ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the socialist imagination. It explores the way Utopian communists and socialists imagined how the new order based on common ownership would come into the world, before it was actually established in the Soviet Union. Socialists who advocated social justice but accepted private ownership of the means of production have largely been ignored. More concretely, the idea of common ownership is highly conducive to the insular imagination of socialism. It was Stalin’s ambition to set up an economically and militarily powerful socialist state that would be as independent from external circumstances as possible. The assumption that single-country socialism represented a radical new departure on Stalin’s part, a sharp break with a socialist tradition that was profoundly and essentially internationalist is quite widespread. Stalin established state patriotism under the facade of socialism in one country. Socialism in one country was no radical new departure on Stalin’s part, but the reinvention of an existing idea in a new context.
