*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Trotsky Was Right: How Stalinism Undermined Legacy of October Revolution- A Guest Commentary
Frank Jackman comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1991-92, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
****************
Trotsky Was Right: How Stalinism Undermined Legacy of October Revolution
The following speech, edited for publication, was given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Jim Robertson at a 17 November 1991 meeting in the Bay Area for the Lenin-Trotsky fund.
There are two great Westernizers in Russian history: one was Peter the Great and the other was Lenin. They were Westernizers not in the sense that they wanted to create colonial dependence for the Russian areas, but seeing the immense backwardness of Russia—one in a period where autocracy was the order of the day and one where the proletariat had become a significant factor—each reached out, in his own way and in his own time, to modernize Russia.
In the case of Lenin, this was not on a nationalist basis, not in order to beat the Turks, the Prussians and the Swedes, but to create a new world order that Marx and Engels had sketched out, in which one would abolish the struggles for ascendancy between imperialist powers and the necessity for national struggles for self-determination or independence. That laid the basis for the Communist International. 1 use Lenin's name as shorthand for the entire Bolshevik Party, of which he was the undisputed leader. He had a great many colleagues in this endeavor.
Modern Russian history opens with the Decembrist Uprising in 1825, when sections of the officer corps and the first sprouts of the Westernizing intelligentsia, facing the implacable opposition of tsarism, thought in terms of a coup, and were executed or deported to Siberia for the result. The Decembrists did not look toward the tsarist intrigues in Europe—you know, how to play the Austrians against the French against the Prussians and the rest. They had drawn conclusions from Russia's expansion indigenously several thousand miles to the east; for example, they enthused over the eastward expansion into Siberia and all the way to Alaska. I don't know if they appreciated the reason why Russia could expand indigenously for thousands of miles, simply absorbing native peoples. The reason was that the Russians were involved in the fur trade, and they did not try to exterminate the natives or to culturally transform them, but to hire them as assistants to do what they already had done all their lives for many generations. It was simply an accelerated hunting/gathering activity, only this time for the world market. For related reasons, but very contrary to British imperialist practices, the Russians sexually intermingled with the natives, and the children were named Ivan and baptized. So there was a process of organic absorption, and thus the Russian Socialist Republic extends all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula, to the Pacific Ocean. To this day American Baptist missionaries have trouble with the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands, who insist on clinging to their ancient ancestral Bible that goes back into an infinity of time, which happens to be in Cyrillic.
The tsarist court and its entourage went another way. Russia had been a strong state certainly since the time of Peter the Great. The autocracy and the church were subordinated to the tsarist empire itself, and the nobility's titles were generated from service to the imperial court and the imperial administration. In the 19th century, an intelligentsia grew up, along with a countercurrent of Slavic mysticism; That's why I can call Lenin, validly, a Westernizer, because he fought this very reactionary current that said there's a special Slavic soul and we must eschew all things Western.
Lenin wrote a little essay, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," in which he said the Marxist movement "is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism," referring to the repeated revolutions that had taken place in the metropolitan areas of France since 1789. And he focused on the new, but very concentrated, proletariat that was growing up in the various parts of the tsarist empire.
Through the 1905 revolutionary experience and the disasters that the Russian government experienced in World War I, the Bolsheviks regrouped in the course of a general social revolution, a prolonged popular revolution. The October 1917 insurrection was a coup planned after all the intermediate forces had tried to make various kinds of compromises between the old order and the appetites of the working class and, to a considerable extent, of the peasantry, which were never to be satisfied. Each government (most typically Kerensky) had continued to honor its treaty obligations to the Allies and had continued to endlessly send millions of men against the all too murderously efficient German army.
The coup was very successful—rapidly and highly peacefully in Leningrad, and equally rapidly but not quite as peacefully in Moscow—and was simply accepted all across the Soviet Union, all the way to Vladivostok. It took about six months for the White Guard officers and their Allied advisers and financial suppliers to begin to develop effective White armies, which were put in the field in the summer of 1918. Russia experienced a terribly debilitating civil war. The Bolsheviks won it: they had interior lines of communication, and when it came right down to it, although a good many of the ideas of the Bolsheviks were not too appetizing to the mass of the Russian peasantry, it was a better deal than the tsarists were offering.
