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In democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on nongovernment websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”
The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here Are the People Trump Doesn’t Want to Exist.”
Identified from a database obtained by The Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.
It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility.
Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised. Some of those photos were fairly quickly reposted, along with other images whose removal had drawn criticism—photographs of the Code Talkers, for example. But thousands of photos were kept offline, making it clear that the basic goal of that purge, the intent to revise history and erase truths and realities that the Trumpists believe challenge their ideology, remains unchanged.
Reading the Post roundup and other articles on the subject reminded me of an event that, while not identical, was similar in meaningful ways to the Trump team’s chainsaw assault on the Pentagon photo archives. It, however, took place in a very different time and setting—nearly 49 years ago, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was then a journalist in Hong Kong, covering stories in China and elsewhere in Asia. Several years into that assignment, in September 1976, China’s longtime Communist ruler, Mao Zedong, died in Beijing. Less than a month later, in early October, his successors arrested his widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates, now condemned as counterrevolutionary criminals for their leading roles in Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.
Only weeks earlier, hundreds of millions of Chinese and other readers around the world had seen photographs in the Chinese communist newspaper, the People’s Daily, and other official media showing all four sitting in the front row of mourners at Mao’s funeral. After they were arrested, Chinese publications continued to carry those photos—but with Jiang and her three allies, now labeled the “Gang of Four,” airbrushed out. The editing was anything but subtle: Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been in the originals, while their names in the captions were blotted out by vertical rows of X’s.
Though I haven’t found copies of those memorable images, an online search turned up a different set of before-and-after shots without the smudges and blotted-out captions I remember but with equally obvious gaps where each of the four had been standing when the photo was taken.
The technology in that now-distant era was different, but the Communist Party officials who doctored those photographs were acting in the same way and for the same reasons that motivated President Donald Trump’s minions nearly a half-century later, when they eliminated those supposedly DEI-related images and descriptions from the Pentagon archives. Both intended to wipe out any evidence that conflicted with the preferred (and often wildly false) historical narratives propagated by their rulers. Both sought to obliterate visual records that might have raised uncomfortable questions about the political messaging of their leaders and the policies and underlying values they reflected. Both were entirely ready and willing to disregard truth and deny reality in order to protect falsehoods their bosses wanted people to believe.
I have no way of knowing what, if anything, President Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or their censors might know about that earlier example—or anything else about Mao, for that matter, or if any of them have ever even heard of Jiang Qing or the Gang of Four. It’s likely that, like most Americans, they know little or nothing about that now-distant Chinese past. It’s more than likely that they’ve never even heard the name Jiang Qing or the label Gang of Four. Still, the parallels are a chilling reminder that, in democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
I had another first-hand encounter with airbrushed history some years later on a short visit to the other 20th-century communist superpower. That glimpse came during a university-sponsored study tour to the Russian Far East in the summer of 1990, just a year and a half before the final breakup of the Soviet Union. In the decades preceding our trip, the Soviet authorities had preserved the communist structures of government, while continuing to proclaim Marxist-Leninist ideology. They had, however, repudiated the brutal legacy of Joseph Stalin’s rule, which ended with his death in 1953. Consistent with that shift in official thinking was an exhibit at the Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok (named for an explorer and naturalist who had been a pioneer in that once remote region), which I visited twice while there. The exhibit, which had been installed just a year before our trip, offered a remarkable display of artworks and relics that recalled the terror of the Stalin era.
On my first visit to the museum, accompanied by two students from the local university hosting our tour, I walked through the Stalin exhibit with Irina Yatskova, a brisk, forthright woman who was the chief of the museum’s Soviet history department. Irina was also co-chair of the provincial branch of the Memorial Committee, a nationwide organization seeking redress for victims of the terror campaigns of the Stalin era. Over the doorway where we entered the gallery, strands of barbed wire hung between bare boards. They were meant to represent the gates outside the entrance to one of the concentration camps of that era. Inside, one wall was covered with photos from the Stalin years, images of smiling workers or grateful peasants thanking the Soviet ruler for their supposedly happy lives. In front of that display stood a huge blown-up photo of Stalin himself, circled by a ring of inscriptions reproducing the worshipful titles he was customarily accorded during his years in power—“creator of happiness and friendship,” “leader and teacher of the Communist Party,” and dozens more in the same vein.
