 This is a subject that I think is in the next month or so will be quite prominent in the bourgeois press, since it's the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And I think they will say more or less the same things as they said back then, that it was a victory of freedom, that it was also, it was claimed the end of history. I think history now, just the last months, has showed that it didn't end 30 years ago. And also they said that this was the victory of capitalism over communism. Now we would just live in the best of the capitalist free world ever. And I think if you look at capitalism for just the last 10 years, it's also quite clear that capitalism is not doing so great either. And then the last part of these sentences, it was the victory of capitalism over communism. And for us, for Marxist, it was very clear that what failed in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, it wasn't communism. It was Stalinist regimes. It was degenerated or deformed worker states that fell in the Soviet Union. And that was the reason why in the end it had to fall. And I will come back to that. What was the reason for the fall of the Soviet Union and what kind of regimes was it? But first I wanted to go a bit into the movement around the fall of the Berlin Wall. And I think if you look at this regime and saw how dictatorial many of them were, it's quite impressive. If you look at the movements around the fall of the Berlin Wall, they were not movements for going to capitalism. It was not movement for the free market as it is claimed today. It was actually movement that wanted freedom, that wanted democracy, but not on a capitalist basis. And I think that is quite impressive when you look at these regimes and all the propaganda being spread now. The fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November 1989, very soon 30 years ago, it was the result of a wave of movements in 89, starting a bit before, that spread from capital to capital in the Eastern European countries in the Soviet Union. Already in the early 80s, there had been strikes in Poland, sort of like the first signs of something brewing in these countries. And also an expression of the blind alley that all these regimes were more and more finding themselves in, all these Stalinist regimes. And an expression also of the fact that the planned economy were more and more stagnating, if you can say that. They were more and more going towards zero and not being able to develop society and develop the lives of the population in the Soviet Union. And so the economy stagnated and these regimes, especially the Russian, came into crisis and was much weakened. And that also meant that when the movements erupted in 89, where earlier on in East Germany 53, Hungary 56, Czechoslovakia 68, the Red Army from Moscow would just come in and crush the uprising. In 89, the Russian regime was so weak and in internal crisis that they couldn't just send in the Red Army and just crush the movements that had erupted. So that was also why these movements could actually lead further than earlier. Yes, so already before the fall of the Berlin Wall, you could see all over, all across 89, that there were movements leading up to this culmination, you could say. In Poland, in the elections in 1989, the Solidarność, which was the trade union leading the strikes in the early 80s, they were allowed for the first time to run in the elections. And they won all the seats that they were allowed to contest, which really showed the mood of discontent and looking for some other way. In Hungary, they decided on a democracy package, trying to make reforms, to lighten up the regime, to make people reform from above to try and keep revolution from below from happening. In Prague in November 89, there were mass demonstrations of half a million and there were strikes. But the most explosive situation was in East Germany, which was also the most industrialized part of the Soviet Union, or of Eastern Europe. And the most experienced working class, the most educated working class. And the leader of Eastern Germany, Ekonika, he was a hardline Stalinist. And he was appliedly opposed to any reform. There were a lot of discussions in the ruling circles of these regimes at the time, was it time to have some reforms in order to try to avoid revolution from below, or should you just try to crush it? And Ekonika was one of the hardline crushers, just rooted out by the roots, you can say. But one thing is to wanting to do this, another thing is to be able to do it. And that's another thing. But the movement in East Germany sprang up. It started around the city of Lipsig. I'm not German, I don't know if I said correctly. No, Lipsig, something like that. Lipsig, okay. Good, sorry. And it was very politically confused. It sprang up around actually the services in the Nikolaj Church, because that was one of the places people could meet. And there were weekly demonstrations in Lipsig. And it was, of course, very politically confused. But this movement spread to all the other cities in East Germany, demanding that something happened. But what was very clear in these movements was that they knew what they didn't want, but it was not very clear what they wanted. Because they just wanted that things should change, it should be different. And