But Russian industry, badly deteriorated, virtually ceased to exist. The few hundred thousand workers who had been in the vanguard of the 1917 Revolution ceased to exist, by and large, as a working class. They died or they were pulled into the administration or especially into the army. There were no raw materials for factories anyhow, except those that were diverted exclusively to the Civil War. When the Civil War was about won (under the policy of War Communism, which was simply a ruthless seizure of peasant products), the end of the war and the growing disgruntlement of the peasantry were signaled by the Kronstadt uprising. It was an uprising of sailors, peasant boys who had been put in this safe area during the war to replace the Bolshevik sailors who had gone to the front or otherwise served the revolution.
The Bolshevik Party at the time was and had been debating a new course, but meanwhile was inertially carrying out the policies of War Communism. The Kronstadt uprising marked the first of about 50 years of alternative interpretations of the Soviet Union as something other than a workers state. At that point, the anarchists began calling for a third revolution. One theoretical interpretation after another that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state became current. In renouncing the Soviet Union as a workers state, the state capitalist currents have based themselves on about three different—and more or less mutually counterposed—points of qualitative departure.
Meanwhile, something very bad was at work in the USSR. Without the political ballast of the proletariat, all parties other than the Bolsheviks, more or less, were undergoing polarization (with the exception of Martov's Left Mensheviks, who still staggered down the middle of the road). Some groups were simply becoming counterrevolutionary, while the other wing, like some Left Social Revolutionaries and a few Left Mensheviks, went over to the Bolshevik Party. So the Bolshevik Party became the repository of such revolutionary virtues as continued to exist in the Soviet Union. But meanwhile deterioration was taking place within the Soviet Union, along with various personal transformations.
The death of Sverdlov and the illness of Lenin vastly facilitated the concentration of administrative powers in the hands of a fairly minor figure known as J.V. Stalin. Actually, he was a Georgian named Djugashvili, but like some semicolonial individuals, he was a greater exponent of Great Russian chauvinism than the ordinary Russian. In the fall of 1923, the growing pressures of economic dislocation, the disorganization of the peasantry and the lack of industrial production created what Trotsky called the "scissors crisis." When the scissors are closed, the prices of industrial and agricultural goods are close together. But with prices for industrial goods rising and for agricultural goods falling, the scissors open, and there is growing discontent among the peasants.
So there was a big debate in the Bolshevik Party. The debate was slammed shut; by then the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had acquired a sufficient consciousness to begin to act in concert. There was a party conference in January of 1924 where, as a way to shake the fist of the bureaucracy at the party, the representation proportions were completely out of line. Substantial forces in the Leningrad and Moscow Communist parties were in opposition to the administration, which was then, with Lenin out of action, concentrated in the hands of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, who constituted a "Troika," as it was called, a team of three.
With this administrative control ensured, the boys at the top began rapidly to develop new theories. The failure of the German Revolution—which Lenin had looked to as the beginning of the necessary extension of the revolution internationally—in 1918-19 and in 1923 propelled the move to the right in the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1924, Stalin advanced the extremely characteristic idea that "we will build socialism in Russia alone." In this miserable, wracked country, somehow socialism was to be built. The ideologist Bukharin found favor. His idea was that not only can you build socialism in one country alone, but you can build it at a snail's pace, entirely independently of the world market and imperialist economic and military appetites. It was isolationism with a great vengeance.
There was a very considerable regroupment of those who rejected this and insisted that the fate of the Soviet Union was intimately associated with international and revolutionary developments. Trotsky was simply the best-known figure. The balance of the '20s consisted in power maneuvering: first, the isolation and downgrading of Zinoviev, and then, eventually, of Bukharin. But it was a period of relative mass social freedom, while the administration at the top was fighting it out, and the Stalin faction emerged triumphant.
