Soviet Tragedy

A History of Socialism in Russia

Martin Malia

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781439118542
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

" The Soviet Tragedy is an essential coda to the literature of Soviet studies...Insofar as [he] returns the power of ideology to its central place in Soviet history, Malia has made an enormous contribution. He has written the history of a utopian illusion and the tragic consequences it had for the people of the Soviet Union and the world." -- David Remnick, The New York Review of Books "In Martin Malia, the Soviet Union had one of its most acute observers. With this book, it may well have found the cornerstone of its history." -- Francois Furet, author of Interpreting the French Revolution " The Soviet Tragedy offers the most thorough scholarly analysis of the Communist phenomenon that we are likely to get for a long while to come...Malia states that his narrative is intended 'to substantiate the basic argument, ' and this is certainly an argumentative book, which drives its thesis home with hammer blows. On this breathtaking journey, Malia is a witty and often brilliantly penetrating guide. He has much wisdom to impart." -- The Times Literary Supplement "This is history at the high level, well deployed factually, but particularly worthwhile in the philosophical and political context -- at once a view and an overview." -- The Washington Post

Part I THE ORIGINS

1 WHY SOCIALISM?

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. The human race would have been spared endless crimes, wars, murders, and horrors if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow man, “Do not listen to this imposter! You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth to no one!”

—J. J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1752

The gradual development of the principle of equality is… a Providential fact… it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all men as well as all events contribute to its progress.

Would it, then, be wise to imagine that a social movement, the causes of which lie so far back, can be checked by the efforts of a single generation? Can it be believed that democracy, after having overthrown aristocracy and the kings, will stop short before the bourgeoisie and the rich?

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

What is Property? Property is theft.

—P. J. Proudhon, What Is Property? 1840

The Russian Revolution is noteworthy not so much because it was Russian—though an ordinary “bourgeois” revolution in Russia would have been quite an event—but because it brought the world’s first socialist government to power. But what does it mean to be socialist? And by what standards can we judge whether the October regime in fact produced a socialist society? Or whether any socialist government, for that matter, has ever truly merited its name?

SOCIALISM: THE HIGHEST STAGE OF DEMOCRACY

No word in the modern political vocabulary is more fraught with ambiguity or charged with emotion than “socialism.” For most people, and in its broadest meaning, the term designates an alternative method to “capitalism” for organizing the economy. In this sense, socialism refers to concrete institutional arrangements and governmental programs. Yet the gamut of these organizational forms is such that the term quickly loses focus; this is clearly evident as we move from progressive taxation and “safety-net” social security to a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state, on to outright nationalization and planning of the entire economy. So perhaps a stable meaning for the antithesis capitalism–socialism can be found in the broad notion of market versus plan?

But this is not a stable focus either. For in socialist usage the market is held to be “anarchic” and the plan “rational,” and these terms give a normative aura to the analysis. Further probing only expands this normative area, for socialism also means collectivism as opposed to individualism, cooperation as opposed to competition, social service as opposed to profit seeking, and altruism as opposed to greed. Thus socialism means, ultimately, a just and humane society, and its essence becomes a moral idea rather than any institutional or economic program.

But this still does not exhaust socialism’s multiplicity of meanings. The word also designates a distinctive social formation, as in the antithesis “socialist society” versus “capitalist society,” and both terms are seen as encompassing all human activity—political, economic, cultural, and even personal—in a single, total system. In this sense, socialism, as the just and humane system, is not just an alternative to, but is “higher” than, capitalism. So socialism also comes to mean the culmination of history, the telos of human development; in this guise it generates a theory of history, or shades off into what has been called metahistory or “historiosophy.”

This confusion of meanings is still worse confounded by the variety of mutually incompatible institutional forms that have called themselves “socialist.” Thus the term has been plausibly claimed by Stalinist Russia, China of the Cultural Revolution, Sweden of the Social Democratic “middle way,” Labourite Britain, Israel of the Kibbutzim, the cooperative community of Brook Farm, and the Khmer Rouge. These various socialisms, moreover, have usually challenged the legitimacy of the others, and indeed have often anathematized their rivals in shrill sectarian tones.

Still another basic confusion of meaning arises from the difference between “socialism in opposition” and “socialism in power.” In the former case we have a movement for the organized pursuit of a more human society, as expressed through political parties, trade unions, cooperatives, or similar fraternal undertakings. In this case socialism is a moral fellowship of seekers after justice, who are set off by their calling from an indifferent or hostile world. In the case of socialism in power, however, we have an established society, allegedly coming at the end of history, as in the metahistorical succession of “feudalism, capitalism, socialism.” But the well-known propensity of power to corrupt invariably produces a great gap between this society and the ideals of the antecedent movement. The result is that socialism in power is often denounced by socialists still in opposition as a degeneration into “state socialism” or, even worse, “state capitalism.” The movement is then reborn under the banner of “socialism with a human face,” and the expectation of the true socialist society is again put off to the future.

