BEFORE the Five Year Plan the "totalitarian" Soviet State was already acquiring its distinctive features, and the same may be said of the personality of Stalin who was its incarnation. Both were fully developed during the course of the memorable five years of industrialisation and collectivisation. Even the memory of the socialist or communist programme disappeared, except for the prisons; and the initials "U.S.S.R." took on their enduring if not definitive meaning.
The fulfillment of the Plan was to triple or almost triple the industrial production of pre-revolutionary days, and to increase agricultural production by half in absolute figures, without taking into account the development of the population. To succeed it was necessary to invest the maximum amount of the national resources in the planned economy, eighty-six thousand million roubles according to financial calculations, whence the necessity of taking, for this purpose, a growing share of the general revenue, by the employment of various unavowable means—indirect taxes, forced loans, low wages and high prices, unlimited fiduciary inflation, the seizure of crops and livestock; that is to say, by robbing the working masses, restraining their purchasing power to the extreme limit, and inflicting unspeakable privations and suffering. It was necessary to acquire the technical equipment of foreign capitalism at great expense and, in order to do this, to export at a loss, challenging world competition by a species of dumping and emptying the country of a large part of its economic substance in spite of the dearth of manufactured commodities and foodstuffs in the interior. (Ordjonikidze stated in 1929: "On the twelfth anniversary of the Soviet Power, we are lacking almost all the products of agriculture.")
On the other hand, a theoretical rise in salaries would follow, estimated at seventy-one per cent, but on the impossible condition of doubling the output of work, noticeably reducing the cost of production and retail prices, increasing the quality of merchandise, enlarging the areas of cultivated land, and increasing the productivity of the soil. This was to augment the rouble's value by one-fifth.
The Plan, therefore, in practice, exacted the sacrifice of the contemporary generation, which was bled and oppressed in the name of a slender material progress, doubtful for future generations, and with very problematical perspectives for economic progress in the present; this apart from political, social, intellectual and moral problems. The bureaucracy, under the pretext of reinforcing the "socialist sector," in reality a new sort of State capitalism, was postponing the human conditions of socialism to the Greek Kalends.
It is true that the piatiletka prophesied and the Government promised to raise the cultural level of the population. Industry could not hope to catch up with any country, much less to outstrip it, without a certain degree of public instruction and the necessary staff. In four years a new personnel of 80,000 engineers, 150,000 technicians, and 800,000 qualified workmen was to augment the old. Collectivised agriculture needed specialised workmen, agriculturists and mechanics by the million. But to educate the population and to form an élite needed time, experience, material means and above all other spiritual conditions. The failure of Bolshevism in the matter of primary education and general culture did not encourage hope for the miraculous change, notwithstanding many noisy but sterile scholastic reforms. Within their own Party the Leninists replaced scientific doubt and the critical spirit by the magister dixit of the worst mediaeval scholasticism, borrowed from the decadent Pythagoreans. Thus they have instinctively fallen into their own specific type of obscurantism with a forbidding terminology, and have brought even lower into the depths the people whom they claimed to have freed front the powers of darkness.
"Ignorance," said Clara Zetkin, "has surely, in a measure, facilitated the revolution, by preserving minds from the contamination of bourgeois ideas." Lenin agreed with this, but only during "a certain period of our struggle," that is, during the period of destruction, for "illiteracy is difficult to reconcile, cannot in fact be reconciled, with constructive activity." He had to remind his obtuse disciples several times of the impossibility of installing socialism without universal elementary education. His latest writings advocated "putting education and culture in the centre of our activity," and reproved vain tirades on proletarian art in order to insist on reading and writing before anything else. He recommended also "giving the teacher a higher place amongst us than in any other country." But after his death, the lamentable state of public education and the privations of the teaching body contradicted the grandiloquent and lying assertions of official propaganda.
In 1923 the Party had proclaimed its intention of "liquidating illiteracy" amongst adults for the tenth anniversary of October, an "historic decision" according to Bubnov and others. But in 1924 at the Communist Congress, Krupskaya stated: "In November the teacher got four roubles, now he gets 10-12 a month, and he is starving ... the price of bread has risen and for 10-12 roubles he can buy less bread than he could previously for four. But the teacher draws this miserable salary only after a delay of two or three months, and at times never receives it at all." At this Congress the teachers' delegate admitted to about seventy per cent of illiterates, a figure which Zinoviev confirmed. Shortly afterwards Zinoviev revealed a "shocking situation" in the country schools, and depicted the school-mistress as being in rags and without fires in winter-time, and the master "who has no means of living because we have paid him nothing."
That same year Lunacharsky spoke plainly in this connection of a "catastrophe": there were less than 50,000 primary schools in place of the 62,000 under the old regime, and that for an increased population. The average salary of a rural instructor, drawn often after a delay of six months, was at times lower than to roubles per month. There was a whole series of provinces where the teacher was starving in the full sense of the word. Not until 1925 did the teachers hold their first semblance of a conference, convened, in fact, by the authorities; they were then admitted to the rank of citizens and electors and became eligible for non-existent soviets. They were no longer treated as intellectuals without a place in the sun. Their way of life was improving little by little, that is to say, hunger, illness and mortality were growing less amongst them, and prostitution and mendicancy were tending to disappear. But salaries, premises and scholastic supplies remained far below a decent minimum.
In 1927, after the tenth anniversary, there was no longer any question of liquidating illiteracy, in spite of all the "historic decisions." The programme of the Party: free and obligatory, equal and polytechnic education; free food, clothing and scholastic material for all students; pre-school and post-school institutions, creches, clubs, libraries, popular universities, etc., showed itself on all points a mockery like the other promises of Bolshevism. In 1928, Pravda (2nd September) recorded the "stabilisation of illiteracy." In 1929, Izvestia (11th July) calculated the proportion of absolute illiterates to be sixty per cent, without counting the aged or incurably ignorant who had forgotten their alphabet; nothing then had changed since Tsarism. It was the first year of the industrial Five Year Plan, and it was no longer a matter of lectures or of literature, but of coal, of iron, of tractors and turbines. Stalin aimed at doing for the advancement of technique what he would not do for socialism: Lunacharsky, dilettante, prattler and muddler, nominally the principal cause of the careless handling of the Commissariat of Instruction, was abruptly relieved of his functions and replaced by Bubnov, who introduced the discipline of the army into educational methods. In 1930, the Central Committee decreed compulsory education, of course without being able to carry it out, and beginning with the following year all the so-called revolutionary innovations were one by one annulled. The former classical system was reestablished, including the one man management of schools, a university hierarchy, uniformity of curriculum, discipline, text-books, examinations and diplomas. Even the brigades of students which had formed part of Bubnov's plan for taking "the offensive on the cultural front" did not survive the experiment.
Stalin believed that he could solve every problem simply by means of his machine. From some 800,000 in 1913, according to N. Rubakin, the number of functionaries had increased to more than 7,365,000 before the N.E.P., to decline later and establish itself at about 3,722,000 in 1927, excluding those belonging to the Party with its multiple affiliates and those in the trade unions and co-operatives. Even more than in Custine's time, there was "a whole crowd of people whose interest lay in perpetuating and concealing abuses." The incomplete statistics do not permit an exact estimate of the total, which perhaps exceeded 5,000,000 in 1930. "We are unable to master this enormous machine created by the extraordinarily backward state of civilisation in our country," sighed Bukharin in the days when he was permitted free speech; but Stalin did not intend to lessen the instrument of domination which he had inherited and which he has since learned to perfect. On the contrary, by suppressing the N.E.P. he added still more force to the bureaucracy, which, by means of the kolkhoz, began to penetrate even into the practical management of agriculture, as well as to achieve control of commerce, the co-operatives and the body of artisans. Step by step with the industrialisation of the country, an unprecedented bureaucracy increased and solidified. Varied in its forms, it was fundamentally unalterable, the curse of a country lorded over by "too large a number of all too petty functionaries." It would require a special work to describe the mischief done by redtape, the insatiable parasitism, certain monstrous effects of which are occasionally pointed out in the leading Bolshevik organs which, however, carefully avoid speaking of the real causes of the evil. "Take our immense Soviet administration. You will find there a colossal number of good-for-nothings who do not want socialism to succeed," declared Ordjonikidze in 1929, already with no illusions; and he added: "People nobody knows what to do with and whom nobody has any use for are placed in the Control Commission." The fatal consequences reveal themselves in every economic and political balance-sheet of the regime.
At the top of the bureaucratic pyramid, the Party machinery, purged of all heterogeneous elements, gave Stalin perfect security after the pitiful collapse of the Right. The occurrence of new insubordination, individual or on the part of small groups, seemed not unlikely in the immediate future, but this would be a mere game which "the master" could put an end to at once.
It becomes useless to follow in detail the operations styled "organisational," revocations, nominations and mutations whereby Stalin exercised a limitless sovereignty, the secret efficacy of which may be explained in three letters—G.P.U. After Lunacharsky, other People's Commissars who had served their turn—Semashko, Unschlicht, Briukhanov—were sacked peremptorily, without even the usual formalities observed in the dismissal of domestic servants. Beyond the bureaucratic corps whom these matters closely concerned, nobody gave any attention to the paltry four or five lines in which the newspapers mentioned the degradations, without any explanation. Public opinion was annihilated and experienced Bolsheviks thought in slogans learnt by heart. The only apparent reason for the sudden ascent of a Syrtsov, promoted to the presidency of the Council of Commissars for Russia in place of the deposed Rykov, was that Stalin had to nominate somebody of whom he could be sure, right or wrong. Nobody could otherwise explain the appointment of Molotov to be head of the Council of Commissars for the Soviet Union—another post withdrawn from Rykov—unless one assumed also that Stalin wanted to get rid of the Secretariat. The endless succession of interchangeable personages in the reigning oligarchy ceased to impress—whether Ordjonikidze returned to the Politbureau, or Kaganovich succeeded Molotov as First Under-Secretary of the Party, or the endless mutations of the Kuibyshevs, Andreyevs and Rudzutaks. In the bureaucratic constellation, whence the Yaroslavskys, the Skrypniks and even the Kirovs were shining with a somewhat tarnished brilliance, new and obscure stars appeared, from Akulov to Postyshev, without anyone knowing why or how. Voroshilov and Kalinin, shamefaced Right-wingers who had deserted at the right moment, vied with each other in orthodoxy and submission for the sake of keeping their places.
It was no longer sufficient for Stalin to be feared and obeyed —the defeated victims must further his career and honour his person in order not to disappear altogether. Fallen to the rank of subordinate functionaries, Pyatakov and Radek multiplied their pledges of servility in the hope of inspiring some confidence in "the boss." Zinoviev and Kamenev, crazy with terror after the revelations of their relations with Bukharin, bought their pardon by denouncing the latter. Bukharin managed to save himself by denials and fresh reiterations of repentance, apart from the threat of suicide.
By preference, Stalin avoided surrounding himself with corpses; not that human life seemed precious, or worthy of respect, but because he found greater advantages in dishonouring an adversary than in causing his death. He could crush oppositions without physically suppressing their leaders who in any case would not take up arms. Experience taught him to despise men, consciously to exploit their weaknesses, to adjust suppression proportionately to the resistance offered. A new procedure made its appearance in Pravda, that of declarations of apostasy and letters of denunciation, worthy products of post-Lenin Bolshevism.
Before calling the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, Stalin reorganised the staff of the Secretariat, rearranged the functions of the Central Committee, renewed bureaux, sections, commissions, and the myriad committees which form the close network of his administration. The Party dealt with, there was a clean up of the trade unions, the libraries, the universities, and theatres. In one case it was the friends of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, the former supporters of the Right, who suffered; in another, the victims were now Dostoievsky, now Schiller, now Dickens, then Lohengrin and Werther, according to the initiative or influence of ridiculous but powerful ignoramuses. The Academy of Sciences was not spared. By means of various arbitrary sanctions, a number of Bolsheviks was forced upon it, under the threat of cutting off its income and on the pretext of strengthening the social sciences. Thus the ruling power forbade all impulse to intellectual independence and in practice subordinated the Academy to the needs of its own propaganda. Custine had already seen in the Russia of old that "here, even men's souls are led by a rope." When the Central Statistical Department annoyed Stalin, he suppressed it, because according to his press "statistics cannot be neutral" and "class statistics" are necessary. Accordingly, the professors of Soviet journalism maintain that "information does not consist in the dissemination of news, but in the education of the masses," "information is an instrument in the class struggle—not a mirror to reflect events objectively." Thus every lie is justified in advance in the name of the more or less misunderstood interests of the revolution. To make use of another century-old observation of Custine: "Here to lie is to protect society, to tell the truth is to upset the State."
The Sixteenth Congress, held two and a half years after the fifteenth, in total disregard of the statutes, at last realised Stalin's ideal, long accomplished in the congresses of the Soviets: a meeting where chosen orators discourse to order, where the chorus applauds to order, carries motions to order and sings the International to order. Henceforward, in the Party sessions, as formerly in the deliberative State Assemblies, the delegates confined themselves, like good little children, to hearing the lesson they would subsequently have to recite to their inferiors, in their capacity of pretentious school-masters. Many previous Congresses had shown the same tendency; but the process was more marked the further one went from the October Revolution. "Russia, this infant nation, is only a school on a huge scale. Everything goes on there as in a military college, except that the students don't come out of it until death." Thus wrote Custine; but if the present resembles the past, history has left no memory of a spectacle as degrading as that of these Bolsheviks. The Right-wing cowards were dragged onto the platform to beat their breasts and confess their errors before an audience of fanatic or venal delegates, which thundered its hatred according to instructions with the one and only motive of pleasing the despot. Rakovsky, from his exile, could well comment on "this savage picture of bureaucrats let loose, it is difficult to say who has most lost the feeling of dignity, those who bend humbly beneath the jeers and hoots, submitting to the outrages in the hope of a better future, or those who, in the same hope, are responsible for these outrages, knowing beforehand that the adversary must yield." Hideous scenes these, but on the morrow, insulters and insulted will sit side by side as colleagues on the Central Committee.
Stalin's report to the Congress expounded once more the platitudes of Leninism in regard to international politics: the whole world was undermined with antagonisms, the bitterest of which ranged in opposite camps the United States and England; the League of Nations was a moribund institution; Social-Democracy was losing all influence while the Communist Parties were marching from victory to victory; capitalist stabilisation was ending and everywhere the revolution rumbled; the bourgeoisie, especially in France, "the most aggressive and militaristic country in the world," was seeking a way out in war against the U.S.S.R.; etc., etc. The rest of his speech was devoted to the internal situation and summed up in the stereotyped formulas of the orthodoxy of the moment the more or less bogus statistics prepared by frightened experts without convictions, terrorised by politicians without knowledge. The same assertions reproduced in all the official literature of this period only assume their full significance when placed in the framework of the ill-matched facts and contradictory proceedings which trace from day to day the tortuous graph of the "general line."
