13.02.1997

SUPPLEMENT: Genesis of bureaucratic socialism

Part III – Terror

(A PDF of this supplement can be found HERE)

We have already seen in supplement two that terror was employed by the rising Stalinite bureaucracy to beat down the left oppositions; how on a much wider scale it was used to rob the peasantry and the workers of land and rights in order to start and sustain primitive accumulation. The political monopoly of the bureaucracy obviously paved the way for a new social formation antithetical to socialism and, though some would deny it, “an epochal defeat of the workers, as well as the peasants”¹. But we still must show why, having defeated first the left and then the right in the CPSU, why, having successfully dragooned the peasants into state-controlled collective farms and legally enslaved the workers, Stalin unleashed wave after wave of terror, not only against the workers and peasants, but against the intelligentsia, foreigners, national minorities, party functionaries, the officer corps and the bureaucratic elite itself.

There is a whole literature dealing with what has commonly become known as the purges. While often containing important, sometimes brilliant insights, its various strands and genres tend to be side-tracked or stopped short by pre-existing ideological assumptions or aims. Eye witness accounts, of course, fully testify to the sufferings, bestiality and cruel waste of human life in the camps - to dismiss or downplay such a holocaust is surely in itself a crime. As is well known, using such honest and essentially reliable material, and the increasingly accessible official sources, Sovietologists and Marxists alike have collected and presented watertight evidence as to the massive scale of terror, the millions of deaths and Stalin’s personal direction of the horror.

However the terror itself has not been scientifically treated in terms of the laws operating in the ectopic social formation. In explanatory terms what we have had so far has been partial. Insight is therefore blinkered, theory decidedly myopic. Some - Alexander Solzehenitsyn, for example - in light of their own experience claim that the terror was self-perpetuating, irrational and that anyway revolutions inevitably eat their own children². Others, such as Roy Medvedev and Robert Tucker, have it that Stalin was pathologically determined to wipe out every rival and that as an autocrat he needed a new class of administrators not tainted with democratic sentiments³. Another view, one notoriously advanced in the 1940s by Joseph Davis, US ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936-38, holds that terror was needed if industrialisation was to be a success and that the purges liquidated the fifth column that would have sided with the Germans and Nazism⁴.

Naturally all these accounts contain elements of the truth. The ‘black tornado’ certainly developed a fearful momentum all of its own. Every ‘enemy of the people’, often under severe and terrible torture, was forced to provide the names of ‘accomplices’ to the NKVD inquisition⁵. Every victim would in spite of themselves create five more. But to grasp the logic of what appears to be inherently illogical one must go further than merely citing the Jacobin terror of Robespierre and Saint-Just, or the red terror of Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin’s terror was a system in its own right. It lasted a generation and decimated a generation. It was no emergency measure, dictated by civil war⁶. Every stratum of society suffered. Every institution of the regime was traumatised. No family, no matter how high, escaped its hand. Terror might have maintained the domination of the bureaucracy, but it also put the fear of god into the hearts of even Stalin’s cronies. To a man they lived in dread of the midnight knock. And yet in the absence of socialism it is correct to say that so-called primitive socialist accumulation could only be carried through using terror.

Similar qualifications apply to theories based on Stalin as a personality. He would appear to have been mentally unbalanced. His uncontrolled vindictiveness and limitless mistrust were only equalled by his cunning. Needless to say, more is required if we are to understand how and why such a man could establish a monocracy. As to the notion that terror eliminated internal enemies, the facts show exactly the opposite. Despite Mein Kampf’s contempt for Slavs and its genocidal promise of a vast living-space for the German master race, “obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia”, Stalin’s terrorism actually created a substantial layer of collaborators⁷. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, actually preferred Nazism to Stalinism⁸.

In 1925 Stalin would surely have been mortified by the idea that his bureaucratic machinations against the left oppositions would - with one improvisation logically and remorselessly leading to another - end in the terrorisation of the whole of society and the death of perhaps 10 or 20 million Soviet citizens. Unlike Hitler, Stalin had no diabolical master plan. His terror was driven by the becoming of a dysfunctional society - which, because of its internal contradictions, had social relations the governing bureaucracy could not spontaneously or consciously control.

‘Socialism in one country’ was a bureaucratic adaptation to the isolation of the Soviet Union. Upholding it was to flagrantly distort Marxism. However, Stalin and his faction could admit no such thing. Nor therefore could they tolerate (contain) those who continued to defend and advocate orthodox Marxism. Left oppositionists soon found themselves expelled from the party and exiled in remote places.

Initially theorised as a corollary to the worker-peasant alliance, ‘socialism in one country’ proved to be incompatible with NEP. The peasants refused to market sufficient grain. To save ‘socialism in one country’ NEP had to be abandoned. Unable to retreat back to the market or trust in mass democracy, Stalin had no option but to risk all and embark on a programme of forced collectivisation and crash industrialisation. Deprived of outside aid by the failure of revolution in the advanced countries, primitive accumulation could only be carried out by extracting tribute from internal sources - namely the workers and peasants. Objections to the method and proposed pace of accumulation were branded treasonable. Economic experts and planning specialists alike received the sort of treatment previously meted out to Trotskyites and Zinovievites. And when things inevitably went wrong, scapegoats had to be found. Managers trained in tsarist times, Mensheviks and foreign engineers all featured in famous show trials between 1928 and 1939⁹.

Overcoming the peasant market economy necessitated terror. So did the absence of market mechanisms.

Primitive bureaucratic accumulation ‘re-enserfed’ the peasantry and deprived the workers of any rights remaining from the gains of the October Revolution. The first five-year plan was an agony for the Soviet people. As targets soared, along with claimed advances in production, their already wretched living standards declined proportionately. Instead of Stalin’s heralded “life of plenty”, starvation and poverty were their lot: “The workers who had been recruited from the villages lived in unspeakable conditions - filth, bedbugs, cockroaches, bad food and inadequate clothing.¹⁰” The first five-year plan dramatically increased the numbers of rightless workers and the absolute and total surplus that could be pumped from them. But in showing its strength, the bureaucracy also showed its weakness. Such was the dialectic of bureaucratic socialism.

