The Thinking Reed

The term ‘Stalinism’ confuses the question, because it personalizes a particular phase in the development of the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement. Analysis, leaving aside the personality of Stalin, must be objective in character in order that we may understand what is meant by ‘Stalinism’.3

The history of the Russian state and the Russian intelligentsia begins, as we all know, not in 1917 but much earlier, and anyone who studies Russia’s autocracy discovers here some very serious differences from the history of the other countries of Europe.

Marx used the concept ‘the Asiatic mode of production’. At first, following Hegel, he distinguished Asiatic despotism as a purely political phenomenon. Only later, in the 1850s, did he come to the conclusion that what was involved was a more profound difference between Europe and Asia. Above all, private property in the European sense was almost unknown in Asia. Engels explains this by arguing that the huge expanses of territory and the need to organize large-scale irrigation and other public works entail the necessity of a strong state. Such a state can arise and develop only if it has economic support in the form of a state monopoly of land, which in the given conditions is the principal means of production (or some sort of mediated state ownership of the principal means of production — including, of course, human beings). In short, the despotic ruling power appears as both the supreme property-owner and as an economic power. Marx noted features of this Asiatic mode of production in Russia as well.

Russian serfdom cannot be equated with European feudalism. In the West the development of feudal relations first gave rise to decentralization, and then absolutism consolidated political authority while allowing a certain economic autonomy to both the feudal landlords and the bourgeoisie. In the economic sphere both groups were able to operate not as subjects of the state but as free property-owners (although the degree and type of freedom they enjoyed varied in different countries and for different estates); in any case, as independent individuals. The state did not subordinate the entire life of society but dominated the political sphere alone. In Russia, however, as a result of the Tatar yoke and the general backwardness, there arose a system akin to the Asiatic type. Here the landlord appeared also in the role of local representative of the central authority. ‘Every landlord’, writes Herzen, ‘played the part of the Grand Prince of Muscovy in miniature.’4 The state, the landlord class and the sadly celebrated Russian bureaucracy formed a single entity. ‘The privileges of officialdom in Russia represent another side’, wrote Lenin, ‘of the privileges and agrarian power of the landed nobility.’5 While Marx’s formula about the state expressing the interests of the ruling class is correct for the West, in Russia this class was itself the state. Similarly, there was never any ‘free’ capitalism in Russia — not only in the sense of the absence of bourgeois democracy but also in that of the absence of free competition and the other features of liberal capitalist economics. The Russian state was itself the biggest entrepreneur; it had its own ‘state factories’, it constantly intervened in business life, regulating relations between capitalists and workers (in such a way, moreover, that both parties lost by this interference). A notable example of this was the creation of the ‘Zubatov trade unions’ with official support. The Bolshevik historian M.N. Pokrovsky recalls: