Russia After Stalin

by Isaac Deutscher

  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 re
ached 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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARXISM AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC

  Plekhanov, whom we have already quoted, wrote that if historical circumstances create the need for a certain political function to be performed they also supply the ‘organ’ capable of performing it. If the need for the ‘function’ is deeply rooted in the conditions of an epoch, the epoch is sure to bring forth not just one but at least several individuals with the minds, the characters, and the wills needed to perform the function. As a rule, circumstances allow only one or, at the most, a few of a whole group of potential leaders to move to the front of the stage; and so the historical record contains the evidence only of their capabilities and deeds. The fact that one individual has already filled the place of the actual leader debars other potential leaders from revealing themselves — they are condemned to remain in obscurity.

  Plekhanov applied this theory not only to politics. He argued, for instance, that if Leonardo da Vinci had not lived to produce his masterpieces, this would not have altered the broad trend of the artistic ideas of the Renaissance, because this trend had sprung from the social conditions and from the intellectual and moral climate of the age. Only the ‘individual features’ of the trend would have been different. The same is true of the great scientific discoveries which bear the name of a single man. Such discoveries are the outcome of the stage of development which a certain branch of science has reached at a particular time, and it is more or less a matter of chance which individual actually makes them. Indeed, it often happens that several leading scientists make a discovery almost simultaneously and independently of one another.

  To return to political history: if, for instance, a certain General Bonaparte had been killed in a battle before he had time to become First Consul and Emperor of revolutionary France, another general would have filled his place with essen
tially the same effect. There were in France at that time several military leaders capable of this. Bonaparte's rise prevented those potential Napoleons from becoming actual ones. The ‘organ’ capable of performing the historical ‘function’ had been supplied; and there was no room for duplication. That ‘function’ consisted in giving an authoritarian and yet revolutionary government — the rule of a ‘good sword’ — to a nation which had tried out and abandoned the republican-plebeian democracy of the Jacobins but still refused to countenance the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order.

  Plekhanov's argument has given rise to considerable controversy, into which it is not proposed to enter here. Suffice it to say that even among Marxists, who broadly accepted Plekhanov's view, there have been many ‘deviations’ from it.

  Trotsky, for instance, in his History of the Russian Revolution, attempted to strike a balance between the general Marxist philosophy of history — which sees the collective forces of social classes and groups as the decisive agents in any historical process — and his own view that Lenin's individual role in the Russian revolution was unique, that is to say that no other Bolshevik leader would have been qualified to perform it. However, Trotsky ‘deviated’ even further from the classical Plekhanovist view. In a private letter to an old Bolshevik friend which he wrote from his exile in Alma Ata, he stated bluntly and without inhibition: ‘You know that without Lenin the October Revolution would not have won.’[5] Thus, while in his published writings he tried to adjust his own view of Lenin's role with Plekhanov's theory, privately he appears to have taken an attitude diametrically opposed to it.