The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher 1967
We have surveyed the Soviet scene so far only from the domestic angle, without referring to international events and pressures. But, of course, the internal evolution of the Soviet Union cannot be isolated from its world context, from the international balance of forces and great power diplomacy, or from the state of the labour movement in the West and the colonial revolutions in the East. All these factors have had an almost continuous impact on internal Soviet developments and all, in their turn, have been affected by the latter.
‘The October revolution’, Lenin used to say, ‘has broken, in Russia, the weakest link in the chain of international imperialism.’ This suggestive image epitomises the thinking of early Bolshevism about itself and the world. The October revolution is not considered here a purely Russian phenomenon: what happened in the ‘weakest link of the chain’ was obviously not a self-sufficient act. Despite the Russian break-through, imperialism — the expansive capitalism of the big industrial-financial corporations — remained the dominant force in the world’s economy and politics; the working classes had still to break various other links of the chain. Where, how and how soon would they do it? These were the questions. Would one or several strong links give way in the West? Or would it be another weak link in the East, in China or India? Whatever the answer, the underlying conception was one of the revolution’s universality and of the international character, scope and destiny of socialism.
This idea was deeply rooted in classical Marxism; and it was not just an ideological postulate but a conclusion drawn from a comprehensive analysis of bourgeois society. Of course, even in 1789 men like Condorcet and Cloots and the cosmopolitans among the Jacobins dreamt about the universal Republic of the Peoples. But their dream was at odds with the real possibilities and tasks of their time. All their revolution could do was to take France out of the age of the feudal and post-feudal divisions into that of the modern nation-state. It could not go beyond the nation-state. The material conditions for any supra-national organisation of society did not exist. Only in the nineteenth century did industrial capitalism begin to produce them. With its mechanical technology and international division of labour it created the world market, and with it the economic potentiality of a world society. As early as 1847 Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
Modern industry has established the world market... has given an immense development to commerce, navigation and communication by land. ... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. ... The bourgeoisie has given... a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of the reactionaries, the bourgeoisie has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. ... In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we now have the many-sided intercourse of nations and their universal interdependence.
Socialism had to begin where capitalism ended. Basing itself on the facts of the ‘many-sided intercourse and interdependence of nations’ it would organise their productive forces on an international scale and enable society to recast its way of life accordingly. In capitalism the urge towards international integration works haphazardly, blindly, by fits and starts, as one of many contradictory trends; under imperialism it finds a distorted expression in the conquest and economic domination of the weak nations by the strong. Socialism, seizing the possibility which capitalism had opened up but not realised, would consciously create the international society. To Marx, Engels and their close friends these were elementary ideas, almost truisms, on which they did not need to waste words. More than forty years after the Communist Manifesto, in 1890, Engels wrote in a message to French socialists:
It was your great countryman Saint-Simon who first saw that the alliance of the three great Western nations — France, England, Germany — is the primary international condition of the political and social emancipation of the whole of Europe. I hope to see this alliance, the nucleus of the European alliance which will once and for all put an end to the wars of Cabinets and races, realised by the proletarians of these three nations.
What a reflection it is on the slowness of our official minds that it took three-quarters of a century — indeed the hundred and twenty years since the Communist Manifesto — before our statemen and opinion makers got just an inkling of some such idea and presented a timid conservative version — or should one say a travesty? — of it in the so-called Common Market.
How consistently classical Marxism repudiated any pretension of national self-sufficiency in socialism may be seen from the following words which Engels, shortly before his death, addressed to Paul Lafargue, the famous French socialist. Engels warned Lafargue against an inclination to exalt French socialism unduly and attribute to it a superior or exceptional role.
