A Conservative’s view of Russia (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

" 'Under God and the Tsar' ran the old saying, 'all men are equal'. In Imperial Russia there was no old-established aristocracy, no bourgeoisie, nothing in short that you could call a proper ruling class. The same was even true under Stalin. But now, forty years on, under Stalin’s successors, a ruling class is fast emerging—a class of capable, ambitious men and women who are ready, indeed determined, to play their proper part in affairs and to have their proper share of the rewards. Such, in England, one imagines, must have been the behaviour of the new upstart aristocracy under the Tudors, and again two or three hundred years later of the suddenly enriched scions of the Industrial Revolution.

“With Victorian England in particular there are many parallels to be drawn. There is the same rapid industrialization with all its attendant sacrifices, human and otherwise, the same sudden economic expansion. the same emergence of a new, confident. self-assertive class, the same earnestness, the same will to power, the same belief in progress, the same sense of their country’s imperial destiny, the same agreeable, absolute certainty that they are right. It is even possible to carry the parallel further. Like their Victorian counterparts the new Soviet aristocracy are priggish, prudish, inclined to be pompous, rigidly attached to their own vested interests and rigidly conservative in their ideas and in their profound reverence for the Establishment in all its manifestations. Even their tastes are the same: they like pictures and statues that are easily comprehensible. They like rich solid food and rich solid ornate decorations and furnishings.

“But, the reader will say, are not these worthy people all Communist? Do they not all believe in world revolution? Of course they do. They are Communists just as the Victorians were Christians. They attend Communist Party meetings and lectures in Marxism-Leninism at regular intervals in exactly the same way as the Victorians attended Church on Sunday. They believe in world revolution just as implicitly as the Victorians believed in the Second Coming. And they apply the principles of Marxism in their private lives to just the same extent as the Victorians applied the principles of the Sermon on the Mount in theirs. Neither more nor less.”

(Taken from Back to Bokhara by Fitzroy MacLean, Four Square Books 3/6. Sir Fitzroy MacLean, Conservative M.P. for Bute and North Ayrshire, formerly in the Diplomatic Service, including service in Moscow, revisited Russia in 1958. This short book is his very readable description and interpretation of the changes he found).