By Greg Oxley
Continuing our regular series of articles on theoretical issues, here Greg Oxley editor of the French Marxist website La Riposte, explains the nature of ‘Stalinism’ and its historical roots.
Of all the arguments deployed against socialism, the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR is one of the most powerful. The ideologues of capitalism often claim that totalitarian dictatorship is an end result inherent to socialism. Many workers are influenced by this idea, and this is what must be answered. It is not enough to declare that we reject the “model” of Stalinism. The root causes of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, must be explained.
From the standpoint of the struggle against oppression and exploitation in the world, the Russian Revolution of 1917 stands out as one of the greatest events in the history of mankind. In the economically and socially backward country that was Tsarist Russia, workers, soldiers and the lower strata of the peasantry rose up en masse to put an end to war and oppression, in a bid to win freedom and democracy.
The monarchy was overthrown by an insurrectionary strike and mass mutiny, in February 1917, in a matter of days. In the course of this insurrection, powerful organs of collective struggle – the soviets (councils) – were created, under the democratic and collective control of the exploited. Regularly elected and recallable delegations to the soviets meant that their composition reflected the mood, the aspirations, and the political outlook of the people.
The soviets seize state power
A few months later, in October (old-style calendar), after the refusal of successive pro-capitalist governments to end the war and their inability to resolve the problems of the masses, the soviets, in which the Bolsheviks had become the majority, finally resolved to take power into their own hands. For today’s socialists, the colossal historical events of 1917 can provide a major source of political and theoretical lessons, if they devote the time and effort required to study them.
After the soviet seizure of power in Petrograd, Moscow and all the main cities, it took three years of struggle against the armies of the internal counter-revolution and of over twenty foreign armies before the revolutionary (‘Red’) army finally prevailed. From this decisive test, the young Soviet Republic emerged victorious, but also exhausted. Tens of thousands of communists had paid with their lives for their revolutionary commitment in the Red Army.
Among those who perished were the most outstanding representatives of the working class. The soldiers were war-weary, the working people had borne the brunt of the deprivation brought about by the conflict and the economy had been bled dry. Not surprisingly then, as in other revolutions, the Russian Revolution was followed by a period of reaction, of a reflux in the mobilisation of the masses who had carried it out.
The French Revolution, too, underwent ascending and descending phases. Following the success of the revolutionary forces in removing the threat of counter-revolution, and particularly after the battle of Fleurus in June 1794, the reflux led to the downfall of Robespierre on July 27(the 9th of Thermidor on the revolutionary calendar) of that year.
The ebb of the revolutionary tide
The successive stages in the French Revolution, bringing figures such as Mirabeau, La Fayette, Brissot, Danton, and Robespierre, followed by the Directory and Bonaparte’s dictatorship, were essentially a reflection of the rise and fall of the revolutionary tide, of the level of the active intervention of the masses at different stages of the revolutionary process. Conflicts within the leading elements in the state were conditioned by changes in the relations between classes and in the psychology of the people.
A similar development occurred in Russia. The working class, numerically weak and culturally backward, had torn down the edifice of tsarism and capitalism. In just a few months, Russia had passed from a despotic monarchy to the rule of workers’ and peasants’ councils. Together with the internal difficulties and the struggle for daily survival was the mortal danger of foreign military interventions, which was only removed by 1921.
Inevitably, after such prodigious efforts, reaction would raise its head at some point. The psychological and material toll of the revolution affected the ranks of the revolutionary class. Instead of the well-being so hoped for, instead of socialist equality and democracy, poverty and death had wreaked havoc. Revolution consumes the energy of the revolutionary class.
Before, as after the revolution, the leaders of the revolution, Lenin and Trotsky were resolutely internationalist. For the leaders of the revolution, it was obvious that if it did not extend beyond the borders of Russia, to become at least Europe-wide, it would end in collapse. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was adopted in 1921 in order to gain time and in the hope that revolutionary victories in Europe would come to the aid of the Russian Revolution.
The New Economic Policy was a concession to capitalism
The NEP opened up a field of activity for capitalists and the rich peasants, under the control of the soviet state, with the aim of developing agriculture and certain branches of industry. Lenin’s speeches and writings from 1921, and up to his death in January 1924, show that he was fully aware of the counter-revolutionary dangers of this strategic policy. At the Eleventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1922, he explained frankly that the NEP strengthened capitalist tendencies in society. He warned against the corruption of the ruling circles.
“In Moscow,” he said, “four thousand seven hundred responsible communists direct the government machine. But who directs and who is directed? I doubt very much whether it can be said that the Communists are really in charge…” In the year before his death, Lenin tried to combat the abuse of power and corruption in the administration.
The end of the war had led to the appointment of a new layer of functionaries to keys administrative posts. Many of the demobilised military officers retained the habits and behaviour of wartime.
Gradually, the most revolutionary elements among the people and in the soviets were pushed aside, increasingly deprived of any effective control over the running of the administration and the economy, whereas capitalists and the upper middle class in the cities and on the land were gaining ground, emboldened by the opportunities opened up to them by the NEP.