there was no one to give it any political lead, to give it any leadership. And the regime went into crisis, and it became quite clear that they couldn't, like Honecker wanted, they couldn't just crash down on the movement. And if they had done it, it might just have led to even bigger explosions. So the Honecker government had to resign, and they put in another, also a Stalinist, but a more moderate kind, called Egon Kranz, who tried to open up saying we should have elections. But at this time already the movement, like we see today now, it's not about the initial demand or about one thing. We should, okay, if we have elections then we're satisfied and we go home. It was too little and it was too late. These attempts of reforming the regimes in a more democratic way. And they are obviously also, because they were Stalinists, also considered using force. And they actually consulted with Moscow, but Moscow was very clear at this point that they were not going to get help from Moscow in any way. Because they didn't have the forces and because they thought it would even lead to even greater explosions. So the Eastern German government were left to themselves. And to be honest, they had no power anymore. The movement had already gone further than what could be controlled and got a momentum of its own. And it was quite clear, one thing is if you are in the middle of it, it's quite clear looking back on it. I think this is sometimes something we forget. One thing is to be in the middle of it, seeing what is the situation. When we look back to it, it's very clear to see that at this point, the power was actually in the streets because the government couldn't do anything. This mighty state with the Stasi agent in all building blocks and workplaces, they were powerless. They couldn't stop the movement from happening and going on. But the problem is, and the problem was, which it is also today, there was no one to pick it up. There was no one to give it any political direction in any sense. Which I think if you look at the history of the Soviet Union and these regimes, it's quite obvious why the left wing were quite decimated at this point, the real revolutionary left wing. But this mighty eastern German state ended collapsing like a house of cards. On November 9, after weeks of these mass uprisings, the East German government announced that East German citizens were allowed to visit Western Germany. And they didn't say how or when, but this, and I think this was also an attempt to soften up, to say it will become better. We will reform, just wait and see. But it just created an even bigger explosion. And I can understand if you're a citizen in East Berlin, you think they say we are allowed to go to West Germany. Let's do it. So they went to the wall, which has been a place where people have been killed trying to cross, but just the masses flooded to the Berlin Wall and started to climb it. And the guards didn't dare to do anything about it. I think they were quite shocked and perplexed, thinking, what the hell are we supposed to do? Okay, we just let it happen. And these East Germans, they were met by West German citizens on the other side. And I think all have seen these scenes of jubilation of people just partying. This is one of the first thing I remember seeing on television. And I was nine at the time, I didn't understand it. But I remember my parents just being, this is massive. This is like a historical event and people all over Europe in jubilant that now you actually had this hated wall, and I think it was hated on both sides, being torn down by ordinary citizens. And this was a period, also the first period after of euphoria. And I think this is very common in the beginning of a revolutionary situation. We can do everything. We have power, people could feel that things were changing. But it's not enough to be euphoric. Like we know it's not enough to overthrow a government or to overthrow a wall. You have to have something to put instead. And this was the problem in all these movements and also in East Germany, that there was nothing to be put instead at this time. Where all the objective conditions for political revolution was there, if there had been a genuine Marxist tendency in East Germany at this time, who had posted the idea of creating a worker state, of having a planned economy, of keeping that, but introducing workers democracy and the workers running of the economy. That could have succeeded, but there was nothing of the kind. And the fact of East Germany was that this vacuum existing in the movement was very quickly filled by a very rich and very powerful neighbor called West Germany, which had all the resources in the world to fill this vacuum and to put forward the demand, which became then the main demand after some time. But it wasn't in the beginning, but the demand of the reunification of Germany. And it's clear when this demand came from Kohl from West Germany, it was reunification on a capitalist basis. That was quite obvious. But they presented it like now that German people have to be united, which was correct, but not on a capitalist basis. And this demand started to gain ground. And also Kohl, he made a smart trick. He tried to bribe and partly succeeded, I think. The Eastern European population saying, we will do a one-to-one