Picture: "Central executive of the all Russian
Proletariat" in 1926 meets in the former Coronation room of the Moscow
Kremlin
Home
| News | Donate
| Join
Part Four: The
Bureaucratic Counter-Revolution
15. Tragedy
in China
Zinoviev and Kamenev,
with their supporters, joined forces with Trotsky and the
Opposition in 1926 in a struggle to pull the party back from
Stalin's increasingly anti-Marxist course.
Stalin, for his part, joined forces with the
extreme right, pro-kulak wing of the party, headed by Bukharin, for
the purpose of defeating the United Left Opposition.
This struggle was cut across by new upheavals internationally.
In Britain, the general strike of May 1926 provoked a profound
crisis. The small Communist Party was presented with the opportunity
of leading hundreds of thousands of workers in opposition to the
reformist TUC leadership, and prepare the transfer of power to the
working class.
But the Stalinist leadership in Russia were tied in an
opportunistic alliance with the "lefts" on the TUC General Council,
and permitted no struggle against them. The TUC right wing betrayed
the strike at the first opportunity. Stalin's "left" allies offered no
resistance.
After ten days, with the strike still spreading, the General
Council unanimously called it off and surrendered to the bosses. This
condemned the British working class to a historic defeat.
"The cause of the proletarian revolution in the West", wrote
Serge, "seemed lost for many years to come. And now an immense light
was rising in the East; the Chinese masses... were advancing from
victory to victory." (From Lenin to Stalin, page 44)
The Chinese working class was moving independently of the
nationalist movement, the Kuomintang, led by the reactionary Chiang
Kai-shek. The Chinese Communist Party was becoming a mass force.
Shanghai and Hankow were in the hands of the workers. A struggle for
power was inevitable.
Again, Stalinist opportunism stood in the way of victory. Stalin
and the Comintern leadership had dangerous illusions in Chiang
Kai-shek, and declared the Kuomintang to be "a revolutionary bloc of
the workers, peasants, intellectuals, and urban democracy [i.e. the
capitalist class] on the basis of a community of class interests... in
the struggle against the imperialists and the whole militarist-feudal
order". (Resolution of ECCI, March 1926)
In practice this meant that the Communist Party had to submit to
Chiang's authority. What was this except the old Menshevik idea of
common struggle by the working class and the "democratic" capitalists"
for democracy on a capitalist basis?
The Left Opposition fought this policy every inch of the way. They
explained that Chiang was defending the capitalists and landlords;
that a soviet (workers') government was needed to give land to the
peasantry and establish democracy.
"We know that Chiang Kai-shek is preparing the open betrayal of
the unions and his communist allies", wrote Serge, "We are not
permitted to speak. And Stalin takes the floor in Moscow before
thousands of workers and solemnly assures them that we have nothing
to fear from Chiang Kai-shek." (From Lenin to Stalin, page
45)
Chiang used the opportunity that Stalin gave him to prepare a
savage massacre of Communists and workers in April 1927. The Comintern
(after flirting with a "left" rival of Chiang, and suffering further
defeats) swung over to an opposite, ultra-left course, and tried to
engineer an insurrection in Canton. It was drowned in blood.
These events spelled the end of the Chinese Communist Party as a
revolutionary workers' organization.
The Chinese revolution set enormous shock waves in motion
internationally.
"A wave of excitement swept over the [Soviet] party", Trotsky
wrote. "The opposition raised its head... Many younger comrades
thought the patent bankruptcy of Stalin's policy was bound to bring
the triumph of the opposition nearer...
I was obliged to pour many a
bucket of cold water over the hot heads of my young friends... The
fact that our forecast had proved correct might attract one
thousand, five thousand or even ten thousand new supporters to us.
But for the millions the significant thing was not our forecast, but
the fact of the crushing of the Chinese proletariat. After the
defeat of the German revolution in 1923, after the break-down of the
English general strike in 1926, the new disaster in China would only
intensify the disappointment of the masses in the international
revolution.
