The question of the class nature of Russia has been a central issue in the Marxist movement for decades. Only the dialectical method, which takes the process as a whole and concretely analyses its contradictory tendencies as they unfold, stage by stage, can shed light on the situation. Although Ted was the only one to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union as early as 1972, neither he nor anyone else could have predicted the precise course of events that occurred subsequently.
That should not surprise us. The German poet Goethe once wrote: “Theory is grey, my friend, but the tree of life is evergreen.” The actual working out of the historical process is enormously complicated, not least because it involves what Marxists call the subjective factor, the conscious intervention of human beings. To predict in detail how the historical process develops would require not just scientific perspectives but a crystal ball, something which, alas, is not available to us.
Although he had predicted the collapse of Stalinism, Ted Grant had thought that the restoration of capitalism in Russia was ruled out. Indeed, for a whole period, it was ruled out. The necessity for a planned economy flows directly from the impasse of world capitalism. It is the only way in which the contradictions can be resolved. But the attempt to re-impose a capitalist regime in Russia by no means flowed as a natural conclusion from the crisis of Stalinism.
Ted’s view was strongly influenced by his conviction that, in spite of the brutal repression of decades of Stalinist totalitarianism, the fundamental ideas of Lenin and the October Revolution would remain alive in the Soviet Union. He did not believe that the capitalist counter-revolution would succeed. But all perspectives necessarily have a conditional character. At the time when Ted wrote this book the process of capitalist restoration in Russia had not yet acquired an irreversible character. It was not clear whether it would be completed or whether there could be a reversal. This was an open question, and we had to proceed with due caution, by a process of successive approximations. For that reason, Ted’s analysis of the process had an algebraic and not an arithmetical character.
An important element in Ted’s thinking was his over-estimation of the potential for the crystallisation of a Reiss faction (a section of the Stalinist bureaucracy moving towards a revolutionary position) and the possibility of a political revolution against the bureaucracy. The so-called Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had degenerated to such an extent that it was completely alien to the ideas and principles of Lenin and the October Revolution. Although there was a certain element in the leadership of the CPSU that was in favour of a return to Lenin, and even looking towards Trotskyism, that faction was extremely weak and had no influence on the course of events. It was the pro-capitalist wing of the bureaucracy that proved to be the decisive force. In the moment of truth, the Stalinists were not even capable of defending Stalinism.
The problem that we faced two decades ago was comparable to that faced by Trotsky in the 1920s and 1930s, when he had the task of analysing the phenomenon of Stalinism. There were many turning points on the road of the bureaucratic counter-revolution in the period 1923-36. This was by no means a pre-ordained event. The final victory of Stalin was not determined in advance. As late as 1933, Trotsky held the position that it was possible to reform both the Soviet state and the Communist Parties, a position that led to frequent conflicts with the ultra-lefts.
Trotsky traced the process of the Stalinist counter-revolution through all its stages, laying bare all its contradictions, analysing the conflicting tendencies both within Soviet society and within the bureaucracy itself and showing the dialectical inter-relation between developments in the USSR and on a world scale. He painstakingly followed the process through all its stages, showing concretely the relation between the class balance of forces in Russia, the different tendencies in the Communist Party and their relationship to the classes, the evolution of the world situation, the economy, and the subjective factor. It is true that he varied his analysis at different times.
For example, he initially characterised Stalinism as bureaucratic centrism, a formula which he later rejected in favour of the more precise proletarian Bonapartism. These changes do not reflect any vacillations on Trotsky’s part, but only the way in which his analysis accurately followed the process of bureaucratic degeneration as it unfolded.
In just the same way the capitalist counter-revolution unfolded with many contradictions and cross-currents. Its success was by no means guaranteed. Only after some time did the process reach the critical point where quantity became transformed into quality. This took place after the economic collapse of 1998. A very important element was the subjective factor and the role of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In the 1930s Trotsky referred to the existence of contradictory tendencies within the Stalinist bureaucracy (the Butenko and Reiss factions). Butenko was a Stalinist functionary who defected to the camp of fascism, while Ignace Reiss was an officer of the GPU who broke with Stalin and came out in favour of Trotsky and the Fourth International before he was murdered in Switzerland.
Decades of Stalinist bureaucratic and totalitarian rule had a far greater effect than we realised in throwing back consciousness. Stalin had succeeded more than he could have hoped in liquidating the traditions of Bolshevism. The most advanced elements of the working class had been exterminated, and because the regime lasted far longer than Trotsky had anticipated, the very memory of the genuine traditions of October had been almost wiped out from the consciousness of the Soviet workers and youth.
This was the ground on which the seeds of capitalist counter-revolution were planted and then thrived. But its subjective causes lay deeper, in the contradictions between a nationalised planned economy and bureaucratic rule that was stifling every pore of the Soviet economy and society. The way in which this process unfolded, and the complex interplay between objective and subjective factors, is brilliantly explained in the present work.