3

Why? Towards a Theory

of the Soviet Holocaust

In the early morning of the second day of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky bedded themselves down on the floor of Smolny Institute. There the momentous All-Russian Congress of Soviets had just adjourned after adopting a 'Peace Declaration of the Peoples of All the Belligerent Countries', and a Land Decree transferring to local Soviets and land committees 'all land-owners' estates and all lands belonging to the Crown, to monasteries, and the Church', as well as constituting itself the new government of Russia.

    Thus the Bolsheviks gave stirring proof of their determination to transform the country, and the world, in the direction demanded by the masses of poor and working people in Russia and voiced by Lenin: 'We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!' Its first act, the peace proclamation, was addressed not only 'to the Governments and to the peoples of the belligerent countries' but also to the workers of England, France and Germany, whose history of struggle is 'a sure guarantee that the workers of these countries will understand the duty imposed upon them to liberate humanity from the horrors and consequences of war; and that these workers, by decisive, energetic, and continued action, will help us to bring to a successful conclusion the cause of peace – and at the same time, the cause of the liberation of the exploited working masses from all slavery and all exploitation.'^l

    For once in the history of the world the hope was to be acted upon. Certainly the imperialist governments would resist the offer. 'But we hope that revolution will soon break out in all the belligerent countries; that is why we address ourselves to the workers of France, England, and Germany ....'² Later in the debate Lenin returned to this point: 'If the German proletariat realizes that we are ready to

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 65

consider all offers of peace, that will perhaps be the last drop which overflows the bowl--revolution will break out in Germany ....'³

    The proclamation was accepted unanimously. 'Suddenly, by common impulse', wrote John Reed, 'we found ourselves on our feet, mumbling together into the smooth lifting unison of the Internationale. A grizzled old soldier was sobbing like a child. Alexandra Kollontai rapidly winked the tears back. The immense sound rolled through the hall, burst windows and doors and soared into the quiet sky.'⁴ 'Did it go altogether into the sky?' asked Trotsky, following upon Reed's description. 'Did it not go also to the autumn trenches, that hatchwork upon unhappy, crucified Europe, to her devastated cities and villages, to her mothers and wives in mourning? "Arise ye prisoners of starvation! Arise ye wretched of the earth!" The words of the song were freed of all qualifications. They fused with the decree of the government, and hence resounded with the force of a direct act. Everyone felt greater and more important in that hour. The heart of the revolution enlarged to the width of the whole world. "We will achieve emancipation ...." The spirit of independence, of initiative, of daring, those joyous feelings of which the oppressed in ordinary conditions are deprived – the revolution had brought them now. "... with our own hand!'' '⁵

    Drifting off to sleep a few hours later, the acknowledged leader of the revolution whispered to the writer of these words, the great organizer of the insurrection: 'Es schwindelt' – 'It is dizzying.'⁶

    Dizzying, this achievement of proletarian power for the first time in human history.⁷ If its provenance was clear in the process by which the October Revolution seized power – relying upon tens of thousands of armed workers – its intentions were broadcast in its first decrees. Together they reflected the fact that, for the first time in human history, the Bolsheviks presided over a state directly resting on and serving the poor and oppressed masses. For the next several years this earth-shaking event reverberated around the world, inspiring revolutionary movements – including those in Germany, Hungary and Italy – and a wave of worker militancy further West – in France, Britain and the United States. Lenin's whispered comment expresses, unconsciously, a key to what would follow. In speaking German at the first moment of release and relaxation, was Lenin not reflexively suggesting Russia's fatal dependence on Germany?

    Hitler created Stalin. This simplistic and onesided anachronism

66

points, none the less, to the Bolsheviks' conviction that their revolution was only the opening shot of the worldwide proletarian revolution, and that their own success, indeed survival, hinged on assistance by a victorious proletariat in the West. It suggests that the failure of the German revolution, and its disastrous aftermath, from the beginning turned Russia back on itself to wrestle with the most severe of contradictions: how to build socialism, there, alone. Defeat in Germany was to remove the prospect of proletarian support, and heighten to the breaking point Bolshevik urgency to end Russia's inferiority. Indeed, if defeat in Germany led to Stalin and 'socialism in one country' in Russia, may we not also say that it led to a suicidally introverted foreign and Comintern policy which kept the German proletariat split while Hitler was rising to power? In this sense, perhaps, it is no less true that 'Stalin created Hitler'.

    A preface to hope reveals itself most strikingly as a history of unreason when we approach the vicissitudes of this revolution, one of humanity's greatest hopes – and catastrophes – in this century. Even today, the possibility of hope for many continues to turn on how the Bolshevik Revolution is interpreted. Was Stalinism inherent in Leninism – or indeed, in Marxism? Is the Soviet Union a socialist society? Was Russia ripe for a Marxist revolution? Upon such questions seems to rest the very chance of socialism after Stalinism and in the light of today's Soviet Union. After all, of all the century's revolutions, only this one erupted in modern industrial cities and was carried through by the industrial working class. As a result the dénouement of the Bolshevik Revolution has done more to stifle hope than any other event in the century, has helped destroy socialism as an ideal worth struggling for in the minds of generations of industrial workers.

    The brute fact of the Soviet Union today, no less than under Stalin, makes a mockery of the claims of those who promise that socialism will be more humane than capitalism, more genuinely democratic, more rational, more technologically inventive, and less destructive of the environment. In short, its very existence, no less than its traumatic history, saps the sense that any alternative is possible. Why struggle for a revolutionary transformation of our societies if that is all that can be hoped for? There are two horrors in the Soviet experience: one is the sheer number of human lives destroyed, the sheer weight of the loss and suffering; another is the defeat of hope.

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 67

The second is perhaps the greater barrier for humanity today. After all, even mass death can be somehow absorbed, if it is seen as being en route to a better world; but the defeat and corruption of revolutionary hopes is a moral, intellectual and political loss from which there is no appeal. Humans abandon hope when struggles and sacrifices, accepted in the conviction that they have some meaning and purpose, are seen to lead nowhere.

Achievement and Disaster

The barbarism of Nazi Germany, difficult as it may be to face squarely, nonetheless seems almost easy to comprehend next to the phenomenon of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The Nazis' madness and evil were apparent in 1933 to anyone who did not share it: war, terror and antisemitism were built into their movement. The great questions about the Holocaust are straightforward, if horrible: why did people choose to commit such staggering evil? But no one contests the complete absence of anything redeeming about the Nazis: no monuments to their purpose are worth preserving except as admonitions. This movement died with its ruler and left everything it touched in ruins.

    The Soviet Union is much more taxing to comprehend. Stalin moved to power silently, almost unobtrusively, not at the head of the glorious mass movement of liberation but in the process of the movement's bureaucratization. In power, Stalin's rule made the whole people potential 'enemies of the people' as it created an astounding apparatus of inquisition, forced labor and death. It cost perhaps 20 million lives, one in eight Soviet citizens. Yet in one of history's most spectacular leaps forward it also created overnight a modern industrial society, barely soon enough to repel Hitler's armies at the gates of victory. If it did the work of the Devil, destroying and terrorizing, it also immeasurably enriched and transformed Soviet life, educating, civilizing, spreading medical care, modernizing. If Stalin stands next to Hitler as one of history's great tyrants, he also towers above the leaders of our century as one of history s great builders.

    Appreciating the aftermath of October thus means heading simultaneously in two directions, measuring achievement as well as disaster. About both there remains dispute and denial, even thirty

68

years after Stalin's death. The debate is, of course, political – the more Stalinist construction is stressed, as in Nettl's The Soviet Achievement, the less is the catastrophe mentioned (it receives there only seven pages);⁸ the more the catastrophe is stressed, as in the Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch's The Soviet Revolution, the less is the achievement referred to (in this case a single grudging sentence).⁹ Avoiding denial means emphasizing both colossal facts which the Soviet thirties have left behind – the victory over Nazi Germany, and the destruction of many millions of people – and inquiring into their connection.

    Certainly the Soviet victory over Hitler can be discussed in terms of such variables as overall military strategy, leadership and battlefield tactics. Stalin's shocking paralysis during the invasion's first two weeks, for example, had a major effect on Soviet losses. At the nadir of the Great Purge Stalin had stripped the military of competent officers and technical experts: across society the Purge had replaced morale with terror, drastically retarding production, preparedness and skill. On the other hand Hitler's fixation on taking Stalingrad, for example, can also be seen as the turning point.

    Nevertheless, in the words of Francis Randall, 'other things being equal, the stronger power wins the war.' The Germans' initial accumulation of armaments and their successful surprise delayed the outcome, 'but Russia's superior strength was never altogether overcome, and eventually won the war.'¹⁰ Russia's superior strength: how did this happen, this transformation from the 'weakest link' in the chain of capitalism to a socialist power superior to one of its strongest links and all her satellites put together? In the height of battle, with two-thirds of European Russia occupied or devastated in 1943, the USSR still out-produced Germany in tanks and airplanes. Although his conclusion may be disputed that Russia's production was superior to Germany's in 'every year' of the conflict, Randall points out the Soviet 'miracle' of the Second World War: 'The Germans started the invasion with a larger accumulation of heavy weapons, and destroyed much of what the Russians had in the first five months. But the Russians eventually succeeded in maintaining their superior production--often In quality as well as quantity – and in concentrating their movements (after the first five months) more rapidly and more effectively to achieve superiorities and win key battles.'¹¹

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 69

It may indeed be that the Soviet Union could accomplish this only by destining 'all for the front', and, in Maurice Dobb's words, 'cutting to the bone the supply of all but the bare essentials for civilian consumers';¹² it may also be that Soviet industrialization had for a dozen years been lopsided towards the heavy industries needed for war production: and it may indeed remain true today that this formidable industrial-technical base has not yet resulted in a bounty of consumer goods. Still, in spite of every possible qualification, the undeniable fact remains that the Soviet Union was saved by modernization and industrialization. It might indeed have been carried out more rationally, humanely and efficiently than the breakneck industrialization of the five-year plans. But without an Industrial, agricultural, technical and cultural revolution victory would have been inconceivable. Revolution: that quantity became quality is attested by the fact that in 1928 production had barely recovered to its pre-First World War level, while by 1940 the basis had been created for a modern industrial state.

    The last point is decisive. The immensity of the country, its inexhaustible reserves of population, the vastness of its resources – these became positive factors of defence only because they had already been harnessed, developed, organized. This achievement took place In the scant twelve years before Germany attacked. The moving of factories and people eastward as the Germans occupied western Russia, the production of weapons of equal quality to the Germans', the training, equipping and organizing of division after division: all of this testifies to the astounding ability of a country only two generations away from serfdom to function as a modern power In the supreme test of modern powers--total war.¹³

    If the achievement is fully half the account, the other half is the holocaust wrought on its people by the state that emerged from the world's first socialist revolution. Stalin was not boasting when he told Winston Churchill that ten million kulaks had to be dealt with during collectivization, most of them being 'wiped out'.¹⁴ Perhaps 5 ½ million peasants died from hunger and the diseases of hunger in the man-made famine of 1932. Mass starvation was caused not by food shortages, but by steeply increased, calculated government requisition from newly-collectivized peasants. Collectivization itself led to some 16 million peasants being forcibly resettled, some 3 ½ million being placed in forced labour camps, with perhaps 3 ½ million ex-

70

ecuted. 'Liquidation of the kulaks' truly meant the physical extermination of one part of the Russian population. It was followed by the Great Purge of the 1930s, a gigantic human iceberg of which the infamous Moscow Trials were only the tiniest tip. Robert Conquest estimates that perhaps a million people were executed in 1936-38, that the forced-labour camp population in late 1938 may have been between 8 and 15 million people, and that during the late 1930s 6 ½ million people died in the camps, largely as a matter of policy. The total casualty figure for the Stalin years, 1930-53, is estimated as 20 million dead.¹⁵

    Just as with the Soviet victory over Germany, so should we take the salient fact of so many deaths as reflecting a much broader reality. That reality takes in all the trappings of a totalitarian state including the cult of personality, the crude bullying of an entire population, the raising of an entire generation on lifeless dogma, and the return for inspiration to Tsarist models.

In the years of terror, no one was above suspicion. All the other five men named in Lenin's will were to die at Stalin's hands, as well as nineteen of the thirty-three Politburo members between 1919 and 1938.¹⁶ As Anton Antonov-Ovseenko describes the years in which he grew to manhood and saw his father destroyed: 'Fear became a nutrient medium, part of the atmosphere you breathed. Everyone and everything was feared. The neighbours in your building, the caretaker in the building, your own children. People lived in fear of their co-workers, those above them, those beneath them, and those on the same level. They feared oversights or mistakes on the job, but even more, they feared being too successful, standing out. At the top they also lived in fear. A party or government post was something like a smoking crater in which someone had just been killed. A newly appointed minister, Central Committee member, secretary of a provincial committee, or president of a municipal Soviet executive committee would hunch down and work away in the fresh crater in the hope that the theory of probability would not let him down: a second artillery shell shouldn't fall on the same spot.'¹⁷

These years were epitomized in the situation described by Roy Medvedev: 'The country had a President [Kalinin] whose wife was kept in a concentration camp.¹⁸ Informing became a central social activity, as every last person was potentially pitted against everyone else. 'Children denounced their parents, and parents disowned

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 71

children arrested for "counterrevolutionary activity." Each denounced the other. Under Stalin the number of informers approached the number of inhabitants able to read and write. Or speak, Only the infants failed to denounce. Even in the kindergartens denouncing was encouraged. Soon every second person in the country was informing.¹⁹ Under certain circumstances, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, socialism 'could be synonymous with hell.'²⁰

Zachto – Why?

Describing that hell has been the great achievement of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962, during the wave of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. In reading it our question becomes the one prisoners wrote on cell walls, carved into the planks of transit camps and on the sides of prison wagons: zachto – why?²¹ Why the catastrophe? Is it separable from the achievement, as for example Antonov-Ovseenko and Medvedev claim, or was it necessary, as Sartre insists? Was it a cost of modernization? Or a consequence of Communist revolution? Or of that revolution's isolation? Or of its prematurity, as Rousset argues? Or, more particularly, a result of Lenin's untimely death? Or of Trotsky's defeat? Or of Bukharin's policies being abandoned?

    To reply to these questions, we must take issue with even the most lucid Bolshevik self-interpretation. This study will insist that the revolution's deformation was inseparable from its accomplishments – in broad outline the thesis developed so powerfully by Isaac Deutscher. But I intend to reverse his emphasis, by focusing on those respects in which the accomplishments of Stalinism stemmed from its irrationality.

    To be sure, Deutscher was sensitive to the fundamental irrationality which came to permeate the revolution. Indeed, one of its greatest descriptions is his characterization of the situation in which the Soviet people and their rulers found themselves during the tours de force of 1928-33 which transformed industry and agriculture: 'The whole experiment seemed to be a piece of prodigious insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were turned upside down. It was as if a whole nation had suddenly abandoned and destroyed

72

its houses and huts, which though obsolete and decaying, existed in reality, and moved, lock, stock, and barrel, into some illusory buildings, for which not more than a hint of scaffolding had in reality been prepared; as if that nation had only after this crazy migration set out to make the bricks for the walls of its new dwellings and then found that even the straw for the bricks was lacking; and as if then the whole nation, hungry, dirty, shivering with cold and riddled with disease, had begun a feverish search for the straw, the bricks, the stones, the builders and the masons, so that, by assembling these, they could at last start building homes incomparably more spacious and healthy than were the hastily abandoned slum dwellings of the past. Imagine that that nation numbered 160 million people; and that it was lured, prodded, whipped, and shepherded into that surrealistic enterprise by an ordinary, prosaic, fairly sober man, whose mind had suddenly become possessed by a half-real and half-somnambulistic vision, a man who established himself in the role of super judge and super architect, in the role of a modern super-Pharaoh. Such, roughly, was now the strange scene of Russian life, full of torment and hope, full of pathos and of the grotesque; and such was Stalin's place in it; only that the things that he drove the people to build were not useless pyramids.'²²

    This description of the irrationality of 'socialist construction' captures, as do much of Deutscher's Stalin and Trotsky, the revolution's passage from reason to madness, from good works to evil without ever fully renouncing reason or the good. The strengths of Deutscher's interpretation are the strengths of the Marxist tradition: its rationalism, its understanding of the ways in which situation influences action and action situation, its historical scope, its sense of the interrelation of the political, economic, social and technological planes. But, like that tradition, Deutscher remains uncritical of his own rationalist and progress-oriented premisses; he is too confident of 'history', too unquestioningly insistent that the revolution's contradictory outcome stems from the barbarism of an earlier world. For example, in describing Stalinism 'as the amalgam of Marxism with Russia's primordial and savage backwardness'²³ he fails to see the utter irrationality of imposing 'enlightenment' on a recalcitrant environment, the irrationality that would become indistinguishable from Marxist rationalism.

