Max Shachtman
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From The New International, Vol. XXIII No. 3, Summer 1957, pp. 139–155.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The eruption of the latest purge in the Russian leadership has precipitated a new discussion in the political world. What is the meaning of the expulsion of Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and Shepilov from the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and from its Presidium? Does it presage a political reform, a democratization, of the regime in the country to be carried out by the new leadership? Is it a step backward to the kind of personal dictatorship represented by the now officially abjured rule of Stalin? Is it a step toward a new kind of regime in Russia, a military dictatorship, under which the army officers replace the Party officials? Or is it an unmeant prologue to a revolutionary intervention in the affairs of state by the millions who have till now been throttled and shackled by their rulers?
It is not a single one of these alone. But it is all four of them, combined in an interplay of conflicting forces and trends unleashed since the death of Stalin. Not one of the forces is reconcilable with any of the others. If one seems to be dominant for a moment, it would be well to bear in mind that the situation in Russia is now exceptionally fluid and unstable. It would be hard to make a bigger mistake than to assume that the kind of final decision has been made which clearly indicates the course of development for a whole period. The disturbances and rearrangements at the summits of Russian society have their greatest importance in signaling the turbulence that is warming up at the foundations. The ruling class is sitting nervously on a vast accumulation of powder kegs. That much is absolutely certain. The only important element of uncertainty is how long it will take for the attached fuses to burn to the kegs. It should not surprise even the most optimistic if it takes less time than anyone expects.
THE QUICKENING OF THE TEMPO of events is indicated in the first place, as is usually the case in despotic societies, by the rapidity of the changes made in the composition of the ruling personnel. If we do not forget that stability and instability are relative terms it can be said that the Bolshevik revolution, in the course of its victory and its establishment of order in the country, produced a stable leadership. It took no less than fifteen years for the Stalinist counterrevolution to exhaust and annihilate this leadership, politically and physically, leaving only a tiny handful to give a simulacrum, utterly illusionary, of continuity from the past. At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, he had succeeded in establishing an entirely new leadership which appeared to have far greater power and solidity than the Lenin leadership had in the five years of its rule. Outwardly, for the first five minutes, so to speak, the succession seemed to establish itself as pre-arranged and foreseen. Malenkov, ostentatiously groomed as heir apparent by Stalin at the last Party congress he allowed to take place, became Prime Minister. He was associated with four deputies: Molotov as minister of foreign affairs, Bulganin as minister of defense, Beria as head of all the police, and Kaganovich as chief of industry. The pre-arrangement was even fortified by lifting Voroshilov, who had for a time been in the light shadows, to the position of President of the republic.
In four short years, there is nothing, or next to nothing, left of this team. Its stability, its “collectiveness” as distinguished from Stalin’s personal rule, proved to have only an external character.
Beria was the first to go, executed in secret, without a trial worthy of the name, without the public knowing how he defended himself against what were undoubtedly the justified but after all long-known charges against him, or how he in turn accused his accusers. He is now officially known, in the words of Khrushchev’s sensational speech last year, as “the provocateur and vile enemy, Beria, who had murdered thousands of Communists and loyal Soviet people,” in other words, as a man perfectly suited for a part in the collective leadership of his compeers.
Even before Beria was disposed of totally, Malenkov was launched on a greased slide. Less than a fortnight after being named Prime Minister and secretary of the party, he resigned from (i.e., he was jerked out of) the latter position and the lesser-known figure of Khrushchev was named in his place. The solemn specialists all over the world nodded wisely at this move as an indication of the dispersal of power among the new “collective leadership” as against the reconcentration of power into the hands of a new Stalin. Malenkov rapidly became touted as the leader of the “reformers,” of the “peace party,” of the “consumer public,” of the relaxation and the thaw. There was no end to the blessings, according to the specialists, that the condescending but affable savior would vouchsafe to the masses without their having to lift a finger of their own to achieve them. His gallant presentation of a flower to a gentlelady at a British garden party removed all doubts as to his character.
All doubts as to his future were also soon removed. He lost his post as party secretary less than two weeks after assuming pre-eminent power in the regime. Less than two years afterward, he lost his power as head of the government, accompanied by an extorted confession that he knew nothing about the problems he was assigned to resolve, as if to underline the insight and foresight of the colleagues so long associated with him. Bulganin took his place. That was in February 1955. Twelve months later, at the party congress, Khrushchev drove a broader blade into Malenkov by his dark description of him as the very right bower of Stalin in the days of his ugliest capriciousness. At the June 1957 Central Committee Plenum, Malenkov was expelled from the body as an anti-Leninist, an enemy of world peace, relaxation and welfare of the people, and a plotter against the party, its leadership and its integrity. A month later, Shvernik, now returning to the prominence he lost when Voroshilov replaced him in the presidency of the republic, informed the public in passing that the same Malenkov, among others, had been active in framing the notorious “Leningrad affair” ten years earlier and was guilty, in general, of “breaches of revolutionary legality committed ... during the period of mass repressions.” In a word, Malenkov now seems to have just enough time in which to count the remaining number of his days.
Molotov, the best-known party leader next to Stalin, and his unwavering faction lieutenant for thirty years, was eliminated from the post of foreign minister in May 1955, about the time the treaty with Austria, which he is now accused of having opposed, was signed by the Kremlin. He is now named as the chief of the “secret anti-party factional group” and as the only one who was impertinent enough to vote against his expulsion from the Central Committee (more exactly, who abstained from the voting – did his co-factionalists therefore vote dutifully for their own ouster?) at its June 1957 meeting. Thrown out with him was his successor as foreign minister two years earlier, Shepilov. Kaganovich suffered the same punishment.
