History of the Soviet Union

Altogether, then, NEP was the party’s creation, but it also faced the party with unforeseen and bewildering dilemmas. During the last couple of years of his life, Lenin began to reflect on these. He suffered a stroke in May 1922, which left him partly paralysed, and another in March 1923, which deprived him of speech, but he did not die till January 1924. Between the first two strokes, at least, he remained politically partly active. For the first time since October 1917 he was able to stand back to some extent from the immediate pressures of decision-making and come to some conclusions about what he and his party had done. His reflections were ambivalent, and his writings of these months sometimes betray a note of uncertainty which had never been present earlier.

On the credit side was the fact that the Bolsheviks had seized power and held it, in spite of grave emergencies. In almost all respects, however, the premises on which Lenin had urged an uprising in October 1917 had proved false. No international revolution had taken place: on the contrary, the revolution had remained confined to Russia, which as a result was now surrounded by suspicious or hostile states and was rapidly resuming the outward forms of the old tsarist empire. The proletariat and poorer peasantry had not proved capable of exercising any kind of class dictatorship: the proletariat was dispersed and impoverished, and the poorer peasants, as a result of the Land Decree, had more or less merged with the rest of the peasantry. Ordinary working people had never had a chance to try their hand at administration: in their place, a growing host of appointed officials (some of them inherited from the old regime) was running the country, especially in the localities. The Bolsheviks had seized power with few definite ideas about how they would govern, and such ideas as they had possessed had been swept away by civil war, deindustrialization and famine. Lenin spent the rest of his life grappling with these unintended consequences of his own revolution, and after his death his successors quarrelled and then split over the heritage. Utopia had failed. The party now divided between those who wanted to restore utopia by coercion (the left), and those who were inclined tacitly to recognize its failure and try to come to terms with the new reality (the right).

For all that he might talk of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, Lenin recognized the actual situation and was deeply worried by it. ‘Those who get jobs in factories now’, he commented at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, ‘are usually not real proletarians, but just people who happen to turn up [vsyachesky sluchainy element].’ ‘Marx’, he added, ‘was not writing about present-day Russia.’ Alexander Shlyapnikov, a leader of the Workers’ Opposition, taunted him from his seat: ‘Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a non-existent class.’ This put the matter in a nutshell. Lacking a secure social base, the party could not direct NEP as it wanted to. The economy was like a car not being driven by the man who thought he was at the steering wheel: ‘Speculators, private capitalists, goodness knows who is actually driving the car … but it often goes not at all in the direction imagined by the person at the wheel.’

This feeling of being out of control was shared by many at the congress. Lenin attributed it partly to what he called cultural factors. Since the Communists would now have to play a more active role than they had envisaged in the construction of a new economy, it was vital that they should possess the basic skills to do this. In practice, he warned, that was not at all the case. Capitalists and private traders were usually more competent. Communist officials often lacked ‘culture’–by which he meant education, tact, honesty, public spirit and efficiency–and so, faute de mieux, they were being swamped by the bad old ways of the pre-revolutionary regime. ‘If we take Moscow–4700 responsible Communists–and then take the whole contraption of bureaucracy there. Who is directing whom? I very much doubt whether one can say that the Communists are doing the directing. … The culture [of the bureaucrats] is wretched and contemptible, but still it is higher than ours.’

Although he could see some problems clearly enough, Lenin was unable to devise any solutions to them. In some ways, he thought the most important thing to do was to ensure that the best individuals were in charge–people of proven ability and probity. In his Testament he reflected on the characteristics of his possible successors from that point of view–and, significantly, he found them all wanting. He expressed particular misgivings about Stalin, on the grounds that he might not be able to use his ‘unlimited authority’ as party General Secretary ‘with sufficient caution’. He later added in an appendix: ‘Stalin is too rude, and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post …’ He also proposed administrative reorganizations: enlarging the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (which had inherited the powers of the tsarist auditor-general) and merging it with the Party Control Commission (a kind of party inspectorate), so that the more capable and trustworthy people at the top could better monitor what was going on lower down. Actually that was a recipe for compounding the problems of overcentralized control, especially in view of the fact that the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was headed by Stalin.

Lenin died before he was able to try to effect any of the changes he proposed, and the party leaders kept his unflattering personal comments secret from the rank and file. With Lenin’s death, the nature of politics and public life changed quite considerably. Lenin had always been confident that he was right in his ideas, but he acted by persuasion: until 1921 he had never tried to silence debate within the party, and even thereafter he often tolerated it in practice. Certainly he had never demanded consecrated status for his own ideas. Now, however, a very real change began to take place. Perhaps it is significant that two members of the commission in charge of Lenin’s funeral ceremony, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leonid Krasin; were past adherents of ‘God-building’, the pre-revolutionary intellectual tendency which had claimed to be a ‘socialist religion of humanity’, indeed ‘the most religious of all religions’. Its main tenet had been that the proletariat, in creating a new and more humane kind of society, were building a new man, who would cease to alienate himself in illusions about a transcendental God, but instead would fulfil a more genuine earthly religious mission. Lenin had been scathing in his denunciation of this tendency, but, as far as is known, Lunacharsky had never abjured it, while Krasin had been a sympathizer of Bogdanov, who as the philosopher of Proletkult (see below, page 180) tried to revive God-building in a new form after the revolution.