Its triumph, at the end of the 1920s, generated a considerable totalitarian grip on Soviet society which rapidly spread into practically every field of human endeavor. (The only one that I can think of that was excluded was music. Stalin executed a lot of poets, because he could kind of figure out what the poetry meant; if it meant the wrong thing, you got eliminated. He could never quite get the composers, because that was a little obscure. But he imposed such a structure on the musical arts that the bitter joke was that if Stalin couldn't whistle it, you couldn't get it published.) So this rather frothy bureaucracy had consolidated around a faction, and this added impetus to Mensheviks or anarcho-syndicalists who wanted to find new reasons to write off the Russian state as at bottom not a working-class state.
Seen through Stalin's eyes, the whole thing was terribly difficult. First he had to deal with his allies, who had bigger names than he did, and he got rid of them. Then his own faction more or less believed the doctrines of socialism in one country as they were first enunciated, and were somewhat idealistic. They began to like a chap named Kirov, who in 1934 was shot to death, which was of great convenience to Stalin. He immediately blamed his opponents. In 1934 the Russian CP had the 17th Party Congress, in which a lot of votes were not cast for Stalin. The party didn't have another congress until 1939, and hardly anybody was still alive who had been to the 1934 congress. The consolidation of a totalitarian bureaucracy of a very brittle and murderous sort, along with extensive, enormous purge trials, meant the liquidation of the tops of the economy and the army and the like. It resulted in the sentencing of many millions of men and women to time in forced labor camps, which became a significant factor.
So again new interpretations of the Soviet Union were made. In the early New Deal, two guys named Berle and Means wrote an influential book saying that American capitalism is no longer owned by the capitalists, but instead by the managers of American industry, and the capitalists who own the shares are merely parasites. As a description of the day-to-day operations of American capitalism, this is as suitable as any other. But when you get into a factional struggle in a corporation, you very rapidly learn it is not the managers, but the holders of the common shares, that in fact do own. But that was probably the germ from whence Shachtman and Burnham in the American Trotskyist movement got their idea that the people who were managing Soviet society are the owners of the means of production. In America this was a prevailing idea—called "bureaucratic collectivism"—among revisionist elements for quite a while. It never took hold in England, where various forms of state capitalist ideas dominated: that is, that the Soviet state itself is the one capitalist. I was never attracted to this idea, because capitalism is associated with the development of surplus value, of exploitation, and the Soviet Union allocated its labor on the basis of administrative decisions and quite
independently of the possibilities of financial return. But right down to this day, the current British centrists and left critics of the Labour Party and New Leftists think along the lines of "state capitalism,"
Trotsky was developing an analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, in which the political commanding heights had been seized by a bureaucracy which was inherently unstable and polarizable. This bureaucracy represented a kind of a bridge between the base, which was the Soviet Union that had issued out of the revolution and Civil War, and a series of accommodations with the imperialist powers. So socialism in one country has a very important corollary. If socialism is going to exist only in one country, what is the role of the working class in the rest of the world? The answer is, to defend socialism in that one country, by supposedly finding friendly capitalists to make common electoral blocs and parties with, as opposed to the hostile and evil capitalists who want to do something bad to the Soviet Union. That's the root theory that still operates in the American Communist Party today, which sees progressive Democrats and evil, reactionary Republicans.
All this was a very slow process. Stalin died, they got a semi-reformer, actually personally a decent chap, Khrushchev. He seems to have been the only top Soviet leader who was not personally involved in the mass, bloody terror. But perhaps he wasn't too apt. At least he didn't remain in power very long, but he told a good bit of the truth about the past. All of this, of course, is implicitly immense evidence that the bureaucracy was and is not a possessing class. In order to possess, you have to be able to inherit. But in Russia if a bureaucrat gets fired from his job, it's like working for the Ford Motor Company—you're fired, you're out, and that's it. And you end up at best with a very small pension, and at worst shot as a traitor. So this was not a class in that it did not offer the perquisites of ownership, which are very real and have been real in every society hitherto.
Under Brezhnev, which they now call a period of stagnation, things ran pretty well. But there was no more real terror. If you were a dissident, you might be abused a bit, deprived of your job, sent off for a few months of re-education, then you would come back and hang around in Moscow writing samizdat. In general there, had been a multilateral agreement that with Stalin gone, and his henchman Beria (the head of the KGB) having been shot as a British agent since 1919, they weren't going to do this to each other anymore, that it was too hard.
