17.09.2008
Stalinist illusions exposed
Mike Macnair explodes the myths about the 'gains' of the USSR
This is the third part of my reply to comrade Tony Clark’s article of June 19, which defended his Stalinist political line.1
In the first article2 I argued that comrade Clark’s idea of ‘socialism’, like ‘official communist’ ideas in general, involve a break with the most fundamental political ideas of Marx and Engels. These are, first, that it is capitalism that makes communism (‘socialism’) possible. Second is the idea that communism (‘socialism’) can only come about through the victory of the proletariat, the wage-worker class, over capitalist rule, and the class rule of the proletariat - as the majority of society - through extreme democracy, over the other classes. The ‘other classes’ here means, mainly, the petty proprietor class, including the technical and managerial intelligentsia. State and party/union bureaucrats are merely parts of the technical and managerial intelligentsia.
In the second article,3 by reviewing David Priestland’s Stalinism and the politics of mobilisation, I addressed the question of how this break from the fundamentals of Marxism came about. I argued that the material conditions for the dictatorship of the proletariat over the other classes did not exist in the former tsarist empire, in isolation, in 1918. As a result, the Bolsheviks were driven to concessions, especially to the peasants and the technical and managerial intelligentsia (spetsy). These concessions involved the subordination of the proletariat, both to the managerial spetsy and to a new segment of this class, the party ‘cadres’. The project of socialist construction in Russia in isolation was utopian, and the more the Bolsheviks/Russian CP clung to this project, the more Bolshevik ideology gradually mutated into utopian forms (described by Priestland from an anti-Marxist standpoint). By the 1930s, clinging to ‘socialism in a single country’ had led to the abandonment of Marx’s class-political perspective.
The utopian ideologies had both rightist technicist (‘revisionist’) and ultra-left voluntarist (Stalinist-proper) sides. These were repeated in the history of both China and (more mildly) Cuba. In each case, the ultra-left voluntarist side was disastrous for the country, for the workers and peasants, and even for the state apparatus; it was for this reason that in each case it was abandoned, leading to an underlying tendency for the rightist side to be strengthened and the victory of ‘revisionism’. Comrade Clark adheres to the ultra-left, voluntarist side of Stalinism against the ‘rightist’ side of this same tendency. But, since this is utopian and can lead only to disasters, this adherence will inevitably lead only to new victories for the rightist side, ‘revisionism’.
This third article concludes the argument by tackling three other aspects of comrade Clark’s arguments. The first and briefest is the question of ‘bureaucracy’. The second is the role of the USSR in the international class struggle - and, with it, Soviet economic development. The third is the question of ‘Trotskyism’ - and with it, the dynamics of global capitalism and the global class struggle.
Bureaucracy
In my May 29 article, to which comrade Clark’s June 19 article was a reply, I said that ‘bureaucracy’ could mean either “rule over society by state officials for their own benefit”, or “the state officials as a group (usually with a derogatory sense that they are parasites on society)”. I said that in the second sense of ‘bureaucracy’, the need to employ specialist officials, comrade Clark was correct to say that the bureaucracy could not be overthrown but only made to wither away; but that in the first sense, the political rule of the bureaucracy, this political rule could be overthrown.4
Comrade Clark replies simply: “This distinction between the two types of bureaucracy seems to me to be completely arbitrary.” This is merely a bald statement without any supporting argument.
There is, however, an additional and important point to be made. In making the distinction between ‘bureaucracy sense 2’, meaning the need to use specialist officials, and ‘bureaucracy sense 1’, the political rule of bureaucrats, I am implicitly arguing that political institutions matter. The determination of politics by economics ‘in the last instance’ does not imply that politics disappears and only economic choices have any significance. The proletariat has a class interest in political democracy.