STALIN scarcely counted on the good will, still less on the spontaneous enthusiasm, of the workers in order to arrive at the remote aims formulated in the Plan. He had opposed himself too much to the industrialist tendency to have any illusions in this respect. His optimistic public statements might deceive a large part of the youth, but not the majority of the working class, jaded by promises, and still less the peasant masses, defiant by nature and hostile by experience. He foresaw a certain "artificially organised famine" in consequence of a too rapidly organised industrialisation, but did not change his policy until forced to do so by the circumstances or, more precisely, by the growing difficulty of stocking the cereals indispensable to the food supplies of the towns. Through lack of industrial merchandise to exchange for agricultural products, he had to use force to tear the crops from the peasants. Thus necessity compelled him to take the road which foresight had prompted Trotsky to urge upon him. Passing from one extreme to the other, from caution to rashness, he remembered a phrase of Lenin as justification and cover for the wildest extravagances: "We must excite the enthusiasm of conscientious workers and peasants by a great ten or twenty years programme, by a clean-cut and lively perspective, absolutely scientific in its foundations." But the joy in labour demanded or stimulated by vulgar artifices won over neither the exhausted proletariat nor the sceptical peasantry, and the strenuous efforts of the "shock-brigades" with all their badly-paid rivalry did not compensate for material unpreparedness, technical backwardness and professional incompetence. Stalin as much through natural inclination as through the logic of the system was led to break through obstacles by draconian measures.
The cruellest "offensive" made itself felt first in the country districts. Collectivisation, like every other obligation imposed upon the people of the Soviet Union, was styled voluntary, in flagrant contradiction of the Plan which had established beforehand the percentages to be realised. "It would be the greatest absurdity to try to introduce communal agricultural work into such backward villages, where a long education would be necessary before the preliminary attempt." Lenin had said this repeatedly. He had been resolute on the necessity of "getting into the good graces" of the small producers, to transform them by "a very long, very slow and very prudent work of organisation." He could only conceive of harmony between a socialised industry and an individualistic agriculture in a free and pacific co-operation, without the least constraint, direct or indirect. Stalin appeared to understand him, to judge by the speeches which preceded his pitiless mobilisation of the "shock-brigades" against the peasantry. But in complete contradiction to his reassuring declarations, and without taking any account of the Plan, which contemplated collectivising and mechanising in five years one-fifth of the agricultural establishments, he carried through by blood and iron in one year three times the expectations of the Five Year Plan. In a single month the number of farms grouped in the kolkhoz exceeded that brought about by twelve years of revolution—on paper, that is, for tractors and machines, not to mention organisation and the consent of the victims, were still sadly lacking. This result was obtained by arbitrary expropriation and illegal pillage, and only at the price of an unexampled repression. This Stalin entitled "liquidation of the kulak as a class," but thousands of poor and middle peasants themselves succumbed. No contemporary records have been able to keep up with all the mass arrests and executions, the suicides and the assassinations which collectivisation dragged in its wake. Statistics abound in empty figures and trifling coefficients, but do not register these numerous victims, any more than the G.P.U. yields its secrets of the barbarous deportations of millions of human beings, transplanted to arctic regions and beyond the Urals. Whole villages, cantons and districts were depopulated and their inhabitants dispersed and decimated, as happened in ancient times in Assyria and Chaldaea. An American correspondent extremely favourable to Stalin's interests estimated at 2,000,000 the approximate number banished and exiled in 1929-1930 (New York Times, 3rd February, 1931). But the truth would appear still more atrocious in its full extent if it were known that the "dekulakisation" was pursued without respite in the course of the following years, and that the official figures vary between five and ten million for the number of kulaks, not including the unfortunate mujiks presumed to possess a little more than the average. (Shortly after the first Five Year Plan, in 1933, the Rostov press, accidentally disobeying the command of silence, announced the deportation en bloc of three stanitsy of Cossacks from Kouban—about 50,000 persons; but more than 100,000 inhabitants of the same region had preceded them on the northern road to misery.) It can be considered then that 5,000,000 villagers at least, regardless of sex and age, have been chased from their hearths and doomed to a life of iniquitous misery, many to death. Mr. H. Walpole, who has attentively scrutinised the data of the Commissariat of Works, arrives also at the total of 4 to 5,000,000 for 1931, a figure which the succeeding years easily surpass. He has noted it in his introduction to Out of the Deep, Letters from Soviet Timber Camps, a collection of heartbreaking letters from deported Mennonites, the authenticity of which is guaranteed by the editor of the Slavonic Review. A qualified and informed eyewitness, I. Solonevich, one of the few who have escaped from the Soviet prison where he worked in the departments of planning and assessment, confirmed these estimates in 1935 with new data. It is impossible to know how many have perished of hunger and cold in the northern forests, in the building of great public works and in concentration camps. But partial information gives us some idea, not precise though none the less terrible—especially of the appalling number of child victims expelled with their mothers, sometimes in the dead of night, and transported from the temperate climate of the south to glacial regions where many of these little innocents have found premature deaths through lack of shelter, of proper care and of the barest necessities. What, in the face of such facts, were the famous proscriptions of Sulla and the two triumvirates, so often evoked by the socialists after the Commune? The historians of the Asiatic empires of antiquity or the middle ages could alone produce anything comparable.
But Stalin, though deaf to the misfortunes caused by his blind policy, could not remain indifferent to its disastrous results on economy. If human life were of little account to him, he at least had to grapple seriously with the problem of livestock and crops. The outraged peasants killed their animals and ate their seeds, either to avoid confiscation, or to protest in their own way. Millions of beasts of burden were killed at a time when mechanical traction only existed on paper—and the result was an automatic restriction of ploughing and corn-sowing. Tens of millions of oxen, sheep, pigs and poultry succumbed to the same fate—there was to be a lack of milk, meat and eggs for pears. Improvised legislation, too tardy and not very efficacious, punished with imprisonment the murder of an ox or calf perpetrated "through malevolence." All products were rationed, the rations grew smaller, but the greater part of the foodstuffs disappeared and the revictualling of the industrial centres was endangered for a long period. The bureaucracy blamed now the rain, now the fine weather, at times the kulaks, and at last bureaucratism itself. Rumours and alarms, collected by the G.P.U., spread among Stalin's associates. High functionaries in informed circles glimpsed the approach of an immense catastrophe, perhaps a change of rule, and prepared for any eventuality in their conversations, the intimacy of which did not prevent the presence of spies and provocateurs. The sorcerer's apprentice of the new agrarian revolution, intoxicated with his facile victory over the disarmed peasants, over women and little children, recoiled before the spectre of a famine, and decided to retreat. In an article Dizzy with Success (2nd March, 1930) he ceased to extol the "unheard of rhythm" of this "formidable avalanche" which had swept over the countryside, and threw the responsibility of his actions on the shoulders of the agents who carried them out. To them he imputed his own madness of a short while before; he denounced bureaucratic procedure, condemned excessive violence, the removal of the church-bells and the socialisation of the hen-houses. He discountenanced the forming of communes where production and distribution would be collectivised, and prescribed that the form should henceforth be the artel, where the house, the kitchen garden, the cow and the smaller livestock remain individual property. A circular of the Central Committee "against Leftish exaggerations" followed, reproving "the abominable, the criminal, the exceptionally brutal conduct" of certain subordinates towards the people. It denounced the division of goods, the deprivation of civic rights, the arbitrary arrests, the closing of churches, the suppression of markets, etc., seeking to limit this irresistible "voluntary" movement, and authorising the malcontents to leave the kolkhoz. In two weeks the number of "hearths" included in the "socialist sector" fell from 14,264,000 on the 1st of March to 5,778,000 On the 15th of the same month. The reflex continued, the "dead souls" dispersed. It was a short-lived respite, however, for the dispersal was brought to a standstill in December of the same year. Stalin then ordered the entire collectivisation of wheat districts and the partial collectivisation of other districts, with definite percentages. Under cover of the recent retreat he had had a breathing space in which to repair losses, to consolidate the positions won and to increase tenfold "police precautions." He was preparing with deliberation for "a sort of artificially-organised famine."
A veritable enslavement of industry soon rivalled the peasant servitude. A decision of the Central Committee (7th September, 1929) had instituted the "one-man leadership" of the manager in every industrial undertaking, abolishing the theoretical rights of the workmen's committees. Ensuing decrees accumulated, damaging beyond repair the sovereignty of the proletariat.
Stalin sought first to fight against the mobility of labour, for the wretched standard of living was driving the workers from one town to another, and a disorganisation of production resulted from this permanent migration. As in the eighteenth century when desertion was the last resource of the serfs if oppression became unbearable, flight seemed to the Soviet workers the only way out of their impossible situation. In October 1930, with the explicit connivance of the G.P.U. came an ordinance forbidding movements of workers engaged in rafting (wood being an essential article of foreign exchange). Another decree extended the same measure to every other industry so as to "rivet" the workers, to dispose of them regardless of their preferences, without considering bonds of parentage or friendship, and increasing the penalties for disobedience. A third measure suppressed unemployment relief and every facility for choosing abode or work. Another in November closed the Labour Exchanges and ordered that the unemployed be summarily sent where they were needed. After which the officials claimed urbi et orbi the disappearance of unemployment. But the following year Stalin admitted to fluctuations of labour that implied millions of workless on the roads. And the economic reviews estimated many more in the country where the non-producing surplus of the population found no employment whatever.
In January 1931, a decree requisitioned former railway workers to replace them in their previous occupation, whether they would or no. An addition to the Penal Code gave ten years' imprisonment for lack of discipline among the transport workers, and prescribed the death penalty in cases of premeditation. In February was instituted the obligatory "work-certificate," modelled on the soldier's certificate, which contained a summarised history of the bearer, his type of employment, punishments, fines, reasons for dismissal, etc. The object of this was to suppress indiscipline and desertions. In March there were further measures to enforce dictatorial authority in the factories, to bring pressure to bear against backward workers guilty of absence, negligence, drunkenness or laziness. In April came preferential rations for the "shock-brigades"—true blackmail of the stomach—and priority rights of lodging, heating and the most urgent necessities. In June the workers were made responsible for damages to material, thus allowing accusations of sabotage for accidents due to defective quality of tools and raw materials and to administrative chaos and governmental carelessness. The factory chiefs received full authority from the Commissariat of Works to transfer technicians and specialised workers, regardless of their consent, and to send them from one place to another like machines in contempt of every sentiment of humanity.
These were the principal links in an unending chain. The decree of the 7th August 1932 on the preservation of State property stipulated the death penalty for theft of merchandise in transport. In November of the same year followed new decrees. One of them punished by dismissal a single day's unjustifiable absence from work. The other placed the former co-operatives under the direction of the factories. Thus the dismissed or defaulting worker lost his food-ticket issued by the director and, as a general rule, his lodgings. The same power of personal control was exercised in regard to production and consumption. These convicts of industry could no longer move an inch without exposing themselves and their families to death from starvation. Yet, incredible as it may seem, even with this monstrous system of repression, which is absolutely unparalleled in any capitalist legislation, Stalin was unable to control all the workers, for many preferred vagabondage to slavery. In December of this last year of the plan, he decided upon a police measure which exceeded in its scope and rigour any analogous measure under Tsarism, viz., the obligatory interior passport for the entire urban population; and for a part of the rural population living near the large towns. Nobody could move or stay twenty-four hours away from home without the visa of the G.P.U. militia and this incriminating document indicated the social origin of the bearer, his family attachments, his occupation and movements; a complete police dossier with all the elements necessary for an eventual prosecution. During the three months that "passportisation" was being introduced, Stalin vetoed marriages, divorces, adoptions and changes of address in order to render fraud impossible. He condescended, however, to permit deaths and to tolerate births.
The peasant-proletarian was no better situated than the worker-dictator. The death sentence for theft applied equally to theft in the fields. A starving individual who had gleaned a few ears of wheat or stolen a few vegetables from the products of his own labour would be eligible for the capital sentence. There was subsequently a similar decree of the Central Committee against vague offences like sabotage in agricultural works and "intent to damage" in tillage and sowing. A series of contradictory decrees followed one another: piecework and payment by results were imposed in collective agriculture, everything was regulated down to its most minute details, standards of work were established, and the amount of produce expected from labourers and tilled fields, and even from cows, was fixed by statute. All this time a rain of circulars was pouring on the kolkhoz where an unprecedented social phenomenon, a gigantic agrarian bureaucracy, was being formed. In 1931, the number of functionaries in the new "socialist sector" was reckoned at more than 2,000,000— administrators, managers, controllers, brigadiers, commissioners, and divers employees. The mujiks, also divided into brigades to regulate their daily tasks, had to support whole legions of parasites who encroached on their own personal share, and to bear the enormous general expenses which burdened net costs and were responsible for budget deficits. Arakcheyev, the Minister of Alexander I, famous for his military peasant colonies, would not have dreamed of calling a shepherd a "commander of the flock" nor dared to have envisaged a bureaucratic militarisation on such a scale.
In proportion as collectivisation extended, famine became rapidly accentuated. Tractors transformed after a short while into scrap iron, mechanical instruments left to rust in the open, did not balance a diminution in the flock or the abandonment or destruction of old implements. All the orders, counter-orders and decrees from Moscow could not save wheat from rotting, potatoes from frost-bite, or weeds from springing up, where there was a lack of elementary precautions and of any stimulus to work. Losses and waste took on extravagant proportions. Neither the mobilisation of workmen and students and of school-children for the sowings and harvestings, nor the mobilisation of young communists for wood felling, of doctors, scientists and artists—each in turn organised into shock-brigades—could take the place of the good will or the interest of the cultivators, any more than the mobilisation of the peasants for heavy industry could answer the needs of modern mechanisation. Stalin tried in 1932 to ward off the crisis caused by the break up of the agricultural system by means of new decrees, such as the right to individual possession of a cow and of small domestic animals granted to members of the kolkhoz (March), reduction of stocks and of State levies (May), conditional semi-freedom of trade granted to kolkhoz after payment of rents and taxes (May), guarantees to the communal groups of the boundaries of their domains (September), obligation of the last free peasants to lend their horses to the kolkhoz that needed them (September). All these palliative measures brought some not very palpable relief, but it was of short duration, as Stalin is always ready to take back with one hand what he gives with the other. And as a result of his opportunism and his intransigence, the flow of blood and tears never ceases.
"Evidently killing is easier than persuasion and this very simple method is very easy for people who have been brought up amongst massacres, and educated by massacre." Gorky wrote this at the beginning of the revolution apostrophising the Bolsheviks. "All you Russians, still savages, corrupted by your former masters, you in whom they have infused their terrible defects and their insensate despotism." Babeuf made similar reflections on his contemporaries: "Tortures of all kinds—drawing and quartering, the wheel, the stake, the gibbet, the plague of executions. What evil precedents our masters have given us! Instead of keeping us in order, they have made barbarians of us, because they are barbarians themselves." There is no difficulty that Stalin does not boast of being able to solve by capital punishment or at least by prison or exile.
