Stalinism and After

The Road to Gorbachev

Alec Nove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134868872
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on personal experience of life in the Soviet Union Nove explains the phenomenon of Stalinism and its aftermath. In highly readable style, Professor Nove traces the origins of Stalinism, analyzes its nature and achievements, examines the process of destalinization which followed Stalin's death, and explores the evolution of the Soviet system under Krushchev and Brezhnev. Stalinism and After is not a biography; it is a study of the effect of the political personalities of one man and his successors on the development of Soviet history. It is within this context that Professor Nove examines the new thinking of Gorbachev and the now-familiar catchwords of his regime: perestroika, glasnost, demokratizatsiya, and uskoreniye.

Chapter 1
Genesis

The Russian Political Tradition

Stalin was born in Gori, Georgia, in 1879, and his name was Djugashvili. The pseudonym Stalin was adopted to suggest ‘steel’, and proved to be well chosen. His early education was in a religious seminary. No doubt these facts are an important element in Stalin's personal psychology, and no doubt this personal psychology played its role in Russia's and the world's twentieth-century history. Yet it is perhaps even more useful to see him as a Russian leader, heir to a Russian tradition and meeting Russian needs in ways which had deep Russian roots. This is not the only such case in European history. One has only to remember Napoleon, a very French emperor who was nevertheless a Corsican.

In fact it is part of the Russian tradition that she is ruled by foreigners. The legend of the foundation of the Russian state in the tenth century is as follows. After a period of chaos, the notables met and decided to write to a Varangian (Viking) prince, saying: ‘Our lands are vast and bountiful, but there is no order in them. Come and rule over us.’ Then came Rurik, the founder of the dynasty, and so Russia (or Rus') was born. No doubt it can be argued that this did not happen so, that Vikings needed no invitation to come and plunder and colonise. But the existence and durability of the legend is significant. In my young days it was known by every Russian schoolboy.

Absolute rule by one called in to establish order in a disorderly land, was one element of the tradition. The absolutist tradition was doubtless reinforced by Russia's adherence to the Orthodox Church, and therefore Byzantine influence prevailed, while links with the Catholic western Slavs were weakened. Another element was provided by the Tartar conquest, which brought Russians into close touch with an initially successful Oriental despotism, and underlined the vulnerability of the Russian lands (by then again disunited). The frontiers to the east, west and south were open, there were no natural barriers, Russia was backward and relatively weak. Despotic and ruthless Muscovite princes succeeded in the end in overthrowing the Tartar yoke, and gradually absorbed or conquered rival princes. They also subdued the westward-looking trading city-states of Novgorod and Pskov, which had close links with the German Hanseatic league towns. Muscovy, the easternmost and most Tartar-influenced of the principalities, became the focus-point of Russian unity. For a long time Muscovy remained weak and vulnerable, and in 1571 Tartar slave-raiders burnt most of Moscow, and Polish armies occupied the Kremlin itself in 1610–12.

In other European countries, unity was disrupted by struggles between the powerful feudal nobility and the king. In Russia such a struggle was nipped in the bud by Ivan the Terrible, who destroyed much of the nobility and separated the rest from what might have become territorial power-bases. It is not for nothing that Stalin declared this bloodthirsty monarch to have been a great statesman, remarking in an unpublished aside that he (Ivan) should have spent less time praying and more in destroying the enemies of the state, a mistake Stalin himself never committed. The survivors of the old aristocracy became gradually merged in a class of service gentry (dvoryanstvo), who owed their entire position and status to the Tsar. Peter the Great, moderniser of Russia, made the gentry families serve the state (i.e. himself) for life, in a civil and military service of fourteen ranks. True, the compulsion to serve was dropped in 1762, but the gentry had little else they could do, except vegetate on their estates. The great Russian nineteenth-century poet, Pushkin, remarked that by west European standards Russia had no aristocracy, since all depended on rank and rank depended on the monarch, who could and did promote men from the lower orders. This, he pointed out, led to ‘cowardly slavishness’ towards authority.

