Arthur Rosenberg 1934
Among the Russian proletariat in the years 1926 and 1927 confidence in the Soviet government was severely shaken. This want of confidence was caused by the belief that the Soviet government was the friend of the kulaks and lacked the desire to promote socialism. In order to regain the confidence of the Russian workmen Stalin was compelled to prove to them that he was in earnest in seeking to realise socialism in the form laid down by his theory of ‘socialism in a single country’.
At the Fifteenth Congress of the party Stalin adopted a resolute and confident manner of speech. He demonstrated to his listeners that Russia was an industrial country, and set before the party the task of furthering its industrialisation by all possible means. He then proceeded to draw the conclusion:
Our country advances unerringly and swiftly towards socialism inasmuch as it forces the capitalist elements into the background and gradually excludes them from the national economy.
Stalin continued:
This fact confronts us with the fundamental problem: who shall be attacked and by whom? This question was asked by Lenin in 1921 after the introduction of the New Economic Policy. Should we be capable of allying our socialist economy to peasant economy, of driving out the private trader and private capitalist, and of learning to trade ourselves, or would private capital be too strong for us and create a chasm between the proletariat and the peasants? Such was the question in those days. Now we are able to say that we have already achieved a decisive victory in this direction. The truth of that statement can only be denied by madmen and the blind. Now, however, the problem of ‘Who’ and ‘By whom’ takes on quite a different character. Now the problem is transferred from the sphere of trading to that of production, manual production and agricultural production, in which private capital has a certain definite importance and from which it must be systematically uprooted.
Stalin admitted in this speech that the situation in the country districts was unsatisfactory, and that hitherto too little effort had been made to destroy the influence of the kulaks. He went on to describe severe measures that were about to be put into operation against the village moneylenders. Police measures — he added — would not alone suffice; it would be necessary to find a satisfactory solution to the problem presented by Russian agriculture. Stalin continued:
This solution is to be found in the transformation of the tiny scattered peasant farms into a vast and centralised industry on the basis of cooperative farming and in the adoption of collective farming based on a new and higher technical knowledge. The solution consists in the incorporation through example and as the result of conviction, but not of force, of the smaller and smallest farms in a great industrial organisation for communal, collective and cooperative farming, employing agricultural machinery and tractors, and making use of scientific methods to intensify agricultural production. There is no other solution. Our agriculture will in no other way be able to catch up with and surpass the agricultural methods of the most highly-developed capitalist countries (Canada, etc).
The Soviet government, in conformity with the resolutions passed by the Fifteenth Party Congress, greatly increased the pace of industrial construction. A Five-Year Plan to cover the period 1 October 1928 to 1 October 1933 was put into operation. Industrial and agricultural production was to attain a certain level within this period. The progress achieved in the first year caused the government to announce its intention of completing the Five-Year Plan in four years. This meant that this stage in the industrialisation of Russia was to terminate at the close of 1932. It has already been stated above that Soviet Russian industry had in 1927 already achieved the level of prewar production. By the end of 1930 industrial production had been doubled, and in 1931 production had been increased by 20 per cent in comparison with the previous year. A further increase was to be expected in 1932, and by the close of that year the output of Soviet Russian industry should have trebled that of Russian industry in prewar years. Although this is doubtless an immense achievement, Russian industry has, nevertheless, not attained to the level of the leading industrial countries in Europe or to that of the United States. A few significant statistics may not be out of place here. In 1913 the coke production of Russia totalled 27 million tons, in 1926, 20 million tons, and in 1931, 58 million tons. For the purposes of comparison with the coke production of Western Europe it is necessary to select a year previous to the present great economic crisis. In 1927 Germany produced 154 million tons of coke and 151 million tons of brown coal. The petroleum output of Russia in 1913 was nine million tons, in 1925, seven million tons, and in 1931, 22 million tons. The United States in 1926 produced 106 million tons. The Russian production in pig-iron in 1913 was 4.6 million tons, in 1926, 2.4 million tons, and in 1931, 4.9 million tons. In 1927 Germany produced 13 million tons. In 1913 Russia produced 4.2 million tons of raw steel, in 1926, 3.0 million tons, and in 1931, 5.3 million tons. Germany in 1927 produced 16 million tons of steel. Great praise must be given to Russia for the steady increase that has taken place in her industrial production in recent years. Soviet Russia will, nevertheless, have to carry out many Five-Year Plans before it attains even to the industrial level of Germany.