Of the ruling quintet installed in 1953, only one remains – Bulganin. But he failed to jump to Khrushchev's defense as instantaneously as Mikoyan did at the meeting of the Presidium (the former Political Bureau) where, according to all the obviously authorized reports, the “anti-party” faction all but succeeded in crushing the new party secretary. Bulganin is, at this writing, plainly in disgrace. A conservative insurance company would be ill-advised to take his account. Below the uppermost ledge of party leadership to which he now clings with only one hand is the familiar oblivion or worse. Voroshilov, already an official nonentity, from whom Khrushchev last year openly demanded a denunciation of Stalin for which “even his grandsons will thank him,” shares Bulganin’s precarious position.
In sum, the bulk of the first post-Stalin leader-team has been wiped out in four years. In any country, a change of this kind would be regarded as clear manifestation of a crisis of the regime. Russia is no exception. What has happened in the past four years, culminating in the June purge, marks the opening of a new stage in a crisis of much longer duration whose roots reach deep into the soil of Stalinist society. Khrushchev seems to have triumphed over all possible or visible rivals. Some take this to demonstrate that the new stage will be dominated by him, that he will be able to determine the course of its development, that his rise to power will be similar to Stalin’s. A comparison will be instructive.
STALIN STARTED HIS REAL RISE to dictatorial power with advantages that, especially now that we are able to look backward upon them, were extraordinarily great. He had the task of destroying the achievements of a revolution. The fact that it could no longer maintain itself by its isolated efforts alone, that it could not solve its fundamental economic problems on socialist foundations and in a socialist way, was his greatest advantage. The revolution’s utter destruction of a native bourgeoisie that might have been able to solve the economic problems on capitalist foundations and in a capitalist way, and the inability of the foreign bourgeoisie to undertake such a solution, was an accompanying advantage. Where basic social problems are not solved in a progressive way, they are solved (except where society lapses into utter moribundity) in a reactionary way. In Russia they were solved – by which is simply meant that the country was completely modernized and brought one step from the very top of the world ladder economically – in a reactionary, unique and never foreseen way. All the hugger-mugger about the progressive role of Stalinism “in the economic field” overlooks the fundamental and overwhelmingly decisive fact that in order to play this role Stalinism established over the nation the rule of a new and more ruthlessly exploitive class than any known in history. The establishment of the social power of a new exploiting class in the epoch of the decay of capitalist society and its over-ripeness for socialist reorganization is a phenomenon of reactionary significance and consequences. Its reactionary character is confirmed by the fact that the only serious resistance offered to the rise of Stalinism came from the working classes and the revolutionary socialists of Russia, and that this resistance had to be curbed, cheated and crushed before the new rulers could achieve a real measure of consolidation, economic and political. The dilemma of the more earnest apologists of Stalinism, especially those who try to think or write in Marxian terms, is two-fold: one, either the social role played by those who resisted Stalinism was reactionary or the social role played by those who crushed this resistance in the course of establishing, expanding and consolidating the “progressive economy” was reactionary; or two, either the struggle against the Stalinist regime carried on by the proletarian elements in Russia was utopian, similar to the workers’ struggles against capitalism in the days before modern socialist theory and movement were established because the bourgeois social order, and therefore exploitive class rule, was the then historical and necessary bearer of social progress, or the “progress” achieved under Stalinism was correspondingly the work that could be performed only by a historically necessary exploitive class and its class rule. The indicated answer in either case leaves little to be said for the progressive, let alone the socialist, character of Stalinism.
Stalin was able to lead to power this new exploitive class, the bureaucracy, which, it is well to add, we for our part do not regard as a historically progressive social formation, or “historically necessary” in any sense comparable to the role played in its time by the bourgeoisie. To the advantages mentioned, was added the fact that Stalin was, from the beginning of his new career, an outstanding and established leader. He was not, to be sure, known to the masses in 1923–1924, but then again, it was not to the masses that he directed his appeal. He was known to the party bureaucracy and was already well entrenched in its midst. His ability was widely underrated, but not by Lenin who named him, along with Trotsky, as the “two most able leaders of the present Central Committee” – which was itself not made up of nobodies. In the course of ten-twelve years of bitter, dogged, merciless struggles, he disposed of all the able and articulate representatives of the socialist revolution of 1917 and its ideals; in the course of another five years, he wiped them out physically. In the course of the same period, he destroyed completely the revolutionary party without permitting any other to take its place – he supplanted it with a compliant apparatus, which is something else again (all talk of a Communist party, under Stalin or since his death is, basically and literally, nonsense); and along with the destruction of the party went the destruction of the remnants of the Soviets, the entire trade-union movement, the factory councils, as well as any and every form of free and independent organization and expression.
Back in 1928 Trotsky wrote that
“... the socialist character of industry is determined and secured in a decisive measure by the role of the party, the voluntary internal cohesion of the proletarian vanguard, the conscious discipline of the administrators, trade-union functionaries, members of the shop nuclei, etc. If we allow that this web is weakening, disintegrating and ripping, then it becomes absolutely self-evident that within a brief period nothing will remain of the socialist character of state industry, transport, etc.”
In this he proved to be fundamentally correct, even though the subsequent development took a historically unexpected turn. The “web” was weakened, ripped and destroyed; with it went the socialist character of the statified economy.
