1930s

The 1930s mark a decisive turn in the book’s account of revolution and modernity: the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and collectivization transformed the social body, while the failure of revolution to spread outward redirected its force within the country. The decade is not presented simply as an aberration after the October Revolution. It is treated as both an extension of revolutionary transformation and the period in which Stalinist rule consolidated itself, leaving the revolution’s unresolved antagonisms to haunt the new order.

Competing modernities

The book places the Soviet project alongside Fascism as an alternative to the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist model. These alternatives do not, in its account, escape the antagonism built into modernity. Modernity also means worldwide capitalism; describing its history as a plurality of self-contained modernities can obscure that shared conflict, making each alternative seem like a separate historical variant rather than a response to the tensions of the capitalist system.

This framing gives the decade a double significance. Soviet industrialization and Fascism could each present themselves as a different route to modernity, but their difference does not erase the underlying problem. In the book’s dialectical account, particular political forms are attempted answers to an antagonism that cannot be reconciled merely by multiplying the available models. The 1930s therefore belong both to the history of a specific Soviet transformation and to a broader argument about the limits of capitalist modernity.

From revolutionary emergency to social transformation

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interpretation gives the period a distinctive chronology: the revolutionary sequence proper, she argues, ended only in 1937. The difficult but energetic years from 1917 to 1921 had put society in a state of emergency, but the subsequent New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of social life intact. Peasants, artisans, and intellectuals largely remained part of a familiar social texture.

The decisive rupture came with the thrust beginning in 1928. Collectivization aimed to liquidate peasants as a class of individual owners, while the old intelligentsia—teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians—was replaced by a new one. The book stresses the scale of the change through Fitzpatrick’s comparison of Moscow: someone returning in 1924 after leaving in 1914 could still recognize the city, its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, the people in charge. A return in 1934 would reveal a city whose entire texture of social life had become unrecognizable.

That transformation was brutal, but the account does not reduce it to destruction alone. It describes the years after 1929 as carrying a ruthless yet sincere and enthusiastic will to remake the social body and create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system. The combination of coercion and revolutionary aspiration is central to the book’s treatment of the decade: the new order was produced through violence, but the drive to transform society was not simply an accidental residue unrelated to the revolution.

The revolution turned inward

The book links this internal transformation to the Soviet Union’s isolation. The October Revolution had understood itself as the first step in a wider European process, one that could survive and fulfill itself only through revolutionary expansion. When that expansion failed, the dynamic force of revolution, in Isaac Deutscher’s formulation as presented in the text, turned inward and began to reshape Soviet society violently. Forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution; the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad.

This interpretation also reframes the comparison with Napoleon. The attempted export of revolution by military means belongs, in the book’s account, to the end of the Civil War in 1920 and the Soviet Red Army’s defeat in Poland. The later inward thrust was a different turn: revolutionary energy that could not travel outward was redirected into the remaking of domestic society. The 1930s are consequently neither just an aftermath of failed expansion nor a simple replay of the earlier military attempt. They represent a change in the direction through which revolutionary transformation was pursued.

Stalinism and the unresolved inheritance

The book resists two opposing explanations of Stalinism: that it was merely a contingent deviation from the revolutionary project, and that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Its proposed task is to hold together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. This formulation makes the decade a tragic continuation of revolutionary history, not an interruption that can be detached from it.

The tension persisted in Stalinist rule itself. The new nomenklatura sought stability, yet repeated purges of its ranks gave the regime’s betrayed revolutionary inheritance a distorted return. In this account, the purges were not simply an external disruption of an otherwise settled order; they were one way the suppressed revolutionary legacy survived within it. The proposed final purge of 1953, prevented by Stalin’s death, appears as an imagined attempt to remove that tension and stabilize the regime completely. The 1930s thus occupy a central place in a longer history whose revolutionary force was redirected and contained, but never simply made absent.

Capitalist form and historical perspective

The book’s wider account of the decade is informed by its reading of Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. It describes Marx’s analysis of value as resisting a choice between treating value as inherent in a commodity and treating it as only a relation formed through exchange. Production and circulation both matter; post-Marxist approaches that elevate production as the sole site of truth lose this parallax perspective and make exchange appear merely illusory.

That theoretical distinction matters to the book’s account of modernity because it refuses to treat visible forms as disposable covers for a hidden essence. A wooden table acquires a different, seemingly transcendent character when it stands as a commodity in relation to other commodities; its social form is not just an ornamental disguise laid over its material use. The book accordingly describes Marx’s move as a return from the supposed essence behind appearances to the secret of the form itself. This framework helps explain why the decade’s rival projects cannot be understood only as different policy choices: they emerge within a wider capitalist antagonism that their particular forms cannot simply dissolve.