page iii

Preface

 
    This study first appeared as a series of articles in the New York weekly, The Guardian, under the title, "Is the Soviet Union Capitalist?" The complete series is reproduced here without alteration apart from a more logical breakdown into chapters, as noted below.

    The study does not aim to answer every important question about the U.S.S.R. The situation of the minority nationalities and of women, the state of Soviet agriculture, U.S.S.R. foreign policy and a number of other topics are merely touched on. The investigation concentrates on the bare minimum elements of political economy necessary and sufficient to answer the question posed in the original title. Which class holds state power? What are the basic relations of production? On these topics the work is concentrated.

    In approximately the first half of the study (parts 2-15) the approach is chronological. The chief political battles and economic changes in the U.S.S.R. since 1917 are sketched in, with emphasis on the crucial 1956-65 transition period. The second part of the study applies

page iv

a magnifying lens to the post-1965 production relations, especially in regard to labor power, means of production, finance, planning, and the division of the social product among different classes.

    The general thesis defended in this work runs counter to the dominant opinion -- the opinion of the dominant classes -- in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In the latter it has been made a crime against the state to disseminate the opinion that capitalism has been restored there. The motives that incline most U.S. and other western Sovietologists to collude with the fiction of Soviet socialism are more subtle and diverse. Anti-communism, opportunism, ignorance, and metaphysics all play a role. The sum of the factors is that it presently serves the interests of the ruling circles in both superpowers to present the relation between them as one between different social systems. Like so many other propositions on which both superpowers agree, the theory of Soviet socialism today is based on falsehoods.

    Uncommon as the view here defended is in rival "establishment" circles, it is not the author's alone by far. The general thesis that a capitalist restoration has taken place in the U.S.S.R. is today a common point of agreement among Marxist-Leninists in scores of countries. This study forms part of the growing international Marxist-Leninist literature on the topic, a literature which testifies to the increasing vitality and unity of the movement.

    Many people, on first becoming acquainted with the Marxist-Leninist point of view, refer to the thesis of capitalist restoration in the U.S.S.R. as the "Chinese view" or the "Albanian view." This is correct in a way, but basically it is a misconception.

    It was the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labor of Albania who stood up first, most firmly, clearly, and consistently in defense of Marxism-Leninism against the revisionist line initiated by Khrushchev. It is they also who did the pioneer's work on the thesis of ca-

page v

pitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, leading the way to solving the most difficult problems of theory and in marshaling reliable data. All Marxist-Leninists acknowledge their contributions, past and present.

    But this does not mean that the thesis of capitalist restoration arises chiefly out of some "national" experience of China or Albania, or would not have been discovered without the Chinese and Albanian parties. The thesis is based on international experience -- not least, that of the Soviet workers and oppressed nationalities -- and has objective validity independently of its first proponents. It has become, as was mentioned, the common property of Marxist-Leninist all over the world.

    Readers should also be aware that not all those who are often labeled "Maoists" or "pro-Chinese" hold to the view that there has been a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. It is not uncommon in this period to encounter experiments in wearing the "Chinese" jacket while walking the "Russian" road. The position of the editors of the newspaper in which this study first appeared is a case in point. While sprinkling their writing with occasional references to the "other superpower" and Soviet social-imperialism," they took care -- in a preface atop each installment in the series of articles to state that they did not believe the U.S.S.R. had become a capitalist country. In this way the editors did a brisk business for a time cultivating a prestigious "Chinese" image while acting as apologists for Soviet social-imperialism on every burning question of world affairs.

    This whole topic obtains a vital urgency from the clouds of world war now gathering on the horizon. In many parts of the world, the question whether the Soviet Union is a big socialist country or whether it is an imperialist superpower like the U.S. has become a shooting question. One has only to think of Angola or to recall such cases as Czechoslovakia, Bangladesh, and Chenpao Island; or the violent repression of Marxist-Leninists instigated by the pro-Moscow parties in In-

page vi

dia, the Philippines, Portugal and other countries. All these and other incidents are only the forerunners of a more general conflict in which, to judge by the scale of the preparations, Soviet social-imperialism will attempt to displace its superpower rival on the whole of the Eurasian land mass and its flanking seas, and to grab a larger share of Africa and Latin America as well. To evade, minimize, or conceal the capitalist character of the U.S.S.R., and to paint this power as less evil, bloody and reactionary than U.S. imperialism, is to abandon scientific thought and to enlist in the ranks of the other superpower's offensive.

M. N.  
11/75  

    Note:  The study is here divided into 24 chapters rather than the 28 installments of the newspaper serial. From installment 18 on, the newspaper installments sometimes began in the middle of a chapter of the original manuscript. In such a case the newspaper inserted a few lead-in lines for continuity. At other times the newspaper ran the beginning of a new chapter into the end of the previous chapter without indicating a break. This practice naturally caused some readers to lose stride. In the present edition the material added by the newspaper, as well as some superfluous footnotes, is deleted and the chapters follow the manuscript. The text is otherwise unaltered.

page 7

 
 
 
2  Revolution

    October 25, 1917, marked the beginning of a new period in Russian and in world history.

    It was the start of the period of Soviet power in the USSR -- a period which came to an end nearly 40 years later with the rise to power of a new bourgeoisie. In order to gain a clearer picture of the present regime, it is useful to trace briefly some of the key aspects of the early period of Soviet development.

    The workers' insurrections in Moscow and Petrograd, the storming of the Winter Palace, the arrest of the old government's ministers and the proclamation of the Soviet Republic put an end to the rule of the bourgeoisie and the landowners in one of the world's largest and most populous countries.

    State power was struck from the hands of the old exploiting classes. The proprietors of near-medieval estates, together with the owners and financial backers of some of the world's most modern factories and their foreign allies were deprived at one blow of the services of Russia's centralized official apparatus for pressing revenues out of the people, suppressing the exploited classes and waging wars of conquest and annexation.

    Moreover, they were deprived in short order of their most important private properties. All the land was

page 8

nationalized immediately. The banks likewise. The foreign debt was repudiated. The major industries quickly followed. Beginning at first with enterprises whose owners closed down so as to create hardship for the workers and to sabotage their new government, the Soviet authority expropriated more than 800 firms between November 1917 and February the next year. By June of 1918, all large-scale industry and mining became state property along with the major transport facilities and warehouses. All foreign trade was made a state monopoly.

    Thus within a few months of the workers' seizure of state power, the new state held the title and the keys to nearly all the country's major means of production. The commanding heights of economic life were in its hands. The swiftest and one of the most massive transfers of property from one class to another in history up to that time had been achieved.

    The U.S. writer Lincoln Steffens, after a visit to Soviet Russia in 1918, returned to say, "I have been over into the future and it works." This oft-quoted phrase, and similar remarks by other visitors at the time, reflected the enormous inspiration which the victory of the Soviet working class radiated. The new Soviet power was the harbinger of the future emancipation of all exploited and oppressed peoples everywhere. But few leaders of the Bolshevik party in 1918 agreed in the literal sense with Steffen's judgment that "it works."

    Quite the opposite. Very little "worked." In the first place the economy was ravaged by four years of interimperialist world war. Industry suffered from shortages of raw materials. Millions of working-age peasants were at the battlefront. Serious famine threatened the cities.

    In the second place, the new Soviet state had hardly begun the task of transforming its newly acquired properties to make them work in a socialist sense. State power having been seized, the transfer of an enterprise from private to state hands was a relatively uncomplicated matter of issuing a confiscation decree and perhaps sending a contingent of armed workers to take physical possession of the plant and equipment, if the workers on the spot had not already done so. But to continue or to

page 9

revive production, and above all to transform the relations of production from capitalist into socialist relations -- that was another matter.

    "Yesterday," Lenin wrote in May 1918, "the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalize, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalized, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialization and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by 'determination' alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialization cannot be brought about without this ability." (Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 333.)

    If the new Soviet power could not even keep track of how many enterprises had been confiscated, it could even less take stock of their capabilities and needs so as to draw up an economic plan. The central State Economic Council set up at the end of 1917 for this purpose achieved only the most superficial grip on economic affairs. In May 1921, Lenin wrote, "There is still hardly any evidence of the operation of an integrated state economic plan." (CW Vol. 32, p. 371.) Only the germs of socialist economy existed.

    The working class had seized state power. It controlled the key positions in the political superstructure of society. But the gigantic task of reshaping the economic foundation of Soviet society still lay before it. As Lenin said in May 1918, and repeated three years later, the name "Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognized as socialist order." (CW Vol. 27, p. 335; Vol. 32, p. 330)

    Three years of civil war and invasion by 14 imperialist states, determined to crush the Soviet power in its cradle, compelled the young state to subordinate all other tasks to survival. The intervention, operating in conjunction with the armed counterrevolution led by the overthrown landlords and bourgeoisie, imposed further terrible sacrifices on the Soviet working people between 1918-21. The reactionary armies cut the urban centers of Soviet

page 10

power off from the sources of fuel, raw materials and above all, grain. Extraordinary economic measures had to be taken -- labor conscription, forced requisition of grain surpluses, emergency rationing among others -- that had nothing in common with a peaceful advance toward socialist economy.

    Defying all the predictions of the world's bourgeoisies, the Soviet state survived the onslaught. But it suffered staggering losses. Contemporary Soviet historians estimate that in 1917 there were just under 3 million factory workers in the Soviet Republic. About 800,000 of them fought in the civil war. Around 180,000 were killed in action. From 10-15 percent of the whole factory proletariat died of hunger and epidemics. As a result the Soviet power counted only 1.7 million factory workers in August 1920 when the main body of the reactionary armies had been beaten.

    More dangerous than the physical losses suffered by the proletariat was its economic degeneration as a result of the paralysis of industry.

    "Owing to our present deplorable conditions," Lenin wrote in May 1921 "proletarians are obliged to earn a living by methods which are not proletarian and are not connected with large-scale industry. They are obliged to procure goods by petty bourgeois profiteering methods either by stealing, or by making them for themselves in a publicly owned factory, in order to barter them for agricultural produce -- and that is the main economic danger, jeopardizing the existence of the Soviet system." (CW Vol. 32, p. 411.)

