And in the traducing and misrepresentation of opponents
The party’s shift after Lenin’s death, from that plaintive, embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in imperfect conditions, to the later bad hope of Socialism in One Country, is a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue.
did October lead inexorably to Stalin? It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917?
Party activists are hounded in great numbers, forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations
The shift is born of despair, as any prospects for international revolution recede. But if it is utopian to hope that international support is around the corner, how much more so is it to wager on the impossible – autarchic socialism?