swap for Eastmark, which was the East German currency, thank you, money. The East German currency to Deutschmark, the West German currency, which meant you would get a lot more buying power for your money. But this is quite clearly a one-off, okay, you have some money, you get more money, but this is a bit like peeing in your pants. You'll get happy for quite a short amount of time. And then it's not so pleasant in the long run. Okay, that was a bit strange, maybe. But what they all so promised was that they would also be happy in the long run, that the East Germans, they would end up having the same living standards as the West Germans. This is a daily saying, sorry if it's not an order to say. And on October 1990, the reunification was officially carried through and on a capitalist basis, of course. The process in Russia happened in a bit of a different form, and it was, you can read this book, which is really good, the last afterward deals with the whole process of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I won't go into detail, because I think this is not what this talk is about, and also I think people can read the book. But the process was a bit more drawn out. In 89, there were strikes in different minds against the deteriorating living standards, because the economy had been stagnating for quite a while, the living standards were falling. So the workers began to strike demanding better wages and so on. It was not demands for capitalism, but it was demands for bringing the economy forward and for improving the lives of the workers. And the regime was in dissolution, but the main factors in the dissolution of the Soviet Union was not the masses in Russia themselves, even though there were strikes in some demonstrations, but it was different wings inside the bureaucracy fighting each other for which way forward. And in the end, the Yeltsin wing won, which was the pro-capitalist wing. There was a coup and there was counterattacks and all these kind of things. But I think the main thing was that it wasn't a mass movement in Russia that ended up ending the Soviet Union. And these, the Yeltsin wing started to introduce capitalist reforms and it had catastrophic results. If you look at, in 1991, the USSR was dissolved. And if you look at the economy from 1990 to 95, the production fell by 60%, which was after a period of a long period of stagnation. But I remember when I started at my university, we had an economy course and we had a book about economy, a macro economy. And the first chapter was, why was capitalism superior? And the example was the Soviet Union. But when you look at all the figures, it was the wrong way around. And I never understood how they used this to argue the opposite of what the figures actually said, because what you saw was, when the Soviet Union fell, all the economic statistics just collapsed. It was a collapse of production and it was a collapse of living standards in these countries and not least in Russia. Between 1991 and 1993 real wages fell by 43% in Russia. It meant that one third lived below poverty line. And I think a really good indicator of how much the living standards plummet is the average living aid for men in Russia that fell from 65.1 years old in 87 to 59 years in 93, which is more than more than six years that the average living age fell. Normally it goes forward and then it's if there is a big war, a lot of men are killed and then maybe the average age fall. But this was not a war situation. This was capitalism coming to save the Russian workers by reducing their living age with the six years. Yes. So now we will have all these jubilant articles and I'm sure television programs. I think, I don't know if there are any Germans here. I think in Germany it must be just massive. It's already starting in the Danish media. And there will be all these histories about how much better it has become. And I think this is also something we have to go into. Has it actually become better for the people? One thing is that the immediate collapse, now they had 30 years to prove that capitalism is superior. And there will be all kind of statistics and so on. And I looked at some opinion polls and if you look at the percentage of people in the former Eastern European countries, they were asked if they approved that their country moved from having a state controlled economy to having a market economy. And it is less people now who approved this than it was in 1991. So it has actually fallen. And I think this shows the impasse of capitalism. It's still a majority in most of the countries, but it is a smaller majority now than it was 30 years ago. And in Russia and in six out of eight countries, not all of them, in Russia and Ukraine, there were more people who were agreeing with this. They said it was better before they didn't approve this move to to market economy. And in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, they say that a majority say that the economic situation for most people today is worse than it was under communism. And it is only in Poland and the Czech Republic that a majority thinks that it has gotten better for the big majority. And I think this is quite saying of the situation 30 years on the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you ask them about health, education