Chapter 6: The complete victory of socialism in the USSR (!)

1. The Stakhanov Movement

The crisis in agricultural and industrial production during the first five-year plan had led to the re-introduction of state distribution. It was a repetition of the experiment of military communism, on a higher material basis.

Practical methods of distribution depend upon the level of technique and existing material resources; as the economy recovered, it became necessary to change course, and in the year 1935, the system of planned distribution again gave way to trade. Market relations were restored, the difference with the NEP being that now they were supposed to develop without the middleman and the trader coming in between the state cooperative and collective farm organizations and the individual citizen. The ruble was restored, bound up with the restoration of bourgeois norms of distribution. [1]

After the devastation caused by forced collectivization, the government was compelled to retreat, and again supply peasants with chicken, pigs, sheep and cows as personal property, as well as also restore small personal farm holdings. [2] In industry, the struggle to raise productivity of labor led to the launching of the so-called Stakhanov movement, whose essence was the introduction of the piecework payment. It was a necessary retreat; the form of wage payment was being brought into better correspondence with the real resources of the country. “Law can never be higher than the economic structure,” Marx had stated, years ago.

The piecework payment system strains nerves without visible external compulsion; Marx had considered this system “the most suitable to capitalistic methods of production.” To a great degree, the Stakhanov movement meant intensification of labor, and even to a lengthening of the working day. While some who participated in the Stakhanov movement were genuine enthusiasts of socialism, the great mass of the workers greeted this innovation not only without sympathy, but with hostility. [3] Which is why the State was forced to carry out mass repressions against workers accused of resistance, sabotage, and in some cases, even murder of Stakhanovites. [4]

The raising of the productivity of labor, especially through piecework payment, led to increase of the mass of commodities and rise in standard of living of the population, but it also led to growth of inequality. The incomes of the upper layer of the workers, especially the so-called Stakhanovists, rose considerably. This was the real motive of the workers who strove to become Stakhanovists; in the words of Molotov: “The immediate impulse to high productivity on the part of the Stakhanovists is a simple interest in increasing their earnings,” that is, the motive was not socialist ideals. On top of it, the bureaucracy too accelerated the growth of a labor aristocracy by showering the Stakhanovists with gifts and privileges. As a result, the real earnings of this privileged stratum of the proletariat often exceeded by twenty or thirty times the earnings of the lower categories of workers. [5]

The Soviet ruling stratum still could not get along without a social disguise. The restoration of the market was hailed as socialism! In a report to the Central Executive Committee in January 1936, the president of the State Planning Commission, Mezhlauk, said: “The ruble is becoming the sole real means for the realization of a socialist (!) principle of payment for labor.” [6] “Although in the old monarchy everything, even down to the public pissoirs, was called royal,” comments Trotsky, “this does not mean that in a workers’ state everything automatically becomes socialist.”

Stalin went one step ahead, and presented the Stakhanov movement as a “preparation of the conditions for the transition from socialism to communism.” [7] The nakedness and crudity with which the piecework payment system was implemented in the Soviet Union would not have been permitted even by the reformist trade unions in Europe and America. How far the Soviet Union was from “the final victory of socialism,” how much the Stalinist leadership had deviated from the socialist road, to what extent it was distorting basic Marxian principles, is evident from the fact that in reality, the preparation of a “transition from socialism to communism” was going to begin, not in the direction being taken by the Soviet leadership, but in the exactly opposite direction – not with the introduction of piecework payment, but with its abolition as a relic of barbarism.

2. The Socialist Principle of “To Each According To His Work”

On June 11, 1936, the Central Executive Committee approved the draft of a new Soviet Constitution. Its very first section contained yet another theoretical innovation: “In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realised: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.” [8] Trotsky writes:

“This inwardly contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It is not difficult to guess the origin of the new 'principle.' To characterize the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' The two parts of this formula are inseparable. 'From each according to his abilities,' in the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work. Working 'according to their ability' -- that is, in accord with their physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all 'according to their needs,' without humiliating control. This two-sided but indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.”

