Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed – Chapter 11 – Whither the USSR

(These are the notes for the presentation at this event, which can also be listened to as a podcast)

This is the concluding chapter of the book, and it stands on the shoulders of the material we have already studied. There is a certain amount of summarising of previous arguments in this chapter, a degree of repetition that I do not intend to repeat here. But in a way, Trotsky sums it up, when he asks “how could the ruling clique, with its innumerable mistakes, concentrate power in its hands?” and he answers, “the Soviet society is not harmonious”.

As we have studied previously, the contradiction between the advanced nature of the new production relations, and the backwardness of Soviet Russia’s material and technological base led to a contradiction between the same higher relations of production and the objective need for bourgeois norms of distribution – that is – an apparatus to administer inequality – in order that the material wealth of the country should be able to advance. The concrete political struggles that were fought within the USSR in that period were a product of those contradictions, and in particular of the isolation of the USSR caused by the failure of the post WWI revolutionary wave to result in a sustained revolutionary victory anywhere else outside the former Russian Empire. Given that external failure, the rise of the bureaucratic regime was inescapable. But it had its own contradictions:

“While the growth of industry and the bringing of agriculture into the sphere of state planning vastly complicates the tasks of leadership, bringing to the front the problem of quality, bureaucratism destroys the creative initiative and the feeling of responsibility without which there is not, and cannot be, qualitative progress…”

“The progressive role of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides with the period devoted to introducing into the Soviet Union the most important elements of capitalist technique.”

“It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command – although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the grey label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative – conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

And that is the point. The backwardness of the productive forces created a vicious circle:

“No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly favourable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.”

But conversely, because this was again, not possible without an external revolutionary development, we get this:

“The more the course of development goes against it, the more ruthless it becomes toward the advanced elements of the population…. The bureaucracy has need of an inviolable superarbiter, a first consul if not an emperor, and it raises upon its shoulders him who best responds to its claim for lordship…. In Stalin each one easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

Trotsky notes similar phenomena in previous social systems:

“Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged. The Stalin regime, rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officers’ corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a variation of Bonapartism – a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history.”

This must be put in its context:

“In the last analysis, Soviet Bonapartism owes its birth to the belatedness of the world revolution. But in the capitalist countries the same cause gave rise to fascism. We thus arrive at the conclusion, unexpected at first glance, but in reality inevitable, that the crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. ….  A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet Bonapartism. In turning its back to the international revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy was, from its own point of view, right. It was merely obeying the voice of self-preservation. “

This is a comparison and a parallelism in different social systems, not a bald equation. Some ‘Trotskyists’ today make bald equations between the Stalinist movement and fascism. As a result, we see the Stalinophobia and Russophobia of some Trotskyists … including some of the forebears of our own tendency that we have escaped from by developing new analyses of China, and Russia, in this period. However, we could also not be historically naïve about the nature of the Stalinist regime in that particular struggle. As Trotsky narrated, about the parameters of Stalinism’s own reaction against the Left Opposition:

“During the first ten years of its struggle, the Left Opposition did not abandon the program of ideological conquest of the party for that of conquest of power against the party. Its slogan was: reform, not revolution. The bureaucracy, however, even in those times, was ready for any revolution in order to defend itself against a democratic reform. In 1927, when the struggle reached an especially bitter stage, Stalin declared at a session of the Central Committee, addressing himself to the Opposition: “Those cadres can be removed only by civil war!” What was a threat in Stalin’s words became, thanks to a series of defeats of the European proletariat, a historic fact. The road of reform was turned into a road of revolution.”

And the regime pushed it further, to the point of an inquisition on an epic scale. They made it clear that they did not fear the old ruling classes, or what was left of them. They feared criticism from the left above all:

“In their persecution of revolutionists, the Thermidorians pour out all their hatred upon those who remind them of the past, and make them dread the future. The prisons, the remote corners of Siberia and Central Asia, the fast multiplying concentration camps, contain the flower of the Bolshevik Party, the most sturdy and true. Even in the solitary confinement prisons of Siberia the Oppositionists are still persecuted with searches, postal blockades and hunger. In exile wives are forcibly separated from their husbands, with one sole purpose: to break their resistance and extract a recantation.”

Trotsky quoted Victor Serge, for his chronicling what actually happened to the struggle of the authentic remnants of the Bolshevik Party in the USSR, those who refused to capitulate to Soviet Bonapartism:

“I exaggerate nothing, I weigh every word. I can back up every one of my statements with tragic proof and with names. Among this mass of martyrs and protestants, for the most part silent, one heroic minority is nearer to me than all the others, precious for its energy, its penetration, its stoicism, its devotion to the Bolshevism of the great epoch. Thousands of these Communists of the first hour, comrades of Lenin and Trotsky, builders of the Soviet Republic when Soviets still existed, are opposing the principles of socialism to the inner degeneration of the regime, are defending as best they can (and all they can is to agree to all possible sacrifices) the rights of the working class … I bring you news of those who are locked up there. They will hold out, whatever be necessary, to the end. Even if they do not live to see a new revolutionary dawn … the revolutionists of the West can count upon them. The flame will be kept burning, even if only in prisons. In the same way they are counting upon you. You must – we must – defend them in order to defend workers’ democracy in the world, in order to revive the liberating image of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and some day restore to the Soviet Union its moral greatness and the confidence of the workers.”

