In these pages an attempt will be made to sketch his career and character. This will not be easy. Until quite recently Malenkov's career ran its course behind the closed doors and the drawn curtains of Stalin's offices. But enough is known to provide some clues to Malenkov's personality and to the policies he is likely to pursue; and since his assumption of power he has given a few more clues, some of which are perhaps of greater significance than it appeared at first.
In what way Malenkov will act his part depends, however, less on himself than on the scene on which he has to act, on the forces in the background, and on the stage in the development of the plot at the moment of his entry. Once again then we have to take a broad view of the whole scene in order to approach the chief character and to see where he stands in relation to the heritage Stalin has left him.
It is tempting to speak of Stalinism at large and to forget that Stalinism was not a static, unchanging phenomenon. On the contrary, it passed through several distinct phases, each with its special features. It held under its sway several Soviet generations. Outwardly these generations may have appeared not to differ from one another. All have been steeped in the Stalin cult; and all seem to have behaved in the same way. Actually, the teachings, slogans, and myths of Stalinism have refracted themselves differently in the minds of each age group, for each has grown up in different social conditions.
What we are witnessing now is a crucial change of generations. The old Stalinist guard is gradually making its exit. What is the outlook of those who come to replace it? To what extent can they have developed new ideas and new aspirations? Where does Malenkov stand in relation to the changing generations?
In Stalinism, the Russian revolution was blended with age-old Russian tradition, as has been pointed out in detail elsewhere.[2] It seems therefore proper to look for possible precedents relevant to the present situation both in the history of modern revolutions and in Russia's own past.
We know of only one significant instance in which a revolutionary-republican dictator tried to bequeath immense power and authority to a chosen heir. In seventeenth-century England, Oliver Cromwell attempted to pass on the heritage of the Puritan revolution and of the Protectorate to his son Richard. However, very soon after Cromwell’s death, his soldiers overthrew the son, restored the Stuarts to their throne, and acclaimed the returning Charles II at least as jubilantly as they had once applauded the execution of Charles I. Is it possible that Malenkov should be Stalin's Richard?
In Russian history there are the memories of what happened after the death of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the two Tsars with whom Stalin has often been compared. Under both these Tsars, Russia's power had grown immensely and her outlook had undergone profound changes, many of which survived their initiators and profoundly influenced posterity. Yet after each of these Tsars, Russia's power receded and shrank. Is there any reason to suppose that something similar may occur again?
One may also recall another Russian precedent. Under Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar, Russia seemed as if frozen in the tyranny of her ruler and in — immobility. Thus Western observers saw her. Yet underneath the surface, influences were at work which made for change. Only a few years after the close of the reign of Nicholas I, his successor Alexander II emancipated the Russian and the Polish peasant-serfs and introduced a number of quasiliberal reforms.
No doubt to some extent every precedent may be irrelevant to the present situation. The parallels drawn from Russian history relate to regimes which were not revolutionary in origin and character, despite the sweeping reforms carried out by the rulers. The analogies drawn from other revolutions may be partly invalidated by the different nature of the Russian revolution, and by the fact that no previous revolution, not even the French in its Napoleonic phase, had spread over as vast a portion of the globe as that which is now under the sway of Stalinism. Whither then is the Russian revolution going as its fourth decade draws to a close?
These are the questions to be probed. But enough has perhaps already been said to foreshadow the general answer:
It is implausible to expect that Stalin's immediate successor will be merely Stalin's continuator. No doubt, he will keep up the pretence of being just that, as Stalin kept up the pretence that he was merely Lenin's continuator. In truth, Stalinism was a continuation of Leninism only in some respects. In others it represented a radical departure from it. There is reason to think that whatever comes in Russia now will only be in part a continuation of Stalinism, while in some vital respects it will mark a break with the Stalin era.
CHAPTER TWO
FROM LENINISM TO STALINISM
THE forecast of a break with the Stalinist era at once brings the sceptic to his feet: ‘Surely’, he says, ‘you are making a sweeping statement? On what can you possibly base it? Only on the accident of Stalin's death in March 1953?’
No, not only on this accident. Of Stalin, one can only say what George Plekhanov, the great Russian thinker, once wrote about other historic figures: ‘Owing to the specific qualities of their minds and characters, influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces.’
It is the ‘general trend’ of contemporary Soviet life which has been preparing the break with the Stalin era; and Stalin's death and its consequences can only influence some ‘individual features’ of the process.
The prediction is less sweeping than may at first appear when it is added that the break with the Stalin era is likely to be similar to that by which Stalinism disengaged itself from the Leninist era of Bolshevism.
Stalinism developed out of Leninism, preserving some of the features of Leninism and discarding others. It continued in the Leninist tradition; but it also stood in a bitter and unavowed opposition to it. Whatever trend emerges in Russia in the near future is likely to adopt the same dual and ambivalent attitude towards Stalinism, preserving some of its features, modifying others, and discarding still others. A crisis of Stalinism has been latent for some time past. All that Stalin's death can do is to bring the crisis into the open, partly or wholly, and to underline the need for a solution. Stalin, like Lenin before him, died at a crossroad of Bolshevik history.
