The history of the U.S.S.R. (1917–1991)

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Trotsky on the contradictions of the Soviet state
By Leon Trotsky, 1937–38. Excepts from “Not a workers' and not a bourgeois state?”, in which Trotsky draws an analogy between Stalin's government and Green's AFL. [Because Trotsky sees the revolution, not as a process, but as an ideal goal, Stalin appears to him an opportunistic preserver of the status quo].
There Is No Communism in Russia
By Emma Goldman, n.d. Communism is now on everybody's lips. Some talk of it with the exaggerated enthusiasm of a new convert, others fear and condemn it as a social menace. But I venture to say that neither its admirers—the great majority of them—nor those who denounce it have a very clear idea of what Bolshevik Communism really is.
Economic democracy: socialism, warts and all
By Norman Goldberg, People's Weekly World, 8 June 1996. Economic democracy (Perestroika) has existed in some form since the NEP, but always in tension with circumstances, and social democrats, by attacking the shortcomings of communism tended to betray it.
Ecology in the USSR
By Douglas Weiner, 30 November 1997. inal part of Douglas Weiner's Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Union (1988). Concerning the creation of natural preserves after the Revolution, which underlay Soviet ecological study. Economic pressure and Stalin's utilitarianism led to abandonment of aim to have man and nature exist in harmony.
80 years Later, Russians Want Socialism
By Renfrey Clarke, Green Left Weekly 19 November 1997. Polls show that while the majority of Russians have not been impressed by the left candidates, they clearly oppose capitalism on both economic and moral grounds. The social basis of the coming socialist revolution remains.
The unfinished revolution
By Boris Kagarlitsky, Green Left Weekly, 5 November 1997. The Soviet system, 1917–1989/91 was actually the capitalist system's source of vitality, and the collapse of the former not only implies the collapse of the latter, but opens the way for a new revolutionary era in the 21st century.
Eighty years on from the October Revolution
Le Monde diplomatique, November 1997. The USSR in fifteen key dates. A chronology.
The world's fascination with the Soviet Union
By Moshé Lewin, Le Monde diplomatique, November 1997. The USSR may have disappeared but its interest has not waned. In fact, a number of historians have been calling for a Nuremberg-style trial of communism, equating Stalin with Hitler. But their two countries had quite different historical trajectories.
Beyond the Soviet Union
By Howard Zinn, Z Magazine 2 September 1999. I was “very glad” the Soviet government was overthrown, and at the point where Gorbachev was in power, and “glasnost” and “perestroika” appeared to have a certain future, I saw the possibility of a socialist but democratic Soviet Union that would retain the social programs without the cruelties of the police state.
The Soviet Union and the struggle for socialism
Based on a talk by Fred Goldstein to the December 6–7 2003 Workers World conference in New York. The socialist movement has long been laboring under a cloud of demoralization and doubt because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Much of the movement has accepted the bourgeois interpretation of the collapse of the USSR as a proof that socialism—socialism in the communist sense of establishing the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and organizing a planned economy—is fundamentally flawed.
Soviet Union in 1920s: Scientific, not utopian
By Leslie Feinberg, Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans Pride Series, Part 11, Workers World, 12 August 2004. During the 1920s, in the first decade of the Russian Revolution, signs that the struggle to build socialism could make enormous social gains in sexual freedom—even in a huge mostly agricultural country barely freed from feudalism were apparent.
The USSR: The Thwarted Transition
By Ariel Dacal Diaz, October 2004. Debates in which ideological antagonism gains more importance than the subject requires after the Soviet collapse lost a precious opportunity to rethink, understand and assume the characteristics of the Soviet process as a whole that offers important elements for anti-capitalist alternatives demanded by the 21st century.