Statement on Stalinism

When people in the Western nations think of communism, their mental images seem forever associated with a totalitarian system of mass murder, Kafkaesque repression and massive industrialization, combining to form what some American politicians have called an "Evil Empire". Such serves in the common Western mind as an adequate summary of the history of the USSR, which in turn serves as the communist state par exemple. But the latter is more justified than the former.

Not, as some (mostly young) left-wing people in the West would argue, because the USSR wasn't "real communism" and somehow "real communism" is a state of ideal politics which can be completely separated from history and philosophy, and which essentially means whatever the person speaking thinks the world utopia is like. Such is merely a classic example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, and a rather poorly reasoned one at that. But the real reason is because that atmosphere, and even simply those historical circumstances, were unique to the USSR under Stalin (and mostly in the 1930s), and because Stalinism is not actually Communism. The latter can be maintained as historical reality without reverting to the fallacy mentioned above, because we can avoid the "real communism" argument by simply pointing out the differences between the USSR under Marxist-Leninist policy, such as it was under every other ruler or group of rulers than Stalin, and the Stalinist period and ideology.

And despite the efforts to assert the contrary by Stalinists, those differences are manifold and clear. To see how and what, we have to go back to the period directly after the October Revolution in Russia in 1917.

J.V. Dzugashvili, genannt Stalin, was among the leadership of the Communist Party in those days about the only real proletarian, having been born to exceedingly poor parents in Gori in Georgia. Contrary to most of the Bolshevik leaders, he had never been to any other country, and was not as interested in political analysis as they were, having had a far worse education. In 1919 he became a member of the Politburo at its founding and immediately started surrounding himself with supporters, such as Voroshilov, Budennij, Mikoyan, Molotov and Ordzhonikidze. He was subsequently appointed People's Commissar for the Nationalities, a position which concerned itself with the policy towards non-Russian minorities within the USSR (though it was not yet named that at the time). Here, almost immediately, he came into a severe conflict with Lenin, the manifest leader of the Bolshevik revolution and the most skilful communist thinker and politician among the leadership, but who was unfortunately suffering from a severe illness that would for years strongly limit his capacity to make policy.

Lenin's policy on this consisted of a Soviet federation in which the minority peoples would be granted relative autonomy within communist frameworks, which fit in with the communist political thought that the labourers of one people should not fight the labourers of another, and that nationalism was a harmful "deviation" that merely served as a tool for dividing and so ruling the proletariat. Stalin, however, conceived of the new state differently: he proposed a federation in which a strong centralized government would rule all the other nationalities, a so-called derzhava or "super-state"¹. When in 1922 the Politburo appointed a commission to research the matter of the nationalities question, Stalin immediately proposed a drastic plan. Under the name "autonomization", he proposed to merge all the republics' own commissariats on domestic affairs as well as foreign policy with those of Russia proper, and also to merge their own political police with the Russian GPU, in order to basically make them a formal part of the Russian Federation. This policy was to be implemented in all autonomous regions with the exception of Bukhara, Qhorezm and the Far Eastern Republic, the most unimportant and outlying areas of the Union.
This policy was vigourously opposed by the communists in the autonomous regions, as well as by the Leninists in the Russian Soviets. Most importantly, Lenin himself opposed the idea. He met with Stalin, indicating that Stalin rushed things too much and that he wanted some serious amendments to the proposal, most importantly to maintain the independence of the republics over their own affairs. Stalin rejected these, calling them "absurd" and "pointless".

In the end Lenin won out, of course, and a more decentralized system was set up that opposed the Stalinist Russian nationalism, among other reasons because of the strong support of Christian Rakovsky, secretary-general of the Ukraine SSR, for the Leninist version of the plan. What is not so much important is the matter of the nationalities itself, as to make clear that from the start on, Stalin opposed Lenin in essential matters of policy, and always in such a way as to increase his own influence and to increase the centralized power of the Russian state and the leaders of the Russian state (such as himself), against everything else. This decidedly non-communist pattern of chauvinism was already recognized by Lenin in an early stage, but (partially due to his illness) he had trouble doing anything about it. In a letter to Kamenev on the 6th of October, Lenin wrote: "I am declaring war on great-Russian chauvinism: it is necessary to insist absolutely that the Union's Central Executive Committee be chaired in turn by a Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, etc. (...)". Lenin subsequently wrote a larger work in which he railed against the totalitarianism of some of those calling for "unity of the apparatus", and compared it with the way the Tsarists had always run the bureaucracy, full of oppression for the people in general and minorities especially, and which was of old used to serve the "Russian bully" (ot istinno Russkogo derzhimordy).² He also stressed that Stalin "played a fatal role" in the chauvinism of the nationalities issue, and remarked that he had been decidedly acerbic, and that "Animosity (ozloblenie) was the worst thing in politics".³ And, finally and most importantly, Lenin decided to take measures against Stalin and his right hand, Ordzhonikidze, for going against clear communist policy and trying to subvert the communist leadership into increasing Russian national power. He planned to do these things at the next Congress of the Soviets, and in the meanwhile, contented himself with writing to Trotsky and the anti-Stalinist Georgians Makharadze and Mdivani voicing his support for the autonomy policy in the case.

