by Ludo Martens
.
La Libre Belgique, 4 March 1949, p. 1; 6 March 1949, p. 1.
It is important to remember that after their flight to the West, Avtorkhanov and Tokaev, two representatives of bourgeois tendencies in the Soviet Union, supported the most extreme positions of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie during the Cold War.
Weaknesses in the struggle against opportunism
There is no no doubt that Stalin continued, during the latter years of his life, to struggle against social-democratic and bourgeois nationalist tendencies and against Anglo-American subversion.
Nevertheless, it is clear that this struggle was not done to the extent that was necessary to redress and reinvigorate the Party ideologically and politically.
After the war, which had required extraordinary professional effort on the part of military, technical and scientific cadres, the old tendencies of military professionalism and technocratism were substantially reinforced. Bureaucratization and the search for privileges and the easy life were also reinforced. This negative development was encouraged with the `dizziness of success': the tremendous pride that the cadres had developed from the anti-fascist victory often became presumptuousness and arrogance. All these phenomena undermined the ideological and political vigilance that was necessary to fight the opportunist tendencies.
Stalin struggled against particular forms of opportunism and revisionism. He thought that the class struggle in the ideological sphere would continue for a long time. But he was not capable of formulating a comprehensive theory of its basis and its social base. In other words, he was not able to formulate a consistent theory explaining how classes and the class struggle persist in a socialist society.
Stalin had not completely understood that after the disappearance of the economic basis of capitalist and feudal exploitation, that there would still exist in the Soviet Union fertile ground for bourgeois currents. Bureaucracy, technocratism, social inequalities and privileges allowed the development within certain sectors of Soviet society a bourgeois lifestyle and aspirations for the reintroduction of certain aspects of capitalism. The persistence of bourgeois ideology among both the masses and the cadres was an additional factor that encouraged entire sectors to veer towards anti-socialist positions. The adversaries of socialism always had important resources and ideological and material resources from imperialism, which never stopped infiltrating its spies and buying off renegades; the latter never stopped in their efforts to exploit and amplify all forms of opportunism within the Soviet Union. Stalin's thesis, according to which `There is no class basis, there can be no class basis, for the domination of the bourgeois ideology in our Soviet society', was one-sided and undialectic. It introduced weaknesses and errors in the political line.
.
G. Malenkov, Report to the Nineteenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), p. 126.
Stalin was not able to define the adequate forms of mass mobilization of workers and kolkhozians to combat the dangers of restauration. Popular democracy should have been developed, with the deliberate intention to eliminate bureaucracy, technocratism, ambitiousness, and privileges. But the popular participation in such a defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not ensured as it should have been done. Stalin always underscored that the influence of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism was reflected in the Party through opportunist tendencies. But he was not able to formulate a theory about the struggle between the two lines in the Party. In 1939, summarizing the Great Purge, Stalin focused exclusively on `the espionage and conspiratorial activities of the Trotskyite and Bukharinite leaders' and on the manner in which `the bourgeois states ... take advantage of people's weaknesses, their vanity, their slackness of will'.
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Stalin, Leninism: Selected Writings (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 468--469.
Stalin clearly underestimated the internal causes that gave birth to opportunist tendencies, which, once infiltrated by secret services, became linked one way or the other to imperialism. Consequently, Stalin did not think that it was necessary to mobilize all of the Party members to combat opportunistic lines and to eliminate unhealthy tendencies. During the ideological and political struggles, all the cadres and members shoud have educated and transformed themselves. After 1945, the struggle against opportunism was restricted to the highest circles of the Party and did not assist in the revolutionary transformation of the entire Party.
It was by analyzing these weaknesses that Mao Zedong formulated his theory about continuing the revolution:
`Socialist society covers a fairly long historical period. In the historical period of socialism, there are still classes, class contradictions and class struggle, there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and there is the danger of capitalist restoration. We must recognize the protracted and complex nature of this struggle. We must heighten our vigilance. We must conduct socialist education .... Otherwise a socialist country like ours will turn into its opposite and degenerate, and a capitalist restoration will take place.'
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Mao Tse-tung and Lin Pao, Post-Revolutionary Writings (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 429.
Beria's and Khrushchev's revisionist groups
This political weakness was further aggravated by revisionist tendencies within the leadership of the Party that emerged at the end of the forties.
To direct the different sectors of the Party and the State, Stalin had always relied on his closest collaborators. Since 1935, Zhdanov had played an essential rфle in the Party consolidation work. His death in 1948 left a vacuum. In the beginning of the fifties, Stalin's health took a dramatic turn for the worse after the overwork incurred during the war. The problem of Stalin's succession posed itself for the near future.
