Trotsky's Interpretation Of Stalinism

Perry Anderson

Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism

Trotsky’s interpretation of the historical meaning of Stalinism, to this day the most coherent and developed theorization of the phenomenon within the Marxist tradition, was constructed in the course of twenty years of practical political struggle against it. His thought thus evolved in tension with the major conflicts and events of these years, and can be conveniently periodized into three essential phases.* Trotsky’s early writings on the subject date from the inner-party struggle that broke out in the CPSU after the Civil War. They do not name Stalinism as such. Their focus is what party tradition called ‘bureaucratism’. The New Course (1923) is the key text of this period. In it, Trotsky took over the two major terms of what had been Lenin’s explanations of this before his death. Bureaucratism, Lenin had argued, was rooted in the lack of culture of the Russian masses, rural or urban, that deprived them of the necessary aptitudes for competent postwar administration, and in the petty-commodity and 49

subsistence character of the agrarian economy, whose immense dispersal of the primary producers rendered inevitable an over-centralization of the state apparatus in Russia. Trotsky subjoined a third cause—the inevitable contradiction between the immediate and long-term interests of the working class, amidst the great shortages and dire exigencies of postwar construction. More significantly, however, he insisted that bureaucratism was not ‘only the aggregate of the bad habits of office-holders’, but represented ‘a social phenomenon—a definite system of administration of men and things’.1 The main locus of this phenomenon was the state apparatus, but the latter—by absorbing ‘an enormous quantity of the most active party elements’2—was infecting the Bolshevik Party itself. The expression of this contamination was the increasing dominance of the central apparatus within the party, operating through an appointments system, repressing democratic debate, and dividing the Old Guard from the rank-and-file and younger generation. This development posed the danger of a ‘bureaucratic degeneration’3 of the Old Guard itself. Bureaucratism was thus—here Trotsky broke clearly beyond Lenin’s analysis—‘not a survival of some preceding regime, a survival in the process of disappearing; on the contrary, it is an essentially new phenomenon, flowing from the new tasks, the new functions, the new difficulties and the new mistakes of the party’.4 Defeat of the Left Opposition

The New Course warned of the dangers of bureaucratism prior to the victory of Stalin’s grouping within the CPSU. After the consummation of that victory, Trotsky’s oppositional writings in the later 1920s attempt to provide a more comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon. The Third International after Lenin (1928) is probably the most important text for his views in this intermediary phase of his thought. There, he attributes the defeat of the Left Opposition within Russia, which sealed the triumph of a bureaucratic internal regime, to the downswing of the international class struggle: above all, the disasters that had overtaken the German Revolution in 1923 and the Chinese Revolution in 1927, respectively on the Western and Eastern flanks of the USSR. The shift in the world balance of class forces to the advantage of capital was inevitably translated into an increase in alien social pressures on the Bolshevik Party itself, within Russia. These were in turn compounded by the failure of Stalin’s faction to pursue rapid industrialization in the USSR to date, which would have strengthened the countervailing weight of the Soviet proletariat. After the effects of the First Five-Year Plan became visible, Trotsky modified this claim to argue that the new ‘labour aristocracy’ created by Stakhanovism, above the mass of the working-class, objectively functioned as a support of the bureaucratic regime within the party. Stalin’s own faction, which had won its victory on the social-patriotic slogan of Socialism in One Country, Trotsky still characterized as a Centre, poised between the party Right (Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky) and the Left, the creature of the permanent apparatus of the CPSU. * Text of a talk given in Paris in 1982. 1 The New Course, Ann Arbour 1965, p. 45. 2 Ibid, p. 45. 3 Ibid, p. 22. 4 Ibid, p. 24. 50

