Workers' Liberty

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) was a revolutionary in his teens and until
after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1920s he became
the key leader of that section of the Bolshevik Party who, under
pressure of isolation, exhaustion, and the extreme poverty of Russia,
were abandoning their socialist ideals and joining up with the state
bureaucrats inherited from the old regime.

The working class had been dispersed and battered by the long civil
war (1918-21) against counter-revolutionaries backed by forces from
no fewer than 14 other states. Stalin's faction defeated the loyal
revolutionaries led by Trotsky, and from the late 1920s carried
through a full-scale counter-revolution, transforming what had been a
brave though flawed workers' state into a dictatorship more
oppressive for the working class than any the world had ever seen
before.

In his lifetime, Stalin was a hero for many workers in the official
Communist Parties who did not know, or chose not to know, the
realities of Russia under Stalin's rule, and took heart from its
impressive claims for industrial growth. In 1956 Stalin was denounced
by his successors in Russia's government, and gradually, after that,
"Stalinism" came to be seen as something to be opposed by anyone with
left-wing or democratic ideas.

Those successors also introduced some reforms in Russia, easing the
police-state terror. However, they maintained the essentials of
"Stalinism" - a state with a single bureaucratic "party" hierarchy
controlling both industry and all the supposed "mass organisations",
with no freedom of autonomous trade-union or other organisation for
the working class - for many decades.

From 1985, in a drive to revitalise Russia's by-then stagnant
economy, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the system in a limited
way, from above. In the event those attempts provoked, in 1989-91,
the collapse in both Eastern Europe and Russia of a system which had
long been rotting from the inside.
Stalinist regimes exist today in North Korea, Cuba and - although it
has overseen a great development of capitalism - China.