Bolsheviks Against Stalinism (1928/1933): Was there an alternative to Stalinism?

Book excerpt: "This book was published by Vadim Rogovin in Moscow in the fall of 1993, slightly less than two years after the Soviet Union had been dissolved. It is the second volume of what would become a seven-volume study of the struggle of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, as it fought the Stalinist degeneration of the workers' state established after the October Revolution in 1917. The first volume raises the question: "Was There an Alternative to Stalinism?" It studies the rise of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky in 1923, and ends with the expulsion of Trotsky and his supporters at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927. The succeeding volumes examine the history of the resistance to Stalinism up through Trotsky's assassination in August 1940 and the outbreak of World War II. The period under consideration in this book was a time when new oppositions composed of former Bukharinists and Stalinists arrived at "Trotskyist" ideas. This process concluded in 1932 with an attempt to unite the old and new oppositional groups inside the party. This book attempts to trace the history of the inner-party struggles of 1928-1933, comparing the following fundamental types of sources: official "party documents" (decisions of congresses and plenums of the Central Committee, the speeches of Stalin and his accomplices, Stalinist propaganda); memoirs of the participants in political life of those years; Soviet archival material that exposes im- portant aspects of historical events hidden from contemporaries; and oppositional docu- ments, a large portion of which are unknown to the Soviet reader."--