by Ludo Martens
.
The Times, 27 December 1950. In Klugmann, op. cit. , p. 111.
So Tito had become a simple pawn in U.S. anti-Communist strategy. Tito declared to the New York Herald Tribune that `in the event of a Soviet attack anywhere in Europe, even if the thrust should be miles away from Yugoslavia's own borders', he would `instantly do battle on the side of the West ... Yugoslavia considers itself part of the collective security wall being built against Soviet imperialism.'
.
New York Herald Tribune, 26 June 1951. In Klugmann, op. cit. , p. 98.
In the economic field, the socialist measures that Yugoslavia had taken before 1948 were liquidated. Alexander Clifford, the Daily Mail correspondent, wrote about the economic reforms adopted in 1951:
`If it comes off, Yugoslavia looks like ending up a good deal less socialised than Britain': `price of goods ... determined by the market --- that is, by supply and demand'; `wages and salaries ... fixed on the basis of the income or profits of the enterprise'; economic enterprises that `decide independently what to produce and in what quantities'; `there isn't much classical Marxism in all of that'.
.
Daily Mail, 31 August 1951. In Klugmann, op. cit. , p. 150.
The Anglo-American bourgeoisie soon recognized that Tito was to be a very effective weapon in its anti-Communist struggles. The April 12, 1950 issue of Business Week reads:
`For the United States in particular and the West in general this encouragement of Tito has proved to be one of the cheapest ways yet of containing Russian Communism.
`To date the West's aid to Tito has come to $51.7 million. This is far less than the billion dollars or so that the United States has spent in Greece for the same purpose.'
.
Business Week, 12 April 1950. In Klugmann, op. cit. , p. 175.
This bourgeoisie intended to use Tito to encourage revisionism and to organize subversion in the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. On December 12, 1949, Eden spoke to the Daily Telegraph:
`Tito's example and influence can decisively change the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe.'
.
Daily Telegraph, 12 December 1949. In Klugmann, op. cit. , p. 191.
Understanding the Communist demagogy of Tito for what it really was, the London Times wrote:
`Titoism remains a force, however, only so long as Marshal Tito can claim to be a Communist.'
.
The Times, 13 September 1949. In Klugmann, op. cit. , p. 194.
Titoism took power in 1948 as a bourgeois nationalist current. It is with nationalism that Yugoslavia abandoned all principles of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nationalism was the soil in which Trotskyist and Bukharinist theories flourished.
After the Second World War, this nationalist orientation had great influence in other Communist Parties in Central and Eastern Europe.
After Stalin's death, Great-Russian nationalism developed in Moscow and, in backlash, nationalist chauvinism spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
Let us examine the principles that are at the heart of this controversy. In 1923, Stalin had already formulated an essential aspect of proletarian internationalism in these terms:
`It should be borne in mind that besides the right of nations to self-determination there is also the right of the working class to consolidate its power .... There are occasions when the right of self-determination conflicts with the other, the higher right --- the right of a working class that has assumed power to consolidate its power. In such cases --- this must be said bluntly --- the right to self-determination cannot and must not serve as an obstacle to the exercise by the working class of its right to dictatorship. The former must give way to the former.'
.
Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936), p. 168.
Starting from the principle of proletarian internationalism, Stalin was a resolute adversary of all nationalism, starting with Great-Russian nationalism. Still in 1923, he declared:
`The principal force hindering the amalgamation of the republics into a single union is ... Great-Russian chauvinism. It is not fortuitous, comrades, that the Smenovekhists have recruited a large number of supporters from among the Soviet officials.'
.
Ibid. , p. 153.
`Smenovekhism is the ideology of the new bourgeoisie, which is steadily growing and gradually joining forces with the kulaks and the bureaucratic intellectuals. The new bourgeoisie has created its own ideology ... which declares that the Communist Party is bound to degenerate and the new bourgeoisie to consolidate itself. We Bolsheviks, it appears, will imperceptibly to ourselves move towards this threshold of a democratic republic and cross this threshold, and then, with the help of a Caesar, who is to rise either from the military or from the civil ranks, we are to find ourselves in the position of an ordinary bourgeois republic.'
.
Ibid. , p. 300, n. 43.
But in the world struggle between socialism and imperialism, Stalin also understood that bourgeois nationalism could be used as a powerful anti-socialist weapon:
`When a life-and-death struggle is being waged, and is spreading, between proletarian Russia and the imperialist Entente, only two alternatives confront the border regions:
`Either they join forces with Russia, and then the toiling masses of the border regions will be emancipated from imperialist oppression;
`Or they join forces with the Entente, and then the yoke of imperialism is inevitable.
