Russian Revolution

Sometimes decades pass and not much happens. At other times more events take place in days than those that occurred in decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago we were relentlessly told the great political and economic questions had all been settled and that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to the dustbin of history. The strategists of capital were exultant. The “end of history” was proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama. 

The Moscow Trials, which lasted from 1936 to 1938 will go down as the greatest frame-up in history. Their aim was to liquidate the entire remaining Bolshevik old guard and act as the means by which Stalin could consolidate his power as head of the bureaucratic caste that ruled the Soviet Union. Seventy-five years on, Jim Brookshaw - a former member of the British Communist Party - looks back at what happened and asks: why?

On the 16th November 1927, scarcely ten days after the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Adolf Joffe shot himself. At his bedside he left a letter to Leon Trotsky, a translation of which we are publishing today for our readers (1) together with a brief explanatory introduction. These are the words of a genuine Bolshevik and victim of the Stalinist terror.

The genuine forces of revolutionary Marxism were neither demoralised nor disillusioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The search for an alternate to the present mayhem and drudgery of capitalism will have to rediscover the path of the most scientific of the revolutions of the past.

In the avalanche of propaganda against “Communism” an idea is often peddled that while preaching equality, the Communist leaders make sure their own personal position is well catered for. What this propaganda is based on is the horrible bureaucratically degenerate Soviet Union under Stalin. Not happy with attacking Stalin, however, they attempt to show that Lenin was no different.

As the ferocious crisis of Pakistani capitalism devastates society, we hear frantic cries of “revolution” from mainly the right-wing politicians and intellectuals. This reflects their utter desperation and impotent rage at the historical failure of their system to run society.

Ted Sprague looks back at the period into which Lenin was born, the kind of society it was, and the key events that marked the young Lenin. He looks at the way Lenin discovered Marxism and made it his own, using it in later life to lead the Bolshevik party.

The enemies of socialism try to maintain that the collapse of the USSR was the result of the failure of the nationalised planned economy, and that the latter is inseparable from a bureaucratic regime. This was answered by Trotsky well in advance in The Revolution Betrayed. He explained that a nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen. In this introduction to the Indonesian edition of Trotsky’s classic work Alan Woods explains why the Soviet Union collapsed and what the situation is today.

To this day anarchists hold up Makhno as the true champion of the workers and peasants of Russia after the 1917 revolution. This myth ignores the real nature of the Makhnovite army and the social layers that it represented. Because Makhno did not base himself on the working class but on certain layers within the peasantry, he ended up with what amounted to a reactionary position.

Alan Woods was interviewed by Sudestada, an Argentine arts, culture and news monthly magazine, on the Russian Revolution and its subsequent degeneration. As Alan has explained, what failed in Russia was not socialism, but a bureaucratic caricature of socialism.

On October 1, Boris Yefimov, Stalin’s loyal cartoonist, died. In his works he followed all the twists and turns of the Stalinist regime. He was particularly vicious in his portrayal of oppositionists and the Trotskyists in particular.