The October 1917 Russian Revolution saw a popular mass movement, led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrow the capitalist order and establish the Soviet Union as the world’s first workers’ state. However, the defeat of the revolutionary movements of the working class in Germany and Europe after the First World War left the Russian workers’ state isolated in a poor and war-devastated economy, creating the conditions for the emergence, and eventual triumph, of a privileged bureaucracy, headed by Joseph Stalin.
The Stalinists abandoned the internationalist program on which the Russian Revolution had been based and adopted instead the anti-Marxist perspective of building “socialism in one country”. This nationalist outlook provided the ideological basis for a repressive bureaucratic apparatus that destroyed Soviet democracy, murdered hundreds of thousands of genuine Marxists, and sabotaged the revolutionary struggles of workers around the world.