In his autobiography My Life (1929), he sketched what he saw as the social-psychological mechanisms that had converted so many revolutionaries of 1917 into functionaries of this regime—‘the liberation of the philistine in the Bolshevik’—as the elan of the insurgent masses declined in the aftermath of the Civil War, and fatigue and apathy set in, creating a period of generalized ‘social reaction’ in the USSR. In subsequent essays on Stalin’s industrialization drive, Trotsky extended the notion of a factional ‘Centre’ into the more far-ranging category of Stalinist centrism—arguing that while centrism was an inherently unstable phenomenon in capitalist countries, a posture mid-way between reform and revolution in the labour movement, reflecting shifts from left to right or vice-versa in mass pressures, in the USSR it could acquire a durable material basis in the bureaucracy of the new workers’ state. The abrupt zig-zags of Stalin’s policies at home and abroad, from appeasement to all-out war on the kulaks, from class conciliationism to ultra-leftism in the Third International, were the logical expression of this centrist character of his regime, subject to complex and contradictory class pressures on it. The decisive court of these pressures, however, was international, not national. The Four Fundamental Theses

Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism, hitherto still fragmentary and tentative in many respects, became systematic and conclusive from 1933 onwards. The reason, of course, was the triumph of Nazism in Germany, which convinced Trotsky that the Comintern—for whose rectification of line he had fought down to the last moment—was now unrecuperable, and with it the Stalinized CPSU itself. The decision to found a new International was thus the immediate impulse for his frontal engagement with the problem of the nature of Stalinism, which for the first time now became the direct object of extended theoretical interpretation in itself, rather than an issue treated in the course of texts discussing many other questions, as previously. The crucial essay that provides nearly all the main themes of Trotsky’s mature thought on Stalinism was written within a few months of Hitler’s seizure of power: The Class Nature of the Soviet State (1933). In it, he set out the four fundamental theses that were to be the basis of his position down to his death. Firstly, the role of Stalinism at home and abroad had to be distinguished. Within the USSR, the Stalinist bureaucracy played a contradictory role—defending itself simultaneously against the Soviet working-class, from which it had usurped power, and against the world bourgeoisie, which sought to wipe out all the gains of the October Revolution and restore capitalism in Russia. In this sense, it continued to act as a ‘centrist’ force. Outside the USSR, by contrast, the Stalinized Comintern had ceased to play any anti-capitalist role, as its debacle in Germany had now irrevocably proved. Hence ‘the Stalinist apparatus could completely squander its meaning as an international revolutionary force, and yet preserve part of its progressive meaning as the gate-keeper of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution’.5 Soon afterwards, Trotsky would argue that the Comintern performed an actively 5

The Class Nature of the Soviet State, London 1968, p. 4. 51

counter-revolutionary role in world politics, colluding with capital and shackling labour in the interests of protecting the Stalinist monopoly of power in Russia itself, which would be threatened by the example of any victory of a socialist revolution, creating a proletarian democracy, elsewhere. Secondly, within the USSR Stalinism represented the rule of a bureaucratic stratum, emergent from and parasitic upon the working class, not a new class. This stratum occupied no independent structural role in the process of production proper, but derived its economic privileges from its confiscation of political power from the direct producers, within the framework of nationalized property relations. Thirdly, the administration over which it presided remained typologically a workers’ state, precisely because these property relations—embodying the expropriation of the expropriators achieved in 1917—persisted. The identity and legitimacy of the bureaucracy as a political ‘caste’ depended on its defense of them. Therewith, Trotsky dismissed the two alternative accounts of Stalinism most widespread in the labour movement in the 1930s (which had emerged within the Second International during the Civil War itself)—that it represented a form of ‘state capitalism’ or of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’. The iron dictatorship exercised by the Stalinist police and administrative apparatus over the Soviet proletariat was not incompatible with the preservation of the proletarian nature of the state itself—any more than the Absolutist dictatorships over the nobility had been incompatible with the preservation of the nature of the feudal state, or the fascist dictatorships exercised over the bourgeois class were with the preservation of the nature of the capitalist state. The USSR was indeed a degenerated workers’ state, but a ‘pure’ dictatorship of the proletariat— conformable to an ideal definition of it—had never existed in the Soviet Union in the first instance. Fourthly and finally, Marxists should adopt a two-fold stance towards the Soviet state. On the one hand, there was now no chance of the Stalinist regime either reforming itself or being reformed peacefully within the USSR. Its rule could only be ended by a revolutionary overthrow from below, destroying its whole machinery of privilege and repression, while leaving intact the social property relations over which it presided—if now within the context of a proletarian democracy. On the other hand, the Soviet state had to be defended externally against the constant menace of aggression or attack by the world bourgeoisie. Against this enemy, the USSR—incarnating as it did the anti-capitalist gains of October—needed the resolute and unconditional solidarity of revolutionary socialists everywhere. ‘Every political tendency that waves its hand hopelessly at the Soviet Union, under the pretext of its “non-proletarian” character, runs the risk of becoming the passive instrument of imperialism.’6 ‘The Revolution Betrayed’

