by Chris Harman
How bureaucratised the party had become was shown in 1926, when Stalin and Bukharin fell out with Zinoviev. The Petrograd district organisation which had until then virtually unanimously backed Zinoviev now just as unanimously denounced him. Zinoviev and his supporters were subject to the same sort of attacks that had previously been directed at Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
It was at this point that Stalin and Bukharin gave expression to the bureaucratic conservatism of much of the party by embracing a completely new doctrine known as ‘socialism in one country’. Previously all the leaders of Bolshevism had been agreed that while workers could establish a state of their own in a single country they could not advance to full socialism on that basis. Overcoming the heritage of 5,000 years of class society would only be possible by utilising all the means of production created by modern industrial capitalism – and these existed on a world scale, not in one country, and certainly not in a backward country like Russia. Eventually the revolution had to spread or die.
Not only had Lenin reiterated this on numerous occasions, but Stalin himself had insisted in his book Lenin and Leninism , published in 1924:
The main task of socialism – the organisation of socialist production – still remains ahead. Can the task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be achieved without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible … For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. 163
Such was the importance Stalin attached to Marxist theory and scientific rigour, however, that in the next edition of the book he simply removed the ‘No’ and the ‘insufficient’!
Stalin and Bukharin represented a ruling group which feared and fought anything that might disturb its position of bureaucratic privilege. Its chief characteristics were inertia and complacency. The idea that Russia could simply ignore the outside world, rely on its resources and, as Bukharin famously put it, ‘build socialism at a snail’s pace’, fitted such a mood. That was why every party functionary involved in daily compromises with industrial managers, better-off peasants or get-rich-quick traders rushed to support Stalin and Bukharin in their attacks on those who tried to remind them of workers’ democracy and world revolution. This enabled the ruling group to resort to ever more repressive measures against the opposition, using police to break up a demonstration in support of the opposition by some Petrograd workers on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, 164 expelling the opposition from the party, exiling them to remote areas and finally deporting Trotsky from the USSR.
Even so, until 1928 the atmosphere in Russia was still very different from that which characterised the 1930s – something that is ignored by many works on Stalin’s gulag of concentration camps. The Red terror had been wound down after the civil war. There were only 30,000 prisoners in the camps in 1928 and they were not compelled to work. This was still not a totalitarian regime.
As Michael Reiman has written, on the basis of a study of archives from the period:
Although repression, especially political repression, continued to be widespread, the technique of mass preventive terrorism was virtually abandoned. A normal peacetime framework of legality and the observance of legal procedures was established. Everyday civilian life had re-emerged. The NEP era’s distinctive culture came into its own, with its restaurants, confectioneries and places of entertainment. A richer artistic and ideological life also developed … Workers … actually experienced the positive aspects of the new trade union laws, labour’s new rights, and the freer conditions of the supervision in the factory … Stalin’s authority was still limited. Although his power was great, it was not unlimited. 165
But the whole structure defended by Stalin and Bukharin had inbuilt weaknesses which came to a head just as they banished the opposition. Its stability depended on the peasantry continuing to deliver grain to the city, even though the level of output of industrial goods was not high enough to satisfy their needs, and on Western capitalist powers abandoning any dreams of rolling back the revolution by military force. In fact neither condition could last. As some sections of the peasants grew richer they demanded more from the state and took action to get it. And the major capitalist powers, still driven to divide the world between them, had not lost their desire to carve up Russia.
Both issues came to a head in the middle of 1928. The peasants began refusing to sell their grain to the cities, and Britain, until then Russia’s biggest trading partner, broke off diplomatic relations and imposed a virtual ban on trade. A political crisis convulsed the Kremlin. As Reiman explains:
The changed international situation critically affected internal relations in the USSR. The authority of the party leadership was severely undermined … Confusion and disorientation were felt in political circles. The party leadership … was beset by increasing nervousness and anxiety. 166
The ruling group split down the middle. Bukharin desperately wanted to continue as before. But that would have meant the bureaucracy surrendering some of its power at home to placate the peasants and abandoning any real hope of resisting future foreign demands. At first Stalin was at a loss to know what to do, but then moved to a policy which offered the bureaucracy a possibility of strengthening itself at home and abroad – enforced industrialisation, to be paid for by seizing grain from the peasants by force. Such a policy suited those running the industrial plants. ‘The drive for further expansion’, one study of the period reports, ‘came as much from officials and managers – many of them now party members – as from party leaders’. 167 It also provided the means to produce tanks, battleships, aircraft and machine-guns on the same scale as the Western states and to ward off threats of foreign attack.
