From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
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Markin comment on this issue:
Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
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Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
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This pamphlet aims to explain the current rise in anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union by showing that it is not a new phenomenon, but is deeply rooted in old Russian traditions, and has been continually manipulated by the bureaucracy in order to provide a scapegoat to divert popular discontent away from the authorities onto another target.
It argues that the official promotion of anti-Semitism started in the mid-1920s, when Stalin hinted at the Jewish backgrounds of Trotsky, Zinoviev and other oppositionists, and “as Stalin consolidated his grip on Soviet society, the level of repression of Jews and Jewish organisations and institutions rose in tandem”. Stalin's measures against Soviet Jewry, the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ campaign of 1948-49, the ‘Doctor’s Plot’ and his plans for their deportation to the east, are described, as are the anti-Semitic measures of the post-Stalin era, the ‘economic’ trials, in which Jewish defendants were prominently featured, and the steady stream of anti-Semitic tracts masquerading as anti-Zionism.
Under glasnost many of the official restrictions upon Jewish employment have been lifted, but unofficial anti-Semitism has flourished. Pamyat and similar groups publish anti-Semitic works, encourage anti-Jewish activities, and enjoy considerable support among the more conservative bureaucrats.
The pamphlet’s view of Soviet anti-Semitism merely as a traditional hangover from Tsarist days, which the bureaucracy mobilises whenever it needs a scapegoat, is somewhat one-sided. These factors, real as they are, cannot fully explain the development of Soviet anti-Semitism.
The instances of anti-Semitism in the Communist Party that so shocked Trotsky in 1926 can be attributed to the influx of careerist, backward people during the period after Soviet rule had been consolidated, and their encouragement by unscrupulous elements like Stalin, who were not choosy about their methods in the fight against the oppositions. Yet in the late 1920s, the Soviet authorities embarked upon an extensive campaign against anti-Semitism. The closure of synagogues and the persecution of rabbis referred to in the pamphlet were part of a wider, clumsy anti-religious campaign, rather than a specifically anti-Jewish measure. The Moscow Trials and the terror of the late 1930s did occasionally have anti-Semitic overtones, such as prosecutor Vyshinsky’s reference to Jewish defendants by their long-forgotten family names, but it seems that the Jewish victims of the terror were not picked on specifically because of their ethnic background.
Up until the late 1940s, official anti-Semitism was not an important weapon in the arsenal of the bureaucracy. Its use was episodic and unsystematic, and reflected the prejudices of individual bureaucrats.
The pamphlet does not explain precisely why the vicious campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ blew up in 1948. It was an integral part of the atmosphere of the time, when Stalin fought the Cold War on the home front by sealing off the Soviet bloc from the rest of the world, and promoting virulent nationalist sentiments. Soviet Jews were an immediate target. That many of them had relations abroad, especially in the USA, and, after the terrible experiences they had suffered in wartime Europe, looked positively at the new state of Israel, was enough for Stalin to view them as potentially disloyal.
Anti-Semitism in the post-Stalin era does resemble the pamphlet’s concept of the bureaucracy’s manipulation of atavistic prejudices, but that is not the case under glasnost. Many of the official restrictions upon Jews have been removed, and if the government has not condemned anti-Semitism, it has not endorsed it.
Whilst anti-Semitic organisations have no lack of support within the state machine, an official anti-Semitic campaign is unlikely in the short term. Gorbachev needs all the support he can get, and most Soviet Jews support his reform policies. As the majority of Soviet Jews work within the state sector, a purge of several million people would be highly disruptive (which is probably why Stalin’s planned deportation of the Jews was abandoned after his death). Nevertheless, the open promotion of nationalism as the Soviet bureaucracy fragments along national lines, makes a resurgence of official anti-Semitism more likely.
Stalinism and Anti-Semitism contains a lot of useful information, and at 60p one can forgive its rather tatty appearance. But its ahistorical approach means that it cannot go beyond basic truisms, and cannot fully explain the development of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
Paul Flewers
This is at the same time both a bad and an important book – quite often for the same reasons. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, it is a child of glasnost, being the first Western study of the alliance to have made use of previously closed Soviet archive materials. This alone makes the book worth reading, for, as the author correctly points out, an enforced and near exclusive reliance on non-Soviet documentation has impeded attempts to understand the origins, significance and workings of the Pact. The author believes that his study of newly-available Soviet materials has enabled him to resolve previous doubts and differences over the Pact that were in part a result of this difficulty, and points to a series of conclusions, which he summarises at the beginning of his book. Those of special interest are as follows:
Roberts fares no better in his treatment of German ‘national Bolshevism’. Considering that its prime objective of an alliance with the USSR against the decadent Western liberal plutocracies was consummated by the Pact of 1939, one would have thought that this exotic – but highly symptomatic – political current would have merited more than a single paragraph (p.35). Surely he could have told us what Lenin thought of it, or made at least a passing reference to the outrageous ‘Schlagater’ speech delivered by Karl Radek to the Comintern Plenum of June 1923. Of the two, Lenin’s comments obviously carried greater weight and therefore, for us, have more interest. For example, in December 1920 he referred to a “political mix up in Germany” wherein the “German Black Hundreds [pro-Nazis – RB] sympathised with the Russian Bolsheviks in the same way as the Spartacus League does ...”, adding the telling point that this alignment had become “the basis ... of our foreign policy ...” [4] Another speech, made at the same time (but expunged, for obvious reasons, from editions of Lenin’s Collected Works) was even more explicit, referring to “an independent Poland” as being “very dangerous to Soviet Russia”. Moreover, “the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us to strangle Poland ...” [5] Maybe the author’s tendency to idealise the early years of Soviet rule (“diplomacy, even of the propagandist kind initially practised by the Bolsheviks, was eclipsed by revolutionary endeavour”, p.26) partly accounts for such blind spots. The ‘Third Period’ phase of the Comintern again saw the Soviet leadership – now in the hands of Stalin – speculating on the supposed advantages of an alliance with German chauvinism, only this time in the form of unadorned National Socialism. [6] Only by ignoring such evidence – and there is much more – is it possible to sustain the book’s thesis on the origins of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But even in the area where the author claims a special expertise – the new Soviet materials – his research, which is the most interesting part of the book, is vitiated by a determination to prove, come what may, that the Pact was forced on Stalin by a Western refusal to stand up to Hitler. Stated briefly, Roberts believes that what other historians and analysts have interpreted as signals to Hitler (notably Stalin’s March 1939 speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU, and the sacking of Stalin’s Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov two months later) have been seriously misconstrued, and that in fact Stalin was earnestly pursuing a military alliance with the West against Hitler right up to the very eve of the Pact’s signing on 23 August 1939. Yet all the evidence to refute this claim is to be found in one single collection of documents, available to the public since its publication in 1948 by the US State Department. Significantly, much of Roberts’ book is taken up with trying to minimise either the significance or reliability of this documentary collection, culled after the war from the Nazi Foreign Ministry archives. It must be said, whatever the book’s other merits, in this endeavour it fails lamentably. The first document in the collection is dated 17 April, but in fact the final turn had already been made. Even before Munich, Stalin had made clear, through a speech by Litvinov to the League of Nations on 23 September 1938 that the USSR “had no obligation to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her ...” and that the USSR consequently had a “moral right” to renounce its pact with the beleaguered Czechs [7], which of course Stalin promptly did, doubtless much to Hitler’s gratification. Hints of a possible alliance between the ostensible enemies quickly ensued. At a diplomatic reception in Berlin on 12 January 1939, Hitler singled out for special and friendly attention the new Soviet Ambassador Merekalov. Early in February, during a dinner party at the home of a German industrialist, General Keitel (executed after the war for atrocities on the Eastern front) discussed with the Soviet Military Attache the possibility of combined action against Poland. [8] Hitler was informed at once. The wheels were beginning to turn. Next came Stalin’s speech of 10 March to the Nineteenth Party Congress, in which he accused the Western Allies of inciting conflict between Germany and Russia. Russia was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for anyone. Of all the above events, Roberts mentions but the last – and only then to dismiss its significance as an olive branch to Hitler. Stalin “had little option, in the face of continuing German hostility, but adherence to the aim of creating an anti-Fascist alliance ...” (p.119). But, as we have seen, that hostility was waning. Hitler’s claims on Poland, followed by Western guarantees to maintain its existing frontiers, meant for the Nazis the risk of the dreaded war on two fronts, a prospect that drove Hitler inexorably towards securing his eastern flank by drawing Stalin into a new Polish partition. A Nazi diplomat reported that he could “discern in Stalin’s speech certain signs of a new orientation”. Roberts, despite all that ensued, does not think so. Yet sure enough, in a speech on 1 April, Hitler used the same code, repudiating any desire to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” (these were his actual words) by fighting the West’s battles against Russia. This speech was subsequently circulated by Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to the heads of all the European diplomatic missions. [9] On 12 May Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry issued a directive to the German press to maintain a total silence on relations with the USSR, following it up with another on 31 May warning that “now is not the time for an anti-Soviet campaign”. These moves only make any sense in the context of a Soviet approach, not to the Western Allies, but Hitler.
Roberts, it should be remembered, attributes no significance whatsoever to Stalin’s speech (or Hitler’s response to it, which he passes over) in preparing the ground for the Pact. Yet the documentary evidence totally refutes him. In the early hours of 24 August, during the celebrations that followed the signing of the Pact by Stalin and Ribbentrop, Molotov “raised his glass to Stalin – who through his speech of March this year, which had been well understood in Germany – had brought about the reversal in political relations”. Well understood in Germany ... but not by Roberts, who sees in it an attempt to secure an alliance with the Western Allies against Hitler! (Not to be outdone, Stalin also proposed a toast: “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”) [10] This is not the only document Roberts prefers in this instance to ignore, or in others, to misconstrue. Following hard on the heels of Stalin’s 10 March speech came the Nazi invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on 15 March. Three days later Litvinov delivered to the German ambassador in Moscow a note refusing to recognise the ensuing Nazi occupation as in any way legal. Yet on 17 April the Soviet ambassador called at the German foreign office in order to secure the continued “fulfillment of certain contracts for war material by the Skoda works” [11], which were, of course, situated in Nazi-occupied Czech territory. The report speaks of the Nazi response to the request as being regarded by the Soviets as “a test” of German intentions towards the USSR. The hint being taken, the talk then drifted towards and around the subject of the possibility of a drastic improvement in German-Soviet relations. Merekalov left almost at once to report back to Moscow. How does Roberts treat this encounter? Predictably as a routine diplomatic exchange, and a bid by a new ambassador to advance his career (pp.126-7). He also neglects to point out that the Soviet request to supply the requested war equipment was granted – hardly the action of a regime bent on immediate war with its customer.
Roberts’ next big hurdle is the sacking of Litvinov. It is the one that more than any other brings him down. On 3 May Litvinov, the salesman and, let us grant the possibility, maybe the advocate of a pro-Western, and therefore anti-Nazi orientation, was dismissed from his post as Soviet Foreign Minister. Roberts observes (correctly) that “in the West the most popular explanation had been that Litvinov (a Jew and an opponent of rapprochement with Nazi Germany) was removed to facilitate negotiations with Hitler ...” (p.128). Like many academics (and, it should also be said, Marxists of various persuasions) Roberts suffers from an organic aversion to anything that is either popular or obvious. The truth can’t ever be that simple. The more the evidence and the general consensus seem to point in one direction, the greater the urge to look in another. Something that is widely believed and appears obvious may or may not be true ... but whether it is true or not has nothing to do with either. Lacking any hard evidence to refute the ‘popular’ view, to which we shall return in a moment, Roberts asks us to believe that Litvinov’s removal was partly the result of a routine domestic party purge instigated by Beria, and partly also a “reshuffling” (sic) of diplomatic staff designed to bring forward a “new generation of Soviet diplomats” (p.l29). Rather like the Red Army “reshuffle” of 1937 perhaps? Only Litvinov was more fortunate than his colleagues, merely being placed under house arrest. Insofar as Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov sent out any international signals, says Roberts, they were intended not for Hitler but the Western Allies – “it would put further pressure on the French and British to come to terms” (pp.130-1). Yet no evidence is cited either to suggest that this was the intention, or that its supposed recipients perceived it as such. Rather the contrary. On 4 May 1939 the German embassy in Moscow reported back to Berlin on the sensational sacking of Litvinov, regarded – possibly correctly – as the major enemy of Nazi Germany in the Soviet leadership: “The decision apparently is connected with the fact that differences of opinion arose in the Kremlin on Litvinov’s negotiations” [with the British and French – RB]. There then follows a reference to Stalin’s 10 March speech and then this final comment: “Molotov (no Jew) is held to be ‘most intimate friend and closest collaborator of Stalin’. His appointment is apparently to guarantee that the foreign policy will be continued strictly in accordance with Stalin’s ideas”. [12] The very next day the Soviet Charge in Berlin reinforced this impression in a conversation with a German diplomat, inquiring whether the removal of Litvinov “would cause a change in our [the Nazi] position toward the Soviet Union”. [13] A signal to Britain and France? I find it incredible that Roberts, who has surely read this document, sees fit to pass it over in silence, preferring instead his entirely unfounded explanation of a domestic purge and renewed commitment to an alliance with the Western Allies.
The benchmark for this approach is established on the book’s very first page, when the reader is asked to accept its axiom that until the Pact, the Stalin regime had been “the bulwark of anti-Fascism”. As evidence of the Kremlin’s role as “the citadel of resistance to Fascism and militarism” he cites Soviet arms supplies to Spain and support for sanctions against Italy (p.44), overlooking that, in the latter case, Stalin continued to supply oil to Mussolini for the duration of his invasion of Ethiopia and intervention in Spain. Other judgements also cry out for comment. On page 77 we are told that Stalin’s policy in Spain “was unequivocally directed towards a Republican victory” and that to ascribe any “sinister, machiavellian motives” to it was “largely fantasy”. In order to sustain his case here, Roberts lumps together Soviet and International Brigade forces into a collective total of 40,000 men (p.78), thereby obliterating the vital distinction between the combatants of the brigades and the small and, from a military point of view, largely token Soviet personnel, who were expressly forbidden by Stalin to perform anything other than an advisory and instructional role to the Republican forces. The price the Republic had to pay for Stalin’s aid is so well documented that one can only gasp at the comment, on page 79, that NKVD terror apart, Stalin’s intervention in Spain was an “otherwise creditable episode” in pre-war Soviet foreign policy. Then in a puerile section (of less than two pages) on the reaction of the Comintern to the Pact, the new line is presented as “defeatist” (p.175). That was true (though not in the classic Leninist sense) only of those countries still fighting Nazi Germany, where the line was to make peace on the terms proposed jointly by Stalin and Hitler in October 1939, but not of those countries already conquered by the Nazis. Here the Comintern played a Quisling role, hiring itself out to Hitler in competition with home grown Nazi traitors. This policy met with some startling initial successes, notably in Belgium and Norway. [14]
For German itself, a third policy was adopted, one of a thinly veiled and utterly shameful ‘defencism’, together with demands that anti-Nazi opponents of the Pact be denounced to the Gestapo. Needless to say, this policy was advanced from the safety of neutral Sweden. In the immortal words of Walter Ulbricht, “if Germany were conquered [by Britain and France] the German workers would be treated in the same way” as were the workers in those countries – “the muzzling of the workers’ press, the establishment of concentration camps” [15], the inference being that by defending the Third Reich against the Western Allies, the German workers would prevent the establishment of censorship and concentration camps in their own country. (In fact, it was Hitler’s defeat that brought their abolition, at least in the Western zone. In the East it proved to be business as usual.) Of all Stalinist utterances, this must surely rank as not only the most perfidious, but also the most stupid. Roberts’ failure to recognise or come to grips with such nuances suggests that the Comintern is alien territory. But then so are Stalin-style elections. On page 189 we are informed, dead pan, that in the Baltic states, “elections were held to the new peoples’ assemblies which voted on 21 July to seek incorporation into the USSR, a wish which was duly granted by the Supreme Soviet in early August”, neglecting only to add that in each case the vote was unanimous. No mention is made at all of the hideous deportations and exterminations carried out by Stalin in the territories granted to him by his Nazi allies, the victims of which run into millions. In fact, so greatly appalling was the NKVD terror that there were recorded instances of Jewish refugees from the Nazi zone fleeing, or being driven, back to their near certain deaths under the lash of Stalinist pogroms. (See, for example, Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.128.)
The treatment of Stalin’s military assistance to Hitler during the Pact is likewise very sketchy, filling barely a single page. Mention is made of navigational aid provided by a radio station at Minsk for German aircraft attacking Poland from 1 September, but not of the joint Nazi-Soviet military headquarters stationed at Bialystock which coordinated the final annihilation of Polish armed resistance following Stalin’s stab in the back of 17 September. [16] The security Stalin provided for Hitler’s eastern front, enabling him to strike uninhibitedly in the West against Scandinavia, the low countries and France, is well known (though not evaluated by Roberts). But Stalin also rendered Hitler direct and active military assistance. German warships were equipped in Soviet yards (chiefly Murmansk) and allowed passage via the summer northern route into the Pacific, there to attack Allied shipping. [17] At a crucial moment during the Nazi naval landings in Norway (April 1940), a German tanker arrived from Murmansk, laden with Soviet oil, to refuel Hitler’s warships and landing craft. [18] And all this in addition to substantial, and in some instances indispensable, supplies of raw materials and fuel to the Nazi war machine right up to the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941.
Just why Roberts chose to write such an astonishing book is, I must confess, something of a mystery. All one can say for certain is that he elected to follow a path other than that dictated by the vast body of evidence available to him. I became convinced of this on reading his review, written for The Independent nearly a year after the appearance of his book on the Pact, of a new Soviet biography of Maxim Litvinov. Naturally, the purge of 3 May figures prominently in the review. But once again, Roberts cannot accept the possibility that Litvinov’s fall could have anything at all to do with changes in Stalin's policy towards Nazi Germany. “The problem with this view is that Soviet policy towards Nazi Germany did not change until that summer.” Once again he assumes what he is obliged to prove. He forces his opinions onto the facts, instead of basing his arguments upon them. The ghost of Beria is invoked once again to explain the elimination of the entire Litvinov team of diplomats. (Where have we heard that before?) As for his successor, Molotov’s “pursuance of Litvinov’s policy of alliance with the West was so successful that by August, the USSR had opened negotiations for a military pact with Britain and France. It was only when these failed that Stalin finally turned to Hitler.”
