28.03.1996

Great terror and opposition

Phil Sharpe of the Trotskyist Unity Group reports on the recent lecture tour of a visiting Russian academic

Professor Rogovin made a welcome contribution towards developing our understanding of Stalin’s terror and purges of the mid-1930s.

Firstly he challenges the anti-communist view of historians such as Robert Conquest that the purges were the irrational product of a paranoid dictator presiding over a totalitarian society, in which the victims of the purges were atomised and isolated individuals caught up in the maelstrom of the individual and collective insanity of Soviet society.

Secondly he showed in rich and fascinating detail that the purges were a political response by Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy to the increasing mass support for both the left and right oppositions. Stalin had come to the realisation that the imprisonment of his political opponents was no longer sufficient to maintain the stability of his regime, and that more repressive purges were necessary in order to eradicate the continuation of oppositional socialist consciousness both within and outside the Communist Party.

The purges primarily represented another stage in the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism, and within this context the role of the Stalinists in the Spanish civil war represented the beginning of the terror.

Professor Rogovin outlined how Stalin’s previous attempts to play upon the ideological differences between the left and right opposition in the 1920s could no longer be sustained by 1932.

The Riutin Platform and other oppositional statements helped to bring about embryonic united front activity between the right and left opposition. Bukharin himself may have played a passive role in this process and accepted his defeat by Stalin, but rank and file Bukharinists often worked with Trotskyists in opposing the counterrevolutionary politics of Stalin.

Stalin became worried that the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) was unable to suppress these political developments, and so the decision was taken to launch the Great Terror. The later generations of servile Stalinist bureaucrats were the product of this terror and the destruction of the old Bolshevik opposition to Stalin.

There followed wide ranging discussion, which dealt with the Red Army purges, Stalin and historical necessity, internationalism and nationalism in the former Soviet Union. I asked whether on the basis of his research professor Rogovin now thought it was a tactical error for Trotsky to have rejected a united front with Bukharin in 1929 on the question of party democracy.

Rogovin felt that it was a Deutscherite myth to believe that Trotsky ruled out such a possibility in 1929, although this point seems to be disputable in relation to Trotsky’s writings of this period.

However, in response to an additional question I raised about the importance of party democracy in relation to building revolutionary parties, Rogovin made the important point that party democracy is important not just for a party, but also in connection to building a relationship with the working class, and for facilitating its revolutionary creativity.

The International Communist Party is to be congratulated for having supported and made possible this tour by this important leftwing Russian intellectual.

It would be additionally welcomed if the ICP - and one of its individual leaders in particular - would engage with the TUG in a manner as serious and thoughtful as Rogovin’s replies to questions from his audience.