by S. A Smith
Yet in later life Trotsky vehemently denied that there were continuities between Leninism and Stalinism, insisting that a whole 'river of blood' separated the two. It is beyond question that there was much in Leninist theory and practice that adumbrated Stalinism. Lenin was architect of the party's absolute monopoly on power; it was he who ruthlessly subordinated the Soviets and trade unions. It was he who refused to give any quarter to those who thought differently, who eliminated a free press, who crushed the socialist opposition, who banned the right of party members to form factions. He even went so far as to suggest
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that the will of the proletariat 'may sometimes be carried out by a dictator'. Lenin, in other words, must bear considerable responsibility for the institutions, the climate of intolerance, and the legal and moral nihilism that allowed Stalin to come to power. But this argument has suggested that while there was a logic at work, it was not the inexorable logic of an unfolding idea, but one inscribed in the interaction of certain ideological goals and organizational principles with structural and circumstantial pressures.
If many of the features typical of Stalinism can be traced back to before 1928, the so-called 'Great Break', instituted by the First Five-Year Plan and forced collectivization, was exactly that - a break in policy that unleashed devastating and wrenching change upon society. Living under Stalin was a very different experience from living under NEP, and to deny any element of discontinuity is to fail imaginatively to £ appreciate the murderous nature of Stalinism. The institutions of rule g may not have changed, but personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use e of force, the cult of power, endemic fear, a stifling conformism, paranoia jg about encirclement and internal wreckers, the unleashing of terror used 1 against a whole society, all meant that political life was qualitatively different from under Lenin. Of course, terror, forced labour, and show trials had their antecedents under Lenin, but quantity had become transformed into quality. In accelerating the economic modernization of the Soviet Union, Stalin believed he was continuing the revolution. Yet he stamped out any residual emancipatory impulses, presiding over the consolidation of a leviathan state in which a ruling elite enjoyed power and privilege at the expense of the mass of the people, and in which forms of patriarchy and Russian chauvinism were reconstituted.
A related question concerns the extent to which Stalinism represented the resurgence of deeply rooted elements in Russia's political culture. The cultural continuity argument is central to Richard Pipes's influential account of the Russian Revolution. It rests on the idea that tsarism was a patrimonial regime in which the tsar's absolute and unconstrained
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authority derived from his ownership of the country's resources, including the lives of his subjects. Undertsarism the peasantry, Pipes avers, were politically passive, accepting of autocracy, and lacking a sense of civic responsibility. The preceding account has emphasized that the revolution released a flood of change that massively destabilized cultural norms and practices. Yet it has endorsed elements of the cultural continuity argument, pointing to how in the 1920s a 'return of the repressed' was in operation. The similarity between taken-for-granted orientations to politics undertsarism and Stalinism is striking -the primacy of the state vis-a-vis society, the personalized relationship between people and ruler, the lack of legal restraints on power, the absence of institutions mediating between rulers and ruled, clientelism as away of building social and political relationships, and mistrust towards the outside world. Moshe Lewin has argued that there is a 'contamination effect' of tradition, whereby the quicker customary patterns are broken, the more likely they are to reassert themselves in the longer term. At the same time, and contra Pipes, one must be cautious about interpreting Russia's political culture as a monolithic system. Culture is a contested field of relatively empowered norms and practices. In 1917 democracy - of a very particular kind - flourished, so one has to explain why this gave way to impulses to authoritarianism. Moreover, rather than treat political culture as a causal factor explaining the rise of Stalinism, it is better to view it as a conditioning context, in which norms and practices shape political action negatively by providing few resources to counter the reimposition of authoritarian rule. Finally, Stalinism was never traditional authoritarianism writ large: it synthesized many elements of the Russian national tradition with Leninism, its character as a mobilizing party-state making it very much a creature of the 20th century.
