The Moscow New Look (1956)

From the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

More light has been thrown on the methods of the Russian dictatorship by the recent “reinstatement ” of various old guard Communists who were liquidated during the purges of the thirties.

In Hungary, for instance, Bela Kun, the leading figure of the pre-war Communist Party, has been posthumously restored to favour, and hailed as a revolutionary hero who fell foul of “the cult of the individual." 

Tuominen, the former secretary of the Finnish Communist Party, has presented a hair-raising picture of what actually went on during those bloody days of the great purge. He describes, in an article in Uusi Kuvalehti (1) the actual Comintern meeting where Kun was exposed:— 

“One such ominous meeting was convened in the Spring of 1937. Immediately the session began the chairman, Georgi Dimitrov, laconically announced that the case of Bela Kun would be discussed. It was to be presented by Manuilsky, the liaison official between the Comintern and Stalin. Manuilsky began reading from a document. After reading a couple of paragraphs, he asked: ‘Does Citizen Bela Kun recognise this? '

“The word Manuilsky used—'Citizen'—seemed to affect Bela Kun like an electric shock. The rest of us, too, except Dimitrov and Manuilsky, were startled. When the word 'Citizen' had been substituted for 'Comrade' on this sort of occasion, it meant nothing less than a sentence of death. Horrified and pale, Bela Kun mumbled: 'Yes, I do. It is written by myself. It is a circular sent to Communists in Hungary.'

“Kun vainly tried to defend himself against the allegation that he had criticised Stalin and the Comintern: 'This is a vile conspiracy. I did not mean Comrade Stalin, but you, Manuilsky, and Moskvin, who are secretaries and bad Bolsheviks. I do know that Stalin is a member of the presidium and Zhdanov and Yezhov members of the executive committee, but.after all, they seldom attend meetings. They are good Bolsheviks, the best in the world, but you, Manuilsky, you’re no Bolshevik. Didn't Lenin even in exile call you a god-seeker?' This attack made Manuilsky flush with anger. He, too, lost his temper. Trying to keep calm, he started in an ironical vein and said: 'Such a great leader as Citizen Bela Kun considers himself to be shouldn't waste his ammunition on such a small bird as I. But Comrade Stalin is a big enough target even for him, and it’s at Comrade Stalin that he aimed in this circular.'

“. . . We all sat there, silent and horrified, watching this great and strong popular leader fight for his life, and the sharp, poisonous attacks of his executioner. Nobody dared to speak, nobody could think of anything to say. for or against.

"As the fight was beginning to wane, Dimitrov tinkled the chairman's bell, declared the discussion closed, and announced that the case would be referred to a committee of three. Until the case had been fully cleared, Citizen Bela Kun was relieved of all duties in the Hungarian Communist Party and the Comintern. The session was over. Bela Kun was allowed to go, and as he left the hall two N.K;V.D. men took him away. Nothing more was heard of him, and his case was not discussed again at the Comintern meetings. Rumour had it that he had been shot.”

It is interesting to note that Wilhelm Pieck, the East German Premier, and the Italian Communist leader. Togliatti, are mentioned by Tuominen as being present at this meeting. One can realise with what consummate hypocrisy Togliatti and other European Communists now condemn the evils wrought by Stalin’s “personality cult,” after acquiescing in, and being a party to these very evils for all the years of Stalin’s lifetime.

The case of Kun is by no means unique. At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the old Bolshevik leader, Anastas Mikoyan, resurrected two of the party leaders who disappeared during the great purge—Antonov-Ovsenko and Kossior. It is worth while to observe, however, that Kun and these two were not brought to trial, but merely “disappeared.” The situation with regard to all those who were brought to trial and executed has not yet altered, and Khrushchev’s continued denunciation of “Trotskyites, Bukharinites, bourgeois nationalists and other enemies of the people” is the mixture as before.

It is impossible to predict how far the Soviet Government will carry this “resurrection from the dead” policy, but it seems unlikely that many of the thousands of prominent Bolsheviks who were purged, will be restored to a posthumous position of dignity. The favourable mention of Antonov-Ovsenko is particularly interesting, as he was one of the members of the 1917 Bolshevik Government (Council of People’s Commissars) of whose 15 members only one survived the purge—no prizes for the correct answer! It is highly improbable that other members of this Council, which included Trotsky and Rykov, will ever be commiserated with by the powers-that-be as “innocent victims of the cult of the individual,” as this would in effect deny everything that the Communists have been saying for years about the “truly democratic” nature of the Soviet Government.