In saying this, I am saying something which is a common CPGB position, which CPGB comrades keep ‘going on’ about, against the dominant economism of the British far left. I am also following the substantive line of Marx and Engels against the Proudhonists and later the Lassalleans, state socialists, etc.5
It is ironical that in replying to Clark’s June 29 article, which is mostly about defending ‘Marxism-Leninism’ against ‘Trotskyism’, I am also here following Lenin in polemical disagreements, before 1917, with Trotsky, and with other leftists who had common positions with Trotsky. Lenin’s case for the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ was in part that, even though he thought the most that could be achieved by the Russian Revolution was capitalism, there was a choice available between a more democratic and a less democratic capitalism, and the proletariat should choose a strategy which would lead to a more democratic capitalism.6
The same issue arose in Lenin’s polemics in 1916 over national self-determination, with the Polish left around Radek, with Trotsky and with the so-called ‘imperialist-economist’ tendency in the Bolsheviks (Bukharin, Pyatakov and others).7 National self-determination, says Lenin, is a political, democratic demand; and the fact that economic self-determination is impossible in the epoch of imperialism does not alter the fact that political self-determination is preferable to regimes of political oppression of one nation by another. Whatever one may think of the merits of Lenin’s individual arguments in these debates, the idea that taking political institutions seriously is ‘Trotskyism’ as opposed to ‘Leninism’ is foolish.
The material base - the economy - in the last instance limits what is politically possible. The complete abolition of bureaucrats - specialist officials - is for this reason not possible anywhere in the world today. But it does not follow from this that the political dictatorship of the officials over the proletariat - expressed in the form of banning or control by officials of parties and factions, state (or union or party) censorship of what can be said, the ‘right’ of officials to control what information is given out to the ranks, the top-down appointment of local and sectoral officials, and so on - cannot be overthrown.
Moreover, since officials and ‘cadres’ are themselves a segment of the intelligentsia, which is a segment of the class of petty proprietors, to the extent that there is a political dictatorship of the officials over the working class, the dominant tendency will be towards accommodation with the capitalist class. Utopian leftist ‘anti-bureaucratism’ which does not tackle the institutional political forms of the dictatorship of the officials, like Stalin’s and Stalinists’, serves only as a minor-key temporary interruption to this tendency, and one which is doomed to defeat.
The USSR has fallen, and with it the satellite states. In China and Vietnam the dictatorship of the bureaucracy survives as a regime which exploits sweatshop labour in the ultimate interest of imperialism. Cuba under Raul Castro looks to be heading down the same path. The Communist Party Alliance, for which comrade Clark writes, correctly recognises that North Korea’s “Juche idea” is a pure nationalism that has nothing to do with Marxism.8 In this context, clinging to the memory of Stalin’s ‘anti-bureaucratic’ rhetoric is a form of pure nostalgia politics.
However, it has serious practical consequences in the workers’ movement under capitalism. In this movement, the political dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy over the ranks immediately serves capital. Capital relies - for its control over the working class majority - not only on the Blairs and Browns, but also on the Woodleys and so on, who support the Blairs and Browns (if only by blocking organised political opposition to them). Even in the small groups of the left, the political dictatorship of the bureaucracy drives towards opportunism, as we have seen recently in the Socialist Workers Party. The interest of the working class in political democracy, as opposed to the institutional forms of the political dictatorship of the bureaucracy, is thus a matter of immediate practical political significance.
Stalin supports world revolution?
I have no intention of defending the view which comrade Clark attributes to Trotsky, that “the Stalinists were the greatest counterrevolutionary agency of imperialism in the working class, through and through a counterrevolutionary role which Lenin had previously assigned to social democracy” (original emphasis). It is frankly highly doubtful that this was Trotsky’s view. It was defended by the ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’ in the 1950s. They were challenged at the time by their Trotskyist opponents to produce evidence for it in Trotsky’s writings. They were unable to do so.
Comrade Clark’s argument, however, rests more on the claim that the USSR in the Stalin period gave actual support to the world revolution, that “for Stalin’s faction, building socialism in one country served the interest of the world revolution”. His positive evidence for this claim consists of the following:
1. The defeat of Germany in World War II: in 1928 “A period of modernisation was set in motion, which turned the Soviet Union into an industrial power strong enough to play the leading, or at least decisive, role in the defeat of fascism.”
2. “During the 1926 British general strike, Soviet Stalinists mobilised the workers to raise money for the miners.”
3. “Stalinists supported anti-imperialist movements around the world, and the Soviet Stalinists gave financial aid to foreign communist parties; was this all in the name of counterrevolution?”
4. “The Soviet Stalinists gave material assistance to the republican side in the Spanish civil war - hardly the actions of a conservative regime.”
