Leninism has surrendered: its supporters have been dispersed and its victims curse them from their graves. Its integrity has been withdrawn and its appeal has been destroyed. The abject failure of the communist experiment makes it difficult to imagine the masses it inspired, the sacrifices it received, the moral capital it once possessed, the reverence accorded its leaders, and the Utopian hopes it inflamed. World history has rendered its judgment: Leninism is a thing of the past.
Especially in the postcommunist climate, however, it is important to bring balance and a sense of historical perspective into our view of events. Questions regarding the connection between Lenin and his heirs, and whether the entire undertaking could have turned out differently, are still worth asking. The difficult transition of communist into parliamentary states is also better understood when the manner in which the Soviet Union was transformed from an authoritarian into a totalitarian, and then back into an authoritarian, state are taken into account. The implications deriving from the disintegration of the communist experiment, its ethical and practical costs, have still not been fully grasped by many on the Left.
Leninism was as much a product of the collapse of orthodox Marxism as revisionism. But it privileged the political over the social revolution, the party over the trade unions, and the “mission” over the empirical character of the proletariat. Leninism was the mirror image of revisionism. Two organizational views squared off against one another. A “dictatorship of the proletariat” confronted the bourgeois republic. Communist revolution contested a politics of socialist reform with little to offer those languishing in the colonial territories. Moral relativism opposed a vague universalism. Indeed, no less than revisionism, Leninism expressed more than the mere quest for power and more than a set of contingent responses to unique historical circumstances.
Leninism confronted the old-fashioned “stage theory” of history with a new voluntarism. It projected a politics of will powered by an ethical commitment to the basic elements of the class ideal: radical democracy, social justice, and internationalism. Equating these values with their own interests and ignoring the need for institutional accountability, however, the communists squandered the considerable moral capital they inherited from their role in bringing about the Russian Revolution. Understanding this development calls for moving beyond what Simone de Beauvoir termed “the force of circumstance,” reconsidering forgotten alternatives, and reconstructing the bond between theory and practice.
This begins with the vanguard party whose embodiment of “true” revolutionary consciousness turned it into the substitute for the proletariat as the agent of history. The new party was organized to assure discipline, secrecy, and flexibility in the face of economic backwardness and severe political repression. But its “democratic centralist” form of decisionmaking, which called for public unanimity on the part of all members on all matters, harbored a presentiment of what was to come. Lenin felt himself justified in treating all opponents—whether socialist or not—in a totally instrumental and expeditious manner and this same logic would later be employed against critics of the new regime and rivals of its leader with far more drastic consequences. Indeed, the same logic initially used to make and then preserve the Russian Revolution annihilated the possibility of realizing its goals.
Dictatorship was introduced in the hope of instituting a more radical form of democracy. Economic justice was undertaken on the basis of “primitive socialist accumulation,” but with an eye on the robust modern society of the future. Even “socialism in one country” initially reflected more despair over the failure of revolutionary hopes in the aftermath of the first world war than an abandonment of revolutionary aspirations. But the means abolished the ends: the international struggle against capitalism was compromised and “socialist” construction became identified with the most barbaric forms of modernization. The communists were ultimately left without any purpose other than the perpetuation of their own dictatorship—and so, were ethically rudderless.
Different policy choices made during the 1920s could have produced something other than a “totalitarian” regime in the 1930s, just as different policy choices in the 1980s could have prevented the disintegration of the USSR in the 1990s. Only the party, however, was in the position to make those choices: the victorious Bolsheviks crushed all movements and institutions capable of contesting their understanding of socialism or providing institutional checks upon them. With the party in the saddle, once the implications of “democratic centralism” had been radicalized, the organizational theory invented by Lenin could be used against all attempts to limit the power of Stalin. This indeed would produce a qualitative rupture in what otherwise seems a logical development: life within the party, its more experimental policies, its use of terror, its propaganda, and its aims were all transformed. There was indeed a shift from Leninism to Stalinism.
Just as Stalin liquidated the radical meaning of Leninism while still employing it for legitimacy, however, his successors sought to distance themselves from him without fully breaking with the system he had dominated. The militant style, the turgid propaganda, and even the fear deriving from the uninhibited exercise of arbitrary power all began becoming increasingly obsolete following the death of Stalin. In seeking merely to reform all this, however, the communist regime lost its original “revolutionary privilege,” which Stalin desperately sought to retain, and opened itself to comparison with other socialist nations. A spirit of malaise and corruption increasingly took hold. This spirit would indeed hasten the collapse of the USSR and, with the new millennium, also leave its mark on the new Russia.
Underdevelopment and Revolution
Despite its glittering literary tradition, turn-of-the-century Russia was a provincial backwater, shrouded in religious mysticism and illiteracy. Its secret police was notorious throughout the civilized world and, as various works like the Autobiography of Maxim Gorky so graphically portrayed, the most terrible misery burdened the vast majority. The peasantry had only been freed from serfdom in 1863 and, though foreign investment was spurring industrialization in isolated cities, imperial Russia still lagged behind the West politically and economically. The country lacked a proletariat and a trade union movement along with a bourgeoisie informed by the democratic values of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. And so, while Western social democracy was predicated on the existence of a genuine labor movement informed by the liberal legacy of the bourgeoisie, communism was not. Therein lies perhaps the most profound reason for the tragic deformation of the Russian Revolution.1
Revolution was, in fact, a mere speculative possibility when the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP) was formed in 1898. Recognizing they were stuck within a semifeudal context, most members of the RSDP attempted to draw the practical consequences of orthodox Marxism and its stage theory of history. This view essentially claimed that capitalism must reach its productive limit before the proletariat can bring about a revolution. The majority of the RSDP thus concluded that the party should foster bourgeois development and, in order to mitigate its worst effects, trade union activity among the proletariat. Inspired by a speculative belief in “the actuality of revolution,”2 while also embracing the theory of orthodox Marxism, Lenin headed the opposition.
Born into a middle class family in 1870, Lenin was sixteen when his brother Alexander was hanged for his participation in a plot to assassinate the czar. Admitted to Kazan University, where he planned to study law, he was expelled for taking part in a student demonstration. This led him into revolutionary circles and he began the systematic study of Marxism. He was already a prominent figure in radical circles when he published a Marxist attack on anarchism, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ are …” (1894) and, by 1895, he had been arrested for organizing workers in St. Petersburg. While in Siberian exile, Lenin wrote The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which claimed only a bourgeois and democratic revolution would prove possible in the near future given the economic backwardness of Russia.
Economic determinism marked Lenin’s early studies on Russian economic development and the diminishing role of the peasantry. His Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), written in order to combat an empiricism and an irrational form of idealism enjoying brief popularity in the labor movement, exhibited even stronger traits of “vulgar Marxism.”3 But his thinking always sought to link the real with the ideal: the tactical response to existing conditions was always strategically formulated with a specific revolutionary purpose in mind. After embarking upon a study of Hegel while living as an exile in Zurich, in fact, he explicitly stated that “intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism.”4 Until 1917, however, most considered Lenin little more than a particularly crude and sectarian adherent of orthodox Marxism. He was late in recognizing that what mattered was ultimately less the level of economic development in a nation than its revolutionary potential. Only in 1917 would Lenin embrace the idea of a “permanent revolution,” which had been developed in 1905 by Trotsky and Alexander Helphand (who was known as Parvus),5 and insist that the proletariat must seize power.
Lenin held Kautsky in high esteem until 1914. He praised him in various works including What Is To Be Done? Lenin learned from Kautsky that no intrinsic connection exists between fostering bourgeois economic conditions, or furthering trade union activity, and creating the prerequisite political consciousness for overthrowing the monarchy and ushering in a republic. He, too, reached the conclusion that ignoring the qualitative difference between economic gains and political power would inevitably result in reformism. Lenin never simply rejected the use of parliamentary tactics and he usually supported demands for higher wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions. He knew that a revolutionary movement could not grow simply by feeding the masses dreams of Utopia. In keeping with Kautsky, he emphasized that such tactics and demands are not ends unto themselves. With even more certitude than the radicals in Western Europe, moreover, Lenin believed that the prospects for meaningful reform were no greater than the possibilities for revolution in the Russia of 1902.
Marx and Engels had already stated in The Communist Manifesto that, before any revolution could take place, a part of the ruling class must “break off” and join the oppressed. Lenin appropriated their insight and highlighted the need for radical action even in the face of objective constraints. He knew that the authors of the Manifesto had kept their eyes cast upon the French Revolution while writing it. Marx and Engels were aware that 1789 did not take place in the nation with the strongest bourgeoisie of the time. It was subsequently logical for Lenin to interpret the importance of revolutionary action in the face of objective constraints, employing a group of disaffected intellectuals to instill the requisite consciousness into the masses, and perhaps even establish a proletarian version of an “educational dictatorship.”6 Lenin would indeed place his own revolutionary aspirations in coherent relation with those of the French Revolution and, in this vein, he could even view his communists as “Jacobins inseparably linked to the proletariat.”
Lenin was convinced that the weak bourgeoisie of imperial Russia, whose members were mostly supportive of the imperial regime, would prove unwilling and unable to carry through the revolution by itself. A revolutionary undertaking in an economically backward nation would involve not merely the bourgeois and proletarian classes, according to Lenin, but also the peasants and even elements of the antisocialist middle strata. Or putting it another way, following the basic idea of Marx and Engels in 1848, Lenin essentially sought a bourgeois revolution that would lay the groundwork for an attack upon the bourgeoisie.7
Solidifying a revolutionary alliance of classes with obviously conflicting concerns while still giving primacy to proletarian interests, in his view, required a “party of a new type.” Perhaps it would prove possible for such a party, after shifting class alliances from those employed during the first bourgeois phase of the revolution,8 to lead the proletariat into the second socialist phase. In any event, however, Lenin considered the European model of an open democratic labor party with loose rules for admission simply inappropriate for coordinating underground resistance in a huge empire with a ferocious secret police. Only a centralized and disciplined vanguard of “professional revolutionary intellectuals” could prove capable of securing secrecy in a far-flung organization, maintaining lines of communication, coordinating political activity, distributing illegal propaganda, and preserving the revolutionary goal during nonrevolutionary periods.
Lenin’s “party of a new type” was not merely a product of Russian conditions. His innovation reflected what was becoming a more general European preoccupation: the turn of the century was marked by modernist avant-garde groups like the fauves, the expressionists, and the futurists no less than the explosion of “elite theory” generated by thinkers like Roberto Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto. The organizational theory of Lenin was also influenced by controversies taking place within the Second International. The criticisms leveled at Eduard Bernstein and his followers during the revisionism debate were directly relevant to Lenin’s own orthodox criticisms of the Mensheviks in the organizational controversy of 1902.9
This was the context in which Lenin formulated his most radical claim. Consciousness must be brought to workers from the outside: “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness.”10 Kautsky would surely have endorsed the idea and perhaps even Eduard Bernstein. In contrast to them, however, Lenin was willing to draw the conclusions from his insight for a revolutionary politics. The party must not only inject the requisite consciousness into the proletariat from “outside” its ranks,11 but serve as the only agent of the revolutionary enterprise. It must link “empirical” with “utopian” interests, and shoulder the responsibility for “imputing” the level of revolutionary consciousness among workers in any historical circumstance in the formation of policy.12
Lenin wanted as centralized and disciplined an organization as possible. His understanding of class struggle was in terms of an almost military notion of class war. Party members should be able to fight for their positions within the organization, at least in principle, but they would have to support the “party line” in public. He envisioned the party as a pyramid composed of cells organized in a hierarchical manner: crucial decisions would be made at the top and advice would rise up from the bottom. The very reasons that led him to invent his particular organizational model also led him to subordinate the individual to the party and ignore democratic procedures.