That is what Stalin was called upon to achieve. An apparent paradox: the rule of the working class is absolutely indispensable to the development of a socialist economy, but in isolated Russia the rule of the working class was an obstacle to the solution of the economic problem by an exploiting class. Stalinism eliminated the obstacle. In doing so, he attracted the enthusiastic support of the elements required to make up the new bureaucratic class. It was not that they were indifferent to Stalin’s crushing of all opponents – they were ardently satisfied with it. It was not simply that he provided them with the mantle of the authority of a revolution in whose name he always spoke – he provided them with an apparatus to maintain their rule, with an unparalleled police machine to smash all resistance to their rule. He fashioned a shameless but Marxistically couched theory to give ideological justification for their class privileges over the working classes, namely, that Marxism rejects equalitarianism. No ruling class ever owed so much to one man. Stalin was strategist and tactician, theorist and political leader, ideologist and hangman for the collectivist bureaucracy. In the obscene welter of extollment to “the greatest genius of all ages,” so revolting to any civilized ear and eye, the bureaucracy, at least, expressed at bottom a sincere, heartfelt gratitude to a man who lavishly deserved it from them. In outlawing socialism, its principles, ideals and aims from Russia, he gained not merely an obligatory but a genuine and veritably immense authority from the beneficiaries of his leadership.
THERE IS, HOWEVER, A FATAL and ever exasperating flaw in the rule of the bureaucracy. Every step required for the consolidation of its power over society led inexorably to a greater centralization of state power until it reached its peak in the establishment of the personal despotism of Stalin. No other way was possible, and no other way is possible now. The bureaucracy was enabled to exercise every liberty over the working classes, ruling them with an arbitrariness unknown in any other modern country. But it was not and is not able to rule itself. Self-rule is possible for the ruling class in capitalist society, has long been exercised there, and it still is. For the ruling class in Stalinist society, self-rule is impossible. To whom shall it submit the differences of opinions which reflect the conflict of interests, economic, political and even personal? To the objective decision of the market, that “blind regulator” to which all capitalist producers of commodities are fundamentally subjected? The Stalinist economy knows no market and it is not based upon the production of commodities. To the democratic decision of the people? But the moment it invites the people to make any decisions that are binding on the economic or political regime, is the moment when the rule of the bureaucracy comes, as it is perfectly aware, to an end. To its own ruling ranks? But that is a practical impossibility from a dozen standpoints. Even if it were possible to organize its ranks for such a purpose, the open discussion of its disputes would be tantamount to an invitation to the masses to intervene in the decision. It is not for nothing that Khrushchev closed his speech at the 20th Congress with the warning that “we should know the limits; we should not give ammunition to the enemy; we should not wash our dirty linen before their eyes.” (Who “the enemy” really is, is sufficiently indicated by the fact that the speech has not been published inside Russia to this day; and by the fact that the Russian people are always informed only of the conclusions reached by the victors in any dispute that arises in the ranks of the bureaucracy.) In actual fact, disputes of any kind, even if not openly conducted, are a menace to the bureaucracy, and there is an excellent reason why it forbids factions (“parties”) in its midst. What ground is there for the belief among the bureaucracy, whose rule is a perpetual defiance of the majority, that a defeated minority will abide by the “democratic decisions” of the whole and resist the temptation to seek support for its interests and views outside the ranks of the ruling class, that is, among the ruled, thus throwing the entire social structure into jeopardy?
By its very nature this class, which is unique in the long history of ruling classes, must abandon all thought of self-rule and, however reluctantly, raise up above itself, as well as above the nation as a whole, a supreme arbiter to whose decisions the rulers bow by common consent. In turn, it can justify his omnipotence only by ascribing to him omniscience. The megalomania which Khrushchev attributed to Stalin may have been a psychic disturbance. But the power of this megalomania was systematically stimulated and nurtured by the bureaucracy itself in its own interests. Stalin presents a problem in social analysis, not in psychoanalysis.
In concentrating all power into his hands, Stalin was able to assure order in the country. Translated, this means: to defend the rule of the bureaucracy from the masses at home and from enemies abroad. But if the power to make all decisions on differences and conflicts of interests in the bureaucracy was transferred to him, it does not mean that the differences no longer existed, that the conflicts were eliminated, or that his decisions were accepted with equal satisfaction by all. The further the country advanced toward modernization and the more critical the international situation became, the more complex, diversified and multitudinous became the problems they posed. Stalin’s purely personal decisions on the vast and complicated problems could not but arouse increasing hatred and increasing fear in all sections of Russian society, the bureaucracy itself not excluded. He could assure order, but he could not assure security. The capitalist who is interested in a general or an abstract way in the “social rule of the capitalist class,” rapidly loses this interest if his personal position as an owner of a share in the total capital is wiped out. The bureaucrat is after all interested in the “social rule of the bureaucracy” only abstractly, but is most intensely concerned with his own position in the bureaucracy. If, overnight, he finds he has been cast out of the job of regional party secretary or of director of a trust, without recourse, and lucky to be alive for the moment, he may very well find little consolation in the assurance that the incumbents still rule society “as a class.” He wants security in his position and, better still, sure prospects of advancement. Stalin offered the bureaucracy everything, but not security.
The regime was coiled around the whole nation like hoops of iron riveted at every point by the G.P.U. At the height of his power and the adulation he was bathed in, Stalin was universally detested and feared, even by his closest coadjutors. There is no reason whatever to doubt the description that Khrushchev gives in this regard of the feelings that filled the manly breasts of himself and the other intimates of Stalin. He still praises Stalin for having crushed the Trotskyists, Bukharinists and all the others who in one way or another represented the ideas of the socialist revolution – “a stubborn and a difficult fight but a necessary one.” By that fight, Stalin made it possible for the bureaucracy to live. He condemns Stalin for having crushed his own supporters and threatened the political, if not the physical existence, of all of them. By that fight, Stalin made it all but impossible for the bureaucracy to live. But it is equally important to note that while the bureaucrats hated Stalin, they were not in opposition to him. They had no political alternative to the megalomaniacal supreme arbiter who was their authentic creation.
