"What were Lenin's four conditions?
1) Free and democratic elections with right of recall of all officials.
2) No official to receive a higher wage than a skilled worker.
3) No standing army but the armed people.
4) Gradually, all the tasks of running the state must be done in turn--when everybody is a bureaucrat, nobody can be a bureaucrat.

Under Stalin every one of these conditions were abolished. The state became a bureaucratic monster, designed to protect the power and privileges of millions of officials--but especially the leading elite--against the working class which was thus politically expropriated. Only one conquest of October remained--a very important one, to be sure--the nationalised, planned economy, which ensured gigantic and unprecedented progress for the USSR, not thanks to Stalin and the bureaucracy, but in spite of them.

Stalin drew a line of blood between the bureaucracy that usurped and betrayed the October revolution and the Trotskyists who fought to defend the real ideas of Bolshevism-Leninism. Yet, even when they were expelled from the Communist International, Trotsky and his followers still regarded themselves as Communists and faced towards the Communist Parties, fighting for a change of course, for workers' democracy and proletarian internationalism. However, at that time, the door was firmly shut. The successes of the first five-year plans and industrialisation of the USSR--which Trotsky had first advocated against the opposition of Stalin--meant that the bureaucracy was able to consolidate its position for a whole period.

However, as Trotsky had predicted, the privileged caste of officials that rose to power as the result of the isolation of the revolution in conditions of terrible backwardness, and which betrayed all the traditions of Leninism and October, ended up by undermining the basis of the nationalised planned economy--the only one of the conquests of October that survived. Not content with their bloated incomes and privileges, they yearned to transform themselves into the owners of the means of production, to be able to transmit their wealth and privileges to their children through inheritance. Already in their lifestyle and psychology these creatures were similar to the bourgeois in the West. They carried Communist Party cards in their pockets, but had nothing in common with Communism, socialism or the working class. In the end, they passed over to capitalism with the same ease with which a man changes from a smoking to the non-smoking compartment of a train.

This was the biggest betrayal in the history of the world working class movement. By comparison, the betrayal of the Social Democratic leaders in 1914 was child's play. Those who persist in characterising the former regime as "socialism" can never explain how such a monstrous thing could occur. The truth is that the regime of Stalin, Khrushchov, Brezhnev and Gorbachov had nothing to do with socialism, as understood by Marx and Lenin. It was a hideous bureaucratic caricature. Trotsky explained that a nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen--not the caricature of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, but the genuine workers' democracy established by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917. Without the democratic participation and control of the working class at every level of industry, society and the state, the rise of a privileged bureaucracy is inevitable, with all the attendant evils of corruption, swindling and mismanagement, which undermines and sabotages the planned economy. The chaos and sabotage increased to the degree that the Soviet economy advanced and became a modern, complex and sophisticated mechanism. This is the secret of the decline in the growth rate of the USSR from about 1965 onwards. With more scientists than the USA, Germany and Japan together, the Soviet Union could not get the same results. When the growth rate reached zero in the last years of Brezhnev, the regime stood condemned."

A marxian anti-stalinist.