THE LEGACY OF STALINISM
I.DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
Stalinism, we have seen, was no accidental phenomenon in post-revolutionary Russia. It was no freak of history, as some of its old-Bolshevik opponents were inclined to believe. It had its roots deep in its native soil, and it quite naturally flourished in its native climate. This accounted in the last instance for its stupendous strength and resilience, which allowed it to survive so many convulsions and shocks that might have broken any less organically constituted regime.
The question whether Stalinism can survive Stalin for long depends on whether the social conditions from which it had sprung are still prevalent in the Soviet Union. Does the blend of Marxism, autocracy, Greek Orthodoxy, and primitive magic still satisfy a vital need of Russia's development? If so, then, failing some national calamity like a defeat in war, Stalinism may be expected to survive Stalin for a long time, regardless of temporary difficulties and possible rivalry and division in the ruling group. But if the social conditions which have produced it have vanished or are about to do so, then Stalinism cannot long endure.
A survey of the legacy of Stalinism, in both domestic and foreign affairs, may therefore not be out of place here. What does that legacy consist of? What meaning has it for the present and for the new and rising Soviet generations?
In trying to answer these questions one does not have to resort to guesswork, but has only to draw certain inferences from the changes which Stalinism has wrought in Soviet society.
The changes are, on the whole, well known, although the knowledge of them is no guarantee against the temptation to think of the Russia of the 1950's in terms that would have been perfectly up to date and realistic in the 1930's, or even 1940's, but which are now becoming obsolete. It is a common propensity of the political analyst to lag mentally behind the times. It is even more common for statesmen and politicians to try to apply to new problems solutions successfully or even unsuccessfully applied to previous situations. We are liable to make such errors in our thinking about any nation. But with regard to no nation is this time lag likely to be as great as in relation to Russia, because every recent decade has brought about changes in Russia's national existence more radical and profound than those normally occurring in the life of a nation over half a century.
The West has had its eyes fixed on the purges, the witch-hunts, and the terror which Stalinism employed in its merciless struggle to perpetuate its hold over the minds and bodies of the Soviet people, and more recently of all peoples within the Soviet orbit. That struggle has been real enough; and so has its effectiveness. Yet it was Stalin himself, not his opponents, who in a sense waged the most bitter and effective struggle against the perpetuation of his own system.
Stalinism has persistently and ruthlessly destroyed the soil in which it had grown, that primitive, semi-Asiatic society on whose sap it fed. By its barbarous methods it has succeeded in driving out of Russia most of the barbarism from which it had drawn its strength.
It has achieved this because, even while it expressed the ascendancy of the Oriental-Russian backwardness over Marxism, it also represented the dictatorship of Marxism over that backwardness.
Marxism had postulated an industrial society as the prerequisite for the establishment of socialism. In a titanic struggle with the inefficiency, the sluggishness, and the anarchy of Mother Russia, Stalinism has carried its industrial revolution almost to every corner of its Eurasian realm. The core of Stalin's genuine historic achievement lies in the fact that he found Russia working with the wooden plough and left her equipped with atomic piles.
None of the great nations of the West has carried out its industrial revolution in so short a time and under such crippling handicaps.
Great Britain long enjoyed the advantages of being the world's first and only industrial workshop. Protected by the Channel from foreign invasion, the British devoted their undivided economic strength to the development of their productive resources. The industrialization of Britain, now gaining and now losing momentum, stretched over centuries.
In the United States the process took several decades only. But the United States benefited from exceptional geographic, climatic, and historical advantages. Its people were protected by two oceans and had no need to waste their resources on the requirements of war. They were also fortunate in not having to break down and to overcome inherited anachronistic forms of economic life in their own country. And they were assisted by an abundant influx of foreign capital and machinery, by the immigration of many enterprising spirits and vast numbers of skilled and unskilled labour from all countries of the old world.
Germany also was assisted in her industrialization by foreign capital; and she could freely draw on resources in craftsmanship accumulated over the ages. The process by which Germany changed from an agricultural into an industrial nation lasted nearly half a century, a half-century of an expanding world economy and peace in Europe (1871–1914), which allowed Germany to invest only a negligible proportion of her resources in unproductive armaments.
The Stalinist industrial revolution has so far lasted less than a quarter of a century; and nearly half a decade of this was taken up by a most devastating war, which obliterated much of the achievement of previous years. Even in peace the threat of war hung over Russia's vulnerable frontiers most of the time; and armament production drained off a huge portion of the nation's resources. Foreign investment played no part in Soviet industrialization. The contribution of foreign skill and labour, if not totally absent, was comparatively negligible, while Russia's own resources in administrative and industrial skill were extremely poor.
Tens of millions of muzhiks had to be hastily trained as industrial workers; and hundreds of thousands of men and women had to become technicians and managers within the shortest possible time. Managers and workers alike had to acquire their skill on the job like soldiers who learn to handle rifles and guns for the first time on the battlefield. The effectiveness of the industrialization was correspondingly reduced. Nor could industrialization be carried out on the scale intended without a forcible break-up of anachronistic forms of economic life, especially of the primitive small farm, which tied up labour needed in industry and which could not feed the swelling industrial population. The forcible break-up of the old rural economy engendered chaos, famine, and widespread and violent discontent which in its turn drove the industrializers to use even more violence in the pursuit of their objectives. All this again reduced the effectiveness of industrialization.
This is the economic story of Stalinism in the 1930's. Many critics have convincingly exposed the inhuman cruelties then perpetrated by Stalinism. Their criticisms have by now become so familiar and widely accepted in the West that they need not be repeated here. However, the exclusive and somewhat belated dwelling on the horrors of Stalinist industrialization tends to obscure the general balance of the Stalin era and to substitute the picture of the Russia of the 1930's for that of mid-century Russia. Much, although by no means all, of the dust of the murderous 1930's has long since settled; and towards the end of the Stalin era the Russian scene presented a very different aspect from that of the middle ofthat era.
The up-to-date balance sheet of the Soviet industrial revolution can be outlined here only in the most general terms.
In the early years of the Stalin era Russia's industrial strength was hardly more than that of any small, or at the most of any medium-sized Western nation. In those days Russian economists still looked up to France, the most backward of the industrial powers of the West, while Germany was a giant whom they admired and feared. American technology was fabulously remote, as if beyond the range of the imagination.
Towards the end of the 1930's the Soviet Union, as an economic power, was catching up with and beginning to surpass Germany, as can be seen from the following basic figures:
Basic Industrial Figures for Germany* and Russia in 1929 and 1940
1929
1940
Output of coal (in millions of tons)
Russia
41
166
Germany
177
185-190
Steel (in millions of tons)
Russia
5
18
Germany
18
20
Electricity (in billions of kwh)
Russia
6
48
Germany
30
55
Goods traffic on rail-ways (in millions of tons)
Russia
187
590
Germany
463
500 (approx.)
* The figures for Germany do not include the output of Austria, the Sudetenland, and other territories annexed by Hitler.
The table indicates, of course, only that Russia's aggregate industrial power was catching up with Germany's. The degree of Russia's industrial saturation was, because of her much more numerous population, well below the German level. In consumer industries Russia was far behind Germany. On the other hand, in engineering and armament industries she was already well ahead of Germany precisely because she devoted only a negligible proportion of her basic materials to consumer industries and used them mainly for the expansion of her engineering plant.
Basic Production*
Million metric tons
U.S.S.R. in
1951
U.S.S.R plan for
1955
Great Britain, France, and West Germany
1951
United States
1951
Coal
281
372
398
523
Oil
42
70
1.7
309
Electricity (billion kwh)
103
162
147
370
Pig iron
22
34
29
63
Crude steel
31
44
39
95
* This table is taken from The Economist of 30 August 1952. Another table in the same paper showed that Russia's industrial saturation, i.e. her output per head of population, remains well below that of Western Europe, although it is approaching that of France. Here again, Russia is much further behind Western Europe in consumer industries than this table indicates, but she is also more ahead in engineering and armament.
In the present decade Russia is beginning to overtake the combined industrial power of Germany, France, and Great Britain; and she obviously aspires to catching up with the United States in the not too remote future.