But then Lenin had a severe stroke, on March 9, 1923. The whole rest of the year he was virtually incapable of movement or speech. On January 21, 1924, he had another stroke, and died immediately. Trotsky had in the meanwhile supported his policy against Stalin's, calling the centralization plan "imperialist and anti-proletarian". But due to the uncertainty over Lenin's situation, he fatally hesitated to take real measures against Stalin himself (or Ordzhonikidze), whom had been marked for exile from the party, or even execution. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev all failed to perceive Stalin's desire for centralized power and for himself to be at the head of that centralized power, and so they contented themselves with asking Stalin in a resolution to show more loyalty, which had no effect. The plans to restore the de-centralized system of united independent socialist republics at the next meeting of the Supreme Soviet was postponed indefinitely.

This gave Stalin the opportunity to seize the power. He immediately went out stating his policy plans and finding a way to use this opportunity to cement his power base. Still of course calling himself a communist, he nevertheless claimed the following:
"For us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres."⁴ It may be a ridiculous statement for a professed Marxist to state that there are "no objective difficulties", but it is altogether more fitting in the role of a totalitarian ruler, ever exhorting his subjects to do his bidding more and better. So he revealed himself, though, quite like Hitler's Mein Kampf, it was not recognized at the time as such. In this, Moshe Lewin has convincingly argued that he basically followed a policy such as a warlord like Genghis Khan would do, conceiving of the state only as a conglomerate of military and polical power which can be brought to bear against any and all opponents, both within and outside the country, but which has no further justification than the presumed existence of such opponents.

Immediately at Lenin's burial he swore a so-called "oath to Lenin", which was a listing by Stalin of Lenin's purported commandments to the party and his demand that he and all others fully obey them. Furthermore, he started working on eliminating the power of the Bolshevik leaders within the state, to the benefit of his personal power and of those that indeed did blindly obey him. As general secretary, he had total power over the Secretariat, which assimilated and distributed the cadres over the various departments and institutions. As such, it could also determine the delegations to party congresses and conferences, and any other forum where a vote could be taken on policy. In this way, he ensured that his wishes would be done on all fronts. The Central Committee continued as the only remnant of the old system, and was still elected by the party members and took votes; but its real power had irretrievably gone over to the Secretariat, with Stalin at its head.

The consequences of this were immediately clear. The bureaucracy was centralized, and also forced to function fully as a tool for Stalin to implement his policies. This "bureaucratization" had a profoundly negative effect on the experience of the lower party members and the workers within the party, and complaints began to increase during the 1920s, until they became so numerous that I.A. Iakovlev, one of the few remaining Bolsheviks, wrote as head of the Central Control Committee of the party that "democratization" was the only real option to fix the rigidity of the system and make it socialist again.⁵ During this period, the only real political opposition came from the "Left Opposition" of people like Rakovsky and Trotsky, and both had been exiled and stripped of power, and would later be murdered. So the bureaucratization policy continued basically unopposed, ever increasing the hold Stalin had over the party and the state, while even vague supporters such as the head of the Inspectorate, Kuybyshev, stated that "nothing in our new state so much resembles the old Tsarist regime as our administration".⁶