    Deutscher's lucidity, and its limits, recall and mirror the strengths

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 73

and weaknesses of Leon Trotsky's appreciation of the revolution's course. Possessing Marxist intellectual tools but not power, Trotsky in opposition and then exile became the lucid self-consciousness of Bolshevism, the one Russian analyst who both shared the revolution's commitments and dared to confront it with the full force of its own betrayal. He alone spoke to it with its own voice, of its own hopes. Like Deutscher after him, he sought the source of the betrayal in the material situation. Thus he produced the most compelling contemporary self-interpretation of Bolshevism: 'Socialism is a structure of a planned production to the end of the best satisfaction of human needs; otherwise it does not deserve the name of socialism. If cows are socialized, but there are too few of them, or they have too meagre udders, then conflicts arise out of the inadequate supply of milk – conflicts between city and country, between collectives and individual peasants, between different strata of the proletariat, between the whole toiling mass and the bureaucracy. It was in fact the socialization of 'the cows which led to their mass extermination by the peasants. Social conflicts created by want can in their turn lead to a resurrection of "all the old crap" ....'²⁴

    In Marx's original the German reads Scheisse – shit. Meaning classes, exploitation, inequality, the absence of democracy. What else could be expected in a society where the struggle for survival was the dominant feature of life, where the typical citizen was not the literate worker and trade unionist living in cities and producing modern goods with sophisticated equipment, but the illiterate muzhik, only a generation away from serfdom? Where by the mid-thirties, while 'the United States consumes twelve pencils a year per inhabitant, the Soviet Union consumes only four, and those four are of such poor quality that their useful work does not exceed that of one good pencil, or at the outside two.'²⁵

    Seeing the society and most of the population as fatally underdeveloped, Trotsky sought, a way out of the cul-de-sac in which the revolution's own assumptions placed it by describing the Soviet Union as 'a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism.'²⁶ He might with greater accuracy have insisted that the country was being pushed towards socialism without having first gone through the capitalist advance beyond feudalism. He might have emphasized, according to Marxist assumptions, the absence of a process of human development, one which Russia had not yet

74

undergone by itself and to whose fruits it was denied easy access by the failure of revolution in Germany. His theory of uneven and combined development gave a premature happy ending to what would become a tragedy. Writing in the mid 1930s, his vision of the Soviet Union was dominated by his sense of its backwardness – meaning the abysmally low Russian level of education and political development; meaning a general absence of the experience of working in collective, modern industry, of living in cities, of exposure to science and technology. This situation, for Trotsky, explains the growth of bureaucratic rule, increasing inequality, and the cult of Stalin.

    Trotsky's extremely penetrating analysis is however hampered by a fundamental blind spot. The weakness of his perspective is perhaps best expressed by the major omission of The Revolution Betrayed: Trotsky virtually ignores the fate of the peasantry in the early 1930s. He dismisses talk of induced famine, forced labour camps, mass executions, expropriations and deportations, as simply 'the twaddle of liberals that collectivization as a whole was accomplished by naked force.'²⁷ But as a whole, it was. While Trotsky accurately describes the mood of civil war in the countryside during these years, he pays more attention to the loss of animals – slaughtered en masse when the peasants were forced to enter collective farms – than to the loss of human life.

    Why? While Trotsky emphasizes the goal of the changes in the countryside as being to move from 'barbarism to civilization' he totally passes over the barbaric means employed. The source of this fatal blind spot is that Trotsky, while in some sense perceiving the contradictory situation in which the Bolshevik Revolution found itself, was himself part of that contradiction. Exiled from power – indeed, perhaps only because of this – he could to some extent voice the revolution's humane, egalitarian and democratic aspirations against Stalin's crudeness and brutality. It is Trotsky, after all, whose history of 1917 has been one of the great celebrations of the power of ordinary people. But, as we shall see, when in power himself Trotsky accepted, even promoted and initiated decisive early steps down the road to the police state of the 1930s.

    Deutscher, like Trotsky, treats the expropriation, exile and slaughter of tens of millions of peasants with striking callousness. This admittedly 'bloody cataclysm' receives only three pages in Stalin, while an entire chapter ('The Gods are Athirst') is devoted to the 

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 75

Great Purge of 1936-38, treating it primarily as a party purge. His Trotsky acknowledges, as does his Stalin, that 'millions of people [were] dispossessed and condemned to social, and many also to physical, death.'²⁸ But that is all: where page after page is devoted to the internal manoeuvering under Stalin, to deep and sustained analysis of the causes of the revolution's turns of direction – for example, Deutscher takes seven pages to discuss the consequences of Jacob Blumkin's 1929 visit to Trotsky on Prinkipo – it is little short of astounding that Deutscher does no more than register the event experienced as an unmitigated holocaust by the vast majority of Soviet citizens.

    Why does Deutscher's eloquence grow cold when speaking of the destruction of what he regards as the grey, primordial peasantry? To him it seems they scarcely matter, except as obstacles to socialism, as a human mass to be 'civilized'. He seems to regard them with the eyes of a Trotsky, if not a Stalin. Are they not enlightened eyes, Western eyes? His point is that their fate under the Bolsheviks was in a sense foreordained by history. 'In a vast country accustomed to extensive agriculture [the replacement of the unproductive small-holding by the modern large-scale farm] could be achieved either by the energetic fostering of agrarian capitalism or by collectivization – there was no other choice. No Bolshevik government could act as the foster parent of agrarian capitalism – if it had so acted it would have let loose formidable forces hostile to itself and it could have compromised the prospects of planned industrialization. There was thus only one road left, that of collectivization ....' Although the all-important questions of scale, method and tempo had still to be resolved, 'the actual situation of 1929 dictated that Stalin and his followers attacked the opposing forces with mounting fury.'²⁹

    Deutscher does quote Trotsky's description of the 'liquidation of the kulaks' as a 'monstrosity'. But the 'monstrosity' is not the human catastrophe but the fact that 'collectivization should not outrun the technical means needed for it.'³⁰ In other words, the surviving collectivized peasants would be unable to produce enough to discover the advantages of social over individual farming! For Deutscher collectivization appears as an inevitable war, against virtually equal opponents, 'a war which the collectivist state waged, under Stalin's supreme command, in order to conquer rural Russia and her stubborn individualism.'³¹ Bukharin, reviled by Stalin – and by history

76

– for his sympathy to the peasants, views this 'war' rather differently in his comparison of 1919 with the period 1930-32: 'In 1919 we were fighting for our lives. We executed people, but we also risked our lives in the process. In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men, together with their wives and children.'³²

    A second blind spot, for all Deutscher's eloquence in rendering the irrational directions taken by the revolution, concerns his unwillingness or inability to comprehend this phenomenon of irrationality. One senses in him no pathos for the millions destroyed; nor even the momentary self-doubt that it might all not have been necessary. For his work is animated by a fervent belief in progress and ultimate rationality. Stalin was driving history .forward: if the path was catastrophic perhaps this was inevitable. Russian savage backwardness absorbed and transformed the Bolshevik drive to enlighten, modernize, rationalize. Stalin undertook, to quote a famous saying, 'to drive barbarism out of Russia by barbarous means. Because of the nature of the means he employed, much of the barbarism thrown out of Russian life has crept back into it.'³³ It rests with Stalin's heirs to sort out those aspects of the heritage worth keeping from those to be discarded.

    One senses that the rationality guiding Deutscher's enterprise and the Marxist project in some sense gilds its subjects: tragedies and irrationality there may be, but they fit within an overall logic of human betterment. However, if the whole is indeed becoming insane, may it not be argued that it was not human betterment but 'pyramids of sacrifice' which were being produced?

Deutscher conveys but does not comprehend the break with rationality of a society in which, in Antonov-Ovseenko's words, 'there arose two categories of citizens – those in confinement and those still waiting to be arrested.'³⁴ This society in which nearly every person became a potential 'enemy of the people' was a society which claimed to be entering into socialism while its children were without milk to drink.

    Under Stalin, society underwent a rupture from reality, and proceeded instead by a systematic displacement – by fantasy, by organizing itself around myth, and by a violent and disfiguring assault on reality itself to make it conform to the fantasy and myth. But if the worst features of Stalinism are to be regarded as madness, I will

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 77

argue that they were neither the revolution's accidental deviation nor its bastard child. They were produced, rather, out of the revolution itself, as were Its best features and achievements. Not, as Deutscher argues, as the revenge of Old Russia against her modernizers, but somehow as the product of the modernizers themselves.

The Revolution Against the Workers

For Lenin the event that 'lit up reality better than anything else'³⁵ was the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921. However the Bolsheviks tried to discount the rebellion at the naval base and surrounding industrial complex – as led by White Guards, anarchists and Social Revolutionaries, as based on new peasant recruits and untried revolutionaries-its locale and character were fated to bring about, as Bukharin said, 'the collapse of our illusions'.³⁶ Leonard Schapiro's description of it as the 'revolt of the proletariat against the dictatorship of the proletariat'³⁷ contains more than anti-Communism. Indeed the entire leadership knew quite well that they were using 'violence against the "toiling masses" in the name of the "toiling masses".'³⁸ First, the sailors of Kronstadt had always been the shock troops of the revolution: the Aurura, which had played a major role in the October insurrection, was now up in arms, as was the Petropavlovsk, whose crew demanded the overthrow of the Bolsheviks in the name of proletarian democracy. Second, this uprising was undeniably one of workers – in whose name the Bolsheviks claimed to rule Russia. A sympathetic general strike in nearby Petrograd was expected. And indeed the Petropavlovsk resolution sought not to return to pre-revolutionary days, but demanded freedoms only for the workers and peasants and their parties, calling for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly.³⁹ In swiftly and mercilessly repressing the revolt, the party of workers was suppressing what had been one of the main fortresses of the Bolshevik revolution itself, suppressing those who, genuine revolutionaries, now demanded that the revolution live up to its promises. The reversal is captured in the image of Trotsky reviewing the victors of the bloody assault on the pride and glory of the revolution, the Kronstadt that had been his own political base in 1917.

    Two simultaneous events confirmed the revolution's direction: the

78

Tenth Party Congress passed a motion by Lenin to ban organized factions within the party; and this same congress initiated the New Economic Policy. The narrowing of party democracy continued, a process dating back to October 1917. Victorious in the Civil War but frightened by the size of potentially counter-revolutionary forces, the revolution reasserted the Bolshevik political monopoly rather than fulfilling its promise to restore opposition parties. 1920 had seen the debate which led to dismantling the trade unions as autonomous organizations whose purpose was to represent the workers. Deutscher presents the logic of the next step. 'Almost at once it became necessary to suppress opposition in Bolshevik ranks as well. The Workers' Opposition (and up to a point the Decemists too) expressed much of the frustration and discontent which had led to the Kronstadt rising. The cleavages tended to become fixed; and the contending groups were inclined to behave like so many parties within the party. It would have been preposterous to establish the rule of a single party and then to allow that party to split into fragments. If Bolshevism were to break up into two or more hostile movements, as the old Social Democratic Party had done, would not one of them – it was asked – become the vehicle of counterrevolution?'⁴⁰ But the goal of the Workers' Opposition and the Decemists was not to overthrow the revolution, but rather to restore proletarian democracy. The Kronstadt rebels had been slaughtered for demanding one fundamental component of such democracy: free elections to the Soviets. Now the party oppositions were prosecuted for demanding others: workers' control at the factories and over the entire economy. Together these demands had been the Bolsheviks' own in 1917; now they were repressed as actually or potentially counter-revolutionary.

    Why had Bolshevik power, which in 1917 meant workers' power, now come to impose itself decisively over the workers, to the point of making their trade unions instruments of factory discipline and of repressing those party members who sought to restore that power to them? Most immediately, this was a time of crisis: the victors ruled over a ruined country. Ten million had died in the Civil War, industry was at a near-total halt, the cities were depopulated, the countryside was providing a fraction of its pre-war produce. By the end of 1921, thirty-six million people were suffering from famine. The working class – in whose name and with whose support the Bolsheviks had

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 79

made the October Revolution, who had flocked into the party in 1917 – had fought and died in the Civil War, had been absorbed into the party and government apparatus, or had fled the towns. The ruling party saw itself as a workers' party, but it also saw as threateningly premature demands for free food, clothing and lodging, as well as medical attention, travelling facilities and education – in a land where the railways were ruined and the factories were producing one-fourth of their pre-war output, a land which was reverting to cannibalism in the countryside.⁴¹

    These urgencies were framed by the momentous fact, already apparent though not finally confirmed until 1923, that no other proletarian revolution had succeeded in the wake of the World War. The Bolsheviks were alone, ruling over a ruined society. Lenin's speeches and writings of the period demonstrate how far the strategic perspective of European revolution had dominated Bolshevik thought. In 1920, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin insisted that 'ours is an international cause, and until the revolution takes place in all lands, Including the richest and most highly civilized ones, our victory will be only a half victory, perhaps still less.'⁴² Now that the Civil War seemed won, it was clear that economic development had to precede socialism, and reconstruction to precede development. Lenin did not spell out what was the danger that will continue 'until the revolution is victorious in one or several advanced countries.' But was it not parallel to the bourgeois situation, as Lenin had characterized it: 'however strong it may seem militarily, it is internally impotent'? As time would tell, according to E. H. Cart, 'the Russian proletariat, unaided by the other proletariats [elsewhere] and thrown back on its own resources, was unequal, in numbers, in organization and in experience, to the enormous burdens which the revolution had unexpectedly placed on it.'⁴³ This weakness is the tragic key to the aftermath of the world's first proletarian revolution.

    The solution to the problem was infernal: the weakness of the working class elsewhere and its smallness and dispersion in Russia both allowed and impelled the Party to step into the gap.⁴⁴ First, all other parties must be repressed, or allowed to lead only a shadow existence. Then workers' freedom must be repressed: their power to manage, to elect, to voice grievances and expectations. Then, freedom within the party Itself must be restricted. Trotsky voiced the

80

implacable if grotesque logic of the process: 'The Workers' Opposition has come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the party, as it were, as if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy. ... It is necessary to create among us the awareness of the revolutionary historical birthright of the party. The party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering in the spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary vacillations even in the working class. This awareness is for us the indispensable unifying element. The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy, although the workers' democracy is, of course, the only method by which the masses can be drawn more and more into political life.'⁴⁵

    These words betray a striking shift: from the living, breathing workers, with their 'temporary vacillations', to the abstract and now-empty 'principle of a workers' democracy'. The recalcitrant present is appealed to 'the revolutionary historical birthright of the party'. It may be superfluous to comment that the ostensible goal of the entire project – to draw the masses 'more and more into political life' – is rendered quite impossible by a structural orientation intended to override the masses' 'passing moods'.

    This exclusive and dictatorial rule of party over class was the result of a successful proletarian revolution and of a numb, prostrate and shrunken working class. Victorious, the proletarian leadership had been absorbed into the administrative machinery of party, army and state.⁴⁶ This bureaucracy began to become the nerve centre of Soviet Russia and – given the absence of a large and active proletariat in the factories – at the same time substituted itself for the class. As Trotsky's statement eloquently stows, by 1921 they had become rulers, concerned first of all with keeping power. Deutscher's and Cart's analyses both suggest that had Russian society been sufficiently developed, the new rulers might have been forced to pull back, to allow a more mature and rooted working class some control over an advanced economic base. But, the interpretation suggests, the situation forced them to become rulers in order to strengthen the state which would create that base. In response to the crisis, they now sought to secure their ability to do just this by expanding their power

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 81

in every possible direction.

    Thus in vital respects they became rulers in the traditional mould: they focused not on restoring power to the people, but on taking it from them and using it to protect their position. They wanted to make certain things happen to and for the people, and 'in their name'. A large, organized, energetic, articulate, and experienced working class in the factories, even one organically tied to the party, would have restricted them. It would have conceded less power to them; it would have made its demands too loud to suppress. For all their references to the proletariat, the Bolsheviks were determined henceforth to function, in Moshe Lewin's words, as 'a dictatorship in the void'.⁴⁷

    The void caused by proletarian weakness was only the obverse of Russia's other major demographic fact: the vast majority of its people were peasants. The initiation of the New Economic Policy represented a hand stretched out towards that frightening reality of counter-revolutionary Russia – a remarkable concession to reality by urban and future-oriented revolutionaries who feared being overwhelmed by what Roger Pethybridge calls 'the naked confrontation between Bolshevik aspirations and social backwardness.'⁴⁸ Social backwardness, as I have indicated, was defined by these aspirations: the vast majority of Russians, living in the countryside, had just received their land, lived on the borderline between modern civilization and starvation, used wooden ploughs often pulled by themselves, and found their solace in religion and vodka or samogon. The Bolsheviks, of necessity, ruled over this mass of illiterates as a conquered province whose every mood needed close watching. Under the nep, rural Russia, now at peace and relieved of the threat of White restoration, was given the space to develop itself – and feed the country – at its own pace. If the Soviet Union was indeed not ready for socialism, nep was the most tangible proof of and concession to this. In the face of famine, the government restored the free market and an agricultural system based on individual initiative. It gave its way to the 85 per cent of Russia that had supported the revolution only because it meant achieving an age-old dream – private ownership of land.