But neither the French [he wrote] nor the Germans, nor the English, will have all to themselves the glory of having crushed capitalism. France... may perhaps give the signal [for the revolution], but it will be in Germany... that the issue will be decided; and even France and Germany will not secure definite victory as long as England remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The emancipation of the proletariat can be only an international event; you render it impossible if you try to make it simply a French event. Exclusive French leadership of the bourgeois revolution — though it was inevitable because of the stupidity and cowardice of other nations — led — you know where? — to Napoleon, to conquest and to invasion by the Holy Alliance. To wish to attribute to France the same role in the future is to pervert the international proletarian movement and even... to render France ridiculous, for people outside your frontiers mock at these pretensions.
I have quoted at length these passages, so characteristic of classical Marxism, because they seem to me to provide a clue to the understanding of Bolshevism and of the relationship between the Russian revolution and the world. The Bolsheviks grew up in the tradition of which Engels expressed the quintessence; and even after the ‘epicentre of revolution’ had moved from Western Europe to Russia they still thought of the establishment of socialism as an international process and not simply a Russian ‘event.’ Their own victory was in their eyes a prelude to world revolution or at least to a European socialist upheaval. Hindsight tells us that in so far as they expected an imminent international revolution they were mistaken. But hindsight may not see the events more clearly than did a bold, even though partly erroneous, historical foresight. The Bolsheviks started from the premise that the catastrophe of 1914 had inaugurated a whole epoch of world wars and revolutions, the epoch of capitalist decline. This premise was historically correct. The next decades were in fact filled by a gigantic contest between revolution and counter-revolution. In 1918 revolution overthrew the empires of the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs and brought into being, if only for a short time, councils of workers’ deputies in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Budapest and Warsaw. And even after revolution was defeated in Germany, Austria, Hungary and other countries, the capitalist system did not regain its old stability. It staggered on from crisis to crisis, until the worldwide slump of 1929 brought it to the brink of ruin. The possessing classes first saved their domination by agreeing to economic and political reforms for which generations of socialists had fought in vain before the Russian revolution. Then fascism and Nazism came forward as the saviours of capitalism. Colonial upheavals and the great Chinese revolution of 1925-27 gave to the crisis a new range and depth. And in Europe, after the shadow of the Third Reich had fallen across it, Austria and Spain were shaken by civil wars, and France experienced the stormy class struggles of the Popular Front period. All this indicates how vast were the revolutionary potentialities of the interwar decades. The Second World War again revealed the crisis and disintegration of the social system. In Nazi-occupied Europe people fought not only for their national independence; civil war raged within many an occupied nation. The revolutionary aftermath of the war in France, Italy and Greece is a matter of historical record. Eastern Europe was transformed by revolution from above. Not since the Napoleonic wars had Europe experienced any comparable social breakdown.
The Bolsheviks understood quite well the epoch in which they had entered upon the stage of world history. It was the epoch of world wars and revolutions. That so many revolutionary efforts have been frustrated or have proved abortive does not invalidate the premise on which they acted. Men engaged in combat do not take defeat for granted before the battle is joined — it is in the actual fighting that the outcome of the struggle is decided. Lenin and his comrades did not as a rule provoke battle arbitrarily — more often than not trials of strength were imposed on them. And revolutionaries may take the view, traditionally held by British soldiers, that they may lose all the battles except the last one, and that in the meantime they have to fight the battles that they have to lose.
Lenin and his followers stood by the universality of the revolution for yet another reason. They saw little or no hope for the achievement of socialism in Russia alone. Isolated from the advanced industrial countries and reduced to her own resources, Russia could not, or not for a very long time, overcome economic scarcity, the low level of her civilisation, or the weakness of her working class; she could not prevent the rise of bureaucracy. All Bolsheviks — and this goes even for Stalin — expected at first that Russia would join a European socialist community in which Germany, France or Britain would take the lead and would help Russia to move towards socialism in a rational and civilised manner, without anything like the sacrifices, the violence and the social inequality that were to accompany the industrialisation of an isolated Soviet Union. As early as 1914 Lenin’s watchword was the United States of Socialist Europe, although later he had his doubts not about the idea itself but about whether it would be properly understood. Then, in 1918, he argued that socialism ‘is already a reality in our days; but its two halves are as it were torn asunder: one half, the political conditions for it — the rule of the proletariat exercised through the Soviets — has been created in Russia; while the other half, the industrial and cultural prerequisites, exist in Germany’. To achieve socialism these ‘two halves’ had to be brought together. If Engels argued against Lafargue that neither the French nor the Germans ‘could have all to themselves the glory’ of doing away with capitalism, Lenin had not a shred of Lafargue’s illusion. He and his comrades knew that the emancipation of the workers could result only from the joint efforts of many nations; and that if the nation-state provided too narrow a framework even for modern capitalism, socialism was quite unthinkable within such a framework. This conviction permeated all Bolshevik thinking and activity until the end of the Lenin era.
