One of the more striking and peculiar episodes in Soviet religious history was when Jewish communists staged a show trial in which “Judaism” itself was placed in the dock as a symbolic defendant and subjected to a mock legal proceeding. Various offenders, representing different aspects of Judaism, were brought before the judge, such as a character performing as a Rabbi who “testified that he taught religion in order to keep the masses ignorant and servile” (Gitelman 1972, 301). Or a Jewish woman who proudly proclaimed that she sent her children to Kheder, a traditional Jewish religious school, where students received a narrow, overwhelmingly religious education. The Soviets believed these schools left Jewish youth deprived of the secular knowledge and skills necessary for participation in modern society, especially one that was socialist. There would be no leniency in the trial, as “the … ‘prosecutor’ summarized the ‘case against the Jewish religion’ and asked for a ‘sentence of death for the Jewish religion,” which was the sentence that was ultimately delivered (Gitelman 1972, 301).

Subscribe now

The ferocity with which Jewish sections of the CPSU, or the Evsektsiia, railed against the religious traditions of their own community was undoubtedly shocking, evoking protest and indignation from other Jews who saw this as an intolerable attack on their religious identity and way of life. The Evsektsiia was unswayed; its blistering attack on Judaism left not one part of the religious tradition untouched. They held various trials critiquing Judaism, such as ones organized against “circumcision,” Jewish schooling, or other traditional Jewish practices seen as backward, tied to bourgeois power, or otherwise incompatible with the atheistic project of transformative modernization spearheaded by the Communists.

Of course, this was not unique to Judaism. The Soviet Union was well-known for its highly repressive anti-religious campaigns in which religious institutions, of all stripes, were dismantled, clergy persecuted, and religious education and practice were subject to various clampdowns. Though what distinguishes the Soviet brand of religious persecution from other historical examples was the universalist ideological basis of its hostility toward religion, which treated religious belief itself as a social problem as opposed to targeting any particular faith out of a chauvinistic or sectarian reasons. Indeed, this is why the campaign against Judaism was led by Jewish communists. Their task, as delegated by the central leadership, was the integration of Jews into Soviet society, but the Jewish sections of the CPSU went well beyond what was expected of them and “assumed the enormously heavy burden of planning and implementing the economic, social, and cultural modernization of Soviet Jewry” (Gitelman 1972, 9).

The anti-Judaism campaign is likely the most controversial anti-religious campaign in the USSR, which inevitably invites discussions around antisemitism, given the status of Jews as a highly oppressed and marginalized minority in the former imperial empire. Indeed, some have been quick to point out a supposed uninterrupted continuity between Tsarist antisemitism and alleged Bolshevik and early Soviet antisemitism. Yet this assumption erases enormous differences between the different regimes’ approaches to the Jewish minority, given that the Russian Revolution brought the abolition of centuries-old legal restrictions on Jews and opened unprecedented opportunities for social advancement. As historian David Vital (1999) puts it, the massive entry of Jews into civil and military state service, from which they had previously been “totally excluded,” was “both revolutionary in spirit and in its social consequences.” The Bolsheviks came to power on an anti-colonial and anti-imperial agenda, promising to emancipate minorities, which, in many regards, they did. The freedoms Jews experienced in the revolutionary period were historic and represented a massive blow to the longstanding tradition of political exclusion that had characterized Jewish life across the Russian Empire and much of Europe.

Subscribe now

This presents what might appear to be a contradictory policy, in which Jews found themselves at the crossroads of the Soviet Union’s anti-colonial commitment to minority inclusion and its militant state atheism. In reality, however, there was no inherent contradiction between these positions, which both had deep roots in the broader left-wing tradition. In Marxist thought, both religion and national oppression had historically been understood as forms of social domination bound up with class exploitation. The Soviets then distinguished between Jews as a national minority, whose legal and political equality they sought to protect, and Judaism as a “backwards” and oppressive religious system, impeding their social emancipation, and thus needing to be abolished. In the Bolshevik conception, both were facets of the same broader project of liberation.

Despite the sweeping political and civil rights formally granted to Jews, local instances of antisemitism predictably persisted. The Evsektsiia took the fight against antisemitism as seriously as they did the fight against religion, undermining the claims of Jewish “self-hatred.” They defended Jews against local antisemitism by challenging discriminatory treatment by non-Jewish Party and state officials, rebuking their tendency to treat Jews as inherently “petty bourgeois” and “speculators,” a stereotype based on the overrepresentation of Jews in petty trade and artisan work. Indeed, Jews were disproportionately classified as lishentsy, a designation for those deemed politically suspect and deprived of political rights.

Raspe (2022, 892) clarifies that “to some extent, this was a reflection of the socioeconomic situation of the Jewish population, but it was exacerbated by the common association of economic crime with Jews in the early Soviet period,” a kind of structural bias or prejudice that Jewish Communists saw as needing to be actively combated. Notably, Evsektsiia chairman Aleksandr Chemerisskii described this mistreatment of Ukrainian Jews as “the most disgusting agitation for antisemitism” (Raspe 2022, 892). These abuses reportedly ceased when local administrations were converted into Jewish national councils, which served to protect and safeguard minority rights. Evsektsiia therefore played an important role stigmatizing antisemitism, and challenging economic abuses and bureaucratic overreach against Jewish artisans, who still had to contend with deeply entrenched cultural prejudices.

Subscribe now

But what of the religious rights of Jews?

The Soviet war on religion is often conceived as a defect of a totalitarian and dysfunctional political system, but this view is too simplistic. It treats the Marxist worldview with condescension and does not sufficiently grapple with the genuine ideological convictions that underpinned secular, left-wing hostility to religion. Historian Graham Johnson (2000, 95) observes:

Socialist and communist movements tended to be secular and at times militantly anti-religious. Marx’s own views developed via engagement with the atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach. Consequently any socialist position derived from Marx is expected to be materialistic and this view is encouraged by the fact that European social democracy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed in a spirit of anti-clericalism and atheism. Britain’s most significant Marxist party in the pre-war years was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and it is well-known for its emergence out of a radical tradition steeped in secularism and freethought

Indeed, Raphael Samuel (1980) notes that, rather than being an authoritarian imposition, Bolshevik atheism had its roots in popular opposition to the abuses of religion, as well as a broader interest in secular ideas and freethought, writing that “anti-clericalism was a powerful force in Russia during the 1920s” and that it “appears to have arisen as a spontaneous movement among workers, peasants and intellectuals before the Party put itself at its head.” On a similar note, Richard Stites (1988, 105) describes how episodes of “popular anti-clericalism and even atheism certainly flourished during the Revolution and Civil War,” as communists sought, in the words of a 1921 Central Committee formulation, “to replace religious understanding of the world with a rigorous communist scientific system.” By 1934, the atheist movement could boast upwards of 5.5 million members; its cultural and intellectual institutions produced some 1,200 books and pamphlets, which were published alongside newspapers, journals, educational courses, workers’ study groups, films, plays, museums, and even a “Radio University” devoted to atheist education. This is not to say that atheism was universally, or even widely, embraced throughout Soviet society. Religious belief remained deeply rooted among the population, particularly among peasants, and efforts to attack religious practice often met with resistance; rather, my point is that Soviet atheism was based in a powerful, organic revolutionary current that became a core plank of the Bolshevik mission to create a new, anti-capitalist modernity.

The Soviets took seriously the conviction that human emancipation required confronting the economic domination of the bourgeoisie, a form of domination that also encompassed the social institutions and ideas through which such domination was reproduced. Indeed, for Lenin (1905), “the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society.” Historically, however, the Evsektsiia was not the sole progressive Jewish voice, and had diverged in significant respects from the competing socialist Bund movement, which had largely disappeared as an independent political force in the Soviet Union by the early 1920s.

Unlike the Evsektsiia, the Bund did not seek to eradicate religious belief as a political goal, but advocated a secular Jewish socialist politics that sought to displace the influence of religion and religious authority from public and political life, though its members often held strongly anti-clerical and atheist views. Yet, despite its secular orientation, Lenin had argued in 1913 that the Bund’s desired goal of Jewish national-cultural autonomy nevertheless risked perpetuating the influence of the clergy and bourgeois nationalism within Jewish communal life. And while the Bund was indisputably progressive in its socialist and anti-Zionist outlook, it proved insufficient to keep pace with the more radically transformative vision of the Jewish sections of the Communist Party, which aggressively dismantled “the traditional sources of authority among Jews” in pursuit of socialist modernity (Gitelman 1972, 317). In this way, the Evsektsiia implemented the secularizing project in a more radical and coercive way. Both political entities had differences in approach and tactics, but their broad end goals of an anti-Zionist, Yiddish, secular, and socialist Jewish community were actually similar in many respects, and it is not surprising that many Bundists ultimately joined the Evsektsiia, which came to represent the dominant face of revolutionary Jewish politics in the USSR.

The Soviets were operating under the premise that emancipation required actively dismantling the religious and communal structures that sustained particularistic identities and insular cultural-economic hierarchies; the traditional Jewish community, such as the shtetl, for instance, was seen as a “nest of bourgeoisie and clergymen,” held together through communal bonds of religion.

The shtetl was a small town that was predominantly, but not exclusively, Jewish, where economic and communal life came to be intertwined. Its social structure had been shaped by the restrictions imposed on Jews under the Russian Empire, which concentrated many Jews in petty trade and small-scale occupations, as antisemitic policies excluded them from much of the wider economy. However, this position of marginalization still encompassed internal hierarchies and class conflict, which Kassow (n.d.) writes often led to “often painful social divisions.” He adds:

The social differences that divided shtetl Jews were felt everywhere, from the synagogue to the market place. At the top of the social scale were the sheyne yidn, the well-off elite who ran the shtetl’s institutions and controlled its politics … Just below the sheyne yidn were the balebatim, the “middle class” whose stores and businesses did not make them rich but afforded them a certain measure of respect from the community. Further down the social scale came the skilled artisans, such as watchmakers and exceptionally skilled tailors. Near the bottom were ordinary tailors and shoemakers, followed by water carriers and teamsters. Lower still were the beggars and the marginal types that every shtetl seemed to have.

These social divisions did not neatly map onto the typical Marxist schema of an industrial proletariat pitted against an organized bourgeoisie, but they were nonetheless interpreted as a political arena in which the Soviets could intervene against those deemed to constitute the exploitative classes. A 1929 resolution declared that most Soviet Jews still held “bourgeois views,” called for strengthening the “class war in Jewish towns and villages,” and proposed organizing the Jewish poor, particularly poor artisans.

Read more

This article is a follow-up to my last article, with the admittedly dramatic title “Stalin Vs. the Deep State.” Though the actual content of that piece is perhaps less sensational than that title suggests. It is primarily a careful review of the Russian historian Leonid Naumov’s work. As discussed in that piece, Naumov puts forth the controversial thesis that Stalin was engaged in a power struggle with the NKVD during the Terror, having earlier conferred enormous coercive power upon a security apparatus whose leadership had become dominated by the North Caucasian political network associated with the ruthless Chekist Efim Evdokimov. It is this NKVD that Naumov argues may have considered preemptively striking at Stalin. With most of the background established in the first part, I will now turn to the more contentious question at the heart of Naumov’s argument: how the NKVD’s growing autonomy translated into a potential conflict with Stalin, and the extent to which its leadership contemplated moving against him.

Subscribe now

Evdokimov and the North Caucasian Clan

In my previous article, I began sketching out a survey of the political life of the Chekist Efim Evdokimov and his influence on the Terror, as he is really the central character of this story. I will finish that narrative here, before explicating the broader theory of the anti-Stalin “deep state” conspiracy at the centre of Naumov’s work. As I had previously discussed, Evdokimov, who was head of the OGPU’s Secret Operational Department at the time (1929-1931), lobbied spurious charges against Yagoda, the current GPU leader at the time, accusing him of torture and mishandling evidence, among other transgressions. Getty relays that Evdokimov’s removal from his security post in 1931 into party administration was carried out by Stalin as a way of weakening the disruptive clan maneuvering that plagued Soviet politics. Furthermore, it must be added, Stalin was perhaps growing weary of Evdokimov’s hyper-repressive policies. As the operational mastermind of dekulakization, as well as the Shakhty trial and Civil War repression, Stalin was pleased with the results of this new phase of the revolution from above, yet Evdokimov wanted to take the repression even farther than even Stalin was comfortable with. Wheatcroft (2007, 34) writes:

On 16 June 1931 at a time when Evdokimov’s activities on the Kulak front were approaching a climax a proposal was brought before the Politburo aimed at removing socially alien elements from industrial enterprises. This would appear to be indicative of a desire to expand the scale of repression from the countryside into the towns and industry … these proposals caused some concern in the Politburo... and I have suggested that this might explain why the resolution of this proposal was deferred, and why Evdokimov and his allies were dumped at this time

In addition to his divisive clan politics, Evdokimov and his team’s penchant for mass, indiscriminate violence became too much even for the Stalinist leadership. Stalin was not opposed to mass repressive violence but needed a sound reason to embrace it. At this point in time, that reason was not there. Stalin was wholeheartedly behind dekulakization, which he saw as an extension of October in many ways, serving a clear purpose in the road-map of socialist construction by extending the revolution to the countryside. However, Evdokimov’s desire to push for repression in urban centres, at this point in time, would have made little sense for the leadership.

Subscribe now

Stalin instead moved towards winding down repression and introducing greater legal normality into the security apparatus. Ivan Akulov, a Party official and “complete outsider to the security forces,” was installed as First Deputy Chairman of the OGPU. Akulov subsequently “greatly reduced the level of extra-judicial sentencing carried out by the troiki” in an attempt to bring regularity and procedure to the judicial system (Wheatcroft 2007, 36-37). This formed part of a larger effort to “reduce the power of the large security chiefs and to make them more accountable to the law” (Wheatcroft 2007, 37). Getty (2013, 176) writes:

As Stalin’s lieutenant L. M. Kaganovich put it, ‘the reorganization of the OGPU means that, as we are now in more normal times, we can judge through the courts and not resort to extrajudicial repression as we have until now.

There is a bitter irony to this, knowing what followed a few years later, but it goes to show the volatility of the period and the precarity of the regime, which zig-zagged between polar opposite approaches in light of perceived threats. The divergent paths of mass repression and normalcy lay on either side of a knife’s edge. In any case, this relaxation of repression was not only a major personal blow to Evdokimov but to his entire clan’s philosophy of maximal repression. Beyond his own personal fondness for mass violence, it was a way for his group to assert themselves politically and cultivate influence in the way they best knew—through violence. This seeming return to legality left no place for Evdokimov’s clan. Yet this was not an immediate victory for Evdokimov’s nemesis Yagoda, as he was demoted to serve under Akulov, the Party outsider. Nevertheless, Akulov was likely not intended as a permanent replacement, as he lacked a security background and never took operational command of the OGPU. Indeed, in 1934, Yagoda was elevated to become head of the Soviet security apparatus.

Evdokimov’s removal from the OGPU should be considered a demotion rather than a complete political defeat. Although he was removed from the centre of security operations, he continued to exert considerable influence through his political connections and esteemed, tried-and-true track record as a purveyor of mass repression. Wheatcroft (2007, 38) notes that by August 1933, “Evdokimov had restored himself to Stalin’s favour” and that “he was again giving Stalin advice on security matters, and Stalin was accepting his advice.” Soon afterward, Evdokimov moved into the Party apparatus, becoming Party secretary for the North Caucasus Krai, a move that Wheatcroft notes was in part likely facilitated by his close ally Yezhov. As Evdokimov helped bring about Yezhov’s rise, Yezhov in turn ensured that Evdokimov retained his influence in the Soviet system.

Subscribe now

The Terror bears the stamp of methods pioneered by Evdokimov and his clique; the mass repression of the late 1930s should not be understood as sudden, aberrant turn to violence stemming from the paranoid mind of any single figure, but as a rapid escalation of existing thinking around repression, a trajectory that closely follows Evdokimov’s team, which had already showcased its brutal methods as early as the Civil War. As repression expanded in 1937, the NKVD revived the “album method,” a procedure for processing individuals in absentia without trial, where local lists of accused “enemies” were compiled and sent in for rubber-stamp mass sentencing. This method had been invented by Evdokimov in the North Caucasus as early as 1927, when he responded to the abundance of perceived threats by “stream-lining the process” of mass extra-judicial killing, which entailed compiling the photographs and charges of seventy-nine alleged “Whiteguardists” into an album for collective sentencing. This had the mark of the “preemptive” logic that would define the later Terror, as Evdokimov was clear that the Cossacks needed to be annihilated, since their continued existence in any form posed a political threat.

The Evdokimovian style of repression was introduced into Yezhov’s NKVD through Mikhail Frinovsky, Evdokimov’s former deputy, whom Yezhov brought into the NKVD leadership as a way of bringing experienced insiders to operate an apparatus that was initially alien to him. Wheatcroft (2007, 40) notes that it was Frinovsky who “worked out the operational instructions for the first mass operations (Order 00447, The Anti-Soviet Element campaign)” in July 1937. Evdokimov’s man Frinovsky was the direct link between the earlier mass killing via the album method in 1927 and the especially brutal NKVD Order 00447, which initiated the mass operations.

Read more

The years of Stalinist terror endure in the historical memory as one of the most perplexing episodes of mass violence in modern history. It’s the single topic I’ve spent the most time researching, yet the deeper I dig into this historical episode, the more difficult it becomes to isolate any single cause, or even set of causes. What initially appears to be one historical phenomenon opens up into a series of interconnected processes, each with its own institutional dynamics. I cannot resolve the riddle of the Terror here, or perhaps ever for that matter, but I hope to illuminate a dimension of these events that has largely been neglected in Western scholarship. In this writing, I approach the Terror from a different angle, drawing primarily on the work of the Russian historian Leonid Naumov (2010), whose revisionist interpretation shifts attention away from the conventional focus on Stalin himself and towards the internal dynamics of the NKVD, which, he argues, put the Great Terror into motion.

Before Yezhov’s “mass operations” against entire segments of the population, Stalin initiated the purge of the political elite, removing officials he had come to see as unreliable, compromised, or as a threat. However, to disseminate violence on such a scale meant greatly empowering the NKVD. The NKVD’s influence grew in direct proportion to its perceived usefulness to the leadership. In other words, the political interests of its senior officials were served by Stalin’s heightened perception of internal threats. The greater the perceived danger of subversion, the greater the authority and political leverage the NKVD acquired. This gave the NKVD leadership a clear motive in inflating Stalin’s perception of threat.

Subscribe now

As the scale of repression spiralled out of control, it eventually began threatening the very NKVD officials who had directed it. This gave them a powerful shared interest in resisting Stalin. Since these officials controlled much of the coercive apparatus and had established extensive personal-political networks within it, Naumov considers it plausible that they could have moved from factional self-preservation to a coordinated conspiracy against Stalin. Indeed, Yezhov’s top brass of the NKVD became dominated by a political faction known as the North Caucasian clan, a group consisting of experienced Chekists with a particularly brutal history of leading repression. Naumov explains how the USSR’s clan structure, with its various factions jockeying for influence, enabled political actors within the security apparatus to manoeuvre in ways that enhanced the power of their clan rather than fulfilling their mandate and, in the process, established greater autonomy from the centre. Eventually, Naumov argues, Stalin lost direct control over the NKVD as its repressive capacities became concentrated in the hands of this tight-knit group of individuals belonging to a single political network.

According to Naumov, Yezhov’s NKVD knew they would have little time left if Stalin concluded they were conspiring against him, making pre-emptive action a logical, if highly risky, course. Unlike other potential conspirators, moreover, the NKVD leadership possessed the coercive machinery capable of translating such ambitions into action. Ultimately, however, Naumov argues that they waited too long and were destroyed before they could act upon any potential conspiratorial aims.

In the world of conspiracy-thinking, the term “deep state” evokes a shadowy network of largely unknown state actors whose political interests diverge from those of the central government, allowing them to exert influence over the leadership. In some cases, the deep state attempts to remove or replace the visible leadership. As we shall see, this concept provides a useful framework for the NKVD of the 1930s. Indeed, the principal actor within this “NKVD deep state” was not even its formal leader, Yezhov, but rather a network of security figures, largely unknown today, centred around the enigmatic figure of Efim Evdokimov. We will revisit the significance Efim later in this piece.

Subscribe now

Naumov is quite clear that the culpability of other actors does not absolve Stalin or shift responsibility, as is often argued by neo-Stalinist writers. He emphasizes that the Soviet leader signed off on no shortage of executions and did not have objections to the mass execution of those he saw as suspect. Stalin deliberately initiated and authorized a system of mass repression, however he notably did not exercise continuous operational control over everything that subsequently happened within it. Those leading the repressive campaign often escalated and directed the Terror in ways that went beyond what Stalin requested, ultimately bringing the NKVD into conflict with the central leadership. Stalin responded to this dangerous autonomy within the NKVD by annihilating its leadership and replacing it with a new, more dependable leadership coalition (Beria’s group).

Naumov is a scholar who situates himself within the “revisionist school” of Soviet historiography, which centers the internal dynamics of the Soviet political system and institutional conflict instead of treating Terror as the straightforward implementation of a centrally conceived plan dictated by Stalin. Naumov specifically names J. Arch Getty, who pioneered the revisionist current of Soviet historiography, as an influence on his work, and Getty (2013), in turn, has cited Naumov approvingly, particularly in Practicing Stalinism. Though Naumov goes further than Getty in many respects by drawing attention to what he sees as a plausible “conspiracy” against Stalin within the NKVD. Of course, any work arguing that there was a legitimate conspiracy against Stalin, a leader known for staging show trials on fantastical charges for his opponents, will understandably raise eyebrows. Yet, Naumov advances a serious historical argument, and I will evaluate both the evidence he presents and the conclusions he draws from it.

The most speculative and weakest part of Naumov’s argument is the leap from demonstrating that the NKVD possessed political interests distinct from, and in conflict with, the central leadership to the stronger claim that its leaders may have explicitly conspired to kill Stalin. Yet Naumov’s evidence for an actual assassination plot is considerably weaker, as he essentially reconstructs a motive through an inferential argument based on an accumulation of informal clues and circumstantial evidence.

The real strength of Naumov’s argument lies elsewhere: in demonstrating how the institutional dynamics of the NKVD and the clan structure of Soviet politics produced a semi-autonomous security apparatus capable of pursuing interests of its own. In this way, the semi-autonomy of the NKVD can be seen as a major factor in the origins and escalation of the Terror. Overall, this is a hugely important contribution to the literature that is worthy of greater reception in the West.

Stalin and the NKVD

Before embarking on our explication of Naumov’s account, it is necessary to delineate certain events and clarify our terminology, as Naumov himself does. Notably, we must distinguish between the Great Purge and the Great Terror, which are two distinct, albeit overlapping, processes that are often construed as interchangeable in the popular understanding of the Terror.

Robert W. Davies (2018) distinguishes between an initial “nomenklatura purge,” directed against officials and political elites, and the subsequent “mass purges” of “anti-Soviet elements” and “counter-revolutionary nationalist groups.” The latter involved the mass repression of entire segments of the population considered suspect. While the explanation for either of these strands of repression depends on the historian being cited, the nomenklatura purge is typically understood as Stalin’s effort to destroy perceived political opponents or unreliable elements within the officialdom and then reshape the Soviet ruling elite. In contrast, the Great Terror, according to historians such as Khlevniuk (2009), is better understood as a campaign to identify and eliminate a potential “fifth column” through “mass operations” amid growing fears of war and internal subversion.

Subscribe now

While the causes of these two strands of repression were interrelated and mutually reinforcing, it makes little sense to treat them as a single process, given their staggered chronology and distinct mechanisms of repression. The purge began in 1936 with the prosecution of senior political figures and prominent officials, while the mass operations of the Great Terror began the following year, in the summer of 1937, and continued into 1938. Whereas the Great Purges remained principally a political campaign that emanated from the centre, with the central leadership retaining ultimate political authority, the Great Terror extended repression through mass operations whose implementation was far more decentralized and increasingly shaped by regional NKVD initiative. While the Great Purges had populist and “bottom-up” dimensions that I’ve addressed in my other writing (see here and here), one cannot understate their principally centralized character.

Naumov distinguishes these two strands of repression and tries to show that the second grew out of the former by looking at the clan politics of the NKVD. Central to our story is Yagoda, Yezhov’s less notorious predecessor. While Yagoda has hardly endured in historical memory as some kind of moderate, he was a relative moderate compared to his successor. This brings us to William Chase’s (2024) reassessment of the 1936 political trials: the case against Ivan Smirnov and other former Left Oppositionists who were put on trial by Stalin on charges of conspiratorial plotting. (I go over this case in greater detail in my two-part series, “The Conspiracy Against Stalin.”)

Chase argues that, while the many lurid charges of Stalin’s show trials go well beyond what the surviving evidence can substantiate, there was nevertheless a genuine clandestine opposition network that formed the basis of the investigation in this 1936 case. Smirnov and others had maintained covert contacts with Trotskyist figures abroad and participated in efforts to coordinate the various anti-Stalinist opposition currents into a broader bloc. The significance of this is that Yagoda’s investigation had a genuine evidentiary basis, in contrast to the weakly grounded conspiratorial narratives "revealed" by Yezhov. Thus, the transition from Yagoda to Yezhov must be seen as a crucial phase in the radicalization of repression and in the transition from the Great Purge to the Great Terror.

Yagoda belonged to the first generation of senior Chekists, whose careers had been formed in the early Cheka and OGPU. This old security elite was far from unified, however, and consisted of competing personnel networks built around longstanding patronage ties. As the political purges intensified in 1936, these rivalries became increasingly antagonistic. Eventually, some members of the old generation were destroyed, while others advanced their own careers by participating in the repression of former colleagues. Yezhov seized upon the increasingly charged political atmosphere to undermine Yagoda’s credibility, presenting himself as the more resolute prosecutor of terror.

Subscribe now

A major event of the 1930s was the assassination of Kirov, which rapidly escalated fears of subversion and infiltration. This investigation was re-opened in 1936. Yagoda was at the head of the investigation, yet Yezhov was “attached as a watchdog” (Getty 1987, 122). This was done because Stalin’s inner circle didn't fully trust Yagoda to run the investigation the way they wanted. With the uncovering of the Trotskyist Left Oppositionist group in 1936, which was formed in 1932, Stalin believed they were now “four years behind,” a testament to his dissatisfaction with Yagoda's work. Ironically, Yagoda's caution and relatively liberal attitude made him a comparatively more reliable evaluator of threats. All this only benefited Yezhov's career ambitions. Petrov and Jansen (2002, 53-54) write:

Read more

The American Revolution remains a vexing period of historical study for the Left. Was the 18th-century movement of emancipation from British control a successful example of a “historically progressive” bourgeois revolution? Or could it be argued that the revolution instead primarily constituted a slaveholders’ revolt and colonial land grab, enabling westward conquest of Indigenous territory? Both sides of the debate have been readily embraced by different segments of the Left. The Trotskyist website WSWS, for example, has championed the pro-American Revolution interpretation, which sees the revolutionary cause as one that was ultimately progressive, despite the destructive and contradictory processes that accompanied it (Mackaman 2016; North 2026). These writers insist the revolution’s historical character is not reducible to the harms inflicted upon Black and Indigenous people.

