The Red School: The London School of Economics and Russian Leftism
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 12 November 2026
The London School of Economics has a curious history. Founded by British socialists, its intellectual ancestors became admirers of Stalin, yet it subsequently emerged as one of the principal centres of opposition to Marxist economic orthodoxy. Its relationship with Russian socialism reveals some of the most profound contradictions in twentieth-century political thought.
The London School of Economics and Political Science, universally known as the LSE, occupies an unusual position in British intellectual history. Founded as an institution devoted to the scientific investigation of economic and social questions, it has been simultaneously a nursery of socialist radicalism, an establishment training ground for politicians and civil servants and one of the most influential centres of free-market economic thought in the Western world. Its relationship with Russian leftism, and particularly with the successive manifestations of Russian revolutionary socialism, provides a fascinating illustration of the ideological contradictions that have characterised European political thought over the last century.
To understand this relationship, one must begin with the intellectual origins of the institution itself. The LSE was established in 1895 by four leading members of the Fabian Society: Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw. The Fabians were socialists, but they were not revolutionaries in the Russian tradition. Their conception of socialism was gradualist, bureaucratic, technocratic and fundamentally British. They believed that capitalism could be superseded not through violent insurrection but through the progressive extension of public administration, state ownership, social welfare and rational economic planning. Their favoured instruments were committees, commissions, legislation and the patient accumulation of statistical evidence.
This Fabian conception of socialism was initially quite different from the revolutionary Marxism developing in the Russian Empire during the same period. Russian Marxists, including Vladimir Lenin, were concerned with the overthrow of an autocratic state whose political institutions offered few legitimate avenues for democratic reform. The Fabians, by contrast, operated within a constitutional monarchy whose parliamentary institutions appeared sufficiently adaptable to accommodate socialist objectives. Nevertheless, the two traditions shared an intellectual conviction that society could be organised more rationally through collective action and that the economic inequalities of industrial capitalism represented a historical problem requiring comprehensive political solutions.
The foundation of the LSE therefore preceded the Russian Revolution of 1917 by more than two decades, but its intellectual premises made it particularly receptive to the great ideological experiment that followed. The Russian Revolution transformed socialism from a body of political theory into an international question of practical government. Suddenly there existed a vast state claiming to organise economic life upon principles that British socialists had discussed for generations. To the Fabians, the Soviet Union offered the possibility of observing in practice the administrative and economic arrangements they had previously examined largely in theory.
Yet the relationship was never straightforward. Leninism differed profoundly from Fabianism in its insistence upon revolutionary dictatorship, the monopoly of political power by a single party and the suppression of opponents considered enemies of the working class. The Bolsheviks regarded parliamentary gradualism as an inadequate response to the structural injustices of capitalism, whereas many British social democrats regarded Bolshevik methods as a repudiation of the democratic principles that socialism ought to advance. These differences were not merely tactical. They concerned the fundamental question of whether socialism was principally a means of increasing human freedom or a system of collective economic organisation whose objectives might justify restrictions upon individual liberty.
The most notorious episode in the LSE's relationship with Russian communism arose through its founders themselves. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose intellectual influence upon British socialism was immense, became increasingly sympathetic towards the Soviet experiment during the interwar years. The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression appeared to them to demonstrate the inherent instability of capitalism, while the Soviet Union claimed extraordinary achievements in industrial development and economic planning. At a time when Western economies were experiencing mass unemployment, Soviet propaganda presented a society in which productive activity was organised according to a comprehensive national programme.
The Webbs travelled to the Soviet Union in 1932 and returned profoundly impressed by what they believed they had discovered. Their subsequent two-volume work, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, published in 1935, represented one of the most elaborate intellectual defences of the Stalinist system produced by prominent British socialists. The book attempted to explain Soviet institutions in terms of administrative efficiency, collective welfare and the development of a new social order. Its authors believed that the Soviet Union was creating an alternative civilisation that might eventually demonstrate the superiority of planned economic organisation over competitive capitalism.
There was something tragic, and intellectually revealing, about this enthusiasm. The Webbs were not ignorant or frivolous people. They were exceptionally industrious social investigators whose earlier work on poverty, trade unionism and the administration of public services had contributed enormously to British social reform. Nevertheless, confronted with the Soviet Union, their habitual scepticism appeared to desert them. They accepted official Soviet explanations with insufficient scrutiny and failed adequately to confront the implications of political repression, forced collectivisation and the catastrophic famine that had devastated Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933.
