ABSTRACT
Perry Anderson described Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism as a remarkable feat of political balance. This is an excellent starting point to discuss the question of its merits and evolution. Anderson’s characterization captures the difficulty of the task confronting Trotsky. This is true, first, as a matter of arriving at a correct analysis of Stalinism. The phenomenon was without historical precedent. Its very appearance as a new and peculiar force remained undetected for obvious reasons by the Stalinists themselves, who for a while concealed their multifarious mutations behind the banner of “Leninist” continuity and only much later smuggled in the designation of “Stalinist” to certify the orthodoxy of their activities.1 It also remained undetected by the many self-professed friends of the Soviet Union in the West who rushed to its defense only as it degenerated, as well as by myriad enemies who recognized in “Stalinism” at best only the quantitative intensification of all the tendencies that were already present at the moment of the Russian Revolution.2 Part of Trotsky’s merit was to give this phenomenon a proper name, analytically detaching it from the October Revolution, and forcefully posing the question of its nature, origins, and specificity against a complacency and complicity that transcended most political divisions. From the standpoint of Marxist theory, moreover, the rise of Stalinism pointed to the necessity to revisit some important Marxist concepts (for example, the dictatorship of the proletariat), to examine others that had hitherto been peripheral (such as the question of bureaucracy), and to interrogate the actual political and programmatic content of foundational ideals such as internationalism.
