50 Years Ago: The Stalin Dictatorship

The late Prince Kropotkin stated at the outset of the Russian revolution: “The Bolsheviks are not what the Western workers think they are”. He was correct. The Western workers thought them to be Socialists: they were mistaken.

Socialism is the noblest cause that ever appealed to the world or to man; the Bolsheviks defamed those who would not accept their leadership and have dragged the working-class movement into the sewers of opportunism and corruption: they used their organisation, the Communist Party, as a means of enabling them to influence the Labour movement of the Western world in the interests of Soviet Russia: the Communist Party became the foreign office of the bureaucracy of the Kremlin, and now. under the dictatorship of Czar Stalin, functions as the ruthless tool of imperialism.

[From the Socialist Standard. April 1940.]