Another revealing event is the publication of part of Lenin's so-called political testament. This is the document that the Trotskyists have been publicising for years, but until recently, the Communist party has always denounced it as a forgery. With the publication of that part of the document that criticises Stalin, however, the Communists have in effect admitted the authenticity of the rest of the testament, which singles out five people for praise—Piatakov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. The only other person mentioned in the testament is Stalin, who comes in for a considerable amount of criticism and is said to be unfit for the post of General Secretary of the party. Ironically, enough, it is of course only Stalin who survived, the other five being executed or murdered.

Further criticism of Stalin at the 20th Congress came from A. M. Pankratova, the Soviet historian. She condemned Stalin's version of history for its “arbitrary handling of the facts,” for “fostering the personality cult,” and for “poorly reflecting . . . the activities of the Old Bolsheviks, the collaborators of Lenin.” As has been pointed out, most of Lenin's collaborators were either shot, imprisoned or committed suicide, and this is certainly a “poor reflection” on somebody.

The apparent frankness of the 20th Congress in facing up to its problems is in reality just as spurious as the declarations and resolutions of die previous Congresses. When one looks at the record of the Soviet Communist Party Congresses, it can be seen that since the late 20's every resolution has been carried unanimously, and no one has spoken in opposition to a resolution. The 20th Congress is no exception. The statement by Mikoyan that “in the course of about 20 years we had in fact no collective leadership" doesn't really indicate any better state of affairs than when he said at the 19th Congress (1952)—“At the present stage in world history and the history of our Motherland, it is unthinkable to live, build, fight, without thorough mastery of all the new concepts Comrade Stalin has contributed to the Marxist-Leninist science . . . After the 19th Party Congress our party will go forward still more calmly and confidently to the victory of Communism, under the guidance of our leader and teacher, the brilliant architect of Communism, our beloved Comrade Stalin. Glory to the great Stalin!” (Stormy, prolonged applause. All rise.) (2).

It is also worthwhile to note that although the Party Congress is theoretically the democratic organ that determines the party, and eventually, government policy, there has been a strange neglect to hold Congresses at all, and in fact since 1925 the gaps between Congresses have become wider and wider. Although the Party Rules required that Congresses be held annually, the Congresses held since 1925 have been as follows:—1927; 1930; 1934; 1939; 1952 and 1956. (3).

One is led to conclude from all this that the ferment in the Communist parties of the world with regard to “overcoming the cult of the individual” is so much hot air, and merely a display put on for the benefit of those who are anxious to see the Russian bureaucracy placed on a more stable footing. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that all those former undoubting Communist party members are only having doubts now because Moscow tells them to. 

In spite of all the reassuring speeches of Krushchov, Bulganin and other Soviet leaders, in spite of all their barnstorming “goodwill” tours, and in spite of the alleged restoration of collective leadership, there is fundamentally nothing that has happened since Stalin's death that would lead an intelligent observer to draw the conclusion that shattering changes have been made in the Russian bureaucratic governmental system. The fact remains that a ruling class has been put in the saddle in Russia and the other so-called Communist countries and no amount of juggling with the reins of power of the substitution of one official by another will alter the fact that the Russian workers are fundamentally in the same position as their brother-workers everywhere else—the position of exploited wage-slaves.

Albert Ivimey

1.—New Statesman & Nation, September I, 1956.

2—Pravda, October 12, 1952.

2—Stalinist Russia, T. Cliff, p. 97.

Here and There: The Church in Spain (1937)

The Here and There column from the August 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Church in Spain

Among a series of excellent articles on Spain in the Manchester Guardian one deals with the function of the Catholic Church in Spain and its attitude towards the Civil War. The correspondent, who spent a year in Spain, says: —

The burnings were often carried out by the villagers without any instructions from outside— indeed, they were often as spontaneous and, seemingly, as natural throughout Spain as the seizure of land was in the South of Spain. . . .

But, generally speaking, the war on the churches seems to have been a popular, spontaneous movement. And even when a gang arrived from outside the villagers, would, as a rule, stand round passively and look on while petrol was poured on the altar and set alight and the priest was dragged from his hiding- place.

In a country where the majority of the people have been, and still are, Catholics this indifference to the fate of the clergy needs some explaining. Read on: —

A Materialist Church.