THE TOTALITARIAN REGIME IS NOT the absolute monarchy, although it has many features in common with it. The succession in the former is not so simply indicated and effected as in the latter. With the death of Stalin, a new situation was created. It was obviously impossible merely to put forward another Stalin who would continue where the other left off. Stalin acquired his enormous power and authority only after many years of bitter and arduous struggle for it, in which he not only wiped out all opponents and rivals but reduced his own supporters to the position of subordinates with so little power and authority of their own that they lived, toward the end, in daily trepidation. The bureaucracy, in March 1958, presented any number of alternatives for the succession, but not one of them with Stalin’s authority or anything comparable to it. In fact, the one who had been implicitly nominated by Stalin as his candidate, speedily found out that the recommendation did not guarantee him the sword of power in the hand but the stab of the dagger in the back. Indeed, the race for the succession started with the candidates vying for prominence, first in the implicit disavowal of Stalin’s regime and then in disavowing and even violently denouncing the man to whom they owed whatever position they had. This proves not merely that there is no gratitude in politics, but that the process of recreating the kind of despotism that Stalin ultimately represented is unfolding under radically different conditions than those prevalent in the days of Stalin’s own rise to power.
All of Stalin’s work, all of his achievements, have combined in a complex way to make the continuation of his regime, if not downright impossible, then extraordinarily difficult, and in any case to burden every attempt to stabilize the regime with convulsing crises.
Stalin did not appeal to the people against his opponents or his rivals. He scarcely pretended to appeal to them. On the contrary, the masses were, generally speaking, disinherited, disfranchized and driven into silent drudgery like oxen. Stalin appealed to the bureaucracy, led them to power for which, in exchange, they surrendered to him all authority. With Stalin dead, the bureaucracy is left with little or no authority of its own and with a tremendous uncertainty about its own position. One of the accomplishments over which Stalin presided was the establishment of a tremendous working class which hardly existed at all at the beginning of his rise. Another accomplishment was the establishment of a huge industry now capable of satisfying the still unfulfilled needs and aspirations of the working class. The bureaucracy can now acquire authority, and confidence in itself, only by appealing for the support of the people. It will not confer full power, that is, place all reliance upon any leader or leadership who cannot assure the position of the bureaucracy among the people. It does not dare to make a definitive choice among the candidates for leadership until one of them has demonstrated by his policy that he can assure this position. The whole past regime in which the bureaucracy was the basic social force is so discredited in the eyes of the people, and the bureaucracy itself is so disoriented, that it feels it is risking its very existence unless it finds a broad base of support or at least acquiescence for its continued rule among the working classes. The demonstration of this fact is given by the words and deeds of every candidate for the succession to Stalin.
Beria, immediately after the death of Stalin, was the first to present himself as a reformer of the regime, seeking to enlist popular support by promising the national minorities and the minority nations a change for the better from the chauvinistic and oppressive policy pursued so brutally by Stalin. He followed the promise by announcing that the “doctor’s plot” invented by Stalin (surely with the complicity of Beria himself!) had proved to be a frame-up. He was given no chance by his rivals to expand on his role as reformer and friend of the people. His position as head of the detested G.P.U. not only made such a role incongruous, but made it easier for his rivals to appear as reformers themselves by arrest, defamation, secret trial and execution of Beria as the man who “murdered thousands of Communists and loyal Soviet people.”
In their own eagerness to win the people, the remainder of the post-Stalin leadership placed Serov, a secondary figure, at the head of the G.P.U. and rigorously reduced the powers of the G.P.U. itself without, of course, abolishing the secret police completely. At one stroke, the leadership made a concession to three forces: to the masses who hated the G.P.U. even more than they feared it; to the bureaucracy which had been perpetually subjected to the insufferable intervention of the till then omnipresent and omnipotent secret police; and to the regular army officer corps which suffered not only from the same intervention but also from the existence of an army-within-the-army constituted by the externally-controlled and independent G.P.U. troops – Stalin’s own combination of S.S. divisions and Gestapo.
The rivalry among the would-be dictators was given pause for a moment by the first big manifestation of open struggle of the masses against the Stalinist regime, the June 17 rising of the workers of East Germany. But only for a moment. Malenkov, who had begun with an announcement that the hypertrophied horde of bureaucrats and bureaucratic institutions would be reduced, proclaimed the doctrine, unknown under Stalin, that the successes in heavy industry had now produced all the conditions “for organizing a rapid rise in the production of consumers’ goods” and that “it is indispensable to increase substantially the investments devoted to the light and food industries.” In that sentence he unquestionably voiced the deepest conviction of the overwhelming majority of the Russian people. On Malenkov’s lips, this pledge was anxious demagoguery, not unknown on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and calculated above all other things to promote his own political interests. That did not prevent the rise of the most excited predictions about the worthy intentions of the new regime and its apparent spokesman. One observer (he turned out to be Isaac Deutscher) reminded his readers that Trotsky had once advocated a “limited political revolution” against Stalinism, and that although he was tragically ahead of his time, “he could not imagine that Stalin’s closest associates would act in accordance with his scheme. What Malenkov’s government is carrying out now is precisely the ‘limited revolution’ envisaged by Trotsky.” That did not turn out to be precisely the case. The “limited revolution” was not carried out, but in little more than a year the “Malenkov government” was kicked out. The over-eager observers consoled themselves with the thought that Malenkov, after all, had not been, or had not yet been executed by the now rising Khrushchev, forgetting that Stalin, too, did not begin by executing the opponents he removed or expelled.