    So widespread and general was the ruin of large-scale industry, Lenin wrote in October 1921, that the proletariat has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat. The proletariat is the class which is engaged in the production of material values in large-scale industry. Since large-scale capitalist industry has been destroyed, since the factories are at a standstill, the proletariat has disappeared. It has sometimes figured in statistics, but it has not been held together economically." (CW Vol. 33, p. 65.)

    Such a situation posed special dangers for the Soviet power, since the proletariat was not only the working class

page 11

but the ruling class as well. Unless industry was revived, Soviet power would lose its footing and be overthrown. It was in the midst of this grave emergency, more dangerous than intervention snd civil war, that Lenin proposed to the party and the country in early 1921 the New Economic Policy (NEP).

    When the Bolsheviks first took power -- as Lenin put it -- "we assumed that we could proceed straight to socialism without a preliminary period in which the old economy would be adapted to socialist economy. We assumed that by introducing state production and state distribution we had established an economic system of production and distribution that differed from the previous one." (CW Vol. 33, p. 88.)

    Three years later, experience had proved that this was not possible. The "attempt to introduce the socialist principles of production and distribution by 'direct assault,' i.e. in the shortest, quickest and most direct way," had suffered defeat.

    The NEP meant a change in strategy based on the clear recognition of this defeat. Instead of immediate transition to socialist economy, there would have to be a fairly long transitional period -- perhaps five to 10 years by Lenin's estimate -- during which the groundwork for socialist economy was carefully prepared. Instead of an all-out assault, there would be a period of strategic retreat, regroupment and consolidation. Instead of merciless blows against the capitalists, the Soviet power would offer them concessions and encouragement within definite limits to get the economy going again.

    The plain fact, as Lenin put it in 1920, is that "there is a firmer economic basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism." (CW Vol. 31, p. 516.) Some 80 percent af the country were peasants, and of these the great majority were small-holders working an individual plot in an individualist way. There was a large stratum also of small workshops and manufacturers likewise engaged in petty-capitalist production and exchange. Even in the most advanced sectors of large-scale industry -- which in Russia at the time was more concentrated than anywhere else in the world -- the foundations for socialism were not yet ripe,

page 12

The proletariat lacked organizational, cultural and technological skills in sufficient quantity even to run them on the old capitalist basis, much less to operate them in a coordinated, planned, socialist way. A period of "schooling" -- under the tutelage of the capitalists and their experts -- was required even in this core of the state sector of the economy.

    The analysis of Lenin's New Economic Policy and of the circumstance under which it was adopted sheds important light on the transformations in the Soviet mode of production carried out several decades later under Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Kosygin. The two sets of measures, as will be seen, have many crucial features in common, including the commanding role given to profits, the freedom given managers to engage in commodity exchange and others. In a number of respects, the latter even consciously copied from the former and drew on quotations from Lenin's speeches of the period to give their work a mantle of legitimacy. A crucial difference, however, was that Khrushchev and his followers portrayed their policies as an irreversible advance to communism while Lenin, with the frankness and truthfulness of a Bolshevik, proclaimed openly that NEP was a temporary retreat to state capitalism.

page 13

 
 
 
3  NEP

    The years of imperialist intervention and civil war in Russia, from 1918 to 1921, were the new Soviet power's baptism by fire.

    Did the new state command the loyalty of the majority af workers and peasants? Was its apparatus cohesive and effective? Were the policies of its leadership adequate to cope with the all-sided onslaught?

    By 1921 there was no longer much doubt. The Soviet power had survived challenges that would have crumbled every other state in the world at that time.

    "We have, no doubt, learned politics," Lenin told the 8th All-Russia Congress of Soviets in December 1920. "Here we stand as firm as a rock. But things are bad as far as economic matters are concerned. Henceforth, less politics will be the best politics." (Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 514)

    The restoration of the country's ruined economy became the highest political priority.

    Among the measures adopted beginning in early 1921 under the name of the New Economic Policy (NEP) were the following:

    -- Restoration of commercial relations between town and countryside. The wartime emergency system of military

page 14

requisitioning of grain from the peasants had to be stopped. In its place Lenin proposed, and the Soviet power adopted, a "tax in kind." The peasantry would no longer have to give up its entire grain surplus to the state, but only a fixed and known percentage of it. There was thus a material incentive to increase food production. The peasant would be left with a portion of the grain surplus to exchange on a regular market basis for the products of industry.

    -- Restoration of retail trade. The Soviet power retained the state monopoly of grain trade at the wholesale level and kept control of wholesale trade in most products of large-scale industry operating on a nationwide scale. But private retail trade, and limited wholesale trade on a regional and local scale, were again legalized. Private merchants were encouraged to operate.

    -- Restoration of small- and medium-sized private industry, working on a capitalist basis under loose state supervision.

    -- A limited reopening of the Soviet economy to foreign investments, by offering concessions on a highly profitable basis for investors in raw materials extraction and industry.

    -- Reorganization of the nationalized large-scale mass-market industries, placing these, too, to a large extent, on a capitalist footing under the direct supervision and control of the proletarian state.

    Of all these measures, the last was the boldest and most drastic. For the large-scale state industries working for the mass consumer market made up -- almost as much as the heavy machine-building industry -- the main economic pillar of the Soviet state. This was the socialist bastion in which new, socialist relations of production were to become entrenched first of all, and from which they were to advance throughout the rest of the economy.

    As Lenin put it in May 1921, "the manufactured goods made by socialist factories and exchanged for the foodstuffs produced by the peasants are not commodities in the politico-economic sense of the word, at any rate they are not only commodities, they are no longer commodities, they are ceasing to be commodities. " (CW Vol. 32, p. 384)

page 15

In other words, in this sector -- and here alone -- the capitalist relations of production, founded (as Marx analyzed in Capital) on the production of commodities, were being suppressed and the new socialist relations were arising.

    Yet here, too, a partial retreat was required. Already by November of the same year, the direct exchange (barter) of manufactured goods for foodstuffs had broken down. The link between town and country had become highly capitalist again, with "ordinary buying and selling" for money and monetary gain restored in its place. (CW Vol. 33, p. 96)

    As in the relations between state industry and private agriculture, so was a retreat required in the internal structure of state industry. As Lenin put it in his "Draft Theses on the Role and Functions of the Trade Unions Under the New Economic Policy" (December 1921-January 1922): "A free market and capitalism, both subject to state control, are now being permitted and are developing; on the other hand, the state enterprises are being put on a profit basis, i.e., they are in effect being largely reorganized on commercial and capitalist lines. He repeats: "With the free market now permitted and developing, the state enterprises will to a large extent be put on a commercial, capitalist basis." (CW, Vol. 42, pp. 375-376)

    In specifics, this reorganization meant that every state enterprise (with exceptions made for heavy industry) must "pay its way and show a profit." (Ibid., p. 376) It meant that "it is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories be concentrated in the hands of the management. The factory management, usually built up on the principle of one-man responsibility, must have authority independently to fix and pay out wages and also distribute rations, working clothes and all other supplies; it must enjoy the utmost freedom to maneuver, exercise strict control of the actual successes achieved in increasing production, in making the factory pay its way and show a profit and carefully select the most talented and capable administrative personnel, etc." (Ibid., p. 379, see also Vol. 33, pp. 184-196.)

    To give them a material incentive, moreover, the

page 16

directors of factories and trusts were paid on a partly commission basis, so that their income was made dependent on the profitability of their enterprises. There were experiments also with tying workers' wages to enterprise profitability.

    All this and more, it will be shown, has made its appearance again 40 years later in a new guise.

    But what is remarkable in looking back on this turn in Soviet policy -- which has been sketched only very briefly here -- is the utter and complete frankness with which Lenin advanced it and characterized it. "Freedom to exchange implies freedom for capitalism. We say this openly and emphasize it. We do not conceal it in the least. Things would go very hard with us if we attempted to conceal it." (CW, Vol. 32, p. 490)

    Some 40 years later, in a wholly different historical context, when a wholly different Soviet party leadership undertook a far more sweeping restoration of the freedom to trade," and a far more profound reorganization of state enterprises "on a commercial capitalist basis," this frankness was gone, replaced by a stultifying, crushing hypocrisy.

    Lenin's clarity and frankness about the significance of NEP testified to the fact that throughout this limited and temporary restoration of capitalism in the USSR, the proletariat remained the ruling class. The state capitalism that the NEP temporarily fostered was not the state capitalism found in bourgeois economics texts, in which the bourgeois holders of economic power collectively subordinate the state and state property to their interests. On the contrary, the proletarian political power subjected the bourgeoisie to its interests. No matter how great the freedom given to the bourgeoisie in economic matters, the proletarian power always kept the reins in its own hands and loosened or tightened them in accordance with its own economic and political policies.

    The NEP period of Soviet history comprised three broad phases: the retreat in the direction of capitalism, the consolidation and the new offensive toward socialism. All three phases, and not only the retreat, formed part of the NEP design. Taken as a whole, NEP was the policy of transforming the capitalist (and even precapitalist)

page 17

economic foundation of the USSR into a socialist foundation; it was the policy of laying "the economic foundation for the political gains of the Soviet state" (CW, Vol. 33, p. 73); it was the policy of transition during the period when "capitalism has been smashed but socialism has not yet been built." (CW, Vol. 30, p. 513) As Lenin said in one of his last speeches, in November 1922, "NEP Russia will become socialist Russia." (CW, Vol. 33, p. 443)

    It was Lenin himself, in March 1922, who called a halt to the "retreat" that was the first phase of NEP. It fell to his successors to decide how to consolidate, and when and how to pass on to the general offensive against the capitalist elements.

