Stalinism: Its Origin and Future. Andy Blunden 1993
In this volume, we see how the contradictions resulting from the isolation of the Russian Revolution were resolved in the aftermath of the War and the failure of the political revolution in Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War devastated. Twenty-one million Soviet citizens had died in three and a half years of fighting Nazi Germany on Soviet territory. Despite the criminally incompetent leadership of Stalin, the Red Army was victorious and Stalin’s personal hold on the government and people of the USSR had been enormously strengthened.
Soviet society in the aftermath of the War was very conservative. Stalin personified this conservatism which was reflected domestically in reactionary family laws, institutionalised moralism, almost-feudal social stratification, unashamed jingoism, and no industrial or political unrest.
On the international scene, Stalin cynically carved up the world with Churchill and Truman, abandoning any vestige of a socialist perspective in the West. Even within the region occupied by the Red Army, Stalin took every possible measure to restore capitalism from the ruins and social disintegration of the War.
Outside of the Soviet Union however, the War had had quite a different effect. In many European countries, leading sections of the bourgeoisie had collaborated with the Nazis, and were now discredited and despised by the vengeful masses. In other countries, the national bourgeoisie had been destroyed by the War and occupation.
In the former colonies, the weakness of the colonial power had been exposed and hopes of national liberation ran at fever pitch.
A wave of radicalisation affecting millions of people swept from War-devastated Eastern Europe, Japan and China, to the colonies and Western Europe.
Despite all the efforts of Stalin to cement a permanent alliance with his war-time Allies, and despite the unspeakable distortion Stalinism had wrought upon the state which had been created by the Russian Revolution thirty years before, masses rose up against capitalism and looked to the Soviet Union for leadership.
The USA came out of the War economically, militarily and politically stronger than ever before, in a world laid waste by war. The prospect of all Europe falling to Communism and national liberation movements throwing their former colonial masters out of Asia and Africa was not something America was going to take lying down.
Thus, hardly had the sound of the guns of Nazi Germany stilled and the clouds of the first atom bomb cleared before President Harry Truman launched the Cold War.
Stalin died in 1953. Blockaded and hounded by imperialism from without, Stalin's heirs now faced an uprising from within, as workers in Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union protested against Stalinist repression and rose in revolt, reaching out for the ideals of Socialism and challenging the corruption, political repression and bureaucratism of the Stalinist regime.
Just as the Iron Curtain prevented the workers of the “East” coming to the aid of the workers in the West and their colonies, the same Iron Curtain left the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union isolated from the support of workers in the West.