Even though it was Stalinism that had failed not socialism, the collapse of the totalitarian regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe ideologically disarmed workers’ organisations, changing the world balance of class forces for a whole historical era. IAIN DALTON reviews an important new collection of Peter Taaffe’s writings.
The Collapse of Stalinism – its causes and consequences
By Peter Taaffe
Published by Mentmore Press, 2026, £12.99
The collapse of Stalinism was a major turning point in world history, alongside the victory of the October 1917 revolution and the outcome of the second world war the third most significant turning point in the 20th century in shaping the world balance of class forces. Whilst previous material produced by the Socialist Party, such as the Rise of Militant book, covered how the regimes in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed from 1989 onwards, this new publication adds a richness to understanding how this process took place. It does so through articles written by the late former Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe, stretching over a period of some 45 years.
The book splits into three sections, the first dealing with the character of the Stalinist states. The workers’ democracy of the early years of the Russian revolution under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky is separated by a river of blood from the brutal, dictatorial regime that is depicted in Peter’s reviews of two books by Soviet dissidents and two by a historian about the rise of Stalinism.
Stalinism was a product of the isolation of the revolution, the backwardness of Russian society and the growing influence of a conservative layer within the state bureaucracy, finding its key representative in Joseph Stalin. The relatively healthy workers’ state, based on the Soviets, democratically elected workers councils, degenerated into a regime in which workers’ power was usurped by a parasitic bureaucratic caste.
In order to consolidate its control, the bureaucracy was forced to wage a one-sided civil war against almost everyone who had been in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian revolution. Peter reviews books by Russian Marxist Vadim Rogivin who details the monstrous events that were needed to carry this through: show trials where confessions were forced out of participants under the threat of execution of their families, tens of thousands sent to Siberian penal camps and shot en masse.
The Left Opposition, headed by Leon Trotsky, opposed these policies, and were the main victims of Stalinist repression. The books reviewed by Peter of Soviet dissidents, Leopold Trepper and Petro Grigorenko, vindicate their stand. As Peter comments, the words of Leopold Trepper on this are worth quoting in full:
“And yet we went along sick at heart, but passive, caught up in machinery we had set in motion with our own hands. Mere cogs in the apparatus, terrorised to the point of madness, we became the instruments of our own subjugation. All those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine are responsible, collectively responsible. I am no exception to this verdict. But who did protest at that time? Who rose up to voice his outrage?…”.
“The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra… Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess’, for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism”.
Why did Stalinism collapse?
Part two deals with the growing crisis within the Stalinist regimes and how a section of the ruling bureaucracy eventually sought a way out through a return to capitalism. This was not a pre-ordained conclusion – as Peter notes, quoting the Financial Times less than a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall: “East Germany has no mass movement on the horizon yet, Czechoslovakia’s leadership cannot allow the questioning of the source of its legitimacy in the Soviet invasion of 1968, Hungary faces dissidents, but not yet a proletariat aroused. Bulgaria will introduce Soviet-style reforms, without yet Soviet-style chaos or fledgling democracy; Romania and Albania are clamped in iron”.
Peter and the rest of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), had anticipated that, like the ultimately unsuccessful movement in Hungary in 1956, the struggle to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy would be a political revolution to restore workers’ democracy. The book, however, charts how this position evolved through the 1980s. The article, Andropov and After, contains an analysis of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980-1981 and shows how it once again posed the question of political revolution in the Stalinist states.
Peter goes on to analyse Gorbachev’s reforms in the mid-1980s. Until the 1960s, developing the Soviet economy had been a question of imitating and borrowing from the advanced capitalist countries, and society had moved forwards, so much so that the USSR had taken the lead in the space race with the first successfully crewed flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961.
When it was just a question of major infrastructure, basic industries or targeted projects, then top-down planning could get some results. But fully harnessing newly developing technologies, such as IT, and producing goods of sufficient quality, would have necessitated the oxygen of workers’ democracy to direct and check the plan.
With the bureaucracy having become an absolute fetter on the development of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev’s attempt at ‘reform from the top’, his calls for openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika), were conducted in the open, whereas previous attempts at change from above to forestall revolt from below were largely conducted behind the scenes. But whilst Gorbachev merely wanted to renovate the bureaucracy to ensure that the caste maintained its rule, the consequences of what he opened up would move far beyond that.