At any rate, the form of ceremony chosen for Lenin had strong traditional religious overtones, especially the decision to embalm his body and preserve it for public display in a mausoleum on Red Square, in the middle of Moscow. This was comparable with the Orthodox cult of ‘relics’ of saints. But it was also different: Orthodoxy had never preserved a whole body. This was, in fact, a religious gesture of a new kind. Stalin approved of the decision to embalm Lenin–indeed he may have initiated it–and although he was never a God-builder, he had a shrewd idea of the value of religious symbolism to the state, derived perhaps from his youthful study in the Tiflis seminary. In accord with the new spirit, at a session of the Congress of Soviets on the eve of the funeral, he carefully enumerated Lenin’s ‘commandments’ and pledged himself to fulfil them, as if consciously assuming the mantle of disciple and heir.

During 1924–5 he continued this work by assembling a doctrine, drawn selectively from the dead man’s writings, which he published as The Foundations of Leninism. Two special institutes were set up, the Marx-Engels Institute and the Lenin Institute, to gather and study the heritage of the founding fathers of the new ideology, and a journal, Bolshevik, was founded to publish the results. Claiming for himself the home ground of these ideological temples, Stalin could assail the ideas of opponents of the new orthodoxy, not just as misguided, but as somehow illegitimate. Traditional religions would have used the term ‘heresy’; Stalin called them ‘deviations’.

The first issue on which Stalin tried thus to isolate and discredit his opponents was the fundamental question of the nature of the revolutionary state and the nation it claimed to represent. NEP had initially been launched in the expectation that it constituted a ‘retreat’, a temporary concession to capitalism in order to restore the economy until such time as socialist revolutions could break out elsewhere and backward, war-torn Soviet Russia receive fraternal help from outside. By the autumn of 1923, however, with the failure of yet another attempt at a Communist coup in Germany, it was becoming clear that, for the foreseeable future, Russia was going to be on its own. Did that mean that the Soviet state should indefinitely prolong a ‘provisional’ economic system, or did it mean that the Russians should abandon hope of external help, and buckle down to build socialism on their own?

Almost ever since the October revolution, some Bolsheviks had tacitly accepted the proposition that, for the moment at least, proletarian internationalism must mean Soviet (and even Russian?) patriotism, since Russia was the only country in which a ‘proletarian’ state had been established. We have seen this at the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and during the Soviet-Polish war. At the same time many non-Bolsheviks took a partly compatible view: that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in holding on to power because, in circumstances which threatened the disintegration of the Russian Empire, they had proved themselves to be the party best able to hold that empire together. This stream of thought crystallized in 1920 in the form of smenovekhovstvo (from the collection of essays, Change of Landmarks, which appeared in that year). Nikolai Ustryalov, its leading exponent, now in emigration in Kharbin, argued that the defeat of the Whites had demonstrated that the Bolsheviks were now the only truly Russian national force: they had succeeded in holding Russia together against all the attempts of foreigners and non-Russian nationalities to dismember her. His case was strengthened by the reincorporation of the remaining non-Russian nations into the new Soviet Union, and by the introduction of NEP, which seemed to show that, in social and economic terms as well, the new Russian state was becoming more like the old one. In a famous image, Ustryalov likened Soviet Russia to a radish–‘red outside and white inside’.

This point of view found some support among émigrés, but even more perhaps inside Russia itself. It was close to the outlook of probably the majority of former Imperial Army officers who had joined the Red Army. Many of the ‘bourgeois specialists’ would also have sympathized with it: indeed, Jeremy Azrael, the historian of the managerial stratum in Soviet society, goes so far as to call smenovekhovstvo ‘the ideology of the specialists’. Some writers (especially the ‘fellow travellers’) and clergy took a similar view. At a time when émigré books were still published inside Russia, and links between Soviet citizens and émigrés were strong, these ideas, while not universally accepted (especially in emigration) did play a part in reconciling the traditional professional classes to the new system.

Obviously the Soviet leadership could not simply take over smenovekhovstvo, since it was avowedly non-socialist and anti-internationalist. But there were good reasons why they should evolve their own version of Russian patriotism. First, because they needed to appeal to the specialists on whom they still depended so much: and it was cheaper and more effective to gain their willing compliance than to rely on compulsion alone. Secondly, even the party apparatus itself, now growing so fast under the guidance of Stalin’s card-indexers, could not be expected indefinitely to work enthusiastically for a system that was only provisional. They too needed to feel that they were doing something constructive, ‘building socialism’, even if only in Russia, and not just marking time till the world revolution, now apparently receding, should at last break out.

