The fall of European Stalinism: Workers' Liberty 3/25

"When Erin has ceased with their memory to groan, she will smile through the tears of revival on thine”. Those were the words with which an English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, addressed the Irish Republican Robert Emmett, who in 1803, at 25, had been hanged, cut down still alive, disembowelled and then chopped up by a servant of the then all-powerful British government of Ireland. When the working class has ceased to groan at the memory of the Stalinist tyranny, it will smile on the memory of Leon Trotsky, who defended the working class and the name and principles of international socialism...

Chronology 1979 December: USSR invades Afghanistan, where it fears that the pro-USSR government is about to be defeated by traditionalist and Islamist rebellion. The invasion becomes “Russia’s Vietnam war”. 1980–1 Mass workers’ movement, Solidarnosc, erupts in Poland. It is banned after a military coup in December 1981, but continues to exist underground. 1985 March: After two brief periods of office for elderly conservatives following the death of Leonid Brezhnev (in 1982, after 18 years of rule), Mikhail Gorbachev is appointed General Secretary of the USSR’s ruling party, with a mandate to...

It is 20 years since the destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people of then divided Germany signalled that Russia’s control over Eastern Europe was collapsing. Russia had held Eastern Europe in a brutal grip for four and a half decades, since the end of the Second World War. It had used the most brutal and bloody methods of imperialist control to maintain that grip. In East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 it used as much military force as was required to beat down revolt against old-style Stalinist, and Russian, rule. The threat of Russian invasion and re...

“But socialism is dead, darling!” This was one response on the street to the front page of Socialist Organiser with the headline: ‘Stand up for socialism’ And there were many similar responses, sad as well as gleeful. For sure, if the Stalinist systems were any sort of socialism, then socialism is dead, and it deserves to be dead. It was rotten and stinking for decades before its recent outright collapse. But Stalinism was not socialism. It was the opposite of socialism. Throughout our existence, Socialist Organiser has championed the underground workers’ movements and the oppressed...

The system Stalin built in the old Tsarist empire has collapsed irretrievably. The USSR is collapsing, too: most of its republics have now declared themselves independent. In most of those republics the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union” has either been banned outright, or banned from activity in the army and the KGB, and in factories. For decades the cells of the 17-million strong “party” — in reality the machinery of a vast privileged bureaucracy, not a political party — have been the local institutions through which the central state-party has controlled society. Now the party’s property...

From Socialist Organiser, January 1992 What is happening in the former USSR now is a grotesque triumph of unreason. In its destructiveness and senselessness, it will rank in history with the carnage of the First and Second World Wars as an almost inexplicable piece of 20th century madness. At the behest of men like Boris Yeltsin and other ex-Stalinists, men who have been through their whole lives members of the corrupt old Stalinist ruling class, nearly 300 million people are now being pitched into the maelstrom of deliberately created or intensified economic chaos. All efforts at rational and...