Does Leninism lead to Stalinism?
John Molyneux
This is a chapter from my forthcoming book on Lenin for Today and has also been published in Irish Marxist Review 17.
The Nightmare of
Stalinism
Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union as its absolute
dictator from 1928 to his death in 1953. There can be no equivocation about
this: the Stalinist regime was an utter nightmare.
In terms of human rights it was, as everyone knows, an
extreme tyranny. Democracy of any kind was non-existent; it was a one-party
state in which all elections were ruthlessly rigged so that the ruling
Communist Party candidates always won with close to 100% of the vote. No
political, intellectual or cultural criticism or opposition was permitted.
There were a series of purges and show trials in which past oppositionists or
possible future oppositionists were accused of fantastic crimes and
conspiracies, invariably convicted and either executed or sent to the gulag
archipelago in Siberia – close to a death sentence. The whole social life of
the country was held in an iron totalitarian grip by the party/state and the
GPU and intellectual life in general assumed a Kafkaesque character in which
history was continually being rewritten: a scientist could be required to
endorse scientific theories he or she knew to be bogus and a composer could be
condemned because their music was not in the approved style.
Nor can it plausibly be claimed that even if life was
intolerable for ‘intellectuals’ at least it was reasonably good for ordinary
working people who kept their heads down. On the contrary, the living standards
of the working class were forced down to fund industrialisation in the Five
Year Plan and held at a low level. Housing conditions were appalling. Work
discipline was intense and trade union rights and the right to strike were
non-existent. Trade unions existed, of course, but they were completely controlled
from above by the party/state which also constituted the management of industry.
And it was ‘ordinary people’ – workers and peasants – who made up the vast
majority of those sent to the camps and used as forced labour on a huge scale.
In addition there was the scourge of famine, with several million people dying
in the famine of 1932-3, mainly in the Ukraine but also in other parts of the
USSR such as Kazakhstan and at least tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands in a
smaller famine in 1946-7 which struck the Ukraine again and also Moldova.[1]
The only serious counter to this indictment is to cite the
prodigious economic development and growth achieved first in the thirties[2]
and then in the fifties, which transformed backward Russia into a major
industrial and military power. But there are three major objections to this
defence: a) the growth and industrialisation was achieved at the expense of
Russia’s working people; b) in historical perspective it was not greater than what
was achieved at the same or other times by capitalist societies such as the
USA, Japan and, in recent decades, China; c) in time the economic growth
started to slow and then virtually ground to a halt thus precipitating the
collapse of the regime in 1989-91.
Stalinism was also a reactionary disaster for women, LGBT+
people and for national minorities. The Revolution in Lenin’s time was hugely
progressive in all these areas but Stalinism reversed all the gains that were
made. The Russian Revolution proclaimed its commitment to complete legal and
social equality for women and in 1920 the Soviet Union was the first country in
the world to make abortion completely legal and free. Stalinist Russia
recriminalised abortion in 1935[3] as
well as introducing medals for motherhood (i.e. having numerous children). One
of the earliest acts of the Bolshevik government in late 1917 was the
decriminalisation of homosexuality and there were openly gay members of the
government such as Georgy Chicherin who served as Commissar for Foreign Affairs
from May 1918 until 1930. In 1933 homosexuality was again made illegal, which
it remained until 1993. Under Stalin there was a general policy of
Russification and many of Russia’s national minorities suffered severe
oppression with the dissolution of a number of the USSR’s National Republics
and the forced deportation of their entire
populations, e.g. the Volga-German Republic in 1941, the Kalmyks in 1943, and the
Chechens and the Crimean Tatars in 1946. The Stalinist regime also cynically
exploited and encouraged anti- Semitism.[4]
For all these reasons, and many others – I have given here
only the briefest summary - to
characterise Stalinist Russia (or post-Stalin Russia or the replica regimes it
spawned along its borders) as socialist or communist is to damn socialism and
communism, as many who insist on this designation are well aware. Similarly to
assert continuity between Lenin and Stalin or that it was the nature of
Leninism that created or caused Stalinism, to hold what I will call ‘the
continuity thesis’, is to damn Lenin and Leninism.
The debate on this question has raged since at least the
1930s but it has never been anything like an equal debate. On the continuity
side stand a) the entire Western establishment and more or less all of its
media; b) the vast majority of the academic world across all its disciplines,
beginning with History and Soviet or Russian Studies; c) the majority of
international social democracy; d) in a mirror image of the bourgeois
establishment view, the Stalinist regimes themselves and the vast majority of
the international communist movement; e) anarchism, including its most
influential spokesperson, Noam Chomsky. On
the discontinuity side, arguing that there was a fundamental break between
Leninism and Stalinism, stand only Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyists (including
‘dissident’ Trotskyists like Tony Cliff, Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, Hal
Draper, Chris Harman, Alex Callinicos etc.) and a few other independent Marxist
intellectuals such as Ralph Miliband, Lars Lih and Marcel Liebman, with Isaac
Deutscher occupying an intermediate position. So in quantitative terms it has
been no contest – the continuity thesis has been so overwhelmingly dominant as
to constitute what could be called ‘a consensus’ and, by those so inclined, simply asserted as
fact.
Moreover the
continuity position has the considerable advantage of corresponding to surface
appearances. Chronologically Leninism did lead to Stalinism and there was
apparent continuity in the regime and in its language and in the claims it made
about itself – at least if you did not look too closely. But, as Marx said,
‘all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of
things directly coincided’[5]
and the sun appears to go round the earth but in reality, as we all now know, it
is the other way round. So what are the actual arguments for and against the
continuity thesis?
The Continuity Thesis
We should begin by noting that the continuity thesis rests
on and is reinforced by a key idea in bourgeois ideology which is also widely
accepted as common sense. This is that capitalism is ‘natural’ or corresponds
to ‘human nature’, whereas socialism is contrary to human nature and therefore
can only be imposed on society by force and dictatorship. According to this way
of thinking only free-market capitalism, in which the existence of private
ownership of the means of production limits the power of the state, is
compatible with freedom and democracy. This is further strengthened by two
notions that are even more deeply engraved in our collective thinking: namely
that there always has been and always will be social and political hierarchy –
human nature again – and that the mass of ordinary people are congenitally
incapable of running society. Consequently the concept of an equal or classless
society is utopian and revolution which stirs up the masses, especially
revolution made in the name of workers’ power and socialism, is dangerous and
doomed to fail; it is also an inherently deceptive process in which naïve or
unscrupulous leaders ‘use’ the masses for their own ends to make the revolution
only to put them back in their place afterwards. The continuity between Lenin
and Stalin, between the October Revolution and the Stalinist police state of
the thirties, is thus seen as a particularly virulent example of this general
pattern. This scenario is also paralleled by the Nietzsche/ Foucault view of
history as a process driven by the will to power so that the sequence
Tsar-Lenin-Stalin is viewed as merely one more example of the endless play of
power struggles.
Regarding the human nature/capitalism equals freedom,
socialism is dictatorship/ all revolutions lead to tyranny arguments there is a
sense in which the whole of Marxism is a reply to these bourgeois apologetics.
Personally I have written quite extensively on these issues in the past[6]
and will not go over this ground now, except to say that the existence of many
thousands of years of egalitarian foraging societies constitutes an empirical
refutation of the idea that hierarchy and class division are inevitable and
that socialism is incompatible with human nature. But generally speaking the Lenin-Stalin
continuity thesis is presented without explicit mention of this ideological
framework. Rather it is simply asserted as historical fact (which enables it to
be accepted by those, such as Chomsky, who might recoil from these conservative
assumptions). However the existence of the framework in the background is
important because its ‘common sense’ status greatly assists the uncritical acceptance
of the continuity narrative. This narrative runs as follows:
- Lenin was, from the outset, a deeply authoritarian personality with dictatorial or even totalitarian ambitions.
- The Bolshevik Party was largely Lenin’s creation and it was constructed in his own image as the instrument of these ambitions.
