The Soviet Union: Antithesis of a Worker's State

This work examines the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a state that laid claim to empowering the proletariat and the masses yet ultimately abandoned the tenets of Marxism and Leftism in favor of bureaucracy and oppression. Using two separate eras of Soviet history as case studies, I chronicle the rise of Joseph Stalin in implementing collectivization and the effects this process had, not only immediately on the peasantry as a form of violent 'so-called primitive accumulation', but in the long term on the strengthening of bureaucratic power in the USSR. Then, analyzing the period leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration itself, I document bureaucratic privileges state officials enjoyed and offer a class-based argument on the Soviet Union's economic-political system, identifying within it fundamental elements of capitalism. I then offer a renewed perspective on the collapse of the Soviet Union introducing disillusionment with the Soviet bureaucracy as a supremely powerful apparatus with both economic and political control as a new factor in the final chapter of the Soviet Union. With these case studies, I must then conclude that, by various different metrics, the Soviet Union became the antithesis of a worker's state and failed in guaranteeing a classless, socialist society where the proletariat was actually in charge of the means of production.