This focus on the future is the deepest cause of the ambiguity surrounding “socialism,” for of all our terms designating different types of societies “socialism” alone was created before, not after, the fact of that type of society’s existence. “Feudalism,” “absolutism,” “Old Regime,” “liberalism,” and “capitalism,” for example, all emerged either after or simultaneously with the fact of their existence; they therefore designate something real, however imperfectly their history or reality embodies whatever principles they may claim. But the term socialism, together with its higher derivative, “communism,” is unique in that it appeared almost a century before the first attempt was made, in 1917, to attain a corresponding reality. Thus socialism does not designate in the first instance an actual social formation; it designates rather an ideal alternative to all existing social formations, which are labeled for this purpose “capitalism,” a term coined after its antithesis and designed to serve as its metahistorical foil. In sum, socialism is a utopia, in the literal meaning of that term: a “non-place” or a “no-where” viewed as an ideal “other.”

The term socialism is thus unique in that it corresponds to no identifiable object in the sublunary world on whose nature all observers can agree. To be sure, there have been numerous false sightings and some temporarily convincing apparitions, but none has produced that unanimity of opinion that only empirical verification can bring. So, the full reality of socialism is reserved for the realm of faith, “the belief in things unseen, the hope in things unknown.”

Thus it becomes clear that “socialism,” strictly speaking, does not mean anything. First, it is meaningless, intrinsically, because its economic programs do not, and cannot, realize its moral ideal in a manner that compels recognition as true socialism. Second, it is meaningless, historically, because it has been claimed by so many mutually incompatible social formations that it loses all concrete focus. So when people profess socialism we never know just what they mean, or what they can be expected to do if they come to power. This imprecision certainly smoothed the Bolsheviks’ way to total power—and eased periodic Popular Front collaboration with them.

Thus socialism is not a historical or a social-science term at all, but ultimately a messianic, indeed a quasi-magical term; in fact, it has often been claimed that the more ardent forms of socialism have something of a secular religion about them.¹ Masses of humanity could once surge through Red Square chanting “forward to the victory of socialism!” but it is quite inconceivable that shareholders should march down Wall Street mouthing such rousing slogans about capitalism. And it is an exercise in futility when champions of the free market answer Marx with “Non-Communist” or “Capitalist” Manifestos, as if faith could be vanquished by growth statistics.² But such is the potency of the socialist idea that most men—its foes no less than its friends—perennially mistake it for a social-science category or a putative stage of history, to the enduring confusion of what we are talking about whenever we utter “socialism.”

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Socialism derives its emotional charge from an equally charged and ambiguous term: “democracy.” In the common usage of the late twentieth century, democracy combines three things that historically have different origins and that are not necessarily related: first, constitutional government and the rule of law; second, popular sovereignty founded on the will of the people; third, social justice understood as social equality.

The first of these, constitutional government based on a representative assembly and the rule of law through an independent judiciary, has its origin in medieval feudal institutions. To mention only the most obvious and best known instances in this development, we need simply recall that England’s Magna Carta was no modern Bill of Rights but a feudal contract between the king and his barons. Likewise, the Mother of Parliaments developed as an assembly of hereditary lords with an elective Commons of equally privileged knights-of-the-shire and burgesses. In short, only gentlemen were involved, while the mass of humanity was dismissed as “peasant rogues” or “villeins” (as European villagers were once known) and excluded from public life.

It was only in the eighteenth century, in the American and French Revolutions, that this oligarchic constitutionalism began to be generalized to the whole of society. Yet even in those two revolutions, the ancient Greek word “democracy” was almost never used: Over the centuries it had come to mean “mob rule” leading to “anarchy,” and absolute equality was not deemed necessary, or even feasible, in the first modern republics. Indeed, as late as 1863 the thoroughly constitutional order of the American Republic, founded on universal manhood suffrage, was still deemed compatible with chattel slavery. In short, constitutional government is far older than popular sovereignty or the equation of justice with social equality.

The latter two principles appeared only in the middle of the eighteenth century. Until that time all European societies (and non-European ones as well) rested on two other principles. The first was that legitimate authority was always superordinate authority: It came from above and was exercised through kingship or some corporate collegiality, the whole ultimately sanctioned by God or the law of nature or both. Government thus was not devised by man or society; it was simply given. The second old-regime principle was that all societies were necessarily divided into a class hierarchy of interdependent but unequal orders, whether of patricians and plebeians, of nobles and commoners, or of clergy and laity; inequality, therefore, was natural, legitimate, and inevitable.

