TROTSKY
363
Wandering from country to country, often after being expelled by
the police, and earning a bare living through political journalism,
he found himself in New York during the war years, and there he
wrote for a radical Russian paper until word of the March 1917
revolution brought him rushing back to his homeland. During the
years between the two Russian revolutions Trotsky's main intellectual
work was the development-and defense against critics within the
movement-of his theory of permanent revolution, a bold set of
speculations concerning Marxist strategy in backward countries. It
may be useful here to attempt a schematic and condensed summary
of this theory:
1) Czarist Russia is a backward country in which the
im–
mediate task is the bourgeois-democratic revolution that will
confront those problems that, historically, have been solved by
the great bourgeois revolutions of the past: such problems as
the overthrow of the autocracy, the abolition of semi-feudal
relations in the countryside, the right to self-determination for
oppressed national minorities, the convocation of a constituent
assembly to establish a republic, the proclamation of democratic
liberties, etc.
2) These tasks, however, must be faced in Russia long after
the bourgeoisie as a class has lost the revolutionary elan of its
youth. Because of the special backwardness and isolation of
Russian society, the Russian bourgeoisie is characterized by
timidity and indecision. It has many social and economic
reasons for opposing the Czarist autocracy, yet is bound to it
by links of petty interest, prestige and cowardice. Above all,
it shares with the autocracy a growing fear of the two main
classes at the base of Russian society: the peasantry and the
workers. Because of these congenital weaknesses, the Russian
bourgeoisie is incapable of a revolutionary initiative even in
behalf of its own interests; it cannot make "its own" revolu–
tion. Consequently the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in a
backward country like Russia must now be fulfilled by the
plebeian classes. Or to put forward a seeming paradox, the
bourgeois revolution has to be made
against
the bourgeoisie.
3) While it rests with the working class and the peasantry
to carry through the bourgeois revolution, these classes are
not socially or historically of equal weight. The peasantry–
because of its geographical dispersion, centuries-long passivity,
tradition of petty ownership, and lack of common outlook-has
