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innocent people.' He rightly argues that Stalin's crimes cannot be balanced off against his correct decisions:

'Any rehabilitation of Stalin would be a crime gainst the Party?

But the Party which Stalin left is not the Party which he found: it is this dialectic which Medvedev does not grasp. The Party became the instrument of the bureaucracy, of the parasitic caste represented by Stalin.

It is not simply a question, therefore, of condemning Stalin, opposing his rehabilitation and making sure that his crimes are widely known. Medvedev takes must this rationalist position: as though the bureaucratic degeneration has been reversed, or at least stopped conditions of Russia and the isolation of the first workers' state which gave Stalin his opportunity. Stalinism was not the product of one man's will despite the monstrous and pathological features which it derived from him.

Moreover, Stalinism was fought step by step within the Communist Party by the Left Opposition. The bureaucratic degeneration could have been arrested against all the odds; Trotsky's struggle derives its significance and its historical justification in the first place from that possibility.

But that was not its only justification. In his person, in the formation of the International Left Opposition and then in the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 Trotsky was able to preserve for posterity the continuity of This will require a return to the traditions of the Left Opposition and à study of Trotsky's writings of a kind which Medvedev has evidently not made.

Despite its weaknesses, despite its rejection of the Trotskyist alternative, Medvedev corroborates much of what Trotsky wrote about Stalinism and the rise of the bureaucracy.

Written under conditions where much secondary material, as well the sources which no one can see, was not available, his book has something of a pioneer character Soviet Union by a loyal Com- book written inside the munist Party member. We can be sure that it will not be the last book of its kind.

CONCLUDED LEON TROTSKY :

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