- In 1917 the Bolsheviks, at Lenin’s prompting, took advantage of the crisis and chaos in Russia and its weak government to seize power in an opportunistic coup and impose their rule on Russian society.
- That this rule led more or less inexorably to the totalitarian police state of the 1930s (and of the period up to the fall of Communism in 1989-91) which exhibited an intensification of the levels of repression but not any fundamental or qualitative change.
- The essential continuity between this coup and the later Stalinist dictatorship is proved, above all, by the authoritarian behaviour of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the early years of their rule.
- Further proof is supplied by the fact that in every case where declared Leninists have taken power the outcome has been essentially the same, single party rule in a police state: witness Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam.
Let us consider the last, most general, point first. What it
relies on is taking the self-declaration of the political leaderships concerned
as Leninist at face value. In reality, in all of these cases [with the
exception of Cuba] the political leadership was already thoroughly Stalinised
and in none of them did the political strategy pursued remotely resemble that
of the historical Lenin. In Eastern Europe ‘Communist’ power was conquered not
through workers’ revolution from below but by means of Red Army occupation at
the end of World War 2. As Chris Harman has written:
The Russian army had ensured the
police and secret police were in the hands of its appointees. Now a series of
moves were used to destroy resistance to Russian dictates. First, non-Communist
ministers were forced out of office; the social democratic parties were forced
to merge with Communist parties regardless of the feelings of their members;
then Communist Party leaders who might show any sign of independence from
Stalin… were put on trial, imprisoned and often executed. Kostov in Bulgaria,
Rajk in Hungary, and Slansky in Czechoslovakia were all executed. Gomulka in
Poland and Kadar in Hungary were merely thrown into prison.[7]
This was not a case of Leninism leading to Stalinism but
Stalinism leading to Stalinism.
In both China and Cuba the revolution was carried through by
guerrilla armies, based in the countryside on the peasantry with a middle class
leadership[8]. To
say these revolutions were not Leninist is not to engage in pedantry or to
adopt some narrow or dogmatic definition according to which the Leninist label
is denied to those who differ on some point of doctrine or secondary question.
The difference is on the issue that for Marxism (and for Lenin himself) is
absolutely fundamental – the class nature of the revolution and the class basis
of its political leadership. For Marx and Lenin the revolutionary struggle and
the social basis of the revolutionary movement and party was first and foremost
the working class and not the
peasantry. This was because the working class, concentrated in modern industry
and in great cities had the potential power to defeat capitalism and the
ability, once it had conquered state power, to be both the producing class and
the ruling class at the same time, thus paving the way for a classless
communist society. In contrast the peasantry, while it had an important role to
play in the revolution as an ally of the proletariat, lacked the capacity to
emancipate itself or lead the construction of socialism. In China and Cuba the
peasants were able to form the rank-and-file of the revolutionary guerrilla
army and defeat the greatly weakened Kuomintang and Batista regimes but what
they could not do, because of their social position rooted in farming in the
countryside, was take control of the main forces of production which were
located in the cities and thus themselves run the economy and the state. Instead
they had to hand over the running of society to their leaders who became the
embryo of a new, state capitalist, ruling class. So it is quite wrong to
attribute the anti-democratic character of either the Chinese or the Cuban
regimes to the application of Leninist doctrine.[9]
The notion of Lenin’s power-seeking motives is
psychologically implausible and unhistorical as an explanation of his embarking
on a political course involving imprisonment, exile and isolation; the
Bolshevik faction and later party was never a Lenin dictatorship but was very
democratic and very much a workers’ party[10];
the October Revolution succeeded precisely because it was not a coup or putsch
but because it had overwhelming working class support.[11]
To these factual considerations I would add a methodological
one. The idea that an event of world significance such as the Russian
Revolution and its historical development over eighty years including the emergence
of a major new society – the USSR – can be explained or understood as
primarily, or mainly, a consequence of the ideas or actions of one individual
or one small organisation, rather than mass social forces i.e. social classes
in struggle conditioned by the development of the forces of production, is a
particularly blatant example of ‘the great man’ theory of history. It is akin
to saying that the structure of 18th century English capitalism was
determined by the personal character of Oliver Cromwell or the organisation of
the New Model Army or that the regime of Italian fascism was mainly shaped by
the dictatorial personality of Mussolini. In other words it is not serious
history. A serious analysis of the rise and causes of Stalinism must begin with
the objective material conditions prevailing in Russia and internationally in
the years following the Revolution and it must examine how these conditions
impacted on Russia’s social structure and shaped the balance of class forces.
To say this is not to espouse a mechanical determinism or
deny the role of ideology, or politics or even individuals[12];
it is not even to deny that at certain moments these can be decisive in tipping
the balance between contending forces, but it is to insist that that they take
their place only as the final links in the chain of explanation not as prime
movers. However, this leaves open the possibility of arguing that even if
objective factors such as Russia’s economic backwardness were primary, the
ideology and the organisational practices of Leninism/Bolshevism nevertheless
played an important role in facilitating the emergence of Stalinism. Here the question
of the behaviour of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the period between October 1917
and 1922 is crucial and it is on this ground that the arguments of a number of
anti-Stalinist Marxists, such as Samuel Farber and Robin Blackburn[13],
have sometimes converged with those of conservative, liberal or anarchist anti-Marxists.
The charge sheet, the list of claimed offences, which can be
laid at Lenin’s door, is formidable. First, that from the outset he rejected a
‘broad’ coalition with other ‘socialists’ such as the Right SRs (Socialist
Revolutionaries) and the Mensheviks, in favour of a narrow government with only
the Left SRs and with a clear Bolshevik majority. Thus it is said Lenin set off
on a course away from pluralist soviet democracy in the direction of party
dictatorship. Second that, despite the Bolsheviks having ceaselessly demanded
the calling of the Constituent Assembly, Lenin opposed holding elections for
the Assembly in autumn 1917 and then, when they were held and produced a large
anti- Bolshevik majority, he dissolved the Assembly by force in January 2018,
so taking a further step in the direction of single party dictatorship. Third,
that Lenin launched, in December 1917, the Cheka (All-Russian Emergency
Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), which was
responsible for the Red Terror during the Civil War and later evolved into the
GPU, the NKVD and the ‘Great Terror’ of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Fourth,
that Lenin, from 1918 onwards, imposed a policy of one-man management of
industry in place of the initial workers’ control. Fifth, that beginning with
the banning of the Cadets in December 1917, Lenin moved step by step to the
outlawing of all other political parties by May 1919 and the establishment of a
one-party state. Sixth, that Lenin and the Bolshevik government bloodily
suppressed the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors in March 1921 and accompanied
this by banning factions within the Party thus driving a further nail into the
coffin of free debate.
The Continuity Thesis
Assessed
Any discussion of the merits of this indictment must begin
with an acknowledgement that all the charges in this list are based on
indisputable historical fact. The Bolshevik government did dissolve the
Constituent Assembly establish a political monopoly etc and rule in an
increasingly authoritarian fashion in the years in which it was headed by
Lenin. These facts are what make this component in the continuity thesis the
strongest part of this whole argument. At the same time it must also be
acknowledged that in relation to each of these charges there is another side of
the story. Thus it can be argued, from a Marxist and Leninist point of view,
that the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly was justified because the
Soviets represented a higher form of democracy, specifically working class
democracy, than the Assembly, which was a form of bourgeois parliament. While
the suppression of Kronstadt, bitter as it was, can be justified on the grounds
that mutiny of the naval garrison, strategically located at the entrance to
Petrograd, threatened to reopen the just concluded Civil War and so, regardless
of the subjective intentions of the soldiers, play into the hands of the
counter-revolution. But rather than launch into the very detailed historical
argument necessary to make an assessment of each charge, I want first to pose a
basic question: why did Lenin and the Bolsheviks behave in this increasingly
authoritarian manner?
