Shachtman Calls Russian Society A Big Cop-Out

Russia is no longer a truly socialist country, Max Shachtman, a founder of the American Communist Party, said last night, speaking in Burr A on "Fifty Years of Soviet Rule: Worker's Paradise Lost?"

"No one could imagine a bleaker outcome of the promises of 1917," he said. In 1917 socialists were sure that world revolution was imminent. By 1923 this hope had dimmed, but there was still promise in the "unique Bolshevik revolution." With the Stalinist counter-revolution, this possibility, too, was gone, Shachtman said.

He linked Russia's deviation from the path of true socialism with two major factors--her backwardness due to years of civil war and her need to prove that socialism was a stronger system than capitalism.

"No modern society can be built on a backwards economy," including a socialist society, he said. But rapid modernization demands the exploitation of labor, he continued, and socialism cannot exist where labor is exploited.

In order to modernize Russia, the resistance of the people had to be eliminated, Shachtman said. Modernization was accompanied by the greatest expansion of bureaucracy ever seen anywhere, he continued.