'The communist future of mankind'

When Trotsky died, it seemed to most observers that his death marked the death of everything he had stood for too. Communism, whose programme proclaimed human liberation from oppression and want, and, immediately, proletarian liberation from capitalism, had, so it seemed, turned into Stalinism, a tyranny so all-pervasive and foul that, as Trotsky expressed it in 1938, it differed from Nazism 'only in its more unbridled savagery'.

Stalin's 'communist' empire was already very powerful, and in the next three years would begin an immense expansion. Stalinism seemed 'the wave of the future'.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we can see things more clearly. In the long and terrible period of Stalinist and fascist reaction through which Trotsky lived during his last 17 years, from 1923 until his death, it fell to him to preserve the honour as well as the unfalsified programme of authentic communism - and the possibility 21st century socialists have, after the destruction of European Stalinism, to build mass revolutionary workers' movements that will bury capitalism. On this 60th anniversary of his death, we are proud to honour the memory of Leon Trotsky.

'For 43 years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for 42 of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into the room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.'

From Trotsky's Testament.