Bureaucrats gain self-confidence and power
The various echelons of the young soviet bureaucracy, which were supposed to be serving the interests of the working class, increasingly played the role of arbiters between the classes. They gained in self-confidence and autonomy. The term “sovbour” – Soviet bourgeois – entered the vocabulary of the workers.
This realignment of social forces was taking place in an international situation that pushed such developments even further along, because every defeat of the working class abroad was darkening the horizon of the revolutionary elements in the soviet state, tending to foster political scepticism and indifference, not only within the bureaucracy, but also among worker activists.
After the soviets took power, the Communist International had been set up under the influence of Lenin and Trotsky, to promote revolutionary ideas across the world. But this organisation, too, was affected by the growth of bureaucracy and this contributed to the failure of revolutions elsewhere and to the growing isolation of the Russian revolution.
The successive errors of the policy of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and then of Stalin and Bukharin, contributed to defeats for the working class internationally and these, in turn, demoralised revolutionaries and strengthened the national conservatism of the bureaucracy in Russia. In 1923, an insurrection in Bulgaria was defeated. Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922.
The following year, the soviet workers were closely following a new revolutionary upsurge in Germany, only to see that at the decisive moment, the leadership of the German Communist Party, badly ‘advised’ by the Communist International, practically gave up the fight. For the communists of the USSR, this defeat, of the strongest working class in western Europe, was a cruel disappointment. In 1924, they learned of the failure of an uprising in Estonia; in 1926, of the liquidation of the general strike in Great Britain and of the victory of the reactionary General Pilsudski in Poland.
The abandonment of Communist ideas in China
In 1927-28, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang drowned the Chinese Revolution in a horrific bloodbath. The leadership of the Communist International had prepared this defeat, having pushed for the de facto dissolution of the Chinese Communist Party into the nationalist Kuomintang, which then massacred communist activists on a massive scale. In the 1930s, even more serious defeats occurred in Germany and Austria, with the rise of Hitler.
This long chain of defeats resulted in the collapse of the Russian masses’ confidence in the world revolution and the isolation of the internationalist revolutionaries. Under these conditions, the Soviet bureaucracy could rise ever higher above the workers, eliminating in the process all that remained of the Soviet democracy of the early post-revolutionary years.
The process of bureaucratisation in the state and in the ruling party, translated into a struggle on both the ideological and organisational levels. Riding on the wave of disillusionment about the possibility of an international revolution, the bureaucracy launched a campaign against the “permanent revolution” and for so-called ‘Socialism in One Country’, a concept first introduced by Stalin in 1924. This propaganda resonated with the workers, and even more so with the peasants. The defeat in China opened the way to mass arrests of internationalist opponents. It was then that Trotsky, who led the Left Opposition, was sent into exile.
It was no accident that Stalin became the spokesman for the ascendant bureaucracy. As Communist Party General Secretary, he was at the heart of the administrative apparatus, had the prestige of an “old Bolshevik” and a narrow-mindedness that distanced him from theoretical concerns and revolutionary principles.
Stalin eliminated most of the leaders of the October revolution
Stalin was therefore perfectly suited to the role of arbiter of the internal affairs of the privileged caste that was rapidly freeing itself from the “old” ideas. All of his activity tended to free the party apparatus from the control of its members, fostering careerism and corruption in the process.
Towards the end of the 1920s, Lenin’s companion Krupskaya was already saying that “if Lenin were still alive, he would certainly be in prison.” By the 1930s, some of those who had risen to become leading representatives of the Soviet bureaucracy had in fact been on the side of the counter-revolution in 1917. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of leaders and activists of the October Revolution, including almost the entire leadership of what had been the Bolshevik Party, died in the camps or in front of the firing squads of the Stalinist regime.
Stalinism could be characterised as a form of “Bonapartism”, by which we mean a type of regime that stands as an arbiter between warring classes. But unlike the capitalist Bonapartist regimes, (such as that of Napoleon himself) Stalin’s regime was based on the same property relations that had been established by the October Revolution, not based on private ownership and the ‘market’, but on state ownership and a plan of production.
In its initial struggle against internationalism and Soviet democracy, the regime had relied on the bourgeois elements strengthened by the extension of the NEP, or the “course towards the kulaks” (rich peasants). By 1927-28, these elements had become so strong that they attempted a coup de force to re-establish capitalism and Stalin made a volte-face by eliminating them violently and completely by forced collectivisation. Through such zigzags, the bureaucracy defended the socialisation of the means of production, and the power and privilege of the bureaucracy were derived from that.
The bureaucratic and dictatorial degeneration of Soviet Russia was not due to an inherent characteristic of socialism. In different historical conditions – and particularly if the revolutions which occurred in the interwar period had not been defeated – things would have turned out differently. Stalinism, with all its attendant horrors, was the product of the objective internal and international conditions of the post-revolutionary period, which led to the isolation of the revolution in an economically and culturally backward country and the death of the socialist, democratic and internationalist aims of the 1917 revolution.
[Feature image of Stalin from Wikimedia Commons, here]
