[Editorial in: The International Socialist. A Journal a Labour Opinion, Vol. 1, No. 5, May-June 1953, p. 3-13]
The death of Stalin marked the end of an epoch in the history of the Russian revolution, and of the world working class movement. Its significance in relation to class and national policies on a world scale was marked by the intense journalistic speculation, by the diplomatic scurryings in the Chancelleries of the United States, Britain and other important countries in Europe and Asia.
The changes that have taken place in the world relationship of forces between the Powers, and between the classes, is shown by the different treatment of the death of Stalin and the death of Lenin by the world press and the capitalist governments, even of the mightiest of the Powers.
However, in all their mystical appreciation of Stalin and his role in the events of the last three decades, their whole outlook prevented them from having a genuine understanding of the social role and significance of Stalin and his influence on events. All these critics, blinded by their own capitalist or middle class outlook could see was that Stalin had been victorious in the political struggles in the Russian Communist Party, had defeated Trotsky and the old Bolsheviks, and became the totalitarian dictator of the vast Soviet Union. He had been at the head of the Soviet Union when it emerged from terrible backwardness to become the second industrial and world Power. After bearing the brunt of the war against Nazi Germany, under his leadership the Russian armed forces carried their banners victoriously from Stalingrad, deep in the heart of Russia, to the conquest of all Eastern Europe, and planted their flags on top of the ruins of Berlin. These they claim are the achievements of Stalin.
As always, with their standards, they measure everything by apparent material success or failure. While hating and fearing Stalinism, as the heir and apparent continuator of the Revolution, they had not and could not understand its real role and significance.
Looking below the surface of events the lives and significance of great men can only be understood by the social forces they represent, in the clash of national, class and group interests, which in their turn, in the last analysis, represent the development of the productive forces at various stages of their growth, and the conflicts to which this gives rise.
The career of Stalin is an instructive and striking confirmation of the theory of Marxism, in relation to the role of the individual, and the decisive significance of the social forces in determining the selection of this or that individual for positions of power, at various stages in the evolution of society. Stalin, despite the lies of the Communist Party to the contrary, played only a secondary role in the events of the Revolution in 1917 and during the heroic period of the revolution, in the years of the Civil War. These facts have been established irrefutably in the History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky, and in other documented works. Not a creative thinker, writer or orator but an organiser, Stalin played a secondary role while Lenin was alive and during the great phase of the Revolution.
His whole life fitted him for the part he was to play in the period of reaction against the Revolution of 1917 and its conceptions and ideas. Never at any time has he been able to understand and lead in action the masses at a time of revolutionary upsurge. In 1917 he put forward the idea of union with the Mensheviks, and a conception of the revolution which would have meant surrender and compromise with the Liberal capitalist Government. This he dropped after the return of Lenin from exile, but in the preparation of the October insurrection, he adopted a cautious and equivocal attitude, sympathetic to the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev, and in the actual uprising he played no important part whatsoever.
Stalin Represents Reaction
How did it happen then that a blind and mediocre empiric, incapable of assessing events from a Marxist theoretical point of view, as the Revolutions and Wars in the past three decades demonstrate, should so easily have ousted Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rakovsky and the whole galaxy of talent and tradition, intellectual, moral and theoretical represented by the Old Guard of Bolshevism ? How had he maintained power for three decades, filled with upheavals, violence and catastrophes national and international? The answer of his capitalist, middle class and Stalinist admirers is to point to his undoubted powers of manoeuvre and intrigue. They do not see that these could only gain Stalin power under certain social conditions.
The October revolution began with the slogans of Socialism, of democracy and equality, of internationalism and fraternity between the peoples, of an end to capitalist inequality and ownership, of workers control of the state and of industry. These were the ideals in the early years of the Revolution. But Russia emerging from the poverty and backwardness of Czarism, on its own resources could not carry them through. The failure of the revolution to extend to the advanced states of Europe had to lead to reaction in Russia. It was this and not any cleverness or cunning of Stalin’s which made his career!
Stalin, unconsciously at first, came to represent the bureaucracy, the millions of officials in the State and the Party, who had gradually been ousting the workers, and establishing control of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet State. In 1924, influenced by the failure of the German revolution of 1923. which his sorry advice to the German Communist leaders had played a big role in helping to bring about, Stalin brought forward the reactionary and utopian theory of Socialism in One Country. This reflected the mood and interests of the officialdom who had ridden to power on the backs of the masses. They were hostile to Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, who were fighting for the restoration of democracy in Party and State, for an International Socialist orientation, and for a programme of planning and industrialisation. They were vitally concerned only in the preservation and extension of their own power and privileges.
