With the end of 2025 come two important dates in the history of the former USSR. The first is its establishment on 30 December 1922, a monumental event, as the first state to undertake socialist construction. The second was the victory of the counter-revolution on 26th December 1991 and subsequently, the formal lowering of the Soviet flag.
Throughout its socialist development, the people of the USSR sought to improve and refine production, science, healthcare, construction, and living conditions for the working class. The life expectancy of average people in the latest period of Tsarist Russia was around 30 years old. Following decades of improvements, spanning from electrification to widespread industrialisation. By the late Soviet period, life expectancy had more than doubled while access to doctors, hospitals, schools, and other basic services had become near-universal.
Within 30 years, the USSR crushed Nazi Germany, became the first nation in space, emerged as the world leader in various scientific fields, and systematically developed integrated agricultural and industrial production across a network of relatively self-sufficient regions. This unprecedented level of economic and social development, achieved under extremely difficult material conditions, was possible only because production was no longer organised around profit. The abolition of capitalist relations of production – starting from the expropriation of the capitalist class, the abolition of wages as a relation of exploitation, and the progressive weakening of the law of value and commodity production – allowed resources to be planned and mobilised according to social need rather than market return. It was this socialist reorganisation of production that made such advances historically possible.
Now, despite winning the revolution in 1917, the USSR eventually fell to the counter-revolution in 1989. Bourgeois opportunism did not re-emerge primarily through individual failures or organisational shortcomings, but persisted through spaces in which commodity circulation was tolerated – and, from the mid-1950s onwards, at times actively incentivised – within the socialist economy. As these relations expanded, they produced material pressures towards accommodation with capitalist norms, laying the economic basis for opportunism to take root.
In Britain today, we too face opportunism though in a form different from what characterised the later years of the Soviet Union. All parties and organisations across the British Left today build their coalitions on reformist demands, clamouring higher wages, rent controls, welfare expansion, and nationalisation of infrastructure, with the aim of securing a more tolerable accommodation with the capitalist system.
In most cases, these strategies are advanced with apparently compelling justifications: the rightward drift of mainstream politics, a prolonged period of economic stagnation, the inhumane conditions faced by refugees and migrants, or the urgent need to mobilise solidarity with Palestine. Yet, without combatting capitalism as a system of productive relations, none of these crises can be resolved.
At best, reforms are temporary and reversible; at worst, they absorb and disperse working-class anger while leaving the underlying structures of exploitation intact. As economic pressures intensify, these unresolved contradictions will deepen, and the task of building an organised, independent working-class movement will become not easier, but increasingly difficult
When the Bolsheviks seized power, they did so under conditions of civil war and invasion by the imperialist powers. As the British Left today, they had many apparent justifications for accommodating capitalism. Yet the Bolsheviks relentlessly combatted it and preserved their revolutionary line. They drew a clear line against all those who sought alliances with liberals and favoured class collaboration, insisting on the political and organisational autonomy of the working class, even under conditions of extreme pressure. Their experience proves that taking shortcuts in such moments compromises the party’s core, leaving it unable to withstand crises.
Ultimately, both the foundation of the USSR and its eventual counter-revolution serve as a cautionary tale: communists are never immune to opportunism. In both its glorious foundation and its tragic end, the experience of the USSR demonstrates that taking shortcuts ultimately compromises the core of a revolutionary organisation, leaving it unable to withstand future crises. It is our duty to learn both from the unwavering revolutionary clarity of its early years and from the mistakes and concessions of its final decades, in order to avoid repeating the same errors.