Lenin meant to “revise” Marxism in order to deal with the political problems raised by economic underdevelopment rather than employ it as a fixed and finished system. He must surely have believed, no less than Bernstein, that his critics were the dogmatists. It was with a certain prophetic quality, however, that Trotsky criticized his future comrade’s “substitutionism”: “Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organization (the caucus) at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”13
Lenin believed he could substitute the vanguard for the working class as the agent of revolution because he believed that their interests were identical. Identifying agency and “true” consciousness with the party, however, renders the base indeterminate and turns it into little more than a “vacuum.”14 Since any class or combination of classes can ultimately serve as the foundation for the new organizational agent of revolution, the vanguard can be used for any end. There is ultimately nothing “Marxist” about it. One revolutionary goal can easily be substituted for another given a shift in the balance of class forces and party needs. Fascists and religious zealots along with representatives from any number of other viewpoints would indeed all find themselves able to employ the notion of a “vanguard” with much profit.
Lenin may have sought to make the party responsive to the masses: he even opened it to new members in moments of crisis like 1917 and 1921.15 The proletariat was also originally used as its point of reference. But the party always had the final word. Questions of institutional accountability and the dangers of democratic centralism were never given their due. The “revolutionary privilege” of the party was seen as resting on its embodiment of “true” consciousness. Any competing political organization or institution was always considered an expression of “false consciousness” by definition—no matter what its function or empirical support from the working class. Indeed, from the first, the Bolsheviks felt themselves entitled to deal with their opponents in terms of political expediency rather than from the standpoint of what was then known as “revolutionary tolerance.”
Leninism never had any room for reciprocity or universal understandings of ethics. Ethical commitment to a “categorical imperative of revolution” may have informed Lenin’s notion of the vanguard party.16 But issues of legality or illegality,17 truthfulness or lying, violence or nonviolence, were rendered contingent from the start. A difference in style, or what Leon Blum would later call “an incompatibility of feeling and morality,” separated the Bolsheviks from all other socialist movements. Their tone, their arrogance, and their invective were foreign to European socialists. They developed a distinct identity that had a profound effect on the meaning they would ascribe to socialism. Their belief in the party was exaggerated and unquestioning. The subservience of the individual to the party was based on trust in its mission, and trust was seemingly enough.
Lenin was a student of the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, and the Paris Commune. He must surely have seen how the politics of the bourgeoisie and its philosophy changed once it had gained power. But Lenin was unable to apply this insight from the past to his own situation: he saw no need for institutional checks on the party. He simply assumed it would be different with his communists because they were communists. They would not allow self-interest to undermine solidarity or bureaucracy to extinguish the prospect of Utopia. Lenin could indeed have benefited from the insight of Milovan Djilas, once a communist and later a prisoner for many years under Tito, who wrote: “In politics, more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation and in doubt of the good intentions of others.”18
The Transition and the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The Russian Revolution struck the world like a thunderbolt. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were instantly transformed from a little-known sect into world-historical actors. Euphoria gripped the masses. Betrayed by the social democrats, weary after four years of death notices and rationing, they saw the October Revolution as opening a period in which everything seemed possible. Not force alone, but the Utopian dream of an egalitarian and democratic communist society inspired the masses to those incredible sacrifices they would make in the coming years.19
As much as any other single pamphlet, Lenin’s The State and Revolution inflamed those early hopes for an end to “prehistory” and the creation of an emancipatory alternative to capitalism. In fact, this work still provides an inspiration for many “ultra-leftists” and “councilists.” At the same time, however, Lenin’s most Utopian work provides a fundamental insight into the authoritarian character of his vision. Written during the crucial period between Russia’s bourgeois and communist revolutions, its arguments did not embody the practical experience of the October Revolution, but rather presented Lenin’s general ideas on the state, beyond any immediate concern with Russian conditions.20 It forwarded the Utopian moment of workers’ democracy. Nevertheless, its immediate political purpose was different.
Lenin’s pamphlet was intended as an attack upon both his social democratic and anarchist critics. It served to distinguish the communist position and provide his followers with an explicit revolutionary standpoint. Social democrats had always maintained that the state could be used to transform a capitalist into a socialist society. Since the state can only serve the interests of the ruling class, however, Lenin argued that the attempt to employ the capitalist state to transform capitalism must prove illusory. The old state apparatus must be smashed along with the class enemy. But this should not be seen as justifying anarchism. Demanding the immediate abolition of the state as such leads anarchists to evade crucial questions concerning how to defend the revolution against its enemies and how to establish conditions for the transition to a “higher” phase of communism and a “free association of producers.” Their refusal to confront the reality of counterrevolutionary as well as revolutionary power turns anarchists into the worst kind of Utopians. Thus, whatever their differences with the social democrats, anarchist views on the “withering away of the state” supposedly left them just as politically misguided.21
The historical context in which the pamphlet was written is crucial. Lenin was, at the time, departing from the legal path to power under Kerensky’s provisional government and beginning the illegal struggle to make the revolution “permanent.”22 It was already clear that the seizure of power would demand a military defense of the revolution against its enemies. This alone seemed to justify the need for a highly disciplined and centralized workers’ state. Hardly anyone before had seriously dealt with the problems of the transition, however, or been willing to consider whether the traditional form of state was adequate for the inevitable struggle against the equally inevitable reaction. Lenin was the first to link the question of the transition with an organizational response to the prospect of counterrevolution.
The State and Revolution breathed new life into the idea of the Paris Commune, which, essentially from its collapse to the events of October 1917, existed merely as a symbol without any real referent in the theoretical or practical debates among socialists. Lenin’s call for a direct attack on the state, no less than discussion about its “withering away,” existed only at the boundaries of socialist discourse in the Second International. There was both drama and daring in Lenin’s contention that the socialist revolution will consist “not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine.”23
Marx originally envisioned the transition as taking place under conditions of abundance. The new proletarian regime would extend democracy and, in so doing, attack the privileged classes. It would also institute a new set of humanized production relations, no longer constrained by the imperatives of capital accumulation, and create the foundations for a “leap into the realm of freedom.” A centralized socialist state would thus simultaneously defend the revolution and facilitate the emergence of a communist society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Lenin’s ideas were the same in the abstract. But the attempt to realize them without a mass-based labor movement and under conditions of economic underdevelopment would give them a very different substantive meaning. Russian backwardness made it incumbent upon the “new” state machine to accumulate capital under numerous constraints imposed by the counterrevolution even as it simultaneously sought to introduce a new set of production relations. Thus, from the very start, a set of mutually exclusive undertakings defined the Bolshevik project.
The need for accumulation would supplant the hope of Utopia. Justifying this demanded the redefinition of both the transition and the “leap into the realm of freedom.” The former would involve substituting rule by the vanguard for the extension of democracy,24 while the latter would involve equating modernization with socialism.25 Understanding the communist experiment is indeed impossible without a sense of the political meaning behind this redefinition. In virtual despair, while preoccupied with securing an improvement in agriculture and raising productivity, Lenin spoke about the need to maintain an apparatus of compulsion and identified “Communism as Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”26 The Soviet Union would have to employ the same values of production as its capitalist adversary and, without the constraints imposed by institutional accountability, reduce individuals to a “factor of production” in a more radical fashion. Bolshevik control over the “commanding heights” of the economy appeared necessary to ensure what Preobrazhensky first termed “primitive socialist accumulation.” Indeed, before long, the revolutionary vanguard would find itself transformed into the custodian of a rigid bureaucratic order fearful of libertarian innovations.27
The Russian Revolution was not the outcome of a fully developed capitalism. It lacked not merely a proletariat, but also an indigenous bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks were left shouldering the burden of modernization. This was the precisely why orthodox Marxists believed that the communist seizure of power was premature and why they thought that it would result in the sacrifice of democracy. Gramsci indeed admitted what everyone knew when he, a supporter of Lenin, stated that the events of October 1917 constituted a “revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.”28
But the critics evaded the question of “what is to be done?” It became a matter of embracing the activist or the structural strain within Marxism. Lenin’s voluntarism may have reflected the underdevelopment of imperial Russia. But there was little with which to confront “objective” conditions other than the communist vanguard. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” had, in this vein, always been considered an unfortunate necessity. The State and Revolution turned it into a virtue: belief in the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would now define the “true” Marxist. But, under the communist state, perhaps there was still a chance to modernize the country and also create the conditions for its own disappearance.29 Thus, Lenin could write that it is only:
from the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism—from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the ‘state’ which consists of the armed workers, and which is ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.30
The call for a state “which is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word” raised the image of the Paris Commune. But, in contrast to Marx, Lenin did not see this experimental order as the transition to one that would institutionalize democratic procedures. That would have meant returning to republican institutions and, obviously, subverting the primacy of the party. Lenin was left with a yawning chasm separating the ideal of a new commune from the reality of an increasingly authoritarian and poverty-stricken nation. He recognized the problem and so refused to provide an ironclad promise for the realization of the future communist society in his most Utopian work.31 Neither in theory nor praxis was he able to bridge the chasm. Where implementing the ideal would have meant destroying the revolutionary state, crushing the counterrevolution and simply transforming underdeveloped material conditions meant deferring the dream. The State and Revolution thus provides an excellent example of how the limits within even the most Utopian theory are conditioned by the constraints on political action in a specific historical context.
Mitigating the ever-deepening contradiction between ideal and reality would have demanded an event whose realization stood outside the control of Lenin and the Bolsheviks: revolution in the West. Successful revolutions in the economically advanced nations would have curtailed the intervention of those previously warring allies in support of the “White” counterrevolution. They would also have provided military and technological support for the devastated USSR and lessened the burden of underdevelopment. Banking on the possibility of international revolution was not outlandish. Disgust with World War I had, since 1916, sparked working-class revolts in much of Europe. Everywhere it was possible to hear the call for “soviets” or “councils” that would abolish the need for a state “in the proper sense of the word.” Many social democrats and even anarchists initially aligned themselves with Lenin. The principled Menshevik leader, Julius Martov, recognized that the revolution was “sick.” But he also recognized that the Bolsheviks had significant support among the proletariat and that the alternative to them might prove even more distasteful.32 His position was indeed not very different from the unfairly forgotten anarchist poet, Erich Miihsam, who grasped the spirit of the times when he wrote:
The revolutionary activists of the whole world placed themselves on the side of the Russian Revolution. In Russia itself, the divisions between the various revolutionary tendencies had not yet reached fruition. A coalition of Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries ruled from January until March 1919. The anarchists fought under Makhno in common with the Red Army against the white generals of the counterrevolution. Especially abroad, in fact, the unity of all revolutionaries and the defense of the revolution assumed a near holy status. Only after the Bolsheviks succeeded in assuming power for themselves, after they began to persecute their previous allies, did it become possible even abroad to differentiate between the Revolution and the Bolshevik-Communist Party.33
The State and Revolution provided the regime with a symbol of radical democracy and, even under Stalin, the soviets were never formally abolished. Trotsky had argued that the soviets provided a practical revolutionary function insofar as they would “give unity to the revolutionary struggle.”34 But there was a sense in which Lenin always distrusted these organs of democratic rule. He did not, for example, understand their importance in 1905. But it was also reasonable for him to admire the idea that political representatives be paid the same as workers, that instant recall should reign, that “the cook” should have a chance at running the state, and that a new form of governance should combine legislative, executive, and judicial functions. He also learned from experience. Lenin quickly grasped the role soviets might play in undermining the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.35 This self-appointed regime lacked the confidence of the workers and the peasants, remained committed to continuing the war, and accepted support from what would become important elements of the counterrevolution. Its overthrow appeared ever more necessary as Russia moved closer to chaos.36 Thus, Lenin allied himself with the insurgent revolutionary masses under the general slogan, All Power to the Soviets!
The alliance was purely tactical. But, then, things were less clear during the revolutionary upsurge that swept imperial Russia than they may now appear. The strength and even the political complexion of the “soviet” movement was open to debate.37 The support given by urban soviets to the Bolsheviks and other socialist parties did not extend to the countryside. It was also highly questionable whether the soviets had the unity, the resolve, or the administrative capacity to carry through a civil war let alone forward a viable program for the transition.