Then, in the middle 1920s, the fact of Russia’s isolation in the world struck home with a vengeance, and Stalin and Bukharin came forward to expound Socialism in One Country. The Bolsheviks had to take cognisance of the bitter necessity for Russia to ‘go it alone’ for as long as she had to — that was the rational kernel in the new doctrine which captivated many good internationalists; and with it neither Trotsky nor Zinoviev nor Kamenev had any quarrel.
But the special significance of the new doctrine lay elsewhere, in the fact that it made a virtue out of the necessity, and that it represented a reaction against the universalist conception of the revolution. Arguing from the Soviet Union’s isolation, Stalin and Bukharin produced the watchword for a kind of ideological isolationism. They proclaimed that Russia, unaided and unsupported by other nations, could and should not merely advance towards socialism, which was to all Bolsheviks self-evident; but that she could by herself achieve fully fledged socialism — a classless society free from man’s domination by man, which was, at best, a pipe dream. They said in effect that, barring war, the fate of the new Soviet society was quite independent of what was going on in the rest of the world; and that socialism could be and was going to be a nationally self-sufficient, closed, autarchic system. To paraphrase Engels, they made of the ‘emancipation of the proletariat’ a purely Russian event, and by this alone they rendered it impossible. The practical implications were soon to become evident. For over three decades Socialism in One Country was the official canon and the central dogma of Stalinism, imposed in a quasi-ecclesiastical manner upon Party and State. To doubt its truth was blasphemy, and for committing it, uncounted multitudes of party members and other citizens were punished with excommunication, prison and death. Up till now, though socialism is supposed to had spread to a dozen countries in the meantime, Socialism in One Country has not yet been stripped of its canonicity.
Behind the idea of a self-sufficient Russian socialism there was the tacit acceptance of the view that the prospects of revolution in the West had faded for good. This undoubtedly reflected a popular mood. After many years of fighting, famine and frustration the people were desperately weary, and shrugged off the party’s customary promises that the international revolution, the great liberating force of the Western proletariat, would soon come to their rescue. The new doctrine held out a different prospect: it assured the people that, even if the Russian revolution were to remain isolated forever, it would still fulfil its promise of socialism and establish the classless society within its own boundaries. ‘This is a doctrine of consolation’, Eugene Varga, one of its eminent expounders, confessed in private. It was also, we may add, a doctrine of exaction, for in the name of Socialism in One Country the people were presently asked to give up all civil liberties and bear endless heavy sacrifices and privations. The men of the ruling group, and the bureaucracy at large, had, in addition, their own motives of Realpolitik and raison d'état. The thinking of any bureaucracy is tied to the nation-state, is shaped by it, and is limited by it. The Bolshevik bureaucracy now descended from the heights of the heroic period of the revolution to the bottomlands of the nation-state; and Stalin led it in the descent. They craved security for themselves and their Russia. They strove to preserve the national and, above all, the international status quo, and to find a stable modus vivendi with the great capitalist powers. They were convinced that they could find it in a kind of ideological isolationism, and were anxious to disengage the Soviet Union from the class struggles and the social conflicts in the outside world. In proclaiming Socialism in One Country, Stalin in effect told the bourgeois West that he was not vitally interested in socialism in other countries. And the bourgeois West understood him well, even though it wondered whether to take him on trust. During the great struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, most of our statesmen and leaders of opinion held that the West’s interest would best be served if Stalin won. He stood for moderation and peaceful coexistence.
