Stalinism: Its Origin and Future. Andy Blunden 1993
The failure of the “Moscow Coup” was demonstrably the “point of no return.” After August 1991, an incontestably, avowed capitalist power ruled in Moscow. The job of undoing the social and economic work of the 1917 Russian Revolution of Lenin and Trotsky still lay ahead, but the counter-revolution had been made. The state apparatus now lay in the hands of the capitalist class, and the working class possessed no effective counter to this power.
The forces of counter-revolution and disintegration had grown up on the international scene. The roots of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution lay in the isolation of the Revolution by the armies of imperialism and the devastation wrought upon the young workers’ state by the Wars of Intervention combined with the policies of class collaboration of the Social-Democratic workers’ bureaucracies in the West. The isolation of the Revolution led to its internal degeneration, the phenomenon we call Stalinism.
The twin forces of the counter-revolutionary, anti-communist warfare waged by imperialism against the Soviet Union and its supporters and allies, together with the conservative and bureaucratic leadership of the Communist International, brought about the gradual diminution of the influence of the Communist Parties and the Soviet Union itself, and the decline of the Soviet economy which not only failed to “catch up and overtake” imperialism, but gradually fell further and further behind.
The process of economic and political decline began in the War years, even while huge gains and achievements still lay ahead.
The final process of collapse began really in the farthest reaches of the Communist International, as its weakest parties, those within the leading imperialist countries, lost their position of authority within the workers movement, were overtaken by new social movements, split, became thoroughly marginalised and turned their backs upon the Soviet Union.
This process of disintegration rolled in from the West, through Eastern Europe and the Republics in the Western USSR until, in August 1991, the mighty Soviet Red Army fell in a heap before a small band of disparate oppositionists gathered outside the Russian Parliament.
The Soviet working class had for all intents and purposes abstained from this historic overturn. Its struggle would only now really begin.
In the next and final volume of this series we shall look at the struggles of the Russian working class to respond to this new situation, to reorganise, find a way to re-assert itself and make a new historical choice. We shall look at the state of the workers’ movement internationally in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in particular in those countries where Communist Parties have wielded or continue to wield influence.