and so on, it's also a majority who think it was better before. So I think we will have a lot of speeches and articles, but I think this is the real fact for the majority of people. It's clear for a small minority in all these countries, they got way better off, much, much richer, even if that was possible. But for the great majority, lives actually ended up being worse. So let's go into what was these regimes. But because if you also look at these opinion polls, it also said, is life better now than it was under communism? And this is what they still say. And I think this is one of the main, how can you say, arguments when you meet someone, when you sell the paper or something, you still admit with this, especially from older people. But what about the Soviet Union? Do you want it to be like the Soviet Union? What about Stalin? And you have to be able to answer it. And I think all of us need to be able to answer this because it's quite important not just to answering an old cranky lady on the street corner, but also in order to understand what actually went wrong, why did it end up collapsing? And was that really what we want? I think there are many things in these kind of regimes we don't want. And it's not what we're fighting for. And I think actually today, I think that has changed, that could also be interesting to discuss. But I think it is changing. As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was this argument. So what about the Soviet Union? But I think today, with all this, I don't know if I can say it like this, but degeneration of the left wing into individual identity politics, it actually, when it pushes some of the more serious young people looking for answers on the left wing away from that, they end up looking to the Soviet Union and to Stalinism. And I'm not that much into a different Internet fora. But I have been told that on the Internet fora, different kinds, the Stalinists are actually gaining quite a lot of attraction. So I think we also need to be able to, those who are going away from petty wars who are left wing politics, they shouldn't end up in the Stalinist camp. They should end up in our camp because we are the real defenders of the Soviet Union, the planned economy. And the only ones who can actually explain what went wrong and why it ended up failing and developed as it did. And Stalinism, we have just produced a theoretical magazine on the subject, and I really struggle, how do you define Stalinism? Because it's not like Marxism. Marxism is like, you can say, it has three component parts, philosophy, history, and economics. Stalinism, it's not a set of ideas. It didn't arise like some Stalin sat down and thought, how do I think the Soviet Union should develop? What do I think about society? This was not like, you can't take a book and say, okay, this was Stalin's thought and this is Stalinism. You can only understand Stalinism as the concrete expression, the political expression of the political degeneration of the Russian Revolution. You can only understand it in its historical context. And I think this process has been best explained by Trotsky in the Revolution Betrayed in the book from 36. And where he actually also predicted that if the workers in Russia didn't carry through a political revolution, then the Soviet Union would end up collapsing. And at that time, I think many people on the left thought he was completely crazy and it took a bit longer than he thought. But still he was absolutely correct in analyzing the underlying processes and internal contradictions in the Soviet Union to see what would eventually happen if the workers didn't intervene to change the course of development. And the main thing, and I think this is something we really need to stress, the main explanation which is very short, and of course you need to know a bit more than this very short thing, was that he said that Stalinism and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution came from the objective conditions of the isolation of the Russian Revolution in a backward country. This is like the main, if you have to explain it very shortly, this is our explanation, an isolated revolution in a backward country. And if you look at what the Bolsheviks said they never thought, I was just at the China discussion and somebody raised the question of is it possible to build socialism in one country? He didn't say that, but in relation to China. There was no one in the Marxist camp before Stalin, but during the Russian Revolution and so on, there was no one who could ever imagine posing the question of creating socialism in one country. If you look at what Lenin and the Bolsheviks said and Marx and Engels and all the others, but also Lenin and the Bolsheviks that Stalin, and the Stalinists say that they are the heritage of, they never said that we should try and build socialism in Russia or that it was possible. What they said from the beginning was that the Russian Revolution should be the spark that ignited the world revolution. And they said it quite concretely actually, we cannot build socialism in Russia. We can be the beginning of the revolution but then we will need the help from the advanced capitalist countries, the workers, to take power in their countries and come to our aid so we together can build socialism. So