This is, quite simply, untrue. These negotiations began in Moscow on 12 August. So even if we were to concede Roberts’ arguments that the Pact was born later than all the sources suggest, and that only in “the first two weeks of August” did “Soviet foreign policy begin to make an appreciable shift in favour of an accommodation with Germany” (p.151), it remains to be explained how it was that even as War Minister Voroshilov conducted these “successful” negotiations with British and French military officials in Moscow, a yet more successful Ribbentrop was preparing to fly to the Kremlin to sign his Pact with Stalin. [19] Could it not be that Stalin’s dalliance with Britain and France was a cover (and a spur to Hitler) for the consummation of his Pact with the Nazis? Trotsky certainly thought so, and nothing in this book persuades me that he was wrong.
As far back as the period of the Nazi rise to power, Trotsky considered Stalin’s collaboration with the Nazis in such enterprises as the Prussian Red-Brown Referendum of 1931 [20] evidence of a Kremlin foreign policy aimed at “keeping alive German-French antagonisms”. [21] When the issue of Stalin’s German policy arose at the 1937 Dewey Commission investigation into the Moscow Trials (understandably in view of Stalinist accusations that Trotsky was a Nazi agent), Trotsky recalled how Isvestia greeted the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany ... “the USSR is the only state that is not nourished on hostile sentiments towards Germany ...” It was Hitler who repulsed Stalin, not the other way round. [22] Pressed on this point, Trotsky insisted that “Stalin declared and it was repeated in the press, that ‘we never opposed the Nazi movement in Germany’ ...” [23] All these observations, it should be remembered, were made at the high tide of the ‘People’s Front’ episode, when Litvinov’s pro-Western policy appeared to predominate. They suggest that almost alone amongst serious commentators of the day (and even now historians like Roberts, who with the supposed wisdom of hindsight and access to archives, should know better) Trotsky never took very seriously Stalin’s policy of ‘collective security’ against Nazi Germany, deriding it as a “lifeless fiction” and predicting, even before the conclusion of the Munich agreement, that “we may now expect with certainty Soviet diplomacy to attempt a rapprochement with Hitler ...” [24]
Trotsky pursued his hunch (for he lacked any tangible proof) on 6 March 1939, wondering whether a Stalinist boycott of a New York anti-Nazi demonstration was simply “conservative stupidity and hatred of the Fourth International” (for amongst the rally’s sponsors was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) or evidence that orders had gone out from Moscow to “muzzle” all anti-Fascist activities “so as not to interfere with the negotiations between Moscow and Berlin diplomats ... the next few weeks will bring their verification ...” [25] In fact it took four days, for on 10 March Stalin made his first public signal to Berlin. The very next day, Trotsky described the “chestnuts” speech as a sign of Stalin’s “new turn towards reaction”. While unsure as yet of the tempo or prospects of this new orientation, Trotsky nevertheless concluded that on the strength of this speech alone, “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler”. [26] And that at a time when the Western Allies, taking fright after the consequences of their capitulation at Munich became clear, had begun to court Stalin!
Here too Trotsky’s estimation diverges totally from that of Roberts (not to speak of all Stalinist, and most leftist inclined historians and commentators): “Today all the efforts of the British government are concentrated on concluding an agreement with Moscow – against Germany.“ Hitler, fearing encirclement and a possible war on all fronts, likewise looked to the Kremlin for insurance. As for Stalin, “from the first day of the National Socialist regime” he had “systematically and steadily shown his readiness for friendship with Hitler”.[27] Only when met with hostility did Stalin pass over to “collective security” and its political counterpart, the People’s Front. But even then, it was possible to detect “more intimate notes intended for the ears of Berchtesgarden ...” Consequently, in the scramble for partners, “if at last Hitler responds to Moscow’s diplomatic advances, Chamberlain will be rebuffed ... Stalin will sign a treaty with England only if he is convinced that agreement with Hitler is out of the question”. [28] Roberts’ entire book revolves around the contrary thesis that Stalin turned to Hitler because he felt let down by London and Paris.
Once signed, the Pact was roundly denounced by Trotsky. He failed to find in it any of the virtues detected by some of his more recent epigones. The Kremlin “preferred the status quo, with Hitler as its ally” to any advances for the workers’ movement. As for the rudely discarded ‘People’s Front’, it had proved to be nothing but a “low comedy”. Although unaware of the Pact’s secret protocols, he correctly predicted that “in exchange for Poland, Hitler will give Moscow freedom of action in regard to the Baltic states”. [29] And in view of his earlier and repeated declarations on the subject, he was surely entitled to point out “since 1933 I have been showing and proving to the world press that Stalin is seeking an understanding with Hitler”. Brushing aside apologists for Stalin's ‘treason’ (and they are amazingly still in business today), Trotsky damned the Pact as “a capitulation of Stalin before Fascist imperialism with the end of preserving the Soviet oligarchy”. Not, it should be noted, the “gains of the revolution”. The Pact’s only “merit” was that “in unveiling the truth it broke the back of the Comintern”. [30] Trotsky found “completely absurd” the idea that Stalin’s seizures of territory involved any challenge to Hitler. (Muffled echoes of this argument can still be found in Trotskyist publications.) “It is much more probable that Hitler himself inspired Stalin to occupy eastern Poland and to lay his hands on the Baltic states.” The documentary evidence here proves Trotsky completely correct, as it does also in the case of Stalin’s “shameful war” against Finland. [31] Finally – and here too in defiance of contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion – Trotsky foresaw that Stalin’s diplomacy, far from averting Hitler’s long announced crusade against the USSR, had instead enabled Hitler to eliminate the Polish ‘buffer’ protecting Russia from a Nazi invasion. [32] Perhaps part of the difficulty in assessing Stalin’s reasons for concluding his alliance with Hitler comes from assuming that his motives were purely political. In his uncompleted biography of Stalin, Trotsky argues that “Stalin’s union with Hitler satisfied his sense of revenge ... He took great personal delight in negotiating secretly with the Nazis while appearing to negotiate openly with the friendly missions of England and France ... He is tragically petty”. [33] (Lenin – amazingly late for one normally so shrewd – also discovered spite to be one of his General Secretary’s mainsprings of action.)
Going back over Trotsky’s writings on German-Soviet relations, one cannot but be impressed at the way in which his step-by-step analysis of events is, not only in outline, but often in the smallest details, borne out by documentary materials to which, in contrast with Roberts, he could not possibly have had access. One wonders what he would have been able to achieve with them.
Robin Blick
2. See for example the documents presented in Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, OUP, 1958, and Pearson, The Sealed Train, Macmillan, 1975.
3. For this and other instances of early Soviet collaboration with German nationalist forces, see Adam Westoby and Robin Blick, Early Soviet Designs on Poland, in Survey, Volume 26 no.4 (117), Autumn 1982.
4. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31, p.300.
5. Westoby and Blick, p.124.
6. For more detail, see Robert Black (Robin Blick), Fascism in Germany, London 1975.
7. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy (Ed. Jane Degras), Volume 3, p.305, OUP, 1953. On Stalin’s indifference to the fate of Czechoslovakia, see Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army, London, 1940, pp.284-5.
8. A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, London 1950, p.6.
9. Ibid., p.8.
10. Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.76.
11. Op. cit., p.1.
12. Op. cit., pp.2-3.
13. Op. cit., p.3.
14. See F. Borkenau, European Communism, Faber and Faber, 1953, pp.253-7.
15. Quoted in op. cit., p.249.
16. Rossi, op. cit., p.60.
17. Rossi, op. cit., p.96.
18. D. Irvine, Hitler’s War, Macmillan, 1985, p.98.
19. On Stalinin’s double dealing see: Rossi, op. cit., pp.37-8, Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, Volume 1, London 1961; Wollenburg, pp.290-2.
20. See Black, op. cit., for details and background.
21. Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, 1973, p.25.
22. The Case of Leon Trotsky, Merit, 1968, p.293.
23. Op. cit., p.311.
24. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, Pathfinder, 1974, p.29.
25. Op. cit., p.203.
26. Op. cit., pp.216-9.
27. Op. cit., p.350.
28. Op. cit., pp.350-5.
29. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder, 1973, pp.76-7.
30. Op. cit., pp.81-3.
31. Op. cit., pp.113, 116.
32. Op. cit., pp.79, 97.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Stalin, London 1947, p.415.
In the last year or two of his life Trotsky had several metaphors for the Communist International of Stalin and Dimitrov. He called it a corpse; but the Kremlin was to require this corpse to display a few more twitches of life before finally ordering its dissolution in 1943. Trotsky also called it a cesspit – a dunghill, to use the most direct English rendering. With this cloacal image Trotsky conveyed his profound disgust at the terminal degeneration of the body he had helped to found in 1919, at its ‘doglike servility’, at its transformation into a docile instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in the autumn of 1939 sold it to Hitler “along with oil and manganese”. [1] This book shows in detail – word for word – what went on in the leadership of one section of that dunghill in belated response to the German-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War.
On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.
But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line. Monty Johnstone points out in his Introduction to About Turn that neither the Executive Committee of the Comintern (which had not held a plenary meeting for four years) nor its Presidium (of which Pollitt was a full and Gallacher a candidate member) was in any way involved in this policy switch. Dimitrov had then briefed D.F. Springhall, the CPGB’s representative at Comintern headquarters. Springhall got back from Moscow on the evening of 24 September with the theses in his head; they were to follow him in a more tangible form soon afterwards.
Waiting for Springhall must have been a trying time for the leading British Stalinists. But the week that followed his brief report must have been agonising. The CC stood adjourned for a week, and in the meantime the Daily Worker’s line on the war was totally unclear. It published material so fence-sitting and so confused that much damage was done to the party’s credibility, even amongst its own members. This resulted from sharp differences between the three-man secretariat (Dutt, Springhall and William Rust) to whom Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary, and the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, J.R. Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley).
When the CC resumed on 2 October, Dutt complained bitterly of this “complete incoherence worse either than the old line or the new”, told his comrades that “the duty of a Communist is not to disagree but to accept”, and, in a thinly veiled reference to Pollitt, warned that anyone who deserted now would be branded for his political life. Gallacher complained of the “rotten”, “dirty”, “unscrupulous”, and “opportunist” factional methods used by Dutt and his supporters, those “three ruthless revolutionaries”. They had shown “mean despicable disloyalty” and it was impossible for him to work with them. Campbell, ardent defender of the Moscow Trials and pitiless scourge of Trotskyism, said the CPGB would soon be indistinguishable from “the filthy rabble of Trotskyists”. The shipbuilding worker Finlay Hart objected to Dutt’s telling them to “accept or else”. Maurice Cornforth, philosopher-to-be, said he agreed with something he had once heard Pollitt say: the Soviet Union could do no wrong. “This is what we have to stick to”, he observed, adding that the new line didn’t mean cooperation with the Trotskyists, whose line, he was certain, would be “based on anti-Soviet slanders”. Rust said Gallacher saw himself as a kind of elder statesman who attended meetings when he felt like it, while Campbell was presenting British imperialism as a man-eating tiger turned vegetarian. Burns said Dutt’s opening statement had been “peculiarly low and dastardly”. Dutt and his supporters had used “the most vile factional methods”; they wanted as many as possible to vote against the theses so that the could be “represented as the real nucleus of the Comintern to carry the line forward in the British party”. They were attempting to clear themselves with Moscow by explaining how pure they were. Springhall said no comrade who had a conversation with Comrade Dimitrov could fail to learn something from him, and accused Campbell of thinking that the Soviet Union was only concerned to save its own skin.
Harry Pollitt showed himself as reluctant as Campbell to depart from the Popular Front line of the Comintern’s 1935 Seventh Congress. In politics, he said, there was neither friendship nor loyalty. He told Dutt: “You won’t intimidate me ... I was in this movement practically before you were born.” He had never heard a report so bankrupt and devoid of explanation as Springhall’s. Springhall had had no responsibility for drafting the theses: he was just a messenger boy (“what Strang was for Chamberlain”). “I was never an office boy”, said Pollitt. “If there is one thing that is clear it is that the fight against Fascism has disappeared and Fascism has now, because of its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, taken on a progressive role.” Soviet policy had antagonised important sections of the working class movement. The new line was in essence a betrayal of the labour movement’s struggle against Fascism – a word, he added bitterly, it was becoming unfashionable to mention. He himself wanted to “smash the Fascist bastards once and for all”.
So much for the first day of the resumed meeting. Little that was new was added on the second, final, day. John Gollan, Ted Bramley, Idris Cox and Peter Kerrigan expressed support for the new line, though Bramley wanted to know why there had been so little consultation by the Comintern (a point later re-emphasised by Gallacher); and Kerrigan (“I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken”) said he had been flabbergasted when the Red Army marched into Poland. “If ... Comrade Pollitt is not convinced of the correctness of the line we will have to consider arranging for him to have a talk in Moscow”, suggested Cox, in words that still have a rather sinister ring 51 years later. Jimmy Shields, long a party functionary, said that “when the Soviet Union makes a move we should support it, whether it [such support] is considered to be mechanical or not”. The railway worker William Cowe said the Comintern was his “guiding light”. When the vote was taken, only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against the new line – though Pollitt later asked, successfully, that Gallacher’s vote be recorded as being in favour.
Here is our closest, most intimate picture of the Stalinist method as it was used in Britain by these fearless fighters for Socialism, these battle-hardened cadres, these veterans of the Lenin School, these tenth-rate bureaucrats whom we watch here jockeying for the privilege of being recognised as Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in Britain. The picture I was given, when I joined the Young Communist League in 1942, and for the next 14 years, was of a party that had always been truly monolithic, where deep friendship and mutual loyalty had always prevailed. Pollitt and Dutt, we were given to understand, went together like Sohrab and Rustam, or port and nuts. The picture that emerges from this book is totally different, and helps to explain why Pollitt would never enter the Daily Worker building so long as Rust was its editor. (Perhaps it also helps to explain why Dutt left his private papers not to the CPGB, as one would have expected, but to the British Library.)
What also emerges, to an extraordinary degree, is the degree of criticism of, and even hostility to, the Soviet Union and the Comintern expressed in unguarded moments by people who, in public and for their own good reasons, were prepared to swallow those doubts and even forget later that they had ever entertained them. Dutt reports and reprobates this, in a striking passage where he speaks of “anti-International tendencies, a contemptuous attitude to the International, the kind of thing that began already from the time of the [Moscow] trials, talk of collapse of the International, talk of the Soviet Union following its interests”. These were “a reflection of enemy outlooks”. Even Rust, according to Gallacher, had complained that the CPGB was becoming the “propaganda department of the Soviet foreign office”.
And here surely is the key to the whole debate. For the British propaganda department of Stalin’s Foreign Office is precisely what they had by now become, after 15 years’ Stalinisation of their party. As T.A. Jackson had so presciently warned in 1924: “Our job is only to carry out all instructions at the double, and to stand to attention until the next order comes.” [3] The depth of the CPGB leaders’ uneasiness about their rôle, here revealed so poignantly and at the same time so farcically, shows Trotsky’s wisdom in advising his supporters, in the following June, to devote more attention to the rank and file of the Communist parties: “On the day that Moscow makes a half turn towards the democracies as a half friend, there will be a new explosion in the ranks of the CP. We must be ready to gain from it. I consider the possibilities in the CP very good despite the transitory radicalness of the CP, which cannot be for long.” [4]
Trotsky, not for the first time, was here over-optimistic about the immediate possibilities; but about Stalinism’s inherent volatility and instability he was absolutely right in the long term. The era of ‘explosions– is of course long over; Stalinism and its organisations are now decomposing before our eyes. Those who seek to profit politically from this process urgently need to learn a lot more about Stalinism’s past. This book makes a useful starting-points. [5]
Peter Fryer
2. The full text of this manifesto appears in 1939: The Communist Party of Great Britain and the War, ed. John Attfield and Stephen Williams, Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp.147-52.
3. Communist Review, Volume IV (1923-24), p.539.
4. Discussions with Trotsky: 12-15 June 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p.254. Trotsky was of course referring to the CPUSA, but his advice no doubt had more general application in the 1939-41 period.
5. Unfortunately the editing of this book is far from flawless. There are many fairly obvious mishearings or errors of transcription. The word ‘not’ should clearly come before the words ‘playing its part’ in line 19 on p.68; the word ‘decision’ in the bottom line of p.85 should, I imagine, be ‘discipline’; ‘work’ in line 8 of p.148 should undoubtedly be ‘war’; ‘Dutt’ in line 18 of p.150 seems to be an error for some other name; ‘loosen’ in line 34 of p.148 should perhaps be ‘lessen’; the word ‘Springhall’ should appear in bold type at the beginning of line 3 of p.188; ‘principal questions’ in line 27 of p.188 should probably be ‘principled questions’; ‘clearly’ in line 4 of p.202 should certainly be ‘clearer’; ‘Cox’ in line 6 of p.250 should plainly be ‘Kerrigan’; ‘don’t’ in line 19 of p.266 should surely have been deleted; lines 16-21 on p.292 seem to have strayed in from later in that section. There are similar errors elsewhere, not to mention a number of misprints. Nor are the Biographical Notes wholly reliable: eg Jim Roche ceased to be a CPGB full-timer in 1956, not 1957. To cap it all, the indexes are a disgrace: these lazily compiled and forbidding strings of page numbers virtually unrelieved by sub-headings are of little use to the serious student. For Lawrence and Wishart to charge £34.95 for such a shoddily edited book surpasses mere effrontery.
The rapidity and extent of the political, social and economic changes now taking place in Eastern Europe, and the fact that they are clearly the outcome of a very long process, make it all the more urgent for revolutionaries to grasp the meaning of what is happening, a task that cannot even be started without an appreciation of the class character of these states and of their laws of motion and development. The reaction of the international Trotskyist movement to this most fundamental of ideological challenges has been most disappointing, and what has so far appeared can be placed in two clearly defined categories, those that are works of apologetic, of the ‘we-were-right-all-the-time’ kind of argument, where the organisation had failed to foresee a single thing, and those that continue to hedge their bets, of the ‘confused-situation-that-can-go-either-way’ variety, where the group which publishes them clearly does not have a clue. A disappointing feature of both types is the lack of any attempt to trace the development of Soviet and Eastern European society as a whole since 1917.
It is one of the many strengths of this book that its author has not only seen that this is the main problem, but has done his utmost to address it. It is a thoughtful, and indeed in many ways, an ideologically exciting book. Whether you accept its main thesis or not, and it will emerge from what is written below that this reviewer does not, it will still challenge your presuppositions and force you to rethink your ideas from top to bottom in the most rigorous way. And unlike most would-be Marxist texts these days, it is written in intelligible English, which is no small gain as well.
