The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect—Interventions in Russian and Soviet History

Marot (history, Keimyung U., South Korea) analyzes the development of socialism in Russia and advances a perspective on the Stalinist subversion that eschews social-historical interpretations as "in the thrall of a teleological conception of the Soviet epoch." The connection between Leninism and Stalinism has remained a point of controversy that Marot argues can best be understood in terms of "the Bolshevik Party as the organization structurally linking to two epochs," which political historians and social historians fetishize, allowing in different ways for them to ignore the Party's relationship to the worker movement. To this end, Marot considers the original Agrarian Question and Lenin's revaluation of workers' self-activity, the Trotskyist Left Opposition's complicity in the rise of Stalinism, political leadership and working-class agency, the political and philosophical views of Alexander Bogdanov, and Lenin's commentary on "vulgar materialism" and "vulgar idealism" in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

John Eric Marot, Ph.D. (1987), University of California, Los Angeles, teaches History at Keimyung University in Korea. He has published many articles on Russian and Soviet History, notably “Class Conflict, Political Competition, and Social Transformation: Critical Perspectives on the Social History of the Russian Revolution” (Revolutionary Russia, 1994) and “Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and the Rise of the Stalinism: Theory and Practice” (Historical Materialism, 2006).