ONCE UPON a time the church had a saying: “The 
light shineth from the East.” In our generation 
the revolution began in the East. From Russia it 
passed over into Hungary, from Hungary to Bavaria 
and, doubtless, it will march westward through 
Europe. This march of events is taking place 
contrary to prejudices, allegedly Marxist and 
rather widespread among broad circles of 
intellectuals, and not those of Russia alone.
..
The more powerful a country is 
capitalistically—-all other conditions being 
equal—-the greater is the inertia of “peaceful” 
class relations; all the more powerful must be the 
impulse necessary to drive both of the hostile 
classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—out of 
the state of relative equilibrium and to transform 
the class struggle into open civil war. Once it 
has flared, the civil war—-all other conditions 
being equal—-will be the more bitter ahd stubborn, 
the higher the country’s attained level of 
capitalist development; the stronger and more 
organized both of the enemies are; the greater the 
amount of material and ideological resources at 
the disposal of both.
..
In our analysis there is not an atom of 
“messianism.” The revolutionary “primogeniture” of 
the Russian proletariat is only temporary. The 
mightier the opportunist conservatism among the 
summits of the German, French or English 
proletariat, all the more grandiose will be the 
power generated for their revolutionary onslaught 
by the proletariat of these countries, a power 
which the proletariat is already generating today 
in Germany. The dictatorship of the Russian 
working class will be able to finally intrench 
itself and to develop into a genuine, all-sided 
socialist construction only from the hour when the 
European working class frees us from the economic 
yoke and especially the military yoke of the 
European bourgeoisie, and, having overthrown the 
latter, comes to our assistance with its 
organization and its technology. Concurrently, the 
leading revolutionary role will pass over to the 
working class with the greater economic and 
organizational power. If today the center of the 
Third International lies in Moscow—-and of this we 
are profoundly convinced then on the morrow this 
center will shift westward: to Berlin, to Paris, 
to London. However joyously the Russian 
proletariat has greeted the representatives of the 
world working class within the Kremlin walls, it 
will with an even greater joy send its 
representatives to the Second Congress of the 
Communist International in one of the Western 
European capitals. For a World Communist Congress 
in Berlin or Paris would signify the complete 
triumph of the proletarian revolution in Europe 
and consequently throughout the world.

First published in Izvestia, Nos. 90 and 92, April 29-May 1,1919.


Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1924/ffyci-1/ch07.htm

[MC5 comments why this above was wrong:
Again, the revolution was not in the West after 1919. It came
to the colonies of the East first. Contrary to Trotsky, the 
labor "tops" or "labor bureaucrats" did not hold down the workers
waiting to explode. The labor bureaucrats were merely expressing
well the sentiments of the labor aristocracy exploiters, who wanted
no socialist revolution in the majority-exploiter countries.
A socialist revolution centered in Europe and Amerika 
and proving the "advanced" nature of workers there
relative to the Third World is the pipe-dream
still animating much of the brain-dead "left."]