And it was this same disappointment that served as the
chief psychological source for Stalin's policy of national-reformism
[i.e. "socialism in one country"]." (My Life, pages 552-553)
Thus the international defeats, caused by the bureaucracy's
shortsighted opportunism, at the same time strengthened the
bureaucracy, and created conditions for the isolation and defeat of
the Marxist opposition. Trotsky explains:
"The advances workers were indubitably sympathetic to the
Opposition, but that sympathy remained passive. The masses lacked
faith that the situation could be seriously changed by a new
struggle. Meantime the bureaucracy asserted: 'For the sake of an
international revolution, the Opposition proposes to drag us into a
revolutionary war. Enough of shake-ups! We have earned the right to
rest. We will build the socialist society at home. Rely upon us,
your leaders!' This gospel of repose... indubitably found an echo
among the weary workers, and still more the peasant masses." (The
Revolution Betrayed, page 92)
16. The
Defeat of the Joint Left Opposition
In a major document entitled The Platform
of the Joint Opposition (1927), Trotsky drew a balance sheet of
ten years of Communist government, and reasserted the policies of
Marxism in contrast to the blind opportunism of the bureaucracy.
The Platform called for the revival of the soviets, the restoration
of workers' democracy, and a bold program of industrialization. Under
pressure of the Opposition, the bureaucracy had put forward proposals
for a limited five-year plan. But it was based on the kulaks'
interests, and neglected the need for industrial development. The
Platform explained the alternative:
"We must carry out in deeds a redistribution of the tax-burden
among the classes - loading more heavily the kulak and Nepman,
relieving the workers and the poor...
"we must steer a firm course towards industrialization,
electrification and rationalization, based upon increasing the
technical power of the economy and improving the material conditions
of the masses." (pages 45-46)
The Opposition criticized Stalin's disastrous foreign policy of
seeking "instant" support from left-reformist and nationalist leaders,
rather than building the Comintern as a mass revolutionary force. The
danger of imperialist attack, it explained, could only be defeated
through an all-out struggle to mobilize the support of the mass of the
working class internationally.
The bureaucrats had no answer to these ideas. Their "reply" was to
unleash a campaign of vicious intimidation against the Opposition.
On the central committee, now packed with Stalin's hand-picked
yes-men, Trotsky, Zinoviev and others were sworn at and howled down
when they tried to speak. It was no better in the rest of the party.
Victor Serge describes the scene in meeting after meeting:
"I had occasion to speak, or rather to try to speak, before
gatherings shaken with a sort of frenzy. We were given the floor for
five minutes after three-hour harangues. And against each of us they
unleashed five, six, sometimes ten 'activists' eager to procure the
favour of the secretaries. The crowd looked on passively, with a
certain anxiety; they were often on our side, but they were afraid."
(From Lenin to Stalin, page 49)
On the tenth anniversary of the October revolution, in the face of
this merciless witch-hunt, the Opposition heroically took their
slogans to mass demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad: "Let us turn
our fire to the right - against the kulak, the nepman and the
bureaucrat"; "Let us carry our Lenin's Will"; "Against opportunism,
against a split, and for the unity of Lenin's party"!
The bureaucracy reacted with panic-stricken fury. They had seen, at
a demonstration in Leningrad the previous month, how thousands of
workers had flocked to listen to Trotsky and Zinoviev when, by
mistake, the police had escorted them to a platform. Now the
Opposition demonstrations were violently broken up. A shot was fired
at Trotsky's car.
At the fifteenth congress, in December 1927, not one Oppositionist
was permitted to attend as a delegate. 940 leading supporters of
Trotsky were expelled. Yet the Opposition continued to fight for its
ideas. The London Times, under the headline "Trotsky versus
Stalin", reported:
"The views of the Opposition, in spite of all prohibitions and
the efforts of the Ogpu [secret police] ... continue to be widely
propagated by means of illegal pamphlets, which, according to
Pravda, are each being printed in editions of tens of
thousands..." (December 2, 1927)
Marxist opposition to the rule of the bureaucracy was from this
point driven underground.
Zinoviev's and Kamenev's courage deserted them and, together with
2,500 supporters, they surrendered to Stalin. More expulsion of
Trotskyists followed. Trotsky himself was expelled, exiled to Siberia,
and then - because he remained a focal point for the Opposition -
deported from the Soviet Union early in 1929.
In spite of these terrible blows, Trotsky and thousands of his
supporters remained committed to the ideas of Bolshevism and the
program of the October revolution. In their propaganda they identified
themselves as the Bolshevik-Leninists, to distinguish themselves from
the upstart bureaucrats who had installed themselves at the head of
the Communist movement.