Furthermore, changes had taken place. They'd already gone through a generation of bureaucrats, who started out as rather bright, uneducated, ambitious peasants who found favor in the eyes of their chiefs. They went out and worked hard, but then they too had children—and the children hung about in the main centers of the country, because they didn't want to go back to the farm. They got high-grade degrees from Moscow U. and places like that. They are the new intelligentsia. And they look to the West, not in the sense of learning from it, but of conciliating it and becoming consumers, with a house in the hills somewhere near Los Angeles. And that explains, by and large, the social base of Yeltsin.
The Russians have been sealed off for a very long time, and they're quite innocent. They believe that any criticism of the United States is a lie by the bureaucracy, because they've been lied to a lot, as well as told the truth a lot. They think that one can simply join the West. Well, one can join the West, all right, like Brazil or Mexico. And that's what the world bourgeoisie would like to do with the Soviet Union. But they have a problem: it was profitable for the United States to spend tens of billions of dollars a year in war preparations against the Soviet Union, but nobody wants to put capital into Russia because the prospect of extracting profit is very uncertain. So very little money is flowing into East Europe as a whole, except the Germans are maintaining and rebuilding an infrastructure in East Germany, after having destroyed its industrial base. And if the Poles can't get money, it's not going to be so easy for the Russians either.
The East European countries now are neocapitalist without capital. It doesn't matter that they haven't managed to denationalize any plants because nobody wants to buy anything—the industrial capacities are not particularly good—and furthermore it's a stormy area. But Russia had an indigenous proletarian revolution. The historical memory of the proletariat is badly but not entirely impaired. Stalin created the Stakhanovite program, in which people are supposed to be paid for how hard they work. The idea of equality is a pervasive feeling among huge masses in the Soviet order. To them, the idea of private ownership of the means of production looks quite literally like sheer theft. So that has been for the Russian proletariat, which is now a much larger section of Soviet society, something that never caught on. Meanwhile the Yeltsin forces are fast accruing everyone who wants to introduce inequality and impoverishment for the masses, and status as a bourgeoisie co-equal with the West (a semi-Utopian aspiration) for the few. Yeltsin is a really despicable character who has long had relations with the anti-Semitic fascists of Pamyat, for example. His main drive is for an early, fast, brutal capitalization of the USSR, at the expense of the constituents that stand outside of Russia itself.
So the issue has not yet been completely joined in the Soviet Union. On the 74th anniversary of the October Revolution, in defiance of the authorities and without official authorization, the working class began to raise its head and come forward with slogans. Not all of them were so appetizing, because there are some nationalists there who want to blame the Jews for everything, as well as Wall Street. But there are also some internationalists, so when we intervene, when we have trouble with some people who want to beat us up, there were always groups that come and defend us, too. The mobilization in Moscow in particular was very large, around 90,000. And this was in spite of the threats by Popov, the liberal mayor of Moscow, who up until the last couple of hours said that he wasn't going to let the march happen.
It's quite important to get the Soviet working class into action, and along intensely political and Bolshevik lines. The issues do not lend themselves to simple economism: a better deal with the trade union to get a few more rubles from management. Because obviously—and it's obvious to the Russians, too—the whole of the country hangs in the balance. While Gorbachev's earlier appointees were liberals, the late ones were rather conservative, and they split off and last August they tried to stage a coup, which was a disastrous, isolated failure. They turned their backs on the working class, and the coup collapsed. But the Yeltsinites do not have complete control yet. We are dealing not with a totalitarian bureaucracy, but a decomposed one. There is every kind of bureaucratic obstacle while at the same time very shady operators will print our stuff for a very considerable amount of dollars—anything!
There is a window of opportunity; the police do not knock on your door. We want to exploit this very much against the capitalist-restorationists, and to engage in a struggle among those who oppose the capitalist-restorationists and against those, like the Great Russian chauvinists, who believe in Mother Russia, "beat the Yid," and the suppression of the constituent republics. We find a considerable base of support for our position for a Leninist-Trotskyist party, which means for a political revolution in the Soviet Union.