Whether or not Russia will ever be able to realize her ambition of attaining industrial parity with the United States, the mere fact that she is about to leave behind the combined industrial power of the great nations of Western Europe and is thinking ahead so ambitiously, gives a measure of the profound transformation she has undergone in the Stalin era.
This transformation has taken place on the basis of a publicly owned and planned economy. Stalinism claims to have provided the first historically significant demonstration, carried out on a gigantic scale, that planning is the most effective method for the rational use and the most rapid development of a nation's economic resources. Stalinism has implanted this conviction in the new Soviet generations even in its most bitter opponents and enemies among them; and it impresses upon the new generations of China and Eastern Europe that their way of escape from inherited poverty and the anarchy of their underdeveloped capitalism lies also in a publicly owned and planned economy.
What validity, it may be asked, has this claim concerning the superiority of Soviet planning? How much of Russia's industrial expansion has been due to planning, and how much has been achieved by, for instance, the use of forced labour?
It is important to make a distinction between the fundamental elements of the Soviet economy and its marginal phenomena. A few years ago the number of the inmates of Soviet concentration camps was most implausibly estimated by Western commentators from 12 to 20 millions. If these figures were correct the whole Soviet experiment in planning would be only of negative significance to the rest of the world, for it would represent nothing but the recrudescence of slavery on a staggering scale.
However, much laborious research and some evidence from inside Russia have reduced these speculative figures to more plausible proportions. Dr. N. M. Jasny for instance, an able but also a most extreme Menshevik critic of Stalinist economic policies, has reached the conclusion that at the height of the deportations the total number of inmates of those camps may have amounted to three or four millions. Morally, this makes little difference: the use of forced labour is equally repugnant and its condemnation remains equally valid whether four or twenty million people are involved. But a more precise idea of the dimensions of the problem helps to bring the economic picture of the Stalin era into more realistic focus. It disposes of the theory that the Soviet economy could not function without forced labour.
In an economy in which the total number of workers and employees is about 40 millions — it was over 30 millions before the Second World War — and in which further scores of millions work on collective farms, the labour of four million convicts is a marginal factor. The brunt of the industrialization has been borne by a working class which has been severely regimented, disciplined, and directed, but which is essentially a normal working class.
The impressive results of Stalinist planning should not cause incredulous surprise in the West. After all, the West, too, has learned from its own experience about the advantages of planning, even though it has so far planned its economic resources and activities only sporadically, and under the stress of war. It is enough to glance at the industrial statistics of the United States and of Great Britain to realize that in this century both these nations developed their industries at an incomparably faster rate during the few war years, when they adopted some elements of planning, than during whole decades of uncontrolled economy in peace. In both countries the economic story of the two inter-war decades (1919-39) is one of overall stagnation compared with the great expansion of 1940-4.
According to the Federal Reserve Bulletin (February 1953, p. 161) the overall index of American industrial production, taking the level of output in 1935-9 as 100, oscillated around this level for two decades, declining steeply in years of depression and rising only slightly above it in years of prosperity and reaching the highest point, 113, in 1937. It took the Second World War and some planning to send the index of production soaring to 239 in 1943.
Is it to be wondered at that Russia's comprehensive planning over a quarter of a century has shown cumulative effects? True, even Russia's top planners had to train themselves on their jobs. They committed many monstrous mistakes, for which the nation and the State had to pay. But they also gradually accumulated experience and perfected the technique of planning. In recent years their work has consequently shown much more self-confidence and efficiency than it did in the 1930's.
The test came after the cease-fire of 1945, when Russia's wealthiest (western and southern) provinces lay in ruins, their cities razed, their coal-mines flooded, and their factories demolished. Within four or five years the Russian economy staged a remarkable recovery. How this has affected Russia's power-political position can be seen from the fact that in the opening phase of the cold war Russia's annual output of steel was only one-eighth or one-seventh of America's. It is at present well over one-third; and it is planned to be nearly one-half of the American Output by the middle of the 1950's.
It is time to consider how these economic changes have affected the social climate of Russia.
The Stalin era has been one of rapid urbanization. In the last pre-war decade alone the Soviet town population increased by 30 millions, of whom no fewer than 25 millions were peasants shifted from country to town, a fact which helps to explain the notoriously abominable housing conditions in Soviet cities. Even during the last war a multitude of new towns sprang up in the Asiatic provinces, towns the location of which is not even indicated on ordinary Russian maps. Urbanization was resumed after the war and is still going on, although, naturally, its momentum has slowed down.[10]
The millions of muzhiks turned into modern industrial workers had to be taught to read and write, to handle precision tools, and to understand something of complicated technological processes. They had also to be broken in to the regular industrial rhythm of life; and they had to acquire within a few years the habits of industrial discipline which the West had inculcated into its working classes, by coercion and persuasion, over the centuries.
What this meant will become clearer if it is remembered that the life of Russia's rural population had been entirely regulated by the rhythm of nature, and by a most severe climate. The muzhik had been accustomed to work from sunrise to sunset in the summer and to sleep through most of the winter. A most rigorous, inhuman factory discipline was used to break him of these habits. But towards the end of the 1930's the new discipline had been more or less achieved; and in the closing years of the Stalin era the Soviet Union already had a vast trained, modern labour force, which could be expanded in a less revolutionary and violent manner. The most baffling and cruel job was to accumulate a national fund of industrial knowledge and know how—the accretions were then bound to come more organically and easily. The rapid formation from the rawest human material of this industrial labour force was the most essential part of the so-called cultural revolution of Stalinism.
Technology, planning, urbanization, and industrial expansion are the deadliest enemies of the primitive magic of Stalinism. Russia's rulers could not teach with impunity chemistry, physics, mathematics, medidne, and the use of industrial tools to the children of semi-illiterate workers, wholly illiterate muzhiks, and nomads and shepherds. The rulers themselves made an anachronism of the Stalin cult. They dragged the mind of Russia out of the epoch of the wooden plough and of primitive myth into the world of science and industry; and now they cannot expect it to feel at ease in the stuffy air of the Stalin cult and to accept uncritically its antics.
For social, political, and strategic reasons, Stalinism has carried the industrial revolution beyond the Urals to the Asiatic lands, to the very homeland of primitive magic. There fifty or so per cent of Soviet basic industry and engineering plant is now concentrated. There Soviet Chicagos, Pittsburghs, and Detroits have Sprung up in an environment which even in this generation was not much different from the cultural level of the Red Indian communities of early America. The primitive element is still being dissolved, sucked in, and digested by the centres of a fresh and vital industrial civilization. Can one assume for a moment that all this will have no effect on Russia's political mentality?
Modernization has not been confined to the urban population. The town has strongly reacted upon the country. The thirty or forty millions who had migrated or been shifted to the towns during the Stalin era did not lose all contact with their earlier environment. They have been the human channels through which modern civilization has infused itself into the life of rural Russia.
The infusion has been all the more effective because of the simultaneous revolution in the technology of farming and in the social framework of rural life. On the fields the tractor, the combine-harvester, and the lorry have replaced the horse and the ox. The old smallholder, with his conservative self-sufficiency and indifference to the great issues of the age, has given place to the collective farmer, the member of an intricate and interdependent community which is more and more acutely aware of its own dependence on governmental policy, on developments in industry, and on the State of international affairs.
Here again, Stalinism in its very struggle for life and power was committing suicide by slow degrees. At the start collectivization gave Stalinism effective control over the peasantry. However, historically the omnipotence of the centralist Russian bureaucracy was based on the political impotence of an atomized peasantry. As long as the bulk of the nation existed in a politically amorphous state and was inherently incapable of self-organization, the absolute government at the centre enjoyed unrestricted freedom of movement, except at times when it was threatened by urban revolution. In collectivization, as Stalin himself once remarked, there lurks a threat to any centralist bureaucracy, because collectivization concentrates the peasantry's scattered strength and imparts to it a much greater potential power in politics than it had before.
Contemplation of the atrocious methods by which collectivization had been forced on the peasantry should not obscure the fact that with the years the basic structure of collective farming became consolidated and stabilized. In those far-off days of 1929-33, when the party sent out its shock brigades to collectivize the muzhiks' land and cattle, the muzhiks thought that this was the end of the world, as indeed it was for those among them who fiercely resisted and were made to suffer for it. Since then the bulk of the peasantry has somehow adjusted itself to the collectivist framework of its existence and has also found within it some scope for the satisfaction of private interests.
