14.02.2008

Roots of Stalinism

Results of research in the Moscow archives throws up new insights on the post-revolution period. Phil Kent reports

Simon Pirani addressed a packed London meeting of the Campaign for a Marxist Party on February 10, entitled ‘The Russian Revolution and the transition to Stalinism’. Comrade Pirani’s new book The Russian Revolution in retreat 1920-24 has just been published, but it costs £80. His advice is that you persuade your local library to acquire a copy.

His thesis is that bureaucratic rule - which became fully developed as a system under Stalin - first appeared under the Bolsheviks with the civil war against the ‘whites’. The majority opinion in the working class at the time was that the civil war excused the increasingly anti-democratic state apparatus and activity during the hostilities, but with the coming of peace in 1920 the working class thought democracy should return.

A common assumption has been that the cities emptied of workers during the civil war either through conscription into the army, where a great many communists lost their lives, or by workers running away to the countryside to escape famine. So that after the civil war the revolution was left wallowing in a peasant sea. There is some truth in this. For example, said comrade Pirani, Moscow’s population halved, but still there was industrial activity in the cities, especially around the war effort. The old working class did not disappear, though it certainly shrank, and they kept much of their revolutionary expectations and modes of organising.

So the creeping authoritarianism (and the start of institutionalised privileges, he pointed out) of 1920-24 is seen on the left today as resulting from the decimation of the working class and was therefore a regrettable, but necessary, course of action, not a turn to Stalinism (described mainly in terms of the concept of ‘socialism in one country’).

Comrade Pirani learnt Russian and went to Moscow in order to study the archives first-hand. His researches seemed to demonstrate that all sections of the revolutionary left got into the habit of failing to respond to the needs of workers, arguing for their own organisation’s viewpoint rather than genuinely representing what workers were saying. For example, in 1921 Moscow workers elected a soviet that included a 25% minority that was non-Bolshevik - elected principally by the heavy industry sector. It was the ‘old’ working class - increasingly found in the mushrooming state bureaucracy - that voted for the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks simply refused to work with this minority. Other groups too found that if they disagreed with the Bolsheviks they were excluded from politics and often imprisoned.

Occasionally someone would mention the centrality of the working class to socialism, but it was like a shooting star, gone within a moment. The sun, the moon, the planets and all the bodies in the firmament maintained their positions and paths only through state power. The working class democratic traditions of Bolshevism of 1917 and before were increasingly forgotten.

A lively debate from the floor followed. Gerry Downing argued the orthodox left case that the Bolsheviks consistently followed the right course of action in the circumstances - having won power in a backward country, where the working class made up but 10% of the population, and where the isolated revolution was under attack internally and externally, virtually every decision could be justified. The opposition was either directly counterrevolutionary or favoured policies that would have led to the revolution’s defeat. Comrade Pirani replied politely that he had spent years researching the subject and the comrade was parroting post hoc apologetics: the facts simply did not support his arguments.

Another approach was taken by a series of CPGB members. John Bridge argued that the revolution was necessarily distorted from the first. How could a tiny minority like the Russian working class introduce democracy or, in a sea of poverty and insecurity, even maintain democratic standards in their own ranks? Stan Keable added that there had been no international at the time to ensure that the Russian Revolution and world revolution were kept in pace. To use Mike Macnair’s phrase, 1917 was a “great gamble”, not irrational or forlorn from the outset, because of the destabilisation of Europe, brought about by World War I, but out on its own. Without the spread of the revolution to western Europe the Russian Revolution could - as Fredrick Engels argued, when discussing the German peasant revolts - do no better than fulfil the programme of another class. Stalin’s triumph was not the inevitable outcome of the revolution, but in the circumstances defeat was.

Another comrade pointed out that the revolution had gone on to inspire the world and she mentioned Cuba, Vietnam and Angola as revolutions that had not been defeated and which still gave hope to the world. But these revolutions were in the same mould as the Russian Revolution. Not that they resulted in Stalinist mass murder, but that they focused on a bureaucratic elite. A socialism that is introduced as the gift from above, that provides everything humanity needs. It reminds me of those New Zealand butter adverts, with cows contented because they have lots of green grass. If they had brains they could thank farmer Giles for his kindness, but this is no place to give Animal Farm a happy ending.

Comrade Moshé Machover’s main point was that with the benefit of hindsight we would perhaps have been better off if the Bolsheviks had maintained their democratic credentials come what may, even if it meant going down to defeat, because what the world revolutionary movement has inherited from the Russian Revolution is worship of state power and numerous self-replicating, anti-democratic sects which view the working class not as a potential ruling class but as mere foot soldiers.

A comrade from a libertarian, anarchistic tradition felt that communism was about the elimination of alienation. A spontaneous process that is only possible in the absence of a party. I do not see how it could possibly work (by which I do not mean that communism is a nice idea, but cannot be put into practice). Only a democratic Marxist party of the working class can bring about the degree of international unity and direction to overthrow capitalism - and free the proletariat from alienation. The most important task of communists is to build such a party.