The Crisis of Marxism and the Soviet State

One of the basic premises of Marxism was that the process of industrialization brings with it the waning of nationalism. The Soviet Union survived and won World War II not under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, but mostly on the impulse of Russian nationalism. To use Marxist semantics, is another of the inherent contradictions of the Communist system: its ideological premises, in this case national equality, clash with the political interests of the regime which require it to stress Russian domination and to curb national aspirations of the non-Russian groups. The mere word “profit,” when applied to the Soviet economy, stuck in the throats of the more orthodox Marxist theorists, but nevertheless the regime bravely launched another effort to cure the ills of socialism with capitalist remedies. By the early 1960’s the coincidence of some bad harvests and failures with the virgin lands plunged Soviet agriculture into a new crisis and undoubtedly contributed to Khrushchev’s downfall.