Subscribe now

On the other side of the debate, the celebratory reading of the American Revolution has been challenged in recent years, as seen with the “1619 Project” associated with The New York Times. These writers have told a more critical narrative, highlighting the perspectives of Black and Indigenous people whose experience of these events were hardly triumphant and entailed immense human suffering; the leftist scholar Gerald Horne represents the more radical end of this critical framing, arguing that there really was no American Revolution at all, only a reactionary counter-revolution in defense of slavery. Which side of this debate, then, is more accurate?

For the Left, one of the favoured ways of navigating challenging theoretical questions is to defer to figures of scriptural authority in the Marxist tradition. For some, it might almost seem like a relief to be able to sidestep the convoluted debates of ivory-tower historians interpreting archival evidence and instead defer to those great, tried and true revolutionaries who have actually won revolutions. Certainly, there would be no one better equipped to resolve a debate over the character of a revolution than the greatest revolutionary himself, Lenin. His writings are quite clear:

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest... That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery...(Lenin 1918)

Lenin regarded the American Revolution as an authentic liberatory struggle, praising these events as one of history’s rare genuinely revolutionary wars and explicitly characterizing the Thirteen Colonies as being held in “colonial slavery” by the British Empire. For many, these comments seem to settle the debate. Lenin, the greatest revolutionary, unequivocally offered his support for this progressive and bourgeois revolution. Yet I would argue that one cannot conclude this so quickly.

Subscribe now

Indeed, there are a number of major issues with Lenin’s comments. He decries the “colonial slavery” of the “American people,” but has little to say about the American Revolution’s relationship to those held in the literal bondage of slavery, an institution in which the Founding Fathers participated in and preserved. Lenin says the American Revolution is quite unlike the “vast number” of wars of conquest, with little reference to the fact that the American Revolution is deeply implicated in the conquest of Indigenous land and the destruction of their societies across the continent. This, however, is not to say that Lenin’s blind spots make him an inadequate interlocutor on the American Revolution. In fact, in his own context, he was quite sensitive to the plight of minority nations and Indigenous peoples suffering under the yoke of Tsarist settler-colonialism.

Lenin, a 20th-century statesman in Soviet Russia, was not, and did not pretend to be, an expert on American history, and thus his conclusions were necessarily shaped by the knowledge and state of historical understanding available in his period. His assessment also predates major developments in the historiography of the American Revolution and Indigenous dispossession, and he does not appear to have fully considered the extent to which the Revolution facilitated the subsequent westward expansion of the settler republic at the expense of Indigenous nations. He was, however, deeply knowledgeable about the Russian colonial system he sought to overthrow, and his analysis can be brought into conversation with recent histories of colonial expansion in the Americas to produce a more nuanced, critical account of the American Revolution. While Lenin was writing long before the term “settler colonialism” was common vernacular on the revolutionary left, he nonetheless was an important theorist of this issue in an early variant, espousing an incisive critique of Russia’s conquest and colonial subjugation of minority nations. Indeed, Lenin aptly described the Tsarist Empire as a “prison-house of nations.” We might say the same of the United States.

Lenin had noted the way in which the Russian Empire had spread into new territories, displacing Indigenous inhabitants, settling the land, and imposing its cultural and political rule over oppressed minorities. This, of course, has a number of similarities with the Manifest Destiny of the American Empire and the mass displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples in America. It would indeed be apt to characterize the United States as a prison of the many Indigenous nations who suffered, and continue to suffer, under the yoke of American colonial power. In the following piece, I will be writing a Leninist critique of Lenin’s interpretation of the American Revolution, drawing on Soviet critiques of settler colonialism (or what Marx and Engels called “colonialism proper”), including Lenin’s own writings on the topic, as well as more recent historical research, to foreground the forms of colonial domination that conventional celebrations of the American Revolution tend to overlook.

Subscribe now

From “Colonialism Proper” to “Settler Colonialism”

One popular misconception about the concept of settler colonialism is that it is alien to Marxism, a conceptual apparatus that goes well beyond the contours of Marx’s thought and that, for some, is even perceived as a kind of academic fad or activist reading of history that is politically motivated. This is not true, and what we now know as settler colonialism was a matter of serious importance to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which is all readily available in the historical record. As John Bellamy Foster (2025) points out in the Monthly Review, Marx did not use the exact phrase “settler colonialism,” as the word “colonialism” itself means “settlerism.” It would have been redundant and incoherent for a 19th-century thinker to use the word in that way. Foster (2025) writes:

by the twentieth century, the meaning of colonialism had so broadened that it was no longer associated with its classical historical origins or its linguistic roots, making the use of the term ‘settler colonialism’ more acceptable.”

For Marx, settler colonialism, or what he called “colonialism proper,” had an eliminationist character that is best exemplified by the extermination of Indigenous nations in European conquests of the Americas and Australia:

Colonialism proper, in Marx’s conception, took two forms, both having as their precondition a logic of extermination, in the nineteenth century sense of exterminate, meaning both forcible eradication and expulsion … Marx’s approach to settler colonialism encompassed not only the exterminist logic directed at Indigenous nations, but also the dual forms of production (free farmers and plantation slavery) that emerged within the resulting settler colonial structure. Nevertheless, the overall dialectic of settler colonialism had as its precondition the extermination (including removal) of Indigenous populations. As Marx expressed it in the first volume of Capital (Foster 2025)

Marx’s understanding of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the effects of European colonization was informed in part by the Quaker writer William Howitt, whose Colonization and Christianity condemned European imperialism as unparalleled in its brutality. As Howitt wrote, “The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race” (Foster 2025). This unrestrained critique of European barbarity was quite unlike that of other 19th-century writers of the time, an outlook that clearly influenced Marx’s own understanding of settler conquest.

For instance, Marx was sharply critical of French settler colonialism in Algeria, examining how the conquest and colonization of the country disrupted Indigenous communal institutions and landholding systems, facilitating the expropriation of Indigenous land and the imposition of private property. Though viewing French settlement as a process of expropriation and dispossession, he concluded during his stay in Algiers that there was no hope for the Indigenous population “without a revolutionary movement.” Marx’s writings on the topic place him squarely within the tradition of anti-colonial thought and as a precursor to Marxist critics of settler colonialism today.

Subscribe now

This context is essential for understanding Lenin’s own approach to colonialism. In both his 1916 notebook Imperialism and The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, Lenin approvingly reproduced Engels’s distinction between “colonies proper,” that were “occupied by a European population,” and countries with native populations “which are simply subjugated” (Lenin 1916). That distinction was subsequently developed within the Soviet communist tradition, in which Lenin was a central figure, best exemplified in the Comintern’s 1928 Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, which situated settler colonies as integral elements within this broader machinery of global imperialism.

As seen in Lenin’s early critiques of imperial expansion, the Soviet historiographical framework explicitly condemned Tsarist domination over its periphery. Soviet Marxist historians of the 1920s and 1930s expanded upon the ideas seen in Lenin’s writings and produced more detailed, historical analyses of Russian settler colonialism, which we will examine later. Lenin’s disgust with the Russian brutalization and exploitation of minorities in Russia’s periphery can be seen, for instance, in his rejection of the term “inorodtsy.” This was a racialized legal term employed by the Imperial regime to describe the “internal aliens” of the empire, such as the Indigenous peoples of Siberia, marking them as barbaric outsiders in need of civilizing by the enlightened metropole. In the time of Peter the Great:

indigenous Siberians were beginning to be considered not merely as adherents of the “wrong” faith (”idolaters”) but as “wild,” “backward,” “unenlightened,” and “poor” people in a state of “childhood,” who were accordingly opposed to those who were “civilized” and whose care they needed. (Akimov 2023)

Lenin understood the dehumanizing, colonial nature of such a system of classification, and was explicit in the need for the Soviet system to reject the forms of racial hierarchy Russian colonialism was predicated on. Golubev (2023, 15) writes:

Lenin mainly used this concept in quotation marks and called upon “an absolute purge of the concept inorodtsy from state life” as early as 1913.

This racial hierarchy of Russian supremacism was deeply implicated within the system of settler colonialism that undergirded the empire. It must also be emphasized that the belief in the inferiority and “child-like” nature of the Indigenous was bound up with the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The Circassians, for instance, suffered greatly at the hands of Russian chauvinism and were subjected to mass expulsion and large-scale settler colonization of their homeland following conquest. The Indigenous people of Siberia experienced extensive and violent land appropriation through Russian settlement. The expropriation and theft of Indigenous land by Euro-American powers likewise, in part, was predicated on civilizing ideology that viewed Indigenous “heathen savages,” whose perceived lack of “civilization” justified the forceful acquisition of their land.

As far as the settler was concerned, Indigenous territories were ripe for the taking as their political and economic imperatives demanded. The newly “discovered” lands of the Americas were a tabula rasa, an empty canvas upon which European civilization could be established, despite the presence of millions of Indigenous inhabitants with intricate political systems and flourishing societies. Indeed, the so-called European doctrine of discovery “provided that newly-arrived Europeans automatically acquired property rights in the lands of indigenous peoples and gained political and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants” (Miller et al. 2010). Similarly, a recurring theme in the scholarship of the bourgeois historians of the Tsarist regimes was the inferiority of the non-Russian minorities and their seeming inability to develop “vacant” land, which, it was believed, necessitated the intervention of the Russian state, including its expansion and control over their land.

Soviet Marxist historians critiqued Imperial scholars of the preceding era for their characterization of “Russian settler colonialism as a process that allegedly brought order, prosperity, and civilization to what the pre-1917 Russian historical scholarship described as empty and wild lands” (Golubev 2023, 14). They noted how these imperial scholars aimed to subtly cast the history of Russian settler colonialism as a process dictated by “objective” and “natural” factors, such as “ as land hunger or the desire to escape from the oppressive government moved into ‘empty’ lands” (Golubev 2023, 10). Moreover, across both imperial contexts, Christianization constituted a mode of colonial domination that sought to remake Indigenous societies according to the cultural and moral norms of the imperial power. Not only was it necessary to seize and exploit territory annexed by the invading force, but to fundamentally transform and assimilate the original population into a subordinate position within the cultural framework of the colonizer.

Read more

Few historians would disagree that Stalin was a dictator whose authority ultimately depended, to a large degree, on the concentration of personalized power. Yet this emphasis on the centralized nature of the Stalinist state has led to its populist, mobilizational, and pro-worker policies being overlooked, as these characteristics are often difficult to square with the popular depiction of Stalinism as one-man rule. In reality, both of these dimensions are complementary elements of the Stalinist state. The early critiques of Stalinism as a purely coercive apparatus that uniformly oppressed workers often related Stalin to Napoleon Bonaparte, the quintessential strongman of the nineteenth century, whose own rule had allegedly likewise depended on a powerful bureaucracy and centralized rule. This comparison, however, obscures more than it reveals, and interrogating its limits offers a productive way of drawing out the actual character of the Stalinist state.

Subscribe now

The Napoleon-Stalin historical analogy has been a fixture of the historical imagination, a comparison that has proved fruitful for different theorists in different ways, most notably in Trotsky’s anti-Stalin writings and, in a more flattering light to the Soviet leader, Kojeve’s reading of Stalin as an “industrialized Napoleon,” marking the “end of history.” There is reason to be wary of these comparisons. While one could argue that Stalin and Napoleon were similar insofar as they were world-historical actors whose individual leadership had an outsized impact on the course of history, we cannot overstate their similarities. In a previous article, drawing on recent developments in the historiography of the Second World War, I argued that historians’ growing recognition of Stalin’s effectiveness as a wartime leader contradicted Trotsky’s claim that, unlike Napoleon, Stalin was a nonentity or mediocrity. Here, however, is where the similarities end.

Napoleon was ultimately a stabilizer who sought to de-politicize France and quell the revolutionaries flames that set the stage for his emergence. The historian van Ree (2003, 281), for instance, writes that “while Napoleon to a significant extent ‘betrayed’ Jacobinism, Stalin did not.” Whereas Stalin ruled as a Bolshevik-in-power and, like his Jacobin forerunners, sparked mass terror and sweeping repression of enemies, Napoleon sought to distance himself from the radical factions associated with terror and revolutionary fervour (this is discussed in greater depth in my two part series The Red Jacobins and The Red Robespierre). Stalin’s Machiavellian conclusion that the mass destruction of entire segments of the population out of suspicion of lurking traitors is a pattern of thought characteristically produced by the climate of revolutionary zealotry itself, not a Thermidorian reversal. As van Ree (2003, 280) writes, “Ironically, especially the campaign of terror in the party’s ranks brought the Soviet system nearer to the Robespierre original than it had been under Lenin, when the revolution had not yet devoured its children.” In this writing, I will closely examine how Napoleon’s defense of social privilege, hereditary rule, and “familism” was in stark contrast to Stalin’s orientation towards populism and mass mobilization. Perhaps most significantly, Stalin led an unprecedented “affirmative action”-style campaign for workers, aggressively promoting those with proletarian backgrounds into specialist and management positions, displacing those with ties to the old regime. This can be considered part of a broader process of Stalin’s revolution from above, in which “bureaucracy” and bourgeois specialists became major targets of his revolutionary ire.

Subscribe now

One could argue that Napoleon and Stalin both had progressive elements, and thus the comparison is still appropriate. While it is true that Napoleon consolidated the gains of the French Revolution and, importantly, did not restore the Ancien Régime, he nonetheless restored the hereditary principle of rule, which amounted “to the restoration of an important element of [the Ancien Régime],” writes van Ree (2003, 280). Van Ree (2003, 280) clarifies that “together with the Church and feudal privilege, the monarchy was the cardinal evil for the revolutionary patriots.” Indeed, Saint-Just (1792) famously declared that “It is impossible to reign innocently. The folly is all too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.” Likewise, Robespierre (1794) said, “A nation is truly corrupted when, having... lost its character and its liberty, it passes from democracy to aristocracy or to monarchy. That is the decrepitude and death of the body politic.” It is clear that the resurgence of a monarchical system or empire was irreconcilable with Jacobin ideology and constituted a categorical betrayal of the political vision of the Revolution’s principal actors.

On the other hand, Stalin did not make himself a Red Tsar. He did not replace the revolutionary political order with a (quasi-)restoration of the old regime and install himself as the head of a monarchical order of a new type. Instead, he seized and held power within the organs of power the Bolsheviks had already established, elevating himself to dictator from inside that originary structure of the revolution—a non-trivial distinction. The “counter-revolutionary” influence of neo-monarchists shaped the political orientation of Napoleon’s rule in a way that had no coherent analogue under Stalin, as we shall see later in this article. Stalin consciously expelled and marginalized “bourgeois specialists” and those remnants of the old order that remained even vaguely proximate to Soviet power. These suspect groups were to be replaced by a new class of proletarian “red specialists.” Both may have become autocrats, but only Napoleon fundamentally altered the revolutionary identity of the regime by decisively breaking with the Jacobin legacy. Dwyer (2010, 341), in discussing Napoleon’s political model, points to three “sites of ideas” that formed the basis of his approach to empire, one of which was the neo-monarchists.

The first ‘ site ’, perhaps the most influential, consists of the neo-monarchists in Napoleon’s entourage, including some members of the political elite, who all urged Napoleon to adopt an hereditary system in the years leading up to the proclamation of empire in May 1804 in the belief that it was the best means of government at their disposal … he was eventually brought around to their way of thinking

Suffice it to say, if anyone in Stalin’s inner circle had suggested that he restore certain symbolic and political elements of the Tsarist regime, even while maintaining the substantive gains of the October Revolution, they would almost certainly have been summarily executed as counter-revolutionaries. It is Stalin’s dogged war against perceived unearned privilege and bureaucratism that makes Trotsky’s claims about Stalin’s Bonapartism so unpersuasive. Lars Lih (1995, 10) describes Stalin’s dramatized conception of class struggle as the “anti-bureaucrat scenario,” in which the success of socialist development hinged on the expunging of various class enemies representing residual bourgeois influence or reliance on “class-alien elements,” such as the old specialists or other bureaucrats who were insufficiently attentive to their governmental responsibilities. For comparison, the French revolutionaries had a specific vision of what a virtuous society looked like, and it was one that excluded the aristocrats and the priests. This was ensured through force. In a similar manner, Stalin sought to expunge all traces of bourgeois influence from Soviet society, adopting a political approach similar to that of the Jacobins, including the paranoia and suspicion directed against internal enemies, but dialled up even further.

Given Stalin’s continuity with the Jacobin worldview of political radicalism, his politics were notably distinct from the stabilizing tendencies of Napoleon, who revived aristocratic forms: a new imperial nobility, dynastic marriage, and hereditary titles. Napoleon conceived of his empire as an extension of familial rule: “Here at court began to reappear the old customs of the greatest nobility” (Tulard 1995). Tulard (1995) writes:

In a note dated 14 June, 1810, the emperor used the ‘evil’ word “privilege” … In 1811, the birth of the king of Rome at last gave some meaning to the term “heredity”. Napoleon could speak of the Fourth Dynasty … Thereafter, they turned to the concept of the family. An enquiry was launched as to whether “the glorious history of the Fourth Dynasty” was properly taught in high schools. After the Merovingians, the Carolingians and the Capetians, came the Bonapartes. Related to the Hapsburgs!

Joseph ruled in Naples and Spain, Louis in Holland, and Murat in Naples; all held their thrones by virtue of their dynastic relationship to Napoleon and could be installed or deposed at his word. This is the same principle of hereditary favour the Revolution had supposedly abolished. Suffice it to say, Robespierre and the Jacobins would be rolling in their graves as France once again became the preserve of a ruling family. On the other hand, Stalin had no qualms about killing those close to him, whether comrades-in-arms or family members, if they were seen as suspect or somehow disloyal to his political vision of socialist construction. Stalin consolidated personal power within institutions that continued to derive their legitimacy from the October Revolution and Marxism-Leninism, even as they were wielded as instruments of highly personalized dictatorship; these institutions waged war on the ‘bourgeois’ or reactionary remnants of the previous regime, facilitating a total transformation into a non-market state. By contrast, Napoleon purged the radical republican wing of the Revolution, which evoked the revolutionary fervour of the Jacobins. Indeed, the Stalin-Napoleon comparison downplays the ideological context of both figures. Dwyer (2010, 341) notes that historians have far too often overemphasized Napoleon's self-coronation as being purely motivated by political self-interest, as if Napoleon had pursued the path he did because it was the inevitable byproduct of the accumulation of power, while ignoring:

the loose-knit group of politicians and intellectuals committed to a return to monarchical forms, enthusiastic proponents of an institutional model that eventually garnered national political support.

Subscribe now

Napoleon’s Empire was not merely the personal project of a tyrant, but must be viewed, in part, as the result of a political movement that regarded hereditary monarchy as the most appropriate institutional arrangement for post-revolutionary France. By embracing these currents, Napoleon reshaped the Revolution’s republican constitutional form into a dynastic political order. Thus, to place Stalin and Napoleon within the same framework effaces fundamental differences between their respective political contexts, reducing each figure to a generic “strongman” type and neglecting the institutional nature of their political centralization and its relationship to their respective revolutions.

It goes without saying that no such system of familial privilege existed within Stalin’s USSR, though it is often suggested that Stalin had essentially replaced such a system with one of unaccountable bureaucrats who ruled over their little fiefdoms as princes would. The Stalinist USSR, in this rendering, was essentially a traditional empire with a red coat of paint. This seems like a compelling interpretation at a surface glance, given the generally “authoritarian” centralized structure of the USSR, but again overlooks fundamental differences between varying forms of top-down power and how leaders responded to those below them. For instance, van Ree (2003, 280) writes:

[Napoleon and Stalin] reacted in opposite ways to their background. Both became nationalists, but whereas Napoleon remained faithful to the Corsican “familism” and restored the hereditary principle of rule, Stalin drew the conclusions of the purer, radical nationalist, deciding as he did to root out “familism” wherever he observed it, almost in the spirit of the modern African nationalist leader doing his best to root out tribalism.

Indeed, Stalin was wary of the formation of “bureaucratic cliques,” known for their “familyness,” rudeness, neglect, and favouritism, as these “toadying bureaucrats” sought to discreetly expand their own personal power at the expense of the central authorities—not through outward defiance, but through deliberately poor communication and quiet noncompliance with directives. Getty (2013, 23) writes:

As Stalin said, “both in the center and in the localities, decisions are made, not infrequently, in a familial way, as in the home, so to speak.”62 In a 1937 Central Committee meeting, A. A. Zhdanov and others decried “familyness” (semeistvennost’) in which everything was decided behind closed doors by small groups having common interests, among them self- protection.

Divorced from the needs of the locals they were supposedly responsible for, these bureaucratic elites became a target of Stalin, who took provincial parties to task for what Getty (2013, 248) calls the “‘familial’ choice of personnel.” These entrenched regional powers were the closest socialist analogue to subordinate princes or nobles within an imperial hierarchy, yet their experience under Stalinism differed sharply from that of their monarchical counterparts. By the nature of being a state, a government will invariably encompass regional middlemen to govern over localities in a vast “empire” in which the centre cannot reliably micromanage. In the Soviet context, these regional leaders were treated with suspicion and derision—and ultimately mass murder.

Read more

One of the most striking arguments in Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism is his repeated invocation of Napoleon Bonaparte as a historical analogue for Stalin. In Trotsky’s biting critique, he argued that both figures betrayed the ideals of their respective revolutions, ushering in an era of authoritarian consolidation that marked the exhaustion of revolutionary politics in their respective eras. Trotsky (1935) remarked that “in their manner of living, their interests and psychology, the present-day Soviet functionaries differ no less from the revolutionary Bolsheviks than the generals and prefects of Napoleon differed from the revolutionary Jacobins.” This analogy is problematic for a number of reasons, and is largely untenable on evidentiary grounds, collapsing historically distinct phenomena into a single framework that was politically useful for Trotsky at the time. However, this is not to say there are no similarities. Stalin and Napoleon are familiar insofar as they belong to the broad category of individuals who exerted an outsized influence on the course of history, but, following Plekhanov’s reading of the individual in history, they did so not as autonomous architects of events, but as men whose particular qualities happened to meet the particular demands their epochs had already placed before them.

Trotsky denies any exceptional qualities as a leader in Stalin, essentially arguing they are similar only in their shared betrayal of revolutionary ideals, while insisting that Stalin lacks any of the redeeming capacities, such as the military prowess or world-historical significance, that made Napoleon such a notable historical figure. I will argue that Trotsky’s politically convenient reading of the Napoleon-Stalin connection was applied in reverse.

In a previous article, I argued, following van Ree and Fitzpatrick, that Stalin did not represent the exhaustion of the revolution, as he presided over a period in which revolutionary fervour reached its most hysterical peak under the Great Terror. Like the Jacobin Terror, this episode was defined by an excess of revolutionary energy, one turned inward with devastating consequences as the revolution consumed its own adherents. In another article, I addressed the empirical issues with Trotsky's “Bonapartism” theory as a conceptual framework for making sense of Stalinism, given that, following Marx, Trotsky had conceived of Bonapartism as a class stalemate, a balance of forces involving two antagonistic classes in deadlock, which enabled the state to function as a mediating ruler with relative autonomy. Trotsky tried to apply the concept of a class stalemate to the USSR, arguing that kulaks and other bourgeois exploiters had pushed Stalin into passivity, thereby establishing a class stalemate with the Soviet proletariat. Of course, historical research on the Stalin era by specialists has completely discredited the notion that Stalin was too passive and in fact reveals the opposite problem: that his unrelenting and brutal campaigns of repression, including collectivization and NKVD “sweeps,” were too extreme and totalizing.

As it relates to the sequencing of revolution, Napoleon and Stalin were not analogous. There is no individual that can be considered a clean one-to-one analogue with Stalin from the French Revolution, but it would be more credible to argue that Stalin was akin to a Robespierre type figure who somehow held on to power and was able to institutionalize his revolutionary ideology in France. This would have necessarily entailed a degree of stabilization and conservatism inherent to state-building, but likely would not have gone as far as Napoleon in accommodating reactionary sentiment. No post-revolutionary state in history has been able to indefinitely sustain the utopian energy of the peak of that revolution; that will invariably dissipate, and it falls to the revolutionaries to translate their gains into durable political and economic institutions. This, however, does not mean that comparisons between Stalin and Napoleon are entirely without merit. Rather, Trotsky went about the comparison in the wrong way.

Trotsky (1935) had written, “there is no need to ascribe to Stalin the traits of Napoleon I; whenever the social conditions demand it, Bonapartism can consolidate itself around axes of the most diverse caliber,” implying that Napoleon, despite being a traitor to Jacobin ideals, was a man of high calibre, presumably due to his exceptional military and political capacities which led him to decisively shape an entire epoch. For Trotsky, Stalin and Napoleon may have occupied a similar structural role in their relation to the revolution, but he was clear that such analogous political forms were not dependent on the particular greatness of the individual in question. After all, for Trotsky, Stalin, unlike Napoleon, was an utter mediocrity, a provincial bureaucrat without any intellectual depth or organic connection to the working class. Despite the criticism levelled at Napoleon by Marxists over the years, they could not deny that he was a brilliant military and political figure. Trotsky would never concede that a similar characterization could be applicable to his most hated opponent.

Recent developments in historical research, with leading military scholars working closely with the archives, have seen a number of historians begrudgingly acknowledge that Stalin was an indispensable military leader whose decision-making was a major contributing factor to Soviet victory over Nazism. In this sense, Stalin arguably shared some of the qualities of “greatness” evidenced by Napoleon. Benjamin Schwarz (2007), surveying new developments in Second World War historiography for The Atlantic, writes:

But the new accounts—which even draw on transcripts of telephone and telegraphic conversations with his front-line generals—all go further than that, and put Stalin at the center of the Soviets’ awesome military achievement.

