Long Live the Russian Revolution: War Awakens Russian Masses¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Russian Revolution of October 1917, despite being betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucracy, remains the fundamental source of the Soviet Union’s economic and military strength. It contends that collective ownership and planned economy have proven superior to capitalism, enabling the USSR to emerge from five years of war as the dominant power in Europe and Asia. However, the text insists that virtually nothing of the revolution’s original content survives except its basic conquest of nationalised property. Stalin has replaced the internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky with reactionary nationalism, restored tsarist military insignia, and appeals to feudalist traditions such as Suvorov and Peter the Great rather than to revolutionary traditions.
The chapter draws on a speech by Kalinin, President of the USSR, reported in the BUP on 25 October, to demonstrate the growing ferment among workers and peasants, particularly returning soldiers. Kalinin admitted that soldiers returning from Germany were demanding a “new order” at home, having been impressed by German living standards. The chapter uses this to expose the bureaucracy’s deception: conditions under Hitler and the Balkan dictatorships were actually higher than in the USSR. This is attributed not to the October Revolution but to the backward economy inherited from tsarism, aggravated by bureaucratic abuses. The bureaucracy’s crime was to claim that socialism had been built in Russia and that “socialism in one country” was possible.
A further anecdote from Kalinin—a woman demanding boots while he wore good ones—is turned against the bureaucracy. The text argues that the masses now understand the role of the usurpers: bureaucrats live like tsarist aristocrats while workers and peasants lack boots, clothing, and food. The war has given the masses self-confidence, and they are beginning to demand equality and democratic control. The growth of inequality has paralleled the bureaucracy’s degeneration, but industrial expansion and the abolition of illiteracy have widened the gulf between masses and officials.
The chapter’s polemic is directed squarely at Stalinism. It attacks the theory of “socialism in one country” as a deception that led to the disaster of the Communist International. It argues that the bureaucracy, terrified of the masses, now aids imperialism in strangling European revolution. The coming years, it predicts, will see the Soviet masses demand workers’ democracy: revived Soviets, workers’ control of the economy, abolition of extreme differentiation, free elections, and a return to Marxist internationalism. Only a political revolution overthrowing the bureaucracy can restore Soviet democracy. The Fourth International, leading the struggle against world capitalism, can assist in regenerating the degenerate but isolated workers’ state, which will eventually unite within a Socialist United States of Europe.