On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union (also known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)—which emerged out of the socialist revolution of October 1917—was formally dissolved by the Stalinist regime led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The destruction of the Soviet Union was the outcome of the anti-socialist and nationalist policies of the ruling bureaucracy, which confirmed the warnings of the Trotskyist movement of the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism.
In the immediate aftermath of its split with the national-opportunists of the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985-1986, the International Committee of the Fourth International had developed an extraordinarily prescient analysis of the pro-capitalist orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy, reflected in Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika policies. It warned the Soviet and international working class of the danger of capitalist restoration.
The ICFI’s analysis was based on the entire theoretical and historical struggle by the Trotskyist movement, dating back to the 1923 formation of the Left Opposition by Leon Trotsky, the analysis made by Trotsky of the counterrevolutionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy in his work, The Revolution Betrayed, the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, and the struggle waged by the ICFI against pro-Stalinist Pabloite revisionism throughout the second half of the 20th Century. The ICFI was guided by the Trotskyist program for the defense of the gains of the October Revolution on the basis of the program of world socialist revolution.
In this page, readers can find contemporaneous documents published by the ICFI from the late 1980s, including its analysis of the objective causes, political significance and implications of the 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 glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) program within the Soviet Union.
In this 1987 speech, delivered on the occasion of the 47th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, North reviews the history of Trotsky's struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
This volume, first published in book form in 1989, is a collection of articles published in the Workers League’s Bulletin newspaper between March and May of 1989. It contained a comprehensive and politically devastating analysis of the program and actions of the regime of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.
A single reading of The Revolution Betrayed will still yield more knowledge of the structure and dynamics of Soviet society than would be acquired from a systematic review of the countless thousands of volumes which bourgeois “Sovietology” has inflicted on the public over the last few decades.
The historical legitimacy of the Russian Revolution derived not from the possibility of creating an isolated socialist Russia but from the fact that it was the opening shot of the world socialist revolution.
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. In the course of his two-week visit, he was able to meet with trade unionists, students and socialist activists in Moscow and Leningrad. North's trip to he Soviet Union was part of the ICFI's intervention in the USSR and eastern Europe amidst the historic political crisis of Stalinism. The central thread of the intervention was the struggle to reestablish the historical and political links of the Soviet working class, and the workers in the Stalinist-ruled countries of Eastern Europe, to the proletarian internationalist foundations of October.
The ICFI welcomes the humiliating collapse of the August 19 Stalinist putsch in Moscow. Within just 61 hours, the military-backed putsch crumbled in an ignominious heap. The Stalinist bureaucracy, the gravedigger of the October Revolution, has suffered a defeat from which it cannot recover.
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. The ICFI's initiative to hold the conference was taken in response to the launching of the Gulf War by Washington, US imperialism’s “unipolar moment” and the march toward the restoration of capitalism and dissolution of the USSR.
The oft-repeated warnings of the Trotskyist movement, dating all the way back to the 1920s, that Stalinism would lead the Soviet workers to a catastrophe, have been profoundly and tragically vindicated.
The task at hand is not only to provide an appropriate definition of the new states, but to understand the implications of this transformation in the broadest historical context.
On March 11, 1992, eleven weeks after the legal dissolution of the Soviet Union, the International Committee of the Fourth International began a plenum—a meeting of leading members—the twelfth since the split in 1985–86. In an opening report, David North addressed what the end of the USSR represented “within the context of the objective historical experience of the working class.”
