The Soviet Period to the Death of Stalin. The Bol-
shevik Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the
Communist International in 1919-20 introduced an
entirely new situation. The Bolsheviks' seizure and
maintenance of power in Russia created a new institu
tion of orthodoxy, markedly to the left of Kautsky's,
with the evidence of success as proof of its validity.
The Second Congress of the Comintern forcibly inter-
nationalized this orthodoxy and split the European
labor movement. But those parties which remained
outside the Comintern now became in Soviet eyes not
heretics but complete apostates, renegades, or infidels;
Moscow could not admit that they had any part of
Marxism, and soon many of them did not claim it. In
the few Social Democratic parties that did profess
Marxism, theory was—in spite of a few works such
as Henri de Man's Au delà du Marxisme (Paris, 1927),
written in a revisionist spirit—submerged in that re-
formist praxis which was the cause or effect of Re-
visionism rather than Revisionism itself. In the words
of the Program of the Communist International
adopted at the Sixth World Congress in August 1928,
“social-democracy has completely abandoned Marxism.
... Having traversed the stage of Revisionism, it has
reached that of bourgeois liberal social reform and
overt social imperialism” (J. Degras [1960], p. 515).
Nor did the major new heresies, which sprang up
in the Soviet Union and the World Communist move-
ment itself, qualify for the label Revisionist. For some
ten years after the Revolution, these heresies were on
the Left, the products either of doctrinaire adherence
to Communist principle where the self-defining ortho-
doxy of those in power saw the political need for
compromise, or of a factional struggle centered round
the figure of Leon Trotsky. For a brief spell in the
mid-twenties, solitary figures such as Georg Lukács (see
below) might be condemned as Revisionist, as a term
of opprobrium with little meaning. But by the time
that a Right Opposition, led by Bukharin, Rykov, and
Tomsky, emerged in the Soviet Union, the label Re-
visionist was, as has been seen, already considered
obsolete. Bernstein had not even been expelled from
the German Social Democratic Party, and to call a
man Revisionist was something less than calling him
a traitor; but in the circumstances of Stalin's emergent
dictatorship, collectivization and the first Five-Year-
Plan, the lines of loyalty were so harshly drawn that
any divergence quickly became treachery. Revisionism
is incompatible with a totalitarian system. Thus, with
orthodoxy disintegrated on the one side, and totally
imposed on the other, the idea of Revisionism virtually
disappeared from the international labor movement for
some forty years. It was not until new divisions in the
World Communist system came to light after the death
of Stalin that Revisionism reappeared in any definable
form.