The workers might have had their trade unions finally taken from them and turned into instruments of management and the state, subsistence levels might have been halved and production quotas doubled and doubled again. But the oppressed soon found unexpected ways of exerting themselves within the workplace and undermining the intentions of the supposedly all-powerful bureaucracy. Spontaneity corroded Stalin’s decrees¹¹.

A stubborn refusal to cooperate by the minions on the shop floor produced disastrous results for those who sat in warm offices, but who were, precisely because of their elevated position, legally responsible for the delivery of plan targets. Without “any organisers or leaders, just an invisible wink”, workers resisted¹². Go-slows, reinterpreting orders, human error, absenteeism became weapons of self-defence (negative control). Nor did workers worry about using working hours to hunt down food and other necessities. If managers did not play ball, the labour shortage meant they had no compunction about flitting from job to job in order to search out better conditions. Demoralised, hungry, badly trained and yet prepared to cock a snook at management, workers’ productivity was bound to suffer.

At a local level there was every incentive for management to seek an accommodation with the workers on the one hand and to fabricate plan results on the other. It was easier to slacken the pace of work and find bonuses and other palliatives for the workers than to genuinely fulfil the demands of the planning authorities. The macro-economic consequences of such micro-economic compromises were all too obvious. Quality was a chimera. Plan values never matched use values. And everywhere there were lies, cheating, deceit and wonderfully inventive reports of glorious success.

From the viewpoint of Stalin and the centre it appeared that the workers were irresponsible and lazy, if not active saboteurs¹³. With everything subordinated to accumulation there was neither room nor desire for concessions to the sullen mass. For those now accustomed to terror the answer seemed obvious - draconian legislation. In the name of ‘socialism in one country’ bureaucratic omnipotence had to be enhanced and the workers cowed. What a travesty of genuine socialism!

In October 1930, the first decree was made forbidding the free movement of labour. It was followed two months later by one that prohibited managers from taking on workers who had left their previous place of employment without permission. At the same time unemployment benefit was ended on the grounds that unemployment no longer existed. In January 1931 came legislation providing for prison sentences in cases of labour indiscipline - confined initially to railworkers. February saw the introduction of compulsory labour books for all industrial and transport workers. In March, decrees against negligence were announced, followed by a stipulation making workers responsible for damage done to machines or materials. Privileged rations for ‘shock brigades’ were introduced, and in 1932 the then very meagre food supplies were put under direct control of factory managers and distributed through a trick system of allocation by results. July 1932 saw the repeal of article 37 of the 1922 labour code, under which the transfer of a worker from one enterprise to another could be effected only with their consent. On August 7 1932 the death penalty was introduced for theft of state or collective farm property; a law which was immediately applied on a wide scale - firing squads began to devour workers on the same scale as kulaks. From November 1932 a single day’s unauthorised absence from work became punishable by instant dismissal. Then at the end of 1932, on December 27, came the reintroduction of internal passports - denounced by Lenin as one of the worst features of tsarist backwardness and despotism¹⁴.

It was not only the peasantry which were ‘re-enserfed’. The workers were too. And using hunger, fear, bribes and killings, Stalin hoped to get these worker-slaves to accept his new system of exploitation. Terroristic laws were enacted as a makeshift substitute for the spontaneous discipline of the market and the conscious discipline of the plan.

There can be no doubt that with the advance of production under bureaucratic socialism new layers found themselves absorbed into the labour process to the point where there was a crippling population shortage. This generated an irresistible upward pressure on levels of subsistence. The same spontaneous social laws necessitated an eventual abandonment of Stalin’s most authoritarian measures. Insubstantial and ultimately unsustainable material incentives became ever more important. Nevertheless, throughout its entire history bureaucratic socialism had constant recourse to naked force in order to maintain its domination. Clearly Stalin’s terror played a key role in the birth of the system. Moreover in the 1928-1941 formative years, each successive crisis caused by the unfolding of internal contradictions was dealt with using the mailed fist. With each terroristic partial solution the society evolved, took shape and its contradictions became more pronounced and intractable.

Terror secured the bureaucracy’s domination of the countryside. It also unintentionally ruined agriculture and triggered famine. Terror against the workers subordinated labour power to the bureaucracy and prevented the emergence of a conscious proletarian challenge. But no legislation could break the negative control workers exercised over their own individual work (nor the non-productivity on the state and collective farms), precisely because it was social. Stalin institutionalised competition between workers through creating a privileged stratum of shock workers (and in due course Stakhanovites). Suffice to say reducing necessary labour remained a constant frustration.

The turmoil, the countless drawbacks, foreseen and unforeseen, of Stalin’s collectivisation and industrialisation caused huge stresses and strains to develop within the governing apparatus. The Old Bolshevik, left and right, had been routed. However, Stalin still faced overt and covert opposition from within the party hierarchy. It was Stalinite ideologically. But it was not yet completely subordinated to Stalin, the man.

Most students of the USSR agree that the so-called Ryutin platform was the “crucial” event leading to Stalin’s generalisation, his systemisation, of terror¹⁵. MN Ryutin was a young, unorthodox Bukharinite. With the help of a small group of co-thinkers he produced, and circulated, a long theoretical document (‘rediscovered’ in 1989, it is believed to have contained 13 chapters and run to 200 pages). It included, not to say centred on, a stinging attack on Stalin and his policies.

The eclecticism of Ryutinite politics is summed up by the confused, but not unperceptive, notion that the (Bukharin) right wing of the CPSU “has proved correct in the economic field”, but Trotsky was equally correct “in his criticism of the regime in the party”¹⁶. Of course, the motive behind Ryutin’s praise for former leaders was to focus on the need to remove the incumbent leader (it does not reduce Ryutin’s stature that years later he became a Gorbachevite hero of convenience). According to Ryutin, Stalin was the “evil genius of the Russian Revolution”. Due to his “personal desire for power and revenge”, Stalin had “brought the revolution to the verge of ruin”¹⁷.