This may provide the historical reason for a crucial omission in The State and Revolution. Lenin never did provide an analysis of the structural role of the soviet either in terms of its relation to the party or how it might adjudicate conflicting interests within a fragmented society. As surely as he divorced the vanguard party from the proletariat it claimed to represent, so did he separate the soviet from its function in the political order. This type of institutional indeterminacy, however, marks Lenin’s entire theory of the state. It always ignored fundamental differences in governance in favor of formal class definitions of the state. Thus, he could write:
The dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from the ‘classless society’, from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.38
Lenin seemed unaware that the form of government possesses its own dynamic. He was content to equate “government” with “state” and, as a consequence, this most “political” Marxist had virtually nothing to say about institutional politics. The reason is clear: the only way of privileging his authoritarian dictatorship of the proletariat was by arguing that in essence, whether democratic or authoritarian, every bourgeois state is the same “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” His shift of slogans from “All Power to the Soviets” to “The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power” was thus consistent.39 The difference between a decentralized democratic and a centralized authoritarian regime is merely a matter of expediency: the only salient question is which can best repress the forces of reaction and express the “true” needs of the working class.40 And, from Lenin’s perspective, that is something only the vanguard can decide. The “new machine” will be socialist only insofar as it supports interests favorable to the most advanced sector of the proletarian movement: the Bolshevik Party.
The Wretched of the Earth
Leninism never had much appeal for workers in advanced industrial societies. But that was not the case for the oppressed living under colonial rule. The great transformation of the twentieth century was undoubtedly the liberation of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Though some movements of national self-determination were inspired by religion, and others by charismatic personalities, most were profoundly influenced by Leninism in the theory they employed no less than the practice in which they engaged. Its countless believers were not mere dupes any more than their movements were simply pawns for the USSR. There were indeed legitimate reasons for the appeal of Leninism among the most wretched of the earth.
Perhaps the Russian Revolution did not bring about the victory of international socialism, but it was still the first national revolution of the modern age. It had taken place in an economically backward nation and its vanguard provided an illustration of how to sustain an insurgent movement under harsh political conditions. Leninism offered the prospect of a national front composed of various classes and dominated by the revolutionary organization. Its willingness to place “politics in command” also obviously had tremendous appeal in areas lacking an indigenous bourgeoisie and where national land reform would prove necessary. The modernizing success of the USSR—if not the bloodshed—would serve as an inspiration.
But there was something else: imperialism and the plight of the colonized had been relatively neglected.41 Lenin brought both into the socialist limelight in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. The pamphlet filled a vacuum. Marx had subordinated the notion to capitalism and he was unsentimental about the way in which it would break down the “Chinese walls of tradition” and transform precapitalist nations. Revisionists were often supporters of imperialism while the analytic skills of Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg did not compensate for their inability to provide political advice to those fighting colonial rule. Lenin’s brochure may have been marred by various empirical errors, and it never envisioned the possibility of what might be termed “socialist imperialism.” Nevertheless, it provided what other works lacked: a political understanding of imperialism and a practical response to its continuation.
Imperialism is Lenin’s finest theoretical effort. Written during World War I, its explanatory power reaches beyond that event. It ties together his ideas on revolution, the party, nationalism, and internationalism. It also marks his most original contribution and his break with orthodoxy. The pamphlet draws on the work of John A. Hobson, Rudolf Hilferding, and Nikolai Bukharin. In fusing their insights with his own, however, Lenin created something genuinely new. With this work, indeed, it became possible to speak about “Marxism-Leninism.”
Hobson was a liberal and a socialist, and also the teacher of John Maynard Keynes. He had argued in his influential study of 1902 that the “economic taproot” of imperialism derived from those “selfish” sectors of capital that greedily sought to export their surplus—no matter what the consequences for the nation as a whole.42 “Parasitical” in character, these interests threatened the “common good” through the militarist and ultra-chauvinist tendencies they strengthened as well as through the negligible benefits that would accrue to the nation from pursuing an imperialist course. Nevertheless, through state action, electoral activity, and heightened awareness, Hobson believed that such parasitical interests could be controlled.
Lenin appropriated the notion that imperialism rests on the attempt to export an overproduced surplus and the ensuing exploitative relation that arises between an economically advanced nation and its colonies. In contrast to Hobson, however, Lenin rejected the idea that this or that particular capitalist interest was “parasitical.” Instead, the capitalist system itself was seen as being defined by seemingly irrational imperialist policies.
Lenin considered imperialism a necessary imperative that had arisen as a consequence of changes in the organizational structure of capitalism itself. In making this claim, he profited from the work of the great Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding,43 who argued in 1911 that the banks and “finance capital” had gained hegemony over other capitalist sectors of the economy.44 This had made it possible to regulate markets through state intervention, secure investment outlets, and the exercise of financial leverage. Hilferding believed, in fact, that the state might mitigate conflicts between capital and labor to the point where this new form of “organized capitalism” could conceivably continue forever. Thus, he challenged the idea of an inevitable capitalist collapse from within the tradition of orthodox Marxism.
Building on Hilferding, while critical of his reformism, Lenin suggested that the predominance of finance capital and its fusion with a new interventionist state had resulted in a “higher” and final stage of capitalism. A new linkage is seen as existing between imperialism, militarism, and capitalism. Monopolies now increasingly compete over markets and heighten what Lenin termed “unequal development.”45 The result is a twofold contradiction in which the advanced nations compete with one another over colonies even as tensions emerge between each and its subject peoples. By engaging in imperialist policies and rationalizing exploitation more efficiently, however, these economically advanced nations can quell domestic class conflict. Imperialism allows them to collect “superprofits” and, with the “crumbs” of these profits, buy off their own proletariat with social programs and various forms of state assistance. Thus, according to Lenin, imperialism generates a “labor aristocracy” in the advanced nations whose interests are inimical to those of the masses languishing under colonial exploitation.
In this vein, according to Bukharin, it no longer makes sense to speak about international solidarity in traditional terms. The world is witnessing a split between the “haves” and the “have-nots” along East-West lines.46 Organized capitalism has produced a “fusion” between the administrative, the economic, and the political functions of bourgeois society resulting in a type of “national trust.” Neither Bukharin nor Lenin ever meant to imply that revolution was impossible or unnecessary in the West. But it was a question of where to look and Lenin believed that the best possibility was a revolution at the point of intersection, so to speak, between the haves and the have-nots—or, using a phrase his pamphlet would make famous, at the “weakest link in the chain.” His work indeed suggested that revolution would spread from East to West and that is precisely what occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Imperialism showed why capitalist nations were driven to challenge each other for markets. It exposed the hidden source of the militarism and chauvinism that had set nation against nation. It clarified why Italy, still economically underdeveloped, should have been late in entering the war and why a rapidly industrializing Germany should have followed an especially bellicose policy in the years leading up to the war.47 It also provided an explanation in Marxist terms of what at the time seemed almost incomprehensible: the “great betrayal” of European social democracy and its Marxist leaders. Above all, however, Lenin offered reasons why the revolution did not take place in any of the advanced Western nations as Marx himself predicted and why it occurred—and could occur again—in the poorest parts of the globe.
The problems with Imperialism have been endlessly documented. Its idea of a “labor aristocracy” thesis was empirically flawed: critics argued that workers in imperialist states were not always better off and skilled workers in Germany were, for example, often the most radical in their views.48 The pamphlet cannot explain why the bulk of world trade is still carried on among the advanced nations and, in fact, not every economically advanced nation has engaged in imperialist policies. Imperialism is reduced to an economic reflex of capitalism and the contingent character of foreign policy is essentially ignored.49 Thus, Imperialism manifests many of the same inadequacies as The State and Revolution.
But these criticisms had little relevance for what would become the anti-imperialist struggles for national self-determination. Most recognized that the proletariat was still far better off than the colonized and enough Western workers now recognized that they had been misled by the imperialist ambitions of their governments and that they had received little in exchange for their acceptance of a “class truce.” What the concept of a “labor aristocracy” lacked in theoretical rigor, in short, it retained in practical salience. Lenin’s theory seemingly justified his split with the Second International. It was also evident that the revolutionary winds had changed direction: they were now indeed blowing from East to West.
Imperialism fit perfectly with the views Lenin had already articulated prior to the war on the right to “national self-determination.” He had always maintained that revolution in an economically backward nation required the proletariat to ally itself with the bourgeoisie and other classes. Concerted action demanded a unifying ideology and in this way, according to Lenin, supporting the right to national self-determination was a prerequisite for success in the first, or anti-imperialist phase, of the revolution. It is certainly true that repression of nationalist movements by the czars had created enormous discontent, and support for the Russian Revolution was in large measure dependent upon them. At the same time, however, Lenin only wished to render “negative support” to nationalist movements since “beyond that begins the ‘positive’ activity of the bourgeoisie striving to fortify nationalism.”50 Thus, the need for a vanguard party capable of engaging in coalition politics and shifting its “line” without ever sacrificing its unique class interests or its commitment to the next socialist stage of the revolution.
Lenin believed in general equality among national cultures within a nation-state and general equality among socialist nation-states within the Communist International when it was formed in 1919. But he also assumed that minorities would see their economic interests in amalgamating into larger national units and remaining part of a socialist nation.51 He even suggested that minorities learn the dominant language of their particular area for the same reason. Lenin could subsequently state that any minority had the political right to secede from a nation even as he maintained that this right would not necessarily be exercised. He always underscored his belief that nationalism is not an end unto itself.52
Proclaiming national self-determination as a transcendent right, however, conflicted with the impossibility of granting it once nations made the decision to secede from the nascent Soviet Union.53 Or, putting it another way, the USSR found itself in the position of extending this right only to those nations it did not control and only nominally to its own minorities. Taking this logic a step further, the cardinal problem of Lenin’s entire theory emerges: the horrible repression of nationalist aspirations in the Ukraine and Georgia,54 and elsewhere, becomes legitimate in principle because imperialism under socialism is impossible by definition.
Lenin still maintained that the proletariat should play a leading role in the anti-imperialist struggle and that the ultimate liberation of the colonies depended upon revolution in the Western nations. This stance led him to break with his former Indian protégé Manabandra Roy who, anticipating Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh, wished to highlight the independent role of the peasantry rather than simply subordinate its interests to those of other classes.55 Lenin called upon his vanguard initially to offer support for “progressive” bourgeois democratic revolutions in preparation for a communist seizure of power. As against Stalin, who truly had no coherent policy for the underdeveloped world, Lenin sought to link the bourgeois struggle against imperialism with the proletarian struggle against capitalism.
He had argued that the Soviet Union should initially present itself as the supportive ally of all bourgeois-national-democratic revolutions. Only when the vanguard of the proletariat and peasantry actually seized power should it become the model for rapid industrial development along a non-capitalist path.56 Nothing more than trust in the party, however, prevents negative from turning into positive support for the national revolution. Then, too, the rise of various neutralist states with very different ideological concerns would undermine the connection between anti-imperialism and anticapitalism—between serving as an ally and serving as a model—that Lenin had presupposed. The two stages of the same revolutionary process would, soon enough, turn into mutually exclusive strategic alternatives.57
Officially, of course, the Soviet Union continued to offer itself as a model for “progressive” movements in the colonial world. But its willingness to ally with what were often reactionary military or religious regimes implied the need for retreat from the revolutionary goals of the past. “Counterimperialism” rather than “anticapitalism” subsequently became its overriding concern during the cold war. This did not necessarily preclude support for genuinely progressive movements and states in the former colonial world. Nevertheless, in keeping with changing national interests, the USSR arbitrarily designated as progressive any regime that claimed to oppose the Western “imperialist” enemy.
Historical developments would shatter what remained of the original theory. Globalization has nothing in common with Lenin’s understanding of imperialism and the explosion of sovereign states in the former colonized territories invalidates his views of the struggle against it. Resistance can no longer rely on “national self-determination.” Human rights will instead play an expanded role in contesting the arbitrary exercise of power. Dealing with transnational issues like immigration and the environment no less than poverty and the arrogance of global capital requires international parties, unions, and interests working within strengthened international institutions like the United Nations. A new cosmopolitan ideology might yet retrieve the commitment to social justice and democracy betrayed by so many nationalist movements of the past. In any event, however, the next progressive attempts to coordinate the interests of the wretched and exploited will have little in common with Leninism or the interpretive changes it suffered at the hands of its successors.
