chat

I’d recommend reading Ch. 3 of Foundations of Leninism for a summation of this. Also, while some Trotskyists frame SIOC as a vulgar development of Stalin, Lenin (who both Trotskyists and MLs would like to claim as their own) actually spoke on this matter on several occasions.

I'll try to keep it short.

In the midst of the 1905 revolution, Trotsky dreams up this idea that in underdeveloped countries workers have to play the role of the democratic revolutionary forces because the national bourgeoisie are incapable of it. In this theory, since the workers are in charge already, they can/must carry out the revolution all the way through (thus making it permanent). I think importantly here for Trotsky, just because Communists are in charge doesn't mean it's socialism.

In 1924, after Europe begins to quiet down, Lenin dies and Stalin begins consolidating power in the CPSU. Domestically this was the height of the NEP which was seen kind of like a truce with the semi-bourgeois peasantry. Internationally (in what is known as the "Second Period"), Comintern policy begins to shift away from "The international worker's revolution is imminent" because it clearly wasn't. The new direction was characterized by:

1. Thawing relations with the capitalist powers in Europe
2. Pursuing socialist development in the USSR
3. Supporting bourgeois-democratic forces where it was of strategic interest to the USSR (specifically in the colonized world)

Trotskyists would also characterize the Second Period as the beginning of the USSR exercising strong control over foreign Communist Parties, bureaucratization, and being extremely right wing (for a Communist Party). The third point is probably where the largest break with the theory of Permanent Revolution is. Trotsky and his followers were strongly in favor of Communists standing on their own (or with less radical workers in a united front) as opposition to all bourgeois forces. Perhaps the most famous instance of this break is in China where the Communists were directed to support the Kuomintang and they got burnt badly for it (though I would argue the KMT would have turned their sights towards the Communists regardless)

Socialism in One Country was of course an attempt to reconcile that the "grand prophecy" of the international worker's revolution didn't happen after 1917 and the USSR basically stood alone. Navigating reality on both international and domestic fronts required pragmatism and a degree of cooperation with the capitalist powers of the world.

The theory of Permanent Revolution wasn't that the USSR should have been invading and establishing socialist states in other countries. It's more so that the Comintern (which was dominated by the USSR) should have maintained a more revolutionary line internationally. As we get into the Third Period of the Comintern and then the Popular Front we see the focus shift towards fascism and social democracy. Those debates resemble this one but I've already written too much.