To celebrate this year’s centenary of Ted Grant, founder of the Militant Tendency and Socialist Appeal, we are re-publishing a series of Ted’s key writings. We begin with Ted’s pamphlet “The Rise and Fall of the Communist International”, which analyses the founding of the Third International and its decline under Stalin.

The Moscow Trials, which lasted from 1936 to 1938 will go down as the greatest frame-up in history. Their aim was to liquidate the entire
remaining Bolshevik old guard and act as the means by which Stalin
could consolidate his power as head of the bureaucratic caste that ruled the Soviet Union. Seventy-five years on, Jim Brookshaw – a former member of the British Communist Party – looks back at what happened and asks: why?

The history of the Russian Revolution is intimately associated with the names of Lenin and Trotsky, its two great leaders. They attracted all the praise and they bore all the hatred. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. The October Russian Revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party, was the greatest event in history. For the first time, the workers and peasant took power into their hands, swept aside the landlords and capitalists, and proceeded to organise a democratic workers’ Soviet Republic.
The authority of the new Soviet government rested upon a congress of soviets (workers’ committees) elected from factories and barracks.