ABSTRACT
In the 1930s, Leon Trotsky, who by then had been stripped of the more modest means available to the commander of the Red Army, issued his own
foreboding prophecies about the future of the Soviet Union. He did so at a time and in a context that is now very difficult to recapture. The capitalist world was still engulfed in the terrible social and economic problems that arose from one of its deepest crises. The Soviet Union, according to many accounts, had avoided most of the damage inflicted by the otherwise worldwide economic depression, industrialized its economy, consolidated its position as a great power, and still appeared to many to be on its way to that final synthesis between freedom and equality called communism. Many moderate and respectable figures in the West continued to support the Soviet Union and Stalin in particular, even as news of some troubling internal developments began to come out.6