    In all respects the easiest part of the battle during the second and third phases of NEP was the elimination of the private merchants and small manufacturers from the scene. From the mid-1920s on, the share of the country's total trade in the hands of private companies declined, while the share of the state increased. By 1932, the hated private traders, who were called NEPmen, were all but gone. In manufacturing, where about one-eighth of the country's workers in 1923 were employed by private enterprise, the private share had been reduced in 1932 to less than 1 percent. (See the periodic reports of the Soviet State Planning Commission, presented at party congresses by Stalin, [Works, Vols. 12 and 13] and the modern revisionist Outline History of the Soviet Working Class by Y. S. Borisova et. al., Moscow 1973.)

    The gradual liquidation of foreign investments and leases presented few problems, as these never amounted to any significant proportion of output. Few capitalists had accepted Lenin's offer to invest in the proletarian state.

    More difficult and protracted was the struggle to reverse the capitalist measures introduced in the state industrial sector during the first phase of NEP. Necessity dictated progress here: the managers of the state industrial trusts quickly used their freedom to jack up prices beyond the point where the peasant and worker masses could afford to pay. In 1923 and 1924, the state cracked down on its trusts, imposing first a rigid credit control and then price controls that severely limited the managements' freedom of action. In the spring of 1924, the first serious start was made to

page 18

design a comprehensive long-term economic plan for all branches of nationalized industry; meanwhile the socialist planning principle made gradual headway on a patchwork, branch-by-branch basis. (See E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, Pelican Books 1969.) By 1927, Stalin was able to report that the state now "has every possibility of directing nationalized industry in a planned way, as a single industrial enterprise," (Works, Vol. 10, p. 309); and in 1929, the capitalist relations in the state sector had been so far suppressed that this possibility, with the adoption of the first five-year plan, became -- at least in approximation -- for the first time a reality.

    The hardest battle of all, during the third and final phase of NEP, was not however in industry but in agriculture. The restoration of the free market during the first phase of NEP had led, as was its intent, to a revival of agricultural production -- and class struggle. Instead of suffering famine as before, the Soviet state in 1922 had been able to export grain, and there was a salutary improvement in the food situation. But the revival of agricultural production meant a revival of capitalist relations in agriculture: a growing concentration of landholdings, of grain surpluses, of capital in the hands of the richest peasants (kulaks), a growing impoverishment of the poorer peasants and of the landless laborers, who were forced to flee to the cities where they aggravated the problem of unemployment. By 1928-29, after a succession of good harvests, the kulaks had grown strong enough (they thought) to thumb their noses at the Soviet state. They refused to pay the grain tax, refused to sell grain except at highway-robbery prices and in a number of areas engaged in open sabotage and armed rebellion. The agricultural cooperatives that had begun, following Lenin's directives, as part of NEP had become largely a dead letter.

    This new emergency confronted the Soviet state once more with the specter of famine and civil war.

page 19

 
 
 
4  Collectivization

    In the 1920s the Soviet industrial proletariat was still an island -- though a growing one -- in a vast peasant sea.

    While in the state-owned industries the retreat toward state capitalism had been halted and a definite forward march toward socialism was underway in the late 1920s, out in the countryside capitalism was in full bloom.

    Agricultural laborers and poor peasants were being ground into misery; middle peasants were being squeezed down, and the richest capitalist farmers -- the kulaks -- were accumulating grain and power.

    The kulaks' arrogance can be measured from an anecdote Stalin reported in April 1929 to the Party's central committee. In grain-rich Kazakhstan, "one of our agitators tried for two hours to persuade the holders of grain to deliver grain for supplying the country, and a kulak stepped forward with a pipe in his mouth and said, 'Do us a little dance, young fellow, and I will let you have a couple of poods of grain.'" (Works, Vol. 12, p. 95)

    The harvests had been good; yet the state was menaced by famine. The resistance and -- in many areas -- armed rebellion of the kulaks threatened to reverse the progress toward socialism in the cities and to undermine the power of the Soviet state.

page 20

    In this emergency, and after heated intraparty struggles against the "left" and right opposition, the central committee, led by Stalin, resolved to launch an all-out offensive against the last great bastion of capitalism in the USSR: capitalism in agriculture.

    This was the campaign for collectivization of agriculture. Its aim was to combine the millions of small- and medium-sized peasant plots into tens of thousands of collective farms (kolkhozes). In a collective farm, the individual patches of land are merged (apart from small plots for household consumption) into large tracts which the farmers cultivate collectively. A portion of the harvest is taxed off by the state; but the remainder is the property of the collective, to be sold by it to its best advantage, with the proceeds divided among the collective farmers in proportion to their work.

    (In state farms [sovkhoz] by contrast, the entire crop goes to the state and the farmers receive a predetermined wage, just as in a factory. There were already state farms in the USSR at that time, based mainly on expropriated big landlords' estates; but the majority of the peasantry was not ready for this higher form.)

    In order to achieve the collectivization of agriculture, however, it was necessary to deprive the capitalist forces in the countryside of their strongest and leading elements, the kulaks. For this purpose the party put forward the slogan to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." This meant to deprive them of their economic base, their property, their possibilities for exploiting the middle and poor peasantry and laborers and for resisting the Soviet state.

    The struggle that began in agriculture in late 1928, lasting some five years, amounted to a second Bolshevik revolution. It was a revolution carried on both from above, by the Soviet state including the Red Army, and from below, by the masses of agricultural laborers, poor and middle peasants.

    Like all genuine revolutions, it was "not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture," it was not so "refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous." It was, much like the peasant movement in Hunan described by Mao

page 21

Tsetung In 1927, "an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." (Selected Works, Vol. 1 p. 28.) It therefore did not lack instances when the peasantry went "too far," and liquidated the kulaks (as well as some who were mistaken for kulaks) not only economically but also physically. But, as the chief bourgeois critic of this revolution, Prof. M. Lewin, admitted, "In order to understand this process of wholesale dekulakization, it is also essential to bear in mind the misery in which millions of bednyaks [poor peasants] lived. All too often they went hungry; they had neither shoes nor shirts, nor any other 'luxury items.' The tension which had built up in the countryside, and the eagerness to dispossess the kulaks, were in large measure contributed to by the wretchedness of the bednyaks' condition, and the hatred they were capable of feeling on occasion for their more fortunate neighbors, who exploited them pitilessly whenever they had the chance to do so." (Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, Evanston, 1968. p. 488.)

    There were also excesses committed "from above," by overzealous party leaders, who were often members of the intraparty opposition intent consciously or unconsciously on sabotaging the process. Inexperience, shortage of cadre and honest errors played their part as well. The opposition -- echoed by the bourgeois press abroad -- lost no opportunity to focus on these excesses and errors, to magnify them out of proportion and damn the general line of the revolution because of its tactical blunders. But there was in reality no other socialist alternative, and those members of the opposition who were dedicated to the cause of Soviet power, as Prof. Lewin records, soon came to see this truth. "He does the job badly," said these repentant oppositionists of Stalin, but he does it." The "most intelligent cadre," in Lewin's estimate at least -- meaning the more enlightened followers of Leon Trotsky and of Nikolai Bukharin, then the chief "left" and right opposition faction leaders -- complained of Stalin's "iron hand" and "despotic methods," but conceded that "thanks to this man's indomitable will, Russia is being modernized. Despite his shortcomings, a few more years

page 22

of this terrible, almost superhuman effort will bring an all-round increase in prosperity and happiness."

    By the end of 1933, the long road of the New Economic Policy (NEP) had been completed. The initial retreat toward state capitalism, the consolidation, and then the general offensive toward socialism had been successfully executed. About two-thirds of the peasants were in functioning collective farms; private industry had all but vanished; socialist principles in state industry had gained the upper hand and the first five-year plan had been triumphantly completed ahead of time, unemployment was abolished. After 16 years of political rule, the new Soviet power had succeeded in remolding the capitalist economic foundation it inherited, and in creating the foundation appropriate to itself -- the foundation of a socialist economy.

    At the 17th party congress in January 1934, Stalin -- speaking for the central committee -- was able to make the landmark declaration that the socialist economic formation "now holds unchallenged sway and is the sole commanding force in the whole national economy." (Works, Vol. 13, p. 316.)

    At the time that the USSR entered the new era in its economic development, the rest of the world was plunging into the depths of the Great Depression. A front-page editorial by Pravda in 1931, on the occasion of the 14th anniversary of the October revolution, threw into sharp relief the contrast between the achievements of the Soviet power and the sufferings in the capitalist world:

    "Proletarians! Workers of all countries! Today in the squares, at meetings, demonstrations and rallies you will sum up the results attained by two economic systems -- capitalism and socialism.

    "Remember:

    "In the capitalist countries --

    "Tens of millions of unemployed. The deepening world crisis. Thousands of bankruptcies, tens of thousands of closed enterprises. Growing poverty, hunger and plunder of the colonies. Preparations for fresh imperialist wars.

    "In the country which is building socialism --

    "Powerful growth of industry. No unemployment.

page 23

Creation of large-scale mechanized agricultural production on the basis of state and collective farms. Improving material conditions of the working people. The rallying of the working people around the Bolshevik party and its Leninist central committee." (Quoted by Borisova et. al., Outline History of the Soviet Working Class, Moscow 1973, p. 168.)

    And in fact the triumphant march of socialism in the USSR in this new period appeared as a beacon amidst the gloom of the capitalist world. It was a period when phrases that today may seem strained and trite -- "glorious, triumphant, brilliant, dazzling" and the like -- came naturally to the lips of those who lived or saw it. It was as Marx had foretold: the integument of capitalist relations burst asunder, and the tremendous potentials slumbering in the lap of social labor began to stir. Momentous productive forces that the capitalists had tried for decades, in vain, to whip into life now suddenly found liberation. It was as if the country exploded with productive energy. It did not march ahead; it leaped, it stormed, it flew ahead. It left its critics in the dust as so many carping dwarves. It threw terror into the world's bourgeoisies. It traced out for the first time in history the magnificent future that opens before the world's oppressed and exploited people once they have seized state power.