Frank Jackman comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1991-92, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
****************
Trotsky Was Right: How Stalinism Undermined Legacy of October Revolution
The following speech, edited for publication, was given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Jim Robertson at a 17 November 1991 meeting in the Bay Area for the Lenin-Trotsky fund.
There are two great Westernizers in Russian history: one was Peter the Great and the other was Lenin. They were Westernizers not in the sense that they wanted to create colonial dependence for the Russian areas, but seeing the immense backwardness of Russia—one in a period where autocracy was the order of the day and one where the proletariat had become a significant factor—each reached out, in his own way and in his own time, to modernize Russia.
In the case of Lenin, this was not on a nationalist basis, not in order to beat the Turks, the Prussians and the Swedes, but to create a new world order that Marx and Engels had sketched out, in which one would abolish the struggles for ascendancy between imperialist powers and the necessity for national struggles for self-determination or independence. That laid the basis for the Communist International. 1 use Lenin's name as shorthand for the entire Bolshevik Party, of which he was the undisputed leader. He had a great many colleagues in this endeavor.
Modern Russian history opens with the Decembrist Uprising in 1825, when sections of the officer corps and the first sprouts of the Westernizing intelligentsia, facing the implacable opposition of tsarism, thought in terms of a coup, and were executed or deported to Siberia for the result. The Decembrists did not look toward the tsarist intrigues in Europe—you know, how to play the Austrians against the French against the Prussians and the rest. They had drawn conclusions from Russia's expansion indigenously several thousand miles to the east; for example, they enthused over the eastward expansion into Siberia and all the way to Alaska. I don't know if they appreciated the reason why Russia could expand indigenously for thousands of miles, simply absorbing native peoples. The reason was that the Russians were involved in the fur trade, and they did not try to exterminate the natives or to culturally transform them, but to hire them as assistants to do what they already had done all their lives for many generations. It was simply an accelerated hunting/gathering activity, only this time for the world market. For related reasons, but very contrary to British imperialist practices, the Russians sexually intermingled with the natives, and the children were named Ivan and baptized. So there was a process of organic absorption, and thus the Russian Socialist Republic extends all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula, to the Pacific Ocean. To this day American Baptist missionaries have trouble with the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands, who insist on clinging to their ancient ancestral Bible that goes back into an infinity of time, which happens to be in Cyrillic.
The tsarist court and its entourage went another way. Russia had been a strong state certainly since the time of Peter the Great. The autocracy and the church were subordinated to the tsarist empire itself, and the nobility's titles were generated from service to the imperial court and the imperial administration. In the 19th century, an intelligentsia grew up, along with a countercurrent of Slavic mysticism; That's why I can call Lenin, validly, a Westernizer, because he fought this very reactionary current that said there's a special Slavic soul and we must eschew all things Western.
Lenin wrote a little essay, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," in which he said the Marxist movement "is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism," referring to the repeated revolutions that had taken place in the metropolitan areas of France since 1789. And he focused on the new, but very concentrated, proletariat that was growing up in the various parts of the tsarist empire.
Through the 1905 revolutionary experience and the disasters that the Russian government experienced in World War I, the Bolsheviks regrouped in the course of a general social revolution, a prolonged popular revolution. The October 1917 insurrection was a coup planned after all the intermediate forces had tried to make various kinds of compromises between the old order and the appetites of the working class and, to a considerable extent, of the peasantry, which were never to be satisfied. Each government (most typically Kerensky) had continued to honor its treaty obligations to the Allies and had continued to endlessly send millions of men against the all too murderously efficient German army.
The coup was very successful—rapidly and highly peacefully in Leningrad, and equally rapidly but not quite as peacefully in Moscow—and was simply accepted all across the Soviet Union, all the way to Vladivostok. It took about six months for the White Guard officers and their Allied advisers and financial suppliers to begin to develop effective White armies, which were put in the field in the summer of 1918. Russia experienced a terribly debilitating civil war. The Bolsheviks won it: they had interior lines of communication, and when it came right down to it, although a good many of the ideas of the Bolsheviks were not too appetizing to the mass of the Russian peasantry, it was a better deal than the tsarists were offering.