it was never in their mind, and Lenin actually said he was prepared to sacrifice the Russian Revolution for the German, because the German Revolution were more important for world revolution. So it was quite clear that this was the line of the Bolsheviks. And this was also what happened. The Russian Revolution was the spark that it ignited a worldwide revolution movement. The problem was the lack of leadership that subjects for other discussions what went wrong in the German Revolution and so on. But this was the main, this was like the germ of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, that all these revolutions that happened throughout the world that they ended up being defeated. So the Russian Revolution stood back as the only one. And if you look at the first period after the revolution in 1917 and onwards, it's clear that all the steps that the Bolsheviks are taking, they're taking it as necessary, imposed upon them because of this isolation in order to just hang on with the tip of their fingernails until the revolution comes to their aid in other countries. So just to keep power in order for the isolation, just to wait for the isolation to be broken. And they took many steps that you wouldn't have taken in Germany after a German Revolution because the economic situation in Germany were quite different. And I think this is something that is also really important for us to understand. There was a discussion of blueprints at the China discussion. Do we take everything that every Marxist have ever written and say this is exactly word by word what we should do? If we take anything Lenin said from 1917 until he died and say this is how we should implement socialism in each and every country after the revolution, it would be very wrong. We have to understand why did they take the steps that they took at the time that they took them? What was the conditions that compelled them to do it? And then understand the method in it. Yes, so this was the conditions of the Russian Revolution. And this idea of building socialism in one country and Stalinism, it arose out of these concrete conditions in Russia after the revolution. Yeah, if we look at Stalinism, of course, if we look at it today, it is a set of ideas. It is a set of ideas that became Marxist principles or whatever Marxist Stalinist principles that arose out of what ideas the Stalinist bureaucracy needed in order to justify the steps that they took in Russia after 1924 basically. And it is ideas that has played and still continues to play a very reactionary role in history and labor movements throughout the world. So it is ideas we need to understand and we need to fight. Yes, and it is complete anti-Marxist ideas. This idea of socialism in one country, for example, it is, I think it's quite obvious for everyone who sits in here, Marx explained how capitalism is a global economic system, how all economies are completely intertwined. And this is what has made it possible for us to produce enough now for everybody to get what they need. So you can't go back and isolate each economy. You need this division of labor, this global economy in order to actually further humanity, further production. And therefore socialism needs to be international and not just in one country. And up until I think actually early 24 or late 23 at least, Stalin wrote an article and held speeches where he explained this political line of the Bolsheviks. The Russian Revolution just needs to hold on until the world revolution comes to an aid. And then six months after Lenin died, he died in January 24, Stalin wrote the exact opposite. There's a really funny speech where he tries to explain how what he says is actually what he said earlier also. And it is really, really strange to try and follow his arguments because it was different. And if you look at it from two different sides, and it doesn't make any sense because he basically just swatched 180 percent to the opposite. Now it's possible to build socialism in Russia. And this is what we should focus on. Yes. And what it actually expressed, and I think this is a very good example of what was going on in Russia at this time, was that this idea expressed the growing power of the bureaucracy in the Russian state and their interests. And their interests were not, and I'm coming back to why this bureaucratization grew and how it happened, but their interests were not world revolution or workers' democracy. Their interests were keeping their power and their privileges intact. And in order to do that, they needed as much order and calm. They didn't need the stress and chaos of revolutionary upheavals they needed. Let's plan. We all know the type. Let's plan. Let's do it no matter what happened. And then we just keep everything intact and go forward. And that was their social interest. And Stalin was just, how can you say? He was just the personalization of this bureaucracy. And if it hadn't been for Stalin, it would have been someone else. And Stalinism would have been called something completely different. Yes. So how could this happen that suddenly in quite a short period from 17 to 24, we have a situation where the leader, the general secretary of the Bolshevik party can go out and say what we're fighting for socialism in one country? And how could the degeneration of