Essays On The Russian Question

The Bureaucratic Revolution
by Max Shachtman
Donald Press, 360 pp., $2.95

During the 1940s and 1950s the author of this book was the leader of a tiny radical organization, the Independent Socialist League. Originally a fracture from the American Trotskyist movement—it quarreled with Trotsky over the character of the Russo-Finnish war, insisting that the Russian invasion was an act of imperialism, no more deserving of political support than the Trotskyists were willing to give any of the belligerent powers—the ISL, under Shachtman’s intellectual guidance, soon moved away from the Leninist tradition and uneasily approached the politics of what might be called left social democracy. The group was, I think, the most intellectually reflective, and therefore the most indecisive and tortured, of the recent American Marxist tendencies; it kept breaking into various fragments, a very few members going back to Trotskyism...