Guardians of the Revolution
In 1918, however, things were different. The Bolsheviks could look back proudly at what they had accomplished. All along, they were the ones who had dared. In the prewar years, they had suffered innumerable humiliations. Before the war, as a minority, they had split Russian social democracy over the need to organize around a speculative belief in the coming revolution. When World War I broke out, against the tide of popular opinion, the Bolsheviks rejected the policies of the Western “labor aristocracy.” Lenin stood by his principles and, refusing even to compromise with the “social pacifists” who now opposed the conflict, he alone called upon the international proletariat to turn the war between nations into an international class war. Then, in October 1917, the Bolsheviks became the driving force for the first proletarian revolution in world history. The others had talked; they had acted. Now, in 1918, the capitalist powers were ready to wage an offensive, and Lenin’s “communists” were faced with yet another challenge: defend the revolution that they had introduced.
World War I had caused enormous devastation, and it was still not over when the February Revolution of 1917 brought a democratic provisional government into existence. Its leaders did not wish to offend crucial Western economic interests. They hoped to maintain political support from reactionary segments of Russian society. They worried about the loss of Russian prestige in international affairs and they sought to preserve their honor. The new regime led by Alexander Kerensky, for all these reasons, stubbornly committed itself to continuing the war effort even as it lacked solid backing from its own citizens. As the war took its toll, the imperial army crumbled and the national administration fell into disarray. Workers spontaneously began to socialize their factories while, in keeping with Lenin’s slogan of “Land, Bread, and Peace!” peasants started to divide the old estates among themselves. Production came to a virtual standstill, anarchy ruled in the countryside, and the ruble collapsed. This indeed framed the context in which the Bolsheviks took power.
They too were split over how to handle the war issue. Some like Bukharin wished to continue the war in order to foster revolution in the West, whereas others feared the domestic economic consequences of withdrawal. Lenin favored unconditional peace. But the party majority chose to disregard his arguments and instead backed Trotsky’s position of “neither war nor peace.” That policy, however, turned into a disaster. As negotiations continued at Brest-Litovsk, the German army penetrated ever further into the Soviet Union. There was little time to spare when the Central Committee reversed itself and endorsed Lenin’s line. By then, conditions for peace had grown stiffer and enormous chunks of territory appeared to have been lost.58
But the Bolsheviks had garnered support from the most active proletarian elements of the population and passive support from segments of other classes like the peasantry. No other force could possibly have reestablished stability by pulling Russia out of World War I and saving the country from an antidemocratic counterrevolution whose ferocity would become so notorious that it actually aided the “Reds” during the Civil War.59 In 1917, putting the matter bluntly, the choice was not between a robust republic and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was rather between an unrepresentative and ineffectual bourgeois democracy, which was clearly leading the country into chaos, or some form of authoritarian order. The question was merely whether that order would be White or Red.
The provisional government was plagued by dissension from the start, beyond the disruptions caused by the Bolsheviks, and its other major national parties were in disarray. No liberal party had serious support from below and none of the radical parties would have been willing to cancel the enormous foreign debts the imperial regime had amassed.60 But there were other issues as well. The Social Revolutionary Party was paralyzed over continuing the war effort and it quickly split. Its small “left” faction retained a revolutionary democratic program, though it lacked a genuine mass base, while its large “right” faction had a strong base in the peasantry, but lacked a coherent political program. It was indeed the inability of the Left Social Revolutionaries to harness the discontent of the peasantry that led them into their short-lived coalition with the Bolsheviks. As for the Mensheviks, the traditional enemies of Lenin, their support for the war and the provisional government left them with only a narrow base of support among the proletariat. The soviets were, moreover, obviously disorganized and they lacked a plan for either waging the civil war or reconstructing the economy on a national basis. Thus, the Bolsheviks emerged as the only political force on the left capable of linking the interests of workers and peasants and formulating radical policies for dealing with a nation still enmeshed in war and threatened with counterrevolution.
Lenin’s abolition of the provisional government could have been justified either through channeling power to more radical institutions like the soviets or by calling for new elections to a new and more representative Constituent Assembly. With the soviets generally seen as defining the new regime and a civil war looming on the horizon, however, he believed there was no going back to a republic. But the soviets would never rule Russia. Though workers organized from below in 1918 to secure control over the shop floor, and money was effectively abolished, this had as much to do with the collapse of the ruble as ideological commitments. With the onset of the civil war, “Green” anarchist bands, under the leadership of Makhno, reigned over parts of Russia and dealt with the Reds and the Whites as circumstances dictated. Internal sabotage and assassinations grew more frequent. Administrative and economic disintegration continued. The Whites, meanwhile, began receiving economic and military support from those previously warring Western states whose elites now realized that they had something in common: a desire to end the communist experiment.61
“Those who are not for us are against us” became the rallying cry. It was when the war broke out in 1918 that support for the Bolsheviks and support for the Russian Revolution became identical in the eyes of the world.62 As Trotsky traversed the Soviet Union, indefatigably organizing and directing the nascent Red Army, a ferocious civil war raged whose outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion. With the country isolated within the international community, facing economic collapse and internal revolts, it was no wonder that the Bolsheviks should have become obsessed with unity, discipline, economic efficiency, and the administrative centralization of power. In this way, revolutionary euphoria at the level of the soviets combined with the party’s policy of “war communism” to create the parallel construction of a new society—from the bottom up and from the top down.
Amid sabotage and starvation in the cities, armed detachments of Bolsheviks seized food from the peasants and attempts were made to collectivize the countryside. But this only led to a further decline in agricultural production, especially given the allied blockade and the skills of the peasants at avoiding requisitioning. Rationing soon became necessary along with the manifest need to rebuild Russia’s shattered transportation and communication systems. Thus, a centrally controlled “militarization of labor” was instituted that conflicted with the soviets’ desire for decentralized democracy.
Contradictions between ends and means, which had already been intimated in The State and Revolution, became apparent as the “heroic period” of the Russian Revolution drew to a close. The years from 1918 to 1921 were marked by experimental social policies. These involved everything from introducing abortion rights and divorce to attacking anti-Semitism, fostering avant-garde culture, and transforming everyday life. Nevertheless, underpinning these developments was a draconian economic and political policy that, most agreed, would have to give way before a new approach.
The Bolshevik triumph in the civil war seemed to mitigate the need for “war communism” and its harshest authoritarian controls. The trade unions demanded democracy, an end to the militarization of labor, and the protection of workers from further austerity measures. As peasant revolts spread throughout the countryside to protest the first experiments with collectivization and forced requisitions,63 moreover, nostalgia arose for the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Opposed to both the Constituent Assembly and the Bolsheviks, harking back to 1905, radical proponents of the soviets sought to extend democracy through a new commitment to decentralized shop-floor control rather than to a general program of “workers’ control.”64 The cry grew for “soviets without Bolsheviks” that would culminate in the Kronstadt rising of 1921 and its ruthless suppression under the stewardship of Trotsky.65 Indeed, Richard Pipes was basically correct in labeling this year as the “false Thermidor.”66
Just when a decisive reaction against the Bolsheviks was taking shape, interestingly enough, Stalin began his rise to genuine eminence within the party.67 The specter of counterrevolution and economic despair still lingered. The communists naturally feared the political demands of the Kronstadt sailors more than any economic demands. And so, following the insurrection, economic changes were made to assuage the peasants and the workers. Though Lenin and the Bolsheviks surely remembered that the demand for economic capitalist rights had helped undo Robespierre and usher in the Thermidor, war communism was scrapped soon after the Bolshevik victory at Kronstadt in favor of the New Economic Program (NEP) of 1921. This program introduced the “second period” of the revolution (1921–28).
It was time for a “breathing spell” both at home and abroad. Lenin elaborated this belief in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which called upon the newly founded Communist International to oppose revolutionary adventurism and instead concentrate upon building unions and mass parties throughout Europe. He also admitted that the NEP involved a revolutionary retreat. Money was reintroduced and a system for taxing agricultural production was instituted. In the countryside, forced requisitioning and collectivization came to an end as peasants were allowed to sell their surplus on the open market. At the same time, the Bolsheviks took control over the “commanding heights” of the economy, emasculated the soviets, ended the militarization of labor, and began to industrialize in a slow regulated fashion. Thus, in exchange for political control, the party was willing to risk the return of capitalism and, in exchange for future modernization that would benefit workers, it granted peasants the right to earn profits from which the state could garner income through taxes.
NEP was a compromise fashioned by the party to placate the divergent concerns of classes with conflicting interests. But bureaucracy blossomed as middlemen (“NEP-men”) profited from the market atmosphere while class distinctions grew in the countryside. Even worse, a “price scissors” loomed. As increased farm production led to lower prices for agricultural products, minimal gains in manufacturing exacerbated demand and generated high prices for industrial commodities. Though the poor crop of 1924 temporarily solved the crisis, the price scissors foreshadowed future peasant discontent.68 In that same year, Lenin died at the age of fifty-four.
While despairing over the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic degeneration, and the power Stalin was amassing, a stroke had already left him incapacitated in 1922. By then, all forces hostile to the Bolsheviks had been vanquished. But the civil war had left the party decimated and, more ominously, previously extra-party forms of opposition had begun to express their interests from within the party itself. That was why Lenin decided to institute a “temporary” ban on factions. The need for discipline had seemingly become more pronounced just as it appeared necessary to open the gates of the party and admit untutored and unskilled “workers from the bench.” This situation gave new importance to the position of General Secretary occupied by the still relatively unknown party bureaucrat: Josef Stalin.69
The Civil War created the foundations for what would follow. Originally, the Bolshevik obsession with political hegemony had derived from an almost frantic attempt to create power out of a vacuum. Lenin and his followers believed that the country was beset by a host of conflicting interests unable to grasp the general will or establish any revolutionary authority capable of enforcing effective rules for conflict resolution.70 Its quest for order and centralized authority, however, left the communist leadership directly pitted against what would become an array of competing forces: the Kerensky government and those who desired a constituent assembly, the soviets, other socialist parties, the trade unions, and ultimately even internal party dissidents. But, while the Bolsheviks were shutting down all the institutional structures wherein such conflicting “factional” interests might be expressed, the divergent concerns and interests of extra-party groups did not just disappear. They simply shifted from one political arena to the other: from the provisional government to the soviets, from the soviets to the trade unions and peasant associations, and finally, once other competing institutions had been eliminated, from these organizations to the Communist Party itself.
With the failure to realize the promises of a bourgeois revolution, as Rosa Luxemburg anticipated,71 authoritarianism fed upon itself and the public realm became ever more circumscribed. The responses by the Bolsheviks to these countervailing forces did not merely constitute a set of discrete, instrumental decisions. Revolution and counterrevolution created a situation in which one repressive act quickly became a precedent for the next. A political dynamic took shape, justified by the needs of the party, that gave credence to Max Weber’s famous statement that ideology is not like “a cab, which one can have stopped at one’s pleasure: it is all or nothing.”72
The vanguard party tried to stand above the interests of particular classes and groups. But what was possible for a party leading a revolution became impossible for a party leading a state. It quickly became apparent that the new order had not solved the problem of class conflict. Lenin even admitted as much when he put forward the polemical question: “If the ram and the goat fall out, must the lynx of counterrevolution be allowed to devour them both?”
The vanguard identified its interests with those of the proletariat and the socialist state. But, from the very first, a question lingered. Was this state really either proletarian or socialist? Lenin himself had admitted that the Soviet Union was a “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” Attempting to identify socialism with modernization, and the nationalization of industrial concerns, he stated openly that the nascent Soviet Union would be lucky if it entered the stage of “state capitalism” in the near future.73 Was the party building capitalism or building socialism?
