In 1991 the USSR collapsed after its East European satellite states had first been overthrown in revolutions, bourgeois revolutions. That year has been described as the end of the “short twentieth century”, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” running from 1914-1991. It was a turning-point in world history, and one which obliged socialists everywhere, including those most hostile to Stalinism, to re-evaluate and reorient.
In 1991 the USSR collapsed after its East European satellite states had first been overthrown in revolutions, bourgeois revolutions. That year has been described as the end of the “short twentieth century”, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” running from 1914-1991. It was a turning-point in world history, and one which obliged socialists everywhere, including those most hostile to Stalinism, to re-evaluate and reorient. The book surveys socialist responses at the time, with appendices on the history of Trotskyism and Orthodox Trotskyism; on what we said about Stalinism in the 1960s; and on Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The Left after Stalinism
Reform and revolution
Timeline
The risen people
i. The risen people
ii. Russia retreats from Afghanistan, 1988
iii. Why the Berlin Wall fell
iv. Why the workers want to restore capitalism
v. Stalin’s system collapses
vi. How Gorbachev’s reforms helped bring down Stalinism
vii. Why socialists should support the ban on the “CPSU”
viii. What would you know about socialism, Mr Yeltsin?
ix. Democracy and bourgeois democracy
x. The triumph of unreason in the ex-USSR
xi. Socialism would have been better
xii. The Bolsheviks’ conception of the 1917 revolution
xiii. Trotsky after the collapse of Stalinism
xiv. In the beginning is the critique of capital
xv. Fifteen of the lies against socialism
xvi. What was in the coffin at the funeral of socialism?
xvii. And where were Jacob Sverdlov’s sons?
The left on the fall of Stalinism: Was August 1991 a capitalist counter-revolution against a workers’ state?
Appendix One
The August 1991 coup in the USSR by Socialist Organiser
Appendix Two
An open letter to Ernest Mandel
Notes on the history of Trotskyism and Orthodox Trotskyism
Appendix Three: As we were saying
Ripening seeds of a new October
Moscow Trial 1968
Stalinism with a human face: Czechoslovakia 1968
Bureaucrats' Czechmate
Appendix Four
Vietnam 1968-75
Afghanistan 1979-80
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