For instance, military historian Norman Davies makes clear that he is hardly a fan of the ruthless dictator, but he follows the evidence where it leads, observing that Stalin had endured a “calamity of indescribable proportions,” and that “the victory of 1945 in Europe was above all his” (Davies 2006, 425). For Shcwarz (2007), “Davies’s conclusion, that the victory was Stalin’s, would seem inarguable.” Alfred Rieber, in what is perhaps the most exhaustive scholarly examination of Stalin’s wartime leadership to date, Stalin as Warlord (2022, 268), writes that Stalin’s leadership, “steady, ruthless, tireless, and remarkably flexible — given the pre-war evidence, was a major factor in winning the war.” A popular misconception is that the USSR had won the war despite Stalin’s leadership and not, at least in part, because of it, a notion that seems to be based on understandable moral revulsion with Stalin’s acts of repression rather than an objective analysis of his performance as a military leader. In reality, it makes little sense to believe that a dictator with absolute power who retained close control over the levers of military power would have nothing to do with the outcomes of military decisions he had a key role in making. To a great extent, Stalin owns both Soviet victories and losses, and it was the former that carried through the victory over Nazism. Indeed, historian Geoffrey Roberts (2006, xi), in another magisterial assessment of Stalin’s war leadership, does not shy away from stating uncomfortable historical conclusions plainly:

Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt – they were all replaceable as warlords, but not Stalin. In the context of the horrific war on the Eastern Front, Stalin was indispensable to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

Along the same lines, Kershaw (2022, 238) writes, "However absurd the attempt was to claim sole credit for the victory, it is not easy to imagine that it could have been attained by a different leader." What this emerging consensus among military historians suggests, is that Stalin, despite his moral shortcomings, was an irreplaceable world-historical military leader who was uniquely qualified in leading the Soviet war effort to victory and defeating Hitler. Of course, all this occurred after Trotsky was killed on Stalin's orders, but the triumphant story of Stalinist war victory is difficult to reconcile with Trotsky's narrative of Stalin as a bumbling mediocrity. Indeed, perceptions of Stalin from other leaders and diplomats suggest an assured, confident, though ruthless leader:

[Stalin] was brief and incisive his comments, clear about his objectives, patient and inexorable in pursuing them. Brooke [Britain's head of the Army] considered that he had an outstanding military brain, and observed that in all his statements he never ones failed to appreciate all the implications of a situation with quick, unerring eye, and “in this respect he stood out compared with Roosevelt and Churchill.” The head of the U.S military mission in Moscow had noted that no one could failed to recognize “the qualities of greatness in the man.” (Grey 1979, 389)

In another relevant passage, Grey (1979, 387) writes:

Read more

Trotsky’s account of bureaucracy has become the default lens through which much of the Left has come to understand Stalinism. He treats the bureaucracy as the central cause of the revolution’s degeneration, but does his account of its class basis and relationship to Soviet society still hold up? Indeed, the historian Robert McNeal (1977, 32) already noted in 1977 Trotsky’s “somewhat fantastic perception of the USSR in the late twenties and early Thirties,” which often served as the basis of his interpretations of the Stalinist state. Much has changed since Trotsky was writing, and new historical research into the inner workings of the Soviet system gives us good reason to be sceptical of Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism.

Subscribe now

Trotsky’s hatred of the bureaucracy ran deep. Stalinism, Trotsky reasoned, did not have an organic base in the working class. It was purely a creature of the bureaucracy. Trotsky, however, is careful not to let his own animus subsume the theoretical point; Stalin was not the creator of the bureaucracy, but merely a personification of these tendencies, as the revolution had exhausted itself, leaving an opening for the bureaucratic takeover. In describing Trotsky’s characterization of the nature of Stalinism, Twiss (189, 2014) writes that:

Unlike the right and the left wings, the centrist tendency had no roots in the fundamental classes of Soviet society. Rather, [Stalinism’s] strength was to be found in the apparatuses of the party, the state, the economic institutions, and the mass organisations, which combined constituted an enormous ‘layer of “administrators”

He attributed his own political downfall to Stalin’s bureaucratic manipulation rather than to any kind of expression of meritocratic advancement or democratic sentiment within the Party. As General Secretary, Trotsky believed that Stalin used his position to build a network of loyal officials within the Party apparatus, allowing him to consolidate power and marginalize opponents through control over these appointments. In actuality, historian James Harris, working from archival evidence, argues that Stalin did not usurp power but won the support of Party officialdom through normal channels of intra-party democracy. Trotsky’s account of bureaucratic manipulation may have provided a less politically humiliating explanation for his defeat, but there is no evidence to suggest that the General Secretary’s office, despite certain advantages, possessed the autonomous, all-encompassing power often attributed to it by sections of the anti-Stalinist left, given the institutional constraints of the position. Historian James Harris (2005, 79) writes [emphasis mine]:

Some have argued that Stalin tipped the weight of the Central Committee in his favour by excluding his opponents from it and appointing his supporters. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Stalin could control the slates of Central Committee members up for election at the Party congresses in the 1920s, or overtly manipulate its expansion in his favor. Rather, it appears as though Stalin largely carried the Central Committee on the basis of his policies and, in time, on the concrete results they brought … Stalin nevertheless placed greater emphasis on the support he had in the broader Party membership: ‘In 1927,’ he observed, ‘720,000 Party members voted for the Central Committee line. That is, the backbone of the Party voted for us

Trotsky had derided his political defeat as bureaucratic manipulation, but it is probably more accurately described as being outmaneuvered in a political struggle by a rival whose ideas and policies had greater resonance with the intended audience. A number of scholars have noted that Trotsky's single-mindedness and intransigence undermined his ability to build coalitions and navigate the cutthroat arena of Soviet politics. Trotsky, Carr (1958, 152) writes, “had no political instinct in the narrower sense, no feeling for a situation, no sensitive touch for the levers of power.” Kotkin (2014), too, reiterated Carr’s finding, largely critical of Trotsky's merits as a political operator in his monumental biography on Stalin. It’s also worth noting the extent to which Trotsky's understanding of bureaucracy was shaped by his own dwindling political prospects and alienation from the political system he played a central role in founding. Initially, from 1917-1922, Trotsky's conception of bureaucracy was centred around inefficiency and the need to restructure the Soviet economy. This was hardly unique to Trotsky, as Lenin, Stalin, and other leading Bolsheviks offered similar organizational critiques of Soviet bureaucracy, yet these earlier alternate Soviet conceptions have been overshadowed by Trotsky's later interpretation, which has come to dominate Left discussions of the Soviet bureaucratic question.

Subscribe now

Trotsky’s recourse to bureaucracy as the master explanation for Stalinism's deficiencies carries obvious appeal, not least because it overlapped, in the wake of de-Stalinization, with right-wing anti-communist images of an omnipotent Soviet state apparatus. Yet, as we will see, Trotsky's conceptualization was quite ill-defined and vague, and lacked the rigour one might expect of Marxist analysis. Where he did take steps to outline its specific characteristics or conditions, they were often contradicted by the available evidence. Murphy (2017) writes:

Twiss contends that by 1936 Trotsky believed the bureaucracy had moved away from “relative autonomy” towards “extreme autonomy” and, claims Twiss, that this “suggested a class-like degree of autonomy.” Yet such a transformation to complete autonomy would have negated Bonapartism and represented a class, not a “class-like” formation … Either the bureaucracy was a temporary phenomenon wavering between contending classes or it represented the interests of a particular class, even if that class was the bureaucracy itself

If the bureaucracy had effectively governed as a ruling class in the process of asserting its independence, then Trotsky’s application of the Bonapartist framework, a theory premised on a class stalemate, makes even less sense. As I discussed in my earlier article on Trotsky’s interpretation of Bonapartism, Trotsky had claimed, implausibly, that Stalin was not doing enough to confront the so-called kulak threat, and that his power, in part, emerged from a stalemate between the “exploitative laters of society” and a demoralized proletariat. This balance of class forces purportedly allowed the Stalinist bureaucracy to function as a temporary mediator in a period of crisis, ruling with relative autonomy. Though as Trotsky perceived the strength and size of the bureaucracy to grow, he increasingly described it as evolving into an ever more independent and self-sustaining social formation.

Trotsky's theories of bureaucratism and Bonapartism were deeply intertwined, with Bonapartism serving as the class-structural explanation for the bureaucracy's emergence. Yet this framework sits uneasily with what the scholarship has established: the kulak, as Lewin (1966) has demonstrated, did not exist as a clearly defined class (the leadership never arrived at a clear and workable definition of what the Kulak was), and the wealthier and vocal anti-Soviet elements among the peasantry were in any case thoroughly repressed under Stalin. In the absence of evidence for an actual class stalemate, Trotsky's theorization of Bonapartism is unable to provide a coherent explanation for the emergence of the Soviet bureaucracy. And one cannot underestimate the centrality of the kulak to Trotsky’s theorizing of Bonpartism and by extension, bureaucracy, as Trotsky (1929) had written that [emphasis mine]:

The problem of Thermidor and Bonapartism is at bottom the problem of the kulak. Those who shy away from this problem, those who minimize its importance and distract attention to questions of party regime, to bureaucratism, to unfair polemical methods, and other superficial manifestations and expressions of the pressure of kulak elements upon the dictatorship of the proletariat resemble a physician who chases after symptoms while ignoring functional and organic disturbance

In addition to the Kulak problem, Trotsky repeatedly suggested that the continued growth of the bureaucracy was stoked by various alien, hostile class forces, which Stalin supposedly did not sufficiently respond to. Twiss (2014, 311) is right to point out that “this argument must have seemed less and less plausible after the leadership launched its all-out assault on the same alien elements.” Stalin's terror encompassed far-reaching, indiscriminate campaigns against entire categories of people, which included suspected class enemies alongside countless innocent people. The correct critique of Stalin was that his campaign against enemies was too extreme, not too passive. In this way, Trotsky continually misdiagnosed the issues of Stalinism, and his prescribed solution, unrelenting force against perceived state enemies, was precisely the problem to begin with. Given that his belief in Stalin’s alleged passivity towards the kulak and other domestic enemies as a driver of bureaucratic growth depended on enemies who simply did not exist on the scale Trotsky supposed, the “bureaucracy” loses its material foundation as a viable theoretical category. In light of these problems, it is difficult to see how the theory can be salvaged, and seems to suggest that Trotsky may have embraced some of the same repressive policy decisions if he had been in power instead of Stalin.

If Trotsky effectively conceded that the bureaucracy governed like a traditional ruling class by virtue of its extreme autonomy, he had moved beyond Bonapartism as Marx and Lenin conceived it—as a semi-autonomous formation contending between warring classes. This departure leaves Trotsky’s theory of the bureaucracy with more questions than answers. What was the exact nature of this independent bureaucratic ruling stratum? Generally speaking, the term “bureaucracy” implies a broad system of organization that is inherently hierarchical, and includes a spectrum of power, from lowly clerks and middle-managers to top officials. Sheila Fitzpatrick (1986, 361-362) notes that:

the social position and class interests of those at the bottom were quite different from those at the top, perhaps at times directly opposed to them. Trotsky, to be sure, had in mind the higher level of bureaucracy when he talked of a new ruling class. But how high, and on what basis can a cut-off point be drawn?

Trotsky had little to say about the class tensions and dynamics within the bureaucracy, which was certainly not a monolithic structure. An all-encompassing, amorphous “bureaucracy” tells us little about the power and class motivations of a ruling elite whose parameters cannot even be defined, or its relation to different segments within the bureaucracy which, in reality, had their own semi-independent political and economic interests. See J. Arch Getty’s Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition, James Harris’ The Great Urals: regionalism and the evolution of the Soviet system, or Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 for more nuanced studies of the Stalinist state that account for the different interests within the “bureaucracy.”

Subscribe now

The political structure of Stalinist bureaucracy was undoubtedly hierarchical, with the ruling layer occupied by Stalin and his inner circle, but Fitzpatrick(1986, 363) notes “the discovery that Stalinist society was hierarchically stratified is scarcely unexpected (what society is not?) and in itself is unlikely to change anyone’s thinking about the nature of Stalinism.” Trotsky speaks of the bureaucracy as essentially “self-sufficient,” as if the vast administrative apparatus functioned as a unified and self-directing entity ruling over a passive population (Twiss 2014, 6). Yet Trotsky was clearly oblivious to the tensions, fragmentation, and internal divisions within the Soviet state, as recent developments in Soviet historiography have made plain. The research of Adeeb Khalid and David Priestland, for instance, has revealed the ways in which the Soviet state operated as a “mobilization state,” characterized by an interplay between “above” and “below,” pursuing populist campaigns that successfully engaged ordinary citizens in state initiatives. This was not democracy in the conventional liberal parliamentary sense, but it reveals that Soviet citizens were broadly patriotic and deeply invested in the goals articulated by the Party leadership through its mass cultural and educational institutions. We see this at a more intimate level in studies of Soviet diaries and memoirs, which reveal how successfully the state drew ordinary citizens into its vision of a communist future. Hellbeck (2006, 6), whose extensive archival work has made him one of the foremost authorities on Soviet subjectivity, writes:

Through a multitude of political-education campaigns, the Soviet regime prodded individuals to consciously identify with the revolution (as interpreted by the party leadership), and thereby to comprehend themselves as active participants in the drama of history

This “mobilization state” described in the historical literature is entirely absent in Trotsky’s characterization of the state, which elides these nuances in favour of a static picture of an alienated populace, manipulated and repressed from above by a bureaucratic “ruling class,” a portrayal which was politically convenient for a disgruntled outlier looking to win back his spot in the Soviet ruling clique, but hardly reflective of how Soviet citizens actually engaged with the state. The coercive might of the USSR was certainly a defining aspect of the state, but it was only one part. It notably employed a form of what I call “pedagogical statecraft” that sought not merely to repress or manage citizens, but to transform its population through state-facilitated class struggle. Priestland (2007, 368) writes that:

As in 1928–30, Stalin was squeezing the middle-level apparatus in a ‘double press’: pressure from below was combined with pressure from above … The masses, he declared, had special energies that Bolsheviks had to use in building socialism; only ‘democratic’, non-‘bureaucratic’ relations between officials and the masses could mobilize them.

As I’ve described in detail in my other writing, the these “democratic”, populist, and anti-bureaucratic impulses lay at the heart of Stalinist terror, and, in part, explain how the leader came to endorse cataclysmic violent policies, drawing everyday citizens into the transformative class warfare which sought to usher society into the next phase of history. Priestland (2005, 183) writes that Stalin’s voluntaristic and populist tendencies “had their roots in left Bolshevik thinking.” He (2005, 183) notes that these dimensions of Stalin’s worldview “have often been obscured by the common assumption that Stalin was a conservative figure,” a popular misconception that Trotsky’s writings have contributed to. On the flip side, while Stalin’s Left or “democratic” views have been marginalized in popular historical memory, Trotsky’s conservative and centralizing tendencies have been equally obscured, buried underneath the legend of the romantic revolutionary martyr. Once both these selective readings are corrected, Trotsky’s and Stalin’s ideological worldviews are actually closer than one might think. It is worth briefly tracing out Trotsky’s ideas on democracy.

Subscribe now

The Early Theory of Bureaucracy

Read more

The Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism endures as the most influential and politically resonant critique of the Soviet leader, producing a robust tradition in which anti-bureaucratism and democratic political organization constitute key pillars. For activists of the Trotskyist left, any progressive movement aspiring to advance socialism in the 21st century must distinguish itself from what it perceives as the failed authoritarian experiments of the past. The intention to correct those failures is surely welcome, yet any political program grounding itself in historical critique should take care to get the history right.

Subscribe now

The focus of this writing will be the views of Trotsky himself, particularly his understanding of the Stalinist state as a Bonapartist bureaucratic regime. These views have informed so much of the left’s understanding of Stalinism, and their foundations are deserving of closer scrutiny. Though it should be noted that Trotsky’s critique of Bonapartism was never fully consistent; it evolved throughout his political career and often in response to ongoing developments. These critiques were shaped by his dwindling political fortunes, certain ideological assumptions, and, by nature of exile, a limited view into the actual machinery of the Soviet state. The result was a conceptual framework built on faulty foundations.

Trotsky’s conception of Bonapartism was always central to his interpretation of Stalinism as a “Thermidor,” a counter-revolution betraying the original Bolshevik thrust of the Russian Revolution carried forward by Lenin and himself. This article stands on its own, but can be read as a sequel to my previous two pieces on the French Revolution and Stalinism (Part 1: Red Jacobins and Part 2: The Red Robespierre), which argued that historical Stalinism had more in common with Jacobin terror than with Napoleon’s Thermidorian reversal of the revolution’s radical phase.

Trotsky drew on the concept of Bonapartism as previously employed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, adapting it to the Soviet experience. For Trotsky, Bonapartism was a political category derived from the historical experience of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power in the aftermath of the French Revolution, though not reducible to Napoleon I as a historical figure. It described a situation in which the state acquires a degree of autonomy from society, elevating itself above competing social forces. As Trotsky (1937) wrote:

Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes — in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged

Within this framework, Trotsky interpreted Stalin as a modern Bonapartist figure. Much as Napoleon had consolidated the social gains of the French Revolution while curtailing its democratic and popular dimensions, Stalin was seen as presiding over a bureaucratic counter-revolution carried out in the name of the October Revolution. In an excellent study on Trotsky’s developing notion of Soviet bureaucracy, Twiss (2014, 316) describes the nature of this Trotskyist comparative analysis between Stalin and Napoleon Bonaparte:

On the basis of both the general deterioration of the regime and the growing concentration of power in Stalin’s hands, in early 1930 Trotsky began to compare the party regime to the highly autonomous and authoritarian regimes of Napoleon and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Thus, in February 1930 he asserted that the methods used against the party right represented ‘a new stage in the process of the Bonapartist degeneration of the party regime’ In his draft theses on the Russian question in April 1931, he denounced the ‘Bonapartist system of administering the party.’

There are two major issues with Trotsky's theorization that will be addressed in the following writing. The first concerns Bonapartism as an analytical category and whether, as Trotsky (re-)constructs it, it can be coherently applied to the Soviet experience. The framework faces serious difficulties here, as the political-economic context of 1930s USSR is difficult to reconcile with Trotsky's core assumptions. Building on his Marxist predecessors, Trotsky developed the Bonapartist category in novel ways, but in doing so distorted the empirical reality to make the model fit. The second issue is Trotsky's comparison of Napoleon and Stalin, one which is contradicted by a great deal of evidence demonstrating how fundamentally different these two figures were, both as individuals, in the nature of the regimes they presided over, and in the historical roles each played. That will be the focus of the second part of this article.

Subscribe now

Bonapartism

Engels, building on Marx, described Bonapartism as a kind of class stalemate, in which two warring classes prove unable to decisively defeat one another, allowing the state to rise above both factions and govern with a degree of independence, playing one side off against the other. Both Engels and Marx identified earlier historical instances of this phenomenon, with Napoleon III serving as its paradigmatic modern expression, concentrating state power amid the unresolved conflict between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes.

It is not entirely surprising that Trotsky saw Stalin as a Bonapartist figure alien to the working class, especially considering that Trotsky, as a founding figure of the revolution, was outmaneuvered and pushed out of his own Bolshevik government, a defeat he could only make sense of in terms of counter-revolutionary treachery and connivance. Like Napoleon, who was seen by many on the Marxist left as having betrayed the gains of the French Revolution, Stalin, according to Trotsky, had similarly betrayed October, rising to power on the back of bureaucratic reaction and elevating the interests of a privileged caste above those of the international working class. The broad, superficial commonalities between the alleged revolutionary usurpers had no doubt encouraged Trotsky to draw deeper connections between the two political actors across time through the framing of Bonapartism. For Trotsky, Stalin’s rise was similarly enabled by a balance of class forces, producing a degree of state autonomy in which the bureaucracy could govern semi-independently.

What were the two opposing class forces in Stalin’s USSR? Twiss (2014, 168) describes how, according to Trotsky, “bourgeois elements had grown in size and economic influence and had become more self-confident.” Trotsky had argued that the NEP, necessary as it was, still “revived forces hostile to socialism’, resurrecting a layer of peasant exploiters (the kulaks) and a layer involved in ‘trading capital’ that dreamed of a restoration of capitalism” (Twiss 2014, 169-170). This dimension of Trotsky’s critique deserves more emphasis than it typically receives. Despite the popular characterization of Trotsky as the humane alternative to Stalin, Trotsky in some respects shared the same ideological impulses that ultimately drove Stalinist mass repression. In his reading, Stalin had permitted right-wing elements in the country-side to grow bolder in their anti-Soviet activity; here, the Stalinists were not doing enough to combat the kulaks! These reactionary elements had fought the proletariat to a standstill, Trotsky argued, further entrenching the Stalinist bureaucracy’s grip on power. The opposing class forces in the Stalinist USSR thus comprised reactionary elements in the countryside on one side, and the Soviet proletariat on the other.

Subscribe now

In reality, however, when it came to the de-kulakization drive, there was no Soviet figure more ideologically committed to defeating the kulaks, going so far as to “liquidate” them as a class, an intensification of existing tendencies within Bolshevism that understood the repressive destruction of kulakdom in its entirety as necessary to realizing socialist construction. On this, Kotkin (2014, 739) writes that “If Stalin had died, the likelihood of coerced wholesale collectivization — the only kind — would have been near zero,” adding that Stalin “felt the survival of the revolution was at stake and that he had the political room to act.” Stalin went above and beyond his peers in pursuing a path of total liquidation. Indeed, Lewin (1966, 210) writes that:

Read more

Read Part 1 First:

In his excellent analysis of Stalin's political thought, the historian Erik van Ree (2002, 283) situates the Soviet leader in close ideological proximity to Robespierre and the Jacobins, characterizing his political worldview as “Marxist Jacobinism.” To what extent is this provocative characterization true? The relation between Soviet socialism and Jacobinism was not always straightforward. To understand Stalin’s relation to Jacobinism, we must first briefly survey the history of Bolshevik and early Soviet engagement with French revolutionary thought. A range of opinions on the Jacobins was expressed by different prominent historical figures associated with twentieth-century Marxism and Bolshevism, and it was fairly common to see these figures shift their views as ongoing political developments recast the meaning of the past, which, in turn, shaped how they conceptualized revolutionary strategy for changing the future. The indecisiveness around the meaning of the French Revolution in the early Russian Marxist tradition is perhaps best exemplified by Plekhanov:

[Plekhanov’s] activist impulses, when they were triggered for one reason or another, would cause him to praise the Jacobins lavishly. But on other occasions, when for whatever reason he was calmer, he would condemn them for their excessive activism and voluntarism, for their unfortunate penchant for getting ahead of themselves ideologically and politically (Bergman 2019, 82)

Subscribe now

Much of this debate came to centre around Lenin himself, who, as the dominant figure of the Russian Revolution, was frequently analogized with Robespierre. For some, the comparison was a mark of praise, highlighting Lenin's revolutionary vigour and bold leadership; for others, it was a condemnation, casting him as the initiator of ruthless terror and centralization. Trotsky, for instance, critiqued Lenin in 1903 as “a Robespierre [who] transformed the modest [Party] Council into an all-powerful Committee of Public Safety” (Bergman 2019, 91). He was concerned about what he saw as authoritarian tendencies in Lenin, which could very well lead the future Soviet leader down a path of violence and destruction, as Robespierre had.

It is clear, then, that Robespierre did not have a positive connotation for Trotsky at this time, yet a few years later, he seemingly reversed this view, suggesting that, in the words of Bergman (2019, 95), a Russian Robespierre may be “a good thing for Russian democracy” after all. The Soviet economist, Vladimir Akimov, had “declared that the authoritarianism Lenin … had revealed at the congress smacked of Jacobinism, and that, if unchecked, could lead to the application of terror” (Bergman 2019, 89). Akimov believed that individual leaders with authoritarian tendencies could bring the revolution to ruins, and it was thus paramount for the socialist movement to identify its “Robespierres” and remove them from power. Martov critiqued Lenin along similar lines, although he had his own trajectory of evolving views on the issue, initially believing “that only through ‘a Jacobin revolution’ could socialism be achieved” (Bergman 2019, 89). This positive association would not last. By 1900, he had changed his position entirely, turning the comparison against Lenin, and concluding that a Jacobin-style dictatorship would be “the worst possible outcome for Russia” (Bergman 2019, 90). Martov feared that excessive centralism would cause the party to degenerate into a “bureaucratic putschist organisation run by a leader and divorced from the masses,” and used the Jacobin analogy to express this anxiety (Cliff 1989). Stepping outside Russia, Rosa Luxemburg similarly criticized Lenin, detecting the Robespierrean legacy in the perceived centralizing tendencies of Lenin. Like Martov, she viewed the Jacobin leadership as an elitist group whose interests were separate from those they claimed to lead. If anything, all this goes to show the immense importance of the French Revolution to the twentieth-century Russian and Marxist worldview; as the closest and most studied historical precedent for their own revolution, it provided these radicals with a reference point and framework to interpret and solve their own political dilemmas.

Subscribe now

Of course, it's worth noting how Lenin (1917) responded to those who derided Jacobinism:

Bourgeois historians see Jacobinism as a fall (”to stoop”). Proletarian historians see Jacobinism as one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed class. The Jacobins gave France the best models of a democratic revolution and of resistance to a coalition of monarchs against a republic … “Jacobinism” in Europe or on the boundary line between Europe and Asia in the twentieth century would be the rule of the revolutionary class, of the proletariat, which, supported by the peasant poor and taking advantage of the existing material basis for advancing to socialism, could not only provide all the great, ineradicable, unforgettable things provided by the Jacobins in the eighteenth century, but bring about a lasting world-wide victory for the working people.

For Lenin, as a revolutionary, there could be no greater praise than to compare him with the man who had steered the first great modern revolution through its most desperate and decisive hour. Robespierre's revolutionary intransigence and unflinching willingness to deploy terror in defence of the revolution only demonstrated his whole-hearted devotion to the cause, a temperament that, Lenin believed, was vital for the 20th century revolutionaries aiming to complete what the Jacobins had started, but ultimately could not. They were constrained by the material and historical conditions of their pre-capitalist age; it was up to the Bolsheviks to finish the job. The revolutionary leader had stated that:

The Jacobins of 1793 have gone down in history for their great example of a truly revolutionary struggle against the class of the exploiters by the class of the working people and the oppressed who had taken all state power into their own hands. (Lenin 1917)

Lenin (1917) had referred to the Bolsheviks as the “Jacobins” of the 20th century, and placed both groups, the Bolsheviks and Jacobins, under a single umbrella of revolutionary struggle against class exploitation and oppression. In this way, 1917 was not a fundamentally new project, but one that picked up from 1793, fulfilling the mandate of revolution now that the historical moment was finally ripe for it. Indeed, Lenin seemed to suggest that Bolshevik-Jacobinism embodied a kind of “veritable Platonic ideal of Revolutionary Virtue” that transcended any particular historical moment or place, a universal truth, but only partially revealed, that emerged from the crucible of revolution and awaited its full realization with the communist movement (Bergman 2019, 160).

Subscribe now

For Lenin, the personal attributes and heroism of the Jacobins played a large part in his high esteem of them. As a great admirer of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of the original What Is to Be Done?, a novel whose ascetic revolutionary hero Rakhmetov embodied the ideal of total dedication to the cause, it was clear that Lenin was drawn to revolutionary Great Men, and, as Bergman notes, the Jacobins seemed to represent the real, flesh-and-blood versions of these fictional characters. Lenin was accordingly dismissive of those Russian Marxist critiques of Robespierre which warned of the bureaucratizing and degenerating effects of his policies of terror. His faith in a Marxist conception of the unfolding of history led him to attribute the Jacobins' failures to the different historical circumstances of eighteenth-century France rather than to any inherent flaw or error of the revolutionary leadership in France.