The productivity of Soviet farming and the farmers' standard of living have been rising in recent years. What may surprise us is not that this should happen but that it should happen so late, and that the rise should be so slow.
Under the Five Year Plans the government lavishly invested in agriculture, saturating it with machinery, tractors, combine-harvesters, artificial fertilizers, and so on. The State also trained agronomists, accountants, and administrators en masse. More recently it embarked upon ambitious schemes for afforestation and irrigation which should increase the fertility of the soil and protect it from recurrent droughts. In relation to all these efforts the rise in the output of Soviet farming has been modest; and it has lagged behind the growth of the industrial population.[11]
There were plenty of reasons why collectivization and mechanization should bear fruit only slowly. Throughout most of the 1930's the effectiveness of mechanization was nearly nullified by the technological backwardness and the political restiveness of the peasantry. The muzhik was either incapable of handling the new machines or, resenting collectivization, deliberately damaged and broke them as the Luddites had done in an earlier age. Only in the late 1930's did the unrest subside enough and the handling of the machines improve sufficiently to make an advance possible. This was soon interrupted by the war, which deprived farming of its manpower and disrupted and depleted its technical equipment. The first post-war Plan (1946-50) was largely devoted to re-equipment. Only in the early 1950's could agriculture resume the advance it had begun fifteen years before.
Collective farming has thus enjoyed only two very brief spells of the social, political, and technological stability which it needed in order to show that it could be much more efficient and of greater advantage to the peasants than the primitive smallholding. The recent rise in agricultural output may therefore be regarded as the first delayed dividend on national investment in farming and on educational progress. Much greater returns ought probably to be expected. Collective farming has still to prove its worth; but if a new war or domestic convulsions do not upset its work, it should be able to do so in the near future with most beneficial effects upon the national standard of living.
This is not to say that collective farming really presents such a picture of perfect socialist harmony as is painted by Stalinist propaganda. The more enlightened the collective farmer the greater is his self-assurance, and the less is he likely to put up with the incompetent and arbitrary meddling of a bureaucracy. Soviet newspapers have in their muted manner given recently a number of indications of friction between the collective farmer and the bureaucratic bully. The tug-of-war is likely to grow more intense in consequence not of the peasants' poverty and sullenness but of their growing well-being and self-confidence.
Nor has the perennial clash of interests between town and country been finally resolved. It has only been kept within bounds; and it is now passing on to ‘a higher level’, as Stalin himself indicated in his last published essay on economics.
The outlook of the town is determined by public ownership and planning. In agriculture, on the other hand, a precarious balance between public and private interest has so far operated; and agriculture has up to a point retained a market economy. Planning and market relations are antagonistic to each other.
In the long run, as Stalin argued, the planned sector of the economy will strive to eliminate the rural market and to embrace farming as well. The collective farms, in which ‘group ownership’ is still dominant (as it is in any co-operative enterprise), would eventually become national property, in one form or another. In his last essay and correspondence Stalin sketched something like a long-term plan of agricultural policy pointing in this direction. He insisted that the transition should be carried out gradually and slowly so as not to antagonize the peasants. It remains to be seen whether it can or will be effected in the mild, evolutionary manner or whether it will lead to new violent conflicts between State and peasantry.
Whatever the prospects, industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and planning are enduring elements in the domestic balance of the Stalin era.
As Russia looks back, with pride or resentment, upon the road which she has travelled in blood, toil, and sweat during these last decades, she must know in her heart that there is no way back for her from the stage of development she has reached.
There is no way back from industrialization.
In this respect Russia is sharing the fate of older industrial nations, who have not been able to conjure out of existence the tremendous productive forces they have brought to life. The Cervanteses of the industrial age, for instance Tolstoy in Russia and Ruskin in England, have mourned the chivalries of faded epochs, depicted the curses of science and technology, and implored mankind to retrace its steps and recapture the beauty and integrity of a primitive, ‘natural’ way of life. But mankind, even if it listened with forebodings to their warnings and injunctions, could not retrace its steps.