    As the urban Bolsheviks confronted rural Russia, these activists, who were, in Lewin's words, 'used to deducing the political from the economic and social found themselves in a disturbing situation in

82

which a governing elite devoid of any social basis embodied a kind of "pure political power" and imposed its will on a society whose spontaneous dynamic, under the nep, tended towards ends that were the opposite of those of the party.'⁴⁹ The void in which they found themselves was in fact a "two-storied void", the first being the absence of a proletariat and the second, that of an economic infrastructure.'⁵⁰ For Lenin this meant not merely that the party must struggle to find ways to build the prerequisites of socialism from the human mass of backward peasants – itself a superhuman undertaking. It meant also the ever-present threat of the party's degeneration: 'Something has happened rather like what we learned in our history lessons when we were children: one people subjugates another. The subjugator is then a conquering people and the subjugated a vanquished people. This is true enough, but what happens to the culture of these two peoples? The answer is not so simple. If the conquering people is more cultured than the vanquished people, the stronger imposes its culture on the weaker. But in the opposite case, the vanquished country may impose its culture on the conqueror. Is this not what happened in the capital of the rsfsr, and were not 4,700 of the best Communists (almost a division) submerged by an alien culture? Is it true that one might have the impression that the culture of the vanquished is of a high level? Not so: it is wretched and insignificant. But it is still superior to ours.'⁵¹ Ruling over Russia, the Bolsheviks were mortally threatened from without and within. Finding themselves in a void they strove mightily and with vigilance to keep both their power and their purpose alive-by perpetuating that void. Hence the trend in which the revolution was, in Isaac Deutscher's words, 'beginning to escape from its weakness into totalitarianism.'⁵² If free elections were potentially counter-revolutionary, and workers' democracy would endanger the dictatorship that had come to be the revolution, then any faction calling for workers' democracy had to be banned. Factions were indeed banned. But from then on the party suspended above the masses had to function with an absolute but unwritten law: no one could take intra-party disputes outside to the masses. As Deutscher points out, a party which can allow no freedom to the society it rules ends up by tolerating no freedom inside itself.

    Concessions to individualism and to the anti-socialist character of the peasants worried many of the Bolsheviks: what would become of

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 83

socialist aspirations? Was nep itself another step along the path of growing irrationality? But there was nothing inherently irrational in the encouragement of individual farming and the restoration of the market. The point is that the contrary aspects of the period – freedom of enterprise, and the progressive narrowing of political controls – were in truth dialectically linked. Undertaken by Marxists, could not help but be accompanied by grave self-doubts, criticisms, and fear of a complete reversion to capitalism. The very weight of the threat, the extent to which concessions to it violated socialist intentions, intensified the siege mentality in the party and the pressure for greater uniformity. It was felt that the party must rule over the peasantry and never permit its own outlook to absorb, however unconsciously, the petty-bourgeois attitudes encouraged by nep. To this very day Bukharin is criticized for having absorbed and expressed the ideology of the kulaks. Keeping its distance from the great mass of the people was thus a fundamental operating principle of the party whose ultimate commitment – and historical and moral claim to superiority over all others – was to be at one with and serve the needs of the great mass of people. Reality itself imposed on the Bolsheviks this rupture with reality.

The Bolshevik Perspective in Perspective

Or so it would seem. This would seem to be the likely self-interpretation of a lucid Bolshevik of the early 1920s. As such, Bolshevism's habits of perception and purposes function like unseen lenses through which all situations are perceived, framing the given through which 'reality' and its 'necessities' are experienced. The self-interpretation of historical actors has always been that their actions are imposed by necessity; the victors among them generalize their lenses as norms through which reality itself seems to be speaking. If nothing else, historical hindsight enables us to see the situation as being one of interaction--composed of events and tendencies which took on their meaning in relation to the Bolshevik intentions and modes of perception. If the situation was indeed becoming 'irrational' in 1921 it was so as an interaction between objective and subjective planes of reality, not as an irreducible, irrational given.

    Victory made the Bolshevik subjectivity into a dominant objective

84

force, to be sure; but that was not the only possible way of perceiving the situation in which the revolution found itself. Alternative revolutionary projects did exist, and each defined the situation differently. The anarchist Makhnovist movement, to take one example, controlled large areas of the Ukraine until 1921, fighting off Deniken's White Guards in the name of 'the complete liberation of the Working People from every oppression.'⁵³ The Red Army's victory over it meant the imposition of an authoritarian repressive force, concerned more with party power than workers' or peasants' freedom. The Makhnovists saw the peasants not as the 'huge sack of potatoes'⁵⁴ Marxist lenses insisted they were, but rather as a disciplined, creative and revolutionary force capable of achieving 'the egalitarian, stateless community of workers.'⁵⁵

    Bolshevik social roots, traditions, prejudices, theory, goals and experience all led them to fear and suspect the peasants on whom the Makhnovists had based their movement, and over whom the Bolsheviks now ruled. Later Marxists, perceiving the peasants and their own situation differently, were to base themselves in the countryside – in successful insurrections in Yugoslavia. China and Vietnam – but no thought could have been further from the Bolshevik mind.

    If the suppression of the Makhnovists thus took on the force of necessity to the Bolsheviks, what about the suppression of Kronstadt? Or the integration of trade unions? Or the outlawing of party factions, the proclamation of nep? In short, were there meaningful alternatives within the framework institutionalized by the Civil War? Certainly retrospective lucidity would insist that a more rational policy may be imagined: one capable of halting the dynamic which eventually substituted Stalin for the Soviet proletariat, and moving more deliberately towards socialism. A more rational policy would have allowed for independent trade unions, recognition of all  political parties which accepted the revolution and acceptance of factions within Bolshevism, while pushing for a planned economy with stress on building cooperative collective farms. A rational dictatorship of the proletariat would have continued to train and equip workers to rule, and sought to keep alive their power from the shop floor through the party cells to the Soviets. David Rousset, for example, emphasizes that only trade-union democracy could have possibly avoided the organic break 'of the Bolshevik party from the proletariat

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 85

at the point of production'⁵⁶ which he sees as the structural root of the revolution's undoing.

    A more rational policy then, might have made fewer accommodations to the non-socialist sector of the economy while drawing less power into Bolshevik hands: the emphasis on tolerance and concession might have shifted from the economic to the political sphere, taking the place of the emphasis on control. This would have meant sharing power. Could the party have moved in this direction? If a lucid self-interpretation tends to transform its subject's commitments and modes of perception into unseen givens, retrospective lucidity courts the opposite danger – of imagining a situation that could have been severed from the subjective lenses of its dominant forces. Since the situation consisted of the interaction of 'objective' trends with 'subjective' commitments and presuppositions, we must neither be seduced by the Bolshevik self-interpretation of necessity, as if that gave us the situation, nor Ignore Bolshevik lenses, as if the situation could have existed independently of them.

    One decisive lens of Bolshevism – the very basis for its spilt with the Mensheviks In 1903 – was the idea of the vanguard party. What Is To Be Done specifies that, because the spontaneous struggles of workers lead only to trade-union consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness can only 'be brought to them from without'⁵⁷ by a 'small, compact core'⁵⁸ of professional theoreticians, propagandists, agitators and organizers. 1917 saw a reversal in Bolshevik practice and, with State and Revolution, in theory as well; the following years however, brought a reversion to the theory and practice of the original primer of Leninism. There, as Herbert Marcuse has pointed out, 'Lenin aimed beyond the exigencies of the specific Russian situation, at a general international development in Marxism, which in turn reflected the trend of large selections of organized labor toward "class cooperation". As this trend increased, it threatened to vitiate the notion of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject on which the whole Marxist strategy depended. Lenin's formulations intended to save Marxian orthodoxy from the reformist onslaught, but they soon became part of a conception that no longer assumed the historical coincidence between the proletariat and progress which the notion of the "labour aristocracy" still retained. The groundwork was laid for the development of the Leninist party where the true interest and the true consciousness of the proletariat were lodged in a group

86

different from the majority of the proletariat.'⁵⁹

    The vanguard party implies that the proletariat's own 'natural' course of development does not coincide with, and may even run counter to, the role Marx assigned it. Such an outlook suggested a sense of the party as more advanced than its class, of its ability to appeal to the truth of a situation as being beyond that situation itself, as well as a sense of bitter hostility to all other parties who might mislead the proletariat. As the party more and more becomes the active locus and subject of the revolution the class more and more becomes its raw material and object. But to carry this self-consciously Jacobin idea to its extreme conclusion is to negate the very idea of proletarian revolution. History, of course, decided otherwise.

    The revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 flatly contradicted Lenin's sense of the limitations of the spontaneous consciousness of the proletariat – by creating the Soviets and overthrowing the Tsar – and he saw the need to formulate a more revolutionary perspective on its capacities, in order to bring the party in line with both experience and possibility. State and Revolution, written in August and September, was '"interrupted" by a political crisis – the eve of the October Revolution of 1917.'⁶⁰ In it be threw off the established 'Leninist' lenses he had used since 1902 – explicitly criticizing the very Jacobin passages in Kautsky he had leaned on before, and insisting now that under socialism 'for the first time in the history of civilized societies, the mass of the population will need to take an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration.'⁶¹ Earlier Lenin had accepted and extended Kautsky's attack on the 'primitive democracy' which absurdly demanded 'that laws should be passed directly by the whole people'⁶² and emphasized instead the need for professional revolutionaries and officials. Now he defined revolution as 'the proletariat destroying the "administrative apparatus" and the whole state machine, replacing it with a new one, consisting of the armed worker.'⁶³

    The old lenses could not have truly seen the new situation, but the revolutionary commitment underlying them prevailed to shape a view more in keeping with the actual behaviour of the Russian proletariat in 1917. The Bolsheviks became a mass party, taking it upon themselves to express the most radical moods of the proletariat, to organize their militia and, ultimately, to direct their seizure of power.

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 87

One consequence of the Civil War was that by 1921 the revolution had become a party affair. While theoretically the Bolsheviks had always seen themselves as representing the working class's deepest long-range needs, the actual conjuncture of Bolshevik policy and proletarian self-consciousness in revolutionary practice had turned out to be episodic – only by midsummer 1917 could they be said to have won majority support. As is obvious from parliamentary experience, such support could in the future be withdrawn, and then perhaps returned once again.

    Now, by 1921, it became alarmingly clear just how episodic was this conjuncture of party and class. The Bolsheviks could not help but revert to their old lenses, droning on about being the party of the working class even against these workers, who after all were now just recruits fresh from the countryside. They knew all too well that in the crisis this actually existing working class was ceasing to follow them and tending to see other groups, whether anarchists or the newly revived Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, as expressing its aspirations and grievances. Moreover, the Bolsheviks could not help but interpret the crisis that led to nep as confirming both the backwardness and the dominant socio-economic weight of non-proletarian Russia. Ruling over this populace and convinced that it must not have a share in power, the Bolsheviks yet felt the need to grant concessions to its menacing reality. A more socialist-oriented solution than nep might have had unacceptable political over-tones – encouraging, for example, peasant-controlled collective farming. Instead, the political monopoly tightened even as – and because – individual farming was encouraged. The least socialist solution, it was also the one most in keeping with the strengthening of the Bolshevik monopoly.

    Would free elections to the Soviets or free trade unions have meant the destruction of the revolution? Certainly the rulers would not have been re-elected. The point is that in the trial by fire since 1917 Bolshevik power had become indistinguishable from the revolution. For them to risk that power after the Civil War was in-conceivable – all the more so given the ingrained Leninist conviction that the party reflected the long-range interests of the workers even against their short-range inclinations. Indeed, had not their victory in fact been the victory of the proletariat and vice-versa? The victors of the Civil War were above all determined to preserve the revolution,

88

even if against the spontaneous and temporary moods of the working class in whose name and with whose active participation it was achieved. Free elections to the Soviets were therefore unthinkable – especially because in their view an immature working class misled by other parties would have forced the Bolsheviks to share their power.

    Whatever it may have meant in the underground struggle against the Tsar or in opposition to reformism, with the Bolsheviks holding state power this vanguard conception now meant that they were fully ready to become usurpers installed over the working class in its name. As this usurpation became possible and seemed necessary, however, it initiated an irreversible process. Using their power against the working class, they leaned heavily on and inflated all those aspects of Bolshevik tradition in which they saw themselves as embodying its wisdom over and against it. In the wake of Kronstadt, they would henceforth seek to revive the working class, enlarge it, educate it – while keeping it passive and firmly under control by the party.

    This, the great contradiction of the Bolshevik revolution, meant that the party inevitably raised itself high above its class – and Russian society as a whole – and thus ceased being what its Marxism had insisted it must be: the organic expression of the vital modern productive force. The repression of Kronstadt was one decisive step in this detachment, epitomized in the Bolshevik refusal even to negotiate with the rebels. They arrested their representatives, and blamed the workers' and sailors' revolt on White Guards – all acts of a party separating itself from its social base in order to rule over it.

The Need for Mystification

The rupture took place in consciousness as well as in politics. En route to becoming a ruling class, the dominant wing in the party had not only to articulate what was to be done, but also to integrate it into their outlook, to behold it and find it both Marxist and good. The Bolshevik lenses I have described took shape out of a commitment to socialist revolution: in the face of the disjuncture between 'progress and the proletariat' they had sustained a path to the socialist future. But now, in decisive respects, the party itself was veering away from

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 89

that future. As this happened, the Bolshevik self-conception itself became more and more detached from the reality of Russia in the mid 1920s: Marxism, the great critique of ideology, was itself becoming ideology. And in the process the vision itself absorbed the reality, more and more grotesquely, with ever greater distortion.

    Certainly oppositionists continued to voice the socialist promise against this sorry reality, trying to open the party's eyes to the contradiction. At the centre of the party, Lenin himself had emphasized in 1921 the distortion of those who saw themselves as 'representatives of the proletariat' when the proletariat itself was virtually nonexistent. In response he was taunted by Shlyapnikov, on behalf of the Workers' Opposition, at the 1922 Eleventh Party Congress: 'Vladimir Ilyich said yesterday that the proletariat as a class, in the Marxian sense, did not exist [in Russia]. Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a non-existing class.'⁶⁴

    An open exchange of such lucid ironies was becoming rare indeed. To see the facts for too long and too dearly was to illegitimize party rule, and worse, to call in question the revolution itself. If I have presented critically the self-interpretation of a lucid Bolshevism, let us be clear that even with its limitations it has been a product of historical retrospect. At the time, only Lenin in the mainstream seemed to approach such lucidity, and even then only for occasional moments. The full force of the contradictions into which Bolshevism had stumbled had become impossible to acknowledge without moving into the opposition, letting go of the levers of power, and risking being cut off from the revolution itself, instead, the dominant Bolsheviks began to veil and distort their own mode of perception.

    The urge to escape the contradictions appears in the enthusiasm for electrification of the early 1920s, as Marxists confronted the still primitive character of the society they had conquered. Roger Pethybridge quotes from a 1921 poster-poem of Mayakovsky which shows the futurist vision confronting the sceptical bourgeois:

At electrification his eyes bulged a bit,

'Utopia,' he said, 'nothing will come of it'.

Just you wait, bourgeoisie.

There'll be New York in Tetushakh

There'll be paradise in Shuee.⁶⁵

The fantasy of what the future would bring to these two remote

90

villages was pathetically contradicted by reality: when a huge map was lit up at the party congress of 1920 to show Russia's future hydroelectric plants, the electric power of most of Moscow had to be cut off to avoid overstraining its power station.