`There is no third solution. So-called independence of a so-called independent Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Finland, etc., is only an illusion, and conceals the utter dependence of these apologies for states on one group of imperialists or another ....
`And the interests of the masses of the people render the demand for the secession of the border regions at the present stage of the revolution a profoundly counter-revolutionary one.'
.
Ibid. , pp. 79--80.
In the semi-feudal republics of the Soviet periphery, bourgeois nationalism constituted the main form of bourgeois ideology rotting inside the Bolshevik Party:
`It should be borne in mind that our Communist organisations in the border districts, in the republics and regions, can develop and firmly establish themselves, can become genuine internationalist, Marxist cadres, only if they get rid of their nationalism. Nationalism is the chief ideological obstacle to the training of Marxist cadres, of a Marxist vanguard in the border regions and republics .... In relation to these organisations nationalism is playing the same part as Menshevism played in the past in relation to the Party of the Bolsheviks. Only under cover of nationalism can various kinds of bourgeois, including Menshevik, influences penetrate into our organisations in the border regions. Our organisations in the republics can become Marxist cadres only if they are able to withstand the nationalist ideas which are pushing their way into our Party in the border regions ... because the bourgeoisie is reviving, the New Economic Policy is spreading, nationalism is growing; because there are still survivals of Great-Russian chauvinism, which also tend to develop local nationalism, and because there is the influence of foreign states, which are fostering nationalism in every way.'
.
Ibid. , p. 178.
`The essence of the deviation towards local nationalism consists in the attempt to isolate oneself and shut onself up within one's own national shell, in the attempt to hush up class differences within one's own nation, in the attempt to resist Great-Russian chauvinism by turning aside from the general current of socialist cosntruction, in the attempt to shut one's eyes to that which brings together and unites the toiling masses of the nationalities of the U.S.S.R. and to see only that which tends to estrange them.
`The deviation towards local nationalism reflects the dissatisfaction of the moribund classes of the formerly oppressed nations with the regime of the proletarian dictatorship, their endeavour to separate themselve
s off into their national state and there to establish their own class supremacy.'
.
Ibid. , pp. 262--263.
Stalin came back to the question of internationalism in 1930. He formulated a principle that became crystal clear during the Brezhnev era:
`What does a deviation towards nationalism mean --- irrespective of whether it is a deviation towards Great-Russian nationalism or towards local nationalism? The deviation towards nationalism is the adaptation of the internationalist policy of the working class to the nationalist policy of the bourgeoisie. The deviation towards nationalism reflects the attempts of ``one's own'' ``national'' bourgeoisie to undermine the Soviet system and to restore capitalism. The source of these deviations ... is a common one. It is a departure from Leninist internationalism ....
`The major danger is the deviation against which one has ceased to fight and has thus enabled to grow into a danger to the state.'
.
Ibid. , pp. 267--268.
Stalin against opportunism
We can now address the question: how was the revisionist Khrushchev able to immediately seize power after Stalin's death?
Several aspects show that as early as 1951, Stalin was seriously worried about the Party's state. Before then, from 1945 to 1950, he was forced to concentrate on reconstruction and on international problems.
Bourgeois tendencies in the thirties
The most important bourgeois tendencies that Stalin had to fight during the twenties and thirties were Trotskyism (Menshevism covered up in ultra-leftist rhetoric), Bukharinism (social-democratic deviations), Bonapartism (militarist tendencies within the army) and bourgeois nationalism. These four tendencies all continued to have influence in the years 1945--1953.
Let us give two revealing examples.
After the war, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, a young civil servant of Chechen origin working in the propaganda department of the Central Committee, fled the Soviet Union for the U.S. His ideological past shows the links between the various opportunistic tendencies of the thirties and those that surfaced after 1945: `politically I was a follower of Bukharin'
.
Alexander Uralov (Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov), op. cit. , p. 8.
However, his book The Reign of Stalin is full of praise for Trotsky, `the lion of the October Revolution', who should have, according to Lenin's `Political Testament', run the Party with Bukharin's help.
.
Ibid. , pp. 38, 41.
`Trotsky (was) the friend of the Georgian `nationalists' '.
.
Ibid. , p. 79.
Avtorkhanov continued by implying that Trotsky considered that an attempt `in imposing proletarian `socialism' on the most backward agricultural country in Europe' `would likely degenerate into a despotic dictatorship by a handful of anarchic socialists.'
.
Ibid. , p. 169.