Chicago cannot again become the idyllic little market town of the farmers of Illinois, which the late John Dewey still saw in his young days and described wistfully to the author shortly before his death. No more can Chkalov, Malenkov's home-town, or Sverdlovsk (in the Urals), with their giant engineering plants and power stations, change back, the first into the dreamy meeting place of the Orenburg Cossacks and the second into the für traders' market-place of old.
Industrialization is now for Russia a matter not merely of national pride and ambition but of physical survival. In a country where the State employs over 40 million people in its industries and administrative establishments, and where even the functioning of mechanized agriculture depends entirely on the nation's mines, steel mills, engineering plant, and means of transport, any serious hitch or halt in industrial development, not to speak of de-industrialization, would bring unemployment and starvation to scores of millions. In telling the Soviet people that it alone of all conceivable Russian parties and groups stood for the programme of industrialization, Stalinism succeeded in identifying itself in the eyes of the people with their most vital interests. It derived further strength from telling them that in case of war the West would aim at ‘reducing the Soviet Union to colonial status’, that is at obliterating the industrial achievements of the Stalin era.
As it will be argued later, there may be ample room for certain shifts of emphasis in the programmes of industrialization. But it cannot be expected that post-Stalinist Russia will renounce this part of Stalin's legacy.
There is no way back from collective farming either.
We cannot know with certainty whether or not the great majority of Soviet peasants are inwardly reconciled to the collectivist system. All the old Russian emigres and many vocal recent refugees from the Soviet Union take it for granted that the peasants are still longing to return to the old smallholdings, and are only awaiting the opportunity. Though there is some evidence to support this view, against it must be set the fact that collective farming withstood the shock of the last war much better than might have been expected; and that it did not show any serious signs of a break-up. Nor does it seem probable that the younger generation of peasants brought up under the new system is really hankering to return to small-scale private farming.
But even if it were assumed that the peasants are still full of nostalgia for the pre-collectivist economic system, they are no more free to go back to it than the mass of workers in Ford's factories are to become small, independent artisans.
At the beginning of the Stalin era the peasants were kept within the collective farms primarily by political force. At its end they are kept within them primarily by the force of economic circumstances, especially by the nature of the technological processes established in agriculture. A collective farm can now no more be broken up into a hundred smallholdings than a great modern liner can be broken up into small sailing boats.
If the present system of farming were to disintegrate, this would be the death sentence to innumerable human beings, town-dwellers and peasants alike. Even if a large section of the peasantry were still bent on demolishing the collectivist structure, there is no reason to suppose that Russia, under whatever regime, would allow this sectional interest to drive her to commit national suicide.
A similar view has recently been taken by so well-known and extreme a critic of Soviet agricultural policy as Dr. N. M. Jasny, quoted before. While in Dr. Jasny the anti-Soviet emotionalist is sometimes at loggerheads with the scholar, he nevertheless argues from a thorough knowledge of Soviet agriculture. In the January 1953 issue of the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik he published an essay which was a cri de coeur against those ‘irresponsible’ Russian emigre politicians who ‘promise’ the peasants that, after the overthrow of the Soviet regime, they will abolish the collective farms.
Dr. Jasny argues that if Russian farming were to go back to the pre-collectivization System ‘it could feed barely half the present urban population. Consequently a simple return to those forms would be equivalent to a huge calamity.’ He also argues that if the anti-Bolsheviks were to assume power, they would have to re-enforce the compulsory food deliveries introduced by Stalin in order to prevent starvation in the towns. ‘What will the Russian people eat after the overthrow of the Soviet regime and in what will they be clad?’ It is enough to pose this question, says Dr. Jasny, to see the complete unreality of promising the peasants ‘a free choice of the forms of farming’.
He concludes: ‘I think that the preservation of the collective farms is inevitable for an indefinite time, for, in the event of their abolition., the situation after liberation from Stalinist rule, which will be difficult enough anyhow, will amount to a most enormous catastrophe.’
