These people found confirmation for their thesis in what happened after the Russian revolution. Undoubtedly a monstrous dictatorship now exists in Russia and all the so-called socialist countries. The capitalists say this was inevitble and Stalinism and Bolshevism are the same.

The Capitalists really hate Russia not for the Stalinist bureaucracy, but for the planned economy upon which it leeches. The tremendous economic advances in Russia are an enormous advantage over what existed before 1917, making possible a rapid elimination of poverty, illiteracy and disease, and remaining an inspiration for exploited people everywhere.

The Communist Parties in capitalist countries, in their turn reinforce many workers' resistance to revolutionary struggle against capitalism, when the example of Russia is held up before them. For they too say that Russia and Eastern European countries are socialist and that Stalinism is the heir of Bolshevism.

Trotsky alone made a thourough-going working class criticism of Russian society under Stalin in the 1930s. He showed how Stalinism was not the natural development of Bolshevism, but on the contrary its counter-revolutionary negation. Neither did the bureaucracy emerge as a result of any abstract general laws of human nature but because of the desperate material conditions that existed in Russia after the revolution and the wars of intervention, the last concerted crusade of all imperialist powers against the hope of workers everywhere. Famine stalked the land - and as Marx put it in 1845 "where want is generalised all the old crap of opression and exploitation will re-emerge".

Trotsky himself was the clearest evidence that Bolshevism and Stalinism were not identical, but seperated by rivers of blood. Co-leader of the revolution in 1917, he was driven out of Russia and finally murdered by Stalin's agent in 1940, because he stood for workers' democracy.

Every socialist needs to be able to answer the question, "What happened in Russia?" Trotsky's writings give hope to workers' everywhere, when they see a world dominated by capitalist exploitation on the one hand and Stalinist opression on the other. This pamphlet is an important part of the theoretical understanding of Stalinism, and a lever for its overthrow and replacement by workers' democracy and socialism.

February 1978