The impact of the repression of Stalinism meant the working class didn’t have its own independent organisations that could struggle for power. So when their desire for better living conditions fuelled mass movements sweeping the ground from the Stalinist elites, this lack of organisation left a vacuum, as in many of the revolutionary movements in the recent period. A section of the bureaucracy seized the opportunity to convert themselves into capitalists by looting the state, and in Russia consolidated a new gangster capitalism under their rule. In East Germany, unification on a capitalist basis with West Germany was undertaken to stabilise the situation, and to enable West German capitalists to exploit cheaper labour in the East.
Reorientating the movement
The final section of the book deals with the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism. An understanding of its consequences is crucial to correctly evaluating the world economic and political events that have happened since. As the book’s introduction notes: “In order to work out the correct perspectives and programme for the stormy period ahead, it is essential for revolutionary socialists to also look back and understand the causes of the collapse of Stalinism and its consequences”.
These processes provoked debates amongst Marxists and the left in general. As is noted in the book, other left groups drew mistaken conclusions from these events. Some reflected the pessimism of Fidel Castro’s comment that ‘the sun has been blotted out’, in effect capitulating to the idea of capitalism’s predominance now being secured for some time.
Others, such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who viewed the Soviet Union as state capitalist, considered its collapse to be a ‘sideways step’ and as a result viewed the 1990s as being a period more favourable to Marxism than it was – ‘the 1930s in slow-motion’ as they argued. This meant they misunderstood the ideological and organisational consequences for the workers’ movement and the boost that the unleashing of capitalist relations in the former USSR and Eastern Bloc gave to capitalism and globalisation, as well as the contradictions this was storing up.
Within the CWI the question of what was taking place in the USSR and Eastern Europe was a strand of an international debate, ending in a split. The minority who broke from the CWI in the early 1990s, now organised in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), refused to accept that capitalism had been restored in Russia for years.
The catastrophic impact of capitalist restoration in the USSR and Eastern Bloc is discussed, noting that in one year alone, 1992, production levels dropped by 25%. This had a devastating impact on the living standards of Russian workers, with life expectancy decreasing.
Gangsters, former bureaucrats and speculators, bought up the shares workers were given in the privatised industries, consolidating themselves as oligarchs owning vast swathes of former nationalised industries. This laid the basis for the coming to power of ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin in 2000, who has dominated the new capitalist Russian state ever since.
But whilst brutal repression and wars have become synonymous with Putin’s rule, this is storing up new contradictions in Russian society. As Peter concludes in one of the articles dealing with this, “Putin and his like, in showing the bloody face of capitalism, is supplying a powerful lesson to the peoples of the world that only a socialist confederation of Europe and the world can eliminate war and suffering forever”.
Capitalist restoration also had a significant ideological impact in the workers’ movement; one article deals with the replacement of Clause Four, Part IV of Labour’s constitution. The commitment contained in that clause to public ownership, which had been introduced in the wake of the Russian revolution, was seen as key to the transformation of the party into New Labour, an openly bourgeois party. This was part of a process amongst sections of the leaders of the workers’ movement, not just in Britain but internationally, embracing capitalism as the only way forward. Trade union leaders embraced ‘partnership’ methods with the employers, holding back struggles and enabling anti-working class counter reforms to be carried out, while the former social democratic parties were transformed into capitalist parties.
These processes are what led the CWI to pose the question of the ‘dual task’; continuing to build a revolutionary Marxist organisation that can draw on the treasure trove of Marxism and the working class’s experience of struggle in order to put forward a socialist programme to transform society, whilst at the same time fighting to rebuild the workers’ movement, including new mass parties of the working class, which would play a key role in developing the combativeness and consciousness of the working class and provide a forum for debate as to what was necessary to transform their conditions.
In conclusion, this collection is vital reading to understand the profound impact that the collapse of Stalinism had in the previous period, as well as its lingering legacy in the ‘post-post-Stalinist’ period we are now moving into, as the workers movement starts to recover and the idea of a socialist alternative to decaying capitalism once again begins to come to the fore.