Stalin then set out to dismantle the old socialist aspects of the party and state administration. He removed the "party maximum", a rule whereby no member in any part of the hierarchy could earn more than the highest obtainable salary of an educated worker. He also removed the tradition of fraternization and addressing each other as equals (the famous "comrade" remained, but had no real meaning any more), contemptuously calling it "nivellation" (uranilovka). Instead, the leaders of organizations, whom Stalin tellingly called "commanders", would form a ruling class (nachalstvo), which would be continuously rotated to prevent any power other than Stalin's to become entrenched.
With the mysterious assassination of the popular Leningrad secretary Kirov and the fortuitous death of Kuybyshev, the Politburo was filled with supporters of Stalin, who then arranged for the distribution of all important Commissar's offices between a few trusted people, namely Andreev, Yezhov and Kaganovich.⁷ Yezhov became the party inspector of the new NKVD, the Stalinist secret police, and as such arranged the show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev, where both were tortured into 'confessions' and then executed. Yet they were not to pretend to have equal status to Stalin: always the letters from these trusted ones to Stalin were full of hailing and grovelling phrases, indicating the degree of power Stalin now had over even the highest officers of the USSR. In 1936, Yagoda, the then head of the NKVD, was executed after a mock trial, basically for not being ruthless enough in hunting the "Trotskist conspirators" and other phantom opponents of the regime. Yezhov immediately replaced him, and with him came the purges of the Yezhovschina in 1937-1938, where a veritable witch-hunt for opponents of the regime, whether real or imaginary, led to the arrest of about one and a half million Soviet citizens for "counter-revolutionary activity", about seven hundred thousand of which were executed, high and low.⁸

As with any system where one man holds absolute power over all of the country and all of the administration, the personal oddities and insanities of that man will be reflected in the state's behavior. The Secretariat and the Orgburo, main agencies of the Central Committee, micromanaged all decisions and all policies by local governments and officials to an absurd degree, egged on by the hypercentralization that Stalin demanded. In this system, where according to Stalin "no man was irreplaceable"⁹, Stalin's power and also his paranoia took the proportions of an omnipotent, omniscient God-King, whose word was law and whose personal security was the security of the state. Essentially, Stalin copied the ruling tactic of the French King Louis XIV, whose notoriety in stating "l'État, c'est moi" was only rivalled by his skill in eliminating the power of all his noblemen. All Stalin's demands of local governments took the form of ultimata, and desire for total mastery made him involve himself in spheres which Lenin had explicitly left alone. Since an omniscient ruler is necessarily always right, he considered himself an expert on fields such as theatre, writing, history, sciences and even warfare, even going so far as to accredit to himself the victorious defense of Petrograd in 1917 (which in reality had been done by Trotsky). He appointed the crooked biologist Lysenko as head of the Academy of Sciences, but insisted on personally editing his lectures for publication. He also eliminated the brilliant Field Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had in his military tactics already predicted the shape of "mobile warfare" that WWII would assume, and had proposed measures to ensure the Red Army's superiority in such cases. But Stalin's trusted man in the military, Klement Voroshilov, opposed any changes to military planning, and this was exacerbated by the fact that the Marshal of Cavalry, Budennij, was an old friend of Stalin's, and of course would become entirely obsolete in any modernization of military functioning. So Tukhachevsky and several other Marshals, as well as about half of all higher officers, were sacrificed to Stalin's personal power interests, again substituting the interests of Stalin for the interests of the Soviet Union.

I will not go into the Ukraine famine, the de-kulakization or World War II, since those do not concern the matter of Stalinist policy being opposed to actual communism. What does perhaps deserve notice in this context is that Stalin's dislike of the kulaks, allegedly rich privately operating peasants, may stem from his personal hatred of decadence and excesses of wealth. He hatred drunkenness, debauchery and public displays of opulence, something which may also explain why he joined the Bolshevik party in the first place when it wasn't so likely to succeed in any kind of revolution. But this is speculation, and should be regarded as such.

The purges, however, do deserve some extra attention. Most notable here besides the purge of the military is the execution of Bukharin, the "philosopher" of the Bolsheviks and though never very powerful, certainly intellectually superior to Stalin or his direct associates. Bukharin was first publicly discredited in Pravda as "Rightist scoundrel" who would have sought to undermine the Party. In confusion, he sent letters to Voroshilov and Stalin asking for an explanation and appealing to them for help. Instead, Stalin layed a trap. He let the matter be voted upon in the Central Committee, giving them three options: either direct execution, or an NKVD investigation, or acquittal. Nobody, of course, dared vote for the third option; but all who voted for the second option, and there were few left, were also executed. Such was Stalin's policy towards internal dissent and discussion, which had always been an important part of the dealings of the Central Committee in Lenin's time (and again would be after Stalin's death). The same subsequently happened to the delegates at the Seventeenth Congress of 1934 (nicknamed the "Congress of the Victors"): of them, a majority of 1.108 were later arrested, and of those 848 were executed. In reward for the purging, the NKVD leaders were given increased salaries, dachas and free medical care.