However, Stalinism could not easily disentangle itself from the class struggles and the social conflicts in the outside world. It was burdened with a revolutionary heritage which it could neither scrap nor jettison. The headquarters of the Communist International were in Moscow; and the International was the embodiment of the Bolsheviks’ earlier allegiance to universal revolution. For a very long time Stalin could not afford to disband the Comintern — he dared the coup only in 1943. Meanwhile he did what he could to adapt it to his purpose. He tamed it. He turned it into an auxiliary of his diplomacy, or, as Trotsky once put it, he transformed the foreign Communist parties, from the ‘vanguards of world revolution’, into pacifist frontier-guards of the Soviet Union. The Communist parties consented in fact to minister to the diplomatic interests and to the national egoism of the ‘workers’ first state’, because it had been the workers’ first state. They did not have the courage to insist on their own independence even though if they had done so they would have saved their political dignity and revolutionary efficacy. They thus involved themselves in a suicidal equivocation: an International operating as a mere agent of Socialism in One Country was a pathetic contradiction in terms.
The Stalinist search for national security within the framework of the international status quo might have made some sense if the status quo had been inherently stable. But this was not the case. Nothing could have been more precarious than the social equilibrium and the international balance of power of the interwar decades. The social equilibrium was catastrophically upset by the great slump of 1929. The military and diplomatic balance was disrupted by Germany’s recovery from the defeat of 1918 and her determination to overthrow the system based on the Treaty of Versailles. Russia could not insulate herself from the shocks these developments produced. Yet what Stalin, his diplomacy and his tamed Comintern did was to try to insulate her, and even to forestall the shocks and to hold off or mitigate the conflicts abroad into which she might be drawn. The great ruthless dictator, the supposed master of Realpolitik, was in fact the King Canute of our century, bidding the waves of revolution, counter-revolution and war to stand still. In view of the tremendous authority Stalin exercised over world Communism, an authority backed by the whole power and prestige of the Soviet Union, his attitude and policy did, of course, a great deal to shape world history in a fateful epoch. No one can say what the West, or what the world at large, would have looked like by now if the labour movement outside the Soviet Union had followed its own interests and traditions and not allowed external influence, Stalinist or otherwise, to interfere with the rhythm and direction of its own development. Perhaps the advanced nations of the West might have achieved their socialist revolution by now; or they might have come much closer to it than they are today.
I do not think that the defeats of revolution and socialism in the West were as inevitable as they may now appear to have been. I do not think that they have all been caused by objective circumstances, that is by the inherent ‘soundness’ of our Western society. At least some of the major reverses of socialism have been due to subjective factors, to the unsoundness of the policies promoted by men and parties who were supposed to be the champions of socialism. The Marxist predictions about class struggle in capitalism were not as wide of the mark as they may now seem except in so far as Marx, Engels and Lenin did not reckon with Stalinism and its international consequences.