the revolution happen? And if you read, also left-wing historians, but if you, especially if you read Bosvian historians, it was a fight, a clash between personalities. I don't know how many times I read, but Trotsky, he just wasn't smart enough. He wasn't brutal enough. But Stalin, he was like the, he was committed. So that is why he won. And I think that is a very superficial explanation. And it also, it doesn't explain anything because there are many determined people in history. And I think Trotsky was a very determined person in history also. But it was a question of the objective conditions. And if we look at Russia, it was extremely backward at this time. Beside that, it had been completely crushed, the economy in the First World War, and then we had the Civil War, that even destroyed the economy more. It was not until 1926 that they reached the same level of production as they did in 23. And the social base of this bureaucracy that grew out was the Pettibus Vassi, especially the peasants, the small landowners. And during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had had to take quite harsh measures called war communism. And one of the main features of that was saying, the workers were starving, and the soldiers in the Red Army were starving. And what they did, they needed grain. They needed food for the workers not to starve. So they went into the countryside and they took the grain from the peasants. And it's quite clear, I think it's quite clear for everyone. You don't have to be a big psychologist to see this. If you're a peasant and the state comes and take your grain, you get pissed off. Especially because the state, they didn't have anything to offer back because the industry was completely crushed. But this was necessary in order for not letting the workers die of hunger, basically. But it also became clear that when the Civil War ended, they had to take steps in order to accommodate the peasants, which was the great majority of the Russian population. So they took some initiative called the New Economic Policy, the NEP, which was admissions to capitalism. It was allowing a more free market within the grain market. So allowing the peasants to sell grain on the market. And of course this meant that there was a differentiation, a social differentiation within the peasantry. Those peasants who were already a bit rich could get richer, start to employ the poorer peasants, and a whole layer of so-called NEP men who were the people who traded between the countryside and the cities also began to grow up and become more and more powerful. And this was like the social base of this bureaucracy. Yes, this petty bourgeoisie that was growing inside Russia. And also at the same time, a petty bourgeoisie in a bit of another respect, not in respect to property, but in respect to the position in society began to grow up. If you look at the bureaucracy in the state, it grew like enormously. In 1920, the number of people employed in the state had risen from 100,000 in 1917 to 5,880,000. That's quite an exposure, yeah, a large growth. And that was five times the number of workers. So the workers, their force in society were being undermined. And also the workers' democracy had been undermined during the Civil War. A lot of the workers had been sent to the front. They were like the front fighters in the Red Army. A lot of them had had to just flee the cities because there was no food to get. And for example, the number of industrial workers had fallen from 1.2 million, no, from 3 million to 1.2 million in 1920. The population of Petrograd had fallen from 2.4 million to 574,000 in the same period. So the working class, the power of the working class was really being undermined because of the objective conditions. The plan of the Bolsheviks was to revive the Soviets, the workers' democracy, once the Civil War was over. But then other things came across. And if we look at the people working in the state, a lot of them were former Tsarist officials because generally the population in Russia they couldn't read and they couldn't write. And they needed the new regime, they needed experts, both in the state and in the military. And they tried to control them politically. But if you suddenly have 5.8 million who you have to control and you have a working class of less than 3 million, it's a bit difficult. So, and it's clear that former Tsarist officials, they didn't have any interest in communism or revolution or anything. They had an interest in their own social position in society and their privileges. And in order to keep them, you also, the Bolsheviks needed to give them some privileges for them not to flee out of the country. So while the communist officials, they had a party maximum. They could only earn the same as a skilled worker. Then all these old officials, they needed to, some kind, you can say, bribe them in order to stay and help building the worker state. But it was also clear that this was a big danger. And Lenin warned repeatedly and more and more towards his death against this bureaucratization in the state and actually saying, we are not running the state. The state is running us and saying, this is the main problem that we have to fight. And this also started to affect the Bolshevik party itself. During the civil war, the doors had