In 1930, when there was a currency shortage, a mere decree was sufficient to send to the firing-squad scores of Soviet subjects suspected of hoarding a few hundred roubles. Industrial miscalculations and agricultural mishaps were treated in the same way as financial difficulties. Forty-eight alleged saboteurs of food production were executed without trial after the arrest of numerous technicians, professors, scientists, statisticians and socialist or liberal co-operators who had rallied to the regime and were employed in the administration of the national economy. This helped to exculpate the chiefs, while intimidating the intelligentsia, and making a parody of justice before the credulous people. Next the existence was revealed of the so-called "Industrial Party," said to include some 2,000 members. Yet only eight of them were brought to trial, and the ringleader, to judge by the evidence, was an agent provocateur. The most valuable officials of the Gosplan among whom were Bazarov, Groman, Sukhanov, Kondratiev, found themselves accused of counter-revolution and wrecking (vreditelstvo). Terrorised by the execution of forty-eight of their colleagues, and cowed by the G.P.U. methods of intimidation, they nearly all signed the confessions that were demanded from them and admitted to crimes that they could not possibly have committed. Others were dismissed from office, like Riazanov, who remained indifferent to the threats, and Kondratiev, who took shelter behind the Communist Right with which he was in sympathy. In actual fact these criminals had in private conversations exchanged pessimistic views on exaggerated industrialisation and collectivisation, and had envisaged a possible socialist government in the event of a crash raising the question of a successor to Stalin. Two distinct and spectacular trials, conducted at an interval of three months because of the practical impossibility of contriving some connecting link, proved nothing simply because they proved too much. But ardent in the pursuit of their own destruction, the accused denounced themselves and exceeded to their very best ability the imputations of the prosecution. Their counsel always pleaded guilty, and there were never any witnesses but those for the prosecution. "It is a common practice to terrorise and even to beat up a witness to make him tell the truth," observed de Maistre when visiting Russia at the beginning of the last century. Under Stalin this method has improved: witnesses and accused are now terrorised so as to make them tell lies. The hounded engineers, cowed by the threats of their clumsy persecutors, through sheer ignorance denounced accomplices and implicated people who had died abroad several years before, and involved in their charges persons who could not possibly have been suspected of such crimes, for example, Aristide Briand, accused of "preparing for war against the U.S.S.R." The alleged Mensheviks, in reality deserters from that Party, with the exception of one of them who subsequently retracted his statements, gave evidence of secret meetings held at Moscow with Abramovich, an exiled socialist leader, who had not crossed the frontier for ten years. These were startling impostures, designed to eke out the scantiness of the charges, which were a mixture of truth and falsehood supplemented by the activities of police agents provocateurs. The result of this tragi-comedy of pitiless condemnations and commutations of sentences, both of them arranged beforehand, was to bring discredit on the whole affair and to confuse public opinion.
On the other hand Stalin was scoring points every day with the executions decided by the G.P.U. without any other form of trial. At this period thousands of such cases were to be found in the press, though it did not announce all of them; and the orgy of murders was to continue further. This is borne out by the execution (March 1933) of thirty-five functionaries of the Commissiariat [sic] of Agriculture accused of having "allowed weeds to grow in the fields" and other charges of the same nature. Publicity was only given in certain cases and where it might serve to set an example. It happened sometimes that the reason given to the public did not coincide with the secret one, as in the case of the thirty-five, who were shot in reality on suspicion of espionage. The G.P.U. at times deemed it useful to exploit its executions for several purposes. The mass arrests of 1930 included every type of intellectual, even the historians (Platonov, Tarlé, etc.) who could not possibly have done any harm to production or supplies, and the last peaceable socialists who had cut themselves away from politics. Finally, Stalin was not content to abuse his power of punishment—he also foresaw the need for reward: the order of "Lenin" for civilians, the order of "The Red Star" for soldiers. These two new decorations, created in 1930, carried with them a number of privileges, under the pretext of "socialist edification" but, actually, of course, in defiance of every principle of socialism.
The Party had not passed through the phase of tension of the Five Year Plan without incidents. The conflicts, however, now affected only isolated individuals, and were settled without any effect whatever on the rank and file; as in the old days at the court of Russia under Nicholas I, which F. Lacroix compared to "the movable floors in a theatre in which invisible trapdoors open to swallow up the victims consigned to the dungeon by the tyrant of the melodrama."
Syrtsov's fall in 1930, as precipitous as his sudden elevation a few months previously, was incomprehensible to the public. It was known only that the President of the Council of Commissars, worried about the consequences of "the general line," shared his confidences and vague hopes of reform, including a return to the N.E.P., with Lominadze and other lesser figures. That was all that was needed to unmask a new disaffection, almost a plot. Trotsky's informants attributed to Syrtsov a disparaging judgment on Stalin, his protector: "A stupid man who is leading the country to ruin." It all ended in the customary dismissals, exclusions, repentance and humiliations. Once more Bukharin and his fellows disavowed their comrades and confessed their mistakes. That same year, Sokolnikov, compromised by his conversations with the imprisoned ex-Mensheviks, assured his safety and his embassy in London by imploring Stalin's pardon and swearing eternal obedience. Krizhanovsky lost his post in the Gosplan for unknown reasons, shortly after Rykov's disgrace. The generation of veterans, weakened by age and perverted by power, was either giving up the struggle or being swept away.
At the beginning of 1931, Riazanov was suddenly made the target for the thunderbolts of the dictator. He was reproached with keeping the documents of the Russian Social-Democracy in the archives of the Marx-Engels Institute, where they had been placed by a colleague. Accused of treason, implicated quite arbitrarily in the so-called "Menshevik affair," but excluded from the trial where he would doubtless have vindicated instead of blackening his character, the old scholar was ruined, expelled from the Party, arrested and deported; his works were pilloried, his editions of Marx and Engels prohibited, and the Institute he had created annulled by being absorbed into the Lenin Institute. The previous year the official Communist world had covered Riazanov with bouquets and compliments on his sixtieth birthday, hailing him as "the most eminent Marxologist of our time," who had devoted "more than forty years of active service to the workers' cause." But Stalin, obsessed with the idea of winning at all costs the reputation of being a theorist, was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to get rid of a scrupulous scientist who hesitated to couple without justification the name of the ignorant successor of Lenin with those of the authors of the doctrine. With him went the last refuge of social science at Moscow. Shortly after the deportation of Riazanov, hired encomiasts tried to acclimatise the formula of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, but they did not succeed in increasing the reputation of the man whom they thus sought to honour.
An episode which at first sight seems more obscure was the sudden fate which befell Yaroslavsky, one of the most servile agents of the government. Because of a History of the Party of which he was not even the author but which was published under his responsibility, this professional detractor of Trotsky and specialised tracker-down of Trotskyists fell in 1931 under the fantastic accusation of Trotskyism. The truth is that Stalin, warned of the excessive ambition of his subaltern, invented some sort of pretext to force him to a public apology so as to belittle him in the eyes of everybody. From the denunciation to the confession the operation did not last three weeks. At the same time, with a simple letter to the editorial staff of a review, Stalin revolutionised the history of Bolshevism in a hand's turn by shamelessly perverting the facts and by delivering into the hands of his functionaries and clients a whole host of very orthodox historians who had not yet learned sufficiently to depreciate Trotsky or glorify Stalin. His threatening allusion to "rotten liberalism" and "Trotskyist contraband" were too clear not to provoke an epidemic of loud denials, at once lamentable and grotesque, which revealed only too well the hopeless degradation of the revolutionary phalanx of October; Radek, Shliapnikov and many others hastened to recognise all sorts of imaginary errors in their old forgotten writings, and to recant the most innocent and least deniable truths. A certain Deborin was induced to publish abroad his philosophical deviations, whilst regretting that he had not sufficiently criticised ... the idealism of Hegel! The panic was designed to produce a more severe expurgation of books and libraries and a more rigorous censorship of new publications in the spirit of Stalinist conformity. Everyone ran the risk, through lack of zeal or mere inadvertence, of losing his employment, lodging and breadcard and falling into the condition of a pariah. Even the Complete Works of Lenin were tainted with suspicion because of documentary notes, the relative probity of which contradicted the legends Stalin found useful to himself. The letter of anathema entitled Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism became a "document of the greatest international significance, political and world-historical" to quote the careerist "red professors." For years, hack writers and party pedants appealed to its authority on every possible occasion and on every subject, continually hunting out "rotten liberalism" even on questions of philosophy, literature and music, with which the miserable document is no more concerned than with historic fact.
A gloomy silence spread over the Party and oppressed the "socialist fatherland," where the critical spirit scarcely dared venture abroad except in the stifled murmur of anecdotes and spiteful epigrams as in Rome under the Caesars. On the surface, unbroken unanimity reigned, and a chorus of venal eulogies of Stalin took the place of political life in a country plunged in toil, hardships and misery. One of the principal renegades of the Left Opposition, Pyatakov, had led the way in identifying the General Secretary first with the Central Committee, then with the Party, and then with the State, giving him the personal homage of a vassal to his lord. Falling easily into line with him, a chorus of careerists and parvenus took care not to write or speak anything but tributes of outward admiration for the man on whom their futures depended. Every discourse, every article began and terminated henceforward with a digression in Stalin's honour, and men rivalled each other to invent new flatteries. Mention of his name was made everywhere; it was sedition to omit it. A jesting pun on the "genial secretary" was taken seriously and by a slight change of meaning, the word "genius" became inseparable from his name, which the press printed in large characters. At the end of 1932 an obscure quarrel with a certain Riutin, allied with divers oppositionists of Left and Right, gave opportunity to exclude and deport a handful of malcontents for the crime of not having denounced anyone—among them Zinoviev and Kamenev. But the two cronies were to obtain pardon six months later when they pleaded for clemency, and not only admitted their innumerable errors but prostrated themselves before the might of Stalin. It was no longer enough to get down on your knees, you had to grovel in the dirt on your belly. The moral suicide of the survivors of the Old Guard, stubborn in claiming a political role against the omnipotence of their conquerors, indicated the inevitable fate of those who did not resort to physical suicide. In 1933, Skrypnik, suspected rightly or wrongly of deviating from "the general line" and of weakness or tolerance in regard to nationalism in the Ukraine, found the only solution in his revolver.
Stalin alone had the right to express an opinion, which took on the force of law, ipso facto, and the boyars of the bureaucracy had the privilege of repeating it, vulgarising it and commenting on it until such time as the "genius" of the land should have changed his mind or have contradicted himself. After his moderating intervention in the excesses of collectivisation, he published a Reply to Comrades on the Collective Farms to cover his retreat with a good score of quotations from Lenin, every one of which was a condemnation of his own practice, but from which he thought to escape unscathed by turning them against his subordinates. In a discourse pronounced in February 1931, he was not afraid to postulate the realisation of the Plan, no longer in four but in three years, "for all decisive branches of industry," and to subscribe to equally puerile blustering with the final and peremptory argument: "There exists no fortress impregnable to a Bolshevik." But his boasting could not dissipate the difficulties of industrialisation, and in another discourse in June 1931 he retreated noticeably. The low quality of labour due to the permanent evasion of the workers prior to "passportisation," which he had the audacity to explain as being caused by the prosperity of the country districts, obliged him to turn his attention to the material conditions of the proletariat. He found it necessary to modify the allocation of salaries by accentuating the inequality to the profit of qualified workers, giving them the stimulus of better food and lodgings. In euphemistic and laboured terms he declared the five-day week a fiasco. "In a series of enterprises we have continuous work, in words or on paper," he said, and commanded that "where conditions are not propitious to such an experiment we should pass temporarily to the six-day week" whilst waiting to return to the first arrangement. He canvassed the idea of "changing our policy" in respect of the decimated technical cadres: "it would be stupid and unreasonable to-day to consider every specialist and engineer of the old school as a criminal or a saboteur." He acknowledged the statistical bluffs of which he had been the first to avail himself: "In a series of enterprises and economic undertakings we have ceased for a long time to count and calculate or to establish real budgets of receipts and expenditure." But he concluded nevertheless on the habitual optimistic note.
That was his last speech before the expiration of the five-year term. The incessant lie that facts gave to his words inspired him for a time with the wise decision to keep quiet. He had given his enemies too many weapons by announcing always the contrary of what was going to happen, by dragging in the wake of the most easily predictable events, and by displaying a rare misunderstanding of international and Soviet realities, and of the economic and social theories of which he claimed to be the interpreter. On one single point he was not mistaken, but he took care not to make too much of it: he had prophesied in 1928 a certain artificially-organised famine" in the case of a too rapid tempo of industrial development. He was saying nothing original and borrowing from the "deviation of the Right" the only idea that future events were to verify.
In fact, the famine made itself felt as early as 1931, in spite of the coupon system, the parsimonious rations, and the rigorous discipline. But this time the peasants had more to complain about than the workers, who were provided for first after the bureaucracy, the police and the army, in the order of urgency. The State took one-half of the gram crop which had fallen to 695 million tons (against 96.6 in 1913) but which was again reduced by a quarter on the average, by losses due to fraud. But the population had increased by about 25 millions and bread was an essential article of diet in a country where meat, milk, cheese, indeed all provisions were almost unprocurable. The livestock which had survived the mass-slaughter of collectivisation, deprived of proper care and fodder in the kolkhoz, perished in enormous numbers. The soaring prices in the market after the partial re-establishment of commerce revealed a precipitous devaluation of the rouble. Powerless to cope with the food-supply of the towns, the Government wanted the workers to raise rabbits at home and even to cultivate the land around the factories and camps. But "the offensive on the rabbit front" came to a lamentably abrupt end, owing to the extermination of the subjects of the experiment. The inexperienced breeders lacked suitable premises and above all food. Stalin alone had failed to foresee all this in the very beginning. One of the monstrosities of the regime dated from this period: the Torgsin, an institution of shops reserved for clients with foreign money and precious metals, an oasis of abundance in a socialist desert. The State refused it the use of its own paper money, which it also decreed should not cross the frontiers, and the wretched poor, indignant but cowed with fear, dared not rummage for themselves. Even more unbelievable was the expedient used to procure dollars. A veritable slave-trade was inaugurated when Soviet "citizens" were authorised to expatriate themselves, provided a ransom were paid by their friends and relatives in foreign countries. Although in 1932 the shortage of merchandise was becoming more acute and famine was rapidly gaining ground, the imperturbable planomaniacs juggled with stunning masses of figures and planned the second piatiletka, always promising their mountains and marvels for the morrow. The press demonstrated by a thousand graphic and photographic artifices the prodigious success of national economy "on all fronts," and soothed popular distress by stories of electric tillage, sowing by aeroplane, artificial rain produced by the bombardment of the clouds, and other discoveries which, judging by the level of Soviet technique at that time, must be regarded in the same light as the fantasmagoria of Fourier on the transformation of the sea into lemonade by the action of boreal citric acid. They even proposed a grandiose plan for diverting the Gulf Stream so as to temper the Arctic Ocean to the profit of Northern Siberia. A frantic propaganda fed the starving masses with photographs of Dnieprostroy and Magnitogorsk, the steel and cement "giants" risen on the steppe for the future well-being of their posterity. The Soviet patriotism of the young communists was warmly praised—they were the heroes of the "working front," desperately keen to beat records. The press quoted the cubic metres of earth excavated, of coal extracted, of metal cast. But the temporary exploits of the shock brigades did not console empty stomachs or lessen the nightmare of famine and its attendant horrors, scurvy and typhus. The generations which were sacrificed to the machine-god looked in vain for a human word from the Kremlin where Stalin, immured in silence, was turning socialism into the ideal caricatured by Flaubert "under the double aspect of a farm-house and a textile-mill, a sort of Americanised Sparta where the individual would only exist in order to serve a society more omnipotent, absolute, infallible and divine than the Great Lamas and the Nebuchadnezzars."
