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IRVING HOWE
shown itself incapable of taking the historical lead. Its role has
always been to serve as a crucial but subordinate ally of an
urban class.
4) The sole urban ally now available to the peasantry-unless
it remain the collective serf of Czarism-is the proletariat.
For Trotsky, then, the inevitable conclusion is that the bourgeois–
democratic revolution could be completed in a backward coun–
try only under the leadership of the working class, small and
inexperienced though it may be-which means more par–
ticularly, only under the leadership of the revolutionary party
speaking for the working class. But the workers, having gained
power, will not be able to stop short before the problems of
the bourgeois revolution. The very effort to cope with these
will inevitably force them to go beyond the limits of bourgeois
property, so that, as Trotsky would write later, "the demo–
cratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist,
and thereby becomes a
permanent
revolution."
5) The socialist revolution thus begun in a backward country
cannot be completed within national limits. For that, there
would be neither a sufficiently secure economic base nor a
working class sufficiently strong and conscious. Power could be
held and steps toward socialism taken only
if
there speedily
followed victorious revolutions in the advanced European
countries. Russia's very backwardness would thrust her forward
in the revolutionary scale and bring her under the rule of the
working class, perhaps before any of those countries which,
because of their economic maturity, were commonly regarded
as most ripe for socialism. But this same backwardness, after
having forced the working class to power, would overtake it
and drag it down unless it received aid from abroad. Or as
Trotsky later put it: "In a country where the proletariat has
power ... as the result of the democratic revolution, the sub–
sequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism is not only and
not so much dependent in the final analysis upon the national
productive forces, as it is upon the development of the inter–
national socialist revolution."
Unquestionably this was the boldest theory, the most extreme
prognosis, advanced by any Russian Marxist in the years before
the first world war. The full measure of its audacity can be
grasped
even today by anyone who troubles to break past the special barriers
of the Marxist vocabulary and examine the theory in terms of the
tensions between "underdeveloped" and advanced countries in the
