8. Socialism in One Country¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 8: Socialism in One Country¶
This chapter dissects the theory of Socialism in One Country as a pivotal ideological battleground that determined the fate of the Russian Revolution and the international communist movement. The text opens by exposing Monty Johnstone’s false balance: his claim that both Trotskyist and Stalinist accounts are equally distorted masks his ultimate endorsement of Stalin’s position. Yet the historical record demolishes this retrospective justification. Before 1924, Stalin himself held the opposite view, writing in Foundations of Leninism that socialism’s final victory required the joint efforts of the proletariat in several advanced countries. By 1926, he had reversed this position, claiming the party had always believed otherwise. Lenin, Trotsky, and even the Mensheviks all agreed that completing socialist transformation in Russia without Western revolution was impossible—a consensus flowing from fundamental Marxist premises about capitalism’s international character.
The struggle over this theory was no academic debate but a life-and-death conflict. The Left Opposition fought for planning, industrialisation, and internationalism, while the Stalinist bureaucracy leaned on kulaks and Nepmen, reflecting reactionary strata enriched by the revolution. The defeats of the European revolutionary wave (1918–23) are attributed to Social Democratic treachery, not any inherent impossibility of revolution. Stalinist policy, abandoning revolutionary internationalism for deals with bourgeois governments, contributed to further defeats in Germany (1923), Britain (1926), and China (1927), which reinforced the bureaucracy and doomed the Left Opposition.
The chapter argues that Stalin’s post-1928 industrialisation does not retroactively validate the Opposition’s programme, as conditions had changed. The catastrophic costs of forced collectivisation—grain harvests collapsing from 835 million hundredweight to 200 million, livestock losses reaching 55% of horses and 40% of cattle, millions of peasants perishing—stand as indictment. Trotsky’s evidence to the Dewey Commission insisted that industrial successes were due to socialised property, not bureaucratic methods, and that output could have been two to three times higher under Soviet democracy.
Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR’s future presented three hypotheses: a revolutionary party overthrowing the bureaucracy to restore Soviet democracy; a bourgeois party restoring private property; or the bureaucracy converting itself into a new possessing class. He did not predict inevitable capitalist restoration, emphasising that the bureaucracy must defend state property from which it derives power. Stalinism is explained as proletarian Bonapartism rooted in Russia’s isolation and backwardness, not socialism. The bureaucracy is a privileged caste requiring political revolution to overthrow it—not a single personality but a layered hierarchy analogous to intermediate layers supporting Western capitalism. The Purges are characterised as a one-sided civil war against Bolshevism, eliminating the Old Bolsheviks and their traditions.
The chapter concludes by confirming Trotsky’s 1928 prediction: the theory of Socialism in One Country would lead to the nationalist degeneration of the Communist International. Stalin cynically used the Comintern as a border-guard for the USSR before disbanding it in 1943. The Eastern European and Chinese revolutions were not genuine workers’ states but grotesquely deformed regimes of proletarian Bonapartism. The subsequent break-up of the Stalinist bloc along nationalist lines—from the Yugoslav split to the Sino-Soviet border clashes—confirmed Trotsky’s analysis. The Stalinist parties everywhere abandoned internationalism for narrow national patriotism, as seen in the “British Road to Socialism” and their ingratiation with national bourgeoisies.