AFTER the fifteenth anniversary of October the prosaic and bloody industrial epic came to an end. Between the years 1932 and 1933 the Party could not dispense with a general review. In spite of so many resolutions, orders and proclamations, each one more full of "historic importance" or "international interest" than its predecessor, and despite immeasurable sacrifices of every kind, the economic plans, enlarged and several times recast, had still not been fulfilled from any point of view. The U.S.S.R. had not caught up with or surpassed a single civilised country. It threatened to eclipse neither Europe nor America nor Switzerland nor Belgium. That did not prevent Stalin from crying victory, when in January 1933 he at last broke the silence in order to pass under review the accumulated evidence of his bureaux and auxiliaries.
He succeeded in this only by concealing beneath his sophistries the gaping wounds of planned economy and by drowning the tragic realities in the verbiage of public meetings. He tortured statistics that had already been falsified from day to day. He played tricks with quantities, qualities, weights, and values. He himself was not sure of his starting-point, for his data comprised fragmentary and uncontrollable elements. The subordinate bodies always supplied satisfying results to the centre through their fear of unmerited punishments. "Through the habit of wanting to disguise the truth before the eyes of other people, you end by being no longer able to see it yourself, except through a veil which grows thicker every day." So wrote Custine; the same author remarked, with judicious whimsicality: "Russia is the empire of catalogues; it sounds superb when you read these lists of titles—but be careful not to go any further. If you open a book you will find nothing of what is promised; the chapter-headings are there, but the chapters have yet to be written." Trials with concealed motives, continual scandals, acute crises in every branch of activity—all are habitually accompanied by "correctives" which justly merit the title "comboasts."
In the elementary style which is so typical of him, Stalin summed up before the Central Committee the general balance-sheet of industrialisation carried out according to his methods:
Formerly we did not have an iron and steel industry, the basis of the industrialisation of the country. Now we have such an industry.
We did not have a tractor industry. Now we have one.
We did not have an automobile industry. Now we have one.
We did not have an engineering industry. Now we have one.
We did not have an important and modern chemical industry. Now we have one.
We did not have a real and important industry for the production of modern agricultural machinery. Now we have one.
We did not have an aircraft industry. Now we have one.
In the production of electric power, we were last in the list. Now we are among the first in the list.
In the production of oil products and coal we were last in the list. Now we are among the first in the list.
We had only one single coal and metallurgical base, the Ukraine, which we could hardly manage. We have not only succeeded in improving this base, but we have created a new coal and metallurgical base—in the east, which is the pride of our country.
We had only one single textile industry base-in the north of our country. In the very near future we will have two new bases of the textile industry, in Central Asia and Eastern Siberia.
And we have not only created these new enormous branches of industry, but we have created them on such a scale and of such dimensions that they make the scale and dimensions of European industry pale into insignificance.
If Stalin's affirmations are taken one by one and examined individually, it will be found that all is not absolutely false in this vague and high flown statement, in which the orator avoids juxtaposing the passive with the active. It goes without saying that a people numbering 160,000,000 and submitted to a military discipline, could not possibly work in mines and on a soil of exceptional natural resources without producing anything, above all when they work under the advice and direction of 10,000 foreign technicians and specialists. But that does not answer the question whether the results are harmonious and durable and in just proportion to the exhausting effort and fantastic expenditure, as well as being in conformity with a true material and moral progress and with the final aims of socialism. And even from Stalin's point of view, nothing could justify a plan, a political system, a regime, which because of its barbaric methods ended in a return to barbarism with a superficial covering of American modernism which ill concealed its essentially Asiatic structure.
It is inexact to say that the U.S.S.R. had to start building everything from bedrock and may therefore justly boast of an unprecedented success. In the thirteenth century, Russia held the first place in the world for cast iron, for iron and copper and for the export of wood, leather and sail-canvas, a place which she subsequently lost. At the end of the nineteenth century, she surpassed the United States in the production of petrol and had in six years more than doubled her supply of cast iron and steel, and almost doubled her production of coal and naphtha. These advances and recessions point to a lesson that still holds good. Russia has always had feverish industrial booms followed by periods of torpor or depression which pulled her back. Peter the Great left about 730 factories for the most part founded by himself. The number of factories had more than tripled under Catherine II, more than doubled under Alexander I, and almost doubled under Nicholas I, but with a still greater increase of workers and an even greater sum total of trade. Under Alexander II, railway construction had increased more than twentyfold. Under Alexander III, industry had well-nigh doubled its working forces, and tripled the average scope of its enterprises. Under Nicholas II, indeed, the financial system of Witte made it possible to double the length of the railways in ten years, and in consequence to enlarge the coal and metal industries, and to inaugurate, notably at Donetz, an acceleration comparable to the burst of industry in the English mining districts at the beginning of the last century, and that of the Rhino-Westphalian districts in the 'seventies or, more recently, of the United States or Japan. In his Development of Capitalism in Russia, which appeared in 1899, Lenin stated: "... The progress in the mining industry is more rapid in Russia than in Western Europe and even in North America.... In the last few years (1886-1896) the production of cast metal has tripled.... The development of capitalism in the younger countries is accelerated by the example and aid of the older." And the industrial output of Russia was doubled between the Russo-Japanese War and the World War. The periods of stagnation do not contradict the general tendency, which is also compatible with barbarous customs. Besides, since the liberation of the serfs, economic progress had been accomplished along less abnormal lines than "mobilisation," "shock-brigades," "offensives on all fronts," mass deportations or executions. Trotsky was able to say before the N.E.P., "if Russian capitalism has developed not gradually but by leaps and bounds, constructing American factories in the open steppe, that is all the more reason why a similar 'forced march' should be possible to socialist economy." Without the legacy of the past in the matter of industrial concentration, with its imported machinery, technical cadres, and its influx of foreign science and capital, the Plan would not even have been conceivable.
The historic antecedents, then, must not be misunderstood. Sovietism, like Tsarism, but in an extreme measure, tends to an artificial industrialisation by the omnipresent and constant interference of the State, sheltered behind a prohibitive customs duty, and at the expense of the over-exploited working classes. And Stalin, like his predecessors of the autocracy, owes much to the lucrative participation of the "rotten West," as the Bolsheviks would say in the manner of the reactionary Slavophiles. Ivan the Terrible could not have conquered the Tartars without the help of the engineers and artisans from Germany, Hungary and Italy. Michael Romanov, the first of the dynasty, enrolled a number of Englishmen to organise his army in the European manner. Peter the Great would have been less great if he had not recruited so many instructors from Holland and elsewhere. And we know well enough the role played by the French and Belgians in the contemporary organisation of heavy industry. Stalin is only making use of an old tradition in appealing to the competence and experience of "moribund capitalism"; of the great firms of Europe and above all America, such as Ford, Austin, MacKee, General Electric, Westinghouse, Harvester, Cleveland Tractor, Freyn Engineering, etc., whose creative work the mouthpieces of the Party shamelessly attribute to themselves. From Tsar Peter the Great to Count Witte, all the industrialisers of Russia have wanted to make their country independent, to make it an autarchy, without scrupling to profit from the international division of labour. Their successor scarcely changes anything but the words when he contrasts Soviet statism and the imperialist capitalism that opens credits for him and sends him its technical experts; and when he makes comparisons between the respective curves of industry, for the short period of the Five Year Plan which ran parallel with the greatest economic crisis the modern world has experienced. It is undeniable that the high industrial coefficients of the U.S.S.R. coincided with a contrary tendency in the countries of excessive production. But here, where technique had already taken enormous strides forward, there naturally remained less to be done. Stalin unsuspectingly emphasised the backwardness of his empire when he marvelled at certain rhythms of progress and forgot the point of departure. The nearer to the zero line were the latest industries, the easier was it for him to string together imposing and deceiving percentages. He also confused economy with technique, the results of which can be bought without assimilating its processes. In the same way, he confuses industrialisation with socialism. The deception is closely reminiscent of intoxication, the more profound as the illusions were stronger.
Stalin insistently boasted of the cyclopean span of the work accomplished, which is one of the favourite themes of his literary, journalistic and photographic propaganda. In his simplicity he believes that its magnitude is sufficient to mark the superiority of an enterprise, and he copies and exaggerates the mania for "the greatest in the world" without bothering about its reasonableness, and often to the detriment of the interests in his charge. This motive of pride is not less fragile. "The bourgeoisie," says the Communist Manifesto, "has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals." A State covering one-sixth of the globe does not in any way surpass its rivals by superb, costly and infirm "giants," which are produced at a loss and contribute nothing to the satisfaction of immediate needs. The factories in which the equipment is obsolete before it is paid off put heavy charges on the budget, to the detriment of social obligations, and the gap is vast between the magnitude of the undertaking and its doubtful utility. Besides, Tsarist Russia also had to construct on the scale of its vast territory, without finding in this an historic excuse, any more than the great works of art of the two continents have spared the people economic crises, unemployment and misery. The Trans-Siberian, the longest railway in the world, and a legacy of Tsarism, could evidently not exist in Switzerland; but no Plan will ever bring the transport system of Siberia or Russia up to the level of the Confederation's railways, in the matter of regularity, frequency and hygiene. Turksib, created partly under the old regime and partly under the new, would do honour, according to Stalin's reasoning, as much to the former as to the latter. There are many, however, who would like to know the number of workmen who died from epidemics in the process of laying the Soviet sleepers over the sands that are traversed by a puffing and problematic train; the film of the enterprise is a poor compensation for all the unfruitful exploitation. The titanic dam at Dnieprostroy, the work of the American, Colonel Hugh L. Cooper, and other foreign experts in the Union, measures 770 metres long by 40 metres at the base, but the Zuyderzee dyke is 30 kilometres by 94 metres at sea level and is 134 metres wide at the bottom, yet Holland is one six-hundredth the size of the U.S.S.R., and has one twenty-third of its population, and claims no praise for this block of concrete. Each of these two works represents in one way or another an economic heresy. The American turbines at Dnieprostroy will turn uselessly for years for lack of cables to carry the current, or motors to transform the energy, or factories to use it. In France, the hydro-electric stations of Kembs and La Truyière, established without any bluff or noisy plan, are scarcely less formidable than the Dnieprostroy and have notable differences in their favour. The Colerado [sic] Central takes the prize for audacity and power, but is not worth to President Hoover, whose name it bears, the consideration that Stalin would give it. The joint use of the Magnitogorsk minerals and the Kuznetsk coal, more than 2,000 kilometres apart, produces steel at an exorbitant manufacturing cost, raised by the expense of transport and the cost of the high-pressure furnaces, forges and leadrollers constructed by the Cleveland engineers. The Ford factories of Nizhni-Novgorod will produce motor-cars destined to founder in the quagmires, so lacking is the country in serviceable roads. The model machines from the Tractor Factory at Stalingrad, of American origin, deteriorate in a year's time in the inept hands of an improvised working personnel. Not one of these industrial monsters can stand up to the slightest impartial examination nor prove what Stalin implies in the hopes of getting away with the deception. The bridges of Newport News, of Sydney, of the Zambezi are "the biggest in the world" and do not solve any social problem. No more than do the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Suez and Panama canals, the Saint-Gothard and the Simplon, the underground canal of the Rove near Marseilles or the tunnels under the Scheldt at Antwerp and so many other triumphs of engineering. The U.S.S.R. has as yet nothing to be compared with these, and it could for a long time to come get along much better without them than without bread. The Rockefeller Centre was erected at an unprecedented loss. If the canal from the Baltic to the White Sea, dug at the command of the G.P.U., by a multitude of unfortunate deported peasants (286,000 in June 1934, according to I. Solonevich) were to justify Bolshevism, then the reclaiming of the Pontine marshes would be an irrefutable justification of fascism. And no language would be enough to celebrate proportionately the Great Wall of China. The idea has sprung up spontaneously on many sides of comparing to the Pyramids, mutatis mutandis, these palaces erected in Russia for the housing of machines by the labour of coolies whose lodging is in wretched hovels. Historians had already made use of the comparison in connection with Peter the Great, and the Mensheviks had used it against the "labour armies" of Trotsky. For grandiose as the "giants" born of the Five Year Plan may appear in this "Empire of Facades," as Herzen would say, the waste of funds, the squandering of energy, the losses of every description are still more grandiose, and the sacrifices in human beings seem to belong to another age.
Stalin has several times quoted Lenin's allusion to Peter the Great, and many commentators have used it to suit their purpose. Though now a commonplace, it is by no means favourable to the socialist principles of the Bolsheviks. "An apostle of civilisation with a knout in his hands, the knout in his hand being the persecution of all enlightenment," Peter could only copy from the West, borrowing the forms without taking the substance, seeking practical advantages without understanding the premises, and batching ill-proportioned and fictitious works that were Often useless, at times harmful and always precarious. Half of his factories only existed on paper and only about twenty survived him. Of the thousand vessels, frigates and galleys of his fleet, hardly more than fifteen were sea-worthy ten years after his death. The senseless construction of Petersburg at an outlying point of the Empire, and on a swamp that became a cemetery for thousands of workmen, and the building of the port of Taganrog under almost similar conditions do not redeem the horror of his crimes. Quite the contrary. "But at last, the town exists," wrote Voltaire, pensioned by the Court of Russia and a worthy precursor of the "intellectuals" hired by Stalin to sing his praises. Sylvain Maréchal replied in his History of Russia: "To cement the foundations of new city with the blood of a hundred thousand men is what Voltaire calls creating a nation. Can one play more impudently with the poor human species?" Rousseau showed his perspicacity in writing in the Social Contract: "Peter had imitative genius. He did not have the true genius, which creates and makes everything out of nothing. A few of the things he did were good, the greater part were misplaced. Diderot discovered the truth during his stay in Russia as is proved by his famous dictum on the "colossus with feet of clay" And Condillac was not wrong to address himself to Peter in these terms: "You have erected an immense edifice, but permit me to ask you what are its foundations. Perhaps you have neglected them so as to occupy yourself only with the exterior decoration. This magnificent grandeur, which is your creation, will perhaps disappear with you." He was not the dupe of the "profound calm—forerunner of decadence." Another question of the intelligent Abbé could also be addressed to Stalin: "What have you done to diminish this overwhelming terror which has accompanied your power and which can only create mercenaries and slaves?"
