brings together contributions from Ernest Mandel and Chris Harman in the long-running debate on the class nature of the USSR. Chris Harman argued that Soviet Union and the other "socialist" countries were bureaucratic state-capitalisms. Mandel argued that the Soviet Union had degenerated under the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalin but had not reverted to a form of capitalism. Paul Le Blanc provides an introduction that looks back at the debate 30 years on.