5. From War to ‘De-Stalinisation’¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 5: From War to ‘De-Stalinisation’¶
The Second World War, for Trotsky, was a continuation of the first interimperialist slaughter. He had predicted in 1931 that a Hitler-led Germany would attack the USSR. Stalin’s diplomacy with the Western ‘democracies’ proved bankrupt; after Munich and Hitler’s annexations, he signed the Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, complete with a secret protocol to partition Poland. Trotsky condemned this as a measure of the Soviet bureaucracy’s degeneration. He insisted on the unconditional defence of the USSR against Hitler while simultaneously preparing to overthrow Stalin, prioritising the preservation of state property and the planned economy. The Pact was a betrayal of the international working class, but British and French policy was equally hypocritical, aiming to isolate the USSR and turn Hitler east. Stalin halted anti-fascist propaganda, handed German anti-fascists to the Gestapo, and sent congratulations to Berlin.
Stalin’s refusal to act on repeated warnings of invasion left the USSR catastrophically unprepared. The Purges had destroyed the Red Army’s best generals, including Tukhachevsky, whose Blitzkrieg theory the Wehrmacht copied. Khrushchev later admitted the Purges undermined discipline and caused the catastrophic defeats of 1941. Stalin demolished the Minsk fortified line on his personal orders, gifting Hitler the Barbarossa plan. He dismissed intelligence from border units and Churchill, writing warnings “For the archives”. He forbade defensive preparations and ordered troops not to return fire even after the invasion began. This paralysis lost vast territory and millions of soldiers in the first weeks. Only after releasing purged officers like Rokossovsky from prison did the Red Army shift to flexible manoeuvres. Despite these losses, the Soviet planned economy achieved an unprecedented evacuation of 1,523 industrial enterprises eastwards; by 1942, production had recovered, demonstrating the superiority of nationalised planning over capitalist anarchy. Military spending rose from 15 per cent of national income in 1940 to 55 per cent in 1942, described by Nove as “perhaps the highest ever reached anywhere”. The Battle of Kursk was the most decisive engagement, with 10,000 tanks deployed on each side. Victory allowed the Stalinist regime to survive for decades and extended nationalised property forms to Eastern Europe and China, installing deformed workers’ states of proletarian Bonapartism.
The Chinese Revolution of 1949 was a peasant war, not a proletarian revolution. The peasant Red Army, a classical instrument of Bonapartism, carried out the historical tasks of the working class, leading to inevitable distortions. Mao established a totalitarian one-party dictatorship modelled on Stalinist Russia, which had nothing in common with a workers’ state or the soviets of 1917. Such Bonapartist regimes arose due to the impasse of capitalism in colonial countries, the existence of Stalinist Russia, and the delay of revolution in advanced countries. The Soviet economy achieved remarkable post-war industrial growth, surpassing Stalin’s 1960 targets by 1958. However, the bureaucracy appropriated the wealth, with wage differentials exceeding those in the capitalist West. This inequality, combined with the absence of workers’ democracy, meant the regime was unsustainable.
At Stalin’s death in March 1953, he was preparing another mass purge, exemplified by the fabricated ‘Doctor’s Plot’. His death — likely murder — came at an opportune moment for the bureaucracy. Reforms from above were needed to prevent revolution from below, as shown by uprisings in East Germany and labour camps. Khrushchev’s faction won, executing Beria, reducing forced-labour camps, and loosening economic controls. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev blamed Stalin’s crimes on the ‘cult of the personality’. The text argues this is un-Marxist: Stalin represented the bureaucratic caste, not himself. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 demonstrated that, as Trotsky predicted, the bureaucracy splits when faced with a general proletarian uprising. Power rested in workers’ councils, particularly the Budapest Central Workers’ Council, which added a demand for an end to the one-party state to the four points Lenin outlined in 1917. Its defeat, and the bureaucracy’s survival for another 35 years, negatively affected mass