The Soviet Union’s place in history
The Soviet Century
Moshe Lewin
Verso Press, 2005, £25-00 (HB)
The 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution is
being used by western commentators and historians to repeat old lies and
distortions about the revolution and its aftermath. An exception is The
Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin, which NIALL MULHOLLAND reviews as one of
the few books published in recent years to shed new light on the
subject.
MOSHE LEWIN IS rare among post-war academic
historians of the former Soviet Union. Rejecting both the cold war
anti-communist ideologues and Stalinist apologists, he attempts to
honestly and objectively analyse the USSR. His historical works often
confirm Leon Trotsky’s brilliant analysis of the Soviet Union, which has
been further developed by genuine Marxism.
Lewin does not give a chronological history of the
Soviet Union but a "presentation to general aspects of the system". He
covers the periods of Joseph Stalin’s rule, from Nikita Khrushchev to
Yuri Andropov, and the Soviet era as a whole. Although heavy in style,
the book is packed with instructive facts and figures – often the fruits
of Lewin’s original research in Moscow archives.
Lewin condemns the attempts by most western
historians to "perpetuate Stalinism, by backdating it to 1917". He also
attacks Russia’s "new power-holders – most of them from the old
nomenklatura but now re-baptised ‘democrats’, ‘liberals’ or
‘reformers’," who "not content with looting and squandering the nation’s
wealth… embarked on a massive propaganda campaign against the old Soviet
system… from the original sin of October 1917 right up to the failed
coup d’état by conservative party stalwarts against Gorbachev in August
1991".
Lewin rejects the argument that the October 1917
Russian revolution was a ‘conspiracy’ made behind the backs of the
Russian people which thwarted the evolution of peaceful capitalist
parliamentary democracy. He shows the real alternatives in 1917, a
socialist revolution or right-wing, bloody reaction. This was clear to
even pro-capitalist ‘liberals’. "Although they were supporters of a
constitutional monarchy, the Cadets – the Liberal party – believed that
even that degree of liberalisation was excluded in Russia for the time
being; and for this reason, they defended a dictatorship".
The "anti-Bolshevik left", the Mensheviks and
Socialist Revolutionaries, who "in principle [were] committed to a
democratic solution" held ministerial positions in the Provisional
Government in 1917 and became "champions of a strong state". These left
parties "never stopped ‘yearning for Miliukov’," a Cadet leader, who, in
turn, "was yearning for the ‘iron fist’ of a monarchist".
Lewin details how the Bolsheviks took power in a
country devastated by war. By the start of 1917 five million Russian
soldiers had died, were taken prisoner or invalided out – one in three
of the total Russian armed forces. The ravages of war, revolution,
famine, disease and civil war (after imperialist armed intervention
against the young Soviet state), had an enormous impact. In January
1923, the population of the USSR was six to nine million below the
January 1914 total. The economy was in ruins: the output of large-scale
industry was only 13% of the 1913 total, grain output no more than
two-thirds of the 1909-13 level, and foreign trade collapsed.
Lewin writes that the 1917 "proclamation of a
‘socialist revolution’ in October meant above all that socialists were
taking power and believed the situation to be revolutionary". However,
the "starting point of Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’ was
the premise that Russia on its own was far from ripe for socialism". For
Lenin too, "the prospect of socialism could only be envisaged on a
European scale".
The clash between Lenin & Stalin
LEWIN GIVES IMPORTANT details about the degeneration
of the Bolshevik party (renamed the Communist Party), in the 1920s.
Important sections of the most politically advanced and self-sacrificing
working class were lost during the civil war years. Between 1917 and
1920 the combined populations of Petrograd and Moscow fell from 4.3
million to 1.96 million. New waves of Communist Party members –
careerists and poorly educated new members with little or no political
experience and without the ethos or ideas of the Old Bolsheviks –
flooded the party, particularly after 1924. For the "old Bolsheviks… the
party was no longer recognisable; it was no longer a party of
revolutionaries totally devoted to the cause of socialism". This milieu
served as the "social background for the politics and ideology of
Stalinism". Lenin "noted with regret that entire sections of the tsarist
administration remained in operation under the new regime… [which] was
obliged to turn not just to the expertise of some specialists but to
whole agencies".
