Stalinism: Its Origin and Future. Andy Blunden 1993
In the previous volume of this series we looked at the post-war crisis of Stalinism and the failure of the political revolution against Stalinism in Eastern Europe. We ended that volume with the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, which marks the beginning of the period of the decline of Stalinism.
In this volume, we take a short step back in time to look at the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, and the subsequent conflict which developed between the two great workers’ states leading up to the Sino-Soviet split, which was itself a contributing factor in the fall of Khrushchev.
The Chinese Revolution, followed by the failure of the US to crush the workers’ state in North Korea (1950 – 53) and the victory of the Vietnamese revolution against French colonialism in 1954, opened a period of successful revolutionary struggles which swept across the world – Cuba, Suez, Algeria, Libya – culminating in the final glorious victory of the Vietnamese Revolution in April, 1975.
The great irony of this period is that the wider, deeper and more powerful became the international movement of which Stalinism stood at the head, the more deeply Stalinism was thrown into crisis.
In the first part of this volume we analyse the roots of the conflict between the leaderships of the Chinese and Soviet states. The social nature and historical origins of Stalinism manifested itself in this split, which could not be simply a split between two rival governments, but led to a split in the entire workers’ movement across virtually every country in the world.
As is commonly understood, once the “monolith” of Stalinism was broken by the Sino-Soviet split, the formerly homogeneous international movement very rapidly unravelled. This disintegration became a major factor in the movement from crisis to decline in the world Stalinist movement.
In the second part of this volume, we follow the development of not only the world Stalinist movement, but more importantly, the struggle of the workers under its sway to break free.
In the West, the Stalinist movement became increasingly marginalised as it was overtaken by a range of workers’ and other social movements, including most importantly the women’s movement.
In Eastern Europe, we follow particularly closely the development of the working class in Poland. The events of the mid-1950s in Europe we characterised as a political revolution which failed. That is, it was a workers’ movement which aimed to “renovate” the workers’ states, and replace Stalinism with workers’ democracy. However, beginning around 1968, the character of the working class opposition to Stalinism began to change. The anti-Stalinist struggle continued almost without interruption in Poland from 1968 up until the election of a Solidarity Government in June 1989.
The transformation from political revolution to the abandonment of the workers’ state, is seen in its purist form in Poland, but is essentially a process characteristic of the period. It is of great importance in understanding the place of Stalinism in the history of the workers’ movement. We also look at the little-known story of the struggle of Soviet workers, which continued “by a thread” from the Khrushchev days till the last days of Brezhnev.