Nor should the 'return of the repressed' be read as signifying that the impact of the revolution was shallow. A theme of the book has been that an antagonistic perception of the social order bit deep into popular culture, that commitment to equality was widespread, and that the
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ideal of soviet power was hugely popular. What motivated much resistance to the Bolsheviks was precisely the sense that they were betraying those ideals. The revolution, however, always meant different things to different people and different things to the same people at different times. It could mean being forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, unimaginable hardship for cold and hungry townspeople, outsiders coming into one's village and seizing grain, or upstarts from one's own village behaving corruptly as representatives of soviet power. Alternatively, it could mean the chance to learn to read, not losing one's child to disease, increasing the size of one's household plot, getting a divorce from a drunken husband, or being schooled in one's native tongue.
Social identities remained fractured and unsettled, yet they had undergone profound transformation as a result of the revolution. Class £ had provided the dominant language through which political g allegiances were constituted in 1Q17 and it continued to be dominant in
i
e the new order. One is struck by the speed with which peasants took up jg the language of class - eagerly seeking to prove, for example, that they 1 were not kulaks - although whether this was as a means of self-protection, of legitimating complaints, or of explaining away their problems is anyone's guess. This happened so quickly because the Bolshevik discourse of class was superimposed on an already existing sense of 'them' and 'us'. At the same time, it is clear that peasant perceptions of rural society continued to be at odds with those of the communists. Poor peasants, the cynosure of the party leadership, were often considered 'idlers' and 'spongers' by fellow villagers, whereas kulaks might be praised for their industriousness or castigated as 'commune eaters' and 'parasites on the mir'. Nevertheless, the deployment of class distinctions as the basis of official policy, such as in granting tax exemptions or in encouraging poor peasants to form separate organizations after 1926, did much to focus social identities around them. By extension, the millions of peasants who petitioned the authorities orwrote to the press wrote themselves into the new order in
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the very act of writing, their little text forming a fragment of the Big Text written by the state. In other words, notwithstanding the widespread resistance to the repression and social engineering of the party-state, Bolshevik ideology provided a basis on which millions in this highly fluid society could fashion an identity, however fragile.
So far as workers were concerned, class in some respects weakened as a social identity, which may help explain why the level of collective protest declined in the 1920s. In its propaganda the party-state constantly hammered away at the notion that the proletariat was the ruling class, and in spite of poor living and working conditions, workers did enjoy certain privileges relative to other social groups. The state had become the powerful exponent of the discourse of class, with power to determine its strategic uses through the mass media, organs of censorship, schools and the like. So the language that had been used by workers since 1905 to articulate grievances lost much of its oppositional force. Workers could still use it - especially to contrast rhetoric with reality - but through use of such categories as 'conscious' and 'backward' workers, through the idea of disaffection as an expression of 'petty-bourgeois' consciousness, the state did much to
emasculate a language that in 1917 had served to knit togetherthe disparate elements of the workforce into a self-conscious political force.
The transformation of social identities took place along many other dimensions than that of class. The category of 'woman' acquired a new salience after 1917, but never to the point that it challenged the implicitly masculine construction of the revolutionary script. And for every 'new woman', there were a thousand whose lack of response to the drama of revolution appeared to reinforce a view of the female sex as 'backward'. Similarly, for those in their 20s and younger, 'youth' became a category through which a very empowering identity could be constructed, aligning them with the forces of culture and socialism, legitimizing their rebellion against 'backward' parents. Yet the high-minded construction of youth inherent in official ideology strained
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22. Red Square caricatures
At a philosophical level, the revolution raised profound questions about how justice, equality, and freedom can be reconciled that are still relevant today, even if the answers the Bolsheviks gave to those questions were fat ally flawed. We live in a world where it has become hard to think critically about the principles on which society is organized. Everything conspires to make us acquiesce in the world as it is, to discourage the belief that it can be radically reordered on more just and equal lines. Yet that is precisely what the Bolsheviks undertook to achieve. I write at a time when there has been a rise in 'anti-capitalist' protests, motivated by revulsion at the staggering inequalities that characterize our world. As the 21st century dawns, it seems safe to conclude that there will be elements in the Russian Revolution that continue to inspire, even as there are many that will stand as a dreadful warning.
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