Leon Trotsky, Book Review:
Problems of Everyday Life

Aug 28, 2025

The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #250, September–October 2025, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization. A version of the book in English is available from Pathfinder Press or from Amazon.

Trotsky’s book addresses a little‑known aspect of the Bolsheviks’ struggle after the seizure of power in October 1917. When the revolutionary wave ebbed in Europe from 1921 onwards, they did not limit themselves to the work of bringing about new revolutions elsewhere. Though they knew that the destiny of Soviet Russia and that of the world revolution were one, they set out not only to improve the lot of the working masses of Russia, but also to reconstruct their way of life, and in doing so to raise their cultural level, with a view toward the socialist society to come.

Even before the end of the Civil War (1918–1922), which the bourgeoisie had imposed on Soviet power, Lenin had insisted on the urgency of undertaking a “cultural revolution.” Attacking mentalities, morals, and a backwardness that centuries of tsarist barbarism had anchored in customs and traditions was a way to extend the political and social revolution that had given power to the toiling masses and expropriated the exploiting classes.

Thus, Lenin explained: “Socialism will only be able to take shape and consolidate itself when the working class has learned to govern. [...] Without this, socialism will remain a pious aspiration.” Then: “To remake our state apparatus [derived from tsarism with all its defects], we must at all costs set ourselves the following task: first, educate ourselves; second, educate ourselves further; third, educate ourselves forever.”

This new revolution was of vital importance to the workers’ state. Surrounded by imperialism, it also saw within its state apparatus the growth of a caste of bureaucrats—a danger that Lenin had foreseen very early on—who would take advantage of the backwardness of the masses, their exhaustion after seven years of world war and then civil war, to position themselves to take power.

It is therefore not surprising that Volume 21 of Trotsky’s Works in Russian, published in February 1927 and which includes the third edition of Problems of Everyday Life, is entitled The Epoch of the Struggle for Culture and Its Tasks. This was the last volume of Trotsky’s work published in the USSR, because Stalinism went on to ban his writings, imprison thousands of communists loyal to October, and liquidate Lenin’s party, his work and his militants.

In July 1923, when the first edition of Problems of Everyday Life appeared, Trotsky considered that “the party library lacked a small pamphlet which, in the most down-to-earth language, would show the average worker and peasant the link which unites certain realities and certain phenomena of our transitional epoch [between capitalism and socialism] and which, while indicating a correct perspective, would assist in communist education.”

To give the most concrete content to this undertaking, he brought dozens of party organizers together in the factories of the capital. “The meeting,” he says, “immediately went beyond the scope of the initial project. The problems relating to the family and everyday life captivated all the participants. During the three sessions [we] shed some light on the different aspects of workers’ lives in a time of transition, as well as our means of influencing the workers’ way of life.”

The contributions made by these communist workers, both men and women, are fascinating. What emerges is the image of a society traversed by multiple contradictions, of a country that has made the revolution, but whose population and working class are still crushed under the weight of the past. Trotsky uses this incredibly rich material to reveal what was changing in the daily lives of the masses. He also shows without embellishment everything holding them back, here accusing militants of exaggerating the significance of certain advances, there of tolerating the circulation of poorly written and printed newspapers that the workers cannot understand. Elsewhere, he shows how a certain laxity in language not only reflects the era when the aristocrats kept millions of peasants in material and moral filth but also hinders the development of literacy and the acquisition of new knowledge.

Trotsky emphasizes that the social relations resulting from the revolution, collectivized property and planning, provide levers to change things, to make up for delays, and even provide the opportunity to overtake developed countries in certain areas.

All the same, he does not hide in the shadows those aspects of life which may have worsened for the working classes after 1917, and sometimes, even if it seems paradoxical, in direct relation to advances made possible by the revolution. A case in point concerns the relationships in families and in couples. On a legal level, women had become the equal of men. They had the same rights as men, they could vote and be elected, and marriage was no more than a formality, as was divorce. The law protected the mother and her children, whether or not she was married and whether they were born of a “registered union” (a marriage) or a de facto union. This was an upheaval in the traditional framework of family life, and it did not take place, even within the party, without reservations that were expressed in broad daylight. Moreover, their new rights were not seen by all women as progress, because the collective material means—canteens, nurseries, laundries, etc.—which would allow them to escape domestic slavery had not yet been put in place.

In the beginning of the summer of 1923, while he was away from Moscow due to an illness and receiving care in the Caucasus, Trotsky wrote an article almost every day for the party daily, Pravda, in which he discussed the essential reconstruction of the daily life of the masses. The subjects he covered were numerous and varied: protections for mothers and infants, the role of cinema, the upheavals of the family framework, religious prejudices, politeness and cleanliness, family and traditions, the use of informal and formal forms of address and what they cover, attention to detail, etc.

Furthermore, Trotsky addressed new, and not insignificant, problems that were arising in Soviet society. The Communist Party was in power there, and yet patterns of behavior conveyed by the class enemy were observed to be gaining strength. This was the case with the bourgeoisie’s renewed vigor as enabled by the NEP. This New Economic Policy, launched in 1921 under the control of the party in order to revive the economy by injecting doses of profit, led to social differentiation in the city and in the countryside. Everywhere, nepmen and kulaks prospered and thus tended to impose their profiteering morality. With the bureaucracy proliferating, these new bourgeois were the relays and agents of the pressures of the imperialist environment on an isolated, poor, and backward USSR. It was also to combat this threat, explains Trotsky, that it was necessary at all costs to fight to raise the cultural level of the masses, as well as of the party’s rank and file members. The party had grown considerably since October 1917, without its new members having the same understanding that the “old Bolsheviks” had of the political and class objectives of the new power.

Either Soviet society would raise its level of education, culture, and way of life, and stay the course in anticipation of a new rising tide of world revolution, or it would be pulled back by the forces of the new bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy, and thus of the imperialist world order. There was no alternative.

This idea, which is contained in the theory of permanent revolution, runs through and illuminates this entire book. The revolution, even if it suffers a setback—and it has been much longer than Trotsky could have imagined—will sooner or later resume its forward march; we must prepare ourselves and prepare for the revolution. This conviction is the common thread of this work, fascinating in what it reveals of the Bolsheviks’ struggle at the time and inspiring when Trotsky evokes, in the present tense and not as a utopia, what a socialist society could be, what immense individual and collective progress it will be accompanied by, carrying humanity to as yet unsuspected heights.