    Pethybridge's point is that the fantasy itself was an evasion of Russian reality: 'the existing state of society seemed such a rebuttal of Bolshevik aspirations that it was more comforting to neglect it by looking beyond.'⁶⁶ This escape was fatal: 'the tensions between theory and reality in the social sphere eventually contributed to the political climate that led to Stalinism.'⁶⁷

Perhaps the crowning irrationality of the 1920s was the elevation of the party to divine status. We have seen how the situation led to isolating and elevating the party over the workers as well as the rest of Russian society. We have seen this expressed in Trotsky's attack on the Workers' Opposition and Decemists: the party 'is entitled' to reject the 'moods' of the proletariat and exert a dictatorship over the whole of society. Three years later, as he was falling from power and under attack, Trotsky represented and extended this view of the party even as he rejected Zinoviev's call for recantation. As a relatively recent convert to Bolshevism, he may have felt impelled to demonstrate unwavering loyalty in the midst of a fierce struggle; but Trotsky was nevertheless voicing his own and the party's abiding mood, and drew its conclusions with his usual relentless brilliance. 'Nothing could be simpler or easier, morally or politically, than to admit before one's own party that one had erred. ... No great moral heroism is needed for that. ... Comrades, none of us wishes to be or can be right against the party. In the last instance the party is always right, because it is the only historic instrument which the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks. I have said already that nothing would be easier than to say before the party that all these criticisms and all these declarations, warnings, and protests were mistaken from beginning to end. I cannot say so, however, because, comrades, I do not think so. I know that one ought not to be right against the party. One can he right only with the party and through the party because history was not created any other way for the realization of one's rightness. The English have the saying "My country right or wrong." With much greater justification we can say: My party, right or wrong – wrong on certain partial, specific issues or at certain moments. ... It would be ridiculous, perhaps, almost inde-

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 91

cent, to make any personal statements here, but I do hope that in case of need I shall not prove the meanest soldier on the meanest of Bolshevik barricades.'⁶⁸

    This growing religion of the party originated as a response to the impossible situation. A guardian of historical truth became increasingly necessary in a situation which so violently mocked that truth. Connected to this is the mythology we have seen emerging about the party's relationship to the Soviet working class. Deutscher describes the process of its formation: 'Acting without the normal working class in the background, the Bolshevik from long habit still invoked the will of that class in order to justify whatever he did. But he invoked it only as a theoretical surmise and an ideal standard of behaviour, in short, something of a myth. He began to see in his party the repository not only of the ideal of socialism in the abstract, but also of the desires of the working class in the concrete. When a Bolshevik, from the Politbureau member to the humblest man in a cell, declaimed that "the proletariat insists" or "demands" or "would never agree" to this or that, he meant that his party or its leaders "insisted," "demanded," and "would never agree." Without this half-conscious mystification the Bolshevik mind could not work. The party could not admit even to itself that it had no longer any basis in proletarian democracy.'⁶⁹

    If they found themselves in a contradictory situation by 1921, the Bolsheviks lived the contradiction between ideology and reality in part, by losing touch with reality, by distorting it, by lying about it. Only in part, of course: the nep showed remarkable sensitivity towards reality at a time of crisis. At the Tenth Party Congress Lenin emphasized that 'so long as there is no revolution in other countries, only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia. And that is how it must be stated, frankly, at all meetings and in the entire press.'⁷⁰ At the Eleventh Party Congress Lenin again emphasized the absolutely central place of the smychka with the peasants. 'Then the building of socialism will not be the task of that drop in the ocean, called the Communist Party, but the task of the entire mass of the working people.'⁷¹

In spite of such moments of clarity the distortion and the lie became, inevitably, a part of Bolshevism's essence, in accordance with – and in proportion to – the narrowing of its circle of power. We will see this paradox intensify to a point of explosion: Russia's lack of maturity in Marxist terms, the Bolsheviks' impotence to achieve the

92

socialism for which they had come to power, led to one of the most powerful state apparatuses in the history of the world; this state apparatus, constructed in a carefully maintained 'void', came to base itself on wholesale distortion and grotesque irrationality. Already, at Lenin's funeral in 1924, the tendency was explicit in Stalin's medieval prayer to the memory of Lenin: 'On his departure from us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to revere and maintain the purity of the name of the party member. We swear, comrade Lenin, that we will faithfully carry out this command! .... On his departure from us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to safeguard, like the pupil of our eye, the unity of our party. We swear, Comrade Lenin, that we will faithfully carry out this command.'⁷²

Stalin Versus Trotsky

On 17 January 1928, gpu agents hustled Leon Trotsky, the leader of the October Revolution, and his family out of Moscow. Exiled to Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan, near the Chinese frontier, Trotsky would never return to Russia or to political power. Kept unnoticed by gpu deception, this momentous departure was both finale and prelude. That the revolution should deport one of its great leaders was given appropriately ironic punctuation by the fact that the commander of the accompanying guards had served in Trotsky's bodyguard during the Civil War. The process and events leading to this event show a further widening of the distance of the leaders of the Soviet Union both from the class in whose name they ruled and the masses over whom they ruled: the dramatic stifling of political life within the Communist Party; the fatal extension of the process of substitution; reliance on ever more grotesque forms of mythmaking; and the development of the characteristic forms of Stalinist legitimation – the quasi-religious cult of Lenin, the rewriting of history, the use of the big lie, the demand for recantation from defeated opponents.

    The fundamental differences that emerged between Trotsky and Stalin during the 1920s can be explained by the disintegration of the worldwide revolutionary movement catalyzed by October. Thus, in another example of the lucid self-interpretation of Bolshevism, Jean-Paul Sartre has analyzed the 'monstrous' slogan of the victors' 'socialism in one country', as a response to the impossible situation

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 93

into which revolutionary Russia awoke in the 1920s. 'Soviet isolation was first and foremost that of a monstrosity: an underdeveloped country moving without any transition from a feudal system to socialist forms of production and property.'⁷³ For the revolution to succeed in its own terms – to become socialist – required international revolution; for the Soviet Union to survive required turning inward, consolidation, construction. Events had made impossible the unified Bolshevik project – of achieving socialism in Russia as part of a worldwide revolutionary movement – and so it now split into what became seen as mutually antagonistic intentions of radicalizing or surviving. The contradiction became complete as these two irrational fragments of the once unified project proclaimed themselves wholly true when, fundamentally, neither was. On the one hand, 'permanent revolution' risked the Soviet Union, where socialism had indeed taken power. On the other, socialism could scarcely be constructed in a single country, least of all a backward and impoverished one: the victorious slogan, while relieving the Soviet Union of the responsibility for promoting world revolution, also claimed that its backward masses could achieve the impossible by themselves. A tragic necessity, isolation, was mythologized into a matter of national pride as well as an excuse for pursuing a cautious and unrevolutionary foreign policy. The 'abstract universalism' of Marxism, preserving the image of worldwide socialist liberation, became Trotskyism, while its real incarnation in backward Russia became Stalinism. By distorting consciousness, the false became true.

    The most striking feature of Sartre's discussion is his emphasis on how the false became true in Soviet Russia, in fact as well as consciousness. While socialism was impossible in backward Russia, the revolution led by socialists did indeed triumph. Under Stalin's slogan it proceeded to build 'an order based on the fundamental socialization of land and machines, under emergency conditions and through continual sacrifices of everything to the most rapid possible increase in the rate of production.'⁷⁴ Certainly socialism in a single country became 'synonymous with hell,' but it also became 'the matrix for the institutionalization of the Russian Revolution.'⁷⁵

    In other words, a false idea was the response to an impossible situation. Adopted, it became the guide to accommodating socialism to Russia and to transforming the latter: 'The adaptation of this highly specific reality to the new exigencies was to be long, arduous and

94

embattled. But what was essential had been preserved. The transformations had to be violent but they were no longer required to be revolutionary. In this way, the monstrous slogan acquired a practical truth, because it really was the idea of that monstrous hut inevitable transformation: of that distorted praxis, whose particular distortion was nevertheless the reality (and therefore the truth) of an incarnation which transcended itself in an undertaking which it conditioned at the outset and which remained qualified by it.'⁷⁶

    Sartre certainly makes such distortions sound absolutely necessary, if the revolution were to survive. But as Moshe Lewin points out, such necessity also retained a great element of chance at its centre. One leader had seemed capable of calling the monstrosity by its true name; of refusing to give in to ideological distortions which hid the possibilities of the situation: of laying hold of both vision and reality and avoiding the fracture in the party which the revolution's position seemed to impose – in short, of uniting in his person the political stature, moral authority, intellectual acuity, popularity, and devotion to the revolution's goals necessary to keep the original Bolshevik project intact. But Lenin – never mentioned by Sartre – was incapacitated by late 1922 and died in January 1924 – an accident of history which certainly undercuts Sartre's necessitarian formulations.

    What if Lenin had lived? Lewin argues that it was not inevitable that left-wing dictatorship had to 'degenerate into a personal, despotic and irrational dictatorship.' While only 'daring reforms' could have counteracted the tendencies of the bureaucratic machine that had emerged from the Civil War, Lewin insists that 'there was nothing essentially utopian about Lenin's aim of achieving a rational dictatorial regime, with men of integrity at its head and efficient institutions working consciously to be beyond both underdevelopment and dictatorship.' But such plans could remain only subjective 'wishes' 'in the absence of a capable and undisputed leader.' Lenin's untimely death removed that leader: 'the embalming of his body and the cult of his person helped to dissimulate a type of dictatorship utterly foreign to his plans.'

    Lewin does not underestimate the difficulties even Lenin would have had in reversing the situation and reforming the party. But by 1922 this had become his goal, and only illness and death kept him from making a determined effort to remove Stalin. He may have fail-

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 95

ed, even with his skills, his reputation, and his determination. But if anyone could have prevented what became the Stalinist excesses, it was Lenin. 'As the founder Lenin was not afraid of unmaking and remaking what he had made with his own hands. He was not afraid of organizing the people around him, of plotting, of fighting for the victory of his line and of keeping the situation under control. Trotsky was not such a man. Lenin disappeared and Stalin was assured of victory.'⁷⁷

An Irrational Situation

It is certainly part of the irrationality of the situation that Trotsky became the mythical enemy and Anti-Christ of the revolution only after he was defeated. This may have dawned on many of those who encountered 'Trotskylsm' first through the eyes of the Comintern, and found out only later that this mighty foe was no more than an insignificant sect. Indeed, Trotsky had already been bested by the time of Lenin's death, so much so that the succession was never in doubt. It was no accident that Trotsky, travelling to a rest cure, should have learnt of Lenin's death by a code message from Stalin which lied to him about the funeral day. Thus Trotsky continued his trip while Stalin made himself the most prominent of the mourners. The result of the momentous contest between Stalin and Trotsky was strictly predetermined by the fact that effective power had been in Stalin's hands since 1922.

    Historians tend to present the conflicts of the 1920s as the most articulate protagonists saw them: locked in life-and-death debates about the great policy issues affecting 'the fate of 160 million people; and the destinies of Communism in Europe and Asia.'⁷⁸ But two puzzling interrelated features of the Trotsky-Stalin conflict point to the deepening 'irrationality of the contest. First, the major oppositionists of the 1920s – not only Trotsky, but also Zinoviev and Kamenev, and later Bukharin – remained strikingly obtuse about the real issue, Stalin's accumulation of despotic power. Second, as Deutscher says, 'this great contest took place in a frightful void. On either side only small groups were involved.'⁷⁹ The interaction of Marxist blindness and the reality of Bolshevik power doomed any and all oppositions, and intensified the irrational course of the

96

revolution.

    So blind to the decisive political process was Trotsky that as late as 1926-27 he was able to proclaim as the paramount principle of the Joint Opposition: 'With Stalin against Bukharin? – Yes. With Bukharin against Stalin? – Never.'⁸⁰ In other words, the reigning social and economic considerations dictated a possible alliance with 'centrist' Stalin but never with 'rightist' Bukharin. Bukharin was himself so obtuse to the political process taking place that he contributed to destroying party democracy, without which he himself was destined to be helpless once Stalin decided to change course. When Stalin stole Trotsky's thunder and displaced Bukharin in 1928-29 by his push for rapid industrialization, it should have become clear to both that their Marxist disposition to emphasize social and economic 'substance' over political 'form' had blinded them to the most important changes taking place in the 1920s: the separation of the party from the proletariat and of the leadership from the party apparatus, whose apex of decision-making progressively narrowed until it was wholly dominated by the General Secretary; and the final elimination of all opposition to the latter's domination.⁸¹

    Their Platform, drafted in October 1928, leaves no doubt of the Joint Opposition's primary concern with the social and economic 'base' of Soviet society rather than its political 'superstructure'. In that respect it was on the whole an excellent critique and a plausible programme, projecting a rational Left path towards voluntary cooperatives and greater industrial development and planning, as well as defending the economic rights of workers and poor and middle peasants. In this last sense it would have changed the thrust of the smychka with the peasantry towards those who had most to gain from a more explicitly socialist course. In addition, it rejected – shortly before the Great Depression began – the thesis of capitalist stabilization upon which 'socialism in one country' was based, and sought a more militant international in anticipation of a revival of imperialist aggressiveness and, perhaps, of socialist opportunity.

    The programme of the Joint Opposition, in short, projected a course that would have been far more foresighted and humane, as well as effective, than the convulsive 'Great Change' initiated by Stalin two years later. As such, it has for fifty years been the locus of Marxist criticism of Stalinism, achieving the status of the rational

Why. Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 97

alternative which, tragically, was not to be followed.

    The Platform, like many of those whose sense of subsequent history has been shaped by it, makes a single but decisive mistake: it assumes 'that the situation can be corrected by the party itself.'⁸² The circumstances of its drafting, as well as its form, tone and content reflect the Opposition's determination to persuade the party politically to a new course even though, in terms of structure and personnel, it was becoming drastically different from the one that had made the revolution. Certainly the Opposition could count on several thousand supporters among the Old Bolsheviks, perhaps as many as Stalin and Bukharin.⁸³ But beneath this thin layer was a vast inert mass, members who had joined more recently and who had little commitment to, or experience of, disagreement, debate and democracy. For them the party was the new avenue of advancement, and their relationship to it was structured by the hierarchies and routines of the newly developing system of privilege and power. If Trotsky and his followers still thought and acted in terms of a party, most of these party masses were now candidates for the machine: they were not revolutionaries so much as a part of the emerging ruling class. Their adherence to a risky Left deviation was the last thing to be expected.

    Manipulated by Stalin, this apparatus had blocked Trotsky at every turn at least since Lenin's death, slowly but inexorably narrowing the ground on which he stood, often with his own cooperation. 'Trotskyism' had already been described as a deviation from Leninism; oppositionists had lost their positions and been deprived of access to other party members, at congresses or in print, and were being hounded from the party. In fact, the Joint Opposition 'offensive' culminating in the Platform may equally be seen as their last gasp, the defensive and impotent response of people fighting for their political lives.

    Placed in this context, the Platform reads as an act of uncomprehending blindness, a futile show of intellectual acuity in a situation dominated by a deaf-and-dumb party machine, a test of strength in an internal battle that had already been lost. If anything, the real situation dictated a different kind of struggle for the party, or an appeal beyond it: who could have better sensed this than the tactician of October, the orator of the revolution and organizer of the Red Army? Yet the Platform both presumes an articulate, informed,

98

politicized, enfranchised audience that no longer existed and leaves the life-and-death issue – the stifling of that audience along with party democracy – as one topic among others, even then treating it only briefly.

    Following its introduction, the Platform speaks about the working class and the trade unions (reaffirming the prohibition on strikes in state-owned industries), the 'agrarian question', industrialization and economic planning, the Soviets, and the national question – all before discussing the party. Only as his fifth point under this topic does Trotsky attack the 'systematic abolition of inner-party democracy – in violation of the whole tradition of the Bolshevik Party, in violation of the direct decisions of a series of party congresses.'⁸⁴

    Why no frontal attack in these few months before Trotsky's political career would be forcibly ended? Not only did the Opposition face almost overwhelming tactical problems; not only was its great leader blocked from seeing the party, 'the fundamental instrument of the proletarian revolution', as almost hopelessly corrupted; but the developments themselves were virtually unintelligible in traditional Marxist terms. Trotsky's fidelity to Marxist categories veiled the situation from him; and so did the reformulation of Marxism in which he had been a leading force.

Marxism as Ideology

Marxism became ideology to the exact extent that all party leaders sought to obscure the structures that had come to dominate Soviet life. They had built into their new society the domination of Russia by a small, beleaguered and disciplined minority. By absorbing into itself most of its own surviving class base – and then deciding, at Kronstadt, to treat as treason challenges from the remaining class base lying outside of itself – the ruling party created the decisive structures of the new Soviet Union. Opposition parties accepted the rules of the new situation, yet still hoped to appeal against the Communist Party to the masses. Because they challenged the very separation from and suppression of the vast majority which had become a central condition of Communist rule, they were inevitably regarded as treasonous and themselves suppressed.

    The Bolshevik opposition groups – in a party whose very revolu-

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 99

tionary hallmark was its intimate contacts with the masses – implicitly threatened to carry their criticisms and appeals beyond the party. Was this reaching out not implied in the very programme of the Workers' Opposition, which sought workers' control in the factories? But even while some Old Bolsheviks criticized the party for being ruled by a clique, and demanded that the Twelfth Congress (1923) should overrule the 1921 ban on inner-party groups, Zinoviev formulated what Deutscher terms the canon of Bolshevik self-suppression: 'Every criticism of the party line, even a so-called "Left" criticism, is now objectively a Menshevik criticism.'⁸⁵ Zinoviev presented the iron logic of the bureaucracy ruling over society as if it were a conquered territory: all criticism is treason. We can also see in this statement a drastic slippage taking place in which revolutionaries who had prided themselves on hardheaded realism seem now, in power, to be losing contact with reality. A lie replaces the truth.

    The reason is tied up with the self-interpretation of Bolshevism itself. Minority rule is not necessarily irrational; nor is minority rule of an urban-rooted party over the countryside necessarily irrational. But minority rule is irrational if the rulers' claim to legitimacy comes from a mass base that is being suppressed by their rule. Irrational, because such rule embodies a deep conflict between its purposes, outlook, and original bases of support on the one hand, and the real nature of its power and functioning on the other. Since neither side of the contradiction can be abandoned, reason itself abandons the field to unreason, analysis to mythology.

    Marxism became ideology – became a weapon of distortion – not in spite of but because of its democratic outlook. Unlike Tsarism, it drew its justification from revolutionary origins which depended on a mass base. For Bolsheviks their power meant rule by the organized and conscious arm of the proletariat; and in Marxism proletarian rule had always meant the rule of the vast majority. As a twentieth-century movement with a democratic ideology, Lenin's Bolshevism had broken with Tsarism's emphasis on birthright and religion. But whereas Tsarism had no need to convince its subjects that they were a ruling class, Bolshevism emphatically did. The Bolsheviks suffered a deep contradiction between socialism as democratic ideology motivating them and justifying their rule on the one hand, and socialism as the reality of their Jacobin dictatorship over the proletariat and the rest of the population on the other. As their power-

100

base narrowed within the society and the party, there was a greater and greater need for a network of lies and intellectual distortions which would reconcile noble democratic aspirations with the growing monolith. Hence Zinoviev's reference to 'objectivity': the need for myth implies a need for interpreters, transferring to the party the power to decide what critics meant, regardless of their intention.

    In the same period party critics found guilty of 'errors' began to feel pressure to recant: to disavow their 'mistakes' publicly and praise the correct line. And at the same time we see the first steps in rewriting history. Trotsky's 'literary struggle' ends up with his 'errors' being found as far back as 1903. These grotesque violations of sense have their roots in the flight from the inadmissable Bolshevik contradiction: that the workers' state was becoming a bureaucratic monolith.