Bureaucracy Supported Stalin
It was the support of these social forces, a great part of them recruited from the old Czarist officialdom and the old ruling class landowners and capitalists, who provided the backing which enabled Stalin to emerge victorious in the struggles and disagreements over policy, which tore the Bolshevik Party to pieces. It was this that prepared the way for the Stalinist counter-revolution.
Before his death Lenin had become alarmed at the growing bureaucratisation of the Party and State in the Soviet Union. He had sensed the danger which Stalin as the consummate expression of these forces represented to the Revolution. He was preparing to struggle for the removal of Stalin from his position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, as “rude and disloyal”. The last thing he wrote before he died was a letter breaking off all personal and comradely relations with Stalin.
As events were to demonstrate, Lenin and Trotsky represented the interests of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union. Stalin came to be the incarnation of the officialdom usurping control from the masses. One by one under the influence of the bureaucratic reaction the ideals of the revolution were sullied. Trotsky in his biography of Stalin described the process “‘As the life of the bureaucracy grew in stability, it generated an increasing need of comfort. Stalin rode in on the crest of this spontaneous movement for creature comfort, guiding it, harnessing it to his own designs … Secretly at first and then more openly, equality was proclaimed a petit-bourgeois prejudice. He came out in defence of inequality, in defence of special privileges for the higher-ups of the bureaucracy.
In this deliberate demoralisation Stalin was never interested in distant perspectives. Nor did he think through to the social significance of this process in which he was playing the leading role.… Never does he consider that his policy runs directly counter to the struggle that engaged Lenin’s interest more and more during the last year of his life – the struggle against bureaucracy. He himself speaks occasionally of bureaucracy, but always in the most abstract and lifeless terms. He has in mind lack of attention, red tape, the untidiness of offices and the like, but he is deaf and blind to the formation of a whole privileged caste welded together by the bond of honour among thieves, by their common interest and by their ever-growing remoteness from the people. Without suspecting it, Stalin is organising not only a new political machine but a new caste. … That the crystallisation of a new ruling stratum of professional officials, placed in a privileged situation and camouflaged from the masses by the idea of Socialism – that the formation of this new arch-privileged and arch-powerful ruling stratum changes the social structure of the state and to a considerable and ever-growing extent the social composition of the new society – is a consideration that he refuses to contemplate and whenever it is suggested, he waves it away with his arms or with his revolver.”
Stalin Opposed Five-Year Plan
Nowadays the legend has gained currency that Stalin proposed and carried through the idea of the Five Year Plans and the industrialisation of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be more at variance with the facts. The Left Opposition from 1923 to 1927 fought bitterly for such a programme. Stalin with short-sighted blindness ridiculed the idea. Only after the expulsion of the Opposition events forced him to adopt the programme albeit in a caricatured form. As predicted by Trotsky the danger developed of an overthrow of the Revolution and the restoration of capitalism by the kulaks and Nepmen. Then from a policy of conciliation of the kulaks, or rich peasants, in a panic Stalin advanced the programme of industrialisation under bureaucratic control and the complete collectivisation of agriculture, though there was no technical base as yet on which it could have been effected. As a result of the bureaucratic and brutal way in which industrialisation and collectivisation were carried out by the bureaucracy, millions lost their lives in the famine of 1931. Countless sacrifices were unnecessarily imposed on the masses by the short-sighted leadership.
Always it was the same. The immeasurable advantages provided by State Ownership and Planning were partly vitiated and negated by the bureaucratic lack of foresight and understanding which received its consummate expression in the leadership of Stalin.
He retained his position, not from the genius of his policies, but because he became the expression of the interests of the new ruling caste which raised itself above the revolution.
Disastrous Foreign Policy
In foreign policy, again it was the policy of the Opposition which was proved by events to be correct. Stalin’s instructions to the Chinese Communist Party to support Chiang Kai-shek ruined the Revolution of 1925-1927, and his instructions to the British Communist Party in 1925-1926 and in the General Strike resulted in the breaking of the back of that Party for decades. But perhaps the greatest expression of the ‘‘genius’” of Stalin was the role he played in the coming to power of Hitler, with all its consequences for the German, European and world working class. This remarkable theoretician developed the idea of “social-fascism”, the “theory” that the Socialist Party of Germany was a “social-fascist” Party, and under his de[…] the German Communist Party fought against a United Front with the Social-Democrats, split and paralysed the workers, and surrendered to the Nazis without a struggle.