But Russian industry, badly deteriorated, virtually ceased to exist. The few hundred thousand workers who had been in the vanguard of the 1917 Revolution ceased to exist, by and large, as a working class. They died or they were pulled into the administration or especially into the army. There were no raw materials for factories anyhow, except those that were diverted exclusively to the Civil War. When the Civil War was about won (under the policy of War Communism, which was simply a ruthless seizure of peasant products), the end of the war and the growing disgruntlement of the peasantry were signaled by the Kronstadt uprising. It was an uprising of sailors, peasant boys who had been put in this safe area during the war to replace the Bolshevik sailors who had gone to the front or otherwise served the revolution.
The Bolshevik Party at the time was and had been debating a new course, but meanwhile was inertially carrying out the policies of War Communism. The Kronstadt uprising marked the first of about 50 years of alternative interpretations of the Soviet Union as something other than a workers state. At that point, the anarchists began calling for a third revolution. One theoretical interpretation after another that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state became current. In renouncing the Soviet Union as a workers state, the state capitalist currents have based themselves on about three different—and more or less mutually counterposed—points of qualitative departure.
Meanwhile, something very bad was at work in the USSR. Without the political ballast of the proletariat, all parties other than the Bolsheviks, more or less, were undergoing polarization (with the exception of Martov's Left Mensheviks, who still staggered down the middle of the road). Some groups were simply becoming counterrevolutionary, while the other wing, like some Left Social Revolutionaries and a few Left Mensheviks, went over to the Bolshevik Party. So the Bolshevik Party became the repository of such revolutionary virtues as continued to exist in the Soviet Union. But meanwhile deterioration was taking place within the Soviet Union, along with various personal transformations.
The death of Sverdlov and the illness of Lenin vastly facilitated the concentration of administrative powers in the hands of a fairly minor figure known as J.V. Stalin. Actually, he was a Georgian named Djugashvili, but like some semicolonial individuals, he was a greater exponent of Great Russian chauvinism than the ordinary Russian. In the fall of 1923, the growing pressures of economic dislocation, the disorganization of the peasantry and the lack of industrial production created what Trotsky called the "scissors crisis." When the scissors are closed, the prices of industrial and agricultural goods are close together. But with prices for industrial goods rising and for agricultural goods falling, the scissors open, and there is growing discontent among the peasants.
So there was a big debate in the Bolshevik Party. The debate was slammed shut; by then the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had acquired a sufficient consciousness to begin to act in concert. There was a party conference in January of 1924 where, as a way to shake the fist of the bureaucracy at the party, the representation proportions were completely out of line. Substantial forces in the Leningrad and Moscow Communist parties were in opposition to the administration, which was then, with Lenin out of action, concentrated in the hands of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, who constituted a "Troika," as it was called, a team of three.
With this administrative control ensured, the boys at the top began rapidly to develop new theories. The failure of the German Revolution—which Lenin had looked to as the beginning of the necessary extension of the revolution internationally—in 1918-19 and in 1923 propelled the move to the right in the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1924, Stalin advanced the extremely characteristic idea that "we will build socialism in Russia alone." In this miserable, wracked country, somehow socialism was to be built. The ideologist Bukharin found favor. His idea was that not only can you build socialism in one country alone, but you can build it at a snail's pace, entirely independently of the world market and imperialist economic and military appetites. It was isolationism with a great vengeance.
There was a very considerable regroupment of those who rejected this and insisted that the fate of the Soviet Union was intimately associated with international and revolutionary developments. Trotsky was simply the best-known figure. The balance of the '20s consisted in power maneuvering: first, the isolation and downgrading of Zinoviev, and then, eventually, of Bukharin. But it was a period of relative mass social freedom, while the administration at the top was fighting it out, and the Stalin faction emerged triumphant.
