Inside the Soviet Union, the contradictions between the bureaucracy and the working class were growing. However, the “Communist” parties internationally were presenting the Soviet Union as the happy fatherland of socialism. Stalin’s successor, Krushchev, at the 20th party congress in 1956, lifted a corner of the veil on what was really happening: “Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion… He abandoned the method of ideological struggle for that of administrative violence, mass repressions and terror.” (Full text)

Bureaucratic tyranny takes on a logic of its own. As repression intensifies, the rulers’ fear of revenge increases. Opponents, driven from power, are mistrusted. Even if they recant, won’t they become a threat again? Might they not provide the spark for insurrection from below? Whole layers of the party came under intense suspicion from Stalin and the bureaucracy – none more so than the surviving “Old Bolsheviks”, who could remember the party of Lenin, who kept silent about the bureaucracy’s crimes only out of fear.
Bukharin, as early as 1928, shrank back from the monster he had helped to create. In a secret discussion with Kamenev he exclaimed in terror: “What can we do? What can we do in the face of an adversary of this sort, a debased Genghis Khan…?” (Quoted by Serge, in ‘From Lenin to Stalin’)

While the old Bolsheviks kept their heads down, a younger generation was coming to the fore, eager to restore the ideals of October. The whole party seethed with discontent. Expulsions in the early 1930s ran into hundreds of thousands. Yet the old Bolshevik leaders, despite their capitulations, commanded vastly greater respect than Stalin and the ruling bureaucratic clique – many of them disreputable ex-Mensheviks and former enemies of the revolution who had crossed to the winning side after the war.

The bureaucracy moved to nip the danger in the bud, unleashing a reign of purest nightmare. They launched the “Moscow trials”: incredible frame-ups where broken old Bolsheviks were accused of murder, sabotage, terrorism – any fantastic crime to discredit them and terrorize others. But the main charge against them was “Trotskyism”. One after another they were accused of “conspiring with Trotsky”, now vilified as an “agent of capitalism” and as being a “German spy” since 1921!

In this way the regime betrayed the real motive for the “purges”: their obsessive fear of Marxism, of workers’ democracy and the workers’ revenge, and their hatred of the foremost representative of Marxism in the labour movement internationally – Leon Trotsky.

A tragic parade of human wrecks who had once been Bolshevik leaders, blackmailed and cowed into admitting anything and everything demanded of them, assed before Stalin’s “judges”.

Three “trials” were staged: in August 1936 (including Zinoviev and Kamenev); January 1937 (including Radek and Pyatakov); and February 1938 (including Bukharin, Rykov and Rakovsky). Their accuser was the former Menshevik lawyer, Vyshinsky, who during the civil war had collaborated with the Whites. Now he could shriek the hatred of the bureaucracy against the former leaders of the revolution: “Mad fascist police dogs!” “Despicable rotten dregs of humanity! Scum of the underworld! “Shoot the reptiles!”. No evidence was brought against the accused except their GPU-dictated “confessions”. But, with one or two token exceptions, all were condemned to be shot. Each of these murders, every curse by Vyshinsky, was admiringly reported and defended by the “Communist” parties internationally.

The Moscow trials were only the facade of what Trotsky termed “a one-sided civil war of the bureaucracy against the Bolshevik Party”. Arrests followed waves of arrests. Countless old Bolsheviks, who refused to “confess” in public, were assassinated in prison. Left Oppositionists in Siberian labour camps were taken out in groups to be shot. Altogether tens of thousands – the flower of the Russian workers’ movement – were wiped out.

The Left Oppositionists remained revolutionaries to the end. An example of their unbending courage were the events at the Vorkuta labour camp in Siberia towards the end of 1936, when the Trotskyists led a mass fight-back by prisoners against the petty tyranny of the authorities with the only weapon still available to them – the hunger strike. After four months, all their demands were conceded. But soon the reprisals followed, hundreds of executions carried out in strict secrecy.

Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Communist Party congress in 1935, 1,108 had been arrested by 1938 for “anti-revolutionary crimes”. Of 139 central committee members, 98 were shot.

Of 1.5 million CP members in 1939, only 1.3% had belonged since the October revolution. Of Lenin’s central committee of 1917, only Stalin survived as a leader. Trotsky himself was murdered by a Stalinist agent in 1940. The last vestiges of the Bolshevik Party had been eradicated.

The total death toll under Stalin in the 1930s is estimated at 12 to 15 million. But it must not be forgotten that this slaughter was not simply the consequence of power-hunger, ruthlessness or, as Khrushchev falsely explained it, the “cult of the individual”. It was the culmination of the political counter-revolution by the bureaucracy against the revolutionary working-class tendency in the Russian workers’ state.

The regime established under Stalin had nothing in common with the regime of Lenin and Trotsky, though the outward trappings and names such as the “Communist Party”, the “Politbureau”, the “soviets” and so on, were preserved to give the opposite impression. No, rivers of blood separated Marxism from the regime of the Stalinist bureaucracy.