In the years before the Second World War, the insane purge of the Army and Industry, of nearly all those who had played some role in the Revolution, consolidated the personal hold of Stalin and of the privileged stratum he represented; at the cost of terrible blows to the economy and the armed forces of the Soviet Union.
In the Spanish revolution, and the French upsurge resulting in the stay-in strikes of 1936, Stalin played the sinister role of strangling and destroying the movement through his puppets, in the leadership of the French and Spanish Communist Parties, for the purposes of Russian foreign policy, and in the interests of the bureaucratic reaction.
Again Stalin’s lack of foresight was demonstrated in his role of helping to unleash the Second World War through his Pact with Hitler. At the time Trotsky predicted this would pave the way for big victories for German imperialism in the war, and make inevitable and very rapid a Nazi attack on the Soviet Union.
War of Material – Not Policy
The early victories of the Nazis in Russia, can be laid at the door of Stalin and his policies. It is not generally known that when the invasion of Russia began the fire-power of the Russian army was greater than the German. But the officer corps of the Red Army had been largely decapitated in the purge, and at the head of the Red Army were incompetent creatures of Stalin, Timoshenko, Voroshilov, and Budyenny. Their strategical incapacity resulted in the terrible defeats of the early stages of the war. Whole armies were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of prisoners taken by the Nazis. Their cohorts penetrated to the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, nearly all the resources Russia possessed in the Ukraine and European Russia, were either destroyed or in the hands of the invaders. The war was waged as the bloodiest war of attrition in all history.
The young and weak Soviet Republic under Lenin and Trotsky, poor in material and resources, could emerge victorious in the wars of intervention against far stronger enemies materially, only because the war was waged as an International Socialist struggle; but the war which Stalin waged was one of material and men. No attempt was made to provoke revolution in Germany or in the countries and armies of the enemy. This would have been too dangerous for the bureaucracy who feared the contagion of revolution on the Russian masses. This again involved needless sacrifices.
Warned by events, and with his own neck at stake, Stalin replaced his cronies at the head of the armies; generals such as Zhukov, Malinovsky, Tolbukhin, and Rokossovsky were brought to the fore. Many of the officers and generals who gained prominence were trained in Tukhachevsky’s school but had not yet been reached by the purge which devastated the ranks of the officer corps. Rokossovsky and Zhukov, according to some reports, were in jail, in the hands of the N.K.V.D. and were released to go straight to the front. The officer cadre, at the cost of terrible sacrifices, was reconstituted on the field of battle.
Thanks to the tremendous advantages given by State ownership and Planning, and to the immense resources of Russia, even without European Russia, the U.S.S.R. outproduced Nazi Germany in war material. Under the new leadership the armed forces marched victoriously to the conquest of Eastern Europe and Berlin.
Thus taking the position as a whole it may be seen that Stalin’s contribution was an additional load for the workers and peasants of Russia to bear. The great achievements of the Revolution, of industry and of the war, are not to be credited to Stalin. His name will be forever linked with forced labour and concentration camps, inequality and Byzantinism of the revamped bureaucracy; the virtual enslavement of the workers and peasants, for the benefit of the privileged parvenus of the Kremlin.
The bureaucracy viewed his mistakes and crimes indulgently because he was the consummate expression of their interests. He was virtually deified as the Vozhd (the Boss) as the arbiter of the destiny of all Russia. Stalin and the Bureaucracy defended State Ownership of the means of production, because it was and remains the source from which stems its privileges, power and income. The Bolsheviks in the heroic period found hitherto unplumbed and untapped springs of energy and enthusiasm in the people. Under the Stalinist regime all decisions come from the elite, who lord it over the silent masses. There is a chasm filled with the blood of the murdered generation of October, between Bolshevism and Stalinism.
In the post-war period once again Stalin revealed himself as the arch-leader of bureaucracy, that revolutionary initiative was something alien and foreign to him. During the war he had shown his mistrust of the movement of Tito’s peasant partisans in Yugoslavia, and advised a deal with Mihailović and the King. After the war he signally failed to understand the dynamic of the mighty Chinese revolution. His advice (like that at critical periods of revolution throughout his history) to the Chinese delegation which came to Moscow, was to compromise and in effect to capitulate to Chiang Kai-shek. Fortunately, unlike the earlier Chinese Revolution, he was not able to impose his policy on the Chinese Stalinists. Despite their polite and verbal acceptance of the sage’s guidance they completely ignored it in practice. They could do this because they had already established an independent base in the large territories they had captured, and in the strong Chinese Red Army.
