The Soviet Union from the Death of Lenin to the Establishment of Stalin's Autocracy
Chapter 2 Section 6
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This below is Chapter 2 Section 6:
The Soviet Union from the Death of Lenin to the Establishment of Stalin's Autocracy
The stabilization of the Weimar Republic meant the preservation and further development of a social system which, despite all the differences in detail, was common to the German Reich and the states of the West and to whose creation and development the Germans had made an important contribution. The popular word capitalism aimed at one part or aspect of the system, namely the world market economy of its economy. Russia, on the other hand, had followed a path since November 1917 that from the beginning was dissimilar to this system, so much so that there was no convincing analogy in the history of Europe. Since the development of Russia was in this respect new, it is appropriate to consider it before the further history of Germany.
The fact that Bolshevik Russia of 1923 represented a phenomenon that was unprecedented was easily explained by the doctrine of the ruling party: it showed Europe its own future in an as yet unformed shape; it constituted the paradigmatic impetus through which Europe would arrive at its own future of a classless society by finally leaving its past behind and thus also helping Russia to develop a complete communist society. In the last years of his life, however, Lenin came closer and closer to an almost opposite view, according to which his work appeared to him as the opening of a special path for Russia to modernity, which was essentially different from the main path taken in Europe because the conditions were different, above all the backwardness of the country the unsophisticated nature of its inhabitants. That is why the European multi-party system, universal suffrage and the national parliament were incapable of solving the tasks at hand, and that is why Lenin unabashedly placed himself and his party in parallel with the tsar and his nobility, that is why he oriented himself towards the German war economy and that is why he could no longer see in Marx an advisor and helper. Nevertheless, he did not come to the obvious conclusion that Russia, through him and the Bolshevik party, had become a developmental dictatorship, which must follow Europe in other ways and which one day in the distant future would be reconciled and reunited with Europe on a new basis. Rather, he held firmly to the negative part of Marx’s teaching, namely the critique of “old Europe” and the conviction of the imminent “downfall of the world bourgeoisie,” but the Russian Revolution was no longer the paradigmatic impetus for the classic Marxist revolution in Europe, but for a new kind of upheaval in the colonial and semicolonial areas of the world rising up against the “imperialist plundering and oppression of the majority of the world’s population.” Thus Lenin did not abandon the term world revolution, even though he had a clear view of the Russian special path and although the old hostility to the bourgeoisie was transformed into a new contrast to the old or bourgeois Europe, including its worker aristocracy.
Nobody knows what advice Lenin would have given his students and followers if he had not already been terminally ill by the autumn of 1923. This much is certain, that the hope of a return to the original concept through the victory of the revolution in Germany was the last emotion in which Trotsky and Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin agreed. Immediately after the German October, the dispute over Lenin’s succession broke out openly, and it took place first as a dispute over the Russian October, which itself became controversial in light of the lessons of the German events. Trotsky on the one hand, Zinoviev and Stalin on the other, took sides with one or the other grouping of the Communist Party of Germany, Trotsky like Radek first for Brandler, Zinoviev for Ruth Fischer and the leftists, and then in the fall of 1924 Trotsky with his lessons of October, opened the attack on the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Stalin and Kamenev, who had taken advantage of Trotsky's illness to seize the reins. Trotsky presented himself here as Lenin’s best pupil, in some respects even his teacher, and opened old wounds by denouncing Stalin’s non-Leninist attitude in the weeks after the February Revolution and Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s resistance to Lenin's will for an armed insurrection in October. For its part, the triumvirate, allied with men like Bukharin, Bela Kun and Otto Kuusinen, led a violent attack not only against Trotsky, but against “Trotskyism,” which has always been something different from Leninism and which today must even be regarded as an “hostile system.”