The backwardness of Soviet society in the mid-1930s can be gauged from the fact that it had been forced to restore the market. Hence, it could not even think of endowing each citizen “according to his needs.” But for that very reason, the question of its citizens working “according to their abilities” did not arise. Instead, it was obliged to keep in force piecework payment, the principle of which could be expressed thus: “Get out of everybody as much as you can, and give him in exchange as little as possible.” Wage labor even under the Soviet regime does not cease to wear the humiliating label of slavery. Payment “according to work” benefits the intellectual at the expense of physical, and especially unskilled, work; it is a source of injustice and oppression for the majority, privileges for a minority.

Instead of frankly acknowledging that bourgeois norms of labor and distribution still prevail in the Soviet Union, the authors of the constitution cut this integral Communist principle in two halves, postponed the second half to an indefinite future, declared the first half already realized, mechanically hitched on to it the capitalist norm of piecework payment, and named the whole concoction a “principle of Socialism.” [9]

3. The Proclamation of Abolition of Classes in the USSR

In the very period when market relations were being restored, the ruble was being rehabilitated, bourgeois norms of distribution were being re-introduced, the piecework payment system was being ruthlessly enforced, all of which were inevitably going to sharpen inequality, in that very period the Soviet leadership and the official press began proclaiming the “complete triumph” of socialism in the Soviet Union! On April 4, 1936, Pravda declared: “In the Soviet Union the parasitical classes of capitalists, landlords and kulaks are completely liquidated, and thus is forever ended the exploitation of man by man. The whole national economy has become socialistic, and the growing Stakhanov movement is preparing the conditions for a transition from socialism to communism.” [10] In his speech on the Draft Constitution of the USSR at the Eighth Congress of Soviets on November 25, 1936, Stalin too made the same pronouncement, that the complete victory of socialist system in all spheres of the national economy is now a fact, exploitation of man by man has been abolished, all exploiting classes have been eliminated and the Soviet society has succeeded in achieving socialism, that is, the lower phase of communism. [11]

“The Soviet power,” said the program of the Bolshevik party on this subject, “openly recognizes the inevitability of the class character of every state, so long as the division of society into classes, and therewith all state power, has not completely disappeared.” [12] Stalin’s statement was in flagrant contradiction with the program of the Party. But he had no problem, because all opposition had been shattered, only those remained who were willing to applaud every statement of the leader.

Having been transformed into an appendage of the CPSU, the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, dutifully, in a resolution of August 29, 1935, solemnly affirmed that “the final and irrevocable triumph of socialism and the all-sided reinforcement of the state of the proletarian dictatorship, is achieved in the Soviet Union.” [13] This testimony of the Communist International was wholly self-contradictory. If socialism had “finally and irrevocably” triumphed, not as a principle but as a living social regime, then a renewed “reinforcement” of the dictatorship was obvious nonsense. And on the contrary, if the reinforcement of the dictatorship was being evoked by the real demands of the regime, that meant that, the triumph of socialism was still remote. It is elementary Marxism that the very necessity of reinforcing the dictatorship testifies not to triumph of classless harmony, but to the growth of new social antagonisms.

In a speech at a session of the Central Executive Committee in January 1936, Molotov, the president of the Council of People’s Commissars, declared: “The national economy of the country has become socialistic. In that sense we have solved the problem of the liquidation of classes.” However, there still remain from the past “elements in their nature hostile to us,” fragments of the former ruling classes. Moreover, among the collectivized farmers, state employees and sometimes also the workers, “petty speculators” are discovered, “grafters in relation to the collective and state wealth, anti-Soviets gossips, etc.” And hence results the necessity of a further reinforcement of the dictatorship. [14]

The statement of the head of the Soviet government was murderously self-contradictory. Socialism reigned in the country; classes are abolished; fragments of the past, “petty speculators” (not even speculators) and “gossips” remained. If that was indeed the situation, it is impossible to think these were capable of overthrowing the classless society. But what was the need then of the iron dictatorship of the bureaucracy?