Here again was a striking confirmation of Stalin’s incapacity as a revolutionary thinker and leader.
New Trials Prepared
Events in the last months of Stalin’s life delineated his sinister figure in its true light. A new and ghastly trial was being prepared in the true spirit of Stalin. Nine doctors were charged and “confessed” to the murder by poisoning of Zhdanov and Sherbakov. Seven of them, in order to give the affair an anti-Semitic slant, were prominently depicted as “Jewish-Zionists”.
The whole of Stalin’s career has been signposted by trials, deaths by poisoning, and other mysterious occurrences, In a previous trial, Yagoda, a former analytical chemist and a tool of Stalin’s at the head of the secret police, was put on trial allegedly for forcing doctors to poison Gorky, Menzhinsky and others. Yagoda paid with his life for the crimes of his master. In his biography of Stalin, it is suggested by Trotsky, that in all probability, Stalin may have poisoned Lenin. Lenin was a sick man but seemed to be on the edge of recovery. He was preparing a campaign to destroy the position Stalin had built behind the scenes in the Bolshevik Party. It was at this period that Lenin wrote the document which has come to be known as his Testament, in which he denounced Stalin. Had Lenin recovered Stalin was afraid that his whole career was in jeopardy.
However this may be, Stalin has outdone Genghis Khan, Nero, Caligula and the Borgias. With uncanny prophetic insight Trotsky wrote in accusing Stalin as the arch-poisoner of the Kremlin, with reference to the Yagoda trial “It is only Yagoda that has disappeared; his poison chest remains.”
Because of disagreement probably Stalin had Zhdanov murdered as the most convenient way of getting rid of him. And as usual he puts someone else in the dock for his own crimes. This time however the denouement was to be different.
Was Stalin Murdered?
Stalin was an old man at the time of his death and may have died naturally. But events since his death at the least seem to cast an air of doubt over this. The latest moves from Moscow indicate that Stalin was probably murdered by his successors. That would be an appropriate end for this grave-digger of Socialism.
Let us examine the background which gives plausibility to this suggestion. The whole history of Stalinism shows that every time a big increase in production, and even a slight improvement in the level of the standard of living of the masses takes place, it creates a tendency to crisis in the regime. Stalinism has become more and more incompatible with the needs of the development of the economy. From relatively assisting the development of the productive forces it has become more and more a brake. The masses feel the regime of Stalinist absolutism as more and more a nightmare burden. This explains why every big rise in the level of production tends to cause a crisis. The pressure from the masses at the bottom produces a crisis in the bureaucracy, even its top levels. The lower and middle layers of the bureaucracy feel the oppressive atmosphere of insecurity, fear and arbitrariness. At the slightest whim from the top, any bureaucrat can be broken and imprisoned. Any group can be made scapegoats for the crimes of the bureaucracy, for the corruption and nepotism which always flourish in an uncontrolled regime of Byzantinism.
Thus the rise in the development of the economy in 1936-39 produced a crisis for the Stalinist regime. Stalin’s method of attempting to solve this was the unbridled repression and terror of the purges of that period. Millions were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of thousands were shot. The purge extended to all strata of Russian society and even affected large layers of the bureaucracy itself.
After the recovery from the ravages of the war the dazzling rise in the level of the economy inevitably prepared a new political crisis for the regime of Stalinism. The mass discontent in its turn was bound to provoke a crisis even in the top layers of the bureaucracy as to how to face up to this problem.
There were reports that Zhdanov was in favour of a “Liberalisation” of the regime to act as a vent for the dissatisfaction of the masses. Similar moves took place in 1936 with the much-heralded introduction of the Stalinist constitution. But they did not have the intended effect. Then Stalin struck with the purge. At the time of the death of Zhdanov, who had built up a powerful position for himself within the bureaucracy, rumours were current that Stalin had had him “liquidated” because of his attitude on this question.
