
The strongest objection
Paul Mason’s defenders could reasonably answer that none of
this proves Leon Trotsky represented an immaculate democratic socialism. It
does not. They could point to the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the
Red Terror, restrictions on opposition parties, and Leon Trotsky’s advocacy
during the enormously difficult Civil War period for measures involving the
militarisation of labour. These questions have generated an immense historical
literature, and any serious appraisal of Bolshevism must confront them.
Indeed, the argument becomes stronger for doing so. The
Marxist case against Stalinism should not depend upon constructing a sanitised
picture of Soviet Russia before 1924. The revolution took place under
catastrophic conditions. Its government made decisions that deserve examination
and criticism. The historical debate concerns whether these measures sufficiently
explain everything subsequently associated with Stalinism or whether a
qualitatively different bureaucratic-political reaction developed under the
pressure of isolation and defeat.
The mere existence of authoritarian measures before Joseph Stalin proves neither historical continuity nor historical inevitability. To establish that Stalinism was the necessary product of Bolshevism, one must explain why an organised opposition emerged against the bureaucracy, why the bureaucracy politically suppressed that opposition, why it had to outlaw its programme, and why so much of the revolutionary generation had eventually to be physically destroyed. Those events cannot simultaneously be treated as irrelevant and held up as evidence of an inevitable straight line from October to Stalin.
Stalin did not simply “continue” October.
This is where much conventional anti-communist historiography runs into a contradiction. If Joseph Stalin was carrying Vladimir Lenin’s project to its logical conclusion, why did his regime's consolidation involve such extraordinary destruction of the personnel and traditions associated with the revolution? The answer cannot be that every victim was a principled socialist opponent of Stalinism. They plainly were not. Nor should we romanticise the period's factions and political manoeuvres. But the scale of the attack upon the old Bolshevik generation remains historically significant. A regime confident that it represented a seamless continuation of October would scarcely have needed continually to rewrite October's history.
Leon Trotsky was particularly intolerable because his
political and literary activity preserved another record of the revolution and
another conception of its historical significance. He participated directly in
the events of 1905 and 1917, headed the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, and later
became the Stalinist regime's most prominent international opponent. The fight
over historical memory was consequently inseparable from the political struggle
over the future.
The Fourth International and the continuity question
This issue becomes still more acute with the founding of the
Fourth International in 1938. For Leon Trotsky, Hitler's rise, without
effective resistance from the enormously powerful German workers' movement, was
decisive evidence of the Stalinised Communist International's bankruptcy. He
concluded that the Third International could no longer be politically
regenerated and that a new revolutionary international had to be constructed.
One can agree or disagree with that conclusion. What cannot
reasonably be done is to write the political history of communism as though it
does not fundamentally complicate the identification of Stalinism with Marxism.
The Fourth International asserted the opposite precisely: that defending
Marxism now required an irreconcilable struggle against Stalinism. This is why
the question of historical continuity matters. If Stalinism was communism,
then organisations fighting Stalinism from the standpoint of international
socialist revolution become anomalous or inconvenient footnotes. If Stalinism
represented a bureaucratic degeneration of a workers' state and a political
betrayal of revolutionary internationalism, those same movements acquire
central historical importance. A global history of communism must take a
position on that question, whether explicitly or implicitly.
Why Trotsky breaks the picture
We can therefore return one final time to the question
raised at the beginning: why does Leon Trotsky’s absence from the cover and
promotional genealogy matter? Not because book-cover design constitutes
historiography. It does not.
Not because we have evidence of Paul Mason sitting with his
publisher and demanding, “Leave Trotsky out.” We do not. It matters because
Trotsky disrupts the picture being presented. Put him back at the centre of the
twentieth-century story, and “communism” no longer appears to move inexorably
towards totalitarianism. Instead, there is revolutionary communism and
Stalinism; internationalism and “socialism in one country”; the October
Revolution and a bureaucracy that ultimately exterminated much of the
generation that led it.
The Communist International emerged in the early
revolutionary years, later becoming the Stalinised Comintern, with the
bureaucracy and the Left Opposition fighting it. Suddenly, there was no single
road. There was a crossroads. And if there was a crossroads, Stalinism cannot
simply be declared the inevitable destination without reconstructing the
struggle over which road to take. That is ultimately what makes Leon Trotsky so
inconvenient to histories that seek to present Stalinism as the definitive historical
judgement on revolutionary Marxism.
