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For years specialists believed that Trotsky was the first to elaborate in action a (( theory of bureaucracy D in order to give a scientific definition to the social support of Stalin’s dictatorship. In fact it was Rakovsky, his close friend and lieutenant at the head of the Left opposition, who did so.Rakovsky formulated a social analysis of the "Stalinist bureaucracy" for the first time during his struggle against Stalin on the "national question" in 1922 and 1923. In 1923 he explained that "the servants of society became its masters". He developed his analysis during his exile and finally wrote in 1930 the following formulation: "From a proletarian State with bureaucratic distortions – this was Lenin’s definition of the political form of out State – we are moving into a bureaucratic state with communist, proletarian remnants. Under our very eyes it has grown and goes on developing a major and original class of people who govern. What unifies it is an original form of private property, namely the possession of State power." The article relates the genesis of this cornerstone of the Marxist theory of bueaucracy.