Interesting comparisons can be made between the number of factory workers, and indeed of all paid workers and employees, in Russia, and in the modern industrial states of Western Europe. The percentage of paid workers and employees to the total population, or to all engaged in work of any kind, affords an approximate index figure for the rate of proletarisation or for the disappearance of the self-supporting small industries and occupations. In 1927 there were 2,300,000 factory workers actually employed in the great industries. The total number of persons in receipt of wages or salaries amounted to 10,300,000. Among these were no less than 3,300,000 brain workers — employees, officials, civil servants of all descriptions. The balance was made up of railwaymen, transport workers, agricultural labourers, and those employed in small industries or businesses. In consequence of the growth of Russian industry the total number of industrial workers in Russia had risen, in 1931, to 5,400,000 and the total of wage-earners in the widest sense to 18,500,000. The increase in the latter class is to be accounted for by the increase in the number of employees and officials as a result of the concomitant growth of industry and also of the over-organisation that was a consequence of the attempt to complete the Five-Year Plan in four years. Out of a wage-earning population of 32 million in Germany in 1925 there were no less than 21 million workmen. If the population of Germany of 65 million be compared with that of Russia of 160 million, the following result is obtained. In Germany every third person is in receipt of wages, or a salary, and in Russia every eighth person. The total number of wage-earners, inclusive of working members of families, can today be reckoned in general at half the total population. According to this rule two-thirds of the industrial population of Germany are wage-earners, or employees, and in Russia only a fourth. These figures prove that even today the self-supporting lower middle class are in the majority in Russia even though they are concealed behind the veil of so-called peasant ‘collectives’. Here, again, many and successful Five-Year Plans will be necessary in order to transfer the centre of gravity of Russian economic life from the country to the town, and from the peasantry to the proletariat.
The vast growth of Russian industry since 1927 has necessitated the expenditure of immense sums of money. The circulation of money has in consequence steadily increased. This form of inflation can, nevertheless, be justified from an economic standpoint, since the goods produced in Russia increased in proportion to the increase in the amount of currency in circulation. The sound principles on which Russian foreign trade has been conducted have not been departed from in recent years. It is true that Russian imports have notably increased in consequence of the necessity to import from abroad the machinery necessary for the expansion of industry. Foreign currency was also necessary to pay the foreign experts employed in Russian factories. This increased demand for foreign currency was in great part balanced with the help of the proceeds of Russia’s export trade.
Soviet Russia has made use of all possible means to increase its export trade in recent years. Russia not only sold her natural products like naphtha, timber, furs and corn, but also products of which her own population had an insufficient supply, such as butter, fish, poultry, etc. These heavy sacrifices were required of the Russian population, especially of the proletarian population of the towns, in order to acquire foreign currency. The economic crisis throughout the world and the diminishing purchasing power of the international market at present places difficulties in the way of Russian export, and therefore of the acquisition of the foreign currency necessary for the further industrialisation of Russia. Nevertheless, the Soviet government obstinately continues to carry on its work of industrialisation and the entire state and party machinery works unceasingly to increase industrial production. The working capacity of the factory workers is strained to the uttermost — the trade unions cooperate in this endeavour — for, according to the official party belief, the industrialisation of Russia means the realisation of socialism. The demands made of the factories by the party and the government are so great that they cannot possibly be fulfilled. It is in this connexion significant that the production of the year 1931 has failed to reach the projected figures: 83,500,000 tons of coal were to have been produced and only 58 million tons were actually obtained; 8,800,000 tons of steel were stipulated for, and only 5,300,000 were produced. Even the naphtha industry, which had undergone an especially rapid and successful increase in productivity, only produced 22,300,000 tons instead of the projected 25,500,000 tons. For 1932, extraordinarily high demands have been made of the individual industries and in general the figures exceeded those stipulated for in 1931. It is unnecessary to add that the quality of the manufactured article suffers from hasty production.
The plan for the industrialisation of Russia lays the greatest stress upon heavy industry and upon increased production of raw materials and machinery. Judged from the standpoint of national economy this is right, since it is only by this path that Russia can arrive at having a modern self-supporting industry, but it involves at least temporarily neglect of production of the necessaries of life and of readymade goods. For this reason the vast growth in the industrial production in Russia in recent years has not diminished the lack of commodities from which the population is suffering.