On the other hand, comrade Clark argues: “The greatest defeats experienced by the working class in the period of Stalin were those in China in 1927 and in Germany, by fascism, in 1933. I would argue that, although opportunist mistakes played a role in China, and communist sectarianism made it easier for social democracy to betray the working class in Germany, this was hardly a reason to write off the communist movement, as Trotsky was to do. Above all, these defeats are a warning about trying to direct world revolution from an international centre.”
We can discard at once the attempt to give material aid to the 1926 general strike, since it did not belong to ‘the Stalin period’. At the date of the British General Strike, Trotsky and Zinoviev were still members of the politburo and the international trade union work was led by Tomsky, who was factionally aligned with Bukharin in the ‘right’, not directly with the Stalin group.
Soviet material aid to the Spanish republic is highly ambiguous, as it was accompanied by the promotion of the people’s front policy, which Trotskyists argue helped in the defeat of the republic, and with NKVD assassination operations against the Spanish left.
Soviet financial aid to foreign communist parties is equally ambiguous. Even if it is motivated by the desire to spread revolutionary ideas, such aid creates a relation of dependence of the receiving party on the source of funds. This is inconsistent with the aid-receiving party being dependent on the local working class it is supposedly trying to organise. It is thus inconsistent for comrade Clark to simultaneously laud Soviet aid to foreign CPs and damn “trying to direct world revolution from an international centre”: the aid inevitably reduces the political autonomy of the national CPs.
To make this point is, of course, to leave aside the question of whether the ideas the CPSU promoted in and through the foreign communist parties were revolutionary ideas, or ones which tended to promote class-collaborationism.
Soviet support for “anti-imperialist movements around the world” - ie, left nationalists - can only be seen as a gain for the world revolution if one of two claims is true. The first possibility is that the result of the creation of replicas of the USSR in some countries, and left-nationalist one-party regimes in others, created a ‘socialist camp’ which could stand up to the inevitable imperialist response. But this is precisely what is disproved by the fall of the USSR and the pro-market turn in China, etc.
The second possibility is that but for this support, the classical colonial empires would have continued to exist. However, this claim is implausible. The ‘neo-colonialism’ of the post-World War II ‘third world’ merely replicates the relations between Britain and Latin America in the 19th century with a new world hegemon. The overthrow of the classical colonial empires was an interest of the US in extending its hegemony vis-à-vis Britain and France, and this interest was reflected in US diplomacy in the period of decolonisation.
The contribution of Soviet support was thus not mainly to assist in the overthrow of formal colonialism, but to promote ‘socialism in one country’ as an alternative road to ‘development’. In some cases this led to Soviet-style regimes (above). In others, the people’s front policy promoted by the USSR led to utter disaster for the local workers’ movement, as in Indonesia, Iraq and Iran.
Moreover, the possibility of the so-called ‘socialist camp’ was, in reality, created by the results of World War II. The only real argument that “building socialism in one country served the interest of the world revolution” is thus the claim that the ‘Stalin period’ “turned the Soviet Union into an industrial power strong enough to play the leading, or at least decisive, role in the defeat of fascism”.
This is also, in fact, the main argument commonly used by Trotskyist comrades to defend their belief that the USSR was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. They argue that the USSR was able to defeat the German Nazi regime because of the nationalisations and the plan.
But how far is the argument true?
Stalinism, the Nazi regime and the war
The first point to be made is about comrade Clark’s characterisation of the Nazi victory in 1933, that “communist sectarianism made it easier for social democracy to betray the working class in Germany”. This is a whitewash. The KPD was not weak enough for the 1933 defeat to be the sole or predominant responsibility of the SPD. In the November 1932 election the SPD obtained 20.4% of the votes and 121 deputies; the KPD 16.9% and 100 deputies. The KPD was a party with mass support, not a marginal hanger-on of an SPD mass leadership. Moreover, the Austrian Social Democrats fought back against the 1934 fascist coup, though they were defeated. The KPD in 1933 made no attempt to organise resistance.
A KPD united-front policy in 1928-33 and resistance to the rise of the Nazis might have ended in defeat. But it might also have succeeded. It is clear that the ‘third period’ policy made this impossible. The policy was made in Moscow and subordinated the fate of the German working class to the perceived state-diplomatic interests of the USSR in its military collaboration with the German military right (which the SPD attacked, leading to Moscow’s ‘third period’ turn). If the 1933 coup had been defeated, the question of the 1939-45 war would not have arisen.
