ISR Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialist Review, Vol.27 No.4, Fall 1966, p.161.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Stalin
ed. by T.H. Rigby
Prentice-Hall. 182 pp. $1.95 paper.
This is a collection of materials about Stalin which provides a valuable outline of his career. It includes selections by Trotsky, Lenin, Deutscher, E.H. Carr and others. The articles by Robert H. McNeal and Robert C. Tucker are of more dubious value.
They attempt to magnify Stalin’s individual importance in order to point out the alleged dangers “inherent” in all socialist revolutions. And this is the viewpoint of Rigby’s book as a whole. It concentrates on Stalin’s personality and individual methods in such a way as to give the impression that Stalin rose to tyrannical heights on the basis of “greatness” alone.
What is omitted is an analysis of the historical conditions surrounding Stalin’s rise, and above all the development of the Soviet bureaucracy itself.
“Stalinism,” Trotsky wrote in My Life, “is above all else the automatic work of the impersonal apparatus on the decline of the revolution.”
ISR Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 9 June 2009