Avtorkhanov was mostly a partisan of social-democratic ideas. For him, `the Bukharin school' defended free competition between the socialist and capitalist sectors: `socialised heavy industry (would) gradually eliminate the capitalist section ... through the free play of competition.' `One should be able to say to the co-operative peasants, `Enrich yourselves!' .... The rural petite bourgeoisie (the kulaks), being unable to withstand the competition of the co-operatives, would gradually disappear'.
.
Ibid. , p. 123.
Finally, Avtorkhanov also defended bourgeois nationalist positions:
`Of all the federated republics, those of the Caucasus had always shown the greatest tendency towards separatism ....
`When in 1921 the Soviet occupied these countries by force, the democrats and the partisans of independence went underground .... There were repeated nationalist revolts in the Caucasus'.
.
Ibid. , pp. 144--145.
So we see Avtorkhanov expressing sympathy for the four main opportunist tendencies that menaced socialism during the twenties and thirties: Trotskyism, Bukharinism, bourgeois nationalism and militarism. His positions in favor of this last tendency were presented in chapter 7 (page ).
Avtorkhanov's positions during the war and during the period 1945--1950 are significant. Referring to the Nazi aggression, he wrote that what `90 per cent of the population secretly thought and desired ... (was) the end of Stalin, even at the price of Hitler's victory .... The war against the U.S.S.R., which the German soldiers had won in 1941, was lost for them by the S.S.'
.
Ibid. , p. 158.
`Hitler, the tyrant, was nothing but the shadow of Stalin'.
.
Ibid. , p. 237.
After having flirted for some time with Hitler, Avtorkhanov, resolute anti-Communist, finally fell into the hands of the Anglo-American imperialists.
`(D)uring the first two years of the war the peoples of the U.S.S.R. went so far as to prefer Hitler to Stalin ....
`They had a unique chance, rarely encountered in history, of playing the two opponents, German and Russian, against one another, and of winning the war without intervening with their own forces .... The thing became possible on the day when Hitler turned his armies against the East ....
`(W)hen Hitler and Stalin were at grips it would have been possible for the Allies ... to contrive matters that when the crowd got back from burying Hitler they would have to follow Stalin's funeral procession.'
.
Ibid. , p. 240.
Well received in the U.S., Avtorkhanov became an ardent partisan of U.S. hegemony, which he encouraged to fight against `Communist expansion':
`Faithful to Lenin's teaching, Stalin ... (has) staked everything on world revolution .... The purpose of Stalinism is ... to set up a terrorist world-dictatorship by a single party.'
.
Ibid. , p. 242.
`Everyone must today realise that the world is faced by a single alternative --- Stalinism or democracy. In order to settle the question during his lifetime, Stalin has mobilised his fifth columns throughout the world.'
However, for Avtorkhanov, U.S. countermeasures would render these plans obsolete.
`In the end there can be only one solution of the problem for Stalinism --- war.'
.
Ibid. , p. 245.
Our second example concerns Tokaev's clandestine organization, linked during the thirties to the Bonapartists, the Bukharinists and the bourgeois nationalists. It continued its activity after the war.
In 1947, Tokaev was in Germany, at Karlshorst. A `comrade standing very high' brought along microfilms with the last pieces of Tokaev's personal dossier:
`Far too much was known .... The hunt was uncomfortably close. And when the indictment was ready, there would figure in it deeds of as long ago as 1934'.
.
Tokaev, op. cit. , pp. 354--355.
`(A)t the end of 1947 the revolutionary democrats of the U.S.S.R. came to the conclusion that they must act: better to die honourably than to drag on as slaves .... we liked to think that parties of a Liberal complexion and those belonging to the Second International abroad would try to help us .... We knew that there were national communists not only in Yugoslavia, but also in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltic States, and we believed that they too would support us where they could though we were not communists at all ....
`But the MVD (state security) won in the race. We were too slow to mobilise. Once again we suffered a catastrophe .... Arrests had begun, and the charges ran all the way back to the assassination of Kirov in 1934 .... Others were charged with Buonapartist (sic) conspiracies in 1937 and 1940, with bourgeois nationalism, with the proposed attempt to overthrow the rйgime in 1941. As the net closed in round us all, I was given the task ... of saving at least a part of our records.'
.
Ibid. , pp. 358-359.
After his flight to England, Tokaev published a series of articles in the Western press. He admitted having sabotaged the development of Soviet aviation, and explained it as follows:
`To
not try to refrain my compatriots in their insatiable ambition to dominate the world would mean to push them to the fate that Hitler reserved for the Germans.' `It is crucial for the West to understand that Stalin has only one goal: world domination by any means.'