The excesses of terror could be avoided because the Bolsheviks, Lenin had written in 1917, could simply arrest their opponents; their enemies were allegedly not as entrenched or implacable as the foes of Jacobinism. On the other hand, the bold and decisive use of repression to crush enemies and consolidate power was praised, and he refused to let the former overshadow the latter. Lenin claimed that “a government of the proletariat which had its historical parallel in 1792” was not realizable by the Mensheviks, whose aversion to violence and political timidity meant they could never be the next iteration of Jacobins (Price 1921, 45). Lenin desired the revolutionary prestige and historical legitimacy that came with the Jacobin comparison, situating the Bolsheviks as part of a grand world-historical tradition of radical transformation, while reserving the right to disavow the parts that were politically inconvenient—written off as historically irrelevant to the Bolshevik’s current situation. His pick-and-choose approach to Jacobinism made sense in the short term, as he did not want to validate the critiques of his critics, and the muscular legacy of the French Revolution was too compelling and relevant to not take up. However, the romanticization of terror as a form of heroic leadership with the courage and ferocity to do what others could not failed to grasp what terror entails. In actuality, terror emerges from a kind of revolutionary fanaticism that is not easily constrained or channelled in a purposeful way. Terror is not simply the might of revolutionary heroes in command, but a chaotic form of repressive governance that easily slips into collective self-destruction. The notion that Lenin could kill Trotsky or Stalin in the way Robespierre had done to Danton would have struck him as absurd and far-fetched, yet this exact kind of thing did happen after his passing, as a new surge of revolutionary suspicion was activated by the looming threat of Nazism, war, and the post-NEP agrarian crisis, among others issues beyond the scope of this writing. Lenin’s Cheka carried out mass repression and terror against actual class enemies, but once those threats were largely liquidated, it’s not surprising that the same machinery of terror was pointed inwards once the leadership perceived a new wave of threats. In this way, Stalinism was not a “betrayal” of Leninism, but a radicalization of its existing tendencies, following along the same course of self-destruction already laid out by Robespierre.

Subscribe now

Lenin also suggests that Jacobin-style hyper-violence, though unnecessary for the Bolshevik context, was still a proportional response to the legitimate threats specific to the Jacobin moment. The excesses of terror are indeed the product of particular political and military circumstances, but such circumstances have a habit of recurring across historical contexts. Revolutions tend to generate similar pressures and configurations of crisis across, which makes the recurrence of self-destructive revolutionary fanaticism a strong possibility rather than an isolated Robespierrean aberration. For these reasons, the self-destructive endpoint of Jacobin terror was not an anomalous defect of that specific period (Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolutions draws out these commonalities across the English, French, and Russian Revolutions and their respective reigns of terror). In explaining the process of Jacobin Terror, specifically, Linton (2013, 24) writes:

Read more

The political character of Stalinism remains one of the most vexing historical questions for the Left. Its violence, centralization of power, and cult of personality, among other facets, have naturally led large segments of the Left to want nothing to do with this episode of history. Beyond complete disassociation, it has become a political imperative to reject the idea that Stalinism had anything to do with Marxism or “real” Communism and instead position Stalin as a traitor to Lenin’s original cause who exploited the revolutionary moment to usurp power and establish a highly personalized dictatorship. For Trotsky (1933), a useful analogy for making sense of this betrayal was the French Revolution:

Why do we speak precisely of Thermidor? Because it is the best known and most complete historical example of a masked counter-revolution which still contains the outward forms and the ritual of the revolution, but which already changes the class content of the state.

In Trotsky’s framing, Stalin, like Napoleon before him, had led a counter-revolution under the guise of completing the revolution, and the various deficiencies of Stalinism, from the rejection of democracy to excessive police violence, were only proof that the Soviet leader had strayed greatly from the revolutionary path set out by Lenin and Trotsky. For Trotsky (1937), Stalin’s system had “nothing in common with Marxism” and was “in general foreign to any doctrine or system whatsoever … In keeping with its essential interests the caste of usurpers is hostile to any theory.”

Subscribe now

While one can certainly criticize Stalin’s interpretation of Marxism, his violent policies and their outcomes, what is less convincing is the claim that Stalin did not genuinely believe in Marxism or that he was driven primarily by personal ambition or self-interest. Trotsky’s analysis was shaped by his own bitter rivalry with Stalin, and his assessment of the leader’s relation to Marxism is hardly the observation of an objective analyst. For a more dispassionate assessment, we must turn to academic historians working out of the archives who have closely studied Stalin’s political thought. Geoffrey Roberts’ study of Stalin’s library shows, for instance, how the Soviet leader was deeply invested in Marxist theory, with his collection of books consisting almost entirely of works in that tradition, and many heavily annotated in the margins. Stalin took Marxist ideas seriously his whole life, and they profoundly shaped how he approached his decisions as a leader. The fact that even in his final years he was publishing theoretical treatises on linguistics and political economy is demonstrative of an actor deeply submerged in Marxist thinking.

Stalin’s “unremitting pursuit of socialism and communism,” writes Roberts (2022, 209), was rooted in “deeply held beliefs.” Indeed, for Roberts (2023), “The most important thing to understand about Stalin is that he was an intellectual, driven by his Marxist ideas, a true believer in his communist ideology.” This is a common theme across the major works on Stalin. In Kotkin’s (2014, 462) monumental biography, he writes that “The fundamental fact about [Stalin] … was that he viewed the world through Marxism.” Khlevniuk (2015, 7) observes that “Ideological doctrines and prejudices were often decisive in Stalin’s life and actions... Underpinning Stalin’s worldview was an extreme anti-capitalism.” Likewise, Robert Service (2005, 300) is clear that “[Stalin] and the rest of the Politburo were Marxist believers.” For Sheila Fitzpatrick (2007), “Stalin was a Marxist, and the issue of the workers mattered to him.” Lastly, Ronald Suny (2022), author of a magisterial young Stalin biography, makes the important observation that the pursuit of power is not reducible to purely self-interested political manoeuvring; one can accumulate power in service of an ideological mission, as was the case for the Soviets: “Power was seldom simply about personal aggrandizement or advancement. Based on convictions derived from experience, history, and Marxism, power also served the commitment to a certain vision of the future.” Thus Stalin’s contentious political calculations and compromises should not be seen as irreconcilable with a broader revolutionary ideology, as his own political power became inseparable from the socialist system he built and the political values it projected. Indeed, the ability to successfully navigate power struggles and maneuver in the political arena is necessary for the revolutionary who is serious about seizing power and implementing their ideological agenda.

To suggest that Stalin had more or less abandoned Marxism strains credulity. But that still leaves us with a nagging, unanswered question. How could Stalinism, a system in Trotsky’s (1937) words “thoroughly permeated with police subjectivism” whose “practice is the empiricism of crude violence,” be reconciled with a revolutionary tradition that was supposed to be radically liberatory? Furthermore, even granting Stalin’s own deeply held Marxist convictions, it is worth asking whether the system he built could still very well constitute a fundamental departure from the tradition he claimed to uphold, distorting Marxism beyond recognition in its violent attempt to realize it. In the words of Shachtman (1946), was Stalin’s Marxism, regardless of his own intentions, “organically alien” to the Bolshevik spirit which engendered the October revolution?

Subscribe now

Trotsky’s mistake is in assuming that excessive state violence and repression are somehow at odds with the spirit of revolution. He (1935) explains how the original Bolshevik revolutionary terror “has been completely supplanted by the cold blooded and venomous terror of the bureaucracy,” describing Stalin’s terror as a kind of bureaucratic consolidation. However, if the Jacobin terror is any indication, sweeping centrally directed violence, self-destructive paranoia, and the expunging of perceived impure elements are not aberrations of revolution, but in fact are among its most fundamental characteristics. Few would characterize Robespierre’s reign of terror, in which countless innocent people were executed on spurious charges, including his close allies, as a straightforwardly good thing; its exceptional brutality and fanatical character is noted by even Robespierre’s most sympathetic writers. Yet it would be incoherent to say that Robespierre “betrayed” the revolution, when his episode of terror in fact constituted an integral, yet tragic, sequence of the revolution itself. The violence did not stem from a departure from revolutionary zeal, but was a manifestation of its excess, consuming its makers through the unfolding of its own internal logic. To say the self-destruction of terror is “revolutionary,” is not to say it was justified, but that, despite its needless devastation, it still emerged as a part of a process of revolutionary upheaval. Under external and internal pressure, apocalyptic tendencies within an ideology of revolutionary transformation reach hysterical heights.

On these terms, Stalin’s purges and his cult of revolutionary purity may also be less a betrayal of the tradition Trotsky claimed to defend, and a distilled expression of its zeal. In this way, Stalin, rather than being a Bonapartist, can perhaps more credibly be described as the Red Robespierre. On this note, van Ree (2003) writes:

But if we are drawing historical parallels, did Stalinism not represent a twentieth-century “Thermidor” or a “Bonapartist” aberration rather than a Jacobin repeat performance? With his terrorist campaigns, Stalin followed in Robespierre’s footsteps. He consolidated the revolutionary dictatorship instead of undermining it. Ironically, especially the campaign of terror in the party’s ranks brought the Soviet system nearer to the Robespierre original than it had been under Lenin, when the revolution had not yet devoured its children. Stalin’s motives for the terror were also remarkably similar to Robespierre’s, namely to establish total, unconditional unity of the state and root out all alleged traitors to the nation. Contrary to what Trotskii believed, precisely the Stalinist terror proves that there was no “Thermidor” in the USSR.

On a similar note, Fitzpatrick (2008, 4) writes:

The fact that it was state terror initiated by Stalin does not disqualify it from being part of the Russian Revolution: after all, the Jacobin Terror of 1794 can be described in similar terms. Another important similarity between the two episodes is that in both cases the primary targets for destruction were revolutionaries. For dramatic reasons alone, the story of the Russian Revolution needs the Great Purges, just as the story of the French Revolution needs the Jacobin Terror.

Sheila Fitzpatrick makes the controversial move of including the Stalinist purges as an episode within the Russian Revolution. The Red Terror, with its violence largely directed outward against defined class enemies, is only one part of the paradigmatic sequence of revolutionary terror. Just as the Jacobin terror saw its violence close inwards, consuming its most faithful adherents, the Soviet terror followed the same course, though it took more time to get there. There was a 15-20 year gap separating the Leninist and Stalinist terror, but the revolutionary impulse of terror was only simmering beneath the surface, only to be reactivated by a confluence of external and internal political factors. Stalin, then, “completed” the terror, following in Robespierre’s footsteps by rooting out all perceived opposition, which also encompassed close allies. The French and Russian Revolutions are parallel stories. Indeed, Fitzpatrick and van Ree are correct to note that the notion of Thermidorian disillusionment does not coherently map onto the Stalin era in the way Trotsky supposed, as Stalinist spasms of mass upheaval and terror reveal a fanatical escalation rather than a relaxation of revolutionary energies.

This was not a surgical removal of enemies by a totalising bureaucratic apparatus. Caught up in revolutionary fervour, Soviet officialdom sought to destroy perceived enemies in a war which they themselves genuinely understood as being waged on the defensive. Indeed, Getty (1987, 206) writes that it was really not “a petrified bureaucracy stamping out dissent and annihilating old revolutionary radicals. In fact, it may have been just the opposite … a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy.” The state was perceived as being riddled with enemies, and thus the terror was a process of “cleaning house.” While for Trotsky and Stalin’s critics, to kill one’s friend and comrade, to put no individual above the test of party loyalty, was an act of betrayal, for its participants it was unwavering revolutionary fidelity to the cause. Loyalty to the general will of the party was placed above any personal attachment or feeling. In their subjective worldview, to kill one’s (former) comrade was to cut away the rotting part of the fruit, an act not of treachery but of necessity, performed in the service of the unitary organism of the Party which embodied the revolution itself.

Read more

This article is free, but there is a bonus chapter at the end for paid subscribers.

In recent weeks, the work of controversial scholar Gabriel Rockhill (2025) has sparked a flurry of scathing reviews challenging his controversial conception of “Western Marxism,” which he views as an ideology consciously manipulated in certain directions by “powerful external forces,” namely the CIA and other Western imperialist institutions (Thakor 2026). For Rockhill, Western Marxism cannot be described simply as the theoretical output of the West’s workers’ and socialist movements, because its current form is entangled in an imperialist, conspiratorial formation encompassing networks of academic elites and shadowy CIA influence. This, he argues, has produced a “compatible left” that is not only unwilling or unable to confront Western imperialism but is, in many ways, complicit in furthering these imperial interests, which are often directed against the state-building efforts of socialist projects associated with the “East” (Rockhill 2025, 62).

In this reading, the revolutionary state-building projects associated with Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping must be distinguished from a Western form of Marxism confined to the walls of academia and subordinated to serving the very powers it purports to critique. Gabriel Rockhill is building on Domenico Losurdo’s theorization of bifurcated Marxisms, as articulated in his 2017 work Western Marxism and, to a lesser extent, his Stalin biography. For both Rockhill and Losurdo, Stalin is one of the “good” Marxists, representative of “Eastern Marxism.” This Marxism, unlike its Western variant, is grounded in a pragmatic, revolutionary vision of state-building. It is socialism in power, and power, Losurdo argues, invariably involves compromises and complexities that do not neatly align with the “utopian” and “messianic” theories of Western Marxism. Losurdo underscores how these theories continue to centre the abolition of the state, which he sees as the very vehicle of socialist and Third World development. The “self-neutralizing Eurocentrism” underlying Western Marxism reveals its practical limitations relative to its far more successful Eastern counterpart (Hakamäki and Engel-Di Mauro 2023, xi).

Losurdo states plainly that “Stalin was … the incarnation of Eastern Marxism,” contrasting his developmental focus on building socialism in Russia with Leon Trotsky’s call to spread revolution to the West (Losurdo 2025, 68). He frames this as a misplaced priority, removed from the realities of consolidating the gains of a revolution. For Losurdo, the Stalin-Trotsky split is emblematic of diverging Marxist worldviews that have fundamentally different orientations towards revolution and class struggle. The latter has shaped the contemporary academic establishment, in which Western “professional intellectuals” have become “ensconced in elite networks,” writes Gabriel Rockhill, pontificating on philosophical debates and aesthetic questions while the East takes the lead in building real socialism (Rockhill 2025, 75).

From its disavowal of the orthodox Marxist conception of the “withering of the state” to the vast generalizations entailed in splitting Marxism into two broad, antagonistic camps, this is a controversial reading that has provoked a highly polarized response on the left. Firstly, these traditions are far too diverse and interrelated to be seriously claimed as distinct theoretical traditions operating from different premises. Rockhill’s critique of “Western Marxism” is clearly a partisan reaction to the anti-Stalinist and anti-CCP orientation dominant in left academia and publishing, and the theoretical framework he constructs around that political conclusion is not especially convincing.

As I will argue in this piece, the claim that Stalin’s “SiOC” was a new innovation, the beginning of an “Eastern Marxist” state-building project, is problematic, as the evidence shows that Stalin did not create the idea of socialist development in a single country, which was already established, in less developed form, within the German Marxist intellectual tradition. This precedent was set in the work of Vollmar and Kautsky:

In several important instances, Stalin seemed to continue on suggestions present in Kautsky’s works. The main ones were the concept of socialism in one country, pioneered by Vollmar, and the continued existence of bureaucratic apparatuses, commodity and money relations, and wide wage differentials under socialism. We may assume that his reading of the Erfurter Programm and others of Kautsky’s works was of some influence here (van Ree 2002, 261)

Indeed, van Ree (2005, 18), a specialist in Stalin’s political thought, writes that “Stalinist ideology contained little that was not prefigured in the Western revolutionary movement,” and that Western Marxism was “more permeated with ‘Stalinist’ elements than we would like to think.” Nor was “Eastern Marxism” always the principled bastion of anti-imperialism that Rockhill and Losurdo claim. It is telling that Mao’s highly questionable Sino-Soviet split foreign policy, including rapprochement with the United States and the CCP’s early support of the American War on Terror framework, are not meaningfully addressed in his work. Indeed, Jiang Zemin called George W. Bush within hours of 9/11, expressing support for fighting “terrorism” alongside the U.S. At the very least, these examples complicate the notion of a uniformly anti-imperialist “Eastern Marxism” and reveal how state-building imperatives can lead to awkward alignments with imperial forces. Stalin’s support of Israel perhaps being the most egregious example.

This is not to say that Rockhill does not point out compelling facts or connections between certain academics and American institutions. He does, but such revelations are incorporated within a broader political critique that is ideologically committed to defending his vaguely defined “Eastern Marxism” against the betrayals of “Western Marxists,” which oddly includes non-Marxists like Foucault and Derrida (Wolfe 2026). The forceful response of Rockhill’s critics reflects the long recurrent anxiety around the “mainstreaming” of Stalinism, or the more frightening sounding “Neo-Stalinism,” on Left movements. As Soviet history and the historical Stalin become instrumentalized towards these different political perspectives, the reality of Stalin’s Marxism becomes lost. The purpose of the article is to move beyond this ideological tug-of-war to locate the truth of Stalinism.

Stalin: Western or Eastern Marxist?

My intention is not to retread familiar ground with yet another attack on the credibility of Rockhill or Losurdo’s scholarship. Rather, my aim is more narrow: to interrogate their interpretation of Stalin as the “incarnation” of Eastern Marxism. In fact, I would argue that Stalin defies any such simple binary categorisation. If anything, the available evidence suggests a closer cultural and intellectual affinity to Western Marxism and the European ideas that shaped that ideological current. Despite Stalin’s eventual post-war drift into Cold War isolation, it remains a little-known fact that Stalin in the 1930s was a cultural patron of European arts, architecture, film, theatre, and philosophy, facilitating mass translations of European texts and inviting various visiting theorists to participate in the cultural life of the USSR. This was concurrent with the height of the Stalinist terror throughout the 1930s. Katerina Clark (2011, 16) writes:

in 1932 … the Soviet cultural world became more cosmopolitan, more open to products from the West. The horizon of Soviet culture widened as translation took off. The huge spate of translations published in the 1930s cannot be ignored by those who write of nationalism tout court. The infamous years 1937 and 1938 produced a harvest of translated works by major western European and American writers. Though we have to recognize that, given the length of time it takes to translate, this harvest was probably sown around 1935

This was part of a conscious project of socialist cosmopolitanism in which the USSR sought to represent itself as the New Rome and, by extension, the inheritor of Western civilisation. Continental Europe, with the USSR at the helm, was to be elevated to the new heights of universalist socialism. The USSR was not alone in its ambition of becoming a new Rome. Both Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy cast themselves as rightful heirs to a purified Western or classical civilization, though along hyper-nationalist and racial lines, projecting imperial dominance through military force and ethnic hierarchy. By contrast, the Bolshevik project drew on a different lineage. It mobilized universalist currents rooted in German Marxism and French Jacobinism, reworking ideas from these traditions into a Soviet vision of cosmopolitanism and pan-European fraternity. The fact that few would associate the Stalin years of breakneck industrialization and mass terror with a rich intercultural transmission with Europe is perhaps demonstrative of the extent to which Soviet history is so often viewed solely through the prism of the gulag and famine, a topic Losurdo himself has covered in depth. As a result, the fascinating cultural histories of the Soviet project have been pushed to the margins, displaced by the evocation of totalitarian nightmares deeply imprinted in the popular historical-cultural imagination.

The primary interface for Soviet cultural exchange with the West was VOKS, one of many cultural institutions that facilitated dialogue through initiatives like book exchanges, artistic tours, and exhibitions, all of which were carried out in coordination with Comintern and other relevant state organs. What is particularly noteworthy is that throughout the 1920s VOKS was “negotiating for links with the Institute for Social Research (i.e., the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist critical theory),” one of the main targets of Rockhill’s ire (Clark 2011, 39). It may perhaps come as a surprise to see the Soviet state engaging with these philosophies, which were presumably far removed from the concrete realities of pragmatic state-building praised by Losurdo. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” is often treated as a total disavowal of internationalism and world revolution, marking an inward turn towards state development. But as Stalin articulated and codified “socialism in one country,” the Soviet state was simultaneously strengthening cultural ties with Europe, which, at this point, the Soviets saw themselves as not only being a part of, but as its cultural capital via Moscow. Clark (2011, 10) writes that Stalin “aspired to generate a superior civilization, to make their country a primus inter pares in a cultural confederation within their world, continental Europe.” While Moscow never attained this status in reality, the fact that it was a major ambition is nonetheless revealing of Soviet cultural priorities in the region. I will also mention that the Soviet fascination with European civilization and the Western intellectual heritage should not be confused with Eurocentric racism or chauvinism, as the Soviets explicitly sought to create a universal project superseding European colonial domination. Indeed, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism were major planks of the Bolshevik revolution, and the Soviet state’s multi-national character was a point of pride. Thus, despite an intellectual heritage rooted in the West, Stalin’s brand of Marxism resists such a simplistic binary categorization of Western or Eastern Marxism. Even as it developed out of the former, the Soviet state’s universalist character also encompassed the latter.

One Stalin biographer once, somewhat pejoratively, described Trotsky as a “café intellectual,” contrasting Trotsky’s intellectual preoccupations with Stalin’s early background as a professional revolutionary scrapping his way through the “wild west” of the Caucasus (Read 2016, 151). Stalin’s beginnings on the revolutionary frontlines of the “East” are important, as his Georgian roots undoubtedly shaped his militant political outlook as a revolutionary turned statesman. Yet, despite this, we know that Stalin still made a conscious effort to shift public perception away from these origins as he grew more comfortable in the seat of power, associating himself with the dominant Russian Marxism, which, in the 1920s and 1930s, he saw as the most advanced part of European civilization.

Stalin’s development and circulation of European theoretical work within the USSR reflects a conscious effort to situate Soviet modernization within a European transnational intellectual framework rather than an isolated national project. Europe, as the cradle of Marxist theory, was essential to the Soviet self-understanding as being at the forefront of historical progress. These “café intellectuals” who articulated Marxist theory had a central role to play in the development of socialism. Indeed, Katerina Clark (2011, 28) describes Stalinist society as resembling Plato’s utopian political ideal of rule by philosopher-kings, in which a cultured elite would guide and transform society according to a universal historical vision:

Nevertheless, Moscow of the 1930s had several utopia-like features. One of them was the elevation of intellectuals to an elite existence, a position classically elaborated in the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. Thanks to the new importance of culture intellectuals enjoyed an enhanced status, both materially and in power and prestige. They were, as Ivan Szelenyi said of their postwar eastern European counterparts, “intellectuals on the road to class power”

These utopian dimensions of Stalinism are noteworthy. It is clear that Stalin and his leading bureaucrats were, in Clark’s (2011, 10) words, the “inheritors of a messianic tradition,” undermining Losurdo’s insistence that Stalin was fundamentally a pragmatist who disavowed messianism. Moreover, Clark’s research challenges the notion that Stalin came to reject internationalism, or that his rule represented a break with Western Marxism and its theoretical ambitions, as Soviet-European cultural exchange in the 1930s was “inextricably bound up with Soviet internationalism” (Clark 2011, 5). Stalin remained serious about world revolution even as its urgency was deprioritized in light of the more immediate pressures of survival, diplomacy, and war. van Ree (2005, 9) writes:

the world revolution always remained on his agenda as a secondary and subordinate goal, to be pursued through the world communist movement, which he attempted to guide towards victory in the long run. Stalin never changed this basic framework

On a similar note, historian Lars Lih (2023, 365) writes:

Stalin was not hypocritical in his support for world revolution, since from his point of view no sacrifice of state interests was involved. His caution about revolutionary prospects in particular cases did not mean he dismissed all revolutionary prospects for the foreseeable future.

Notably, in tracing out the origins of Stalin’s SiOC, van Ree notes that towards the end of Lenin’s life, the revolutionary leader had contemplated the possibility of realizing a “complete socialist society” in Russia, a testament to some level of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism on that topic. Of course, Lenin did not have the same systematized doctrine of “socialism in one country,” but he showed an openness to the possibility of nation-based socialist production in a way that did not repudiate the necessity of global revolution:

In his 1923 article Lenin accomplished a shift in definition. He defined co-operative property on land owned by a proletarian state as socialist, and as ‘completely socialist’ for that matter … Now, once this system was defined as a fully socialist one, the creation of a “complete socialist society” in backward Russia was at one stroke deemed possible. (van Ree 1998, 96).

Socialism in One Country was not an “Eastern” deviation invented by Stalin, but one that was thoroughly rooted in a broader Western Marxist tradition, even if rejected by Marx and Engels, who were explicit that socialism could not endure in a national context. SiOC in the Marxist tradition was first articulated by German intellectuals such as Vollmar and Kautsky, and Lenin’s own thoughts around establishing socialist production in a single country were certainly shaped by the Kautskyian legacy, as van Ree (2011, 86) observes that Kautsky:

could not have been more explicit in his thesis that a socialist economy would have to be organised as a relatively autarkic whole within a national framework.

For Lenin, socialist production within a single country was bound up with the prospect of war, writing “that an isolated socialist state must orient itself towards war, overtake the imperialists economically as well as militarily and ready itself to defeat them on the battlefield” (van Ree 2010, 173). The development of a nation’s productive forces enabled a powerful military, which in turn supported the spread of revolution. van Ree is correct to note that this “obviously anticipated Stalinism in some of its essential elements” (van Ree 2010, 173). Therefore, the supposed Stalinist break with Leninism on “Socialism in One Country” is better understood less as a rupture than as a development of existing tendencies, not an inevitability but a historically plausible trajectory already latent in Lenin’s thought.

In tying this back to Stalin’s European cultural renaissance, Soviet newspapers and journals aimed at non-Russian European audiences circulated both within and beyond Stalin’s USSR as a way of constructing a shared cultural horizon between Soviet and European leftist spheres, one that framed the USSR as the legitimate centre of an expansive international revolutionary culture. An exemplary publication was the 1931 The Literature of World Revolution, which brought key Western texts into Soviet circulation and made them accessible to a wider readership. The Soviets used these journals to discuss modernist writers such as Joyce and Dos Passos, appropriating Western literary techniques in service of a Soviet cultural project explicitly premised on European foundations, though this engagement with literary modernism was not without significant internal debate and controversy. These developments echo Stalin’s claim in 1919, in Principles of Leninism, that “the October Revolution has at the same time created a powerful and open centre of the world revolutionary movement, around which it can now rally and organise a united revolutionary front of the proletarians and of the oppressed peoples of all countries against capitalism.” Moscow, as the cultural and literary centre of the socialist world, was thus conceived as a beacon of hope for revolutionary movements internationally, radiating the promise of transformation far beyond its own borders.

Stalin as Messiah

One of Rockhill and Losurdo’s major issues with Western Marxism is its “traffic in magical thinking and a belief in the most suspect forms of idealist, utopian salvation” (Losurdo 2024, 23). In this framing, Stalin, as the incarnation of Eastern Marxism, allegedly rejected the idealistic horizons of Western theorists to pursue a pragmatic state-building project. Yet one aspect of Stalinism that Losurdo sorely neglects is its millenarian core. For him, Lenin’s death marked a transition from the overtly utopian early Bolshevik period to the more rational order of Stalinism, which supposedly recognized the hollowness of the “messianic expectations” of communism (Losurdo 2023, 121). What Losurdo derides as “magical thinking” is nevertheless clearly present in Stalin’s own thought and points to a deeper continuity with revolutionary Bolshevik political culture of the 1910s and 1920s. Katerina Clark (2011, 125) even notes that “in some senses the thirties were more utopian than the twenties.” Secularised messianic ideas continued to shape Stalin’s governing ideology. Perhaps nowhere is this apocalyptic logic more visible than in the terror of the 1930s.