If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out?
On another wall, a stylized map showed the route by which prisoners were transported to concentration camps scattered across the Soviet Arctic—a journey that began on the Trans-Siberian railroad from the Russian heartland to Vladivostok and then by ship for another 1,400 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, the gateway to Russia’s vast frozen northern region. A row of display cases in front of the map contained bits of memorabilia: prisoners’ ID cards, photographs, a few letters, and two shriveled roses tied with a red ribbon—brought there by a former prisoner’s daughter, Irina told me. There was also a panel listing the names of prominent victims of Stalin’s terror, including many of the top leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who were later exiled, imprisoned, or executed as Stalin eliminated possible rivals for power.
There was, however, a glaring omission from that list. The name of Leon Trotsky, by far the most prominent of the old Bolsheviks who had fallen out of favor under Stalin’s rule, wasn’t on that panel. And Trotsky was similarly missing from a display in a different exhibit, dating from a previous era and reflecting an earlier version of ideological orthodoxy. Focused on the original Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, portrayed in the heroic style traditional in past official propaganda, the exhibit included many photos from 1917 and the following years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. None of them, however, showed Trotsky, even though he was at the time a highly visible revolutionary leader, second only to Lenin himself. When I mentioned that to Svetlana Soboleva, one of the teachers hosting our group who accompanied me on a second visit to the museum a few days later, she replied with a question of her own: How did I know Trotsky wasn’t in the photos, since the captions were in Cyrillic script, which at the time I couldn’t read? I knew because I would recognize Trotsky if I saw him, I replied, and I hadn’t seen him in any of the pictures.
Svetlana looked at me in surprise. “I’ve never seen a photograph of Trotsky!” she said. I was startled—and puzzled. If Stalin’s other high-ranking victims had indeed been officially rehabilitated and their images restored to public view, why, I wondered, was Trotsky still a non-person?
I must have asked that question at the time, but I don’t remember how I framed it, or how she answered. Now, relevant details are easy to find on the Internet—for instance, on a page at the Rare Historical Photos site, which notes that, after sending Trotsky into exile, Stalin ordered him “eliminated from all photos.” His censors also erased other rivals or potential rivals, as strikingly shown in a spread of four successive copies of the same Stalin photo. The original print, from 1926, has him standing with three contemporaries; in three subsequent versions each of them would be deleted, one at a time.
A different web page on the same topic, posted on the HistoryNet site, carries the apt subheadline: “Was Stalin the forefather of Photoshop?”
It’s hard not to see a straight line between Stalin’s version of photoshopping and the purge of the Pentagon archives in 2025, though it’s equally important not to overstate the connection. The United States today in no way resembles the Soviet Union of the 1930s, or China at the time of Mao’s death (or today). The communist regimes had no safeguards against official abuses of power; America’s political and legal systems have many. The rule of law, a functioning structure of government by elected representatives, and independent news media constitutionally protected from official repression, all continue to defend the basic rights of citizens and other residents, and still attempt to defend truth in the face of official distortions. It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility, a thought that would never have crossed my mind before witnessing the opening months of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
Writing this essay, I found myself wondering where his photoshoppers might go from here. Months or years from now, whose names and visual images might they seek to erase from the visual and written record of our history? If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out? Obviously, that’s not a serious thought at this point. But it is one that would never have occurred to me, had the Pentagon files not recently undergone that photo purge. Am I 100% certain that this will never happen? Or will I (and the rest of us) just have to wait and see?
"The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run," said the economist.
