Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky

This work constitutes a rebuttal to charges made against the Bolsheviks by Karl Kautsky in 1919. Trotsky's defense of Bolshevism is devoted to two basic questions. One is the question of the revolutionary seizure of power to establish and maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet form, the kind of party required for this purpose, and the role it must play. The other is the question of the methods to be pursued by a socialist revolution in realizing socialism, that is, in reorganizing the economic foundation of society.