To answer that it was a result of Lenin’s authoritarian
personality takes us back to ground we have already covered and rejected and is
also open to the powerful objection that if it were really a matter of Lenin’s
personal psychology he would have been blocked (or even removed) by others
around him. Remember it is a matter of demonstrable fact that in the early
years of the revolution there was no automatic deferral to Lenin[14]. At
the very least we would need to be talking about a collective authoritarian
mentality on the part of all or most of the leading Bolsheviks. Not only is
there a lack of evidence for this there much evidence to the contrary. For
example in Moscow, where the October Insurrection did not pass off smoothly as
it did in Petrograd and there were six days of serious street fighting, there
was the following episode recounted here by Victor Serge:
On the
29th [October –JM], in the evening, after a terrible day in which
the headquarters of the insurrection nearly fell, a twenty-four hours’ truce
was signed: it was quickly broken by the arrival of a shock battalion to join
the Whites. The Reds on their side were reinforced by artillery. Gun batteries
went into action on the squares, and the Whites retreated to the Kremlin. After
long vacillations, due to their desire to avoid damage to historic monuments,
the MRC [Military Revolutionary Committee]–JM] decided to order the bombardment of the
Kremlin. The Whites surrendered at 4 p.m. on 2 November. ‘The Committee of
Public Safety is dissolved. The White Guard surrenders its arms and is
disbanded. The officers may keep the sidearms that distinguish their rank. Only
such weapons as are necessary for practice may be kept in the military
academies ... The MRC guarantees the liberty and inviolability of all.’ Such
were the principal clauses of the armistice signed between Reds and Whites. The
fighters of the counter-revolution, butchers of the Kremlin, who in victory
would have shown no quarter whatever to the Reds – we have seen proof – went free.[15]
Serge
comments:
Foolish clemency! These
very Junkers, these officers, these students, these socialists of
counter-revolution, dispersed themselves throughout the length and breadth of
Russia and there organized the Civil War. The revolution was to meet them
again, at Yaroslavl, on the Don, at Kazan, in the Crimea, in Siberia and in
every conspiracy nearer home.[16]
Then
there was the question of the death penalty. On the very first day after the
insurrection, on the initiative of Kamenev, the death penalty was abolished.
Lenin thought this was a mistake and that it would be impossible to defend the
revolution without firing squads[17],
but this was hardly the action of a group of authoritarian leaders set on
establishing their personal dictatorship. Victor Serge, a revolutionary with
deeply libertarian and humanistic instincts, offered the following assessment
of the general character of the Bolsheviks:
The
October Revolution offers us an almost perfect model of the proletarian party.
Relatively few as they may be, its militants live with the masses and among
them. Long and testing years – a revolution, then illegality, exile, prison,
endless ideological battles – have given it excellent activists and real
leaders, whose parallel thinking was strengthened in collective action.
Personal initiative and the panache of strong personalities were balanced by
intelligent centralization, voluntary discipline and respect for recognized
mentors. Despite the efficiency of its organizational apparatus, the party
suffered not the slightest bureaucratic deformation. No fetishism of
organizational forms can be observed in it; it is free of decadent and even of
dubious traditions.[18]
An alternative explanation is that the authoritarianism was a
consequence of Bolshevik ideology. But this does not fit the facts at all.
First, because Bolshevik/ Leninist ideology as it evolved from 1903 to the
beginning of 1917 did not envisage the immediate conquest of power by the
proletariat in Russia at all – they did not believe the Russian Revolution
would move beyond the limits of radical bourgeois democracy and capitalist
property relations. Second, because in so far as they did form theoretical
conceptions regarding the nature of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the
proletariat it did not include the notion of one party rule. Rather their idea
was that just as in capitalist democracies with bourgeois parliaments the
government would be formed by the party with a parliamentary majority so in the
Soviet state, state power would reside in the Congress of Soviets and the
government would be formed by the party with a majority in the Soviets. As
Lenin expressed it in November 1917 in a statement ‘To all Party Members and to
all the Working Classes of Russia’
It is a matter of common knowledge that the majority at the
Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies were
delegates belonging to the Bolshevik Party.
This fact is fundamental for a proper understanding of the
victorious revolution that has just taken place in Petrograd, Moscow and the
whole of Russia. Yet that fact is constantly forgotten and ignored by all the
supporters of the capitalists and their unwitting aides, who are undermining
the fundamental principle of the new revolution, namely, all power to the Soviets. There must be no government in Russia
other than the Soviet
Government. Soviet power has
been won in Russia ,
and the transfer of government from one
Soviet party to another is guaranteed without any revolution, simply by a
decision of the Soviets; simply by new elections of deputies to the Soviets [My
emphasis –JM]. The majority at the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets
belonged to the Bolshevik Party. Therefore the only Soviet Government is the
one formed by that Party.[19]
What any conscientious reading of Russian
history or of Lenin’s writings in the years 1917-21 shows is that
overwhelmingly the main factor determining the actions of Lenin and the
Bolshevik Government was the force of circumstances – sheer necessity. Even the
first step of forming a Bolshevik government, which as we have just seen Lenin
was prepared to defend on principle, involved an element of necessity. The SRs
and the Mensheviks had walked out of Soviets as the Insurrection was taking
place. Nevertheless, at the insistence of the Bolshevik right who had opposed
October (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov etc.) negotiations for a coalition were
undertaken. But the Right SRs and the Mensheviks demanded both a majority for
themselves and the exclusion of Lenin and Trotsky; in other words they would
only join a coalition that would undo the October Revolution. In the end a
coalition was formed with the Left SRs on 18 November. But the coalition broke
down over the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty (itself determined by
necessity) and the SRs took to arms to oppose the government – they attempted
to assassinate Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador, to provoke a war with
Germany and then launched an uprising on the streets of Moscow.
Similarly with the dispersal of the
Constituent Assembly the principle of Soviet rule was articulated by Lenin in
combination with considerations of necessity. Thus Lenin’s ‘Theses on the
Constituent Assembly’ of December 1917 began:
1. The
demand for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly was a perfectly legitimate
part of the programme of revolutionary Social-Democracy, because in a bourgeois
republic the Constituent Assembly represents the highest form of democracy and
because, in setting up a Pre-parliament, the imperialist republic headed by
Kerensky was preparing to rig the elections and violate democracy in a number
of ways.
2.
While demanding the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, revolutionary
Social-Democracy has ever since the beginning of the Revolution of 1917
repeatedly emphasised that a republic
of Soviets
3. For
the transition from the bourgeois to the socialist system, for the dictatorship
of the proletariat, the Republic of Soviets (of Workers’, Soldiers’ and
Peasants’ Deputies) is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as
compared with the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly),
but is the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to
socialism.
But went on to say:
13. Lastly, the civil war which was started by the
Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolutionary revolt against the Soviet authorities,
against the workers’ and peasants’ government, has finally brought the class struggle
to a head and has destroyed every chance of setting in a formally democratic
way the very acute problems with which history has confronted the peoples of
Russia, and in the first place her working class and peasants.
14. Only the complete victory of the workers and peasants
over the bourgeois and landowner revolt (as expressed in the Cadet-Kaledin
movement), only the ruthless military suppression of this revolt of the
slave-owners can really safeguard the proletarian-peasant revolution. The course
of events and the development of the class struggle in the revolution have
resulted in the slogan "All Power to the Constituent Assembly!"—which
disregards the gains of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, which disregards
Soviet power, which disregards the decisions of the Second All-Russia Congress
of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, of the Second All-Russia
Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, etc.—becoming in fact the slogan of the Cadets and the
Kaledinites and of their helpers. The entire people are now fully aware that
the Constituent Assembly, if it parted ways with Soviet power, would inevitably
be doomed to political extinction.[20]
In short, we must disperse the Constituent Assembly because if we don’t it will
become a rallying point for the counter-revolution.
