The Role Of Bolshevik Ideology In The Birth Of The Bureaucracy
(This article was first published in Socialism ou Barbarie#35(1964),as an introduction to Alexandra Kollantai's The Workers Oppostion,but it can stand alone as a refutation of the standard Leninist/Trotskyist claim that the Soviet Union only degenerated post 1924 i.e after Lenin's death,and as such has been published in pamphlet form by a number of groups.)
We are happy to present to our readers the first translation into French of Alexandra Kollontai's pamphlet The Workers' Opposition in Russia. This pamphlet was published in Moscow at the beginning of 1921, during the violent controversy that preceded the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik party. This Congress was to close discussion forever on this controversy as well as on all the others.
People have not finished talking about the Russian Revolution, its problems, its degeneration, and about the regime it ultimately produced. And how could one? Of all the revolts of the working class, the Russian Revolution was the only victorious one. And of all the working class's failures, it was the most thoroughgoing and the most revealing.
The crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the Budapest uprising in 1956 teach us that insurgent workers encounter immensely difficult organisational and political problems, that an insurrection can find itself isolated, that the ruling classes will not hesitate to employ any kind of violence or barbarian savagery when their power is at stake. The Russian Revolution, however, obliges us to reflect not only on the conditions for a proletarian victory but also on the content and the possible fate of such a victory, on its consolidation and development, on the seeds of a failure whose import infinitely surpasses the victory of the troops of the Versaillese, of Franco's army, or of Khrushchev's tanks.
Since it crushed the White armies and yet succumbed to a bureaucracy it had itself generated, the Russian Revolution puts us face...
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