The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?
Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1937.
First edition, first printing. [x], 308 pp. Bound in publisher's black cloth with gilt and black spine lettering blocked on red, red topstain. Near Fine with light wear and mottling to cloth, light offsetting to free endpapers, and ownership signature to front free endpaper. In a Near Fine dust jacket, price of $2.50 intact and crossed through with pen, with sunned spine panel, light wear, and vertical crease to front flap.
A beautiful copy of this sharply-designed book, an important and to some extent prophetic Marxist text. Trotsky wrote his denunciation of the new Soviet regime in exile after losing a power struggle with Stalin. The postscript to his introduction notes that the manuscript had been completed before Stalin's show trials kicked off the Great Purge, and so "the proceedings of the trial could not be evaluated in its pages." The translator Max Eastman had personally observed the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin during a stay in the Soviet Union, taking Trotsky's side and later becoming a friend. They remained friends until the former commissar was assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
Price: $2,500