Lewin demolishes another right-wing myth: that the
Stalinist party was a ‘continuation’ of the Bolshevik party. In Lenin’s
time, "policy discussions were a normal procedure… ideological debates
were a normal feature". Congresses and conferences were held even during
the civil war years, when party cadres had "to come straight from the
front". The "founder and leader of the party and the state, Lenin, never
behaved as a despot or dictator in his party… he enjoyed genuine
authority". Yet, however "highly respected", Lenin was "frequently
subjected to strenuous attack" at party meetings.
Lewin describes how Stalin, politically and
culturally inferior to all other Bolshevik leaders, and "secretive,
intensely self-centred, cautious and scheming", was well suited to
represent the interests of the rising bureaucracy. The civil war
conditions gave "free rein" to "features of a profoundly authoritarian
personality".
Lewin concludes that the ending of the civil war saw
two divergent orientations surface in the Bolsheviks. One based around
Stalin, whose "clear and simple vision" was to create "an untrammelled,
unfettered, ultra-centralised and self-serving power". In contrast,
Lenin and Trotsky represented genuine socialist internationalism "that
concentrated on equipping Russia with a state that defended the
interests of the majority of the population".
Documents that were only available after Gorbachev’s
‘perestroika’ of the 1980s "contain the most revealing material about
the clash between Lenin and Stalin… it ran virtually the whole gamut of
system building: ideology, the respective roles of party and state,
economic policy, and especially the strategically crucial issue of
policies towards the peasantry".
Letters between Lenin and Stalin show "Stalin’s
hostility towards Lenin and Lenin’s growing irritation with Stalin – a
deepening personal and ideological divide". Lewin believes Stalin’s
"total lack of respect, and soon, hatred, for Lenin were indirectly fed
by his obsessive hatred of Trotsky, who stood in the way of Stalin’s
self-image as a great military strategist and statesman". Lenin "relied
on Trotsky and his prestige… he worked closely with him".
Stalin’s undemocratic conduct, particularly towards
national minorities, and his tendency to represent the interests of
state officialdom over the interests of workers, led Lenin to send a
letter to the politburo on the eve of the twelfth party congress
demanding Stalin’s removal from the powerful post of party general
secretary. But Stalin was charged by the central committee with
supervising Lenin’s medical treatment, which "allowed him unabashedly to
spy on the sick man". Stalin successfully manoeuvred and Lenin’s wishes
were not brought to the party congress.
Lewin contests that Trotsky did not act decisively
against Stalin and "lost his sense of reality". Citing a report by five
doctors, in June 1922, Lewin speculates: "was illness or extreme fatigue
a factor in this massive failure of political acumen on Trotsky’s part?"
Isolation & exhaustion of the Soviet Union
LEWIN DOES ALLUDE to "broader configurations of
social and political forces, and the available alternatives at a given
moment, are the framework in which leaders can win or lose". The truth
is that the struggle for power could not be reduced to a personal
struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, but was a struggle of living
forces. The Russian working class was exhausted and decimated after
years of civil war. Russia was isolated due to the betrayal of workers’
revolutions in the west by social democracy.
The 1923 German revolution offered the possibility
of the working class coming to power in a major industrialised country,
which would have rejuvenated the Russian revolution. But due to the
mistakes of the German Communist Party leadership, and the
Stalin-Zinoviev dominated Comintern (Communist International) leadership
in Moscow, the German revolution was defeated. This strengthened
reaction in Russia and a sense of demoralisation and defeat among the
Russian working class. These events, and later defeats like the 1926
British general strike and the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, prepared
the way for the coming to power and consolidation of Stalinist reaction.
In 1924 Stalin announced ‘socialism in one country’,
which was anathema to genuine Marxists but reflected the interests of
the privileged tops. In reply, Trotsky pointed out that while the Soviet
Union must industrialise and modernise, generally, this was a long way
from socialism; a society with higher labour productivity and standards
of living than in the most advanced capitalist societies. This
presupposes the working class taking power internationally and
establishing a world socialist planned economy.
Stalin’s ‘theory’ of socialism in one country,
Trotsky correctly warned, would lead to disastrous policies within
Russia (including forced collectivisation of agriculture) and transform
the Communist International into a counter-revolutionary tool of
Stalin’s foreign policy.