The sanguinary Tsar was not the only one to employ these methods. They show through the more seductive decor put up by his descendants. Questioned by M. de Ségur on the new buildings in Southern Russia that were shown to Catherine the Great by Potemkin, the Emperor Joseph II, who had visited them, replied: "I see in them more brilliance than reality.... Everything seems easy when you are lavish with money and men's lives. We could not do in Germany or in France what they risk here. The master orders, the thousands of slaves work. They are paid little or nothing, they are badly fed, they dare not let a murmur of complaint escape them and I know that in three years ... fatigue and the unhealthiness of the swamps have been responsible for the deaths of fifty thousand men, without any complaint being made or without a word having been spoken." His opinion was corroborated in the following century in Custine's letters. "With the powers of action usurped by this prince, a true creator would have achieved many quite different miracles. But the Russian, having made an entrance on the great stage of the world after everyone else, has only the genius of imitation"; thus the French traveller speaking of Peter I. "It is only when his people submit blindly that a master can order tremendous sacrifices to produce very little" was his reflection at "the colossal childishness" of Nicholas I, who represented for him, "not the force of a great country but the uselessly wasted sweat of the wretched people." He defined Russia thus: "It is a country where the greatest things are done with the most meagre result." The commands of the master "put life into the stones, but only by killing men."
There would be novelty in the "planning," if the Plan were not in a very large measure a nebulous myth which it is impossible to take seriously, since its sponsors flatter themselves with having transgressed its fundamental principles under the pretext of speed. This means that they have accentuated the errors, the lack of balance and the disorders which they set out to remedy. A single irrefutable example demonstrates its inanity. When Stalin, in the speech already quoted, congratulated himself on a collectivisation three times that of the original Plan, without having tripled the tools, fertilisers and buildings, and without even having provided the minimum essentials originally scheduled, he clearly discredited the principle, which he could not even conceive, much less apply. Similar statements hold good for industry. With a rolling stock inferior in quantity and quality to that of 1917, With worn-out rails, rotten sleepers, and faulty signals, it was not logical to burden the transport with a triple load, unless deliberately to provoke catastrophe upon catastrophe and the ruin of the railways; which, in effect, was what did happen. The Plan aimed in principle at an economic harmony measured by indices of quantity and quality, of value and price. From this limited point of view, and if one leaves out of account the freedom of choice which had been suppressed, it was necessary to produce a certain volume of raw materials and to transform them into manufactured articles, but at the same time to reduce manufacturing costs and to raise the value of money, the salaries and the general standard of living. But the quantities aimed at were not obtained; the quality of the products deteriorated, the manufacturing costs increased, real wages fell, and the notion of comfort grew vague in the memory of the workers. No matter from what angle it is examined, the unrealisable Plan has not been carried out. The proof is easily disentangled from the muddle of statistics deliberately confused by the ever-changing standards of comparison. And without bothering to refute in detail a pseudo-scientific charlatanism, which even goes as far as to predict future crops and consequently meteorological prospects, it is only necessary to emphasise certain fundamental data to be clear on the issue.
Stalin estimated the realisation of the industrial programme at 93.7 per cent, or a production three times that of before the War, and double that of before the Plan. He did not say on what he based his calculations, letting it be thought that it was a question of quantities enumerated in weight or volume, whereas in fact his figures simply translate an arbitrary value into more or less fictitious roubles. In fact, if the key industries are examined, we have quite a different picture. In 1932, 6.2 million tons of iron were cast instead of the 10 calculated in the Plan and the 17 predicted by Stalin at the Sixteenth Congress. Forty-two million tons of coal were extracted instead of the 75 (according to the Plan), the 90 (control figures) and the 140 fixed by the Central Committee (decision of the 15th August 1931); 22.2 million tons of naphtha instead of the 45 required by the Central Committee (announcement of the 15th November 1930);the capacity of the electrical power reached in theory 13.5 thousand millions of kilowatt-hours, instead of 22 (according to plan), which says nothing of the means of using it. The results are still lower for chemical products, for copper and other coloured metals, for cement and building materials. Thus the percentage of achievement in the principal branches of work is very far from approaching Stalin's round figure, and a certain percentage must still be deducted for faulty production. It must be clear to every sane individual beyond the reach of the G.P.U., that the factories have only been able to make machines within the limits of the metal and fuel supplies, to say nothing of other restrictive conditions. The same year, 844 locomotives instead of 1,641 (Plan) were manufactured, 18,600 coaches instead of 37,000 (Plan), about 50,000 tractors instead of the promised 170,000, and 26,700 automobiles instead of the 200,000 announced by Stalin at the Sixteenth Congress. No better, indeed worse, is the actual balance-sheet for the production of spare parts, minor tools, and articles of current consumption. Thus 2550 million metres of cotton textiles were manufactured against the 4,700 millions of the Plan. Although this was approximately up to pre-War level, the population had increased and the internal market had been starved for fifteen years. In vain did Stalin try to present a rise in price as corresponding with an increase in production.
Almost 35 milliard roubles invested in industry and transport have given, in quality as in quantity, nothing but deceptive results. Beneath the whip of a deceitful emulation and an open repression, bad workmanship ruined an enormous proportion of the goods, sometimes a quarter, sometimes a half, according to the particular factories—and it was no rare case when the losses and throw-outs were three-quarters the total, or even more. This goes to show again what trust can be put in the varnished statistics of the Gosplan. So inferior were the products, that in 1933 there was a decree to punish bad work—this "crime against the State"—with five years of prison. Moreover, the manufacturing costs, which should have been lowered by one-third in industry, and by one-half in building, had further increased, according to official statements, in spite of the subterfuges of accounting used to confuse the calculations. And the output of the worker, instead of having doubled according to schedule, persisted at the original level, four or five times below the established productivity of America. It is difficult not to be reminded of a bitter reflection of Herzen's, "It must never be lost sight of that with us all change is only a change of scenery: the walls are all cardboard, the palaces painted canvas." A metaphor, certainly, but one which covers a profound truth.
In their ignorance or their audacity, the dictators of the Soviet State made great play with the 118 milliard roubles sunk in the venture, instead of the 86 scheduled. But here the fantasy of the figures goes beyond all semblance of reality. Monetary circulation has increased by about 6 milliards in four years, instead of 1,250 millions which was set as the maximum, and this does not include the local money issued to palliate the scarcity of cash by means of notes and certificates, etc. (It increased again by two milliards in the two following years.) An adviser of Peter the Great had persuaded himself that in Russia the circulation of money depended exclusively on the will of the sovereign, and very conservative Russian financiers had condemned the gold standard long before Soviet economists. Stalin listened to experts of the same school, for whom unlimited note issues did not imply financial inflation. Nevertheless in four years the rouble had lost nine-tenths of its value instead of regaining one-fifth of it. Even at this, its purchasing power was due to administrative circulars and coercive ordinances of an inexplicable complexity. Left to the mercy of the laws of exchange the rouble would not have been worth a kopeck. By an empirical and composite system of tariffs and reckonings, taxes and rations, which ignored all common standards of value, the relation of prices to wages varied infinitely, and money changed its value according to whose hands it was in. Hence, no figure had any precise meaning, neither the sum total of the national income, evaluated with governmental despotism, nor the individual balance-sheet, made up of so many different elements. The nominal salary did not indicate the standard of living of the recipient, who had to put up with the caprices of bureaucratic remuneration and with processes of assessment which defied all stable definition. After stopping the publication of the balance-sheets of the State Bank, the authorities had to give up establishing commercial and budgetary indices. In the chaotic state of finance was reflected the chaos of the whole planned economy, characterised in its final analysis by an absence of or a contempt for any plan.
The agricultural disaster, justly compared to the effects of a major war, caught up and surpassed the financial catastrophe which followed upon industrialisation. Contrary to the Plan, which specifically required the encouragement of individual production, 15 million peasant homes out of 25 million were forcibly collectivised into some 211,000 kolkhoz. But the crop of 1932 was only 7 hundredweight to the hectare and 69.9 million tons in all (against 96.6 in 1913), which was sufficient, with the abnormal losses and the normal birth-rate, to cause a famine. And that was in spite of the 10 milliard roubles expended, in spite of the use of perfected implements, in spite of the periodical mobilisation of the communists, the frantic agitation led by the press at each new season, and the "offensives on all fronts," of tillage and pasture, sowing and harvesting, housing, threshing and stock-rearing and all the work that is executed peacefully everywhere else in the world. Stalin admitted that the kolkhoz as a whole worked at a loss, like the great socialised industry. Other admissions revealed that the 5,383 sovkhoz, burdened with endowments and machines, were not yet productive of revenue. In an array of 147,000 tractors, 137,000 were in need of major repairs. In the "depots for tractors and machines," petrol, oil and spare parts were lacking as well as professional attention. But the nightmare of collectivisation had been fatal above all to the livestock, reduced in five years to 160 millions from 276 millions. Statistical fictions only give a feeble idea of the truth as another admission that Voroshilov allowed to escape him bore witness. "Not only the horse but the ox, which has become a rare phenomenon in our Ukraine, aids and will aid the tractor." From this it is easy to draw conclusions relative to meat, leather and wool. If you add to this the fact that the productivity per hectare of technical culture (flax, cotton, beetroot) decreased by half in a population of 165,000,000, the acute scarcity of cloth and sugar is explained without further investigation. Thus the main reason for the interminable shortage of merchandise, and the great famine, which reached its culminating point in the spring of 1933, are sufficiently clear. The Sozialisticheski Vestnik rated at 5,000,000 at the least the number of victims of "a sort of famine artificially-organised" by Stalin, and all reliable information tends to confirm this figure. It is also the estimate of an extremely sagacious observer, Mr. W. H. Chamberlin, who is well qualified to speak on account of the length of his stay in the U.S.S.R., and his sympathy for the Russian people.
Whilst outwardly denying the evidences of famine, as he denied the failure of his rash plans, even though the falsified statistics of his own bureaux pointed to it, Stalin was nevertheless forced to take some notice and to check the presumptuous march forward—to ruin. His shouts of triumph covered practical instructions which became more and more modest. It was a question henceforward of concentrating effort, not on the extension and intensity of production, but on the assimilation of the technique so dearly paid for, on the improvement of quality, on productivity of labour and on the lowering of manufacturing costs. By an apparent paradox, which betrays a lot, the "Bolshevik rhythm" had to lessen its speed instead of increasing it as mechanisation progressed. It was no longer a question of L. Sabsovich's book, The U.S.S.R. in Fifteen Years, the textbook of a perfect Bolshevik, in which the author tabulated a great mass of absurd hypotheses on fifty per cent annual increase in industrial production from 1933. Stalin was content with thirteen to fifteen per cent on an average in the course of the second Five Year Plan embarked upon. And as it is always a long way from the programme to its realisation, the inevitable halt seems obvious enough. There was less and less talk of surpassing western capitalism. And with good cause. With a population two-thirds that of the U.S.S.R., and in a country already filled with abundance, the United States produced in 1929 about 36 million tons of iron, 546 of coal, 133 of naphtha, 120 milliard kilowatt-hours, 5,651,000 motor-cars, 229,000 tractors, and the comparison with "one-sixth of the globe" is even more conclusive for copper—1,069,814 against the U.S.S.R.'s 46,694 in the best year, 1932. Even by falsifying parallels, by the astute choice of a Soviet maximum and an American minimum, the "corn-boasting" could not produce results. So much so that no one breathed another word of the second piatiletka, of which Molotov and Kuibyshev had sketched the main lines a year earlier at the Seventeenth Party Conference, indicating astronomical figures. The year 1933 went by without a Plan in the country of Plans.
On the other hand, modifications in the "general line" increased to the relative, but scarcely perceptible, advantage of private rural economy, by the restitution of horses and cattle to the cultivators so as to save the remainder of the stock from total loss, and by the increase of free trading among the kolkhoz and their members, reductions in taxes and dues, restrictions in the programme of sowing and stores, etc. The scarcity of manufactured goods even encouraged giving leases of premises to the artels of artisans, and providing them with tools. These precarious expedients did not prevent Stalin from introducing new coercive measures against the peasants, the chief of which was to instal near the 2,245 "tractor and machine stations," branches of Party police under the name of Political Sections. Stalin, of course, could only conceive of consolidating collectivised agriculture by increasing the police and bureaucracy.
The famine, whose black blot spread from the Ukraine and the Kouban district to the lower and middle Volga, to the Caucasus and the Crimea, over the most fertile lands of Southern Russia, and whose scope was proportional to the degree of collectivisation, still pursued its ravages until the 1933 harvest, which was exceptional both for climatic conditions and for results: 89.9 million tons, calculated on paper by multiplying the sown area by a supposed yield per hectare, and including the grain which rotted in the fields, was lost in transport or otherwise ruined. For the Plan had made provision for everything except barns to store it in, vehicles to transport it, scales to weigh it and mills to grind it. If one takes into account the losses, estimated at a quarter, and the extra mouths to feed, as well as allowing for the insignificance of exports and the excess of forage left over by the extermination of horses and cattle, the miserable pre-War level was even then not attained. Nevertheless, after the horrible period that had been endured, a certain improvement was felt in food supplies, as is the case in all backward countries where economic activity depends almost entirely on the harvest. The price of rationed bread suddenly doubled in August, which signified a general fall in real wages. But money had depreciated still more, as prices obtained in the free market proved, where wheat was sold at two hundred times the official price. Judging by the extraordinary procedure employed to preserve cereals from pillage, Stalin was not mistaken as to the real situation of supplies in the country, nor as to the conversion of the peasants to his singular form of "socialism." Precautions unheard of in the annals of agriculture were instituted: day and night watch was kept over the immense plains by sentinels and mounted guards. Watch-towers had to be erected above the sea of rye in which to place armed spies. The Communist youth were mobilised, and even the children, to spy on marauders. It was necessary to forbid access to the roads and by-paths except to those who had the password. The press congratulated urchins who had denounced their own parents, "barbers" guilty of having "shaved" a few handfuls of ears of corn, hidden them in the bottom of a pail and covered them with herbs or fruit. Will it ever be known how many starving mouths have paid for such an attempt on the "socialist property" with their liberty or even their lives?
In short, the Plan had been fulfilled only in the restricted measure predicted by those serious and prudent economists, technicians and specialists who were accused in 1930 of wanting to minimise working speeds, and were imprisoned and deported for sabotage—that is to say, for the crime of clearsightedness. Moreover, it is necessary to write off a considerable amount for spoiled production, and to add to the liabilities frozen capital, unfinished production, deteriorated machinery, wasted resources and unused new material. In a manner exactly the reverse of true economic progress, the acquirement of technique led to a destruction of wealth, to an increase in costs and to the dissipation of energy.
Without the foreign bourgeoisie, with its industrialists and bankers, its architects and engineers, its advances and credits, its patents of invention, processes of manufacture and implements of every kind, Stalin would never have obtained the minimum of what it was possible to obtain by better and more rational, cheaper and more fruitful, and more human methods. He had sacrificed consumption to production, agriculture to industry, the disinherited country to the parasitic towns, light industry to heavy industry, the working classes to the bureaucratic patriciate, and, in short, the man to the machine; only to end in anomalies, disproportions, and uncoordinated results which were never worth the expense.
