Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Ten years later, however, such ideological devotion secured no clemency in the face of a paranoid Stalin confronting the spectre of total war with Nazi Germany. On 28 August 1941 the Soviet Presidium issued another decree, ‘Pertaining to the Resettlement of the Germans in the Volga District’. ‘According to trustworthy information received by the military authorities,’ the edict began ominously,

  there are, among the German population living in the Volga area, thousands and tens of thousands of diversionists and spies who, on a signal being given from Germany, are to carry out sabotage in the area inhabited by the Germans of the Volga… [However] none of the Germans of the Volga area have reported to the Soviet authorities the existence of such a large number of diversionists and spies among the Volga Germans; consequently the German population of the Volga area conceals enemies of the Soviet people and of Soviet authority in its midst.

  Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler's audacious invasion of Russia in June 1941, was set to hit the residents of Engels hard. As the Wehrmacht scythed their way through the Ukraine, the Crimea and southern Russia, Stalin ordered the region's loyal, industrious Volga Germans rounded up en masse. In textbook Soviet logic, since they had failed to offer up the presumed Nazi traitors in their midst, all were guilty and all had to suffer. ‘In case of diversionary acts which would be carried out by German diversionists and spies in the Volga province upon a signal from Germany, the Soviet government, in accordance with wartime laws, will be compelled to take punitive measures against the entire German population of the Volga province.’7 After surviving the horrors of collectivization, the Great Famine and the Great Terror there now came wholesale removal as the autonomous Volga province was officially wiped from Soviet geography. Catherine the Great's 200-year-old German communities joined Stalin's growing list of undesirables – rightists, Trotskyists, saboteurs, wreckers, collaborators and ‘fifth columnists’ – raised at dead of night by the secret police and dispersed to the eastern edges of Siberia. And just as the protection of the Holy Blessed Virgin had failed to save the inhabitants of Pokrovsk from previous Soviet cruelties, so now the communist halo of Engels offered no cover to its German inhabitants. In their tens of thousands the Volga Germans became another statistical testament to the industrial inhumanity of Stalin's Marxist-Leninist state.

  For any biographer, the question must surely be whether Engels the man was in some form responsible for the fate of Engels the city. Did his philosophy, as the Volga propaganda sheets claimed, help to shape the contours of Stalin's Soviet Union? For ideological opponents of Marx and Engels, the usual method of invalidating their philosophy has long been the rush to the Gulag: a quick reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat and force as the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one and the reader is on his way to the Krasnoyarsk camps. ‘In his own idiosyncratic ways, indeed, he [Lenin] could not have been more loyal to the doctrines and doings of Marx and Engels,’ as a recent history of communism by Robert Service puts it. ‘The co-founders of Marxism had approved of violent revolution, dictatorship and terror… Many assumptions of Leninism sprang directly from the Marxism of the mid-nineteenth century.’8 What is more, many of the political leaders of the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc and then the anti-imperial communist movement came to their Marxism specifically through the works of Engels. His writings – Anti-Dühring, and the abridged Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy – provided an easily accessible conduit to the complexities behind Das Kapital. And nowhere more so than in Russia.

  As we have seen, Marx and Engels were always circumspect about the prospect or even the desirability of a proletarian revolution taking place in Russia. Endless tergiversations about the role of the obschina, concerns over the Oriental habit for despotism, debates about the speed of industrialization and the role of the peasantry led Marx to conclude that there could be a Russian road to socialism only if it occurred concurrently with a complementary proletarian revolution in the advanced West. Engels would not even admit to this: in his final years he remained adamant that the still feudal Tsarist state would have to pass through all the intermediate stages of mass industrialization, working-class immiseration and bourgeois rule before any prospect of revolution would be in the offing.