Genuinely Christian priests have been killed. Much fine art has been destroyed and some of the finest music in the world been silenced. But the problem of the Church in Spain has another aspect. It was a Church more permeated by materialism than any other in Europe. It was largely—though by no means entirely—a commercial enterprise. It was the biggest landowner in a country of big landowners. It had a vast, and sometimes even a commanding, share in various industrial and commercial interests. A Church that identifies itself too closely with a temporal order is in danger of sharing the destiny of that order. And if a Church throws its weight on the side either of revolution or of counter-revolution, it will survive with the one or perish with the other.

The Spanish clergy has used Catholic teaching to influence Spanish workers to assist in maintaining the landowning and capitalist interests of the Spanish Church. They have failed and millions of Spanish Catholics are now the bitter enemies of the Catholic Church. The Jesuit boast that Catholic teaching until the age of seven years immunises the mind for life from heretical influences is a patent myth. The dominating influence in class struggles is class interest. The class interest of the Spanish workers, or what appears to them to be their class interest, dominates the influence of religious superstition. In many thousands of cases the open struggle with the Catholic Church will be sufficient to destroy its influence entirely. The position surprises many people with exaggerated ideas about the power of religion. The attitude of the Spanish worker to the Catholic Church is no less a logical expression of material interest than the attitude of the angry Spanish peasant who hung the image of St. Anthony upside down in a well after a failure of his crops. (An instance quoted by the Guardian correspondent, which can be paralleled by many stories from countries where there is a large Catholic peasantry.)

The Catholic Church is lined up with the landowning class behind Franco in a desperate fight to retain its ownership and feudal privileges. That is its chief interest in the struggle; and its resources are at the disposal of Franco. Many churches have become arsenals and many priests have discarded the cassock for the rifle. It is a ruthless and bitter class struggle in which life and property inevitably are destroyed.

If Catholic priests were murdered by angry Spanish peasants they have the reactionary and callous attitude of the Catholic Church to thank.

Whatever the outcome of the immediate struggle in Spain the hypocrisy and charlatanry of the Catholic Church there has dealt a blow to its moral influence which will not be rebuilt so easily as the walls of its churches.

Civilising Spain

The Irish Brigade, raised by General O’ Duffy to fight on behalf of Franco in Spain, has returned to Ireland without having done much fighting. The Manchester Guardian (June 23rd, 1937) quotes from the Irish Times and the Irish Press an account by the volunteers of what they saw in Spain.

We saw General Franco’s army executing “Reds” each morning in massed groups. They machine-gunned the condemned people, beginning at their ankles and directing the fire up along their bodies. The “ Reds,” in their last moments, lifted their clenched fists in the Communist salute, snouting “Viva Madrid !” This was in Caceres. It was in this town that the brigade spent most of their time.

That “great gentleman” and Catholic, Franco, will find a place in history with those murderers of the Paris Communards, the French ruling class. 

Marx—by Mr. Woodburn

Mr. Arthur Woodburn, secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, N.C.L.C. lecturer, and exponent of finance and economics, arch-squarer of the circles in Labour Party policy, says in the June Plebs: —

When individuals deny the obvious and proved fact that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party there is no point in arguing with them. . . . No one can join the Labour Party without proclaiming himself a Socialist.

It is, perhaps, too much to expect an Oracle to argue, but does he need to? Surely an "obvious and proved fact” should speak for itself? The “obvious and proved fact” that prominent members of the Labour Party have openly repudiated being Socialists and that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party does, however, appear to require explanation. Would you oblige, Mr. Woodburn? And would you also mention where evidence can be found for the statement that Marx agreed that 

It was quite conceivable that the capitalists would be bought out if they were paid very well if (as an exception, and England at that time was an exception) circumstances so developed that the capitalist would be obliged to submit and proceed in a cultured and organised manner towards Socialism on terms of compensation, 

and where

Elsewhere Marx said that "Under certain conditions the workers will not by any means refuse to buy out the bourgeoisie.”

There may be “not much point in arguing,” but, really, Mr. Woodburn, we would like to know.


