The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25)

The first of three volumes recording the central political battle in the Soviet Union following the death of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in 1924.

He examines and affirms the continuity of the communist political leadership of the victorious Russian Revolution of October 1917. He draws the lessons of the crushing defeat of the German Revolution of 1923. He explains why only a centralised, tested proletarian party can lead a revolution to insurrection and victory. And why, to retain the power they had won, workers and peasants needed to continue Lenin’s fight against rising bourgeois and petty-bourgeois layers and their allies in the Soviet republic, in the Communist Party apparatus, and in the Communist International.