KHRUSHCHEV BECAME THE MOST spectacular and in his conduct, at least, the most self-assured of the candidates. He best reflects – not represents, but reflects – the conflicting forces whose interplay is the outstanding characteristic of the new stage.
He appeals for support to the masses more outspokenly, one might almost say more recklessly, than Beria or Malenkov did, or than any of the others who are now in the official leadership. Even though his 20th Congress speech has not yet been published in Russia, it is safe to believe that virtually everybody knows of its substance. In effect, he has told the Russian people:
“This is what the mad tyrant was in reality and in detail, and I feared and hated him no less than you did. The thoroughness and vehemence with which I exposed and denounced his evils are the best proof I can give that under my leadership the dread regime of terror and caprice will come to an end.”
It is hard to overrate the importance of the fact that Stalin started his rise to power with the oath that he would be nothing but a faithful disciple of Lenin, the leader of the preceding regime; whereas Khrushchev starts with a bitter denunciation and renunciation of the leadership and regime of his predecessor.
Khrushchev must know that the successor regime cannot even think of maintaining itself without popular support. To gain it, not even the curbing of the G.P.U. was enough. The monstrous slave camps had to be largely liquidated. The release of millions of only half or one-third productive workers from the camps served to satisfy the increasingly desperate need for industrial manpower, and that was not the least of the reasons for the grand gesture. But it was skillfully made to invest the leadership with the mantle of reformers. Nobody has been heartier than Khrushchev in promising that, now at last (or at any rate in the not distant future!) the people, and not merely the bureaucrats, will eat their fill, as much as the Americans eat and maybe even more.
He gives whatever bond he deems it safe to give in order to show that his promises are being implemented. It is not only Stalin who is disavowed and at least as a cadaver, dethroned. It is the whole despised gang around him who are being repudiated, except for a few worthy exceptions among whom Khrushchev nominates himself as the worthiest. With the expulsion of his three opponents from the Central Committee, he not only strengthens his own position but assures the people that it is now rid of practically the last of the outstanding members of Stalin’s immediate circle: Malenkov the heir apparent and for that reason alone the most personal embodiment of Stalin’s regime; Molotov, reputed the “hardest” of the Stalinists, the most unyielding in seeking to maintain the old regime, and now, above all, the opponent of relaxation of international tension that might break out into a war which the Russian people (and not they alone) dread more than anything else; and Kaganovich, the very incarnation of the Simon Legrees of Stalin’s harshest exploitation of the toilers.
But the whole point of all the reforms, the real as well as the sham and apparent, those already vouchsafed and those that will in all probability be granted in addition, is that they must be safe reforms. They cannot and will not go beyond what is required to restore that adequate measure of stability to the foundations of the regime which it has lost since Stalin’s death, or more exactly, which it has lost to such an extent that the regime is in a state of crisis. The foundations of the regime are the totalitarian powers of the bureaucracy, guaranteed by the abolition of all representative institutions of the people, without which democracy, above all workers’ democracy, exists only in the imagination. And while Khrushchev appeals and must appeal for the support of the people, he cannot, and he will not under any circumstances, allow that support to be asserted and tested in the only meaningful way, namely, by enfranchising the disfranchised masses, by universal suffrage and with it, necessarily, all the other elementary democratic rights without which voting ceases to be voting and becomes nothing more than a classical Bonapartist plebiscite. Unless you live in the dream-world where one luminous day the bureaucracy announces to the masses, “Ekh, you are now old or bold enough to be granted all the power to determine our own fate,” the inherent limitations upon reforms are plainly indicated. Anything and everything is possible from the bureaucracy now, in its days of indecision and apprehension, but not the freedom of the people expressed in the self-maintained machinery of representative government. Ruling classes in the past have fought like tigers against the attempt to deprive them of their power, and in some cases they have yielded to the will of the people without offering armed resistance. But there is no recorded case of a ruling class committing suicide in deference to the popular will. There is no indication that the Stalinist bureaucracy will offer itself as the first case in history.
BUT IF KHRUSHCHEV, or a restored Malenkov (he is after all still alive and therefore still available if the bureaucratic wheel should turn) or any other candidate at present not visible, cannot rule through the machinery of representative government, what machinery is left? It is not possible to rule without a machinery of rule to enforce sovereignty and authority, to see to the execution of decisions, or if it is preferred, an apparatus. Can Khrushchev rule through the rule of the bureaucracy, the party bureaucracy in the first place? Stalin ruled through the rule of the party apparatus, indispensably supplemented by the G.P.U. The G.P.U. is not presently available to Khrushchev, and with its former powers, at least, it is not likely to be available for some time. Is the party apparatus, the party bureaucracy, available to him? It is not. And therein lies another decisive change from the days of Stalin’s despotic power.
There are two important reasons why it is not simply at his disposal, at least not yet.