Expelled from the party in September 1930, Ryutin was arrested six weeks later. Despite being readmitted in January 1931, unlike so many Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyite and Zinoviev-ite, he was not to be tamed. In June 1932, as part of the “All-Union conference of the Union of Marxist-Leninists”, Ryutin put his name to an “appeal to the membership of the CPSU(B)”. Unambiguously it was a call for political revolution (Trotsky had no monopoly on the idea of revolution within the revolution). “Stalin and his clique will not and cannot voluntarily give up their positions,” said the appeal. So “they must be removed by force” and “as soon as possible,” it concluded¹⁸. Ryutin was rearrested in September 1932 and it is well known that Stalin pressed for his execution. The general secretary interpreted political revolution as a euphemism for his own assassination. The Soviet Union however was an oligarchy, not yet a monocracy. Much to Stalin’s fury, he could not win on the politburo. Defeat “rankled” - in 1936 he spoke of the OGPU being four years behind in unmasking Trotskyites¹⁹. Over the next two years Stalin put together what for him was the “logical solution” - the blood sacrifice of Kirov²⁰.

It would appear that two implicit trends existed within the commanding heights of the apparatus. One favoured pressing on with terror. The other wanted some sort of normalisation. Both found expression at the 17th Congress of the CPSU in January 1934. Officially entitled the “congress of victors”, it turned out to be the congress of victims - over the next few years 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates were to be shot; 70% of the central committee elected by them were to die violent deaths. On the face of it Stalin was triumphant. All prominent oppositionists had surrendered by 1933 (apart, of course, from Trotsky, who continued to damn Stalin from abroad). Zinoviev and Kamenev, back from Siberia, made another grovelling confession of their sins to the congress. Hitler’s success in becoming chancellor in Germany finally prodded Rakovsky and Sosnovsky into capitulation. They too abased themselves before the beast.

In his report Stalin boasted that there was “nothing to prove and, it seems, no one to fight”²¹. Yet the “murderer and peasant-slayer”²² did not feel secure in his Kremlin lair. Stalin warned that those who advocated a relaxation of the struggle against left and right “deviations” were “sworn enemies of Leninism”²³. He did not name names. But he must have been talking about real people, a real political trend. Perhaps equally significantly in terms of subtext, he did not put the all-too-evident shortcomings of the country’s economy down to the party’s line nor to objective conditions. The “responsibility for the failures and defects” lay with “ourselves alone”: ie, the bureaucracy²⁴.

Stalin received his now customary “stormy and prolonged applause”. Yet, in spite of the public adulation, there had been private talk amongst delegates of replacing Stalin as general secretary with Kirov, who is reported to have rejected such suggestions out of hand. Nevertheless 150-300 delegates are believed to have voted against Stalin in the election to the central committee (the official figures gave the number as three)²⁵. This not inconsiderable act of defiance reflected a broader trend which seems to have wanted an end to terror.

Some have suggested that Kirov had taken up the mantel of Bukharin’s pro-NEP politics. Given the sufferings the party leadership had just inflicted on the entire country in the name of primitive accumulation, it would appear improbable. Indeed no convincing evidence has been presented. NEP had woefully failed. Moreover primitive accumulation, or more accurately, the terror accompanying it, destroyed the kulak farms which generated marketable surpluses. A return to NEP would totally discredit the regime politically and almost certainly result in food supplies to the swollen cities and rash of new industrial projects becoming even scarcer. NEP was not an option. Nor is it the case that Kirov was viewed in leading circles as Stalin’s natural successor. He was up and coming, but still no more than a second-rank figure. Kirov was, though, the personification of those who thought that, while terror had been an unfortunate necessity, it should give way to normalisation - incidentally Bukharin had been charged with the task of drafting a new, democratic, constitution and this was seen by many to indicate that the moderate trend in the bureaucracy had gained influence.

Normalisation was an understandable goal. Society had become deeply disaffected. Many party members felt exhausted and demoralised. Normalisation presumably meant some sort of democratisation and relief from suffering. Such a regime would surely have been welcomed by the Soviet peoples - at least momentarily. Stalin’s institutionalisation of terror would, in that case, never have happened and perhaps therefore the gruelling patriotic war with Nazism greatly shortened. But the system could not be saved. In historic terms democratisation would have actually brought forward collapse. The social formation in the USSR was unsustainable. Normalisation was not a viable programme because the system itself was unviable. Khrushchev opened things up and was removed by the bureaucracy in order to prevent him going any further. Gorbachev went further and the system did collapse.

Stalin must have decided to strike first and liquidate all who might in some way favour his removal. To preserve the system he needed to establish a monocracy. Terror therefore had to encompass those who thought themselves totally loyal to the system, but who might not be totally loyal to Stalin. Obviously the machinery of terror was already in place. All Stalin had to do was some fine tuning. In July 1934 the OGPU was replaced by the NKVD. The change was more than one of title. The NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, unlike the OGPU, was under Stalin’s “supreme political authority”²⁶. It was his praetorian guard.

With the NKVD Stalin carried out what Conquest calls the “crime of the century” - the assassination of Kirov²⁷. The official 1938 version of events of December 1 1934 was an interesting combination of fact and fiction. Leonid Nikolayev was a young Zinovievite - that at least is beyond dispute. According to the account he planned Kirov’s death, acting directly under the orders of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. The conspiracy was facilitated by Genrikh Yagoda, head of NKVD - shot in 1938. It was he who instructed Ivan Zaporozhets, second in command of Leningrad NKVD, to remove all obstacles to the assassin.

There can be no doubt that Stalin plotted the whole thing. Yagoda, as it was later said, set up Nikolayev and cleared his way into the Smolny and Kirov’s third-floor office. But “Yagoda could only have acted on the secret order of Stalin”²⁸.

Stalin showed remorse at Kirov’s funeral. It was clearly feigned. Stalin would now experience no problems of the sort he had encountered over Ryutin. The death of Kirov allowed him to create the hysterical atmosphere needed to make terror permanent. The politburo did not have the opportunity to decide on its response to the Kirov assassination. Stalin simply presented its members with a fait accompli. Immediately news came in of the “evil murder of comrade Kirov” Stalin launched his terror. Initially it was former oppositionists who were arrested. However, such ‘liberalism’ soon gave way to indiscriminate terror. Within a few months 30,000 to 40,000 Leningraders had been deported to Siberia and the Arctic²⁹. It did not stop there. “The flower of the party” was to be “stamped out in the savage violence” that followed³⁰. Along with, it should be added, millions of others.

The Soviet social formation economised politics and politicised economics. Terror therefore soon invaded every aspect and layer of life. Traitors and spies had to be endlessly unmasked and fed to the never satiated gulag. Having exhausted the readily available supply of kulaks, bourgeois specialists, tsarists, Mensheviks and foreign engineers, new human material was needed. From outsiders the terror shifted to insiders. A new enemy was invented, writes Gabor Rittersporn. It had become increasingly “difficult to maintain” the fiction that the hardships endured by the people were all the fault of those “alien to the regime”³¹.