These four corner-stones of Trotsky’s account of Stalinism remained stable down to his assassination. It was on them that he erected the major edifice of this study of Soviet society under Stalin: the book entitled Where 6

Ibid, p. 32.

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is Russia Going? (1936: misleadingly translated as The Revolution Betrayed). In this work, Trotsky presented a panoramic survey of the economic, political, social and cultural structures of the USSR in the mid thirties, combining a wide range of empirical materials with a deeper theoretical foundation for his analysis of Stalinism. The whole phenomenon of a repressive workers’ bureaucracy he now anchored in the category of scarcity (nuzhda), basic to historical materialism since Marx’s formulation of it in The German Ideology. ‘The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting-point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get something and who has to wait.’7 So long as scarcity prevailed, a contradiction was inevitable between socialized relations of production and bourgeois norms of distribution: it was this contradiction that fatally produced and reproduced the constraining power of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Trotsky then went on to explore each side of the contradiction, assessing and emphasizing the grandeur of Soviet industrial development, however barbaric the methods the bureaucracy employed to drive it forward, while at the same time meticulously exposing the vast gamut of economic, cultural and social inequalities generated by Stalinism, and providing statistical estimates of the size and distribution of the bureaucratic stratum in the USSR itself (some 12–15% of the population). This bureaucracy has betrayed world revolution, even if it still felt subjectively loyal to it; yet it remained an irreconcilable enemy in the eyes of the world bourgeoisie, so long as capitalism was not restored in Russia. The dynamic of its regime was equally contradictory: on the one hand, the very development it had promoted at breakneck pace within the USSR was rapidly increasing the economic and cultural potential of the Soviet working class, its capacity to rise up against it; while on the other hand its own parasitism was increasingly an impediment to further industrial progress. However spectacular the accomplishments of the Five-Year Plans, Trotsky warned, they still left social productivity of labour far behind that of Western capitalism, in a gap that would never be closed until a shift to qualitative growth was achieved, which bureaucratic misrule precisely blocked. ‘The progressive role of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides with the period devoted to introducing into the Soviet Union the most important elements of capitalist technique. The rough work of borrowing, imitating, transplanting and grafting, was accomplished on bases laid down by the revolution. There was, thus far, no question of any new word in the sphere of technique, science or art. It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made pattern by bureaucratic command—although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more economy runs into problems of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized 7

The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1945, p. 112. 53

economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative.’8 Technological superiority would rest with imperialism so long as Stalinism persisted, and assure it victory in any war with the USSR—unless a revolution in the West broke out. The task of Soviet socialists was to accomplish a political revolution against the entrenched bureucracy beforehand, whose relation to the socioeconomic revolution of 1917 would be as the change of power in 1830 or 1848 was to the upheaval of 1789 in France in the cycle of bourgeois revolutions. In the final two years of his life, as the Second World War started, Trotsky reiterated his basic perspectives in a series of concluding polemics with Rizzi, Burnham, Schachtman and other proponents of the notion of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’. The working class was in no way congenitally incapable of establishing its own sovereign rule over society. The USSR—‘the most transitional country in a transitional epoch’—lay between capitalism and socialism, gripped by a ferocious police regime that yet still defended in its own fashion the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Soviet experience was an ‘exceptional refraction’ of the general laws of transition from capitalism to socialism, in a backward country surrounded by imperialism—not a modal type. The contradictory role of Stalinism at home and abroad had been confirmed by the most recent episodes of international politics—its counter-revolutionary sabotage of the Spanish Revolution (beyond its control) contrasted with its revolutionary abolition of private property in the border regions of Poland and Finland incorporated by it into the USSR. The duty of Marxists to defend the Soviet Union against capitalist attack remained undiminished. Disillusionment and fatigue were no excuses for renouncing the classical perspectives of historical materialism. ‘Twenty-five years in the scales of history, when it is a question of profoundest changes in economic and cultural systems, weigh less than an hour in the life of man. What good is the individual who, because of empirical failures in the course of an hour or a day, renounces a goal that he set for himself on the basis of the experience and analysis of his entire previous life-time?’9