It is easy to see why Russian anti-Bolshevik politicians are loath to accept this view. If they did accept it., they could in effect only promise the Russian peasants that they would virtually continue the agricultural regime established by Stalin. In this instance Dr. Jasny, however, argues from realities, not from the hallucinations of political quixotry. He analyses the technological structure of Soviet farming to prove that it does not permit any break-up into smallholdings.
Most of the Soviet tractors are of the ‘Leviathan’ type, larger than any known outside Russia and useful only on giant farms. This type of machine., says Dr. Jasny, could be replaced by smaller ones in the course of many years (and with the help of American lend-lease deliveries!) so as to allow for a break-up of the present collective farms into smaller (but still collective) farms. But if the choice is to be only between smaller and larger collective farms, and if even this choice may become available only after a re-equipment taking many years, then the mountain of the anti-Stalinist ‘revolution’ in farming would give birth to no more than a mouse. All the same, the argument serves to underline the fact that Russia cannot afford to renounce even collectivization, that once most hateful and still most controversial part of the legacy of the Stalin era.
Nor is there any way back for Russia from public ownership and planning.
Even in capitalist countries there seems to have been not a single significant instance of any sector of the economy which had long been publicly owned and publicly managed being handed back to private hands.[12]
The whole of Soviet industry has been built up by the State. No title of private ownership has ever attached to it (except for the negligible remnant of pre-revolutionary industry, which has also been completely re-equipped by the State).
This fact has sunk deeply into the mind of the Russian people. Any form of private ownership in industry is to them an anachronism as repugnant and irrational as slavery or serfdom is to the British or the American peoples.
Of this we have incontroverüble evidence: among the many political groups formed in the West by the new Soviet refugees, each of which swears to destroy the whole structure of Stalinism to its very foundations, none has dared to write into its programme the abolition of public ownership of industry. On the contrary, each group ardently swears to preserve it. If this is the mood among emigres, among the victims and the extreme opponents of Stalinism, it can be imagined how strong the attachment to public ownership is among the people in the Soviet Union.[13]
With public ownership goes planning — indeed, it is inseparable from it. Even the most old-fashioned industrialist ‘plans’ the work of his own business. Trusts and syndicates plan and coordinate the productive processes within the concerns under their control. Public ownership ipso facto makes of the whole national industry a single concern which cannot be run without comprehensive planning. The method may undergo many important modifications. It may be more or less bureaucratic, more or less centralist, or more or less elastic and efficient; but for Russia to abandon planning would be to condemn herseif to economic anarchy and ruin.
Such is the legacy of the Stalin era that posterity can neither scrap it nor get away from it. Therein consisted the greatness of that era. Yet such was also its misery and squalor that in order to make proper use of its enduring achievements, the Soviet people will be compelled sooner or later to transcend Stalinism.
Stalinism had its roots in the backwardness of Russia; but it has overcome the backwardness and has thereby potentially disestablished itself. For a time it may continue to haunt the Russia of its own making as a ghost from the past. The ‘ghost’ still wields all the material instruments of power; and no one can say how and when it will relinquish them or, alternatively, who will wrest them from its hands, and when. This is not a forecast of startling events, but merely a statement of the fact that a profound contradiction is maturing between, to use the Marxian term, the social and economic structure and the political superstructure of post-Stalinist society.
In the analysis of any long-term historical trend, contemporaries, even if they grasp correctly its general direction, can never be sure just how far the trend has gone at any particular time. We have no yardstick by which to measure history's molecular processes nor can we determine when those processes may coalesce to produce an epoch-making event. In the case of Russia, the measuring is the more difficult because we can know only the broad outline of the trend and we have had little or no insight into the molecular processes.
During a quarter of a century Stalinism, without compunction or pity and yet with some suppressed compassion, drove a nation of 160–200 millions to jump the chasm which separated the epoch of the wooden plough from that of the atomic pile. The jump is not yet completed. We cannot count the myriads which have landed on the farther side or those still left behind — or, even, those who have been made to jump to their destruction.
All we know is that the process is in a very advanced stage. Russia may still be mired up to her ankles or to her knees in the epoch of primitive magic; but she is not plunged in it up to her neck and ears, as she was a quarter of a Century ago.