The Russian Revolution (26 page)

Collectivization was the Achilles' heel of the First Five-Year Plan, a regular source of crises, confrontations, and improvised solutions. On the positive side, it provided the desired mechanism for state grain procurements at low, non-negotiable prices and in larger volume than the peasants wanted to sell. On the debit side, it left the peasantry resentful and unwilling to work, caused massive slaughter of livestock, led to famine in 1932-3 (provoking crises throughout the economy and administrative system), and forced the state to invest much more heavily in the agricultural sector than was compatible with the original strategy of `squeezing the peasantry'.7 In theory, collectivization could have meant many things. As practised in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it was an extreme form of state economic exploitation which the peasantry understandably regarded as `a second serfdom'. This was demoralizing not only to peasants but also to the Communist cadres who experienced it at first hand.

Nobody was really happy about collectivization; it was seen by Communists as a battle won, but at great cost. Furthermore, the kolkhoz that actually came into being was very different from the kolkhoz of Communist dreams or the one depicted in Soviet propaganda. The real kolkhoz was small, village-based, and primitive, whereas the dream kolkhoz was a showplace of large-scale, modern, mechanized agriculture. Not only was the real kolkhoz lacking in tractors, which were removed to regional Machine-Tractor Stations, it was also acutely short of traditional draught power because of the slaughter of horses during collectivization. Living standards in the village had dropped sharply with collectivization, going down to the barest subsistence level in many places. Electricity had become even less common in the countryside than it had been in the 192os because of the disappearance of the `kulak' millers whose water-powered turbines had generated it. To the chagrin of many rural Communist officials, collectivized agriculture was not even fully socialized because peasants were allowed small private plots, even though this encouraged them to skimp on work in the collective fields. As Stalin admitted in 1935, the private plot was essential to the peasant family's survival, since it provided most of the peasants' (and the nation's) milk, eggs, and vegetables. For much of the 1930s, the only payment that most peasants received from the kolkhoz for their work was a small share of the grain harvest. s

As to the Revolution's political goals, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the regime's survival through the anxious months of 1931, 1932, and 1933 seemed in itself a victory-perhaps even a miracle-to many Communists. Still, this was not a victory to celebrate in public. Something more was needed, preferably something about socialism. In the early 1930s, it had become fashionable to talk about `the building of socialism' and `socialist construction'. But these phrases, never precisely defined, suggested process rather than completion. In 1936, with the introduction of the new Soviet Constitution, Stalin indicated that the `construction' phase was essentially finished. This meant that socialism was an accomplished fact in the Soviet Union.

Theoretically, it was quite a leap. Exactly what `socialism' meant was always vague, but if Lenin's State and Revolution (written in September 1917) was a guide, it involved local ('soviet') democracy, the disappearance of class antagonism and class exploitation, and the withering away of the state. The last requirement was a stumbling block, for even the most optimistic Soviet Marxist could hardly maintain that the Soviet state had withered away, or was likely to do so in the near future. The solution was found by introducing a new, or at least hitherto neglected, theoretical distinction between socialism and communism. It was only under communism, it transpired, that the state would wither away. Socialism, though not the final end of the Revolution, was the best that could be achieved in a world of mutually antagonistic nation-states in which the Soviet Union existed in the midst of capitalist encirclement. With the advent of world revolution, the state could wither. Until then, it must remain strong and powerful to protect the world's only socialist society from its enemies.

What were the characteristics of the socialism that now existed in the Soviet Union? The answer to this question was given in the new Soviet Constitution, the first since the revolutionary Constitution of the Russian Republic in 1918. To understand it, we need to recall that according to Marxist-Leninist theory a transitional phase of proletarian dictatorship lay between the revolution and socialism. That phase, which began in Russia in October 1917, was characterized by intense class war, as the old possessing classes resisted their expropriation and destruction by the proletarian state. It was the cessation of class war, Stalin explained in introducing the new Constitution, that marked the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to socialism.

According to the new Constitution, all Soviet citizens possessed the equal rights and guaranteed civil liberties appropriate to socialism. Now that the capitalist bourgeoisie and kulaks had been eliminated, class struggle had disappeared. There were still classes in Soviet society-the working class, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia (strictly defined as a stratum rather than a class)-but their relations were free of antagonism and exploitation. They were equal in status, and equal also in their devotion to socialism and the Soviet state.9

These assertions have infuriated many non-Soviet commentators over the years. Socialists have denied that the Stalinist system was true socialism; others have pointed out that the Constitution's promises of freedom and equality were a sham. While there is room for argument about the degree of fraudulence, or the degree of intention to defraud,10 such reactions are understandable because the Constitution had only the most tenuous relationship to Soviet reality. In the context of our present discussion, however, the Constitution need not be taken too seriously: as far as claims of revolutionary victory are concerned, this was an afterthought that had little emotional charge in the Communist Party or the society as a whole. Most people were indifferent, some were confused. A poignant response to the news that socialism already existed in the Soviet Union came from a young journalist, a true believer in the socialist future, who knew how primitive and miserable life was in his native village. Was this then socialism? `Never, neither before or after, have I experienced such disappointment, such grief."

The new Constitution's guarantee of equal rights represented a real change from the 1918 Constitution of the Russian Republic. The 1918 Constitution had explicitly not given equal rights: members of the old exploiting classes had been deprived of the right to vote in soviet elections, and urban workers' votes were heavily weighted as against peasants' votes. Associated with this was an elaborate structure of class-discriminatory laws and regulations designed to put workers in a privileged position and disadvantage the bourgeoisie that had been in place since the Revolution. Now, under the 1936 Constitution, everyone had the right to vote, regardless of class. The stigmatized category of `disenfranchised persons' (lishentsy) disappeared. Class-discriminatory policies and practices were being phased out even before the new Constitution. In university admissions, for example, discrimination in favour of workers had been dropped a few years before.

