Fake News from Petersburg 1917

Trotsky's book on the Russian Revolution is exciting reading. He describes the clairvoyant leadership of Lenin in the successive congresses and programmatic papers, how the Vyborg industrial area workers were organized and prepared by the Bolshevik fraction for the insurrection. Trotsky consistently downplays his own importance and paints Lenin - whose contribution was writing position papers in the deep underground - as the giant whose clear vision and hard will pushed ahead the proletariat.

Yet it is clear that the unarmed workers did little and the active forces were front soldiers back from the trenches, thoroughly convinced of the incompetence of the Czarist officer class and its unwillingness to end the war. After it was clear that the forces guarding Petersburg and the Winter Palace, they entered unopposed and arrested the Provisory Government of Kerensky. The insurrection was a military action  led by Trotsky, who was the President of the Military Commission of the Bolshevik fraction.

Basically, the October Revolution was an unopposed military coup. Trotsky avoids ideology and presents no vision of socialism. It is all about destroying the Czarist regime and capitalism, because they are an obstacle to the development of the production. And a primitive army cannot fight the advanced German forces. He predicts the next war against Germany and the need for preparation. Stalin took over and completed the plan.