It was around this time that two groups of revisionists within the leadership became visible and started to plot their intrigues, while preaching fidelity to Stalin. Beria's group and Khrushchev's contituted two rival revisionist factions that, while secretly undermining Stalin's work, were waging war with each other.
Since Beria was shot by Khrushchev in 1953, soon after Stalin's death, it might be supposed that he was an adversary of Khrushchevian revisionism. This is the position that Bill Bland took in a well documented study of Stalin's death.
.
Bill Bland, `The ``Doctors' case'' and the death of Stalin' (London: The Stalin Society, October 1991), Report.
However, testimony from diametrically opposite sources concur in their affirmation that Beria held rightist positions.
For example, the Zionist author Thaddeus Wittlin published a biography of Beria in the nauseating style of McCarthyism. Here is an example: `the Dictator of Soviet Russia looked down at his peoples as if he were the merciless new god of millions of his people'.
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Thaddeus Wittlin, Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 354.
Literally. But, presenting the ideas developed by Beria towards 1951, Wittlin claimed that he wanted to authorize private enterprise in light industry and `to moderate the collective farm system', as well as `by returning to the approach of the pre-Stalin era, the NEP'. `Beria ... was against the Stalin policy of Russification of non-Russian nations and republics'. Beria wanted `Better international relations with the West' and `also intended to restore relations with Tito'.
.
Ibid. , pp. 363--365.
This homage to Beria's `reasonable politics' stands out, coming from such a sickening anti-Communist pen.
Tokaev, clandestine opponent, claimed that he knew Beria and others in the thirties, `not of servants, but of enemies of the rйgime'.
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Tokaev, op. cit. , p. 7.
Gardinashvili, one of Beria's close collaborators, had close relations with Tokaev.
.
Ibid. , p. 101.
Khrushchev, for w
hom it would be in his interest to depict Beria as being close to Stalin, wrote:
`In the last years of Stalin's life Beria used to express his disrespect for Stalin more and more baldly.'
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Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (London: Andrй Deutsch, 1971), p. 313.
`Stalin feared that he would be the first person Beria might choose'.
.
Ibid. , p. 311.
`It seemed sometimes that Stalin was afraid of Beria and would have been glad to get rid of him but didn't know how to do it.'
.
Ibid. , p. 250.
We should not forget Molotov's opinion. He and Kaganovich were the only leaders to remain faithful to their revolutionary past.
`I cannot exclude the possibility that Beria provoked Stalin's death. I felt it through what he was saying. May Day 1953, on the Tribune of the Mausoleum, he made such allusions. He was looking for complicity. He said, ``I made him disappear''. He tried to implicate me. ``I saved you all''.'
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Chueva, op. cit. , p. 327.
`I consider Khrushchev as rightwing, but Beria was even more rightwing. Both were rightwing. And Mikoyan too. But they had different personalities. Khrushchev was to the right and completely rotten, but Beria was even more to the right and even more rotten.'
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Ibid. , p. 335.
`Without question, Khrushchev was reactionary and succeeded in infiltrating into the Party. Of course, he believed in no form of communism. I consider Beria as an enemy. He infiltrated himself into the Party with destructive goals. Beria was a man without principles.'
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Ibid. , p. 323.
During Stalin's last years, Khrushchev and Mikoyan clearly hid their political ideas to better place themselves after the succession.
Khrushchev's disdain for Stalin shows up clearly in his memoirs:
`In my opinion it was during the war that Stalin started to be quite right in the head.'
.
Ibid. , p. 311.
At `the end of 1949', a `sickness ... began to envelop Stalin's mind'.
.
Ibid. , p. 246.
Enver Hoxha noted Khrushchev's impatience for Stalin to die. In his memoirs, he noted a discussion that he had had in 1956 with Mikoyan:
`Mikoyan himself told me ... that they, together with Khrushchev and their associates, had decided to carry out a ``pokushenie'', i.e., to make an attempt on Stalin's life, but later, as Mikoyan told us, they gave up this plan.'
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Enver Hoxha, With Stalin: Memoirs (Toronto: Norman Bethune Institute, 1980), p. 31.
Stalin against the future Khrushchevism
Did Stalin know of the intrigues that the revisionists around him were preparing?
The main report presented by Malenkov to the Nineteenth Congress in October 1952, along with Stalin's book Economic Problems of Socialism, published on the same occasion, showed that Stalin was convinced that a new struggle against opportunism and a new purge of the Party had become necessary.