To understand the nature of this crossroads it may be useful to cast a glance back upon the road which Russia has traversed in the last three decades, and upon the starting-point ofthat road — the transition from Leninism to Stalinism. The heritage of the Stalin era and Russia's attitude towards it may then be seen in perspective.
At the time of Lenin's illness and death (1922-4), Bolshevism was in the throes of a profound crisis, which was aggravated but by no means brought about by Lenin's disappearance. The Russian revolution was no longer able to travel along the road on which Lenin had led it. If Lenin had lived longer he would hardly have been in a position to go on leading it along the same road. He would have been compelled to change direction, one way or another; and bis departure speeded up the change.
The crisis in Bolshevik affairs which coincided with Lenin's death affected the domestic and foreign policies of Bolshevism, and indeed its whole moral climate.
Lenin had been brought up in the old Marxist school of thought, which had come into being in Western Europe, when Western Europe was leading the world in industrial development. The Marxian ideas of the proletarian revolution, the proletarian dictatorship, and the character of a socialist economy were working hypotheses designed to fit a highly industrialized, civilized, and organized capitalist society, with a very strongly developed industrial working class. In the view of nearly all the early Russian Marxists these ideas had no immediate practical relevance to Russia. Until very late in his career, up to the First World War, Lenin refused even to countenance any thought about a socialist revolution in Russia in any foreseeable future.
Only shortly before 1917 did he change his mind and adopt the view that the Russian revolution would have to ove
rthrow not merely Tsardom and what had remained of the feudal order, as he had thought hitherto, but the underdeveloped Russian capitalism as well.
For a whole Century Russia had been fraught with revolution; but the revolutionary movement had been led by an intelligentsia which had had almost no following among the broader classes of the nation. Since the turn of the century, however, the young, small, but politically very active Russian working class had become ‘the chief driving force’ of the revolution. The workers could not be expected to content themselves with the overthrow of the Tsar and of the landed gentry, to whom they were opposed only indirectly. They saw the capitalist industrialists as their immediate enemies; and in a revolutionary situation they were bound to aim at the expropriation and the overthrow of the latter. This, however, would mark the beginning of a socialist revolution, leading to the establishment of a nationalized and planned economy. Such was Lenin's attitude at the outbreak of the revolution of 1917.
But it was still Lenin's (and his party's) conviction that Russia's industrial resources and the general level of her civilization were highly inadequate for the establishment of socialism. Thus Lenin expounded the idea of a socialist revolution in Russia and he himself led the revolution while recognizing that if victorious the movement could not achieve its ultimate purpose in Russia.
This was a fundamental contradiction in his attitude. He sought to resolve it by treating the Russian revolution as the first act of a much wider international upheaval, the main arena of which he saw, in accordance with Marxist tradition, in the industrial countries of Western Europe.
The Russian revolution was therefore, in Lenin's view, no self-sufficient, national-Russian phenomenon; and the chances of the future socialist order were not dependent on the inadequate resources of Russia alone.
Western industry, technology, and civilization were to supply the basis and the elements of socialism; and Russia, raised up industrially and culturally with the help of Western revolutionary States, was to participate in the experience and the benefits of an international socialist order.
This was no mere theoretical construction. The whole emotional content of Bolshevism in 1917 and after centred on the expectation of a more or less imminent revolution in the West. Lenin and his associates were not the original authors of the prognostication about the impending downfall of Western capitalism. Nor did they for a moment imagine that it was they who could bring it about. A whole generation of European, especially German, social democrats had grown up in the belief that capitalism had outlived its day in the West. Karl Kautsky, the intellectual inspirer of that generation, the man whose modest disciple Lenin regarded himself up to 1914, had argued along these lines ever since the beginning of the century.
But most Western European Marxists treated their own prognostications as ritualistic performances, as something like socialist variations on the Christian theme of the Last Judgment. They refused to be guided in their practical policies by their own preachings. In the pre-1914 Socialist International, the future leaders of the Russian revolution formed almost the only party which believed with passion and zeal in the near advent of international revolution. On this belief the Bolsheviks staked their actions and their — heads.
Lenin's death coincided with a crisis in this belief. From 1918 till 1923, in the aftermath of the First World War, the revolutionary ferment which had engulfed Europe still kept the flame of that belief burning. But the old order, slightly reformed, managed to survive in Europe; and by 1924 the revolutionary ferment had subsided. The Russian revolution was to remain isolated for an indefinite time. The Bolshevik assumptions appeared to have been refuted by the events. Bolshevik Russia had to adapt herself to her isolation.
The dilemma to which this gave rise was in the centre of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. To use terms now current, Bolshevism had to decide whether it should go on staking its future on the ‘liberation’, that is on the self-emancipation, of foreign working classes or whether it ought to aim at ‘containing’ capitalism at the frontiers of the Soviet Union. The policy of ‘liberation’ appeared to have exhausted its possibilities: the working classes in foreign countries were neither ready nor willing to overthrow capitalism. Soviet policy moved slowly but irresistibly towards ‘containment’, which involved a radical revision of Leninist assumptions and attitudes.