A major example, one of many that could be adduced, may be given as illustration. Any student of recent history will be struck and perhaps baffled by the utter impassivity and indifference with which in the early 1930s Moscow viewed the rise of Nazism. Stalin, his advisers and his propagandists showed at that time not the slightest awareness of what was coming. They had no inkling of the gathering force and destructive dynamism of the Nazi movement. From 1929 to 1933 they prompted the German Communist Party to commit a long series of fatal blunders, blunders which made it all too easy for Hitler to seize power. Now, was Hitler’s triumph in 1933 really inevitable? Did objective circumstances make it so? Or could the German labour movement have prevented it? Before trying to answer these questions we have to consider the fact that in 1933 that movement surrendered all its positions to Hitler without a struggle. This is true of both parties, the Social Democrats who controlled the trade unions and had an electoral following of over eight million people, and the Communists who had a following of over five million. The most vigorous and militant elements of the movement were in the Communist Party. Because of their own political weight, and because of the influence their conduct exercised on the more inert mass of Social Democrats, their behaviour in the crisis was of the utmost importance. Yet the Communist Party deliberately and systematically played down the Nazi danger and told the workers that the Social Democrats or ‘Social-Fascists’, not the Nazis, were the chief enemy on whom they ought to ‘concentrate all fire’. The leaders of both parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, refused even to contemplate the idea of any common action against Nazism. There was no objective reason why they should behave in this way. Their surrender was not inevitable. Hitler’s easy victory in 1933 was not inevitable. And Stalin and the Soviet party had no real interest whatsoever in sponsoring the policy of surrender and persisting in it. Their apathy and indifference in the face of rising Nazism resulted solely from the isolationist temper of Stalinism, from its desire to keep the Soviet Union out of any entanglement in any major conflict abroad. Playing for safety, Stalin ruled out any Communist move in Germany that might have led to a confrontation, and possibly to civil war, between the German left and Nazism. Pursuing the mirage of security within the international status quo, the mirage of Socialism in One Country, Stalinism caused the defeat of socialism in many other countries and exposed the Soviet Union to mortal peril. Some of us argued in those years, well before 1933, that a Nazi government meant world war and invasion of the Soviet Union; that it was the duty of the German left to bar Hitler’s road to power; that it had a fair chance of succeeding in this; and that even if it were to fail, it should go down fighting rather than passively accept the prospect of its own annihilation by the Nazis. We were decried in Moscow as panic-mongers, war-mongers and enemies of the German proletariat and of the Soviet Union.
The surrender of 1933 was the most crushing defeat Marxism ever suffered, a defeat which was to be deepened by later events and later Stalinist policies, a defeat from which the German and the European labour movements have not yet recovered. If the German left, and above all the German Communist Party, had not allowed itself to be goaded into capitulation, if it had had the sense to fight for its life, there might never have been a Third Reich and a Second World War. The Soviet Union might not have lost twenty million dead on the battlefields. The smoke from the Auschwitz gas chambers might not have blackened the record of our civilisation. And meanwhile, Germany might perhaps have become a workers’ state.
One could give other examples of how the Stalinist obsession with security led to catastrophic insecurity, and how ideological isolationism invariably aggravated the Soviet Union’s isolation, which, of course, drove Soviet policy into ever deeper isolationism. The vicious circle is reproduced at almost every stage of Stalinist and even post-Stalinist diplomacy, whenever the Soviet raison d'état has imposed itself on the policy of an important sector of the Western labour movement. This was the case with the Popular Front in France, with the Spanish Civil War, and with the repercussions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939-41. In all these instances it was not so much the inherent strength of Western capitalism as the national egoism of Stalin’s policy that inflicted defeat after defeat on the forces of socialism in the West; and each of these defeats was a setback for the Soviet Union as well.
The Second World War and the Nazi invasion drove the Soviet Union out of its isolation. Once again the emancipation of the workers — and, of course, the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination — could ‘only be an international event’. Not only the armies of the great powers waged the war. Guerillas, partisans and resisters of many nations did so as well. An international civil war, with tremendous social revolutionary potentialities, unfolded within the world war. Stalinism, however, went on clinging to conventional security, raison d'état and sacred national egoism. It fought the war as a ‘Fatherland War’, another 1812, not as a European civil war. It would not confront Nazism with the idea of international socialism and revolution. Stalin did not believe that that idea would inspire his armies to fight, or that it could infect and disintegrate the enemy’s armies, as it had done during the wars of intervention. Moreover, he prompted the various Communist-led resistance movements in Europe to fight solely for national liberation, not for socialism. In part he was actuated by the desire to preserve the Grand Alliance; he assumed correctly that if the war threatened to turn into a European revolution, Churchill and Roosevelt would contract out of the alliance. In part, however, he himself was afraid of the revolutionary turmoil, which might have upset the precarious social-political balance within the Soviet Union on which his autocracy rested. He was determined to emerge from the gigantic upheaval with Socialism in One Country and with his autocracy intact. Yet the logic of the war turned against his isolationist ideology. He had to send his armies into a dozen foreign countries; and even while they marched under the Fatherland banners these were still Red Armies, which would not be easily persuaded that their victory, so dearly bought, should end in the restoration of capitalism in all the lands they freed from Nazi occupation. The revolutionary aftermath of the war was there. How to keep it under control, and how to reduce it to a minimum was, at Teheran and Yalta, the common preoccupation of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. They tackled the problems of the alliance in the spirit of conventional diplomacy and shared out and delineated their respective spheres of influence.
