The Paths of the Russian Revolution (Transcriber's Note) (original) (raw)

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Karl Radek

Note by the Transcriber

This pamphlet by Karl Radek, originally published with the title Wege der Russischen Revolution in 1922, was a response to Karl Kautsky’s book From Democracy to State Slavery: A Polemic with Trotsky (Von der Demokratie zur Staats-Sklaverei: Eine Auseinanderssetzung mit Trotzki, Berlin: Verlag Genossenschaft “Freiheit”, 1921), which was in turn a reply to Trotsky’s 1920 book Terrorism and Communism (Anti-Kautsky). In the introduction to the Russian edition of his anthology The Basic Questions of the Revolution, dated 4 May 1923, Trotsky wrote that “German Menshevism” responded to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia “with a series of critical and polemical works, among which the learned tirades of Kautsky take up the first place as far as hopeless banality if concerned. Those among his arguments which are somehow useful for revolutionary criticism were at that time duly evaluated by comrade Radek. There is therefore not the slightest reason for going back to those questions here.” Leon Trotzki, Vorwort zur russischen Aufgabe (4 May 1923), Die Grundfragen der Revolution, 2. Auflage, Hamburg: C. Hoym, 1923, p. X. (Trotsky’s anthology included his Anti-Kautsky). This English version of Radek’s The Paths of the Russian Revolution was first published in an anthology edited by the late Trotskyist historian Al Richardson, In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings, 1917–1923, London: Porcupine Press, pp. 35Daniel Gaido75. For more details on the Bolshevik polemics with the supporters of the democratic counterrevolution see my introduction to the online edition of Karl Radek, Dictatorship and Terrorism (1920).

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Last updated on 18.10.2011