What is at stake
Paul Mason is certainly right about one thing: this history
matters profoundly today. Capitalism confronts younger generations with
widening social inequality, geopolitical conflict, environmental crisis,
deteriorating public services and widespread insecurity. In describing Reds: A
Global History of Communism, Paul Mason points to stagnant Western democracies,
the climate crisis, and renewed arguments over alternatives to the existing
social order. He explicitly says that his political purpose is to answer a
generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced: “not like this”.
But the historical question remains: what did “this” mean?
Did it mean the working class's conquest of political power, revolutionary
internationalism, or Marxism? Or did it mean the bureaucratic suppression of
workers' democracy, the nationalist rejection of international socialist
revolution, and the destruction of the revolutionary movement that opposed
those policies? These alternatives cannot be conflated without predetermining
the conclusion.
The answer to the crimes of Stalinism is not to minimise
them, still less to apologise for them. It is to understand their origins. And
doing so requires recovering the history of those Marxists who fought the
Soviet bureaucracy when doing so meant expulsion, persecution, imprisonment and
ultimately death.
Leon Trotsky’s historical significance does not depend on
portraying him as an infallible leader or an alternative secular saint. It
rests on something far more important: Stalinism faced a Marxist opposition
that challenged it in the name of international socialist revolution and sought
to explain its emergence materially. This changes the historical equation. If
Stalinism was already inevitably contained within Marxism and October, Leon
Trotsky and the Left Opposition become difficult facts to accommodate. Their
struggle must either be marginalised or reduced to an unsuccessful contest for
power within an essentially authoritarian movement.
But if Stalinism arose from the isolation and degeneration
of the Russian Revolution, the defeats of the international working class, and
the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste, then Leon Trotsky belongs not at
the margins of twentieth-century communist history but at its very centre. That
is why his absence from the public image surrounding *Reds: A Global History of
Communism* is so striking. The issue is not simply a missing face on a jacket;
it is the missing historical alternative that face represents.
Mason wants to tell a new generation weighing whether
capitalism can be replaced: not like this. But before that generation accepts
his warning, it deserves to know that history offers another warning—one made
not in retrospect by converts to liberalism or defenders of the existing order,
but from within the revolutionary Marxist movement itself.
It warned that nationalism would destroy socialist
internationalism; bureaucratic privilege would suffocate workers' democracy;
subordinating the international working class to supposedly progressive
bourgeois forces would bring catastrophic defeats; and Stalinism threatened not
to fulfil the programme of October, but to destroy it. The bureaucracy tried to
settle that political argument through repression. It murdered revolutionaries,
erased people from photographs, rewrote the history of 1917, and ultimately
sent an assassin after Leon Trotsky himself. But it could not erase the
historical question he represented.
The history that cannot be erased
For a new generation once again questioning whether
capitalism represents the final form of human society, the conflict between
Trotsky and Stalinism is anything but an academic dispute. It concerns whether
the catastrophe that overwhelmed the twentieth-century communist movement was
the inevitable product of socialist revolution or the outcome of its isolation,
bureaucratic degeneration, and the defeat of the internationalist perspective
on which October was based.
This is why the answer to Stalinism cannot be a retreat into
an ethically improved capitalism, supplemented by appeals to democracy and
“universal human values”. The immense inequality, militarism, political
reaction and social insecurity driving workers and young people towards
anti-capitalist conclusions are not historical misunderstandings. They arise
from capitalism itself. To invoke Stalinism as the final warning against
revolutionary politics is therefore to evade the very social contradictions producing
renewed interest in socialism.
Nor does answering Mason require concealing the conflicts
and repressions of the early Soviet state or turning Trotsky into an infallible
revolutionary saint. It requires something more serious: restoring the
political alternatives that were actually fought over. The Left Opposition showed
that Stalinism faced opposition from within the Marxist movement, in the name
of workers' democracy, socialist internationalism, and world revolution.
That is precisely what breaks the comforting historical equation in which Marx leads inevitably to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin and Stalin ultimately to the gulag. History offered alternatives, and political struggle defeated them rather than historical inevitability disproving them. Any genuinely global history of communism must confront that struggle. Trotsky may be absent from the public picture surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. You cannot easily remove the historical struggle he represents. And for a generation searching once again for a way beyond capitalism, recovering that suppressed history is not merely about understanding the past. It is part of preparing for future struggles.
Selected bibliography
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Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929.
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