From exile, Trotsky continued his theoretical work - his exposure
of opportunism, pretences and treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracy,
and his clarification of the Marxist alternative under rapidly
changing conditions - that had formed perhaps his greatest
contribution to Marxism. These ideas would serve as the guideline for
a new revolutionary generation.
17.
Proletarian Bonapartism
From the late 1920s onwards the policies of
the Soviet bureaucracy went through a series of bewildering zigzags,
creating enormous confusion in the labor movement internationally.
The regime's supporters applauded each contradictory new turn as a
"correct" and "necessary" measure to defend "socialism" in the USSR.
Some opponents, despairing at the hideous travesty of "Leninism"
presented by the regime, claimed that the gains of the revolution had
been destroyed, and that Russia could no longer be regarded as a
workers' state in any sense.
Trotsky, grappling with these questions in the early 1930s,
concluded that the Soviet workers' state had, in reality, degenerated
into a regime of a new kind:
"As the bureaucracy becomes more independent, as more and more
power is concentrated into the hands of a single person, the more
does bureaucratic centrism turn into Bonapartism [named after the
French military dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte]". (Writings 1934-35,
page 180)
Bonapartism, Trotsky explained,
"was and remains the government of the bourgeoisie during periods
of crisis... Bonapartism always implies political veering between
classes; but under Bonapartism in all its historical transmigrations
there is preserved one and the same social base: bourgeois
[capitalist] property...
"It is absolutely correct that the self-rule of the Soviet
bureaucracy was built upon the soil of veering between the class
forces both internal and international. Insofar as the bureaucratic
veering has been crowned by the... regime of Stalin, it is possible
to speak of Soviet Bonapartism." (The Class Nature of the Soviet
State, in Writings1933-34, pages 107-108)
The "proletarian" character of this bonapartist regime arises from
the fact that it is based not on "bourgeois property", but on the
state-owned and planned economy created by the October revolution,
reflecting the historical interest of the working class.
The regime's history from the 1920s onwards has been a graphic
illustration of "veering between class forces both internal and
international".
By 1927, precisely as the Opposition had warned, the kulaks were
holding a gun to the head of the regime. To force prices up they
withheld their grain from the marked, and hoarded gold and arms in
preparation for a showdown.
The cities were threatened with hunger. The threat of capitalist
restoration suddenly became real.
The bureaucracy reacted in panic, attempting to stamp out the
danger by administrative decree and, where that failed, by force. They
imposed compulsory requisitions of grain. The kulaks resisted; the
bureaucracy responded with an all-out attack.
The Left Opposition had long explained the need for
collectivization of the land, but stressed that this should be
voluntary so as to keep the support of the peasants and minimize
disruption. Stalin's declaration of war of the peasantry had nothing
in common with Marxism; it was a blind reflex action, with disastrous
results.
As late as 1929 Stalin maintained that "individual farming could
continue to play a predominant role in supplying the country with
food..." (Quoted by I. Deutscher, Stalin, page 320) Now,
abruptly, the peasants' land was collectivized by decree. By 1930, 55
percent of peasant land had been turned into state farms, and 88
percent by 1934.
Rural Russia was convulsed by civil war. Famine broke out as the
peasants slaughtered their animals sooner than give them to the
regime. An estimated ten million people perished as a direct
consequence of these bureaucratic excesses. Whole peasant communities
and even whole national groups were murdered or deported. In the
cities, bread rationing returned.
These events shattered NEP, ended Stalin's alliance with Bukharin
and the party right wing, and formed the real basis for his plunge
into violent ultra-leftism between 1927 and 1934.
Industrialization had long been argued for by the Opposition, and
scornfully rejected under pressure from the right. Now Stalin could
see no alternative to industrialization - as a panic measure, under
ruthless compulsion from above. In 1928, prompted by the Opposition,
the bureaucracy had half-heartedly adopted a five-year plan of
economic development. Now, abruptly, the order went out to complete
the plan in four years!
Vast projects were launched - dams, power stations, steel plants,
mines - which transformed the Soviet Union within the space of a
decade. While the capitalist world was plunged into the Depression of
the 1930s, Soviet industrial production leaped ahead by 250 percent.
Amazingly, backward Russia by 1935 produced more tractors than any
other country in the world.
Under capitalism, such concerted development would have been
impossible. Russia, under capitalism, would have continued to languish
in hopeless poverty like most of the third world to this day.