Halfin (2009, 257) notes how autobiographies of the era perceived the state’s rapid development as directly leading into the communist future and accordingly “communicated a sense of great personal excitement in the face of the looming classless society.” Losurdo is wrong to treat state-building as separate from the messianic ideal; the two were intimately bound together. Indeed, it was Trotsky (1920) who had noted that “Just as the lamp before going out shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state assumes the most extreme form of dictatorship before disappearing altogether.” Faced with endless enemies obstructing the movement of history, or so they believed, it is unsurprising that such fervent believers would be willing to go to such violent lengths to ensure this promised tomorrow. The leadership themselves were not cynical exploiters of messianic dreams but genuine believers, and it was this conviction that enabled the repression. Soviet officialdom came to understand mass terror as a kind of hyper-moralism, a necessary service to humanity that cleansed the party of impurity. With stone faces, the vanguard of progress carried out staggering violence as the price of ushering in a new phase of history. Halfin (2009, 2) writes:

What transpired in Soviet Russia in 1936–38 cannot be comprehended by recourse to typical explanations such as personal interest and ambition. The true Communist acted for society, not for his own sake. Iurii Piatakov, the deputy head of the Heavy Industry Commissariat, famously stated: “I am ready to sacrifice my pride and self-esteem and everything else … But because we are steeped in the idea of violence, we Bolsheviks know how to direct it against ourselves. If the Party so demands … I can by an act of will expunge from my brain within twenty- four hours ideas that I have cherished for years . . . , reorient myself, and come to agree with the Party inwardly, with my whole mind.

The leadership framed the hunt for wreckers and saboteurs as a Manichaean crusade in which “good communists could realize purity, morality, and their place in the greatest society in history” through the destruction of enemies. Stalin’s own ideology played no small part in these developments. There is a voluntaristic, irrationalist strain in Stalin’s thinking that is difficult to reconcile with Losurdo’s reading of Stalin as a purely pragmatist moderniser. Stalin’s ideology was never static, shifting in different directions throughout his tenure, but David Priestland sees a recurring dominant theme of Bolshevik romanticism or populism in his thought. Stalin was sceptical of bourgeois specialists and their influence, as he believed an “excessively scientistic worldview would inhibit the mobilization” of workers. In this voluntarist view associated with left Bolshevism, Soviet citizens, following their class instincts, could remake society through the sheer collective force of will. David Priestland (2005, 201) writes that Stalin believed cadres could allegedly produce “miracles,” a notion that is best exemplified by the Stakhanovite movement, whose exemplary workers were celebrated for surpassing production norms and held up as living proof that conscious effort and socialist commitment could overcome all material constraints. This stands in contrast to the views of Lenin and Trotsky, who placed greater emphasis on technical specialists, seeing expertise as essential to socialist construction. Priestland (2005, 200) writes:

Like the left before [Stalin], he often implied that it was not enough for society to be run as if it were a machine, operated by experts; tekhnika and ‘machines’ were ‘dead’ unless they were infused with ‘soul’ and operated by cadres who ‘believed’. His language was also full of romantic themes: Soviet people were to be self-sacrificing, ‘active’, ‘energetic’ fighters who swam ‘against the current’. They were to reject narrow ‘pragmatism’, ‘empiricism’, petty-bourgeois philistinism (obyva-
tel’shchina), ‘routine’, and a ‘dead’, ‘mechanical’ approach to life.

Stalin’s belief in the seemingly boundless power of workers had an almost religious quality. In times of crisis he leaned on populist mobilization as a way of steering the state through turmoil, a strategy with a purifying logic that sought to expunge the saboteurs and wreckers he claimed were harboured within a specialist class tainted by those with pre-revolutionary origins. In the years building toward the terror, the state encouraged active citizen participation in mass violence against suspect elements and bureaucrats who were allegedly unresponsive to the needs of the proletariat (Goldman 2007). This strategy of mobilization and class struggle could genuinely strike fear into the middle bureaucracy and bring citizens into alignment with the leadership’s transformative political vision, but it did not possess the near-superhuman efficacy Stalin believed it did, and it was certainly not a catch-all solution to the regime’s political problems. Stalin’s faith in the workers revealed ideological fidelity to a left Bolshevik conception of class struggle and historical progress, but it also severely undermined stability and state-building imperatives. Unable to control its own excesses, the self-consuming logic of the terror led to violence spiralling out of control.

In the late 1930s, this had the effect of producing mass violence on an unimaginable scale. It may be reasonable to speculate that a different leader who leaned onto the technicist side of the Bolshevik technicist-populist debate would have seen far less bloodshed. In this way, Stalin was a kind of apocalyptic leader whose faith in the transformative power of class struggle and the communist future impeded state-building goals by causing mass instability and repressing those with expert knowledge. Priestland (2005, 201) writes:

It is certainly possible to discern a ‘zig-zag’ pattern in the politics of the 1920s and 1930s: in 1927–8 and after 1935 Stalin seems to have moved away from tekhnika towards politika when the threat from abroad appeared to be particularly dangerous. But whatever the reasons for his behaviour, Stalin’s attempts to mobilise the Soviet Union undermined its ability to defend itself … His ambition to be the vospitatel’ of the Soviet people almost led to the ruin of the system he was so desperate to preserve.

Contra Losurdo, Priestland (2005, 201) writes that “Stalin’s approach cannot be explained as a conventional ‘rational’ response to external threats.” Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Stalinist era, which Priestland glosses over in this passage, was that Stalin continually emerged from every successive crisis, from collectivization to World War II, stronger than he had been when he entered it, a pattern that could only have appeared, to true believers and enemies alike, as vindication of his faith in the triumphant march of communist inevitability. Losurdo correctly gives credit for Stalin’s historic victories but misapprehends how he arrived there. Stalin, no matter what one makes of him, was a force of nature, a leader who had “[rearranged] the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth” in line with his own eschatological vision of how the world ought to be (Kotkin 2014, 1138). He devoted his life to his faith, and it appears as if the gods of history heeded his prayers. What should be emphasized is that none of this was inevitable, and there was considerable potential for things to go terribly wrong. That they did not speaks to a combination of Stalin’s political cunning, iron nerves, unwavering persistence, and no small measure of luck.

Stalin’s devotion to his cause is perhaps best exemplified by the collectivization drive. It was not the policy of a pragmatic, cautious modernizer, but the choice of a leader driven by an uncompromising commitment to a radical vision of a non-market society, which he realized rapidly through sheer brute force and staggering indifference to the loss of human life. Kotkin (2015, 1138) writes:

[Stalin] would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism. This required extraordinary maneuvering, browbeating, and violence on his part. It also required deep conviction that it had to be done.

One cannot overstate how important the messianic impulse of Stalinism was in driving this project, and it is indicative of a deeper commitment to a socialist teleology in which history is understood as oriented toward the eventual transformation of society along communist lines. As for collectivization, a purely pragmatic modernizer would not have gone the full way, almost certainly curtailing these policies in the face of realities on the ground. Stalin did not. In this sense, Stalinism did not simply proficiently protect and administer a new social order, as Losurdo argues, but also exacerbated and, in some cases, engendered major crises as part of an ideological mission of total transformation. Losurdo sees the violence of Stalinism as a result of a permanent state of exception, where the multitude of Soviet enemies essentially justifies severe repression. The Soviets did have very real political problems and were indeed threatened by many external and internal enemies (I have written about the “real” anti-Stalin conspiracies at length elsewhere); that does not change the fact that Stalinist violence was wildly disproportionate to the actual threat. For instance, there was never any evidence that Soviet production was plagued by intractable sabotage by Western infiltrators hiding in plain sight, yet the Soviets genuinely believed this and repressed many based on this faulty belief. Obviously, this was damaging to the Soviet economic goals, and the failure to reach these goals, in turn, strengthened their belief in these economic conspiracies. Losurdo acknowledges “excesses,” but does not address the gap between real and perceived threats, a gap that was turned into a yawning chasm as a result of the Soviets’ messianic tendencies.

Stalin’s politics were animated by a form of “true belief” in the Marxist capacity to radically reshape social relations. What Losurdo derides as “magical thinking” in the Marxist tradition has always been a major component of revolutionary traditions across a wide array of historical contexts, one that Losurdo wishes to shed for his own political reasons. He, then, projects this disavowal back onto his preferred historical figures. By erasing Stalin's messianic and utopian impulses rooted in the Western Marxist tradition, Losurdo creates a defanged Stalin, one I find infinitely less interesting. The attempt to save him from his reputation only ends up diminishing him; we are left with a portrait of a man emptied of everything that made him singular. In reality, the Soviet leader was an apocalyptic ruler whose triumphs and tragedies owed much to his ability to harness revolutionary teleology into a totalizing political program that remade the world.

BONUS CHAPTER: Stalin’s Aesthetic Utopia

Or “The Proto-Stalinism of the Russian Avant-Garde”

As Boris Groys’s (1992) work has shown, Stalinism as a political society became a kind of “total work of art,” in which all fields of representation were subordinated to a unified ideological vision. Art, theatre, education, architecture, and literature, were drawn into a single project of the social transformation of everyday life. The Soviet state did not merely govern society as rational technocrats, but sought to stage and remake reality itself. Stalinist USSR, as Vuković (2017, 10) writes, was a “society in which images and representations mediate all social and economic relations.”

Read more

Read Part 1 First:

In the previous article in this series, I discussed the loose opposition bloc of 1932, a coalition in which Trotsky and his son Sedov played a central role. This group coordinated, to different extents, with various anti-Stalin opposition currents, such as the Zinovievists and the Lominadze group, both discussed in part one. In this article, I will cover the remaining groups, as well as the relationship between the 1932 opposition bloc and Stalin’s 1936 political trials.

Out of all the figures and entities discussed in this analysis of Trotsky’s opposition plan, the most significant to this narrative is not Trotsky, but Ivan Smirnov, whose story gives us the greatest insight into the nature of the bloc and its relation to Stalin’s fears of conspiracy. This is closely related to the Rightist opposition of Ryutin and their stated aim to remove Stalin by force, another key element of this article.

Smirnov’s Left Opposition

The 1927 defeat of Trotsky’s Left Opposition resulted in the isolation of his remaining political allies, who were pushed to the sidelines, far away from the centres of decision-making. Their opposition to Stalin was grounded in varying disagreements over the nature and methods of socialist transformation, but their political isolation now meant they would have no role in the future development of socialism, a dismal prospect for these committed revolutionaries. This shaped their response to Stalin’s consolidation of power. We will first note the political trajectory of Radek and Preobrazhensky, Trotsky’s allies whose opposition gave way to eventual capitulation and reintegration. However, capitulation did not necessarily mean the end of political opposition. Of all the major Trotskyist figures, this is best exemplified by Smirnov, who continued to function as a key figure within a clandestine Trotskyist network after capitulation, a distinction that illustrates the divergent political trajectories that followed the fragmentation of the defeated Left Opposition. Where some receded from opposition following capitulation or remained only tenuously involved, others took on a more active role in underground political activity.

Following the defeat of the Left Opposition, Preobrazhensky noted the futility of further open resistance, affirming that blanket opposition “would turn into an Opposition for opposition’s sake; and then, to justify themselves, they would drift away from their own principles” (Deutscher 1963, 55). Indeed, despite their resentment towards Stalin, Preobrazhensky acknowledged that the Left Opposition supported industrialization and collectivization, even if it was not implemented in a manner the Left Opposition supported; that is, not under the transparency of “proletarian democracy,” but delivered from above through the might of the state apparatus. In any case, with little room to openly manoeuvre against Stalin, it was now deemed time for reconciliation, which, in reality, could only be surrender, the price of reintegration into the new Stalin-led Soviet order. Deutscher (1963, 55) writes that Preobrazhensky “did not repudiate the Opposition’s past: … But the Opposition’s present duty was to come closer to the party and then return to it.” Preobrazhensky left for Moscow to negotiate with the Party and was followed by Radek and Smilga a month later.

The capitulation was a humiliating experience. Stalin saw the Opposition’s surrender as a major blow to Trotsky’s political prospects, solidifying his victory over his enemies. In order to maintain his political dominance, Stalin could not tolerate oppositionists returning as “misunderstood trail-blazers.” Rather, they were to slink back to Moscow, heads sullen, as “remorseful saboteurs of the left course” (Deutscher 1963, 57). While Stalin briefly signalled conciliation, he refused any terms that could be construed as concessions to Trotsky. While the Left Opposition could try to frame their defeat as Stalin’s implementation of their own program, given their shared support for industrialization and collectivization, Stalin would not accept anything other than total submission. And why wouldn’t he? The Left Opposition had no leverage. In the end, they were forced to renounce their views, whittled down through prolonged pressure in gruelling negotiations in which they would emerge with nothing, not even their dignity.

This was illustrated starkly by the Opposition’s public orientation towards Trotsky. As Deutscher (1963, 58) recounts, a few weeks prior:

Preobrazhensky had declared that the Opposition ‘could not forgive’ Trotsky’s banishment, and only a few months since Radek himself, the author of the celebrated essay “Trotsky the Organizer of Victory’, had protested to the Central Committee against its causing the ‘slow death’ of that ‘fighting heart of the revolution’ and concluded his protest with the words: ‘Enough of this inhuman playing with Comrade Trotsky’s health and life?

Now Radek had renounced Trotsky, declaring: “I have definitely broken with Lev Davidovich—we are political enemies now.” Deutscher (1963, 58) adds that “he went on to speak bitterly against the new recruits to the Opposition, the angry young men, who, he alleged, had nothing.” For Stalin, everything seemed to be working out. He understood that fighting multiple political fronts was a major liability; thus, being able to both marginalize and co-opt segments of the Left Opposition proved highly advantageous. Trotsky had once predicted that cooperation with Stalin against right-wing threats might be necessary as a tactical contingency. This alignment eventually came to fruition, but entirely on Stalin’s terms, drawing former Trotskyists into his orbit without making any of his own concessions to them.

Now we will shift our attention to the central character of our current narrative: Ivan Smirnov. Smirnov, like other Left Oppositionists, feared the Rightist threat and saw utility in reconciling with Stalin, however distasteful that was for him. But Smirnov separated himself from Radek and Preobrazhensky in that he was more resistant to the Stalinist leadership’s negotiating pressure and was reluctant to throw Trotsky under the bus in the way other oppositionists had. Smirnov had insisted upon the return of Trotsky and refused to fully denounce him. He also managed to retain some semblance of dignity, avoiding the course of total capitulation taken by his predecessors, while still satisfying Stalin by ceding all the key demands around party discipline and factional activity.

Stalin recognized that the Left Opposition shared common ground with his economic program and that they could be reliably depended on to further this agenda. They were accordingly assigned to important technical and administrative roles but kept far away from political leadership and the major levers of decision-making. This was for good reason. The surrender of Stalin’s opponents was surely a welcome development, but it also created new complications. Returned from exile, his former enemies now found themselves close to the centres of power in Moscow, free to collaborate and advance their own political interests discreetly. Yet whatever common ground existed around state-building and development, the opposition’s deeper allegiances were profoundly ideological. Coerced negotiations may produce political subservience, but they could not change hearts and minds, which, for the Left Opposition, often remained devoted to Trotsky. Despite the ease some displayed in renouncing that past, fidelity to Trotsky’s ideas was not so easily tossed aside. Indeed, Neither were Stalin’s lingering doubts. Deutscher (1963, 65) writes:

Although Stalin could not doubt their zeal for the left course, especially for industrialization, he knew what value to attach to the recantations he had extracted from them. They remained Oppositionists at heart. They considered themselves the wronged pioneers of the left course. They hated him not merely as their persecutor, but as the man who had robbed them of their ideas. True, he had turned them, politically, into his slaves. But the hidden hatred of slaves can be more dangerous than open hostility; it can lie silently in ambush, follow the master with a thousand eyes, and set upon him when he slips or makes a false step.

It seems that Stalin’s instincts were correct. His enemies would not give up so easily. For the same reason, Trotsky did not lose hope at the surrender of his allies. While he lashed out at those who denounced him, the exiled leader nevertheless maintained contact with many, keeping his options open in a political battlefield where the terrain was constantly shifting. He later explained that the arrests of his allies granted him insight into the processes of Stalinist repression and the capitulations they produced, especially those “partial” capitulations due to coercion in which individuals awkwardly attempted to compromise with the leadership they opposed. This allowed Trotsky to make sense of the system he was up against.

As for Smirnov, the available evidence suggests that capitulation was not the end of his opposition, but simply a roadblock that required a new, clandestine approach suited to a more repressive political landscape. Chase describes how many oppositionists (“between 200 and 400 people”) followed Smirnov’s example and continued to organize as oppositionists under the cover of political surrender. Preobrazhensky himself, despite his humiliating capitulation, was involved to some extent in underground opposition activity. Chase (2024, 115) writes that most of these individuals were:

readmitted to the party and resumed clandestine Oppositional activities. They viewed staying in the party as essential to helping them to revive it or to create a new party … Back in Moscow, Smirnov regularly organized clandestine meetings of Trotskyists, at times in his apartment, where they debated and decided upon political activities and tactics and organized a small operational center.

From the Party’s perspective, this tendency of oppositionists to act as dutiful capitulators while continuing their oppositional activity shaped Stalin’s conception of “double-dealers,” a notion often mischaracterized as a pure delusion about rampant anti-Soviet spies disguised as patriotic citizens. It is true that the leadership imagined spies, wreckers, saboteurs, and double-dealers where they did not exist, especially in its belief in pervasive economic sabotage by covert agents. This was often invoked to explain failures in production quotas which were actually caused by unrealistic demands or legitimate accidents. Nonetheless, the concept of the double-dealer was shaped by a real phenomenon: the real covert oppositional activity by individuals playing the part of loyal Stalinists. This left a deep imprint on the collective psyche of the Soviet leadership.

Stalin did not mince words in his condemnation of this practice, which he saw as intolerable, writing: “Double-dealing [dvurushnichestvo] is dangerous because it cultivates in the party a rotten diplomacy that undermines the very foundations of the mutual comradely trust of party members. We must exterminate double-dealing and mete out exemplary punishments to double-dealers” (Davies & Harris 2014, 83). For the Oppositionists themselves, double-dealing was an essential practice of resistance. It was precisely what made continued opposition and the desired reconstruction of a new revolutionary leadership possible. Double-dealing was, then, their only way of being able to build Trotskyist power in the USSR; we can see how this ultimately contributed to the Terror, as it was not easy for the leadership to determine who was friend or enemy as Trotsky actively encouraged and coordinated clandestine opposition in the USSR. The intractable persistence of unreliable elements within an already paranoid Party apparatus made the notion of mass culling conceivable as a policy response.

This brings us to William Chase’s 2024 article, a fascinating reassessment of the 1936 political trials in which Smirnov and other Left Oppositionists were tried and ultimately put to death. While these cases, along with the other Stalinist trials, have typically been dismissed as political theatre, Chase’s more attentive analysis reveals the 1936 proceedings under Iagoda can be distinguished from the latter, more blatantly fabricated charges of Yezhov’s trials. Iagoda’s investigation of Smirnov was directly connected to the 1932 bloc discussed earlier, in which Smirnov was implicated as a key figure.

Read more

To what extent can Stalin’s political trials be said to possess any legitimacy? To even pose such a question will strike many as beyond the pale. Yet certain segments of the Left, echoing Stalin’s own justifications at the time, have long maintained that the trials were legitimate proceedings against saboteurs. In the dominant historiography, however, these events are instead understood as episodes of mass, senseless violence in which vast numbers of innocent people, including many prominent Bolshevik figures, were killed on spurious charges. This latter view has been substantiated by a large body of scholarship on the Terror, but revulsion at the neo-Stalinist line has perhaps led to an overcorrection in which the threats Stalin was reacting to have been confidently dismissed as either figments of his imagination or consciously fabricated charges used to consolidate personalized power.

Archival research has complicated this picture. Historians such as William Chase, Pierre Broué, and J. Arch Getty have shown that a clandestine Trotskyist opposition network did operate within the Soviet Union, maintaining contact with Trotsky and his son, Sedov. Trotsky and Sedov denied these claims, and, as Chase and Broué observe, most Western observers simply took them at their word. The archives, however, point to a more complex picture. Indeed, John Archer notes that Broué (2008) and his research team were able to demonstrate that the later terror had its roots in earlier events: “the charges in the Trial of the Sixteen [‘Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center’] in 1936 were not simply pathological inventions but had some rational basis in the events of 1932.”

Getty (1987, 121) describes how Trotsky’s opposition bloc had explicitly called “for a ‘new political revolution’ to remove ‘the cadres, the bureaucracy,’” which was more or less an explicit threat of violent revolution against the Soviet leadership. Furthermore, in a recent study, Chase (2024) concludes that the investigations of Trotskyists connected to this bloc, under Iagoda, leading to the 1936 trials, had legitimate evidentiary grounds:

we are confronted with testimonies from various people, who were in solitary confinement or distant from each other, who described similar events or plans, and who named the same people. While researchers are wise to be skeptical, the available evidence, which though incomplete is quite extensive and consistent

This is a hugely important intervention in that it challenges many of the dominant assumptions that have defined our understanding of Soviet repression. This is, of course, far from the claim that the years of Terror were somehow justified or that their innumerable victims were all guilty of some legitimate crime. Rather, it suggests that, despite spiralling out of control, Stalin’s ruthlessness was in part shaped by perceived threats that had grounding in reality, even as these threats snowballed through the distortions of a dysfunctional security apparatus. This dynamic created a gap between the actually existing threats and the regime’s perception of them that rapidly widened throughout the Terror.

Indeed, Chase notes a stark difference in the use of repression following the transition in NKVD leadership from Iagoda to Yezhov, exemplified by the contrasting approaches in Iagoda’s 1936 investigation and Yezhov’s 1937 Order 00447. It seems Iagoda based his accusations on legitimate intelligence information, which pointed him towards culprits implicated in subversive plotting. Chases writes:

Under Ezhov, interrogators used brutal methods to extract from detainees so-called confessions. Interrogators often wrote the confessions. The available materials related to the interrogations of Olberg and his Berlin comrades are of a different quality in that they often sought operational intelligence about domestic and foreign threats, which led to the identification of culprits, which led to their arrest. In examining the NKVD’s investigation of perceived hostile elements from 1933, Order 00447 was exceptional. Iagoda’s recommendations that the Politburo resentence Trotskyists, who numbered 611, and send the cases of 83 people to the Supreme Court pale in comparison to the scale of Order 00447. The differences beg for attention

Yezhov triggered a descent into mass violence without restraint, and the dynamics of terror, by this point, had acquired their own momentum. This latter phase is what has come to define the Terror in the popular imagination, and the “real” conspiracies of the early 1930s’ have been largely eclipsed. Scholars have often been reluctant to acknowledge the existence of these anti-Stalin conspirators who wished to remove the Stalinist leadership by force, as this could be seen as a gift to those with pro-Stalin politics, but we must follow the evidence where it leads. In any case, that certain anti-Stalin conspiracies had some rational basis also reflects a perspective shared by Trotskyist historians such as Vadim Rogovin and Pierre Broué, who interpret this as evidence that Trotskyists did not simply concede to Stalinism or capitulate under repression. Rather, they point to the continued existence of an organized anti-Stalinist opposition even under conditions of extreme repression. This should not be surprising. Stalin’s rapid consolidation of power produced bitter enemies, and his heavy-handed, destabilizing economic policies naturally invited dissent.

Indeed, Trotsky sought to encourage sympathisers to make the decisive move from passive submission to Stalin’s power to active participation in an opposition bloc, which depended on covert channels of communication and trusted intermediaries within European exile networks. Sedov was a key figure in the dissident anti-Stalin network, coordinating the passing of information in and out of the USSR through secret letters. While Sedov later denied and downplayed the nature of the group, likely to avoid giving credence to Stalin’s political trials, evidence unearthed by scholars Pierre Broué and J. Arch Getty reveals that a clandestine bloc or loose alliance did indeed exist. As Broué (2008) notes, a “document in invisible ink which Sedov wrote in 1932” demonstrates he was actively communicating with “‘Trotskyists’ in the USSR” from Berlin. Furthermore, Getty (1986, 28) writes:

At about this time [1932], Trotsky attempted to contact his ‘lower workers’ directly. During a brief stay in Copenhagen, he handed a letter to an English supporter named Harry Wicks who was to convey it to oppositionists in Russia. The letter began: ‘I am not sure that you know my handwriting. If not, you will probably find someone else who does’. Trotsky went on to call upon loyal oppositionists to become active: ‘The comrades who sympathize with the Left Opposition are obliged to come out of their passive state at this time, maintaining, of course, all precautions’. (emphasis Trotsky’s). He went on to give names and addresses of safe contacts in Berlin, Prague, and Istanbul to whom communications for Trotsky could be sent, and the concluded, ‘I am certain that the men situation in which the Party finds itself will force all the comrades devoted to revolution to gather actively about the Left Opposition’

Getty (1986, 29) leaves no doubt in the matter, writing, “It is clear, then, that a united left oppositional bloc was formed in 1932.” These contacts show a concerted effort to organize a forceful challenge to Stalin, one that successfully recruited major Soviet political actors with grievances against the Soviet leadership. It is not surprising that Stalin would have viewed these different opposition strands as a serious threat to the stability of the Soviet state. For Stalin, Trotsky’s “conspiratorial machinations,” to borrow Getty’s phrasing, were only proof that vast conspiratorial networks plotting to overthrow the regime were active within the state apparatus. In contrast, Trotsky saw organizing an opposition as a necessary step in defeating the “Stalinist bureaucracy,” which he came to view as a Thermidorian counter-revolution, compromising the ideals of the original Leninist revolution.

Who were the main players in the opposition bloc? Beyond the Trotskyists operating clandestinely in the USSR, there was the Smirnov group of former Left Oppositionists, which was also associated with Trotskyism, and the Zinovievists led by Kamenev and Zinoviev; these, together, comprised the major players in the so-called Trotskyist–Zinovievist conspiracy. This alliance also had contacts with other subversive tendencies, such as the Ryutin group and the “Left and Right” opposition associated with Lominadze, among other lesser-known groups. We will review them here.

The Trotskyists

For the first years of exile, Trotsky took a carefully calibrated position on the USSR, wary of being perceived as counter-revolutionary or anti-Soviet. He did not initially reject the Third International or seek to overthrow the leadership, holding out hope for his possible return. However, as his political prospects eroded, so did his patience, at one point writing: “If, however, the Stalinist bureaucracy should bring the USSR to ruin . . . it will be necessary to build a Fourth International” (Getty 1986, 26). In March 1933, he called for a new German Communist Party in the wake of the German Left’s inability to stop Hitler, which he reasoned could have been prevented with KPD–SPD cooperation. At this stage, however, Trotsky still limited his call for a new Party to the German communists and did not yet extend it to the broader International. He insisted there was no real contradiction between remaining faithful to the Third International while also calling for a new Communist party in Germany, as the latter could play a role in regenerating the communist movement. Four months later, in July 1933, Trotsky crossed the Rubicon and concluded that the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern could no longer be reformed. In October, he arrived at the natural conclusion of this line of thinking, affirming that political change would ultimately require Stalin’s removal by force. Still, as Getty notes, nothing had actually occurred within that initial March to July four-month timeframe that could be described as the “Stalinist bureaucracy” bringing about the Soviet state’s ruin, his original condition for building a Fourth International. What material change justified this shift? Why even wait four months?