Slavishness of a different kind was developed among the bulk of the people, the peasants, by the institution of serfdom. Its principal purpose was to compel the peasants to serve the servants of the Tsar. This is why Peter the Great, uneasily aware of the abuses of serfdom, found it necessary to strengthen it. It was part of the pattern of the universal service state, believed by Peter to be necessary for Russia to raise itself to great-power status. This dominance of state and state defined purposes over society was a major feature of Russian history.

Of course it is to be found in some degree elsewhere too: Frederick's Prussia and Louis XIV's France are but two examples. But nowhere else was the state's dominance so complete, nowhere did it last so long. In a very real sense, Stalin's Russia is a continuance of this long tradition.

Chekhov, another great writer, once said: ‘We [i.e. the Russians] must squeeze the slave out of ourselves drop by drop’. The readiness of many to accept Stalinist despotism is to be explained among other reasons by this deeply-rooted national characteristic.

The Renaissance passed Russia by. Until the nineteenth century Russian culture was as backward as the way of life of the bulk of her people. Hardly anything was written which can be read with pleasure today. Then, with dramatic suddenness came the flowering of Russian literature, which made it one of the world's finest: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. With them there came on the scene that most Russian of phenomena, the intelligentsia. Some of them were of the gentry, conscience-stricken at the sight of serfdom, privilege, oppression. Some rose from below, were sons of village priests, merchants, even ex-serfs. Indeed Lenin's grandfather had been a serf, while his father became an educational official and rose in the civil service to reach the status of hereditary gentleman. The intelligentsia combined in themselves a number of features: they were opposed to the Tsarist system, but this did not lead most of them to harbour any sympathy for Western liberalism. On the contrary, they disliked the ‘merchant’ culture of western Europe, and dreamt of finding some new Russian road. Some believed that the old Russian peasant communal traditions pointed the way, others like Lenin thought that Russian capitalism was destroying the old institutions, though he hoped to move rapidly to socialism. Some were deeply conservative, idealising the era before Peter the Great's enforced ‘Europeanisation’ of Russia. Others were revolutionaries of many hues. They had no responsibility for doing anything, so they formed factions and argued endlessly. Among them there were some who believed that conspiracy and terrorism were the best weapons to use, since the inert and ignorant people would not listen to propaganda. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by these terrorists in 1881, and his successor, Alexander III, was to have been assassinated too, but the conspirators were arrested and executed, Lenin's elder brother among them. These intelligentsia-terrorists were a remarkable breed, men devoted to raising up the people, ready to die for their beliefs, yet singularly lacking in either political effectiveness or any appeal to the people on whose behalf they fought and suffered.

No wonder Lenin, in his own doctrine, emphasised organisation and conspiracy, had little illusion about or use for spontaneous mass action. It is said, though with little evidence, that he reacted to his brother's death with the words: ‘We will go another way’. Individual terrorism, the blowing up of tsars and ministers, was not his road. We will be discussing in some detail very soon the road he did take.

Lenin, though himself a man with a distinguished university record, had little patience with the Russian intelligentsia. They were ineffective, they talked too much, they did not understand power and politics, they had namby-pamby scruples. Yet many of his own comrades were precisely such men. Indeed, the Bolshevik party in 1917 could be said to have been dominated by the ultra-radical wing of the intelligentsia. The rise of a Stalin, who was so very different, is partly to be explained by Lenin's search for tough organisers who did not possess the typical intelligentsia defects. It was late in the day when Lenin observed that Stalin had other defects, perhaps more formidable ones. And later on Stalin himself took a terrible revenge on his educated comrades.

There were other elements in what can be called the Russian tradition. There were the rebels, men like Stenka Razin and Pugachev, Cossack freebooters, peasant bandits. In the national consciousness there was the danger of anarchy, disorder, of chaos, in which life would be nasty, brutish and short, and from which Authority and Autocracy could be the only salvation. It is not just a matter of the historical memories of past centuries. In 1919 large areas were controlled by peasant bands of so-called ‘greens’, neither White nor Red, some of whom kept tame anarchist philosophers in their baggage train. Against this, too, the Stalin system came into being.