For his principled revolutionary opposition, Trotsky
was "systematically vilified and had every possible calumny heaped on
his head… he [Stalin] also wished to erase him [Trotsky] from Soviet
history – via censorship, obviously, but also (astonishingly) by
ascribing Trotsky’s achievements to himself. The country would thus be
offered films in which the military exploits of his sworn foe – for
example, Trotsky’s role in the defence of Petrograd against General
Yudenich’s army in December 1919 – were attributed to Stalin. This is
only one example of his incredible pettiness and envy".
Stalin eventually became "sole ruler". The party was
"stripped of the ability to change its leadership through elections".
The "lack of equality and democracy inside the party ranks was one of
the key issues raised by the opposition while it could express itself.
But it was met with demagogic denials…"
GPU (secret police), trade union and party archives
"contain a mass of material" on the "mood and opinions of specific
social groups", particularly of disgruntled workers. Lewin comments:
"During the 1920s, GPU reports on labour disputes were mainly critical
of both administrative and party bosses, who were accused of
indifference and incompetence when it came to dealing with workers’
grievances".
From 1922 to 1935, approximately, "one and a half
million members left the party, mostly by failing to pay dues and
thereby letting their membership lapse. Others drifted away and many of
them were subsequently expelled".
The Stalinist counter-revolution created a new type
of regime: "the USSR was not capitalist; ownership of the economy and
other national assets was in the hands of the state, which in practise
meant the summit of its bureaucracy".
The Stalinist terror
TROTSKY DESCRIBED STALINISM as a ‘transition’
between the camps of capitalism and socialism, which would either
progress towards socialism (which would require a political revolution
in Russia and social revolutions in capitalist countries) or regress to
capitalism. The ruling bureaucracy was not a ‘ruling class’ but a
parasitic excrescence, and the Soviet Union was a ‘degenerated workers’
state’, in which the nationalised, planned economy remained (a
fundamental conquest of the October revolution) and which Marxists
defended. The monstrous show trials and physical liquidation of all
opposition to Stalin’s rule saw most "yielding to Stalin. Trotsky,
forced into exile, was the main exception".
Although Lenin was safely dead, by 1924 Stalin had
to move against the other Old Bolsheviks and the working class. The
Cheka police, created by the Bolsheviks to resist capitalist
counter-revolution, "fought for a great cause, risked their lives and
died for it". The NKVD secret police, under Stalin, "tortured and killed
masses of innocent people".
The scale of the Stalinist terror is disputed by
historians and Lewin avails of new available archive documents to try to
reach an estimate. According to some sources, 1937-38 saw the arrest of
1,372,392 people, of whom 681,692 were shot. Sources for 1930-53
indicate 3,778,000 people arrested, of whom 786,000 were executed. "The
majority of delegates to the 1934 seventeenth congress – 1,108 of them –
had been arrested and 848 shot". Between 1937-39, "Stalin and Molotov
personally signed around 400 lists of people to be executed (a total of
44,000 names)". The purges saw the extermination of "most of the old
cadres". Over 30 years, around four million people were sentenced for
political crimes and 20% were shot.
‘Justice’ was brutal and swift. In most instances
the ‘accused’ were not even present at their ‘trail’, which typically
lasted ten minutes, resulting in sentences of five to 25 years hard
labour or immediate execution. The regime created the dreaded ‘gulag’
system of labour camps and prisons. This produced huge slave labour
armies, which became a key component of the Stalinist economy. From
1934-53 about 1.6 million inmates died in captivity.
As the bloody 1930s wore on, "any organised
opposition, whether open or clandestine, was now impossible". Yet
"individual demonstrations, as well as politically charged collective
reactions – disorder, strikes, withdrawal from the party (however
discreet) – allows us to suggest that the populace and many party
members were not exactly mute… One of the forms of protest [was] a wave
of suicides" which, Lewin believes, were "not always desperate acts by
the powerless; they were also courageous gestures of protest".
Many more people died under Stalin as a result of
"demographic losses in the broadest sense". Forced industrialisation
"led to excess deaths in peacetime of the order of ten million or more",
many during the 1933 famine.
While showing the enormous numbers of deaths under
Stalinism, Lewin rejects what he regards as the grossly inflated figures
given by anti-communist western historians, who often included peacetime
and wartime deaths from 1914-45 (74 million). These cold war historians
provide "fictitious body-counts in which anything goes as long as the
record of ‘communism’ is drenched in ever more blood. When, for example,
80 million corpses are laid at its door, we might wonder: why not twice
as many?"