been completely open. Everybody could join because it was, if they lost, you would be killed, probably. So it was, okay, if you want to fight with us, do it. But towards the end of the war, it became clear who was going to win. So everybody who wanted a career after were very clever to join before the war ended. And the party was just swamped with careerists. A lot of them former Mensheviks and so on. It meant that the party did a purge in 21. I've heard Stalinists say, yeah, we did purchase, but Lenin also did a purge. But if you look at the purge in 21, it was they expelled people from the party. That's it. You're expelled. We think your career is out. The purchase in the 30s on the Stalin is quite a different kind of purchase. You were sent to Gulag and worked to that in a work camp while you were being tortured until you gave in, how do you say that? Confession, thank you. Yes, so they had begun to purge the party because that was still essential in order to keep the worker state in Russia. But shortly after the death of Lenin, the neo-Trampferat in the party, Stalin, Sinovyev and Kamenev, they put forward this idea of a Lenin levy. Open the doors to the party and just swamp the party. Also as a way of them gaining more control of the party and watering out the old revolutionary elements inside the party. And if you look at the situation after this Lenin levy, 80% of the party had joined after 23, and less than 1% of the members had joined before the revolution. So it showed all these dedicated communists who have been part of the revolutionary process were actually being completely swamped in their own party, you could say. So this led the basis for also the degeneration inside the Bolshevik party. Yes, could it have been different if Lenin had left longer, if he hadn't died in January 24? And that is also always very difficult to answer. What we can say is if the isolation of the Russian revolution had been broken at one point in this period, it could have changed the course of the situation in Russia. So maybe if Lenin, if he had lived with his authority, could have made a different outcome in Britain 26, in China 27, but he couldn't make a different outcome in Germany 1919. It's not just the question of one man and his authority. It's a question of the objective to conditions and have the forces of revolution been built before the revolution breaks out. And we don't know because he died. That's the fact of history. So the main thing is that in this period, there were actually also after Stalin and his clique came to power. There were quite a lot of revolutionary movement that could have broken the isolation of the Russian revolution. But the Stalinist bureaucracy at this period, they gave the worst kind of advice to these dedicated communists around the world. Not I think in the beginning because they didn't know better. But then it changed. The more the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union could see that a successful revolution in another country would undermine their wealth and power because it would be an inspiration to the Russian working class, the more they actively sabotaged the revolution like they did in Spain in 1936. And actually Spain, the Civil War in Spain and the revolution in Spain was such an inspiration to the workers in Russia that the Stalinist bureaucracy thought this is too dangerous and that made them launch the Purge Trials of 36, 37, 38, 39, which swiped out not only Trotskyists, they had already been kicked out of the party in 27, but everybody with a memory of the Russian revolution was being wiped out. And not only that, every dedicated communist, I read some memoirs of a communist who didn't understand what was going on, but everyone who didn't join in the process of denouncing other communists, they were being accused and also those who joined in, they were actually also being accused. So it was like a complete snowball that just wiped out tens of thousands of communists in order to secure the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy inside Russia, for real, you can say, more or less. I am running out of time. Yes, what to skip. I think, yes, I think if we look at Stalinist, of course a lot of things happen in the period up to the purchase with the wiping out of the left opposition and so on. And the Stalinist bureaucracy, they swung from one, from being very pro-Kulak, very we should just keep this development from the neb running until they suddenly saw that the Kulaks were actually threatening the regime. They just swung 180 degrees to force collectivization and introducing five-year plans, as the left opposition had actually said, but five-year plans in a four-year period. And I think this is also one of the main characteristics of Stalinism. It's empiricism. They just react to what happens and then they swing because they don't understand the process, they swing to the other extreme and implement what has been said also in a wrong way. And if we look at the development, and this is one of the things that the Stalinists say today, but look at how well the economy developed in the Soviet Union. And if you look at the planned economy in the Soviet Union, it is amazing. It is amazing and it shows the potential of a planned economy. I think, I don't know where I put the number, I