The best for which the party and the revolutionary masses could hope was the elimination of precapitalist conditions under a state they believed was ultimately preparing for a future leap into the socialist realm of freedom. Each step towards modernization would have to be presented as a step towards socialism and any competing claim as a threat to both the national interest and the revolutionary project. Ethics was thereby thrown into the battle and made subservient to the cause. Even before Stalin, morality had been subordinated to the class struggle: moral was seen as what serves the interest of the party and immoral as what hinders it. In keeping with Trotsky and others, against the eternal and universal catechisms of morality, Lenin consistently maintained that “communist morality amounts to the struggle for the confirmation of proletarian dictatorship.”74
Teleology imbued the party and its dictatorship with a historical “privilege” over all other parties and states. Allegiance on the part of the membership was unconditional: the party retained the “truth” of the historical process or, as Brecht wrote in The Measures Taken, “the party has a thousand eyes, we have only two.” With the legitimacy of the party resting on faith in the inevitable triumph of socialism in the USSR, a myth of infallibility was gradually woven around its leadership and the choices it made.75
“Necessity” was increasingly used to justify every mistake and every retreat. But the refusal of Lenin to countenance checks on the party and its dictatorship, his support for the invasion of Poland, his overestimation of revolutionary sentiment in Europe during the heroic years, were not all matters of historical necessity. It was the same with his initial advancement of Stalin and his general faults in matters of personnel. Lenin was blind to the institutional consequences of policy choices like his “temporary” reliance on terror or his ban on factions. Until the very end, in fact, he never realized what Max Weber knew: every organization tends to become bureaucratic and every bureaucracy seeks to grow even at the expense of those whose interests it claims to represent. Only through the use of myth was it possible to evade the consequences of these insights. Indeed, only through such a “myth” could Lenin’s followers justify their power and present the Soviet Union as what it clearly was not: a socialist workers’ state.
Into the Darkness
Lenin had named and criticized, albeit some more forcefully than others, a number of possible successors in his famous “Last Testament”: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Georgi Pyatakov, Lev Kamenev, and Josef Stalin. The first, the logical candidate to inherit Lenin’s mantle, would be tried in absentia and later murdered in Mexico by an agent of the Comintern: the others would all be judicially liquidated by the last, and least famous, of the group. None of the rivals to Stalin fashioned a program capable of dealing with the new situation following the death of Lenin: the failure of the international revolution, the changed role of the party, and the requirements of industrialization. Stalin himself would vacillate on all these issues and this served him well. More was involved, however, than the failure of the other contenders to formulate an insight into “necessity” or grasp “objective conditions.”76 Their political miscalculations and inadequate skills at political infighting, no less than their commitment to democratic centralism, were just as important in their defeat.
Stalin’s “revolution from above” resolved various issues begged by the Bolshevik conquest of power and the isolation of the Soviet Union following the failed uprisings in the West. It identified internationalism with support for the slogan of “socialism in one country.” It transformed a revolutionary into a bureaucratic party to meet the needs of “socialist” construction in a nonrevolutionary age. It confronted the economic backwardness of the USSR by combining rapid industrialization with forced collectivization of the peasantry. It, finally, answered questions regarding the duration of the dictatorship, and justified the reliance on terror, with the self-serving claim that class struggle would inevitably sharpen during the construction of socialism.
How was all this accomplished?77 Stalin’s rise in the party had been unspectacular, but steady. Born in the province of Georgia in 1879, he had served as a bank robber, guerilla, functionary, and party leader. Considered an expert on the question of nationalities,78 he had caught the eye of Lenin who raised him to the Central Committee. There he stayed in the background and built a network of contacts. Using his new position of General Secretary, Stalin slowly began to appoint his protégés to administrative vacancies caused by the civil war. Cautious and duplicitous, he became a power broker par excellence. After building his foundation at the base, Stalin was soon enough in the position to seek support from prestigious Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Zinoviev in what would become his momentous battle against Leon Trotsky.
Indeed, whatever his enormous visibility, Trotsky had become vulnerable. Though most clearly identified as Lenin’s partner and heir, he had only joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, and many still remembered his bitter conflicts with Lenin from 1902. Party functionaries and leaders alike feared the former leader of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, organizer of the assault on the Winter Palace in 1917, architect of the Red Army, and conqueror of Kronstadt. They distrusted this profoundly Western intellectual who was as comfortable writing literary criticism, or history, or political theory, as negotiating the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
As arrogant as he was brilliant, Trotsky’s popular appeal and worldwide fame actually worked against him in party circles.79 By virtue of his position and personality, unlike Stalin, Trotsky ultimately found himself forced to take a stand on every issue. As time went by, any sense of nuance vanished, and he became identified with an uncompromisingly radical foreign policy along with a rigid antipeasant and proindustrialization line. It also did not take much, especially with the help of Stalin and his friends, for party officials to think that in Trotsky it detected the specter of “bonapartism.” Thus, the myth of “Trotskyism” emerged.80
Trotsky’s ambitious and incompetent opponents like Kamenev and Zinoviev lacked any coherent vision for the future of the Soviet Union. Beyond their personal dislike of him, however, they feared that Trotsky would upset the delicate compromise between classes that had emerged from NEP. Stalin played on those fears even as he refused to take a definitive stand. And so, while joining the attacks on Trotsky, he shrewdly undermined Kamenev and Zinoviev in order to pursue a new alliance with the leading Bolshevik economist and theorist of NEP: Nikolai Bukharin. His support came from the peasantry and, anticipating the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Bukharin wished to continue NEP in order to steer a course towards market socialism.81 He also sought a more moderate foreign policy. These three concerns along with his personal ambitions led Bukharin to ally himself with Stalin rather than Trotsky.
It was already too late when Zinoviev and Kamenev attempted to reconcile with Trotsky in a futile attempt to oppose the general secretary and his new supporter. After the dust had settled, the “Left Opposition” was squashed. Once Trotsky had been deposed as a potential rival, however, Stalin quickly turned against Bukharin. The general secretary appropriated Trotsky’s earlier calls for rapid industrialization and, assuring himself a built-in scapegoat for the future, readmitted his great enemy’s supporters to the party. Thus, “Stalinism” began with a dramatic left turn in 1928 that brought the second period of the revolution to an end.
Jealousies and intrigues may have marked the struggle to succeed Lenin. But political controversies were carried on within a fundamental framework of political agreement. No major figure questioned the primary of the party and democracy only became an issue when a particular faction found itself out of power. They all identified morality with the interests of the party and thereby, once Stalin took over, lacked any independent moral foundation for further resistance.82 All of them also wished to avoid a potentially explosive confrontation with the peasantry and all believed that industrialization constituted the prerequisite for socialism. Every claimant to the throne of Lenin understood that the revolutions in the West had been lost—at least temporarily—and that the Soviet Union was threatened with encirclement. Indeed, whatever their particular disagreements over foreign policy, all of them also endorsed the “revolutionary privilege” of the USSR.
All this has led many commentators to conclude that the development of the Soviet Union would have been fundamentally the same even if Stalin’s enemies had gained control.83 Just as the ultraleft is unable to distinguish alternatives for capitalism, however, its enemies have ignored the alternative possibilities that existed within communism. More was involved during the second period than simply a choice between the principal actors: Bukharin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Each brought with him a coterie and, when considering the policies of the victor, it is often forgotten that Stalin’s lieutenants had as much, if not more, to gain from the elimination of the opposition as he did. Each also had divergent opinions about whether priority should be given to the needs of the proletariat, the needs of the peasantry, or a compromise between classes. A genuine choice existed between different styles of leadership with different aims and, ultimately, different policies.84
The party alone was capable of making such a decision and herein lies the principle responsibility of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for what followed. The outcome would have been authoritarian even if Stalin had been defeated. All members viewed the party as sovereign. But there were different understandings of what this implied.85 Trotsky and Bukharin both supported its early “temporary” terror of 1919 and the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors. Neither of them ever seriously considered the need for a permanent regime of terror, however, let alone one that would make the party subordinate to the secret police.86 Their understanding of the party was similar to that of Lenin. Their disputes, no matter how vitriolic, were still carried on along political lines. Under Stalin, however, power would be used to settle grudges.87 Old mistakes were rehabilitated: other charges aside, for example, Kamenev and Zinoviev would be condemned for breaking party discipline by publicly opposing the seizure of power in 1917 even though Lenin had accepted them back into the party. Party life changed and party rule would exist in name only: the entire organization became subordinated to the will of Stalin.
And so, by the end of the 1930s, the Communist Party had little in common with the old vanguard.88 Trotsky and Bukharin were Bolsheviks: Stalin would ultimately ban use of the term. He replaced the “bolshevik” with the “apparatchik” who was cruder, more subservient, more bureaucratic, and less trained in the traditions of revolutionary struggle.89 The party of “professional revolutionary intellectuals” was turned into a party of fawning bureaucrats and thugs. This change was connected to a burgeoning climate of paranoia and corruption that Stalin consciously fostered.90 The Soviet Union under Stalin was indeed run less by a government in any ordinary sense of the word than a “mixture of conspiracy, Mafia, and court.”91 If not necessarily in theory, then certainly in practice, a sharp and decisive break took place between Leninism and Stalinism.
The greater the concentration of power, the more omnipotent the leader, the more important become questions of political style. Trotsky and Bukharin were cosmopolitan intellectuals with sophisticated artistic tastes.92 Their interpretations of Marxism were, whatever their faults, very different than what Stalin understood as “dialectical materialism.”93 It is hard to believe either would have championed Stalin’s later attacks on natural science or quackery like “Lysenkoism.” There is also little evidence that either would have instituted anything like what Trotsky called the “Stalin school of falsification” or consented to the rewriting of history and retouching of photographs in order to glorify their own exploits and abolish those of their critics. Trotsky and Bukharin were far more sympathetic to modern art than their rival and neither was an advocate of “socialist realism.”94 Indeed, while both supported negative censorship over works that were explicitly critical of the revolution, neither ever demanded that scholarly or artistic works must positively support a particular party standpoint.95
Trotsky’s economic program emphasized the need for rapid industrialization. It undoubtedly lacked the moderation of the NEP that Bukharin sought to preserve. Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin, however, envisioned simultaneously industrializing and collectivizing the nation. Terror would probably have been employed. But their supporters were of a different political caliber than Stalin’s and, again, whatever their faults, they did not employ power purely for personal advancement or to settle old grudges. Trotsky and Bukharin were assimilated Jews, but it is unlikely that either would have engaged in the anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin’s later years. Both prided themselves on their ruthlessness in the name of the cause. But Bukharin was a better administrator than Stalin. Trotsky would undoubtedly have made a better commander in chief:96 hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, were unnecessarily wasted during the early stages of the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Indeed, whatever the failings of Trotsky and Bukharin, their policies opposed those of Stalin when it came to Nazism and a host of other issues.
Stalinism
The triumph of Stalin was predicated on his recognition that the failure of the Western revolutions constituted more than a temporary setback. His provincialism served him well in the new context. He understood better than his opponents that the time of the “professional revolutionary intellectual” had passed: a new communist with less exalted attitudes was required for the great task of socialist construction. This undertaking was, moreover, heroic and revolutionary in a new way. The goal of Stalin was more concrete than the international revolution identified with Trotsky and more inspiring than the cautious reliance on established economic policies exhibited by Bukharin. More was involved than ruthlessness or terror in winning the great struggle for power. There is a sense in which Stalin was looking to the future while his enemies were anchored in the past.
Industrialization of the USSR was the foremost priority when Stalin took power in 1928. Such a policy, however, presupposed greater agricultural productivity and lower prices for farm goods. Production had increased in the NEP period. But the policy had also resulted in the formation of a wealthy peasant stratum, or kulaks, which controlled much of the yearly crop and kept it off the market due to low prices. If grain was tight for domestic consumption, moreover, it was also inadequate for export. This only made things worse since agricultural profits were seen as the source for investment in heavy industry.
Such was the context for Stalin’s “second revolution from above” in which he undertook to collectivize agriculture and industrialize the country simultaneously.97 Agricultural profits would now be requisitioned even as industrial development was undertaken without the appropriate degree of investment. Labor discipline was employed against the proletariat by lengthening the working day, introducing piecework, severely punishing unexcused absence, issuing residence permits, lowering wages, rationing food stuffs, and exploiting child labor. But the peasantry suffered the most. They died by the millions due to the combination of incompetence by those charged with collectivization, the unrealistic expectations of Stalin himself, the ambitions of the secret police, and the artificial famines induced during the 1920s and 1930s. But that wasn’t all. The prospects of success for the new policy obviously depended upon eliminating recalcitrant elements in the party or those identified with the interest of either class. Indeed, if introducing the new industrial plan was possible only by empowering the secret police, it simultaneously demanded instituting a new “cult of the personality.”
