is still essential reading. I abandoned Stalinism when I was 20. The Bonapartist Soviet state built by Stalin survived longer than Trotsky could have known, largely because of the Soviet victory over the nazis, which relegitimised the Soviet state and secured its position in Europe and the world.
The fundamental contradictions of that state were never resolved, but the Bolshevik tradition could never be restored after the purges of 1935-39.
The difference between bourgeois Bonapartism - developed of course under Napoleon - is that the bourgeois revolution can survive the elimination of popular participation. Capitalist relations, once embedded, will not revert to feudalism even with the restoration of aristocratic power, as happened in France in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat.
BY contrast, as Trotsky explained, bureaucratic socialism, in the absence of popular democracy, is a husk. He believed a renewed proletarian democratic struggle could revive socialism if Stalinism fell. But the proletariat was atomised and the revolutionists were liquidated by the Stalinist regime. A restoration of socialist democracy was therefore never possible. Only capitalist restoration could happen - it took another 50 years after Trotsky wrote this article.
The strange thing about modern day Stalinists is they are incapable of drawing the logical historical lessons that the Soviet type states have all reverted to capitalism of a particular kind - bereft of socialist democratic traditions and internationalist class consciousness. In many cases they are ultra-liberal, authoritarian, religious chauvinist states. This ought to clarify the way in which stalinism strangled the progressive, revolutionary and democratic traditions of the working class movements in just about all countries in which it was imposed. Once all power was concentrated in the bureaucratic state and leaders like Stalin, the transition was inevitably one toward capitalism. The world-historic conditions for such a restoration did not exist after 1945 and the victory against fascism, achieved by the Soviet army and people.
Despite the Stalinist regime's opposition to indigenous revolutions elsewhere, it did co-opt and ally with various liberation movements in the colonised countries, especially in the relatively adventurous period of Khrushchev's leadership. Only in the 1980s did conditions arise again for full counter-revolution in Russia and worldwide.
It will take decades for a socialist movement, grassroots based development to return to these countries. This is not simply due to imperialist conspiracy. It is because of the reactionary soil in which such capitalist restoration can flourish in former stalinist states and the atomisation and petrification of autonomous labour and socialist movements in these countries.
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