The element of necessity and pressure to
introduce ever harsher measures grows as the circumstances of the revolution
became more desperate as they rapidly did. The main driver of this was the
intensifying civil war and its accompanying White Terror. In one sense the
counter-revolutionary civil war began before October with the attempted
Kornilov coup of late August and it continued immediately after the
insurrection. On the night of 28 October Junkers (cadets from the military
colleges) surrounded and captured the Kremlin in Moscow which had been occupied by the
Bolsheviks. The workers in the Kremlin who had surrendered were promptly lined
up in the courtyard and mowed down by machine gun fire. Serge comments:
This massacre was not an isolated act. Practically
everywhere the Whites conducted arrests followed by massacres…Let us remember
these facts. They show the firm intention of the defenders of the Provisional
Government to drown the revolution in blood.[21]
This, of course, is how counter revolutions
behave as is shown by many historical examples from the Paris Commune to Franco
in Spain, Pinochet in Chile or Al-Sisi in Egypt in 2013, and in early 1918 the
Bolsheviks were provided with a vivid object lesson as to what their fate would
be should they lose by the White Terror in Finland, which followed the defeat
of the workers’ uprising there. More than 8,000 ‘reds’ were executed and 80,000
taken prisoner, of whom over 11,000 were allowed to starve to death. As John
Rees says, ‘In all, the Finnish White Terror claimed the lives of 23,000 Reds.
It was a fate which must have burnt itself into the minds of the Bolsheviks and
steeled their hearts during the civil war.’[22]
Even so it was not until these
counter-revolutionary attempts escalated into full-scale war combined with
major foreign intervention in mid-1918 that the Red Terror developed on an
extensive scale. And this was in circumstances where the White armies behaved
with the utmost savagery and sadism including anti-Semitic pogroms that pre-figured
the Nazis; in 1919 in the Ukraine 150,000 Jews were slaughtered, That is, one
in thirteen of the Ukrainian Jewish population.[23]
Moreover in the darkest days of this war the Bolsheviks lost control of by far
the largest part of Russia. They were assailed on all sides, very nearly lost
Petrograd and were reduced to an area around Moscow, approximately the size of
the old Muscovy Principality. That the revolution and the Bolsheviks were
fighting for their lives is true in the most literal sense; that they responded
with harshness and brutality is hardly surprising.
But the sheer ferocity of the Civil War was
by no means the only factor in this situation. Another was the conduct of the
other political parties – the Cadets, SRs and Mensheviks. To simply say that
Lenin and the Bolsheviks banned all other parties, including the other
‘socialist’ parties, and established a one-party state makes it sound as if
this was done out of ideological intolerance. In reality it was a response to
the fact that to a greater or lesser extent all these parties either supported
the Whites or half supported them and engaged in armed actions against the
Soviet government. This was first and most clearly the case with the Cadet
party, which had already collaborated with Kornilov and Kaledin (leader of the
Don Cossack white rebellion in late 1917). But it applied also to the Right SRs
after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. They gave full support to
the rebellion of the Czechoslovak Legion in May 1918 and when the Legion
occupied Samara the SRs formed an anti-Bolshevik government there. The same
thing happened involving various combinations of Cadets, Right SRs, ‘populist’
socialists and Mensheviks, in a number of regions where the Czechoslovaks or
other White forces took control.
In addition to this there were conspiracies
and terrorist attacks within Bolshevik controlled areas. We have already
referred to the Left SR assassination of Count Mirbach but there was also the
assassination by a Right SR of the Bolshevik leader Volodarsky on 20 June 1918
and on 30 August an attempt on Lenin’s life by the SR Fanya Kaplan[24]
and on the same day a successful murder of Cheka head, Uritsky, also by an SR.
It was in response to these and similar events that the Bolsheviks banned the
other parties.
In addition to the military consequences of
the Civil War and also of immense significance were its terrible economic and
social consequences. Even before the Revolution or the Civil War, Russia was
already suffering from the effects of three years of devastating war, which
claimed over 1.7 million lives and ruined the economy. To this must be added
the disruptive effects of the revolution itself and the severe losses of
population, territory and industry occasioned by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,
and a total Allied Blockade from April 1918.
By 1918 Russia was producing just 12 percent of the steel it had produced in 1913. More or less the same
story emerged from every industry: iron ore had slumped to 12.3 percent of its 1913 figure; tobacco to 19
percent; sugar to 24 percent; coal to 42 per cent; linen to 75 percent. The
country was producing just one fortieth of the railway track it had
manufactured in 1913. And by January 1918 some 48 per cent of the locomotives in the country
were out of action.
Factories closed, leaving Petrograd with just a third of its
former workforce by autumn 1918. Hyperinflation raged at levels only later
matched in the Weimar Republic. The amount of workers' income that came from
sources other than wages rose from 3.5 percent in 1913 to 38 percent in 1918. In many cases desperation drove
workers to simple theft. The workers' state was as destitute as the
workers: the state budget for 1918 showed income at less than half
of expenditure.[25]
Inevitably this meant famine and disease. The urban population
collapsed as workers fled to the countryside in search of food and epidemics of
typhus and cholera raged.
Deaths from typhus alone in the years 1918-20 numbered 1.6 million
and typhoid, dysentery and cholera caused another 700,000… Suffering was
indescribable. Numerous cases of cannibalism occurred. A quarter of Russia’s
population – 35 million – suffered from continuous acute hunger.[26]
It is
hardly surprising that in these dreadful circumstances the Bolsheviks were
forced to resort to harsh and dictatorial measures. In order to deal with the
famine and prevent mass starvation in the cities it was necessary to send armed
detachments of workers to the countryside to forcibly requisition grain but
this stretched to breaking point the relationship with the peasantry which was
so essential to the revolution in an overwhelmingly peasant country. It also
aggravated relations with those political forces, like the SRs, whose social
base was the middle peasants. This further accentuated the need for
authoritarian rule.
To read
Lenin’s writings during this period is to read someone totally aware of the
disaster facing the country. Again and again he refers in speeches and letters
to the workers to ‘the extremely difficult situation’, the ‘desperate
situation’ ‘this exhausted and ravaged country’ etc. Here are a couple of examples:
Comrades, the other day your delegate, a Party comrade, a
worker in the Putilov Works, called on me. This comrade drew a detailed and
extremely harrowing picture of the famine in Petrograd. We all know that the
food situation is just as acute in many of the industrial gubernias, that famine is
knocking just as cruelly at the door of the workers and the poor generally…
We are faced by
disaster, it is very near. An intolerably difficult May will be followed by a
still more difficult June, July and August…The situation of the country is
desperate in the extreme.[27]
The first six months
of 1919 will be more difficult than the preceding.
The food shortage is growing
more and more acute. Typhus is becoming an extremely serious menace. Heroic
efforts are required, but what we are doing is far from enough.[28]
However, every time Lenin speaks of the catastrophe facing
the country he combines this with an unflinching determination to resist, to do
everything possible to defend the revolution and to hold out till the arrival
of aid from the international revolution. The passage quoted immediately above
continues:
Can we
save the situation?
Certainly.
The capture of Ufa and Orenburg, our victories in the South and the success of
the Soviet uprising in the Ukraine open up very favourable prospects.
We
are now in a position to procure far more grain than is required for semi-starvation food rations…
Not
only can we now obviate famine, but we can even fully satisfy the starving
population of non-agricultural Russia .
The
whole trouble lies in the bad state of transport and the tremendous shortage of
food workers.
Every
effort must be made and we must stir the mass of workers into action…We must
pull ourselves together. We must set about the revolutionary mobilisation of people for food and transport work.
We must not confine ourselves to “current” work, but go beyond its
bounds and discover new methods of securing additional forces….
Of
course, the hungry masses are exhausted, and that exhaustion is at times more
than human strength can endure. But there is a way out, and renewed energy is
undoubtedly possible, all the more since the growth of the proletarian
revolution all over the world is becoming increasingly apparent and promises a
radical improvement in our foreign as well as our home affairs.[29]
This passage, in tone and content, is typical of numerous
articles, letters and speeches by Lenin in that period. So too is the reference
to the international revolution at the end which Lenin invokes again and again.