The first five-year plan was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm. But the “plan” did not constitute an integrated program for development. Instead, it called for the rapid modernization of key industries without any regard for consumer needs.98 Inefficiency was built into it, which helped create the basis for a semilegal black market and also was used to justify the coming terror. Structuring the plan in that way, no less than enforcing it as Stalin did, was a choice rather than a necessity.99 Its unreachable production goals, and barbaric enforcement, ironically, brought a measure of success in the development of heavy industry.100 As one plan followed another, however, the price of success became ever higher. The myth of infallibility surrounding the party and its leader thereby took on increasing importance. Everything was thrown behind the modernizing effort: constriction of sexual freedom occurred in conjunction with the increasing regulation of art and the condemnation of free time. Every cost paid by the populace and every step in the creation of a police state was identified with the creation of socialism. The justification for all of this was the ideological postulate of Stalin, which ran counter to the thinking of Marx no less than the views of Trotsky and Bukharin, that class conflict must intensify the nearer a nation gets to socialism.
Terror was used to answer every problem, correct every mistake, meet every criticism, and confront every particular interest or countervailing force. Conspiracies were uncovered everywhere. Plots were “exposed” that sought to overthrow the USSR and its Stalinist leadership. All this only intensified the original paranoid fears—thereby drawing ever more rigid boundaries between “us” and “them” both politically and morally. The terror insured atomization and unity with the figure of Stalin by subverting all intermediate institutions standing between the individual and the state. Every segment of the population was affected by the waves of terror. The terror was both more and less than an attempt to extract the most out of “primitive socialist accumulation.” It was not merely a matter of attacking the class enemy, but of consolidating Stalin’s personal rule and squaring old grudges.101 The terror struck friend and foe alike, and terms like “guilt” and “innocence” became meaningless. Indeed, Hannah Arendt was correct in suggesting that the very arbitrariness of the terror was crucial for the success of the new totalitarian regime.102
Attacks on individuals in the party, mostly industrial experts, had taken place earlier. But the assault on the party as an institution began in response to the assassination of Sergei Kirov.103 He had been one of Stalin’s early supporters and, as “the darling of the party,” probably his last genuine rival. There remains little doubt that Stalin himself orchestrated the assassination. But the most likely culprit took charge of the investigation. Trotsky was transfigured into Satan and Bukharin was pushed into the background. The first major purge followed quickly. Then the Leningrad party organization, which had traditionally served as a base of Zinoviev’s support, was liquidated. Soon afterwards, Zinoviev himself and Kamenev were murdered. Then came the Moscow Trials, highlighted by the sensational “confession” of Bukharin.104 Next it was the military, thereby leaving the Soviet Union unprepared for the Nazi invasion. The armed forces were demoralized, and there was confusion over the chain of command following the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.105 Stalin reacted by renewing the terror and insisting that soldiers fight to the death. Those captured were deemed traitors and, making good on his word, after the war thousands of repatriated Soviet soldiers were shipped to concentration and labor camps. Suspicion and distrust were not by-products of Stalinism, but rather essential to it. The beginning of the cold war brought with it new demands for absolute partisanship, which led to a new domestic terror in 1946–48 and its extension into Eastern Europe.106 The results were monstrous, unimaginable: it is estimated that prisoners in camps by the late 1940s numbered between twelve and fourteen million.107 There had emerged, in short, what Daniel Rousset would later call a “concentration camp universe.”
“Necessity” did not demand any of this. It did not demand the horrendous inefficiency, the terrible waste in lives, the blunders in military and foreign policy, or the corruption and the lying. History did not somehow require the countless individual incidents of bestiality recounted so graphically by the survivors.108 There was no teleological impetus leading from Lenin to Stalin and it makes little sense blaming the Utopian element in Marx,109 let alone what was branded in the notorious Black Book of Communism as “the left idea,” for totalitarianism. It has already been shown how different interpretations of Marx, and the “left idea,” could produce very different outcomes. Indeed, precisely for this reason, those seeking a teleological explanation of Stalinism stand in danger of defining their anticommunist position by the very thinking they oppose.
Communism and Nazism: a difference exists between a philosophy bent on emancipation, which was eventually corrupted by its supporters, and a philosophy that was rotten from the start. Communism envisioned a free and equal “association of producers,” whereas the Nazis called for the subordination of the world to the “master race.” One may not have lived up to its claims but the other was something no decent person could, in principle, accept. Even if Stalin may have sought to achieve somewhat more rational and limited ends than Hitler,110 however, the structure of their dictatorships, the style in which their police operated, the “authoritarian personality” of their supporters, the propaganda to which they listened, were roughly the same. It is academic whether Stalin emerged from within the prevailing system and Hitler was an outsider. It also matters little to survivors whether Stalin was engaged in a modernizing project and Hitler was not: it is absurd to argue over whether the elimination of classes is somehow less appalling than the extermination of races. Getting drawn into this kind of cold war debate was a mistake from the beginning. It constitutes an insult to those who suffered so terribly under both systems.
But few are content with being ideological orphans and, just as John D. Rockefeller gave away dimes to newsboys and contributed to many charitable causes, communists under Stalin were supportive of various progressive struggles. Memories linger. Nostalgia exists for the old sense of revolutionary purpose. Many living in the new Russia look back to the past and hope for the emergence of a new strongman in the future. Some may even recall the famous claim of Georg Lukács that the worst form of socialism is better than the best form of capitalism. But they forget the retort of Ernst Bloch that the worst form of socialism is no socialism at all. Too much time has indeed been wasted defending Stalinism against charges that it was worse, or no better, than Nazism.
There is no room left for excuses or qualification. The analogies falter that once were drawn between Stalin and Cromwell, Napoleon, or even Lenin. Each of them also played his part in destroying a generation. But they unleashed the progressive values of an incipient alternative order. Stalin left behind nothing worthy of being called a legacy. He trampled on every value of the original labor movement. His regime led to the association of Marxism with a socialism of gray and communism with terror—pure and simple. Indeed, when the monster finally died in 1953, the profusion of public sorrow hid a sigh of relief.
The Communist International
Stalin transformed world communism. Its former commitment to international class struggle gave way before an unqualified preoccupation with national interest. But it was again a situation in which Lenin himself laid the groundwork for the perversion of his ideas. Already while in Zurich during the war years he had begun planning for a new form of international organization with the power to enforce its decrees: the Second International had effectively declared itself bankrupt when its member parties chose to support their respective governments in 1914. Over the next few years, Lenin participated with other dissidents in what would become the famous antiwar congresses in Zimmerwald and Kienthal. His stands, however, were certainly not designed to build his short-term influence within the antiwar opposition. The overwhelming majority opposed his demand for an attack on the “social chauvinists” in their national parties, his slogans for turning the world war into an international class war and, above all, his call for a new Third International.111
Lenin considered the creation of a new international organization even more necessary in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The proletarian uprisings in Central Europe and the burgeoning tide of anti-Soviet propaganda, no less than the dire straits of the fledgling dictatorship, made coordination among communists in different nations into a matter of some importance. Support for the new Communist International was only logical during the early years of the revolution when the Bolsheviks were desperately waiting for salvation from abroad.112 But, if the spirit of revolution still prevailed in Europe when the Communist International was established in 1919, no Communist Party outside Bulgaria had either taken power or found itself capable of effectively influencing its government by 1922. The continued existence of an organization dedicated to international revolution certainly did not help matters. The USSR found itself isolated, impoverished, and in need of both allies and foreign investment. Lenin’s misguided attempt to carry the revolution into Poland failed miserably,113 and it was the same with other attempts to implement an “offensive” strategy elsewhere.114 European workers began finding their way back to social democracy following these defeats and right-wing authoritarians took power in many countries: Horthy in Hungary, Pilsudski in Poland, and Mussolini in Italy. A counterrevolution was brewing and fear of communism was gripping the West.
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) anticipated the need for a revolutionary reprieve and it expressed the sentiments in foreign policy of what would become the New Economic Program. The pamphlet attacked the politics of ultraleft revolutionaries in favor of building mass parties through trade union work and electoral activity.115 Continued support for the Comintern, given this shift in line, would have been illogical unless Lenin and his followers were genuinely concerned with preserving the unique identity of their movement. The Comintern provided the Soviet Union with a revolutionary symbol and, perhaps more important, an organizational capacity to foster international action should more favorable conditions for insurgency arise. Its maintenance enabled the masses to see the shift in Lenin’s foreign policy for what it was: the tactical holding action of a revolutionary movement in a time of capitalist stability.116
Lenin had originally designed his organizational theory with an eye on maintaining a revolutionary commitment during nonrevolutionary periods. The same thinking explains his insistence that the acceptance of the “21 Points” serve as a condition for any party’s entry into the Comintern.117 It demanded that every member party maintain an underground organization and, through acceptance of “democratic centralism,” obey the instructions of the Comintern. Such requirements, again, may have made sense in 1919. Given the nonrevolutionary context of 1921/22, however, they must have appeared foolish in strictly utilitarian terms: these conditions cost the communists dearly in Italy and elsewhere. But Lenin undoubtedly feared his Comintern becoming a new version of the socialist international. His intransigence regarding the 21 Points is explicable only by recognizing his speculative commitment to international revolution that diminished during the “second period” of the USSR and that completely eroded under Stalin.
During the early years of the Comintern, the USSR was merely primus inter pares,118 Its growing dominance developed due to the failure of the Western revolutions and its being left as the only existing “socialist” state. This context produced Lenin’s scattered references to “socialism in one country” that Stalin would later turn into the fulcrum of his worldview. Belief in this idea increased the sense of revolutionary privilege needed to justify the subordination of all communist interests to those of the USSR. Thus, following Lenin’s death, what he had introduced as a holding action on revolutionary politics became a permanent feature of Soviet foreign policy.
As the gap widened between the brutal present and the Utopian future in the USSR, the need for discipline and conformity grew.119 The 21 Points were used to realize this goal within the world communist movement.120 The understanding of the vanguard and its attendant commitment to democratic centralism was changed from a tactic necessary to confront Russian conditions into a strategic postulate. Member parties of the Comintern became locked into abiding by decisions increasingly made in Moscow. The USSR became the focus of their identity and unconditional obedience the essence of their military style. Thus, ever more surely, the member parties of the Third International found themselves slaves of the revolution that had already been achieved, rather than agents generating the transformation of their own nations.
Securing such ideological obedience demanded coercion. As one faction in the Soviet Union replaced another, and those in positions of authority were ousted, the substitution of one “line” for another and the purge of recalcitrant members followed in the Comintern. This dynamic becomes clearest in the case of the large German Communist Party (KPD). It began shortly after the Spartacus Revolt of 1919 with the expulsion of Paul Levi,121 the former intimate of Rosa Luxemburg and her successor as leader of the party, for criticizing the disastrous “revolutionary” strategy imposed upon the German communists by Lenin and Trotsky. The next stage was worse: new preoccupations with discipline produced the “bolshevization” of the KPD in 1925–26 under the direction of Grigori Zinoviev in Moscow and his puppets Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow in Berlin.122 The last vestiges of a viable democratic centralism were liquidated in that purge. The substitution of Fischer and Maslow by Stalin’s henchman, Ernst Thälmann, can indeed almost be viewed as anticlimactic.
The foreign policy of Lenin was a radical interlude in the history of Russia:123 his Bolsheviks considered international class conflict as the strategic premise underlying even the most conciliatory tactics. The second period of the revolution (1921–28) marked a time in which dissent became more constricted and member parties were unable to develop any constructive policies. Stalin’s foreign policy, however, eradicated any internationalist concerns. It sought only to exploit the conflicts between nations and reinstate traditional aims harking back to the time of Peter the Great: a barrier against invasion from Central Europe; warm water ports to the South; control of the Balkans; and security against Asia.124 The result was a foreign policy whose dizzying changes of the “party line” ultimately demoralized and disillusioned its own supporters.