The most arresting part of it is that it reminds us of Lenin’s basic definition in State and Revolution, so long ignored or forgotten by those who regard themselves as revolutionaries, of what a workers’ state really is, a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.119). This workers’ state, he points out, “in effect creates a single capital” (p.132). There was thus no question of the immediate abolition of wage labour, that essential component of capitalism, in the Soviet Union: “... the workers’ state inherits a capitalist economy and must therefore live with it at the same time that it transforms it – it is indeed a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.125). “It would not be incorrect”, he concludes, “to call the post 1917 Soviet Union a ‘deformed workers’ state’ almost from the start, a workers’ state whose transition was disastrously hampered by its backwardness and isolation” (pp.142-3).
Here he comes close to the heart of the matter, that the very term ‘workers’ state’ is a dialectical contradiction. It remains bourgeois in the sense that, like any other state, it defends property, but with this proviso, that the property in question is public rather than private. But since the historic task of this state is its own abolition, its withering away, although the workers have created it by means of a revolution, and the state is thus ‘owned’ by them, it still remains a bourgeois instrument and rests upon the exploitation of wage labour, thereby having a high bourgeois content from the start. The author has thus stumbled on a truth that few Trotskyists have ever even noticed, that there is not, and never could be, any such thing as a ‘healthy’ workers’ state, “a grotesque label, if ever there was one, given the reality”, notes Daum carefully (p.143), even when applied to that of Lenin and Trotsky. Thus, if instead of withering away this state power strengthens itself – and in the conditions of the Soviet Union following 1917 there was no question of any other development – its bourgeois content must increase, and it ceases by slow and imperceptible degrees to represent much of the interests of the working class.
Another highly successful part of this exercise is Daum’s destruction, down to the last brick, of the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ created by the International Secretariat to explain the establishment of the ‘peoples’ democracies’ in Eastern Europe after 1945 (pp.310-5). If the nationalisation of the majority of the economy is really the touchstone of what a workers’ state is, he points out, the Soviet Union itself did not become one until the end of 1918; and the idea that a bourgeois state can become a workers’ state by ‘structural assimilation’ really amounts to saying that “Socialist transformation can be achieved without overthrowing the bourgeois state” (p.313). “Such a theory echoes the revisionist method of Bernstein”, he rightly points out (p.312), describing it as “the hallmark of reformism” (p.313). But whilst successfully highlighting Mandel’s dilemma, we shall see that Daum abandons his own methodology when it comes to the Soviet Union, which he believes was a workers’ state until 1936-39, when it was replaced by a bourgeois state, created not as a result of the smashing of the state by armed conquest or internal counterrevolution.
It is precisely in his attempt to apply his own real insights to Eastern Europe that he halts halfway. He correctly draws our attention to that elementary proposition of Marxism, so long and so often forgotten by its would-be practitioners, that the working class revolution is qualitatively different from the revolutions of all other classes by its conscious character; “the creation of a workers’ state”, he points out, “is not just a matter of economic forms; it is the result of a social revolution that places state power in the hands of the working class. Since it inaugurates the period of transition it is in fact the Socialist revolution. And it must be the conscious achievement of the masses.” (p.311) Since he believes that in seizing state power from the Nazis and their puppets, the Stalinists carried out political, not social, revolutions (p.315), he argues that “the proletarian label for the Stalinist states amounts to a cynical rejection of the Marxist conclusion that a workers’ state can be established only through the workers’ conscious activity” (p.13). He is thus obliged to argue that the only feasible theory, that of Haston and Vern/Ryan, is impossible per se: “if the date of the Eastern European revolution is put at 1944-45, then the Stalinist forces became the agent of proletarian revolution at the very moment when they were crushing the movement of workers’ revolt“ (pp.322-3). But in stressing the conscious factor to the exclusion of everything else, he forgets his previous insight, that the workers’ state, being a bourgeois state, also has features in common with all other states, one of which is that it consists of armed men standing in defence of property. Social overturns can take place by armed conquest from abroad, and the possibility of this arose within the lifetime of Lenin in Poland, and its realisation actually took place in the case of Georgia. In the light of the development of Eastern Europe we can surely now affirm that if the Soviet army had indeed conquered Poland in 1919, without the involvement of the Polish working class, and, indeed, in contradiction with their wishes, we would have had a ‘Stalinist’ state in Poland nearly a decade before we got one in the Soviet Union, which actually happened in the case of Georgia, a couple or so years later. For it was Marx himself who explained a long time ago, with reference to the imperialism of the nineteenth century, that the victor in a war involving states of a different socio-economic character imposes its property forms upon the vanquished, that in effect a war between states of a different class nature partakes of the character of an international civil war.
We might add, incidentally, that those who believe that it requires individual, separate revolutions to form new states have certainly got a lot of explaining to do, as the spread of the bourgeois revolution in Europe after 1789 in the first instance took place on the bayonet points of Napoleon’s troops rather than by separate insurrections of the bourgeois class in each country. Daum thus signally fails to grasp what was really at issue in Trotsky’s analysis of the changes in the property forms of Eastern Poland in 1939 as set forth in In Defence of Marxism. “Trotsky seems torn between crediting a revolutionary overturn to the masses and denying the revolutionary character of the Stalinists’ acts”, he concludes (p.318). Yet he himself has already supplied the answer to this conundrum. If a workers’ state really is “a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie”, and if the workers subject to wage labour within it are simultaneously a ruling and an oppressed class, then the operations of this counter-revolutionary workers’ state are bound to take on precisely this character. Daum contradicts his own theory by stating that “the Stalinist social overturn came only later” (p.313), when, in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, “the old bourgeoisies were overthrown” (p.310). He is evidently oblivious of the fact that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who destroyed the embryo capitalist classes in Eastern Europe, and that the complete annihilation of capitalist property forms in the region, by then dominated by German imperialism, came upon Hitler’s defeat. In fact, the truth is that Stalin tried to recreate a native capitalist class in these areas, an attempt he had to abandon when it was obvious that Marshall Aid could well succeed where he was failing, and recreate these classes as clients of American finance capital.
There is far more to this book, however, than can be restricted to these considerations. On the purely historical side Daum provides a devastating picture of the ideological degeneration of the Fourth International, that is, if you accept that there still was one, which this reviewer would not. He shows how the postwar theory of the Trotskyists did not even explain what was happening at the time, still less being able to predict anything, and certainly being utterly useless as a guide to any action of any sort. It began as a complete failure to understand the nature of the postwar world (pp.292ff), continued happily on its way in the ridiculous somersaulting over the nature of the Eastern European states in 1948 (p.311), and when it finally settled down – if it ever did – it left them with an outlook that would not allow them to identify which were workers’ states and which were not (p.313), when this crucial class transformation was supposed to have taken place (p.314), and even with the view that it was possible to have states that had no class characterisation at all (p.314). In terms of activity Daum rightly highlights the importance of the betrayal of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (pp.325-6), whilst strangely neglecting the lack of reaction to the behaviour of the LSSP during the Great Hartal a year later (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.1, Spring 1989, pp.38-43). But whilst it may be true that Bolivia 1952 was the ‘Fourth of August’ of the Fourth International, to use Trotsky's phrase of Germany in 1933, Daum’s analysis leads him to look for the roots of this Stalinist-type degeneration after the end of the war and in the confusion over Eastern Europe. He is thus obliged to accept the myth of ‘Pabloite revisionism’, that it is a creation of the European leadership of the mid- and later 1940s. This is contrary to the clear evidence that adaptation to Stalinism originates with the SWP during the war (as Natalia Trotsky and Grandizo Munis pointed out), and indeed with James P. Cannon himself, in his support for the activity of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944-45, and in the contention that it was still “Trotsky’s army” and not Stalin’s (cf. Max Shachtman, From the Bureaucratic Jungle, part 2, in The New International, Volume 11 no.2, March 1945, pp.48-9).
It is no coincidence that the SWP dropped transitional politics at exactly the same time, and Daum shows that, coming from the same American milieu with the lack of an autonomous working class political movement of any sort, he has no real grasp of them eithcr. “In Britain”, he notes solemnly, “instead of exposing a Labour Party that helped bury the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, the left dug itself ever more deeply into it” (p.22). He thus belongs to that school of idealist ‘Marxism’ that thinks that you can destroy the Labour Party by ‘exposing’ it, i.e. by mere name-calling from outside. Perhaps a bit more reading might come up with the information that it was Engels who urged the trade unions to set up such a party, and that it was Lenin and Trotsky who advised us to “dig more deeply” into it. The “leftward motion of the workers” (p.295), for example, that Daum seems to think is a necessary condition for it, was far from taking place in the British Labour Party when Trotsky advised entry in 1936, and indeed did not take place until 1944. In fact, he shows on more than one occasion that he does not understand the ‘workers’ government’ slogan of the Transitional Programme at all. According to him, when the Bolsheviks raised the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’, “the purpose of Lenin’s tactic was to place the Mensheviks in office so that their subservience to capitalism would be made visible to all” (p.316). But that is the whole point; the slogan means exactly what it says – power, not ‘office’, for part of the time the Bolsheviks were using that slogan the Mensheviks were already in ‘office’, in Kerensky’s government! If it were possible for a reformist party to break with the bourgeoisie and take power, the result would be a workers’ revolution, not a government that “could only have a fleeting existence”, which could either lead “to the workers’ revolution, or it is defeated” (p.316). The whole point of this slogan as a practical, non-sectarian, united front method of demonstrating the class character of the reformists, of really ‘exposing’ them, is to show to their followers that they do not want power for their party at all, but office in a bourgeois state.
There are other indications that Daum’s grasp of Marxism is not as sure as it could be. At one point he argues against Lenin’s concept that revolutionary consciousness had to be brought to the working class from outside, from the declassed bourgeois intelligentsia, in other words (pp.105ff). Apart from the argument about conditions determining consciousness, he has clearly forgotten from which class Marx, Engels, Trotsky, etc., really originated. A very strained argument (pp.274-6) tries to prove that the Soviet Union can still be imperialist, even if it does not export capital in the Leninist sense, giving as its clinching argument that “Czardom had little capital to export” (p.275). Now this really is playing with words, for however penetrated Czarist Russia was becoming by capital, and however ‘feudal’ some of its institutions appeared to be, its ‘imperial’ character was that of an Asiatic Empire, a state form that long predates capitalist society, and indeed every other form of class society as well. He also indulges in over generalisations, categorically denying what Engels treats as a possibility in Anti-Dühring when he states that “no bourgeoisie has gone so far as to abolish private property completely by entrusting its ownership function to the state” (pp.80-1), an assumption that may well need modification if we look at short periods in the history of Israel just after its foundation and of Chiang’s China as it tottered to its doom in 1945-49.
But it is a measure of the power of the author’s reasoning that it supplies the main refutation to the thesis defended by his own book. A major part of his argument against the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ is that by molecular change a state that was once a bourgeois state cannot become a workers’ state without a smashing and recreation of the state apparatus. Such a theory, he argues, leaves us with no guidelines for deciding when a state ceases to be a bourgeois state and becomes one ruled by the workers. But these same arguments are equally valid when applied to the reverse process – counter-revolution. Despite the claim that “this book’s political standpoint is Trotskyist” (p.7), this is demonstrably not the case. It is, in fact, a ‘state capitalist’ analysis of Russia that places the period of the erection of a bourgeois state in 1936-39. Yet the state had the same structure, and even the same personal dictator, before and after this period. This argumentation (pp.170ff) is quite the least convincing part of the book. All sorts of elaborate rationalisations are indulged in to prove the point, as regards both domestic and foreign policy. A quite extraordinary juridical significance is ascribed to the Stalin Constitution of 1936, in spite of the fact that both its author and reviser were shot within two years. In going over the work methods, the exploitation, the labour code, the purges and the terror, he is unable to surmount the problem that the state that implemented them was the same state before and after, which had developed by uninterrupted stages from 1917 onwards. He even tries to pretend that the outright class collaboration of the Popular Front was qualitatively different from previous betrayals, such as Pilsudski’s accession to power in Poland, Chiang’s smashing of the Second Revolution in China in 1927-28, or Hitler’s rise in Germany.
In fact, the same disarray exists amongst state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union as Daum identifies among the Trotskyists with regard to Stalinism after 1945. When did it become a bourgeois state? Along the way he supplies a pretty effective demolition job on the views of Tony Cliff, that the crucial counter-revolution in class terms came about in the period of 1928-29, but in so doing supplies the ammunition for destroying his own dating of this alleged change. State capitalism as a concept turns out to be quite as unscientific as the ‘Pabloism’ he so roundly castigates, since unless it becomes part of the totality of what a ‘workers’ state’ really is, it comes into head-on collision with the class theory of the state. The truth is that the only state capitalist theories that can lay claim to any scientific basis at all are those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and of some of the Mensheviks, who would place Russia’s bourgeois revolution in the setting up of this very state form in 1917.
But the basic thesis of this very fine book, that what we have since 1917 is a continued degeneration of a workers’ revolution in the direction of pure capitalist forms, becoming ever more alienated in structures (Pol Pot’s Cambodia!) and in methods (military bureaucratic conquest and peasant insurrection) cannot be faulted. Comrade Daum is of the opinion – and he argues his case with vigour and imagination – that the crucial change from quantity into quality took place in the Soviet Union in 1936-39. I would argue that we are on the point of witnessing it now, but that it will still require a break at the level of state power, in spite of the ever more warped and degenerated forms through which workers’ power is still expressed.
Al Richardson
This short work contains a handy outline of the development of the Trotskyist movement and the first half of it can certainly be recommended, though it is heavily slanted towards the discussion of ideas alone and gives little of the flavour of the activity of their proponents in the labour movement at ground level. It is also slanted towards Britain and America, on the excuse of “the bias of my knowledge towards British and American Trotskyism” (p.3). Since the number of Trotskyists in one Latin American country alone well outnumbers the Trotskyists of Britain and the USA put together many times over, we may well question this affidavit, and our suspicions receive confirmation when out of a list of 16 supposedly prominent Marxist thinkers of today three of them were modestly attributed to the British Socialist Workers’ Party three pages earlier.
Thus the wisdom of the publishers in inviting this book from a representative of so aberrant and peculiarly British a group, which apparently now sees itself as the founder of something which is “generally known as the International Socialist tradition” (p.74) may well be doubted, for the link of the SWP with Trotskyism is very tenuous indeed, rejecting as it does transitional politics, the theory of permanent revolution, and the analysis of Soviet degeneration. Thus, for example, Callinicos appears to believe that it was the second half of the Bolshevik slogan – ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ that constituted its transitional character, as opposed to the first (‘All Power to the Soviets’, in effect calling upon the Menshevik and SR leaders to take power) (p.40). His definition of entrism as “a kind of raiding party for members” (p.34) says volumes for the politics of the SWP, but next to nothing about Trotskyism.
For it is when he turns to the politics of his own milieu, in the last two chapters, that he confirms Lenin’s dictum that a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey. This is most clearly shown when he tries to justify his previous contention that whereas Shachtman and Castoriades carried out “revisions of orthodoxy”, Tony Cliff’s endeavours marked a “return to classical Marxism” (pp.4-5).
We may well agree with him, for the truth is that state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union do not originate within the Trotskyist movement at all, but within Second International Social Democracy in general, and in Menshevism in particular. It is true that he very easily disposes of a straw man when he repudiates Perry Anderson’s opinion that the father of ‘state capitalism’ was Karl Kautsky (p.77), pointing out correctly that Kautsky's concept was not the same as Cliff’s at all, hoping in this way to draw a blind over the whole topic. But the fact of the matter is that the credit for this particular form of state capitalism should go back to the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who taught Jock Haston his Marxism in the first place (cf. Against the Stream, p.251) and had promulgated the theory as far back as 1918. For it was Haston who first raised the question of state capitalism within the Revolutionary Communist Party, not only as a purely Russian phenomenon but in global terms, both in the group’s internal bulletin (War and the International, pp.182-5) and in a series of articles in Socialist Appeal (mid-August to mid-September 1947). In fact Cliff’s remit from Mandel when he first came to Britain was specifically to argue against these incipient ‘state capitalist’ heresies, and what happened was that in the course of the dispute the contestants changed sides. Anyone who wishes to make a serious investigation of the whole topic should consult the above sources, as well as the SPGB’s position, which was reissued as a pamphlet in the same year as Cliff first published his own, though we have to admit that Cliff’s logic is inferior to theirs, since they dated Russia's capitalist revolution back to 1917.
Al Richardson
Here is the book which will undoubtedly be the standard reference for its period for South African trade unions and their associated politics. The weaknesses of independent black and working class political organisations made the trade unions of pivotal importance during the whole of this time. Yet the trade unions themselves were often more glimpses of what might have been than anything else. The trade unions considered here were mostly short-lived, fissiparous, and individually all too frequently left hardly a trace. Despite all of this, however, this is a landmark book which is essential for any real understanding of the politics of South Africa then or subsequently.
The material is densely packed and immensely detailed, but justifiably so; perseverance will be rewarded. Nevertheless to the extent that this is not quite a full Making of the South African Working Class, some peripheral prior knowledge or reading would be useful. The period before 1930 is still sparsely covered and little known. A broad overview of the earliest phases of industrialisation would have been very helpful, as also would have been a review of the attempts of the early Communist Party and its forerunners to forge a unity in struggle between black and white workers. Decent alternative sources for either are few and hard to come by. Perhaps they need a volume in their own right, but in the meantime part of this essential supplement is available from Baruch Hirson himself in his articles in the journal Searchlight South Africa.
The 1928 Non-European Federation trade unions are dismissed in one sentence as “revolutionary unions ... in line with Profintern directives ... they paid little heed to the workers’ immediate needs” (p.40). But this hardly does justice to the attempts of the remarkable S.P. Bunting, the original and later shamefully treated CPSA leader, to circumvent the most damaging Moscow directives. Even despite this abrupt dismissal, however, it is still evident that the destruction of these unions by the CP purges of 1929-31 was a disaster. Genuine trade union militants of the highest calibre, Gana Makabeni to name but one, were permanently soured in their relations with white Socialists, and set off on courses of their own; many more were lost for ever. The scars and repercussions of this catastrophe far outweighed and outlived the tiny embryonic entities which had made up the Non-European Federation.
That the cudgels were taken up not just by those few black activists forceful and resourceful enough to go it alone, but also by the even tinier handful of South African Trotskyists should be of no surprise to the readers of this journal. Indeed it was the experience of the 1929-31 South African purges and their impact on the putative Non-European trade unions that was central to the creation of the Trotskyist nuclei in South Africa. One of these nuclei, a group in Johannesburg centred around ex-CPSA activists Ralph Lee and Murray Gow Purdy, made strenuous efforts to take up where the old Federation unions had left off. To struggle simultaneously against both the prevailing conditions in South Africa as a whole and the poison and suspicion engendered by the CPSA was, however, a superhuman task. This group, the only one of the small Trotskyist groups seriously to tackle the trade union question, effectively disintegrated as key members made their way to Britain in two waves in 1935 and 1937. Their story still remains to be told in full. There is some brief mention of them on page 41, but this misdates Lee’s departure to the earlier 1935 date. New material which could have given more flesh to these bones has come to light too late to have been included.
