On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union — which had emerged out of the socialist revolution of October 1917—was formally dissolved by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The Trotskyist movement, organized in the International Committee of the Fourth International, was the only political tendency at the time that was not taken by surprise by the events unfolding in the USSR. Basing itself on Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, the ICFI, from the very beginning, provided an extraordinarily prescient analysis of the crisis of the Stalinist regimes. The Trotskyist movement also intervened powerfully in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It fought for the defense of the conquests of the October Revolution through a political revolution by the working class against the bureaucracy, and the international extension of the revolution, as the only alternative to capitalist restoration.
The ICFI developed this work based on the political and theoretical conquests made in the aftermath of the split with the national-opportunists of the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985-1986. The expulsion of the Pabloites from the Fourth International provided the basis for a renaissance of Marxism within the ICFI.
On this page, readers will find the most critical documents from this intervention. This unique record testifies to the power of the Trotskyist perspective and Marxist analysis. Three decades later, in a new period of social and political upheavals, it will help educate new generations of revolutionaries in Marxism and the critical experiences of the working class in the 20th century.
When Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, proclaimed the policy of “perestroika” (“reconstruction” or “restructuring” in English) in 1985, virtually the entire petty bourgeois left hailed it as a move toward a “self-reform” and toward genuine socialism by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The ICFI developed an entirely different assessment: Basing itself on Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union and the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, it recognized that, with perestroika, the bureaucracy was preparing the wholesale restoration of capitalism.
This statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International set forth its Marxist analysis and principled revolutionary Trotskyist line on Gorbachev’s much vaunted perestroika within the Soviet Union.
In this 1987 speech, delivered on the occasion of the 47th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, David North reviews the history of Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
This report provides a careful analysis of how the “reforms” of perestroika worked to undermine the economic and social foundations of the Soviet state.
David North’s May Day speech from 1988 reviews the history and significance of the Marxist movement’s struggle for internationalism.
This statement was written in response to the fourth Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow in May 1988. It warned that the “treaty for the elimination of Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) will do nothing to prevent a nuclear holocaust.”
In June 1988, the Soviet Supreme Court rehabilitated many of the key defendants of the Moscow Trials, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and Pyatakov. The verdict, as this article notes, “blasted to pieces” the “political legitimacy of Stalinism. It shall be remembered forever as the perpetrator of the most terrible crimes against the working class and Marxism.”
While Zinoviev and Kamenev were rehabilitated, the main defendant of the trials, Leon Trotsky, was not rehabilitated in 1988 and, in fact, never would be in the Soviet Union.
The verdict confirmed what the Trotskyist movement had always maintained: That Zinoviev and Kamenev, and all the other leaders of the October revolution that were put on trial and executed, were completely innocent.
These sections from the ICFI’s 1988 perspectives resolution discuss the Pabloites’ adaptation to Stalinism and the historical and economic basis for the unfolding collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Half a century after the founding of the Fourth International, Trotskyism emerges as the undisputed platform of the whole historic program and vision of scientific socialism. Therein lies the world historical significance of the Fourth International.
The speech by Gorbachev to the UN was the most explicit and unabashed declaration of the bureaucracy’s hostility to the proletariat and socialism, and its political unity with world imperialism.
First published in book form in 1989, this collection of articles provides a comprehensive and politically devastating analysis of perestroika.
In 1989, the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany suffered a rapid collapse. This page documents the ICFI’s analysis of the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe in 1989 as well as the extensive intervention of the German section of the ICFI, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA), in the crisis of Stalinism in East Germany.
In November 1989, David North traveled to the Soviet Union on behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International. It was the first such official visit of a representative of the Trotskyist movement since the expulsion of the Left Opposition in 1927 and the mass murder of Trotskyists and socialists in the Great Terror of the 1930s.
In the course of his two-week visit, North was able to meet with trade unionists, students and socialist activists in Moscow and Leningrad and give lectures that were attended by hundreds of people.
In November 1989, David North, the national secretary of the Workers League, travelled to the Soviet Union on behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The following exchange with students took place during the trip by David North, the national secretary of the Workers League, to the Soviet Union in November, 1989.
The following discussion with a Soviet journalist took place during the trip by David North, the national secretary of the Workers League, to the Soviet Union in November, 1989.