Holding out until the arrival of the international revolution is central to the
whole Bolshevik perspective and was so long before the dark days of the Civil
War. It was the expectation that the Russian socialist revolution would spark
the spread of the revolution across Europe, above all to Germany, that
justified not only the harsh measures of the Civil War but also the October
insurrection itself. Until Stalin began to promulgate the doctrine of
‘socialism in one country’ in late 1924 it was common ground among all Russian
Marxists that it would not be possible to build socialism in Russia alone and
Lenin repeatedly stated that ‘there would doubtlessly be no hope of the
ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone’[30]
and at the Seventh Party Congress in March 1918 the following resolution was
formally passed.
The Congress considers the only reliable guarantee of
consolidation of the socialist revolution that has been victorious in Russia to
be its conversion into a world working-class revolution.[31]
The emphasis I have placed on the horrors
of the Civil War and its accompanying economic catastrophe as the main
determinant – as opposed to aspirations to totalitarianism - of Bolshevik
behaviour in these years is open to the objection that the end of the Civil War
saw not a relaxation of the Bolshevik dictatorship but its reinforcement. After
all two of the list of charges against Lenin that I listed earlier, the
suppression of Kronstadt and the banning of factions within the Party, date
from after the Civil War is over. The fact is, however, that the pressures on
the Bolshevik Government were if anything intensified rather than eased by the
victory of the Red Army over the Whites.
This was because while hostilities
continued the peasantry had to choose between on one side the Bolsheviks and
their forced food requisitions (which they deeply resented) and on the other
the White armies who treated them as or more harshly and whose victory, they
knew with certainty, meant the return of the landlords and the loss of their
principal gain from the revolution, the land. Faced with this choice the
peasantry, in their majority, opted for the Bolsheviks/ Communists, which in
the final analysis is why they won the Civil War[32].
But the moment the War was over and the threat of landlord restoration receded
peasant anger turned against the Bolsheviks. Now, in their eyes, there was no
justification whatsoever for hated food requisitions and they rose in revolt
against the regime. Tony Cliff summarises what happened:
Now that the civil war had ended, waves of peasant
uprisings swept rural Russia. The most serious outbreaks occurred in Tambov
province, the middle Volga area, the Ukraine, northern Caucasus and Western
Siberia…In February 1921 alone the Cheka reported 118 separate peasant
uprisings in various parts of the country.[33]
Rebellion in the countryside rapidly found a resonance with
workers in the town. Many of the urban workers had until recently been peasants
or had returned to their villages in search of food during the famine, so links
between town and country were strong. Anti-Bolshevik strikes broke out in the
St. Petersburg district and the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors was part of
this same process. And this revolt by peasants-workers- sailors was reflected
in terms of tensions and splits inside the Bolshevik Party, including its top
leadership. In the four months leading up to the Tenth Party Congress in March
1921 there was a huge debate inside the Party on the relationship between the
state and the trade unions with Trotsky, Bukharin and others (eight members of
the Central Committee in all) arguing for the state to take control of the
unions, Shliapnikov, Kollontai and the Workers’ Opposition arguing for trade
union control of production and Lenin, Zinoviev and others (the ‘Platform of
the Ten’) taking an intermediate position which would leave the state and the
party in control of industry but allow the unions the right to defend the
workers against the state which Lenin said had become a ‘workers’ state with a
bureaucratic twist to it’.[34]
The dispute was intense and bitter. Lenin became convinced
a) that the Party was on the verge of a split; b) that with sections of the
population in revolt such a split could destroy the revolution and open the
door to the Whites; c) that the root of the problem was the economic regime of
War Communism, essentially the forced requisitioning of grain. His answer to
the crisis was therefore to retreat on the economic front by introducing the
New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed a free market in grain so as to gain a
breathing space but to combine this with strengthening the power and unity of
the Party; hence the continuation of the ban on other parties and the
introduction of the ban on factions. In other words the devastation brought by
the Civil War and the economic collapse continued to impose itself on Lenin and
Bolsheviks even after the War was over.
The argument I have presented so far that the harsh
measures of the Lenin-led government were the product of the situation it faced
rather than its pre-ordained authoritarian inclinations raises two other
issues. Even if this point is broadly accepted does it follow from this that
the actions and policy of the revolutionary government, designed to ensure its
survival, were, as a whole, justified? And if they were justified overall does
this involve claiming that each and every one of Lenin’s or the regime’s
actions were correct or justified?
On the last point the answer is clearly no. For example
Victor Serge and Ernest Mandel, both partisans of the October Revolution, both
regard the establishment of the Cheka as a major mistake. Serge writes:
I believe that the formation of the Cheka was one of the
gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in
1918, when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All
evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of
day (without excluding secret sessions in particular cases) and admitting the
right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse
and depravity.[35]
The Red Army’s march on Warsaw in August 1920, in a
misguided attempt to stimulate or provoke a Polish revolution, was clearly both
a major defeat and a serious political mistake with very damaging consequences,
as Lenin himself admitted. [36]
Making the ban on other parties permanent after 1921 and erecting it into a
point of principle was also a mistake.[37]
Unfortunately it would take a whole book, or several books,
to go through all the actions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks during these years
assessing the correctness or otherwise of each of them. The truth is neither
Lenin nor the Bolsheviks as a whole nor anyone else could have gone through
those years, defending the Revolution against overwhelming odds and in the most
difficult of circumstances, without committing numerous mistakes and even
crimes. The real historical issue is whether or not their overall strategy of
trying to hold out until the international revolution came to their aid, with
the harshness that necessarily entailed, was right and that in turn depends on whether
there was an alternative.
Clearly there was one alternative: the alternative of
defeat and a victory of the counterrevolution. But was there a ‘third way’,
some kind of social democratic or liberal middle ground? Lenin thought not.
Either the advanced and class-conscious workers triumph and
unite the poor peasant masses around themselves, establish rigorous order, a
mercilessly severe rule, a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat - either
they compel the kulak to submit, and institute a proper distribution of food
and fuel on a national scale, or the bourgeoisie, with the help of the kulaks,
and with the indirect support of the spineless and muddle-headed (the
anarchists and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries), will overthrow Soviet power
and set up a Russo-German or a Russo-Japanese Kornilov, who will present the
people with a sixteen-hour working day, an ounce of bread per week, mass
shooting of workers and torture in dungeons, as has been the case in Finland
and the Ukraine.
Either—or.
There is no middle course. The situation of the country is
desperate in the extreme.[38]
Victor Serge agreed.
If the Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was only a short
step to chaos and through chaos to a peasant rising, the massacre of
Communists, the return of the émigrés, and in the end, through the sheer force
of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian.[39]
What was tragically not possible
in those terrible circumstances was a model non-bureaucratic socialist
democracy as envisaged in The State and
Revolution or by Marx in The Civil
War in France, still less an anarchist ‘Third Revolution’ leading directly
to a stateless communist society – what Serge called ‘infantile illusions’.[40]
However, rejecting the idea that the Bolshevik regime in
the early years was a product of Leninist totalitarianism and accepting that it
was in the broad sense a necessity to prevent a White victory and some sort of
Russian fascism, still does not in itself refute the continuity thesis. It is
also necessary to present an alternative, and superior, analysis of the rise of
Stalinism and its relationship to Leninism.
Stalinism as
Counterrevolution
The key to such an analysis is in understanding that the
rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy was a product of the interaction of two major
objective social factors: the
weakness and exhaustion of the Russian proletariat and the isolation of the
Russian Revolution.
On the eve of the First World War Russia was still one of
the most economically backward regions in Europe with a working class that
constituted only a small minority in an overwhelmingly peasant country – for
which reason it was generally assumed by Russian Marxists, including Lenin,
that Russia was not yet ready for socialist revolution. The war itself further
damaged the economy though it also partially proletarianised millions of
peasants by conscripting them into the armed forces. Then came the Revolution,
Brest Litovsk and the Civil War whose catastrophic effects we have already
alluded to.