  But history arrived early for Russia and, in 1917, Lenin's Bolsheviks successfully diverted a popular revolution into their extraordinary ideological experiment. The first chair of the Council of the People's Commissars certainly knew his Marx, but he often seemed to prefer his Engels. Indeed, Lenin thought it ‘impossible to understand Marxism and to propound it fully without taking into account the entire work of Engels’.9 Lenin's earliest and arguably most influential instructor in the Marxist doctrine was the exiled Russian leader of the Emancipation of Labour group, Georgi Plekhanov. From his Geneva outpost, Plekhanov had turned time and again to Engels for philosophical and strategic advice as to the most efficacious way of implementing Marxism in Russia. ‘First of all, please spare me “mentor” – my name is simply Engels,’ the ‘Grand Lama’ replied to one particularly fulsome Plekhanov enquiry.10

  What Plekhanov took from his reading of Engels was a belief in Marxism as a complete theoretical system capable of explaining history, natural science, economics and, most importantly of all, political action. For Plekhanov was the first to bestow Marxism with the title ‘dialectical materialism’, by which he meant a totalizing, philosophical worldview based on Marx and Engels's application of Hegelian dialectics to the natural and physical sciences and then societal change itself. With its step-by-step account of contradictions, qualitative and quantitative change, and the negation of the negation, dialectical materialism seemed to provide an unbreachable political route map for Russia's revolutionaries. However, Plekhanov always retained an intellectual's purity and never swayed from Engels's conviction that socialism in Russia could not be imposed overnight, but had to follow a period of bourgeois-democratic rule and sustained industrial growth. These were both the preconditions and contradictions of capitalist society which would provide the chrysalis for a communist transformation; he was deeply hostile to any kind of Leninist insurrection which would see a vanguard elite instigate a top-down socialist revolution from inside the walls of the Kremlin. The result of such a febrile putsch in Russian society, Plekhanov rightly feared, would be ‘a political abortion after the manner of the ancient Chinese or Persian empires – a renewal of Tsarist despotism on a communist basis’.11

  While the power-hungry Lenin ignored such reservations, he certainly imbibed from Plekhanov (before their political split) his interpretation of Engel's codification of Marx. In the process, the science of Engels's Marxism – with all its provisional humility and capacity for revision – metamorphosed into an irreproachable dogma. In what resembled a philosophical version of Chinese whispers, Lenin swallowed Plekhanov's version of dialectical materialism whole. ‘Dialectics IS the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism,’ Lenin declared.12 As such, Marxism for Lenin was a complete body of theory akin to ‘a single piece of steel, [from which] you cannot eliminate even one basic premise, one essential part, without departing from objective truth, without falling a prey to bourgeois-reactionary falsehood’.13 The unalterable natural laws of the dialectic explained the inevitable, scientific ascent of socialism; the fluid, destructive process of contradiction; and, rightfully understood, offered a complete programme for communist governance. ‘This insistence on the integrality of Marxism was inherited from Plekhanov by Lenin, and became part of the ideology of the Soviet state,’ in the judgement of Leszek Kolakowski.14 And what the dialectic gave Lenin the revolutionary was a profound intellectual self-confidence and an awesome degree of ideological rigour. In a purple passage from The Teaching of Karl Marx, Lenin favourably compared the inspiring mystery of dialectical materialism to Darwinian evolution:

  A development that repeats, as it were, the stages already passed, but repeats them in a differen
t way, on a higher plane (‘the negation of negation’); a development, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line; a development in leaps and bounds, catastrophes, revolutions; ‘intervals of gradualness’; transformation of quantity into quality, inner impulses for development, imparted by the contradiction, the conflict of different forces and tendencies reacting on a given body or inside a given phenomenon or within a given society; interdependence, and the closest, indissoluble connection between all sides of every phenomenon (history disclosing ever new sides), a connection that provides the one world-process of motion proceeding according to law – such are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of evolution more full of meaning than the current one.15

