Fragen des Alltagslebens

This volume presents the most important articles and speeches by Leon Trotsky on issues of everyday life, culture, and education in the young Soviet Union. They are the result of discussions on how to overcome the backwardness and cultural void inherited from the old Tsarist regime. The titles of the individual articles, which appeared in Pravda in 1923, speak for themselves: 'The Newspaper and Its Readers', 'Liquor, Church, and Cinema', 'From the Old Family to the New', and 'The Struggle for Language Culture' are examples of the unwavering belief that it is possible to liberate the previously oppressed masses from their former passivity through education and cultural offerings such as cinema, local libraries, and so on. The improvement of human society is presented here not as an unattainable utopia, reserved for Sunday speeches, but as a practical task of enlightenment and cultural endeavor. Trotsky's full attention was directed towards the most oppressed layers of society: 'Everyday male egoism knows neither measure nor bounds. To completely reshape everyday life, one must be able to view it through the eyes of women.' This collection is supplemented by Trotsky's well-known essay 'Their Morality and Ours' from 1938, in which he engages with those who equate the October Revolution with Stalinism and Trotsky's and Lenin's positions with the crimes of the bureaucracy under the banner of morality.