The bureaucracy is not to be had in a day by the first one to come along with the demand that it surrender its favors. Malenkov, has learned this, despite the advantage of having been for years at the central control point of the party bureaucracy under Stalin and of having been designated by Stalin as his successor. He was discarded by machinations and intrigue at the very top without the bureaucracy lifting a finger to protect him. Stalin, we recall again, had to fight tough and numerous battles before the bureaucracy entrusted him with full power, and even then it was only after he had succeeded in reorganizing and replacing the bureaucracy literally from top to bottom. He won out with them and over them only after having demonstrated over a long period of time and in a whole series of vital questions, that his policies and his leadership sufficed to satisfy their basic requirement, the stability of their rule. Why should the present bureaucracy, overnight, as it were, turn over full power to Khrushchev, place itself completely at his disposal? He has relieved them of the unendurable terror of Stalin’s days, and that is welcome. But it is far from enough. Stability, order – that is enough, or at any rate, it is adequate. The bureaucracy is in its nature obsessed with the fear of self-rule. It has no way of discussing and deciding freely the policies it requires for its preservation. Indeed, it does not want any such way, for inherent in it are the open divisions in its ranks, the cracks in the monolithic structure through which the masses can so easily pour and wash away all the obstacles to popular sovereignty. The inexorable trend toward extruding a supreme arbiter, even though it has slowed down in the present crisis, is still in operation. The bureaucracy, without a clear course of its own, disoriented by events, can tolerate a Khrushchev while he demonstrates what his capacities are and what they can yield, but it is far from ready to give him full confidence and blind obedience. It does not, or does not yet, oppose Khrushchev; but neither is it committed to him. In the crucial hours when – as all the reports agree – the “anti-party faction” of Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich tried a coup de palais against Khrushchev, they seemed to manage without too much difficulty to get a majority in the uppermost circle of the bureaucracy, the Presidium, to favor the ouster of the apparent party boss, and even Bulganin was won to their side for a moment. The coup did not, to be sure, succeed; and on that point, more later. But it is preposterous to assume that the bureaucracy as a whole has attached itself slavishly and irretraceably [?] to Khrushchev’s claim to supremacy when its most authoritative representatives at the top were ready to challenge the claim so rudely.
On his side, in turn, Khrushchev has little reason to submit his claim for endorsement by the bureaucracy. In the very first place, he has no guarantee of the outcome, since he cannot but know the position and the state of mind of the bureaucracy. He was able, two years ago, to oust Malenkov from the position of Prime Minister, but Malenkov remained in the Presidium. Even at the June 1957 meeting of the Central Committee where he succeeded in having Malenkov-Molotov-Kaganovich-Shepilov expelled from the Central Committee, they were not expelled from the party even though the resolution makes a significant allusion to the threat of such expulsion. To attribute such restraint to Khrushchev’s oath to avoid Stalin’s road or to a passion for the principle of collective leadership, is absurd. The all-but-successful attempt of the Presidium members, who incarnated the “collective leadership,” to vote Khrushchev out of his post, just as Malenkov was voted out of his post two years earlier, is sure to have cooled any passion he may have had for the famous principle. In the second place, there is a sharp conflict between the attempt to gain popularity among the masses and the attempt to rule through the bureaucratic apparatus as before. The bureaucracy is enormously discredited among the people. When Khrushchev delivered his massive blows at Stalin, the bureaucracy as a whole was morally shattered. It is inconceivable that the people would thereafter retain any respect for the representatives of a regime guilty not merely of failing to resist the frightful abominations of Stalin but of defending and participating in them with enthusiasm and praise. The Russian people are not cattle. There is not a country in the world whose government would last five minutes after it was shown that its entire officialdom had been the active or passive accomplices of such monstrous crimes as Khrushchev catalogued at the 20th Congress, provided the people were free to act. The only difference here is that the Russian people are not yet free to act. But they are free to think to themselves. Their thoughts cannot be consoling to the bureaucracy which was stripped to revolting nakedness by Khrushchev himself. And he would have to be the biggest dolt of all to entertain illusions on this score. And, in the third place, Khrushchev finds himself compelled to undertake such actions against the bureaucracy as are guaranteed to achieve anything but its enthusiastic support.
The pores of the Russian economy are choking with bureaucracy. There is no regime possible in Russia today or tomorrow that could any longer tolerate such a condition. Since Stalin’s death, almost a million bureaucrats have had to be sacked from their posts, according to Khrushchev’s own report earlier this year. Almost half a million other superfluous bureaucrats, he added, should be up for discharge. These two figures alone are enough to give the appalling picture of the waste, inefficiency and downright parasitism spawned by bureaucratic collectivism, the vertical super-centralization of industry has multiplied the waste and inefficiency of the economy in grotesque ways. In a situation where the still enormous bureaucracy must be maintained, where the wretched conditions of the workers and peasants must be alleviated to some degree at least, where yesterday’s exploitation of the economy of the satellite countries for the benefit of the Russian economy is no longer so easy to pursue, and where the international situation demands strenuous efforts to achieve industrial and military equality and even superiority over the United States – a change in the economic structure is an unpostponable elementary necessity. Khrushchev is trying to undertake the change. The central Moscow ministries of most industries (but not of war industry!) have been eliminated, and Russia has been divided into 92 regions with 92 Economic Councils to manage the industrial establishments of their respective areas, with restricted rights of local planning and of local inter-industrial and inter-factory transactions.