    Today these achievements are in danger of being slowly forgotten. The period of socialist economy in the USSR lasted only slightly more than two decades, from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s. The reversals that have occurred in the last 20 years have tended to obscure what existed during the socialist period, and to efface from consciousness not only its achievements, but its very character. What really is socialism? Was the USSR really ever socialist at all? If it was socialist, how could it have turned capitalist afterwards? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to have a somewhat closer look at Soviet socialism in theory and practice.

page 24

 
 
 
5  Socialist Economy

    In the early 1930s the Soviet Communist party proclaimed that the USSR had entered the period of socialist economic development.

    The country could now call itself the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" not in the future sense that Lenin had employed when he said, in 1921, that the name "implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the existing economic system is recognized as a socialist order." It was now socialist rather, in the actual sense.

    What were the theoretical and practical grounds for recognizing the economic order of the 1930s as socialist?

    Though Marx and Engels, as is well known, refrained from drawing up any blueprints for the new society, they drew certain basic deductions from their analysis of the old society which have served Marxists since their time as general guidelines.

    What began in the USSR in the 1930s was not full communism, classless and stateless society in which the antithesis of town and country, of mental and manual labor has been overcome. It was a long way from that. It was rather what Marx called the "lower stage of communist society," a long period of transition between the end of

page 25

capitalism and the beginning of full communism. It contained therefore both the seeds of the distant future and the traces of the recent capitalist past. By common Marxist usage since Marx, this first stage is termed socialism and the term communism is reserved for the classless society.

    According to Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme," which served Lenin as text for his chapter five of "State and Revolution," -- the key writings on this question -- the working class during the period of socialism can dispense neither with the state, as an organ of repression by one class against another, nor with certain economic and legal relations taken over from the old bourgeois society.

    As far as the Soviet state was concerned, this was and remained in the period, a dictatorship of the proletariat. After the battles of 1917, of the civil war period, of NEP and collectivization of agriculture, there was no longer any doubt about that. The many hundreds of thousands, perhaps a few million, of defeated, expropriated and embittered former kulaks, NEPmen: unreconciled old-regime officials, managers and privileged intellectuals with their families, offspring and hangers-on who remained in the country might have liked nothing better than the implementation of Trotsky's demand, voiced from exile abroad, for the "freedom" to form political parties rivaling the CPSU. But the party had no intention of allowing the state to "wither away" as a repressive force in this manner.

    "Democracy for the vast majority of people, and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people," this was the role Lenin, following Marx, laid out for the proletarian state in the period of socialism, and the party stood by that program, though not without making some political errors that proved in the long run very costly.

    As for economic relations, Marx and Lenin, in the abovementioned texts, had laid out plainly that the motto of socialist distribution could not yet be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This was for the communist future, when the progress of

page 26

the productive forces permits the abolition of scarcity, and when social consciousness, ingrained desire and sheer force of habit leads all workers voluntarily to participate according to their ability in everyday production, so that distribution of articles of consumption can be a matter of each one taking freely from the public stores according to need.

    The motto, rather, was ". . . to each according to the amount of labor performed." This meant not taking freely, but paying money in exchange for commodities; and being paid at work not according to need but according to productivity. It was straightforward commodity-money exchange, such as existed not only under capitalism but even earlier. It necessarily resulted in inequality of wages between workers in different kinds and grades of jobs, and between slow and fast workers on the same job. The gap between the lowest and the highest wages even increased during the 1930s, as an enormous influx of new recruits from the countryside more than tripled the ranks of the industrial proletariat between 1929 and 1940. Yet, while a growing inequality of wages was incompatible with the advance toward communism, wage inequality -- and the commodity-exchange relations in distribution of consumer goods on which it rested -- were not in themselves in violation of the theory of socialism. Marx and Lenin were amply clear on this point. Socialism, as Lenin pointed out, does away with the injustice that consists in the means of production having been seized by private owners, but it "is not capable of destroying at once the further injustice consisting in the distribution of the articles of consumption 'according to work performed' (and not according to need)." The socialist order of society, as distinct from the higher, communist order, "does not remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of 'bourgeois right' which continue to rule as long as the products are divided 'according to work performed.'" (State and Revolution, Ch. 5, Sec. 3.)

    As regards the distribution of consumer goods, the advance made by socialism over capitalism therefore does not lie in the abolition of wage inequalities. What it abolishes is rather the class of consumers standing far

page 27

above even the highest-paid workers, who draw stratospheric incomes not deriving from wages but from profits, i.e. not from their own labor but from the labor of others. Such a social layer did not exist under Soviet socialism; it has reappeared today, however, as will be shown.

    There was thus a wide sphere of commodity-exchange relations in the USSR, embracing not only the output of the state consumer-goods factories but also much of the food produced by the collective farms. All this was an objective breeding ground for what Marx and Lenin called "bourgeois right [narrow self-interest] which compels one to calculate with the coldheartedness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than somebody else, whether one is not getting less pay than somebody else. . . ." to quote State and Revolution. These were among the traces left over from the past, obstacles in the path toward communism, potential nuclei, among others, of a restoration of capitalism. But, for all that, Soviet economy during this period was not capitalist, it was socialist.

    Marx, in analyzing and comparing different historic forms of production so as to identify the specific characteristics that defined capitalism, noted that money and commodities existed in many other forms of society, to varying degrees, without capitalism arising. "The historic conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It [capitalism] can spring into life only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free laborer selling his labor power." (Capital, Vol. I, International ed., p. 170.)

    Or, as Marx writes later in the same work, "In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation can only take place under certain circumstances that center in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to

page 28

increase the sums of values they possess, by buying other people's labor power; on the other hand, free laborers, the sellers of their own labor power and therefore the sellers of labor. . . . With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the laborers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labor. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale." (Capital, p. 714.)

    Lenin likewise, in his study of the "Development of Capitalism in Russia," showed that only "the separation of the direct producer from the means of production, i.e., his expropriation, [signified] the transition from simple commodity production to capitalist production (and [constituted] the necessary condition for this transition). . . . The home market . . . spreads with the extension of commodity production from products to labor power, and only in proportion as the latter is transformed into a commodity does capitalism embrace the entire production of the country, developing mainly on account of means of production. . . ." (Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 68-69.)

    Thus in order to demonstrate that a given society was capitalist, in the scientific sense of the term, it would be necessary to show not merely that articles of consumption were commodities (which was true but proves little), but also and principally that commodity exchange, based on expropriation of the direct producers, embraced and governed the means of production and labor power. If the direct producers, the workers, are not divorced from the means of production, and if consequently neither these means nor labor power function as commodities, then no survivals of "bourgeois right," nor any amount of other inequities and injustices, can allow of such a society being properly termed capitalist.

    Inversely, if the direct producers have been separated from the means of production, and consequently both labor power and means of production are exchanged as commodities, then no amount of social welfare benefits, no nationalizations, no statutory curbs on excess profiteering,

page 29

no ameliorative measures whatever can conceal or modify the capitalist character of such a society. It is important to keep these elementary, but necessary and sufficient characteristics of capitalism firmly in mind in order to grasp the left and right, the forward and backward of Soviet development. There exists an enormous abundance of superficial definitions, half-truths and irrelevant notions in the literature about what is capitalism and what is socialism, all of which either innocently or with forethought serve to mystify or to distort the historical process and the present situation.

page 30

 
 
 
6  New Shoots

    The history of the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s was like a long march to reunite the workers with the means of production.

    It was a complex and protracted struggle to revoke the great historic divorce arising at the dawn of capitalism, between the peasant and the land, between the weaver and the loom. This schism, constantly reproduced and universalized by the capitalist order, creates and recreates on the one side the millions of empty-handed workers and on the other side the relative handful of owners of the means of production. On this separation are founded the twin markets in commodities that characterize the capitalist order and distinguish it from all others: the market in labor power between the capitalist and the worker, with the workers always the sellers and the capitalist in the buyer's role, and the market in means of production, with the capitalists buying and selling from each other. Once the basic schism is suspended, these markets lose their reason for being; labor power and means of production shed their commodity character and become transformed step by step into social property. Such, in broad outline, was the path of Soviet development toward socialism and in the socialist period.

page 31

    What were some of the specific steps that were taken by the Soviet power to reunite the working class with the means of production? Certainly, the nationalization of the means of production by the workers' state was the political basis for the whole process. But had the process ceased with the signing of nationalization papers, it would have been a paper "socialism." In fact the nationalization decrees in many cases only legalized factory seizures taken by the workers on their own initiative; and from then on, wave after wave of mass initiatives and movements spurred on the socialist transformation of Soviet society and gave it life.

    One of the earliest of the innovative mass movements pioneered by the Soviet working class was the practice of subbotniks, or "Communist Saturdays." The first was organized on their own initiative by the workers at the chief repair shop of the Moscow-Kazan railway in May 1919. Working voluntarily and without pay after the regular shift had ended, the workers toiled out of political inspiration alone, in order to save and to strengthen the Soviet power against its foes during the Civil War. Despite end-of-the-week fatigue, the workers' productivity during the subbotniks regularly was two or three times higher than during regular hours.

    "Communist subbotniks are extraordinarily valuable as the actual beginning of communism," Lenin wrote, identifying the subbotniks as one of the "new shoots" pointing ahead of the then existing stage of social development toward the ultimate goal of a classless society. Following the first local initiatives, the party organized nationwide subbotniks with excellent results throughout the Civil War period, and the practice was revived again and again. In the late 1920s, a new form of the subbotnik arose, the voskresnik -- voluntary overtime work to raise funds for the great industrialization drive projected by the first five-year plan. Like the subbotniks, these initiatives also were quickly popularized by the party and government press, and mobilized millions of workers.

