“A Soviet Trotskyism?” explores the difficult circumstances faced by Soviet Trotskyists during the 1940s and 1950s — a period for which almost no documentation of their activity survives. Drawing on primary sources from the archives of the Fourth International held in Paris (the BDIC archive in Nanterre), the study examines the organization’s efforts to gain a hearing and establish networks in the USSR and its satellite states; analyzes international correspondence that reveals the extremely precarious conditions in which Trotskyists lived within Soviet borders; and offers a detailed case study of a Ukrainian anti-Stalinist group that expressed sympathies for Trotskyism and maintained contact with its official representatives. This all took place at a historical moment before the fragmentation and diaspora of international Trotskyism into numerous competing currents. Taken together, the research reconstructs the political and social conditions under which this persecuted political current struggled to survive inside the USSR.
Ernesto M. Díaz Macías (2025) studied this question.