This is not the place to evaluate the economic prospects of the new economic arrangement, except, perhaps, to note that in general, in capitalist economy, too, where industrial and technological rationalization is not unknown, observers tend to abstract their evaluations from what turns out to be decisive in the long run, the influence of the social relations which develop out of the structural changes, and the political consequences that follow. But it is in place to point out that the “horizontal” reorganization of industry, the “decentralization,” will not result in greater power for the local bureaucracy and a corresponding “withering away” of the omnipotence of the central state power. This is now the claim of over-enthusiastic observers who expect the early flowering of socialist democracy in Russia as an organic outgrowth of a benevolent bureaucracy. But it is the contrary that is indicated. Despotism and decentralization are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, atomization is often the essential precondition for the preservation of despotism. It is worth noting a relevant passage in the well-known official Russian government organ, Economic Problems (April 1957): “It is obvious that the division of the territory not only does not diminish the centralization of the economy by the state throughout the country as a whole, but on the contrary, requires its reinforcement. The economic role of the state is not only not relaxed under present conditions [the conditions created by the establishment of the 92 regional Economic Councils. – M.S.], but acquires a greater reality, becomes more effective.” So that, apart from the objective conditions that dictate the “horizontal reform” of the economy, the change has the effect of dispersing the bureaucracy, of reducing its possibilities for cohesion and mutual contact to a local level, and of concentrating the power to make unobstructed decisions on the most vital and fundamental questions in the hands of the uppermost ranks of the centralized state bureaucracy.
WHAT IS LEFT? THE ARMY, or to be precise, the army apparatus, the officer corps. Khrushchev may inveigh against bureaucrats twice as much as he does in order to elicit the sympathy of the masses. But he needs something stronger than their sympathy to assure the continued domination of the regime over them. The army machine is stronger. Its rise is entirely picture of the waste, inefficiency and downright parasitism spawned by bureaucratic collectivism, the main respect in which it has caught up with, if it has not outstripped, the vices of capitalism. In addition, the vertical super-centralization of industry has multiplied the waste and inefficiency of the economy in grotesque ways. In a situation where the still enormous bureaucracy must be maintained, new in the history of the Stalinist regime, and it constitutes an important new element of the latest stage in the crisis of the regime.
Throughout Stalin’s career, he employed political means against his opponents and to solve political problems; he employed bureaucratic means of all sorts toward the same ends; from 1927 onward, he supplemented these increasingly with the employment of the G.P.U. But the military machine was kept apart. Even when it was decimated in the Tukhachevsky purge, it did not lift a finger to intervene in the situation. Politically, it was inert, except to the extent that the party bureaucracy kept it under rigorous surveillance and control through political commissars and G.P.U. spies. There is little doubt that the officer corps, in its own way, shared the growing general apprehensions and discontent over Stalin’s policies and despotism, and that is certainly all that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were guilty of. But so long as the party bureaucracy was intact and capable of ruling the country and maintaining order, the officer corps remained in its own field and obeyed orders. Even at the end of the war, after the army, and with it its leadership, had acquired a tremendous moral prestige among the people, Stalin was able to keep it in its allotted place and even to banish to the provinces the most popular of the Marshals, Zhukov (under “socialism” there are, of course, Marshals).
Since Stalin’s death, a radical change has been in process. There is a crisis of the regime – the rulers can no longer rule in the old way, the ruled do not want to be ruled in the old way. The bureaucracy is no longer intact, no longer solid, no longer self-confident, and order is in jeopardy. The military machine now has to play, dares to play, and is even called to play an increasingly active and direct political role.
Immediately after Stalin’s death, Zhukov was brought back to Moscow from his banishment to resume leadership of the army, although still under the civilian control of the minister of defense, “Marshal” Bulganin (Bulganin is as much a military man as Zhukov is a party man). A few months later the Beria crisis supervened. The reports then current that Zhukov mobilized regular army troops to invest Moscow in order to prevent a possible coup d’etat by Beria at the head of his G.P.U. divisions, ring with verisimilitude. In any case, Beria was executed after a secret trial presided over by Marshal Koniev, in whose person the officer corps took revenge upon its rival and tormentor, the G.P.U. From that moment on, the exceptional power and prerogatives of the G.P.U. were drastically reduced. Less than two years later, in the Malenkov crisis, Bulganin replaced Stalin’s heir, and his own position as war minister was given to Zhukov. It was the first time, under Lenin or under Stalin, that this post (or for that matter any other post of cabinet rank) was given to a military man, or to anyone but a party leader. However, it was still only a government post, whereas the real governing body of the country is the Political Bureau or as it is now called the Presidium. At the 20th Congress, the advance of the new element in the situation was further and more clearly manifested. The more violently Khrushchev denigrated Stalin, the more lyrically did he sing the praises of the army chiefs, of Zhukov in particular. He ridiculed and riddled Stalin’s reputation as a military strategist, laughed at him because he “planned operations on a globe,” cited case after case of his “nervousness and hysteria” during the war, and topped it all by claiming that Stalin’s orders caused numerous defeats at the hands of the Germans, untold and unnecessary deaths of troops, and all but utter disaster in the war. For the military, he had only the most lavish praise. Everything went calamitously in the first period of the war “until our generals, on whose shoulders rested the whole weight of conducting the war, succeeded in changing the situation.” To Stalin’s contemptuous remarks about Zhukov, Khrushchev reported in 1956 that he had answered stoutly: “I have known Zhukov for a long time; he is a good general and a good military man.” At the Congress Zhukov was elected an alternate member of the party Presidium, again an act without precedent in the history of the Stalinist regime, let alone of Lenin’s.
Early in 1957, the “anti-party faction” tried its coup against Khrushchev, and in his absence, in the meeting of the Presidium. Only Mikoyan stood by Khrushchev; Bulganin wavered. Krushchev returned precipitately to Moscow; so did Zhukov. All the unofficial newspaper reports agree, and it should be obvious that the account was deliberately “leaked” from an authoritative source, that it was Zhukov who turned the momentary Presidium majority into a minority with the ominous warning that the army stood by Khrushchev. It is true that Khrushchev called an emergency meeting of the Central Committee to call the Presidium to account. By this act, he violated a fundamental precept of Stalinist rule which had always been not to appeal to a lower body against the decision of a higher one, and no body is higher in the bureaucratic hierarchy than the Presidium. In the unwritten rules of the totalitarian hierarchy, this is an unprecedented, inadmissible and dangerous procedure, which can lead to appealing to a party congress against the Central Committee and God alone knows how much further from there. But Khrushchev was able to venture on this procedure not so much because he was sure that the wider group of the bureaucracy had confidence in him, but because of the crucial and decisive support he had from Zhukov as the authentic representative of the officer corps. He was saved not by the party bureaucracy but by the military. In return, Zhukov was elevated by the Central Committee from alternate member to full member of the Presidium. It has never happened before. For the first time the military occupy not merely decorative positions at Congresses or in government posts, but a full position in the real ruling body of the party and the country as a whole.