A Reassessment: Forty Years Later Another forty years on, we are still only a few hours into that life-time. Do these hours—which subjectively seem so long—give us reasons to question Trotsky’s basic judgements? How should we assess the legacy of his overall perspective on Stalinism? The merits of Trotsky’s interpretation, it might be said, are three-fold. Firstly, it provides a theory of the phenomenon of Stalinism in a long historical temporality, congruent with the fundamental categories of classical Marxism. At every point in his account of the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, Trotsky sought to situate it in the logic of successive modes of production and transitions between them, with corresponding class powers and political regimes, that he inherited from Marx, Engels or 8 9

Ibid, p. 276. In Defense of Marxism, New York 1965, p. 15.

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Lenin. Hence his insistence that the proper optic for defining the relation of the bureaucracy to the working class was the antecedent and analogous relationships between absolutism and aristocracy, fascism and bourgeoisie; just as the relevant precedents for its future overthrow would be political risings such as those of 1830 or 1848 rather than a new 1789. Because he could think the emergence and consolidation of Stalinism in a historical time-span of this epochal character, he avoided the explanations of hasty journalism and improvised confections of new classes or modes of production, unanchored in historical materialism, which marked the reaction of many of his contemporaries. Secondly, the sociological richness and penetration of his survey of the USSR under Stalin had no equal in the literature of the Left on the subject. Where is Russia Going? remains a topical masterpiece to this day, by the side of which the collected articles of Schachtman or Kautsky, the books by Burnham or Rizzi or Cliff, appear strikingly thin and dated. The major advances in detailed empirical analysis of the USSR since Trotsky’s time have largely come from professional scholars working in Sovietological institutions after the Second World War: Nove, Rigby, Carr, Davies, Hough, Lane and others. Their findings have essentially developed rather than contradicated Trotsky’s account, providing us with far greater knowledge of the inner structures of the Soviet economy and the Soviet bureaucracy, but without an integrated theory of it such as that bequeathed by Trotsky. The greatest historical work on the fate of the Revolution, the writings of Isaac Deutscher, was composed in profound continuity with this legacy. Thirdly, Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism was remarkable for its political balance—its refusal of either adulation or commination, for a sober estimate of the contradictory nature and dynamic of the bureaucratic regime in the USSR. In Trotsky’s life-time, it was the former attitude that was unusual on the Left, amidst the intoxicated enthusiasm not only of Communist parties but of so many other observers for the Stalinist order in Russia. Today, it is the latter attitude that is the more unusual, amidst the apoplectic denunciation not only by so many observers on the Left but even within certain Communist parties of the Soviet experience as such. There is little doubt that it was Trotsky’s firm insistence—so unfashionable in later years, even among many of his own followers— that the USSR was in the final resort a workers’ state that was the key to this equilibrium. Those who rejected this classification for the notions of ‘state capitalism’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ were invariably left with the difficulty of defining a political attitude towards the entity they had so categorized. For if one thing was evident about ‘state capitalism’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ in Russia, it was that it lacked any vestige of the democratic liberties to be found in ‘private capitalism’ in the West. Should not, therefore, socialists support the latter in a conflict between the two, as far the lesser—because ‘non-totalitarian’—evil? The logic of these interpretations, in other words, always ultimately tended (though with individual, less consistent exceptions) to shift their adherents to the Right. Kautsky—father of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ alike in the early 1920s—is emblematic of this trajectory; Schachtman ended his career applauding the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s. The contrasting solidity and discipline of Trotsky’s interpretation 55

of Stalinism has only acquired retrospective relief from the attempts to rethink Stalinism that followed it. The Limitations of Trotsky’s Analysis