"Socialism", said Trotsky, "has demonstrated its right to
victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital... but in the
language of steel, cement and electricity." (The Revolution
Betrayed, page 8)
The Soviet Union's progress in the 1930s impressed working people
the world over. But, under bureaucratic rule, it took place at a
terrible cost.
Orders, often wildly unrealistic, were issued from bureaucrats'
offices. Failure to execute them was treated as sabotage. Forced
labour
was used on a vast scale. Up to 15 million Soviet citizens - peasants
who opposed collectivization and, later, opponents of every
description - were herded into slave labour camps. Countless numbers
perished.
The working class swelled from 11 million in 1928 to 23 million in
1932. Passes, called "Labour Books", were introduced in 1931 to chain
workers to their jobs. While the bureaucracy cultivated a labor
aristocracy, the value of workers' wages dropped by two-thirds between
1928 and 1935.
Milk consumption per person dropped from 189 kilograms per year in
1927-28 to 105 kilograms in 1932; meat consumption from 27.5 kilograms
to 13.5 kilograms - while the bureaucracy became entrenched in their
privileged lifestyle.
But in spite of the workers' superhuman sacrifices, the Soviet
Union continued to lag far behind the industrialized capitalist
countries in almost every aspect. Its cultural backwardness could not
be overcome by bureaucratic dictate. Sophisticated new industries,
requiring a high technical level, could not be built like railway
lines.
To enforce industrialization on this bases, driving millions of
workers to the limit and crushing all opposition, the most ruthless
centralization of power was needed. The bureaucratic regime
degenerated into out-and-out police dictatorship.
Stalin's faction, having crushed both the left and the right,
remained as supreme arbiters in the bureaucratized "Communist" Party.
Stalin, once the scheming henchman of the bureaucracy, now became its
master - the top bureaucrat, dispensing privileges and positions to
his hangers-on.
Trotsky sums up:
"Stalin guards the conquests of the October Revolution not only
against the feudal-bourgeois counter-revolution, but also against
the claims of the toilers, their impatience and dissatisfaction; he
crushes the Left wing which expresses the ordered historical and
progressive tendencies of the unprivileged working masses; he
creates a new aristocracy, by means of an extreme differentiation in
wages, privileges, ranks, etc.
Leaning for support on the topmost
layers of the new social hierarchy against the lowest - sometimes
vice versa - Stalin has attained the complete concentration of power
in his own hands. What else should this regime be called, if not
Soviet Bonapartism?" (Writings 1934-35, page 181)
18. From the
"Third Period"...
Foreign policy flows from domestic policy,
serving the same interests. The bureaucracy's violent break with the
kulaks and the right wing of the party was accompanied by an equally
violent swing to ultra-leftism in the international arena.
Recoiling from the opportunist line that had led to disaster in
Britain and China, Stalin moved to salvage the regime's
"revolutionary" credentials by imposing an exact opposite course at
the sixth Comintern congress in August 1928 (the first in four years).
Capitalism, Stalin proclaimed, had passed through two "periods"
since 1918 - first, a revolutionary period until 1923; then, a
"gradual and partial stabilization". Now a "third period" of intensive
crisis was beginning, that would spell the "final collapse" of
capitalism, and place the struggle for power on the order of the day.
Marxism explains that there is no such thing as a "final crisis" of
capitalism. The capitalist class will always resolve their problems at
the expense of the working class until their rule is overthrown.
Stalin's aim, however, was not to develop a Marxist position but to
stampede the Comintern to the left. The Communist parties had to smash
all other tendencies in order to capture the leadership of the
movement; the time for debate was over!
As a recipe for civil war in the labour movement, Stalin put forward
the insane argument that "objectively, Social Democracy is the
moderate wing of fascism... They are not antipodes but twins." (Quoted
in Deutscher, Stalin, page 401)
The most disastrous result of "third-period Stalinism" were
experienced in Germany, where it split the working class, allowed
Hitler to take power, and made the Second World War inevitable.
For reasons unforeseen by Stalin, the collapse of the New York
Stock Exchange in October 1929 led to a world-wide capitalist
depression. Germany, in particular, was devastated. The crisis of
leadership and sectarianism which paralyzed the labour movement,
however, allowed Hitler's Nazis to build up growing support.
The ruined middle class, the unemployed, the workers and youth
looked in vain to the SPD and KPD for a solution. The SPD leaders were
married to capitalism; the KPD was obsessed with attacking the SPD and
breaking up its meetings.
