Here let me simply note that the relationship with the USSR very quickly became more a strategic choice than the recognition of an identity. The Communist Parties' unconditional support for the Soviet state, their inability to give at least a problematic, if not a critical image of it in their press, their refusal of all but apologetic analyses of the "homeland of socialism" and later of the people's democracies, correspond less to a certainty about the identity of the aims of the October Revolution and the concrete reality of the Soviet state than to a deliberate decision not to confront this problem. The USSR was the first socialist country, and an encircled one, too: and that was that. For it and for the Communist Parties, the first priority was to safeguard it. Thus the whole history of the International can be read as a subordination of the Communist Parties to the USSR. It can also be read as the anchoring of the revolutions lacking in Europe to the only reality antagonistic to capital existing as a state, and hence capable of opening an objectively new potentiality for class struggle on a world scale.
[...]
When this distinction between the Soviet state [as the hope of a possible alternative] and the other states disappears totally in the consciousness of a Communist, then-but only then-the relationship is broken. So long as this is not the case, the bond that unites him to the socialist countries holds firm, reduced to a single thread, but extremely strong: the "otherness" of the camp. This bond may be accompanied by a thousand distinctions, critiques, maintenance of distances, even condemnations, but they are issued from the same side of the barricades. With a consequence: once the relationship is located on this terrain, a break becomes very difficult. In fact, if it is easy to recognize that the USSR cannot be identified with the revolution (the left's crisis of conscience before the War), and if it is now accepted that the USSR can no longer even be identified in any specific way with an antagonistic contradiction with imperialism (the left's crisis of conscience since the War, especially in the 1960s), it is qualitatively more difficult to deny its difference with respect to capitalism and imperialism. Hence it is always possible to find a line of demarcation justifying an alignment. (Only the Chinese try to erase it by reducing it to an "inter-imperialist contradiction", i.e., one between imperialism and social-imperialism: but the use of a different term is enough to leave an open breach, all the more so since their analysis of when, how and why the USSR changed its nature is far from satisfactory.)
Rossanda Rossanda, “Revolutionary Intellectuals and the Soviet Union,” 1974