Three phases of Stalinism
ALL ELEMENTS OF workers’ democracy were destroyed by
the new rulers. The Bolshevik party, Lewin remarks, was transformed into
a bureaucratic apparatus. "The old party principle of the ‘party
maximum’ (whereby a member, whatever his position in the hierarchy,
could not earn more than a skilled worker) was abandoned as early as
1932, along with other remnants of the initial egalitarianism". Stalin
and his henchman, Molotov, made "all decisions", via a "completely
secret channel of communication".
The character of the dictatorship had extreme
consequences: "A highly centralised state, taking on a mass of tasks
that are often simply not feasible". With disastrous consequences,
Stalin imposed his opinions on the fields of science, industry,
agriculture, art, literature and education.
In 1937, Stalin destroyed the Red Army high command,
as a result of his fear of opposition being expressed through it. In the
run up to world war two, Marshal Tukhachevsky "virtually bombarded
Stalin with memos and articles about the need to prepare for a war that
would require massive technological resources and in which mobile armies
would play an unprecedented role". Tukhachevsky’s advice was ignored,
and he was arrested, "atrociously beaten" and dragged before Stalin. At
the start of the war, the German army employed such a strategy against
Soviet troops to devastating effect. Lewin remarks, "with the likes of
Tukhachevsky, the tragedy could have been avoided".
Lewin outlines three phases of the development of
Stalinism: the "elimination of Leninism and taming of the party"; the
"extermination of the historical party via the purges and the rewriting
of its history"; and "dispensing with ideological liabilities and
switching to a nationalist ‘great power’ ideology, comparable to tsarism
and adopting its attributes". The reference to ‘Great and Holy Russia’
in the Soviet Union’s national anthem "rounded off this new-old
rhetorical format".
However, the system’s "absolutist features,
befitting another age, were profoundly incompatible with the effects of
forced industrialisation in response to the challenges of the new
times". The ruling bureaucracy realised things had to change after the
death of Stalin in 1953. The coming to power of Nikita Khrushchev and
‘de-Stalinisation’ saw the eventual dismantling of the gulag camps and
industrial slave labour complex and changes in the penal system. Charges
like ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ or ‘enemy of the people’ were
removed from the criminal code.
Despite the ending of some of the most draconian
repression, Soviet workers were still denied basic labour rights. When
the Bolsheviks came to power, labour laws were a prominent part of the
government’s agenda: the eight-hour working day, two weeks’ paid
holiday, pensions, unemployment, sickness and disability insurance. The
"principle of equal pay for equal work was proclaimed", comments Lewin.
But the rise of Stalinism meant that "between 1930 and 1940 most of the
1922 labour code had been rendered obsolete".
Workers were forced to take any measures in their
struggle against state managers, such as by "changing jobs". KGB
documents record major workers’ unrest at Novocherkask, in the
Rostov-on-Don region, between 1-3 June 1962, where "protest exploded in
an important factory and spread to the whole city". This witnessed mass
demonstrations, blockades of trains, attacks on party and KGB officers,
and soldiers fraternising with strikers. Moscow sent troops to quell the
protests, killing 23. Events at Novocherkask convinced the central
committee to strengthen the KGB secret police.
Post-war economic development…
LEWIN TRACES post-war Soviet economic development,
which saw big economic gains and improvements in living standards.
Between 1950-60, agricultural output grew by 55% and urban housing stock
doubled. Healthcare saw "great improvements", with infant mortality
rates dropping from 182 per thousand live births in 1940 to 81 in 1958
and 27 in 1965. Education levels rose: the numbers in higher education
trebled from 1.25 million students to 3.86 million from 1950-66. Peasant
incomes grew rapidly, pensions rose and wage differentials narrowed. The
Soviet Union enjoyed "some spectacular successes, especially in
aerospace". Lewin quotes another historian: "By 1965 the Soviet Union
faced the future with confidence, observed by the capitalist powers with
considerable alarm". (RW Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin
to Khrushchev, Cambridge 1998)
These spectacular economic achievements were as a
direct result of the nationalised planned economy, despite the dead
weight of the bureaucracy. Today, pro-capitalist commentators rubbish
and dismiss the achievements of the Soviet Union. Yet it has to be
emphasised that Russia was one of the most underdeveloped countries in
the world in 1917 but, in a matter of a few decades, it became a modern,
industrialised country, a ‘superpower’.
