The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Page 15 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science Nikolai Krementsov, of the St. Petersburg Institute for the History of Science and Technology, writes in Science in the Twentieth Century [1997] that at the end of the 1920s, the scientific community in the Soviet Union was completely co-opted into the system of power relations and occupied a prominent place in the social structure of the State. The global economic crisis in the 1930s changed the situation. World autarchy The crisis, which began with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929, led to a contraction in world trade and to the spread of autarchy among the leading nations. Russian State capitalism adapted to the new situation with forced industrialisation, which found its political expression in the Stalinist terror. The Bolshevik Party kept its name, but became something entirely different: adopting the theo...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 8 Lenin often used the metaphor of a chain that binds the world to describe imperialism. The October Revolution of 1917 broke a first link in that chain and hoped to pull the whole thing loose. The metaphor was adopted in those years by all the Bolshevik leaders and the leaders of the newly formed Third International. Within a decade, Stalin's well-known formula of socialism in one country signified the overturning of that strategic cornerstone and the defeat of the revolution in Russia, in Europe, and in the world. Dates that have come to symbolise historical change act as the synthesis of previously accumulated contradictions, and, while such a sudden change does not exhaust the possibility of future contradictions, the concentration of events in 1926 nonetheless marked a watershed that revealed the true extent that the counter-revolution had reached. The great general strike in the United Kingdom that year, wh...

The Analysis of a Defeat From the special series 1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International It was in Lenin’s legacy that the generation of the ’20s and ’30s could have found the theoretical tools to deal with the unprecedented Stalinist counter-revolution and execute an organised retreat for the world party. Socialism in one country? Lenin had already framed the essential characteristics of that issue in 1915: given that Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism , it could be assumed that the victory of socialism would be possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone . What that first unequivocally means is that either the socialist revolution is replicated internationally, or it is inevitably defeated. Moreover, since the revolution had begun in backwards Russia, in 1917 it was already predictable that the time given to this inception in one country would be very short. Of course, ext...