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speeded up by the war, which Russia fought in close alliance with
powerful bourgeois states. Yet nothing of the sort happened. Actually
the war has led to the expansion of the area of state serfdom (or
bureaucratic collectivism, if you prefer a more neutral term) at the
expense of the area of capitalist economy. It is this erroneous inter–
pretation of Stalinism as historically belonging not to itself but to
some other class which accounts for Trotsky's faulty reading of Soviet
strategy during the People's Front period. In that period Trotsky and
his
followers pictured Stalin as abjectly capitulating to the bourgeois–
democratic states in order to obtain the then much-desired alliance
against Nazi Germany. It turned out, however, that once the alliance
was effected (after an interval of backing the Nazis in the war),
instead of Stalin it was his allies who grovelled, renouncing some of
their essential interests for the sake of a partnership of which the
USSR was the chief beneficiary. Contrary to Trotsky's prediction,
Stalin has pursued not only an independent but even a brutally
aggressive course in relation to his allies. It is plain that only in
appearance did the People's Front strategy indicate the relinquish–
ment of independent positions in favor of democratic capitalism. In
reality it was a strategy of deception calculated to extract from capi–
talism what it could give by way of political and material aid while
withholding all return-payments except verbal promises and such
purely formal concessions as the dissolution of the Comintern. The
war was conducted by the Soviet bureaucracy neither in a proletarian
nor in a bourgeois fashion. The methods it employed are: peculiar
to itself, accurately reflecting its interests as a new ruling class, the
master of a new social order as hostile to capitalism as it is to social–
ism. In point of fact, on the basis of Trotsky's general theory of the
Soviet bureaucracy it becomes impossible to explain either its conduct
of the war or the subsequent successes of its foreign policy.
Not a few left-wing critics have observed that this theory of
Trotsky's is logically implicit in his either-or perspective restricting
present-day society to the alternative of capitalism or socialism."'' He
saw no other possibilities. Lenin was equally committed to this view;
Trotsky quotes him as stating repeatedly that without a revolution
in the West the revival of capitalism was unavoidable in Russia. It
is this schema which to a certain extent renders intelligible the ap–
parent incapacity of both Lenin and Trotsky to comprehend the
*
Hence Trotsky evaluated the Stalinist state as a combination of both systems. In
its socialist aspect he characterized it as
"a,
degenerated workers' state"; in its
capitalist aspect as "the first stage of bourgeois restoration."