    The "shock-work team" movement, initiated in 1926 by the same railway workshop that had begun the subbotniks, was in part a drive to bring the subbotnik spirit into

page 32

regular working hours. It laid emphasis at the same time on reorganizing the work, discarding the old patterns of division of labor inherited from capitalism and inventing new ones that promoted greater productivity. Led by the Komsomol (Communist youth league) activist Nikolai Nekrasov, the movement produced not only higher production but far greater enthusiasm by workers in participating in production meetings, where all aspects of the existing work methods were criticized and reshaped to bring out the workers' initiative. (Borisova et al., Outline History of the Soviet Working Class, pp. 121-124.)

    The Stakhanovite movement, beginning in 1935, was the successor of the shock-work teams. Like the latter, it emphasized reorganizing the division of labor, and developing teamwork to achieve higher output. But it contributed also a stress on quality output, and, above all, on improved work technique and technology. The redesign and innovation of machinery and machine processes by the workers themselves -- frequently, as Stalin pointed out in his "Economic Problems of Socialism" (1952, p. 28), over the objections of conservative engineers and technicians -- was the keynote of the movement. A bourgeois U.S. scholar, David Granick, in his study "The Red Executive" (1960), defended the movement against Western charges that it was mainly a form of speedup. "Primarily, it was aimed at motivating workers to use improved techniques on the job," he wrote, "and to innovate new ones. Its emphasis was thoroughly modern, being on rationalization rather than on sweating." (p. 213.) It too was popularized by the party, not without opposition from engineers and managers, and spread to large proportions of industry, mining and transport.

    Such mass initiative brought about extremely rapid increases in labor productivity. During the first five-year plan, beginning in 1929, labor productivity had risen 41 percent; during the second plan, when the Stakhanovite movement began, it leaped 82 percent; and it grew by another 33 percent on top of this higher base during the third plan period. (Borisova, p. 206.) By this time unemployment, the chief spur to greater worker effort (speedup) under capitalism, and also the chief result under

page 33

capitalism of technological "rationalization," had ceased to exist in the USSR.

    An ingenious and telling form of mass initiative that arose during the first plan period was called the "public tugboat." According to Borisova's account, "it commenced in the Donets Basin on the initiative of the workers of the Artem mine. At one of the production meetings the discussion turned to a neighboring mine whose workers systematically failed to cope with the plan. A veteran worker-rationalizer found a way of helping them. Having once served in the navy he recalled that sometimes it was necessary to tug ships and barges which could not sail under their own steam, and proposed to do the same to the workers of the neighboring mine. . . .

    "His proposal was approved and shortly afterwards the first 'tugboat team' arrived at the backward mine, only to receive a hostile welcome: 'You've no business to be here. We can get along without your help. So turn around and head for home.'

    "'We've come here not to chitchat, but to extend comradely assistance,' the Artem miners replied. 'And we shall stay here until we have fulfilled our assignment.'

    "Assisted by the party organization they grouped the foremost workers around themselves and got the socialist competition going. Within a short space of time the backward mine caught up with the plan. At the end of the five-year plan period public 'tugboat teams' were operating at many industrial enterprises." (p. 148.)

    A more thoroughgoing form of mass initiative was the participation of workers in criticizing the five-year plan and drawing up revised plans of their own. This was called "counterplanning." Borisova writes that "it was first advanced in the summer of 1930 by the shock-workers of the Karl Marx Works in Leningrad. This was done in response to the address of the shock-workers of the Znamya Truda Factory to the Leningrad shock-workers. The address was published in the Leningradskaya Pravda on April 9, 1930 under the heading, 'Znamya Truda Shock-Workers Are Drawing Up an Extended Counter Industrial and Financial Plan.' At the time the workers of the Elektrozavod Factory in Moscow were devising

page 34

counterplans for the enterprise as a whole and for each of its shops and lathes. Through their participation in the elaboration of counterplans thousands of workers became acquainted with the organization and management of production. Many of them acquired an inclination for planning and enrolled at higher educational institutions offering specialized training in this field." (p. 147.)

    Counterplanning, even more than the Stakhanovite movement, frequently upset those engineers and managers who had retained or acquired a basically bourgeois outlook. Numbers of them fled to the capitalist countries, where intelligence services and scholars would pump them for inside information on Soviet conditions. One such scholar, Joseph Berliner, gave the following transcript (in his 1957 study, "Factory and Manager in the USSR") of an account of counterplanning by a renegade plant manager:

    "All the workers, all are called to the production conference. And then begins the so-called 'counterplanning,' in a very crude form, which quickly ends in a fiasco. They read off the plan. Here, our chief administration has given us such and such information, such and such indices, of course we have to meet them, we all understand that this has to be done. Thus, the agitation proceeds further. This we have to do, we have to fulfill and overfulfill. 'I hope that some of the workers -- this is said by some engineer or a representative of the party organization -- will bring forth counterproposals.' Now everyone wants to manifest his 'activity.' Some 'butterfly,' some milkmaid gets up in her place and says 'I think we should promise Comrade Stalin to overfulfill by 100 percent.' She takes no account of materials, no account of supply. Then a second stands up and says 'We should all promise 100 percent and I personally promise 150 percent" In short, it piles up higher and higher, and the engineers and economists scratch their heads. Nevertheless, this is called 'counterplanning,' a manifestation of the new socialist morality and higher socialist enthusiasm. All this goes to the top and there, you understand, there is confusion, downright confusion, a complete muddle." (p. 275.)

page 35

    Dripping with chauvinism, contempt and sarcasm, such a factory manager as the one who furnished this account naturally saw the workers' enthusiasm as contradictory to "efficiency" and "rationality." What about materials, what about supply? It did not occur to such bourgeois minds that if the enthusiasm were to spread to the other factories producing materials and supplies for this factory, and so on in a chain reaction, then a forward leap in production might very well be achieved all around.

    This narrow bureaucratic spirit also had its partisans in the office of Gosplan, the central state planning bureau, as the bourgeois Sovietologist M. Lewin, in his 1968 "Russian Peasants and Soviet Power," recounts. "At the outset," Lewin wrote, "Gosplan in a body tried to stem the flood of unreasonable demands. . ." which reached them from the factories below and the Central Committee above -- demands for vastly increased production. But the party leadership had little tolerance for this footdragging. An "atmosphere" was created within Gosplan, Lewin recounts, "such that it would have been an act of 'civic courage' on the part of the planners to insist that there were sectors on which the brake should be applied. . . . The planners were aware of the risks involved in arguing too much, or raising objections on technical or other grounds. In the privacy of their own offices, they remarked that it was 'better to comply with the demand for rapid growth rates than to go to prison for having advocated more moderate ones.'" (p. 346.)

    The party leadership, in purging from Gosplan the most outspoken of these "brakemen," sided squarely with the so-called "butterflies" and "milkmaids" who were engaged in counterplanning at the point of production. When the shock-worker team at a Lugansk factory, drawing out the implications of counterplanning for the whole economy, raised up the call to "finish the five-year plan in four years," the Central Committee picked it up and broadcast it throughout the country.

    Thanks to such worker initiatives, generalized and popularized by the party leadership, the phenomenal development of the productive forces projected by the first five-year plan was achieved in four years and three

page 36

months. It was a triumph that still has bourgeois political economists and historians scratching their heads, and it was followed by further, almost equally spectacular advances.

    But there was really no mystery about it. Such advances in the development of the forces of social production were the fruit of the reunion between the working class and the means of production. The mass initiatives and movements both reflected and deepened this profoundly new relationship of production, whose political precondition was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    However, not all the elements in Soviet society were as cheered and gratified by the triumphs of socialism as was by all accounts, the great majority of working people and party cadre.

page 37

 
 
 
7  Bourgeois Right

    The Soviet Union of the mid-1930s was predominantly a scene of triumph and unity.

    Its elementary features were that state power was solidly in the hands of the working class; the major opposition blocs within the party had been exposed and defeated and the unity of the party was strong; the alliance between the working class and the peasantry had been cemented by the collectivization of agriculture; the foundations of socialist economy had been laid; and gigantic forward strides were being made on this basis.

    It was this triumphant spirit that animated the party's 17th Congress of 1934, inspired the adoption of the historic Soviet constitution of 1936 and provided the context for extensive measures of democratization in the Soviet government apparatus in 1937 and the strengthening of democracy and centralism in the party at the 18th Congress in 1939.

    There was nothing phony or hollow at the basis of the predominant spirit of the time. The victories in the area of political. cconomic, social and cultural construction achieved by the Soviet power were as real and tangible as the victories being achieved in our own day by the national liberation struggles of the peoples of Indochina. There was

page 38

and is no legitimate ground for a cynical or pessimistic attitude regarding them.

    And yet, some 20 years after the landmark adoption of the 1936 Soviet constitution, the elementary features of Soviet society had undergone a complete change of character. State power came into the hands of a bourgeois class; the party changed nature; the worker-peasant alliance came under attack; the foundations of the socialist economy were put to the sledgehammer and wrecking ball; and the bottom began falling out from under the forward strides in the development of social production.

    To understand that the USSR was once socialist is not difficult in itself. Nor is it so difficult to see, as will be shown, that it is today capitalist. Not so easy, however, is to grasp these two opposite and contradictory states in their interconnectedness and as a process, to see the seeds of the later in the earlier and to mark the point where an accumulation of gradual, insignificant quantitative changes produced an abrupt turnabout in the whole character of the society.

    In this connection, a highly important contribution has recently appeared in the Chinese theoretical journal Red Flag. Although it addresses itself mainly to current questions in the Communist party of China, it has direct and clear reference also to the ongoing discussions among Marxist-Leninists everywhere about the transformations that took place in the Soviet Union. Entitled "On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique," by Yao Wen-yuan, the article is a critique of shallow, idealist or vulgar interpretations of the Soviet capitalist restoration and deserves lengthy quotation in the context of the present study.

    "It is rather clear," writes Yao, a veteran Communist and a leader in the cultural revolution, "that the Lin Piao and antiparty clique represented the interests of the overthrown landlord and bourgeois classes and the desire of the overthrown reactionaries to topple the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

    "The Lin Piao antiparty clique opposed the great proletarian cultural revolution and had inveterate hatred

page 39

for the socialist system under the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country, slandering it as 'feudal autocracy'. . . ."

