FROM LENINISM TO STALINISM
THE forecast of a break with the Stalinist era at once brings the sceptic to his feet: ‘Surely’, he says, ‘you are making a sweeping statement? On what can you possibly base it? Only on the accident of Stalin's death in March 1953?’
No, not only on this accident. Of Stalin, one can only say what George Plekhanov, the great Russian thinker, once wrote about other historic figures: ‘Owing to the specific qualities of their minds and characters, influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces.’
It is the ‘general trend’ of contemporary Soviet life which has been preparing the break with the Stalin era; and Stalin's death and its consequences can only influence some ‘individual features’ of the process.
The prediction is less sweeping than may at first appear when it is added that the break with the Stalin era is likely to be similar to that by which Stalinism disengaged itself from the Leninist era of Bolshevism.
Stalinism developed out of Leninism, preserving some of the features of Leninism and discarding others. It continued in the Leninist tradition; but it also stood in a bitter and unavowed opposition to it. Whatever trend emerges in Russia in the near future is likely to adopt the same dual and ambivalent attitude towards Stalinism, preserving some of its features, modifying others, and discarding still others. A crisis of Stalinism has been latent for some time past. All that Stalin's death can do is to bring the crisis into the open, partly or wholly, and to underline the need for a solution. Stalin, like Lenin before him, died at a crossroad of Bolshevik history.
To understand the nature of this crossroads it may be useful to cast a glance back upon the road which Russia has traversed in the last three decades, and upon the starting-point ofthat road — the transition from Leninism to Stalinism. The heritage of the Stalin era and Russia's attitude towards it may then be seen in perspective.
At the time of Lenin's illness and death (1922-4), Bolshevism was in the throes of a profound crisis, which was aggravated but by no means brought about by Lenin's disappearance. The Russian revolution was no longer able to travel along the road on which Lenin had led it. If Lenin had lived longer he would hardly have been in a position to go on leading it along the same road. He would have been compelled to change direction, one way or another; and bis departure speeded up the change.
The crisis in Bolshevik affairs which coincided with Lenin's death affected the domestic and foreign policies of Bolshevism, and indeed its whole moral climate.
Lenin had been brought up in the old Marxist school of thought, which had come into being in Western Europe, when Western Europe was leading the world in industrial development. The Marxian ideas of the proletarian revolution, the proletarian dictatorship, and the character of a socialist economy were working hypotheses designed to fit a highly industrialized, civilized, and organized capitalist society, with a very strongly developed industrial working class. In the view of nearly all the early Russian Marxists these ideas had no immediate practical relevance to Russia. Until very late in his career, up to the First World War, Lenin refused even to countenance any thought about a socialist revolution in Russia in any foreseeable future.
Only shortly before 1917 did he change his mind and adopt the view that the Russian revolution would have to overthrow not merely Tsardom and what had remained of the feudal order, as he had thought hitherto, but the underdeveloped Russian capitalism as well.
For a whole Century Russia had been fraught with revolution; but the revolutionary movement had been led by an intelligentsia which had had almost no following among the broader classes of the nation. Since the turn of the century, however, the young, small, but politically very active Russian working class had become ‘the chief driving force’ of the revolution. The workers could not be expected to content themselves with the overthrow of the Tsar and of the landed gentry, to whom they were opposed only indirectly. They saw the capitalist industrialists as their immediate enemies; and in a revolutionary situation they were bound to aim at the expropriation and the overthrow of the latter. This, however, would mark the beginning of a socialist revolution, leading to the establishment of a nationalized and planned economy. Such was Lenin's attitude at the outbreak of the revolution of 1917.
But it was still Lenin's (and his party's) conviction that Russia's industrial resources and the general level of her civilization were highly inadequate for the establishment of socialism. Thus Lenin expounded the idea of a socialist revolution in Russia and he himself led the revolution while recognizing that if victorious the movement could not achieve its ultimate purpose in Russia.
This was a fundamental contradiction in his attitude. He sought to resolve it by treating the Russian revolution as the first act of a much wider international upheaval, the main arena of which he saw, in accordance with Marxist tradition, in the industrial countries of Western Europe.
The Russian revolution was therefore, in Lenin's view, no self-sufficient, national-Russian phenomenon; and the chances of the future socialist order were not dependent on the inadequate resources of Russia alone.
Western industry, technology, and civilization were to supply the basis and the elements of socialism; and Russia, raised up industrially and culturally with the help of Western revolutionary States, was to participate in the experience and the benefits of an international socialist order.