By its dictatorship over prices, the State had been able to sell very dearly what it bought very cheaply, and thus, with other too well-known methods of despoliation, it robbed the whole population to the exclusive profit of a new parasitic class. When State-controlled agriculture and industry worked at a loss, the deficiencies dragged in their wake an excess of privation and suffering, crowned by a "sort of artificially-organised famine." Certainly the collective effort has laid the costly foundations of new metallurgical and chemical industries, and created armament factories which strengthened the military power. But to offset this, there had been an accumulation of failures in finance, transport, agriculture and animal breeding, which forbade incurring an armed conflict at the risk of complete breakdown. I order to give the people of the U.S.S.R. the means of fighting, Stalin had taken from them every reason for defending themselves. Far from having freed his country from dependence on other countries, and isolating it from the world market as an autarchy, he had made its economy more than ever dependent on more developed and better equipped nations, as much for repairs and spare parts as for the replacement of imported implements. On the other hand, he fired the imagination of the young generation with works of imposing grandeur, awakened in them a utilitarian mysticism towards mechanisation and technique, stirred up a Soviet chauvinism, blessed with a revolutionary terminology, but directed to purely national ends. He had, besides, gone beyond the ephemeral and burdensome successes of outward display, by masterfully exploiting, in the tradition of Tsarism, the ignorance of the public, the credulity of the working class, the vanity of the intellectuals, the venality of the press and the corruption of the politicians.
Imitating Peter I, who paid the press of the day to spread throughout Europe the rumours of his imaginary victories over Charles XII long before Poltava, he went to great expense to broadcast recitals of his political triumphs and descriptions of his majestic works. But the Russians have brought their powers of persuasion to a fine art, and delight in making visitors take mole-hills for mountains and the statistical exercises of the bureaucrats for palpable realities. Vladimir Monomach, Grand Prince of Kiev, used to recommend that strangers should be cordially welcomed "because," he said, according to Rambaud, "your good or bad reputation depends on the accounts they will give in their own country." The advice has been followed by his successors. Even under Peter, one reads in Kliuchevsky, "economic enterprises produced a strong impression on superficial foreign observers. Russia appeared to them as a great factory."
Under Nicholas I, to quote again from Custine's inexhaustible collection of letters, "Moscow prides itself on the progress of its factories.... The Russians are proud of possessing such a great number of fine buildings to show to foreigners." Stalin has introduced nothing new in this respect either, except to exaggerate beyond the bounds of all decency. This is demonstrated by a plethora of eulogistic literature in which the inexactitude of the facts vies with the inanity of the commentaries. Tenacious adversary of industrialisation before making himself its champion in the wrong sense, he became for the New York Business Week the "Mussolini of Mechanics." But the prestige gained by such stratagems is of no avail in important matters where the truth demands its rights. However, the Plan has had as a result the formation of numerous bodies of mediocre technicians who are not without the capacity to improve, in the long run, and the education of millions of adolescents in the needs of industrial production, hastily inculcating in them the rudiments of general and professional culture, indispensable to the economic and technical transformation in progress. Education, restored to some of the discipline of classical pedagogy, had been made more widely available, although it must not be forgotten that the Party, in deciding anew in 1934 to introduce universal compulsory education, showed how much value could be placed on its great "historical" resolutions of "world" significance. But there again the negative elements outweigh the positive in a "totalitarian" state, where liberty of conscience and freedom of expression do not exist, where the standardised press is only permitted to express the authorised opinion of the day, where critical thought and scientific objection as well as political doubt are repressed with more severity than common crimes, and where the unlettered have a better chance of conserving their intellectual faculties and their moral health than the dishonest intellectuals depraved by official mendacity and their subjection to fear. It only remains to discover the original correlation of production relations and property forms to the social structure, after fifteen years of Bolshevik evolution, and to find out if the transitory nature of the regime tends, as the communist programme claims, to substitute the administration of things for the government of men.
LENIN exercised power for scarcely more than five years, during which many contradictions between his theories and his practice had corrected the bookish concept of an intermediary phase between capitalism and socialism. Stalin's reign had lasted some ten years when the Party, in 1933, announced the proximity of the golden age of classless society. But a State no more than an individual can be judged by the ideal which it glorifies. In actuality, the case is complicated by insoluble contradictions between the concrete and the abstract, in an extreme disorder of ideas and values, wherein are confounded the Russian past, the Soviet present and the immutable traits of despotism, common to all periods and all climates. Discrimination is necessary to see whether Stalin really justifies Spencer, who saw in socialism "a future slavery." Liberal economy whole-heartedly denounced as socialist all tendencies in the State direction of production, exchange and labour. In this respect, the edicts of Diocletian on maximum prices and minimum wages, on agricultural colonies and on trade corporations, could justifiably find a place in an anthology of socialist legislation—an absurd hypothesis.
Stalin has had precursors in antiquity and in the middle ages, both in the East and West, but there can be no legitimate authority for calling them socialists in the exact meaning of the term. The most remarkable, Wang An-shih, lived in China under the Sung dynasty. Assured of the Emperor's confidence, this bold minister thought he could regenerate his mediaeval country by so regulating economic life as to make the State the sole owner of the soil, and the sole buyer and seller of grain. By a series of laws, which demanded for their application a whole host of functionaries and a new mandarinate to replace the old, he decreed from on high a veritable agrarian revolution (equalitarian revision of valuation and rent, loans of seed against takings in kind, taxation of commodities, etc.). This was completed by a series of radical reforms, establishment of a salt tax and recasting of the monetary system, the creation of a popular militia besides the permanent army, bureaucratic conscription for the civil service and compulsory education. Of this "extraordinary experiment in 'statism'" to use the expression of G. Soulié de Morant, there remained nothing after the death of the "Chinese socialist of the year one thousand," an inexact expression of an eminent historian and orientalist, René Grousset, who is not mindful of the exact terms of sociology. Modern socialism implies, in effect, certain conditions of historic maturity, namely, the exhaustion of capitalist resources, the conscious will of the active population, the material possibilities for the workers to acquire "comfort and liberty." Between Wang and Stalin there are many similarities of conception and method, at more than ten centuries' distance, and the analogy holds good in the final results of the two attempts, i.e. famine and misery. But the differences are all to the advantage of the great Chinese reformer, too little appreciated by Abeé Rémusat, Father de Mailla, the Abbé Huc and other missionaries who have studied from the same sources. In their Empire du Milieu the brothers Reclus have been less severe. Wang had read only Confucius and was ahead of his epoch, whilst the theorists of socialism in a single country pretend to have read Marx, and with no excuse lag behind the Utopians. If Stalin's dictatorship merits the name of socialist, the theocratic domination of the Jesuits in Paraguay would figure strikingly amongst the enterprises of the pioneers of socialism, side by side with the less famous communities of the monastic colonisers. The part, albeit subsidiary, played by the workers in the Bolshevik movement does not alter the matter. Among the African Bambaras, the blacksmiths crown their chief, but their caste is none the less despised, beneath all the ritual honours, and there has never been any attempt to cite these tribes of the Sudan and Senegal as an example of proletarian democracy.
Russian history throws a better light on the Soviet regime devoid of soviets, than the arbitrary references to Marxism, of which Stalin actually represents the antithesis. In particular, it unites the old and the new modes of mysticism. In the same way as pagan customs persisted under other forms in Christianity after the baptism of the slave tribes in the principality of Kiev, many age-old traditions have been transmitted, under other colours, to Sovietism from Tsarism, both in spirit and in custom as well as in economic, political and social organisation. T. G. Masaryk says rightly of the Bolsheviks, "children of Tsarism" like other Russians: "They have succeeded in suppressing the Tsar, but they have not suppressed Tsarism. They still wear the Tsarist uniform, albeit inside out...."
In the fifteenth century, after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, Muscovite monks saw in Moscow the third Rome, excluding for ever the eventuality of a fourth; the doctors and apologists of the Leninist religion have a similar aim in claiming Moscow as the capital of universal Communism. At the same period Joseph, "hegoumenos" of the Volokolamsk monastery, elaborated a doctrine which M. Kizevetter sums up thus: "Joseph defends a social order founded on a rigorous discipline which denies the individual the right of doing as he pleases. In the religious domain he affirms that salvation depends on the punctual observation of ritual and the literal acceptance of every word of the Holy Scriptures without any discussion whatever; he approves of the suppression by the ecclesiastical power of every manifestation of free thought in religious matters, as well as of the execution of heretics practised in Moscow...." Dogmatic Bolshevism is more akin to such conceptions than to socialism, which is inseparable from the idea of free enquiry and judgment, and which has as its final aim the integral freedom of the individual. Stalin invokes Lenin on every corner of the battlefield and makes orthodox pronouncements whilst deporting to icy temperatures the little children of the so-called kulaks. But Ivan the Terrible was not lacking, either, in exterior signs of devotion, while he committed his appalling atrocities. And the murderous rivalry encouraged among certain young-communists, exhausted by the useless task of shock-brigading, recalls at times those fanatical disciples of the Archpriest Avvakum who burned themselves alive to escape the fiery river of the last Judgment.
It is not subjection to the State which stamps knouto-Soviet Russia with an original imprint. Under the early Romanovs, the whole population was made to submit to the State, and in various ways subjected to strict economic obligations. It had already sought to escape by flight from the Tsarist and manorial repressions, and the central control could secure it only by such rudely enforced measures as those later employed under the Five Year Plan. As early as the seventeenth century Russians were forbidden to go abroad—an undoubted precedent for the general sequestration brought about by Stalin; and books sent from Europe were not allowed to enter by virtue of a special ukase that still guides the Glavlit or Soviet censorship. The Tear, sole owner of the country and the people, made himself the "principal merchant" and the "principal producer" in the Empire, to use the words of the English doctor, Samuel Collins. Peter the Great introduced State monopoly in the trade of articles of immediate necessity and all foreign commerce. Under his reign, a sort of State capitalism developed, and multiplied the number of officials by ten. Serfdom grew on a large scale and was introduced into industry at its inception, apart from the employment of penal labour. The institution of the internal passports adds one more resemblance to the sombre Stalin period, when the workers and peasants within a few years lost their last remaining liberties, like their predecessors, the free cultivators, who became serfs within the course of a few centuries, thus reversing the social evolution of the west. Peter's successors followed in his footsteps—trade with China became a monopoly of the Treasury, and under Elizabeth the State took charge of every possible transaction. And even when capitalism regained its rights, and re-established competition, from Catherine's time, the initiative of the Crown remained decisive for the progress of industry and transport. The military colonies of Alexander I foreshadowed future agricultural collectivisation on a small scale. The Soviet State, with more powerful material means, reproduces, condenses and generalises all these phenomena in a knot of historical conditions incompatible with intermediate solutions.
That the savage precedents of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great are to be recognised in Stalin's outstanding acts is not contested among observers of Russia. But in each of the principal representatives of the autocracy, gestures and acts may be found which have their parallels with contemporary Russia. Catherine used to correspond with Voltaire and Diderot, but she imprisoned Novikov and banished Radishchev. She took ideas from Montesquieu and borrowed from Beccaria, but she extended and consolidated serfdom. She avowed herself an "apostle of light," but she dared to boast of the mujik's well-being in the midst of a famine. She rewarded the self-interested praise of the encyclopaedists and employed the most despicable mercenaries. Stalin, as well, acts quite against his maxims, encouraging without what he dare not tolerate within. He supports strikes and promotes subversive acts of which he would crush the least glimmerings in the U.S.S.R. He buys the favour of well-known foreign men of letters and gags or banishes Russian writers. He keeps a whole string of hired adulators in foreign countries. Alexander I, like his father, posed as a freemason, posed as a Jacobin, quoted Rousseau, and protested against the Negro slave-trade at the Congress of the Holy Alliance, while admitting the traffic of souls in his own Empire. Stalin in the same way calls himself the defender of the workers in the capitalist countries and is himself their worst oppressor in the "socialist fatherland." Of Nicholas I, who loved to class himself as an engineer in order not to be recognised as a policeman, historians draw a portrait in which one may distinguish many of the features of Stalin's physiognomy. Between the two absolutisms, the similarities are so strong that the collection of Custine's century-old letters is worth consulting again, as one of the best works on the eternal Russia, "where you must go to see the result of this terrible combination of European science with Asiatic genius," where "the Government dominates everything and encourages nothing," where "everybody thinks what nobody says," where "the absurdities of the parvenu can exist everywhere and become the appendage of a whole nation," where "boundless evil is inflicted as a remedy," where the "force of despotism lies solely in the mask of the despot," where "the reciprocal mistrust of the Government and the subjects banishes all joy in life," where "the inhabitants, inured to resignation, counterfeit for themselves an astonishing kind of happiness composed of privations and sacrifices." Stalin has made more true than ever the profoundly just reflections of the author whom we have so frequently quoted: "in this country an avowed tyranny would be a mark of progress."
Whether of divine right or popular origin, all dictators and dictatorships offer analogies in their methods and raison d'etre. The bureaucratic absolutism incarnate in Stalin is no exception to the rule, with the ancestral Russian tradition that inspires him in spite of the Soviet novelty in which he decks himself. The combination of ruse and violence propounded by Machiavelli for the use of the Prince is practised daily by the General Secretary. But identity of means does not always presuppose similarity of aims. Bolsheviks from Lenin to Stalin at first believed that they could arrive at socialist liberty by the evil means of police constraint. This was before they had made a virtue of necessity and codified the cruel expedients of civil war for times of peace, until in the end dictatorial habit became their second nature. Without the dictators being aware of it, a metamorphosis of the regime took place, which Stalin, aided by his faults even more than by his qualities, has been able to consummate and perfect in the sense of personal power without meeting insurmountable obstacles, still preserving the revolutionary vocabulary shorn of its initial meaning. The result is a political architecture of bastard appearance, which at least two great examples will help us to understand. In Rome, the Empire "slid" into the Republic to use Seneca's phrase, while it preserved the exterior symbols. In France, the coinage struck at the beginning of the Empire bore the legend: "République Francaise, Napoléon Empereur." Caesar gave himself out as the successor of the Gracchi, and Bonaparte as the successor of the Jacobins. Stalin's Caesarism proceeds from the same causes and grows on favourable ground: in Tsarist Russia, after the October manifesto of 1905, there had been quite as bizarre a system, which the Almanach de Gotha called "constitutional monarchy under an autocratic Tsar." The Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics, the very name a fourfold contradiction of the reality, has long ago ceased to exist to the full knowledge of everyone; only well-meaning but very young Leninists still hope for its spontaneous resurrection at the end of the "general line"; the dominating Party has lost all illusions in this respect and forgotten its socialist programme.
So-called Soviet society rests on its own method of exploitation of man by man, of the producer by the bureaucracy, of the technician by the political power. For the individual appropriation of surplus value is substituted a collective appropriation by the State, a deduction made for the parasitic consumption of functionaries. Stalin reckoned for 1933 about 8,000,000 functionaries and employees, whose precise income it is impossible to estimate. But official documentation leaves us no doubt: the bureaucracy takes an undue part of the produce, corresponding more or less to the old capitalist profit, of the subjugated classes, which it submits to an inexorable sweating system. There has thus been formed around the Party a new social category, interested in maintaining the established order, and perpetuating the State of which Lenin predicted the extinction with the disappearance of classes. If the Bolsheviks have not the legal ownership of the instruments of production and the means of exchange, they retain the State machinery which allows them all the spoils by varied circuitous means. The mere freedom from restriction in imposing retail costs several times higher than manufacturing costs, contains the true secret of bureaucracies—technical exploitation, characterised moreover by administrative and military oppression.
