There has also been an extensive discussion on my Facebook home page. I raised this issue on a post on Facebook, as follows:

In my review, I quote Trotsky that the issue posed as he was writing was not the sociological definition of the Soviet Union but that of Marxists’ attitude to it. The final section of my review dealt with that at some length, perhaps breaking some new ground.

I specifically posed this in terms of an attempt to find common ground with those who maintain a state-capitalist position. I said that the historical question of whether to support the Red Army against Hitlerism is posed again now — for example with respect to Canada’s foreign affairs minister, who finds in impossible to disavow her Nazi collaborationist grandfather.

I look forward to a response on this question.

http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/trotsky-and-problem-soviet-bureaucracy

Had Trotsky come to any firm conclusion that differed from the views he expressed in the debate in the SWP, it is virtually inconceivable that he would not have made that crystal clear. It was not strictly a matter of his personal opinion. It was a question of the stance of an entire movement associated with his fight to maintain a Leninist course.

Of course what future conclusions Trotsky might have come to, based on events he did not live to see, is impossible to answer. But I doubt the issue for Trotsky was the depth of the crimes of Stalinism (as someone has suggested in the discussion of John’s post on Facebook). Throughout “In Defense of Marxism” Trotsky makes clear his grasp of the depth of those crimes.

In “The USSR and War” Trotsky writes, “The Soviet oligarchy possesses all of the vices of the old ruling classes but lacks their historic mission.”

Later in that same article in response to “Bruno R.” Trotsky paraphrases Bruno’s view this way: “On the one side the Soviet bureaucracy has adopted the political methods of fascism.” Leaving no doubt where Trotsky himself stood on that assertion, Trotsky continues, “The first assertion is absolutely correct.”

However like John I do find something anticipatory about this comment by Trotsky in the Stalin biography:

“But let us bear in mind that the unwinding process has not yet been completed and the future of Europe and the world during the next few decades has not yet been decided.”

This fits like a glove, in my view, with three points Trotsky made in “In Defense of Marxism”:

“…we expected the wrecking of the Soviet state, rather than its degeneration; to put it more correctly, we did not sharply differentiate between these two possibilities. But they do not at all contradict each other. *Degeneration must inescapably end at a certain stage in downfall*.” (My emphasis. GM)
— from “The USSR in War.”

“To determine at the right moment the critical point where quantity changes into quality is one of the most important and difficult tasks in all the spheres of knowledge including sociology.”
— from “A Petty-Bourgois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party”

“The dialectic is not a magic master key for all questions. It does not replace concrete scientific analysis.”
— from the same article