An important component of the intervention of the ICFI was an extensive correspondence that David North conducted with workers, youth and intellectuals in the USSR from 1989 into the early 1990s. We are publishing a selection of these letters here, many of them for the first time.
In 1990, the ICFI reissued Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, in which he had provided a comprehensive, scientific analysis of the historical and social origins of the Soviet bureaucracy. This preface to the 1990 edition was written in light of the unfolding collapse of Stalinism, which fully confirmed Trotsky’s 1936 analysis.
The conquest of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany would have destroyed the conquests of the October Revolution, the greatest event in human history.
In the night of August 18-19, 1991, a faction of the Stalinist bureaucracy, based in the military and KGB, launched a coup to overthrow the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup suffered an ignominious collapse three days later, on August 21. The ICFI welcomed the collapse of the coup as another major nail in the coffin of Stalinism, but warned:
“The implacable opposition of the socialist working class to the military-KGB coup must retain its complete independence from the political aims of the imperialists and their political and economic agents within the Soviet Union. ... Without the independent intervention of the working class on the basis of a socialist program, the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union will lead to even more brutal forms of repression and social devastation. Six decades of Stalinist terror will be replaced by the terror of capitalism.”
In the aftermath of the collapse of the coup, the bureaucracy moved rapidly toward the final liquidation of the USSR.
The rapid collapse of the Stalinist coup and its explosive aftermath is a critical turning point in world history and in the development of the international working class.
The following are remarks given by David North to the Philosophical Department at Kiev University in October 1991, and the discussion which followed.
In October 1991 David North visited Moscow and Kiev on behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International. On October 3 he delivered the following lecture at a workers club in the Ukrainian capital.
The Berlin World Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism was held by the ICFI on November 16–17, 1991. It was the IC’s response to the US invasion of Iraq in January 1991. Carried out with the full backing of the Soviet bureaucracy, “Operation Desert Storm” marked the beginning of decades of imperialist wars.
With this 1991 May Day manifesto, the ICFI issued the call for the holding of the Berlin conference. It was published in 18 languages and carefully reviewed the origins of the re-eruption of imperialist wars and the basis for the building of a socialist antiwar movement .
In this report, given just one week after the official liquidation of the Soviet Union, David North provided a historical assessment of the origins and significance of the collapse of Stalinism.
This report to the 12th Plenum of the International Committee outlined the tasks of the Fourth International in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, first and foremost, the reestablishing of socialist consciousness in the working class to prepare it for a new period of wars and revolutions.
In an analysis of the origins of the dissolution of the USSR and the tasks of the Fourth International, David North stressed in March 1992:
“Stalinism set out to destroy the greatest conquest of Marxism: the development of the revolutionary political consciousness of the working class, the transformation of an oppressed and exploited mass into a conscious historical force. ... It falls upon the Fourth International, led by the International Committee, to reestablish within the working class the great political culture of Marxism. That is the only foundation upon which a genuine revolutionary workers movement can be built.”
Based on this assessment, in the 1990s, the International Committee developed a comprehensive campaign to restore and defend the historical truth about the October Revolution and the struggle of Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition against Stalinism. A critical component of this campaign was a world lecture tour with Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin in 1995–1996, which attracted thousands of workers and youth in Europe, Australia and the United States. It also involved the publication of documents of the Left Opposition and the memoirs of Nadezhda Ioffe. Many critical essays and assessments of the International Committee of the most central experiences of the 20th century — from the October Revolution to fascism and the Holocaust — were developed in those years in conscious opposition to the postmodernist rejection of history and the historical falsifications in bourgeois academia.
With this essay, the ICFI initiated the publication the founding documents of the Trotskyist movement, many of which were published for the first time in English in 1993–1994.
An answer to this question requires an examination of the history of such movements in the 1920s and 1930s.
A critical component of the ICFI’s campaign in defense of historical truth was the collaboration with Vadim Rogovin, a Soviet historian and sociologist who wrote a seven-volume history of the Soviet Left Opposition in the 1990s. In 1995–1996, the IC organized a world lecture tour with Rogovin, which attracted thousands of workers and youth in Europe, Australia and the United States.
This volume consists of lectures and essays that David North wrote in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. In opposition to declarations of the “end of history” (Fukuyama) or the “short twentieth century”(Hobsbawm), and the postmodernist rejection of history, the International Committee insisted that the great historical problems of the 20th century —social inequality, fascism and war — had not been resolved.
