Stalinist coup killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada Revolution – The Militant

....Stalinism destroyed the Grenada revolution. Bernard Coard was trained in its brutality, rigidity, and bureaucratic “decisiveness.” Like all Stalinists, he confused political clarity with dogmatism, centralism with commands, flexibility with softness, discipline with submission, firmness with harshness. The faction he was building in Grenada was truly petty bourgeois — the nucleus of an administrative caste trained in giving orders and wielding authority, not of a political vanguard of the working class relying on the revolutionary organization, mobilization, and political education of the exploited producers. 

Maurice Bishop, not Bernard Coard, was the communist educator of Grenadian working people. Through Bishop’s speeches, workers and farmers gained a deeper understanding of the class struggle in Grenada, the Caribbean, and worldwide. Through working to deepen the Grenadian people’s involvement in the revolution, Bishop helped promote their class-struggle experience and politicization. Bernard Coard was not a “brilliant master of Marxist strategy and tactics.” He was a Stalinist phrasemonger.

Although Stalinism remains a powerful obstacle to workers’ and peasants’ struggles, as shown by the events in Grenada, its hold over the international working-class movement has been irreversibly weakened by the advance of the world revolution since the closing years of World War II. Above all, a corner was turned in 1959 with the victory of the Cuban revolution under the leadership of a revolutionary internationalist leadership. Revolutionary-minded workers, peasants, and youth throughout Latin America and many other parts of the world have been attracted to and influenced by the example of the Cuban Communist Party. …

Bernard Coard’s political course was based on a rejection in practice of what [Russian revolutionary leader V.I.] Lenin called “one of the most profound and at the same time most simple and comprehensible precepts of Marxism.” …

“In the final analysis,” Lenin said, “the reason our revolution has left all other revolutions far behind is that … it has aroused tens of millions of people, formerly uninterested in state development, to take an active part in the work of building the state.”

That is the communist perspective that Maurice Bishop died fighting to advance.

Stalinist coup killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada Revolution – The Militant