Stalinism—October Revolution: Revolutionary Legacy and Betrayal

Stalinism—October Revolution: Revolutionary Legacy and Betrayal describes a relation that cannot be reduced either to simple continuity or to an accidental detour. The book argues that Stalinism betrayed the October Revolution while remaining bound to its emancipatory project: the new order tried to suppress its revolutionary origins, but its purges repeatedly brought the buried conflict back into view. The resulting history is at once a story of social transformation and a contradiction within the regime itself.

Revolution and the changing social order

The relation takes shape across a sequence of distinct periods. In the difficult, enthusiastic years from 1917 to 1921, Russian society was in a general state of emergency. The subsequent New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet state power but, in this account, left much of society’s existing texture substantially intact: peasants, artisans, intellectuals, and other groups remained part of a social body not yet remade at its foundations.

The decisive change began with the drive launched in 1928. Collectivization and rapid industrialization aimed not merely to administer society differently but to alter its composition: peasants were to be liquidated as a class of individual owners, while the old intelligentsia—including teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians—was replaced by a new one. The contrast in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account makes the scale of the change concrete. Someone leaving Moscow in 1914 and returning in 1924 could still recognize the city, its shops, offices, and theaters, and often the people in charge. Returning in 1934, that person would find the entire texture of social life transformed.

Fitzpatrick therefore treats the revolutionary sequence as extending beyond the initial seizure of power: in her account, it ended only in 1937. The revolutionary project’s movement into social reconstruction makes the later Stalinist order harder to describe as an unrelated interruption. At the same time, the transformation’s coercive form marks the distance between the project’s emancipatory promise and the society created in its name.

Betrayal embodied in the purges

The new nomenklatura stabilized its rule, but the stability remained haunted by the Revolution it had betrayed. The book reads the purges as the form in which that revolutionary inheritance survived inside the regime. Their recurrence did more than erase traces of the past: it repeatedly inscribed the regime’s betrayal into its present, as arbitrary arrests and killings threatened members of the very ruling stratum that had consolidated power.

This account explains the purges’ apparent irrationality through a structural contradiction. Accused officials could be treated as guilty because they belonged to the new nomenklatura, understood as a class that had betrayed the Revolution. Yet the regime’s public accusations concealed, rather than resolved, its own deeper guilt. In the book’s psychoanalytic analogy, the confession of guilt masks the underlying wrong: the displacement of the revolutionary project by a stabilized postrevolutionary order.

The social origins of some NKVD agents sharpen the conflict. Stalin recruited people of lower social origins who could act out resentment toward the nomenklatura by arresting and mistreating its members. The agents’ actions therefore made the threat to the ruling class an internal feature of the system, not merely an external challenge. The idyll of a settled new order could be disrupted at any moment by an intervention whose arbitrariness exposed how precarious that settlement remained.

The Revolution’s return and its limits

The book’s account draws on Badiou’s distinction between a truth-event and its disastrous institutionalization. Stalinist Communism, despite the horrors committed in its name, remains related to the October Revolution as a truth-event; Fascism, by contrast, is presented as staging an imitation of revolutionary authenticity without that underlying truth. This distinction does not excuse Stalinism. It identifies why its failure bears the mark of the project it betrayed, while the rival spectacle is described as imitation rather than a catastrophic consequence of the same revolutionary inheritance.

That inheritance also shaped political hopes about how the contradiction might end. Gennadi Zyuganov’s 1996 vision of a Soviet Union that would have turned out well if Stalin had lived longer rested, in the book’s reading, on the imagined completion of a final purge and a reconciliation between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church. The fantasy seeks a point at which the regime could finally become whole by eliminating the tension that defined it. Its appeal thus reveals the same desire for pacification that the history of repeated purges frustrates.

Historical necessity and political judgment

The book calls for holding together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. It rejects both the Trotskyist claim that Stalinism was merely a contingent deviation and the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. In this framing, the outcome was neither an inexplicable accident nor proof that the revolutionary project contained no emancipatory possibility. The task is to understand how the revolution’s expansion was blocked and its force redirected.

Isaac Deutscher’s interpretation of forced collectivization supplies a causal account of that redirection. A dynamic that failed to expand outward beyond the Soviet Union turned inward and violently reshaped Soviet society. Forcible industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution, while the liquidation of the Russian kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad. The relation between Revolution and Stalinism is therefore also a history of displaced political action: the transformation intended to move outward was redirected into the remaking of society at home. The resulting order consolidated itself, but its repeated purges ensured that the betrayed revolutionary inheritance continued to haunt it.