These are relatively small gripes blown up considerably, for what then follows in terms of the trade union developments of the later 1930s and 1940s is seminal. The later efforts of the lone Trotskyist Max Gordon, who inherited Lee’s Laundry Workers Union, can only command admiration. But the motives of the philanthropically funded Race Relations Institute in underwriting both his, and other non-confrontational trade union ventures will exercise minds. So too will all the ramifications of the gradually unfolded fact that the mine workers were amongst the last and least easily reached groups of workers to be unionised; secondary industry workers came first.
The rôle of the CPSA is one of the continual frustration of all that could have been. Individual members could play courageous and constructive rôles; but nothing any of these individuals could do could outweigh the original and continuing damage of the Stalinist subordination of the real interests of the workers to externally prescribed manoeuvrings. After the throttling of the earlier trade unions at birth, the courting of black nationalism was Stalinism’s next most enduring and problematical legacy. The destructive factionalism which this fostered in later township, anti-Pass Laws and trade union developments cannot help but be apparent from a study such as this.
Factionalism was probably inevitable, but the activities of the CPSA fostered it rather than combatted it. The resultant quagmire was never successfully coped with by the Trotskyists either; though their attempts to seek a correct relationship between black and white workers, black nationalism, and urban and rural struggle make fascinating and still relevant reading.
The finale of the book is with the great postwar struggles and revolts which culminated in the brutally suppressed and semi-insurrectionary 1946 miners’ strike. Again the Trotskyists were not absent. The Workers International League made highly significant efforts to promote both unity and a revolutionary perspective, and succeeded in establishing an important Progressive Trade Union Group. Baruch Hirson himself played an important rôle in these struggles alongside a now returned but rapidly fading Ralph Lee. Again, however, it is a glimpse of what might have been. The WIL had turned in on itself, suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of frustration and impotence, and had ceased to exist even before the last act in this saga, the 1946 miners’ strike, was played out.
The 1946 revolt was crushed and black trade unions subsequently banned. The “formation of trade unions and their conversion into a base for a working class movement” had only ever been seen as the “prime task” by Trotskyists, and not even by all of these. Other forces, including by no means least the CPSA, had seen to it that this task had not been realised. In 1946, as in 1930, a promising development had been snuffed out; the way was opened for the domination of very different forces in the 1950s. The 1946 strike had even seen some interventions by some of the more militant figures within the ANC, these were figures who lent support to the strike, but only “because it was part of the African’s struggle against white domination”; not because of any conception “of the African worker as central to the struggle” [my emphasis]. These figures were Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. The workers of South Africa are still paying the price of the failures of the 1930s and 1940s, and may have to pay still further for the still current policies of these same figures and their SACP associates; this is not just a purely academic study.
Ian Hunter
Material bearing upon the modern history of Albania is not at all rich. Analysing it is not made any easier by the fact that the better sources come from the Yugoslavs, the sworn enemies of the regime, whilst the standard bibliography was compiled by one of its supporters in Britain, Bill Bland, with obvious intent to distort the true picture. It must therefore be questioned whether a book about “a liar and his lies”, to misquote Trotsky, can possibly add anything to our basic understanding. But to take such a view would be to make a serious mistake. The editor of this book deserves real praise for setting about the thankless task of trying to distill some truth from Hoxha’s endless lying by checking it against the accounts coming from the Yugoslavs and British wartime intelligence. If he has only been able to succeed halfway, the reason perhaps lies in his ignorance of the testimony of Sadik Premtaj, joint leader of the Te Rinjte (Youth) Group, whichwe republished in Revolutionary History (Volume 3 no.1, Summer 1990, pp.21-6), and in the inadequate model he uses to understand Stalinism as a phenomenon, which at times tempts him to relax his keen criticism and give the unspeakable Hoxha the benefit of the doubt wherever there is any.
But in spite of Hoxha’s own intentions, this compilation does prove to be very revealing. Before we introduce it, let us state that the Albanian Party of Labour was not, is not, and probably never will be, a working class party of any sort, in spite of its name. An Albanian proletariat does exist now as a result of the usual accumulation that Stalinism produces, but before the war it was vestigial, or rather, there was an Albanian proletariat, but it worked on the docks in Trieste and Yugoslavia, so it did not live in Albania; and there was a proletariat in Albania, but it was not Albanian, consisting of Italian workers brought over to build the railway. Albanian society was itself too backward to produce a real working class, being divided into two tribal groups, the Gegs and the Tosks. Significant numbers of the leaders of the Albanian Communist Party derived from the more backward of these groups. Well over three quarters of the leadership of the Albanian Communist Party were from the middle class, and it had the lowest percentage of workers in it of any Communist Party in Eastern Europe. Only three workers played any part in the leadership at all – Tuk Jakova, Pandi Kristo and Koçi Xoxe, a tinsmith from Korçë and it is noteworthy that all of them were pro-Yugoslav, for the Yugoslavs after a while began to favour the thin working class element in the Albanian party. Against these people Hoxha’s class prejudices are barely disguised. His foremost opponent, Xoxe, is described as making “no efforts to extend his horizon and to raise the level of his knowledge”, and “who remained, you might say, ‘illiterate’”, and because he had been “brainwashed and inflated” by Tito, “emerged as one of the ‘persecuted proletarians’” (pp.72-3). This authentic schoolmaster attitude certainly does not extend to his intellectual superiors in the Albanian Communist movement, Lazar Fundo, the founder of Albanian Marxism, who was accused of Trotskyism and Bukharinism, enticed back to Albania, and battered to death with a club, or to the poet and scholar Sejfulla Maleshova, a “vain megalomaniac” (p.72), who was expelled and imprisoned in 1948. Hoxha’s own rather more primitive mentality emerges right at the start of the book with the revealing comment about Albania’s past invaders, that “we never mixed our blood with them” (p.39).
Readers aware of Stalin’s background of Georgian blood feud will spot the parallels in this book straight away, not only in the elimination of friends and families that accompanied every major purge, but even in the actual techniques used: “to choose the victim, to prepare the blow with care, to sate an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world!”, as Stalin himself put it (Souvarine, Stalin, p.659). Hoxha’s own distinctive contribution to this science where no witnesses survive to tell otherwise is to arraign his opponents as agents of a foreign power and then have them “commit suicide”, supposedly in remorse (Nako Spiru, pp.101-4, and Mehmet Shehu, pp.333-6). His own family and sidekicks of course rise with him, and will probably fall accordingly when the reaction seas in against his memory. His wife Nexhmije, for example, the leader of the party’s youth, now finds herself in the same position as the unlamented Madame Mao, fighting a last ditch resistance in defence of her husband’s autocracy, even from beyond the grave. As Halliday puts it, “Hoxha grew up in a world of blood feuds and skulduggery” (p.2).
Probably the least successful part of the editor’s work is due to his lack of a coherent overall working model of Stalinism. Yet all the evidence is presented to show that Albanian Stalinism is a classic manifestation of the type. As Halliday points out: “Hoxha’s path to powe and is power, was littered with the corps of his old foes, and his old friends. No Communist regime has experienced such repeated purges and decimations as Albania’s” (p.3). Equally typical is the ideological baggage, such as when Hoxha utilises the anti-Marxist and thoroughly idealist argument so beloved of Stalin and Mao that a regime can change its class character purely by a change in the head of its rulers:
Hoxha’s party had the method of the Moscow Trials well worked out long before it got into power. We are told at one point (pp.57-8) that Anastas Lulja and Mustafa Gjinishi were both involved in a plot with the British in 1942. Yet Lulja was eliminated for alleged factional activity in 1943, Hoxha and Shehu personally taking part in his ‘execution’, whereas Gjinishi, supposedly Britain’s main agent (pp.48, 61) was in fact made the scapegoat for signing the Mukje agreement, and shortly after being expelled from the Politbureau in 1944 was then killed in an ambush, allegedly by the Germans. Spiru, who is supposed to have “committed suicide” in 1947, is variously described as an agent of the Yugoslavs, then as one of their opponents, and finally as an agent of the Russians (pp.74, 105, etc.). The scenario does not vary greatly right up to Hoxha’s death. Koçi Xoxe, no more an ‘agent’ of the Yugoslavs than Hoxha himself had been earlier when they had made him leader of the party, was supposedly ‘shot’ in 1949, though in all probability he was strangled by Shehu with his bare hands (p.9); Liri Gega, made out to be a Yugoslav agent since at least 1943 (pp.75, 205), was shot whilst pregnant in 1956; and Shehu himself, who apparently served as many masters as Spiru, being an agent successively of American, British and Yugoslav intelligence (pp.34, 331-2) began his spying career in an American schoolroom before the war. Yet again, by now somewhat monotonously, he is alleged to have “committed suicide” in 1981, whereas other reports suggest he was shot with a revolver at a meeting of the Political Bureau. It is therefore with some sense of astonishment that we encounter the editor explaining that Hoxha “was not a ‘Stalinist’ in other important respects. He was a cultured and well-read man. He was also in much closer contact with the population of his country than Stalin” (p.16). This is a ludicrous way of explaining human political behaviour. Was Catherine the Great any less an autocrat because she enjoyed French culture, or Hitler less a Nazi because he appreciated Wagner?
Whence came this obvious, deliberate and pronounced Stalinism? Halliday reproduces Hoxha’s own repudiation of “the absurd anti-Marxist claim that allegedly the Yugoslavs had created our party, that allegedly they had kindled the fire of our national liberation war” (p.12l), and though put on his guard by Hoxha’s mendacity, the furthest he will go is to say that the problem of the foundation of the Albanian Communist Party is a “subject of unresolved disputes” (p.349 n4). Is it really so ‘unresolved’? Long ago Sadik Premtaj pointed to the Yugoslavs as the de facto organisers of the Albanian Communist Party, as well as being the source of the complete Stalinisation of its structure (Revolutionary History, Summer 1990, pp.21-6). Hoxha implicitly confirms this story in this book, when he admits that contact was maintained with Moscow via the Yugoslavs (p.69). This use of other parties to hand down instructions where contact was difficult was a well established practice in the Comintern, such as for example how Moscow kept in contact with the Indian Communist Party via the British Communist Party. It was sometimes maintained where there was no real need for it, for example under the Cominform arrangements, where the British Communist Party itself was placed under the tutelage of the French. Hoxha even confirms Premtaj’s story when he talks about the “service” of Yugoslav agent Dusan Mugosa “in the region of Vlora in the spring and summer of 1943” (p.75), by which he can only mean the part played by the Yugoslavs in the murder of Lulja and the leaders of the Vlore regional committee. Whilst it is true that the only figures in the early history of Albanian Communism who spent any time in Moscow were Ali Kelmendi, Lazar Fundo and Sejfulla Maldshova (none of whom took part in the actual conference that united the three groups to set up the Albanian Communist Party), Stalinism does not have to be imparted at first hand, especially if it reflects the backwardness of the country in the first place. In any case Tuk Jakova revealed the true picture at the plenum of June 1955, when he came out with the “Trotskyist” and “bourgeois nationalist” sentiments that “the party history be rewritten so as to make clear that it had been founded not only by Hoxha but by ‘certain foreign persons’ [the Yugoslavs], and that all those purged be rehabilitated” (W.E. Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift, Cambridge 1963, p.22). The same is confirmed by Milovan Djilas, by no means uncritical about the myths of his own regime (Rise and Fall, London 1985, p.112). Halliday himself admits that “since the Yugoslavs have a much better track record on truth, their version is inherently more plausible” (p.25). As a matter of fact, Miladin Popovie’s first attempt to organise a real Communist Party in Albania at Tito’s behest dates from as far back as 1939, some two years before its founding conference, when he first made contact with the Shkoder group. At this time Hoxha’s Korçe group, in fact, was still hostile to the idea of unification.
This brings us on to the basis of Hoxha’s own career. It was the Yugoslavs who appointed him leader of the new party, and gave all the strategic positions in it to his Korçe group. All the indications fromthe earliest period are that he first rose as a pliant tool of the Yugoslavs, seeing his chance at ultimate unfettered power by siding with the Russians at the time of the Stalin-Tito split. Halliday is mistaken in taking as good coin Hoxha’s frequently expressed nationalist sentiments, claiming that we should accord “due recognition to the long-term nationalist component in Hoxha’s policies”, or that he was “first and foremost an Albanian nationalist” (p.25). Apart from the fact that Stalinism is always a nationalist deviation from true Marxism, the truth is that Hoxha was merely a Stalinist dynast of the usual sort, using and being used by his superiors until the opportunity arose to cut loose on his own, like Mao, Togliatti, and Tito himself. This emerges quite clearly from his behaviour at the time of the conclusion of the Mukje agreement in 1943. At that conference with the Balli Kombetar (an alliance of right wing nationalists and the Djarri group, influenced by Greek Archeiomarxism) Ymer Dishnica signed a pact for a joint resistance struggle on behalf of the Albanian Communist Party. One part of the agreement was that after the war the future of Kossova should be decided by a plebiscite, Kossova being the Yugoslav province with a high proportion of Albanians in it. The Yugoslavs, enraged, ordered the Albanians to repudiate it immediately, which they did, Hoxha himself making an abject ‘self criticism’ some time afterwards. The truth about the whole episode shines out clearly through Hoxha’s lies and evasions. First he tries to blame the Yugoslav emissary, Vukmanovie Tempo, for trying to start a “fratricidal war” by advising an outright attack upon the Balli Kombetar (p.63). Then he manufactures a long, dialogue that is meant to clear him for the responsibility of the decision to negotiate the agreement in the first place (pp.64ff.). Then at last he has to admit that “immediately the party learned of this betrayal by its delegates, it denounced it” (p.65). Hoxha shows himself to be a true protege of his Yugoslav mentors here, and there is not much evidence of a defence of Albania’s national interests at this time. Even four years later Hoxha was careful not to support Nako Spiru when he allegedly came out against Yugoslav influence (pp Miff). Hoxha’s patriotism can thus only be defined in the sense employed by Dr Johnson, when he described it as the last resort of a scoundrel.
All these limitations do not, however, prevent this from being a very useful and informative book. Only with the judicious use of it, along with the accounts of Premtaj and Pipa from the Albanian side and those from Yugoslavia, is it now possible for the first time to sketch out the main lines of the political development of this small and still mysterious country - if development is not too dynamic a word to use for this strange Stalinist fossil left over from a bygone age.
Al Richardson
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
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Markin comment on this issue:
Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Reviews
Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between The Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, pp606This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
Medium-sized engineering factories rather than gigantic enterprises were to the fore in terms of protest, in part precisely due to the fact that their intermediate size facilitated prompt mobilisation of employees.Again, although the new workers who swarmed into the capital from the countryside as a result of Stolypin’s land policy have often been supposed to be a primitive, ignorant lot, McKean shows that they mostly came from areas with a relatively high level of literacy.
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
The Bolsheviks' commitment to a national political general strike from the summer of 1913, the electoral strategy in the Tsarist Duma elections, the decision to launch an attack on Menshevik union positions in the spring of 1913 and the resurrection of the slogan of a soviet in October 1915 were all cases where the activists took the lead. Lenin either gave them retrospective sanction or opposed them in vain.When the local grassroots leaders considered a slogan sent to them from abroad to be inappropriate to their task, they would simply ignore it:
A textual analysis of 47 leaflets and appeals published illegally by Bolshevik militants between January 1915 and 22 February 1917 is most illuminating. Not a single leaflet mentioned the essential Leninist slogan of the defeat of Russia being the lesser evil ...McKean has made especially thorough use of the records of the Okhrana, the secret police. Their reports supply, he says, “an invaluable corrective” to exaggerations and slanted accounts in contemporary newspapers and later memoirs. In particular they often expose the falsity of claims by Soviet historians that the Bolsheviks were responsible for some strike or demonstration. There was a great deal more cooperation on the ground between members of different Socialist parties and tendencies than official Soviet history would have us believe, and among the Okhrana’s chief concerns was the promotion of splits. It is startling how many agents and informers the police had in the labour movement: this information helps to explain the success of repressive measures taken at certain moments.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
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Reviews
Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990, pp328, £47.50Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
What is beyond question, however, is that the rank and file contributed to the implementation of Stalin’s policies after 1928. There is no doubt that their enthusiasm, however brutal its consequences in many instances, was indispensable to the Stalinist ‘great turn’. (p.67)Here, broadly speaking, she puts herself alongside the school of revisionist historians of the Soviet Union in the West. They have broken with the old totalitarian school that saw the bureaucratic apparatus as monolithic and all-embracing, while the masses were but passive puppets. Before Merridale, others, such as Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), have stressed the degree of popular motivation and enthusiasm that accompanied the ‘Great Turn’. Coming at a time when many Soviet historians are turning to totalitarian theories, this school offers many refreshing insights compared with the dull old Stalinist and Western orthodoxies. It points to the very real enthusiasm shown by a layer of workers for the ‘turn’ in its earliest years, and argues that, at least at this time, party activists were not simply passive dupes.
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
To suggest that the new generation were all passive dupes of the General Secretary is to underestimate the interest the average worker had in the progress of the revolution, both in general and in terms of his or her prospects in the new society. Those who did not have this interest tended to stay away altogether. (p.139)The attempt to create a mass party was indeed fraught with contradictions for the emerging bureaucracy. On the one hand, it was formed on the basis of shop and shift cells. On the other hand, the increase in its proletarian composition was also accompanied by the development of an ever greater network of supervisory committees to oversee the rank and file. However, Merridale documents a degree of grassroots vitality in the late 1920s within a party supervised by the emergent bureaucracy, but organised in the plants and workshops.
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
Propagandists with other party responsibilities left the preparation of classes until the last moment, reading teaching materials on the tram on the way in. (p.l50)This is not surprising in an organisation that had ordained subordination to the claims of industrial management:
The party cells must actively promote the fulfilment of the principle of edinochalie in the whole system of industrial management. (quoted p.168)Such a situation created very real tensions, as Merridale demonstrates. Most high ranking technical personnel were not party members, but were in many cases inherited from Tsarism or the non-party technical intelligentsia. In the giant Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory in 1925, only two members of the factory administration and not one foreman were party members. Hence the contradiction between a worker based party and a management whose dictates the workers were not allowed to challenge by the apparatus of that same party. And hence the need for the Stalinist clique finally to transform the party into an apparatus party.