This was no mere theoretical construction. The whole emotional content of Bolshevism in 1917 and after centred on the expectation of a more or less imminent revolution in the West. Lenin and his associates were not the original authors of the prognostication about the impending downfall of Western capitalism. Nor did they for a moment imagine that it was they who could bring it about. A whole generation of European, especially German, social democrats had grown up in the belief that capitalism had outlived its day in the West. Karl Kautsky, the intellectual inspirer of that generation, the man whose modest disciple Lenin regarded himself up to 1914, had argued along these lines ever since the beginning of the century.
But most Western European Marxists treated their own prognostications as ritualistic performances, as something like socialist variations on the Christian theme of the Last Judgment. They refused to be guided in their practical policies by their own preachings. In the pre-1914 Socialist International, the future leaders of the Russian revolution formed almost the only party which believed with passion and zeal in the near advent of international revolution. On this belief the Bolsheviks staked their actions and their — heads.
Lenin's death coincided with a crisis in this belief. From 1918 till 1923, in the aftermath of the First World War, the revolutionary ferment which had engulfed Europe still kept the flame of that belief burning. But the old order, slightly reformed, managed to survive in Europe; and by 1924 the revolutionary ferment had subsided. The Russian revolution was to remain isolated for an indefinite time. The Bolshevik assumptions appeared to have been refuted by the events. Bolshevik Russia had to adapt herself to her isolation.
The dilemma to which this gave rise was in the centre of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. To use terms now current, Bolshevism had to decide whether it should go on staking its future on the ‘liberation’, that is on the self-emancipation, of foreign working classes or whether it ought to aim at ‘containing’ capitalism at the frontiers of the Soviet Union. The policy of ‘liberation’ appeared to have exhausted its possibilities: the working classes in foreign countries were neither ready nor willing to overthrow capitalism. Soviet policy moved slowly but irresistibly towards ‘containment’, which involved a radical revision of Leninist assumptions and attitudes.
It remains a moot point whether Lenin himself would have been able to carry out such a revision, which would have gone against all his mental habits and cardinal beliefs. Rarely, if ever, has an initiator of a great revolutionary movement been able to throw overboard his cherished ideas and principles when these clashed with immediate reality or had been outpaced by events. The Russian revolution was withdrawing into its national shell; and Lenin, the Internationalist par excellence, might not have been able to withdraw with it. At any rate, the great majority of his friends and disciples, who by his side had led the October Revolution and had built the Soviet State, found themselves at loggerheads with the new trend in Bolshevism.
Lenin died at a moment when history had overtaken him. His illness and death relieved him of the bitter necessity to grapple with a dilemma which he might have found insoluble.
The crisis which confronted Leninism in its domestic policy was no less deep and grave. There, too, Lenin's party was marking time at a crossroad, while Lenin was on his deathbed.
Bolshevism had proclaimed the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ in Russia; but it had also conceived that dictatorship as a ‘proletarian democracy’. To put it in simpler terms, Lenin had frankly and without inhibition denied any political freedom to the former possessing and ruling classes and to their parties. His government, like any revolutionary government before it, claimed the right to suppress those who strove, arms in hand, to restore the pre-revolutionary order. This was the meaning of proletarian dictatorship.
But Leninism also committed itself in 1917 and afterwards to respect, to guard, to promote, and to extend in every possible way the political freedom of the working classes, who should have been the real masters in the new State. This was the meaning of ‘proletarian democracy’, which should have supplemented, or rather formed the basis of, the dictatorship.
However, during the civil war, and even more so after it, the political freedoms of the working classes too were gradually curtailed and largely destroyed. This is not the place to explain and analyse this development.[3] Suffice it to say here that towards the end of the Leninist era the dictatorship spoke on behalf of the proletariat but that only a residuum of proletarian democracy had survived. The Bolsheviks had outlawed all rival parties, including the Mensheviks and Anarchists, who had had their main following among the workers, and the Social Revolutionaries, who had drawn their support from the peasantry.
True enough, those parties had, because of their anti-revolutionary attitude, forfeited most or nearly all of their support among the working classes. But in a proletarian democracy, as the Bolsheviks originally conceived it, those parties should have been allowed to go on competing with the Bolsheviks for influence over the masses. This they were not allowed to do.
Lenin had never made a principle of the single party system; yet towards the end of his life the Soviet regime had become just such a system. The abolition of ‘proletarian democracy’ could not leave unaffected the Bolshevik Party itself, which now proceeded to curtail the freedom of expression in its own ranks, for its own members.
The trend was leading from a proletarian democracy towards an autocracy speaking on behalf of the proletariat.