Unemployment has indeed been overcome by the great increase in employment necessitated by the rapid growth of Russian industry, transport, etc; and this achievement of the Soviet government is all the more noteworthy in view of the unemployment prevalent throughout the world. The Soviet government may justifiably pride itself upon the fact that unemployment no longer exists in Russia. This is an important achievement for the Russian workman from a psychological standpoint, since as long as there were a million unemployed in Russia the contrast between the official socialist legend and the reality was glaring in the extreme.
Ever since 1928 Stalin’s policy has been directed towards a steady repression of the kulaks and the development of peasant cooperative societies. Stalin was anxious to avoid anything in the nature of a startling interference on the part of the Soviet government in the peasant life of Russia, because he feared that it would have catastrophic effects upon Russia’s food-supplies. His object was to increase the number of peasant cooperative societies and he hoped that within the five years 1928-33 approximately a fourth of the Russian peasantry would be organised in societies for cooperative production. The object of the state was to favour these societies in such matters as the payment of taxes and the granting of credits. The cooperative societies were to be given tractors and all other necessary modern farming implements and machinery. The peasants who still remained in their archaic isolation would thus be induced to abandon it gradually by the sight of the work accomplished by the cooperative societies for production (the ‘collective’ farms).
Class distinctions in the Russian village proved too strong in the years 1928-29 for even a slow rate of development to be maintained. The kulaks observed that the government wished to take still sharper measures against them in taxation, local administrative questions, etc, and they intensified their obstructive tactics. They systematically held back grain supplies with the result that in 1928 Russia was forced to purchase foreign wheat in order to relieve the worst sufferings of the population. In many districts in Russia the kulaks organised a regular terror. Village correspondents for Communist newspapers who reported the true state of affairs were in danger of their lives. Many of them were murdered. Stalin found himself compelled to make use of the entire resources of the Soviet state in his struggle with the kulaks and the order went forth that they were to be exterminated as a separate class in society. Their properties were confiscated in many cases and presented to the peasant cooperative societies. Kulaks who had been specially active in a counter-revolutionary sense were exiled from their native districts. It is unquestionable that many injustices were done to them and that there was much suffering. Although it is possible to argue that the kulaks were only punished because they wanted to make money, and that the Soviet government itself had for years stimulated their cupidity, the truth is that the struggle with the kulaks in the years 1929-30 was a struggle for the preservation of the Russian Revolution.
All concessions on the part of the Soviet government had proved unavailing in satisfying the wealthy peasants and the village usurers. In the first place they asked that in return for their grain they should be given manufactured goods at prices that were not higher than those obtained for the same goods in foreign countries. A domestic policy that would have satisfied the kulaks would have finally resulted in the destruction of the government’s monopoly of foreign trade. The abolition of this monopoly would have had for its consequences the flooding of the Russian market with cheap foreign manufactured goods and the ruin of Russian industry. All progress in civilisation that had resulted from the Russian Revolution would have been destroyed as a result of the decay of the great industrial towns. If the kulak had in reality been stronger than the Soviet government, he would have become the autocrat of the village, have allied himself with the reactionary elements in the state administration and the Red Army, and thus have brought about a real Russian Thermidor and a White Guard military dictatorship. The struggle with the kulaks of necessity involved the country in unpleasant economic consequences. Since the small farmer and peasant as a general rule only produced sufficient supplies for his own needs, the country as a whole was forced to rely upon the bigger farmers — the kulaks — for its supplies. The expropriation and dividing up of the kulak farms at first resulted in producing a state of confusion in the villages and a complete disorganisation of the food market. In a large number of instances the kulaks slaughtered their cattle wholesale before their lands were confiscated and the panic thus created seized upon large numbers of the small farmers.
In the course of the single year 1929 Russia’s stock of cattle sank by a quarter and her stock of pigs by more than a third. The consequences of this catastrophic shock to Russian agriculture in 1929 have not yet been overcome. The Soviet government was once more forced to introduce food rationing, and in conjunction with it came state control and high prices, to the exclusion of free trade. The results were similar to those experienced by Germany during the World War — shortage of food supplies, profiteering, lowering of agricultural production. The Soviet government was forced to restore liberty to trade by the May Decrees of 1932.