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
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Reviews
Campaign for Solidarity With Workers in the Eastern Bloc, Stalinism and Anti-Semitism, London, 1990, pp20, 60p.This pamphlet aims to explain the current rise in anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union by showing that it is not a new phenomenon, but is deeply rooted in old Russian traditions, and has been continually manipulated by the bureaucracy in order to provide a scapegoat to divert popular discontent away from the authorities onto another target.
It argues that the official promotion of anti-Semitism started in the mid-1920s, when Stalin hinted at the Jewish backgrounds of Trotsky, Zinoviev and other oppositionists, and “as Stalin consolidated his grip on Soviet society, the level of repression of Jews and Jewish organisations and institutions rose in tandem”. Stalin's measures against Soviet Jewry, the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ campaign of 1948-49, the ‘Doctor’s Plot’ and his plans for their deportation to the east, are described, as are the anti-Semitic measures of the post-Stalin era, the ‘economic’ trials, in which Jewish defendants were prominently featured, and the steady stream of anti-Semitic tracts masquerading as anti-Zionism.
Under glasnost many of the official restrictions upon Jewish employment have been lifted, but unofficial anti-Semitism has flourished. Pamyat and similar groups publish anti-Semitic works, encourage anti-Jewish activities, and enjoy considerable support among the more conservative bureaucrats.
The pamphlet’s view of Soviet anti-Semitism merely as a traditional hangover from Tsarist days, which the bureaucracy mobilises whenever it needs a scapegoat, is somewhat one-sided. These factors, real as they are, cannot fully explain the development of Soviet anti-Semitism.
The instances of anti-Semitism in the Communist Party that so shocked Trotsky in 1926 can be attributed to the influx of careerist, backward people during the period after Soviet rule had been consolidated, and their encouragement by unscrupulous elements like Stalin, who were not choosy about their methods in the fight against the oppositions. Yet in the late 1920s, the Soviet authorities embarked upon an extensive campaign against anti-Semitism. The closure of synagogues and the persecution of rabbis referred to in the pamphlet were part of a wider, clumsy anti-religious campaign, rather than a specifically anti-Jewish measure. The Moscow Trials and the terror of the late 1930s did occasionally have anti-Semitic overtones, such as prosecutor Vyshinsky’s reference to Jewish defendants by their long-forgotten family names, but it seems that the Jewish victims of the terror were not picked on specifically because of their ethnic background.
Up until the late 1940s, official anti-Semitism was not an important weapon in the arsenal of the bureaucracy. Its use was episodic and unsystematic, and reflected the prejudices of individual bureaucrats.
The pamphlet does not explain precisely why the vicious campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ blew up in 1948. It was an integral part of the atmosphere of the time, when Stalin fought the Cold War on the home front by sealing off the Soviet bloc from the rest of the world, and promoting virulent nationalist sentiments. Soviet Jews were an immediate target. That many of them had relations abroad, especially in the USA, and, after the terrible experiences they had suffered in wartime Europe, looked positively at the new state of Israel, was enough for Stalin to view them as potentially disloyal.
Anti-Semitism in the post-Stalin era does resemble the pamphlet’s concept of the bureaucracy’s manipulation of atavistic prejudices, but that is not the case under glasnost. Many of the official restrictions upon Jews have been removed, and if the government has not condemned anti-Semitism, it has not endorsed it.
Whilst anti-Semitic organisations have no lack of support within the state machine, an official anti-Semitic campaign is unlikely in the short term. Gorbachev needs all the support he can get, and most Soviet Jews support his reform policies. As the majority of Soviet Jews work within the state sector, a purge of several million people would be highly disruptive (which is probably why Stalin’s planned deportation of the Jews was abandoned after his death). Nevertheless, the open promotion of nationalism as the Soviet bureaucracy fragments along national lines, makes a resurgence of official anti-Semitism more likely.
Stalinism and Anti-Semitism contains a lot of useful information, and at 60p one can forgive its rather tatty appearance. But its ahistorical approach means that it cannot go beyond basic truisms, and cannot fully explain the development of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
Paul Flewers
Reviews
Geoffrey Roberts, Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact With Hitler, IB Tauris, London, 1989, pp.296, £19.95This is at the same time both a bad and an important book – quite often for the same reasons. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, it is a child of glasnost, being the first Western study of the alliance to have made use of previously closed Soviet archive materials. This alone makes the book worth reading, for, as the author correctly points out, an enforced and near exclusive reliance on non-Soviet documentation has impeded attempts to understand the origins, significance and workings of the Pact. The author believes that his study of newly-available Soviet materials has enabled him to resolve previous doubts and differences over the Pact that were in part a result of this difficulty, and points to a series of conclusions, which he summarises at the beginning of his book. Those of special interest are as follows:
- Stalin only signed his Pact with Hitler after the failure of his genuine attempts to secure an anti-Nazi alliance with Western bourgeois democracies.
- Consequently, “the final decision of the Soviet Government to opt for rapprochement with Germany was not made until mid-August 1939” (p.5).
- Stalin signed the Pact because he feared “Britain and France might abandon the USSR in the face of the coming German invasion of Poland” (p.5).
Roberts fares no better in his treatment of German ‘national Bolshevism’. Considering that its prime objective of an alliance with the USSR against the decadent Western liberal plutocracies was consummated by the Pact of 1939, one would have thought that this exotic – but highly symptomatic – political current would have merited more than a single paragraph (p.35). Surely he could have told us what Lenin thought of it, or made at least a passing reference to the outrageous ‘Schlagater’ speech delivered by Karl Radek to the Comintern Plenum of June 1923. Of the two, Lenin’s comments obviously carried greater weight and therefore, for us, have more interest. For example, in December 1920 he referred to a “political mix up in Germany” wherein the “German Black Hundreds [pro-Nazis – RB] sympathised with the Russian Bolsheviks in the same way as the Spartacus League does ...”, adding the telling point that this alignment had become “the basis ... of our foreign policy ...” [4] Another speech, made at the same time (but expunged, for obvious reasons, from editions of Lenin’s Collected Works) was even more explicit, referring to “an independent Poland” as being “very dangerous to Soviet Russia”. Moreover, “the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us to strangle Poland ...” [5] Maybe the author’s tendency to idealise the early years of Soviet rule (“diplomacy, even of the propagandist kind initially practised by the Bolsheviks, was eclipsed by revolutionary endeavour”, p.26) partly accounts for such blind spots. The ‘Third Period’ phase of the Comintern again saw the Soviet leadership – now in the hands of Stalin – speculating on the supposed advantages of an alliance with German chauvinism, only this time in the form of unadorned National Socialism. [6] Only by ignoring such evidence – and there is much more – is it possible to sustain the book’s thesis on the origins of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But even in the area where the author claims a special expertise – the new Soviet materials – his research, which is the most interesting part of the book, is vitiated by a determination to prove, come what may, that the Pact was forced on Stalin by a Western refusal to stand up to Hitler. Stated briefly, Roberts believes that what other historians and analysts have interpreted as signals to Hitler (notably Stalin’s March 1939 speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU, and the sacking of Stalin’s Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov two months later) have been seriously misconstrued, and that in fact Stalin was earnestly pursuing a military alliance with the West against Hitler right up to the very eve of the Pact’s signing on 23 August 1939. Yet all the evidence to refute this claim is to be found in one single collection of documents, available to the public since its publication in 1948 by the US State Department. Significantly, much of Roberts’ book is taken up with trying to minimise either the significance or reliability of this documentary collection, culled after the war from the Nazi Foreign Ministry archives. It must be said, whatever the book’s other merits, in this endeavour it fails lamentably. The first document in the collection is dated 17 April, but in fact the final turn had already been made. Even before Munich, Stalin had made clear, through a speech by Litvinov to the League of Nations on 23 September 1938 that the USSR “had no obligation to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her ...” and that the USSR consequently had a “moral right” to renounce its pact with the beleaguered Czechs [7], which of course Stalin promptly did, doubtless much to Hitler’s gratification. Hints of a possible alliance between the ostensible enemies quickly ensued. At a diplomatic reception in Berlin on 12 January 1939, Hitler singled out for special and friendly attention the new Soviet Ambassador Merekalov. Early in February, during a dinner party at the home of a German industrialist, General Keitel (executed after the war for atrocities on the Eastern front) discussed with the Soviet Military Attache the possibility of combined action against Poland. [8] Hitler was informed at once. The wheels were beginning to turn. Next came Stalin’s speech of 10 March to the Nineteenth Party Congress, in which he accused the Western Allies of inciting conflict between Germany and Russia. Russia was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for anyone. Of all the above events, Roberts mentions but the last – and only then to dismiss its significance as an olive branch to Hitler. Stalin “had little option, in the face of continuing German hostility, but adherence to the aim of creating an anti-Fascist alliance ...” (p.119). But, as we have seen, that hostility was waning. Hitler’s claims on Poland, followed by Western guarantees to maintain its existing frontiers, meant for the Nazis the risk of the dreaded war on two fronts, a prospect that drove Hitler inexorably towards securing his eastern flank by drawing Stalin into a new Polish partition. A Nazi diplomat reported that he could “discern in Stalin’s speech certain signs of a new orientation”. Roberts, despite all that ensued, does not think so. Yet sure enough, in a speech on 1 April, Hitler used the same code, repudiating any desire to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” (these were his actual words) by fighting the West’s battles against Russia. This speech was subsequently circulated by Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to the heads of all the European diplomatic missions. [9] On 12 May Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry issued a directive to the German press to maintain a total silence on relations with the USSR, following it up with another on 31 May warning that “now is not the time for an anti-Soviet campaign”. These moves only make any sense in the context of a Soviet approach, not to the Western Allies, but Hitler.
Roberts, it should be remembered, attributes no significance whatsoever to Stalin’s speech (or Hitler’s response to it, which he passes over) in preparing the ground for the Pact. Yet the documentary evidence totally refutes him. In the early hours of 24 August, during the celebrations that followed the signing of the Pact by Stalin and Ribbentrop, Molotov “raised his glass to Stalin – who through his speech of March this year, which had been well understood in Germany – had brought about the reversal in political relations”. Well understood in Germany ... but not by Roberts, who sees in it an attempt to secure an alliance with the Western Allies against Hitler! (Not to be outdone, Stalin also proposed a toast: “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”) [10] This is not the only document Roberts prefers in this instance to ignore, or in others, to misconstrue. Following hard on the heels of Stalin’s 10 March speech came the Nazi invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on 15 March. Three days later Litvinov delivered to the German ambassador in Moscow a note refusing to recognise the ensuing Nazi occupation as in any way legal. Yet on 17 April the Soviet ambassador called at the German foreign office in order to secure the continued “fulfillment of certain contracts for war material by the Skoda works” [11], which were, of course, situated in Nazi-occupied Czech territory. The report speaks of the Nazi response to the request as being regarded by the Soviets as “a test” of German intentions towards the USSR. The hint being taken, the talk then drifted towards and around the subject of the possibility of a drastic improvement in German-Soviet relations. Merekalov left almost at once to report back to Moscow. How does Roberts treat this encounter? Predictably as a routine diplomatic exchange, and a bid by a new ambassador to advance his career (pp.126-7). He also neglects to point out that the Soviet request to supply the requested war equipment was granted – hardly the action of a regime bent on immediate war with its customer.
Roberts’ next big hurdle is the sacking of Litvinov. It is the one that more than any other brings him down. On 3 May Litvinov, the salesman and, let us grant the possibility, maybe the advocate of a pro-Western, and therefore anti-Nazi orientation, was dismissed from his post as Soviet Foreign Minister. Roberts observes (correctly) that “in the West the most popular explanation had been that Litvinov (a Jew and an opponent of rapprochement with Nazi Germany) was removed to facilitate negotiations with Hitler ...” (p.128). Like many academics (and, it should also be said, Marxists of various persuasions) Roberts suffers from an organic aversion to anything that is either popular or obvious. The truth can’t ever be that simple. The more the evidence and the general consensus seem to point in one direction, the greater the urge to look in another. Something that is widely believed and appears obvious may or may not be true ... but whether it is true or not has nothing to do with either. Lacking any hard evidence to refute the ‘popular’ view, to which we shall return in a moment, Roberts asks us to believe that Litvinov’s removal was partly the result of a routine domestic party purge instigated by Beria, and partly also a “reshuffling” (sic) of diplomatic staff designed to bring forward a “new generation of Soviet diplomats” (p.l29). Rather like the Red Army “reshuffle” of 1937 perhaps? Only Litvinov was more fortunate than his colleagues, merely being placed under house arrest. Insofar as Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov sent out any international signals, says Roberts, they were intended not for Hitler but the Western Allies – “it would put further pressure on the French and British to come to terms” (pp.130-1). Yet no evidence is cited either to suggest that this was the intention, or that its supposed recipients perceived it as such. Rather the contrary. On 4 May 1939 the German embassy in Moscow reported back to Berlin on the sensational sacking of Litvinov, regarded – possibly correctly – as the major enemy of Nazi Germany in the Soviet leadership: “The decision apparently is connected with the fact that differences of opinion arose in the Kremlin on Litvinov’s negotiations” [with the British and French – RB]. There then follows a reference to Stalin’s 10 March speech and then this final comment: “Molotov (no Jew) is held to be ‘most intimate friend and closest collaborator of Stalin’. His appointment is apparently to guarantee that the foreign policy will be continued strictly in accordance with Stalin’s ideas”. [12] The very next day the Soviet Charge in Berlin reinforced this impression in a conversation with a German diplomat, inquiring whether the removal of Litvinov “would cause a change in our [the Nazi] position toward the Soviet Union”. [13] A signal to Britain and France? I find it incredible that Roberts, who has surely read this document, sees fit to pass it over in silence, preferring instead his entirely unfounded explanation of a domestic purge and renewed commitment to an alliance with the Western Allies.
The benchmark for this approach is established on the book’s very first page, when the reader is asked to accept its axiom that until the Pact, the Stalin regime had been “the bulwark of anti-Fascism”. As evidence of the Kremlin’s role as “the citadel of resistance to Fascism and militarism” he cites Soviet arms supplies to Spain and support for sanctions against Italy (p.44), overlooking that, in the latter case, Stalin continued to supply oil to Mussolini for the duration of his invasion of Ethiopia and intervention in Spain. Other judgements also cry out for comment. On page 77 we are told that Stalin’s policy in Spain “was unequivocally directed towards a Republican victory” and that to ascribe any “sinister, machiavellian motives” to it was “largely fantasy”. In order to sustain his case here, Roberts lumps together Soviet and International Brigade forces into a collective total of 40,000 men (p.78), thereby obliterating the vital distinction between the combatants of the brigades and the small and, from a military point of view, largely token Soviet personnel, who were expressly forbidden by Stalin to perform anything other than an advisory and instructional role to the Republican forces. The price the Republic had to pay for Stalin’s aid is so well documented that one can only gasp at the comment, on page 79, that NKVD terror apart, Stalin’s intervention in Spain was an “otherwise creditable episode” in pre-war Soviet foreign policy. Then in a puerile section (of less than two pages) on the reaction of the Comintern to the Pact, the new line is presented as “defeatist” (p.175). That was true (though not in the classic Leninist sense) only of those countries still fighting Nazi Germany, where the line was to make peace on the terms proposed jointly by Stalin and Hitler in October 1939, but not of those countries already conquered by the Nazis. Here the Comintern played a Quisling role, hiring itself out to Hitler in competition with home grown Nazi traitors. This policy met with some startling initial successes, notably in Belgium and Norway. [14]
For German itself, a third policy was adopted, one of a thinly veiled and utterly shameful ‘defencism’, together with demands that anti-Nazi opponents of the Pact be denounced to the Gestapo. Needless to say, this policy was advanced from the safety of neutral Sweden. In the immortal words of Walter Ulbricht, “if Germany were conquered [by Britain and France] the German workers would be treated in the same way” as were the workers in those countries – “the muzzling of the workers’ press, the establishment of concentration camps” [15], the inference being that by defending the Third Reich against the Western Allies, the German workers would prevent the establishment of censorship and concentration camps in their own country. (In fact, it was Hitler’s defeat that brought their abolition, at least in the Western zone. In the East it proved to be business as usual.) Of all Stalinist utterances, this must surely rank as not only the most perfidious, but also the most stupid. Roberts’ failure to recognise or come to grips with such nuances suggests that the Comintern is alien territory. But then so are Stalin-style elections. On page 189 we are informed, dead pan, that in the Baltic states, “elections were held to the new peoples’ assemblies which voted on 21 July to seek incorporation into the USSR, a wish which was duly granted by the Supreme Soviet in early August”, neglecting only to add that in each case the vote was unanimous. No mention is made at all of the hideous deportations and exterminations carried out by Stalin in the territories granted to him by his Nazi allies, the victims of which run into millions. In fact, so greatly appalling was the NKVD terror that there were recorded instances of Jewish refugees from the Nazi zone fleeing, or being driven, back to their near certain deaths under the lash of Stalinist pogroms. (See, for example, Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.128.)
The treatment of Stalin’s military assistance to Hitler during the Pact is likewise very sketchy, filling barely a single page. Mention is made of navigational aid provided by a radio station at Minsk for German aircraft attacking Poland from 1 September, but not of the joint Nazi-Soviet military headquarters stationed at Bialystock which coordinated the final annihilation of Polish armed resistance following Stalin’s stab in the back of 17 September. [16] The security Stalin provided for Hitler’s eastern front, enabling him to strike uninhibitedly in the West against Scandinavia, the low countries and France, is well known (though not evaluated by Roberts). But Stalin also rendered Hitler direct and active military assistance. German warships were equipped in Soviet yards (chiefly Murmansk) and allowed passage via the summer northern route into the Pacific, there to attack Allied shipping. [17] At a crucial moment during the Nazi naval landings in Norway (April 1940), a German tanker arrived from Murmansk, laden with Soviet oil, to refuel Hitler’s warships and landing craft. [18] And all this in addition to substantial, and in some instances indispensable, supplies of raw materials and fuel to the Nazi war machine right up to the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941.