The Trotskyite myth had to be given a new twist. Supposed Trotskyites were to be made responsible for every shortage, every failure. Vyshinsky illustrated the desperate reasoning of a regime which made big boasts, but had to explain poor results: “In our country, rich in resources of all kinds,” he said

“there could not have been and cannot be a situation in which a shortage of any product should exist .... It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then of another. It is these traitors who are responsible for it.”³²

Centre encouraged those below to find fault with those above - excluding itself of course - and to blame every fault on the Trotskyite plot to dismember the Soviet Union. Problems multiplied with every forward step the system made. Everyone had a grievance and a scapegoat. Workers resented managers for the privileges and disruption caused by Stakhanovite methods of work. Stakhanovites accused managers and technical personnel of “sabotaging” their movement. The press was full of such reports. In the midst of a “national hysteria about enemies” Stalin’s paranoia could only grow³³. Complaints mirrored the rising scale of irrationality. Victims therefore grew exponentially.

The “chronic defects of the Stalinist planning system were simply presented as sabotage”. In this way the regime made it “impossible to discuss true responsibility”³⁴. Within industry, breakdowns, raw material shortages, unfulfilled targets, accidents, lack of bonuses, etc, were attributed to the vast Trotskyite plot; which, as diplomatic expediency required, was said to be directed in conjunction with the German, British, French, Japanese or Polish intelligence services. Salem and its malevolent witch-finder was re-enacted at specially convened meetings across the Soviet expanse. At the prompting of Moscow’s plenipotentiaries, hapless managers were denounced by their downtrodden subordinates. But with or without popular participation the NKVD successively liquidated one set of managers after another.

Each bout of exposures, arrests and butchery saw ‘red’ conformists and careerists take another step up the ladder. Through ‘negative selection’ hundreds of thousands with little or no technical qualifications entered the administrative hierarchy. Not surprisingly, as management became progressively less skilled and more fearful, the functioning of the economy became less efficient and more chaotic. Production, virtually stagnant in 1937 and 1938, “actually went down in 1939”³⁵. Soviet economic difficulties were obviously exacerbated by the terror. Most authorities agree on that³⁶. Nor is it wrong to suggest that “the fall-off in Soviet growth rates” was itself a “cause” of the terror³⁷.

At every level the system by its very nature bred ‘saboteurs and wreckers’ - ie, irrationality. Target figures were always unrealistic. Under Stalin’s terror, admitting failure meant certain death. Mere self-preservation led bureaucracy-as-management to hide the truth with exaggerated figures and non-use values. It was a rational, but high-risk strategy. With each success reported, the bureaucracy-as-planners in turn calculated higher targets. Higher targets forced management into bigger lies. The gap between what was real (use values) and what was claimed (target values) grew to the point where it could not easily escape the notice of the authorities. Instead of looking for the social origins of false data and the production of waste, those in command preferred to attribute it to “malevolent human design”³⁸. Hidden Trotskyite wreckers and saboteurs were to be blamed for the incoherence of the plan, not Stalin. Kaganovich uncovered their ‘counterrevolutionary limit-setting on output’ - and duly “organised the mass destruction of engineering and technical cadres”³⁹.

In the dungeons of the NKVD the chief director, his deputy and close associates would confess to anything. “The only chance of avoiding death was to admit to everything ... even this seldom saved a man’s life.”⁴⁰ If spared, they would be packed off to do exhausting manual labour and a premature end in the camps. Needless to say, the inexperienced substitutes had to deploy the same (criminal) exaggerations and methods to survive even in the short term. Antoni Ekart rightly points out that the system left them “no option”⁴¹.

As an attempt at displacing popular anger the show trials give us an unintended glimpse of the “impossible”, but actual, conditions in industry. Conquest quotes AA Shestov, an NKVD agent, who was made to testify, during the trial of the so-called ‘Siberians’, that it was Trotskyites rather than government policy which was rendering the worker’s life intolerable. “Instructions were issued,” said Shestov,

“to worry the life out of the workers. Before a worker reached his place of work, he must be made to heap two hundred curses on the heads of the pit management. Impossible conditions of work were created. Not only for Stakhanovite methods, but even for normal methods.”⁴²

Such concoctions might have fooled some of the workers some of the time. But they could not fool all of the workers all of the time. Moreover for the system as a whole there was a high price. The new managers were supposed to be more obedient and therefore useful to the centre. Or so Stalin thought. However, the actual characteristic that was selected, in almost Darwinian fashion, was not obedience. It was managerial incompetence, combined with a facility for conciliation with the workers and statistical disinformation. The Stalinite environment favoured hacks. Hence utilising those below to discipline those above had quickly diminishing returns. Witch hunting of managers encouraged insubordination. It turned expensively trained specialists and technicians into camp labourers and, in next to no time, corpses. It compounded economic problems.

Having to some degree undermined the authority of management, Stalin sought a solution in enhancing their dictatorial powers. In 1938 the labour book was introduced for all workers. These ‘visas’ contained the supposed reason for leaving previous employment - eg, sacked for ‘sabotage’ - and had to be presented to the next employer. In another attempt to counter the power workers possessed because of the labour shortage, Stalin introduced legislation which in formal terms ‘enserfed’ or ‘attached’ them to their workplace. As from June 26 1940 it became illegal for a worker to unilaterally leave their job unless they were physically unfit or about to enter higher education.

For the Soviet system to smoothly function it needed orders to be realistic, correctly handed down, fully understood and diligently carried out. Yet in the absence of democracy, orders inevitably produced altogether unintended results. They were subject to universal distortion and reinterpretation. Often, because the bureaucracy had no idea of the actual conditions on the ground, they were, to begin with, simply unfulfillable. Irrationality filled the vacuum between market and plan. Terror became ubiquitous in the attempt to bring order. It did not succeed. Nor could it succeed. Control over use-values slipped further and further out of reach. The system made it necessary to lie - academician TD Lysenko did so magnificently. Top biologists were killed en masse because of their body of work contradicted his pseudo-scientific panacea for the ills of Soviet agriculture. What was real and what was unreal, in every area, was for the bureaucracy-as-collectivity impossible to tell. Untruth became the only certainty. The bureaucracy thereby could not master the system it created.

