The present work was first published in London twenty years ago in March 1997. Its author was the veteran British Marxist Ted Grant. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Stalinism had led to widespread questioning of socialism and the October Revolution, not least of all in Russia itself. The purpose of this book was to clarify these questions, and answer the propaganda of the enemies of socialism, basing itself on facts, figures and arguments. It was a task that was long overdue.
This was no academic exercise, but a preparation for the future. What was the Soviet Union, why did it collapse and where was Russia now heading? Ted wanted to shed light on the nature of the regime that emerged from the October Revolution, to analyse its contradictory tendencies, to plot its rise and fall, and to point the way forward. The author spent most of his life studying the Russian question and was uniquely qualified to provide a Marxist analysis of it. An active follower of Trotsky since the days of the International Left Opposition, Ted Grant was a leading exponent of the ideas of Trotskyism. A large part of the present work is based on the wealth of material written by Ted over a period of more than 50 years.
Only the Marxists were capable of explaining the processes that were unfolding in Russia, not ex post facto but decades in advance. By contrast, the writings of both the bourgeois critics of the USSR and its Stalinist friends were characterised by the most complete absence of any understanding. From diametrically opposed points of view, they arrived at the same erroneous conclusion – that the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union was a virtually indestructible monolith, which could continue to exist for as long as one could see.
What happened in the Soviet Union can only be explained by using the Marxist method of analysis. Already in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained that the motor force of human history is the development of the productive forces. From this point of view, the nationalised planned economy in the USSR furnished proof of the most extraordinary vitality for decades. Indeed, such a transformation is unprecedented in the annals of human history.
Needless to say, the method used here is that of Marxism, dialectical and historical materialism, because this alone provides us with the scientific tools necessary to analyse complex and contradictory processes, to separate the accidental from the necessary, to distinguish between what men and women think and say about themselves and the material interests which they ultimately represent. Only by such means is it possible to understand what occurred in the Soviet Union, and thus comprehend what is happening now, and, at least tentatively, establish a prognosis for future developments.
Even before the Second World War, when most capitalist pundits, as well as apologists for Stalin, saw no chink in the armour of the ‘monolithic’ regime in Russia, Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader exiled by Stalin, argued that either Stalinism would be overthrown by a political revolution of the working class or, under certain conditions, it could revert to capitalism.