Secondly, the purge of the officers in 1937-38 undoubtedly weakened the defence of the USSR. The purge was a product of the terror (discussed in the second article in this series), and this was the product of the ‘leftist’ variety of Stalinism comrade Clark supports. It was followed by the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact: the resulting Soviet occupation of Poland and the Baltics also weakened the Soviet military defence when the Nazis did attack in 1941, by drawing the Red Army forward out of partially prepared defences and into hostile, occupied territory and dislocating mobilisation plans.9
The core of the question, however, is whether the industrialisation of 1928-39 had allowed the USSR to ‘catch up’ and thereby be able to defeat the Nazis. There are good reasons to suppose that it had not.
It is certainly true that the industrialisation drive prevented the USSR from falling further behind. By 1928, the USSR had only achieved output comparable to the tsarist empire in 1914; while the capitalist countries, after a brief post-war crisis, had moved rapidly forward in the ‘roaring 20s’. In 1913 the GDP per head of the tsarist empire was slightly less than half that of Germany, 30% of the UK, and 23% of the US. In 1940 Soviet GDP per head had risen by 60%. But it was still only 45% of that of Germany, 36% of the UK, and 28% of the US.10
The bureaucratically ‘planned’ economy characteristically had the effect that ‘shock’ campaigns to raise production in one area reduced production in another, causing production bottlenecks; while the system of bureaucratic targets led to reduced quality of output, and there was persistent underproduction in ‘collectivised’ agriculture.11 Had the USSR been on its own in fighting the Germans, these production problems might well have led to defeat.
But the 1941-45 war was for the USSR a single-front war, while Germany was fighting on several fronts: holding down territory in western Europe; attempting to cut British supply routes, the Suez canal in the north African campaign and the Atlantic through U-boat operations; and maintaining an increasingly difficult air defence against strategic bombing attacks from the western Allies.
Moreover, the deficiencies of the ‘planned economy’ were partly made good by supplies of military material, etc from the Allies. Though the absolute numbers were not high proportional to total Soviet war production, the numbers in relation to particular production bottlenecks were high. This was both in relation to British tank, aircraft and high-tech (radar, etc) deliveries in 1941-42, when Soviet output was disrupted by the need to re-establish plants which had been evacuated from the western USSR as the Germans advanced, and in relation to US deliveries of trucks and transport equipment, high-grade steels and strategic metals, etc, and food.12
Even so, the USSR suffered enormous casualties in the war. The exact number is debated, but is in the region of 25 million in total, probably including 10 million military casualties, around twice as many as total eastern front military casualties on the Axis side.13 The willingness of both regimes to take massive casualties meant that simple population, and hence mobilisable population, was a decisive factor: Germany in 1939 had a population of 87.1 million, the USSR 173.1 million.14 In some ways, the Soviet role in World War II looks extraordinarily like Kagarlitsky’s description of the European military role of the tsarist empire between Peter the Great and the Crimean war: a supplier of cannon-fodder to European wars in the interests of the Atlantic powers, who paid for the troops with military technology.15
In other words, the USSR did not win the war because of economic superiority. It won the war because of absolute numbers, space and climate (the same way the Russians defeated Napoleon in 1812) and because it was allied to Britain and the US.
This actually explains the fact that the war gave a powerful boost to Stalinism as an ideology. The war was fought under the banner of the people’s front. In the aftermath of the war, people’s front governments were created across Europe. In western Europe, these provided a way for the capitalists to restabilise their position. But in eastern Europe, they rested on Soviet bayonets (in Yugoslavia and Albania, on communist partisan forces). When the western Allies began to try to take back eastern Europe, the Kremlin responded by ‘sovietising’ the regimes.
The US and Britain (mainly the US) had raised up the military power of the USSR is order to defeat the Axis powers. Meanwhile, the 1930s and the war had produced mass popular hostility to capitalism. The US now had to contain ‘communism’. It did so partly by the cold war, but partly by large-scale economic concessions to the subordinate classes, organised through the regime of managed trade under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and Bretton Woods, through concessions to the trade unions, and through the social democracy in Europe and nationalist regimes elsewhere.