Its triumph, at the end of the 1920s, generated a considerable totalitarian grip on Soviet society which rapidly spread into practically every field of human endeavor. (The only one that I can think of that was excluded was music. Stalin executed a lot of poets, because he could kind of figure out what the poetry meant; if it meant the wrong thing, you got eliminated. He could never quite get the composers, because that was a little obscure. But he imposed such a structure on the musical arts that the bitter joke was that if Stalin couldn't whistle it, you couldn't get it published.) So this rather frothy bureaucracy had consolidated around a faction, and this added impetus to Mensheviks or anarcho-syndicalists who wanted to find new reasons to write off the Russian state as at bottom not a working-class state.
Seen through Stalin's eyes, the whole thing was terribly difficult. First he had to deal with his allies, who had bigger names than he did, and he got rid of them. Then his own faction more or less believed the doctrines of socialism in one country as they were first enunciated, and were somewhat idealistic. They began to like a chap named Kirov, who in 1934 was shot to death, which was of great convenience to Stalin. He immediately blamed his opponents. In 1934 the Russian CP had the 17th Party Congress, in which a lot of votes were not cast for Stalin. The party didn't have another congress until 1939, and hardly anybody was still alive who had been to the 1934 congress. The consolidation of a totalitarian bureaucracy of a very brittle and murderous sort, along with extensive, enormous purge trials, meant the liquidation of the tops of the economy and the army and the like. It resulted in the sentencing of many millions of men and women to time in forced labor camps, which became a significant factor.
So again new interpretations of the Soviet Union were made. In the early New Deal, two guys named Berle and Means wrote an influential book saying that American capitalism is no longer owned by the capitalists, but instead by the managers of American industry, and the capitalists who own the shares are merely parasites. As a description of the day-to-day operations of American capitalism, this is as suitable as any other. But when you get into a factional struggle in a corporation, you very rapidly learn it is not the managers, but the holders of the common shares, that in fact do own. But that was probably the germ from whence Shachtman and Burnham in the American Trotskyist movement got their idea that the people who were managing Soviet society are the owners of the means of production. In America this was a prevailing idea—called "bureaucratic collectivism"—among revisionist elements for quite a while. It never took hold in England, where various forms of state capitalist ideas dominated: that is, that the Soviet state itself is the one capitalist. I was never attracted to this idea, because capitalism is associated with the development of surplus value, of exploitation, and the Soviet Union allocated its labor on the basis of administrative decisions and quite
independently of the possibilities of financial return. But right down to this day, the current British centrists and left critics of the Labour Party and New Leftists think along the lines of "state capitalism,"
Trotsky was developing an analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, in which the political commanding heights had been seized by a bureaucracy which was inherently unstable and polarizable. This bureaucracy represented a kind of a bridge between the base, which was the Soviet Union that had issued out of the revolution and Civil War, and a series of accommodations with the imperialist powers. So socialism in one country has a very important corollary. If socialism is going to exist only in one country, what is the role of the working class in the rest of the world? The answer is, to defend socialism in that one country, by supposedly finding friendly capitalists to make common electoral blocs and parties with, as opposed to the hostile and evil capitalists who want to do something bad to the Soviet Union. That's the root theory that still operates in the American Communist Party today, which sees progressive Democrats and evil, reactionary Republicans.
All this was a very slow process. Stalin died, they got a semi-reformer, actually personally a decent chap, Khrushchev. He seems to have been the only top Soviet leader who was not personally involved in the mass, bloody terror. But perhaps he wasn't too apt. At least he didn't remain in power very long, but he told a good bit of the truth about the past. All of this, of course, is implicitly immense evidence that the bureaucracy was and is not a possessing class. In order to possess, you have to be able to inherit. But in Russia if a bureaucrat gets fired from his job, it's like working for the Ford Motor Company—you're fired, you're out, and that's it. And you end up at best with a very small pension, and at worst shot as a traitor. So this was not a class in that it did not offer the perquisites of ownership, which are very real and have been real in every society hitherto.
Under Brezhnev, which they now call a period of stagnation, things ran pretty well. But there was no more real terror. If you were a dissident, you might be abused a bit, deprived of your job, sent off for a few months of re-education, then you would come back and hang around in Moscow writing samizdat. In general there, had been a multilateral agreement that with Stalin gone, and his henchman Beria (the head of the KGB) having been shot as a British agent since 1919, they weren't going to do this to each other anymore, that it was too hard.