The "New Leader” and “ The Socialist Standard"

In an article, “A Communist Leader and the Right to Strike,” which appeared in the July The Socialist Standard, it was stated that: “No reference has appeared, or—to be pedantically correct—has been noticed,” in Labour and Communist newspapers to the Bedwas Agreement signed by Mr. Arthur Horner. We learn now that such reference had been made. John Alpin, industrial editor of the New Leader, writes to say that it carried a critical analysis of the agreement and that a reply to that analysis by a member of the South Wales Miners’ Federation was dealt with point by point. Rather disagreeably, he says that he “would have assumed that the S.P.G.B. . . . would have read the columns of the New Leader each week.” We make the correction suggested by Mr. Alpin, if such it can be called, gladly. The number of weekly and monthly journals published by working-class organisations is numerous, and when writing is a voluntary task and journals unobtainable through the usual channels it is quite easy to miss an issue of any particular journal. The New Leader could help to avoid the recurrence of such “errors.” We suggest it put us on its exchange list. We put this suggestion to several journals, including the New Leader, a few years ago. Many agreed, even where the price is much higher than The Socialist Standard and publication more frequent: the New Leader declined. Perhaps, Mr. Alpin, you would do something to adjust the matter?

The Indian Workers and their Exploiters

Congress, India’s Nationalist Party, has climbed down from its earlier attitude of refusing to form governments in the six Provinces where it obtained majorities in the recent elections. In the resolution embodying the decision to form Governments, the draft of which, according to the Daily Herald, is attributed to Gandhi, it is said: —

The proper description of the existing relationship between the British Government and the people of India is that of exploiter and exploited, and hence they have a different outlook upon almost everything of vital importance.

Having admitted that exploiters and exploited must have a different outlook, Mr. Gandhi ignores the obvious, that exploited Indians can have no harmony of outlook with the Nationalist exploiters of their own race. To say, as he has said, that the Indian princes, landowners and capitalists can be persuaded to be “trustees” for the Indian masses, dodges the issue. The British capitalists would claim “trusteeship” for millions of Colonial masses throughout the world with nothing more to support it than the pious hypocrisy which cloaks their real interests. The practice of capitalism does not reveal the capitalist class to be any less the robbers because the class they exploit happen to speak the same language. The Indian workers have yet a painful road to travel before they acquire the understanding necessary for their emancipation. 

More Russian Puzzles

The Russian Government’s purge of "Trotskyites,” “diversionists,” ”wreckers” and “spies” continues, apparently, unabated. As must obviously happen, no amount of bias or coloured phraseology can obscure the contradictions which obtrude through the evidence against the “traitors."

The Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald (June 29th, T 937) gives the number executed for spying in the Far Eastern Province of Khabarovsk as 133 to the end of April, and quotes the Russian newspaper Izvestia, that “the spies were able to persuade railway workers’ to sell them uniforms." The reason why workers, who, according to Russian and Communist claims, are well paid, should want to sell their uniforms, is left to the imagination of the reader who is keen enough to notice the contradiction.

Another report from the same correspondent (July 3rd, 1937) states that a notorious spy, who had been run to earth, succeeded in organising "a gang of ex-priests, monks, kulaks and discontented young people'' (Our italics.) Perhaps a Communist friend could explain that “discontent" of young people.

Many of the “honourable Communists" who helped to draft the Constitution have since become victims of the purge, including Tukhachensky, Gamarnik, Uborevich, Yakir and Chervyakoff, who are dead, and Goloded and Postysheff, who are disgraced.

The Moscow correspondent of the Daily Telegraph (June 29th, 1937) refers to the purge among industrial leaders whose production figures have fallen, and quotes from Pravda an attack on the woman Communist President of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society, who. it is alleged, spent £600 on clothes suitable for her to wear to meet foreigners, when sent on an official trip abroad. The reward of Socialist competition?

Yet another report comments on the arrest of a “Trotskyist bandit,” Doletski, head of the Tass News Agency, which supplies the bulk of all news to Soviet papers. He is ”accused of having suppressed news about wreckers in industry and having over-emphasised news of successes." (Daily Herald, July 8th, 1937.)

Suppression of news inimical to its interests is inevitable where there is political dictatorship and a host of minor dictators in their own particular spheres. No regime claiming to represent working-class interests, which has a sound basis, need repress news or criticism. Socialist principles have nothing to lose and everything to gain from free and open discussion. Under dictatorship even the mildest criticism of the regime, or opposition on questions of policy, must result in intrigue against the Government and take insurrectionary forms.

Where there is dictatorship by a person or a clique, who decide what is right for the majority, it is inevitable that discontent and inequality arise. When discontent becomes widespread a scramble takes place to place culpability on the shoulders of others. Socialist interests can only thrive under the free and open conditions of democracy. 