We need not here go into the complicated conflicts that ensued even before the end of hostilities and ushered in the Cold War. Suffice it to say that, even while the Soviet Union was involved as never before in the affairs of so many countries, and while Stalin had to secure the fruits of victory, the Soviet Union’s predominance in Eastern Europe, by quasi-revolutionary methods, Stalinism remained true to its national narrow-mindedness. The revolution in Eastern Europe was not to be the ‘international event brought about by the joint efforts of the proletariat of many nations’. It was imposed from above by the occupying power and its agents. And the so-called People’s Democracies were to be merely the defensive glacis of Socialism in One Country. In Western Europe bourgeois rule, battered and discredited, was restored in accordance with the pacts of Yalta and Teheran; and the Communist parties there assisted in the restoration, participating in de Gaulle’s and Gaspari’s postwar governments, helping to disarm the Resistance, and curbing the restive radicalism of the working classes. In this way the revolutionary potentialities of the postwar period were realised, but distorted in the realisation, all over Eastern Europe; and they were nullified in Western Europe. Thus Stalinism worked to produce a stalemate in the class struggle which was to enable diplomacy to secure the ‘peaceful coexistence of the opposed social systems’. Once again Stalin sought to obtain national security on the basis of the international status quo, that is, of the division of zones agreed upon at Teheran and Yalta. However, diplomacy could not remove all the big bones of contention that the masters of Teheran and Yalta had strewn along the boundaries of their zones; nor was it able to cope with the unfamiliar perils of the nuclear age. And so the world was left to shiver in the bleak blasts of the Cold War, which was but a depraved form of the class struggle waged by the great powers. One is again reminded of Engels’s warning: ‘Exclusive French leadership of the bourgeois revolution led — you know where — to Napoleon, to conquest and to invasion by the Holy Alliance.’ More than once exclusive Russian leadership in the socialist revolution was ominously close to producing the same results.
However, the epoch of exclusive Russian leadership was coming to an end. The revolutionary aftermath of the war had not been brought under complete control, after all. The Yugoslavs defied the Russian leadership; and the victorious Chinese revolution confronted it implicitly with a huge challenge. Yet even the spread of revolution did not cure Stalinist policy of its national egoism and isolationism; and to these ills the policy of Stalin’s successors still remains the heir. Even if the concept of Socialism in One Country has long since lost all relevance, the mood behind it, and the way of thinking and the style of political action inspired by it have survived.
Yet another aspect of the Soviet Union’s impact on the social and political life of the West may now be briefly considered. In the first years after 1917 the message of the October revolution aroused a deep response in the Western labour movement. In 1920, for instance, congresses of the French and Italian Socialist Parties and of the German Independent Socialist Party, then the most influential body on the German left, voted by large majorities to join the Communist International. Even in conservative Britain the dockers of London, led by Ernest Bevin, expressed their sympathy with the new Russia by refusing to load munitions destined for Polish armies fighting against the Soviets. It looked as if the Western labour movement had raised itself, under the inspiration of the Russian revolution, from the slough to which it had sunk in 1914. During the Second World War again, the battle of Stalingrad lifted Nazi-occupied Europe from the depths of despair and inspired the Resistance with confidence in victory and fresh socialist hope. But on balance, over this half-century, the example of the Soviet Union, far from stimulating the labour movements of the West, has deterred them from pursuing their socialist aspirations.