think that the production rose in the Soviet Union. I can find the number later. I have it somewhere. I think it rose 52 times or something like that in the period until 53, from 13 to 53. And in the U.S. it rose six times. So it really shows the potential. But if you look at the economic development in the Soviet Union, it was not because of the bureaucracy and the way they introduced it, it was despite of it, because there was complete waste, there was complete mismanagement. If you're not allowed to criticize, if you're not allowed to come with your input, and everything has to be decided from the top, you can't develop an economy. In a market economy, then if the good is shit, nobody buys it. But in a planned economy, without democracy, you just produce because everyone just wants to fill out their quota of production. And that created, it created huge, how do you say that, huge progress, but it also created more and more problems for the Soviet economy. And I think this is also what we need to understand, what lessons that Trotsky and the left opposition said from the beginning. If you have a planned economy, it needs to be international, but it also needs to be democratic, because without democracy, then the planned economy will end up dying. And that is exactly what happened. After the Second World War, the economy more and more went into crisis and stagnation and couldn't develop further. And also what happened was, what Trotsky had predicted, at some point in the bureaucracy, they will want to become capitalists themselves. Because one thing is to have privilege, because of your position. The Stalinist era showed that it's very easy to lose your position. That is one thing, but also you cannot give your wealth to your children to inherit. So at some point, they will want to become a capitalist class. And that is also what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed. That the Stalinist bureaucracy, they ended up changing themselves into the new, some of them more luggage, some of them were not. But mainly those who became the gangster capitalist of Russia were former Stalinist bureaucrats. Yes. Yes. Yes. So in the end, the system collapsed. And I think our position is something we should be really proud of and that we should really put forward at the present time. We need to highlight that we are the ones who are actually the only real defenders of the heritage of the Soviet Union, which is the massive gains of the planned economy. And we're the only defenders because we knew, we know why it ended in a defeat, because it was not an international revolution and because it was not democratic. And all those Stalinists who say they actually support or those who defend the memory of the Soviet Union, but ask them, so why did it end up collapse? Why did your kind of regime end up collapsing? And they don't have any explanation. And I think this is what we need to highlight now and to explain that all these ideas that came out of this regime, these Stalinist ideas, the idea of socialism in one country, the idea of two-stage reformism. First we should have capitalism and then we can talk about socialism. The nationalist degeneration of the entire Third International, the one-party states and the one-line parties where you have not democratic centralism, but only centralism. All these ideas are playing a really reactionary role in the Soviet Union and across the world today. So the degeneration of the USSR into Stalinism happened because of objective factors. And these shouldn't make us think, they shouldn't have made the Russian Revolution. What was the alternative? It had been fascism in Russia. But it should make us think, what was the main thing lacking at this time? It was a cater organization on an international scale that could actually help the Bolsheviks break the isolation of the Russian Revolution. And we should build this. We should use this weekend and these lessons to use all our forces to build the necessary force in order for this to happen in the future. This is the thing we should... I think it was Ian in the panel yesterday who said, you should not just sit here and discuss. You should think, what do I do when I come home? And I think this is what we should do when we come home, build a revolutionary international. And also to explain, when this is what I want to end on and an important point, and also to explain, because now all these jubilant articles will come and there will be many on the left wing who will be too scared to defend the heritage of the Soviet Union. There were people when the Berlin Wall fell, Phil who said, the Cliffite for example, who said, but this was not a catastrophe. This was not a step back. This was a step to the side. Because they were afraid, because of all the horrible things that happened, they were afraid to defend, they were afraid to make an objective analysis of the situation and defend all the good things and all the progressive things in the Soviet Union. And we should not fall into this trap of being overwhelmed by public opinion. We have to defend the real heritage of the Soviet Union, the planned economy, and the huge potential and the revolutionary potential of the workers of this part of the world and of the rest of the world to actually move to create a better world. Thank you.