14.11.1996

Stalin on Russian Party

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, November 12 1926

Stalin’s report on the internal Party situation at the 15th Conference of the CPSU naturally took the form of an exposure of the big differences between the opposition and the overwhelming majority of the Party.

After tracing the consolidation of the opposition into a single bloc, devoid of any real basis in principle, Stalin dealt with Zinoviev’s assertion that Lenin was always in favour of coalition of all forces within the Party: reminding Zinoviev that the test of such a coalition is, “Does it increase the fighting capacity of the Party? Does it defend the Party against Menshevism?” The present opposition was a purely unprincipled bloc, rather reminding one of Trotsky’s bloc with the Mensheviks in 1912 ...

Therefore, he said, a decisive struggle against the false ideas of the opposition is a prime necessity. “And their basic error is the question of the possibility of building up socialism in our country, or the question of the character and prospects of our revolution.”

In the 40s of the last century, Engels had declared that a revolution in one country could not succeed, owing to the fact that capitalism had become universal, and had connected all countries in one universal market. The revolution must take place in all advanced countries at more or less the same time (See Engels The principles of communism section 19).

But this was before the stage of monopolist capitalism had been reached, which, as Lenin had pointed out, had brought a new factor in capitalist development into the front rank - namely, the law of unequal development as between the different imperialist countries.

Lenin had explained how this fact of unequal imperialist development ... made it possible for a revolution to take place in a single capitalist country, and for the workers to expropriate their own capitalists and organise social production as a basis for the world revolution. It was possible to break through the capitalist front, owing to the internal conflicts which were weakening imperialism.