In the 1990s, all the talk was about the end of socialism and the unchallenged military and economic superiority of the United States. Nonetheless, two decades later, socialism was revived as a possible political alternative as the Great Recession of 2008 and the intensification of neoliberalism’s cruelties tore a huge hole in people’s faith in capitalism, especially among young people in the United States whose hearts had been captured by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fiery calls for universal healthcare, free public college, and economic and climate justice. Socialism remains a political alternative taken seriously by many across the United States although its vision is still far away from becoming a hegemonic political project.
However, there are different kinds of socialism, and some of them, such as social democracy and market socialism, seek reform rather than the actual replacement of capitalism. On the other hand, the Soviet model, which is the only version of socialism that gave birth to an alternative socioeconomic system to that of capitalism, had many undesirable features and proved unsustainable.
So what would be the ideal system of socialism in the 21st century? In the interview that follows, radical economist David Kotz dissects the lessons drawn from the experience of the Soviet model, explains why reforming capitalism does not solve the problems built into the system of capitalism, and makes a case in defense of democratic socialism as the only sustainable alternative to capitalism. David Kotz is the author of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism and of the soon-to-be-published book Socialism for Today: Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism. He is professor emeritus of economics and senior research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2010-19, Kotz also served as distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the department of political economy at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
C.J. Polychroniou: David, in a soon-to-be-published book titled Socialism for Today, you make the case that democratic socialism is the only alternative to the long list of severe problems (massive social inequalities and economic disparities, environmental degradation, racism, poverty, homelessness, and so on) that plague the United States under capitalism. Now, you acknowledge that a shift to a radically different economic system would be a difficult and costly process but also maintain that the problems mentioned above cannot be solved by reforming capitalism. What do you understand by the term “reform of capitalism,” and do you think all struggles to reform capitalism have ultimately failed?
David Kotz: By reform of capitalism, we generally mean the introduction of institutions and policies that modify the way the system works but without replacing its core features—private ownership of the means of production, the wage-labor relation, and the pursuit of profit by the capitalist class as the basic logic of the system. Since the end of World War II, we have seen two types of reform of capitalism. First, the type of reform that emerged in the industrialized countries after the Second World War and came to be called regulated capitalism or social democratic capitalism and, second, the unrestrained version of capitalism that emerged in the 1980s and has been nothing short of a disaster.
Social democratic capitalism included a more active role for government in the economy, a major role for unions in the capital-labor relation, and changes in the way corporations conduct their businesses. Reforming capitalism along a social democratic line was a process that had started before World War II, thanks to the rise of working-class politics and the fact that socialist parties, in some cases, rose to power. But big business and its political representatives also went along out of fear that capitalism might not survive the political pressures from below without reforms. Sweden led the way to social democratic capitalism in the 1930s, but reform capitalism also spread to other parts of Western Europe after the end of the Second World War. In the United States, reform capitalism took place with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies on account of the Great Depression and had many common features with European social democracy.
"Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers."
Regulated capitalism in the United States produced many benefits for working people. Starting in the early 1950s, labor productivity went up, wages increased, and income inequality remained relatively stable. By the late 1960s, regulated capitalism also led to major improvements in air and water quality and in occupational safety and health. Those regulations were passed under pressure from a broad coalition of environmental activists, consumer product safety activists, and labor unions. People of color also advanced in economic opportunities. Nonetheless, while regulated capitalism created favorable conditions for making progress toward social, economic, and racial equality, full equality remained a chimera. The empirical evidence suggests that racial/ethnic equality and gender equality can be reduced through political and economic struggle but cannot be eliminated. Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers. The improvements made by regulated capitalism were indeed limited and did not resolve all the problems generated by capitalism. Unions had to make major concessions to secure agreements for the reforms from the powerful business interests. The official poverty rate declined over the period of the duration of regulated capitalism, but deep pockets of poverty remained in many parts of the country. The imperialist drive of capitalism also was not tamed in postwar regulated capitalism, and capitalist democracies remained only partially democratic as wealthy individuals and large corporations remained politically powerful.