The action taken by the GPU against the kulaks aroused the fear in many small farmers that a persecution of the Russian peasantry was about to begin. Stalin and the Soviet government never entertained the slightest intention of taking action against the Russian peasants as a whole. Local mishandlings on the part of over-hasty officials occurred that were hardly to be avoided in a process of this kind. The small farmers sought and found protection in the ‘collective’ system of farming. Anyone quick to join a collective society was not only assured of his personal safety but was changed from being an object of suspicion to the Soviet government into a co-worker with it in the cause of socialism. As a member of a collective society the peasant no longer had cause to fear the police and could even approach the state with all manner of requests. Thus the years 1929 and 1930 beheld the Russian peasants flocking in crowds to join the collective societies. As early as 1930, 37 per cent of the agricultural land of Russia was in the possession of the collectives, three per cent in that of the great state farms, and 60 per cent remained in the hands of individual and uncollectivised peasants. At the close of 1931 the collectives were in possession of 62 per cent of all peasant farms and 79 per cent of the arable land, and the process of collectivisation was proceeding uninterruptedly.
Although the Soviet government proudly pointed in its official publications to this triumph of the cooperative ideal among the Russian peasants, the rulers of Russia must in truth have watched the mass movement of the peasants into the cooperative societies with mixed feelings; for the Soviet government did not possess sufficient tractors and other agricultural implements to supply the colossal needs of the collectives. In 1930 only 17 per cent of the arable land in the possession of the collective farms was cultivated by means of tractors. In 1931 it was hoped to raise this figure to 19 per cent and in 1932 to 44 per cent. At present the majority of Soviet collective farms are still using the old primitive methods of agriculture of the peasants. In other words, these collective farms exist only on paper. In the normal type of Russian collective farm the arable land and the means of production are the property of the cooperative society. The farmhouse, domestic animals and garden remain the property of the peasant. The produce belongs to the society and is annually divided up among the members. The taxes paid by a collective farm are very small. The collective farms have to hand over a settled proportion of their produce to the state authorities at state-controlled prices. It was decided in 1930 that the collective farms in the good grain districts after an average harvest must surrender to the state a quarter to a third of their gross production. In districts where the land is poorer the proportion is less. In practice this does not place a too heavy burden upon the collectives. The May Decrees of 1932 lowered the amount of produce to be surrendered to the state and the taxes to be paid by both the collectives and the non-collectivised peasants. At the same time smuggling was in a sense legalised in that the peasants after they had given the required quota to the state were free to sell their surplus stocks of grain, cattle, etc, in the open market at whatever prices they could obtain. It is indeed not intended to permit private trading to develop, and instead the collectives are to open their own shops for the sale of their surplus produce.
The vast extent of the Russian state and the enormous number of its peasant inhabitants renders impossible any effective state control of agriculture. The collectives can easily prove themselves an excellent cloak for the development of a new class of kulaks. If the members of the Soviet Russian collectives were not inspired by agrarian selfishness but by a socialist communal feeling, Russia would not today be experiencing any shortage of food supplies. Once successful collectives have turned into shopkeepers the business instinct will soon seize upon them. Moreover, there is also the serious problem of what is to happen to those poor peasant families that have failed to gain a footing either in a prosperous collective or in industry. Signs are not wanting to show that a new poverty-stricken class is coming into existence in the Russian countryside.
The change in Soviet policy brought about by Stalin in December 1927 altered his relations with the various groups inside the Russian Communist Party. Stalin’s so-called ‘left course’ split the Opposition. The old-time Bolsheviks led by Zinoviev and Kamenev made their peace with the Soviet government. At the same time they were no longer given responsible posts. Trotsky and his intimate friends were once more alone in their opposition. Nevertheless, Trotsky did not allow himself to be discouraged by Zinoviev’s defection and instead only attacked Stalin and his policy with greater bitterness. In 1929 Trotsky was forcibly expelled from Russia by the police and handed over to the Russophile Turkish government, who gave him asylum on an island near Constantinople. Here Trotsky has devoted himself untiringly to literary activities and waged war to the death on the theory of socialism in a single country. He has criticised the mistakes of the ruling bureaucracy in Soviet Russia and demanded that it should accord the Russian workman the right to decide his own fate. He has also demanded the pursuit of a resolute, internationalist, proletarian policy.