Harry Waite

Twenty Years Since Stalin (1973)

From the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. (Engels)
  Our system is state capitalism . . . (Russian underground leaflet)

It is now twenty years since March 1953 when Stalin died. High time to review trends in Russia, the so-called “Socialist camp”—the prison camp society with a state-capitalist economy. A brief sketch of the Stalinist era will help to give the reader some understanding of the developments of the last twenty years.

Stalin became Lenin’s successor largely due to his success in putting his own men in key information posts. Once in power he ruthlessly eliminated the political opposition: the Trotskyists and other opposition factions followed one another into the silence of the camps or were butchered by the G.P.U.

Bolshevik despotism relied on the same instrument of oppression as had done the Tsarist state: a secret police force, especially skilled at spying on nascent opposition movements and strangling them at birth. In Tsarist times this was the Okhrana; Lenin founded its successor, the Cheka, in December 1917. In February 1922 the name changed to G.P.U. and again in 1934 to N.K.V.D. Nowadays it is called the K.G.B: tomorrow yet another euphemistic title will be coined. In a despotic or totalitarian State, such institutions will always be indispensable.

Stalin fought another, more desperate, undeclared civil war with the peasants. In a letter to Sholokhov, Stalin himself wrote that the peasants “in reality were making a ‘silent’ war against Soviet power . . . War by starvation”. During the Revolution the peasants had been able to seize land for themselves and, when land-nationalisation (collectivization) was proposed, they resisted as only peasants can. In January 1930 Stalin decreed full steam ahead with collectivization and the simultaneous elimination of the kulaks (useless to define a kulak since anyone could be labelled kulak who was awkward).

The result was chaos and years of famine, even in the best agricultural regions. Some ten million people appear to have died in the Thirties: from starvation disease or liquidation, who can say? Meat consumption dropped by 50-75 per cent, whilst the country’s grain requirements were barely satisfied. Peasants slaughtered their livestock and destroyed corn and hayricks.

These twin themes—the ruthless suppression of political opposition and appalling agricultural shortages— continue to trouble state-capitalist Russia even now.

Stalin’s purges continued even through the War. In his time (ably assisted by Communist Party bureaucrats) he eliminated masses of peasants and intellectuals, Baptists and Marxists, Jews and atheists, generals and doctors and engineers: all were grist for his mill and no-one felt safe. At the time of his death he had just launched the biggest and best-ever purge of them all, aimed mainly against the Jews. As many powerful members of the Politbureau at the time were Jewish or had Jewish connections it is reasonable to speculate that they may have had every reason for eliminating him.

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Malenkov at first was in power; then in June Beria, head of the secret police, tried to become Stalin’s heir but was eliminated (murdered). By September Khrushchev had become First Secretary of the Party while Malenkov remained Premier. At this stage they were all still good Stalinists. Malenkov cultivated a fairly liberal image while Khrushchev allied himself with Molotov, Kaganovich and other hard-core Stalinists—as was only natural considering his remarkable and ruthless record as Party boss of the Ukraine.

By 1955 Khrushchev succeeded in ousting Malenkov and installed his own ally, Bulganin, as Premier. The new regime now adopted a more liberal image with “peaceful coexistence” abroad and an improvement in the standard of living at home. Then in February 1956 Khrushchev launched an attack on his enemies in the Party under cover of “de-Stalinisation”. This speech, made at the XXth Congress of the CPSU remained secret, restricted to Party members and key bureaucrats, and although widely published in the West, it has never been published in Russia.

The Communist Party was split internally on the de-Stalinisation issue, and after the Politbureau vote against Khrushchev in June and the Hungarian and Polish revolts (autumn 1956), the Kremlin was torn by an internal power struggle. Throughout the Khrushchev era powerful forces in the Establishment fought de-Stalinisation which represented a threat to their positions.

Khrushchev made his second anti-Stalin speech five years after the XXth Congress. In his speech to the XXIInd Congress, which was widely published in Russia and Eastern Europe, he indicted the “anti-Party faction” as responsible for Stalinist repression. A typical case of the pot calling the kettle black! This speech shocked and startled Russians. Party morale became very low and from now on Khrushchev’s position became even more precarious until in 1964, after the catastrophic crop-failure of 1963, he was finally ousted by Brezhnev and Kosygin.

