Russia explained (1980)

Book Review from the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Enigma by Ante Ciliga. Ink Links. £5.95 (paperback).

In 1940 an English translation of a book by a Yugoslav who had spent three years in the early 1930s in a Russian camp for political prisoners was published under the title The Russian Enigma. It has long been known to us as an interesting and useful account of the emergence in Russia in the twenties and thirties of a new privileged and exploiting class, ruling on the basis of state capitalism. Its re-publication, in an expanded form to include parts left out of the 1940 edition, is therefore to be welcomed.

Ciliga was a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party who went to Russia in 1926 and who got himself sentenced to three years in a "political isolator" (1930-33), followed by two years exile in Siberia (1933-35), for having supported the Trotskyist opposition to Stalin. He was eventually allowed to leave Russia at the end of 1935 and so survived to give this account of political and social life in Russia while he was there.

Ciliga entered prison as a Trotskyist but left it convinced that Russia was state capitalist (and not a "proletarian State" as Trotsky said) and that the Bolshevik bureaucracy was well on the way to becoming a new ruling class, exploiting the workers and collective farmers and enjoying definite economic privileges (special housing, shops, restaurants). In the end he also came to see that Lenin as well as Stalin and Trotsky was party responsible for the state capitalism that was evolving Russia. Most of the chapter where he describes his break with Lenin, entitled "Lenin Too", was omitted from the 1940 edition and so appears here in English for the first time. It is good enough to be published as separate pamphlet—as it has been in France.

In the early 1930s political prisoners in Russia still enjoyed a special status and were allowed to discuss politics. Ciliga's account of the discussions that went on in his camp make fascinating reading, as every aspect of "the Russian enigma" seems to have been explored: Was Russia state capitalist or a petty-bourgeois state or a "proletarian state"? Was the bureaucracy a class or a caste? Would it require a revolution to remove them or could this be done by reform?

Particularly interesting is the conversation had with a group of Mensheviks he came across in transit from one camp to another. He went up to them and asked why they wanted to restore capitalism in Russia. He goes on:

They were very much taken aback at first by the way in which I had stated the problem; then one of them answered, "It would be perfectly futile to wish to restore capitalism in Russia, for the good reason that capitalism, though in a modified form, exists there and has never ceased to exist"  . . . We were shown with abundant detail that the present system in Russia had preserved all the essential characteristics of capitalism" commodity production,* wages, exchange markets, money, profits and even partial sharing out of profits among bureaucrats in the form of high salaries, privileges and so on (p. 194).

It would be interesting to know whether such ideas, which are the same as ours on this point, still circulate in Russia. Equally interesting—and equally correct—was the view expressed by a certain V. Smirnov on the Russian revolution:

There has never been a proletarian revolution, nor a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, there has simply been a 'popular revolution' from below and a dictatorship from above. Lenin was never ideologist of the proletariat. From beginning to end he was an ideologist of the intelligentsia 9p. 280).

Ciliga himself did not go this far and continued to regard the Russian revolution as having been in some way "proletarian" even though he had rejected both Trotskyism and Leninism. But his book is still important reading for anyone who wants to understand how State capitalism came to Russia.

Adam Buick

* We have corrected, on the basis of the French version, "production of goods" to "commodity production"—a good example of how the English translation is not always up to standard.

Two anti-Leninists (1993)

Uğur Mumcu

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is probable that few of our readers will have noticed the brief news item at the end of January regarding the assassination in Ankara of the Turkish journalist, Ugur Mumcu. Even fewer will have linked this tragic news with the contacts we had with the émigré review, Marksist published in Paris. It should not go unnoticed, however, that Mumcu was part of a remarkable political trend which we in the Movement for World Socialism can welcome whole-heartedly.

For many years the Socialist Party here and our companion parties overseas have largely been alone in maintaining that Lenin's ideology paved the way for the establishment of state-capitalism in the Russian Empire and elsewhere. Even when the London-based magazine International Socialism diverged from its Trotskyist background by recognizing the USSR to be state-capitalist, they were still so ensnared in their Bolshevik mental straitjacket they could not see the oppressive Russian system as a direct consequence of Lenin's seizure of power in the backward conditions of 1917. The SWP, which emerged from IS in the mid-seventies, remains frozen in its incomplete understanding of the factors giving rise to state-capitalism and, to use a Trotskyist phrase, is accordingly degenerate.

By contrast to the most advance trend within Trotskyism, those around Marksist developed their understanding much further even though many of them emerged from yet more rigid Leninist disciplines as Maoism and its Albanian variant. Mumcu, too, came to a recognition that Leninism was a distortion, a perversion of Marxian ideas. Anyone familiar with the powerful grip which Stalinism has had over the working-class movement in Anatolia will not find it hard to see that Mumcu was not only at risk from those who conspire to re-establish a theocratic state in place of Ataturk's secular republic and who he regularly lambasted in his column in Turkey's best daily Cumhuriyet (the quasi-official mouthpiece of Turkey's own special mix of state and private capitalism). The fact that Mumcu was a scourge of the huge narcotics industry in his country and is said to have been near to publishing a major exposé of the whole business and its political links right the way to the top suggests he could have been in the sights of many different marksmen.

As it is, the TV news from Istanbul reports that Hesbollah, the Tehran-backed Islamic terrorist organization, has claimed responsibility for placing the fatal car-bomb. This could be true but then again MIT, the Turkish secret police who are a menace in their own right to political democracy might have their own reasons for floating this idea.

Whilst acknowledging the valuable contribution Uğur Mumcu and his associates have made to a clearer understanding of the Leninist phenomenon we would be deluding ourselves if we were to overlook the dangers inherent in their reversion to a kind of pre-Leninist Social-Democracy, with all its erroneous attitudes towards the role of leadership, reformist legislation, the nation-state etc. Nevertheless, we share the sense of outrage at this murder and we shall continue as best we can in the work of exchanging and clarifying ideas paving the way to the Socialist world community of the future.

E. S. Grant

Anton Ciliga, whose claim to fame amongst socialists is as the author of the book The Russian Enigma, died in October in Zagreb. As this book first appeared in English in 1940 many will perhaps will be surprised to learn that he was still alive in 1992.

Born in 1898 Anton (or rather, Ante in his native Croatian) Ciliga was a founding member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia who went to Russia in 1926 and was eventually imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia for "trotskyism". He managed to get out of Russia in 1935 and put down his experiences in writing. These were published in book form in French in 1938 under the title Au Pays du Grand Mensonge ("In the Land of the Big Lie", a much better title than that of the English version in fact).

The Big Lie of course was that Russia was a "socialist state", a "workers' paradise". Ciliga, who had been imprisoned as a Trotskyist, eventually came to realise that Russia was state capitalist and that the Party bureaucracy was a new ruling class. This, naturally, meant that he ceased to be a Trotskyist. In fact he came to see Trotsky as no different in principle from Stalin. As he put it himself:

Trotsky as well as Stalin wished to pass off the State as being the proletariat, the bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat as the proletarian dictatorship, the victory of State capitalism over both private capitalism and socialism as a victory of the latter. The difference between Trotsky and Stalin lay in the fact that in his victory Stalin saw the triumph of pure socialism, pure dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas Trotsky perceived and stressed the gaps and bureaucratic deformations of the system.

Besides being an interesting account of the privileged lifestyle of the Bolshevik leaders (and Comintern official from abroad) in the 1920s and of the discussion amongst the political prisoners of various sorts in the 1930s, it is this denunciation of Trotskyism as an ideology of state capitalism that makes the book still worth reading (a new edition was published by Ink Links in 1979), an antidote to the Leninist vanguardist views still being peddled on the streets by the SWP in Britain.

Ciliga, however, soon drifted away from any claim to be a Marxist and became a Croatian nationalist. In later years he was active in Croatian exile politics and when Croatia became a separate state in 1991 he returned from exile and was granted a pension by the new authorities.

Adam Buick