In March 1933, the same month he called for a new German communist party, Trotsky sent a secret letter to the Soviet leadership. In it, he proposed that the Left Opposition be readmitted as a tolerated “tendency” within the party and that he would forgo open criticism in exchange for renewed party unity. This may strike the reader as an act of desperation far removed from reality, but Trotsky legitimately believed that the economic and political crises of the USSR were so bad that it would make it all but necessary for Stalin to sheepishly extend a hand to his exiled nemesis, whose brilliance was now apparently needed to save the revolution. When, unsurprisingly, no reply came to his request, he issued his 10 May 1933 “Explanation,” which ended his attempt at a negotiated return to the Soviet leadership and revealed a new, more dangerous approach, focused on appealing to lower ranks within the Soviet apparatus, who he reasoned may be more receptive to his message. Trotsky essentially admitted his conspiratorial ambitions within the USSR, writing:

We are sending this document [the March letter plus the May Explanation] to responsible workers in the belief that among the blind, the careerists, and the cowards, there are honest revolutionaries from whose eyes one cannot hide the real state of things. We call upon these honest revolutionaries to make contact with us (Getty 1986, 31).

Even after this flagrant threat, he did not abandon the Third International. It was only two months later, in July, that he declared he could no longer remain “captive to one’s own formula,” marking his turn to a Fourth International. Getty persuasively argues that Trotsky’s decision to remain in this intermediate position for four months, between March and July, reflected his continued belief that there still remained political opportunities that could, in some way, facilitate his political return. Trotsky would have envisioned a domestic opposition, led by his clandestine network in the USSR, as playing a key part in maintaining leverage and influence within the Soviet system. Indeed, as we’ve established earlier, Trotsky and Sedov established contact with sympathisers inside the Soviet Union in 1932, which sought to further his political ambitions. Letters from within the USSR were published in the Bulletin of the Opposition, the émigré journal edited by Sedov. Getty (1987, 119) writes:

regardless of Trotsky’s exile location, it was Sedov who maintained contact between the “Old Man” and his followers, organized publication of the Biulleten’ oppozitsii [Bulletin of the opposition], and provided Trotsky with expert advice on European and Soviet affairs. Sedov maintained a network of friends, contacts, and agents who regularly shuttled information and communication in and out of the Soviet Union. Friendly tourists or members of European communist parties carried letters back and forth between Sedov and various Trotskyists in the USSR. These “special journeys,” as Sedov called them, were the main links between Trotsky and the Soviet Union

The information on the Trotskyist actors operating subversively within the USSR is scarce. We simply do not know the strength or size of the group, nor do we know much about its participants, given the sheer secrecy required to operate in the repressive climate of the USSR. It certainly does not help that many of the letters in the Trotsky archive have been destroyed or redacted. Broué does mention a figure by the name of Andrei Konstantinov, who he writes was “only one of those whom the comrades in deportation regarded as a ‘leader’ and was at liberty in Moscow.”

Read more

In the popular imagination, the Soviet era is often characterized as a period of deprivation and scarcity, in contrast to the mass consumer abundance offered by the United States and the West. This is a flawed picture, as the Soviet state had its own unique vision of socialist luxury. This reading list covers the many dimensions of Soviet luxury and consumption: material goods, fashion, food, leisure, domestic space, retail culture, and the conception of a socialist “good life” promoted by the state. I have divided the list into two categories to help readers distinguish (in my view) key works from more specialized or adjacent texts. I have also included two of my own articles that touch on these themes.

Subscribe now

Essential Reads

• Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc edited by David Crowley and Susan E. Reid

• Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia by Jukka Gronow

• Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream by Diane P. Koenker

• The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s by Amy E. Randall

• Communism and Consumerism: The Soviet Alternative to the Affluent Society, edited by Timo Vihavainen and Elena Bogdanova.

Other Recommended Reads

• Fashion Meets Socialism: Fashion industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War by Jukka Gronow & Sergey Zhuravlev

• Comradely Objects: Design and Material Culture in Soviet Russia, 1960s–80s by Yulia Karpova

• Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life After Stalin by Steven Harris

• A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 by Julie Hessler

• Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile by Lewis H. Siegelbaum

• Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era by Natalya Chernyshova

• The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia by Alexey Golubev

My Relevant Articles

Moishe Postone is likely the most influential Marxist thinker in the academic study of antisemitism. His 1980 essay, “Anti‑Semitism and National Socialism,” is a frequently cited intervention in Marxist and critical theory on the Holocaust and argues that antisemitism, unlike other forms of racism, functions as a fetishized form of anti‑capitalism, casting Jews as the conspiratorial embodiment of abstract social power. Postone’s ideas have intuitive appeal on the Marxist left, given that they provide an ostensibly coherent account of antisemitism within the logic of capitalism itself. They aim to contextualize what might otherwise appear as irrational hatred as a structurally generated misrecognition of capitalist social relations. There are, however, major problems with this theory. Rather than engaging Postone’s analysis of antisemitism directly, I will address it from another angle, foregrounding his anti‑Palestinian racism and commitments to Zionism, which, as we will see, bear directly on his theorization of antisemitism.

Subscribe now

As for why this is relevant to Soviet history, Stalin and the USSR play a surprisingly central role in Postone’s understanding of contemporary left antisemitism: he portrays the Soviet leadership, ironically, as a powerful, shadowy elite funding global anti‑Zionism and allegedly rendering major segments of the Left antisemitic. In an interview response explaining the supposed origins of the Left’s opposition to Israel’s existence, which he sees as a defining feature of Left antisemitism, he observes:

Another strand of left anti-Zionism – this time deeply anti-semitic – was introduced by the Soviet Union, particularly in the show trials in Eastern Europe after World War Two … This strand of anti-semitic anti-Zionism was imported into the Middle East during the Cold War, in part by the intelligence services of countries like East Germany. A form of anti-semitism was introduced into the Middle East that was “legitimate” for the Left, and was called anti-Zionism (Martin 2010)

This is a highly implausible association, suggesting that Palestinians did not have a reason to oppose the colonial establishment of a Jewish state on their own land until they were duped into antisemitism by the nefarious plotting of Soviet communists. As historian Alexander Flores (2012, 464) writes:

The Palestinians by and large opposed the Zionist project. They did so not because of any attitude towards Jews, but for what it meant to them in quite concrete terms ... To resist this project, the Palestinians did not need any inspiration from the Nazis. They already had sufficient inspiration - from the Zionists … Zionists themselves, who loudly proclaimed Zionism as the quintessential Jewish project

Flores is referring to the right-wing trope that Palestinians were inspired by Nazism—which, for the record, Postone also sees as an influence on Arab anti-Zionism—but the central point remains that Palestinian resistance cannot be attributed to shadowy, external forces. Wildangel (2012, 527) observes that the “infection” thesis, the claim that antisemitism was imported into the Arab world from abroad, has relied heavily on German‑Italian perspectives and entirely ignores Arab sources. Postone does as well.

The turn to anti‑Zionism in the Middle East and on the modern Left is more coherently explained by Israel’s own violent colonizing efforts in the region, its global impunity from Western states, and the outrage this has generated among foreign observers. As Haugbolle (2023) writes in his study documenting the rise of the global pro‑Palestine movement, its organizers were primarily concerned with “notions of unequal citizenship, such as the denial of property rights, movement, or settlement,” and Stalin’s paranoia around Zionist spies in the Eastern Bloc cannot be considered the basis of contemporary left anti‑Zionist thinking in any serious way. Later Cold War era Soviet messaging likely bolstered and supplied a Marxist–Leninist framing for existing anti‑Zionist sentiment, but it did not generate it. Such a view ignores the regional dynamics in Palestine and substitutes them with a crude, linear model of ideological transmission that attributes a conspiratorial degree of explanatory power to the USSR. Postone attempts to delegitimize the grievances against Israel’s colonial violence and theft of Palestinian land by deceptively linking this opposition to “Stalinism” and all the baggage that comes with it.

As for its actual historical basis, anti‑Israel protest in the West is largely consistent with the Left’s longstanding support of liberation movements in South Africa, Algeria, and other anti‑colonial struggles. Postone turns to these tenuous external explanations of foreign manipulation to explain Left solidarity with Palestine, rather than the far more obvious explanation staring him in the face: that people respond to what they experience and see. That is, decades of brutal military occupation, displacement, settlement expansion, collective punishment, state‑backed settler terror, and now genocide, against an occupied people. This will naturally provoke outrage among a political demographic that has historically been outraged by such behaviour.

Postone ends up taking a denialist stance, obfuscating the reality of the situation in Palestine and going as far as denying Israel’s colonial nature and depicting anti‑imperialist Palestinian solidarity as a kind of ideological contamination or pathology unleashed by an outside force. Postone’s framework structurally cannot account for Palestinian political will as a legitimate originating cause of anything. Palestinians are not moved by their own experiences, history, and legitimate grievances, but are simply manifestations of broader, nebulous, evil antisemitic forces. As we will see, Postone consistently ignores or sidelines historical evidence that undermines his conclusions in order to maintain his thesis of an omniscient, inescapable global antisemitism that has an almost supernatural or mystical quality. To borrow Postone’s (2017) own words, antisemitism becomes a “a powerful global demonic power,” as his thinly veiled loathing of Palestinians expresses itself as an intense form of political paranoia.

Subscribe now

Moreover, moving beyond Postone’s own views for a moment, I would like to discuss a related but far more extreme version of anti‑Palestinian conspiratorial thinking adopted on the Zionist European far-right, most evident in Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia conspiracy theory, famously cited by shooter Anders Breivik, which sees global sympathy for Palestinians not as a response to their unjust treatment, but as a product of vast global networks of elites who instrumentalize “Palestinianism” as a vehicle for extending Islamic dominance over Western society. With the collapse of the USSR and its fading relevance, the UN and international bodies that denounce Israeli aggression have increasingly taken its place as the institutional mastermind of an imagined Islamo‑Leftist conspiracy—one in which Palestinians serve as a central symbolic prop. For Bat Ye’or, the structural analogy between “globalist” institutions and the USSR is explicit:

[European institutions] supranational character is directly comparable to the socialists’ perceived lack of loyalty to a nation-state: “As in the former Soviet Union or a virtual Communist empire, identities are to be destroyed in order to dissolve diversity into a uniform anonymous humanity” (Zia-Ebrahimi 2022, 16)

Coming full circle, the Soviets are now rootless cosmopolitans, re-emerging as a fixture of the far-right conspiratorial imagination. In this way, Zionist conspiracism explicitly reappropriates the ideological structure of Hitlerite antisemitism. There is a kernel of truth to the logic underlying Postone’s theory of antisemitism, but we must abandon his privileging of Jewish identity as the singular victim of racial conspiratorial thinking and substitute it with a broader conception of “racialized conspiracism,” in which different racial or ethnic groups become the object of immense or globalized power, depending on the specific historical and political conjuncture.

The racial representation of certain minorities as harbouring immense power has been observed in a variety of historical and social contexts: the overseas Chinese across Southeast Asia, South Asian communities expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin in populist and racialized economic terms, and Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire, whose commercial prominence made them targets of repression. Today, the prominent reiteration of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” trope are the Palestinians, who, through their vast and mysterious power over progressive, international, and humanitarian organizations, are somehow able to render the world antisemitic.

For instance, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs writes that “the various bodies and organizations within the international community find themselves ripe for manipulation by the Palestinian propaganda machinery.” Or when the Israel Institute of New Zealand, referencing the popular Israeli “Pallywood” conspiracy, posits that the mass devastation and suffering documented in Gaza are staged productions within a “propaganda-industrial complex,” in which Hamas uses a “combination of staged content, emotional manipulation, and the strategic use of civilian suffering” to exert control over the international media (Bouwer 2025). What’s essential here is that the Palestinians or Hamas are not able to control world institutions and media alone but rely on “globalist” (and often communist) systems to spread their cause. In this way, Judeo-Bolshevism has been reformulated as “Islamo-Leftism” for the 21st century.

Postone’s Odious Politics

Postone rejects the applicability of “the rubric of colonialism” to the Palestine situation, despite the centrality of violent dispossession, population transfer, and settlement to the Israeli project, which has always depended on maintaining a Jewish majority through “the objective of de-Arabizing Palestine” (Sayegh 1965, 27). As Shafir (1989, 8) notes, Israel’s colonial project may be seen “as a late instance of European overseas expansion, which had been taking place from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries.” Indeed, Israel’s founding figures were quite explicit about their intentions: “except for among a minority of binationalists who were marginalized and sidelined,” Zureik (2015, 72) observes, the ultimate objective of its major proponents has always been to colonize the land and secure a Jewish majority.

Whatever diversity of thought exists within the broader ideological umbrella of Zionism, the acquisition of land through policies continuous with the historical practices of European colonialism remains its broad consensus and a defining structural feature. Postone does not have much in the way of a response to this historical evidence and appears to just hand-wave it away “on demographic as well as political and historical grounds” (Martin 2010). What political and historical grounds he has in mind remain largely unstated. On the demographic question, we must note that settler colonialism is defined by a particular state logic of conquest and demographic replacement, not by the particular ratio of European settlers to Indigenous inhabitants. By this standard, it remains an apt descriptor of Israeli settlement. Postone’s implication that the full or partial successful realization of the colonizing regime’s demographic aims would somehow negate the colonial character of the project is incoherent and obscures the expansionist logic on which Israel continues to operate.

Rather, Postone insists we treat Israel’s presence in the Middle East as a national conflict as opposed to a colonial one, despite the actually existing dynamics in the region conforming wholly to the latter. For Postone, acknowledging the settler-colonial character of Israel would undermine “its right to exist,” a conclusion incomprehensible to him, as it would allegedly constitute antisemitism. Indeed, Postone seems distressed that the Left has “put the existence of Israel back on the table” (Martin 2010). Of course, there is no such thing as a state’s right to exist; this concept has no basis in international law. But we must also consider the implications of Israel’s fictive “right to exist” for Palestinians, as the nation’s founding was hinged on the mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. As Massad (2011) writes, settlers did not have “a right to establish a ‘Jewish’ state in Palestine,” especially one that also insists upon its “‘right’ to inherit all the biblical land that the Jewish God promised it, and a ‘right’ to enact laws that are racially and religiously discriminatory in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state.”

Israel’s “right to exist” is the “right” to uphold a system of brutalization in which some are conferred greater rights than others. It is the “right” to subjugate others. Postone briefly acknowledges that Palestinian opposition to Jewish immigration is “certainly not antisemitic,” but seems unwilling or unable to grapple with the broader implications of this concession. For if Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement is legitimate, then Palestinian militancy, up to and including armed struggle, becomes legible as morally and politically necessary.

Postone’s Bad History

One specific claim Postone has made on several occasions carries troubling political implications: that the form of anti-Zionism prevalent on the Left today, which he largely sees as antisemitic for opposing Israel’s existence, was invented by Stalin and “imported” into the Middle East. Postone writes that “The USSR began promulgating a form of anti-Zionism that was essentially antisemitic,” which had become “adopted by many Arab nationalists as well as Western anti-imperialists” (Postone 2017, 63). For Postone, the Left’s “late Stalinist usage of ‘Zionism’ in recent decades” has distorted discussions on issues in the Middle East, injecting what he perceives as antisemitic “motifs” into critiques of Israel (Postone 2017, 55). For Postone, critique of Israeli policies within certain parameters he has deemed appropriate is permissible, but anything that touches on the “existence of Israel” is a bridge too far, which inarguably places Postone within a Zionist position. He sees critique of Israel as a colonialist project backed by the immense military weight of the United States as a reformulation of traditional hatred of Jews, a staggering analytic leap that ignores the overwhelming abundance of empirical evidence establishing Israel’s disregard for human rights and international law in pursuit of its violent expansionist ambitions.

Subscribe now

In Postone’s reading, anti-Zionism on the Left is profoundly shaped by the legacy of Stalinism, as Soviet policies towards Jews had effectively made antisemitism, in his words, “legitimate for the left” (Martin 2010). He identifies a convergence between Nazi antisemitism, Soviet antisemitic anti-Zionism, Arab nationalism, and the Palestinian movement in the Arab world, but reserves a role of particular importance for Stalinism, with its supposed capacity to render Nazi-style Jew-hatred palatable to those identifying with progressive politics. There is a lot going on in Postone’s hodgepodge of perceived converging antisemitic threads, and we need to disentangle his crossed wires. Postone ultimately sees a continuous ideological line running from Nazi antisemitism to Palestinian resistance, as reiterations of fetishized anti-capitalism in the form of antisemitism. In Postone’s (2006, 101) reading, the Arabs had their own homegrown antisemitism, but this was radicalized into a conspiratorial form of antisemitism as a result of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s in the Middle East. Then, he argues, the USSR, the country that defeated Nazi Germany in WWII, allegedly adopted “a form of national socialism,” becoming a kind of left-wing Nazi state in the late Stalin era. From here, the Soviet bloc spread its tendrils throughout the world, using its influence in various Soviet-aligned states to spread conspiratorial antisemitism to those with left-wing sympathies in the West and Middle East, and further radicalizing the Arabs who were previously primed with Nazi propaganda.

Postone claims this was a driving factor shaping anti-imperialist opposition to Israel’s existence that we see today. Or so the story goes. As you’ll note, the issue of Palestinian land rights and dispossession is barely a footnote in his narrative, if that. Everything flows from a linear transmission of Nazi antisemitism, which is straightforwardly replicated in multiple disparate contexts, with little attention to the work of specialists who study those different historical areas.

This will likely go without saying, but in case it is not obvious: Postone is not a scholar of the Middle East, and his ignorance of dynamics in the region leads him to distort and selectively arrange the historical facts in a way that reaffirms his theoretical presumptions around a global conspiracy of antisemitism, as a fetishized form of anti-capitalism, with a singular ideological Nazi template. Postone is like a detective who begins with a presumed guilty suspect and then works backward to ensure that all evidence fits the case. As far as I’m aware, Postone does not read Arabic and has not engaged with archival sources. Thus, firstly, in understanding the relation between Arab nationalism and Nazism, we must consider the work of actual scholars, which severely undermines Postone’s thesis.

As Flores (2012, 466) notes, studies like Gershoni and Jankowski’s Confronting Fascism in Egypt, Nordbruch’s Nazism in Syria and Lebanon, Wien’s Iraqi Arab Nationalism, Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust, and Wildangel’s study Zwischen Achse und Mandatsmacht (Between the Axis and Mandate Power) show that Arab responses to Nazism were frequently marked by skepticism and critique, contradicting Postone’s claim of broad Nazi–Arab ideological alignment. Indeed, Wildangel (2012, 526) observes that “in contrast to what some recent studies on German propaganda to the Near East suggest, an analysis of contemporary local sources indicates that trust in this [Nazi] Islamic propaganda, including the radio broadcasting by Nazi Germany, was generally low.”

Much of the confusion from German sources lies in the inability to distinguish Palestinian anti-Jewish sentiment from Nazi antisemitism. Postone, seeing broad superficial similarities between Arab and Nazi anti-Zionism, erroneously treats them as overlapping and convergent, but these are two entirely distinct phenomena with little substantive overlap. Wildangel observes that Arab anti-Jewish sentiment is fundamentally distinct in origin and context from Nazi antisemitism, as “the rise and development of anti-Jewish motifs in modern Arab discourse can be understood as a response to the rise and development of the Zionist project in Palestine.”

Both Palestinian nationalists and Nazis opposed a “Jewish Project,” but in the Palestinian case, the Jewish project was the actually existing establishment of the Israeli state actively and violently displacing them, whose settler proponents explicitly associated with the Jewish faith, whereas the Nazi “Jewish Project” was a work of fiction, a paranoid conspiracy. Postone has imposed the latter onto the former, reading the Palestinian struggle through the lens of the Holocaust, which results in a highly distorted picture. While the Nazis conjured a fictive, powerful Jewish enemy, the Zionist movement in Palestine had real, substantial power, and Postone collapses this important distinction. Indeed, by divorcing Palestinian anti-Zionism from the “framework of European hegemony over the Middle East,” the Palestinian struggle for self-determination is misrepresented as an irrational, hateful movement, manipulated into existence by shadowy external forces (Flores 2012, 468). Rather than being a Nazi-like hatred of Jews, Flores (2012, 469) clarifies that Palestinian anti-Jewish sentiment exists as “largely the result of accumulated enmity and frustrations. They are a rhetorical response to an actual damage inflicted by the other side.” Thus, Palestinian anti-Zionism has nothing to do with a “fetishized anti-capitalism,” and everything to do with the U.S backed, military power subjugating them.

Achcar further clarifies the tendency of Palestinian nationalists to associate Jews with Zionists. In the context of dispossession and conflict, this association was understandable: the Zionist movement largely presented itself as representing all Jews worldwide, and anti-Zionist Jews were very few. As Achcar (2010, 85) notes, “Palestinians generalized about ‘the Jews’ in much the same way as Jews in Palestine under the British mandate generalized about ‘the Arabs,’” making it a reasonable generalization. Unfamiliar with these historical nuances, pro-Israel commentators have misperceived this as Nazi-style racism. Palestinian anti-Jewish sentiment is comparable to the broad anti-European sentiment among Native Americans after being rapidly displaced and having their land stolen by invading European forces—not Nazi antisemitism. This comparison is made especially evident by the pro-Israel historian Benny Morris, who, defending the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in order to create Israel, wrote: “Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history” (Kimmerling 2004).

Subscribe now

Misunderstanding the USSR

The next major error Postone makes is, again, related to his ignorance of the relevant historical field: the claim that the Soviet Union was an essentially left-wing Nazi state that sought to eradicate Jews (which then supposedly transmitted this genocidal impulse to the contemporary anti-imperialist Left and Palestinians). In defence of this claim, Postone (2017) says that the USSR was planning to ethnically cleanse all Jews from the USSR through a mass deportation. Such an act would most certainly place Stalin on the level of Hitler. The problem is that the claim is demonstrably false. The notion that Stalin sought to deport all Jews was a pervasive rumour at the time based on fears arising from his repressive anti-Zionist campaign, but it was not an actual plan ever considered by Soviet leadership. Ken Kalfus (2016) observes that historians “have not yet found evidence that further actions against the nation’s roughly 2.2 million Jews were contemplated.” An operation of that scale would have demanded extensive logistical preparation and the full mobilization of the Soviet state apparatus. The complete absence of any such documentation puts the claim to rest. Notably, Postone gives more credence to an imagined act of ethnic cleansing than the actual ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Richard Evans (1989, 86) once noted, “there was no Soviet Treblinka,” and the attempt to depict the Soviets as equivalent to the Nazis inadvertently downplays the severity of Nazism as a uniquely genocidal phenomenon of the twentieth century.

What is beyond debate, however, is that Stalin spearheaded a highly paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Zionist campaign which led to the repression of countless innocent people. This campaign has surface-level similarities to Nazi-style antisemitism, which, again, leads Postone to collapse the difference between two wholly unique phenomena by erasing their distinct political origins and context. Many historians have cautioned against conflating Stalin’s form of paranoid anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As I’ve written in another article:

Stalin’s orchestration [the Doctor’s plot] is usually assumed to have been motivated by antisemitic tendencies. While at first glance this appears to be a clear case of bigotry against Jews, this view has been challenged by a number of historians who emphasize instead Stalin’s primarily political motivations. For instance, Geoffrey Roberts, a leading specialist on Stalin, writes that Stalin was not so much “anti-Semitic as he was politically hostile to Zionism and Jewish nationalism.”³ This view is echoed by one of Stalin’s biographers, Christopher Read, who notes that newly available evidence “should make observers hesitate to argue, as is widely done, that a general anti-Semitic campaign was under way [under Stalin].”⁴ The scholars Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng write that Stalin’s decision-making during this period can be better explained by his “paranoiac political worldview than by antisemitic tendencies.”⁵ Additionally, the British historian Robert Service describes these events as emerging from “realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice.”

Stalin’s campaign against Zionism was a senseless act of violent repression that affected many innocent people, but it was not antisemitic. It was genealogically and categorically distinct from Nazi and European antisemitism. Indeed, Stalin’s policy here, like the Soviet nationality approach pertaining to other minority groups, was wildly contradictory, moving between historically unprecedented affirmative action gains (such as workplace and education ethnic quotas and protection of minority language rights), which gave Jews institutional representation in power unheard of in Europe at the time, while also delivering paranoid campaigns of repression and exclusion based on suspicions of nationalism. Terry Martin’s (2001) work Affirmative Action Empire is an excellent analysis of these contradictory elements.

Stalin’s anti-Zionism fits with his broader repressive approach against “bourgeois nationalisms,” which was not driven by Nazi-style biological racism or traditional antisemitic scapegoating, but by paranoia over infiltration and security. For Stalin, nations, as entities with a kind of shared consciousness, could be afforded rights and protections as collective units, but also held accountable for perceived transgressions contingent on emerging geopolitical dynamics. This is how Stalin came to unleash repressive campaigns of collective punishment targeting various groups associated with suspect nationalisms, from Ukrainians to Kazakhs, Latvians, and others. Lindemann (2000, 454), a scholar of antisemitism, writes that Stalin’s “hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native Georgia were not exempt,” suggesting that the repression of Soviet Jews can be contextualized within a broader paranoid intolerance of suspect nationalisms, rather than any specific racial or ideological hatred of Jews. Indeed, as historian Diana Dumitru (2019) has shown in her study of Soviet Moldavia, Jewish representation in institutional positions of power remained significant after 1948 in this region, and in some cases, even grew, precisely during the period often described as the height of official Soviet antisemitism. It’s difficult to imagine that an antisemitic state would permit affirmative action policies for a minority they sought to marginalize.

The notion of Nazi-style scapegoating of Jews in the USSR has been theorized by many writers, perhaps most notably Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym, who argued that under Socialism in One Country, scapegoating Jews was a useful way of galvanizing the population against real or perceived threats, essentially operating like Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Postone adopts the same view. Ultimately, however, there is no evidence for this theory. As Gjerlde (2018, 292) writes, describing Soviet anti-Zionism in the 1960s:

Zaslavsky and Brym produce no other evidence to demonstrate that this concern actually motivated Soviet elites … internal deliberations contain no evidence of such motivations and that a different logic in fact existed, which played out both in internal documents and published texts, from which Soviet leaders concluded that Zionists conspired against the Soviet Union and that they needed to publish anti-Zionist texts in order to counter this threat.

