New Course (Trotsky book)

Background

In the spring of 1921, with the Soviet Russia stricken by hyperinflation and factory shutdowns, its great cities depopulated and its economy on the verge of collapse, Soviet leader V. I. Lenin and the ruling Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RKP) launched a program of internal trade liberalization and monetary reform known as the New Economic Policy. This market-based retreat from the utopian goals of the period of War Communism proved controversial among Communist Party members, with various interpretations of the deep meaning of the new program and schemes for a path forward to socialism in largely agrarian Russia gaining currency.

By 1923, the impact of these earlier reforms had begun to make itself felt through economic recovery. Moreover, by this date initial dreams of an immediate world revolution in the industrialized nations of Western Europe which would rescue the economy of economically backwards Russia had faded, indelibly colored by the failure of the 1923 Communist uprising in Germany in September of that year.

Further complicating the situation was a growing power struggle in the governing Central Committee of the Communist Party, pitting a majority consisting of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin, and other long-time party members against a charismatic upstart who had only a few years earlier joined the RKP, Leon Trotsky. With Lenin ill from a series of strokes which began to fall him in 1923, these and other aspiring national leaders began to jockey for hegemony in the Bolshevik organization, attempting to make use of published economic and political analysis to demonstrate their own particular for the mantle of supreme leadership.

It was within this milieu that Trotsky published a series of articles in the official party daily newspaper, Pravda, in December 1923, sharply criticizing trends within the Communist Party towards bureaucratism — a critique which by extension was an appeal to the rank-and-file of the party organization for personal support vis-a-vis Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, and other established party leaders.

Structure

The New Course includes three articles reprinted as chapters verbatim from the pages of Pravda, a fourth chapter being an outline of a prohibited report on "Bureaucratism and the Revolution," and three additional chapters written especially for the new publication. Also included by Trotsky in the book as appendices are a letter, two more December 1923 Pravda articles, and a short open letter signed by 8 young Communist Party activists.

There are in all a total of 7 short chapters, 3 chapter-length appendices, and a brief manifesto, with the count of pages of the Russian language first edition sitting at 104. Page count of the same material in English translation is similar, running between 80 and 110 octavo pages depending upon the edition.

Contents

Chapter 1. The Question of Party Generations Chapter 2. The Social Composition of the Party Chapter 3. Groups and Factional Formations Chapter 4. Bureaucratism and the Revolution Chapter 5. Tradition and Revolutionary Policy Chapter 6. The "Underestimation" of the Peasantry Chapter 7. Planned Economy (Order No. 1042) Appendix 1. The New Course Appendix 2. Functionarism in the Army and Elsewhere Appendix 3. On the "Smytchka" Between Town and Country Appendix 4. Two Generations

First editions

The New Course has been translated and published in a variety of languages. First national editions include the following: