Russia After Stalin

by Isaac Deutscher

  Dr. Jasny argues that if Russian farming were to go back to the pre-collectivization System ‘it could feed barely half the present urban population. Consequently a simple return to those forms would be equivalent to a huge calamity.’ He also argues that if the anti-Bolsheviks were to assume power, they would have to re-enforce the compulsory food deliveries introduced by Stalin in order to prevent starvation in the towns. ‘What will the Russian people eat after the overthrow of the Soviet regime and in what will they be clad?’ It is enough to pose this question, says Dr. Jasny, to see the complete unreality of promising the peasants ‘a free choice of the forms of farming’.

  He concludes: ‘I think that the preservation of the collective farms is inevitable for an indefinite time, for, in the event of their abolition., the situation after liberation from Stalinist rule, which will be difficult enough anyhow, will amount to a most enormous catastrophe.’

  It is easy to see why Russian anti-Bolshevik politicians are loath to accept this view. If they did accept it., they could in effect only promise the Russian peasants that they would virtually continue the agricultural regime established by Stalin. In this instance Dr. Jasny, however, argues from realities, not from the hallucinations of political quixotry. He analyses the technological structure of Soviet farming to prove that it does not permit any break-up into smallholdings.

  Most of the Soviet tractors are of the ‘Leviathan’ type, larger than any known outside Russia and useful only on giant farms. This type of machine., says Dr. Jasny, could be replaced by smaller ones in the course of many years (and with the help of American lend-lease deliveries!) so as to allow for a break-up of the present collective farms into smaller (but still collective) farms. But if the choice is to be only between smaller and larger collective farms, and if even this choice may become available only after a re-equipment taking many years, then the mountain of the anti-Stalinist ‘revolution’ in farming would give birth to no more than a mouse. All the same, the argument serves to underline the fact that Russia cannot afford to renounce even collectivization, that once most hateful and still most controversial part of the legacy of the Stalin era.

  Nor is there any way back for Russia from public ownership and planning.

  Even in capitalist countries there seems to have been not a single significant instance of any sector of the economy which had long been publicly owned and publicly managed being handed back to private hands.[12]

  The whole of Soviet industry has been built up by the State. No title of private ownership has ever attached to it (except for the negligible remnant of pre-revolutionary industry, which has also been completely re-equipped by the State).

  This fact has sunk deeply into the mind of the Russian people. Any form of private ownership in industry is to them an anachronism as repugnant and irrational as slavery or serfdom is to the British or the American peoples.

  Of this we have incontroverüble evidence: among the many political groups formed in the West by the new Soviet refugees, each of which swears to destroy the whole structure of Stalinism to its very foundations, none has dared to write into its programme the abolition of public ownership of industry. On the contrary, each group ardently swears to preserve it. If this is the mood among emigres, among the victims and the extreme opponents of Stalinism, it can be imagined how strong the attachment to public ownership is among the people in the Soviet Union.[13]

  With public ownership goes planning — indeed, it is inseparable from it. Even the most old-fashioned industrialist ‘plans’ the work of his own business. Trusts and syndicates plan and coordinate the productive processes within the concerns under their control. Public ownership ipso facto makes of the whole national industry a single concern which cannot be run without comprehensive planning. The method may undergo many important modifications. It may be more or less bureaucratic, more or less centralist, or more or less elastic and efficient; but for Russia to abandon planning would be to condemn herseif to economic anarchy and ruin.

  Such is the legacy of the Stalin era that posterity can neither scrap it nor get away from it. Therein consisted the greatness of that era. Yet such was also its misery and squalor that in order to make proper use of its enduring achievements, the Soviet people will be compelled sooner or later to transcend Stalinism.

  Stalinism had its roots in the backwardness of Russia; but it has overcome the backwardness and has thereby potentially disestablished itself. For a time it may continue to haunt the Russia of its own making as a ghost from the past. The ‘ghost’ still wields all the material instruments of power; and no one can say how and when it will relinquish them or, alternatively, who will wrest them from its hands, and when. This is not a forecast of startling events, but merely a statement of the fact that a profound contradiction is maturing between, to use the Marxian term, the social and economic structure and the political superstructure of post-Stalinist society.

  In the analysis of any long-term historical trend, contemporaries, even if they grasp correctly its general direction, can never be sure just how far the trend has gone at any particular time. We have no yardstick by which to measure history's molecular processes nor can we determine when those processes may coalesce to produce an epoch-making event. In the case of Russia, the measuring is the more difficult because we can know only the broad outline of the trend and we have had little or no insight into the molecular processes.

  During a quarter of a century Stalinism, without compunction or pity and yet with some suppressed compassion, drove a nation of 160–200 millions to jump the chasm which separated the epoch of the wooden plough from that of the atomic pile. The jump is not yet completed. We cannot count the myriads which have landed on the farther side or those still left behind — or, even, those who have been made to jump to their destruction.

  All we know is that the process is in a very advanced stage. Russia may still be mired up to her ankles or to her knees in the epoch of primitive magic; but she is not plunged in it up to her neck and ears, as she was a quarter of a Century ago.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE LEGACY OF STALINISM

  II. FOREIGN AFFAIRS

  The contrast between the beginning and the close of the Stalin era is equally striking when we consider Russia's attitude towards the world and her foreign policy during that period.

  It will be remembered that by the middle of the 1920's the Bolshevik mind had become profoundly disturbed by the isolation of the Russian revolution. It then began to reconcile and to adapt itself to isolation, and even to glory in it. This mood found its apotheosis in the slogan ‘socialism in one country’, the dogma with which Stalin proclaimed the self-sufficiency and self-containment of the Russian revolution. Henceforth, adherence to this dogma became the test of loyalty to Bolshevism. Any deviation from it was branded as treason; and those who represented the revolutionary internationalism of earlier days were marked as apostates.

  The halcyon days of ‘socialism in one country’ lasted until the Second World War.

  Throughout the late 1920's and 1930's Stalin's diplomacy sought, implicitly or explicitly, to preserve the international status quo and to enhance Russia's position within it. ‘We do not want a single square yard of foreign land’ was the maxim of Chicherin and Litvinov, the two Foreign Ministers of the time.

  ‘Not a square yard of foreign land’ might also be said to have been the watchword inspiring the Communist International, which continued to claim, however, that no land on the globe was foreign to it.

  The main purpose of the Stalinized Comintern was to do political guard duty for the ‘only proletarian State’ so that the building of socialism in ‘one-sixth of the earth's territory’ should not be disturbed by capitalist pressure or — by revolutionary developments in the remaining five-sixths, which might interrupt the Soviet Union's ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalism.

  The Communist Parties refrained from moves which might have embarrassed Soviet diplomacy in its dealings with foreign governments. T
hey backed all and every one of Stalin's diplomatic manoeuvres either indirectly by exercising pressure upon the bourgeois governments, or directly by lending open support to the successive manoeuvres on the ground that no matter how contradictory these might be, they also expressed the quintessence of international proletarian interest. It was no longer Bolshevik Russia which waited for world revolution — world revolution now had to wait until Russia had built up her socialism.

  The records of the Stalinized Comintern are, of course, full of fantastic battle-cries, wild forecasts of imminent world revolution, and the most rabid upbraiding of all bourgeois and Social Democratic Parties. The records also speak of some ‘putschist’ incidents, stray forays in insurrectionist tactics, and displays of pseudo-revolutionary trigger-happiness. It is enough to recall here the Canton rising of 1927, or the bombastic resolutions of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (1928), which instructed all member parties to direct their fire primarily against the social democrats in preparation for an imminent assault on the bastions of world capitalism.

  However, these diversions did not affect the main trend of Soviet and Comintern policy. The communist following could not be kept inactive for an indefinite time without a consequent breakdown in its morale. When the General Staff would not allow it to engage in genuine fighting, it had to permit at least some mock battles. The need for these was the more pressing the more the communist ranks became aware that they were ordered either to render yeoman service to ‘class enemies’ or merely to mark time. The ‘ultra-left’ turns of the Comintern came, as a rule, after spells of ‘rightism’, which had usually left the aftertaste of self-abasement in the mouths of the rank and file.

  But whenever Soviet diplomacy was engaged in serious dealings with foreign powers, the Comintern always sounded the cease-fire to its mock battles and switched back to rightist, ‘opportunist’ policies in which it sometimes persisted with suicidal consequences. This was true of the Communist Party of China in 1925-7; on Stalin's orders, it remained subservient to the Kuomintang up to the moment when Chiang Kai-shek ordered a massacre of the communists, and even during the massacre itself. This was also true of the French and Spanish Communist Parties during the Popular Fronts of 1936-8, when the policy of ‘collective security’ and of the anti-Hitler alliance with the West demanded that the radicalism of the rank and file in the Popular Fronts be kept in check. Then, in the period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement (1939-41), the Comintern sought to gain acceptance of that agreement by the world's working classes by telling them that not the Third Reich but France and Britain were their chief enemies. At the next turn the Comintern became the mouthpiece of the anti-Fascist Grand Alliance, until Stalin, anxious to prove his reliability to Churchill and Roosevelt, rose up early one morning, in April 1943, and ‘clave the wood for a burnt offering’. Unlike the Biblical Isaac on the way to Moriah, the Comintern did not even ask ‘Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’

  Was Stalin then the great Saboteur and betrayer of world revolution, as Trotsky saw him?

  Yes and no. He certainly did his best to destroy the potentialities for revolution abroad — in the name of the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution. But how real and important were those potentialities between the two world wars? Trotsky saw that period as one sequence of great but missed revolutionary opportunities. The historian of the period cannot be so sure about its latent possibilities. He can gauge only its actuality, not its potentiality.

  Stalin worked on the assumption that there was no chance of a communist victory in the West or in the East. If that was so, then he was sacrificing to the selfishness of Bolshevik Russia the shadow, not the substance, of world revolution. He believed that by building up the Soviet ‘citadel of socialism’ he was making the only contribution towards world revolution which could be made at the time. This conviction allowed him to treat the labour movements of the world with boundless cynicism and contempt.

  He hoped that ‘socialism in one country’ would be his life's work and his party's philosophy for a whole historical epoch.

  That epoch came to an end much earlier than he expected. It was brought to a close by the Second World War and its aftermath, in which the dynamics of the Soviet State and the genuine social ferment in the world combined to open a new and momentous chapter of revolution.

  Conservative minds in the West have seen in Stalin the evil plotter responsible for all the revolutions of our day, because to the conservative mind revolution is always the result of plotting and conspiracy. The impartial historian will take a somewhat more complex view of this chapter in Stalin's career. He will record that in the last decade of his life Stalin struggled desperately and unavailingly to save his policy of self-containment, or what remained of it, from the tempest of the time.

  He was guided by motives of orthodox strategy, not of international revolution, when, in 1939-40, he sent his armies to the Baltic lands and to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian marches of Poland. He sought to deny to Hitler these jumping-off grounds for an attack on Russia.

  He could not and would not risk leaving the tiny Baltic States as independent buffers between his and Hitler's war machines. He had to incorporate them in the Soviet Union — or eise, he was convinced, they would be absorbed by Greater Germany. But the Soviet Union could not effectively absorb those countries without bringing their regimes into line with its own. So Stalin's armoured brigades rolled to the Baltic coast and to the River Bug to occupy strategic outposts; but they carried revolution in the turrets of their tanks.

  Even then Stalin produced the Tsars' title deeds to the annexed lands and claimed to have collected for Russia merely her old patrimony. He was still anxious to intimate that this departure from self-containment was only incidental and local in character; and that it had been dietated by national-Russian, not by international-revolutionary motives.

  Then he reverted to self-containment. This was the basis of his war-time cooperation with Roosevelt and Churchill. Soviet self-containment was the very premiss of joint allied policy, written into the paragraphs and clauses of the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam agreements.

  However, those agreements also divided spheres of influence between the Allies; and the whole of Eastern and much of Central Europe was allotted to victorious Russia. It was stipulated that this was to be the sphere of influence of Russia, not of communism. In retrospect, it appears extraordinarily shortsighted of the great statesmen of the West to have believed that Russia's personality could be thus split and her national-power ambitions separated from her social and political outlook. But the illusion was not merely Roosevelt's and Churchill's. It was shared by Stalin.

  It may, of course, be argued that Stalin's behaviour during the war was nothing but make-believe, and that all his solemn vows of non-interference in the internal affairs of neighbouring countries were dust thrown into the eyes of his allies, On the other hand, Stalin's deeds at the time lent weight to his vows. Had this not been so, how is one to account for the strange circumstance that Churchill, the inspirer of the anti-Bolshevik Crusade of 1918-20 and the future author of the Fulton speech, could say in the House of Commons as late as towards the end of 1944:

  ‘Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. … I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no government which Stands to its obligations even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.’

  The point is that both Churchill and Roosevelt had solid evidence that Stalin's policy was in fact geared to self-containment. They saw Stalin acting, not merely speaking, as any nationalist Russian statesman would have done in his place — they saw him divested, as it were, of his communist character. He was approaching the problems of the Russian zone of influence in a manner calculated to satisfy nationalist Russian demands and aspirations and to wreck the chances of communist revolution in those t
erritories.

  He prepared to exact and did in fact exact heavy reparations from Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Finland, and Eastern Germany. This, he knew, would make the name of communism as well as that of Russia odious to the peoples of those countries, to whom it did not even occur to distinguish between the two. With a zeal worthy of a better cause he insisted on slicing territories away from Poland, Hungary, and Germany, and on expelling many millions of their Citizens from their homes.

  From Stalin's viewpoint these policies made sense only if he assumed that in all those countries bourgeois regimes would survive, that is if he had no design to impose communist governments on them. If he had been viewing those countries as future provinces of his empire, it would have been the height of folly on his part to insist on levying in the most unrelenting manner heavy reparations and enforcing expulsions. He expected, of course, that victorious Russia would enjoy a position of diplomatic and economic preponderance in neighbouring countries ruled by ‘friendly governments’, to quote the insipid cliche then fashionable. But he also expected that those governments would remain essentially bourgeois.

  The fact which emerges with equal clarity from the internal evidence of Stalin's own moves and from the numerous memoirs of Western statesmen is that Stalin gravely underrated the revolutionary ferment which was to engulf Europe and Asia towards the end of the war and after. In his calculations he either made no allowance for it or, if he did, he took it for granted that through his Communist Parties he would be able to master and calm the ferment. He looked at the post-1945 world through the prism of the pre-1939 era.

  The state of the world in the decades between the wars had convinced him that he had been right all along in discounting or disregarding the revolutionary potentialities of foreign communism; and he continued to disregard them. He saw every foreign nation as a bulwark of social and political conservatism. He tried to persuade Roosevelt that the overwhelming majority of the French were loyal to Petain. ‘Communism would fit Germany as a saddle fits a cow’ — in this mordant phrase he expressed his view of Germany's revolutionary potentialities to the Polish politician Mikolajczyk. He urged the French communists to take their cue from General de Gaulle at a time when they were the chief driving force behind the French Resistance. He urged the Italian communists to make peace with the House of Savoy and with the government of Marshal Badoglio, and to vote for the re-enactment of Mussolini's Lateran pacts with the Vatican. He did his best to induce Mao Tse-tung to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek, because he believed, as he said at Potsdam, that the Kuomintang was the only force capable of ruling China. He angrily remonstrated with Tito because of the latter's revolutionary aspirations, and demanded his consent to the restoration of the monarchy in Yugoslavia.