  Joseph Stalin took the practical implementation of dialectical materialism to even greater heights. For as the Soviet regime appeared to depart ever more violently from Marx and Engels's ideals, its official rhetoric became ever more fulsome in its claims to orthodoxy. ‘Marxism is not only the theory of Socialism; it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx's proletarian socialism logically follows,’ Comrade General-Secretary Stalin declared. ‘This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.’16 He went on to outline precisely what he meant in a personal contribution to one of the most important publications in official Soviet literature, the Short Course: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (1938). Stalin's chapter, ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, which set out the Marxist fundamentals of the Soviet system, opened with the rigid authority of a commissar's edict: ‘Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist Party.’ He then illustrated this truth with various laws of science – water to steam, effects of heat on platinum wire, oxygen to ozone – lifted straight from Engels's Dialectics of Nature. Stalin explained how these sharp shifts in form confirmed Engels's assertion that nature was a connected and integrated whole in which no phenomenon could be understood on its own, that it was in a state of continuous movement with change occurring rapidly and abruptly, and that driving its development were the internal contradictions inherent to all natural phenomena. Yet with much greater precision than either Engels or Lenin, Stalin then spelled out the political ramifications of dialectical materialism in a direct challenge to any reformist or social-democratic interpretation. ‘If the passing of slow quantitative changes into rapid and abrupt changes is a law of development,’ he reasoned, ‘then it is clear that revolutions made by oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable phenomenon.’ As a result, ‘the transition from capitalism to Socialism and the liberation of the working class from the yoke of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by revolution’.17

  Making a play for total ideological legitimacy, Stalin tied the actions of the Soviet state inextricably to the scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism. ‘The bond between science and practical activity, between theory and practice, their unity, should be the guiding star of the party of the proletariat.’18 And since the Communist Party, which to all intents and purposes meant the will of Stalin, necessarily embodied the true interests of the proletariat, every policy it pursued logically enjoyed the ideological imprimatur of Marxist sanctity. Cornelius Castoriadis explains the Soviet rationale best: ‘If there is a true theory of history, if there is a rationality at work in things, then it is clear that the direction this development takes should be left to the specialists of this theory, to the technicians of this rationality. The Party's absolute power has a philosophical status… If this conception is true, this power must be absolute.’19 The iron cage of the Soviet system was such that what the party decreed instantly became scientific truth.

  Against a backdrop of intimidation and liquidation, the Stalinist state transformed the nuances and complexities of Marxist philosophy into a rigid, totalizing orthodoxy which infected almost every element of Russia's cultural, scientific, political and even private life.20 While Engels had compared the growth of socialism to the early Christian Church, in the USSR it was akin to the worst form of heresy-hunting, medieval Catholicism with liturgies, rituals and a choir of communist saints. There were no doubts; only salvation in this faith which provided the way, the truth, the life. And Stalin's Short Course was its sacred text: an indisputable explication of Marxism-Leninism which stipulated the correct party line on all matters of socialist thought. ‘It was published and taught everywhere without ceasing,’ Kolakowski recalls. ‘In the upper forms of secondary schools, in all places of higher learning, party courses etc., wherever anything was taught, the Short Course was the Soviet citizen's main intellectual pabulum.’21

  As the Soviet Union's geopolitical sphere of influence extended, so the Short Course made its way round the world in tens of millions of copies with smart covers and high-quality Moscow print. The effect was to make dialectical materialism one of the most influential philosophies of the twentieth century, memorized and recited in communist circles from Phnom Penh to Paris to St Pancras, north London, where a young historian named Raphael Samuel wallowed in its icy certainties. ‘As a science of society, it offered itself as an all-embracing determinism, in which accidents were revealed as necessities, and causes inexorably followed by effects,’ he later wrote in a memoir of his upbringing in the providential London milieu of the Communist Party of Great Britain. ‘As a mode of reasoning, it provided us with a priori understandings and universal rules – laws of thought which were both a guide to action and a source of prophetical authority.’ But the point of Marxist philosophy still remained to change the world. ‘Stalin's dictum: “Theory without Practice is Barren; Practice without Theory is Blind”, became as familiar to generations of Communists as Engels's boiling kettle [exemplifying the shift from water to steam as a quantitative to qualitative shift] was in classes on dialectics.'22 Stalin's Short Course quoted extensively from Anti-D ihring and Plekhanov and Lenin often turned more readily to Engels's literature than Marx's, while it was dialectical materialism – far more so than the theory of surplus value – which provided the driving philosophy for the Soviet-directed global communist movement. ‘It is the Dialectics of Nature which has become the constantly quoted authoritative source for the exposition of the dialectic in Soviet Marxism,’ reported Herbert Marcuse in the 1950s.23