In 1928, Stalin inaugurated the infamous “third period” with his “social-fascist” thesis that identified social democrats with Nazis. All critics of communism were now lumped together and the Comintern refused to support republican regimes against mounting threats from the Right. This sectarian policy would later be justified by the belief that Hitler would only last five years and the seemingly revolutionary slogan “After Hitler, Us!” It clearly helped bring the Nazis to power. More might have been involved, however, than a simple miscalculation by Stalin. Given his desire to intensify conflicts among Western nation-states, which would buy time for the USSR to industrialize, his unprincipled “left turn” may well have been predicated on a secret wish to have the Nazis in power.
The year 1936 would witness a change in “line” when Stalin called upon communists everywhere to support the “popular front.” Crucial elections pitting the Right against the Left were ready to take place in France, and it had become clear that Hitler would last more than five years.125 Dissatisfaction with the social-fascist line had already become evident and, at the same time, a call for solidarity abroad might deflect criticism of the terrible purges taking place at home. But this policy was also provisional in character. The communists refused ministries in Leon Blum’s Popular Front government so that they might remain free to criticize it. Fermenting “revolutionary” discontent over its formally neutral stance during the Spanish civil war, and its economic policies, they simultaneously opposed direct intervention in parliament and equivocated over the spontaneous strike wave of 1936. From the first, whatever the excellent organizing efforts of the communists, their support for the popular front was purely provisional.
This was made clear in 1939 when Stalin concluded his infamous pact with Hitler. It sprang more from the perception that the West was incapable of opposing Nazi expansionism, and that Hitler offered a better deal, than the fact that a Soviet agreement with the Western democracies was unreachable. A pact with Germany would, again, provide Stalin with time to reconsolidate his forces following the purge of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the army leadership.126 It also promised the chance to extend the borders of the Soviet Union, remove Poland as a threat, and incorporate Lithuania and Estonia.127 Stalin was indeed intent on meeting all his obligations to Germany and it is important to remember that participation by the Soviet Union in World War II was occasioned only by the invasion of its territory in 1941.128
National interest understandably became paramount once the war began: it resulted in the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. This step was taken in order for communist parties to fight against fascism by using national slogans.129 It also enabled Stalin to deal with their leaders individually and thereby divide any potential opposition that might emerge in the aftermath of the war. Even more importantly, however, the liquidation of this “revolutionary” organization appeared as an act of good will intended to convince the Allies that the time had come to open a second front against Hitler.
It didn’t cost Stalin much. The end of the war brought a rapid expansion of communist influence along with a general euphoria that produced new hopes for the coming peace. The possibility seemed to present itself through the introduction of new organizations, like the World Trade Union Federation, intent on unifying social democrats and communists. Unfortunately, however, any prospects for such unity were doomed once the cold war began and social democrats, almost unanimously, sided with the West. The year 1947 saw the articulation of the Truman Doctrine, and Stalin was ready with his response. In that same year, the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) was secretly convened in Poland.130 Present were only the leaders of nine East European nation-states, controlled by the Soviet Union; there was no participation by non-European parties, and the communist leaderships of France, Italy, and Greece were not even invited. The birth of the new organization was also immediately greeted by a new set of purges to insure the existence of reliable communist governments on the borders of the USSR.
Soon enough, NATO faced the Warsaw Pact and Europe was partitioned into spheres of influence. Since the lines were basically drawn where the respective armies of East and West had liberated the various subjugated nations from the Nazis, for all the cold war rhetoric, the division was already a virtual fait accompli by the war’s end. Stalin essentially respected the lines of demarcation. Far weaker than the West both economically and militarily, he surely considered the acquisition of Eastern Europe well worth the cynical sellout of those revolutionary movements that existed at the time in Italy and Greece. The Soviet Union would engage in only two instances of direct armed conflict outside Eastern Europe: at the Chinese border, which points to the traditional fear of Asia by Russia, and in Afghanistan, which was seen as lying within its sphere of influence and necessary to secure its southern flank. From its victory in World War II, the Soviet Union received almost everything that it had traditionally wanted: a barrier against European invasion, control of the Balkans, and warm-water ports to the South.
Just when Stalin was seeking to reaffirm his totalitarian control, however, challenges arose to his hegemony over the world communist movement. Tito asserted the independence of Yugoslavia in 1948 and, following the triumph of Mao Tse-tung, conflicts of ideological and practical interest produced the Sino-Soviet split of 1953. Far more significant, however, was the success of anti-imperialist struggles and the emergence of neutral states like India. Certainly by 1968, whatever support the Soviet Union extended to national revolutionary movements, it no longer made sense to speak of a unified communist “movement.”131 Neutral nations no less than communist parties elsewhere would increasingly give or withhold support for the USSR on a case-by-case basis.132 The nation had squandered its moral capital. Indeed, long before its final dissolution in 1991, the moral authority of the USSR had become a thing of the past.
Breaking the Chains
A new leadership composed of Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrentii Beria, Georgei Malenkov, and Viacheslav Molotov appeared ready to begin the post-Stalinist transition. It seemed clear to all involved that the USSR required a different approach to power in the 1950s. It could no longer be ruled on the basis of terror—thus the elimination of Beria, the former head of the secret police and biographer of Stalin. It would have to distance itself from the old administration and its inefficiency—thus the elimination of Malenkov. It would need a new and more principled foreign policy—thus the elimination of Molotov, an architect of the pact with Nazi Germany. Khrushchev was not identified with any of these institutions and policies in quite the same way. A man who had risen under Stalin, and participated in his crimes, he called for reestablishing the primacy of the party and the power of the Central Committee.133 This indeed lay behind the secret Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 in which Stalin’s crimes were partially revealed.134
The congress signaled a more liberal attitude towards cultural expression and placed restrictions on the terror apparatus. It condemned the “cult of the personality” and marked an attempt to restore the principles of leadership associated with Lenin. Camps were dismantled, political prisoners freed, and political officials were given some degree of security regarding their positions and their lives. The more rigid forms of conformity and censorship were relaxed. Uncensored writings of atrocities and blunders associated with the recent past were circulated and Khrushchev personally intervened to assure the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In keeping with State and Revolution, moreover, Khrushchev sought to mitigate the alienation of ordinary citizens by introducing new forms of participation associated with what is now understood as civil society.135 Leninism would be reinvigorated in order to overcome the legacy of Stalinism.
Reasserting the primacy of the party and the vision of a “full scale construction of communism” had led Khrushchev in 1961, while visiting the United States, to claim “We will bury you!” A bureaucratic party and increased production, however, could not change the meager prospects of international revolution. Leninism was never viable as an establishmentarian doctrine and its privileging of the party-state was a standing impediment to the liberal rule of law. The new freedom was, in a sense, as arbitrary as the old terror. The extent to which dissidents could dissent was never made explicit and Khrushchev was in line with Lenin’s way of thinking when he sent troops to suppress the anticommunist uprising of 1956 in Hungary. Leninism had helped pave the way for totalitarianism and, if a critical engagement with its authoritarian implications was never undertaken, there were also limits to the constraints that could be imposed on what Sartre had appropriately termed the “ghost of Stalin.”
The new leadership was itself implicated in the crimes of the old regime. But the limits of reform did not merely derive from their fears. The public sphere of the nation and the myth of the party stood in danger of being wrecked through a full disclosure of the past. After all, it was Stalin who had incarnated the very idea of socialism for an entire generation. It was Stalin who had laid down the industrial infrastructure. It was Stalin who had defined cultural life. It was Stalin who appeared to have brought the Soviet Union its victory in World War II. It was Stalin who had been deified in every conceivable way. Indeed, it was Stalin who had given purpose to the indescribable horrors he had imposed on the Russian people during the 1930s and the war years.
This former sense of revolutionary purpose was lost after the dictator’s death. Despite attempts to refashion party unity, and perhaps even a cult of Lenin,136 the old myth of historical infallibility surrounding the party was undermined by an explosion of semi-official criticism. With its foreign policy defined by a narrow perception of national interest, along with the use of unequal trade agreements and “mixed companies” to exploit its satellites,137 its own citizens began to doubt its pronouncements against imperialism. Even before the fall of Khrushchev, the nation started experiencing a deep malaise or, better, a feeling that Kierkegaard, in a different context, called the “sickness unto death.” Ironically, by calling for a rejection of Khrushchev’s “adventurism,” Brezhnev capitalized on this trend.
During his seemingly endless reign, soviet socialism became identified with a joyless authoritarianism that served no revolutionary purpose and fostered no libertarian goals. The “full scale construction of communism” was abandoned as Utopian and even the trumpeted welfare state of the USSR could offer little to recommend it in comparison with Scandinavia. Stalin was partially rehabilitated in his more conservative aspects against Lenin and, in keeping with this move, the state machine received new legitimacy. Its interests were self-evident, however, when Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Czechloslavakia in 1968. The party may have still been privileged in theory, but its bureaucratic and careerist elements were given primacy in practice and the attempt to foster civil society withered. The nomenklatura was liberated from subservience to the party.138 In this vein, moreover, Brezhnev completed the transformation of the older Stalinist form of “crash-planning” into an elaborately controlled and subsidized system wherein the prices of hundreds and thousands of commodities were fixed by the government amid a growing semilegal black market.139
In the face of the postcommunist transition, which has introduced bitter poverty and curtailment of state benefits, many now look back fondly on the Brezhnev years. But such nostalgia is misguided. Corruption was rampant and the decision to engage in an arms race with the United States helped produce the economic debacle that would lead to the dissolution of the USSR. A new form of “legitimation crisis,” employing the phrase of Jiirgen Habermas, began taking hold. Marxist rituals no less than the old Stalinist style had already been rendered obsolete. Mass communication was subverting the remaining forms of censorship and turning culture into an international commodity. Especially given the rise of Western living standards, it was becoming ever more difficult simply to denigrate consumer goods in favor of military hardware while the bureaucratic elite, or nomenklatura, reaped the benefits. The USSR was also losing economic ground as the Brezhnev years came to a close: most had become willing to admit that regulating an economy of more than a billion articles was inefficient and that lack of accountability was creating a situation in which shortages were reinforced by waste.
Freezes and thaws continued during the Brezhnev era as various elite coalitions struggled with one another over administrative decisions and budgetary priorities. Waiting in the wings stood a younger ruling stratum that included Alexei Kosygin, Andrei Gromyko, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko—and, also, Mikhail Gorbachev. The more rigid bureaucrats sought to defend against the future. A bitter conflict arose between the neo-Stalinist followers of Brezhnev and Chernenko and the young neo-Leninist modernizers, supported by Andropov, who took power and held it briefly until his untimely death. It was already clear when the “period of stagnation” was finally coming to an end, however, that the old system was breaking down and that a radical adjustment to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation would have to take place.140 Nevertheless, few expected the impact that Andropov’s protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev, would have on Russia and the world.
Gorbachev maintained a commitment to the primacy of the party, but he also believed in the need for a democratic rejuvenation (glasnost) of the nation and the introduction of market initiatives (perestroika). Already in 1988, which marked the first televised Party Congress, Gorbachev sought to re-empower the soviets as popular electoral organs of day-to-day administrative and legal decisionmaking. He called for five-year terms for elected officials and a new presidential system based on multicandidate elections by a 1,500-member Congress of People’s Deputies that would also elect a 400-member standing legislature.
This radical undertaking did not occur ex nihilo. Indeed, no less than Khrushchev, Gorbachev and his supporters legitimized themselves by making reference to a certain interpretation of Leninism. They looked to the period of NEP and envisioned Lenin heading a party desperately trying to fight an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy and use capitalist tools to improve a lagging economy. Gorbachev and his supporters wished to curb the bureaucracy, roll back centralized planning, and gradually end collectivized agriculture. Their aim was to promote democratic management and self-administration in the factories and, by transforming the pricing system, make foreign investment more attractive. Spending on consumer goods was to be increased, along with discretionary income, while defense expenditures were to be curtailed. Control over the Eastern bloc was to be loosened and relations with the Western democracies improved. New liberal cultural and political policies created a climate of respect abroad and, for a brief period, enthusiasm at home. Political prisoners were released and the possibilities for emigration expanded. A reexamination of the Soviet past began. Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Karl Radek were rehabilitated and certain of Trotsky’s writings were published for the first time. The specter of fear receded.