Stalin insisted:
To slacken the pace of industrialisation would mean to lag behind, and those who lag behind are beaten … We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years or they will crush us. 168
The bureaucracy’s path of forced industrialisation in order to match the West militarily had a logic of its own. Production of ‘investment goods’ – plant, machinery and raw materials that could be used to produce more plant, machinery and raw materials – rose at the expense of consumer goods. The proportion of investment devoted to producing the means of production rose from 32.8 per cent in 1927–28 to 53.3 per cent in 1932 and 68.8 per cent by 1950. 169 But this meant the goods which the peasants wanted in return for feeding the growing mass of industrial workers were not produced.
The only way to obtain the food was by further use of force against the peasants. Stalin followed the logic of this by moving on from seizing grain to seizing land. The collectivisation of land – in reality the state expropriation of the peasantry – was the other side of forced industrialisation. It led to an increase in the surplus available to feed the towns and sell abroad for foreign machinery. But it also resulted in a fall in total agricultural output.
Collectivisation caused enormous hardship among the peasants. Millions of small and middle peasants were denounced as kulaks and herded into cattle-trucks for deportation. Tens of millions went hungry as their grain was seized. Workers also suffered a fall in living standards, which were cut by an estimated 50 per cent in six years. 170 Such pressure on the mass of the population could not be imposed without an unprecedented police regime. Every protest had to be mercilessly crushed. Every channel by which workers or peasants could express themselves had to be closed. The trade unions were subordinated completely to the state. Vast numbers of people were dragged off to the labour camps, so that the number in them was 20 times higher by 1930 than it had been in 1928. 171 Any section of the bureaucratic apparatus which showed signs of sympathy with the workers and peasants also had to be punished, along with any intellectuals who – even inadvertently – produced novels, poems or music which might act as a focus
for discontent. Debate within the party disappeared, to be replaced by ritual condemnation of the latest ‘deviation’. The artistic experimentation of the 1920s was replaced by a dull conformism mislabelled ‘socialist realism’. Executions, rare between the civil war and 1928, now became commonplace. There were 20,201 in 1930 – more than twice as many as at the end of the civil war in 1921. The grisly total peaked in 1937 at 353,074 – almost 40 times the 1921 figure. 172
Show trials, which sentenced people to execution or the living death of the labour camps, did not merely serve as a deterrent to others. The depiction of the accused as ‘Trotskyist foreign agents’ deflected mass bitterness away from the regime towards alleged ‘saboteurs’. The climax of the terror in 1936–37 involved the condemning to death of all the remaining members of Lenin’s central committee of 1917, except for Stalin, Alexandra Kollontai, now Stalin’s ambassador in Sweden, and Leon Trotsky, who survived in exile, to be assassinated by one of Stalin’s agents in 1940.
For decades supporters of Stalin claimed he was Lenin’s heir, fulfilling the aspirations of 1917. It is a claim repeated, although with negative rather than positive connotations, by many supporters of Western capitalism today. Yet Stalin was careful to ensure the Bolsheviks of 1917 were the first to suffer in the terror of the mid-1930s. Only one in 14 of the Bolshevik Party members of 1917 and one in six of those of 1920 were still in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1939. 173 Many of the rest had been executed or sent to the camps. As Leon Trotsky repeatedly emphasised, far from Stalinism being the simple continuation of Leninism, there was a river of blood between the two.
Stalin’s logic was the same as that of any capitalist who faces competitive pressure from a bigger rival – to tell his workers to make every conceivable ‘sacrifice’ in order to compete. For Stalin the way to ‘catch up with the West’ was to copy all the methods of ‘primitive accumulation’ employed elsewhere. The British industrial revolution had been based on driving the peasants from the land through enclosures and clearances; Stalin smashed peasant control of the land through ‘collectivisation’ which forced millions to migrate to the cities. British capitalism had accumulated wealth through slavery in the Caribbean and North America; Stalin herded millions of people into the slave camps of the gulag . Britain had pillaged Ireland, India and Africa; Stalin took away the rights of the non-Russian republics of the USSR and deported entire peoples thousands of miles. The British industrial revolution had involved denying workers the most elementary rights and making men, women and children work 14 or 16 hours a day; Stalin followed suit, abolishing the independence of the unions and shooting down strikers. The only significant difference was that while Western capitalism took hundreds of years to complete its primitive accumulation, Stalin sought to achieve Russia’s in two decades. Therefore the brutality and barbarity were more concentrated.
The Stalinist bureaucracy could not ‘catch up’ by copying the small-scale ‘market’ capitalism of England during the industrial revolution. It could only succeed militarily if its industries were similar in size to those of the West. But there was no time to wait for private firms to grow as they gobbled each other up. The state had to intervene to bring about the necessary scale of production. State capitalist monopolies, not small private firms, were necessary, and the state had to coordinate the whole economy, subordinating the production of everything else to accumulation.
Most people saw the resulting system as socialist, and many still do. For Stalinism did break the backbone of private capitalism in Russia, and later did the same in eastern Europe and China. But its methods were very similar to those of the war economies of the West. It planned, as they planned, so as to hold down the consumption of the masses while building heavy industry and arms production.
