For many the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 heralded the defeat of Russian communism, so close was the ideology identified with the successful workers’ revolution of 1917.  But in fact, communism was defeated far earlier than that.

The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 brought about a massive change in the organisation of Russian society, with the direct control of the means of production in the hands of the Soviets.  Working people controlled their society in a very direct and practical way.  The culmination of the revolutionary movement led by Lenin and Trotsky was the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the establishment of an overwhelmingly proletarian government.

But Russia was isolated in the world, the only society run directly by working people.  Lenin was quite explicit that without the success of the German Revolution, Russia could not hope to continue as a socialist country.  Not only did it face massive problems of restructuring the economy, building an infrastructure, feeding the population, but it also had to relate to the rest of the growing world economy.

The defeat of the German Revolution of 1918-23, now almost ignored by many history books, deprived Russia of industrial support leaving it alone to industrialise through its own resources.  This meant a severe burden for the population of Russia.

The cost of survival was seen in the first five-year economic plans with increasing bureaucratisation and capital accumulation at the expense of working people.  As Lenin and Bukharin predicted, Russia operated as a state-capitalist country.  And as Stalin consolidated his power base in the late 20s, he abandoned the ideas of workers’ control.  His state apparatus would champion the claim of “socialism in one country”.

By 1928, Lenin had died and Trotsky was expelled from the party.  He would be exiled in 1929 for leading the Left Opposition, a group of experienced revolutionaries who fought against the bureaucratisation of the state, the centralisation of power, and the doctrine that socialism could be built from the top down. All of them would eventually be killed in the Stalinist purges.

What remained after the Left Opposition was destroyed was a powerful bureaucratic state apparatus in which Stalin ruled supreme.  For workers, they were employed by state capitalists with working conditions almost indistinguishable from those in the West.  In no way could they be considered to be working in some kind of workers’ state.  Deprived of political power, prevented from organising or expressing their will, locked down by repression and censorship, they suffered oppression on every level.

The growth of the Cold War following the second World War encouraged the belief that communism and socialism were identical to the Soviet Union.  Despite many analyses that challenged this view, the ideological position of the West predominated and it was popular to consider Russia to be a socialist country despite the obvious contradiction.

And so socialism and communism came to be seen as synonymous with oppression and dictatorial state control.  Meanwhile, in Europe a socialist current persisted which had as its slogan “Neither Washington Nor Moscow”, a movement based on socialist and communist principles, opposed to the capitalism of the West, and the Stalinism of the East.

Russia was, and is, a state-capitalist country in which workers have no more rights than in the West.  It operates on capitalist principles every bit as much as the US.  It is hard to claim that socialism or communism persisted in Russia beyond the late twenties.