Gorbachev brought the cold war to an end. His foreign policy was bold and decisive. He called for a moratorium on nuclear testing and experiments in chemical warfare, and dramatic cuts in conventional forces. He was intent upon expanding the power of the United Nations and the jurisdiction of the World Court. In conjunction with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, moreover, Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine that justified interference in Eastern Europe to protect against “antisocialist” forces. His policies also provided the moral and practical impetus for the mass strikes that tumbled the old-line communist governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere: it was Gorbachev whose refusal to support repression of mass demonstrations led to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. His 1989 Address to the Council of Europe indeed expressed the desire to build a “common house,” an expression coined by Leon Blum in the aftermath of World War I, which foreshadowed the integration of Russia into the West.
Perestroika fostered a set of rising expectations for immediate economic improvement. But the transition to a form of market socialism, perhaps on the model of Scandinavia, was sabotaged by the sheer inertia of entrenched bureaucrats who felt themselves threatened by glasnost. They tried to block the devolution of centralized economic authority. At the same time, however, the introduction of “commodity money” generated new forms of competition for resources among the managers of decentralized units. Along with new incentives and pricing policies, the emphasis on market mechanisms—especially in agriculture—produced inflation and other serious economic burdens for the working class. The new climate of freedom also fostered previously repressed nationalist sentiments among states comprising the former Soviet Union.
Gorbachev unleashed the forces that would bring about the disintegration of the USSR.141 Perestroika and glasnost were not halfhearted measures. The institution of democratic procedures, the new commitment to the rule of law, the attack on authoritarian culture and the pestering virus of anti-Semitism, went beyond a simple reform of the old regime. They inspired a new liberal vision of civil society. But the unrealized expectations for immediate economic improvement resulted in mass resentment and disillusionment followed. The ensuing economic degeneration, the loss of international prestige, the corruption of democracy, and the seeming decay of moral values, would all be blamed on Gorbachev.
The sheer rapidity with which events occurred only made things worse: it would indeed seem that the USSR was “one day a mighty empire, the next, rubble.”142 Communists condemned Gorbachev for betraying the party and anticommunists for refusing to break with it. He found himself caught between his early supporters of reform, now intent on radicalizing the process he had begun, and the old guard equally intent on rolling it back. The right criticized him for his utopianism and the left for his conservatism. But they were both wrong. His undertaking remains the single most intelligent experiment with institutional democracy in the history of Russia.
Endgame
On August 19,1991, the media reported that a coup had been attempted in the Soviet Union: its failure led to the dissolution of the communist regime.143 For more than forty-eight hours, the world held its breath. The forces of democracy were pitted against those of authoritarianism. Mikhail Gorbachev stood under house arrest. Tanks rumbled through the streets for the first time since the fall of Khrushchev in 1964. The Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were placed under military rule. Resistance crystallized around Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. Thousands gathered at the Winter Palace in Leningrad, perhaps the greatest symbol of 1917, and elsewhere. Democratic media and newspapers were closed down; curfews were ordered in the cities. Troop movements in Soviet Georgia and elsewhere gave every indication that the coup had been planned for some time. Glasnost and perestroika seemed ready to unravel and the nation stood on the brink of civil war.
The seizure of power was attempted under the rubric of the “National State Emergency Committee.” Headed by Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and President Gennadi Yanayev, both of whom had gained their posts only due to the personal intercession of Gorbachev, it was composed of representatives from the defense establishment, the KGB, and various communist-dominated farmer and worker organizations. The incompetence exhibited by the Committee was remarkable. Yeltsin and major figures of the “reform” movement, no less than other middle and low level opponents, remained free. The plotters overestimated the cohesion of the army and underestimated the need for a recognizable leader. Nor were they able to articulate a coherent program to deal with the nation’s ills. The undertaking was conceived without a clear definition of leadership roles, a coherent military strategy, or an understanding of the degree to which democratic political hopes had taken root. For all that, however, 250,000 handcuffs were ordered and reams of blank arrest orders printed. This was indeed a “putsch of fools.”
The plotters tried to stuff the genie of reform back into the bottle. They sought to reverse the trend towards the “free market,” a pluralistic society, and multiparty elections. Maintaining the unaccountability of the military-industrial complex, and fueling it with scarce resources at the expense of consumer goods, was their primary goal. Former ideological justifications, however, no longer made even superficial sense. Their offer of authoritarianism plus a discredited form of economic planning testified to the bankruptcy of communism. Its supporters did not so much confront one view of the future with another as, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, attempt to set the future against the past.
Structural factors doomed the junta. But they also created the likelihood of a revolt in the first place. More was involved than the ambitions of a few power-hungry apparatchiks or even a communist leadership standing in the shadows. An impending union treaty intent on redressing the imbalance of power among the states of the USSR, a worsening economic crisis buttressed by lack of economic support from the West, the decay of the communist party, and a political identity deficit, created the context in which contingent decisions were made.
On August 17, 1991, just two days before the attempted seizure of power, Aleksander N. Yakolev—the so-called “godfather of perestroika”—predicted a Stalinist coup as he resigned from the communist party. Months before, Eduard Shevardnaze, who had helped bring the cold war to a close as Gorbachev’s foreign minister, stated publicly that dictatorship in the USSR was imminent and surrendered his post. Yakovlev was not taken seriously, and it was originally assumed that the dictatorship of which Shevardnaze spoke was to have been led by Gorbachev himself. Indeed, enough responsible people believed that his express request for these leaders to remain at his side was a mere ploy.
Around the beginning of 1991, in between periods marked by concern over the disintegration of central authority, the Western press talked incessantly about how Gorbachev was amassing power. This was, in turn, used to justify the critical posture of Yeltsin and those “radicals” wishing to speed up the economic and political changes that the Soviet leader had initially set in motion. They supported a plan, tabled by Gorbachev, to introduce the market in “500 days.” They called for dismantling the central state and autonomy for the fifteen republics. They condemned Gorbachev for refusing to challenge the military, the KGB, and the still powerful communist bureaucracy. With support from the radicals eroding, he and the moderates turned to the “conservatives.” Allies were now sought among those who had opposed perestroika and glasnost from the beginning. Indeed, often with hyperbolic flourish, Yeltsin and Shevardnaze accused Gorbachev of poor judgment and perhaps even of having had a hand in the conspiracy.
Confronted by an implacable right wing seeking to inhibit democratic change, and a radical left wing seeking a rupture with the past, Gorbachev must have considered his primary aim to avoid civil war. A practitioner of compromise, he mistakenly believed that the communist party could be reformed. He also made serious errors in matters of personnel, trusting and appointing figures who would play important roles in the attempted coup. Gorbachev undoubtedly bears a degree of responsibility for the events, and he admitted as much. His constant shifting from one set of allies to another created uncertainty and a self-fulfilling prophecy regarding his own political weakness. If Yakovlev and Shevardnaze were aware of a possible coup, however, it stands to reason that Gorbachev knew of it as well. A “mini-rebellion” had, after all, been attempted on June 17, 1991, when Prime Minister Pavlov, with support from the future rebels, asked parliament to enhance his powers at the expense of the president. Gorbachev may have sounded optimistic in public after beating back the attack, but he drew away from the radicals in the following weeks. Perhaps he overestimated the extent to which cabinet posts would placate the old guard. Nevertheless, the claim that he should simply have dropped any connection to the party stalwarts can only be made out of context.
Sanctimonious comments by Shevardnaze that Gorbachev “should have ‘listened to me’ and ‘quit’” simply ignored political reality and the responsibilities of leadership. Divisions within the Soviet Union could have intensified, communists at the grass roots might have attempted to slow reforms even more, the country could have been thrown into greater chaos, and the still powerful party might well have embarked earlier on the adventure it undertook in August. Perhaps a coup would have been attempted sooner or later anyway. But it also might have occurred under more propitious circumstances. Had it succeeded, surely, Gorbachev would have been condemned by those who later criticized his failure to recognize fully the corruption of the communist party. Indeed, whatever the posturing of the radicals, it only made sense for him to attempt staving off a coup by seeking to work with conservatives in the communist party.
It is a mistake simply to judge the choices of yesterday by the events of today. That is especially the case given that the policies of the radicals helped push Gorbachev to the right in the first place. They never explained how they wished to bring about a capitalist transformation of the USSR in 500 days. Subsequent ill-conceived attempts would plunge the nation into virtual bankruptcy and there is something pathetic about Yeltsin’s later admission: “it was all more difficult than we first anticipated.” The radicals also opposed Gorbachev’s sensible and progressive plan for the devolution of centralized authority and they adamantly criticized his refusal to act sooner in offering autonomy to the republics. This makes it all the more ironic that Yeltsin should have left office on January 1, 2000, enmeshed in a genocidal war aimed at squashing the quest for national self-determination by Chechnya. Then too, the radicals castigated Gorbachev for maintaining a communist culture, thereby inhibiting investment and economic aid from the Western democracies. Respect for parliamentarism and the courts has notably declined under the corrupt regime of Yeltsin, however, and foreign investment is still woefully inadequate. The radicals never considered that Western policy might have been predicated less on prudence or a “capital shortage” than a desire to further weaken a disintegrating superpower. Gorbachev’s attempt to affirm the spirit of social democracy, in this vein, went hand in hand with an ever more obvious internationalist commitment. By way of contrast, however, the new leaders of Russia have embarked on a new nationalist course, often with new expressions of nuclear saber rattling, and its standing among nations is far lower than it was in 1991. The problems of times past have indeed only been rendered more acute with the dissolution of the “former Union.”
Socialism has, of course, been discredited. Identified with communist authoritarianism, rather than the democratic traditions of the Western labor movement, visions of the “market” continue to inspire reformers. Privatizing especially smaller firms was perhaps unavoidable. An exclusive reliance on the market, however, was Utopian from the beginning. Everywhere the transition has proven severe. Outmoded larger industries have provoked little interest from buyers and economic hardship have forced most ordinary people to sell their publicly distributed shares in what are largely failing industries, thereby producing an “embourgeoisement” of the nomenklatura and strengthening the hand of an emergent Mafia. Representatives of the old bureaucracy and the new Mafia would indeed use their connections, cash, and expertise to dominate the new firms and wield enormous power in the new order.
Distortion of all social institutions at the expense of working people has been the consequence of an increasingly inequitable and unaccountable concentration of wealth. Pitting markets against state intervention in dogmatic fashion is already no longer viable: the real issue is the degree of mix between them. Planning may have proven notoriously weak in specifying consumer demands, but it is a mistake to assume that the market will inevitably rebuild the infrastructure, surmount unemployment, or guarantee decent wages in the near future. Maintaining the welfare state is surely as pressing as the need for policies devoted to fostering a free market.
Economic desperation might lead many states of the former USSR to engage in various forms of economic cooperation among themselves as they look west for investment. But the wave of repressed nationalist passion unleashed in the wake of the coup continues to grip the region. The “balkanization” taking place in the region has already created memories of the instability prior to the outbreak of World War I. Minorities have engaged in pitched battles in Moldavia, Georgia, and elsewhere. Tartars have called for succession from Russia. Savage conflict has broken out once again between Croats and Serbs in Yugoslavia. The Crimea is demanding independence from the Ukraine. Civil war within and between many of the new republics remains a distinct possibility and might even, one day, be carried on with nuclear weapons.
Reaction follows even those revolutions that conservatives tend to like. History moves neither forward nor backward in a straight line. But the old dream was shattered long before the masses toppled the grotesque statues of party heroes like Lenin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, and Stalin. Democracy was saved in 1991 and it remains the slogan of today despite the dangers for tomorrow. These is no sense in looking back to the communist past.
Boris Nicolaevsky, the old Menshevik leader, once told about meeting Bukharin some years after Lenin’s death.144 While reminiscing, apparently, he asked the old Bolshevik why his party had permitted those radical experiments from below that had marked the early days of the revolution. Bukharin supposedly responded: “Because we didn’t think we could actually succeed and we wanted to provide a monument, like that of the Paris Commune, to inspire comrades of the future.” An obsession with industrial production and authoritarian control unfolded instead. History offers every movement only one chance at success: the task for the next century involves redefining the notion of success and imagining anew the next monuments to freedom.