Even at this stage the economic backwardness and the
international situation are interacting and reinforcing each other. Had the revolution spread to Germany in late
1917 or early 1918 there would have been no Brest Litovsk and, almost
certainly, no Civil War which only really got going with imperialist aid. If
the German Revolution had succeeded in late 1918 or early 1919 it would have
ended much earlier. If Russia had been a more developed, more urbanised society
the Civil War would have had a very different character. The revolution could
have been defended by city and industry based workers’ militia (as was originally
proposed in socialist theory) rather than creating a ‘standing’ (in reality mobile)
army as was forced on them by the nature of the White armies.
The Russian economy emerged from the Civil War utterly
devastated. Gross industrial production stood at only 31 per cent of its 1913
level and production of steel at only 4.7 per cent, while the transport system
was in ruins. The total of industrial workers fell from about three
million in 1917 to one and a quarter million in 1921. And politically the condition
of the Russian proletariat was worse even than these grim statistics suggest. A
considerable proportion of the most militant and politically conscious workers,
the vanguard of the class, had gone into the Red Army and many of them had
perished. Others, again it tended to be the more politically engaged, had been
drawn into administration and were no longer workers as such. The class was
further weakened by its dispersal into the countryside in search of food during
the famine and by sheer physical and political exhaustion.
As a result the Russian working class, which in 1917 had
reached the highest level of consciousness and struggle, was now the merest
shadow of its former self. By 1921 the class that made the Revolution had to
all intents and purposes disappeared.
[The] industrial
proletariat ... in our country, owing to the war and to the desperate poverty
and ruin has become declassed, i.e. dislodged from its class groove and has
ceased to exist as a proletariat.[41]
The role of the working class as the
agents of socialist transformation and initiators of the transition to a
classless society, as articulated in Marxist theory, is based not on the
incorruptibility of revolutionary leaders but on the ability of the mass of
workers to run society themselves and to exercise democratic control over such
leaders as are indispensable in the transition period.[42]
The Russian working class of 1921 lacked the capacity either to run society or
control its leaders. The matter was compounded by the large number of former
Tsarist officials who had been taken over and, out of necessity, incorporated
into the state apparatus and by the fact that there had been an influx of
careerists into the Party.[43]
By this stage the socialist character of the regime was determined by the will
of its Old Bolshevik leadership who constituted a small minority of its total
membership. Lenin was acutely conscious of this.
If we do not close our eyes to reality we must admit that
at the present time the proletarian policy of the party is not determined by
the character of the membership, but by the enormous undivided prestige enjoyed
by the small group which might be called the old guard of the party.[44]
This was not sustainable for any
length of time. In the end social being determines social consciousness as Marx
said. In these circumstances the bureaucratisation of the party and state elite
was an objective social process which gained a momentum of its own and operated
not so much independently of, as on and against that elite’s intentions. Very
near the end of his life, Lenin, deeply concerned at the situation he could see
developing before his eyes, thrashed around rather desperately searching for
organisational devices to slow or reverse the trend. He proposed various
reforms to the Workers’ and Peasants Inspectorate (Rabkrin) which had been
established in 1920 to combat encroaching bureaucratism. In December 1922 he
suggested enlarging the Central Committee with new workers, then expanding the
Central Control Commission and merging it with Rabkrin and finally removing
Stalin as General Secretary.[45]
Nothing substantial came of any of this, nor could it in the absence of
pressure or mobilization from below. Day by day, month by month the growing
caste of state and party officials, freed from popular control, became more
entrenched in their power, more attached to the privileges, more detached from
the working class and less and less interested in international revolution.
Given the exhaustion of the
Russian working class the only thing that could have halted the process of
bureaucratic degeneration was the victory of the revolution elsewhere but this
did not materialise. It was not that international revolution was a pipedream;
on the contrary there was, as Lenin and Trotsky anticipated, a revolutionary
wave across Europe including in Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Bulgaria and Germany.
In March 1919, Lloyd George wrote to Clemenceau:
The whole of Europe is
filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of
discontent but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against pre-war
conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic
aspects is questioned by the mass of the population from one end of Europe to
the other.[46]
But everywhere the revolution was
beaten back. The decisive defeat was in Germany in the autumn of 1923 when the
German Communist Party failed to act in an exceptionally revolutionary
situation and the moment was lost. It is clear that the bureaucratisation in
Russia was already a significant contributing factor to this defeat in that in
1923 the Party leadership of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin refused Trotsky’s
offer to go to Germany to assist the German Revolution[47],
and also advised the leadership of KPD against action at the crucial moment[48].
In the final analysis Stalin, as a
dominant figure in the Party, was the product rather than the producer of this
situation: the bureaucracy ‘selected’ him as their leader. But of course the
moment he found himself in charge of the apparatus (he became General Secretary
in 1922) and then a top Party leader (from 1923) he used his position to
promote his supporters and build a machine loyal to himself. When, in autumn
1924, Stalin promulgated the idea of socialism in one country it contradicted
the whole Marxist tradition since 1845 and indeed what he himself had written
earlier in the year[49].
But as a slogan ‘Socialism in One Country’ very much fitted the mood and needs
of the apparatus. It appealed to their desire to put the perils and dangers of
the ‘heroic’ period of the Revolution behind them and get down to routine
business without the risk of entanglements in risky foreign adventures. As such
it served as a banner under which Stalin and his supporters could wage their
struggle against opposition in the Party – first that of Trotsky and then that
of Zinoviev and Kamenev – who could be attacked as lacking faith in the Russian
Revolution by virtue of their insistence on the need for international
revolution – a struggle which Stalin won decisively in 1927. It also fitted
well with the regime’s economic policy of the mid-twenties which was the more
or less indefinite prolongation of NEP, the rejection of the accelerated industrialisation
proposed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and the perspective of moving towards
socialism ‘at a snail’s pace’as Stalin’s ally Bukharin put it [50].
However the strategy of socialism
in one country combined with the NEP contained fundamental contradictions. NEP,
with its free market in grain had undoubtedly served its purpose of helping the
Soviet economy and also people’s living standards recover from their catastrophic
state in 1921, but the more successful it was the more it encouraged the growth
of a kulak (rich peasant) class in the countryside and, allied to them, of NEP
men (merchants and traders) in the towns. The longer NEP continued the more
this class would develop as a threat to the state owned economy controlled by
the Communist Party. This tendency burst into the open in late 1927 and early 1928
with a mass refusal by the peasantry to sell their grain to the cities.
Socialism in one country was based on the premise that the USSR could evolve
into ‘complete socialism’ provided it was not subject to military intervention
by the West but that was by no means guaranteed. Moreover, as well as direct
military intervention, or rather prior to it, there was the pressure of
economic competition from the rest of the capitalist world which, as Lenin had
repeatedly stressed, remained far stronger and far more productive than the
Soviet Union. How were that competition and the pressure it exerted to be
resisted? Before socialism in one country the answer to this question was that
it would be resisted and, in the last instance, could only be resisted by spreading the revolution. After that
perspective was abandoned, the answer had to be that it would be resisted by
building up Russia ’s
military strength, which in turn meant building up its economic strength.
Stalin, as he later made clear,
had a serious grasp of this problem.
No comrades ... the pace must not be
slackened! On the contrary, we must quicken it
as much as is within our powers and possibilities.
To slacken the pace would mean to
lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten.
No, we don’t want to. The history of old ... Russia ... she was ceaselessly
beaten for her backwardness ... For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness,
for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural
backwardness ...
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced
countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they
crush us.[51]
These problems converged and came
to a head in 1928 and Stalin’s response was to abandon NEP in a massive change
of course. Having decisively defeated the Left and United Oppositions in 1927
he was now able to turn on Bukharin and the pro-peasant right making himself
the unchallenged leader of the Party and dictator of Russia in the process. He launched a campaign to forcibly requisition
more grain from the countryside and in mid-1928 introduced the First Five Year
Plan, which set Russia on the road to rapid industrialisation setting growth
targets far in excess of anything advocated by the Opposition. Then, when the grain requisitions failed to
deliver results, Stalin embarked on the forced collectivisation of agriculture.
