Socialism, Stalinism and National Liberation: Coming to Terms with a Changed World, The Ideas of the URDP ( Vpered Group) in the Post-War Era

Abstract

This article examines the ideas of this largely forgotten group of Ukrainian Marxists in the decade after World War Two. The URDP were unique in being the last such organisation comprising actual citizens of the USSR since the Left Opposition and constituted a distinctive critical Marxist current. Participants in the resurgent Ukrainian movement of the 1940s they provided an analysis which stood apart from the “integral nationalist” and liberal democratic schools. From their analysis of the Soviet system as a form of "state-capitalism" they developed a prognosis of future developments which was remarkably accurate and has been overlooked by transitologists and writers of communist and post-communist studies.