The results looked like enormous gains for ‘socialism’ under the banner of the people’s front. They have remained ever since the fundamental reason for people to be Stalinists or more generally ‘official communists’. But the Soviet victory in 1941-45 was not - unlike the British capitalist state’s victories over the feudal-absolutist regimes between 1689 and 1776 - a result of a superior economic and social system defeating an inferior one. The USSR remained economically inferior to the central imperialist countries and continued to be economically inferior in spite of its economic growth in the 1950s (which slowed to a halt in Brezhnev’s ‘period of stagnation’). In the end, the fact that it was not a superior economic or social system led to its demise.
With the demise, one of the primary reasons for the economic concessions to the subordinate classes of the cold war period has gone. The ability of capital to take the concessions back bit by bit has revealed the political weakness of the working class. Stalinism contributes to that political weakness.
‘Trotskyism’, global dynamics and strategy
The Soviet Union and its satellites and imitators did not construct socialism in a single country, did not catch up with the imperialist west and did not serve as a bastion of the international working class movement. The strategy of ‘building socialism in a single country’ was false, and so was the derivative strategy of Maoism of ‘surrounding the global cities’.
Comrade Clark responds, in the first half of his arguments, by re-running the Stalinist argument developed in the 1920s (in fact by Bukharin and his co-thinkers) that ‘building socialism in a single country’ followed from Leninism and opposition to it amounted to ‘Trotskyism’, meaning a revival of Trotsky’s pre-1917 differences with Lenin.
As usual with Stalinist history, this argument is a pack of lies. Comrade Clark is put forward by the Communist Party Alliance website as an expert on ‘Trotskyism’. But he has either not read Trotsky’s central works on the dispute (Results and prospects and 1905) or is lying about their content. His account of the disputes of the 1920s is not one any serious historian, even one severely hostile to Trotsky, would now defend: the ‘right’ of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, and the ‘Leningrad opposition’ of Zinoviev and Kamenev, and a whole host of lesser figures, are airbrushed out of the picture.
In one of his pieces on the Communist Party Alliance website, comrade Clark cites an academic article which suggests that Trotsky’s overt support in 1923-24 in Moscow was mainly from the apparatus and the intelligentsia, but omits one of the main conclusions from that article: namely, that the internal discussion was rigged by bureaucratic means. The result is that we have no knowledge of whether there was or was not (as Clark claims) an actual majority in the party against ‘Trotskyism’.16
This is all the more true of the 1927 congress, at which Trotsky and the other leaders of the United Opposition were expelled from the party. Within months, the Stalin group was to turn on its Bukharinite coalition partners at this congress and adopt an exaggerated, ultra-left version of the policies of the United Opposition (discussed in the second article in this series). If this impending turn had been disclosed even to the (hand-picked) delegates, would there have been a majority for the expulsions?
Nonetheless, behind the screen of lies there is a heart and centre of the political problem and it is one still relevant today after the fall of the USSR, etc. This is the so-called ‘law of uneven development’.17 Trotsky, in fact, accepted this ‘law’ when it was thrown at him in the 1920s, and in The permanent revolution (1931) adapted it into the ‘law of uneven and combined development’.
The blunt fact is: even if it was Lenin, rather than his successors, who developed the idea of ‘building socialism in a single country’ on the basis of the ‘law of uneven development’, he was wrong: as is shown by the later history of the 20th century. And Trotsky’s adaptation of it was also wrong.
The ‘law of uneven development’ is, in fact, not a theoretical law at all. It is an abstract-empirical generalisation, like the bourgeois economists’ ‘law of supply and demand’. Like the ‘law of supply and demand’, it does not look below surface appearances, and as a result has only limited predictive power.
The appearance on which the ‘law’ is built is the existence in global capitalism of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ countries (and also, though this is considerably less important, ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ regions and economic sectors within individual countries). In this sense it builds on Marx’s comment in the preface to the first edition of volume I of Capital that “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”18
However, while this was true of the relation of Germany to 1860s England, it has not proved to be true in the same sense of many countries outside Europe, or even in eastern Europe. The US has, of course, overtaken England. But Latin America remains ‘backward’ 200 years after the overthrow of the colonial regime of Spanish absolutism - and, as we have seen in this and the last article, the USSR and now the Russian Federation remained ‘backward’ after the revolution and ‘socialism in one country’. Capitalism does not merely inherit uneven development, but also produces it.