Then there was the old Russian mixture of indolence, drunkenness inefficiency and generosity. The indolent appeared in Russian literature under the name of ‘Oblomov’, the idle gentleman. Lenin took the disease of Oblomovism seriously enough to fulminate against it at party meetings after his victory. He knew that the Russians needed organising, that they had to learn the ways of the west, of businesslike behaviour, of thrift, and he said so. He was very conscious, too, of the lack of educated people. For far too long the Tsars had held back education, had sought to prevent its spread to the ‘lower classes’. After 1900 progress was rapid, in this as in so much else. Russian universities were good, the best scientists and doctors were excellent, many school teachers were skilled and devoted. But by the time of the revolution there were still few qualified people, and the World War, civil war and emigration were to deprive Russia of most of them by the time the Bolsheviks finally triumphed. The human material was coarse and ill-qualified. No one knew this better than Lenin. He hoped that revolution in more advanced countries would come to the rescue of backward Russia.

Finally, on this list of traditional attitudes there was a kind of nationalist exclusiveness. This took many forms. There was the religious idea of Moscow as the ‘third Rome’, taking over from Byzantium after its conquest by the Turks. Russia was the home of the true religion, Orthodoxy, Pravoslavie, a Church as national and nationalist as any in Christendom. Foreigners were almost always ‘heathens’ as well as dangerous or subversive. Anti-religious revolutionaries took over the notion of Russia as the country in which light and truth can be found, and eventually Stalin was to link together the internationalist communist creed with the glorification of the past and present of a Russian state. With these ideas there went, for many centuries, restrictions on the movement of foreigners, suspicion, passports, visas. Restrictions applied also to Russians. The poet Pushkin appealed in vain to Tsar Nicholas I to let him visit the West, and was reprimanded by the chief of the gendarmes for visiting the Caucasus without permission.

Indeed, many of the rules and regulations under which Soviet citizens live today have simply been taken over from the Tsars. They may seem shocking to us, but we have a different historical experience. Peasants could not move to town without having to obtain a passport; even a Russian could not move into Moscow or St Peters-burg (Leningrad) without a residence permit. This was so under Nicholas II, it became so under Stalin. The habits of centuries assert themselves in two ways: they affect what the rulers consider right and proper to do, and also what the ruled are accustomed to regard as normal and tolerable in the behaviour of Authority.

Of course many individual Russians did not and do not fit these generalisations. In any case, the old ways of life and thought were dissolving under the impact of the industrial and commercial developments which began in the 1860s and gathered rapid momentum in the 1890s. None the less, just as Tsardom remained little changed (despite the parliament or Duma decreed in 1905) until its fall, so some deeply Russian features survived, greatly to influence events after the revolution. Indeed, the revolution itself had the effect of expelling many of the liberal-European features which had begun to influence the body politic in the reign of the last Tsars, and so to strengthen traditional attitudes, even while adopting the most advanced and extreme revolutionary programmes.

The Circumstances of Revolution

The Russian Empire at the turn of the century was a backward European country, but none the less a great power. Her industrial production was approaching that of France, though of course her population was five times greater. A working class was forming, some of it based in large modern factories erected with the help of foreign capital and foreign specialists, the rest in old-fashioned workshops. But most of it was of recent peasant origin, and the bulk of the population still consisted of peasants. Life was hard in the new industrial settlements, the workers discontented and ready to listen to socialist propagandists. The country was still ruled by the Tsar and by a bureaucracy responsible only to him.

In 1904 the government blundered into a war with Japan which ended in ignominious failure. This touched off a revolution in the cities and peasant riots in the villages. The Tsar was obliged to grant a constitution, but the Duma was found too radical and the stern suppression of the rebels was followed in 1907 by an electoral law ensuring a safe majority for the propertied classes. Industrial development was resumed, and 1913 was the culminating year of a boom period in agriculture and industry alike.

The government, shaken by the peasant riots of 1905, introduced far-reaching changes in the villages: the so-called Stolypin reforms tried to break up the village commune to encourage better-off peasants to consolidate their holdings, to buy land, to become richer, and so more loyal to the throne. Two million households had become peasant-proprietors of the Western type by the time the war broke out in 1914. Who knows, perhaps Stolypin, the then Prime Minister, was right when he claimed that political stability under Tsardom would come given time. But he was assassinated in 1911, and war was soon to engulf Europe.

