The Stalinist Party's Plans for the Communist Future (A Case Study on the Unfinished 1938-1947 Third Party Program)

• In Event: Developments of the Marxist Tradition in Soviet Intellectual History

Abstract

As is well known, the Bolsheviks thought of their party program as a way of publicly connecting the past and present to their plans for the future. The First (1903) and the Second (1919) Party Programs are quite well understood; efforts to develop a third program to reflect the changes in Soviet society after the mid-1920s are much more obscure. This presentation compares how two draft proposals prepared in 1938 and six in 1947 discuss the future of communism both within the USSR and the global context. Special attention is paid to how key concepts like revolution, class consciousness, internationalism and party vanguardism changed over time. The presentation concludes by comparing the treatment of these subjects in 1938 and 1947 to the final version of the Third Party Program, which was finally published in 1961 under N. S. Khrushchev.

Author

• David Brandenberger, U of Richmond