Since 1928 the great majority of Russian workmen and members of the Communist Party have remained faithful supporters of Stalin and the Central Committee. But the radical agrarian policy of the Soviet government led to a breach with the ‘Right’ group of peasant sympathisers in the Communist Party. Stalin overcame their opposition with little difficulty. Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky were removed from their responsible posts. Indeed it is remarkable that the Right Opposition put up so poor a fight against Stalin. For this nationalist conservative group could not only have mobilised the masses of the peasantry but also a large number of civil servants and a part of the army; and Tomsky himself represented important sections of the working class. It must, however, not be forgotten that Rykov’s group was in reality only a buffer between Stalin and the group whose opinions can best be symbolised by the name of Ustryalov. In their first assault upon Stalin’s position the Right would have found themselves the prisoners of the middle-class-peasant–military counter-revolution. The leaders of the Right recognised this danger and preferred to submit to the majority in the party. Police measures such as were employed against Trotsky and his followers have never been used against the Right.
In order to make clear to the Russian proletariat his conversion to unqualified socialism, Stalin at the close of 1927 abandoned the foreign policy that had caused him to become the object of so much criticism. Soviet Russia broke off relations with the English trade unions and also relinquished its propaganda for international trade-union solidarity. It declared war to the death upon the Kuomintang in China and made no further attempt to restrain the masses of the population from revolutionary action. Ever since Chiang Kai-Shek’s victory in the spring of 1927 the fighting strength of the revolutionary masses in China had been broken and armed insurrections could now only be in the nature of wild adventures. Nevertheless, in December 1927, Communist workmen revolted in Canton and proclaimed a soviet republic. The insurrection was put down after bloody fighting. This insurrection in Canton was the tragic conclusion to the Communist International’s Chinese policy. Events in China between 1924 and 1927 display a remarkable similarity with those in Germany between 1921 and 1923. In both cases Soviet Russia judged conditions in a foreign country from the standpoint of her own state interests. In Germany her policy was based on the Treaty of Rapallo and friendship with a middle-class republican government; her policy in China was founded on the agreement with the Kuomintang government and with Chiang Kai-Shek. The Soviet government refused in both instances to believe in the possibility of an independent proletarian revolution in the near future, and by so doing paralysed the KPD in Germany and the Communist Party in China. The Bolsheviks could, nevertheless, not bring themselves to give up their pseudo-radical manner of speech and their intrigues. Hence they failed in Germany to work in sincere collaboration with the Social-Democrats and their friendship with the Kuomintang in China was not of a permanent nature. It was only when it was already too late that it was discovered that in both countries the situation was favourable for revolution. Hamburg and Canton were the achievements of this policy.
Ever since the foundation of the Third International the Bolsheviks attempted to exercise an influence over the course of the world revolution. They did this in the years 1919-21 by directly stirring up an international Communist revolution, and from 1921 to 1927 by their pursuit of a policy of a united front with the Social-Democrat workmen in the West and the movement for national independence in the East. Both policies successively proved mistaken and their failure caused the Soviet government to draw the natural conclusions. After 1928 it abandoned all attempts to influence the international labour movement and to assist colonial and oppressed countries in their struggles for national freedom. And it sought at the same time to maintain its hold over the minority of the international proletariat that still believed in Soviet Russia and to fill their minds with a meaningless pseudo-radicalism.
The new policy of the Communist International was laid down at the Sixth World Congress in the summer of 1928, and at the Fifth Congress of the Red Trade-Union International in 1930. The Sixth World Congress made the discovery that a ‘third period’ had begun in the international labour movement. The first period, from 1917 to 1923, was that of direct revolutionary struggle; the second covered the years 1923-28. In the summer of 1928 the United States was still enjoying great prosperity, and even Germany was experiencing economically an Indian summer, brought about by the foreign credits she had received since 1924. The resolutions of the Sixth World Congress made no attempt to deny the relatively prosperous economic condition of the capitalist world. Although it was always possible from a Communist standpoint to entertain doubts of the permanence of capitalist prosperity, and to prophesy new crises and upheavals on a vast scale, it is very difficult to understand why the ‘third period’ should have been said to have begun in the summer of 1928. It was stated that the typical characteristic of this ‘third period’ was the appearance of Social-Democracy as an ally of world capitalism and its assumption in certain respects of fascist ideas. Any form of united front with Social-Democrat parties and leaders was therefore out of the question during this ‘third period’. This judgement upon international Social-Democracy will be accepted or otherwise by the individual critic according to his own personal political beliefs. The Social-Democrats can be praised or condemned according to the political standpoint from which they are judged. It is, nevertheless, impossible to prove that in matters of principle Social-Democracy had undergone any change between the summer of 1927 and that of 1928.