The coming together of these three
things- Stalin’s establishment of absolute power, the herding of the peasants
into state farms and the dramatic drive to industrialise – were called by Isaac
Deutscher ‘the great change’[52]and
by many others ‘the third revolution’[53]
and the ‘revolution from above’. In reality they were a profound
counter-revolution. What made them a counter-revolution was that they
constituted a transformation in basic socio-economic relations (in Marxist
terms, the social relations of production), the bureaucracy’s transformation of
itself into a new ruling class, and the change from an economy essentially
concerned with production for the needs of its people (i.e. ‘consumption’) to
one that was driven by competitive accumulation of capital, which is to say the
central dynamic of capitalism.
Under NEP control of industrial
production was vested in a combination of the Party cell, the trade union plant
committee and the technical manager known as the Troika. With the drive to
industrialisation the Troika was dispensed with in favour of unfettered control
by the manager. Under NEP living standards rose roughly in line with the (moderate)
growth of the economy. Between 1928 and 1932, the years of the Five Year Plan,
the economy grew very rapidly but living standards fell dramatically. In his
book State Capitalism in Russia, Tony
Cliff presented a mass of empirical evidence to demonstrate the reversal that
occurred at this time. Here are two telling examples:
“Food
baskets” per monthly wage
Number Index
1913
3.7 100
1928 5.6
151.4
1932 4.8 129.7
Division
of gross output of industry into means of
production and means of consumption (in percentages)
production and means of consumption (in percentages)
1913 1927-8 1932 1937 1940
Means of Production 44.3
32.8 53.3 57.8 61.0
Means of Consumption 55.7 67.2 46.7 42.2 39.0[55]
The significance of these figures
should be apparent when we recall the fundamental statement in The Communist Manifesto that:
In bourgeois society, living labour is but
a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated
labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the
labourer.
With the First
Five Year Plan the Soviet Union embarked, under the pressure of world
capitalism, on a process of ‘production for production’s sake, accumulation for
accumulation’s sake’ [Marx] on the basis of the most ruthless exploitation of
wage labour. The social agent of this exploitation was the Stalinist
bureaucracy, thereby undertaking the historical mission of the bourgeoisie and
turning itself into a state capitalist ruling class which, like every other
ruling class, proceeded to help itself to numerous perks and privileges.
It is this
economic transformation that fundamentally defines Stalin’s ‘revolution from
above’ as a counterrevolution: the final defeat of the workers’ revolution of
1917 and the restoration of capitalism in a new state bureaucratic form. But
the counterrevolutionary character of the process is indicated and confirmed by
many other facts: by the fact that Stalin was only able to consolidate his rule
by imprisoning and murdering both millions of workers and peasants and
virtually every old Bolshevik leader who had any connection with the Revolution
and with Lenin[56];
by the extensive use of slave labour in the notorious gulags; by the
abandonment of the party ‘maximum’ which limited the wages of party members and
an official campaign against ‘egalitarianism’ as a bourgeois concept, by the
restoration of bourgeois norms in daily life ranging from the language used to
subordinates to the huge privileges accorded to army officers, to the return on
a large scale of prostitution; and by the draconian criminal penal code which
included long prison sentences and the death penalty for juveniles.[57]
Indeed there was hardly any aspect of social and political life in which
Stalinism did not more or less trample on the policies and legacy of Lenin and
of the early years of the Revolution. Far from being a continuation of Leninism
or its fulfilment, Stalinism was its counterrevolutionary negation. And in the
wider scheme of things it can be seen to be part of an international process of
counterrevolution which included Mussolini and the triumph of fascism in Italy,
the defeat of the British workers’ movement culminating in the General Strike
of 1926, the defeat of the Irish Revolution in 1923, the crushing of the
Chinese Revolution in 1927 and, above all, the victory of Hitler in 1933.
Will It Happen Again?
It is possible to
accept, at least in broad outline, the arguments presented here about the role
of objective conditions in shaping the rise of Stalinism and yet return to the
objection that, nevertheless Leninist ideology played a certain role in
facilitating the process. This is the position taken by Samuel Farber in his
book Before Stalinism and he defends his view as follows:
… most of the undemocratic practices of
‘Leninism in power’ developed in the context of a massively devastating civil
war and in fact cannot be understood outside such a context. But while this is
a very necessary part of the explanation for the decline and disappearance of
soviet democracy, it is by no means sufficient.[58]
In addition, he
argues, a significant role was played by what he calls Lenin’s ‘quasi-Jacobin’[59]
conception of revolution and revolutionary leadership. Similarly Simon Pirani
claims:
The Bolsheviks’ vanguardism and statism
made them blind to the creative potential of democratic workers’ organisations,
intolerant of other working class political forces and ruthless in silencing
dissent,
perhaps different choices in 1921 would
have made possible different types of resistance to the reimposition of
exploitative class relations.[60]
The problem with these arguments is that they can go on for ever
without there being any clear criterion of proof. ‘But, surely, Leninist
ideology played some part?’ How much of a part? 30 percent? 10 percent? 5
percent? And so on ad infinitum[61]. But
what really matters is not forming an exact estimation of the degree of
responsibility of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and their various theoretical and
practical mistakes, real and alleged, for later Stalinism, but whether or not building
a Leninist revolutionary party today invites a repetition of the Stalinist
nightmare, should that party succeed in leading a successful revolution.
The analysis presented above which starts, as Marxist
analysis should, from material conditions and the balance of class forces and
sees the rise and victory of Stalinism as fundamentally a process of class
struggle (rather than a product of ideology or psychology) suggests very
strongly that workers’ revolution today would not degenerate into a new version
of Stalinism.
The reasons for this are obvious. First, the hundred years
since 1917 have seen an immense global development of the forces of production
and a huge accumulation of wealth which in a revolution would be expropriated
by the working class. Any revolution in any major country today would begin on
a much higher economic foundation than the Russian Revolution did. Second, and
this is the most important thing, the working class internationally and in
almost every individual country is an enormously larger and stronger force than
it was in Russia. It would be far harder to dissolve and atomise it than was
the case in 1918-21 and the counter-revolutionary forces would not have the
base in the countryside that was the case then. Third, the global integration
of the world economy is also far, far more advanced and this would greatly
improve the possibility of spreading any successful revolution internationally.
The revolution in transport and communications would massively facilitate this.
In 1917 it took John Reed months to reach Petrograd and it was a couple of
years after the revolution before Western socialists like Gramsci got to read
much Lenin. Today, as we saw with the Arab Spring, the revolution would be live
streamed on the internet and revolutionary leaders and ordinary workers’ alike
would be able to appeal directly to the workers’ of the world to rise up in
solidarity. It would be highly effective.
Let us make for a moment the worst assumptions (assumptions
that I believe are false) about the intentions and ideology of the leaders of
the revolutionary party that has led the revolution in China or Brasil , Egypt , Spain
or Ireland
The Russian working class allowed it because they were
devastated and destroyed by unbelievably horrific conditions. To believe that a
future working class, in the absence of those conditions, would permit a
repetition of the Russian scenario is to take an extremely dim view of the
capacities of the working class and fall back into the crudest stereotypes of
the conservative ‘human nature’ theory which, of course, rules out socialism
and human emancipation in general.
If an essentially Leninist revolutionary party is necessary
for the victory of the revolution, as argued elsewhere in this journal, then
fear of a Stalinist-type outcome is no reason to refrain from building it.
[1] There
are numerous conflicting estimates of the death tolls in these famines and the
true figures will probably never be known but the figures I have cited here are
at the bottom of the spectrum.
[2] This
argument was particularly appealing in the 1930s when Russia’s economic
dynamism could be contrasted with the Great Depression in the West. But it was
also at this time that the Stalinist terror was at its height.
[3] See the
discussion of this ‘thrice shameful law’ in Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, London, p.149-151.
[4] See Leon
Trotsky, ‘Thermidor and Anti-Semitism’, 1937. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/02/therm.htm
[5] Karl
Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow 1966,
p. 817
[6] For
example: John Molyneux, Is Human Nature a
Barrier to Socialism? London 1993; The
Point is To Change it- An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy, London 2012,
especially Ch.8. and ‘Do revolutions always fail?’ Socialist Review, April 2014, http://socialistreview.org.uk/390/do-revolutions-always-fail.