  So – to repeat – was Engels responsible for the terrible misdeeds carried out under the banner of Marxism-Leninism? Even in our modern age of historical apologies, the answer has to be no. In no intelligible sense can Engels or Marx bear culpability for the crimes of these historical actors carried out generations later, even if the policies were offered up in their honour. Just as Adam Smith is not to blame for the inequalities of the free-market West or Martin Luther for the nature of modern Protestant evangelicalism or the Prophet Muhammad for the atrocities of Osama bin Laden, so the millions of souls which Stalinism despatched (or those who died in Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mengistu's Ethiopia) do not rest on the account of two nineteenth-century London philosophers – and not just because of the simple anachronism of the charge.

  In stark contrast to the way in which communist parties seized power in the twentieth century, from 1848 onwards Engels was highly sceptical of vanguard-led, top-down revolutions. He always believed in a workers’ party led by the working class itself (rather than intellectuals and professional revolutionaries) and remained adamant that the proletariat would arrive at socialism through the contradictions of the capitalist system and the development of political self-consciousness rather than having it imposed upon them by a self-selecting communist junta. ‘The Social Democratic Federation over here and your German-American Socialists share the distinction of being the only parties that have contrived to reduce Marx's theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy which the working man is not expected to arrive at by virtue of his own class consciousness; rather it is to be promptly and without preparation rammed down his throat as an article of faith,�
� he complained pointedly to Friedrich Sorge in May 1894.24 The emancipation of the masses could never be the product of an external agent, a political deus ex machina, even if it came in the form of V. I. Lenin. Moreover, as his guidance to the German SPD suggested, Engels was inclined towards the end of his life to advocate the peaceable, democratic road to socialism through the ballot-box rather than the barricade (whilst always retaining the moral right to insurgency). In the specific Russian context, it is most likely that Plekhanov's post-1917, now ‘Menshevik’, demands for a period of bourgeois rule and capitalist development before any effective transition to a socialist state would have been more in tune with Engels's thinking than the Bolshevik will to power.

  Despite the easy caricature from both anti-communists and Marx apologists alike, Engels was never that narrow-minded, mechanistic architect of dialectical materialism which twentieth-century Soviet ideology so exalted. There lies an unconscionable philosophical chasm between Engelsism and Stalinism: between an open, critical and humane vision of scientific socialism and a scientistic socialism so horribly devoid of any ethical precepts. As John O'Neill has argued, Engels's socialism has no necessary connection with twentieth-century state Marxism since the link depends on Engels adhering to a dogmatic conception of science committed to ‘methodological certainty’ and ‘doctrinal orthodoxy’ – both of which Engels rejected when it came to scientific enquiry and historical materialism.25 The closed logic of Stalin's Short Course would have been anathema to the perpetually inquisitive Engels: behind his barracking demeanour, he was interested in challenging ideas, following new trends and often rethinking his own positions. ‘So-called “socialist society” is not, in my view, to be regarded as something that remains crystallized for all time, but rather as being in process of constant change and transformation like all other social conditions,’ he wrote in 1890. ‘I see absolutely no difficulty in carrying out this revolution over a period, i.e. gradually.’26 In many ways Engels's thinking was far more heuristic and less ossified than Marx's. In Anti-Dühring, he concluded that the most valuable result of his scientific investigations was to'make us extremely distrustful of our present knowledge, in as much as in all probability we are just about at the beginning of human history’.27 And he adopted something of a proto-Popperian stance on questions of scientific fallibility. ‘The knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realized in a series of relative errors; neither the one nor the other can be fully realized except through the unending duration of human existence.’28 When it came to historical materialism, he similarly pleaded with one correspondent not to ‘take every word I have said above for gospel’ and told another that ‘our view of history is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model’.29