At the same time, like all historical judgements, Trotsky’s theorization of Stalinism was to reveal certain limits after his death. What were these? Paradoxically, they concern less the ‘internal’ balance-sheet of Stalinism, than its ‘external’ record. Domestically, Trotsky’s diagnosis of the motor and the brake on Russian economic development, so long as bureaucratic rule persisted, proved extraordinarily accurate. Enormous material progress was to be registered in the Soviet Union in the four decades after he died; but labour productivity has revealed itself more and more as the Achilles heel of the economy, as he predicted. As the epoch of extensive growth has come to an end, over-centralized authoritarian planning has proved increasingly unable to effect a transition to qualitative, intensive growth: a slow-down threatening an entropic crisis for the regime, if unresolved. The durability of the bureaucracy itself, surviving well past Stalin, has been greater, of course, than Trotsky imagined in some of his conjunctural writings; although not a real ‘longevity’ in terms of the historical time of which he spoke at the end of his life. Part of the reason for this persistence has probably been the very social promotion of sectors of the Soviet working class through the channels of the bureaucratic regime itself—the proletarian recruitment of so many of whose cadres has often been emphasized by subsequent scholars (Nove, Rigby, etc.). Another part, of course, has lain in the political atomization and cultural stunning of the greatly enlarged working class that emerged during the 1930s—its lack of any pre-Stalinist memory, which Trotsky underestimated. But by and large, the portrait of Russian society he drew nearly half a century ago remains arrestingly accurate and contemporary in its vision today. Abroad, however, Trotsky’s diagnosis of Stalinism proved more fallible. There were two reasons for this discrepancy in his prognostications. Firstly, he erred in qualifying the external role of the Soviet bureaucracy as simply and unilaterally ‘counter-revolutionary’—whereas in fact it was to prove profoundly contradictory in its actions and effects abroad, just as much as it was at home. Secondly, he was mistaken in thinking that Stalinism represented merely an ‘exceptional’ or ‘aberrant’ refraction of the general laws of transition from capitalism to socialism, that would be confined to Russia itself. The structures of bureaucratic power and mobilization pioneered under Stalin proved to be both more dynamic and more general a phenomenon on the international plane than Trotsky ever imagined. He ended his life predicting that the USSR would be defeated in a war with imperialism, unless revolution broke out in the West. In fact, for all Stalin’s own criminal blunders, the Red Army threw back the Wehrmacht and marched victoriously to Berlin, with no aid from a Western Revolution. European fascism was essentially destroyed by the Soviet Union (242 German divisions deployed on the Eastern Front to a mere 22 on the first Western Front in Italy). Capitalism was abolished over one half of the Continent, by bureaucratic fiat from above—the Polish and Finnish operations extended to the Elbe. Thereafter, the 56

commanded the masses in their assault on power. The states they created were to be manifestly cognate (not identical: affinal) with the USSR, in their basic political system. Stalinism, in other words, proved to be not just an apparatus, but a movement—one capable not only of keeping power in a backward environment dominated by scarcity (USSR); but of actually winning power in environments that were yet more backward and destitute (China, Vietnam)—of expropriating the bourgeoisie and starting the slow work of socialist construction, even against the will of Stalin himself. Therewith, one of the equations in Trotsky’s interpretation undoubtedly fell. Stalinism as a broad phenomenon—that is, a workers’ state ruled by an authoritarian bureaucratic stratum—did not merely represent a degeneration from a prior state of (relative) class grace it could also be a spontaneous generation produced by revolutionary class forces in very backward societies, without any tradition of either bourgeois or proletarian democracy. This possibility—whose realization was to transform the map of the world after 1945—was never envisaged by Trotsky. Stalinism Today