This struggle of the top party leaders against each other was mainly conducted as a dispute over party history and party doctrine, with often strange details: Trotsky denied the role of the peasantry, his method was eclectic and not dialectical, his true teacher and pioneer was Parvus; he had taken a wrong position both toward Brest-Litovsk and the NEP, which did not allow a respite and which would have brought about defeat; he denied the party's role as the bearer of the consciousness of the proletariat, he was making the “monstrous attempt to use the German October defeat to pillory the chairman of the Comintern.” Trotsky, for his part, criticized the bureaucracy, the rule of the apparatus, the lack of internal party democracy, and there was no doubt that he had many supporters among the officers of the Red Army and among the student youth. But he was the one who had wanted to militarize the trade unions during wartime communism, and many of his arguments could be viewed as mere means by which he wanted to advance his own and all-too-dictatorial pretensions. The distrust that confronted him as a potential Napoleon was genuine, and on his side there was a discernible reluctance to take steps that must have given new nourishment to this distrust of the old Bolsheviks. But at its core, the dispute was rooted in the matter and not in personal rivalries, because it revolved around Trotsky’s concept of “permanent revolution” and that of Stalin’s “socialism in one country” which was opposed to it. Ultimately, the question was whether the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could, after the failure of the revolution in Germany, retain power in good conscience and fight for its goal, socialism, or whether it should continue to make its own fate dependent on the success of the Western European Marxist revolution. It can be taken as certain that it was Stalin who followed in Lenin's footsteps here, and so it was therefore no mere maneuver in the struggle for succession that Zinoviev, as the pronounced internationalist that he was, joined with Trotsky and Kamenev at the end of 1925 united to form the new opposition to Stalin, which was to a special degree an opposition of intellectuals and which Stalin also opposed as a group which, as a small minority, broke away from the current of the party will. There were wider, major factual questions up for decision: the question of a hostile or friendly relationship with the peasantry, the question of the pace of industrialization, the question of bureaucracy, etc. This opposition was emphatically left-wing and had friends among many left-communists in Europe; Stalin, on the other hand, appeared in alliance with Bukharin as a representative of the right, which advocated a slow expansion of the state-economic and industrial sector and in friendly relations with the middle sized farmers as allies of the proletariat. In doing so, he prevailed, and certainly not only because he was preparing the apparatus and the party congresses, but also because the intellectuals faced much antipathy from the party’s mass following, which the opposition members themselves characterized as “anti-Semitism” in their draft program for the 15th Party Congress. The demand for “free discussion” within the party culminated in street demonstrations in November 1927, and immediately afterwards the party congress expelled the most important members of the Trotskyist opposition from the party. Trotsky himself was exiled to Central Asia shortly thereafter and expelled from the USSR in early 1929.
These years of struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, which occupy a large part in the histories of the party, were, as should not be overlooked, the good years of the Soviet Union. The NEP and the work of the new bourgeoisie had led to an astonishing upswing, and compared to the terrible famine of 1920/21, the population was doing very well, because food was now in abundance. Admittedly, industrial production was relatively small, and there was again talk of the gap between the prices of agricultural goods and those of industrial goods. The unemployment rate was quite high. On the whole, however, one could trust in a continuation of the upswing. However, the tone in which the peasantry was spoken of in the party discussions of these years was a sign of things to come. According to a statistical compilation from a Soviet work on the “Liquidation of the Exploiting Classes in the USSR,” in 1913 there were in Russia 17 million industrial proletarians, 90 million simple peasants, and 22 million exploiters, of whom 17 million were kulaks. Of these, the bourgeois and landlords were now wiped out, but despite all the losses in war and civil war (which, according to some estimates, amounted to more than 20 million people) the number of kulaks, i.e. the wealthier farmers, were still about the same size as those of the industrial proletarians, and the simple peasants still constituted the vast majority. But even the rightists consistently referred to the kulaks as “enemies,” and if they called the simple peasants their “allies,” it became all too clear that the majority of the population was practically without any representation and that they were regarded by the ruling party as an object to be treated well out of prudence, but to be fought ruthlessly in case of need. And even in the good years a peasant would pay a much higher tax than workers for the same amount of income, and one worker’s vote counted as much as five peasant voted in the local soviet elections. On the way of indirect elections to higher bodies, the weight of the peasant votes diminished to the point of complete insignificance, and thus the great majority of the inhabitants of the country were like wax in the hands of that “grain,” like Lenin had called the all-transforming and even the proletarians “walking and ruffling” party, that is, the all-powerful party leadership. From the socioeconomic point of view, the Bolshevik regime was a harsh dictatorship of the urban proletariat over the peasantry, a regime of severe exploitation and extensive disenfranchisement.