Stalin at this period was still a minor party functionary in the Caucasus. He attracted notice as a political bank robber, ‘expropriating the expropriators’ in aid of party funds. His political activities also attracted the attention of the police, and he was arrested and exiled. By the standards he later imposed, his treatment was mild: he was free to live as he pleased in a remote Siberian village, he was not in a prison or camp. He was, however, effectively isolated from political life.

What were Lenin and other revolutionaries hoping for before 1917? What were their programmes, what were the nature of their disagreements? These are not questions of abstract theory, they deeply affect our understanding of what the revolution was about, and many of the later events.

Marxist ideas played a very important role, and found a ready audience among Russian intellectuals. Das Kapital was translated first into Russian. Some revolutionaries disapproved. Heirs of the radical wing of the Slavophils, they believed in a solution based on peasant communal traditions. They did not care for the dictatorship of the proletariat and disliked industrial civilisation. They attracted support, though of a rather passive kind, among the peasants. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party, founded in 1904, became the chief protagonist of these ideas.

The principal Marxist party was the Social-Democratic party, founded in 1898. This split in 1903 into the so-called Bolsheviks (or majority-men) and Mensheviks (minority-men), nicknames which were the result of one vote at one conference, but which stuck. Their chief bone of contention was apparently organisational: whether or not the party should be based upon a select group of revolutionary conspirators, or have a broader base. On to this difference were grafted others. Lenin's Bolsheviks came to attract the more ruthless and extreme elements and they became identified with a more revolutionary approach, though of course the Mensheviks too desired the overthrow of Tsardom. But before 1917 there was no strong distinction between the two factions, and many members in Russia were impatient of their leaders' quarrels, which seemed to them to be splitting hairs.

Brief mention must be made of another Marxist-inspired party, the Jewish Bund, which defended specifically Jewish working-class interests. There were Jews in high positions in all the other revolutionary parties, including the Bolsheviks. This was because they were literate, able, and frustrated by the discriminatory restrictions imposed on them by the Tsarist regime.

A full account of Marxist theories and of their various interpretations would require another book. Karl Marx believed that capitalism, with the private ownership of the means of production, had enabled the owners of capital to exploit the working class, or proletariat, who sold their labour power to the capitalists. The workers created value, but the capitalists appropriated part of the product for themselves. This system was a great advance on the feudalism that preceded it, liberating productive forces and greatly expanding the output and productive capacity of society. However, as Marx saw it, capitalism was bound to generate contradictions which would ultimately destroy it. As capitalism developed, so there would be ever greater concentration of capital in fewer hands, in great monopolistic corporations. The mass of the workers would remain poor. The small business men would be driven by the monopoly-capitalists out of business and into the ranks of the workers. The class struggle would become more acute. Workers would feel increasingly discontented and ‘alienated’ from the process of production and from society. There would also be deepening crises and slumps. A highly developed capitalism would then run into grave difficulties, and the way out would be socialism, ultimately communism, a form of society in which the means of production would belong to the people, and in which the ‘anarchy’ of the market would be replaced by planning. Marx foresaw a future ideal society in which goods would be abundant, everyone would be fully educated, jobs would be interchangeable, money and acquisitiveness would disappear, production would be for use and not for sale, all would be equal, freely contributing to social work to the best of their ability, and drawing whatever they needed from the abundant stocks of goods and services. There would then be no state, since the state is an organ of the exploiting and dominant class, no army, no police. Communism would be world-wide. This happy future was, of course, not seen as an immediate prospect. At first there would be civil strife, revolution, and the mass of the people, the working class, would exercise the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ over the handful of capitalist exploiters. Then there would be a transition period of unknown length, after which socialism would come into existence.

Marx himself described his ideas as scientific, comparing them with so-called Utopian socialists, who merely dreamed of a future just society. Some elements of Marx's vision of the future ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Genesis
• 2 The System Consolidated
• 3 War
• 4 The Last Years of Stalin
• 5 Stalin's Heirs and Stalin's Legacy
• 6 The Fall of Khrushchev and the Rise of Brezhnev
• 7 Brezknev's Death and Gorbachev's Rise
• Appendix
• Index