    Having himself been instrumental in creating this monolith, having challenged none of the steps towards the saddling of Politbureau on party or party on proletariat, Trotsky yet rejected the full force of its irrational and oppressive logic. He demanded a return to inner-party democracy by 1924. But the apparatus, controlled from the top by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, turned this struggle into a virtual trial of the Opposition at the Thirteenth Party Congress. Trotsky and his allies were found guilty of a 'petty-bourgeois deviation from Leninism.⁸⁶ In non-mythological terms – which were becoming more and more rare in party discussions – Trotsky had tried to open up more space for genuine discussion and debate while accepting all the premisses that had led to their suppression. Indeed, he never rejected the Bolshevik monopoly of power, or demanded freedom for opposition parties.

    Now, in 1926 and 1927, he stopped short of the only step which might have given force to his demands and which was a natural one to the great revolutionary orator – appealing to the masses. His defeat was therefore assured. In the end, the only 'mass' protest he attempted was the wretched demonstration by his party followers within the parades celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution. And by then it was far too late.

    Caught in a trap of his own making, he could only struggle from within as it was sprung, unable to step outside and challenge it properly. He fought, in effect, for a Bolshevik monopoly without its consequences. No wonder he was seen as inconsistent. We have seen Trotsky pay homage to the party. By 1926 the trend had gone so far

Why? Toward a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 101

as to demand worshipful self-abasement from all party members. Infallibility, recantation, rewriting history, the call for denunciation of those who voiced contrary sentiments, the labelling of all opposition as treason: this was the path into which its objective and subjective reality was urging Bolshevism by 1927.

Trotsky as Anti-Christ

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Stalin-Trotsky conflict is the emergence of Trotsky as Anti-Christ of the revolution. By the 1930s he became the Enemy personified, blamed for all that was wrong in the Soviet Union, the evil but somehow inept genius behind the fictional plots found everywhere, the sinister inspiration for most of the millions of poor souls executed or exiled to the Gulag Archipelago, and the prime traitor of the revolution, busy selling out his country to the Western powers. In 1931 Stalin was to give this appraisal: 'Some think that Trotskyism is a school of thought within Communism, a faction which has, to be sure, committed mistakes, done not a few silly things, and even behaved at times in an anti-Soviet manner; but that it is all the same a Communist faction. It is hardly necessary to point out that such a view of Trotskyism Is profoundly mistaken and harmful. Actually, Trotskyism is the spearhead of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, waging the struggle against Communism ....'⁸⁷

    Most of this story lies ahead, but for now it is important to see that an increasingly irrational intensity came to surround the protagonists as the battle for different policies became a mortal struggle, as erstwhile comrades became deadly enemies. We have seen opposition within the party begin to appear as treason after 1921: already by 1924 'Trotskyism' was becoming named and regarded as a 'deviation' from Leninism. Why?

    Certainly 'Trotskyism' was a deliberate and cynical invention of the triumvirs – Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev – in their battle against the opposition.⁸⁸ But the hostility bad its own reality, and seems very early to have overflowed any rational intention. The point is that 'the revolution' was becoming a more and more irrational amalgam. And as such it was becoming more and more vulnerable to assertions of its original commitments. By criticizing the loss of inner-party demo-

102

cracy, the abandonment of international revolution and the encouragement of private farming, Trotsky was doing far more than criticizing specific policies: he was judging the revolution by its own repressed yardstick, threatening to puncture the irrational whole and let in the light. This threat of truth gained in force by going hand in hand with proposals to recall the betrayed revolution to its original self. Old Bolsheviks, after all, had withstood exile and Tsarist prisons on behalf of the vision for which Trotsky was beginning to act as spokesman. Trotsky's importance as threat was in exact proportion to the Bolsheviks' need to mythologize: the degree to which reality had to be veiled was the degree to which someone unveiling even a part – and Trotsky never unveiled more than a part of it – would threaten it.

    But how threaten? Trotsky was from the beginning outnumbered and outmanoeuvred in a contest for power which he had never waged more than halfheartedly. We can understand the force and fury he evoked only if we treat ideology as real, as a decisive component of the new amalgam of fact and myth which the Soviet Union was becoming. Trotsky threatened that amalgam not only by his specific complaints, but by being an oppositional voice of considerable authority. No such voice could be allowed to speak freely where rational discussion had become impossible. The force with which Trotsky was now denounced was the very force with which the Bolsheviks had to deny the real nature of revolutionary Russia and its distance from socialist aspirations. In this sense we may say that Trotsky as Anti-Christ was created by the praxis of the revolution itself: praxis understood not only as constructive political activity but as the accompanying process of distortion.

    If this were not enough to define Trotsky as Enemy, one other fact was calculated to drive his former comrades into a frenzy: implied in Trotskyism, as in every form of opposition in a society whose rulers are usurpers, is the threat to appeal to the masses – first in the party, then in the factories, and finally in the countryside. A great revolutionary orator, Trotsky the oppositionist might sooner or later violate the fundamental credo of Bolshevik political life and carry his dissent beyond the party, even if he had no intention of doing so. His exile came, in fact, as a direct consequence of his followers' demonstrating publicly. As inevitably as the dialectic of Bolshevik minority rule in the Soviet Union destroyed inner-party democracy, would not such an effort to

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 103

restore party democracy destroy Bolshevik minority rule? Thus, the underlying irrationality of the revolution, was the underlying basis for the furious response to Trotsky.⁸⁹ The rupture with reality on the one level, paralleled by and causing a similar rupture of ideology from reality, led to the Bolsheviks making into Anti-Christ the one among them who insisted on speaking with their original voice. As such he would be attacked with a progressively more insane frenzy that only grew throughout the 1930s. Whatever he actually said, he always meant more to those who attacked him: he stood for all that they betrayed and denied. Thus Bolsheviks had to describe Trotsky as other than a Leninist – now as a petty bourgeois, now as a semi-Menshevik, now as an agent of the bourgeosie, now as a fascist.

The Great Change

On 27 December 1929, in the midst of the collectivization drive, Stalin declared the 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class'. This mad project beat the countryside into a coma from which it has yet to recover. Breaking with deepest Marxist principles, it was based instead on utopian dreaming, mythology – and brute force. We have already taken several steps towards describing the increasingly irrational universe in which it took shape. 'The Great Change', however, was just that: it crossed the line between mere irrationality and a far more severe rupture with reality. Indeed, the word 'rupture' suggests both subjective and objective act, both withdrawal into a world of the mind peopled by fantasies and a violent attack on the actual world. We can glimpse both sides of the transformation in a famous passage Stalin published just before the assault: 'We are becoming a metal country, a motorized country, a tractorized country. And when we have seated the ussr on an automobile and the peasant on a tractor – let the esteemed capitalists, who boast about their "civilization", try to catch us up then. We will then be able to see which countries can be "classified" among the backward and which among the advanced.'⁹⁰

    The historically-based Marxist vision of a confident proletariat battling the haughty capitalist has been replaced by fantasies of a backward Russia catching up with the West. Yet, ominously, this vision contains more than dreaming: Stalin's determination to make it happen is evident.

104

    Living according to fantasy – in the sense of trying to bring the impossible into being – became acceptable in these years. Indeed, the term 'vulgar realist' was coined to disparage those who doubted that the Soviet Union could both industrialize and modernize agriculture overnight. The gradualist vision of the 'pessimists' was replaced by the voices of men like S. G. Strumulin, a Stalinist planner: 'We are bound by no laws. There are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm.'⁹¹ The decisive November 1929 plenum of the Central Committee saw the forced influx of peasants into collective farms as proof 'that the construction of socialism in a country governed by dictatorship of the proletariat can be carried out with a speed never before known in history.'⁹²

    These visions, of course, were false even when they were uttered. False but used and believed, and because of that effective. Even if some thought it mad, did not 'The Great Change' industrialize the Soviet Union, transform agriculture, and drive out illiteracy: did not the false actually become true? When single individuals depart so far from reality we term it madness. But, Stalin insisted, '[t]he people in the Politbureau and Sovnarkom are sober and calm.'⁹³ These sober men led an entire society to leap over the customary boundaries of reason, into behaviour whose goal was to transform reality until it came in line with their vision.

    The 'madness' of the ruling faction was threefold: a drastic rupture with the world before them; living by fantasies and mythology rather than sense; and a violent – and in their terms successful – transformation of the world to fit the fantasy.

    One root of these events was, of course, the Bolsheviks' impotence in genuine Marxist terms: a future-oriented social class presided over a society whose human base was intractably removed from their goals – which was, indeed, barely emerging from its feudal past. Their impotence to carry out socialism had been expressed from 1918 in vacillations of policy towards the vast majority of the country who were peasants. The Bolsheviks' radicalism, their understanding of the dynamics of revolution and their commitment to the poorest and most oppressed strata had originally led them to sanction sharing out land to the peasants in October 1917. In a series of acts described by Medvedev as 'utopian'⁹⁴ they sought to impose socialist relations on the countryside and so blundered into creating the conditions for an insurrection. They requisitioned the peasant's grain and conscripted his

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 105

sons into the Red Army, but still won enough support from the countryside to prevail in the Civil War. Facing famine and renewed peasant wars, they then declared the nep, which brought social peace and agricultural recovery. After that, amidst the withholding of grain by the peasants in 1927-28 and 1928-29, they returned to a system of forced procurement and confiscation of hidden surpluses. The crisis of 1927-29, refracted through the party's development and adoption of the first Five Year Plan for industrialization, brought to a head its deep anxieties about allowing 'capitalism' to flourish among the food-producing 80 per cent of the Soviet Union. And so, already in late 1927, an 'offensive against the kulaks' was decreed.

    Breadlines in the city and a quadrupling of the price of flour – just as the leadership had accepted a plan to become 'a metal country, a motorized country, a tractorized country' – passed the death sentence on Bukharin's evolutionary hope of arriving at 'socialism at a snail's pace'. In a speech before the November Plenum of the Central Committee, which voted for rapid collectivization, Stalin spoke urgently of the need to 'catch up and surpass' the advanced capitalist countries: 'either we achieve this, or they will destroy us.' He spoke approvingly of Peter the Great's 'attempt to leap out of the framework of backwardness'. Had the proletariat taken power in Germany and France, the Soviet Union would be helped by being able to import machinery. But its isolation and encirclement made overtaking them a matter of 'life and death for our development'. Its overwhelming number of backward and small-scale peasants made its socialist industry 'an island in the sea of the Soviet Union'. Agriculture had to be reconstructed on a collective footing, but to do so required industrial development.⁹⁵

    This linking of agriculture and industrial development is the key: the Soviet Union which had just launched the first Five Year Plan was fed by twenty-five million primitive small holdings, whose productivity was at the level of fourteenth century England or France.⁹⁶ To industrialize depended on an agricultural surplus; that surplus depended on mechanization of agriculture. Under the rule of the pre-revolutionary mir, the peasant collective, holdings were divided into strips and cultivated on the three field system. Low productivity was a token of technical backwardness, which was rooted in turn in the fact that Russia's serfs, after all, had only been freed in 1861. Ten years after

106

the revolution more than 50 per cent of the peasants remained completely illiterate, with a goodly proportion only semi-literate.

    If, in a significant achievement since the revolution, only 28.5 per cent of the peasants still used wooden ploughs (10 per cent of those sowing grain), three quarters of the 1928 grain crop was still grown by hand, half harvested with scythe and sickle, and 40 per cent threshed by hand⁹⁷ To collectivize this wretched agricultural system made no sense without offering the peasant (and country as a whole) greater efficiency, which depended on mechanization. Pravda estimated – at the height of the collectivization drive in January 1930! – that l ½ million tractors were needed for full collectivization.⁹⁸ By 1929 only 35 thousand were available.⁹⁹ But without tractors – and without, by implication, the entry of peasant society into the modern world with the aid of electrification, agronomy, and literacy – collectivization would simply multiply its wretchedness. Thus, as Lewin points out 'the idea that millions of sokhi (wooden ploughs) all added together would make an imposing sum had been treated as a joke.'¹⁰⁰

    Stalin's remarks thus reflect the fact that the Soviet Union consisted of what Lewin calls 'almost two nations or two civilizations, profoundly different in modes of production and modalities of organization in Weltanschauungen and in religion . . .'¹⁰¹ He shows the intensifying Bolshevik obsession with backward Russia – haunted by the example of and under mortal pressure from the advanced capitalist West. This fact fuelled Stalin's growing determination to confront, and overcome, the distance between the civilizations.

    Party membership figures ate a telling index of the distance. Even under conditions of a Bolshevik monopoly of political power only one half of 1 per cent of the rural population had become party members. This number itself (293,000) included non-agricultural workers and officials, and was reduced significantly when only those currently farming were included. By any calculation there was no more than a single party member' for each 125 peasant households.¹⁰² As Carr says, '[m]any villages can never have seen a Communist except in the guise of an occasional visiting official.'¹⁰³

    Ten years after the revolution the party had established no effective counterweight to the peasant's own mir. What this means, of course, is that the Bolsheviks never became part of rural Russia, never understood it, never served it, but rather ruled over it – without the Tsarist aristocracy's time-sanctioned pretension to organic authority, and with

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 107

the modernizing bureaucracy's arrogance and sense of cultural estrangement. Thus the simple practical task of the Bolsheviks in the ]ate 1920s – to get more grain to feed the cities – was undertaken through lenses of incomprehension and hostility. Accompanying Bolshevik rule from the beginning – and one of the very sources of the revolution – the distance between them and the countryside had now to be dealt with.

    The Bolsheviks possessed important conceptual tools to deal with this virtually foreign country under the increasingly unstable and demanding conditions caused by industrialization. Marxist realism was best summarized by an oft-quoted statement of Engels disavowing force towards small peasants when socialists came to power: 'Our task in relation to the small peasants will consist first and foremost in converting their private production and private ownership into collective production and ownership – not, however, by forcible means, but by example and by offering social aid for this purpose.'¹⁰⁴ Lenin accordingly insisted on 'the utmost caution and gradualness' in encouraging the middle peasantry to undertake collective agriculture. The transition would take 'generations' and 'decades', though not 'centuries'. In 1925 Trotsky saw a 'gradual' transition awaiting the necessary 'technical base'.¹⁰⁵

    Such remarks had deep roots in an outlook which sees socialism as harnessing, but not creating, productive forces which required long and painful incubation under preceding social systems. The absolute insistence on a voluntary rather than coercive approach reflected three premisses: the faith that the superiority of socialism will become self-evident over time to all but the exploiting classes; the conviction that socio-economic change is a long and many-sided process – 'organic' would not be inappropriate – whose pace may be encouraged but not forced; and the insistence that this process depends on the mass of working people living through each stage and making their own free decisions about its viability. These premisses rested in turn on a profound Marxist democratic commitment – to the well-being of the poor, to their ultimate wisdom, to their progress. Shared by Right and Left Bolsheviks alike, these premisses confined the mid-twenties' debates to a surprisingly narrow framework: how far should the transition to collective agriculture be quickened? Not even the Left envisioned a forced collectivization – it ran counter to their deepest Marxist convictions.

108

    In the short run, then, Marxist realism had to be pessimistic: it insisted on remaining rooted in the actual situation and its limits. In Bukharin's words, 'it is not possible to build "present-day" factories with "future bricks".'¹⁰⁶ This attitude, of course is the hallmark of Marxism: its claim to science rests on its insistence on moving with, not against, history; on transforming the political and legal superstructure only insofar as the socio-economic base is ripe for such a transformation; on grasping the contradiction of a given historical moment in order to force the productive forces from the constraints of outmoded forms of production or social relations. This meant that even as dictators, Bolsheviks could not be tyrants: the human beings at the root of this process had to be given the space to develop. As Engels had said of the small peasant: 'if he cannot as yet bring himself to this decision [to join the cooperative], we will give him plenty of time to ponder over it on his holding.'¹⁰⁷

    For comparison we must set this emphasis on Marxist tolerance, rationalism and realism – on what Bukharin called 'scientific economic leadership'^l08 – next to the words of Stalin's famous 1931 speech. There he passionately restated thoughts we have already heard him voice. He dwelled on Russia's ceaseless past defeats at the hands of the Turks, Mongols, Japanese, Poles, Lithuanians, English and French: 'for military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness.' And then he rose to the prophetic: 'We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.'¹⁰⁹

    Stalin was, of course, speaking of the impossible. In our century what backward country of 150 million souls could catch up with the most advanced countries in a scant ten years? This was a mad undertaking, mad precisely owing to its utter rupture with sensible reality, its magical substitution of will for actual possibility. To become policy its absolute prerequisite was the completion of the 'double-storey void' discussed by Lewin: not only had the party to dominate the proletariat, but the party itself had also to become a machine, to be brought to heel under an indomitable will Not only had all opposition to be removed, but all control by lower levels had to be broken. To carry out such a transformation required that the directing force have freedom of action to impose itself on those being transformed: on the party, on the working class, on the peasantry. The reversal of Marxist

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 109

sense depended on the reversal of Marxist reality: to transform the base, the Soviet ruling group had to achieve not merely autonomy, but actual control over the base. In the name of science and sanity Bukharin had claimed that it was not possible 'to do as you please'.¹¹⁰ Will, subjective wishes, had to be limited by objective human and historical reality. But having completed the process of substitution by bringing the party apparatus under his control, Stalin would now use it to try to do the impossible: to transform the reality that had so contradicted Bolshevik aspirations.