Hence it is only possible to explain the resolutions passed by the Sixth World Congress by the same methods that were employed above to explain those of the Third World Congress in 1921. Soviet Russia and not the world at large had changed. A new attitude towards the international situation is always the consequence of a change in Russian domestic policy. The policy of compromise pursued in Russia itself at the time of the NEP and the concessions to the kulaks, found its international expression in the policy of a united front. Since, however, Stalin had embarked on his so-called ‘left course’ in domestic policy, it became necessary to reveal this new radicalisation of Bolshevism in the International’s policy by abandoning the policy of a united front with the Social-Democrats and by burdening the Sixth World Congress with the notorious ‘third period’ theory in order to advance a pseudo-practical reason, based upon conditions within the International, for the disruption of the united front. The task of the Communist International since 1928 has been to attract to itself a minority of the workmen by means of radical formulas unaccompanied by purposeful actions. The utopian radicals among the international proletariat are the most receptive of this propaganda. Hence the policy of the Communist International was framed in such a way as to appeal to them. The theory of a working-class aristocracy put forward, before 1917, by Lenin in his isolation in the midst of the World War, was revived — a theory that had been abandoned in favour of an attempt to win the support of the trade-union workmen at the time in 1920 when the Communist International was making a serious effort to obtain the leadership of the proletariat.
The Communists are for the present content to remain a minority of the proletariat. They have no longer any real hopes of achieving power and have therefore abandoned their struggle for the control of the trade unions. The resolutions of the World Congresses in 1928 and 1930 did indeed declare that Communists were to continue their activities in the trade unions. At the same time, however, the task was given to them of organising the non-unionist workmen for the purpose of leading them in economic conflicts without regard for the wishes of the unions. In practice this implied the creation of new organisations in competition with the old Social-Democrat trade unions and the promotion of a split within the trade-union movement. Important successes have, nevertheless, been denied to the Communists since 1928 in their work of organising a red trade-union opposition in Germany and other countries. Although it is true that they have secured the support of at least a part of the unemployed by means of their utopian radical propaganda, it is also true that the utopian radical workmen are the most unreliable element in the whole proletariat. This section of the proletariat, composed chiefly of unemployed, and actuated mainly by purely emotional considerations, is capable of changing its convictions with great rapidity, and could within twenty-four hours abandon the Communists and join the fascists, National Socialists, etc. Recent elections in Germany have testified to the truth of this statement. The Communist International could not indeed achieve any real success with such a policy. The result of a parliamentary election is in this connexion relatively unimportant. But what is of decisive importance is that in all those places where the world revolution is in progress the Communists are without any influence. The Spanish revolution was carried out without the help of the Spanish Communist Party. The English Communists exercise no influence upon the great struggles of the English working class. The Communist Parties in India and China are completely insignificant, notwithstanding the fact that on occasions the European press describes the insurrectionary Chinese peasants as ‘Communists’.
At the time of the Third World Congress the Communist International was still supported by the majority of the workmen in France, Czechoslovakia and Norway. The Communists have long ago lost the support of the majority of the workmen in all three countries. They have sunk to the level of an unimportant minority in France. There are today six million unemployed in Germany, and if their families be added to the calculation, the total is at least nine million voters. The largest Communist vote in the elections in 1932 totalled five million. The KPD probably comprises at present barely 50 per cent of the German unemployed, and only a very small percentage of the employed workmen. That is a catastrophic condition for a party that seriously aims at the leadership of the majority of the proletariat. At the same time the KPD is relatively the strongest party in the Communist International.
During 1925-27 the Communist bureaucrats in control of the party forced the so-called Left to leave its ranks. After 1928 the Right met with the same fate. Thus the Communist parties are for the present freed from all unwelcome independent criticism and are in the undisputed control of the bureaucracy. These bureaucratic officials endeavour to conceal the failure of the policy of the Communist International by narrating to their supporters the victories won by socialism in Russia.
This is not the place in which to discuss whether socialism is better than capitalism. It can, nevertheless, be discovered whether a country is organised in an economic sense in accordance with the doctrines of Marx. In order that Soviet Russia should be truly socialist there are at least three preliminary conditions that must be fulfilled. Industry must be organised into great industrial associations under the free control of the producers; agriculture must be organised in a similar fashion; and production must be regulated solely by demand and not in accordance with market and trade interests. Soviet Russia today does not fulfil any one of these three preliminary conditions. Although industry is organised into the modern big industry system, the producers have no part in the management and no voice in the determination of industrial policy. Socialism is inconceivable unless accompanied by the exercise of self-determination on the part of the people. For socialism is the rule of freedom under which the state disappears. An over-bureaucratised administration based on the employment of force, and which the masses must obey, is irreconcilable with the socialist organisation of society and can only be regarded as a middle-class institution.
