Paul Le Blanc For those wanting to make use of Marxism to understand and change the world, among the most important classical thinkers are, surely, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
These remarks were delivered at a meeting held in Moscow on May 15, 2002, on the fifth anniversary of the death of Vadim Rogovin. Among those attending the gathering were surviving children of Russian Left Oppositionists murdered by the Stalinist regime, scholars who worked with Vadim at the Institute of Sociology in Moscow, the representatives of several socialist tendencies in Russia and many friends.
Today we present the Introduction, written by the late Marxist historian and sociologist, Vadim Z. Rogovin, to the new English translation of the second volume of his seven-volume work, <em>Was There an Alternative to Stalinism?</em>
In this work, Soviet historian and sociologist Vadim Rogovin (1937–1998) explodes the myth, shared by both anti-communists and Stalinists alike, that Stalinism evolved naturally and seamlessly out of Bolshevism.