So then we get to the conclusions of all this, he cites Lenin, noting that “the custom of observing the rules of social life can lose all need of compulsion if there is nothing which provokes indignation, protest and revolt, and thus creates the necessity for repression.” This is the essence of socialism, and the USSR did not achieve it, no matter the verbiage of the bureaucracy and its supporters. This situation was very different, notwithstanding the dawning of a superior mode of production – that dawning, and the improvements it brings, highlight the contradiction:

“The very existence of a greedy, lying and cynical caste of rulers inevitably creates a hidden indignation. The improvement of the material situation of the workers does not reconcile them with the authorities; on the contrary, by increasing their self-respect and freeing their thought for general problems of politics, it prepares the way for an open conflict with the bureaucracy.”

And Trotsky gives several examples of how that antagonism between the workers and the bureaucracy expressed itself, from terrorist outbursts from among the youth, to the emergence of new oppositional currents in the party, unconnected with the original opposition, which the bureaucracy appeared unable to put a stop to despite the repression of the GPU, giving that repression a hysterical character. The question became “Will the bureaucrat devour the workers’ state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat? Thus stands the question upon whose decision hangs the fate of the Soviet Union” Trotsky’s point being that that bulk of the population were even then hostile to the bureaucracy – the peasantry had repeatedly shown this in action. Yet the workers were more reticent. The reasoning for this is made clear:

“If in contrast to the peasants the workers have almost never come out on the road of open struggle, thus condemning the protesting villages to confusion and impotence, this is not only because of the repressions. The workers fear lest, in throwing out the bureaucracy, they will open the way for a capitalist restoration.”

And they are right to be worried, because:

“Without a planned economy the Soviet Union would be thrown back for decades. In that sense the bureaucracy continues to fulfil a necessary function. But it fulfils it in such a way as to prepare an explosion of the whole system which may completely sweep out the results of the revolution. The workers are realists. Without deceiving themselves with regard to the ruling caste at least with regard to its lower tiers which stand near to them – they see in it the watchman for the time being of a certain part of their own conquests. They will inevitably drive out the dishonest, impudent and unreliable watchman as soon as they see another possibility. For this it is necessary that in the West or the East another revolutionary dawn arise.”

This is one key reason why the bureaucracy was not merely passive about the world revolution. Its hostile attitude was not merely negligence and acquiescence to the counterrevolutionary activities of imperialism. The bureaucracy itself feared any outbreak of the world revolution, so in the most obvious such opportunity in the mid-1930s, in Spain, the GPU overtly played a counterrevolutionary role, murdering those like Nin who they feared might lead a revolution.

But though the conflict between the workers and the bureaucracy was hindered by this correct fear, it could not be supressed indefinitely. Because the bureaucracy only acted as watchman “for the time being”. It the long run, the failure of the revolution to spread endangered those gains in any case. The whole perspective of political revolution coming from the working class was a favourable hypothesis, not an inevitability.

“The proletariat of a backward country was fated to accomplish the first socialist revolution. For this historic privilege, it must, according to all evidences, pay with a second supplementary revolution – against bureaucratic absolutism. The program of the new revolution depends to a great extent upon the moment when it breaks out, upon the level which the country has then attained, and to a great degree upon the international situation.

And further:

“It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions…”

And it is posed conditionally, in the circumstances of the time, the disastrous negative possibility:

“If the Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with its treacherous policy of “people’s fronts”, in insuring the victory of reaction in Spain and France – and the Communist International is doing all it can in that direction – the Soviet Union will find itself on the edge of ruin. A bourgeois counterrevolution rather than an insurrection of the workers against the bureaucracy will be on the order of the day.”

As opposed to the positive outcome Communists fought for:

What we all know now is that this was foreshortened, that the Spanish and French revolutions were crushed, in Spain by fascism, in France by the bulk of the French bourgeoisie welcoming Nazi invaders in 1940 under the watchword “better Hitler than the Popular Front” after the French Communist Party under Thorez/Stalin had sabotaged the insurrectionary general strike of 1936 with the dismissive phrase “It is necessary to know when to end a strike”, to support the coalition government of Blum with Daladier. The same Daladier who later accompanied Neville Chamberlain to Munich in their joint effort to persuade Hitler to attack the USSR earlier, with their support, and leave Western Europe alone.  The Nazi attack on the USSR did happen, as is known, and after 27 million deaths, Hitler’s attackers were defeated and driven back to Berlin.  That victory extended the life of the bureaucratic regime by decades, in a US dominated post-WWII era. Yet the problems Trotsky talked of resurrected themselves over that period, and the bourgeois restoration did materialise, in the 1980s and 1990s. Which only goes to show that while a basic Marxist analysis of the contradictions of a phenomenon can be correct, the timing of events derived from that is itself affected by external factors and can be off by decades.

That concludes this work. I also recommend reading the appendix, about the Webbs and their glorification of Stalin’s Russia, while they had previously excoriated the October Revolution and supported the armed imperialist campaign to overthrow it. They became reconciled to the regime in the USSR only insofar as the Stalin regime became reconciled with world capitalism and imperialist ‘order’. That is the fundamental point about such false friends – you must look for people’s real motives, not the superficialities of what they say formally.