The Russian Revolution (19 page)

Issues were argued in the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, particularly with relation to industrialization strategy and policy towards the peasants. But Stalin and Trotsky were not deeply divided on these substantive issues (see below, pp. 113-15): both were industrializers without any special tenderness towards the peasantry, though Stalin's public stance in the mid-192os was more moderate than Trotsky's; and a few years later, Stalin was to be accused of stealing Trotsky's policies in the First Five-Year Plan drive for rapid industrialization. For rank-and-file party members, the contenders' disagreements on issues were much less clearly perceived than some of their personal characteristics. Trotsky was widely (though not necessarily favourably) known to be a Jewish intellectual who had shown ruthlessness and a flamboyant, charismatic style of leadership during the Civil War; Stalin, a more neutral and shadowy figure, was known to be not charismatic, intellectual, or Jewish.

In a sense, the real issue in a conflict between a party machine and its challengers is the machine itself. Thus, whatever their original disagreements with the dominant faction, all the oppositions of the 1920S ended up with the same central grievance: the party had become `bureaucratized', and Stalin had killed the tradition of internal party democracy.18 This `oppositionist' viewpoint has even been attributed to Lenin in his last years19-and perhaps with some justice, since Lenin too had been forced out of the inner circle of leaders, though in his case the cause was illness rather than political defeat. But it would be hard to see Lenin, Stalin's political mentor in so many ways, as a real convert on principle to the cause of party democracy against the party machine. In the past, it had not been concentration of power per se that worried Lenin, but the question in whose hands power was concentrated. Similarly, in the Testament of December 1922, Lenin did not propose reducing the powers of the party Secretariat. He simply said that someone other than Stalin should be appointed General Secretary.

Still, whatever the elements of continuity between Lenin and the Stalin of the 192os, Lenin's death and the succession struggle constituted a political turning point. In seeking power, Stalin used Leninist methods against his opponents, but used them with a thoroughness and ruthlessness that Lenin-whose personal authority in the party was long established-never approached. Once in power, Stalin began by taking Lenin's old role: first among equals in the Politburo. But Lenin, meanwhile, had been transformed by death into the Leader, endowed with almost godlike qualities, beyond error or reproach, his body embalmed and reverently placed in the Lenin Mausoleum for the inspiration of the people.20 The posthumous Lenin cult had destroyed the old Bolshevik myth of a leaderless party. If the new leader wished to become more than first among equals, he had a foundation on which to build.

Building socialism in one country

The Bolsheviks summarized their objectives in power as `the building of socialism'. However vague their concept of socialism may have been, they had a clear idea that the key to `building socialism' was economic development and modernization. As prerequisites of socialism, Russia needed more factories, railways, machinery, and technology. It needed urbanization, a shift of population from the countryside to the towns, and a much larger, permanent urban working class. It needed greater popular literacy, more schools, more skilled workers and engineers. Building socialism meant transforming Russia into a modern industrial society.

The Bolsheviks had a clear image of this transformation because it was essentially the transformation wrought by capitalism in the more advanced countries of the West. But the Bolsheviks had taken power `prematurely'-that is, they had undertaken to do the capitalists' work for them in Russia. The Mensheviks thought this risky in practice and highly dubious in theory. The Bolsheviks themselves did not really know how it was going to be accomplished. In the first years after the October Revolution, they often implied that Russia would need the help of industrialized Western Europe (once Europe had followed Russia's revolutionary example) in order to move forward to socialism. But the revolutionary movement in Europe collapsed, leaving the Bolsheviks still uncertain how to proceed, but determined to make their way somehow. Looking back at the old argument about premature revolution in 1923, Lenin continued to find the Mensheviks' objections `infinitely commonplace'. In a revolutionary situation, as Napoleon said of war, `on s'engage etpuis on voit'. The Bolsheviks had taken the risk and, Lenin concluded, there could now-six years later-be no doubt that `on the whole' they had been successful.21

This was perhaps putting a brave face on it, for even the most optimistic Bolsheviks had been shaken by the economic situation that confronted them at the end of the Civil War. It was as if, in mockery of all the Bolsheviks' aspirations, Russia had shrugged off the twentieth century and regressed from comparative to total backwardness. Towns had withered, machinery was rusting in deserted factories, mines were flooded, and half the industrial working class had apparently been reabsorbed into the peasantry. As the 1926 census would reveal, European Russia was actually less urbanized in the years immediately after the Civil War than it had been in 1897. The peasants had reverted to traditional subsistence agriculture, seemingly intent on recapturing that golden age in the past before the advent of serfdom.