But the death of Zhdanov did not prevent the pressure from continuing from below, and disagreements and fissures from again appearing at the top. Feeling the rumbles from the masses below Stalin, as usual, had but one solution, terror and more terror. The arrest of the doctors was intended as the beginning of a new Purge on the lines of that of 1936-1939. The anti-Semitic slant was to provide a new scapegoat instead of the overworked 1936-1939 scapegoat of ‘‘Trotskyism” which had it been revived again would not have carried any conviction with anybody. This time it was not to be Trotskyists in pretended conspiracy with Germany and Japan but Jewish Zionists in league with Britain and America.
Stalin Prepares Beria’s Downfall
Stalin proceeded on the usual stereotyped pattern. The first trial of the nine doctors was being prepared as a signal for the purge. But this was to be a preparation for a second trial in which Beria the M.V.D. chief would have been involved. Stalin was always afraid of having a too-powerful Chief of Police, like a Fouché under Napoleon, and thus Chief of Police was always a formidable but risky position under Stalin. The skull of the Chief of Police usually ended up by decorating the top of the pile of his victims.
The signs are that Beria knowing the Stalinist pattern of trials, and that the trials were aimed against him, prepared counter-measures. The previous reorganisation of the Ministry of Interior into two Ministries was intended to limit and check the power he had built up.* [*Actually Abarkumalov took over the Ministry of Internal Security under Beria’s overlordship as his senior lieutenant. He was purged months ago and Ignatiev put in his place by Stalin as Stalin’s agent.] His rival was in charge of the preparation of the doctors’ trial. This was the death sentence for Beria. After the first trial in which an allusion would have been made to Beria, in the second trial, after Stalin had made the necessary preparations Beria would have sat in the dock. This is how Yagoda was dealt with. And Stalin intended to repeat the same design. Beria would have been one of the scapegoats thrown to the wolves. Just when this was being prepared Stalin died, very conveniently for Beria. Too conveniently. For from being in a position of peril, Beria became together with Malenkov, master of the Russian State. If there had not been some conspiracy in which Beria received the support of Malenkov, next in line to the succession, it is difficult to explain the changed position. The entire secret police has once again come under Beria’s control, and his rival is under fire already. The rival’s Deputy is under arrest, prior to the arrest of the Minister Ignatiev himself, which is only a matter of time. He has been removed from the Central Committee already. Stalin was probably grooming him as Beria’s successor and this is Beria’s revenge.
As interesting evidence of these assertions is the fact that now the doctors have been released, and it is officially confirmed that their “confessions” were false and extracted under torture and other methods of pressure, it appears there were 15 under arrest and not nine as announced. As in Stalin’s usual methods the six were obviously being held in reserve for the second trial, in which Beria would have been involved. The Court of the Kremlin, like that of the Czars, or any other absolutist regime, was a hive of intrigue and conspiracy. Those sections of the bureaucracy who were fearful of the damage which a new purge would involve for the country and the danger to themselves, for nobody would be absolutely safe once a purge gathered momentum, would welcome a move to remove the fountainhead of the inspiration for purges. From being a necessary tool for the subordination of the masses, and guardian of their privileged position, which had raised him into the position of concentrating the greatest personal power of any dictator in history, they began to regard him with hatred instead of veneration. In hushed circles they would begin to put the blame for the dissatisfaction of the masses on to his obstinacy and obdurate refusal to make what they would consider necessary concessions, in order to save themselves from the brewing storm. In this atmosphere it would not be difficult for Beria to come to an agreement with Malenkov for a duumvirate, and remove the former source of all benefactions who was becoming in their opinion, a source of ruin.
Thus Stalin has passed from the scene of history. In an incredibly short space of time the veneration and idolatry of the cult of Stalin seem to have been dropped, and in a subtle way the sins of the bureaucracy placed on his shoulders. This for the moment seems to have replaced the purge in the internal politics of Russia. Emphasis on the rights of the individual and other concessions are intended to contrast in an unspoken way the Stalinist regime with that of the new rulers.
A similar phenomenon occurred in the past. In 1927, for a short time, when the Opposition was expelled, concessions were given, including the seven hour day. So now the uneasy bureaucracy is temporarily conciliating the masses. The bureaucracy demonstrated its fears by the ceaseless appeals to unity immediately after the announcement of Stalin’s death. The arbiter and demi-god they had created is no more. They are scared of the reaction of the masses. This explains the moves both in home and foreign policy which the new rulers have undertaken. The amnesty of prisoners of various grades, which probably affects millions, the manoeuvres to at least thaw out the cold war, the new concessions in food, clothing and other consumer goods prices, are all intended to persuade the masses of the coming of better times, and a letting-up of the dictatorial regime.