“It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and its resistance,” wrote Lenin in 1917, speaking of the period which should begin immediately after the conquest of power, “but the organ of suppression here is now the majority of the population, and not the minority as has heretofore always been the case.... In that sense the state is beginning to die away.” In what does this dying away express itself? Primarily in the fact that “in place of special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officials, commanders of a standing army), the majority itself can directly carry out” the functions of suppression. [15] If then, in 1936, nearly two decades after the Revolution, it was being proclaimed that the exploiting classes had been eliminated, only petty speculators and gossips remained, obviously the armed people would have laughingly disposed them off, there was no need of a bureaucracy. But the reality was the exact opposite, in place of an armed people, all the powers of compulsion were in the hands of a small minority.

4. The Reinforcement of the Dictatorship

The program of the Bolshevik Party written by Lenin declared: “... Deprivation of political rights, and all other limitations of freedom whatsoever, are necessary exclusively in the form of temporary measures.... In proportion as the objective possibility of the exploitation of man by man disappears, the necessity of these temporary measures will also disappear.” [16] Thus, with the ending of exploitation of man by man in the Soviet Union, as was being declared in 1936 by the Soviet leadership, “deprivation of political rights” and “all limitations of freedom whatsoever” should have ended. However, during the very days when the official press was proclaiming the abolition of classes in the Soviet Union, the January 2, 1936 issue of Pravda announced that a new purge had just been concluded in the Soviet Union. The difference between this purge and all the ones preceding it lay in the fact that it was effected without even the nominal participation of the Party. The purge was given the modest label, “checkup of party credentials.” Under this guise, operating entirely behind the scenes, the checking machinery expelled approximately 10 percent of the party: more than 200,000 party members were ejected from the party. [17] But the bureaucracy was absolutely unfazed by the stark contradiction between its theoretical pronouncements and its practice, between its theoretical pronouncements and basic principles of Marxism, between its theoretical pronouncements and the program of the Party.

The same January 2 (1936) issue of Pravda broke down the figures of the expelled into the following main categories: “From Trotskyists, Zinovievists, opportunists, double-dealers, alien elements, swindlers, adventurers, down to spies of the foreign agencies.” The coupling of Trotskyites with swindlers and spies is not unexpected, remarks Trotsky. Every regime at loggerheads with the people persecutes on the one-hand revolutionists, and on the other, criminals. These two categories had lived side by side in the prisons of the tsar; Kerensky in his own time had sworn again and again that the Bolsheviks were in collusion with Black Hundred gangs and German spies; Stalin remained true to tradition.

Over the past decade, the bureaucracy had already liquidated the ‘remnants and splinters’ of Trotskyites no less than nine times. Yet, once again, during this end-1935 purge too, of the 200,000 expelled from the party, the Trotskyites constituted the biggest group -- the number of the expelled Bolshevik-Leninists was at least 10,000, a more realistic estimate would put the figure closer to 25,000! [18] After all the preceding purges and the campaigns of physical extermination, it seems almost incredible that this time too, among the various categories of the expelled, the Bolshevik-Leninists constituted the largest group, numbering not hundreds but thousands.

Since 1924, the Stalinist bureaucracy had often expelled the Trotskyites as “moral degenerates” and even as “White Guards”; having labeled them this way, it was easier to eliminate them! But despite the bestiality of the repressions, the bureaucracy had been unable to prevent thousands upon thousands of young and daring party members from sympathizing with the Bolshevik-Leninists. Alarmed by the very large number of Trotskyites among those expelled in the latest purge, Stalin immediately announced another purge, from February 1 to May 1, 1936. Old party cards must be exchanged for new ones; this would be done by the secretaries (i.e., the bureaucracy) alone; only those who have earned “confidence” would be issued new cards. [19] Once again the party was not going to be involved in the purge.