By the end of the Soviet era "modernisation had
progressed quite far towards western models". Lewin observes "the
remarkable development of education and intellectual culture as a
whole". Soviet citizens became renowned for being great readers of
quality works of world literature, "not to mention their passion for
poetry". Since capitalist restoration, Lewin laments "such qualities
have almost entirely vanished".
The country’s economic model "remained basically
Stalinist [and] contained dangerous disequilibria". The ruling
bureaucracy prioritised heavy industry and armaments, but was incapable
of developing a modern, complex economy. That required democratic
workers’ planning, control and management.
With 200,000 enterprises and 100,000 construction
sites spread across the country, the central committee decided in 1957
it had to "enhance republican and local powers". But efforts to reduce
and rationalise the "command-administrative system", to make it "more
efficient, less expensive and more responsive to leadership and public
opinion, had been ineffectual".
A Russian academic, Nemchinov, warned officialdom in
1965, "a system which is so harnessed from top to bottom will fetter
technological and social development; and it will break sooner or later
under the pressure of the real processes of economic life". Lewin
believes Nemchinov and others represented a "ferment of considerable
intellectual and practical import", but this came to an end with the
debilitating Brezhnev years. By the time Gorbachev launched perestroika,
the "men of the 1960s" were "already worn out".
… but massive waste & mismanagement
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM was the ruling bureaucracy,
whose size – estimated in 1970, as a two million-strong layer of nachal’
niki (‘bosses’) – and insatiable drive for perks, power and privileges,
increasingly seized up and strangled the economy.
Reports to the ruling elite in the 1960s detailed
enormous "wastage and loss of raw materials", fuel and electricity and
the "production of goods that were too heavy and/or too primitive on
account of obsolescent production techniques and methods". Losses due to
shortages of stock and misappropriation of goods in commercial
organisations and the food industry were legion. Research and culture
facilities were underused.
Lewin concludes, "the system was approaching the
critical point where ‘waste’ was going to render it a historical
aberration; a system that produced more costs than goods… if it
continued to limp along, it was because the country possessed immense
resources".
Some ‘experts’ thought the costly arms sector (40%
of all new machines manufactured in the USSR were intended for ‘special
purposes’) could help revive the civilian sector. Lewin describes this
as "another pipe dream". The military-industrial complex saw
"technological progress rooted in waste and utter disregard for costs",
and exacerbated by "excessive secrecy". The cold war propelled the USSR
"into an arms race that helped to perpetuate the worst, most
conservative features of the system and to reduce its ability to reform
itself".
The Soviet ‘planning’ system, Lewin concludes,
"whose targets were almost exclusively quantative", failed to meet
social needs. The entire economic and social system was in "disarray and
decaying". Labour shortages grew and labour productivity declined.
Labour productivity rates did increase 7.7% per annum between 1951-60,
but only by 5.6% between 1961-65. Although the rate of growth in some
industries was "still high", overall it lagged substantially behind the
advanced capitalist countries. US labour productivity was 2.5 times
higher in industry and services and 4.5 times higher in agriculture.
Reforms: too little too late
YET THE BUREAUCRACY fiercely resisted attempts at
‘reform’. One of the reasons Lewin gives for the plot to remove
Khrushchev in 1964 were some of his "dangerous ideas for the
apparatchiks, especially the proposal to introduce mandatory rotation of
officials at all levels after a certain age", as well the hostility
Khrushchev earned from ‘conservatives’ for ‘de-Stalinisation’ and the
loss of prestige and disorientation it caused. Lewin believes that some
later Soviet leaders, in particular Yuri Andropov, were keenly aware of
the problems of the economy and the need to tackle the bloated
bureaucracy. Andropov "purged a whole layer of powerful, backward
looking apparatus officials that had been the lynchpin of the previous
leadership". But by 1985 Gorbachev, "who was Andropov’s heir, [and] had
many of the right ideas… was destined for a downfall that was as pitiful
as his rise had been meteoric…"
Neither Andropov nor any other Soviet leader could
have ended the crisis through ‘reforms’. Economic stagnation forced the
Soviet leaders to strike blows against the most conspicuously greedy
sections of the bureaucracy and to try to stave off potential social
explosions from below. But bureaucratic control and domination of
society, as a whole, was the problem. Only a political revolution, where
the working class would throw the bureaucracy off its back and
re-introduce workers’ democracy, could have liberated the enormous
potential of the nationalised economy.
