April 6, 2003

Stalin’s rule represented a number of major contradictions. As he consolidated his rule, accurate information about him became rare, being mixed inextricably with distortion and outright falsehood

It is 50 years now since J.V. Stalin has been dead, a long enough period presumably for one to look back on the man and his historical role objectively. He is credited with having killed more communists than all the anti-Communist governments put together; but also with industrializing the Soviet Union and turning it into an almost totally literate nation in just over a decade.

There are problems about evaluating him, not the least because his rule represented a number of major contradictions. He was unknown to the public when he emerged as the top leader of the Soviet Union. He headed the world communist movement, while committed to building socialism in a single country. He desired peace and social stability in the world in the interest of a revolutionary movement. The soviet system had socialist production and bourgeois distribution, his state was a dictatorship of the proletariat while the majority of its citizens was peasant. The state had the most advanced laws, with a primitive, almost mediaeval, penal system, etc.

A major problem is that, as he consolidated his rule, accurate information about him became rare, being mixed inextricably with distortion and outright falsehood. His authorized biography published in Moscow in his lifetime (1949) says: “It was the Bolshevik Party, headed by Lenin and Stalin, that created the Red Army,” (P-69), although history recognizes Trotsky as the leader who created the army and led it to victory. Again, the biography gives the impression (p-9) that Stalin, as the editor of Pravda in early 1917, espoused Lenin’s line. In actual fact, he advocated support to the Provisional Government and was late in adhering to Lenin’s line when the latter returned to Petrograd.

However, as passions subside, historiography becomes more objective. Bolsheviks are not accused so often now of making a coup in November, 1917. It is recognized now that they had the backing of a majority of the working class and of some poor peasants. It is also seen now that maybe the Bolsheviks did not have to seize power. It was lying on the streets, as Lenin put it, and they just picked it up. Indeed, they could not have taken power if the Russian state had not disintegrated completely and the others had not stood in awe of “the machine of state”.

The Bolsheviks, with 80,000 members, were far fewer than the Mensheviks but were better organized and had a modern “Robespierre” at their head. The poor showing of the Russian bourgeoisie in the Revolution of 1905 had convinced the left-wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party that the capitalists were no more capable of leading a revolution against the autocracy. Lenin, therefore, called for an alliance of the workers with a part of the bourgeoisie, mainly the peasants, to perform this historical task. Trotsky, in his famous thesis of permanent revolution, called upon the workers to seize power by themselves and perform the tasks of the bourgeois revolution — land reforms, democracy, industrialization, etc — and then continue on to socialism. The Mensheviks still believed that the tasks of a bourgeois revolution had to be carried out by the bourgeoisie itself.

The country moved steadily to the left between the second Russian Revolution (March, 1917), when the Mensheviks and the right-wing parties formed the government, and November, as the government failed to either make peace with Germany or distribute land among the peasants. The Bolsheviks did these two immediately upon seizing power on November 7, and thus gained the support of the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of Russia. It was these peasants who carried the Bolsheviks to victory against the internal opponents and the intervening foreign armies.

The victorious Bolshevik leadership acknowledged that the backward Russia, whose industrial production in 1913 had been only one third that of France, itself only semi-industrialized, could not build socialism. They thus waited for a revolution in Germany, the advanced country with the biggest socialist movement, to make a socialist revolution and then help Russia. But the German party was led by Ebert, who, according to himself, “hated social revolution like sin”.

At home, the Russian civil war had reduced the Bolshevik party to only 10,000 and the grain requisitions had alienated many peasants. There was an urgent need to strengthen the roots of the new regime. Lenin renewed the worker-peasant alliance through the New Economic Policy of 1921. It privatized the retail trade and permitted the peasants to sell only a certain portion of their product to the state at a fixed price, selling the rest on the open market. As a result, the economy had recovered by the time Lenin died in 1924. But the question remained as to the prospects of socialism in the face of the stability regained by capitalism throughout the world.

The Soviet leadership really had no answer to the problem. Bukharin had practically gone over to peasant capitalism, which, if it had continued, would have led to the restoration of capitalism. Trotsky, stuck with the impossibility of building a socialist society in backward Russia, was yet taking an extreme left position. In that situation, Stalin came up with the project of Russia building socialism with its own efforts and was supported by a majority of the Bolshevik Party in it.

Here, building socialism really meant building its pre-requisites, i.e. industrializing the Soviet Union, mechanizing agriculture and raising the cultural level of the people. The surplus necessary for this project was to be obtained by squeezing the peasants. Forced agricultural collectivization and five year plans, launched simultaneously in 1927, turned the Soviet Union into an industrialized country by 1940. However, the forced pace of industrialization closed the doors of its transition to socialism.

There were two main reasons for it. First, Stalin’s collectivization came not as the socialization of agriculture by the spontaneous action of the peasantry but as a forced measure with the objective of exploiting the peasants. This broke the workers’ alliance with the peasants which had been forged by Lenin through the NEP.

Second, the exploitation of the peasants was bound to, and did, lead to the exploitation of the workers by the bureaucracy, whose existence was necessitated by industrialization. They remained wage-workers and the law of value ruled supreme.

Trotsky was the first to point to the rise and growth of bureaucracy as the main hurdle to socialism in the Soviet Union. He held that Stalin had taken the leadership of the bureaucracy, which had, in turn, carried him to the top and kept him there. However, his analysis was purely economic.

Rakovsky, a revolutionary of Romanian origin, made the most profound analysis of the bureaucracy, before he was sent to a concentration camp by Stalin in 1930. Soviet bureaucracy, he said, was “a part of the working class which has separated, after the revolution, to exercise the functions of government”.

