Was There an Alternative? is available from Mehring Books for $29.95. The richly illustrated volume also includes an appendix of biographies of many oppositionists who were erased from official Soviet history.

North is the chairperson of both the WSWS International Editorial Board and of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. He has played a leading role in the Trotskyist movement for more than four decades, and has written and lectured extensively on the history of Trotskyism. Readers can explore his major writings on the WSWS here.

Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin (10 May 1937, Moscow – 25 September 1998, Moscow) was the greatest Soviet and Russian Marxist sociologist and historian of the second half of the twentieth century. This topic page includes a number of his major works, as well as tributes to him by members of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

One hundred years after the outbreak of World War I and the Russian Revolution, none of the problems of the twentieth century—devastating wars, economic crises, social inequality, and the threat of dictatorship—have been solved. In fact, they are posed even more sharply today.

In this book, North defends Trotsky’s legacy against the campaign of historical falsification begun by Stalin and continuing to this day. While Stalin assassinated Trotsky in 1940, he was unable to silence the Fourth International, founded to embody the revolutionary heritage of 1917.