Stalin scraps “Internationale”¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter, published in Socialist Appeal in January 1944, argues that Stalin’s decision to replace the Internationale with a new national anthem for the Soviet Union is a decisive symbolic rupture with the revolutionary internationalism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. The author presents this as the logical culmination of a series of counter-revolutionary measures—the dissolution of the Comintern, the restoration of military ranks and officer corps, the abolition of political commissars, Stalin’s adoption of the title Marshal, and the rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church. The capitalist press, including the Daily Mail and the New York Times, is cited as having greeted the change with undisguised approval, interpreting it as the formal abandonment of world revolution and a reassurance to Western imperialism that the Soviet Union now pursues purely nationalist aims consistent with capitalist “law and order.” The Observer is quoted at length to underscore that these changes amount to “a new revolution from above,” a characterisation the author endorses as shrewd, except for its approving tone.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik tradition under Lenin, when the Internationale was adopted as the Soviet anthem precisely to bind the Russian proletariat to the world working class. The Red Army’s original oath, pledging loyalty to the world working class, and Lenin’s description of the army as an arm of the Communist International, are invoked to expose the depth of the betrayal. The polemic is directed squarely at the Stalinist bureaucracy and its apologists in the British Communist Party, whose Daily Worker initially printed the news without comment before issuing a justification that socialism had already been achieved in one country, rendering the Internationale obsolete. The author demolishes this argument by noting that Stalinists had been claiming socialism was established for over a decade; if the anthem was unnecessary now, it should have been unnecessary then. The chapter concludes by welcoming the move as a clarifying blow to working-class illusions, asserting that the banner of the Internationale now belongs exclusively to the Fourth International—the party of Trotsky—and that the song of the Paris Commune and the October Revolution has been officially discarded by traitors.