Just why Roberts chose to write such an astonishing book is, I must confess, something of a mystery. All one can say for certain is that he elected to follow a path other than that dictated by the vast body of evidence available to him. I became convinced of this on reading his review, written for The Independent nearly a year after the appearance of his book on the Pact, of a new Soviet biography of Maxim Litvinov. Naturally, the purge of 3 May figures prominently in the review. But once again, Roberts cannot accept the possibility that Litvinov’s fall could have anything at all to do with changes in Stalin's policy towards Nazi Germany. “The problem with this view is that Soviet policy towards Nazi Germany did not change until that summer.” Once again he assumes what he is obliged to prove. He forces his opinions onto the facts, instead of basing his arguments upon them. The ghost of Beria is invoked once again to explain the elimination of the entire Litvinov team of diplomats. (Where have we heard that before?) As for his successor, Molotov’s “pursuance of Litvinov’s policy of alliance with the West was so successful that by August, the USSR had opened negotiations for a military pact with Britain and France. It was only when these failed that Stalin finally turned to Hitler.”
This is, quite simply, untrue. These negotiations began in Moscow on 12 August. So even if we were to concede Roberts’ arguments that the Pact was born later than all the sources suggest, and that only in “the first two weeks of August” did “Soviet foreign policy begin to make an appreciable shift in favour of an accommodation with Germany” (p.151), it remains to be explained how it was that even as War Minister Voroshilov conducted these “successful” negotiations with British and French military officials in Moscow, a yet more successful Ribbentrop was preparing to fly to the Kremlin to sign his Pact with Stalin. [19] Could it not be that Stalin’s dalliance with Britain and France was a cover (and a spur to Hitler) for the consummation of his Pact with the Nazis? Trotsky certainly thought so, and nothing in this book persuades me that he was wrong.
As far back as the period of the Nazi rise to power, Trotsky considered Stalin’s collaboration with the Nazis in such enterprises as the Prussian Red-Brown Referendum of 1931 [20] evidence of a Kremlin foreign policy aimed at “keeping alive German-French antagonisms”. [21] When the issue of Stalin’s German policy arose at the 1937 Dewey Commission investigation into the Moscow Trials (understandably in view of Stalinist accusations that Trotsky was a Nazi agent), Trotsky recalled how Isvestia greeted the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany ... “the USSR is the only state that is not nourished on hostile sentiments towards Germany ...” It was Hitler who repulsed Stalin, not the other way round. [22] Pressed on this point, Trotsky insisted that “Stalin declared and it was repeated in the press, that ‘we never opposed the Nazi movement in Germany’ ...” [23] All these observations, it should be remembered, were made at the high tide of the ‘People’s Front’ episode, when Litvinov’s pro-Western policy appeared to predominate. They suggest that almost alone amongst serious commentators of the day (and even now historians like Roberts, who with the supposed wisdom of hindsight and access to archives, should know better) Trotsky never took very seriously Stalin’s policy of ‘collective security’ against Nazi Germany, deriding it as a “lifeless fiction” and predicting, even before the conclusion of the Munich agreement, that “we may now expect with certainty Soviet diplomacy to attempt a rapprochement with Hitler ...” [24]
Trotsky pursued his hunch (for he lacked any tangible proof) on 6 March 1939, wondering whether a Stalinist boycott of a New York anti-Nazi demonstration was simply “conservative stupidity and hatred of the Fourth International” (for amongst the rally’s sponsors was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) or evidence that orders had gone out from Moscow to “muzzle” all anti-Fascist activities “so as not to interfere with the negotiations between Moscow and Berlin diplomats ... the next few weeks will bring their verification ...” [25] In fact it took four days, for on 10 March Stalin made his first public signal to Berlin. The very next day, Trotsky described the “chestnuts” speech as a sign of Stalin’s “new turn towards reaction”. While unsure as yet of the tempo or prospects of this new orientation, Trotsky nevertheless concluded that on the strength of this speech alone, “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler”. [26] And that at a time when the Western Allies, taking fright after the consequences of their capitulation at Munich became clear, had begun to court Stalin!
Here too Trotsky’s estimation diverges totally from that of Roberts (not to speak of all Stalinist, and most leftist inclined historians and commentators): “Today all the efforts of the British government are concentrated on concluding an agreement with Moscow – against Germany.“ Hitler, fearing encirclement and a possible war on all fronts, likewise looked to the Kremlin for insurance. As for Stalin, “from the first day of the National Socialist regime” he had “systematically and steadily shown his readiness for friendship with Hitler”.[27] Only when met with hostility did Stalin pass over to “collective security” and its political counterpart, the People’s Front. But even then, it was possible to detect “more intimate notes intended for the ears of Berchtesgarden ...” Consequently, in the scramble for partners, “if at last Hitler responds to Moscow’s diplomatic advances, Chamberlain will be rebuffed ... Stalin will sign a treaty with England only if he is convinced that agreement with Hitler is out of the question”. [28] Roberts’ entire book revolves around the contrary thesis that Stalin turned to Hitler because he felt let down by London and Paris.
Once signed, the Pact was roundly denounced by Trotsky. He failed to find in it any of the virtues detected by some of his more recent epigones. The Kremlin “preferred the status quo, with Hitler as its ally” to any advances for the workers’ movement. As for the rudely discarded ‘People’s Front’, it had proved to be nothing but a “low comedy”. Although unaware of the Pact’s secret protocols, he correctly predicted that “in exchange for Poland, Hitler will give Moscow freedom of action in regard to the Baltic states”. [29] And in view of his earlier and repeated declarations on the subject, he was surely entitled to point out “since 1933 I have been showing and proving to the world press that Stalin is seeking an understanding with Hitler”. Brushing aside apologists for Stalin's ‘treason’ (and they are amazingly still in business today), Trotsky damned the Pact as “a capitulation of Stalin before Fascist imperialism with the end of preserving the Soviet oligarchy”. Not, it should be noted, the “gains of the revolution”. The Pact’s only “merit” was that “in unveiling the truth it broke the back of the Comintern”. [30] Trotsky found “completely absurd” the idea that Stalin’s seizures of territory involved any challenge to Hitler. (Muffled echoes of this argument can still be found in Trotskyist publications.) “It is much more probable that Hitler himself inspired Stalin to occupy eastern Poland and to lay his hands on the Baltic states.” The documentary evidence here proves Trotsky completely correct, as it does also in the case of Stalin’s “shameful war” against Finland. [31] Finally – and here too in defiance of contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion – Trotsky foresaw that Stalin’s diplomacy, far from averting Hitler’s long announced crusade against the USSR, had instead enabled Hitler to eliminate the Polish ‘buffer’ protecting Russia from a Nazi invasion. [32] Perhaps part of the difficulty in assessing Stalin’s reasons for concluding his alliance with Hitler comes from assuming that his motives were purely political. In his uncompleted biography of Stalin, Trotsky argues that “Stalin’s union with Hitler satisfied his sense of revenge ... He took great personal delight in negotiating secretly with the Nazis while appearing to negotiate openly with the friendly missions of England and France ... He is tragically petty”. [33] (Lenin – amazingly late for one normally so shrewd – also discovered spite to be one of his General Secretary’s mainsprings of action.)
Going back over Trotsky’s writings on German-Soviet relations, one cannot but be impressed at the way in which his step-by-step analysis of events is, not only in outline, but often in the smallest details, borne out by documentary materials to which, in contrast with Roberts, he could not possibly have had access. One wonders what he would have been able to achieve with them.
Robin Blick
Notes
1. Engels to Marx, 27 May 1851, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Volume 38, p.364. Evidently inspired by his notorious theory of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’, Engels describes the Poles as a ‘finished nation’, to be contrasted unfavourably not only with Germans but Russians, whose racial virtues were such that as a result of interbreeding with them, “even the Jews acquire Slav cheekbones”. (ibid., pp.363-4)2. See for example the documents presented in Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, OUP, 1958, and Pearson, The Sealed Train, Macmillan, 1975.
3. For this and other instances of early Soviet collaboration with German nationalist forces, see Adam Westoby and Robin Blick, Early Soviet Designs on Poland, in Survey, Volume 26 no.4 (117), Autumn 1982.
4. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31, p.300.
5. Westoby and Blick, p.124.
6. For more detail, see Robert Black (Robin Blick), Fascism in Germany, London 1975.
7. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy (Ed. Jane Degras), Volume 3, p.305, OUP, 1953. On Stalin’s indifference to the fate of Czechoslovakia, see Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army, London, 1940, pp.284-5.
8. A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, London 1950, p.6.
9. Ibid., p.8.
10. Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.76.
11. Op. cit., p.1.
12. Op. cit., pp.2-3.
13. Op. cit., p.3.
14. See F. Borkenau, European Communism, Faber and Faber, 1953, pp.253-7.
15. Quoted in op. cit., p.249.
16. Rossi, op. cit., p.60.
17. Rossi, op. cit., p.96.
18. D. Irvine, Hitler’s War, Macmillan, 1985, p.98.
19. On Stalinin’s double dealing see: Rossi, op. cit., pp.37-8, Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, Volume 1, London 1961; Wollenburg, pp.290-2.
20. See Black, op. cit., for details and background.
21. Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, 1973, p.25.
22. The Case of Leon Trotsky, Merit, 1968, p.293.
23. Op. cit., p.311.
24. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, Pathfinder, 1974, p.29.
25. Op. cit., p.203.
26. Op. cit., pp.216-9.
27. Op. cit., p.350.
28. Op. cit., pp.350-5.
29. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder, 1973, pp.76-7.
30. Op. cit., pp.81-3.
31. Op. cit., pp.113, 116.
32. Op. cit., pp.79, 97.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Stalin, London 1947, p.415.
Reviews
Francis King and George Matthews (eds.), About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings of 25 September and 2-3 October 1939, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990, pp.318, £34.95In the last year or two of his life Trotsky had several metaphors for the Communist International of Stalin and Dimitrov. He called it a corpse; but the Kremlin was to require this corpse to display a few more twitches of life before finally ordering its dissolution in 1943. Trotsky also called it a cesspit – a dunghill, to use the most direct English rendering. With this cloacal image Trotsky conveyed his profound disgust at the terminal degeneration of the body he had helped to found in 1919, at its ‘doglike servility’, at its transformation into a docile instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in the autumn of 1939 sold it to Hitler “along with oil and manganese”. [1] This book shows in detail – word for word – what went on in the leadership of one section of that dunghill in belated response to the German-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War.
On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.
But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line. Monty Johnstone points out in his Introduction to About Turn that neither the Executive Committee of the Comintern (which had not held a plenary meeting for four years) nor its Presidium (of which Pollitt was a full and Gallacher a candidate member) was in any way involved in this policy switch. Dimitrov had then briefed D.F. Springhall, the CPGB’s representative at Comintern headquarters. Springhall got back from Moscow on the evening of 24 September with the theses in his head; they were to follow him in a more tangible form soon afterwards.
Waiting for Springhall must have been a trying time for the leading British Stalinists. But the week that followed his brief report must have been agonising. The CC stood adjourned for a week, and in the meantime the Daily Worker’s line on the war was totally unclear. It published material so fence-sitting and so confused that much damage was done to the party’s credibility, even amongst its own members. This resulted from sharp differences between the three-man secretariat (Dutt, Springhall and William Rust) to whom Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary, and the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, J.R. Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley).
When the CC resumed on 2 October, Dutt complained bitterly of this “complete incoherence worse either than the old line or the new”, told his comrades that “the duty of a Communist is not to disagree but to accept”, and, in a thinly veiled reference to Pollitt, warned that anyone who deserted now would be branded for his political life. Gallacher complained of the “rotten”, “dirty”, “unscrupulous”, and “opportunist” factional methods used by Dutt and his supporters, those “three ruthless revolutionaries”. They had shown “mean despicable disloyalty” and it was impossible for him to work with them. Campbell, ardent defender of the Moscow Trials and pitiless scourge of Trotskyism, said the CPGB would soon be indistinguishable from “the filthy rabble of Trotskyists”. The shipbuilding worker Finlay Hart objected to Dutt’s telling them to “accept or else”. Maurice Cornforth, philosopher-to-be, said he agreed with something he had once heard Pollitt say: the Soviet Union could do no wrong. “This is what we have to stick to”, he observed, adding that the new line didn’t mean cooperation with the Trotskyists, whose line, he was certain, would be “based on anti-Soviet slanders”. Rust said Gallacher saw himself as a kind of elder statesman who attended meetings when he felt like it, while Campbell was presenting British imperialism as a man-eating tiger turned vegetarian. Burns said Dutt’s opening statement had been “peculiarly low and dastardly”. Dutt and his supporters had used “the most vile factional methods”; they wanted as many as possible to vote against the theses so that the could be “represented as the real nucleus of the Comintern to carry the line forward in the British party”. They were attempting to clear themselves with Moscow by explaining how pure they were. Springhall said no comrade who had a conversation with Comrade Dimitrov could fail to learn something from him, and accused Campbell of thinking that the Soviet Union was only concerned to save its own skin.
Harry Pollitt showed himself as reluctant as Campbell to depart from the Popular Front line of the Comintern’s 1935 Seventh Congress. In politics, he said, there was neither friendship nor loyalty. He told Dutt: “You won’t intimidate me ... I was in this movement practically before you were born.” He had never heard a report so bankrupt and devoid of explanation as Springhall’s. Springhall had had no responsibility for drafting the theses: he was just a messenger boy (“what Strang was for Chamberlain”). “I was never an office boy”, said Pollitt. “If there is one thing that is clear it is that the fight against Fascism has disappeared and Fascism has now, because of its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, taken on a progressive role.” Soviet policy had antagonised important sections of the working class movement. The new line was in essence a betrayal of the labour movement’s struggle against Fascism – a word, he added bitterly, it was becoming unfashionable to mention. He himself wanted to “smash the Fascist bastards once and for all”.
So much for the first day of the resumed meeting. Little that was new was added on the second, final, day. John Gollan, Ted Bramley, Idris Cox and Peter Kerrigan expressed support for the new line, though Bramley wanted to know why there had been so little consultation by the Comintern (a point later re-emphasised by Gallacher); and Kerrigan (“I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken”) said he had been flabbergasted when the Red Army marched into Poland. “If ... Comrade Pollitt is not convinced of the correctness of the line we will have to consider arranging for him to have a talk in Moscow”, suggested Cox, in words that still have a rather sinister ring 51 years later. Jimmy Shields, long a party functionary, said that “when the Soviet Union makes a move we should support it, whether it [such support] is considered to be mechanical or not”. The railway worker William Cowe said the Comintern was his “guiding light”. When the vote was taken, only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against the new line – though Pollitt later asked, successfully, that Gallacher’s vote be recorded as being in favour.
Here is our closest, most intimate picture of the Stalinist method as it was used in Britain by these fearless fighters for Socialism, these battle-hardened cadres, these veterans of the Lenin School, these tenth-rate bureaucrats whom we watch here jockeying for the privilege of being recognised as Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in Britain. The picture I was given, when I joined the Young Communist League in 1942, and for the next 14 years, was of a party that had always been truly monolithic, where deep friendship and mutual loyalty had always prevailed. Pollitt and Dutt, we were given to understand, went together like Sohrab and Rustam, or port and nuts. The picture that emerges from this book is totally different, and helps to explain why Pollitt would never enter the Daily Worker building so long as Rust was its editor. (Perhaps it also helps to explain why Dutt left his private papers not to the CPGB, as one would have expected, but to the British Library.)
What also emerges, to an extraordinary degree, is the degree of criticism of, and even hostility to, the Soviet Union and the Comintern expressed in unguarded moments by people who, in public and for their own good reasons, were prepared to swallow those doubts and even forget later that they had ever entertained them. Dutt reports and reprobates this, in a striking passage where he speaks of “anti-International tendencies, a contemptuous attitude to the International, the kind of thing that began already from the time of the [Moscow] trials, talk of collapse of the International, talk of the Soviet Union following its interests”. These were “a reflection of enemy outlooks”. Even Rust, according to Gallacher, had complained that the CPGB was becoming the “propaganda department of the Soviet foreign office”.
And here surely is the key to the whole debate. For the British propaganda department of Stalin’s Foreign Office is precisely what they had by now become, after 15 years’ Stalinisation of their party. As T.A. Jackson had so presciently warned in 1924: “Our job is only to carry out all instructions at the double, and to stand to attention until the next order comes.” [3] The depth of the CPGB leaders’ uneasiness about their rôle, here revealed so poignantly and at the same time so farcically, shows Trotsky’s wisdom in advising his supporters, in the following June, to devote more attention to the rank and file of the Communist parties: “On the day that Moscow makes a half turn towards the democracies as a half friend, there will be a new explosion in the ranks of the CP. We must be ready to gain from it. I consider the possibilities in the CP very good despite the transitory radicalness of the CP, which cannot be for long.” [4]
Trotsky, not for the first time, was here over-optimistic about the immediate possibilities; but about Stalinism’s inherent volatility and instability he was absolutely right in the long term. The era of ‘explosions– is of course long over; Stalinism and its organisations are now decomposing before our eyes. Those who seek to profit politically from this process urgently need to learn a lot more about Stalinism’s past. This book makes a useful starting-points. [5]
Peter Fryer
Notes
1. Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p.210.2. The full text of this manifesto appears in 1939: The Communist Party of Great Britain and the War, ed. John Attfield and Stephen Williams, Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp.147-52.
3. Communist Review, Volume IV (1923-24), p.539.
4. Discussions with Trotsky: 12-15 June 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p.254. Trotsky was of course referring to the CPUSA, but his advice no doubt had more general application in the 1939-41 period.
5. Unfortunately the editing of this book is far from flawless. There are many fairly obvious mishearings or errors of transcription. The word ‘not’ should clearly come before the words ‘playing its part’ in line 19 on p.68; the word ‘decision’ in the bottom line of p.85 should, I imagine, be ‘discipline’; ‘work’ in line 8 of p.148 should undoubtedly be ‘war’; ‘Dutt’ in line 18 of p.150 seems to be an error for some other name; ‘loosen’ in line 34 of p.148 should perhaps be ‘lessen’; the word ‘Springhall’ should appear in bold type at the beginning of line 3 of p.188; ‘principal questions’ in line 27 of p.188 should probably be ‘principled questions’; ‘clearly’ in line 4 of p.202 should certainly be ‘clearer’; ‘Cox’ in line 6 of p.250 should plainly be ‘Kerrigan’; ‘don’t’ in line 19 of p.266 should surely have been deleted; lines 16-21 on p.292 seem to have strayed in from later in that section. There are similar errors elsewhere, not to mention a number of misprints. Nor are the Biographical Notes wholly reliable: eg Jim Roche ceased to be a CPGB full-timer in 1956, not 1957. To cap it all, the indexes are a disgrace: these lazily compiled and forbidding strings of page numbers virtually unrelieved by sub-headings are of little use to the serious student. For Lawrence and Wishart to charge £34.95 for such a shoddily edited book surpasses mere effrontery.