In these two critical respects, then, Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism encountered its limits. But they remain consonant with his central thematic emphasis—the contradictory nature of Stalinism, hostile at once to capitalist property and to proletarian liberty. His error was, ironically, only to have thought that this contradiction could be confined to the USSR itself: whereas Stalinism in One Country was to prove a contradiction in terms. In pointing out the ways in which Stalinism continued to act as an ‘international revolutionary factor’ here, it should not be necessary to recall at the same time the ways in which it also continued to act as an international reactionary factor. Every unpredictable gain had an incalculable price. The multiplication of bureaucratized workers’ states, each with its own sacred national egoism, has inexorably led to economic, political and now even armed conflicts between them. The military shield the USSR can extend to socialist revolutions or national liberation forces in the Third World also objectively increases the dangers of global nuclear war. The abolition of capitalism in Eastern Europe has unleashed the furies of nationalism against Russia, which has in turn responded to popular aspirations in the region with the most purely reactionary series of external interventions, repressive and regressive, of the Soviet bureaucracy anywhere in the world. Czechoslovakia and Poland are only the latest examples. Above all, however, while the basic Stalinist model of a transition beyond capitalism may have propagated itself successfully across the backward zones of Eurasia, its very geographical extension and temporal prolongation—complete with the repetition of dementia like the Yezhovschina in the ‘Cultural Revolution’, and ‘Democratic Kampuchea’—have deeply tarnished the very idea of socialism in the advanced West, its absolute negation of proletarian democracy inhibiting the working class from an assault on capitalism within the structures of bourgeois democracy, and thereby decisively strengthening the bastions of imperialism in the late twentieth century. Rien ne se perd, alas. We have still to settle accounts with 57

permanent threat of the ‘socialist camp’ acted as the decisive accelerator of bourgeois decolonization in Africa and Asia in the postwar epoch. Without the Second World of the 1940s and 1950s, there would have been no Third World in the 1960s. The two major forms of historical progress registered within world capitalism in the past fifty years—the defeat of fascism, the end of colonialism—have thus been directly dependent on the presence and performance of the USSR in international politics. In this sense, it could be argued that, paradoxically, the exploited classes outside the Soviet Union may have benefited more directly from its existence than the working class inside the Soviet Union: that on a world-historical scale the decisive costs of Stalinism have been internal, the gains external. Yet these effects have, of course, been largely objective and involuntary processes, rather than the products of conscious intentions of the Soviet bureaucracy (even the destruction of fascism, which certainly formed no part of Stalin’s plans in 1940). They testify, nonetheless, to the contradictory logic of a ‘degenerated workers’ state’—colossally distorted, yet still persistently anti-capitalist—which Trotsky wrongly suspended at the Soviet frontier-posts. By the late 60’s, the USSR had even achieved something like that strategic parity with imperialism which he had thought impossible under bureaucratic rule, and therewith proved capable of extending vital economic and military aid to socialist revolutions and national liberation movements abroad—assuring the survival of the Cuban Revolution, permitting the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution, securing the existence of the Angolan Revolution. Such entirely conscious and deliberate actions—in diametric contrast to Stalin’s options in Spain, Yugoslavia or Greece—were precisely those Trotsky had ruled out for the Soviet Union, when he pronounced it an unequivocally and ubiquitously counter-revolutionary force beyond its own borders. The second disconfirmation of Trotsky’s interpretation was more radical. For him, Stalinism was essentially a bureaucratic apparatus, erected above a broken working class, in the name of the ‘national-reformist’ myth of Socialism in One Country. The foreign parties of the Comintern, after 1933, he judged to be simply subordinate instruments of the CPSU, incapable of making a socialist revolution in their own countries because to do so would be to act against Stalin’s directives. The most he would concede was that—in absolutely exceptional cases—insurgent masses might compel such parties to take power, against their own will. At the same time, he looked forward above all to the industrialized West as the theatre of successful socialist advance, inspired by anti-Stalinist parties, in the wake of the Second World War. In fact, as we know, history took another turn. Revolution did spread, but to the backward regions of Asia and the Balkans. Moreover, these revolutions were uniformly organized and led by local Communist parties professing loyalty to Stalin—Chinese, Vietnamese, Yugoslavs, Albanian—and modelled in their internal structures on the CPSU. Far from being passively propelled by the masses in their countries, these parties actively mobilized and vertically the immense skein of international consequences and connections, progressive and regressive, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, that followed from the fate that befell the October Revolution, that give rise to the phenomenon we still call Stalinism today. 58