The middle class and the most downtrodden layers in particular were
drawn in increasing numbers to the "National Socialist" rallies. The
fascists' demagogic attacks on capitalists and Jews; their mystical
promise to restore German "greatness"; above all, their appearance of
purposeful determination seemed the only alternative to these layers.
Among organized workers, support for Hitler was almost
non-existent.
Trotsky explained the critical need for a united front of workers'
organizations to crush the fascist menace and, in so doing, to prepare
the working class for the conquest of power. But the Stalinized
leadership of the Comintern was blind and deaf to reality.
The German labour movement was the most powerful in the world. Both
the Social-Democrats and the Communist Party had military wings. But,
on Moscow's instructions, the KPD leaders refused all cooperation with
the "social-fascists" - even going so far, in 1931, as to join the
Nazis in trying to bring down a Social-Democratic government in
Prussia!
The German workers' movement, the hope of workers everywhere, was
annihilated without any serious attempt at resistance by its
leadership.
The Stalinists were incapable of drawing the conclusions. In April
1933, with Hitler in power, the Presidium of the ECCI declared that
the KPD's policy had been "completely correct"!
This historical failure of leadership, and the absence of any
criticism from the ranks of the Communist International, finally
convinced Trotsky that the Cominterns - like the Second International
before it - was dead as an instrument of workers' revolution.
The forces of genuine Marxism had been decimated by the savage
blows of a decade. The perspective of a new world war, and new
revolutionary upheavals, was opening up. Objectively, a new
international was necessary to regroup, to build and prepare the
Marxist tendency for the critical struggles ahead.
19. ...to the "People's Front"
The changed alignment of class forces in Europe rapidly pushed the
Soviet regime into a new U-turn.
Germany under Hitler posed a far more immediate threat to them than
the western imperialist powers. Above all, Stalin feared war and the
effect it would have on the Soviet masses. To avoid war, he
calculated, it was essential to appease Hitler.
Throughout 1933, while Hitler liquidated the KPD, the SPD and the
trade unions, and began the genocide of the Jews, Stalin uttered not a
word of criticism. Throughout the 1930s the Soviet bureaucracy hoped
to reach an agreement with Hitler.
But Hitler was relying on the "Communist menace" as a pretext for
rearmament in defiance of his "Allied" imperialist rivals. He could
not be seen to fraternize with Stalin at this stage. (Only in August
1939, when Hitler was preparing to strike to the west, was the
notorious Stalin-Hitler pact of non-aggression signed.)
Surrounded by fascist and right-wing regimes, Stalin's
"revolutionary" ultra-leftism evaporated. Trotsky and the
International Left Opposition explained (as the Comintern had
explained a dozen years earlier) that the only real security for the
USSR lay in revolutionary internationalism - in supporting the
workers' struggle for power in the capitalist states, carrying the war
to the enemy and paralyzing reaction.
But the Russian bureaucracy were incapable of following this
course; their own dictatorship would have been the first casualty if
the Russian workers became infected with these ideas! Instead, quietly
forgetting that capitalism was in its "third period", they looked for
support against Hitler to - the western imperialist powers!
The imperialists were not unwilling to use Stalin for their own
purposes. In September 1934 they accepted the Soviet Union's
application to join the League of Nations (describe by Lenin as a
"robbers' den"); in May 1935 French imperialism signed a pact of
"mutual assistance" with Stalin!
This turn by the Soviet bureaucracy marked a qualitative new stage
in their degeneration. For the first time they entered openly and
deliberately, into political alliances with the capitalist class
itself. Their opportunist failures, from this point onwards, became
transformed into a deliberate betrayal of the workers' revolution
internationally as a condition for capitalist "friendship".
The writing had been on the wall at the 1928 Comintern congress,
where the idea of "socialism in one country" was swallowed without a
murmur. Trotsky warned that this would be "the beginning of the
disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism".
(The Third International After Lenin, page 55) After 1934 this
prediction rapidly became a fact.
The Soviet bureaucracy's entanglement with the "progressive"
capitalist powers was followed, inevitably, by the turn of the
Communist parties internationally seeking alliances with "progressive"
capitalist and reformist parties in their own countries.
The slogan now became "the people's front". The workers' class
demands were dropped from the programs which the Communist partied put
forward - this would "alienate" the "progressive" bourgeoisie!
"Broad support" among the middle class, the Stalinists wisely
proclaimed, could only be won through a program confined to
bourgeois-democratic demands. Today the middle class is no longer a
mass force in the industrialized countries; yet the same program and
the same arguments are still used by the "Communist" parties. This
confirms that the real purpose, then as now, was not so much to win
mass support as to build up a bargaining position in relation to the
capitalist parties.
The full bankruptcy of this position was exposed in the
revolutionary events that erupted in France and Spain during 1935 and
1936. First in France, then in Spain, "Popular Front" governments
swept to power with Communist support. In both countries, after the
rigors of the depression and right-wing rule, this opened the
floodgates of mass struggle.
In Spain, a military coup was launched against the "People's Front"
government in July 1936. The reformists, Stalinists and bourgeois
Republicans dithered; the workers and peasants took up arms. Within
days, most of the country was under their control. Spain was plunged
into a full-scale revolutionary crisis, at a far higher level than
Russia in 1917.
"Red rule in Barcelona - Extremists out of hand", headlined the
London Times on August 1. Two days later its correspondent summed
up the demands of the masses:
"a 36-hour week, unemployment pay, control of production, the
seizure and distribution of land, ... the maintenance of the
[workers'] militias in arms..."
and after another few days:
"'Committees of Workers' have taken over the big railway
companies. It seems only a question of time for this to happen to
the trams, the banks and other key establishments." (The Times,
August 8, 1936)
Stalin, no less than the capitalist class, viewed the unfolding
revolution with horror. All his hopes of stable ties with the
Anglo-French imperialists were at risk. Worse still, the example of
the Spanish workers threatened to infect the Russian workers with the
same will to struggle for control of society. The Spanish revolution
had to be strangled at all costs.
Slavishly following Moscow's directives, the Communist Party of
Spain waged an all-out struggle against the workers' revolutionary
movement.
In the name of "Bolshevism" they argued the Menshevik theory of
"two stages", confining their program to "bourgeois democracy" in the
futile hope of reassuring the capitalists that "Communism" posed no
threat to them. GPU death squads were sent to Spain to assist in the
gruesome task of disarming the workers' militias and exterminating
their vanguard.
Deferring to Stalin's wheeling and dealing with the imperialist
powers, the "Communists" shut their eyes to the first lesson of the
Russian revolution: capitalism cannot guarantee democracy and
stability to the working class in the conclusive epoch of imperialism.
The tasks of "bourgeois democracy" in semi-developed countries such as
Spain could only be carried out under the rule of the working class
itself.
Tragically, Trotsky's sympathizers in Spain missed the golden
opportunity of winning the Socialist youth to their program,
establishing a mass base for Marxism and leading the movement to
victory.
Without Marxist leadership the working class could not withstand
the onslaught of the class enemy combined with that of their own
reformist and "Communist" leaders. Stalinism succeeded in dividing the
movement, isolating the left and murdering its best fighters. This
made the victory of fascism inevitable.
The last hope of working-class victory had been extinguished in
Europe, at least until the conclusion of the imperialist war which now
became unavoidable.
20. Rivers of Blood
Inside the Soviet Union, the sharpening contradictions between the
bureaucracy and the working class led to the liquidation of the
remnants of the Bolshevik cadre.
The "Communist" parties internationally were presenting the Soviet
Union as the happy fatherland of socialism. Stalin's successor,
Krushchev, at the 20th party congress in 1956, lifted a corner of the
veil on what was really happening:
"Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient
cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding
absolute submission to his opinion... He abandoned the method of
ideological struggle for that of administrative violence, mass
repressions and terror." (Quoted in The Moscow Trials, pages
17, 18)
Bureaucratic tyranny takes on a logic of its own. As repression
intensifies, the rulers' fear of revenge increases. Opponents, driven
from power, are mistrusted. Even if they recant, won't they become a
threat again? Might they not provide the spark for insurrection from
below?
Whole layers of the party came under intense suspicion from Stalin
and the bureaucracy - none more so than the surviving "Old
Bolsheviks", who could remember the party of Lenin, who kept silent
about the bureaucracy's crimes only out of fear.
Bukharin, as early as 1928, shrank back from the monster he had
helped to create. In a secret discussion with Kamenev he exclaimed in
terror: "What can we do? What can we do in the face of an adversary of
this sort, a debased Genghis Khan...?" (Quoted by Serge, From Lenin
to Stalin, page 91)
While the old Bolsheviks kept their heads down, a younger
generation was coming to the fore, eager to restore the ideals of
October. Contradictions were sharpening between the regime and the
growing working class. The whole party seethed with discontent.