Reviews
Walter Daum, The Life and Death of Stalinism: A Resurrection of Marxist Theory, Socialist Voice, New York, 1990, pp.380, $15.00The rapidity and extent of the political, social and economic changes now taking place in Eastern Europe, and the fact that they are clearly the outcome of a very long process, make it all the more urgent for revolutionaries to grasp the meaning of what is happening, a task that cannot even be started without an appreciation of the class character of these states and of their laws of motion and development. The reaction of the international Trotskyist movement to this most fundamental of ideological challenges has been most disappointing, and what has so far appeared can be placed in two clearly defined categories, those that are works of apologetic, of the ‘we-were-right-all-the-time’ kind of argument, where the organisation had failed to foresee a single thing, and those that continue to hedge their bets, of the ‘confused-situation-that-can-go-either-way’ variety, where the group which publishes them clearly does not have a clue. A disappointing feature of both types is the lack of any attempt to trace the development of Soviet and Eastern European society as a whole since 1917.
It is one of the many strengths of this book that its author has not only seen that this is the main problem, but has done his utmost to address it. It is a thoughtful, and indeed in many ways, an ideologically exciting book. Whether you accept its main thesis or not, and it will emerge from what is written below that this reviewer does not, it will still challenge your presuppositions and force you to rethink your ideas from top to bottom in the most rigorous way. And unlike most would-be Marxist texts these days, it is written in intelligible English, which is no small gain as well.
The most arresting part of it is that it reminds us of Lenin’s basic definition in State and Revolution, so long ignored or forgotten by those who regard themselves as revolutionaries, of what a workers’ state really is, a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.119). This workers’ state, he points out, “in effect creates a single capital” (p.132). There was thus no question of the immediate abolition of wage labour, that essential component of capitalism, in the Soviet Union: “... the workers’ state inherits a capitalist economy and must therefore live with it at the same time that it transforms it – it is indeed a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.125). “It would not be incorrect”, he concludes, “to call the post 1917 Soviet Union a ‘deformed workers’ state’ almost from the start, a workers’ state whose transition was disastrously hampered by its backwardness and isolation” (pp.142-3).
Here he comes close to the heart of the matter, that the very term ‘workers’ state’ is a dialectical contradiction. It remains bourgeois in the sense that, like any other state, it defends property, but with this proviso, that the property in question is public rather than private. But since the historic task of this state is its own abolition, its withering away, although the workers have created it by means of a revolution, and the state is thus ‘owned’ by them, it still remains a bourgeois instrument and rests upon the exploitation of wage labour, thereby having a high bourgeois content from the start. The author has thus stumbled on a truth that few Trotskyists have ever even noticed, that there is not, and never could be, any such thing as a ‘healthy’ workers’ state, “a grotesque label, if ever there was one, given the reality”, notes Daum carefully (p.143), even when applied to that of Lenin and Trotsky. Thus, if instead of withering away this state power strengthens itself – and in the conditions of the Soviet Union following 1917 there was no question of any other development – its bourgeois content must increase, and it ceases by slow and imperceptible degrees to represent much of the interests of the working class.
Another highly successful part of this exercise is Daum’s destruction, down to the last brick, of the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ created by the International Secretariat to explain the establishment of the ‘peoples’ democracies’ in Eastern Europe after 1945 (pp.310-5). If the nationalisation of the majority of the economy is really the touchstone of what a workers’ state is, he points out, the Soviet Union itself did not become one until the end of 1918; and the idea that a bourgeois state can become a workers’ state by ‘structural assimilation’ really amounts to saying that “Socialist transformation can be achieved without overthrowing the bourgeois state” (p.313). “Such a theory echoes the revisionist method of Bernstein”, he rightly points out (p.312), describing it as “the hallmark of reformism” (p.313). But whilst successfully highlighting Mandel’s dilemma, we shall see that Daum abandons his own methodology when it comes to the Soviet Union, which he believes was a workers’ state until 1936-39, when it was replaced by a bourgeois state, created not as a result of the smashing of the state by armed conquest or internal counterrevolution.
It is precisely in his attempt to apply his own real insights to Eastern Europe that he halts halfway. He correctly draws our attention to that elementary proposition of Marxism, so long and so often forgotten by its would-be practitioners, that the working class revolution is qualitatively different from the revolutions of all other classes by its conscious character; “the creation of a workers’ state”, he points out, “is not just a matter of economic forms; it is the result of a social revolution that places state power in the hands of the working class. Since it inaugurates the period of transition it is in fact the Socialist revolution. And it must be the conscious achievement of the masses.” (p.311) Since he believes that in seizing state power from the Nazis and their puppets, the Stalinists carried out political, not social, revolutions (p.315), he argues that “the proletarian label for the Stalinist states amounts to a cynical rejection of the Marxist conclusion that a workers’ state can be established only through the workers’ conscious activity” (p.13). He is thus obliged to argue that the only feasible theory, that of Haston and Vern/Ryan, is impossible per se: “if the date of the Eastern European revolution is put at 1944-45, then the Stalinist forces became the agent of proletarian revolution at the very moment when they were crushing the movement of workers’ revolt“ (pp.322-3). But in stressing the conscious factor to the exclusion of everything else, he forgets his previous insight, that the workers’ state, being a bourgeois state, also has features in common with all other states, one of which is that it consists of armed men standing in defence of property. Social overturns can take place by armed conquest from abroad, and the possibility of this arose within the lifetime of Lenin in Poland, and its realisation actually took place in the case of Georgia. In the light of the development of Eastern Europe we can surely now affirm that if the Soviet army had indeed conquered Poland in 1919, without the involvement of the Polish working class, and, indeed, in contradiction with their wishes, we would have had a ‘Stalinist’ state in Poland nearly a decade before we got one in the Soviet Union, which actually happened in the case of Georgia, a couple or so years later. For it was Marx himself who explained a long time ago, with reference to the imperialism of the nineteenth century, that the victor in a war involving states of a different socio-economic character imposes its property forms upon the vanquished, that in effect a war between states of a different class nature partakes of the character of an international civil war.
We might add, incidentally, that those who believe that it requires individual, separate revolutions to form new states have certainly got a lot of explaining to do, as the spread of the bourgeois revolution in Europe after 1789 in the first instance took place on the bayonet points of Napoleon’s troops rather than by separate insurrections of the bourgeois class in each country. Daum thus signally fails to grasp what was really at issue in Trotsky’s analysis of the changes in the property forms of Eastern Poland in 1939 as set forth in In Defence of Marxism. “Trotsky seems torn between crediting a revolutionary overturn to the masses and denying the revolutionary character of the Stalinists’ acts”, he concludes (p.318). Yet he himself has already supplied the answer to this conundrum. If a workers’ state really is “a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie”, and if the workers subject to wage labour within it are simultaneously a ruling and an oppressed class, then the operations of this counter-revolutionary workers’ state are bound to take on precisely this character. Daum contradicts his own theory by stating that “the Stalinist social overturn came only later” (p.313), when, in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, “the old bourgeoisies were overthrown” (p.310). He is evidently oblivious of the fact that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who destroyed the embryo capitalist classes in Eastern Europe, and that the complete annihilation of capitalist property forms in the region, by then dominated by German imperialism, came upon Hitler’s defeat. In fact, the truth is that Stalin tried to recreate a native capitalist class in these areas, an attempt he had to abandon when it was obvious that Marshall Aid could well succeed where he was failing, and recreate these classes as clients of American finance capital.
There is far more to this book, however, than can be restricted to these considerations. On the purely historical side Daum provides a devastating picture of the ideological degeneration of the Fourth International, that is, if you accept that there still was one, which this reviewer would not. He shows how the postwar theory of the Trotskyists did not even explain what was happening at the time, still less being able to predict anything, and certainly being utterly useless as a guide to any action of any sort. It began as a complete failure to understand the nature of the postwar world (pp.292ff), continued happily on its way in the ridiculous somersaulting over the nature of the Eastern European states in 1948 (p.311), and when it finally settled down – if it ever did – it left them with an outlook that would not allow them to identify which were workers’ states and which were not (p.313), when this crucial class transformation was supposed to have taken place (p.314), and even with the view that it was possible to have states that had no class characterisation at all (p.314). In terms of activity Daum rightly highlights the importance of the betrayal of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (pp.325-6), whilst strangely neglecting the lack of reaction to the behaviour of the LSSP during the Great Hartal a year later (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.1, Spring 1989, pp.38-43). But whilst it may be true that Bolivia 1952 was the ‘Fourth of August’ of the Fourth International, to use Trotsky's phrase of Germany in 1933, Daum’s analysis leads him to look for the roots of this Stalinist-type degeneration after the end of the war and in the confusion over Eastern Europe. He is thus obliged to accept the myth of ‘Pabloite revisionism’, that it is a creation of the European leadership of the mid- and later 1940s. This is contrary to the clear evidence that adaptation to Stalinism originates with the SWP during the war (as Natalia Trotsky and Grandizo Munis pointed out), and indeed with James P. Cannon himself, in his support for the activity of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944-45, and in the contention that it was still “Trotsky’s army” and not Stalin’s (cf. Max Shachtman, From the Bureaucratic Jungle, part 2, in The New International, Volume 11 no.2, March 1945, pp.48-9).
It is no coincidence that the SWP dropped transitional politics at exactly the same time, and Daum shows that, coming from the same American milieu with the lack of an autonomous working class political movement of any sort, he has no real grasp of them eithcr. “In Britain”, he notes solemnly, “instead of exposing a Labour Party that helped bury the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, the left dug itself ever more deeply into it” (p.22). He thus belongs to that school of idealist ‘Marxism’ that thinks that you can destroy the Labour Party by ‘exposing’ it, i.e. by mere name-calling from outside. Perhaps a bit more reading might come up with the information that it was Engels who urged the trade unions to set up such a party, and that it was Lenin and Trotsky who advised us to “dig more deeply” into it. The “leftward motion of the workers” (p.295), for example, that Daum seems to think is a necessary condition for it, was far from taking place in the British Labour Party when Trotsky advised entry in 1936, and indeed did not take place until 1944. In fact, he shows on more than one occasion that he does not understand the ‘workers’ government’ slogan of the Transitional Programme at all. According to him, when the Bolsheviks raised the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’, “the purpose of Lenin’s tactic was to place the Mensheviks in office so that their subservience to capitalism would be made visible to all” (p.316). But that is the whole point; the slogan means exactly what it says – power, not ‘office’, for part of the time the Bolsheviks were using that slogan the Mensheviks were already in ‘office’, in Kerensky’s government! If it were possible for a reformist party to break with the bourgeoisie and take power, the result would be a workers’ revolution, not a government that “could only have a fleeting existence”, which could either lead “to the workers’ revolution, or it is defeated” (p.316). The whole point of this slogan as a practical, non-sectarian, united front method of demonstrating the class character of the reformists, of really ‘exposing’ them, is to show to their followers that they do not want power for their party at all, but office in a bourgeois state.
There are other indications that Daum’s grasp of Marxism is not as sure as it could be. At one point he argues against Lenin’s concept that revolutionary consciousness had to be brought to the working class from outside, from the declassed bourgeois intelligentsia, in other words (pp.105ff). Apart from the argument about conditions determining consciousness, he has clearly forgotten from which class Marx, Engels, Trotsky, etc., really originated. A very strained argument (pp.274-6) tries to prove that the Soviet Union can still be imperialist, even if it does not export capital in the Leninist sense, giving as its clinching argument that “Czardom had little capital to export” (p.275). Now this really is playing with words, for however penetrated Czarist Russia was becoming by capital, and however ‘feudal’ some of its institutions appeared to be, its ‘imperial’ character was that of an Asiatic Empire, a state form that long predates capitalist society, and indeed every other form of class society as well. He also indulges in over generalisations, categorically denying what Engels treats as a possibility in Anti-Dühring when he states that “no bourgeoisie has gone so far as to abolish private property completely by entrusting its ownership function to the state” (pp.80-1), an assumption that may well need modification if we look at short periods in the history of Israel just after its foundation and of Chiang’s China as it tottered to its doom in 1945-49.
But it is a measure of the power of the author’s reasoning that it supplies the main refutation to the thesis defended by his own book. A major part of his argument against the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ is that by molecular change a state that was once a bourgeois state cannot become a workers’ state without a smashing and recreation of the state apparatus. Such a theory, he argues, leaves us with no guidelines for deciding when a state ceases to be a bourgeois state and becomes one ruled by the workers. But these same arguments are equally valid when applied to the reverse process – counter-revolution. Despite the claim that “this book’s political standpoint is Trotskyist” (p.7), this is demonstrably not the case. It is, in fact, a ‘state capitalist’ analysis of Russia that places the period of the erection of a bourgeois state in 1936-39. Yet the state had the same structure, and even the same personal dictator, before and after this period. This argumentation (pp.170ff) is quite the least convincing part of the book. All sorts of elaborate rationalisations are indulged in to prove the point, as regards both domestic and foreign policy. A quite extraordinary juridical significance is ascribed to the Stalin Constitution of 1936, in spite of the fact that both its author and reviser were shot within two years. In going over the work methods, the exploitation, the labour code, the purges and the terror, he is unable to surmount the problem that the state that implemented them was the same state before and after, which had developed by uninterrupted stages from 1917 onwards. He even tries to pretend that the outright class collaboration of the Popular Front was qualitatively different from previous betrayals, such as Pilsudski’s accession to power in Poland, Chiang’s smashing of the Second Revolution in China in 1927-28, or Hitler’s rise in Germany.
In fact, the same disarray exists amongst state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union as Daum identifies among the Trotskyists with regard to Stalinism after 1945. When did it become a bourgeois state? Along the way he supplies a pretty effective demolition job on the views of Tony Cliff, that the crucial counter-revolution in class terms came about in the period of 1928-29, but in so doing supplies the ammunition for destroying his own dating of this alleged change. State capitalism as a concept turns out to be quite as unscientific as the ‘Pabloism’ he so roundly castigates, since unless it becomes part of the totality of what a ‘workers’ state’ really is, it comes into head-on collision with the class theory of the state. The truth is that the only state capitalist theories that can lay claim to any scientific basis at all are those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and of some of the Mensheviks, who would place Russia’s bourgeois revolution in the setting up of this very state form in 1917.
But the basic thesis of this very fine book, that what we have since 1917 is a continued degeneration of a workers’ revolution in the direction of pure capitalist forms, becoming ever more alienated in structures (Pol Pot’s Cambodia!) and in methods (military bureaucratic conquest and peasant insurrection) cannot be faulted. Comrade Daum is of the opinion – and he argues his case with vigour and imagination – that the crucial change from quantity into quality took place in the Soviet Union in 1936-39. I would argue that we are on the point of witnessing it now, but that it will still require a break at the level of state power, in spite of the ever more warped and degenerated forms through which workers’ power is still expressed.
Al Richardson
Reviews
Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism, Open University Press, 1990, pp.103, £6.99This short work contains a handy outline of the development of the Trotskyist movement and the first half of it can certainly be recommended, though it is heavily slanted towards the discussion of ideas alone and gives little of the flavour of the activity of their proponents in the labour movement at ground level. It is also slanted towards Britain and America, on the excuse of “the bias of my knowledge towards British and American Trotskyism” (p.3). Since the number of Trotskyists in one Latin American country alone well outnumbers the Trotskyists of Britain and the USA put together many times over, we may well question this affidavit, and our suspicions receive confirmation when out of a list of 16 supposedly prominent Marxist thinkers of today three of them were modestly attributed to the British Socialist Workers’ Party three pages earlier.
Thus the wisdom of the publishers in inviting this book from a representative of so aberrant and peculiarly British a group, which apparently now sees itself as the founder of something which is “generally known as the International Socialist tradition” (p.74) may well be doubted, for the link of the SWP with Trotskyism is very tenuous indeed, rejecting as it does transitional politics, the theory of permanent revolution, and the analysis of Soviet degeneration. Thus, for example, Callinicos appears to believe that it was the second half of the Bolshevik slogan – ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ that constituted its transitional character, as opposed to the first (‘All Power to the Soviets’, in effect calling upon the Menshevik and SR leaders to take power) (p.40). His definition of entrism as “a kind of raiding party for members” (p.34) says volumes for the politics of the SWP, but next to nothing about Trotskyism.
For it is when he turns to the politics of his own milieu, in the last two chapters, that he confirms Lenin’s dictum that a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey. This is most clearly shown when he tries to justify his previous contention that whereas Shachtman and Castoriades carried out “revisions of orthodoxy”, Tony Cliff’s endeavours marked a “return to classical Marxism” (pp.4-5).
We may well agree with him, for the truth is that state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union do not originate within the Trotskyist movement at all, but within Second International Social Democracy in general, and in Menshevism in particular. It is true that he very easily disposes of a straw man when he repudiates Perry Anderson’s opinion that the father of ‘state capitalism’ was Karl Kautsky (p.77), pointing out correctly that Kautsky's concept was not the same as Cliff’s at all, hoping in this way to draw a blind over the whole topic. But the fact of the matter is that the credit for this particular form of state capitalism should go back to the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who taught Jock Haston his Marxism in the first place (cf. Against the Stream, p.251) and had promulgated the theory as far back as 1918. For it was Haston who first raised the question of state capitalism within the Revolutionary Communist Party, not only as a purely Russian phenomenon but in global terms, both in the group’s internal bulletin (War and the International, pp.182-5) and in a series of articles in Socialist Appeal (mid-August to mid-September 1947). In fact Cliff’s remit from Mandel when he first came to Britain was specifically to argue against these incipient ‘state capitalist’ heresies, and what happened was that in the course of the dispute the contestants changed sides. Anyone who wishes to make a serious investigation of the whole topic should consult the above sources, as well as the SPGB’s position, which was reissued as a pamphlet in the same year as Cliff first published his own, though we have to admit that Cliff’s logic is inferior to theirs, since they dated Russia's capitalist revolution back to 1917.
Al Richardson
Reviews
Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947, Zed, London 1990, pp.230, £9.95Here is the book which will undoubtedly be the standard reference for its period for South African trade unions and their associated politics. The weaknesses of independent black and working class political organisations made the trade unions of pivotal importance during the whole of this time. Yet the trade unions themselves were often more glimpses of what might have been than anything else. The trade unions considered here were mostly short-lived, fissiparous, and individually all too frequently left hardly a trace. Despite all of this, however, this is a landmark book which is essential for any real understanding of the politics of South Africa then or subsequently.
The material is densely packed and immensely detailed, but justifiably so; perseverance will be rewarded. Nevertheless to the extent that this is not quite a full Making of the South African Working Class, some peripheral prior knowledge or reading would be useful. The period before 1930 is still sparsely covered and little known. A broad overview of the earliest phases of industrialisation would have been very helpful, as also would have been a review of the attempts of the early Communist Party and its forerunners to forge a unity in struggle between black and white workers. Decent alternative sources for either are few and hard to come by. Perhaps they need a volume in their own right, but in the meantime part of this essential supplement is available from Baruch Hirson himself in his articles in the journal Searchlight South Africa.