In fact, there is not much reason for supposing that capitalism inherits uneven development either. Antique social orders (the Greek and Hellenist world, ancient Rome, pre-revolutionary China) draw a sharp line between the ‘civilised’ and the outside ‘barbarians’, but spread more or less homogenous relations of production across the domain of the ‘civilised’. Feudalism in the period of its expansion in the central middle ages could be picked up and adopted within a generation or a bit more by kingdoms - for example, Poland or Scotland.19 The new feudal regimes created by this means or by colonisation were not in a centre-periphery relationship of economic or political subordination to the old countries of the historic feudal ‘core’.
‘Uneven development’ in capitalism, in other words, is not a mere matter of temporal priority in adopting new relations of production. It is a phenomenon produced and reproduced by the laws of motion of capital.
If uneven development between countries is to be seen as a product of the laws of motion of capital, not merely of temporal priority, the question posed is how the laws of motion of capital impose themselves on whole countries. The answer is not hard to find. Capitalism develops - rapidly - international financial markets, an international division of labour and international-level operation of the leading capitalist states: a deepening ‘world market’. The 17th century ‘second serfdom’ in eastern Europe and Russia was not a simple inheritance from feudalism, but a product of the demands of the Dutch and British markets for food and raw materials, just as colonial plantation slavery and the latifundistas of 19th and 20th century Latin America served British and, later, US markets.20
But the world market has effects other than the production of uneven development. It drives labour migration, leading to the formation of an internationally mixed and linked working class (in fact, the main route by which Marxist ideas entered the US and by which Maoist ideas entered Britain). It facilitates the diffusion of cultural products and political ideas. And it produces boom-bust cycles which are - increasingly - global.
This has a result in turn. The offensive movements of the working class, and the acute political crises of capital, do not ‘mature in their own time’ in each individual country. They are internationally coordinated: 1848; the early 20th century working class offensive; the crisis and revolutionary offensive at the end of World War I; a similar crisis and offensive at the end of World War II; the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Uneven development is a real surface phenomenon, just as the ‘law of supply and demand’ describes a real surface effect. But if we look below the surface to the underlying dynamics, we can see why the idea of building socialism in a single country is illusory. Russia was all along, and remained throughout the Soviet period, trapped by uneven development imposed by the global capitalist order. That order can only be overthrown by the combined efforts of the workers in the imperialist and colonial countries, not country by country.
Notes
1. ‘In defence of Stalin’, June 19.
2. ‘Taking Stalinism seriously’, September 4.
3. ‘Bureaucracy and terror’, September 11.
4. ‘Trying Stalinism again?’, Weekly Worker May 29.
5. H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution (part 4: Critique of other socialisms New York 1990) has the details.
6. Two tactics: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/index.htm, especially chapters 2, 6.
7. E.g. VI Lenin, ‘The discussion on self-determination summed up’ (1916): www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm; ‘Reply to Kievsky’ (1916): www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00b.htm; and other texts.
8. G Howell, ‘The Juche idea in the light of Marxism-Leninism’: www.oneparty.co.uk/index.html?http%3A//www.oneparty.co.uk/html/tctalk02.html
9. D Glantz Stumbling colossus (Kansas 1998) is a recent detailed treatment of the state of the Red Army at the beginning of the war.
10. RW Davies, M Harrison, SG Wheatcroft (eds) The economic transformation of the Soviet Union 1913-1945 Cambridge 1994, p270.
11. See figures in RW Davies et al, op cit; H Ticktin The origins of the crisis in the USSR (New York 1992) is the clearest explanation of why the dynamics of bureaucratic ‘planning’ should produce these results.
12. A Hill, ‘British lend-lease aid and the Soviet war effort, June 1941-June 1942’ Journal of Military History July 2007, pp773-808; R Munting, ‘Lend-lease and the Soviet war effort’ Journal of Contemporary History July 1984, pp495-510.
13. RW Davies et al, op cit pp78-79.
14. German population: www.tacitus.nu/historical-atlas/population/germany.htm; Soviet population: RW Davies et al, op cit p269.
15. B Kagarlitsky Empire of the periphery London 2008, pp145-48, 173.
16. D Hincks, ‘Support for the opposition in Moscow in the party discussion of 1923-24’ Soviet Studies 1992, pp137-151.
17. Cited by comrade Clark from VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p342.
18. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
19. R Bartlett The making of Europe Princeton 1993.
20. For more depth on the case of Russia, see B Kagarlitsky op cit.