It is of little importance that the small minority, thus privileged at the expense of the great majority, is not a class like the bourgeoisie, or a caste like the Brahmans. In the sixteenth century, the Cossacks also constituted a kind of class, with its economic and political prerogatives unknown in any other country except in Russia. From Siberia, Rakovsky and his deported friends wrote as early as 1930: "From a workers' State with bureaucratic deformations, as Lenin defined the form of our Government, we are developing into a bureaucratic State with proletarian-communist survivals. Under our very eyes has formed and is being formed a great class of directors, which has its internal subdivisions and which increases through calculated co-option and direct or indirect nominations (bureaucratic advancement or fictitious electoral system). The element which unites this original class is a form, also original, of private property, to wit, the State-power." And they took their stand very pertinently on a phrase of Marx, "The bureaucracy possesses the State as private property." Just as the Consulate was neither a republic nor a monarchy, the Secretariat is neither a democracy nor Tsarism, the consequence of a revolution which was neither socialist nor bourgeois.
According to Bogdanov, whose works on the subject go back to just after the first revolution, a proletariat deprived of real encyclopaedic culture, and general knowledge of organisation, will never be capable of seizing the power or keeping it in order to transform society along communist lines. And the Bolshevik regime, in spite of the intentions of its founders, engenders a dominant class of politicians, administrators, intellectuals and technicians, under which exploitation and oppression by a State of an original type persists under new forms. This last observation, post factum, may be found again, less strongly argued as an intuitive premonition, in one of the theses of the Intellectual Worker, a work published under the name of Volsky at the beginning of the century by a Polish revolutionary, Makhaisky, well known then but since forgotten. A number of communists have arrived at the same ideas by practice and not theory, but have been unable to express them in the country of official communism. Others have reconsidered, within themselves, the idealist notion of the "historic mission of the proletariat," in order to tackle the fundamental revision of doctrines which make too much of an abstraction of the real man, whether bourgeois or proletarian. It remains to be seen whether such conceptions, whatever they are worth, will regain force, wide currency and vitality for the generations destined to take their lesson from the revolution, above all, from the phase which we may call, in Herzen's word, retrovolution.
This revolution has passed through three principal stages, each one of some five years' duration. After War Communism, the vain attempt at a complete economic nationalisation, Lenin's N.E.P. was an attempt to control a composite economy, tolerating a sane competition between the State sector and capitalist initiative so as to realise by degrees a national socialisation. But Stalin, incapable of following this political heritage of harmonising industry and agriculture, and balancing production and consumption, preferred the security of an integral statism to the risks of a special test which the N.E.P. implied. His "great turn" was only possible at the price of mass slaughter at its inception and of absolute mass servitude in the present and future. To take this course, a great contempt for human life and dignity was necessary and also an entire misunderstanding of the spiritual postulates of socialism. Stalin had the singular courage of taking upon himself the most atrocious responsibilities, whilst still continuing to make use of a worn-out language. But the edifice built in fifteen years of Bolshevism will endure only under an unlimited pretorian dictatorship, and could not resist an upheaval of any importance. The Russian people have always benefited by wars which shook the ruling power—unveiled its weaknesses and excited general discontent. The Crimean War hastened the liberation of the serfs, the Russo-Japanese War unleashed the first revolution, the World War precipitated the fall of Tsarism. There is every evidence that Stalin's regime, if it had to rely on its own strength, could not withstand the supreme test any better.
It is easy for a State which monopolises armaments, along with everything else, to break strikes and to crush peasant revolts, distributed over an immense area. The hesitant military intervention of the Allies after Brest-Litovsk was only a mockery, as Lenin recognised without any pretence. But a war of long duration would demand other national and moral resources than interior repression or the first campaign of the Red Army. Neither industry nor agriculture, and still less transport, is ready in the U.S.S.R. to endure the high tension of a modern war. A report of Kaganovich admits 62,000 railway accidents for the year 1934 alone, 7,000 locomotives put out of action, 4,500 trucks destroyed and more than 60,000 damaged. These figures increased in the first months of 1935, and there were "hundreds of dead, thousands of wounded." After, just as before, the Five Year Plan, the inhabitants had to undergo hours and hours of waiting and interminable formalities to get a needle in Moscow, or a nail in the provinces, or a little salt practically anywhere, a railway ticket, a box of matches, a gramme of quinine. Stalin allows himself the frequent spectacle of imposing parades with defiles of tanks and aeroplanes, but he does not realise that in war-time his engines will lack oil or petrol, his artillery will lack munitions, and he will be unable to repair them as soon as they are put out of commission. He may condemn to death for culpable negligence the mechanics and drivers who have escaped from accidents, but that cannot improve the railways or the rolling stock. Whether in regard to equipment, re-stocking, "management," or sanitary services, nothing encourages the rulers to optimism regarding organisation and technique.
The reports of the G.P.U., on the state of mind of the population, gives them no more assurance. The peasants hope for any sort of change, and are only waiting for arms to settle their arrears of accounts with their oppressors. The workers feel scarcely less aversion to the hierarchy of secretaries, in spite of all the propaganda employed to convince them of their advantageous position. The youth alone, which knows nothing of the recent past or of life in foreign countries, accepts with elation the ideology of Soviet chauvinism and would defend the frontiers without reservation if not with enthusiasm. But its warlike impulses, so vigorous in expeditions without peril and without glory against the unarmed peasants, will lose vigour under cannon and machine-gun fire. The Red Army, reinforced by a partial mobilisation, would suffice for the protection of the U.S.S.R. in a conflict limited to neighbouring countries, but not in a conflagration world-wide in scope, entailing general mobilisation. Stalin is aware of this, as is proved by the pliant manoeuvres of his diplomacy whose flexibility borders on resignation and betrays a significant anxiety.
For fifteen years, and above all since Lenin's death, the Bolsheviks have vociferously announced an approaching and even imminent general conflict. They have denounced the aggressive intentions of every country against themselves and accused specifically France, England and the United States of fomenting a new armed intervention in Russia. According to them, the League of Nations was only a "League of Brigands," a war machine erected against their socialist fatherland, and every European and international agreement, from the Locarno Treaty to the Kellogg Pact, concealed "a sword directed against the Soviet Union." Under the most futile pretexts, they discovered menacing preparations of hostility everywhere and in every country and sounded the alarm at home and, with less reverberation, in the working-class centres of other countries. They never found enough sarcasm or insults to hurl at pacifism, wherein they detected the most treacherous enemy of the revolution. But Stalin operated a complete volte-face after the victorious exploits of Japan in Manchuria. It was in the same place where the Red Army under Blücher had three years previously inflicted a military "lesson" on the Chinese to safeguard Russian "rights" in a railway, that the love of peace now counselled a retreat before the Japanese. From 1932 onwards, the U.S.S.R. concluded a series of non-aggression pacts or friendly ententes, first with Roumania and Poland and later with France and the United States, those very States whose anti-Soviet machinations and "war-like designs" the rulers of Russia were incessantly unmasking and branding.
Already Litvinov, at Stalin's orders, had proposed universal disarmament with striking insistency, but in the tradition of the famous rescript of Nicholas II, which was the forerunner of the Hague Conference. In 1933, the advent of Hitler in Germany accentuated the pacific tendencies of Bolshevism. Everything that had been detestable became excellent and vice-versa. Stalin and Molotov had no scruples in singing the praises of the "League of Brigands." They opposed the revision of the territorial clauses of the Versailles Treaty, which had been the objects of their incessant vituperation. They hastened to seek the support of the "imperialist diplomacy" of France, "the most aggressive and militaristic country in the world," as Stalin had said at the last Party Congress, a country which, according to Leninist orthodoxy, "had not ceased to provoke war against the U.S.S.R." In 1934, they honoured as an "eminent foreign savant" the very Marshal d'Espérey whom their press had always considered the "executioner" of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. They ordered their pseudo-communist stipendiaries in every country to make a rapprochement with those whom they had branded the day before as "social-traitors" and "social-fascists," meanwhile dictating a new demagogy under the form of moderation. At home they made patriotism the order of the day. Not even the cult of the "socialist fatherland," but of the "fatherland" without trimmings. However, their policy—peace at any price—was clarified by an unusual decree exempting the peasants of Eastern Siberia—from the Baikal Lake to the Maritime Province-from all or a part of the taxes and dues—the kolkhoz for ten years and the other farms for five. By restoring agricultural liberty in a vast region in danger of invasion, they attempted, somewhat tardily, to instil a little patriotism into farmers ready to welcome the invaders. It would be difficult to imagine an implicit confession more conclusive. But there are others, such as the new terrorist decree of June 1934, which gave warning of the death penalty for "treason to the fatherland" (the simple "flight" into other countries of a Soviet subject, civil or military, was thus classified); and the decree designated the whole adult family of a deserter as hostages to be imprisoned from five to ten years if they did not denounce their relative and for five years if they were unaware of the "crime." Such preventive measures tell a long story and show the extent of solidarity between rulers and ruled.
The defeat so longed for by an enslaved people, with the exception of the privileged Party members, the bureaucracy, the social cadres and the young loyalist generation, would be, for the Stalin of legend, the beginning of the end. The dictator would have no alternative but to put himself at the head of a frank social reaction and re-establish private ownership of the means of production or else fall beneath the debris of his own system. The Soviet State capitalism, formulated by Lenin and once debated by Trotsky and Bukharin, who preferred to speak of State socialism, would then evolve in a direction diametrically opposed to the inconsistent view of the few Bolsheviks who have remained faithful to their principles. There exists no bourgeoisie to seize power in the Soviet Union. The proletariat, demoralised by the secret spying and the repression exercised in its own name, bureaucratised to its core, and composed of ignorant mujiks, has for a long time been powerless to take its own destinies in hand. The disintegrated and paralysed peasant population always has an influence on events, but indirectly and indistinctly. Functionaries, intellectuals and technicians, anxious for security, will rally round the new masters in advance, being unable even to intervene as autonomous elements if the upheaval goes beyond the limits of an internal palace revolution. The police and the army are the only organic forces capable of revising the political statute in a crisis of the regime. But it is otherwise with respect to the economic basis, determined by a combination of national conditions, historic causes and general characteristics inherent in the twilight of capitalist civilisation. The greater part of nationalised industry in Russia has no individual owners nor any who could lay claim to it according to the old laws, and a return to petty agricultural exploitation seems less and less practicable. Any future order will have to face up to the burden and management of a collective property unique in the world. Whatever judgment one may make on the transformations accomplished, some of them are ineffaceable. Economic liberalism will not find a rebirth in Russia at a time when it is declining everywhere else. Nor will there arise in the predictable future any true political democracy, inconceivable on the scale of such a large State even on the hypothesis of dismemberment. The exposure of its realities can indicate far better than theoretical definitions the probable perspective and the aftermath of a political disaster, if these contradictory data are borne in mind.
All objective observations are agreed in asserting the absence of any communist orientation in the industrialised U.S.S.R. Against the grey background of common poverty, privation and want, social injustice and inequality can be easily seen. Wages vary enormously, and the advantages accorded to the most favoured aggravate contrasts that are more odious than in any capitalist country. Stalin had been an unconscious leveller until the day he became aware of the inconvenience of equalitarianism, depersonalisation and irresponsibility, In 1934 he insisted on his latest discovery. "Tastes and needs are not, and cannot be identical and equal in quality and quantity, either in a socialist period or in a communist period." To the excessive levelling of the unprivileged majority, for whom collectivisation meant a complete turning of the tables, succeeds a systematically inverse process. But there persists, as a symbol, the construction of dismal, comfortless and unattractive barracks to house the mass of the workers, considered as numbers on a register. In copying capitalism, the bureaucracy takes the worst as its model, apart from founding a few exemplary houses and institutions for the seduction of benevolent foreign tourists. Millions of women are employed in the most distasteful and strenuous work in heavy industry under the hypocritical pretext of emancipation. In addition to the so-called seven-hour day, supplementary odd jobs, obligatory attendance at the sad comedy of meetings, anxious seeking after the necessary provisions, depressing queueing at shop-entrances, etc., absorb all leisure and degrade the individual, already obsessed with the problem of feeding himself, dragging him down to a semi-animal existence. The knouto-Soviet State is the only one where the proletariat is forced, not only by means of periodic pretences of voluntary loans, to deprive itself of the meanest possible remuneration, but to put up a show of being happy about it. It is also the only place wherein the defenceless workers are shot in punishment for accidents due to worn-out material or administrative carelessness and where the poverty-stricken risk the death sentence for harmless transgressions like theft or petty pillage of crops.
Such things would be impossible without the ruthless restraint of a police and army privileged in every respect—better fed, clothed, housed and with better opportunities of recreation than the other categories of "citizens." Under Menzhinsky's nominal and Yagoda's effective presidency, the G.P.U. constitutes a veritable State within a State, with its civil and military staff, its own productive enterprises, its better supplied and better served eating places, its property, its workshops, its sovkhoz, with even bureaux for technical studies and labour service, well supplied with imprisoned engineers and deported workmen, whose forced labour is duly exploited. In practice its power is limited only by the Will of Stalin. Protective legality for the Soviet subjects is sometimes a trap, sometimes a fiction. Not that there is any lack of texts—chancelleries and archives abound in them, as under Tsarism. "No country in the world has a greater abundance of laws than Russia," Lenin wrote at the beginning of the century. But Michelet had stressed: "There is no law in Russia. The sixty volumes of laws that the Emperor has had compiled are a vast mockery." And Custine had noted even earlier: "After a few months' stay in Russia you no longer believe in laws." Here again Sovietism does not advance over the past—quite the contrary. To save the revolution, especially if nobody is threatening it, the G.P.U. arrogates to itself every possible law, from the most terrible to the most ridiculous.
Inquisitorial and penal despotism carried to this extreme kills all interest in work, all spirit of initiative, all sense of responsibility. Thus he benefits most who shirks his duties and obligations and blames his subordinates. The bureaucracy imagines it can supplement individual or collective zeal by millions of bits of paper, and draws up an abundance of futile circulars and unlimited questionnaires that nobody knows anything about, whether received or returned. Meantime, from the highest to the lowest, everybody looks to a superior command before carrying out the meanest current task. This obliges the Secretariat or the Politbureau to think of everything and to regulate everyday life in its minutest details. Almost every day the press publishes under Stalin's and Molotov's signatures, a long, solemn and circumstantial decree relative to some banal task necessitating not the slightest governmental intervention.
For example, on the 11th February 1933, the public, whether interested or otherwise, received minute instructions on the treatment of horses, bulls and camels, on the rest to be accorded to pregnant mares, the quality of hay, straw and bran to reserve for beasts of burden, the way to curry and shoe them, to harness and yoke them, arrange their stables, couple males and females, etc., the whole interlarded with menacing injunctions, and punctuated with warnings of the rigours of the law. Other orders in the same style dictate minutely the conditions of furnishing the State with sunflower oil or potatoes, or the manner in which to gather cotton, or beetroot. In place of the tutelary and simplified administration—the cheap government promised by the socialist programme—there is a complicated, expensive, vexatious and sterile regime.