The rate of growth of national income fell as
economic crisis grew: 5.7% in the 1950s, 3.7% in the first half of the
1970s and 2% in 1980-85. From the mid-1970s, gross national product was
increasing less rapidly than in the US, and much less rapidly than in
several ‘newly industrialised countries’. By the early 1970s, the Soviet
Union entered into a downswing, before sinking definitively into
‘stagnation’.
As the economy stagnated, wages lost their
purchasing power, and many in the population were forced to find some
additional economic activity on top of their state job. It is estimated
that the ‘shadow economy’ multiplied 18-fold from 1960-90; one third of
it in agriculture, a further third in commerce and catering, and the
rest in industry and construction. By the end of the 1980s, around a
fifth of the population was engaged in the shadow economy and it made up
30-50% of parts of the service economy.
Trotsky & political revolution
IN THE LATE 1980s to early 1990s, the regime "died
after exhausting its inner resources and collapsed under its own
weight". Lewin speculates that the "country’s inability to embark on the
new scientific and information revolution must have engendered a sense
of powerlessness in some ruling circles". He discerns the
"crystallisation of a proto-capitalism within the state-owned economy"
as the "uncontrollable bureaucracy, free of all curbs" began to "attack
the sacrosanct principle of state ownership of the economy". State
ownership of assets and the means of production were "slowly eroded,
initially in the formation of veritable fiefdoms inside ministries, and
then in the de facto privatisation of enterprises by their managers".
Lewin correctly states the "imperative to resolve
the problem of growing labour shortages and arrest economic decline by a
dramatic rise in labour productivity… implied nothing less than a
revolution". He asks: "Can bureaucracy be controlled by another
bureaucracy or even by itself? Our answer is a categorical ‘No’. Control
can be exercised by a country’s political leaders and citizens. It is
for them to decide the relevant tasks and the means required to
implement such control". Lewin states that "socialism involves ownership
of the means of production by society, not a bureaucracy. It has always
been conceived as a deepening – not a rejection – of political
democracy". In contrast, "what we witnessed in the Soviet Union was
state ownership of the economy and a bureaucratisation of economy and
polity alike".
Trotsky talked concretely about the class forces
involved in overthrowing the ruling bureaucracy and the character of a
genuine workers’ state. He advocated political revolution to end
Stalinism, ie independent workers’ organisation and action to overthrow
the rule of the bureaucracy and to re-introduce workers’ democracy.
Lewin stresses the Soviet Union needed to end
economic crisis by "switching to a mixed economy". Technological and
economic reforms "were inextricably bound up with political reforms…
only a revitalised political force could compel the bureaucracy to make
the transition to a mixed economy". Trotsky is cited as providing
authority for the call for a mixed economy in the early 1920s. Lewin
writes that Trotsky held socialism in Russia to be "a long-term project"
and to "realise it" required "following in the footsteps of the market
economy".
Trotsky referred to what became the New Economic
Policy (NEP) which was introduced in 1921 as a temporary measure to
replace ‘war communism’. It allowed limited growth of free trade inside
the Soviet Union and foreign trade concessions alongside the
nationalised and state-controlled sectors of the economy. Both Lenin and
Trotsky warned that the ‘NEPmen’ – petty traders, merchants and
swindlers, who benefited from the policy – were a potential base for
capitalist restoration.
In a socialist economy there would be room for the
‘market’ (involving small producers, artisans, etc) but to meet the
basic needs of all, and to transform living standards and society,
requires the nationalisation of the main pillars of the economy, under
the democratic control, planning and management of working people.
Understanding the history of the Soviet Union is not
an academic exercise. It is vital for the new generation of workers and
youth to learn all the lessons from the Russian revolution, and why and
how it degenerated, as a guide to future revolutionary opportunities.
Already, many of the same issues are posed in Venezuela, where Hugo
Chávez has pronounced a ‘socialism of the 21st century’. Alongside the
indispensable writings of Trotsky, Lewin’s The Soviet Century – for all
the differences revolutionary socialists hold with it – is an important
addition to the historical analysis of the former Soviet Union.
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