The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run. Why? Because it generates a powerful drive on the part of capitalists to resist restriction in the pursuit of the maximization of profit, which is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism has always faced periodic economic crises. When such crises occur, capitalists will grab the opportunity to overthrow regulated capitalism. This is what happened in the 1970s, and regulated capitalism gave way to a decade of accelerating inflation and a severe business cycle. The neoliberal reforms of capitalism in the early 1980s were born out of the inability of regulated capitalism to persist and bring long-term stability.
C.J. Polychroniou: OK, but since the aim seems to be full equality and the absence of exploitation from human affairs, the argument can also be rather easily made that 20th-century efforts to build a full-fledged socialist alternative to capitalism also failed. Isn’t that so?
David Kotz: There were two types of post-capitalist systems that emerged from efforts to move beyond capitalism. One was the Soviet model that emerged after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The second was market socialism that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet model. Neither type succeeded in building a sustainable alternative system. But let me focus on the first type since it did abolish capitalism and build an alternative system. The Soviet model, which spread to many other countries around the world, though with some variations, relied initially on an institution called “soviets,” elected by workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. It was supposed to be the supreme authority in the new social and political order. But soon after the revolution, the Bolshevik party established a repressive regime that did not tolerate dissent. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin became the top leader of the Soviet Union. He established a brutal dictatorship that went on to eliminate much of the leadership that had made the revolution.
Under the Soviet model, all enterprises were owned by the state and allocation decisions were made by a highly centralized and hierarchical form of economic planning. Five-year and one-year plans were formulated for the entire country. Enterprises were given target outputs and provided with the inputs and labor time needed to produce them. Enterprise decision-makers did not aim for maximum profit. There were markets in the Soviet model in the sense that people bought consumer goods in stores and workers decided on jobs in the labor market. However, buying and selling in the Soviet economy did not generate “market forces.” Market forces refers to a system in which relative profitability determines which products will get additional inputs and which will be cut back. Thus, market exchange took place, but the system was not guided by market forces.
Centralized economic planning transformed the Soviet economy from a backward agricultural economy to an industrialized economy in record time. In just a couple of decades, an industrial base was built that allowed the Soviet Union to produce military hardware that was key to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Between the 1950-70s, the Soviet economy was growing so fast that Western analysts were afraid that it would soon surpass the leading capitalist economies. The Soviet model transformed the lives of the Soviet people for the better in many measurable ways. Between 1950 and 1975, consumption per person in the Soviet Union grew faster than in the U.S. By the 1980s, Soviet production surpassed that of the U.S. in steel, cement, metal-cutting and metal-forming machines, wheat, milk, and cotton. It had more doctors and hospital beds per capita than the United States. There was continuous full employment, stable prices, and no ups and downs of the business cycle, while income was relatively equally distributed.
However, the system had serious economic problems. Many sectors of the economy were inefficient, many consumer goods were of low quality, and many consumer services were simply unavailable. Households often faced shortages of consumer goods.
C.J. Polychroniou: In thinking then about a sustainable alternative system to capitalism, what do we keep from the experience of the Soviet model?
David Kotz: As I sought to indicate earlier, the Soviet model brought significant economic and social progress for some 60 years. In my view, the problems of the Soviet model stemmed from its authoritarian and repressive political institutions and the highly centralized form of economic planning that was adopted. But while the Soviet model lacked popular democracy, it did include the key institutions that socialists have long supported: production for use rather than profit, public ownership of enterprises, and a planned economy. The entire experience of the Soviet model holds useful and important lessons for a future socialism.
C.J. Polychroniou: What about market socialism? What lessons should we draw from that experience?
