It would be hard to imagine a more complex problem, from the sociological point of view, than that which emerged in Eastern Europe at the end of the last war. This unique conjuncture situation became, in its time, an acid test for the "left" - it posed very sharply before it the question of method: just what criteria does one use to differentiate between a workers' and a capitalist state? This question was implicit in all the discussions that took place, both in and around the Fourth International, during that long and tortuous process up into the early 1950s. The consequences are still with us today.
It was self-evident, from the start, that the question revolved around the highly complex nature of the Kremlin's intervention. To be sure, the advent of the Red Army into the "buffer zone" sparked off popular uprisings which coincided with a general sharpening of class knives throughout Europe - to reach its tragic climax in the Greek Civil War. Spontaneous strikes and demonstrations against the war-weakened bourgeoisies which, in Yugoslavia, reached wide-scale occupations of the factories and distribution of the big landed estates. But the carve-up between Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta and Potsdam sealed the lid: it left the Kremlin effectively in control of Eastern Europe and the Balkans (excepting Greece).
From that point on, developments in the buffer zone became a direct reflection of Kremlin self-interest - a fact initially true even of Yugoslavia which, due to the success of the partisans during the war, was to reach much greater independence viz-a-vis the Kremlin (and which culminated in the Tito-Stalin split of 1948).
With the refraction of the class struggle into short-sighted opportunist manoeuvrings of Moscow, it became vital to concretely analyse this new social factor in all its inner contradictions.
Only thus could the contradictory path of events it initiated at bayonet-point be put into perspective. Certainly, in a situation where events were directly determined by a rapacious bureaucracy, substitution of abstract criteria (of what a workers state should look like) for a concrete analysis of what was actually taking place, was worse than useless. It had dangerous political consequences.
Trotsky had already drawn attention to this in his comments on the Soviet invasion of Finland and Poland in 1939. Warning sharply against any tendency which refused to start from "the facts as they are", he pointed out the political consequences stemming from such an error in method (viz.: the evolution of the Burnham-Shachtman faction in the SWP towards "state-capitalism"). His warning was doubly cogent after the war, not least for the contradictory path of developments the Kremlin initiated in a highly bureaucratic fashion. Any analysis which refused to come to grips with this contradictory process - as an organic whole reflecting merely the dual nature of the Kremlin - could only end up in gross distortions.
For if anything marked stalinist policy in the "buffer zone", it was precisely this contradictory character - seemingly carried out in two distinct phases. If, to begin with, its reaction was to brutally stifle the very uprisings the Red Army had provoked, this was fully consistent with its fear of the independence of the masses. In order to crush this threat to its own position, it was willing to conclude temporary [illegible] with the extremely war-weakened bourgeoisies - going to the disgusting lengths of collaborating with the Rumanian court and semi-fascist and fascist tendencies inside Bulgaria and East Germany.
If, towards the beginning of 1944, its policy was marked as the Red Army tanks rumbled into Rumania that..."the USSR does not pursue the aim of acquiring any Rumanian territory or changing the existing social order"... But the threat of the Marshall Plan - which was attracting no small interest inside the buffer zone - brought home to the Kremlin that the only way it could retain hegemony over these states was to structurally [illegible] in the government, the extension of nationalisation and the introduction of economic planning.
No doubt but that this "integration" was accomplished in the most bureaucratic fashion - with the limited support of the masses if not over their heads. But it was accomplished; and in the years to follow, the trend was deepened with the introduction of new economic plans and mutual aid schemes between the various countries (COMECON). The point, however, was not to see in this any proof of the "progressive" nature of the bureaucracy. It was merely carrying through, in a very distorted way, the uprisings which it originally sparked off but which, out of self-interest, it had been forced to temporarily quell. Its policy was opportunist throughout. It was only through an understanding of the dual nature of the bureaucracy that the Fourth International was able to conclude that these were "deformed workers states", a conclusion which made no concessions to the bureaucracy - but which recognised the "facts as they are".
It was a conclusion that was to be amply confirmed, not long afterwards, by the uprisings of the East German workers not against the new property-relations which the Kremlin had been forced to introduce but against the complete lack of political freedom that accompanied them.
In its own way, the "buffer zone" posed the most thorny problem for the Fourth International since Trotsky's death in 1940. It became a concrete case on which its analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy was to be tested. It was only by overcoming [the] tendency to substitute abstract norms for a concrete analysis of the social forces involved in all their aims and tendencies that its conclusions were to be so amply confirmed as they were. Other tendencies - through such a faulty methodological approach - were to end up either in the arms of the stalinists; or, equally disastrous, questioning the class character of the USSR.
The importance of the Fourth International's conclusions cannot be over-stressed - for from the analysis of the buffer zone emerged the guidelines for its later appraisal of the Chinese revolution, in 1949, and, more recently, of the enormous significance of Castro's seizure of power. In both cases, the revolution was spearheaded by petit-bourgeois formations (the former stalinist) whose strategy was quite "un-marxist" in the traditional sense. But attempts to come to grips with them by stereotyped criteria torn from the library of "orthodoxy" could only produce a travesty of reality. The vindication of the Fourth International - if it needs one - is that it has been able to face this new reality without sacrificing its principles one jot.
*The Socialist Workers Party has brought out a document on this question ("Discussion of the Class Character of the East European States") which includes excerpts from documents during the crucial period 1946-51, illustrating the range of the discussion and the depth of the problems involved. It is well worth reading for its informative nature as to how the International reached its conclusion that they were "deformed workers states". This is obtainable from the Pioneer Book Service, [5] Toynbee St., London E.1., price 4/- post paid.