5. The New Soviet Bureaucracy

“We are not Utopians,” responded Lenin in 1917 to the bourgeois and reformist theoreticians of the bureaucratic state, and “by no means deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, and likewise the necessity for suppressing such excesses. But... for this there is no need of a special machine, a special apparatus of repression. This will be done by the armed people themselves, with the same simplicity and ease with which any crowd of civilized people even in contemporary society separate a couple of fighters or stop an act of violence against a woman.” [20] Whereas Lenin judged that even the liquidation of the exploiting classes might be accomplished without bureaucratic apparatus, the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union while proclaiming the liquidation of classes not only refused to transfer its powers to the people and move towards liquidating itself, it also increasingly rode roughshod over the party and increasingly concentrated all powers in its hands. This was not surprising, if one looks at the composition of the ruling bureaucracy.

The overwhelming majority of the older generation of the Soviet bureaucracy of the mid-1930s had stood on the other side of the barricades during the October Revolution. Or, at best, they had stood aside from the struggle. Those of these bureaucrats who were in the Bolshevik camp in the October days played in the majority of cases no considerable role. [21]

Take for example, the Soviet Ambassadors only. The Soviet ambassador to London, Maisky was a right-wing Menshevik who broke with his own party in 1918, going to the right in order to avail himself of the opportunity to enter as a minister in the Trans-Ural White government, under the protection of Kolchak; only after Kolchak was annihilated did Maisky consider the time ripe for turning his face towards the Soviets. The ambassador to the United States, A. Troyanovsky, joined the Bolsheviks in his youth; shortly afterwards he left the party; during the war he was a patriot; in 1917, a Menshevik; the October Revolution found him a member of the Menshevik Central Committee, in addition to which, during the next few years, Troyanovsky carried on an illegal struggle against the dictatorship of the proletariat; he entered the Stalinist party, more correctly, the diplomatic service, after the Left Opposition was crushed. The ambassador to Paris, Potemkin, was a bourgeois professor of history during the period of the October Revolution; he joined the Bolsheviks after the victory. The former ambassador to Berlin, Khinchuk, participated, as a Menshevik, during the days of the October overturn, in the counterrevolutionary Moscow Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution, together with Grinko, a right-wing Social Revolutionary, the present people’s commissar of finance. Suritz, who replaced Khinchuk in Berlin, was the political secretary of the Menshevik Chkheidze, the first chairman of the Soviets; he joined the Bolsheviks after the victory. Almost all other diplomats were of the same type.

Some more specimens, from other wings of the bureaucracy. For example, Serebrovsky, a member of the Central Committee of the party, and the organizer of the Soviet gold-mining industry: he participated in the 1905 Revolution as a young student and Menshevik and then went over to the camp of the bourgeoisie for many long years; the February 1917 revolution found him a czarist director of two munitions plants, a member of the Board of Trade and an active participant in the struggle against the metal workers’ union; in May 1917, Serebrovsky declared that Lenin was a “German spy”! Of such caliber is this bulwark of the regime, member of the Central Committee and 100 percent Stalinist!

Another specimen: Zaslavsky, one of the pillars of the present-day Pravda. Who is this Zaslavsky? In the dim past—a right-wing Bundist [Menshevik of the Jewish Bund], later a bourgeois journalist who carried on a most contemptible campaign in 1917 against Lenin and Trotsky as agents of Germany. In Lenin’s articles for 1917 there is to be found, as a refrain, the phrase, “Zaslavsky and other scoundrels like him.” During the civil-war period, he was, while in hiding in Kiev, a journalist for White Guard publications. Only in 1923 did he go over to the side of the Soviet power. And then, in the mid-1930s, he became a defender of Stalinism from the counter-revolutionists Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev! In the USSR as well as abroad, Stalin’s press was crammed with such individuals. [22]

Such was the composition of the new ruling stratum of the Soviet Union. The old cadres of Bolshevism had been smashed. Of Lenin’s Political Bureau, only Stalin remained. Lenin, as Krupskaya herself expressed it, was spared only by death from the repressions of the bureaucracy; failing the opportunity to put him in prison, the epigones shut him up in a mausoleum. [23]