Furthermore, changes had taken place. They'd already gone through a generation of bureaucrats, who started out as rather bright, uneducated, ambitious peasants who found favor in the eyes of their chiefs. They went out and worked hard, but then they too had children—and the children hung about in the main centers of the country, because they didn't want to go back to the farm. They got high-grade degrees from Moscow U. and places like that. They are the new intelligentsia. And they look to the West, not in the sense of learning from it, but of conciliating it and becoming consumers, with a house in the hills somewhere near Los Angeles. And that explains, by and large, the social base of Yeltsin.
The Russians have been sealed off for a very long time, and they're quite innocent. They believe that any criticism of the United States is a lie by the bureaucracy, because they've been lied to a lot, as well as told the truth a lot. They think that one can simply join the West. Well, one can join the West, all right, like Brazil or Mexico. And that's what the world bourgeoisie would like to do with the Soviet Union. But they have a problem: it was profitable for the United States to spend tens of billions of dollars a year in war preparations against the Soviet Union, but nobody wants to put capital into Russia because the prospect of extracting profit is very uncertain. So very little money is flowing into East Europe as a whole, except the Germans are maintaining and rebuilding an infrastructure in East Germany, after having destroyed its industrial base. And if the Poles can't get money, it's not going to be so easy for the Russians either.
The East European countries now are neocapitalist without capital. It doesn't matter that they haven't managed to denationalize any plants because nobody wants to buy anything—the industrial capacities are not particularly good—and furthermore it's a stormy area. But Russia had an indigenous proletarian revolution. The historical memory of the proletariat is badly but not entirely impaired. Stalin created the Stakhanovite program, in which people are supposed to be paid for how hard they work. The idea of equality is a pervasive feeling among huge masses in the Soviet order. To them, the idea of private ownership of the means of production looks quite literally like sheer theft. So that has been for the Russian proletariat, which is now a much larger section of Soviet society, something that never caught on. Meanwhile the Yeltsin forces are fast accruing everyone who wants to introduce inequality and impoverishment for the masses, and status as a bourgeoisie co-equal with the West (a semi-Utopian aspiration) for the few. Yeltsin is a really despicable character who has long had relations with the anti-Semitic fascists of Pamyat, for example. His main drive is for an early, fast, brutal capitalization of the USSR, at the expense of the constituents that stand outside of Russia itself.
So the issue has not yet been completely joined in the Soviet Union. On the 74th anniversary of the October Revolution, in defiance of the authorities and without official authorization, the working class began to raise its head and come forward with slogans. Not all of them were so appetizing, because there are some nationalists there who want to blame the Jews for everything, as well as Wall Street. But there are also some internationalists, so when we intervene, when we have trouble with some people who want to beat us up, there were always groups that come and defend us, too. The mobilization in Moscow in particular was very large, around 90,000. And this was in spite of the threats by Popov, the liberal mayor of Moscow, who up until the last couple of hours said that he wasn't going to let the march happen.
It's quite important to get the Soviet working class into action, and along intensely political and Bolshevik lines. The issues do not lend themselves to simple economism: a better deal with the trade union to get a few more rubles from management. Because obviously—and it's obvious to the Russians, too—the whole of the country hangs in the balance. While Gorbachev's earlier appointees were liberals, the late ones were rather conservative, and they split off and last August they tried to stage a coup, which was a disastrous, isolated failure. They turned their backs on the working class, and the coup collapsed. But the Yeltsinites do not have complete control yet. We are dealing not with a totalitarian bureaucracy, but a decomposed one. There is every kind of bureaucratic obstacle while at the same time very shady operators will print our stuff for a very considerable amount of dollars—anything!
There is a window of opportunity; the police do not knock on your door. We want to exploit this very much against the capitalist-restorationists, and to engage in a struggle among those who oppose the capitalist-restorationists and against those, like the Great Russian chauvinists, who believe in Mother Russia, "beat the Yid," and the suppression of the constituent republics. We find a considerable base of support for our position for a Leninist-Trotskyist party, which means for a political revolution in the Soviet Union.