In the agricultural organisation of Soviet Russia only a small part of the production is organised on a large scale. The predominant agrarian type is the collective farm. At present the state cannot supply the majority of these farms with agricultural machinery. The peasant therefore continues to make use of his old-fashioned plough and aged horse to till the piece of ground that has been in the possession of his family for generations. The communal division of produce in the collectives serves only to veil the traditional petty middle-class system. On the collective farms where state tractors are working the peasant has less work and a far better result from his labours. The collective farm system as a whole serves no other purpose than to work well in the interests of its members, to sell as little produce as possible at state-controlled prices, and to dispose of as much as possible in private trading at far higher prices. That is a typical petty-middle-class method of production.
There is as little trace in the state industries as in the collectives of a system of working solely for the production of necessaries. Here trade interests are also predominant; and this without taking into account the influence daily exercised upon Soviet Russia by the movements of the capitalist world market. The same conditions prevail in the domestic economy of Soviet Russia. The individual state trusts and heavy industries are legally independent. A Russian machine factory must find a market for its goods and pay for its raw materials exactly as is done by a similar factory in Europe. It has its overdraft at the state bank; the management must fulfil all obligations; and, in the event of its becoming bankrupt, its credit ceases with the state bank and its supplies of steel are discontinued. The latest decrees of the Soviet government, published in the second half of 1931 and the beginning of 1932, lay upon the state industries an obligation to organise themselves on a purely business model, acquire capital, and to make profits. At present it is theoretically impossible, however, for a badly managed Soviet undertaking to go bankrupt. All this is trading on a modern financial and capitalist basis.
There is a great difference from an economic standpoint in whether Russia produces 20 or 60 million tons of coal annually, or whether her vast and fertile cornlands are ploughed up with a wooden plough or a tractor. Nevertheless, increased production, and the abandonment of outworn methods of production, have not helped to bring Russia an inch farther along the path leading to true socialism. Soviet Russia still belongs to the same social and state category to which she belonged in 1921. Russia is a peasants’ and workers’ state, organised in accordance with a system of state capitalism by means of which the governing bureaucracy contrives to maintain its hold over both the basic classes in society. The proletarian influence shows itself in the fact that private trading for profits is inadmissible. The governing bureaucracy, which owes its existence to the support of the peasants, issues its commands, nevertheless, to the workmen, and organises industry on a trading and financial and capitalist basis. The proletarian influence prevents the emergence in the country districts of a class of private landowners. The power of the peasants, however, is shown in all the concessions which the state has made to the collectives; and their existence indirectly justifies the dictatorship exercised by the party and state machinery over Soviet Russia.
It is only possible to avoid delivering false judgements on the subject of Soviet Russia by according full recognition to the mixed character of its social order. It is as mistaken to ignore the part of the proletariat in present-day Russia as it is to underestimate the importance of the middle-class and peasant element. Official Soviet statistics published in 1930 show that deposits amounting to 722 million roubles were credited in the books of the Russian savings bank. Of this total only 91 million belonged to workmen, 205 million to employees and government officials, 134 million to ‘special’ workers, that is, members of professions, manual workers, etc, and only 46 million to peasants as individuals. To these figures must be added, however, 246 million belonging to ‘legal persons’, behind which designation were concealed chiefly collectives and other cooperative societies. This statistical panorama serves admirably to reveal the multiplicity of classes in modern Russia no less than the fact that, in standard of living and opportunity for saving, the working class are by no means favoured above the rest.
State capitalism is for Russia an excessively modern form of social and economic organisation. Such an organisation of society demands a modernist civilisation. Soviet Russia can therefore dispense with religion in public life, use the latest pedagogic methods, and make an inestimable contribution towards knowledge of maternity and child welfare. The complete intellectual freedom that is characteristic of a true socialist society is certainly not to be found in Soviet Russia, where the ruling party dictatorship could not continue to exist without a rigidly dogmatic doctrinal system known as Leninism, which all citizens are compelled to believe in.
