During the period of the Stalin regime, precisely because of the annulment of the rights of the workers and peasants, and the repressive form of the new state as against the socialist democratic state that had existed under Lenin, the question of whether a counterrevolution had taken place was debated in many socialist and communist organizations and among workers and progressives.
Some thought that a full-scale counterrevolution had taken place. They made no differentiation between a political counterrevolution and a social one. Indeed, the repression seemed so overwhelming at the time that many considered it must reflect a change in more than the mere form of state. But in reality the Stalin regime ushered in a new form of state, anti-democratic and repressive, while retaining the basic class structures. Collectivization, with all its harshness and drawbacks, strengthened the class alliance between the workers and the peasants.
Whatever one may say about the character of the Stalin regime, the changes it ushered in were mostly in the superstructure--although it did at the same time foster social inequality. No social counterrevolution took place. Perhaps the greatest challenge to this view came during the 1960s when none other than the Chinese leadership under Mao Zedong abandoned their conception of the USSR as a workers' and socialist state, and introduced the concept that the Khrushchev leadership (which followed on the heels of the Stalin regime) constituted a full-scale social counterrevolution. Capitalism had been fully restored, according to them. This view was abandoned by the subsequent Chinese leadership, and has not been revived to this day.