And yet peasants and numerous workers thought longingly back to that time when Stalin had given the go-ahead for the beginning of the “attack on the kulaks” and when all forces were strained to overcome the “petty-bourgeois sentiments that had spread among the working class.” Stalin adopted the leftist demands for the elimination of the kulaks as well as the NEP bourgeoisie and for rapid industrialization of the country as soon as Trotsky had been eliminated and the doctrine of permanent revolution had been pushed back; this made the struggle against the right wing of the party, which he had been allied until now, inevitable. This time too, Stalin turned out to be Lenin's best student. Bukharin, in spite of all his dissociation from the kulaks, had so resolutely represented the program of welfare communism that he even believed in the abolition of all military orders and only had in mind only the mutually beneficial cooperation between agriculture and industry. In this way, the standard of living was to be raised continuously and the peasants were to “slowly” “grow” into socialism. But this had to mean that the party, which was above all a militant party, no longer had an enemy in its own country and would have been restricted in its exercise of power if cooperation and not class struggle had been the slogan. Thus, even in the confrontation with the Right, Stalin had clearly grasped the main Leninist point of view, namely that of preserving, consolidating and maintaining the power of the party, and both his autocracy and collectivization and industrialization would be the direct consequences of the main goals. Thus, in November 1928, Stalin demanded that the rapid pace of development of industry in general, and in particular the production of the means of production, should become the basic principle of the transformation of the entire national economy, and that even the most extreme tension should not be shied away from. Only then would it be possible to catch up with “the advanced technology of the capitalist countries” and overtake it: the aspect of the military self-assertion of the country thus immediately came to the fore, and Stalin cited Germany three times in a row as an example of an advanced capitalist country. If one keeps in mind that the 6th World Congress of the Comintern had just proclaimed the end of capitalist stabilization and had seen the dawn of a new era of wars and revolutions, then one could arrive at the thesis that Stalin had wanted to set in motion preparations for a defensive war against Germany at the end of 1928, although the fear of war, which was consciously nurtured, referred predominantly to Japan and England as the most hostile powers of capitalist encirclement. Or did he want to prepare for the day when he would have to defend a Soviet Germany against the Western powers? But in any case, this industrialization could not be carried out without the provision of huge investment funds. Where would these funds come from? If Russia, under a constitutional tsar, had remained at the side of her allies until the victorious end of the war, she would undoubtedly have been granted huge credits with which she could have continued the industrialization that was already well underway. But the Bolsheviks had canceled Russia's national debt, and they had to pay in cash for basically whatever industrial equipment they bought in the West. If industrialization was to take place “quickly” and “with extreme exertion,” then there was only the path of “socialist accumulation,” which the right-wing groups around Bukharin and Rykov called the “military-feudal exploitation of the peasantry.” Just as foreign debts had been cancelled and the bourgeoisie and the Orthodox Church had expropriated, so now it was necessary to take property away from the relatively wealthy part of the peasantry, it was necessary to export millions of tons of grain, even if the whole population of the country was starving because it, and it was necessary to cut down the forests of the country to a large extent in order to get hold of the necessary capital goods and to be able to pay foreign specialists. And so the world experienced the example of an industrial revolution the likes of which had never existed in history, an industrial revolution ordered by the head of state, the most elementary basis of which was the class struggle against a large and completely defenseless minority of its own population.
The policy of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class and the collectivization of agriculture meant that a tremendous expropriation campaign was set in motion all over the country, that the kulaks were expelled from their estates and deported with women and children to distant places, where they died of starvation in large part or worked themselves to death in the forest camps of the Urals and in construction of the White Sea Canal. Reports of the experiences of such peasants have only come to light indirectly, but from the so-called Smolensk Archives, which fell into the hands of the German troops in 1941 and later reached America, a detailed picture of the events in this western region of Russia can be obtained, which Merle Fainsod has drawn in his book “Smolensk under Soviet Rule.” First of all, the delegations of party members and GPU men (translator: State Political Directorate: successor to the Cheka, predecessor of the NKVD) come to the villages and ruthlessly requisition all the grain of the kulaks, who, as a rule, do not represent a clearly defined class, but are connected to the middle sized farmers and also the village poor by many times; poor villagers are also arrested on the grounds that they are ideological kulaks, and even warm underwear of the kulaks and their wives are is taken away, and they are driven into wastelands and swamps; hundreds and thousands of them are collected in the larger cities to be loaded into cattle wagons and transported to Karelia or the Urals on journeys that often take weeks. Panic grips large swathes of the urban population and, according to GPU reports, phrases like the following from the mouths of poor peasants and workers are numerous: “Our turn will come soon as well,” and “Hunger will kill us all.” Indeed, millions of people cannot be deprived of their property and freedom without any resistance. Quite a few party members fell victim to acts of terrorism, and millions of head of cattle were slaughtered. The result was the great famine of 1931/1933, in which several millions perished and, especially in Ukraine, entire villages died out. All the sufferings and agonies that the industrial revolution in England or Germany had brought to the workers seemed insignificant against this background. And in Germany in particular, people were relatively well informed because quite a few peasants of German descent were affected, whose shocking cries for help were spread by the “Relief for Brothers in Need.”