    Khrushchev, it will be recalled, upon taking command of the Soviet Communist party in 1956 engaged in similar name-calling against the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR under Stalin.

    Yao then goes on to recall the intraparty machinations and intrigues of the Lin Piao faction which culminated in "Project 571," an attempt at a military coup, which failed and cost its author his life during his hasty flight to escape to the USSR in 1971. "All this reflects the life-and-death struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the two major antagonistic classes, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a struggle that will go on for a long period.

    "So long as the overthrown reactionary classes still exist, the possibility remains for the emergence within the party (and in society as well) of representatives of the bourgeoisie who will try to turn their hope for restoration into attempts at restoration. Therefore we must raise our vigilance, guard against and smash every plot by reactionaries at home and abroad and not permit our vigilance to slacken."

    Thus far Yao's article moves on familiar ground. It begins to dig deeper, however, with the following:

    "But seeing this much," -- that is, seeing that the remnants of the old bourgeoisie present a danger -- "is still not grasping the whole issue.

    "The Lin Piao antiparty clique represented the hope not only of the overthrown landlords and bourgeoisie for restoration but [also] of the newly engendered bourgeois elements in socialist society for usurping power. They themselves had some characteristics of the newly engendered bourgeois elements and a number of them were in fact such elements. And certain of their slogans met and reflected the needs in developing capitalism of the bourgeois elements and those who want to take the capitalist road. It is precisely this aspect of the question that merits further analysis.

    "Chairman Mao points out: "Lenin said, 'small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie

page 40

continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale.' This also occurs among a section of the workers and a section of the party members. Both within the ranks of the proletariat and among the personnel of state organs there are people who follow the bourgeois style of life."

    "The existence of bourgeois influence and the influence of international imperialism and revisionism are the political and ideological source of new bourgeois elements, while the existence of bourgeois right provides the vital economic basis for their emergence."

    The term "bourgeois right" is taken from Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program," and refers to relationships that are free and equal in form, but unfree and unequal in substance. Thus "from each according to his ability, to each according to the amount of labor performed" is a relationship of apparent equality but in reality generates inequality because different individuals perform different amounts of labor. Similarly, the motto "last hired, first fired," which underlies the capitalist trade union seniority system, promotes a formal fairness and equality of opportunity; but also in substance reinforces and reproduces discrimination and inequality in hiring.

    Yao then quotes both Lenin and Mao Tsetung regarding the survival of bourgeois relations in portions of the economic basis of socialist society. (See the fifth article in this series.) It is the accent on the economic basis that is crucial here; for it would be idealist to suppose that a new bourgeoisie can be generated within socialist society solely on the basis of old ideas surviving in people's minds. People's consciousness, Marx held, is a reflection of their social being. This remains true in socialist society as well. If bourgeois ideas not only survive but reproduce and take new forms in socialist society, this is because there is a basis for them in social being. The program advanced by the Lin Piao clique, Yao writes, "neither dropped from the skies nor was it innate in the minds of those who claimed to be 'supergeniuses'; it was a reflection of social being."

    "The analyses made both by Lenin and Chairman Mao tell us that bourgeois right which is bound to exist as

page 41

regards distribution and exchange under the socialist system should be restricted under the dictatorship of the proletariat so that in the long course of the socialist revolution the three major differences between workers and peasants, between town and country and between manual and mental labor will gradually be narrowed and the discrepancies between [wage] grades will be narrowed and the material and ideological conditions for closing such gaps will gradually be created."

    If the opposite is done. Yao says, "the inevitable result will be polarization, i.e., a small number of people will in the course of distribution acquire increasing amounts of commodities and money through certain legal channels and numerous illegal ones; capitalist ideas of amassing fortunes and craving for personal fame and gain, stimulated by such 'material incentives,' will spread unchecked; public property will be turned into private property and speculation, graft and corruption, theft and bribery will rise; the capitalist principle of the exchange of commodities will make its way into political life and even into party life, undermine the socialist planned economy and give rise to such acts of capitalist exploitation as the conversion of commodities and money into capital and labor power into a commodity; there will be a change in the nature of the system of ownership in certain department and units which follow the revisionist line; and instances of the oppression and exploitation of the laboring people will once again occur.

    "As a result, a small number of new bourgeois elements and upstarts who have totally betrayed the proletariat and the laboring people will emerge among party members, workers, well-to-do peasants and personnel in state organs.

    "Our worker comrades have put it well: 'if bourgeois right is not restricted, it will hold back the development of socialism and aid the growth of capitalism.'

    "When the economic strength of the bourgeoisie grows to a certain extent. its agents will demand political rule, the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the socialist system and a complete change of socialist ownership, and openly restore and develop the capitalist

page 42

system . . . . "

    Yao also takes note of the particularities entailed in a restoration attempt by newly engendered bourgeois elements, as distinct from remnants of the old bourgeoisie:

    "The new bourgeois elements who arise as a result of erosion by bourgeois ideas and the existence of bourgeois right generally share the political features of double-dealers and upstarts. In order to carry out capitalist activities under the dictatorship of the proletariat, they always put up a certain socialist signboard; since their restorationist activities aim not at snatching back any means of production of which they have been dispossessed but at seizing the means of production they have never possessed, they are especially greedy, anxious to swallow at one gulp the wealth belonging to the whole people or to the collective and place it under their private ownership."

    In order to avoid such a restoration, Yao concludes, it is necessary in practice to "dig away the soil breeding the bourgeoisie and capitalism," and, in consciousness, "to be able in good time to see through the new bourgeoisie . . . as it appears or is taking shape."

    There in a nutshell Yao has put the cardinal mistake made by the Soviet Communist party during the period when Stalin was its leader. They did not dig away fast enough the political-economic-social "soil" that was engendering a new bourgeoisie and did not perceive the danger it posed until the initiative had already slipped out of their hands. A closer look at these problems is in order.

page 43

 
 
 
8  Old Soil

    The gradual emergence and maturing of a potential new bourgeoisie within the fold of Soviet socialist society was a silent and largely secret process that can be sketched today only in the barest outlines.

    There is some sketchy data available to indicate the common economic situation, the material foundation, by which the bourgeoisie that later took power was engendered. But the process by which it gradually organized itself as a class, shaped its own associations and acquired collective self-consciousness prior to its bid for power are almost entirely unknown.

    And necessarily so. For the potential bourgeoisie had to emerge under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Any open association for or intentional advocacy of capitalist aims was impossible. A highly efficient secret police made even conspiracy -- historically a favorite mode of bourgeois organization -- dangerous in the extreme. It is unlikely that future historians will unearth any reliable documentary record of what passed through the minds of the nascent Soviet bourgeoisie while it was a suppressed class. The content of its secret ideas and of its whispered conversations can only be deduced ex post facto: from the content, for example, of Khrushchev's 1956

page 44

"secret" speech and above all from the character of the measures taken after the accession to power.

    What the record does show fairly clearly is that the "remnants" of the old society -- the pre-1917 bourgeoisie and the NEPmen and kulaks pushed out in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- played no leading role in the transformations that took place after the death of Stalin in 1953. Biologically many of these individuals, insofar as they remained in the country, were still young and vigorous enough in the mid-1950s to have played a political role. But conditions under the dictatorship of the proletariat were heavily stacked against this possibility. A bourgeois origin was a handicap in gaining party membership and a virtually absolute disqualifier for party leadership.

    The U.S. financial oligarch and diplomat W. Averell Harriman makes this point ironically in a book recounting his journey to the USSR in 1959 ("Peace With Russia?" New York, 1959, p.17), where he met with the party and government leadership. Harriman quotes Khrushchev:

    "'I was a humble worker myself,' he said. 'I started life as a shepherd, was promoted to a cowherd and eventually got a job in the mines, where I stayed till the Revolution.'

    "As though not to be outdone," Harriman continues the anecdote, "Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, who with Deputy Premier Frol Kozlov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had joined the discussion, broke in: 'And I was the son of a shoemaker.' Kozlov said, 'And I was a homeless waif.' Even Gromyko, who had sat in glum silence throughout the conversation, spoke up: 'And I was the son of a pauper.' I told them they all sounded like American politicians on the stump boasting of the log-cabin origins. . . ."

    The seizure of power after Stalin, in short, was not the restoration of the old expropriated bourgeoisie. It was the rise of a new bourgeoisie engendered within socialism under the proletarian dictatorship. But where and how was this bourgeoisie engendered?

    The classically recognized breeding ground of capitalists under socialism is in agriculture, particularly in the collective farms. Though the Soviet collective farms were no longer characterized by that small-scale production

page 45

which Lenin had noted "engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale," there was still enough of this ground to constitute a danger.

    It was not only the private household plots. More problematic was the form of collective-farm property itself. It was socialist property, in the sense that the proletarian state owned the entire land as well as the major agricultural machinery (tractors, combines and the like) used by the collective farmers. But apart from these primary and some secondary restrictions (such as price controls), each collective farm operated relative to the others and relative to the state much as a private profit-making enterprise. However many thousands of persons might be combined in a single collective farm, each such farm still constituted production of a relatively petty and anarchic kind compared to the scale and the planful integration of production in the state sector, particularly industry.

    In Stalin's last published writing, "Economic Problems of Socialism" (1952), there are clear warnings regarding the collective farms and about the commodity-exchange relations involved in this form. "It would be unpardonable blindness not to see at the same time," Stalin writes, "that these factors are already beginning to hamper the powerful development of our productive forces, since they create obstacles to the full extension of government planning to the whole of the national economy, especially agriculture. There is no doubt that these factors will hamper the continued growth of the productive forces of our country more and more as time goes on. The task, therefore, is to eliminate these contradictions by gradually converting collective-farm property into public property, and by introducing -- also gradually -- products-exchange in place of commodity circulation." (Peking, Foreign Languages Press ed., p. 70).