At a huge cost to society and the bureaucracy itself, terror succeeded in eliminating Stalin’s real and imagined political opponents. Politics ceased and was replaced by intrigue above and ritual below. But to eliminate all his real and imagined opponents Stalin had to terrorise the entire population - everyone lied; everyone cheated. No wonder Stalin is reported to have said that “Where there’s a person there’s a problem; where there’s no person there’s no problem.” So in unleashing wave after wave of terror Stalin was being perfectly logical. Terror atomised the population from top to bottom by destroying all organised bonds of social solidarity outside “that provided by personal allegiance to himself”⁴³. Soviet citizens became islands. Inwardly they feared. Outwardly they feverishly displayed conformist enthusiasm. Even on the most intimate and private level trust between people became highly problematic. Children denounced parents, wives their husbands, husbands their wives. Such extreme atomisation temporarily saved the system by making even the discussion of an alternative impossible. But in saving the system the institutions of the system were lobotomised.

Conquest traces the main isobars of Stalin’s whirlwind as it moved over the summits and plains of society:

“The heaviest impact of all was, of course, on the institutional and communal loyalties which still existed in the country after 18 years of one-party rule. The most powerful and important organisation drawing loyalty to itself and its ideas, rather than to the general secretary himself, was the party - or rather its pre-Stalinist membership. Then came the army. Then the intellectual class, rightly seen as the potential bearer of heretical attitudes. These special allegiances attracted particularly violent attention.”⁴⁴

During the 30s Stalin carried out what Conquest calls “a revolution which completely transformed the party and the whole of society”⁴⁵. It was a counterrevolution. Stalin’s position was thus transformed. The central committee plenum of February-March 1937 marked the point where oligarchy became monocracy. With his victory at this meeting Stalin’s political battle had effectively been won. Nothing could now stop the total annihilation of the old oppositionists. The way was also open to undermine and destroy that group among his own followers who had helped restrain the terror. Constitutional limitations ceased being relevant. Stalin had freed himself from all such constraints. Conquest points out that in the autumn of 1936 Stalin had to “argue and exert pressure to secure the arrest and trial even of potential rivals”⁴⁶. Six months later he could arbitarily order the arrest of his closest colleagues. He could strike when, where and at whom he liked, without let or hindrance.

In the provinces terror swept away almost everywhere the old ‘party-line’ Stalinites who represented an albeit tenuous continuity with 1917 and the civil war. Their place was taken by enthusiasts for terrorism and denunciation. At centre, Stalin had already placed his loyalists in key positions. Nevertheless Moscow, the central committee and the politburo were ravaged too. With the exception of Trotsky in Mexico and poor old Grigori Petrovsky, working on sufferance as a museum administrator, by the end of the 1930s there was no such thing as a living ex-member of the politburo.

In being transformed, the party lost any ability to convince and effectively mobilise. Not surprisingly the party found itself institutionally eclipsed. Whereas “previously the party secretary had been the most powerful man in the area, it was now the NKVD chief who counted”⁴⁷. That mirrored what was happening at centre. The central committee and the politburo became mere rubber stamps for Stalin’s decisions. The NKVD was his personal sword. Initiative within the party was no longer possible. Party gatherings became mind-numbingly dull, pronouncements routine and uninspired. No genuine discussion was allowed. Votes were unanimous and functioned as acclamation, not as decision making. Membership was seen as a social passport. Diamat (dialectical and historical materialism) became a school-swot’s memory test of Stalin’s ‘contributions’ to philosophy, not a tool of scientific investigation. The History of the CPSU(B) had about the same relationship to reality as the New testament. But it too served to establish a confessional dogma not for question. Marxism was thus eliminated as a social discourse. Without exception its genuine adherents were imprisoned, incorporated or killed. Terror depoliticised the party and turned it into a hierarchy of almost feudal dependence. Every secretary would have a chosen band of clone-like retainers. If their man was promoted they would be promoted with him. The skill was in spotting the astrological signs indicating who was to rise and who was about to fall. Getting it wrong during the terror meant the gulag or death.

Terror reached its hand abroad. Trotsky’s sympathisers in a number of countries were cowardly targeted. Eventually in August 1940 the great man himself was to fall to a Stalinite assassin. In Spain the Poum was viciously persecuted and its leadership killed. But the brunt of terror against foreigners was borne by those in the USSR itself; most notably members of communist parties which were illegal in their own countries. Not to be a Soviet citizen was almost all it took to be guilty of a heinous crime.

Communists fleeing Nazism found themselves rounded up by the NKVD. Unbelievably they were charged with being enemy agents. Eye witnesses in the camps tell of German communists with body scars from the Gestapo and crushed fingernails from the NKVD. And grotesquely after the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939 some 570 of these communists, those who had managed to survive the gulag, were herded up in Moscow prisons before being taken to the border of German-occupied Poland, at Brest-Litovsk. Once there, the NKVD proceeded to coolly list them off and transfer them to awaiting Gestapo men.

The Polish party was annihilated, both organisationally and physically, by Stalin. Between 1937 to 1939, all 12 members of its central committee present in Russia, all Polish members on the Comintern executive and control commission, and several hundred others, were executed. Losses among Hungarian exiles was also particularly heavy. They included Bela Kun, the famed leader of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet government. He was accused of being an agent of Germany since 1916 and Britain since 1926. After being terribly tortured he was shot on August 29 1938. Most Finns living in USSR were likewise liquidated as ‘enemies of the people’. The Yugoslav party was virtually destroyed, as was the Bulgarian. Of the 1,400 Bulgarian exiles more than 1,000 found themselves in forced labour camps; only about 100 made it back to Bulgaria.

Cronus ate. But only spewed hypocritical internationalism.

Stalin did not spare even his own terrorists. Liar, torturer and killer though he was, Yagoda was discarded and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov in 1937. Under circumstances prevailing in the USSR such a change was inevitably carried out with new lies, torture and killings. Yagoda was denounced as a former tsarist police agent, a thief, an embezzler and a leading conspirator in the Trotskyite assassination of Kirov. He quickly confessed, was tried and - as with so many before him - shot. Yezhov proceeded to clear out Yagoda’s ‘spies’ in the NKVD. Arrests took place by day and night. Knowing the treatment awaiting them, some preferred putting a bullet through their own heads; others jumped from high windows to ensure a quick end. Most went passively. Three thousand NKVD officers were executed almost immediately. By the end of the purge of Yagoda’s ‘spies’ and their subordinates 20,000 NKVD men had ‘fallen victim’.