During the Khrushchev decade, Party control of the arts had been, to put it mildly, erratic. Khrushchev himself authorised, indeed insisted on the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in November 1962 as part of his campaign against his party opponents. Yet Khrushchev himself declared war on avant-garde artists on December 1st. In foreign affairs the most significant factors were the Cuba crisis and worsening relations with China, culminating in the open split of June 1961.

But far more important in causing Khrushchev’s downfall was his failure in the economic sphere. Agricultural production was misdirected, the price levels for meat and milk being set too low in 1958 with resultant under-production in relation to demand. So in June 1962 Khrushchev decreed big price rises—butter prices went up 25 per cent and meat 30 per cent. The inevitable result was widespread unrest and riots in many cities, notably Novocherkassk where demonstrators were shot by armed police. Another important result was that the collectives transferred their efforts to livestock, neglecting grain production. This in turn—combined with a bad drought—resulted in a catastrophic shortage of grain in 1963. It proved necessary to import large amounts of wheat from abroad—another serious blow to Khrushchev’s prestige and an open demonstration that the most strictly State-run economy was uncontrollable, being subject to the anarchic laws of the market. Since 1917 there have been regular famines and grain shortages in Russia, the worst occurring in 1922-23, 1932, 1942, 1952, 1962-3 and the current crisis of 1972-73. It made no difference changing the boss: the system is basically uncontrollable.

The Khrushchev era then had unleashed bitter criticisms among the writers who began to smell freedom and when the State publishing houses refused their work, they started samizdat (Do-It-Yourself Publishing), refusing to be controlled by the Party. At the same time Khrushchev had failed to solve Russia’s continuing agricultural problems.

What has been happening since Khrushchev’s departure from the Kremlin? It is impossible to detect significant change either on the liberalisation issue or in agricultural policies. Just as Khrushchev was truly Stalin’s heir in his insistence that art must serve the Party’s interests, so today, in Pravda editorials on culture, we recognise the same ruling class view of art as subordinate to the interests of the State:

  Soviet artists were together with Lenin’s party and the people . . . they gave all the strength of their talent to the great cause of communism. And this active participation . . . in the construction of a new life earned for Soviet cultural workers the love and respect of the people, made them the trusty assistants of the party . . . the raising of the ideological and theoretical level of literary and artistic criticism, its militancy and party principle basis . . . To augment the glorious traditions of socialist art, leaning on the Leninist principles of party thinking and closeness to the people, to strengthen its offensive spirit—these arc a matter of honour for every Soviet artist. (Front-page editorial, Pravda, Jan. 25, 1973)

In 1966 Brezhnev-Kosygin passed two laws designed to make “spreading slanderous inventions about the Soviet State and social system”, and “disturbance of public order’’ punishable offences. These were directly aimed at the new generation of oppositionists who were disseminating attacks on the régime in samizdat, who were demonstrating in Moscow squares and even allying themselves with increasingly militant workers (see January Socialist Standard which carries a translated leaflet calling on workers to strike against the “Partocracy” which exploits them).

Since then more and more poets have been imprisoned or brainwashed in psychiatric prisons, more and more critics of the régime have been exiled or sent to those self-same concentration camps that Lenin first devised and where so many of their predecessors sowed the bitter need of frustration. The secret police is as strong as ever, and so is the Kremlin.

And that other perennial theme of crop-failures? No change there either. Today in 1973 Russian agriculture is yet again facing a crisis. Last year’s harvest was a flop: significantly the post-mortems in the Russian press ascribe this to inefficiency, misuse of machinery and waste on the farms, rather than to indifferent weather. Last year Russia had to import 28 million tons grain from various western countries—18 million tons from America alone. Yet 60 years ago, pre-Revolutionary statistics showed Russia to be a major grain exporter: “Grain exports in 1913 exceeded the grain exports of Argentina by 177 per cent., of Canada by 211 per cent, and of U.S.A. by 366 per cent.” (Bulletin of the International Agricultural Institute, Rome 1914, quoted in Posev Dec. 1972 from Tsarisme et Revolution by A. de Goulevitch, Paris 1931).

And not only was last year’s crop a failure but this year’s prospects are exceedingly precarious. The unusually late snowfall will have partly destroyed the spring corn and this, combined with extreme shortage of seed-corn in many areas, will mean a pretty poor harvest in 1973. Only too true the admission in a recent pamphlet published by the Soviet authorities that “at the stage of socialist [i.e. state capitalist] society there are not the means to satisfy man’s needs to the full” (USSR Living Standards).