The second edition of their book, published in 1937, was even more remarkable because the question mark in its title disappeared. What had originally been presented as an enquiry into whether Soviet communism constituted a new civilisation became a more confident assertion. This occurred during the period of Stalin's Great Terror, when mass arrests, executions and fabricated political prosecutions were transforming the Soviet Union into one of the most comprehensively coercive states in modern history. The spectacle of distinguished British intellectuals attempting to reconcile these developments with their ideals of social progress remains one of the most disturbing episodes in the history of Western socialism.
The explanation lies partly in the peculiar psychological attraction of political utopias. Intellectuals who devote their lives to designing better social institutions can become especially vulnerable to governments claiming to have realised their ambitions. The Soviet Union presented itself as a vast laboratory of social engineering, apparently demonstrating that the administrative methods favoured by the Fabians could be applied to an entire civilisation. In such circumstances, the temptation to interpret contrary evidence as temporary inconvenience, hostile propaganda or the necessary cost of historical progress could become overwhelming.
George Bernard Shaw displayed comparable sympathies towards Stalinist Russia, although his enthusiasm was expressed through the theatrical provocations for which he was famous. Shaw's political writings frequently combined penetrating criticism of bourgeois hypocrisy with an extraordinary willingness to excuse authoritarian practices when they appeared to serve collectivist purposes. His admiration for Soviet achievements illustrates a recurring difficulty in European intellectual history: the tendency of highly articulate critics of their own societies to suspend their normal standards of judgement when examining political systems that present themselves as alternatives to Western capitalism.
The LSE itself, however, was never a Soviet institution, nor did the views of its founders amount to an official commitment to communism. Indeed, Sidney Webb had taken considerable care from the School's earliest years to ensure that it was not regarded merely as a vehicle for socialist propaganda. Its academic appointments reflected a far broader spectrum of political opinion than its origins might suggest, and some of its most influential teachers were deeply sceptical of socialist economic theory. This distinction between the political beliefs of individual intellectuals and the institutional character of the university is essential to any fair assessment of its history.
The most conspicuous example was Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who joined the LSE in 1931. Hayek became one of the principal theoretical opponents of central economic planning, arguing that no administrative authority could possess the dispersed information necessary to coordinate a complex modern economy. Market prices, in his conception, were not simply mechanisms for distributing wealth but indispensable signals through which millions of individuals communicated fragmented knowledge about resources, preferences and opportunities. A centrally planned economy might issue instructions, but it could not reproduce the information-generating processes of decentralised exchange.
Hayek's arguments struck at the intellectual foundations of Soviet economic organisation. Where the Fabians imagined that sufficiently sophisticated administration might ultimately coordinate production and distribution, Hayek maintained that the necessary knowledge could never be assembled within a single institution. His The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, carried this economic criticism into the political sphere, warning that comprehensive planning could undermine individual freedom by concentrating coercive authority in the hands of the state. The LSE thus became, during the very decades in which some of its socialist intellectuals were defending Soviet achievements, a centre for the development of some of the most influential criticisms of socialism in modern history.
Karl Popper, who joined the School in 1946, reinforced this intellectual opposition from a philosophical perspective. His The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945, attacked the historicist assumptions underlying doctrines that claimed to discern inevitable laws of political development. Popper argued that the pretence of historical certainty could provide an intellectual justification for authoritarian government, because political leaders claiming to know the destination of history might dismiss dissent as ignorance or obstruction. His philosophy of critical rationalism emphasised the provisional character of human knowledge and the importance of institutions permitting governments and theories alike to be challenged and corrected.
The presence of Hayek and Popper at the LSE created an extraordinary intellectual juxtaposition. An institution founded by socialists who believed in the possibilities of rational administration became a leading centre for theories explaining why comprehensive rational administration might be impossible or dangerous. The contrast was not simply between capitalism and socialism. It concerned two competing conceptions of knowledge: one emphasising the power of experts to discover and implement rational social arrangements, the other emphasising the limits of expertise and the necessity of institutional mechanisms through which errors could be exposed.
Nevertheless, the socialist tradition remained influential within the School. Harold Laski, professor of political science and one of the most celebrated British socialist intellectuals of the interwar period, exerted considerable influence upon generations of students and political leaders. His political commitments frequently brought him into conflict with more conservative colleagues, and his attitudes towards Soviet communism reflected the wider difficulties of the British left in reconciling its admiration for socialist economic achievements with the coercive political practices of the Soviet state. For Laski, as for other prominent left-wing intellectuals, the relationship between political democracy, class conflict and economic transformation remained an unresolved philosophical problem.
