William S. Lear wrote: > > I'm a bit naive on these topics and I'd like to read some critical > assessments of them. Chomsky contends (if I remember correctly) that > the Bolshevik revolution really destroyed the nascent socialism that > existed in the soviets, and I'm curious to know more about this > episode. Any suggestions would be welcome... For a presentation of this position -- with citation of evidence from secondary sources -- see Albert and Hahnel, Chapter 2: The Soviet Experience, in Socialism Today and Tomorrow, South End Press, 1981. For earlier and more detailed material start with Paul Avrich, Krondstadt 1921, and Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control. There are a number of anarchist types who are much more familiar with this literature than I. If you run this request on an anarchist oriented forum I'm sure you will get a much fuller response. There is a rather extensive anarchist literature on this subject that was published by smaller anarchist presses in the West up through the early 1970s. [Try Root and Branch]. This historical work was never published by any mainstream or university press that I am aware of, and of course, was rejected outright and then ignored entirely by any and all Leninist versions of Marxism [Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist]. For less obvious reasons (to me) social democratic authors have ignored this literature as well. [This may be due to the Trotskyist origins of influential social democrats laboring in this field, like Isaac Deutscher, which may have saddled him with sectarian biases against anarchists who traced the origins of soviet totalitarianism back to Lenin and Trotsky, instead treating the defeat of Trosky by Stalin as the source of all Soviet evil.] As a result, not only has the public at large received no exposure to this position, the great majority of the academic and political left since the late 1920s has remained largely unaware of what has always seemed to me to be the most compelling interpretation of Soviet history.
