The Thinking Reed

After Lenin’s death the Party bureaucracy, dealing blow upon blow at the Communist opposition, gradually seized more and more power. A period began, in Trotsky’s words, ‘of the intense but still silent stifling and routing of the Bolshevik Party’,1 a period which ended, however, in noisy show trials and mass repression of Communists. Trotsky called what happened ‘the Soviet Thermidor’, meaning a regime which was both the heir born of the revolution and also its gravedigger, its strangler. From the historico-cultural standpoint this was how barbarism, Asiatic despotism, got its own back on the Western political tradition in Russia — ‘the Eighteenth Brumaire of Ivan the Terrible’.2

The dictatorship of Stalin and his successors, wrote Pomper, ‘perpetuated the very evils that the intelligentsia had struggled against so desperately in the nineteenth century.’3 A time came for the arts ‘when singers were killed and song was put away in museums.’4 Paradoxically, the Russian Revolution proved the accuracy of the prophecies of classical Marxism. When he watched the first steps being taken by the revolutionary movement in Russia, Engels expressed serious fears as to the consequences that might follow an attempt at socialist transformation in a backward peasant country which retained features of ‘Oriental despotism’. From this revolution, carried out

by a small revolutionary minority there follows the necessity of a dictatorship after the successful outcome of the revolt — a dictatorship, of course, not of the whole revolutionary class… but of the small group of persons who carried out the revolution and who themselves… are already subject to the dictatorship of one or a few persons.5

Earlier still he had said that a revolutionary class which is obliged to take power prematurely, when the economic conditions are not yet ripe, does not liberate itself but merely creates the conditions for rule by some other class, even though the leaders of the revolutionary class sincerely believe the contrary.6 Later, Plekhanov reiterated that ‘the Russian socialist party merely provides a fresh historical example to confirm the idea expressed by Engels.. ’,7 and that its victory would result in a ‘political monstrosity similar to the ancient Chinese or Peruvian empire, that is, to a renewal of Tsarist despotism in communist dress.’8

The Statocracy

The revolutionary dictatorship was replaced by a new system which was qualitatively different. This could hardly be called socialism, despite its pretensions, for it did not grant elementary rights to the working people.

When Stalin announced in 1936 that socialism had been built in the USSR, he referred to the fact that in our country there were no longer any bourgeois, landlords or kuląks. The groundlessness of such an argument is obvious. As Wolfgang Leonhard later pointed out, the fact that the old exploiting classes have been destroyed testifies to the appearance of a post-capitalist or non-capitalist society, but certainly not necessarily to the victory of socialism.9 In a subsequent period the nature of the official argument changed somewhat, and today the ruling ideologists speak of the building in the USSR of ‘developed socialism’, referring mainly to the predominance of state property in the country’s economy.

For state property to be really ‘property of the whole people’ it is not enough to write fine words in a constitution. What is needed is democratic social control over the means of production and the public administration, with wide participation by the masses in the discussion and implementing of decisions. This, in turn, is not possible without definite democratic institutions of people’s power, both indirect (Parliament, a multiparty system, a free press, free elections) and direct (a system of participation by trade unions in the application of economic-administrative decisions, local and economic self-government, and so on). Marxists always distinguished between socialization (real collectivization) of the means of production and their formal nationalization. ‘The basic criterion of socialization of the means of production, therefore, in our understanding,’ writes the eminent Marxist economist Wlodzimierz Brus, ‘is the criterion of democratism.’10 This is why ‘there can be no victorious socialism that does not practise full democracy.’11 How ‘full’ present-day ‘Soviet democracy’ is can best be judged by the fighters for civil rights who are now behind bars. It is a pity that we cannot ascertain the opinion of the twenty million Soviet people who were tortured by Stalin…