Next stab at socialism comes in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, in a country heavily indebted to the Soviet Union but then able to defy Stalin and so open up hopes for a revolutionary Marxist renaissance so that what we thought of as a template for a socialist society is remade, found again but then lost.

The full chapter appears in Ian Parker’s Socialisms: Revolutions Betrayed, Mislaid and Unmade, published by Resistance Books and the IIRE (2020).

This was one of the Socialisms series of FIIMG articles