Stalin, an avid reader of Machiavelli, skilfully kept in the background. Many would go to their deaths pleading that Stalin be told of the atrocities being carried out by his secret police. Some died with the cry, ‘Long live comrade Stalin’, on their lips. The terror was associated in the popular mind not with the general secretary, but the men who carried out his orders - Yagoda, Yezhov and finally Beria. People habitually spoke not of Stalin, but of the Yezhovachina - the time of Yezhov - when referring to the depths of the terror.

The terror hit the army over the years 1937-9. It destroyed the most talented among the officer corps. Within nine days of the execution of the legendary Marshal Tukhachevsky (along with his wife and many members of his immediate family) 980 officers had been arrested, including 21 corps commanders and 37 divisional commanders. Veterans of the Spanish civil war were particularly suspect. They were massacred. When Stalin had finished, out of the approximate one million party members in the army, 125,000 were dead; that included 16 out of 16 army political commissars, three out of five marshals, 13 out of 15 army commanders, 50 out of 57 corps commanders and 154 out of 186 divisional commanders (the navy and airforce suffered on a similar scale).

Military doctrine was thrown back. In place of Tukhachevsky’s innovations, such as massed tank formations and coordinated air support, there returned Voroshilov’s creaking tactics and strategy of mixed infantry and cavalry. The country’s fighting capabilities were greatly weakened. Disaster was only narrowly averted in the brief Soviet-Finnish war. Soviet units performed abysmally. Many newly promoted commanders proved utterly incompetent. Despite that and repeated warnings concerning Hitler’s bellicose intentions, the armed forces were in a state of complete unreadiness when the Germans invaded in 1941. The airforce was destroyed on the ground. Whole armies were surrounded and ignominiously captured. The military high command was thrown into complete disarray. Stalin could hardly believe that Hitler had broken his word, that in spite of the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had been attacked. For days he hid away in the Kremlin. An image which hardly conforms with the apologist’s idea of a farsighted Stalin in 1931, knowing he had ten years before war broke out with imperialism, German or any other. The court writer Ilya Ehrenburg later observed how Stalin “suspected his own closest comrades, but he trusted Hitler”⁴⁸.

Terror brought into existence a new, lumpen, bureaucracy. The old one was destroyed, in part because it contained within it those tainted with the ideals of October. Such residual ‘contaminants’ personified the (remote) possibility of a return to revolutionary politics. Alan Bullock, the renowned critic and historian of Nazism, is therefore quite correct in drawing a parallel with his main subject and Stalinism. It had its origins on the left, but it was a rightwing - ie, anti-democratic and anti-working class - phenomenon⁴⁹. Of course it must be explained that Stalin’s terror was self-perpetuating. It was not directed at the Soviet equivalent of the Jews nor the brownshirts - ie, assigned or real political enemies of Stalin. The irrationalities of the system bred lies and failures at every level. The system needed, found and had to keep finding scapegoats, at the top as well as the bottom.

Paradoxically the new bureaucracy did not exercise collective power over bureaucratic socialism. The bureaucracy were vassals whose task was to carry out orders. Power was in the hands of a single individual. In the sense that we can still call it, so was politics and ideology. Stalin was undoubtedly a “practical man”. But he was more than that. Cometh the bureaucratisation of the revolution, cometh the counterrevolutionary revolutionary. By “insight into the requirements of the time” Stalin could be said to have realised himself as a Hegelian “world-historical individual”⁵⁰. The worker-party ideal, had, by becoming its opposite, become materialised.

Bureaucrats could neither debate nor develop alternative ideas. Direction of the Soviet Union was a private affair vested in its ‘red monarch’. Stalin was a despot of Asiatic proportions. Living, at least till his last years, in modest style, he owned next to nothing⁵¹. Nevertheless he had effective right over everything and everybody. In this way the Soviet Union can be likened to the great empires of the ancient world. Their traditions of tribal, peasant-citizen, aristocratic, or republican democracy gave way to autocracy, as territory expanded to the Pillars of Heracles and the outer limits of Eratosthnesian geography⁵². Neither the Roman senate nor the Macedonian assembly could manage a world empire. In extending and preserving far flung imperial gains, the fact of decisions quickly taken and just as quickly acted upon was a great advantage, if not a necessity. Vast space and slowness of communications combined to drain localist institutions of effectiveness and called forth god-kings.

In a painfully backward Soviet Union, non-capitalism and non-socialism likewise favoured one-man management (of the entire system). As in tsarist times industry remained sparse, military orientated and dependent on the state for its existence and ability to function. Agriculture had been archaised by revolution and then in a different way by collectivisation. Expropriation of the landlords and the division of their estates into small parcels recreated something like the old village communes or mirs. Collectivisation without democracy or technology turned the peasants into propertyless labourers, who were effectively the property of a state. It mobilised their common labour along lines not dissimilar to the systems of Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. Their entire surplus product, no matter how meagre, belonged to the higher community ie, the state.

Living in an internal world of seething popular discontent, faced externally by powerful redivisionist fascist powers, the system was highly vulnerable. Therefore its state had to be strong. The logical form under such conditions was monocracy. It could atomise, organise and discipline the population and provide an instant response to internal or external developments and threats. Bureaucratic socialism in one country plus primitive accumulation equals one-man rule.

3.1 The historical tendency of bureaucratic accumulation

What does the genesis of bureaucratic accumulation grow into? A social formation that has its pre-history in the proletarian overthrow of the Kerensky-capitalist state and then the subsequent transformation of the workers’ state into a bureaucratic form of Bonapartism is inherently unstable. The workers cannot rule, but remain a significant threat. The bureaucracy however comes to fear the spontaneous power of the market almost to the same degree as socialism. To preserve its position over society the bureaucracy makes a blind leap into a form of primitive accumulation unique in human history. The law of value is pulled up by the roots. So are the last remnants of positive workers’ power. Counterrevolution within the revolution (ie, post-capitalism) turns the entire populace into state slaves.