In early 1936, the ruling bureaucracy removed the limitations on education and employment upon people of bourgeois origin. [24] At the same moment, it was revealed that the most malicious “class enemies” were being recruited from amongst those who struggled throughout their lives for socialism. “We will in the future too beat down and exterminate with a firm hand the enemies of the people, the Trotskyite reptiles & furies, no matter how skillfully they disguise themselves,” declared Pravda (June 5, 1936), the organ of Stalin. [25]

The bureaucracy had no problems in opening up broad opportunities for careers to the more ambitious offspring of the bourgeoisie. But such developments produced a sharp and dangerous discontent in the masses, especially the worker youths. Hence the exterminating campaign against the “reptiles & furies”.

6. The State of the Whole People

Taking the declaration of the abolition of classes in the USSR to its logical conclusion, the new Constitution of the USSR (of 1936) abolished the Soviet system of election according to class and industrial groups, and replaced it by the system of bourgeois democracy based on the so-called “universal, equal & direct” vote of the entire population. [26] In essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat was being liquidated; from being proletarian, the state now became “state of the whole people.” [27] It was an outright negation of the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin. The reason given by the creators of the constitution was that the in liquidating the capitalists as a class, the proletariat had also liquidated itself; since there were no classes, hence there was no need to have elections based on class groups (i.e., the Soviets). [28] The real reason for this constitutional reform was that the Stalinist regime was becoming increasingly fearful of the more radical elements among the workers and the soldiers. The lava of revolution had not yet cooled; and the increasingly sharp contradiction between the ideals of socialism and the practice of the ruling stratum was breeding discontent amongst them. And so, the Soviet aristocracy wanted to get rid of the worker and soldier Soviets.

Nevertheless, after some wavering, the reformers decided to continue calling the state, as before, Soviet; whereas actually the Soviets had now ceased to exist! However, the institutions of local self-administration, which were now elected through democratic elections in which all people participated, were not Soviets any longer, even if the reformers wanted these new institutions to still carry the old name. Because Soviets are organs of class rule; they cannot be anything else. Likewise, the general state Legislative Assembly was a parliament (or rather its caricature), and by no means the highest organ of the Soviets. The reformers were indulging in a crude political ruse; in trying to cover their new system with the historic authority of the Soviet system, they were only proving that they dared not as yet come out in their real name.

The new Constitution this represented an immense step backwards from socialist to bourgeois principles. It fully conformed to the historic course charted by the new Soviet ruling stratum, such as the abandonment of the world revolution in favour of the League of Nations, the restoration of the bourgeois family, the resurrection of ranks and decorations in the standing army, the justification of increasing inequality in society under the label of a new concocted socialist principle of “to each according to his work.”

References

[1] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1972, pp. 115, 120, 76

[2] Ibid., p. 74

[3] Ibid., pp.80-81

[4] Ibid., p. 84

[5] Ibid., pp. 115, 124-125

[6] Ibid., p. 81

[7] Ibid., p. 82

[8] Ibid., p. 258

[9] Ibid., p. 258-259

[10] Ibid., p. 107

[11] J. V. Stalin, On the Draft Constitution of the USSR, Problems of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1976, Pp. 799-800

[12] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 60

[13] Ibid., p. 62

[14] Ibid., p. 109

[15] Ibid., p. 106

[16] Ibid., p. 263

[17] Leon Trotsky, 20,000 Oppositionists Expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in recent ‘Cleansing’ (January 11, 1936), The New Militant, February 15, 1936

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 110

[21] Ibid., p. 93

[22] Leon Trotsky, The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism, February 1, 1935, www.trotsky.net

[23] Ibid.

[24] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 281

[25] Ibid., p.280

[26] Ibid., pp. 260-261

[27] Ibid., p. 261

[28] Ibid., p. 261

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