The colour-line and the Third Period : a comparative analysis of American and Australian communism and the question of race, 1928-1934

The Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power in Tsarist Russia in 1917 shook the world. Through a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the party of Lenin hastened the end of the imperialist war in Europe. From its inception, the revolutionary regime survived imperialist intervention, civil war, the failure of revolutionary upsurges in Germany and Hungary and international isolation and opprobrium. The revolution that had occurred in the weakest link of the imperialist chain was confined to one vast country. Throughout the 1920s, a functioning form of socialism was established in the infant Soviet Union. The theory and practice of socialist revolution confronted new contradictory and pressing national realities. Following the death of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party descended into a prolonged struggle for revolutionary leadership. The Left Opposition grouped around Leon Trotsky were removed or eliminated by the faction led by Joseph Stalin. With Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1928, the Stalin leadership, because of the failure of revolutionary struggles throughout the world and the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness, advanced the theory of ‘‘socialism in one country’’.