Hitler explicitly saw antisemitism as a mobilizational strategy, “awakening” the masses and compelling Germans to strike against Jews, the perceived source of all their problems. For the Soviets, a review of archival internal communications reveals they had no such motivations and quite literally believed in Zionist political subversion in the same way they feared and repressed various other suspect nationalisms over the course of Soviet history. This was not a form of racial conspiracism exclusive to Jews, but a specific manifestation of a broader political conspiracism, activated in this case by Israel’s turn to the U.S. To exceptionalize anti-Zionist repression of Soviet Jews (and non-Jews), is to implicitly downplay the other victims of Soviet national repression, who suffered in comparable ways. Indeed, this is a symptom of reading all history through the lens of the Holocaust, bending various historical events to fit the same mold.

This leads to our next concern: did this form of Soviet anti-Zionism lay the basis for contemporary anti-Zionism as seen on the Left today? Postone refers to how East Germany played a role in propagating anti-Israel messaging across Europe, shaping the modern anti-Imperialist Left’s approach to Zionism. Indeed, the post-Stalinist USSR was a major ally to the Palestinian liberation movement, but the anti-Zionist rejection of a Jewish state in Palestine preceded the USSR’s pro-Palestine turn and cannot be considered a Soviet creation. While Soviet propaganda doubtlessly shaped the language of Cold War–era anti-Zionist movements, and Moscow lent them institutional weight where it served Soviet interests, to extrapolate from this that today’s anti-Zionism is a product of foreign manipulation by a state that has not existed for decades is to advance a fundamentally conspiratorial argument, one that ignores the real material and political conditions from which the Palestinian struggle for self-determination independently emerged. Indeed, there is something distinctly anti-Marxist about reducing a historically rooted struggle for national self-determination to the machinations of foreign actors. Postone is likely working off the scholarship of the pro-Israel historian Jeffrey Herf (2016) who has extensively documented the anti-Zionist campaign of East Germany and the popularization of Marxist-Leninist anti-Zionist language in communist groups, characterizing Zionism as fascism, genocidal, racist, etc.

For Herf, such criticisms are treated as reflexively antisemitic, with little effort to consider whether Israel’s campaigns of military domination, annexation, land seizure, and state-backed settler-terror might bear any relation to the language used to describe them here, a sentiment that has aged especially poor in light of the ongoing genocide Gaza. But this is all beside the point, as Soviet use of the term of fascism in the anti-Zionist context has a different historical meaning than how the term is used by anti-Zionists today. Gjerde (2018, 290) writes:

The wide application of the terms ‘fascism’ and‘Nazism’ suggests they had a function similar to that of accusing someone of conspiring against the Soviet Union. Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, it was an easy task finding examples in the Soviet press of a wide variety of ‘enemies of the state’ being labelled as ‘fascists’, compared to Nazis or accused of cooperating with Nazis. In other words, just as any opposition could be considered part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, any opposition could be accused of fascism or Nazism. Therefore, when Soviet propaganda accused Zionists of fascism, Nazism and of being part of an anti- Soviet conspiracy, it treated Zionists in a similar way to how it generally tended to treat any opposition.

For the Soviets, “fascism” and “Nazism” were not deployed to claim that the enemy was literally equivalent to or the same as Hitlerite Germany, but had become common expressions for disloyalty and perceived opposition to the state, the labeling of social democracy as fascism being another example of this. Pro-Israel scholars, unfamiliar with the nuances of Soviet history, have erroneously interpreted the Soviet application of “fascism” to Israel as unique, a “singling out” of the Jewish nation and, egregiously, comparing it to their Nazi genocidaires, and therefore antisemitic. In fact, this characterization belongs to a broader, non-antisemitic framework of conspiratorial thinking rooted in the dysfunctional internal dynamics of the Stalinist state, in which various ethnic and political groups were cast in hyperbolic, moralist terms (wreckers, Hitlerites, cannibals) for perceived betrayals.

The Soviet anti-Israel ideological campaign belongs to a very particular historical moment. It was deeply embedded in a rigid Marxist-Leninist ideological framework and the fervent paranoia of the early Cold War era. In reality, Israel is currently carrying out a genocide, and its behaviour is certainly consonant with “fascism,” and this conclusion has nothing to do with 1960s Soviet pamphlets and everything to do with Israel’s ongoing actions. This recognition is affirmed by major human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and B’Tselem, by leading genocide scholars including Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg, and by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, whose members have formally declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide. As one legal scholar notes (Eghbaira 2024), there is a direct continuity between 1948 and 2023, describing the Nakba as not a singular event but an ongoing process that “includes episodes of genocide and variants of apartheid but remains rooted in a historically and analytically distinct foundation, structure, and purpose.” Eghbaira describes how Israel’s “ethnonational hierarchy … continues to produce an intense, brutal, and asymmetrical reality of death and violence,” a legal and political structure that sustains the various modes of domination over Palestinians, which have taken varied and evolving forms. The affinity between the form of state violent coercion and 20th-century fascist politics is striking, from ethnonational rule to militant expansionism.

Zionist Settler-Colonialism as Fascism

This language is not new, nor is it unique to the Soviets. In 1948, Hannah Arendt, no sympathizer of the USSR, and Albert Einstein described the Likud party’s predecessor as “akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Toscano 2023). Historian Ze’ev Sternhell later identified a “growing fascism and a racism akin to early Nazism” within the state’s development, a sentiment echoed by modern Holocaust scholar Daniel Blatman, who argues the “extreme right” has become the “center” and that “there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today” (Toscano 2023). Bringing these perspectives into dialogue with one another, Alberto Toscano (2023) writes that the “fascistic settler and religious right has come to affirm and celebrate the structuring violence and dehumanisation that marks Israel as a settler-colonial project.” While some who have applied the Fascist or Nazi label to Israel have used it to refer to the “Netanyahu Government” or a specific governing faction, it must be attributed to Israel itself as a settler-colonial entity tracing back to 1948. Thus, the label “fascist” is not an antisemitic slur, but rather an analytically useful and accurate way to make sense of Israeli ultranationalism and violence, which are inseparable from its settler colonial structure. Here, the elimination of the indigenous population is not an aberration but a constitutive logic.

Postone does not reckon with any of this, nor does he address the implications of the pre-Stalinist Soviet tradition for Israel, in which Lenin had explicitly declared that “the idea that the Jews form a separate nation is reactionary politically.” This passage long predated the creation of Israel, but it is difficult to read it in any way that could be seen as supportive of later Zionism. As Adeeb Khalid (2007, 466) has noted, the “Russian Revolution might be seen as the birthplace of Third Worldism,” given the centrality of anti-colonialism and national liberation in the Bolshevik political tradition. In a methodological sleight-of-hand, Postone attempts to isolate from Soviet history a specific strain of Stalinist anti-Zionism, which he misrepresents as antisemitic, and then disingenuously frames that as the origin of the anti-Zionism popular today. The Soviet Union’s stance on Zionism evolved over time, reflecting shifting political and strategic priorities but, ironically, the most profound deviation from the largely continuous opposition to the idea of a separate bourgeois Jewish nation was Stalin’s key role in the creation of Israel. This makes Stalin a profoundly unlikely source of inspiration for anti-Zionist activism. Naturally, Postone does not even reference that inconvenient history.

The anti-Zionism of today is best understood primarily as a response to Zionist aggression and to the persistent efforts of progressive global movements and factions acting in solidarity, forming what Haugbolle (2023) calls “an alignment of ‘ideological registers of anti-imperialism with the lived experience of popular struggle,’” which elevated “Palestine to an iconic cause for the global Left.” These efforts should be viewed as being politically and ideologically consonant with the broader climate of historical anti-colonial, anti-war, militant campus and Third Worldist movements, best exemplified by liberation struggles in South Africa and Vietnam. The Palestinian cause garnered considerable support from the post-colonial world on its own terms, and its centrality within the broader anti-imperialist, postcolonial movement speaks to an international solidarity rooted in shared experience of anti-colonial struggle. El Zein (2024) writes

For postcolonial Algeria, Senegal, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana, among many others, the Third World Movement became a state project. Many of the prominent figures and names associated with the Third World movement—Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Ahmed Ben Bella, Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru—were heads of nascent postcolonial states with their own political agendas, often in conflict with one another. What seemed to connect these often disparate agendas of the Third World during those three decades was, however, the question of Palestine …. Notably, at Bandung, the conference participants formally expressed their support for “the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the achievement of the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question

The post-colonial world’s support for Palestine was, in large part, rooted in class solidarity among exploited nations—the shared experience of colonial subjugation. El Zein (2024) notes that, despite the varied and sometimes contradictory political visions of these various African nations, support for the liberation of Palestine was an area of common ground. Israel attempted to present itself as an anti-colonial movement of self-determination, “but after the Six-Day War in 1967, this narrative became indefensible, marking the decline of Israel’s influence in Africa” (El Zein 2024). For Postone, Africa and the post-colonial support of Palestine in the Third World, again, are explained by the increasingly strained notion of a global conspiracy of antisemitism. Postone (2017, 64) writes:

Whereas some countries and areas—especially in East and South Asia—have prospered, others, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, have declined dramatically … This regional crisis, I suggest, constitutes the background for the growing spread of antisemitic ideas in that region.

For Postone, the economic underdevelopment of Global South nations has somehow produced an epidemic of antisemitism in these regions, though the mechanism by which this occurs is asserted rather than demonstrated in any sense. He does suggest an outline of a crude theory of national envy, in which poorer Third World countries are jealous of more prosperous ones and thus blame their conditions on Israel and America. Again, no historical evidence is provided for this. Unsurprisingly, Postone does not make any connection between the disastrous military interventions in the Middle East, which have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and immensely destabilized the region, and anti-West sentiment there. He consistently ignores empirical and historical evidence that undermines his claims and defaults to his mono-explanation of antisemitic conspiracy, which, in and of itself, is a form of conspiracy.

In the following chapters of this series, I will examine the empirical issues in Postone’s Holocaust scholarship, his connections to the often Islamophobic and racist anti‑Deutsch Marxist current, his influence on a “Marxist” liberal Zionists in the UK, and how these currents intersect with a broader worldview of Zionist conspiracism and pro-Israel far-right extremist view-points.

References List

Achcar, Gilbert. The Arabs and the Holocaust. London: Saqi Books, 2010.

Bouwer, Greg. “The Media Battlefield: How Hamas Exploits Journalism and Global Sympathy to Undermine Israel.” The Israel Institute of New Zealand, 25 July 2025. https://israelinstitute.nz/2025/07/the-media-battlefield-how-hamas-exploits-journalism-and-global-sympathy-to-undermine-israel/

Dumitru, Diana. “Jewish Social Mobility under Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery.” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2019).

Eghbaira, Rabea. 2024. “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4: 887–938. https://columbialawreview.org/content/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept/.

El Zein, Dahlia. 2024. Africa & Palestine: A Historic Relationship. Fiker Institute. https://www.fikerinstitute.org/publications/africa-palestine-a-historic-relationship.

Evans, Richard J. In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Flores, Alexander. 2012. “The Arabs as Nazis? Some Reflections on ‘Islamofascism’ and Arab Anti‑Semitism.” Die Welt des Islams 52, no. 3–4: 450–470. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607‑201200A9.

Gjerde, Åsmund Borgen. “The Logic of Anti‑Zionism: Soviet Elites in the Aftermath of the Six‑Day War.” Patterns of Prejudice 52, no. 4 (2018): 271–292. DOI:10.1080/0031322X.2018.1476211.

Herf, Jeffrey. Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Kalfus, Ken. 2016. “Imagining Stalin’s Plot to Exile the Jews.” The New Yorker, February 1, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/imagining-stalins-plot-to-exile-the-jews.

Haugbolle, Sune, and Pelle Valentin Olsen. 2023. “Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause.” Middle East Critique 32 (1): 129–148

Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. “Overview: Palestinian Manipulation of the International Community.” Accessed March 2026. https://jcfa.org/overview_palestinian_manipulation/

Khalid, Adeeb. 2007. “Locating the (Post‑) Colonial in Soviet History.” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4: 465–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634930802017895.

Kimmerling, Baruch. “Top Israeli Historian Analyzes Benny Morris’s Shocking Interview.” The Electronic Intifada, 27 January 2004.

Lindemann, Albert. Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti‑Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Martin, Thomas. 2010. “Zionism, Anti‑Semitism and the Left: An Interview with Moishe Postone.” Solidarity 3, no. 166 (February 4, 2010). Interview with Moishe Postone. Available as PDF at Workers’ Liberty. https://www.workersliberty.org/files/100205postone.pdf.

Postone, Moishe. 2017. “The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity: Reflections on History, the Holocaust, and Antisemitism.” In Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender, edited by Jack Jacobs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/jews-and-leftist-politics/dualisms-of-capitalist-modernity-reflections-on-history-the-holocaust-and-antisemitism/1A2BA8B14DD0152EA60014EB6A56D241.

Postone, Moishe. “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism.” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (January 2006): 93–110, published by Duke University Press.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. 2025. International Association of Genocide Scholars Resolution on Gaza. Berlin: International Association of Genocide Scholars. https://genocidescholars.org/publications/resolutions/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

Sayegh, Fayez A. Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1965.

Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli‑Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Toscano, Alberto. 2023. “The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate.” Verso, 2023.

Wildangel, René. 2012. “The Invention of ‘Islamofascism’: Nazi Propaganda to the Arab World and Perceptions from Palestine.” Die Welt des Islams 52, no. 3–4: 526–544. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607‑20120A12.

Zia‑Ebrahimi, Reza. 2022. “When the Elders of Zion Relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialisation in Antisemitism and Islamophobia.” Patterns of Prejudice 56, no. 3: 273–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2022.2049678.

Zureik, Elia. Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit. London: Routledge, 2015.

John endures in America’s collective memory as a zealous and single-minded advocate for abolitionism, dedicating his life to bringing about the destruction of America’s most vile institution. Brown has been described as many things: fanatic, madman, terrorist, martyr, revolutionary, and saint, to name a few. One label rarely applied to Brown, yet perhaps warranted, is “communist.” John Brown’s son, John Brown Jr., a socialist himself, had written of his father:

Father’s favorite theme was that of the Community plan of cooperative industry, in which all should labor for the common good; ‘having all things in common’ as did the disciples of Jesus in his day. This has been, and still is, my Communistic or Socialist faith (Reynolds 2005, 81).

Brown's Provisional Constitution is a testament to the radical nature of his economic vision, which is typically noted in passing but seldom subjected to serious scrutiny in existing scholarship. The constitution would have established a collectivist economic order, with all produced and captured resources flowing into a common pool, and private appropriations of these of goods treated as a criminal act (Brown 1858). Of course, Brown likely had no knowledge of Marxism, and his spiritual worldview was very much at odds with Marxism’s atheist materialism, as well as the later state-centric socialism of the USSR, which was based on rapid industrialization under the personalized dictatorship of Stalin (Brown was critical of industrialization, associating it with social alienation). Still, Brown’s compassion for the poor and the exploited would have put him in close political proximity with abolitionist Marxists had he lived long enough to associate with them. He belonged to a broad socialist tradition in which diverse and evolving conceptions of radical egalitarianism developed as alternative models to the prevailing systems of economic exploitation.

Subscribe now

Indeed, according to Julie Husband (2005, 163), Brown’s biographer W. E. B. Du Bois was drawn to the abolitionist’s “socialist impulses”; Du Bois’ framed Brown as a kind of forerunner to the political radicals of his own time. The 1962 republication of his Brown biography added new material explicitly connecting Brown to the twentieth-century socialist states, writing that “one could wish that John Brown could see today the results of the great revolution in Russia; that he could see the new world of Socialism and Communism expanding until it already comprises the majority of mankind” (Du Bois 1926, 299; Stewart 2015). For Du Bois, Brown’s war on slavery was one cycle of revolt within the larger arc of struggle against the capitalist system, which the Soviets had taken to new heights. While Brown had no exposure to Marxism, he was clearly influenced by the communist and socialist trends of his time. Reynolds (2005, 81) writes that Brown’s political and economic worldview can:

be related to the utopian socialism of the pre-Civil War period. More than twenty-five utopian communities were founded during this time, many of them based loosely on the ideas of the French visionary Charles Fourier. Despite great differences between the communities, most attempted to provide alternative models of work in order to counteract the perceived evils of capitalism. They tried to make work attractive and cooperative instead of selfish and competitive.

Similarly, on the historical backdrop of Brown’s egalitarianism, Chiakulas (2023, 98) writes

Utopian Christian communities sprang up all over America in the 19th century … indeed, the first ever utopian Christian community founded in America (by a Dutch Mennonite named Pieter Cornelius Plockhoy van Zierikzee) in 1663 in Delaware was also the first European colony to ban slavery from its inception

Brown’s communism, with a lower-case c, was a type of Christian socialism rooted in the radical egalitarianism of the Bible. Brown’s spiritual outlook is usually associated with the vengeful God of the Old Testament, but DeCaro (2002, 5) writes that Brown’s vision was also “premised upon a thoroughly biblical spirituality rooted theologically and ethically in the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.” One might hesitate to associate Brown's biblical egalitarianism with the term communism, but it is accurate insofar as “communism” is not reducible to Soviet-style economies, but also has a pre-Soviet and even pre-Marxist meaning centred around community ownership of all property and the communal organization of social life, as theorized by early utopian socialists. Christian socialists like Cabet and Weitling were using the term communism before it had become more or less exclusively associated with Marx and Marxism.

Marx characterized his critique of political economy as a scientific analysis of historical forces rather than as a societal blueprint or moral ideal; it was “the real movement of history,” abolishing the present state of things. Still, Marx’s critique incorporated certain elements from the ideas of these earlier socialists, even as it sought to wholly transcend them. While noting their serious limitations, Marx (1866) still praised the earlier utopias of Fourier and Owen as containing “the presentiment and visionary expression of a new world.” The same can be said of Brown’s Constitution. Although Brown was no ordinary utopian. He did not spend his days cooking up elaborate, futuristic schemes of an idealized society, but articulated his vision of justice through the language and logic of American constitutionalism. Brown grounded his transformative politics within the familiar paradigms of the existing legal and political order. As Tsai (2011, 156) notes, the Constitution’s language of utopian Christianity was “disciplined by the language of civic republicanism.” Brown’s document should not be dismissed as a pie-in-the-sky dream or the product of religious delirium; it is a compelling work of political theory and a bold expression of democratic self-rule—conceived as the antidote to the US’ unrelenting state violence. Brown’s abolitionism did not exist in a vacuum; it was the most urgent and pressing expression of his broader vision of a just and democratic social order. He was animated by a universal humanism that recognized the struggle against racial oppression as inseparable from the broader cause of human dignity.

Indeed, one must consider how Brown engaged with various oppressed groups. He had reportedly once told white settlers who sought his help driving Native hunters from the area: “I would sooner take my gun and help drive you out of the country” (Reynolds 2005, 159). In Kansas, he befriended local tribes including the Sacs, Foxes, and Ottawas. This is especially noteworthy since even many antislavery whites had no sympathy for the dispossessed Native Americans. Brown was also a committed supporter of the early women’s rights movement, making a point of attending feminist lectures by leading figures like Abby Kelley Foster and Lucretia Mott, a commitment his daughter Anne later confirmed, describing him as “strong for women’s rights and women’s suffrage” (Reynolds 2005, 118). Brown’s surprisingly consistent universalist ethics were directly related to the religious developments of his time. On this religious culture, his particular brand of Calvinism, and its relation to abolitionism and social reform, Reynolds (2005, 30) writes::

John Brown may have thought he was predestined from all eternity to free the slaves, but in fact it was by mere chance that he was born at a moment when American Protestantism had just hit the fan of disestablishment, sending it in all kinds of directions. In the seventy years just after the Revolution, an amazing variety of Protestantisms would arise. To give some notorious examples, the Shakers would recommend celibacy, the perfectionists under John Humphrey Noyes would introduce complex marriage (communal marriage among believers), the Millerites would predict the imminent end of the world, and the Mormons would practice polygamy-all under the aegis of Protestant Christianity

The Protestant Reformation was a seismic historical episode that profoundly shaped Brown’s context. The movement fiercely challenged well-established institutional religious authority and had the effect of unleashing new spiritual and ideological currents that reverberated across time and space. In America, the Great Awakenings, a series of Protestant revivals sweeping the colonies and early republic, carried this forward by enabling more participatory forms of Protestant theology and weakening established churches. This, in turn, generated renewed commitments to abolitionism and other movements for social reform. Brown’s Provisional Constitution’s prescription of holding all property in common was also very much the product of a time when utopian energy enabled all kinds of heterodox thinking and social experimentation. And despite the vast ideological differences separating Brown’s abolitionism from Marxist Soviet communism, it must be emphasized that there is greater continuity between 20th-century socialism and biblical communism than one might suspect.

The utopian ferment of 1920s Soviet Russia, for example, echoes this earlier episode of tumult within the American Protestant tradition. Here, ideological rupture temporarily expanded the boundaries of what was thought to be socially possible. As one historian of the Soviet period writes, utopia-building in the 1920s “proceeded in a more self-conscious and formal way,” taking the form of both “independent experiments in life and culture building and the construction of ideal societies of the future and present” (Stites 1989, 19). Various groups took up the Bolshevik mandate of revolution in their own ways, constructing projects that, for them, reflected the revealed promise of a new Promethean world. The techno-futurist faith in the inexorable movement of history towards full communism played a structural role analogous to that of God’s vision in the earlier Protestant revivals.

Stites documents the extraordinary political imagination of utopian experimentation in early Soviet life: student communes abolishing private property, conductorless orchestras run on democratic principles, radical city-planning schemes proposing to dissolve urban life altogether, and sweeping attempts to abolish the family and reinvent everyday existence from scratch. In both cases, the vibrant, multi-directional outburst of utopian thinking was eventually muted and reincorporated into a more stable institutional order. Brown, not entirely unlike Lenin, was a political visionary who entered upon the stage of history at precisely the moment when the existing order was becoming untenable but its successor had not yet taken shape, casting a large shadow over the sequence of events following his death. In the following writing, we will weave back and forth through various historical periods and episodes to thread together a nuanced portrait of John Brown and the context of his ideological formation.

Subscribe now

Christian Communism

Before turning to Brown himself, we will examine the early history of pre-Marxist, American communism. It is worth examining those early utopian thinkers who explicitly identified with “communism” and built followings in nineteenth-century America. These figures may not have been directly referenced by Brown, but still inhabited a shared American utopian-socialist tradition inflected with Christian thinking, shedding light on the broader pre-Marxist radical inheritance in the U.S. of which Brown was a part. The early proponents of Christian, pre-Marxist communism include figures like Cabet, Noyes, and Weitling, whose Christian spirituality shaped their utopian political aspirations. These figures were ideologically diverse and positioned themselves well outside the doctrinal and institutional boundaries of their respective churches, which is to be contrasted with Brown's orthodox Calvinism; nonetheless, all of them drew heavily on the Bible to inform their radically egalitarian political worldviews. Cabet, who coined the very term communisme, drew on the example of early Christian communities to argue that the abolition of private property was consistent with Christ's teachings, encouraging his followers to establish communist colonies on American soil in the mid-19th century. Cabet (1846) famously declared that "Communism is Christianity... it is pure Christianity, before it was corrupted by Catholicism."

Read more

Read more

The USSR’s most infamous leader, Joseph Stalin, was not always Stalin. Born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Dzhugashvili, the future ruler adopted a number of pseudonyms throughout his life, eventually taking Stalin, meaning “man of steel,” in 1912, now immortalized in history. The name has a larger-than-life quality, something that might seem more appropriate for a professional wrestler or superhero than for a world political leader. However, the boldness of Dzhugashvili’s chosen name was not at odds with the revolutionary culture of his socialist movement, which sought to transform society entirely under a heroic proletarian leadership.

Dzhugashvili was first Soso. This was a nickname Ioseb used in childhood and among close friends, which he carried into his early revolutionary years. After that, there was Koba, a name taken from a Georgian folk hero known for his cunning and defiance, which Dzhugashvili adopted to signal the attributes he sought to project as a fearsome Georgian revolutionary. This is revealing of Dzhugashvili’s style of self-representation, as his carefully constructed image was meant to exude militancy and strength.

These earlier names, Soso and Koba, continued to be used by those close to him, but “Stalin” is how he became known as a political leader and on the world stage. But why Stalin? It was not his first choice when deciding upon a properly Bolshevik pseudonym; he toyed with names like Stefin, and then Salin and Solin. None of these proved quite right. Hellebust (2003, 94) speculates that Salin may have been indebted to his time in the seminary, given the possible reference to the Latin Sal Terrae, or “salt of the earth.” Salt, like steel, was a hardy and valuable substance, but it was steel that better captured the persona Dzhugashvili wanted to embody, given its cultural significance in the Bolshevik and Soviet worldview, in which modernization and industry held a central role.

Metallization

The imagery of metal was woven into the cultural and literary landscape of Bolshevism and Soviet socialism, as this symbolism was a powerful way of conveying the transformative nature of revolutionary socialism. One Soviet artist, having survived the ravages of Stalin’s terror, had enthusiastically pronounced that, “Now I am . . . proven and tested in the hottest fire . . . Now I am not just a Stalinist artist but also a Bolshevik of Stalinist steel!” (Hellbeck 2006, 337). Indeed, Hellebust (2023, 22) writes that, “there is no better metaphor for revolution than that of the blast furnace, where the destructive energy of fire effects a creative transformation of raw material into something different and radically improved.” Though the metaphor’s resonance was more than just literary flair, it spoke to the immediate political objectives of the Bolsheviks, which were grounded in a Marxist Promethean outlook. Russia’s revolutionaries viewed heavy industry, particularly metallurgy and steel production, as the engine through which both society and the state could be forged anew. It is unsurprising that Russian metalworkers, particularly in St. Petersburg, were celebrated as the most socially advanced and politically radical among the Russian proletariat.

Nowhere in the early Bolshevik cultural sphere was the theme of metallization more evident than in fiction and poetry, where the notion of metallization, that is the transfiguration of flesh into metal, emerges as a central motif. This is best exemplified in the work of Aleksei Gastev, whose writings dreamed up a utopian reordering of humans as machines or machine-like entities. He was perhaps most well known for his experiments with metronomes and timed labor, which, through his Central Institute of Labor, trained workers to move with mechanical precision, narrowing the gap between man and machine. Gastev eventually fell out of favour as his hyper‑Taylorism clashed with Stalin’s romantic labour heroism (he was killed in Stalin’s purges), but his prominence during the 1910s provides insight into the symbolic and cultural power of metal at the time, the period when Stalin adopted his name.