This had two results in the absence of a real workers’ democracy: (a) the functions which were exercised by the working class as a whole or by its avant-garde, the party, had become the monopoly of a restricted group which held power (b) the functional differentiation became social, as the way of living, the economic privileges separated the bureaucracy from the workers. “The function modifies the organ itself and the individuals exercising the tasks of political and economic management cease, objectively and subjectively, materially and morally, to belong to the working class”. As a result, the Soviet State passed from being a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformation to a bureaucratic state, since the nature of a social formation created the possibility to turn itself into a dominant social order with political monopoly.

Of course, no one could deny that any nationalized industry must take the form of bureaucracy. The question was that of the loss of political control over this bureaucracy, which had been autonomized.

By the time of Lenin’s death, Stalin had already accumulated vast and effective power in his hands, since he controlled the Party Secretariat, the Party’s Organization Bureau and the Control Commission and had put his men in key positions in the Party. He could not be dislodged. He had obtained these positions because he was ready to take on organizational jobs, which most others were not prepared to do. He had also proved his ability during the Civil War, when Lenin had sent him to the points of crises, such as the defence of Petrograd and Tsaritsyn. Lenin had in his will called him and Trotsky the two ablest men in the Politburo.

It had been expected that the two would fight for power. But, actually, there was no struggle for power. Stalin was on the offensive against Trotsky. The latter only defended himself; never taking the initiative. He never reached for power, being essentially a number two man. The problem was that he was not prepared to be a number two to Stalin, though he was still not ready to take himself the responsibility of the top leadership. The Bolshevik leadership found this position absurd and sided with Stalin. Actually, the two men were very different.

Trotsky was certainly wrong when he called Stalin “the most outstanding mediocrity in our party”, but Stalin was partly right in describing Trotsky, after seeing him in Vienna in 1913, as “a magnificent inutility”.

Another contrast between them appears in their treatment of their tormentors, when they fell into their hands. Captain Nikotin, who had beaten Stalin in captivity, was shot when he was captured by him during the Civil War. A French police official who had tormented Trotsky in Paris, fell in his hands when he was War Minister during the Civil War. Trotsky spared his life.

The Bolshevik Party, which had entered the Civil War with 80 thousand members, ended it with ten thousand, who were not sufficient for the job in hand. Stalin all of a sudden admitted 40 thousand new members to the Party. They may have been sympathetic to the Party or to Stalin. But they had not passed through the tests of revolutionary struggle. Moreover, they were grateful to Stalin for taking them into the only existing party and thus giving them access to privilege and some power. They, therefore, supported Stalin solidly, who could, thereafter, pack the party congresses and central committees with his men. There were four factions in the Bolshevik Party when Lenin died. Stalin united with Bukharin and Zhinoviev to expel Trotsky, then with Bukharin against Zhinoviev, then he got rid of Bukharin. In the thirties, he turned against his own faction under pressure from the bureaucracy. It was this last purge that Khrushchev lamented in his report to the 20th congress in 1956.

One new element which had been introduced into the post-Lenin inner party struggles was the use of the political police against political opponents by Stalin.

As stated earlier, Stalin came to depend more and more upon the bureaucracy, both political and economic. It was a stratum already developing contradictions with the working class from which it had sprung, but had not yet become a class-for-itself. It could not, therefore, be a sure social base for power. So the state power had to depend on a bloated coercive apparatus, which, in such a situation of transition, rendered the state autonomous of classes. This explains Stalin’s ability to use the police for settling inner-party disputes in the twenties and the thirties, and his own gradual rise to absolute power.

The bureaucracy, turning into a class in the sixties, though without acknowledging it, ruled the Soviet Union and then liquidated it in 1991, when it stepped forth as a bourgeois class, though still mainly of the robber baron kind.

Among the many contradictions of Stalinism, two stand out: his foreign policy and his use of terror even after gaining power.

He headed the world communist movement and yet opposed the attempt by the communists abroad to seize power, notably in Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and China. He established Soviet-type regimes only in those countries which had been allotted to him at Yalta and which his police could control. He opposed autonomous revolutionary action elsewhere for fear that they may provoke the other great powers, and thus disturb the international peace which he considered essential for building up the Soviet Union. This is probably what Isaac Deutchermeant when he said that “socialism in a single country” was so integral to his outlook that he did not want a socialist revolution anywhere else.

His use of violence in politics, in fact, of terrorism, which the communists had always condemned, is more problematic. The former French communist, Elleirstein, says the communists and their opponents had both used terror during the Civil War. Stalin continued to use it later too. But he does not say why. Surely, killing as a habit would not be tolerated if it did not serve a social purpose. Trotsky says that Stalin had the will to power but lacked the mental equipment to persuade. So he killed.

The question is how does one person acquire the kind of absolute power that Stalin did and as Khrushchev described in his report to the 20th congress. Khrushchev’s laying of blame for it on the “cult of personality” is not an explanation. It is a substitute for one. True, Stalin had acquired a political police. But why was there no check on its use?

The only explanation for the massive bloodshed of the thirties, when the entire generation of Bolsheviks who had made the revolution was wiped out, would be class struggle. The bureaucracy, growing ever stronger, could not tolerate another leadership laying claim to political power. And since the Bolsheviks enjoyed legitimacy due to their revolutionary credentials, they could not just be pushed aside. They had to be physically eliminated.

Stalin will go down in history as a leader who, like Ivan the Terrible and Shi-huang-ti, mobilized the people to build a great state. But, in the process of industrialization at a forced pace, he forgot the humans that socialism was meant to serve. The rise in production became an end in itself. The result was that, when the system built by him ran into an impasse in the eighties, it sought its solution not on the left but on the right.

So all the sufferings and privations suffered by the people under his rule, turned out to have been not for socialist but capitalist primitive accumulation. This would appear “impossible”. But as AJP Taylor says, “impossible is what one gets from history”.

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