    The process of rupture we have been tracing was coming to a grotesque climax, a form of social madness. Born out of the Bolsheviks' impotence to achieve their goals, the madness I am describing hinged on their control over state power. The vast extent of their state power, depending as it did on the absence of countervailing social forces, was in Marxist terms fundamentally a reflection of their impotence. Genuine power in such terms – the ability of society to advance towards the socialist future – would have depended on a high degree of industrialization and an organized and enfranchised working-class majority. If the Bolsheviks did not enjoy conditions allowing them to fulfil their project, they could nevertheless use the consequence and surrogate of this impotence, the transforming power of the state. They could use its brute force to try to beat the reality before them into a different shape, one more akin to their goals. I call this mad because it is not guided by reality and its own tendencies, but rather by the subjective wishes of the rulers. Madness: systematic enclosure in subjectivity to the point of denying decisive aspects of the objective world. Although the Bolsheviks had long restrained themselves from even thinking the thought, the party ruled by Stalin now decided to coerce backward Russia into becoming what they wished.

    This was a break with Marxism in order to 'fulfil' it, entailing an assault on the producers themselves. Their property was expropriated by the bureaucracy which, at a stroke, became the ruling class.¹¹¹ Rooted in rationalism, Marx had disdained such utopianism and demanded instead that social theory be based on real historical possibilities and tendencies. And yet to do so in Russia meant living with an almost intolerable tension. While celebrating the victory of collectivization at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 Stalin gives a rather telling retrospective voice to this tension: 'Let the Socialist-Revolutionary, Menshevik, and bourgeois-Trotskyist gossips chatter

110

about the peasantry being counter-revolutionary by nature, about its mission to restore capitalism in the ussr, about its inability to serve as the ally of the working class in building socialism in the ussr.'^1l2 Thus does he reveal the fear that must have haunted the Bolsheviks until the 'Revolution from Above'.

    The tension snapped with the push for rapid industrialization and collectivization. The break with sense, the resort to massive violence, was Stalin's way of resolving the contradiction in which the Bolsheviks found themselves caught after 1921.

    These general reflections can be brought into specific focus with reference to the literature which accepts the project of forced collectivization in 1929-33, but speaks of Stalin's 'mistakes' in forcing the pace too rapidly and encouraging brutality. Roy Medvedev thus seems to seek retrospectively a rational way of carrying out the process, and criticizes only its cruelties. But to imagine a rational 'dekulakization' is to misunderstand the entire situation: rapid, forced collectivization was intrinsically a mad project. Because it was inherently brutal and could not help being so, there was no way on earth to soften its impact. We must avoid the systematic distortions that official terminology contained by 1929: Stalin had declared war on virtually the entire peasant population of the Soviet Union. Since Old Russia would not spontaneously and speedily evolve in the Marxist direction – or, more to the immediate point, would not make available to the state large cheap surpluses of grain to feed and finance the Five Year Plan – Stalin decided to expropriate it. J. P. Nettl unflinchingly characterizes Stalin's project in this 'second revolution' of 1929-30: 'Only by destroying the very basis of the old society and providing a universal infrastructure of literacy, by controlled mobilization into a social environment dominated by crude perspectives of production, could the basis of a new society be built.'^ll3

    Under Stalin's unopposed rule the time for caution and Marxist respect for reality was over. If Russia was backward, Stalin would modernize it; if it was economically independent, he would collectivize it. If the Plan required grain, even at the risk of creating chaos, he would establish the forms of production which would enable the state to take it. Not only was coercion inherent in the process, but so was the extermination or deportation of anyone who resisted: how else could the old society be destroyed? Ironically – and tragically for Soviet productivity – it was the more articulate, enterprising and pro-

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 111

ductive peasants who were killed or forcibly resettled in order to deprive the others of leadership. The property of the largest livestock and land owners was used as an inducement to draw their poorer cousins into the collective farms.¹¹⁴

    Since the shooting of the Civil War had died down and their isolation in their own country as well as the world had become apparent, the victors had been struggling to square the circle. How does one live in a society so wedded to the past, yet go on to construct the future? The human mind may customarily reject impossibilities as unthinkable: the circle cannot be squared. But unlike the circle, human beings have the power of decision and thus can assume different shapes, directions and actions, or be forced to assume them. If the rulers have will, so do the ruled: they can be made to behave differently. State power was now held by transformers who had themselves been twice transformed: into a ruling class, then into a bureaucratic machine. These were the preconditions for state power being used to force the pace of history – by, very simply, insisting that its subjects do what the transformers wished. Unlike the circle vainly waiting to be squared, humans can be threatened and beaten into the desired shape – and those who refuse can be deported or killed. Such a perspective would have seemed mad to the Bolshevik party which took power in 1917. A dozen years later its founder was dead, its entire Left had been expelled, the party had broken with its class base in the process of production, destroyed every last element of internal democracy, and begun systematically to nurture itself on lies and myths. It had become a machine run by a boss who traded privilege, power, and the disposition of state property in return for unqualified support. Expropriation of 25 million smallholdings would vastly enlarge the caste administering state property. Even so, to encourage the army of transformers, the deep-seated Marxist reluctance to use force against a producing class – which explains perhaps why the war was only declared suddenly and without warning or preparation tn late 1929 – had to be replaced by new layers of mythology.

    The Bolsheviks had long veiled the actual pattern of rural social relations – in which village solidarity was very important¹¹⁵ – to impose a schema of urban class conflict which both made sense of this foreign world and justified their rule. Thus was the proletariat described as 'ruling' in alliance with agricultural workers (batraks) and

112

poor peasants (bednyaks), but 'supported by' the middle peasants (serednyaks), against the 'rich' and 'exploiting' peasants employing more than a single labourer. Most kulaks were themselves workers, along with their families, on pitifully small and unproductive strips of land. But a mad project required lies to justify it. The lie, of necessity, now entered into the heart of Bolshevik policy as it sought to destroy Old Russia: the joke about 'millions of sokhi' now became official doctrine: the peasants' resources were 'poor, sometimes downright wretched, but when pooled together, they make an imposing sum.'¹¹⁶

    Anyone who opposed collectivization became ipso facto a kulak or supporter. So compelling was this in a society which was more and more living by myth, that the lie became true enough to motivate masses. We can see the lie and its 'truth' in this striking fictional account cited by Medvedev: 'The door opened and the brigade burst into the house. The ogpu officer in charge of the operation was in front, holding a revolver. "Hands up." Morgunov was barely able to distinguish the frail figure of the class enemy. He was barefoot, wearing white drawers and a dark undershirt; a dishevelled beard stuck out on a face that was long unshaven. His eyes, wide with terror darted from place to place. The lined face flinched, the coarse brown hands were trembling. Hanging from a worn-out cord on his bare chest was a little cross, grown dark with age. "Lord Jesus, save us, have mercy on us." Gusts of freezing air came through the open door into the well-heated little hut. Members of the dekulakization brigade were already standing at each window, their faces stern. Expecting something dreadful to happen, they all were ready to rush into battle for their cause, for soviet power, for socialism. But the kulak-agent Terentyev never thought of resisting. He kept blinking and crossing himself, shifting from one foot to the other, as though he were standing on something hot, and suddenly he began to sob, his whole body shaken by convulsive gasps. He was bending over in a peculiar position, shuddering, and small, glistening tears, one after another, rolled down the coarsened, weather-beaten face. His wife, no longer young, jumped down from the high sleeping bench and began to wail at the top of her voice; the children started to cry; and a calf, apparently rather sick and lying beside the stove, added to the clamour. Morgunov looked around, quite horrified. He saw that the hut contained only the one room and the large Russian stove. In the front corner beneath the icons were two simple wooden benches and

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 113

a crude table put together from planks. There was no sign of a dresser, or a bed, or a chair. On the shelves there were some simple wooden bowls, worn by years of use, and some old wooden spoons. Some oven forks and buckets of water stood by the stove, and on the left against the wall, a large old-fashioned trunk. The class enemy! The representatives of authority had already informed Terentyev that he was under arrest. He was to be dekulakized and deported straight away. All his possessions would be confiscated. His family would follow shortly, but their destination was not known. He could take with him only the clothes on his back and a change of underwear. Terentyev trembled and wept. "How can you call us kulaks? What for? What have I done?" He got no reply. Roughly breaking the locks, they opened the trunk and the food cupboard and pulled out some sort of footgear, sackcloth, and foodstuffs. "What for? What have I done?" "Nothing. You're a kulak, a kulak-agent. You're against the collective farm. You don't want to join and you're upsetting everything. And that's all there is to it." And they started making a list of all his goods and possessions.'¹¹⁷

    Perhaps the most striking refutation of the lie of a class-based 'voluntary collectivization' are Stalin's own statistics for livestock production: horses, cattle, and pigs dropped by one half between 1929 and 1933, sheep and goats by two thirds. Rather than surrender their animals to the collective farms, the peasants slaughtered them. Lost in their own myths, a few party members may have dreamed that the peasant, freed from the influence of the kulak, would willingly allow his animals to become state property controlled by a hostile bureaucracy. But when violence so completely effaced the peasant's very deepest nature, he could only respond with his own impotent and self-destructive violence.

Industrialization

Side by side with this process, in the towns and cities forced industrialization was taking place. It too involved a frantic break with sense: in June 1930 Stalin told the Sixteenth Party Congress that the Soviet Union was 'on the eve of transformation from an agrarian to an industrial country', and that in the current year industry had been ordered to raise its output by 47 per cent. Deutscher gives some idea

114

of Stalin's superindustrialist fantasy during the Five Year Plan: 'He was now completely possessed by the idea that he could achieve a miraculous transformation of the whole of Russia by a single tour de force. He seemed to live in a half-real and half-dream world of statistical figures and indices, of industrial orders and instructions, a world in which no target and no objective seemed to be beyond his and the party's grasp. He coined the phrase that there were no fortresses which could not be conquered by Bolsheviks, a phrase that was in the course of many years repeated by every writer and orator and displayed on every banner and poster in every corner of the country.'

    One illustration of the madness is the quota for pig iron: an industry which had produced 3,500,000 tons in 1928 was commanded to produce 10,000,000 tons by 1933. Then, having already advanced this time limit, Stalin told the Sixteenth Congress that '10,000,000 tons of pig iron ... is not enough ... At all costs we must produce 17,000,000 tons in 1932.'¹¹⁸ Those sober economists and business managers who doubted the possibility of achieving so high a target were branded as 'right-wing opportunists' and 'wreckers'. By the time of the Nazi attack in 1941, the Soviet output of pig iron was just approaching 10,000,000 tons!

    A madness parallel to collectivization, this insane attempt to do the impossible by industrializing overnight was based not only on myth, but also on coercion. Such an effort made workers into appendages of industry, imposed impossible goals on managers, and self-consciously exacted a 'tribute' from starving peasants to feed and finance the process. The spirit of the new situation was epitomized by the building of the Moscow underground – that heroic socialist achievement whose necessity, in a city of few automobiles, was primarily psychological and ideological. It was also epitomized in the fact that 5,000,000 tons of grain were exported in the year of 'Revolution from Above' – 1930 – initiating a famine process which became devastating in 1932. While millions of the producers were starving, the Soviet Union in 1932-33 exported 1.75 million tons of grain!

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 115

Madness and Progress

Such an overnight transformation was both sub- and super-human. It was inherently mad, utopian and brutal at the same time – a fantastic exertion of will, an incredibly successful leap of self-development and an assault on the entire country. The whole project was a violation of human possibility: could its destructive consequences have possibly been distilled out while the constructive were left intact? Or were both sides not 'sides' at all, but hopelessly mixed together in a single process? Is it not a Panglossian illusion to see the 'progressive' results as being the normal and the 'destructive' ones as demanding explanation? Because it is good, it is assumed, it must have been sensible: only the harmful results are seen as aberrant. This is the illusion of Reason and Progress.

    As we point to the unmet plan goals, the reduction of grain production, the destruction of most farm animals, the human deaths and deportations, it is certainly possible to imagine a rational non-coercive transformation of Old Russia. We can even read its outline in the Platform of the Joint Opposition. None of the spokesmen for Old Bolshevik rationality – neither Trotsky on the Left nor Bukharin on the Right – conceived of the leap into the void of 1929. The rational Marxist approach always thought in terms of 'decades' and 'generations', as Lenin said. No intelligent analyst of the 1920s would have anticipated as normal and rational the Soviet push to abolish illiteracy or equal the Western supply of physicians overnight. Such progress was itself an aberration.

    Yet the deformation of Bolshevism had progressed so far that this headlong and violent rush was experienced by the party members who carried it out as a comprehensible response to an increasingly difficult situation. An indefinite continuation of nep, based on Bukharin's sober and pessimistic realism, was felt to be unacceptable after 1928. On every front the situation was increasingly threatening, the lenses for perceiving it were becoming increasingly irrational and distorted, and the narrowing of the revolution's social base gave the dictatorship an increasingly free hand. At the summit of the party machine the various factors pointed towards a decisive and shattering break with Old Russia to construct a modern nation strong enough to withstand the threatening world. In retrospect, Stalin's ten years 'or they crush us' remark was uncannily accurate. But of course

116

it was helped to become a self-fulfilling prophecy by Soviet 'third period' foreign policy, which demanded that German Communists treat Social Democrats as the Enemy of enemies. The threat brooded over by Stalin might have been more effectively countered by proletarian politics in the Comintern than by crushing Old Russia. However, Russian and world reality was such that the choice was Stalin's to make. First through successive modulations and then in a sudden leap the choice was made, accompanied by yet another deformation and transformation of original Bolshevik hopes.

False Charges

On 12 March 1938, on trial for his life, Nikolai Bukharin, former editor of Pravda and Izvestia, ex-president of the Comintern and principal author of the recently-proclaimed Soviet Constitution, admitted 'that am guilty of treason to the socialist fatherland, the most heinous of possible crimes, of the organization of kulak uprisings, of preparations for terrorist acts and of belonging to an underground anti-Soviet organization. I further admit that I am guilty of organizing a conspiracy for a "palace coup".'¹¹⁹ Next day he and seven other defendants were sentenced to death, after being found guilty of becoming members and leaders of the inconceivable 'bloc of Rights and Trotskyites which acted under the direct instructions of the intelligence services of foreign states, carrying on treasonable, espionage, diversive, wrecking and terrorist activities, provoking an armed attack by these states on the ussr with the purpose of bringing about the defeat and dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the severance from it of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Central Asiatic republics, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaljan, and the Maritime Region in the Far East for benefit of foreign states hostile to the ussr, their ultimate aim being the overthrow of the Socialist social and state system existing in the ussr and the restoration of capitalism and of the power of the bourgeoisie in the ussr ....'¹²⁰ Within two days, in what is often regarded as the climax of Stalinism, the eighteen were executed.

    Beggaring description even fifty years later, the Great Purge was initiated by the murder of Kirov in late 1934, and rolled over the Soviet Union in vast bloody fits and starts until 1939. We have

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 117

already seen the figures: by late 1938 8 million people are estimated to have been in labour camps for political reasons, and a total of approximately 1 million people were executed in 1937-38. In the process the labour camps became a major part of the Soviet economy. It has been argued that 20 million people entered the camps or were shot between 1936 and 1950 – meaning that the Terror fell on perhaps every second family in the country. Bukharin's fate indicates its other dimensions as well: the creation of a vast apparatus for denunciation and fabrication of charges;¹²¹ the most incredible lies entering into Soviet daily life; the insistence that its victims confess their guilt; the turning of the revolution against the whole people; its suicidal devouring of its own leaders.