We must not leave unchallenged the misuse of the term "socialism” for a state-capitalist society, a vast prison-state which treats its workers as “mere working cattle” without pity for their poverty and stoical suffering; a “Partocracy” where each and every little Party bureaucrat lines his pocket with loot; an economy which operates successfully only insofar as its wheels are greased with graft and corruption, wire-pulling, intrigue and blackmail.

One significant change there is since Stalin’s days. Russia used to be relatively immune to inflation. However this infectious disease of the capitalist system, endemic in postwar Europe and America, is now reported to be rampant in Russia. As the Eisenhower administration commented to their Kremlin opposite numbers:

  The President is aware that you operate under a system of State capitalism, and he hopes that it has been useful to you to have seen the progress of our people under our system of individual capitalism. We are sure that you have found this experience interesting.

(Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1959, quoted in SPGB Pamphlet Russia 1917-1967)

The problems of capitalism are the same the world over. Whether the Kremlin bosses recognise their system as state capitalism or not, the workers in their country are learning fast that this system has nothing to offer them. The Russian proletariat in farms and factories, the internees doing forced labour on starvation rations in the KGB concentration camp empire (about 4 million at Stalin’s death: how many now?) and the unemployed who have no unemployment pay since the regime will not admit that there is any unemployment: they have found this experience interesting indeed and they are stirring with a bitter anger. We wish the exploited people of Russia success in their struggles against the Partocracy which owns and controls the wealth of their country and which crushes them beneath its iron heel.

Charmian Skelton

Changing Russia (1939)

From the November 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

The repercussions of the Soviet-German Pact on Communist influence have been far-reaching. Mr. H. N. Brailsford, an old supporter of the Soviet Government, urged his friends to restrain the “bitterness in their hearts” (Reynolds's, October 8th, 1937). We suspect that Mr. Brailsford’s restraint is governed by the hope that Russia will yet side with the Allied Powers.

Mr. Louis Fischer, in an article in Reynolds's (October 1st, 1939) feels no urge for such restraint. He is an American journalist, has spent many years in Russia and, until now, has been regarded as one of the staunchest and ablest supporters of the Russian Government outside of Russia. After enumerating facts which are now familiar as history, Louis Fischer says:--

   I see two chief reasons for Russia’s new foreign expansion : (1) Domestic difficulties, and (2) the revival of Russian nationalism.
   Several years ago. Stalin started out to build Socialism in one country. But Socialism is a travesty without pants and without freedom. The supply of consumers’ goods (except food) and of housing in Russia is most inadequate, and little progress has been made during the last three years.
   The nation was ready to sacrifice a great deal, and it did, for the sake of the better life that had been promised. But this is the twenty-second year of the revolution, and people get tired investing in a future which never arrives. They grow especially depressed when they see stagnation instead of improvement.
   The objective truth of the Soviet goods shortage is the long queues outside town and village shops, and speculation.
   Neither quantitatively nor qualitatively are the needs of the Soviet population being met.

The New Soviet Constitution of 1936 Fischer interprets as an attempt to meet the “yearning of the population met with disappointment—the yearning for freedom.”

Hopes were dashed, however, and “the purge continued to every nook of the vast Soviet Union, and hundreds of thousands suffered. . . .  A deadly fear was injected into those whom the authorities did not molest.”

And of the Army: —

   In 1936, Moscow created the rank of Army Marshal and raised five men to that rank : Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Bluecher and Budenny. Children treasured a widely published photograph of these five national heroes. Before long, the children had to cut off the face of Tukhachevsky. Executed as a traitor. In a short time Yegorov’s features had to be eliminated. And then Bluecher’s.

And journalists: —

  Hundreds of journalists, writers, professors, politicians and outstanding Communists who had enjoyed general confidence, turned out, according to the official version, to be anti-Soviet. Then how could the ordinary mortal know that the man whose speech he heard to-day, whose article he read to-day. whose orders he was obeying to-day, might not be annihilated to-morrow as a foe of the State?
   Since everybody was a potential spy or traitor, everybody hesitated to talk to or associate with everybody else.

