ABSTRACT
In his critique of real socialism, Rudolf Bahro can be said to have emphasized political economy, whereas Robert Havemann, for example, focused on philosophy. The anti-Stalinist opposition emerged from the political situation of the time and as a consequence was of course divided into several tendencies. The Stalinist purges of 1936-38 and the extermination of the old Bolsheviks led to a radicalization of the old anti-Stalinist opposition, which at the same time, however, saw its importance in world communism waning steadily. For the 1960s Robert Havemann developed much further the theoretical formation of the anti-Stalinist opposition in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In Germany many communists who had earlier been in opposition returned to the ranks of the Communist Party of Germany. Czechoslovakia showed that the ideas of democratic communism are by no means only the utopian ideas of political dreamers.