    Bukharin's fate is certainly high tragedy: agreeing to confess to behaviour 'akin to a kulak praetorian fascism' so that his wife and son would be spared, yet marshalling every last drop of intellectual, moral and political strength to outwit his accusers. Perhaps more heartbreaking are the millions of less brilliant stories – for example, the confession, at the same trial, of a respected Old Bolshevik, Isaak Zelenski. A revolutionary since sixteen, Zelenski was first arrested in 1912 at twenty-two. He spent the next several years in and out of jails, in exile, and as a party organizer. Having, since 1917, served as secretary of the Central Committee and of the Moscow Party organization, as well as chairman of Consumer Cooperatives, Zelenski was now required to confess that he had been an agent of the Tsarist Okhrana between 1911 and 1917 – and that more recently he had been responsible for putting nails and glass in butter!¹²²

The Terror

Did the revolution need this holocaust? It was insane, destructive and unnecessary. In his 'Secret Speech', Khrushchev, speaking for the bureaucracy which had triumphed with Stalin, emphasized that this terror began only after the revolution had become 'secure': 'It is clear that in the situation of socialist victory there was no basis for mass terror in the country.'¹²³ After the brutal period of collectivization and the first Five Year Plan had indeed transformed the face of the country-with the assent and active support of the new privileged class of party members – a relaxation now seemed to them desirable and

118

possible. Instead, Stalin moved from what Alec Nove calls the 'situation-determined' terror of 1929-33 to who y persona and arbitrary measures which brought disaster to the country.¹²⁴

Roy Medvedev focuses on its utter irrationality with a series of questions: 'Stalin was a leader in hard times. He did enjoy the confidence of a majority of the Party and the people. That confidence, that faith of the common people in Stalin, to some degree helped them endure the hardships of economic construction and the war with fascism. But would not the solidarity between the people and the government have been stronger had there been no mass repression? Would not the people have shown the Central Committee more confidence if the best people in the party, government, economic, and military apparat had not been destroyed in the mid-thirties? Would not economic and cultural progress have been much greater if Stalin had not destroyed thousands upon thousands of scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, writers? Would not the war have ended much faster and with fewer losses if our finest officers had not perished before the war and if Stalin had conducted a more sensible foreign and military policy? Would not agriculture have achieved greater progress if Stalin had not grossly and constantly violated Lenin's plan for agricultural cooperatives? And the bureaucracy and rule by fiat, the multitude of mistakes In nationality policy, the inhumanity and wilfulness of Stalinist administration – could all this in any measure strengthen the solidarity of the Soviet people, the friendship among the peoples of the Soviet Union? What then do we have to thank Stalin for? For the fact that his thirty-year rule did not completely ruin the Party, the army, Soviet democracy, agriculture, and industry? For the fact that he did not completely pervert Leninism and the proletarian character of the October Revolution, that he did not destroy all honourable Soviet people, did not bring the country to catastrophe?'¹²⁵

    But our discussion of the stages through which Bolshevism has passed leaves us with a somewhat different sense of the Great Purge: it is not so easy to separate the rational from the irrational in the revolution, excess from necessity, the social from the personal. We have traced an intensifying process of irrationalization, of a narrowing power base, of mythologizing, of distorting reality, of a bloody and violent rupture to transform that reality. Many writers want to preserve the good and rational revolution in the face of the bad and

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 119

irrational.¹²⁶ Some still seek to make it all good¹²⁷ or make it all bad and irrational.¹²⁸ We have rather seen such categories slowly absorb each other.

    Stalinism is the grotesque but consistent climax of the processes and tendencies we have been tracing. Murder and deportation of the recalcitrant peasantry became mass murder; imprisonment in concentration camps was now no longer connected with any apparent social struggle and indeed became economically necessary to the new mode of organizing production; control over the party turned into destruction of the party and extermination of virtually all Old Bolsheviks; 'socialism in one country' became in Stephen Cohen's words, 'an almost fascist-like chauvinism';¹²⁹ the distortion of the past now became the wholesale rewriting of history; the tendency to mythologize specific areas now became the systematic portrayal of the ussr as a near-utopia; the process of narrowing the locus of power now became an absolute autocracy based on the Hitlerian deification of the ruler; the banning of opposition now became the most feverish witch-hunt in all history; the General Secretary's control over the party apparatus now became his personal control over each and every administrator in the country; party control over culture now became Stalin's personal control over, and direct intervention in, every aspect of cultural life. Appropriately, a certain type of official came into prominence in these years as the original core of the party was destroyed: the half-educated sycophantic bully personally dependent on Stalin. The courageous peasants, workers, and soldiers who electrified the world by overthrowing the old order in 1917 had long since been beaten into a fearful, submissive, passive mass. And, equally appropriately, Marxism became a set of catechistic and magical formulas, losing further its original rationality.

One-Man Rule

The evidence suggests that we can neither exempt Stalin from responsibility nor lay it at the door, say, of the October Revolution. The real history was far more complex. The final steps in its logic now demand to be traced. It is, as we have seen, the logic of illogic – of a process that leads to an absolute dictatorship of one man only because of its increasing irrationality.¹³⁰

120

Sartre traced the brutal rationality of the revolution as leading to Stalin, and argued that its irrationality was based on his personal idiosyncrasies. Stalin's personal sovereignty was demanded by the situation because 'the constructive effort of the USSR implies that this society ... find its unity in the biological indissolubility of one individual.'~31 As such, Stalin as the 'summit of the pyramid, the living suppression of all multiplicity', served the society's need for maximum integration. For Sartre, the situation's 'need' for a ruling individual – an individual of specific qualities – entails its domination by the equally deep-rooted eccentricities that go hand in hand with such qualities. The situation may have required extraction of a surplus from the population or destruction of the backward peasantry, Sartre argues, and Stalin's character was such as to fit the situation – but his paranoia, having its source in a different place and time, spilled over the demands of the situation and required the purges.

    This necessity would explain the remarkable fact that none of the threatened Old Bolsheviks sought to remove Stalin before he destroyed them: their sense was that the fate of the revolution Itself lay in the hands of this man, no matter how evil or brutal or paranoid. To strike at him, given the seemingly inevitable logic of the revolution fulfilling itself only in his hands, was thus seen as endangering its very fruits and accomplishments.

    But Sartre's argument returns us to what I have described as the illusion of Reason and Progress: underlying it is the myth that the Soviet Union's positive accomplishments were rational but its disasters were irrational. Yet taking grain from the hands of starving peasants to buy machinery which sat and rusted was an excess of overnight modernization which betrays the latter's brutal and quixotic essence. Sartre must be corrected: not only did such an adventure require a ruler who was 'inflexible, without nerves, and without imagination',;32 but a ruler who utterly lacked internal or external restraint. Moreover, the fact that its precondition was the surrender of all political power to a single individual testifies to the radical deformation of Soviet political life whose course we have been tracing.

    In the final analysis, the internal process of 'substitutionism' reveals a distorting and distorted response to Russia's situation in the world. Bolshevism's isolation and its vast historical and cultural distance from the hulk of Old Russia mirrors in turn Russia's own vulnerability in relation to the relentless forces of modern Europe. The central role

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 121

of Stalin's personal brutality, paranoia and obsession with power stems from these larger social logics: the revolution defended itself from its vulnerability and multiple isolation by narrowing and strengthening its locus of power and then by an incredible leap forward. Stalin's own power-madness is only the extension ab limito of the revolution's own situation-determined weakness,

Stalin's Responsibility for Stalinism

    Most commentators focus on Stalin's subjective drives as the single most important force behind the Great Purge of the mid 1930s. Deutscher, a partial exception, explains the Great Purge as the offspring of Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland, a product of Stalin's fear of being overthrown in the event of war.¹³⁴ Nove, like Sartre, sees the terror as being exclusively Stalin's personal act.¹³⁵ Tucker takes us a step further and sees in the Great Purge a coherent delusional system.¹³⁶ All are certainly right to focus on the inner obsessions of the individual ruler in a situation where, as absolute ruler, his obsessions had come to mean so much.

    Worried that allegations of madness might cast doubt on Stalin's competence – and he certainly planned the Purge with consummate skill and self-control – Medvedev insists on Stalin's abiding and conscious purpose. The basic motive for his crimes was not 'because he stopped trusting his aides, or because he developed a persecution

122

mania and began to see traitors all around him' – but because of his 'measureless ambition'.¹³⁷ A leader's excessive ambition does not automatically lead to mass repression of his opponents and rivals. When considering the personal aspect of the repression in the thirties we must take into account not only the ambition but also the cruelty and viciousness of Stalin. We must also note the contradiction between Stalin's limitless ambition and his limited abilities. It was this very contradiction that drove Stalin into conflict not only with those he saw as his present or future opponents but also with many Old Bolsheviks, who were personally devoted to him, never said anything against him. and carried out all his orders. From his early years Stalin had an inferiority complex. Combined with ambition and vanity, it engendered spiteful envy. Without any serious or systematic education, knowing no foreign languages, he became in 1917 a member of a government that was called, even by its enemies, the best educated in Europe. Surrounded by many brilliant people, Stalin must have felt his inferiority as a political leader, a theorist, and an orator. Hence his envy towards every truly educated Party intellectual. He wanted not only unlimited power but also unlimited glory; no one must upstage him in the historical drama. Thus many people became his enemies not because they were opposed to the regime but because they performed great services for it.'¹³⁸ Thus does Medvedev explain the Terror as resulting directly from Stalin's quest for all power. The dictator who rules over independent-minded old revolutionary agitators can hardly rest secure; his fear becomes transformed into rule by fear.¹³⁹

    To imagine a relaxation, as Khrushchev did retrospectively, was to expect that Stalin might now have laid down the whip and gun, called off the secret police, abandoned the various myths the whole party had been living by – about the working class, party democracy, voluntary collectivization, and the danger of Trotskyism – and allow power to revert back to at least the top layers of the party. It was, further, to suggest that it was then possible to reverse the sense of danger and magic which had propelled the entire project forward – both the obsessive fear of foreign enemies and the mad taking of the will for the deed that had made the Great Change possible. After 1933, however, it would have been impossible to convince a leader who had organized his country's life and structures around it that there was no foreign threat; it would have been equally impossible to convince the ruler of transformed Russia that there were some fortresses the Bolsheviks

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 123

could not storm; and, above all, it would have been impossible to presume that a country which had accomplished so much through brutality – thus incorporating brutality into its very substance – could now relax its grip over its people.¹⁴⁰

    Instead. Stalin relentlessly continued the process we have traced from 1921 and drove for all power. Each step en route seemed to lead logically to the next. Its high point, symbolically, was Molotov's formulation that to be most effective the enemy agent would appear indistinguishable from the loyal Communist – the better able to damage the society at a decisive moment. If so. total vigilance was the only answer. The slightest of counter-revolutionary or anti-Stalin actions, gestures, or thoughts might reveal an enemy of the people to an alert informer. And, fearful of being denounced, tens of millions instead denounced others.

The Social Logic of Stalinism

In this individual logic the reader will no doubt see a social logic. In following at any length the personal dimension suggested by Sartre or Medvedev we rejoin the historical. Not only did Stalin use the revolutionary process for his personal ambition and continue its development beyond what seemed necessary: his own motives parallel those of the revolution itself. To speak of his character traits becoming decisive after 1934 – his feeling of inferiority, his boundless ambition, his fear, his appearance of unbounded will and lack of normal moral limits, his aloofness, his insensitivity to people, the 'contradiction between his great ambitions and limited abilities' – is to sound the most striking resonances with the fate of Bolshevism as it unfolded before 1934. Was not the fundamental contradiction of the revolution the same – between 'great ambitions and limited abilities'? And did not the party, and then the leadership of the party, and then the leader, slowly insulate themselves from the threatening reality of a population whose goals and outlook they did not share? And did not the party slowly efface the line between lie and reality, myth and fact, and in so doing make possible the breakdown of its normal political inhibitions? Did it not – under Stalin's leadership – finally overstep its Marxist sensitivity and scruples, and resolve the contradiction by an extraordinary act of will? Did it not do so by trying,

124

like Stalin, 'to force life into a ready-made framework' mangling it and breaking it when necessary chopping limbs off’?¹⁴¹ Stalin’s character, in other words, only paralleled, absorbed – and expressed – key elements of the revolution's twisted path.

            If the social logic of Stalinism is indeed inseparable from its individual logic, we must now return to our question: why did Stalin drive the country into the Great Purge? It might seem enough to see the madness of the process of collectivization and industrialization letting loose an even more unrestrained madness: after all, 1936-38 is not very puzzling in the country of 1929-33. Does not one madness lead to another? But I would like to claim an even more direct social logic for this holocaust. We can find our clue by looking first at Stalin's celebration of 'the successful building of socialism', at the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934.

            'During this period, the ussr has become radically transformed and has cast off the aspect of backwardness and medievalism. From an agrarian country it has become an industrial country. From a country of small individual agriculture it has become a country of collective, large-scale mechanized agriculture. From an ignorant, illiterate and uncultured country it has become – or rather it is becoming – a literate and cultured country covered by a vast network of higher, secondary and elementary schools functioning in the languages of the nationalities of the ussr.'¹⁴² Stalin continued, enumerating the industrial accomplishments, the rise in national income, the development of large and populous towns, and the creation of more than 200,000 collective and state farms. His concern throughout was to show how successful was the Soviet Union at creating socialism's material basis.

            Five years later, at the Eighteenth Party Congress and shortly after the waning of the Terror, Stalin spoke of farther progress. 'Whereas capitalist society is torn by irreconcilable antagonisms between workers and capitalists and between peasants and landlords – resulting in its internal instability – Soviet society, liberated from the yoke of exploitation, knows no such antagonisms, is free of class conflicts, and presents a picture of friendly collaboration between workers, peasants and intellectuals. It is this community of interests which has formed the basis for the development of such motive forces as the moral and political unity of Soviet society, the mutual friendship of the nations of the ussr, and Soviet patriotism. It has also been the

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 125

basis for the Constitution of the ussr adopted in November, 1936, and for the complete democratization of the elections to the supreme organs of the country.'¹⁴³

    In the same report Stalin said that the Soviet Union had achieved the most modern industrial system and the most mechanized agriculture in the world, and he set the goal of economically outstripping the principal capitalist countries.

    The contrast is decisive. While the 1934 statement is mostly correct – agriculture had not been mechanized, but the rest of the picture is accurate if a bit rosy – the 1939 statement crosses the border of fantasy. But when we draw both together we discover the key to the Stalinist project: to realize the full goals of the Bolshevik revolution, but to do so through an amalgam of lies, murder, violence, myth and actual achievement. Stalin's madness is the madness whose origin we have been tracing, the original Bolshevik project carried to its limit in an impossible situation. We have seen that to the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, how the situation should appear – the ideological dimension – was every bit as important to them as the situation's objective features. This ideological dimension acquires motive force in what Lewin describes as the creation of the base by the superstructure.¹⁴⁴ Obviously, it was absolutely essential that the original Bolshevik outlook, which had played such a decisive role in the process, now absorbed the material changes of 1929-33. Even distorted and mythologized, the ideological plane of Soviet life retained its importance – and now presented its demands. If until 1929 reality flatly contradicted aspiration, did not the vast changes since realize the aspiration?

    With the Great Purge Stalin took the next, fatal steps in resolving the contradiction between Bolshevik vision and Soviet reality. Achieving absolute power, he destroyed all obstacles to making the vision fit the reality: he constructed the ideal society in fantasy and on the lips of its terrorized people. Those parts of the revolutionary vision which could be carried out in reality were indeed carried out: education, collectivization, improvement of health care, industrialization. In the carrying out, violence was used to create the desired reality – or rather (since that was impossible) to create an acceptable approximation of that reality. Those dimensions which were essential to Bolshevism but unrealizable under those conditions, became 'realized' by being embodied in myth, and enshrined in the Constitu-

126

tion: democratic rule by the working class through Soviets. Those parts too threatening to be admitted either into Soviet theory or practice – such ideas as workers' control, economic equality or the withering away of the state – became tabooed and imputed to the Anti-Christ, Trotsky.

    If we appreciate the importance of ideology, then it is clear that the new, systematically irrational reality under construction in 1929-33 required 1936-38 as its completion. Even today the latter period is regarded in the Soviet Union as 'the Victory and Consolidation of Socialism'. During it, a recent text on Marxism-Leninism argues, the Soviet electoral system was democratized, democracy developed within the party and its members' rights broadened.¹⁴⁵

    This will help us understand some of the Purge's most striking features: Bukharin's confession, for example, after he had played a major role in writing 'the most democratic constitution in the world': the insistence that those who were clearly innocent must confess; the attribution of all industrial accidents, all shortages, to 'wreckers'; the use of Vyshinsky, a former Menshevik, to destroy the Bolshevik party; the final steps in the elevation of Trotsky as Anti-Christ of the revolution; the creation of a Soviet dream-world of happy workers and collective farmers; and the resort to systematic mass murder.

    It was more than cynical scapegoatism for Pravda to declare, in February 1937, that 'not one accident should go unnoticed. We know that assembly lines do not stop by themselves, machines do not break by themselves, boilers do not burst by themselves. Someone's hand is behind every such act. Is it the hand of an enemy? That is the first question we should ask in such cases.'¹⁴⁶ Obviously, a society so abused and terrorized, labouring under such impossible demands, was likely to have more than its share of industrial accidents, unfulfilled quotas, food shortages, etc. What Pravda is really reflecting, however, is the mad voluntarism we have seen become central to the party. If the Bolsheviks could storm any fortress, these problems likewise must be products of human will. That is, they must result from sabotage. In a country surrounded by enemies in which the class enemy has been defeated and harmony rules, those who sabotage national goals – enemies of the people – can only be in the employ of external enemies of the revolution.

Moreover, were not many former oppositionists and potential oppositionists now in high positions in industry, no doubt carrying on

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 127

the wrecking that kept people hungry and production inefficient? In reality such people no doubt recalled Marxist teachings and Bolshevik struggles which now had been tabooed; and they might still be able to point out ways in which the revolution failed to live up to its ideals. As a former Menshevik and an obvious opportunist, Vyshinsky, their inquisitor, had no such convictions; he was, therefore the ideal person to pursue them. And pursue them he did. Thus the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Former Political Prisoners were disbanded. But the entire Party had not only to be purged, but virtually destroyed: even good Stalinists had been revolutionaries, and had memories. It was necessary to kill 110 of the 140 members of the 1934 Central Committee. Only 35 of the 1,827 rank-and-file delegates to the 1934 Party Congress (2 per cent) were present to hear Stalin's 1939 report – 1,108 had been arrested as counter-revolutionaries, most of them not surviving.

