Content
The Revolution Betrayed has been characterized by historian Baruch Knei-Paz as Trotsky's "major work on Stalinism" and constituted the chief primary source for a chapter length summary of Trotsky's thinking on bureaucracy in a seminal 1978 intellectual survey.
In the view of Knei-Paz, the subtitle chosen by Trotsky for The Revolution Betrayed — "What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?" — accurately summarized the author's intent behind the book. Trotsky was preoccupied with the question of whether the emerging bureaucratic political and economic formation in the USSR constituted a new social model not encompassed by previously by Marxist doctrine. Knei-Paz asserted that while Trotsky insisted that the Soviet system did not constitute any such new social and economic system, in reality the analysis he presented in The Revolution Betrayed was, in fact, "ambivalent."
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