But unlike in England and Germany, no definable class of people drew visible advantages from the misery of others: the already pitifully low standard of living of the general population fell by a full third between 1928 and 1932, and even the wives of the deputy commissars had to queue for food, despite certain privileges; apparently only the very top of the party did not suffer from hunger, and their full labor was indeed most essential to keep the process going. The obvious question is whether, in the presence of identifiable beneficiaries, exploitation can ever reach such a high level. And yet the jubilant reports in the communist and philocommunist press abroad about the great feats of socialism in the construction of the Dnieprostroy and Magnitogorsk were not entirely unfounded, because never before had a country industrialized so quickly, and never before was this industrialization been borne of the genuine enthusiasm of a mass minority, which had long since ceased to be a mere grain, but rather attracted large sections of the youth through its call for sacrifice and stormy labor. The terrible and the extraordinary arose from the root of will and enthusiasm; only both halves make up the whole of the completely new picture.
Therefore, the period of the first Five-Year Plan and collectivization could indeed be seen as the accelerated catching-up of a universal process and as the establishment of a large-scale collectivist agriculture, which was appropriate to Russian traditions and conditions. The sacrifices then appear as a deplorable but unavoidable expense, and the claim to totality of the party and its leader are considered justified because it accomplished what was necessary, and was therefore rational.
But it is at least as probable that the will to physically exterminate a class regarded as hostile was the actual motive of the party, and that in doing so it struck precisely at the most active and efficient members of the peasantry, so that damage was inflicted on agriculture which could not be repaired for decades and which was, consequently, by no means rational.
The extent to which the aim was to destroy classes and traditions that were considered reactionary, but were in fact were not reactionary at all or at most partially reactionary, is already proven by the title of a book that appeared in Berlin in 1931 and had as its author the Jewish communist Otto Heller. It was called “The Downfall of Jewry.” This did not mean physical annihilation, but rather the end of the “small Jewish town with its filth, its desolations, its lack of culture” through the construction of Soviet socialism, which opened up new and modern possibilities of life for the Jewish nationality, and settlement in Birobidjan, freed from the pressure of a dead tradition. But according to Heller, Western Jewry is also in decline, albeit in a completely different way: through assimilation, through a declining birth rate, through intermarriage. Thus, Judaism in the Soviet Union becomes a beneficiary and in the West a victim of the consequences of that “fall of mankind,” the transition from the communal production of primitive times to the commodity-producing society, in which the Jews, as the “first city dwellers” and as a trading people, played such a large part and which is canceled today in socialism. Therefore, in the Soviet Union, the initially far disproportionate share of Jews in party membership is becoming more and more normalized; in the West, however, “the last, most desperate and strangest nationalism breathes its meagre soul,” namely Zionism, that “product of the petty bourgeoisie.”
Thus the same concept of progress and of the “iron course of history,” condemned to death, after the landlords and the bourgeoisie, also the independently farming peasants and the trading Jews, a death that did not have to mean physical extermination, but could all too easily mean it, and it was not without good reason that Heller pointed out that the great majority of Jewish intellectuals had opted for Menshevism. According to this concept of progress, the social democrats and right-wing socialists were doomed, and the same was true of the Western social order as a whole, the social order of productive differences that made the concept of progress possible in the first place.
And couldn't a similar consequence and paradox also be seen in Soviet industrialization? Was not, on the one hand, Stalin's remark in his famous speech about the tasks of the economists correct, that old Russia had been continually defeated because of its backwardness and that this was the reason “why we must not lag behind any longer,” provided that it is confined to the first fifth of the twentieth century? But did not the largest state in the world, if it developed its heavy industry and thus its armaments production under extreme strain, very soon have to become again that overpowering threat for equality, indeed even for the independent existence of its neighbors, such as Karl Marx had perceived in the tsarist monarchy of nineteenth century, especially since it now had his own parties in those countries who wanted to see their fatherland in the Soviets?
Neither question was frequently asked in Germany between the years of 1924 and 1929. And yet the background to the new phenomenon was already present in the East when the old conditions stabilized again in the German Reich, which were essentially the conditions of the whole of the West.