It was with them above all in mind that Stalin began in 1924 to reconsider the party’s theoretically absolute commitment to international revolution. In an article entitled ‘October and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution’, published in the newspapers in December 1924, he first raised the possibility that socialism might be achieved in one country alone, even if that country were less developed economically than its neighbours which had remained capitalist. Such a victory he deemed ‘perfectly possible and even probable’.

It is significant that this idea, backed with scanty but authentic quotations from Lenin, was directed against Trotsky. Stalin’s article was in fact a salvo in the power struggle for Lenin’s succession. The theoretical differences between Stalin and Trotsky were mainly ones of emphasis: even Stalin conceded that the ‘final victory’, as distinct from just the ‘victory’, of socialism required an international proletarian community. But Stalin depicted Trotsky as someone who lacked confidence in Soviet Russia, and in the ‘alliance of the proletariat and the toiling peasantry’, which had brought about the socialist revolution in Russia, and could, according to Stalin, now make possible the construction of a socialist society. This was a classic example of a weapon Stalin was to use increasingly: exaggerating and distorting the views of his opponents, and applying crude labels to them, as though from a position of unique and guaranteed rectitude. ‘Trotskyism’, ‘the left deviation’, ‘the right deviation’–these gradually became equivalent in Stalin’s rhetoric to ‘non-Leninism’, and hence to ‘anti-Leninism’, which ‘objectively’ meant supporting the imperialists. By stages, in fact, Stalin was able to insinuate that all his opponents were nothing less than enemies of the soviet system.

At any rate, as far as ‘socialism in one country’ was concerned, there was at least as much justification in Lenin’s writings for Trotsky’s assertions that primacy should be given to international revolution. But it was Stalin who managed to occupy the temple, to represent his interpretation as the only truly Leninist one, and to gain the institutional backing for it. The Fourteenth Party Conference, in April 1925, resolved that ‘in general the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is unconditionally possible in one country’.

Thereby ‘socialism in one country’ became official party doctrine, and its implications had to be absorbed. The economic ones were the most pressing. It was generally assumed that ‘building socialism’ meant developing Russia’s industry. Lenin had hoped to do this by attracting foreign concessions to the country, recognizing frankly that Russia needed help from abroad, even from capitalists. But, although a few significant deals were concluded, foreign concessions still accounted for only 0.6 per cent of industrial output in 1928. This was scarcely surprising, in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks had deliberately defaulted on all past Russian debts: it took them many years to regain a reputation for financial probity.

At any rate, it looked as if economic development would have to come out of Russia’s own resources. The Opposition, which was beginning to crystallize around Trotsky, felt this could only be done through rigorous state planning and the diversion of resources from the private sector to feed heavy industry. The manufactured products thus created would feed into all sectors of the economy, including consumer industry and agriculture, and would ultimately make them all more productive. Admittedly, there would probably be some years of austerity, while consumption was cut in order to concentrate resources on industrial investment. The Opposition’s main economic spokesman, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, even called this process ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, and likened it to the ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’, which Marx had described in Capital. He argued, however, that it would be far less objectionable than the capitalist variety, since (a) it would bear mostly on the ‘bourgeois’ sector of the economy, and (b) the surplus value generated would be used for the ultimate benefit of everyone, not just for the conspicuous consumption of the few.

The Oppositionists were moved by a dislike of NEP which was widely shared in the party. They were repelled by the raucous, untidy, money-grabbing peasant markets, by the debauchery of the nightclubs, by the furs and silk dresses at the theatre, all to be seen again just as if the revolution had never taken place. Even prostitutes had reappeared on the streets. Preobrazhensky warned, with Trotsky’s support, that if the socialist sector of the economy were not given deliberate advantages, then the country was in danger of being dominated by kulaks and nepmen (as the traders, retailers and small manufacturers were contemptuously known). Fast industrialization, on the other hand, would enable agriculture to be mechanized, and this in turn would draw the peasants into collective farms, as Lenin had recommended. ‘Only a powerful socialized industry can help the peasants transform agriculture along collectivist lines,’ Trotsky argued in the Opposition’s platform of September 1927.

Spokesmen for NEP were quick to point out the drawbacks in the Opposition programme. ‘Squeezing the private economy’ meant above all squeezing the peasantry: might the result not be the same as during the civil war–severe shortages and the revival of the black market? If Russia was now really on its own, could the nation afford a policy which would endanger the relatively smooth trading arrangements between town and country created by NEP? Or, to put it in Leninist terms, was it prudent to jeopardize the ‘alliance between the proletariat and peasantry’ which had made the October revolution possible? In his Testament Lenin had warned: ‘Our party rests upon two classes, and for that reason its instability is possible, and if there cannot exist an agreement between those classes its fall is inevitable.’

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