Expulsions in the early 1930s ran into hundreds of thousands.
Yet the old Bolshevik leaders, despite their capitulations,
commanded vastly greater respect than Stalin and the ruling
bureaucratic clique - many of them disreputable ex-Mensheviks and
former enemies of the October revolution who had crossed to the
winning side after the war.
These contradictions were brought to a head by the Spanish
revolution in 1936, sending shock waves through the workers' movement
internationally, inspiring the Russian masses afresh with the example
of workers' democracy in action.
The bureaucracy moved to nip the danger in the bud. With grisly
irony, while protesting their commitment to bourgeois-democracy
internationally, they unleashed a reign of purest nightmare in the
Soviet Union itself.
There now took place the "Moscow trials": incredible frame-ups
where broken old Bolsheviks were accused of murder, sabotage,
terrorism - any fantastic crime to discredit them and terrorize
others.
But the main charge against them was "Trotskyism". One after
another they were accused of "conspiring with Trotsky", now vilified
as an "agent of capitalism" and a "German spy" since 1921!
In this way the regime betrayed the real motive for the "purges":
their obsessive fear of Marxism, of workers' democracy and the
workers' revenge, and their hatred of the foremost representative of
Marxism in the labour movement internationally - Leon Trotsky.
As the Times correspondent in Russia admitted:
"The root of the matter is that Stalin never completely won the
battle between his own policy and Trotsky's internationalist policy.
Nor can final victory ever be his... Communism remains an
international creed... lately, the discontent of zealot communists
[revolutionaries] has increased... More still are alarmed at the
great wage inequalities... It has been determined to silence the
voice of opposition once and for all, and break the remnants of
Trotskyism within the country." (August 21, 1936)
This there passed before Stalin's "judges" a tragic parade of human
wrecks who had once been Bolshevik leaders, blackmailed and cowed into
admitting anything and everything demanded of them.
Three "trials" were staged: in August 1936 (Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Smirnov and others); January 1937 (Radek, Pyatakov and others); and
February 1938 (Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky and others). Their accuser
was the former Menshevik lawyer, Vyshinsky, who during the civil war
had collaborated with the Whites. Now he could shriek the hatred of
the bureaucracy against the former leaders of the revolution:
"Mad fascist police dogs!" "Despicable rotten dregs of humanity!
Scum of the underworld! "Shoot the reptiles!"
No evidence was brought against the accused except their GPU-dictated
"confessions". But, with one or two token exceptions, all were
condemned to be shot.
Each of these murders, every curse by Vyshinsky, was admiringly
reported and defended by the "Communist" parties internationally.
Trotsky explained the logic of the whole grotesque performance:
"To justify the repressions, it was necessary to have framed
accusations. To give weight to the false accusations, it was
necessary to reinforce them with more brutal repressions. Thus the
logic of the struggle drove Stalin along the road of gigantic
judicial amalgams." (The Moscow Trials, page 129)
The Moscow trials were only the façade of what Trotsky termed "a
one-sided civil war of the bureaucracy against the Bolshevik Party".
Arrests followed waves of arrests. Countless old Bolsheviks, who
refused to "confess" in public, were assassinated in prison. Left
Oppositionists in Siberian labour camps were taken out in groups to be
shot. Altogether tens of thousands - the flower of the Russian
workers' movement 0 were wiped out.
The Left Oppositionists remained revolutionaries to the end. An
example of their unbending courage were the events at the Vorkuta
labour camp in Siberia towards the end of 1936, when the Trotskyists
led a massive fight-back by prisoners against the petty tyranny of the
authorities with the only weapon still available to them - the hunger
strike. (See Militant International Review, no 33, page 43)
After four months, all their demands were conceded. But soon the
executions began. When a male political prisoner was shot, his wife
and any children over the age of twelve would normally be killed as
well.
Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th CP congress in 1935, 1,108 had
been arrested by 1938 for "anti-revolutionary crimes". Of 139 central
committee members, 98 were shot.
Of 1,558,852 CP members in 1939, only 1.3 percent had belonged
since the October revolution. Of Lenin's central committee of 1917,
only Stalin survived as a leader, surrounded by ex-Mensheviks and
bootlickers. The last vestiges of the Bolshevik Party had been
eradicated.