Malenkov's report had Stalin's brand. It defended the revolutionary ideas that would be dismantled four years later by Khrushchev and Mikoyan. It virulently criticized a number of negative tendencies in the economy and in the life of the Party, tendencies that would be imposed in 1956 by Khrushchevian revisionism.
First, recalling the 1937--1938 Purge, Malenkov noted:
`In the light of the war and its results, we perceive in all its magnitude the importance of that implacable struggle which over a period of many years our Party waged against every brand of enemy of Marxism-Leninism --- the Trotskyite and Bukharinite degenerates, the capitulators and traitors who tried to deflect the Party from the right path and to split its ranks .... By demolishing the Trotskyite and Bukharinite underground ..., the Party in good time destroyed all possibility of the appearance of a ``fifth column'' in the U.S.S.R., and prepared the country politically for active defence. It will be easily understood that if this had not been done in time, we should, during the war, have found ourselves under fire from the front and the rear, and might have lost the war.'
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Malenkov, op. cit. , pp. 108--109.
Four years later, Khrushchev would deny that the Trotskyists and the Bukharinists had degenerated to the point of defending a social-democratic and bourgeois platform, as he would deny that some among them had made contacts with hostile foreign forces. Khrushchev then invented the theory according to which socialism had definitely triumphed in 1936 and there was no longer a social basis for treason, nor for capitalist restoration! Here are the main declarations:
`(T)he Soviet state was strengthened, ... the exploiting classes were already liquidated and socialist relations were rooted solidly in all phases of national economy'.
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Khrushchev, Special Report, op. cit. , p. S17.
`(S)ocialism in our country was fundamentally constructed, ... the exploiting classes were generally liquidated, ... the Soviet social structure had radically changed, ... the social basis for political movements and groups hostile to the party had violently contracted'.
.
Ibid. , p. S15.
Khrushchev concluded that the Purge was an arbitrary act that was in no way justified, thereby rehabilitating the political positions of the opportunists and the enemies of socialism.
In his Report to the XIXth Congress, Malenkov underscored four major weaknesses of the Party. It was precisely those weaknesses that Khrushchev would use four years later to achieve his revisionist coup.
Malenkov underscored that many bureaucratized cadres refused criticism and control from their base, and were formalist and uncaring:
`Not in all Party organizations, and nowhere by any means in full measure, have self-criticism, and especially criticism from below become the principal method of disclosing and overcoming our errors and shortcomings, our weaknesses and maladies ....
`There are cases when people are persecuted and victimized for criticism. We still meet with responsible workers who never tire of professing their fidelity to the Party, but who actually cannot tolerate criticism from below, stifle it, and revenge themselves on those who criticize them. We know of plenty of cases where a bureaucratic attitude towards criticism and self-criticism has ... killed ... initiative ... and infected some of the organizations with the anti-Party habits of bureaucrats, sworn enemies of the Party.
`(W)herever ... control by the masses over the activities of organizations and institutions is weakened, there ... bureaucracy and degeneration, and even the corruption of individual sections of the Party apparatus, invariably appear ....
`(A)chievement has bred in the ranks of the Party a tendency to self-satisfaction, to make a pretence of all being well, a spirit of smug complacency, a desire on the part of people to rest on their laurels and to live on the capital of their past services .... Leaders ... not infrequently turn meetings, gatherings of active members, plenary meetings and conferences into vainglorious displays, into occasions of self-laudation, with the result that errors and shortcomings in work, maladies and weaknesses are not brought to light and subjected to criticism .... A spirit of negligenge has penetrated our Party organizations.'
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Malenkov, op. cit. , pp. 113--116.
This was a recurrent theme in Stalin's work of the thirties: appeals to the base so that it criticizes and controls the bureaucrats who are looking for the quiet life, who repress the active members, are uncaring and behave as enemies of Communism. This text leaves one to wonder about the torrent of criticisms that Stalin wanted once again to raise against the revisionists.
Four years later, when Khrushchev denounced the `insecurity, fear and despair' that supposedly reigned under Stalin, he promised to the bureaucratic and opportunistic elements that he could now doze in tranquility. They would no longer be `persecuted' by the `leftist' criticisms from the base. Self-satisfaction and the tranquil life would be the principal characteristics of the rev
isionist bureaucracy that definitely took power under Khrushchev.
Second, Malenkov, denounced the Communists who ignored Party discipline and behaved as owners:
`A formal attitude to decisions of Party and government, and passivity in carrying them out, is a vice that must be eradicated with the utmost ruthlessness. The Party does not need inert and indifferent executives who prize their own comfort higher than the interests of the work; it needs men who will fight indefatigably and devotedly ....