Building Socialism

Marxism – the patient process of winning people over, using violence only as a 'midwife' – had been superseded by violence tout court, as voluntarism, will, and subjectivity led the assault on a terrifyingly recalcitrant reality. Increased resort to violence was accompanied by the enemy-psychology which justified it and in turn needed violence to justify itself. By 1936-38, in the increasingly self-enclosed mental world of Stalinism – now validated by the threat of Hitler and by its own achievements – all actual or potential oppositionists were enemies and so had to be eliminated; or, they had to be eliminated and so were enemies. They were to be replaced by people who would accept the fantasy construction of the 'successful revolution' – people with no revolutionary past or independent minds, people of low culture, people who could obey, people who accepted denouncing potential 'enemies of the people' as a political and personal obligation, people capable of treating the old revolutionaries ruthlessly.

    These machinations all culminated in the erection of the spectre of the Anti-Christ of the revolution – Leon Trotsky. Even from this distance of time it is shocking to see tens of millions of people arrested for faked-up connections to an imaginary Rightist-Trotskyist-

128

Imperialist plot, while its alleged author was fleeing from one exile to another to find safety. But now we can perhaps understand Stalin's obsession. Trotsky was hated by Stalin, in his son's words, as 'the living embodiment of the ideas and traditions of the October revolution.'¹⁴⁷ Both for the revolution at large and his own followers Trotsky had become a mythical figure: the conscience of a revolution that had betrayed itself and deformed its consciousness as it was carried out. We have seen that every deviation from Stalin's Bolshevism, duly noted by Trotsky – who in exile became more and more democratic in outlook – had to be dealt with. It had to be disguised, distorted or justified – or else Bolshevism itself had to be altered to accommodate the change. A religious cult of Lenin was combined with the effacement of his living memory by destroying his every heir but Stalin. The other five men mentioned in his Testament (Pyatakov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky) were the main defendants in the three great trials of 1936-38. If these trials make sense from the point of view of removing alternatives to Stalin's personal dictatorship, they also make sense as Stalin's effort to define any independent thought or action – or even its possibility – as treason. And they make sense, above all, as an effort to complete the revolution by making the idea of revolution fit the reality and vice versa,

    Reality, Stalin had shown in 1929-33, submits to a design when assaulted. If so, truth could be made falsehood and falsehood truth. This explains the otherwise puzzling insistence on obtaining signed confessions from people who would never even appear at public trial, immediately before they were shot. Days and weeks would be spent interrogating and torturing Innocent people when in fact such 'confessions' were wholly faked: why then was there only a handful of prosecutors who simply signed the confessions themselves before having their victims shot? Such lavish expenditure of effort was not at all due to an attachment to legality, when legality was being continuously redefined and only loosely applied. Nor does it seem that the prosecutors could genuinely have believed the confessions to be true. Rather, the explanation must be sought in the nature of the project itself: to make the false true and the true false. In the process, these innocent people became enemies. And if they themselves withheld assent to this truth, a vital link in the process would remain missing. Thus did the victims, in confessing, themselves contribute to

Why? Towards a Theory o] the Soviet Holocaust 129

creating the new Soviet 'reality'.

            The 'reality' may have been a monstrous structure of lies and distortions as much as of achievements; but by 1939 all eyes, ears and mouths testified that it was the only reality. By then the Stalinist construction had been completed: society was harmonious (because terrorized), completely socialist (because the vision had been redefined to mean nationalized production and forced collectivization), industrialized (because of the exertions of the Five Year Plan and the famine), democratic (because any opposition of this grotesque lie had been crushed) and literate (because social energy had been organized to conquer illiteracy). In this utterly mad, deformed, yet palpably real universe Stalin did finally and fully do the impossible: build 'socialism' in backward Russia. Not yet completed in 1934, the task took the Great Purge to accomplish.

The Lack of Resistance

No separate analysis is needed to account for another remarkable feature of this process, the virtual lack of resistance to Stalin. In contrast to the partisans, ghetto fighters and underground networks under Nazi rule, Stalinism generated no opposition worthy of the name. I have mentioned Bukharin's battle for his integrity while trying to save his family – this, one of the great struggles against Stalin, can only appear pathetic alongside the heroic behaviour so often seen against the Nazis. This sorry absence is indeed one of the reasons the Soviet Union has become such a graveyard of hope in our century.

    The above analysis has explained why. Not only has good become evil while never wholly renouncing good; it has thereby monopolized the language, values and modes of thought of an entire society. Above all, by representing Reason and Progress, it allowed no space for an independent and contrary sense of morality. We have heard Trotsky on party theory. Trotsky might go on claiming to be right, but he more than anyone knew how abstract were his claims. Stalin, after all, occupied the stage of history. Could one go on believing in the revolution and seek to overthrow him? The party's shared assumptions and shared history, its sense of threat and common destiny – indeed, the entire logic we have seen unfold – left little

130

moral, intellectual or psychological space for anyone to be right against Stalin.

Enemies of the People

One startling index of how mad the process became is the fact that on the very eve of war one half of the 70,000 military officers were shot or imprisoned – including 3 of the 5 Marshals, 14 of the 16 Army Commanders Class I and II, all 8 Admirals (Flagmen) Class 1 and II, 60 of the 67 Corps Commanders, 136 of the 194 Divisional Commanders and 221 of the 397 Brigade Commanders.¹⁴⁸

    While laying waste to his best and most experienced commanders in pursuit of a fantasy-enemy, Trotsky, Stalin was also assuring a military hierarchy loyal to him alone, whose service to the revolution and to socialism would be according to his definitions. By doing this, Stalin only crippled his ability to deal with the real enemy, Hitler. In 1941 he also systematically ignored warnings of the impending invasion and kept the Soviet military unprepared until disaster had already struck. With near-fatal consequences Stalin's German policy continued his domestic policy: to take the wish for the deed, to withdraw from the reality before him and deal rather with a 'reality' of his own making.

    Another dramatic measure of this disastrous yet cumulative transformation of Bolshevism lies in the use of 'enemy of the people' to describe those many millions of people killed or shipped off to the camps, The substitution of mythology for reality becomes complete in the phrase. Stalin, of course, represented the people and alone spoke in their name. But who was the 'enemy of the people'? If Conquest is right, and the name of virtually every leading official was in nkvd files as a spy by late 1938; if 'the next wave of the purge would have struck at 10 to 15 per cent of the population, and soon after that at 30 to 45 per cent';¹⁴⁹ if every second family was hit by the Purge – the entire people had indeed become the enemy of the people. Which meant that the entire people had lost, or was on the brink of losing, the right to be treated like people as the revolution became 'successful'. Conquest reports the effort (which would lead to his death) of one free citizen of the Kolyma camp to obtain better treatment for prisoners: '"These people might die." "What people?" the

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 131

representative of the camp administration smiled, "these are enemies of the people."'¹⁵⁰

    Enemies all: one wonders whether or when that administrator himself was liquidated by the revolution gone mad. Like Pyatakov, named in Lenin's Testament and the genius behind the successes of the Five Year Plan, he no doubt felt that earlier waves of victims 'have lost the last semblance of humanity. They must he destroyed like carrion which is polluting the pure, bracing air of the land of the Soviets ....' But might he not, like Pyatakov, admit within six months to himself organizing sabotage and terror? And be executed for crimes against the people?¹⁵¹

    And so, in the bizarre completion of the revolution, we are led to use Vyshinsky's own outraged words for falsely-accused Pyatakov to appraise the progress of the revolution itself: 'This is the abyss of degradationr This is the limit, the last boundary of moral and political decay! This is the diabolical infinitude of crime!'¹⁵¹

    Or perhaps irony win suffice: the outstanding study of the Stalin Constitution was presided over by none other than Vyshinsky. Thus did the former Menshevik prosecutor stand the revolution completely on its head: the fantasy-constitution which guarantees work. well-being, democracy, and civil liberties is celebrated by the police-state prosecutor who had concluded his fantasy-accusation of the Constitution's guiding spirit, Bukharin, by demanding that he be shot 'like a dirty dog'.

Conclusion: Impotence and Power

On one level this entire discussion has been an essay on power; or rather a continuation of the essay on power begun in the chapter on Nazi Germany. In retrospect, was not Martov right when he foresaw certain disaster if the Bolsheviks seized power in October? Engels understood the problem all too well in another context: 'The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents, and for the realization of the measures which the domination implies. ... Thus he necessarily finds himself in an insolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles and immediate

132

interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. ...Whoever is put into this awkward position is irretrievably doomed '¹⁵³

    As one of the fathers of Marxism, Engels is simply insisting on its most basic tenets: authentic social power is a relationship between the 'ripeness' of the situation and the would-be ruling class's many-sided capacity to lead the society. It may be possible to take power politically or to dominate militarily, but these forms of power lack something vital when those who wield them are not ideologically, socially and economically congruent with a significant segment of the society, with its aspirations and historical tendencies. Impotence points towards a structural incapacity to realize their goals: Engels's statement of the 'insolvable dilemma' suggests that state power or military force may indeed be employed to force the issue; but also that the massive use of force is fundamentally a violation of the human subjects upon whom it is imposed. In this respect rulers who use the greatest violence to compel assent lack the more decisive forms of relational power which stem from a deeper congruence with major classes of their society. Congruence: the society and its rulers must 'fit' each other. Marxists become scientific-minded scholars in order to study the development of the situation, to determine just what is possible, just when, just how: this is what sets off Marxism from utopian socialism, and makes its conception of power so different from an older emphasis on weapons and armies, say, or on the state apparatus. Rulers rooted in and accepted by the dominant social class at a time of its historical ascendancy are those most capable of exercising effective power.

    While possessing state power, the Bolsheviks remained in this fundamental sense impotent: they were structurally unable to create the society they had come to power to preside over. However impotent to solve their 'insolvable dilemmas' and change the agenda of history, ruling groups possess nevertheless the tempting and deadly organs of state power. If these can indeed be used to compel assent, to destroy human lives, can they not be used to transform reality? Can not reality be 'reshaped' out of line with its actual possibilities, in ways seeming to reflect the rulers' intentions? May not their power even command pretence about the ways in which it does not?

    If the idea of 'socialism in one country' – in the isolated, unprepared Soviet Union – was, in Sartre's words a 'monstrosity', this was

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 133

because that society did not 'fit' those aspirations. Thus the reality of 'socialism in one country' would not be less monstrous. The situation became irrational at the moment the Bolsheviks began to use state power to mystify and distort the recalcitrant reality, to repress and transform it physically in ways that contradicted its possibilities and their own original intentions.

    In short, Marxist science 'in power', in an epoch such as described by Engels, was indeed 'irretrievably doomed'. This doom took a totally unexpected form, however: holding on to power, this narrowing party cudgelled, terrorized, and destroyed the reality it sought to change.

    This essay on power is at the same time, like the previous chapter, an essay on madness as a social phenomenon At the centre of my essay on madness has been the concept of a rupture with reality. I have said that Marxism is a gentle science, concerned above all with tracing the curves of the human world, linking itself with ascendant social forces so as to liberate repressed but decisive social capacities. Again and again its touchstones are demonstrable, visible, experiential: Marxism presents itself as grasping and working to bring about society's future – embodied in living social forces – appealing to and struggling against its encumbered present. In this sense its decisive dimension is the class struggle, whose violence on either side seeks only to retard or to liberate the social forces generated by society itself. Successful violence is thus 'midwifery'. Faithfulness to 'reality' in this complex and dialectical sense is the hallmark of Marxism.

    To reject accurate perception – not as a mistake, but as a modus operandi – went hand in hand with repressing Kronstadt to hold power. This rupture – perceptual and physical – was accompanied by Bolshevik determination to theorize and institutionalize it. If madness suggests loss of control, lack of capacity to act differently, this took place after the initial break, when the new, distorted modes of perception became self-perpetuating and banned the return to original Marxist realism. Perceiving and acting through lies and distortions, first the Bolsheviks and then the Stalinist 'centre' became progressively more removed from authentic perception. The systematic, wholesale, and pathological break came with their action to 'realize' the distorted vision in that society: Stalinist madness thus begins not in 1937 or even in 1934, but in 1929. I have been discussing a complex many-sided process of rupture: on one level by

134

assaulting reality so that it corresponded to aspects of the deformed vision; on another by changing that vision so that its most flagrantly unrealizable aspects were repressed; on still another by changing human thought-processes so that the original vision seemed to have been realized. The resulting whole became an amalgam of sense and non-sense.

    'Irretrievably doomed': in our century the fulfilment of this prophecy does not necessarily lead to the loss of state power or death, Again and again, we have seen impotence in power – impotence to fulfil the goals to which a certain leadership is tied. The very impotence of the Bolshevik government drove the party to become all-powerful – powerful enough to destroy and create on a scale hitherto unimagined. Not powerful enough to realize Marxian socialism – because for this not brute power but a collective social will was necessary – but powerful enough to extract violently from its people the military strength to defeat Hitler; powerful enough to bludgeon them into the collective farms. The Bolsheviks, alas, were not powerful enough to create a democratic, egalitarian socialism, which presupposed many times the factories and workers Russia had in 1917. But in their Stalinist incarnation they became powerful enough to destroy as 'enemies of the people' most of those who had shaped and been shaped by the struggle for such a socialism.

    More than irrational, I am insisting that the resulting amalgam was mad. Such judgements, of course, are a question of degree: mad connotes a thorough and systematic rupture with reality, its wholesale transformation in fantasy and distortion – and its transformation in fact as well. It was in speaking about Trotsky's daughter and not about the fate of the revolution that Deutscher captured what was, and remains, at stake: 'it was as if reason itself had discovered in unreason its closest progeny and its double.'¹⁵⁴ The Soviet project to realize reason in history became one of history's great attacks on reason.

Conclusion: History and Chance

Does this aftermath make Martov's prediction correct? Which is to say, how far do the catastrophic events I have discussed stem from the Bolsheviks' 'premature' decision to take power? They must cer-

Why? Towards a Theory of the Soviet Holocaust 135

tainly not be seen as utopian in expecting Russian industry to remain intact, its working class to remain their base of support, and to be aided by revolution elsewhere. The first two of these they accepted as premisses, and the third seemed not at all overly optimistic, in the light of their experience of the revolutionary Russian proletariat since the beginning of 1917. From his Finland Station speech of April 1917 onwards Lenin insisted on linking the Russian revolution with the proletariat in Europe: 'The Russian revolution achieved by you has opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!'¹⁵⁵ If power was Lenin's first concern, it was because as Marxists the Bolsheviks equated the party's ability to take and hold state power with the Social appropriateness of their programme. After all, did not the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat suggest their and the society's maturity for socialism? If we have learned since that state power – control over the governmental apparatus and its means of violence – is not necessarily effective social power, can we fault Lenin for not seeing this in advance of the experience that would demonstrate it so decisively?

            Certainly, had the Bolsheviks drawn back and not taken power – or if the Joint Opposition's programme had been carried out, or if Stalin and Bukharin had continued to build 'socialism at a snail's pace' in the 1930s – those millions would not have died in that way. A different Comintern and a different foreign policy might have meant that Hitler would have been stopped short of taking power. Or, when in power, he might have encountered a militarily and ideologically well-prepared Soviet Union in 1941, one commanded by its best officers, and capable of responding swiftly and decisively to attack. But – on the other hand – the Nazis might have indeed won the war over a still-primitive, technically backward Russia, exterminated its Bolsheviks and Jews, and ruled over it for generations. In short, our entire history might have been drastically different, in unforeseeable ways, for better or for worse.

            Cohen has insisted, rightly, on the alternatives to Stalinism that remained within the grasp of Bolshevism right up to the 'Great Change'. Lewin has indicated the possibility of a vastly different course had Lenin lived. Colletti emphasizes the weight of the defeat of revolutions elsewhere, implying how differently the Bolshevik revolution might have turned out under other conditions. The actors themselves lived with these senses of possibility. None of them could

136

have foreseen the total failure elsewhere of the worldwide revolution, or the emergence of fascism, the recalcitrance of isolated Old Russia to Bolshevik visions. Lenin's untimely death and the blurring of the Bolshevik vision en route to totalitarianism were equally unforeseeable. In 1917, action for the world's first socialist revolution was what political action is always and everywhere: a chance. And indeed, not at all a hopeless-seeming chance. The greatest issue for the Bolsheviks at that moment was not the revolution's disastrous corruption-cum-success but whether or not they could actually take and hold on to power. For three years that was the life-and-death concern. No one knew, or could possibly have known, that the victorious revolutionaries would end up in such an unthinkable isolation. Or that the isolation would later be reinforced by Stalin's policies. And even had this been foreseen (in 1921, say), should they have abandoned the revolution?

    In conclusion, all of this suggests that no matter what we may say today about the ways the Leninist outlook or the Marxist vision of progress distorted the Bolsheviks' perceptions and actions, the subsequent history is not the teleological unfolding of an Aristotelian essence. For example, neither the Leninist party nor the decision to take power created the disaster to follow. We have seen, rather, the rational and irrational human transcending of situations in accord with the biases of an original project, itself subject to deformation and transformation in the process.

    Sheer accident, a vast network of unexpected possibilities, and the sedimented results of prior actions all became so many roadblocks to alternative intentions. Complete failure was certainly one prospect open to the October Revolution, as was that of complete success, while a third was any one of several amalgams of disaster and success, the Stalinist version among them. Stalinism hardly 'unfolded' from October as the tree grows from the acorn. If it was the revolution's 'dialectical' result, at the time it was one possibility among many.