Another important figure was Ralph Miliband, who studied under Laski before becoming an influential Marxist political theorist at the LSE. Miliband's writings, particularly Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society, represented a sustained criticism of the limitations of parliamentary social democracy. He questioned whether capitalist political institutions could ever be genuinely neutral between competing economic classes. Yet his Marxism should not be confused with uncritical support for Soviet authoritarianism. The development of Western Marxist thought during the Cold War frequently involved efforts to distinguish socialist criticism of capitalism from the bureaucratic dictatorship that had emerged in the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the history of Russian leftism itself demonstrates why communism should never be treated as an intellectually homogeneous tradition. Russian socialism before 1917 included Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists and numerous other political movements that disagreed profoundly with Lenin's conception of revolutionary government. Many Russian socialists subsequently became victims of Bolshevik repression, while others opposed Stalin from within the revolutionary tradition itself. Leon Trotsky and his followers regarded Stalinism as a bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, although their own political legacy raised difficult questions about the authoritarian origins of the Soviet state.
The LSE's relationship with Russian political thought was therefore not limited to the admiration of Soviet institutions. Its library accumulated substantial collections of Russian revolutionary literature, socialist pamphlets, political journals and materials concerning Soviet administration. Among the Russian émigrés who taught at the School was Alexander Meyendorff, a former member of the Imperial Russian Duma who lectured on Russian legislation, political economy and Marxism during the interwar years. The institution thus served as a repository of evidence about Russian political movements that extended far beyond official Bolshevik ideology.
During the Cold War this scholarly tradition became increasingly systematic. Leonard Schapiro, appointed to teach Soviet studies in the 1950s, produced major works examining the origins and institutional development of communist dictatorship. His research helped establish a more historically rigorous understanding of the Soviet political system, distinguishing revolutionary ideology from the administrative and coercive machinery through which communist governments exercised power. The contrast with the Webbs was striking. Whereas the founders had often approached Soviet institutions with the expectation of discovering a superior system of social organisation, subsequent scholarship increasingly examined how those institutions actually functioned and how they had eliminated political opposition.
The Cold War also transformed the political significance of the LSE's socialist inheritance. Students from newly independent or decolonising countries encountered Marxist and social-democratic ideas alongside liberal economics and conventional political theory. The School educated intellectuals and political leaders from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, many of whom subsequently participated in movements for national independence or economic transformation. Its influence upon the wider international left was therefore substantial, although this influence was frequently associated with anti-colonialism and democratic socialism rather than direct allegiance to Moscow.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 fundamentally altered the intellectual circumstances in which the LSE operated. Soviet-style central planning had lost much of its attraction as a plausible model for modern economic development, while the political and economic consequences of communist dictatorship became increasingly difficult to disregard. The School's subsequent intellectual development reflected the broader transformation of European social democracy, particularly through the work of Anthony Giddens and his conception of the Third Way. Giddens sought to reconcile market economics with social justice and collective responsibility, moving beyond the traditional socialist assumption that extensive public ownership was necessary for the achievement of progressive political objectives.
Contemporary Russia has complicated these debates still further. Vladimir Putin's political system is not Marxist in any conventional sense. It combines authoritarian presidential power, state-directed capitalism, oligarchic wealth, conservative nationalism and an increasingly aggressive conception of Russian imperial destiny. Soviet symbols and historical memories remain important instruments of political legitimacy, but these should not be mistaken for a coherent commitment to communist economic theory. The contemporary Russian state has retained elements of Soviet administrative culture while abandoning many of the ideological principles through which Soviet power originally sought to justify itself.
This distinction has significant consequences for contemporary Russian leftism. There remain political movements in Russia that identify themselves with communism or socialism, but their attitudes towards the Putin government and its war against Ukraine differ substantially. Some have embraced Russian nationalism and the restoration of imperial influence, imagining the contemporary Russian state as an imperfect successor to Soviet greatness. Others, particularly among anti-authoritarian socialists, democratic Marxists and progressive activists, regard Putinism as the negation of socialist principles. They see the concentration of political power, suppression of independent trade unions and subordination of society to militarised nationalism as fundamentally incompatible with social emancipation.
The LSE has continued to provide an intellectual forum for precisely these disputes. In October 2023 its Ralph Miliband Programme hosted a discussion entitled Can Russia Be Remade?, featuring the Russian-American academic Nina Khrushcheva and examining whether the Russian left might contribute to a more progressive political future. The significance of such discussions lies in the recognition that Russian political alternatives cannot be reduced to a choice between Putin's authoritarian nationalism and an uncritical restoration of Western-style market liberalism. There are competing traditions of Russian political thought, including democratic socialist traditions, that seek alternatives to both imperial authoritarianism and the inequalities of oligarchic capitalism.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has also forced a reconsideration of some older Western left-wing assumptions about international politics. Parts of the European left have traditionally interpreted conflicts involving Russia through the framework of opposition to American power, NATO expansion and Western economic dominance. Such interpretations may identify legitimate questions about the conduct of Western foreign policy, but they risk subordinating the political agency of smaller nations to an analysis of competition between great powers. From the Ukrainian perspective, this can reproduce precisely the imperial assumptions that genuine socialist internationalism ought to reject.