Well might Fischer add that “the arrests and shootings demoralised the population”! He speaks of watching these events from "near and afar with mounting disappointment and concern.  . . .  But while the Soviet Government helped the Spanish Republic, I, who had hoped that victory in Spain might save Europe from war and Russia from reaction, imposed silence upon myself.” He goes on to add that “ with one exception, every important Russian who returned from Spain has been executed or arrested.”

Fischer's observations on the growth of Russian nationalism are worth quoting, though they are long: —

   As long as the Soviet Government behaved like a sincere advocate of world peace and helped the victims of Fascist aggression, I was willing to moderate my criticisms of its deed. But now the Russians have made a deal with Hitler. Now I am afraid Russia has set out on the road of Pan-Slav expansion. 

  In his speech on May 31st, 1939, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Molotov launched a just attack on the Anglo-French policy vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia, and said that at Munich "the large Slav nation of Czechoslovakia ” had been destroyed. This is the first time the word “Slav" has been used in such a connection by a Soviet statesman. 

   When all else fails to stir the imagination or insure the loyalty of a citizenry, patriotism is a shrewd expedient. About 1936, the Bolsheviks began putting tremendous emphasis on patriotism and on love of fatherland. This was new in Soviet propaganda. Theretofore, the accent had been on internationalism. It changed abruptly to nationalism. 

     I have never thought that these vaccinations ever “took.” On the contrary, it was Spain which excited the Soviet masses more than anything else in half a dozen years. 

    Lenin had strongly imbued the Soviets with the spirit of international solidarity. He did not have to teach the inhabitants of the country to hate the black, Tsarist past of Russia. But now a new cult of Russianism arose.  

  Pre-revolutionary Russian history was reinterpreted to make it palatable to the Sovietised generation. Peter the Great, reviled for his cruelty by all who read, was furbished up for modern heroism. A whole galaxy of Tsarist notables reappeared out of the dustbin into which a proper assessment of their anti-labour and anti-peasant activities had thrown them. Pokrovsky, a veteran Soviet historian of Russia’s past, was discarded.

 Figures like Alexander Nevsky were brought forward out of the mist of the Middle Ages and popularised in the films, in this case, paradoxically, to breed contempt for Germany.

   Art, literature and politics received a deepening Russian tinge, while minor nationalities receded somewhat out of focus. In the same period the Comintern was eclipsed, and agitation for the world revolution moved behind a thick cloud. Acquisitive Nationalism became the guiding star of Soviet foreign and domestic policies. 

   I believe this is the broad background against which the Bolsheviks’ rapprochement with the Nazis and their subsequent military moves can best be viewed.

Well might the Communists put up Mr. Pat Sloan at a public meeting in order to “Answer your doubts about Russia.” (How long has it been admitted that Communists might have doubts?)

It would seem that the chant, “ Trotskyism,” no longer convinces the faithful!

Harry Waite

Darkness at Noon (1969)

Book Review from the February 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Great Terror by Robert Conquest, Macmillan, 84s.

Robert Conquest is no friend of Russia and that fact alone will probably be enough for most supporters of the Russian regime to discredit his account of Stalin's purges. 

The one unfortunate fact, for the  tireless Russophiles, is that Conquest's stuff is carefully documented, with even its trivia with testimony. And what is perhaps the most terrifying part of the book ― "casualty figures" of the purges ― computed in part from Russian government population statistics.

It is arguable, whether most of the book was needed. There is little to be  gained from yet another account of the Kirov murder, the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the pitiless system of arrest, interrogation, execution or slow, living death in the labour camps. Most of it has been done, somewhere or other, before.

The casualty figures are another matter. There are of course no official details to go on; it must all be done by combining the evidence of participants ― some of them NKVD officers ― with official statistics and matching it all up with the Census of 1959. Conquest's conclusion, which is staggering but difficult to argue against, is that, as an under-estimation, twenty million were killed ― by execution, in the “collectivisation drive", in  the  camps ― under the Stalin state capitalist regime. 

The Nazis could hardly have improved on this. And for some of the time this wholesale murder was going on, we were told that the Russians were our gallant allies, contented under the solicitous care of Uncle Joe. Henry Wallace, who was then the American Vice-President, visited one of the worst camps in 1944. The place was specially tarted up and Wallace duly found it "idyllic".

This sort of story should make even the most obstinate Tory pause for thought. What happens to a man who fights for power over capitalism? The answer cannot be avoided and the last forty years have given evidence galore. He does the job as the system demands and on those terms everything ― murder, torture, everything ― is justified.

Ivan