Yet the idea of proletarian democracy had been deeply rooted in the mind of the party. Lenin had proposed each of the successive restrictions of proletarian democracy as an emergency measure, to be cancelled after the emergency was over. During the civil war he outlawed the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, and other minor groups; then he allowed them to come into the open again and to renew activity; and then he drove them finally underground. Internal freedom in the Bolshevik Party survived the civil war; but it began to shrink rapidly soon afterwards. Emergency followed emergency, and the restrictive measures at first designed to be temporary came to stay.
The direction in which the regime was evolving disturbed profoundly important sections of the Bolshevik Party. Towards the end of the Leninist era the party was internally divided over this issue. Some of its leaders and members clamoured for a return to proletarian democracy, although only very few went so far as to demand the restoration of freedom to the defeated enemies of the revolution. Others strove to arrest halfway the drift towards a quasi-socialist autocracy. Still others, from conviction or self-interest or both, promoted the prevalent trend, saying or implying that the restoration of political freedoms would wreck the revolution, and that its safety lay in a further concentration of power at the top, in the Central Committee, in the Politbureau, and eventually in the hands of a single leader. Bolshevism was torn between its democratic past and its undemocratic future.
Lenin's position in this controversy was extremely difficult. He had been responsible for the measures which restricted the freedom of expression even of those who had supported the revolution; and he had also been the standard-bearer of proletarian democracy. He tried to strike a balance between dictatorship and democracy. He himself did not rule his party with an iron rod. He dominated it by the sheer weight of his intellectual and moral authority. At all the party congresses over which he presided, he was openly assailed by many and sometimes very influential opponents. On occasions he was outvoted and then he either submitted to the majority or sought to reverse its decision by constitutional means.
In his last years Lenin struggled to arrest halfway the trend from proletarian democracy towards an autocracy. But the trend was to prove stronger — it could no longer be arrested, let alone reversed. In nothing was this demonstrated more strikingly than in the story of Lenin's will. In it Lenin advised his followers to remove Stalin from the post of the party's General Secretary on the ground that Stalin had gathered too much power in his hands and was making too brutal a use of it. Lenin's advice had no effect. His successors ignored it and brushed it aside at the same time as they were initiating a quasi-religious cult of the dead Lenin.
If Lenin had lived longer he could not have grappled with the dilemma indefinitely, for otherwise the trend would have overpowered or bypassed him. He would have had to make up his mind either in favour of a gradual restoration of proletarian democracy or in favour of an autocratic form of government, and then he himself would have had to become the autocrat. In other words, he would have had to do either what Trotsky did or what Stalin did. In Lenin's personality both these characters were in a sense blended; and it is at least doubtful whether he could have become either a Trotsky or a Stalin, without disintegrating his whole personality.
Thus once again we see how the death of a great leader coincided with a crucial ferment, which was to drive his party from its accustomed road, to cause an upheaval in its outlook and its moral climate, and to regroup its leading personnel. The accident of Lenin's death in 1924 can be seen as ‘something relative’, to paraphrase Plekhanov. It occurred ‘at the point of intersection of inevitable events’.
So did Stalin's rise to power. More than any other Bolshevik leader, Stalin was determined to solve the crisis of Bolshevism in a definite manner, without harking back unduly to the party's traditions, without giving himself to theoretical scruple or — human weakness. The fact that he made a cult of Leninism does not contradict this assertion. It was only by doing so that he could render Leninism harmless and irrelevant to practical policy. The Leninist tradition had dominated the party so strongly that the only way of effectively breaking away from that tradition was to present even that break as an act of devotion.
In one fundamental respect Stalin did, of course, continue Lenin's work. He strove to preserve the State founded by Lenin and to increase its might. He also preserved and then expanded the nationalized and State-managed industry, in which the Bolsheviks saw the basic framework of their new society. These important threads of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism were never cut.
But when Stalin took over its direction the State was in such a condition that it could be preserved only by being politically refashioned almost into its opposite. In theory it might still have become either a proletarian democracy or an autocracy. In fact only one road was open to it: the one leading towards autocracy.
The Bolshevik regime could not revert to its democratic origin, because it could not hope for enough democratic support to guarantee its survival. After the civil wars, with their legacy of destruction, poverty, and famine, there was too much acute discontent in the classes which had helped the Bolsheviks to win these wars for the Bolsheviks to rely on their backing. In later years, when economic reconstruction was under way and the ruling group might have met with more popular support, its members were already fixed in undemocratic habits of government and had a stake in persisting in those habits. It is as a rule easier for any government or party to move away from a democratic principle a thousand miles than to go back to it a single yard.
Stalin was not inclined to go back a single inch. He identified himself wholeheartedly and unreservedly with the development towards autocracy. He became its chief promoter and its chief beneficiary. Unswervingly he remoulded the Leninist State into a new, authoritarian-bureaucratic shape.