Gastev’s human-industrial fantasy never came to fruition, yet it nonetheless came alive in his poetry, extolling apocalyptic, techno-futurist dreams, even if they sometimes read like nightmares. In one piece, called Gates, he depicts a factory that quite literally ingests its workers, initiating their transformation, which they embrace “without fear, unblinking.” This process culminates in their collective voice in song, and the workers become one with the machines while ritualistically summoning an “iron demon of the age.” Similarly, in We Grow Out of Iron, Gastev describes a cacophony of industrial noises—singing, hammer blows, bells, and the roar of machines—which become the soundtrack to a metallic metamorphosis: Gastev’s narrator transforms into a gigantic titan, whose shoulders are likened to the iron girders of a factory ceiling. Bearing a vivid apocalyptic tone and quasi-religious imagery, these writings framed socialist construction as an eschatological rupture with the old world. As extreme as these writings may appear to the modern reader, the writing of Gastev was not fringe or marginal, but highly celebrated, defining works of art during this period of revolutionary Bolshevism/the early USSR. Hellebust (2003, 51) writes:

Reviews of the first edition praise him for his style, calling the book a cornerstone in the edifice of proletarian literature. Obviously, Gastev and his ideas received a good deal of official support, at least during the first years of the Revolution … the Bolshevik cultural commissar Lunacharsky did not hesitate to name him “the most gifted proletarian writer. The first decade of the Revolution was the reign of what Kleinbort dubs the “metallic theme,” with Gastev its flag bearer

Gastev’s metallized vision inspired younger poets to explore flesh-to-metal transformations in their own ways. In a harrowing poem by Gerasimov, a worker’s fall onto yellow-hot sheet metal becomes a kind of crucifixion, and a “bloody angel” ascends in a “gory resurrection.” Related to this is Vladimir Kirillov’s Iron Messiah, which envisions a mighty colossus, who, channeling the power of the working class, as well as that of the machines, railways, and electricity they’ve built, emerges as a kind of mechanical Jesus (Hellebust 2003, 55).

Here he is, savior, lord of the earth,

Master of titanic strength,

In the noise of countless steel machines,

In the radiance of electric suns.

Hellebust (2003, 62) recounts how one Soviet poet remarked that workers did not fear God “for we are God.” Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary fervor fuelled industrial dreams of a mechanized society, with its locomotives, factories, steel mills, and furnaces, smashing the old world and creating something entirely new in its own proletarian vision. Miracles of creation were real, but they required no higher power—only the workers’ own tools and collective effort. Ironically, the radically atheist Marxist revolutionaries’ fiery zeal “only served to stimulate the ‘sacralization of political vision’” (Hellebust 2003, 62). While most explicit in Gastev and his direct followers, such themes recur throughout the cultural production of the early period of revolutionary Bolshevism, and persist, albeit in more subdued and metaphorical form, in the later Socialist Realism period. The metallurgical futurism of proletarian poetry reflected the same industrial-messianic political culture in which Dzhugashvili became Stalin, the “man of steel.”

The Power of a Name

Beyond the symbolic aptness of steel in the Soviet context, why “Stalin,” specifically? This has been subject to different viewpoints by historians. The scholar Robert Tucker was of the position that Dzhugashvili chose the name based on its similarity to “Lenin.” In comparison with the names of other leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev, Molotov, Trotsky, for example, it is Stalin’s name which alone bears such close resemblance to Lenin’s. This does make sense if one considers the extent to which Stalin was known to admire Lenin. Tucker (1973, 135) writes:

On his return to the Caucasus, he acquired the reputation of being a “second Lenin” not only by forcefully defending Leninist positions but also by emulating Lenin’s mode of argument and mannerisms. From Arsenidze, who knew Djugashvili in those years and whose bias as a memoirist is not in his favor, comes valuable corroborating testimony: “He worshiped Lenin. He lived by his arguments and by his thoughts. He copied him peerlessly, to such a degree that we jestingly called him ‘Lenin’s left foot.’” It is likely, moreover, that the identification with Lenin played a part in Djugashvili’s decision to adopt “Stalin” as his party name.

Just as Dzhugashvili initially adopted the name of Koba in honour of a Georgian hero, he was now able to signal his fidelity to another beloved figure. Tucker (1973, 136) pointedly asks, “Why not, then, carve out a place of eminence alongside that of the mountain eagle? Why not become Lenin’s partner, his right-hand man, his alter ego, Lenin II?” For Tucker, Stalin’s adoption of a Lenin-like name is not reducible to the power of Lenin’s political arguments, but also spoke to Dzhugashvili’s emotional need for a psychosocial identity as a rebellious young man. Of course, Tucker’s line of thinking, while interesting, is also quite speculative. We do not know the inner thought process of Stalin, and Tucker’s psychosocial approach has obvious limitations. Suny (1991, 48) comments that “Stalin is without doubt one of the least hospitable subjects for the psychohistorian,” noting that he “left no intimate letters, no secret diary, and few witnesses to his inner life,” and that “Bolshevik political culture was hostile to open personal expression and imposed on Stalin and other adherents an enforced modesty.” Though, as Kotkin (2014, 714) observes, Tucker’s use of psychology was likely a means of compensation for his lack of access to archival sources at the time of his writing of these volumes. And while Tucker certainly veers too far into the nebulous territory of psychohistory in grounding Stalin’s supposed deep-seated desire to emulate Lenin, Stalin’s unwavering fidelity to the original Bolshevik leader is still nonetheless widely accepted in the historiography, with some exceptions. Robert Himmer (1986, 284), for example, takes the position that Dzhugashvili’s adoption of the name Stalin, on the contrary, was an “adverse judgement” of Lenin, drawing attention to a perceived political antagonism between the two.

Read more

Read Part 1 First

In the last piece in this series, I had discussed the origins of Soviet clowning and the political and cultural significance of its circus, a form of entertainment that was distinctly shaped by preceding Russian and European circus traditions. The early Soviet circus, as we discussed, understood itself as a radical, socialist reinvention of the longstanding circus tradition, with the clown adopting the persona of a proletarian labour hero and providing ideologically sound entertainment that extolled the virtues of Russia’s socialist achievements and future. This was soon complicated by the changes wrought by the NEP era, as market reforms reintroduced profit dynamics that brought the Soviet circus more in line with its counterparts in the West. It was apparent that the overtly socialist messaging of the circus was not as profitable as the more varied and light-hearted themes of the bourgeois circus. This, of course, was not encouraging for the Soviet leadership, who saw such trends as demonstrative of a potential capitalist restoration on the horizon.

Subscribe now

Taking seriously Marx’s notion of base-superstructure, the perceived cultural degeneration of the Soviet circus was a sign that the intended temporary retreat of the NEP’s market liberalization had now surely outlived its usefulness and that the proper path to socialism ought to be reinstated. It was in this light, with Stalin’s seismic transformations of the Five-Year Plan, that he sought to reshape society along the lines of a unitary, centralized socialist economy. In reality, however, the rapidly changing “economic base” would not mechanically produce a corresponding cultural transformation. Stalin was clearly aware of this. The new socialist reality had to be actively constructed in a voluntarist fashion through cultural production. This would ensure that “culture” kept up with the “economic base.” This is how Stalin’s radical economic transformations came to be paired with comparably radical cultural transformations.

Thus, the USSR functioned as a kind of pedagogical state that was heavily invested in the ideological shaping of the New Soviet Man (and Woman). Stephen Kotkin characterized the Soviet “party-state” as a kind of secular theocracy. While individuals with managerial or scientific skills were essential to its functioning, its fundamental purpose remained ideological. Party cells were embedded across institutions to instil “party spirit,” sustaining a dual structure in which administrative bodies managed day-to-day governance while the party ensured ideological “correctness” and oversight. The New Soviet Man could not blossom without ideologically oriented institutions that would explicitly nurture socialist ideals. Kotkin (1995, 293) writes that:

In short, both parts of the party-state were functional, but their functions were different: whereas the state’s role was defined in terms of competent technical and economic administration, the party’s was defined in terms of ideological and political guidance. Such a bifurcated political system, with the party analogous to a church, resembled a kind of theocracy.

Kotkin’s comparison of the USSR to a theocracy is an awkward one, given that the Soviet state was vehemently atheist, but it is a productive structural analogy in the sense that it captures the primacy of ideology in Soviet state-building. This should not be confused with the cliché that the Soviets replaced religion with their own atheist or Marxist “religion.” Rather, the ideological structures they employed shared certain structural features with religious institutions, particularly the Christian Church, in which overarching utopian-ideological and doctrinal imperatives ruled over other affairs. One Soviet official acknowledged that the task of producing a new Soviet man was extraordinarily difficult, requiring the extension of “the tentacles of cultural revolution into the private lives of each worker” and “the education of the psyche of the proletariat in the direction of the continuous raising of its socialist consciousness” (Neirick 2012, 63). This was the underlying impetus behind much of the Soviet party-state ideological mandate: the forging of socialist souls.

The production of mass culture, encompassing books, movies, plays, and other cultural forms, was to play a central role in the state’s articulation and dissemination of its ideological mission. In 1928, with its formal declaration, “Socialist Realism” established an ideological framework in which all art was to be filtered through the Party’s vision, defining standardized criteria of cultural production. To fashion a viable, non-capitalist modernity, it was paramount that citizens be fully immersed within the teleological narrative of socialism’s inevitable ascent. More than building institutions and economic structures, socialist construction required representing socialist reality, creating a world in which citizens could see themselves as co-constructors of the communist vision. In the words of historian Tijana Vujošević (2017, 121), “Socialist realism was a broad enterprise to make socialism real.”

There was arguably no medium of Socialist Realism more culturally resonant than the circus. As we will see, these performances had distinctive features that made them especially conducive to the state’s larger goals of representing actually existing socialism for its masses. While the pre-Stalin Revolution circus’s socialist character could be best exemplified by its biting revolutionary content and commentary, the Stalinist circus revealed its socialist attributes through “the young performers who had been raised in the Soviet Union and trained according to the properly socialist methods that they continued to employ in their performances” (Neirick 2012, 90). The new Soviet performer had been tempered in the flames of Stalin’s tumultuous period of rapid industrialization and modernization and came to the circus arena with a broad and impressive skill set; they were living proof of a triumphant era of socialist success capable of producing the most dazzling wonders. While such optimistic sentiments coexisted uneasily with the reality of the trauma and violence endured in these years, one cannot deny the joy audiences found in the riveting feats and performances of the circus.

Stalin’s Performers

In the first part of the series, we focused on the figure of the clown. The Stalinist period saw the continuation of the proletarian clown’s emphasis on mirroring everyday reality. Rather than the cartoonishly absurd clown of the West, it was important that the Soviet citizen see himself in the socialist clown, a fellow labouring comrade whose work just happened to revolve around entertaining the masses. The Soviet clown Rumianstev further developed a more “naturalistic clown character.” Neirick (2012, 85) writes:

Performing in his first season with the Leningrad circus, he appeared in the ring without makeup, wearing a baggy jacket with a striped shirt and slightly oversized pants … The clown then claimed literally to have drawn his new character from the masses of healthy, happy, ordinary Soviet citizens who surrounded him in the streets and in the ring: “My hero is a normal, healthy, smiling person, very active, who rushes everywhere and reacts to every funny situation with a child’s directness. His smile is healthy and calm, and the optimistic feeling of the contemporary Soviet person is already reflected in it.”

If the clown was to represent the everyday working man, the Soviet physical performer (acrobats, trapeze artists, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, jugglers) represented the most advanced segment of the Soviet working class. They were understood as being emblematic of a new stage of socialism made possible by Stalin’s sweeping policies. These new, socialist developments were to be reflected in every dimension of society, including the individual, whose habits, appearance, and physicality were to embody a superior kind of human being: the new Soviet man (and woman). One major element of this quasi-Nietzschean project was physical fitness. The idealized Soviet citizen was fit. Grant (2012, 66) comments:

physical culture was taken very seriously by the state, with anyone neglecting the physical aspects of their development considered “only half a person, like one who neglects the education of his mind”. The ideal man was not complete unless he had sporting prowess and achievements to add to those in other spheres of life.

This was seen as a necessary trait for the patriotic Soviet citizen, as physical fitness signified one’s capacities as a revolutionary and labourer; vitality, strength, agility, and endurance enabled the socialist citizen to direct their energy toward building socialism and defending it against its sworn enemies. Fitness was more than what someone could lift; Soviet propaganda emphasized cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene, portraying care of the body not as a separate duty but as an integral part of a socialist physical culture, in which a kind of moral and ethical discipline was inherent. A striking example of this culture appears in a Soviet diary, where a citizen attributed his political and career failures, in part, to his “weak body,” associating difficulty in coping with the challenges of life with physical weakness (Grant 2012, 66). This sense of physical deficiency was bound up with how he viewed his own (lack of) mental fortitude and political commitment.

Subscribe now

Read more

READ PART 1 FIRST:

How can we make sense of Trotsky’s decision to pass on sensitive information regarding communists and alleged Comintern agents to the U.S. State Department, or to accept an invitation to testify before the vehemently anti-labour Dies Committee? Were these ugly acts of self-defence against his dogged killers? A desperate and ill-advised tactical manoeuvre to strengthen his weakening political position? Or bald-faced acts of political treachery? While Trotsky owed little to Stalin and his agents trying to kill him, his contribution and participation within American anticommunist repression, however instrumentalized towards his own narrow political objectives, had real implications for those in the American left who resolutely opposed these reactionary institutions and had suffered considerably at their hands.

Subscribe now

A superficial reading of Trotsky’s “eagerness” to work with U.S. authorities might misdirect one into endorsing Stalin’s caricature of Trotsky as an ideologically fascist, pro-imperialist, and anticommunist agent. This fails to capture Trotsky’s motivations, which were multi-faceted and shaped both by the desperate conditions of his political isolation in Mexico and by his own strategic misjudgment, rather than any inherent fascistic pathology. At the same time, these missteps cannot be dismissed as mere strategic error alone, since doing so downplays the moral consequences of knowingly exposing fellow communists to state repression. His eagerness to speak before the Dies Committee also conferred a degree of legitimacy upon the most vicious body of anti-communism and anti-labour of the time, as explicitly noted by his allies. One of the enduring misconceptions of Cold War history is the notion that anticommunism or McCarthyism was an exclusively conservative or liberal phenomenon, when in reality it also had a kind of leftist manifestation. Schrecker (1998, xii) writes:

To begin with, there was not one, but many McCarthyisms, each with its own agenda and modus operandi. There was the ultraconservative version peddled by patriotic groups and right-wing activists that manifested itself in campaigns to purge textbooks of favorable references to the United Nations … there was even a left- wing version composed of anti-Stalinist radicals who attacked Communists as traitors to the socialist ideal

Schrecker describes American anti-Stalinist opposition to Soviet communism as a form of McCarthyism. This is an important point, but it needs to be clarified, as Schrecker’s language is potentially misleading: anti-Stalinist leftists did not share the ideology of McCarthy-style anticommunism, but their actions, at times, indirectly contributed to and reinforced anticommunist political repression out of a common desire to oppose Stalinism and its American representatives in the form of the CPUSA. The liberal historian may not be particularly attentive to what might appear as minor ideological quibbles to them, but this is an important distinction for those grappling seriously with what American Marxists actually believed. In reference to Trotsky’s relation to the Dies Committee, he was not “seeking to aid the red baiters,” as one Trotskyist writer interprets Schrecker’s argument, but the material outcome of his actions did ultimately aid the anticommunist crusade against the CPUSA (Jones 1999).

For anti-Stalinists and the American Right, there was an alignment of political interests that ultimately served their separate yet overlapping aims, both of which relied on the mechanisms of American state repression to weaken the CPUSA and Moscow’s influence. In the context of left-wing anticommunism, anti-Stalinist intellectuals played an especially important role in legitimizing repression against the CPUSA, particularly through the “New York Intellectuals,” as this loose circle of New York–based commentators wielded outsized influence in the political and cultural debates of their time. Many were “increasingly involved with Trotskyism,” given its opposition to “the authoritarian and manipulative aspects of the CP … associating the CP with the malignancies of Stalin” (Schrecker 1998, 80; Cherny 1999). At the same time, we cannot ignore the CPUSA’s own response to Trotskyists under the Smith Act in 1941, when “the Party actively aided the government’s case and enthusiastically applauded the verdict” (Wald 2000). This speaks to the intense, burning hostility between these opposing communist tendencies and to the profoundly compromised morals that sometimes emerged from their rivalry. Indeed, between, “Socialists, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites, Musteites, and a wide array of unaffi liated radical intellectuals and activists,” left-wing and communist anticommunism took many forms (Schrecker 1998, 76). Thus, Trotsky’s decision to cooperate with U.S authorities was certainly not unique to him and his followers, and traversed left-wing political tendencies. In any case, the purpose of this writing is to understand Trotsky’s individual motives, and situating his actions within the broader context of left-wing anti-Stalinist assistance to U.S. authorities will serve that aim.

In discussing different forms of treachery, the political philosopher Margalit (2017, 220), in his work On Betrayal, distinguishes what he calls “ideological collaboration” from “opportunistic collaboration,” though he notes that the distinction is sometimes not entirely clear. In Trotsky’s case, his involvement with the U.S. authorities decisively falls into the latter category: there is no evidence to suggest he had any ideological sympathy with American anticommunists, and they in turn had none for him, as the regime in power typically “despises the collaborator, especially if the collaboration takes place for opportunistic reasons” (Margalit 2017, 198). Despite the lack of ideological affinity between the two poles of collaboration, it is still true that, as Margalit writes of the collaborator, “there is no way for such a party to come to power on the strength of its own ideology, but now, with the help of the conquerors’ bayonets, they can ascend to power” (Margalit 2017, 220). While Trotsky’s party ultimately did not ascend to power, this was precisely the logic of certain actors on the anti-Stalinist left, which contributed to right-wing repression of Stalinists because such violence served their political ends.

Trotsky was not unique in this regard. The more well-known episode of a high-profile left-wing figure informing on other communists out of an anti-Stalinist impulse was George Orwell. Orwell had produced what one journalist called a “snitch list,” a confidential record he put together for the British Information Research Department (IRD), an anti-communist information unit within the British Foreign Office intended to further British interests in the Cold War propaganda battle (Cockburn 2012). This list identified writers and intellectuals he saw as sympathetic to Stalinism. For this act, Cockburn (2012) writes: “The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch, an informer to the secret police, Animal Farm’s resident weasel.”

However, Orwell, unlike Trotsky, could not be seen as being motivated by self-defence in any way, and had the added shame of being explicitly racist in the way he reported, describing Paul Robeson as “anti-white” (Cockburn 2012). Nonetheless, both men gave fuel to an anticommunist witch-hunt that had a profoundly negative effect on the lives of many left-wing Americans. To what extent did Trotsky betray the principles of his revolution? While both Trotsky and Orwell certainly saw themselves as acting righteously against Stalinism, there are still unavoidable ethical implications to their actions. Or, to quote Margalit (2017, 198), perhaps we should frame our question this way: “When does collaboration amount to betrayal?”

There is a specific kind of moral cruelty to betrayal that separates it from other forms of harm, undoing the bonds of camaraderie by which those in a political community define their relations. To betray is to forsake what was held in common; it is a grievous moral injury that cuts especially deep because it is inflicted from within. We expect our enemies to hurt us, but those who have professed their allegiance to the same communal values and political aspirations presumably owe some degree of loyalty. In the culture of revolutionary politics, the concept of fraternity is especially relevant, one that has been downplayed in favour of the more intuitive notions of liberty and equality. Margalit (2017, 259) describes “fraternity as a brotherly attitude toward people we don’t know,” an admittedly “elusive concept,” but one that is crucial to our purposes. Betrayal, argues Margalit, is the flip side of fraternity—the violation of fraternal norms, the metaphorical familial bonds and “thick relations” which hold together a political community.

Of course, Trotsky did not see himself as being in political community with Stalinists. If we can speak of betrayal, it is the betrayal of the American Left and the workers’ movement, broadly speaking—the moral complicity of participating, albeit indirectly, in the anti-labour, racist, and reactionary machinery of American anticommunism. While Trotsky’s sympathetic biographer, Isaac Deutscher (1963, 482), like many of Trotsky’s political supporters, unwilling to fully recognise the full extent of his failings, had dismissed the episode as a “minor blunder,” additional evidence and research in the decades since have shed further light on this painful episode in the history of revolutionary Marxism. In this writing, I will synthesize the findings of Myers, Schrecker, and Chase to produce a picture of how Trotsky made his deal with the devil.

Anticommunism and the Dies Committee

Trotsky accepted the Dies Committee’s invitation in the autumn of 1939, but the U.S. State Department did not learn of his plans until weeks later, after his secretary, Joseph Hansen, had contacted the American consulate in Mexico City to ask about a visa. The inquiry naturally raised concerns in Washington. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle warned J. B. Matthews that a congressional appearance by Trotsky carried serious political risks. Martin Dies, under direction by the U.S. State Department, then withdrew his invitation.

This would have been devastating news for Trotsky. He had pinned much hope on this fleeting opportunity. The decision to testify before the Dies Committee proved to be a contentious one and had sparked considerable backlash amongst his allies. The Dies Committee was a thoroughly reactionary institution, operating as a partisan instrument aimed at aggressively pursuing its anticommunist objectives.

The Committee was largely comprised of members who were overall hostile to Roosevelt’s government, and there was little the president felt he could do against the body given the broad support ideological anticommunism received in the U.S.; acting against the Dies Committee would make him look “weak” on communism. While Dies was known to occasionally investigate fascist sympathizers, its first and foremost priority was eradicating all traces of communist influence, focusing its efforts on progressive entities that would ostensibly attract communists, such as CIO unions and New Deal agencies. Despite the broad support for anticommunism, Dies’ repressive methods earned controversy, especially among more liberal-minded politicians, who were uneasy with the outward trampling of civic liberties and labour rights embraced by the Right. Regardless, Congress repeatedly reauthorized the committee, lest it appear insufficiently anticommunist. Schrecker (1998, 92) writes:

Unable to destroy the committee, Roosevelt tried to appease it and his other conservative opponents. He took steps designed to show the public that the administration was fully as alert to the menace of Communism as Dies and his colleagues, while at the same time quietly moving to eliminate potential sources of embarrassment. These efforts, however, simply legitimized the committee’s charges and set important precedents for the future.

The United States leadership, though they were at unease with the Dies Committee, succeeded only in inadvertently bolstering both its visibility and authority, establishing the robust tradition of hysterical American anticommunism which still persists today. By the end of the 1930s, the Dies Committee, emboldened with help from local police and the FBI, raided Communist Party offices in several cities and brazenly seized membership lists and other materials. State and local authorities followed suit. Nobody was beyond suspicion:

Over the years, HUAC evolved into a well-organized, well-funded government body responsible for ʻferreting outʼ any signs of disloyalty among the countryʼs citizens. The enthusiasm with which the members of this committee took to their task resulted in wide-ranging abuse of power and the destruction of many innocent lives (Andrle 2014, 22)

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the Dies Committee was that anyone who opposed its flagrant violations was labelled a communist and then fully exposed to its inquisitorial wrath, with victims suffering “loss of employment and livelihood … jail time [being] also a possibility if a person attempted to defend themselves before the Committee” (Andrle 2014, 23). The committee was relentless in securing more “names,” fuelling its search to expunge communism from American society, and with little regard for evidence of actual guilt beyond loose associations. Andrle’s research recounts the story of one victim, Emanuel Fried, who, sticking to his principles, refused to provide names. Fried recounted that he was “unable to hold onto jobs with a number of U.S. companies who hired me, the FBI visiting those employers, getting them to fire me, punishing and pressuring me because I refused their demand” (Andrle 2014, 50). The constitutional lawyer, Frank Donner, had aptly compared the anticommunist crusade to the medieval witch-hunts (Andrle 2014, 24).

Within the American Communist Party, leaders and ordinary members alike faced constant harassment, as its 1940 election efforts were disrupted and hundreds were arrested. Myers (1977, 179) describes the plethora of anticommunist and reactionary measures used to crack down on the left: pressure was applied against foreign-born workers, and immigrants who could not be deported were threatened with being placed in concentration camps; the Smith Act criminalized political ideologies and speech that called for revolution or government overthrow; new state laws imposed draconian penalties for the vague charge of “hindering national defense” and allowed vigilantes near immunity in harassing organizers and activists; union disclosure laws forced the publication of officers’ names, meeting times, and contributors, making union members vulnerable to further state repression under the guise of transparency; the Federal Trade Commission also moved against unions, treating strike activity and other forms of collective action as “conspiring in restraint of trade”; the prevailing culture was intensely and unrelentingly anti-labor and anti-communist, which set serious roadblocks for the organized left in the U.S. at the time.

A Deal with the Devil

Yet, despite all this, Trotsky remained steadfast in defending the decision to speak before a committee which had caused so much pain and agony in the American Left. The interests of Trotsky and the anticommunist Right superficially aligned, as Martin Dies was also intent on destroying the pro-Stalin American Communist Party, the CPUSA. Schrecker (1998, 81) provides further context on left-wing anti-Stalinist complicity in anticommunism, writing that the CPUSA:

for all its flaws, was neither strong nor dangerous. It may well be, therefore, that for some of the New York intellectuals, their justifiable revulsion against Stalin’s crimes … allowed them to overcome their hesitations about collaborating with their traditional enemies on the right and making their own, albeit limited and indirect, contribution to the postwar wave of political repression.

Thus, an often-overlooked component of American anticommunism was the role the left, particularly the anti-Stalinist Marxist left, played in bolstering the anticommunist Right. While the Stalinist left were quick to accuse the Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist left of being fascist agents or instruments of imperialist powers, in some contexts this accusation became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, as segments of the anti-Stalinist left resorted to morally dubious means of combatting their Stalinist rivals, drawing on the repressive powers of the American state to punish other communists. That being said, it should also be reiterated that the Stalinist condemnation of Trotskyist treachery is undermined by their own complicity, as the CPUSA assisted the repression of Trotskyists under the Smith Act prosecutions of 1941.

Trotsky himself was implicated in left-wing/communist anticommunism. His tactical pursuit of the weakening of his much-reviled Stalinist bureaucracy produced a convergence of interests with the Americans’ leftmost hated enemy. It is likely that this desperation—a desperation to both evade Stalin’s clutches and to inflict maximum damage against the political machinery of his arch-nemesis—produced political options that Trotsky likely otherwise would not have considered. It is worth noting how allies conceived of Trotsky’s decision to testify before Martin Dies. In a letter, one of Trotsky’s close allies of the time, James Burnham (1940), wrote:

The further consequences were that, through the publicity connected with the invitation and the later withdrawal, we in effect gave a partial white-wash to the Committee and its purposes, to the renegades who had appeared before it; we, you might say, legitimised the Committee in the eyes of the radical workers … And we also gave what could only seem as a sample of cynical opportunism in our own agitation.

Burnham was correct in noting that Trotsky had given a “partial white-wash” to the Committee, implicitly acknowledging it as a legitimate political body before which a communist might, in theory, make an appearance. For those on the American Left well acquainted with the repressive tyranny of the Dies Committee, this was deeply troubling. It was expected that a principled leftist refuse to legitimize the virulently anticommunist apparatus, and to speak before it was to violate the norm of non-cooperation that underpinned left-wing worker solidarity. Burnham (1940) charitably remarks that Trotsky’s decision to testify could “seem” like cynical opportunism, but in reality, cynical opportunism is exactly what it was: Trotsky had elevated his own personal needs over those of his party, damaging his credibility and reputation as he pursued a visa and subordinated his “popular front” to these personal imperatives.

Subscribe now

Read more