The wages of the Russian workman have risen in recent years. At the same time his real standard of living has been lowered in comparison with the years before 1927, since the supply of manufactured goods available for the town population has not improved and the supplies of food have diminished. Nevertheless, there is no actual famine, unemployment is virtually unknown, and the Soviet government should find it possible in the near future by the employment of all the means at its disposal, and after its latest concessions to the peasants, to bring the national food supplies once more into order. Moreover, the Soviet government in taking action against the kulaks has for the time being suppressed all open enmity among the country population. The situation of the small farmers and peasants organised in the collectives has improved wherever modern machinery could be placed at their disposal. There has never been any question of a persecution of the peasantry by the Soviet government.
The socialist theory put forward by Stalin has given the Soviet government freedom of action in the immediate future. A new Five-Year Plan is now being drawn up. The collectivisation of Russian agriculture and the simultaneous raising of the level of industrial production to a respectable height is possible within the next few years. The Soviet government will then be able to declare that the ‘realisation of socialism’ has been achieved and the ‘class-free society’ brought into existence. It would then be possible to lessen the present too intense pace of industrialisation. The party dictatorship might even be relaxed and more freedom accorded to self-government; for in a ‘class-free society’ the dictatorship of the proletariat is clearly superfluous. Substantial concessions to the peasants could also be justified by the argument that ‘peasants’ in a private capitalist sense no longer existed but only agricultural producers within the framework of the perfected socialist order of society.
Class distinctions in Russia cannot be concealed permanently. If the present and the succeeding Five-Year Plans prove an economic success, improved living conditions will strengthen the class-consciousness both of the workers and the peasants. In a distant future Russia will not be spared decisive class-warfare, and Narodnik ‘socialism’ will not avail to postpone the conflict indefinitely.
In their endeavours to overcome Russia’s backwardness the Bolsheviks feel themselves the executors of the testament of Peter the Great. On 19 November 1928, in a speech before the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, Stalin said:
We are not responsible for the technical and economic backwardness of our country. It has existed for centuries and has come down to us as an inheritance from our entire history. This backwardness was also felt to be an evil in pre-revolutionary days and it continued to be so after the revolution. Peter the Great’s attempt, after his experience of developed Western states, feverishly to build factories and other works to supply the army and to increase the defensive strength of the country, was a unique attempt to burst the bonds of this backwardness. It is only natural that neither of the old classes — feudal aristocracy or middle class — was able to solve the problem provided by the backwardness of our country. Indeed these classes were not only incapable of solving this problem but even of visualising it properly. The centuries-old backwardness of our country can only be overcome by successful socialisation and only the proletariat, which had established its dictatorship and directs the destinies of the country, is able to accomplish it.
The historic mission thus placed before Bolshevism has in the main been fulfilled by it. Bolshevism in Russia overthrew the Tsar with the help of the proletariat and completed the middle-class revolution. It overcame the shameful backwardness of the country and brought it up to the level of a modern middle-class European state. Indeed, thanks to the power of the working class, Bolshevism could in Russia replace private capitalism and its accompaniments in social and economic life by a modern system of state capitalism.
The successes achieved by the Bolsheviks from a Russian nationalist standpoint were precisely the cause of their international failures. It is not an accident that Soviet Russia has advanced steadily and uninterruptedly since 1921, whilst the Communist International has in the same years gone steadily downhill. Bolshevik doctrines and methods were modern and progressive in comparison with the ideas and methods of Tsarist Russia. But they were reactionary when applied to the industrial lands of the West, where the middle-class revolution has virtually reached its completion, where the peasants are no longer the most influential element in the population, and where the proletariat has already learnt to create and control its own organisations. The heroic deeds of the Russian workmen from 1917 to 1920 temporarily threw a veil over Bolshevik backwardness and awoke the feeling that Bolshevism was the predestined form of the universal proletarian revolution. Important sections of the European proletariat were at that time anxious to ally themselves with the Bolsheviks in an attempt to seize the reins of government. In the course of time, however, the impossibility of entrusting the leadership of the world proletariat to the government of the agrarian Russian state became more and more evident. The Russian state and the international working class once more parted company, and Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in a single land’ is only the verbal expression of an accomplished fact. An isolated, nationalist, Russian Bolshevism was not even capable of leading the Asiatic peoples in their struggle for freedom.
The historic deeds of the great Russian Revolution still fascinate some small sections of the international working class. But the Communist International has no longer any influence upon the course of the world proletarian movement. The achievements of Bolshevism in the Russian Revolution will live forever in history. If today the international middle class still fears Bolshevism, it does so because it misunderstands the present nature of Bolshevism. It may have cause to fear the international Marxian proletariat and the world revolution: but these are not ‘Bolshevism’.