He had even less hesitation in breaking away from the revolutionary internationalist aspect of Leninism.
During the Leninist period he had, like every other Bolshevik, expounded the view that the Russian revolution could not be self-sufficient, and that its future depended on the progress of world revolution. He emphatically repeated this even shortly after Lenin's death, saying that socialism could not be built up in a single isolated country, especially in one as ‘backward’ as Russia.
Even while he was reiterating this Leninist axiom, world revolution was to him merely an abstract idea. The immediate reality in which he was wholly immersed, and to which he genuinely responded, was the Russian revolution. The other party leaders, who as emigres had lived many years in the West and had been impressed by its seemingly powerful Marxist movement, could argue with great sincerity that international communism had first claim on Soviet Russia, or even that the interests of Soviet Russia had to be subordinated to those of world revolution. To Stalin this reasoning was little better than a mental aberration of emigres, on whom the West had cast a magic spell, depriving them of any sense of reality.
Instinctively he adopted an attitude towards which the Russian revolution was in any case drifting, an attitude of national self-centredness and self-sufficiency. To many rank and file Bolsheviks world revolution had become a lamentable myth by 1924, while the building of socialism in Russia was the exacting and exhilarating experience of their generation. Despite all his verbal tributes to Leninist internationalism, Stalin became the chief mouthpiece of this sentiment. He elevated the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution to a supreme principle — this was the real meaning of his idea of ‘socialism in one country’. He was determined to make the sacred egoism of the ‘only proletarian State in the world’ the guiding idea of international communism as well. Whenever the interests of foreign communism clashed or appeared to clash with those of the Soviet Union, he sacrificed foreign communism.
By the middle of the 1920's Bolshevism had virtually solved its dilemma of ‘liberation’ versus ‘containment’ in favour of containment. World capitalism was not to be allowed to overlap the frontiers of the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was not to forgo even the slightest chance of an understanding with any bourgeois government, even if such an understanding could be bought only at the price of ‘betraying’ foreign communism. Fascist regimes, bourgeois democracies, and Oriental reactionary dictatorships — all were equally good, or equally bad, as partners in trade and diplomatic bargaining.
The Communist International still proudly claiming to be the vanguard of world revolution became the rear-guard of Stalin's diplomacy. It was used as an instrument of Soviet pressure upon capitalist governments rather than as a militant movement fighting for their overthrow.
‘Socialism in one country’ was in effect the formula in which Bolshevism, under Stalin's leadership, intimated its readiness for self-containment to a world which was anyhow bent on containing it. Thus the statesmen of the Western world understood the formula; and most of them applauded Stalin's victory over Trotsky, in whom they saw the hateful incarnation of all the world-revolutionary aspirations of early Bolshevism. (Little did those statesmen expect that one day they would feel threatened by a revolution carried on the point of the bayonets of Stalin's armies!)
As long as Bolshevism hoped and believed that its ultimate salvation would come from abroad, it remained in a sense elevated above its Russian environment. It did not feel dependent on that environment only. It could afford to express its disdain for native ‘backwardness’, for Russia's semi-Asiatic outlook, and for her Tsarist past; and nobody vented that disdain more often and with less inhibition than Lenin did. During the early years of the Soviet regime, the Bolshevik leaders had the feeling that they were Marxists in partibus infidelium, West European revolutionaries acting against a non-congenial Oriental background, which temporarily restricted their freedom of movement and tried to impose its tyranny upon them. Only revolution in the West could relieve them from that tyranny; and that it was about to do so was beyond doubt.
No sooner had Bolshevism mentally withdrawn into its national shell than this attitude became untenable. The party of the revolution had to stoop to its semi-Asiatic environment. It had to cut itself loose from the specifically Western tradition of Marxism. It had to lay itself open to the slow, persistent infiltration of native backwardness and barbarism, even while it struggled to defeat that backwardness and barbarism.
The adjustment began in the early part of the Stalinist era, and it did so in every field of activity: in the method of government, in the approach to problems of culture and education, in the relations with the outside world, in the style of diplomatic dealings, and so on. The process of infiltration was gaining momentum throughout the Stalinist era; and it reached a grotesque climax just at its end.
This does not mean that Bolshevism surrendered to its native environment. On the contrary, during the greater part of the Stalin era Bolshevism was as if at war with it — industrializing, collectivizing, and modernizing it. In a sense, Bolshevism has ‘Westernized’ the essential framework of Russian society. But it could do so only by itself becoming ‘Orientalized’. This mutual interpenetration of modern technology and Marxist socialism with Russian barbarism formed the content of the Stalin era.
