On the relative strength of the USSR¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War not as a weakened state dependent on Anglo-American imperialism, as the Allies had calculated, but as the greatest military power in Europe and Asia, second only to the United States globally. The core claim is that state ownership and planned economy demonstrated their superiority in both peace and war, enabling the USSR to survive the loss of the Ukraine and Donets Basin—where two-thirds of its heavy industry was concentrated—and, virtually unaided, defeat a Germany armed with the resources of all Europe. This was achieved through the transfer and construction of new heavy industrial bases in the Urals and Siberia, combined with high mass morale and a reorganised army command. The chapter insists that the economic system of the USSR stood the test despite the incubus of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which pursued a reactionary, chauvinist policy aimed at sabotaging world revolution.
The text draws heavily on the historical experience of the interwar period, contrasting the USSR’s position after the First World War—when industrial production had collapsed to one-fifth of pre-war levels and the proletariat numbered under two million—with the transformed situation after the Second World War, where the proletariat numbered 20-25 million and hundreds of thousands of technicians had been trained. It cites Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed to illustrate the depth of the earlier crisis. The chapter also references the new Five-Year Plan, which set moderate targets: pre-war production by 1947 and a 50 per cent overall increase by 1950.
The polemic is directed against two targets. First, the chapter attacks the international resolution on the Soviet Union produced by the Fourth International’s Pre-Conference document, which it accuses of one-sidedness and false pessimism. It rejects the claim that the USSR faced imminent economic collapse or destruction through combined Anglo-American pressure, arguing that the loss of Germany and Japan as potential launching pads for war against the USSR, and the persistence of inter-imperialist contradictions, gave the Soviet Union a field for manoeuvre. Second, it polemicises against the political conclusions drawn from this false evaluation: the American SWP’s assertion that the war was still on, the French party’s opportunist proposal for a united propaganda front with the Stalinists, and the refusal of the British Minority to demand the withdrawal of the Red Army from occupied territories. The chapter insists that the bureaucracy remains a relative, not an absolute, fetter on the development of productive forces within the USSR, and that its position is temporarily strengthened by the paralysis of world revolution through the Stalinist parties. Only on a world scale is its reactionary character fully revealed. The most important task for the European masses, therefore, is the defence of the European revolution against Stalinism as well as imperialism, for a proletarian victory in any major European country would sound the knell of doom for the bureaucracy.