Marxist Analyses of Stalinism

Abstract

Marcel van der Linden’s recent book Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (Brill, 2007) deals mostly with what is usually referred to as Stalinism, i.e. the regime that developed in Russia in the aftermath of the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. The word ‘Stalinism’ does not appear in the title, however, because the first chapter analyzes the early criticisms of the Soviet experiment, while it was still led by Lenin and Trotsky. The bulk of the work, however, deals with the nature of the Soviet Union after the consolidation of Stalin’s regime, and it is this aspect of van der Linden’s book that we feel has not been adequately addressed by David Laibman in his review in this journal. In this article (which is part of an international symposium on Western Marxism and the Soviet Union) we attempt to assess van der Linden’s contributions to Marxist historiography on Stalinism as well as its theoretical and empirical shortcomings.