[7] Chris
Harman, A People’s History of the World,
London, 1999, p. 545. See also Tony Cliff, ‘On the class nature of the people’s
democracies’ in Neither Washington nor
Moscow, London 1982, pp. 86 -100 and Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe:1945-83, London 1988, pp. 15-41.
[8] For
analysis of the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions and their class character see Tony Cliff, Permanent Revolution, International Socialism (1st series), 12,
Spring 1963. John Molyneux, What is the
Real Marxist Tradition? London 1985, pp. 41-65. Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao on
Modern China, London, 1978 and Mike Gonzalez, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, London 2004,
[9] It is
important to understand that there was an objective logic in this process which
operated independently of the ‘correctness’ or ‘sincerity’ of Mao’s or Castro’s
relation to Lenin.
[10] See the
evidence on this point in John Molyneux, ‘In Defence of Leninism’, Irish Marxist Review 3.
[11] See the
other articles by myself and James O’Toole in this issue and, for extensive
discussion of this issue, Paul Le Blanc
et al, October 1917:Workers in Power,
London 2016.
[12] Trotsky
argued that if Lenin had not been present in Petrograd
in 1917 the October Revolution would not have happened. Isaac Deutscher took him to task over this
saying that Trotsky’s claim violated the basic tenets of historical materialism
and citing Plekhanov on the, very limited, role of the individual in history.
See my discussion of the debate, where I side with Trotsky, in John Molyneux,
‘Is Marxism deterministic?’ International
Socialism 68, pp. 64-69.
[13] See for
example John Rees ‘In Defence of October’, International
Socialism 52, and the debate that followed: Robert Service, ‘Did Lenin lead
to Stalin?’; Samuel Farber, ‘In defence of democratic revolutionary socialism’;
Robin Blackburn, ‘Reply to John Rees’, and John Rees ‘Dedicated followers of
fashion’ in International Socialism 55.
[14] Witness
the major debate within the Bolshevik Party over the Brest- Litovsk Treaty in
which Lenin found himself, for some time, in a minority in his view that it was
necessary to sign the Treaty and in which it was only the unfolding of events
that enabled him to gain the majority.
[15] Victor
Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution,
London, 1992, p.76.
[16] As above.
[17] See
Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol 3, London
1978, p.18
[18] Victor
Serge, as above, p.59.
[19] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, p.304 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/nov/06a.htm
[20] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, p.381.
[21] Serge, as above, p.75.
[22] John
Rees, as above, p.33.
[23] See
above, p. 36. This article provides detailed descriptions of the atrocities
perpetrated by the Whites and gives a picture of the mindset and character of
the White Guard generals and their armies.
[24] Kaplan
fired three shots at Lenin. One bullet lodged in his neck, one in his shoulder.
The injuries permanently damaged his health and probably contributed to his
early death. Kaplan was executed on 3 September.
[25] John
Rees, as above, p.31.
[26] Tony
Cliff, Lenin, Vol.3, as above , p.90.
[27] Lenin,
‘On the Famine; A Letter to the Workers of Petrograd ’,
Collected Works Vol. 27. pp. 391-398.
[29] As
above, p. 439-40.
[30] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 88.
[31]
‘Resolution on War and Peace’, as above.
[32] This is
accepted even by the arch anti-Leninist, Leonard Shapiro. See L.Shapiro, The Russian Revolution of 1917, New
York, 1984, p.184.
[33] Tony
Cliff, Lenin, Vol.4, London 1979, p.
130.
[34] Cited
in Tony Cliff, Lenin Vol.4, as above,
p. 126.
[35] Victor
Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
Oxford, 1980, pp. 80-81. For Mandel’s assessment see E.Mandel, ‘October 1917:
Coup d’état or social revolution’ in Paul Le Blanc et al, October 1917: workers in power, London 2016, pp. 78-79. Were Serge
and Mandel correct on this point? Possibly,but the matter was complex,
including the fact that the foundation of the Cheka was very much an initiative
of the Left SRs and Lenin certainly did not have much control over it. Mandel
recounts an ‘anecdote’ that Lenin called in his old friend and adversary,
Martov, gave him a false passport and told him ‘Leave the country immediately.
If not the Cheka will arrest you in a few days and I would not be able to stop
them’. As above, p.78.
[36] See
Lenin, Collected Works, Vol..32,, p.
173. See also the account of Trotsky, who opposed the attack, in L.Trotsky, My Life, New York, 1970, pp. 457-460.
[37]
Particularly unfortunate in my view was the acceptance of this alleged
‘principle’ of single party rule by Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the
mid-1920s as if it were a doctrine of Marxist or Leninist theory when it was
nothing of the kind and initially introduced only as a temporary emergency
measure. Trotsky, later, corrected this in The
Revolution Betrayed, as above, pp. 265-68.
[38] Lenin,
‘On the Famine’. Collected Works,
Vol. 27, pp. 391-98.
[39] Victor
Serge, as above, p. 129.
[40] As above, p.128.
[41] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33,
p. 65.
[42] Hence
the emphasis on the principle of recallability from the Paris Commune through
The State and Revolution to the Soviets.
[43] See the
extensive discussion of this in Tony Cliff, Lenin,
Vol. 3 as above, Ch.13.
[44] Lenin,
‘Letter to Molotov’, 22 March 1922, Cited in Cliff, as above p.184.
[45] For
accounts of this period in Lenin’s life and his conflict with Stalin see Moshe
Levin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Ann Arbor , 2005, and Tony
Cliff, Lenin, Vol . 4, as above,
Ch.11-12.
[46] Quoted
in E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution
1917-23, Vol.3, Harmondsworth 1966, pp.135-6.
[47] See
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Oxford
1978, pp. 111-112.
[48] See
Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution,
London 1982, Ch.13.
[49] In April 1924 in The
Foundations of Leninism Stalin wrote: ‘The main task of
socialism – the organisation of socialist production – still remains ahead. Can
this task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be
attained without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced
countries? No, this is impossible.’ [cited in L.Trotsky, The Third
International After Lenin, New York
[50] Nikolai
Bukharin, who was allied to Stalin against Trotsky and then against Trotsky
plus Zinoviev and Kamenev, was both the main ’theorist’ of socialism in one
country and the representative within the Party leadership of the peasant
interest. For this reason Trotsky and the Left Opposition saw Bukharin as
constituting the right wing of the Party as opposed the Stalin in the centre.
[51] Stalin,
addressing a conference of business executives in 1931. Cited in Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, Harmondsworth, p.328.
[52] Isaac
Deutscher, as above, p.296.
[53] For
example, Leonard Schapiro, The Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, London 1970, p.282.
[54] Tony
Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia,
London 1974, p. 40.
[55] As above, p.35.
[56] The
likes of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin, Smirnov, Preobrazhensky,
Serebriakov, Rykov, Tomsky, Rakovsky, Antonov-Ovseenko and, of course, Trotsky.
[57] See
Tony Cliff, as above, pp.59-65. Victor Serge has left an absolutely
devastating picture of daily life at the lower end of Russian society in the
1930s, especially as regards women and children. See V. Serge, Destiny of a Revolution, London (n.d) pp. 26-40.
[58] Samuel
Farber, ‘In defence of democratic revolutionary socialism’, International Socialism 55, p.87.
[59] As above p.91.
[60] Simon Pirani , ‘Socialism in the 21st
Century and the Russian Revolution’, International
Socialism 128.
[61] These
issues have in fact been debated at great length in the pages of International Socialism (and
elsewhere) beginning with John Rees, ‘In Defence of October’, International Socialism 52, followed by
replies by Robert Service, Samuel Farber, David Finkel and Robin Blackburn and
a further response by John Rees, all in International
Socialism 55. The debate is resumed with Kevin Murphy and Simon Pirani in
IS 126 and 128 and John Rose and Sheila McGregor in IS 129. Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class
Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory, Chicago 2005, is also a major
contribution to this question.
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