David Kotz: The idea of combining market allocation with socialist planning has a long history. New models of market socialism were proposed following the collapse of the Soviet model in 1991. The hope was that markets would guarantee economic efficiency while a socialist state assured economic justice and material security. Market socialism did not emerge in Russia after the collapse of state socialism, but it did emerge in China after 1978 under the post-Mao leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In China, market forces were introduced gradually and with a high degree of state oversight to avoid economic chaos. The record shows that market socialism not only reproduced many of the problems of capitalism but has a tendency to promote a return to capitalism. That’s because market forces can do their job of allocating resources only by activating the profit motive as the primary force of productive activity.
C.J. Polychroniou: In your book, you argue that economic planning is the institution that can achieve the aim of creating just and sustainable societies—not market forces. But you also argue that an “effective and sustainable socialism” requires direct participatory planning and new forms of public ownership of the means of production. Can you briefly lay out the basic features of democratic socialism?
David Kotz: Here I can respond only briefly to this question, which I consider in detail in my forthcoming book. My view follows closely the model of socialism in Pat Devine’s book Democracy and Economic Planning. The following are some of the key features of a future democratic socialism in my view:
Democratic socialism will inevitably face a contradiction between wide participation in decision-making and the need to make allocation decisions in a timely manner, allocation decisions that are inter-dependent in an actual economy. It will not be perfect, but it promises the best possible future for the human species.
The legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, 107 years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is still waiting to be born.
This year marks the 107th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In the evening of October 25, 1917, the Winter Palace in Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg) was stormed. This event marked the beginning of the Great October Revolution, one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century that shaped the course of history for decades ahead.
Leading up to the events of October 25 was another revolution in late February 1917, which brought to power a group of leaders from bourgeois political parties that formed a provisional government headed initially by Georgy Lvov, a liberal reformer, and then by Aleksander Kerensky, a social democrat who as Prime Minister from July to October 1917 continued Russia's involvement in World War I despite that being very unpopular among the soldiers and with the masses in general. In early March of that year Tsar Nicholas II, who had ruled imperial Russia since 1894 but had managed to make autocracy the most unpopular it had ever been, abdicated. Five months later, Russia was pronounced a republic.
Although the provisional government did introduce some reforms on the political front, prompting even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to declare Russia in April 1917 “the freest country in the world”, it was the Red October Revolution that turned the old order completely upside down by inaugurating a socialist regime and making Soviet-style communism a global ideological and political force that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Still, more than one hundred years later, the rise of the Bolsheviks to power continues to divide scholars, the chattering classes and even the educated public. There are several issues that are particularly divisive, such as whether the October Revolution was a popular insurgency or essentially a coup, and whether Stalinism evolved naturally from the basic principles and political strategies of Lenin or was an unexpected development.
Likewise, there is still a great deal of ambiguity, disagreement and confusion over the nature of the regime that flourished in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. For example, did the Soviet Union represent an “actual socialist society”, a “degenerated workers’ state”, or simply a “totalitarian state economy” in which the communist ideology functioned as a mere instrument of political legitimization and imperial rule?
When it happened, the Great October Revolution produced global hysteria, untamed enthusiasm and hope about the possibility of the creation of heaven on earth (a new utopia) in equal measures. For the bourgeois classes everywhere, the inauguration of the Soviet regime was anathema to core values of the “western civilization”, while for radicals and communists it signified a natural culmination of the inevitable march of history towards human freedom and a social order devoid of exploitation.
However, an objective evaluation on socialism and the legacy of Soviet communism gives no room for mourning or celebration. It was essentially the epic story of an impossible dream that turned in due time into a political and historical nightmare because of the interplay of a vast array of factors that included “backward” socioeconomic conditions, outside intervention, an absence of democratic traditions, and misconceived notions about socialism and democracy. Hence, while one can easily romanticize about the October Revolution, the cold reality of history smacks you in the face.