    We know from subsequent events that the bourgeois elements within the USSR and its communist party did not agree with this estimate of Stalin's. Nor did they agree with his strict injunction (in the same work) against the idea of selling off the machines and tractors to the

page 46

collective farms, a proposal that was bound to lead, Stalin wrote, "to the regeneration of capitalism." (p. 96) (A few years afterward Khrushchev implemented precisely this proposal among others which Stalin had criticized in this work.) It is significant, however, that neither Khrushchev nor any other high party official came out at the time in favor of the proposal, which had been put forward in letters to Stalin by two obscure individuals named Sanina and Venzher. A public discussion of Stalin's book was organized and the entire party was directed to participate but if Khrushchev already in 1952 agreed with Sanina and Venzher and their like, he kept it secret. In public he and his allies agreed with Stalin's ideas enthusiastically -- and a short time later did the opposite. Such methods were characteristic of the ascendant Soviet bourgeoisie.

    Despite the tremendous importance of developments in agriculture during and after the Soviet socialist period however, the leading forces behind the events of the mid-1950s came not only from this sector, the most obvious and well-recognized seedbed of capitalism. Agriculture had been Khrushchev's main speciality. But others of the leading neobourgeois forces that took power after Stalin's death had party careers that involved them rather more heavily in the affairs of engineering and industry.

    The position of Soviet engineering and management personnel, particularly that of enterprise directors, was a sharply contradictory one during the socialist period. They had great responsibilities, greater even than those of managers in capitalist society, but vitally fewer powers than their capitalist counterparts.

    The Soviet enterprise director (or plant director) under socialism was held personally responsible and accountable for the organization of the production process in its human, technical and bookkeeping dimensions. Responsibility was concentrated in the individual, in accordance with the principle of "one-man management" advocated in the early 1920s by Lenin along with the other measures that made up the first stage of NEP. It was a principle designed to overcome the confusion, evasion of responsibility and production breakdowns that were all too

page 47

frequent in the early period of spontaneous factory seizures and primitive workers' "self-management" and it was preserved and even to a certain extent reinforced in the period of planned economy. The director's responsibility under the system was in fact even heavier than that of a plant manager under capitalism, because the Soviet director was bound both technically and legally by the economic plan which prescribed in considerable detail what was to be produced and when. As Stalin emphasized in a speech at the 15th Party Congress in 1927, "Our plans are not forecast plans, not guesswork plans, but directive plans, which are binding upon our leading bodies. . . ." (Works, Vol. 10 p. 335). This meant that a director who failed to fulfill the plan was violating the law, could be brought before a court and if found guilty of conscious misdoing, sentenced to death as a saboteur.

    At the same time as they were charged with heavy and strict responsibilities, the Soviet managers as a rule had considerably less power than their capitalist counterparts over the workers. They did have strong authority, particularly during the great influx of peasants in the industrialization drive of the early 1930s, to assign workers to different roles in the internal division of labor, to punish lateness and absenteeism with fines and otherwise to "run the shop" -- though even this authority could be challenged successfully. But they did not have the most vital of the powers possessed by their capitalist counterparts, namely the power to fire a worker at will. They could not threaten a worker with unemployment and hunger.

    This was a concrete meaning of the phrase that labor power in the USSR was no longer a commodity bought and sold like any other: its price (wages) was no longer depressed by the existence of a relative surplus army of unemployed and the inalienable right of commodity buyers to refuse to buy -- the right to not hire and to lay off -- was no longer recognized. Except during wartime, workers were free to quit; but managers could not fire them except by proving some criminal offense against them. Thus, lacking the whip hand, the managers were weak.

page 48

    Moreover, the workers had more than one channel by which to get at directors who abused such authority as they had. As the British bourgeois scholar Mary McAuley writes (in "Labour Disputes in the Soviet Union," Oxford 1969), there were special courts to hear industrial disputes to which only workers had access; managerial personnel could appear there only as defendants and were barred from initiating cases (pp. 54-55). Even before matters came to court, there were ways that the workers on the shop floor could let a troublesome director know who was boss. One of these avenues, the production meeting, is described by the bourgeois scholar David Granick in his book, "The Red Executive":

    "Management is operating under severe ideological and practical handicaps in its efforts to keep down worker criticism. One factory director . . . implied that production meetings were a real ordeal for him. But at a question as to whether workers dared to criticize openly, he said, 'Any director who suppressed criticism would be severely punished. He would not only be removed, he would be tried.'" (New York, 1960, p. 230)

    The combination of enormous responsibility but relatively little power in the hands of the enterprise directors was not in the long run a healthy one. The way forward would have been progressively to transfer more and more of the directors' responsibilities to the workers themselves, to match their power. But as the party's policy on the question remained basically static, the directors seized the initiative themselves. On the one hand they arrogated to themselves more of the powers held by the workers, and at the same time chipped away at the responsibilities imposed on them by the plan. Both these tendencies on the directors' part, stemming from an identical capitalist impulse, were kept in check and suppressed during Stalin's lifetime. But their source was not eradicated. After his death, once the new leadership had consolidated its grip on the party, the directors' suppressed complaints at their powerlessness and at the onerous burden of the plan were given free play in the press and the demands implicit in these complaints were given full satisfaction.

page 49

 
 
 
9  In the Balance

    From the end of World War 2 to the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Communist party and government appeared outwardly strong and unshakable as never before. Behind the solid exterior, however, there were processes in motion that allowed this bastion of socialism -- the embodiment at the time of everything Marxism-Leninism stood for -- to be taken over rather painlessly, as historical changes go, by a group of leaders with an anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist counterrevolutionary program.

    The task is to understand how such a turnabout was possible. It is a very difficult task. There are few models for the mind to lean on. Most of the key documents that would shed light on particular events are not available. Much was done in secrecy. Nevertheless, by looking at developments in broad outline, it is possible to identify four main causes that brought about this historic reversal.

    The first of these has already been touched on earlier, namely the reflection, up in the highest circles of the party and the government, of the vestiges of bourgeois relations of production that existed within socialist society at the base. In the structure of the collective farms, as was

page 50

pointed out, there remained a certain objective basis for the narrow, self-centered, profiteering and anarchic behavior that is a mark of capitalism. At the point of production in industry, likewise, an excessive concentration of responsibilities in the hands of individual directors and engineers engendered among the latter some feelings of superiority and a desire to gather power into their hands as well. In both these main branches of social production, the leading people at the base necessarily operated with one toe, or even one foot, on capitalist or semi-capitalist ground. The aspiration of moving further in that direction, rather than toward communism, could not but arise in their heads in one or another form. While in the minds of most this notion -- at least in its most obvious dress -- was undoubtedly quickly repressed, it was to be expected that such ideas in disguise would exert a significant influence over many, and become the altogether dominant impulse in the heads of a few.

    All this is inevitable in any socialist society -- society as it emerges out of capitalism, carrying with it not only many of the old ideas but also some of the old soil. Even the working class is bound to be touched in its consciousness by the survivals under socialism of what Marx called "bourgeois right"; for the inequalities of the wage scale, supplemented too often in the USSR by individual bonuses and premiums, must have worked counter to the brilliant spirit of collective enthusiasm and the new attitude toward labor which the Soviet working class displayed par excellence.

    It is equally inevitable that such remnants of capitalist relationships of production at the base of socialist society will percolate up into the higher levels of party and government, as well as other institutions. It is part of the work of the higher levels to keep in the closest possible touch with conditions below. In the countless meetings, visits and conferences where Soviet cadre of different levels daily rubbed elbows, the backward aspects of reality and thought at the base were bound to be transmitted upward along with the progressive ones. The collective farm manager whose underlying motives were not much different from those of a kulak, the factory director who

page 51

thirsted to hold the whip hand over the workers, the engineer who developed delusions of genius, the lower-level party cadre who wanted privileges -- all were bound to find or to shape, sooner or later, a sympathetic ear on the higher levels, a leader who knew both how to conceal and to advance their interests. Con-men, careerists and, ultimately wreckers such as Khrushchev, turned out to be the natural products of the shady side of socialist society, just as the great builders of socialism, leaders of the working class and teachers of Marxism-Leninism such as Stalin were the natural products of the bright socialist mainstream.

    The presence of two-faced, careerist and opportunist individuals in high party and government circles in the USSR was an historically inevitable and constantly recurring condition. So long as society remains in the socialist stage of development such persons will be climbing or trying to climb up the ladder, just as they do in communist parties in capitalist society. The exposure and ouster of one or two of them does not discourage the others, it only teaches them to be more clever. This was the first reason why a bourgeois takeover was possible in the USSR.

    In addition to this more or less constant condition, there was in the Soviet Union during this particular period an historically temporary condition, compounded both of objective and subjective elements, which made the work of the rotten apples in the party barrel easier and tilted the scales of chance in their favor.

    The Soviet party and government by the late 1940s and early 1950s had achieved an unprecedentedly strong and triumphant position externally and internally. Having stood off, driven back and smashed the German fascist invasion during the war, the USSR found itself by 1950 no longer an isolated socialist state but the center of a camp of socialist countries embracing the bulk of the Eurasian land mass with about a third of the world's population.

    Internally, there was a rapid reconversion and reconstruction of the war-ravaged economy, a technological modernization and expansion that led to significant production advances over the prewar standard

page 52

relatively short time, all without the spasms of unemployment that marked the postwar reconversion in the capitalist countries. Though there was still much to be done, the Soviet party and government had cause to celebrate. Their achievements were spectacular.

    This historical conjuncture, however, inevitably gave rise to a certain mood of self-satisfaction among many of the leading cadre who had been involved in the victories. There was a feeling among entirely honest and dedicated cadre that they could now retire on their laurels while remaining at their posts. A penetrating description of this development during the last years under Stalin was published in 1968 by the Albanian party newspaper Zeri i Popullit:

    "The members of the Bolshevik party, who were led to legendary battles by Lenin and Stalin, were cadres of a class origin and with revolutionary vigor, tempered in revolution, in struggles, in the building of socialism, in battles against Trotskyism, against deviators and other traitors. They were ideologically and politically tempered and had a firm and legitimate confidence in their glorious Bolshevik party, in Lenin and Stalin, in the correct line and norms that they had mapped out.

