62. The defeats suffered by the international revolution further strengthened the Stalinist bureaucracy and resulted in Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927 and his forced exile from the Soviet Union to Turkey in 1929. Although no faction of the International Left Opposition emerged within the Turkish Communist Party, Trotsky’s presence in Istanbul made Turkey the center of the world Trotskyist movement. Ninety-five years ago, in the extreme isolation on the island of Prinkipo, Trotsky was able to lead the International Left Opposition. The four and a half years he spent in Turkey from 1929 to 1933 were among the most important years of Trotsky’s life. Here he not only wrote his autobiography and the monumental three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, he also wrote unparalleled articles warning against the rise of Nazism in Germany and the deadly dangers it posed to the German and international working class. It was in Turkey that Trotsky called for the establishment of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.

63. The political implications of Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s national socialist perspective extended beyond the problems of Soviet policy. At stake were fundamental questions of global perspective and the strategic tasks of the international working class in the imperialist epoch. Trotsky wrote:

The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled with the framework of the national state. From this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of a bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.^[1]