Georg Lukács on Stalinism and Democracy: Before and After Prague, 1968.

Reading Campeanu through Lewin: A contribution to the political history of Stalinism

“…Even if Eastern (and Western) Marxists paid considerable attention to the excesses of socialist regimes, not all of them felt the need to label their whole existence as Stalinist and post-Stalinist. Djilas (1957: 53–4), for example, advances three stages of the Soviet and of East-European socialist regimes: a ‘revolutionary’ one (Lenin), a ‘dogmatic’ one (Stalin) and, finally a ‘non-dogmatic’ one (post-Stalinist collective leadership) – while Lukács, openly embracing Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s as history’s only available way of fighting against fascism, nevertheless interpreted Stalinism in his later years as a ‘vulgarization’ of Marxism and a ‘deformation’ of Russia’s revolutionary traditions at the eve of the October Revolution (Pike, 1988).…”