The challenge to these immemorial ideas, though long in gestation, first became open and militant in the mid-eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1752) and Social Contract (1762) may be counted as the major symptoms, though not of course the cause, of this egalitarian revolution. But soon the ideas of superordinate authority and natural inequality were deemed downright scandalous. For example, it was only in this period that slavery, for the first time in recorded history, came to appear abhorrent to enlightened opinion, and that abolitionism emerged as a movement.³

But it was only in the American and French Revolutions that men first acted on these new principles. The American Revolution was the first political movement to enshrine popular sovereignty in practice; still, it did not explicitly advance an egalitarian agenda, for a property suffrage existed in most states until the 1820s. Then, the French Revolution carried the challenge to the Old Regime all the way by moving from popular sovereignty combined with a property suffrage to the more logical egalitarianism of universal (manhood) suffrage. Though this advance proved temporary, it nonetheless established the principle of universal suffrage as the next century’s goal throughout Europe.

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Why the idea of equality appeared so recently in human history is obviously a complex matter, but very plausible insights were advanced by the major thinkers of the Revolutionary Age. The number of those who contributed to the new awareness that made the egalitarian revolution possible is too large to permit even a cursory survey, but a few key names may be singled out as epitomizing, or symbolizing, the most crucial aspects of this new world of values.

If equality among men were to become a primary moral principle and a political force, it first had to be materially possible. It was only in the late eighteenth century that this began to be true, and here the great symbolic name is Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year, 1776, as the American Declaration of Independence. Until this period the productive capacity of human society had increased so slowly as to be almost imperceptible: Every increase tended to be quickly cancelled out by an even greater increase in population, which was then reined in by the scourges of war, pestilence, and famine, a pattern first analyzed by a critic of Smith, Thomas Malthus. Under such circumstances of generalized scarcity, the subordination of the penurious many to the affluent and powerful few appeared unavoidable and, hence, normal and legitimate.

What Smith did was to challenge this fatalistic view. He did not do this by proclaiming the advent of “capitalism,” as some commentators today would have it, since no such word or concept existed at the time; nor did he express any real awareness of an industrial revolution occurring as he wrote, although historians now make this revolution the economic centerpiece of the period. Rather, in terms more appropriate to the age, he argued that the development of the “division of labor” had at last made it possible for mankind to enter “commercial society,” the “civilized” culmination of a progression whose earlier stages had been “hunting,” “pasturage,” and “farming.” So the natural “propensity of men to barter, truck, and exchange one thing for another” was at last unfettered, thereby making possible an accelerated “expansion of public opulence,” or what would now be called “growth.”⁴ Although Smith had much to say about “the invisible hand” of “self-interest” working for the benefit of all, he used the word “market” sparingly and only in the limited sense of the mechanism of exchange or of a specific area of demand, not in the broader sense of the global organization of society. For him the practical task at hand was to combat the “mercantile system” of the governments and the worker guilds of his day—and, indeed, the monopolistic practices of the entrepreneurs—in order to liberate man’s capacity to improve his moral and material lot.

It is this melioristic message and optimistic materialism, this belief that “opulence” could eventually be available to the larger number of men, that was the precondition for both nineteenth-century classical liberalism and nascent socialism. Both the “bourgeoisie” and the socialist spokesmen for the “proletariat”—as the commercial and laboring classes respectively came to be hypostatized after 1830—shared this fundamental optimism about the new industrial age. They differed mightily, however, in their estimates of the social conditions necessary for human liberation. For liberals it was the market, or, as the nineteenth century put it, “free trade,” that was the motive force of progress. But for socialists free trade and the division of labor meant the victory of the strong over the weak: These market forces were the cause of social differentiation, inequality, exploitation, and, therefore, of dehumanization. Although Marx was the most systematic and powerful exponent of this pessimistic perception of the Smithian revolution, he did not repudiate it. For him, as for all socialists, it was the founding act of modernity. As Friedrich Engels put the matter, “Adam Smith was the Martin Luther of political economy,” the liberator of mankind from the “medieval” backwardness of mercantilism.

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But this material change could be effective only in conjunction with decisive cultural changes that conferred on man a new understanding of his place in nature and history. The origin of this transformation was the seventeenth-century’s Scientific Revolution, which for the first time gave mankind what seemed to be infallible, or at least incontrovertible, knowledge. For the revolutionary quality of this knowledge was that while it dealt in universal and necessary laws, often mathematically expressed, it yet could still be verified empirically. Man thus appeared to have acquired absolute knowledge of the sort previously attributed only to God. So the Enlightenment of the next century brought forth the optimistic hope that the new method of the natural sciences could be extended to all human activity and all branches of knowledge to yield a universal science that would also be power—over nature, society, and man himself. And in this dynamic meliorism the Enlightenment came to view history as the triumphal march of Progress.

But this new vision could win out only by challenging the force that had hitherto dominated European culture, the revealed religion of Christianity. At first, moderate rationalists, such as John Locke, while still deferential to religion, had nonetheless relegated it to a strictly subordinate role. Later, more extreme rationalists, such as Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preface
• Introduction: The Historical Issues: A Time for Judgment
• Part I: The Origins
• Part II: The Experiment
• Part III: The Empire
• Part IV: The End
• Acknowledgments
• Notes and Sources
• Index
• Copyright