For starters, the Great October Revolution was unlike the February Revolution which erupted as a result of spontaneous action by hundreds of thousands of hungry and angry men and women workers and militant troops. What happened in October 1917 was the outcome of a well-designed strategy on the part of the leader (Lenin) of a minority party (the Bolsheviks) to wrest control from the provisional government because of a strong ideological aversion to “bourgeois democracy” and desire for power. Unsurprisingly Lenin’s call for “all power to the Soviets” ended up being something entirely different: all power went to the party and its politburo.
The October Revolution was not a coup in itself, but neither was it a popular uprising that enjoyed the kind of mass support that the February Revolution had. In fact, it was not until the autumn of 1917 that Lenin’s “land, peace, bread” slogan had been embraced by some workers in St Petersburg and Moscow.
Yet, even this does not mean that the Bolshevik program and Lenin’s ideas of rule were accepted by the majority of the Russian people: In the November 1917 elections, the first truly free election in Russian history, Lenin’s party received only one quarter of the vote, while the Social Revolutionaries managed to receive over 60 percent.
Lenin had stomach neither for parliamentary democracy nor for sharing power with any other political organization. His unwavering intent to establish socialism in Russia, regardless of the ripeness of the social and economic conditions, and his firm conviction that only the Bolsheviks represented the true interests of the workers, would compel him to adopt strategies and policies that would soon deprive the Revolution of whatever potential it had originally had for the establishment of a new social order based on workers’ control of the means of production and democracy (which Lenin, sadly enough, associated with the “dictatorship of the proletariat”).
Indeed, not long after the November elections, Lenin would ban several opposition newspapers and unleash a campaign of “Red Terror” against all class enemies (with the Social Revolutionaries being the first victims following their uprising in Moscow in early July 1918). The orchestration of the “Red Terror,” which lasted until the end of the Russian civil war, was assigned to Cheka (a Bolshevik police organization that reported to Lenin himself on all anti-communist activities), thereby laying the foundations for the emergence of a full-fledged police state under Stalinism.
The clearest illustration of how far to the “right” the Bolsheviks had moved following the outbreak of the October Revolution is the brutal repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 by Red Army troops. Disheartened by the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial tendencies, a garrison of the key fortress of Kronstadt revolted in March 1921 against the communist government and the ideas of “war communism” – even though the Kronstadt sailors had been, back in 1917, among the strongest supporters of the October Revolution and the idea of “Soviet power”. To be sure, they were, until then, in Lev Trotsky’s own words, “the pride and joy of the revolution”.
With the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, it became clear that Lenin’s concept of the “vanguard party” and his understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” did not permit dissent of any kind and that a socialist political order was to be based on one-party rule.
As for the policy of “war communism”, it ended a complete disaster. Lenin himself admitted as much in a speech on October 17, 1921, when he said, “we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution”.
But this did not mean that all Bolsheviks shared Lenin’s views on “war communism” or that they embraced the policy that was followed in the 1920s by a partial return to the market system of production and distribution. The soon-to-be “new Tzar” Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, regarded the New Economic Policy as the betrayal of the October Revolution. His “revolution from above”, launched in 1928 with the policy of collectivization and dekulakization (a campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the more “well-to-do” peasants) reopened the gates of hell and converted Soviet socialism once and for all into a barbarous and murderous regime.
Stalinism did not merely formalize the worst aspects of Leninism but became, in reality, an actual stumbling block for the transition into socialism both inside the Soviet Union and throughout the rest of the world where the ideas of social justice and equality continued to move the minds and hearts of millions of decent people.
Hence, the end of Stalinism and the collapse of Soviet communism (which in the course of its 74 years did manage to turn a “backward” country into an industrialized nation that was able to defeat Nazism and make undeniable advances on several economic, cultural, and social fronts) mark simply the end of a dream turned into a nightmare.
In this context, the legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, 107 years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is waiting to be born as neoliberalism, militarism, and the climate crisis are wreaking havoc on the planet, but the possibilities available to create an egalitarian, socially just, ecologically friendly, and decent society lie today outside the ideas, practices and policies of the October Revolution.