Thus, the shift away from class discrimination was real, although it was by no means as complete as the Constitution implied, and met considerable resistance from Communists who were used to doing things the old way.12 The significance of the change could be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, the dropping of class discrimination could be seen as a prerequisite for socialist equality ('Revolution accomplished'). On the other hand, it could be taken as the regime's definitive abandonment of the proletariat ('Revolution betrayed'). The status of the working class and its relationship to Soviet power under the new order remained unclear. There never was any straightforward official statement that the era of proletarian dictatorship had ended (though this was the logical inference to be drawn if the Soviet Union had already entered the era of socialism), but usage shifted away from terms like `proletarian hegemony' towards blander formulations like `the leading role of the working class'.

Marxist critics like Trotsky might say that the party had lost its moorings by allowing the bureaucracy to replace the working class as its main source of social support. But Stalin had a different view. From Stalin's standpoint, one of the great achievements of the Revolution had been the creation of a `new Soviet intelligentsia' (which in essence meant a new managerial and professional elite), recruited from the working class and peasantry.13 The Soviet regime no longer had to depend on holdovers from the old elites, whose loyalty would always be dubious, but could now rely on its own elite of home-grown `leading cadres and specialists', men who owed their promotion and careers to the Revolution and could be relied on to be completely loyal to it (and to Stalin). Once the regime had this `new class'-'yesterday's workers and peasants, promoted to command positions'-as a social base, the whole issue of the proletariat and its special relationship to the regime became unimportant in Stalin's eyes. After all, as he implied in his comments to the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, the flower of the old revolutionary working class had in fact been transplanted into the new Soviet intelligentsia, and if workers who had failed to rise were envious, so much the worse for them. There is little doubt that this point of view made perfect sense to the `sons of the working class' in the new elite, who, in the manner of the upwardly mobile everywhere, were both proud of their disadvantaged background and happy to have left it behind.

`Revolution betrayed'

The pledge of liberte, egalite, fraternite is a part of almost all revolutions, but it is a pledge that the victorious revolutionaries almost inevitably dishonour. The Bolsheviks knew this in advance because they had read Marx. They did their best, even in the euphoria of October, to be hard-headed scientific revolutionaries and not utopian dreamers. They hedged their promises of liberte, egalite, and fraternite with references to class war and the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it was as difficult to repudiate the classic revolutionary slogans as it would have been to conduct a successful revolution without enthusiasm. Emotionally, the Old Bolshevik leaders could not help being somewhat egalitarian and libertarian; and they were somewhat utopian too, for all their Marxist theory. The New Bolsheviks of 1917 and Civil-War vintage had the same emotional response without the intellectual inhibitions. While the Bolsheviks did not exactly set out to make an egalitarian, libertarian, and utopian revolution, the Revolution made the Bolsheviks at least intermittently egalitarian, libertarian, and utopian.

The ultra-revolutionary strain in post-October Bolshevism was dominant during the First Five-Year Plan Cultural Revolution which, in the manner of such episodes, overreached itself and was followed by a reversion to milder and less experimental social and cultural policies. These have been labelled a `great retreat'; and although that term obscures some important `revolutionary' features of the 193os, notably the fact that peasant agriculture was now collectivized, urban private trade illegal, and a new wave of terror was to break only five years after the collapse of Cultural Revolution, it still captures something of the transition that occurred in the mid-1930s. Much, of course, depends on the perspective. Young enthusiasts, eager to go out and build socialism in Magnitogorsk or Komsomolsk-na-Amure, seem neither to have attached much importance to the changes nor to have considered themselves to be living in a period of revolutionary `retreat'.14 On the other hand, Old Bolsheviks, especially Old Bolshevik intellectuals, found many of the changes jarring, especially the increased emphasis on hierarchy, the acceptance of elite privilege, and the move away from the regime's earlier identification with the proletariat. Such people might not have agreed with Trotsky's accusation that a betrayal of the revolution had occurred, but they would have known what he meant.

The `great retreat' was most startlingly visible in the sphere of manners, a development that critics like Trotsky called embourgeoisement, though supporters described as becoming `cultured'. In the 1920s, proletarian manners had been cultivated even by Bolshevik intellectuals: when Stalin told a party audience that he was a `crude' man, it sounded more like self-promotion than self-deprecation. But in the 1930s, Stalin began to present himself to Soviet Communists and foreign interviewers as a man of culture, like Lenin. Among his colleagues in the party leadership, the newly risen Khrushchevs, confident of their proletarian origins but afraid of behaving like peasants, were beginning to outnumber the Bukharins, who were confident of their culture but afraid of behaving like bourgeois intellectuals. At a lower level of officialdom, Communists tried to learn the rules of polite behaviour and put away their Army boots and cloth caps, not wanting to be mistaken for members of the non-upwardly mobile proletariat.

In the economic sphere, the Second Five-Year Plan marked a transition to sober planning, and the watchwords for labour were increasing productivity and acquiring skills. The principle of material incentives was firmly established, with increased differentiation of workers' wages according to skill and bonuses for output above the norm. Specialists' salaries were raised, and in 1932 the average salary of engineers and technicians stood higher in relation to the average workers' wage than at any time in the Soviet period before or after. The Stakhanovite Movement (named for a recordbreaking coalminer from the Donbass) glorified individual workers while being at the expense of the collective. The Stakhanovite was a norm-buster, lavishly rewarded for his achievements and feted by the media, but in the real world almost inevitably resented and shunned by his fellow workers. He was also an innovator and rationalizer of production, encouraged to challenge the conservative wisdom of the experts and expose the unspoken agreement between factory management, engineers, and trade-union branches to resist the constant pressure from above to raise norms.15