Only around the onset of the war did Stalin relent, having Yezhov and some of his associates executed in a "rectification" and subsequently appointing the cruel Beria, but decreasing the scale and degree of terror. Nevertheless, the GULAG camp system had reached unparallelled massiveness, with about 1.6 million deaths in various camps and settlements in hostile climates, and another 2.4 million who remained imprisoned, many of them political prisoners.¹⁰ Yet after World War II, which saw the deaths of another twenty-six million people, some of the policies were reduced in scale, and the de-kulakization was abandoned after Stalin lost interest in it. There was no political or ideological foundation for any of this though, merely the need to constantly find new opponents for the war machine of the Stalinist state to act against.

Yet the political idiocy was not yet over with the bloody end of the Second World War. Influenced by the nationalist Russian Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo in replacement of the mysteriously assassinated Kirov in 1934 and Party secretary, the so-called "Zhdanovism" was implemented nationwide. Its main target were the "cosmopolitans" (a fancy way of referring to Jewish intellectuals) and those "fawning over the West", which could mean anything at all. Zhdanovism absolutely opposed all forms of nationalism in the minority regions, but fervently supported the all-Russian ideal, absolutely ignoring Leninist policy. It also saw the introduction of courts of honor, an archaic institution hearkening back to Tsarist days, which was mainly aimed at forcing a nationalist patriotism in all spheres of government, and those found wanting would be fired (though not killed this time). Under the guise of "spiritual independence", Alexis Kuznetsov, recently installed as Politburo member, paranoia and vigilance again became the main weapons of the state and its officials, and references were purposely made to the great purges to incite fear among the subjects. This reactionary (and historically quite Tsarist) policy would continue until 1950, when Stalin organized the last great purge before his death. Kuznetsov as well as the head of Gosplan, Voznesensky, were executed, as well as many intellectuals and Jewish leaders.

Stalin died in 1953, and Stalinism with him. It should historically be obvious that the policies implemented by Stalin and his followers in no way follow the Marxist-Leninist ideology (for good or for ill), and that Stalin purposely sought to conceal this by organizing purges against all of the leading Bolsheviks that had not already died of natural causes, including such star figures as Kamenev, Trotsky and Bukharin. His absolute over-centralization and the religiously inspired 'personality cult' fit far more in the Tsarist picture of the supreme ruler ruling the land in God's name, destroying the enemies within and without and protecting the land in exchange for his subjects' absolute obedience. Consider for example the title he gave himself, "generalissimo"; Tsars before him had called themselves "prince", "sovereign", even "Imperator", but none had yet called themselves that, and so Stalin 'crowned' himself. Equally telling is his re-implementation of the old Tsarist uniforms for the officers and military, and the renewed use of Peter the Great's "table of ranks and uniforms" as well as the references to "The Great and Holy Russia", the removal of the Internationale as anthem in favor of the old Russian anthem, and the so-called "socialism in one country", basically an abandonment of the Marxist requirement for internationalism. This pattern also fits the agricultural nature of the country in the Tsarist period and up to the 1950s, where most Russians were poor farmers who looked up in a similar way to their landowner (khoziain), who was to them both tyrant and protector. This system had reached its apex under Nicholas II, and subsequently led to the October Revolution. It should therefore be considered one of history's great ironies that a self-professed follower of that revolution would so severely betray it, that he undid all its works and ruled as the veritable successor of the despot that his fellow revolutionaries had so hated.

¹ The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin (London 2005)
² K voprosu o natsianalnostiakh ili ob "avtonomizatsii", V.I. Ulyanov (Moscow 1922)
³ The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin (London 2005)
⁴ Speech at the Sverdlov Party University.
⁵ RGASPI (Russian State Archive for Socio-Political Research), f. 613.
⁶ Speech to the Workers Party Inspectorate, 1929.
⁷ Politbiuro - Mekhanizm Politicheskoi Vlasti v 1930-ye gody, Oleg Khlevniuk (Moscow 1990).
⁸ KGB Records under Chrushchov. The precise figures were slightly revised, and are now given as 1.372.392 arrests and of those, 681.692 executions.
⁹ The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin (London 2005)
¹⁰ Istoricheskaia Logika Stalinizma, B.P. Kurashvili (Moscow 1996)
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 03:22