    "To them the party was everything, it was their heart, brain and eyes, that is why they defended it, were educated by it and by their great leader. But while trying to carry out the party's and Stalin's correct line and norms the Soviet cadres, at first not all of them and not in a clear-cut way but gradually, became susceptible to a feeling of stability which is alien, in the revolutionary sense, to development. . . . Successes at work nourished the feeling of self-complacency and, parallel with these successes, the Soviet cadres began to lose their proletarian simplicity, raised unjust claims, which they considered 'politically legitimate' because these people had worked and fought. With their rise to responsibility there was taking shape in them the feeling of ease and complacency and they were ever more infected by bureaucratism, intellectualism and technocratism. . . . Many cadres no longer listened, as they had done previously, to the voice of the masses. Among them the thought began to prevail

page 53

that they knew everything themselves, that they were specialists in everything, that they stood above the masses, above the working class politically and ideologically and were more farsighted than the latter. The authority and prestige which the Bolshevik party and Stalin enjoyed among the masses of the Soviet people and in the working class were confounded by these cadres with their personal authority and prestige. All these antiproletarian features deformed the revolutionary concepts among these cadres. As this also infected the party line and its implementation, the revolutionary norms of the party remained formal, the life of the party itself and its organization as well as the whole Soviet state administration were in the process of becoming sclerotic. . . ." (The Party of Labor of Albania in Battle with Modern Revisionism, Tirana 1972, pp. 419-421.)

    In short, the problems within the Soviet party were larger than the presence of a few opportunists. There was a dulling of the fine edge of revolutionary vigilance which would have uncovered the opportunists and caused their downfall. Sincere and dedicated proletarian cadre failed to unmask the bourgeois elements among them, and even united with them to a certain extent, because they themselves had become infected with bourgeois moods.

    These two conditions alone, however, one more or less constant and the other due to temporary historical events, could not by themselves have ensured a revisionist takeover had it not been for a serious political and theoretical error committed by the party leadership, headed by Stalin, nearly two decades before and never corrected. This was the thesis, advanced publicly by Stalin as early as 1936, that the USSR had become "a classless, socialist society." (History of the CPSU, Short Course, New York 1939, p. 329.) Stalin consistently maintained that the USSR ". . . is free of class conflicts. . . ." (Report to the 18th Party Congress, 1939) and that therefore there was no danger, indeed no possibility, of a regeneration of bourgeois forces and of a capitalist restoration from within Soviet society. The danger of restoration came exclusively from the outside via foreign invasion (Letter to Ivanov, New York, 1938). Even in his last published writing, the

page 54

Economic Problems of Socialism (1952), Stalin corrects himself only to the extent of saying that ". . .even under socialism there will be backward, inert forces that do not recognize the necessity for changing the relations of productions," but still asserts that there can be no real danger because "socialist society . . . does not include the obsolescent classes that might organize resistance. " (Peking 1972, p. 52)

    Because of this basic gap in Stalin's analysis the long series of educational campaigns, cultural purification measures and party-wide theoretical discussions undertaken at his direction after the war could not sufficiently arouse and mobilize the party and the people and shake up the complacent. The campaigns remained to a great extent formal, lifeless exercises because their point was not aimed at the heart of the question. Stalin's theoretical development on this vital point lagged behind the demands of the practical movement and did not give it the revolutionary leadership that was urgently required. This was the third of the major reasons why revisionism could triumph.

    All of this, however, would probably still not have been sufficient to ensure a revisionist victory if there had been among Stalin's closest associates in the party a leader of a stature and ability comparable to Stalin's own. For as long as Stalin himself was alive, the newly engendered bourgeois forces in Soviet society and their incognito representatives in the party and the government dared not take a decisive step. They made progress by inches if at all. They might insinuate their program in minor ways here and there, claim and receive one or another petty privilege that meant nothing and float now and then a tiny, very cautious trial balloon. But there were severe limits. For while Stalin could not or would not recognize the aspiring new bourgeoisie as a class in his theory, this did not prevent him from taking the most vigorous measures against the bourgeois program and its architects in practice.

    Just one example among many cases: In early 1949 the powerful chairman of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), N.A. Voznesensky, undertook apparently on his

page 55

own hook a modest but significant reorganization of the planning apparatus and an upward revision of prices in the state sector. It was a step along the lines of what Khrushchev did later and had the effect of giving greater scope to commodity-money exchange relations and to the operation of the law of value. Voznesensky did not get far. He was promptly arrested, tried as a saboteur and shot. (See Felker, Soviet Economic Controversies, Cambridge 1966, Kaser, Comecon, 2nd ed. Oxford 1967) And he was not the only one to try similar moves and meet a similar end.

    Of course in the long run this method of restraining the aspirations of the bourgeoisie could not succeed. It was a harmful method when used on a large scale and it was used too often by Stalin and his subordinates when milder measures would have been more productive. But for as long as he was alive, one thing was certain: the newly engendered bourgeoisie and the capitalist-roaders knew beyond a doubt that they were living under the dictatorship of the proletariat. They might have had a certain status and some minor material benefits, they might sun themselves on festival occasions in the party's praise for work well done -- but let them take one step out of line and they were done for. They did not have and could not achieve the most important thing, political power.

page 56

 
 
 
10  After Stalin

    In late October 1952, a few months before he died, Stalin proposed to more than double the number of members of the highest party bodies, from which a successor to his leadership was certain to be drawn.

    His plan was approved by the central committee, and Stalin's list of nominees to the expanded party presidium and to the new secretariat was accepted in full. It was a move that made Khrushchev nervous, if his purported memoirs are to be believed on this point. He had not been consulted. Was Stalin preparing to oust him? A number of Western Kremlinologists thought so. But no one could be sure.

    Whatever Stalin's intent, he did not live to carry it out. At his death there were some three dozen persons, members of the presidium and the secretariat, who technically could qualify as his successor. The majority of them were probably good Marxist-Leninists. But there were clearly none -- not even the best of them, Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov -- with the towering abilities, the driving energy and a prestige even remotely approaching Stalin's.

    Amidst the growth of complacency and opportunism within the party, amidst the unceasing quiet erosion of the

page 57

socialist structures and principles by the newly engendered bourgeoisie, there was only one man then and there, in the leadership, who had the power to save the situation. And that man, Stalin himself, died on March 5, 1953.

    His death was mourned by millions of working people from one end of the earth to another and by none more deeply than by the workers of the USSR. He had led the Soviet Communist party and the country for three decades filled with historic achievements. He had waged titanic battles against the "leftist" and rightist factions that had tried to derail the Soviet power from the path of socialist construction. The struggles he led for collectivization and industrialization laid the material basis for the Soviet people's great victory over fascism in World War 2. Whatever his errors and limits, he had been a worthy successor to Lenin. He defended Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. With him as its leader, the Bolshevik party led the Soviet working class and peasantry from chaos, backwardness and isolation to the construction of a modern socialist state standing at the center of a growing international socialist camp. Despite the mountain of slanders heaped upon his memory by the sinister clown who took over after Stalin, the words of Molotov at Stalin's funeral in Red Square March 9 still express the judgment of Marxist-Leninists:

    "Stalin's immortal name will live forever in our hearts, in the heart of the Soviet people and of all progressive mankind. The glory of his great deeds for the welfare and happiness of our people and the working people of the whole world will live through the ages."

    Even before the late leader's body had been placed in its coffin, however, a struggle broke out among his potential successors that was to transform the USSR over the course of the next generation as profoundly as it had changed between 1917 and 1937 -- but in the politically opposite direction: from the proletarian dictatorship to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, from socialism to state-monopoly capitalism, from proletarian internationalism to social imperialism. Although in essence a struggle between two different classes, it took the form at the

page 58

outset of a rivalry for power between different leaders. It quickly grew into a fight within and between the leaderships of the country's major institutions -- party, government and army -- and spread finally through nearly the whole of the superstructure of Soviet society.

    Only the briefest overview can be given here of the extraordinarily complex and twisted path of the power struggle that opened with Stalin's death and concluded with the defeat of the "antiparty group" and the consolidation of Khrushchev's power in June 1957.

    Politically, the broad course of events was this: Khrushchev rose in power and influence by posing as the heir and defender of Stalin and of Marxist-Leninist ideology for over two years. He declined very sharply in power when he suddenly turned against Stalin openly at the 20th Congress in 1956. He was rescued from certain overthrow in 1957 only by the intervention of the general staff of the army and air force.

    The key events in the struggle were these: the Beria putsch of March 6, 1953; the struggle between Khrushchev and Malenkov during 1953-1955, the 20th Congress in 1956 and the bloodless Khrushchev-Zhukov coup of June 1957.

    The most obscure of these turning points is what happened the night Stalin died. By dawn of March 6 the commanders of the army units guarding Moscow were under arrest and their troops confined to barracks by paramilitary state security police units under the command of L. P. Beria. Beria's men had full control of the city and the Kremlin. That night Stalin's private secretary, a Gen. Poskrebyshev -- the only one who may have known Stalin's intentions regarding the succession -- mysteriously disappeared and was never heard from again. By the end of the day, five of the 10 members of the party secretariat and 22 of the 36 members and candidates of the presidium elected by the central committee in October 1952 had been dismissed from their posts. Of the 52 government ministries, 27 were abolished. In the new list of leaders, Beria's position had skyrocketed to the rank of first deputy prime minister, right behind G. M. Malenkov. Malenkov was also named first secretary of the party, its top post;

page 59

Khrushchev was right behind him. Marshal G. K. Zhukov emerged from obscurity to become codeputy minister of defense.

    There are no reliable accounts or explanations of how these drastic decisions