ABSTRACT
The Sovietological revisionists of the West, however, find Jeane Kirkpatrick's distinction scandalous, in part because of the conflation it effects between communism and fascism and in part because Stalin Mausoleum must be presented as an aberration from the Leninist main line of Sovietism, for if he is integral to the system, then the prospects for its democratic transformation are dim indeed. As for the blatant fantasies—to use a charitable term—about democratic Stalinism, they are clearly destined for that same trashcan of history to which Trotsky once consigned the Provisional Government of 1917. Between Mikhail Gorbachev and a neo-New Economic Policy (NEP) stands the mountainous mass of decaying Stalinist success, whereas between Lenin and the first NEP there stood only the failed wreckage of War Communism. The internal contradiction of perestroika is that Gorbachev has been trying to promote soft communism through structures and a population programmed for hard communism.