The 1928 Non-European Federation trade unions are dismissed in one sentence as “revolutionary unions ... in line with Profintern directives ... they paid little heed to the workers’ immediate needs” (p.40). But this hardly does justice to the attempts of the remarkable S.P. Bunting, the original and later shamefully treated CPSA leader, to circumvent the most damaging Moscow directives. Even despite this abrupt dismissal, however, it is still evident that the destruction of these unions by the CP purges of 1929-31 was a disaster. Genuine trade union militants of the highest calibre, Gana Makabeni to name but one, were permanently soured in their relations with white Socialists, and set off on courses of their own; many more were lost for ever. The scars and repercussions of this catastrophe far outweighed and outlived the tiny embryonic entities which had made up the Non-European Federation.
That the cudgels were taken up not just by those few black activists forceful and resourceful enough to go it alone, but also by the even tinier handful of South African Trotskyists should be of no surprise to the readers of this journal. Indeed it was the experience of the 1929-31 South African purges and their impact on the putative Non-European trade unions that was central to the creation of the Trotskyist nuclei in South Africa. One of these nuclei, a group in Johannesburg centred around ex-CPSA activists Ralph Lee and Murray Gow Purdy, made strenuous efforts to take up where the old Federation unions had left off. To struggle simultaneously against both the prevailing conditions in South Africa as a whole and the poison and suspicion engendered by the CPSA was, however, a superhuman task. This group, the only one of the small Trotskyist groups seriously to tackle the trade union question, effectively disintegrated as key members made their way to Britain in two waves in 1935 and 1937. Their story still remains to be told in full. There is some brief mention of them on page 41, but this misdates Lee’s departure to the earlier 1935 date. New material which could have given more flesh to these bones has come to light too late to have been included.
These are relatively small gripes blown up considerably, for what then follows in terms of the trade union developments of the later 1930s and 1940s is seminal. The later efforts of the lone Trotskyist Max Gordon, who inherited Lee’s Laundry Workers Union, can only command admiration. But the motives of the philanthropically funded Race Relations Institute in underwriting both his, and other non-confrontational trade union ventures will exercise minds. So too will all the ramifications of the gradually unfolded fact that the mine workers were amongst the last and least easily reached groups of workers to be unionised; secondary industry workers came first.
The rôle of the CPSA is one of the continual frustration of all that could have been. Individual members could play courageous and constructive rôles; but nothing any of these individuals could do could outweigh the original and continuing damage of the Stalinist subordination of the real interests of the workers to externally prescribed manoeuvrings. After the throttling of the earlier trade unions at birth, the courting of black nationalism was Stalinism’s next most enduring and problematical legacy. The destructive factionalism which this fostered in later township, anti-Pass Laws and trade union developments cannot help but be apparent from a study such as this.
Factionalism was probably inevitable, but the activities of the CPSA fostered it rather than combatted it. The resultant quagmire was never successfully coped with by the Trotskyists either; though their attempts to seek a correct relationship between black and white workers, black nationalism, and urban and rural struggle make fascinating and still relevant reading.
The finale of the book is with the great postwar struggles and revolts which culminated in the brutally suppressed and semi-insurrectionary 1946 miners’ strike. Again the Trotskyists were not absent. The Workers International League made highly significant efforts to promote both unity and a revolutionary perspective, and succeeded in establishing an important Progressive Trade Union Group. Baruch Hirson himself played an important rôle in these struggles alongside a now returned but rapidly fading Ralph Lee. Again, however, it is a glimpse of what might have been. The WIL had turned in on itself, suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of frustration and impotence, and had ceased to exist even before the last act in this saga, the 1946 miners’ strike, was played out.
The 1946 revolt was crushed and black trade unions subsequently banned. The “formation of trade unions and their conversion into a base for a working class movement” had only ever been seen as the “prime task” by Trotskyists, and not even by all of these. Other forces, including by no means least the CPSA, had seen to it that this task had not been realised. In 1946, as in 1930, a promising development had been snuffed out; the way was opened for the domination of very different forces in the 1950s. The 1946 strike had even seen some interventions by some of the more militant figures within the ANC, these were figures who lent support to the strike, but only “because it was part of the African’s struggle against white domination”; not because of any conception “of the African worker as central to the struggle” [my emphasis]. These figures were Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. The workers of South Africa are still paying the price of the failures of the 1930s and 1940s, and may have to pay still further for the still current policies of these same figures and their SACP associates; this is not just a purely academic study.
Ian Hunter
Reviews
Enver Hoxha, The Artful Albanian: the Memoirs of Enver Hoxha, edited and introduced by Jon Halliday, Chatto & Windus, London, 1986, pp394, £5.95Material bearing upon the modern history of Albania is not at all rich. Analysing it is not made any easier by the fact that the better sources come from the Yugoslavs, the sworn enemies of the regime, whilst the standard bibliography was compiled by one of its supporters in Britain, Bill Bland, with obvious intent to distort the true picture. It must therefore be questioned whether a book about “a liar and his lies”, to misquote Trotsky, can possibly add anything to our basic understanding. But to take such a view would be to make a serious mistake. The editor of this book deserves real praise for setting about the thankless task of trying to distill some truth from Hoxha’s endless lying by checking it against the accounts coming from the Yugoslavs and British wartime intelligence. If he has only been able to succeed halfway, the reason perhaps lies in his ignorance of the testimony of Sadik Premtaj, joint leader of the Te Rinjte (Youth) Group, whichwe republished in Revolutionary History (Volume 3 no.1, Summer 1990, pp.21-6), and in the inadequate model he uses to understand Stalinism as a phenomenon, which at times tempts him to relax his keen criticism and give the unspeakable Hoxha the benefit of the doubt wherever there is any.
But in spite of Hoxha’s own intentions, this compilation does prove to be very revealing. Before we introduce it, let us state that the Albanian Party of Labour was not, is not, and probably never will be, a working class party of any sort, in spite of its name. An Albanian proletariat does exist now as a result of the usual accumulation that Stalinism produces, but before the war it was vestigial, or rather, there was an Albanian proletariat, but it worked on the docks in Trieste and Yugoslavia, so it did not live in Albania; and there was a proletariat in Albania, but it was not Albanian, consisting of Italian workers brought over to build the railway. Albanian society was itself too backward to produce a real working class, being divided into two tribal groups, the Gegs and the Tosks. Significant numbers of the leaders of the Albanian Communist Party derived from the more backward of these groups. Well over three quarters of the leadership of the Albanian Communist Party were from the middle class, and it had the lowest percentage of workers in it of any Communist Party in Eastern Europe. Only three workers played any part in the leadership at all – Tuk Jakova, Pandi Kristo and Koçi Xoxe, a tinsmith from Korçë and it is noteworthy that all of them were pro-Yugoslav, for the Yugoslavs after a while began to favour the thin working class element in the Albanian party. Against these people Hoxha’s class prejudices are barely disguised. His foremost opponent, Xoxe, is described as making “no efforts to extend his horizon and to raise the level of his knowledge”, and “who remained, you might say, ‘illiterate’”, and because he had been “brainwashed and inflated” by Tito, “emerged as one of the ‘persecuted proletarians’” (pp.72-3). This authentic schoolmaster attitude certainly does not extend to his intellectual superiors in the Albanian Communist movement, Lazar Fundo, the founder of Albanian Marxism, who was accused of Trotskyism and Bukharinism, enticed back to Albania, and battered to death with a club, or to the poet and scholar Sejfulla Maleshova, a “vain megalomaniac” (p.72), who was expelled and imprisoned in 1948. Hoxha’s own rather more primitive mentality emerges right at the start of the book with the revealing comment about Albania’s past invaders, that “we never mixed our blood with them” (p.39).
Readers aware of Stalin’s background of Georgian blood feud will spot the parallels in this book straight away, not only in the elimination of friends and families that accompanied every major purge, but even in the actual techniques used: “to choose the victim, to prepare the blow with care, to sate an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world!”, as Stalin himself put it (Souvarine, Stalin, p.659). Hoxha’s own distinctive contribution to this science where no witnesses survive to tell otherwise is to arraign his opponents as agents of a foreign power and then have them “commit suicide”, supposedly in remorse (Nako Spiru, pp.101-4, and Mehmet Shehu, pp.333-6). His own family and sidekicks of course rise with him, and will probably fall accordingly when the reaction seas in against his memory. His wife Nexhmije, for example, the leader of the party’s youth, now finds herself in the same position as the unlamented Madame Mao, fighting a last ditch resistance in defence of her husband’s autocracy, even from beyond the grave. As Halliday puts it, “Hoxha grew up in a world of blood feuds and skulduggery” (p.2).
Probably the least successful part of the editor’s work is due to his lack of a coherent overall working model of Stalinism. Yet all the evidence is presented to show that Albanian Stalinism is a classic manifestation of the type. As Halliday points out: “Hoxha’s path to powe and is power, was littered with the corps of his old foes, and his old friends. No Communist regime has experienced such repeated purges and decimations as Albania’s” (p.3). Equally typical is the ideological baggage, such as when Hoxha utilises the anti-Marxist and thoroughly idealist argument so beloved of Stalin and Mao that a regime can change its class character purely by a change in the head of its rulers:
Revisionism is the idea and action which leads the turning of a country from Socialism back to capitalism, the turning of a Communist party into a Fascist party. (p.214)Yet with all this evidence the compiler can still say when dealing with Hoxha’s more blatant lies that “he manifestly relies too heavily on a faulty memory” (p.1), and unable to discern that it is a social mechanism at work he goes on to discuss Hoxha’s massacres in the ‘psychological’ way that used to be used when looking at Stalin:
No one can doubt that Hoxha is extremely suspicious. Indeed, suspicion is almost the central motif of his memoirs. But where is the dividing line between vigilance and paranoia? The question is whether Hoxha is too suspicious. (p.10)Halliday even appears to be taken in by the “apparent paradox” that Hoxha could be “an out and out Stalinist” and “unusually well read and intelligent” (p.6). What does he think the ‘Red Professors’ were who for so long defended Stalinism in the British Communist Party before 1956, whose names now glitter among the New Left? Intelligent Hoxha may well have been, but that says nothing about the deep backwardness and barbarism of his regime, or of himself as embodying it. The notes to this book outline Hoxha’s techniques with almost clinical accuracy, how anybody who had at any time ever disagreed with him was then discovered to have been a spy all the way through; that ideological differences are a cloak for treason, and all of them are reflections of manipulation from abroad; and that any ‘mistakes’ Hoxha himself may have made were not really committed by him at all, but by somebody else who was really one of these spies. “Hoxha even lists the fact that every single Minister of the Interior in Albania between Liberation and the end of 1981 was a foreign agent, allegedly”, comments Halliday, and yet can still express amazement that Hoxha “refuses to confront ... the possibility that the accusations are false” (p.10). This is probably because Halliday appears to believe that Stalinism is a purely Russian phenomenon, and he is thus prevented from using the normal techniques of analysis for its Albanian variant. He makes a point of describing the Albanian Communist Party as “a highly specific formation ... set up without any known direct contact with Moscow”, and hence “not at all a ‘Moscow creation’” (p.22). He is also obliged to pose the problem in this way because he is reluctant to accept the fact that the Stalinist nature of the Albanian Communist Party was imparted to it by the Yugoslavs, to whom it owes its creation, as we shall see.
Hoxha’s party had the method of the Moscow Trials well worked out long before it got into power. We are told at one point (pp.57-8) that Anastas Lulja and Mustafa Gjinishi were both involved in a plot with the British in 1942. Yet Lulja was eliminated for alleged factional activity in 1943, Hoxha and Shehu personally taking part in his ‘execution’, whereas Gjinishi, supposedly Britain’s main agent (pp.48, 61) was in fact made the scapegoat for signing the Mukje agreement, and shortly after being expelled from the Politbureau in 1944 was then killed in an ambush, allegedly by the Germans. Spiru, who is supposed to have “committed suicide” in 1947, is variously described as an agent of the Yugoslavs, then as one of their opponents, and finally as an agent of the Russians (pp.74, 105, etc.). The scenario does not vary greatly right up to Hoxha’s death. Koçi Xoxe, no more an ‘agent’ of the Yugoslavs than Hoxha himself had been earlier when they had made him leader of the party, was supposedly ‘shot’ in 1949, though in all probability he was strangled by Shehu with his bare hands (p.9); Liri Gega, made out to be a Yugoslav agent since at least 1943 (pp.75, 205), was shot whilst pregnant in 1956; and Shehu himself, who apparently served as many masters as Spiru, being an agent successively of American, British and Yugoslav intelligence (pp.34, 331-2) began his spying career in an American schoolroom before the war. Yet again, by now somewhat monotonously, he is alleged to have “committed suicide” in 1981, whereas other reports suggest he was shot with a revolver at a meeting of the Political Bureau. It is therefore with some sense of astonishment that we encounter the editor explaining that Hoxha “was not a ‘Stalinist’ in other important respects. He was a cultured and well-read man. He was also in much closer contact with the population of his country than Stalin” (p.16). This is a ludicrous way of explaining human political behaviour. Was Catherine the Great any less an autocrat because she enjoyed French culture, or Hitler less a Nazi because he appreciated Wagner?
Whence came this obvious, deliberate and pronounced Stalinism? Halliday reproduces Hoxha’s own repudiation of “the absurd anti-Marxist claim that allegedly the Yugoslavs had created our party, that allegedly they had kindled the fire of our national liberation war” (p.12l), and though put on his guard by Hoxha’s mendacity, the furthest he will go is to say that the problem of the foundation of the Albanian Communist Party is a “subject of unresolved disputes” (p.349 n4). Is it really so ‘unresolved’? Long ago Sadik Premtaj pointed to the Yugoslavs as the de facto organisers of the Albanian Communist Party, as well as being the source of the complete Stalinisation of its structure (Revolutionary History, Summer 1990, pp.21-6). Hoxha implicitly confirms this story in this book, when he admits that contact was maintained with Moscow via the Yugoslavs (p.69). This use of other parties to hand down instructions where contact was difficult was a well established practice in the Comintern, such as for example how Moscow kept in contact with the Indian Communist Party via the British Communist Party. It was sometimes maintained where there was no real need for it, for example under the Cominform arrangements, where the British Communist Party itself was placed under the tutelage of the French. Hoxha even confirms Premtaj’s story when he talks about the “service” of Yugoslav agent Dusan Mugosa “in the region of Vlora in the spring and summer of 1943” (p.75), by which he can only mean the part played by the Yugoslavs in the murder of Lulja and the leaders of the Vlore regional committee. Whilst it is true that the only figures in the early history of Albanian Communism who spent any time in Moscow were Ali Kelmendi, Lazar Fundo and Sejfulla Maldshova (none of whom took part in the actual conference that united the three groups to set up the Albanian Communist Party), Stalinism does not have to be imparted at first hand, especially if it reflects the backwardness of the country in the first place. In any case Tuk Jakova revealed the true picture at the plenum of June 1955, when he came out with the “Trotskyist” and “bourgeois nationalist” sentiments that “the party history be rewritten so as to make clear that it had been founded not only by Hoxha but by ‘certain foreign persons’ [the Yugoslavs], and that all those purged be rehabilitated” (W.E. Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift, Cambridge 1963, p.22). The same is confirmed by Milovan Djilas, by no means uncritical about the myths of his own regime (Rise and Fall, London 1985, p.112). Halliday himself admits that “since the Yugoslavs have a much better track record on truth, their version is inherently more plausible” (p.25). As a matter of fact, Miladin Popovie’s first attempt to organise a real Communist Party in Albania at Tito’s behest dates from as far back as 1939, some two years before its founding conference, when he first made contact with the Shkoder group. At this time Hoxha’s Korçe group, in fact, was still hostile to the idea of unification.
This brings us on to the basis of Hoxha’s own career. It was the Yugoslavs who appointed him leader of the new party, and gave all the strategic positions in it to his Korçe group. All the indications fromthe earliest period are that he first rose as a pliant tool of the Yugoslavs, seeing his chance at ultimate unfettered power by siding with the Russians at the time of the Stalin-Tito split. Halliday is mistaken in taking as good coin Hoxha’s frequently expressed nationalist sentiments, claiming that we should accord “due recognition to the long-term nationalist component in Hoxha’s policies”, or that he was “first and foremost an Albanian nationalist” (p.25). Apart from the fact that Stalinism is always a nationalist deviation from true Marxism, the truth is that Hoxha was merely a Stalinist dynast of the usual sort, using and being used by his superiors until the opportunity arose to cut loose on his own, like Mao, Togliatti, and Tito himself. This emerges quite clearly from his behaviour at the time of the conclusion of the Mukje agreement in 1943. At that conference with the Balli Kombetar (an alliance of right wing nationalists and the Djarri group, influenced by Greek Archeiomarxism) Ymer Dishnica signed a pact for a joint resistance struggle on behalf of the Albanian Communist Party. One part of the agreement was that after the war the future of Kossova should be decided by a plebiscite, Kossova being the Yugoslav province with a high proportion of Albanians in it. The Yugoslavs, enraged, ordered the Albanians to repudiate it immediately, which they did, Hoxha himself making an abject ‘self criticism’ some time afterwards. The truth about the whole episode shines out clearly through Hoxha’s lies and evasions. First he tries to blame the Yugoslav emissary, Vukmanovie Tempo, for trying to start a “fratricidal war” by advising an outright attack upon the Balli Kombetar (p.63). Then he manufactures a long, dialogue that is meant to clear him for the responsibility of the decision to negotiate the agreement in the first place (pp.64ff.). Then at last he has to admit that “immediately the party learned of this betrayal by its delegates, it denounced it” (p.65). Hoxha shows himself to be a true protege of his Yugoslav mentors here, and there is not much evidence of a defence of Albania’s national interests at this time. Even four years later Hoxha was careful not to support Nako Spiru when he allegedly came out against Yugoslav influence (pp Miff). Hoxha’s patriotism can thus only be defined in the sense employed by Dr Johnson, when he described it as the last resort of a scoundrel.
All these limitations do not, however, prevent this from being a very useful and informative book. Only with the judicious use of it, along with the accounts of Premtaj and Pipa from the Albanian side and those from Yugoslavia, is it now possible for the first time to sketch out the main lines of the political development of this small and still mysterious country - if development is not too dynamic a word to use for this strange Stalinist fossil left over from a bygone age.
Al Richardson
