The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

I find Solidarity’s obsessive anti-Stalinism extremely tiresome. Dishonest too. You can’t be blaming everything bad that has happened to socialism on “Stalinism”. Who says that Stalinism was not a form of socialism? Of course it was! State socialism. Dictatorial socialism. Totalitarian socialism. Or, as those who struggled against it in Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s put it — “actually existing socialism”. Solidarity’s idea of socialism as some immaculate conception outside of the real world is simply a fantasy. A day dream. It is in fact what anti-socialists like Herbert Spencer said...

Oh my darling, oh my darling, Oh my darling Party Line, You are lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry, Party Line. Leon Trotsky was a Nazi, And I know it for a fact. First I read, then I said it, Before the Hitler-Stalin Pact. (Anti-Stalinist song of the 1940s, to the tune of “My Darling Clementine”) Fenner Brockway, the leader in the 1930s and 40s of the anti-war Independent Labour Party, tells a story from 1939 in his second volume of memoirs, Outside the Right (1963). “From the beginning of the [Second World] war, Communist Party policy twisted and turned according to Russian interests...

In 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, we went on the streets with the headline: “Stand up for socialism”, and the strapline: “Stalinism was the opposite of socialism”. A common response, gleeful or sad, was: “Socialism is dead, darling!” But for years and decades before 1991, we had championed the underground workers’ movements and the oppressed nationalities in the Stalinist states. We had waged war on the idea — which used to be held by many in the labour movement — that states like the USSR, China, or Cuba were socialist in any sense or in any degree. Stalinism was as distant from...

Chapter 4: Superstition or struggle? The workers against Stalinism The search for the original sin of Bolshevism has exercised tired and demoralised socialists for at least 50 years. Like characters in an ancient Greek drama, they seek the explanation for the Stalinist plague in some violated taboo. Was not the sin in the way the Bolshevik Party organised itself? That has always been a popular explanation, and shows signs of life now among some tired ex-radicals in the Labour Party and on its fringes. For Foot, the great sin was revolutionary violence. The diagnosis of what exactly was...

Chapter 3: The scarecrow of Stalinism Can the tiger be skinned claw by claw? In part 2 of his written oration on parliamentary democracy and those whom he denounces as its enemies (Observer, January 17 1982), Michael Foot attempts to answer the challenge he had posed to himself in part one. There, he ended by promising to undertake the difficult task of replying to those whose rejection of the idea that there can be a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism in Britain was expressed in RH Tawney's brilliant image which Foot quoted thus: "Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a...