Shortly before his death Lenin had a premonition of the shape of things to come. He recalled the familiar historical phenomenon when a nation which has conquered another nation culturally superior to it succumbs to the political and cultural standards of the conquered. Something similar, so Lenin argued, may happen in class struggle: an oppressed and uneducated class may overthrow a ruling class culturally superior to it; and then the defeated class may impose its own standards upon the victorious revolutionary forces. In a flash of extraordinary foresight, Lenin had the vision of his disciples, the former professional revolutionaries, adopting the methods of government and the standards of behaviour of the Tsars, the feudal boyars, and the old bureaucracy. Lenin warned his followers against this danger; but up to a point he himself furthered it. He argued, for instance, that in order to prepare Russia for socialism industrially, technologically, and educationally, Bolshevism must drive barbarism out of Russia by barbarous methods, as Peter the Great had done in his time.
This obiter dictum, one of Lenin's many and sometimes contradictory sayings, became Stalin's guiding principle. He had none of the qualms about barbarous methods which beset Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders; and he had no hesitation in proclaiming that the driving out of barbarism in a barbarous manner was no mere preliminary to socialism — it was socialism itself.
To sum up: the transition from Leninism to Stalinism consisted in the abandonment of a revolutionary internationalist tradition in favour of the sacred egoism of Soviet Russia; and in the suppression of Bolshevism's pristine attachment to proletarian democracy in favour of an autocratic System of government. The isolation of the Russian revolution resulted in its mental self-isolation and in its spiritual and political adaptation to primordial Russian tradition. Stalinism represented the amalgamation of Western European Marxism with Russian barbarism.
A brief historical digression may perhaps be permitted here.
We have seen that Marxist communism had had its cradle in the industrial West. A Western philosophy (Hegel), a Western political economy (Ricardo), and the ideas of Western Utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) had nursed it. Marxism claimed to make articulate theoretically and to express politically the revolutionary aspirations of Western industrial workers. During many decades it then strove to convert and conquer the West through the exertions of the Western working classes. By the turn of the century great labour movements had sprung up all over Western Europe, which marched under Marxist banners and solemnly vowed to use their first opportunity to carry out proletarian revolutions.
Yet this apparent success of Marxism was spurious. More than a hundred years after the message of the Communist Manifesto had first resounded throughout the world not a single proletarian revolution has triumphed in the West. Not even a single full-scale attempt at such a revolution, an attempt genuinely backed by a majority of the working class, has taken place in the West, apart from the Commune of Paris, defeated in 1871.
Instead Marxism has spread to the East; and by the efforts of the intelligentsia and a young and small working class it has conquered primitive peasant nations, from whom it had expected little or no response, and whom it had not considered capable of initiating a socialist order. At the middle of this century Marxism has become in a sense displaced from the West and naturalized in Russia and China. Where it has survived as a mass movement in the West, in France and Italy, it has done so in its ‘Orientalized’ form; and it exists there as a broad reflex of the Russian metamorphosis of Marxism.
In the East Marxism has absorbed the traditions of Tsardom and of Greek Orthodoxy. It has indeed become so thoroughly transformed that the West has almost forgotten that Marxism is its own authentic product and has come to treat it almost as if it were an exotic Oriental religion.[4] In its prevalent Stalinist version Marxism has very nearly ceased to understand the West, and has itself become incomprehensible to the West. So profound has become the displacement and transformation of the greatest revolutionary and international movement of our age.
A striking parallel to this is found in the fortunes of early Christianity, which came into being as a Judaic ‘heresy’, as one of the extreme sects in the Synagogue, wholly in character with old Biblical tradition, and bent on converting to its beliefs primarily the Jews. Yet it was not given to Christianity to convert the people from whose midst its Man-God and its Apostles had come. Instead, Christianity moved into a disintegrating pagan world, whose mind was no longer dominated by the old gods, where Jupiter's thunder no longer made men tremble, and Neptune was no longer able to shake the seas.
It was in the temples of the old Graeco-Roman deities that Christianity made its conquests; and it began to breathe the air of their temples, to absorb and assimilate pagan myths, symbols, and beliefs. It came to dominate its new environment while it was adapting itself to it. It ceased to be a Jewish heresy; it ceased to live on the Nazarene memories of the Old Testament and on Jewish oral tradition. It ceased to understand the Jews and it became incomprehensible to the Jews. From the Judaic creed of the oppressed it became the religion of the Roman Caesars. But converting the Caesars, it also became converted to Caesarism, until the Holy See became an Imperial court, and until the hierarchical habits of the Roman Empire became its ecclesiastic canons.
In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.