Anti-Stalinist left
[8] Prominent anarchist communists and libertarian Marxists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Rosa Luxemburg, and later, Emma Goldman were among the first left-wing critics of Bolshevism.
[8][9] Rosa Luxemburg was heavily critical of the methods that Bolsheviks used to seize power in the October Revolution claiming that it was "not a movement of the people but of the bourgeoisie".
[11] In one of her essays published titled "The Nationalities Question in the Russian Revolution", she explains:[10] To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the "people" who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petit bourgeois classes, who – in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses – perverted the "national right of self-determination" into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class policies.Because of her early criticisms toward the Bolsheviks, her legacy was vilified by Stalin once he rose to power.
[8] The Kronstadt rebellion (March 1921) was a key moment during which many libertarian and democratic leftists broke with the Bolsheviks, laying the foundations for the anti-Stalinist left.
[14] Like Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman was primarily critical of Lenin's style of leadership, but her focus eventually transferred over to Stalin and his policies as he rose to power.
[17] Conversely, Trotsky argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved.
[22] According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus is that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.
[24] According to his biographer, Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky explicitly supported proletarian internationalism but was opposed to achieving this via military conquest as seen with his documented opposition to the war with Poland in 1920, proposed armistice with the Entente and temperance with staging anti-British revolts in the Middle East.
[24][25] In 1936, Trotsky called for the restoration of the right of criticism in areas such as economic matters, the revitalization of the trade unions and the free elections of the Soviet parties.
[28] Trotsky also opposed the policy of forced collectivisation under Stalin and favoured a voluntary, gradual approach towards agricultural production[29][30] with greater tolerance for the rights of Soviet Ukrainians.
From the 1930s and beyond, Leon Trotsky and his American supporter James P. Cannon described the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state", the revolutionary gains of which should be defended against imperialist aggression despite the emergence of a gangster-like ruling stratum, the party bureaucracy.
The Great Purge occurred from 1936 to 1938 as a result of growing internal tensions between the critics of Stalin but eventually turned into an all-out cleansing of "anti-Soviet elements".
The Soviet leadership turned to popular front policy during the 1930s, in which Communists worked with liberal and even conservative allies to defend against a presumed Fascist assault.
Adherents of that view, espoused most explicitly by Max Shachtman and closely following the writings of James Burnham and Bruno Rizzi, argued that the Soviet bureaucratic collectivist regime had in fact entered one of two great imperialist "camps" aiming to wage war to divide the world.
The first of the imperialist camps, which Stalin and the Soviet Union were said to have joined as a directly participating ally, was headed by Nazi Germany and included most notably Fascist Italy.
[41] Shachtman and his cothinkers argued for the establishment of a broad "third camp" to unite the workers and colonial peoples of the world in revolutionary struggle against the imperialism of the German–Soviet–Italian and the Anglo–American–French blocs.
[43] In the pamphlet titled "On New Roads to Socialism" one of Tito's high ranking aides states:[43] The indictment is long indeed: unequal relations with and exploitation of the other socialist countries, un-Marxian treatment of the role of the leader, inequality in pay greater than in bourgeois democracies, ideological promotion of Great Russian nationalism and subordination of other peoples, a policy of division of spheres of influence with the capitalist world, monopolization of the interpretation of Marxism, the abandonment of all democratic forms ...Tito disagreed on the primary characteristics that defined Stalin's policy and style of leadership.
[44] Tito has also accused Stalinist USSR's hegemonic practices in Eastern Europe and economic exploitation of the Soviet satellite states as imperialist.
Some of these critics include George Orwell, H. N. Brailsford,[46] Fenner Brockway,[47][48] the Young People's Socialist League, and later Michael Harrington,[49] and the Independent Labour Party in Britain.
[55] The NCL was critical of the continuation of Stalinist Communism because of aspects such as famine and repression,[8] and as later discovered, the covert intervention of Soviet state interests in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
[56]: 31 Members of the NCL were often ex-communists, such as the historian Theodore Draper whose views shifted from socialism to liberalism, and socialists who became disillusioned with the communist movement.
[56]: 29–30 These perspectives inspired the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), as well as international journals like Der Monat and Encounter; it also influenced existing publications such as the Partisan Review.
[57] According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the CCF was covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to support intellectuals with pro-democratic and anti-communist stances.
[59] From the late 1950s, several European socialist and communist parties, such as in Denmark and Sweden, shifted away from orthodox communism which they connected to Stalinism that was in recent history.
[64] In 1961, the historian Theodore Draper famously published in the anti-Stalinist Encounter magazine that Fidel Castro had betrayed the Cuban Revolution and could bring international war.
Draper attempted to present a Marxist interpretation of Castroism, that made analogies to Trotskyist conceptions of Stalinism as a betrayer of the Russian Revolution.
