Reviews for The Russian Democratic Party Yabloko: Opposition in a Managed Democracy

The average rating for The Russian Democratic Party Yabloko: Opposition in a Managed Democracy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-12 00:00:00 Burton Schwimmer Just a hair over a hundred pages long, this historical treatise by Comrade Trotsky I found to be surprisingly easy light reading after having finished a massive and even drier historical war tome. Overall, it's a fairly surface treatment of the political power struggles going on before, during and just slightly after the Russian Revolution, but it was interesting, coming from the horses' mouth -- though we can reliably judge Trotsky as an unreliable narrator, to some degree. The masses are a pretty amorphous construct in Trotsky, and different factions are not delineated with much precision as they are in other accounts. My favorite phrase in the book is "instincts of slavery," which the working classes tend to revert to when opportunities to seize and maintain self governance arise, instead opting to be led, exploited, controlled and lied to. Of course, that opportunity is always there, but as we are seeing right now, it's easy to distract and lead people off into the weeds of Crazyland. Every time Trotsky described the platitudinous wishy washy modus operandi of Kerensky and the Mensheviks it sounded dead like the non-progressive liberal wing of the US corporate Democratic Party, led by Papa Biden -- who not surprisingly is running from campaign promises like an old pro. One of my favorite passages in the book has Trotsky complaining about the Party's opponents having the temerity to accuse them of trying to create conditions for revolution, and then in the next paragraph admitting he was doing just that. LOL. KR@KY 2021

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-02 00:00:00 Desiree Ford This is a good brief description of the fist proletarian revolution in human history and its immediate challenges. It's not series of sequential events it's an historical examination unfolding social contradictions and the class forces that these contradictions set in motion. Obviously Trotsky's three part 'History of the Russian Revolution' is better description of the October revolution and 'My Life'has a better description of the civil war and Brest-Litovsk. The thing that most struck me about this book is Trotsky's description of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and their formal approach to "ending the war" and power in genreal.... the limitation, lack of confidence in the proletariate, and inability to break with the liberal "experts". I haven't seen a better description of this disease anywhere.