Separating peasant from soil; the bloody transformation of humble property into re-expropriated property; terroristic legislation to curb the negative power of workers; indiscriminate mass slaughter of every suspect and the gulag system: all this at a personal level serves the blinkered and selfish interests of the individual bureaucrat - he wants to hang onto his chauffeur-driven car, aristo-wife, privileged rations, and self-contained apartment. Never in the course of human history has so much mass suffering been imposed for so damned little. Great October produced its negation in the most banal wants and lusts.

Stalin’s first five-year plan, based on collectivisation, imported technology, extended hours and savage reductions in living standards, is a one-off. Following plan targets are ever more reliant on productivity increases. However, the bureaucracy finds itself constantly frustrated. The system can only partially socialise production and only partially control the surplus product. Moreover, due to the same immanent laws, workers through individualised action secure higher levels of subsistence despite the wishes of centre. Rates of accumulation fall. Reproduction of the relations of production are thereby never viable. Not even the bureaucracy can act in a coherent fashion. The self-interest of each bureaucrat, of each part, undermines the whole. To stabilise the system the bureaucracy jumps from one futile experiment to another - vertical ministerial integration, horizontal republican integration, computer-managed hyper-centralisation, pseudo-market decentralisation. In fact all that staves off collapse is the continued atomisation of the population and augmenting the sphere of industry with human subtractions from the home and countryside. To that extent the social formation was only capable of primitive accumulation.

By the mid-1960s the Soviet Union can be classified as industrialised and urbanised. Even from the late 1940s the USSR attains superpower status; an example for others, and not only in the ex-colonial countries, to emulate. Yet while prestige runs high, its contradictions are cracking the facade of ‘real existing socialism’. Inexorably capitalism presses home its advantages and just as inexorably the Soviet Union’s disadvantages pull it down.

Capital freely roams and exploits the planet. By its own nature it constantly revolutionises the means of production - both repelling and attracting workers. The USSR is of continental proportions, but is neither a global nor a continually dynamic system. The surplus population so necessary to it is declining to the point of exhaustion. The scientific and technical revolution has a negligible impact. More and more input produces less and less in the way of output. Export provides a temporary respite in the form of hard (universal) currency. But products remain decidedly second rate and, except for raw materials, unattractive on the international market. Real growth rates eventually reach zero and threaten to become negative. The social formation is an absolute fetter.

Within the bureaucracy the search for a solution has begun long before. Stalin’s lumpen-bureaucrats of subjugation have of need been increasingly superseded by technocratic-bureaucrats. These highly educated people are promoted because of qualities of competence, not perceived “unquestioned obedience”⁵³. Beneath a well rehearsed veneer of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ they are attracted to the market (which besides offering them a cornucopia of licit wealth promises effective control over the workers through unemployment and commodity fetishism). Ironically, perhaps the first tentative example of this neo-Bukharinism is Stalin’s 1952 Economic problems of socialism in the USSR - no one else could get away with such heresy. Enterprises are urged not to “function without taking the law of value into account”⁵⁴. Instead of managers reporting “approximate” figures “spun out of air”, Stalin’s so-called law of value will bring, he hopes, price rationality, cost discipline and improved methods of production, thereby making “enterprises pay”⁵⁵.

Nor can Khrushchev ignore the ossification of the system he inherits a year or two later. A limited thaw of intellectual life is encouraged in the quest for the magic formula that will restore early dynamism⁵⁶. By the mid-60s the pro-market school gains the upper hand⁵⁷. M-C-M’ is their incantation. Nemchinov, Kantorvich and other ‘reformist’ economists give theoretical justification to new appetites and passions that have begun to stir at the top. Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’, particularly stultifying after the suppression of Dubcek’s ‘human face’ experiment in Czechoslovakia, is only an interregnum in a process whereby the bureaucracy - or at least a section of it - seeks to transform itself into a capitalist class.

Underpinning the bureaucracy’s industrialisation of the USSR is the constant increase in the number of workers. Police repression, atomisation and internal divisions puts off the formation of these workers into a class (ie, a collectivity which acts together). So does the growing level of subsistence they secure individually from the system. Revolts there are. But without political democracy nothing can overcome their spontaneity. They do not herald the birth of a new, higher, system.

Bureaucratic socialism in the USSR emerges from the failure of proletarian socialism. The genesis of the social formation negates every democratic vestige surviving from the October Revolution. It also, in the drive for domination, negates the market and its kulaks and nepmen. But the social formation creates by its own self-movement its own negation. In spite of the national fragmentation and tremendous economic dislocation it causes, the bureaucracy is drawn to capitalism like the moth to the flame. Here is the negation of the negation.

Yet in re-establishing private property and the market much of what bureaucratic socialism brought into existence must be sacrificed. What was raised by state command is ill adapted to endure the cold winds that come with the law of value. The great steel cities, vast engineering complexes, arctic mining colonies and mammoth accumulation of heavy industry built in Stalin’s time made the Soviet Union a superpower. But, as with light industry, most of it is hopelessly uncompetitive in world terms. For the first time since 1928 human masses have to be expelled from the productive process. Behind the scourge of unemployment there follows homelessness, plague, hunger and poverty. Capitalism is the bringer not of civilisation, but a new barbarism. Only the workers, by forming themselves into a class, can bring civilisation. Who was and is and is to come!