However, like other swings of the bureaucracy in the past, they can only prepare for a swing in the opposite direction at a later stage. These concessions far from satisfying the masses will merely whet their appetite for real proletarian democracy and Socialist equality. The bureaucracy, like all privileged castes and classes, is willing to do anything for the masses, except climb off their backs! When the bureaucrats find that “enlightened” absolutism no more than a terror regime can hold back the masses, they will swing back to the familiar methods of the club and gangsterism.
Industrialisation Nurtures Crises
The development of industrialisation has meant the production of tens of millions of workers and hundreds of thousands of technicians. And this process is continuing.
With it the level of culture, despite the strait-jacket of Stalinism, has and will continue to be raised. More and more the repulsive regime of Byzantinism, comes into conflict with the need of the development of the economy and of culture. The arbitrary waste and mismanagement of the uncontrolled tops, their squandermania and luxury as a symptom of the diseased system, contrasts with the austerity and sacrifices of the masses. As a typical and symbolic instance, Stalin spent £100,000 on his daughter’s wedding!
The rise in culture and the needs of science, technique, and production come more and more into conflict with the ignorant fiat of the omniscient Central Committee. The incompetence and waste of uncontrolled bureaucracy prevent the full utilisation of all the productive potentialities of planned production. The participation and initiative of all strata from top to bottom, is an absolute necessity if society is to proceed as fast as possible in the direction of Socialism. The withering away of the State and of Money can only begin with the fraternal co-operation of the peoples of Russia, and with workers democracy in place of bureaucratic tyranny.
In place of the Bolshevik party as a democratic organ of the Russian proletariat, containing within its ranks the advanced, self-sacrificing and most intelligent elements of the working class, Stalin transformed it into the organ of the bureaucracy, not only in its aims but also even in its social composition. The ordinary rank and file worker or peasant finds no place in this set-up. Managers, Secret Policemen, army generals and officers, high-ranking dignitaries of all sorts, foremen and the aristocracy of labour, compose the overwhelming majority of the membership of this tomb of Bolshevism.
However at whatever cost in the lives and sacrifices of the masses vast Russia has been transformed. In place of backward, of illiterate peasants, tens of millions of workers have been created in the crucible of industrialisation. In the long run they hold the key to the future of the Soviet Union. The totalitarian terror coming each time after the solemn declaration that all enemies of the state apart from insignificant remnants have been finally liquidated, point to the permanent crisis of Stalinist Bonapartism – the rule of the military-police State. The zig-zags in policy, are an endeavour of the regime to escape the permanent threat of overthrow, which hangs over it.
Stalinism: Effect and Cause Change Places
Stalinism arose out of the impasse of the revolution. An isolated backward Russia on the one hand, and the failure of the Socialist revolution in Europe and Asia on the other, opened the way for the development and consolidation of Stalinism. These were the points of departure for the development of Stalinism. But history does not proceed as some pseudo-Marxists imagine, in a mechanical way. The fact that the peculiar conditions which gave birth to Stalinism in Russia are changing, does not mean that Stalinism smoothly and automatically passes from the scene. If cause and effect change places, as in the dialectic of history has so often happened, Stalinism as the effect of the series of factors sketched above, now becomes the cause of new phenomena in the distorting of the revolutionary movement of the masses. The revolutions in China and Yugoslavia have been deformed from their inception on national Stalinist lines. This chain reaction thus creates new complications for the Labour movement on a world scale.
Malenkovism will not be able to solve any of the fundamental problems which face Russia. It cannot satisfy the masses. In the long run it will inevitably be overthrown. Temporarily for a few years or more, they may consolidate their rule in Russia. And National Stalinism consolidate itself in China and Yugoslavia.
Nevertheless no new tranquil period opens out for capitalism in the West or Stalinism in the East. The relative “calm“, in comparison to the period to come, of the post-war period, will give way after a possible pause, to a series of national and international crises. The epoch which opens up will be far more disturbed than that between the first and second world wars. All regimes will be tested and retested anew. Revolution, in the long run is inevitable in Russia – political revolution – which will replace the rotted Stalinist autocracy with workers democracy. It is a question merely of which will be first – Socialist revolution in the West or political revolution in the East. Stalinism will be erased as a blot on Socialism, and in its place will come the abolition of national boundaries and fraternal co-operation of the peoples. Rotted capitalism and the ulcer of Stalinism will vanish from the memories of the peoples.
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