One of the leaders of 1917, Raskolnikov, survived during the 1930s
as Soviet ambassador to Bulgaria. Recalled to Moscow in 1938 for
"promotion" (i.e., to be shot), he fled into exile instead and wrote
an open letter to Stalin:
"With the help of dirty forgeries, you staged false trials and
made up accusations which are more ridiculous than the witch trials
of the middle ages... Inert pulp writers glorify you as a semi-deity
born of the sun and the moon and you, like an Eastern despot, enjoy
the incense of crude flattery. You mercilessly exterminate talented
writers who are personally displeasing to you... sooner or later,
the Soviet people will put you on trial as a traitor to socialism
and the revolution." (Published for the first time in the USSR in
the magazine Ogonyok in June 1987)
The total death toll under Stalin in the 1930s is estimated at 12
to 15 million. Survivors, such as Raskolnikov, were understandably
embittered and filled with hatred towards Stalin. But it must not be
forgotten that this slaughter was not simply the consequence of
power-hunger, ruthlessness or (as Krushchev falsely explained it) the
"cult of the individual". It was the culmination of the political
counter-revolution by the bureaucracy against the revolutionary
working-class tendency in the Russian workers' state.
The regime established under Stalin had nothing in common with the
regime of Lenin and Trotsky, though the outward trappings (the
"Communist Party", the "Politbureau", the title "soviets", etc.) were
preserved to give the opposite impression. Rivers of blood separate
Marxism from the regime of the Russian bureaucracy.
Testimony as to the historical significance of Stalinism is
contained in the gloating poem that appeared in a White magazine after
the first Moscow trial:
"We thank you, Stalin!
Sixteen scoundrels,
Sixteen butchers of the Fatherland
Have been gathered to their ancestors...
"But why only sixteen?
Give us forty,
Give us hundreds,
Thousands;
Make a bridge across the Moscow river,
A bridge without tower or beams,
A bridge of Soviet carrion -
And add your carcass to the rest!"
21.
Conclusion
Under the spreading terror of Stalinism in the
Soviet Union and fascism in Western Europe, the forces of Marxism were
decimated or extinguished during the 1930s. Only the genius and
determination of Trotsky (murdered by a GPU agent in 1940), and a very
small band of followers, remained to re-educate a coming generation in
the ideas of the workers' struggle for socialism.
To the end of his life Trotsky continued to defend the gains of the
October revolution - in essence, the state-owned and planned economy -
despite the monstrous bureaucratic deformation of the "Soviet" regime,
and rejected the idea that Russia had become "state capitalist".
At the same time, he explained that there was no possibility of
"reforming" the regime to re-establish workers' democracy. It would
have to be defeated and overthrown by the mass movement of the working
class, once again taking power into its own hands, to re-open the road
to socialist transformation.
Outstanding among Trotsky's works is The Revolution Betrayed,
providing a detailed and scientific explanation of the processes that
have been outlined in this pamphlet.
Today the balance of forces in the Soviet Union is radically
different. The working class is the most powerful and best-educated in
the world. The bureaucracy has no role left; it had become an absolute
obstacle to economic and social progress. Gorbachev's attempts to
streamline the bureaucracy (like those of Brezhnev and Krushchev
before him) cannot alter the historical bankruptcy of its rule.
Rather, it reflects a new stage in the crisis of Soviet Stalinism,
in which the objective conditions are ripening for political
revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy and restore the role of the
working class. (This id fully explained by Ted Grant in Gorbachev:
Reform or Revolution? [Editors note: Ted Grant's position on the prospects for the Soviet
Union is presented, along with the majority view, in the section on the
Collapse of Stalinism on this website])
Brilliant "dress rehearsals" of the approaching political
revolution have already been provided by the working class in Hungary
in 1956, in Poland in 1980-81, etc.
Internationally, also, the conditions of the 1980s are the reverse
of the late 1930s. Revolutionary movements are awakening in every
sector of the world. The program of Marxism is once again gripping the
minds of workers and youth from Liverpool to Sri Lanka, from South
Africa to Spain.
The lessons of the triumph and degeneration of the Russian
revolution must be relearned in order to rise to the task that will
face us in the next period: the conquest of power by the working class
on every continent, the establishment of workers' democracy, and the
socialist transformation of the world.
The Collapse of Stalinism
|