It remains a moot point whether Lenin himself would have been able to carry out such a revision, which would have gone against all his mental habits and cardinal beliefs. Rarely, if ever, has an initiator of a great revolutionary movement been able to throw overboard his cherished ideas and principles when these clashed with immediate reality or had been outpaced by events. The Russian revolution was withdrawing into its national shell; and Lenin, the Internationalist par excellence, might not have been able to withdraw with it. At any rate, the great majority of his friends and disciples, who by his side had led the October Revolution and had built the Soviet State, found themselves at loggerheads with the new trend in Bolshevism.
Lenin died at a moment when history had overtaken him. His illness and death relieved him of the bitter necessity to grapple with a dilemma which he might have found insoluble.
The crisis which confronted Leninism in its domestic policy was no less deep and grave. There, too, Lenin's party was marking time at a crossroad, while Lenin was on his deathbed.
Bolshevism had proclaimed the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ in Russia; but it had also conceived that dictatorship as a ‘proletarian democracy’. To put it in simpler terms, Lenin had frankly and without inhibition denied any political freedom to the former possessing and ruling classes and to their parties. His government, like any revolutionary government before it, claimed the right to suppress those who strove, arms in hand, to restore the pre-revolutionary order. This was the meaning of proletarian dictatorship.
But Leninism also committed itself in 1917 and afterwards to respect, to guard, to promote, and to extend in every possible way the political freedom of the working classes, who should have been the real masters in the new State. This was the meaning of ‘proletarian democracy’, which should have supplemented, or rather formed the basis of, the dictatorship.
However, during the civil war, and even more so after it, the political freedoms of the working classes too were gradually curtailed and largely destroyed. This is not the place to explain and analyse this development.[3] Suffice it to say here that towards the end of the Leninist era the dictatorship spoke on behalf of the proletariat but that only a residuum of proletarian democracy had survived. The Bolsheviks had outlawed all rival parties, including the Mensheviks and Anarchists, who had had their main following among the workers, and the Social Revolutionaries, who had drawn their support from the peasantry.
True enough, those parties had, because of their anti-revolutionary attitude, forfeited most or nearly all of their support among the working classes. But in a proletarian democracy, as the Bolsheviks originally conceived it, those parties should have been allowed to go on competing with the Bolsheviks for influence over the masses. This they were not allowed to do.
Lenin had never made a principle of the single party system; yet towards the end of his life the Soviet regime had become just such a system. The abolition of ‘proletarian democracy’ could not leave unaffected the Bolshevik Party itself, which now proceeded to curtail the freedom of expression in its own ranks, for its own members.
The trend was leading from a proletarian democracy towards an autocracy speaking on behalf of the proletariat.
Yet the idea of proletarian democracy had been deeply rooted in the mind of the party. Lenin had proposed each of the successive restrictions of proletarian democracy as an emergency measure, to be cancelled after the emergency was over. During the civil war he outlawed the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, and other minor groups; then he allowed them to come into the open again and to renew activity; and then he drove them finally underground. Internal freedom in the Bolshevik
Party survived the civil war; but it began to shrink rapidly soon afterwards. Emergency followed emergency, and the restrictive measures at first designed to be temporary came to stay.
The direction in which the regime was evolving disturbed profoundly important sections of the Bolshevik Party. Towards the end of the Leninist era the party was internally divided over this issue. Some of its leaders and members clamoured for a return to proletarian democracy, although only very few went so far as to demand the restoration of freedom to the defeated enemies of the revolution. Others strove to arrest halfway the drift towards a quasi-socialist autocracy. Still others, from conviction or self-interest or both, promoted the prevalent trend, saying or implying that the restoration of political freedoms would wreck the revolution, and that its safety lay in a further concentration of power at the top, in the Central Committee, in the Politbureau, and eventually in the hands of a single leader. Bolshevism was torn between its democratic past and its undemocratic future.
Lenin's position in this controversy was extremely difficult. He had been responsible for the measures which restricted the freedom of expression even of those who had supported the revolution; and he had also been the standard-bearer of proletarian democracy. He tried to strike a balance between dictatorship and democracy. He himself did not rule his party with an iron rod. He dominated it by the sheer weight of his intellectual and moral authority. At all the party congresses over which he presided, he was openly assailed by many and sometimes very influential opponents. On occasions he was outvoted and then he either submitted to the majority or sought to reverse its decision by constitutional means.
In his last years Lenin struggled to arrest halfway the trend from proletarian democracy towards an autocracy. But the trend was to prove stronger — it could no longer be arrested, let alone reversed. In nothing was this demonstrated more strikingly than in the story of Lenin's will. In it Lenin advised his followers to remove Stalin from the post of the party's General Secretary on the ground that Stalin had gathered too much power in his hands and was making too brutal a use of it. Lenin's advice had no effect. His successors ignored it and brushed it aside at the same time as they were initiating a quasi-religious cult of the dead Lenin.
Russia After Stalin Page 2