Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In his first extended theoretical discourse on economic matters since the late 1920s, Stalin responded to what he read by composing some ‘Remarks on Economic Questions Connected with the November 1951 Discussion’. Some 3,000 copies of these remarks were circulated within the party but he resisted wider publication, saying it would undermine the authority of the textbook. His remarks prompted many comments and queries, including three letters from economists to which he chose to reply. Those replies, together with his original ‘Remarks’, were published by Pravda under the collective title Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.⁵⁸

Economic Problems was published in October 1952, on the eve of the 19th party congress. It was Stalin’s first significant ideological outing since Marxism and the Linguistic Question in 1950 and was of more interest to the average Soviet citizen than his critique of the long-dead Marr’s obscure theory of language. Like Stalin’s linguistics intervention, Economic Problems was a model of clarity, sometimes tediously so in its more technical sections on commodity production, the law of value and the abolition of the antithesis between mental and physical labour. However, Stalin disregarded his own advice to the economists that they should stick to practical observations and stay away from abstract theorising.

While the ageing dictator retained considerable intellectual powers, his comments showed the stagnation of his thinking. His argument that there are objective laws of political economy which operate independently of human will was essentially no different from the position he had staked out in Anarchism or Socialism? and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. According to Stalin, social action could constrain economic laws but it couldn’t change, override or abolish them, not even under socialism. Under capitalism the fundamental law of political economy was commodity production for profit; under socialism it was production for common welfare. The over-arching law of political economy was that the development of the forces of production determined history’s direction towards socialism because that was the only system in which they could achieve their full potential.

Stalin’s explanation for the continued existence of capitalism – a system whose private property relations were said to constrain the development of the productive forces – was that powerful interests blocked progress to socialism. That’s why political action was required to change the status quo. The problem with this argument was that it highlighted the importance in human affairs of politics, not economics.

The knots into which Stalin tied himself to defend his position are best illustrated by the section on the ‘Inevitability of War Between Capitalist Countries’, provoked by Eugen Varga’s contribution to the textbook discussion. Varga (1879–1964) was a Hungarian-born economist who for many years ran an influential Soviet think tank, the Institute of World Economy and World Politics.⁵⁹ He questioned the validity of ‘Lenin’s thesis on the inevitability of war between imperialist countries’, suggesting it no longer applied because of the evident damage to capitalist interests caused by two world wars and because US domination of the imperialist order precluded the possibility of a major inter-capitalist war.⁶⁰

Stalin did not name Varga but wrote vaguely of ‘some comrades’ who were wrong to question Lenin’s thesis, because, he averred, ‘profound forces’ continued to operate and that meant war was inevitable. Particular wars could be averted by the struggle for peace but not war in general. So, according to Stalin’s abstruse reasoning, war was inevitable but it might never happen. A more cogent hypothesis was that put forward in 1956 by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev: there was a tendency to war under capitalism but it was an eventuality that could be prevented by political struggle. Because of the strength of socialism and the forces for peace, said Khrushchev, war was no longer inevitable, which was a highly comforting thought in an age of nuclear weapons.

The statistician L. D. Yaroshenko (1896–1995) was another of Stalin’s targets. Yaroshenko argued that the prime task of economists in a socialist society was the scientific and technical development of the productive forces through the rational organisation of the whole economy.⁶¹ In Economic Problems, Stalin named and shamed Yaroshenko at length, insisting the political economy of socialism concerned the relations of production and their relationship to the productive forces. In other words, socialist political economy remained a science of the underlying laws of economic development, not a methodology for socialist planning.