This pamphlet – Trotsky’s report delivered on the eve of and to the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in April 1923 – is one of the most concentrated and analytically powerful documents to emerge from the critical transitional period of the early years of the Soviet republic. Written at a moment of acute political, economic, and organisational danger, it stands as a masterclass in Marxist method applied to the concrete problems of building a workers’ state under conditions of isolation, economic backwardness, and growing bureaucratic deformation.
It was the first congress of the Bolshevik party held without Lenin’s active leadership, a fact that imbued every political question with heightened gravity. Trotsky, as the most prominent figure of the Soviet leadership after Lenin, presented to the congress a sober and systematic accounting of the fundamental problems confronting the workers’ state.
Trotsky locates his report within the international context of the period of stabilisation of global capitalism after the defeats of the initial spontaneous revolutionary upsurge of the working class in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Within this context he addressed the critical relationship between the working class and the peasantry which Trotsky outlines as a concrete political, economic and organisational challenge. The problems addressed encompass the relations between the working class and the peasantry, between the working class and the formerly oppressed nationalities, the mutual relations of the party and the working class, and the mutual relations of the party and the state machine.
The pamphlet also contains Trotsky’s early and prescient analysis of the “scissors crisis”, the dangerous divergence between rising industrial prices and falling agricultural prices that threatened to rupture the worker-peasant alliance on which the Soviet state depended. His insistence that the congress address this not in “abstract-agitational” form but through concrete measures of economic planning and the rationalisation of industry reveals the rigour and practicality that distinguished his perspective from that of his opponents in the emerging bureaucratic apparatus.
For students of Marxism, labour history, and the history of the Soviet state, Tasks of the 12th Congress is indispensable. It belongs alongside The New Course, The Platform of the Left Opposition, and The Revolution Betrayed as a foundational text for understanding the trajectory of the Russian Revolution and the origins of Stalinism.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was born on November 7, 1879 in the village of Yanovka, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire and is now within the borders of Ukraine. Along with Vladimir Lenin, he was one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. Trotsky, who was head of the Red Army during the years immediately following the revolution, led the Soviet Union to victory in the Civil War from 1918-1921.