The introduction of NEP in 1921 was an admission that the Bolsheviks could perhaps do the work of the big capitalists, but for the time being could not get along without the small ones. In the towns, private trade and small-scale private industry were allowed to revive. In the countryside, the Bolsheviks had already let the peasants have their way over the land, and were now anxious to ensure that they played their role as reliable `petty-bourgeois' producers for the urban market, as well as consumers of urban manufactured goods. The policy of assisting peasants to consolidate their holdings (begun under Stolypin) was continued by Soviet authorities in the 1920s, though without any frontal attack on the authority of the mir. From the Bolshevik standpoint, small-capitalist peasant farming was preferable to the traditional communal and near-subsistence cultivation of the village, and they did their best to encourage it.

But the Bolsheviks' attitude to the private sector during NEP was always ambivalent. They needed it to restore the shattered economy after the Civil War, and they assumed that they would probably need it for the early stages of subsequent economic development. However, even a partial revival of capitalism was offensive and frightening to most party members. When `concessions' for manufacturing and mining were granted to foreign companies, Soviet authorities hovered anxiously, waiting for the moment when the enterprise looked solid enough for them to withdraw the concession and buy the foreign company out. Local private entrepreneurs ('Nepmen') were treated with great suspicion, and the restrictions on their activities became so onerous by the second half of the 19206 that many businesses went into liquidation, and the remaining Nepmen acquired the shady look of profiteers operating on the fringes of the law.

The Bolsheviks' approach to the peasantry during NEP was even more contradictory. Collective and large-scale farming was their long-term objective, but the conventional wisdom of the mid-192os held that this was a prospect only for the distant future. In the meantime, the peasantry must be conciliated and allowed to follow its own petty-bourgeois path; and it was in the state's economic interest to encourage the peasants to improve their agricultural methods and increase production. This implied that the regime tolerated and even approved of peasants who worked hard and made a success of their individual farming.

In practice, however, the Bolsheviks were extremely suspicious of peasants who became more prosperous than their neighbours. They regarded such peasants as potential exploiters and rural capitalists, often classifying them as `kulaks', which meant that they suffered various forms of discrimination including loss of voting rights. For all their talk of forging an alliance with the `middle' peasant (the category between `prosperous' and `poor', into which the great majority of all peasants fell), the Bolsheviks were continually on the watch for signs of class differentiation within the peasantry, hoping for a chance to throw themselves into a class struggle and support the poor peasants against the richer ones.

But it was the town, not the village, that the Bolsheviks saw as the key to economic development. When they spoke of building socialism, the main process that they had in mind was industrialization, which would ultimately transform not only the urban economy but also the rural one. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, it seemed a gigantic task just to restore industrial production to the levels of 1913: Lenin's electrification plan was virtually the only long-range development scheme of the first half of the 192os, and, for all the publicity given to it, the original goals were quite modest. But in 1924-5, an unexpectedly rapid industrial and general economic recovery caused an upsurge of optimism among the Bolshevik leaders, and a reassessment of the possibilities of major industrial development in the near future. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka during the Civil War and one of the party's best organizers, took over the chairmanship of the Supreme Economic Council (Vesenkha) in 1924 and began to mould it into a powerful ministry of industry which, like its Tsarist predecessors, focused largely on the development of the metallurgical, metalworking, and machine-building industries. The new optimism about rapid industrial development was reflected in Dzerzhinsky's confident statement at the end of 1925:

These new tasks [of industrialization] are not just tasks of the kind we were considering in abstract terms ten, fifteen or even twenty years ago, when we said that it is impossible to build socialism without setting a course for the industrialization of the country. Now we are not posing the question on a general theoretical level, but as a definite, concrete objective of all our present economic activity.22

There was no real disagreement among the party leaders on the desirability of rapid industrialization, although inevitably the issue was bandied around in the factional struggles of the mid-192os. Trotsky, one of the few Bolsheviks who had actively supported state economic planning even in the dismal early years of NEP, would have been happy to champion the cause of industrialization against his political opponents. But in 1925 Stalin made it clear that industrialization was now his issue and one of his highest priorities. On the eighth anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin compared the party's recent decision to press forward with industrialization on the basis of a Five-Year Plan with Lenin's momentous decision to seize political power in 1917.23 This was a bold comparison, suggesting not only the stature Stalin hoped for himself but also the importance he attached to the industrialization policy. Already, it appeared, he was staking out his place in history as Lenin's successor: he was to be Stalin the Industrializer.

The party's new orientation was expressed in Stalin's slogan `Socialism in One Country'. What this meant was that Russia was preparing to industrialize, to become strong and powerful, and to create the preconditions of socialism by its own unaided efforts. National modernization, not international revolution, was the primary objective of the Soviet Communist Party. The Bolsheviks did not need revolutions in Europe as a prop for their own proletarian revolution. They did not need the goodwill of foreigners-whether revolutionaries or capitalists-to build Soviet power. Their own forces were sufficient, as they had been in October 1917, to win the fight.

Given the undeniable fact of Soviet isolation in the world and Stalin's intention to industrialize no matter what the cost, 'Socialism in One Country' was a useful rallying cry and good political strategy. But it was the kind of strategy that Old Bolsheviks, trained in a strict school of Marxist theory, often felt compelled to dispute even when they had no major practical objections. There were, after all, theoretical problems to be ironed out, disturbing undertones of national chauvinism, as if the party were pandering to the politically backward masses of the Soviet population. First Zinoviev (leader of the Comintern until 1926) and then Trotsky took the bait, raising objections to `Socialism in One Country' that were ideologically impeccable and politically disastrous. The objections enabled Stalin to smear his opponents, while at the same time underlining the politically advantageous fact that Stalin had taken a stand for nation-building and Russian national strength.24

When Trotsky, a Jewish intellectual, pointed out that the Bolsheviks had always been internationalists, Stalin's supporters portrayed him as a cosmopolitan who cared less about Russia than about Europe. When Trotsky correctly asserted that he was no less an industrializer than Stalin, Stalin's men recalled that he had advocated labour conscription in 192o and thus, unlike Stalin, was probably an industrializer who was prepared to sacrifice the interests of the Russian working class. Yet, when the financing of industrialization became an issue and Trotsky argued that foreign trade and credits were essential if the Russian population were not to be squeezed beyond endurance, this was only further proof of Trotsky's 'internationalism'-not to mention his lack of realism, since it appeared increasingly unlikely that large-scale foreign trade and credits would be obtainable. Stalin, by contrast, took the position that was simultaneously patriotic and practical: the Soviet Union had no need or desire to beg favours from the capitalist West.

However, the financing of the industrialization drive was a serious issue, not to be dismissed by rhetorical flourishes. The Bolsheviks knew that capital accumulation had been a prerequisite for bourgeois industrial revolution, and that, as Marx had vividly described, this process had meant suffering for the population. The Soviet regime must also accumulate capital in order to industrialize. The old Russian bourgeoisie had already been expropriated, and the new bourgeoisie of Nepmen and kulaks had not had time or opportunity to accumulate much. If, being politically isolated as a result of the revolution, Russia could no longer follow Witte's example and obtain capital from the West, the regime must draw on its own resources and those of the population, still predominantly peasant. Did Soviet industrialization therefore mean `squeezing the peasantry'? If it did, could the regime survive the political confrontation that was likely to follow?