Jack Conrad

Uncharacteristically Hillel Ticktin does deny just that. What an epochal defeat for the working class is meant to entail one can only imagine (see his otherwise excellent article, from which I have freely taken, in Critique No27, p133).↩︎
See A Solzehenitsyn The gulag archipelago London 1974.↩︎
See R Medvedev Let history judge London 1976; and RC Tucker Stalin in power London 1992.↩︎
See JE Davis Mission to Moscow London 1942.↩︎
Torture had been routine throughout the first half of the 1930s. Prisoners were beaten, toe nails torn out, bones broken and fingers slammed in doors, etc. “All this was, in a sense, ‘unofficial’,” says Conquest. However, in 1937 “it suddenly became the usual method of interrogation, at least in the bulk of cases at the lower level” (R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p121). Unquestionably Stalin was behind this descent into barbarity. In January 1939 the central committee (Stalin) issued a circular to NKVD and party organisations openly justifying torture: “The party central committee explains that the application of methods of physical pressure in NKVD practice is permissible from 1937 on, in accordance with permission of the party central committee .... It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services use methods of physical influence against the representatives of the socialist proletariat and that they use them in the most scandalous forms. The question arises as to why the socialist intelligence service should be more humanitarian against the mad agents of the bourgeoisie, against the deadly enemies of the working class and of the collective farm workers. The party central committee considers that physical pressure should still be used obligatorily, as an exception applicable to known and obstinate enemies of the people, as a method both justifiable and appropriate” (quoted in ibid p122). Roy Medvedev reports that to obtain confessions the NKVD “tortured husbands in front of wives and visa versa”. Again, Medvedev tells how the politburo member, SV Kossior, withstood torture only to be broken when his 16-year old daughter was brought to the interrogation room and raped in front of him (quoted in ibid p127). Holding hostages became standard. “It seems a general rule that with confessions by prominent figures, members of the family were in the power of the NKVD. Bukharin, Rykov, and Zinoviev all had children of whom they were very fond” (ibid p127).↩︎
"In 1919 we were fighting for our lives. We executed people, but we also risked our lives in the process. In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men, together with their wives and children” (Bukharin quoted in BI Nikolaevsky Power and the Soviet elite New York 1965, p18). Though not at all sympathetic to communism, Conquest too distinguishes between the red terror of the civil war years and Stalin’s terror: “Lenin’s terror was the product of years of war and violence, of the collapse of society and administration, of the desperate acts of rulers precariously riding the flood, and fighting for control and survival. Stalin, on the contrary, attained complete control at a time when general conditions were calm. By the end of the 1920s, the country had, however reluctantly, accepted the existence and stability of the Soviet government. And that government had, in turn, made slight economic and other concessions which had led to comparative prosperity. It was in cold blood, quite deliberately and unprovoked, that Stalin started a new cycle of suffering. First had come the party’s war on the peasantry. When this had done its worst and things were settling down again in the mid-1930s, the great terror was again launched cold-bloodedly at a helpless population. And cold-bloodedness was compounded by the other distinguishing quality of the Stalin purge - the total falsehood of all the reasons given for it and accusations made during it” (R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p251).↩︎
A Hitler Mein kampf London 1992, p128.↩︎
"Far from the great purge eliminating a Soviet fifth column, it laid the foundation for one throughout the country in 1941 to 1945. This was the first war fought by Russia in which a large force of its citizens joined the other side” (ibid p456).↩︎
The first show trial was that of the Shakhty engineers in 1928. It was presided over by the ‘human rat’, Andrei Vyshinsky - confessions were extracted through threats and maltreatment. The trial of the so-called ‘industrial party’ was in 1930; that of the Mensheviks in 1931; and in 1933 the Metro-Vic engineers.↩︎
NI Khrushchev Khrushchev remembers London 1971, p64.↩︎
"The power of the state under Stalin, however harsh the controls and the dictatorship, could not thwart the force and impact of spontaneous social developments” (M Lewin The Gorbachev phenomenon London 1989, p25).↩︎
M Lewin The Gorbachev phenomenon London 1989, p25.↩︎
"While Stalin often blamed the failures of the system on ‘sabotage’, the disorder among the population was a normal reaction of a hard-pressed, disorientated body social trying to defend itself and cope with everyday problems and tasks” (M Lewin The Gorbachev phenomenon London 1989, pp23-24).↩︎
See R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p21.↩︎
ibid p24.↩︎
Quoted in ibid p25.↩︎
Quoted in ibid p24.↩︎
Quoted in ibid p24.↩︎
Quoted in ibid p25.↩︎
ibid p25.↩︎
JV Stalin Selected works Vol 13, Moscow 1955, p354.↩︎
From the 1931 popular anti-Stalin poem by Osip Mandelstam.↩︎
ibid p371.↩︎
ibid p374.↩︎
R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p33.↩︎
ibid p34.↩︎
ibid p37.↩︎
NI Khrushchev, quoted in Argumenty i fakty February 11 1989.↩︎
R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p45.↩︎
NI Khrushchev Khrushchev remembers London 1971, p66.↩︎
GT Rittersporn in J Arch Getty and RT Manning (eds) Stalinist terror Cambridge 1993, p101.↩︎
Report of the court proceedings in the case of the anti-Soviet ‘bloc of rights and Trotskyites’ Moscow 1938, p676.↩︎
R Thurston in J Arch Getty and RT Manning (eds) Stalinist terror Cambridge 1993, p159.↩︎
E Zaleski Stalinist planning for economic growth, 1933-1952 Chapel Hill NC 1980, pp248-9.↩︎
R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p276.↩︎
See N Jasny Soviet industrialisation Chicago 1961, pp132-79; A Nove An economic history of the USSR Harmondsworth 1982, pp225-69; R Medvedev Let history judge London 1976, pp192-258.↩︎
RT Manning in J Arch Getty and RT Manning (eds) Stalinist terror Cambridge 1993, p116.↩︎
ibid p117.↩︎
R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p276.↩︎
ibid p128.↩︎
A Ekart Vanished without a trace London 1954, p156.↩︎
Quoted in R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p154.↩︎
ibid p255.↩︎
ibid p255-6.↩︎
ibid p69.↩︎
ibid p179.↩︎
ibid p227.↩︎
ibid p453.↩︎
A Bullock Hitler and Stalin - parallel lives London 1991.↩︎
GFW Hegel Lectures on the philosophy of history London 1902, pp31-2.↩︎
Stalin’s official salary was “about 1,000 roubles a month” (R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p59).↩︎
Eratosthenes (about 276-194 BC), founder of geography. He brilliantly estimated the world within a few thousand miles of its actual circumference. According to his knowledge-system, Libya, east-India and Europe formed a world-island surrounded by world-sea.↩︎
DJ Dallin The new Soviet empire London 1951,p171.↩︎
JV Stalin The essential Stalin London 1973, p459.↩︎
ibid.↩︎
“It is not without significance that between 1928 and 1954 no textbook of economics was written and published in the Soviet Union” - what was written consisted of apologetics justifying the current economic policies with quotes from the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin (J Wilczynski The economics of socialism London 1982, p11).↩︎
Profit was “officially accepted in the USSR in 1965 as the main criterion of enterprise performance” (J Wilczynski The economics of socialism London 1982, p31).↩︎