Westerners who witnessed this in the 1930s were bewitched by the economic success of the USSR, and so were many observers from the Third World who saw the rapid industrial advance of the USSR in the 1950s and early 1960s. It seemed that, whatever its faults, Stalinism had found a way of escaping from the crises which beset the market capitalism of the rest of the world. The British Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, lifelong opponents of revolution, visited Russia in the mid-1930s. They were so impressed that they wrote a book entitled The Soviet Union: A New Civilisation? . By the second edition they were even more impressed, and removed the question mark.
Yet the USSR could not escape the world in which it found itself, even in the 1930s. State direction enabled its industries to expand while those of the rest of the world contracted, but only at an enormous price to its people. Even the world recession had a direct impact. Stalin financed the import of foreign machinery by selling grain from the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. When the price collapsed after 1929, he had to sell twice as much, and at least three million peasants starved to death as the state seized their grain.
The abandonment of world revolution
Stalinism was not simply a response to isolation. It also perpetuated that isolation. The theory of ‘socialism in one country’ led to the imposition of policies on Communist parties in the rest of the world which damaged the chances of revolution.
During a first phase of the Stalin–Bukharin alliance the search for respectable allies in the West meant cosying up to the British TUC through an ‘Anglo-Soviet trade union agreement’, even as the TUC betrayed the general strike. British trade unionists were encouraged to raise the slogan, ‘All power to the general council of the TUC’, although the most cursory glance at the record of the British trade union leaders would have revealed how they would use such power.
In the same months the search for allies in the East meant praising Chiang Kai-shek. Even after he had attacked workers’ organisations in Canton, Stalin and Bukharin told Chinese Communists in Shanghai and elsewhere to put their trust in him. 174
There was a change in the policies expected of foreign Communist parties when ‘socialism in one country’ shifted from being ‘socialism at a snail’s pace’ to forced industrialisation. They were suddenly told in 1928 that they were in a new ‘third period’ of revolutionary advance. The principal enemy was now the same left wing inside the social democratic parties and the trade unions which the Russian leadership had been praising so highly only a few months earlier. Stalin and his followers declared that these people were now ‘social fascists’ and as dangerous as the far right. Communists everywhere had to direct most of their fire against them, refuse to ally with them under any circumstances and, if necessary, form breakaway trade unions.
New leaders who would accept such policies were imposed on the foreign Communist parties, and nearly everywhere there were expulsions of established leaders who would not go along with them. What was Stalin’s motive in performing this 180 degree turn? Part of the rationale was to cover up for the mistakes made in Britain and China. After forbidding the Chinese Communists to criticise Chiang Kai-shek in March 1927 as he prepared to butcher them, Stalin and Bukharin then pushed the Communists to try and seize power in Canton in November. The balance of forces was completely against them, and the result was a bloodbath, but it created a climate in which it was very difficult to criticise Stalin and Bukharin for being too conservative. The turn fulfilled other functions as well. The sense of a desperate, heroic struggle internationally fitted with the desperate scramble to industrialise Russia regardless of the impact on the lives of the mass of people. The turn also enabled Stalin to weed out anyone in the international movement who might conceivably criticise what was happening in Russia. It ensured the final transformation of foreign Communist parties into organs of Russian foreign policy.
The ‘third period’ was disastrous for the foreign parties. The crisis which erupted in 1929 radicalised a substantial minority of workers and created growing sympathy with Communist propaganda about the evils of capitalism. But it made many workers cling to the security of the established social democratic parties and unions. It was usually young workers and the unemployed who moved in a ra
dical direction, since demonstrations which ran up against bloody police repression were the only effective means the unemployed had of expressing their anger. By contrast, those workers with jobs were often so terrified of losing them that they listened to calls for ‘moderation’ from parliamentary and trade union leaders.
These workers were bitter too. When employers gave them little choice but to strike they could do so in the most militant fashion. But usually their bitterness was bottled up, not finding expression until they felt they had a chance of fighting successfully. The splits in the ruling class created by the crisis could suddenly open new possibilities for workers’ struggles, as could upturns in the economy, however short-lived, which led to firms employing more workers. So the years after 1929 saw many sudden upsurges of militant forms of struggle: the revolutionary overthrow of the Spanish monarchy and a massive revival of the workers’ movement; a revolutionary upheaval in Cuba; a huge upsurge of the French left, leading to the formation of a ‘Popular Front’ government and the occupation of the major factories; and the birth of mass trade unionism in the US culminating in an occupation at the world’s largest car manufacturer, General Motors.
But nowhere did this happen instantaneously with the onset of the crisis – there was a time lag of two, four or six years – and nowhere did it simply dissolve the influence of the old social democratic and union organisations overnight. Typically, sections of the social democratic leadership maintained and even increased their influence for a time by adopting much more left-wing language than previously. Those who simply denounced these leaders as ‘social fascists’ were cut off from the workers who followed them.