The LSE's contemporary scholarship reflects these tensions rather than any single institutional political orthodoxy. Its researchers have offered differing interpretations of Russian security concerns, the historical roots of Russian imperialism and the responsibilities of Western governments. At the same time, the institution has developed a substantial programme of research and cooperation concerned with the defence of Ukrainian sovereignty, democratic institutions and civil society. Its Ukraine Programme has worked with the Kyiv School of Economics and other partners to investigate the consequences of the war, the resilience of Ukrainian society and the possibilities of a politically just and sustainable peace.
This contemporary engagement raises a historical irony. The founders of the LSE were attracted to Soviet socialism because they believed that rational economic organisation might improve the condition of humanity. Yet the Soviet system they came to admire was also responsible for the destruction of independent Ukrainian political institutions, the suppression of Ukrainian cultural life and the violent subordination of Ukrainian society to a centralised imperial state. The Holodomor remains the most terrible example of the consequences of coercive economic and political policies imposed in the name of collective progress. Any contemporary assessment of the relationship between Western socialism and Russian communism must confront this history rather than treating it as an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise admirable intellectual experiment.
There is a deeper philosophical question underlying the entire history. To what extent can intellectuals legitimately treat other societies as experiments in the implementation of their preferred political theories? The Webbs approached Soviet Russia with a framework of expectations derived from their own experience of British administration and social reform. They interpreted unfamiliar institutions through concepts that made them appear attractive and progressive, sometimes neglecting the experiences of the people compelled to live under them. Their failure was therefore not simply one of political judgement but of intellectual methodology: they allowed theoretical conviction to obscure empirical evidence.
The LSE's most important contribution to the subsequent development of political thought may consequently lie in its capacity to accommodate competing answers to this problem. The administrative optimism of the Fabians, the revolutionary theories of Marxists, Hayek's scepticism concerning centralised economic knowledge and Popper's insistence upon the fallibility of political theories together constitute an unusually rich intellectual inheritance. These traditions cannot be reconciled into a single coherent political doctrine, and it would be a mistake to attempt to do so. Their coexistence demonstrates the value of an academic institution in which fundamental political assumptions can be subjected to sustained criticism.
There is also something distinctly British about the history of this intellectual relationship. The LSE was established by people who believed that the social sciences could improve government, yet it became a place in which some of the most powerful arguments against excessive confidence in government were developed. Its socialist founders admired aspects of an authoritarian system abroad while participating in democratic political life at home. Their successors inherited both the achievements and the embarrassments of this intellectual tradition, gradually transforming the institution into an international centre for the investigation of political systems rather than an organisation committed to establishing any particular one.
For contemporary Russia, the central political question is no longer whether the Soviet model of economic planning can provide an alternative to Western capitalism. It is whether a country whose modern history has been dominated by successive forms of autocracy can develop institutions that permit political pluralism, peaceful changes of government and the independence of neighbouring states. Russian democratic socialists may have something important to contribute to this process, particularly if they can recover traditions of social solidarity without reproducing the authoritarian practices that discredited Soviet communism. Their task is to disentangle the legitimate aspirations of socialism from the imperial and coercive structures with which Russian revolutionary politics became historically associated.
The London School of Economics is particularly well equipped to contribute to this intellectual reconstruction precisely because of its complicated past. It has experienced, within a single institutional history, the optimism of socialist planning, the seductions of Stalinism, the economic criticisms of centralisation and the philosophical defence of the open society. Its relationship with Russian leftism has therefore been neither an uninterrupted romance nor a straightforward repudiation. It has been a long process of intellectual attraction, disillusionment, criticism and reassessment.
Perhaps the ultimate lesson is that the value of a political philosophy cannot be measured solely by the generosity of its intentions. The founders of the LSE sought a more rational and equitable society, ambitions that remain worthy of serious consideration. Yet their encounter with Soviet communism revealed the dangers of allowing admirable objectives to excuse indefensible methods. For an institution devoted to the scientific study of politics and economics, the most enduring obligation must be to examine political claims against the evidence rather than to arrange the evidence around political convictions. In this respect, the turbulent history of the London School of Economics and Russian leftism is not merely an episode in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. It is a continuing lesson in the responsibilities of scholarship, the limitations of ideology and the necessity of political freedom.