Paradoxically, a major reason for this was that the workers saw the Russian revolution as the first great historic test of socialism. They were not aware of the tragic handicaps with which the Soviet Union was burdened. No matter what some Marxist theorists said about these handicaps, no matter how cogently they argued that a free and classless society could not come into being in one poverty-stricken and semi-barbarous country, to the mass of our workers these were niceties of abstract theory. To them socialism in Russia was now a matter not of theoretical speculation but of practical experience. Clearly, it was not in the Soviet interest to encourage exaggerated hopes. Soviet leaders, aware of their responsibility, would have conscientiously explained the position, as Lenin used to do; and they would have made it clear that even the great achievements of the Soviet Union were and could be only preliminaries to socialism, not the real stuff of socialism. They might thus have avoided fostering illusions and prevented subsequent disillusionment; and they might have impressed upon the labour movement of the West its co-responsibility for the isolation and the predicaments of the Soviet Union. Stalin and his associates, however, were too much concerned with national pride and bureaucratic prestige to act in this way. They offered their ‘doctrine of consolation’, their myth of Socialism in One Country, to the workers not only of Russia but of the world.
One effect of the spread of this myth was to turn Western Communists and Socialists into mere spectators. As the Russians were saying that they could well achieve, or even that they had achieved, socialism all by themselves, there seemed nothing left for people in the West to do, except to watch how the Russians were faring. For thirty years or so Stalinist propaganda spoke of the miracles socialism was working in the USSR. The ardent and the naïve believed. The great majority of Western workers wondered, suspended judgement, or formed negative opinions. Accounts of Soviet poverty, famine and terror fed the scepticism. The Great Purges and the Stalin cult, zealously defended by all Communist parties, aroused disgust. Then multitudes of American, British and French soldiers came into contact with their Soviet allies in occupied Germany and Austria; and they drew their conclusions. Finally, in 1956, there was the shock of Khrushchev’s revelations. Many millions of Western workers have, over the years, pondered these experiences and have concluded that ‘socialism does not work’ and that ‘revolution leads you nowhere’. Many have sunk into political apathy; and many have reconciled themselves to the social status quo in the West, which the postwar booms and the welfare state have rendered somewhat more tolerable. Intellectuals, who had believed in Soviet socialism, have ended by denouncing the ‘God that failed’ them. The myth of Socialism in One Country has thus bred an even more deceptive myth — a colossal myth — about the failure of socialism. This double mystification has come to dominate much of Western political thinking and has greatly contributed to the ideological stalemate in which the world still lives half a century after 1917.
The West, however, has hardly any reason to view this outcome with self-righteousness. For when a Russian looks at the record of the West, in its relationship with Russia, what does he find there? The rapacious Peace of Brest Litovsk, the Allied armed intervention against the Soviets, the blockade, the cordon sanitaire, the prolonged economic and diplomatic boycotts; and then Hitler’s invasion and the horrors of Nazi occupation, the long and clever delays by which Russia’s allies postponed the opening up of a second front against Hitler, while the Soviet armies were immolating themselves in battle; and, after 1945, the rapid reversal of the alliances, the nuclear blackmail, and the anti-communist frenzy of the cold war. What a record! What a record!
A Marxist must ask why the working classes of the West and their parties have allowed so much freedom of initiative and action to the governments and establishments who between them were responsible for this record. The historian has to probe the objective circumstances that may have prevented Western socialism, in the course of these fifty years, from intervening radically and from making the West face the Russian revolution in quite a different manner. He has also to make allowance for the adverse effects of the prolonged and exclusive Russian leadership in socialist revolution. But, having carefully considered all objective circumstances and having made all necessary allowances, how will he sum up his conclusions? Engels, speaking about the exclusive French leadership of the bourgeois revolution and its baneful consequences, and having undoubtedly analysed with care the objective circumstances of the epoch, summed up his view in these few plain and pregnant words. All this, he said, ‘was made inevitable because of the stupidity and cowardice of other nations’. Will a future Engels have to pass the same verdict on our epoch?