Is the road now opening up to a Bonapartist dictatorship of the classical military type? It is. It does not follow that the road will be travelled to the end, but it has opened up. The officer corps, too, wants order and stability in the country. Professional soldiers, officers in particular, are notorious for their contempt of “politicians,” that is, of the civilian authorities and even of the civilian population as a whole. When all goes well “at home,” the contempt is in check; when there is trouble, difficulty, incompetence and bungling in the civilian government, the contempt becomes more active, outspoken and even defiant; and when the social order itself seems imperilled without anyone being able to stabilize it, the contempt is idealized into the call they feel to intervene to save society with a strong and firm hand.
The party apparatus is not in a position to end the crisis of the regime by stabilizing it. It does not have a consolidated leadership or a clearly-set policy, it has lost heavily in cohesion, and even more heavily in prestige among the people. Can the army apparatus substitute for it? Unlike the party bureaucracy, the officer corps unquestionably enjoys immense popularity, not only because of its successful defense of the country in the war but also because it is not regarded as sharing in complicity and responsibility for the Stalin regime. Indeed, it bears the aura of heroically silent victims and even martyrs of Stalinism, as well as the laurels of heroes in the war victory. The huge popular demonstration reported for Zhukov in Leningrad after the June Plenum bears the marks of authentic spontaneity, in contrast to the dreary, manufactured, enforced “ovations” exacted from the people by the bureaucracy. The military has that advantage, and Khrushchev’s exceptional efforts to associate himself with it shows that it is not a trifle. On the other hand, however, that the military has a greater cohesiveness than the disoriented party machine, a greater capacity for decisive political action and the resolve to take the risks of assuming power or trying to – and they would certainly prove to be great risks – is still only a hypothesis, a strongly-indicated hypothesis without which any analysis would be faulty, but still only a hypothesis. It has not yet given sufficient proof in action of the necessary qualities. It cannot be equated, for example, with the Prussian Junkers, who had a long and practiced tradition not only of military but also of political leadership and on top of that a long and strong class bond. The Russian army corps is appearing on the political scene for the first time. This is a phenomenon of first-rate importance, but as yet its importance is more symptomatic than effective. In its first appearance, it is likely to proceed with the greatest caution, feeling its way gradually and resorting only to minor tests of strength and acceptability – unless the crisis suddenly sharpens and compels it, in the absence of any other force for “law and order” to make precipitate decisions.
THE COMPLEXITY AND FLUIDITY of the situation permits of no certain answer for the next period. To forestall the inevitable, the regime, while it is wrestling with the crisis, may alleviate it by more and more concessions to the masses. To master the bureaucracy, Khrushchev (this one or another one) may invoke the prestige and power of the military as the only means of cowing the party apparatus, an initial indication of which was given by the June crisis. The officer corps may move to the seizure of political power as the savior of the country as a whole and the benevolent protector of the people from the rule and vices of the quarrelsome and incompetent “politicians”; or it may smash the party bureaucracy and try to administer the economy of the country through the medium of a subordinated industrial bureaucracy. These are all real possibilities, and unexpected combinations are not excluded. But anything between or outside of the re-consolidation of the dictatorship over the masses in the old form or in a new one, and the smashing of the dictatorship by a revolutionary people, that is not a real possibility.
And the people, the Russian workers and peasants – and students? Is it really possible for them to undertake a revolution? After the series of demonstrations, strikes, local uprisings and in one case a national revolution that have marked the post-Stalin period in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, not to mention isolated outbreaks in Russia itself, the skepticism implied in the question should at least be modified. It is not a matter of whether or not the Russian masses want a revolution. They did not want one in 1916 or even in the first month of 1917. It is a question of what they are being driven to in order to solve the crisis of the regime and establish their own law and their own order. The fact that the uprisings against Stalinism started at the ends of the new Russian empire should not disorient the conclusions about the possibilities of an uprising in Russia. Because a decaying organism so often shows the first manifestations of weakness and even paralysis at its extremities does not warrant the diagnosis that the heart is therefore sound. It is certain that the Russian regime itself does not have confidence in such a diagnosis. It is not at all excluded that one of the considerations of the bureaucrats in bringing or allowing the army into such unprecedented prominence and association with the regime is to ward off a revolutionary intervention from below which they take with far greater seriousness than do the gullible visitors from abroad. The Russian people is a revolutionary people with living revolutionary traditions and very recent revolutionary examples on their borders to remind them of these traditions. The working class in particular is a new, vastly more numerous and compact, more self-confident and more demanding mass than any working class known in Stalin’s days. So are the peasants and the students, each in their own way. It was Chesterton who is supposed to have said long ago: “We don’t know what the British working classes think because they haven’t spoken yet.” Neither have the Russian working classes. Not yet. When they do, they will speak with the voice of the revolution whose aim it is, in the forgotten but ever-timely words of Marx, to establish democracy.
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Last updated on 11 January 2020