Its repulsive effect may be seen in literature as well as in social life. State Bolshevism has produced neither a man nor an idea nor a book nor a great work. Nobody could think of holding the regime responsible for this, if it did not stifle original talent and creative genius, irreconcilable with narrow terrorist discipline. The renown of the best contemporary Russian writers will not enhance the greatness of the Steel Secretary, any more than the glory of Pushkin, Gogol or Lermontov gave lustre to the Iron Tsar. In arts and sciences as in philosophy and history, merit, intelligence and knowledge date from a period before Stalin, and owe nothing to this new autocracy, which tends to level character downwards, determines the duty of consciences and annihilates everything so as to have nothing to fear, contributing nothing or less than nothing to the treasury of culture. Even in the domain of cinematographic art, to which the Russian innovators have brought their splendid gifts, so well-known in the theatre, and whose purely national qualities must not be imagined as specifically Soviet, the very fine promise has been retarded, initiative choked. Rare communist writers worthy of attention among the younger group, like M. Sholokov or F. Gladkov, would have emerged and matured far better under Tsarism, like their elders Gorky or Mayakovsky whose principal works date from before the revolution. We know that their only choice was between the official ideology and nothing.
From 1925, Stalin brought to art and literature the disciplinary methods in force in the Party and the State. He aimed only at combating the preponderant influence of Trotsky and Trotskyists like Voronsky and Polonsky, literary critics and directors of the principal reviews. In the Federation of Soviet Writers, the Pan-Russian Union of Writers group, the most important through the quality and prestige of its members, was suspected of some independence of spirit and sympathy for Trotsky's personality. To gain a point, Stalin did not hesitate to confer a fictitious authority on the Association of Proletarian Writers, nine-tenths composed of incompetents or simple scribblers. It was the beginning of an era of humiliations, denunciations, provocations, and persecutions which obliged true writers to take refuge in subjects with no reference to the present, childhood memoirs or historical novels, and which reduced to silence or retraction the "travelling companions" Of the communists, as Trotsky called I. Babel, E. Zamiatin, B. Pilnyak, A. Tolstoy, L. Leonov, C. Fedin, V. Ivanov, V. Katayev, M. Zoshchenko, L. Seifulina, G. Oliesha, M. Bulgakov, Veressayev and others. The sycophants of the Association, domesticated by the Party, were licenced to impose their unreadable productions on the public, and to censure the most eminent authors. Drawn up in shock brigades to perpetrate their extravagances, some decided to "conquer power in literature," to raise "shock-brigades in poetry," to trace "the Bolshevik line in artistic creation," to assure "a class vigilance on the edition front"; other alleged champions of the "proletarian hegemony in art" proclaimed the necessity of a "Five Year Plan for poetry" and a "Magnitogorsk of Literature." The slogan was raised to "outstrip Shakespeare and Tolstoy." A veritable carnival of folly triumphed along with the intellectual prostitution.
After Stalin's intervention regarding "Trotskyist contraband" in the historical works of the Party, the proletarian musicians declared: "In the light of Comrade Stalin's letter, new and great tasks arise on the musical front. Down with rotten liberalism with its bourgeois resonances and inimical class theories." And they undertook to "revise the scoring of the composers of the past, beginning with Beethoven and Moussorgsky." Stalin's letter was to make of "each Soviet orchestra a collective struggle for authentic Marxist-Leninism." The communist cell of the Conservatory was accused of a "right deviation" by reason of its liking for a "conductor of doubtful political opinions." After music—painting. Such and such an art critic denounced a "counter-revolutionary landscape," another obscure and ponderous nobody proscribed Rembrandt and Reubens. On the other hand, awards and medals went to the dullest reproductions, to recompense legends such as "Mauser, the War-Horse of Comrade Voroshilov" or "Grandmother of a Communist Girl." The Moscow museums were enriched with explanatory placards, according to which Renoir and Degas represent "rotten capitalism," Gustav Moreau "the art of the plutocracy," Cézanne "the epoch of heavy industry," and Gauguin "colonial policy."
To the same category of inanities belong "the struggle for the dialectic on the front of mathematics," and the "offensive on the philosophy front," whilst others extol Leninist physics, Soviet chemistry, or Marxist mathematics. To this may be added manifestations of delirium such as Krylenko's at the congress of chess players in 1932. "We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess,' like the formula 'art for art's sake.' We must organise shock-brigades of chess-players, and begin the immediate realisation of a Five Near Plan for chess." These clownish monstrosities extracted from the Soviet circus as typical examples of the collective insanity let loose by Stalin in an intolerable atmosphere, would have raised a burst of hilarity, were it not for the agonising presence of the G.P.U. behind the actions of the execrated Association and behind various communist factions of demoralised intellectuals, immoral and uncultured, and more capable of doing harm to an élite than producing anything themselves. Certain men of letters were able to escape the cruelty thanks to Stalin's capricious protection, others expatriated themselves with great difficulty, but the exceptions do not alter the rule. A revolutionary of the quality of Mayakovsky was not able to escape in 1930 except by suicide, as did Essenin, another great mal-adjusted poet, in 1926; likewise the proletarian poet, Kusnietzov, the symbolist poet, Vladimir Pyast, and the revolutionary writer Andrew Sobol. This gives some conception of the tragic situation of artists as well as workers and peasants. The favour accorded to B. Pasternak would have allowed him to survive under no matter what despotism and indicates even more clearly the inhuman conditions in which the majority of his confreres are stagnating. And one can well understand the conversions, prostrations, and contritions obtained from the Soviet intelligentsia, to the shame of the parvenus of the dictatorship. In 1932, with his usual abruptness and brutality to the weak, Stalin suppressed by a stroke of his pen the Association, producer of so much evil, which had served him as an instrument. He ordered the fusion of all writers' groups. He affects in aesthetic matters a very liberal breadth of view. But there has remained the evil of an arid conformism in Soviet art and literature, absolutely incompatible with any sort of socialism or communism.
The same contradiction finds definite confirmation in the plebiscite, contrived by every possible means of corruption and intimidation for the purpose of perching Stalin at the top of an incredible scaffolding of lies and impostures, and of forging for him the renown of a great man, of a hero, "sans peur, et sans reproche" of a protean and universal genius. The hagiography composed in honour of the dead Lenin is nothing besides the canonisation of the living Stalin. Followed up with a spirit of consecutiveness rare in the U.S.S.R., the enterprise reveals a continued tendency towards the crystallisation of a personal power that has the characteristics at once of Tsarism, Bonapartism and Fascism, with Oriental methods and American pretensions.
NO INK can transcribe the systematic stimulation inaugurated on the occasion of Stalin's fiftieth birthday, and prolonged since in a crescendo of adulation, artificial veneration and adoration. Quotations can give only a very poor idea of it, since a few lines cannot sum up whole drifts of apologetic literature or reproduce typographic variations and illustrate the assorted iconography. It is incessant repetition of various processes which goes to fashion minds and which is able to determine an effective current among the crowds.
After enlivening a slightly drab biography by attributing to Stalin everything that should have been laid to the account of Lenin, Trotsky and others, the bureaucratic camarilla, guided by experience, soon learned to forestall the desires of its master, to anticipate his intentions and stimulate his greeds. From 1930 onwards there began a contagious outbidding among courtiers of every category, bent on outdoing the most obsequious or the cleverest. Scarcely had it passed into circulation than the word "genius" became obligatory, and he who neglected to write it for any reason, or without a reason, rendered himself liable to suspicion, and exposed himself to grievous vicissitudes. Shameless and sordid servility suggested a thousand ways of advancement in a career by glorifying the tyrant. He was painted, he was sculptured in Napoleonic attitudes. There already existed a Stalingrad, a Stalino, a Stalin, a Stalinabad, Stalinsk, and Stalin-Aoul, but ingenious functionaries continue to bestow his name on new towns in so far as appropriate geographical terminations can be found: Stalinissi and Stalinir in Georgia, Stalinogorsk in Russia. The public is wondering what is restraining Stalin from bequeathing his name to Moscow, since the highest peak of the Pamirs already bears it. You can no longer count the innumerable institutions and establishments already under the same ensign. Careerist engineers call an extra-hard steel "stalinite." The Soviet executive responded to a unanimous and unforced desire by conferring on Stalin the second order of the "Red Flag." He later decided to recompense services rendered to industry with a medal struck with his inevitable effigy, which is scattered throughout newspapers, is pasted all over walls, and, by an involuntary but all the more admirable symbol, reigns in the empty windows of shops denuded of goods.
The men of letters, above all, vie with each other in dithyrambic servility, hoping to gain some favour, a better paid post or a more copious ration, or-a passport for foreign countries. They know that Stalin is racked by a most painful sentiment of intellectual inferiority—Bukharin had been able to discern it long since—and is particularly avid of praise for his erudition and culture which are sadly limited. Here the truth loses all semblance of fact. Stalin "has always been distinguished by his profound understanding of literature," said someone in the review, At the Literary Post. He ranks amongst the "profound connoisseurs and critics of Hegel," according to a contributor to Revolution and Culture. He is one of "the most authoritative specialists in contemporary philosophic problems," says a third. "In reality, certain pronouncements of Aristotle have only been fully deciphered and expressed by Stalin," wrote a fourth in the Cultural Front, its outlandish gibberish penetrated with a pungent mockery. Rut this presumptuous daring is no more than a very cheap compliment, and you will find presently from a fifth encomiast that Socrates and Stalin are the highest peaks of human intelligence. One pedagogue announced in the most casual manner at the Communist Academy, "the full significance of Kantian theories can be finally embodied in contemporary science only in the light of Comrade Stalin's last letter"—that same scurrilous letter on "putrid liberalism" and "Trotskyist contraband." "Every section, every line of Stalin's reasoning provides the most fertile theme for artistic works," asserts a manifesto from the Association in commenting on a confused and interminable speech about the Plan, and it invites all writers and critics to meditate long and seriously on the text in question. In Soviet Land, a prose poem magnifies "the great face, the great eyes, the great and incomparable brow" of Stalin, whose appearance produces the effect of "a ray of summer sunshine." The Literary Gazette is not afraid to extol him as a stylist: "It is up to linguistics and criticism to study Stalin's style." This time the insult is obvious, the satire certain, and one might expect pitiless reprisals; but the eulogy is allowed to pass like the others. The editor of Izvestia declares in Congress: "On the threshold of the new age stand two unequalled titans of thought, Lenin and Stalin," and he concludes, "Can anyone really write on anything unless he knows his Stalin? Never! Without Stalin no one can understand anything or write anything of interest." Demian Biedny, fallen into disgrace, tries to purchase pardon by exclaiming at a meeting, "Learn to write as Stalin writes." The same poetaster has lavished praise on others in the same vein. A literary woman sees Stalin quite simply as the direct successor of Goethe. One of Kalinin's essays ends with the words, "Ask me who best understands the Russian language and I reply—Stalin." At the time of the tercentenary of Spinoza's birth, Pravda sees its way to insert in large letters among various philosophic extracts from Marx, Engels and Lenin, several quotations from Stalin which had nothing to do with either Spinoza or philosophy. Yet Stalin accepts this clumsy rubbish without raising an eyelid. After Aristotle, Socrates, Kant and Hegel, one Spinoza more or less is nothing to worry about. "There is no flattery too outrageous to offer this power which compares itself to the gods," wrote Juvenal in other times but in similar circumstances.
An indescribable apotheosis took place in 1934, when Stalin was pleased to call the Seventeenth Party Congress, three and a half years after the sixteenth, followed next day by a purge which lasted over a year and "cleaned up" about 300,000 unworthy members. Everything gravitated then around the celebrations of the most hated man in the Soviet Union. Elaborate preparation created the atmosphere, companies of sycophants and individual champions zealously outdoing each other in panegyric. Everyone busily collected and analysed the most banal platitudes of their idol and called them "world-historical" maxims. With the slightest pretext and on the flimsiest motives, orators and journalists vied in reiterating: "Stalin was right..." or "As Stalin said ..." and everyone was at pains to invent new epithets of praise, for "shock-brigadier," "legendary figure," "beloved commander," "genial thinker," and "adored Stalin" lose their force by dint of repetition. At the opening of the Congress, the repertory swelled with new hyperboles, like that of Bukharin who styled Stalin "the field-marshal of the revolutionary army." The formula went as far as congratulating the "chief of the world proletariat," co-responsible for all the defeats of the Third International since Lenin's death, more personally responsible for the rout of 1927 in China, and directly responsible, in 1933, for the blind policy which brought communism in Germany from shameful bankruptcy to helter-skelter disorder and irreparable retreat without striking a blow. During the Congress a continuous hosanna went up from dawn to dusk on the "steel colossus," the "great engineer," the "great pilot," the "great master," the "great architect," the "great disciple of the great master," the "greatest of the theorists," the "finest of the Leninists," and finally the "greatest of the great...." Stalin is genial, very genial, most genial: he is wise, very wise, most wise; he is great, very great, the greatest.... Superlative declension became the rule, and it was printed every day in every column and page of each newspaper, with a fawning subservience and ecstasy quite untranslatable. In the Congress, modestly styled "the Congress of conquerors," the record was beaten by one of the favourites, Kirov, who hailed "the greatest leader of all times and all nations." The speeches opened and ended with a profession of faith in the superman's glory, amid highly spontaneous ovations and irrepressible acclamations. It is impossible to describe the reception accorded to Stalin himself when he read the report of the Central Committee. After the Congress, there was an endless echo in local assemblies, press columns, resolutions and telegrams.
That is only one panel of the diptych. The other represents the inexpressible ruin of the vanquished. For at the moment of supreme exaltation, Stalin yet wished to feast himself with "sweet vengeance." He made his unfortunate adversaries lash themselves in public, confess their abjection to the tribunal, and cringe under the shouts of his minions, rabid enough to trample them underfoot. Once more capitulators of the Right and of the Left admitted their errors, and some were cowardly enough to make accusations against each other. We need not have any doubt that they exhausted the utmost resources of their vocabulary in order to pour forth a feigned enthusiasm about the victor whom they were cursing in their hearts. A dirty business this, that defies description and comment alike, in which neither cheater nor cheated was taken in by the falsity of the situation. Yet nothing could convince the Bolsheviks in their frenzy of the shame of false repentance and ignominious persecution. "Among us, it is as easy to acquit as to condemn," wrote Gorky; but in this mentality "you can see a solicitude to acquit one's self of one's own failings in advance." In making his report Stalin had stated: "At this Congress there is nothing else to expose, no one else to attack." In spite of this, blows were not spared against Trotskyism already retracted and annihilated many times, against supposed heresies rebutted and liquidated, against time-honoured opponents already rolled out flat and won over to the integral Stalinist orthodoxy. It is certain that the inflexible police and prison methods of Stalin are appropriate to the system, for they ensure him results in advance. At the close of the Congress, Sosnovsky, one of the last well-known partisans of the Opposition, sent his submission from Siberia, followed shortly by that of Rakovsky. Both disavowed their discomfited faction, renounced their impious ideas, repudiated Trotsky and paid homage to Stalin. In the prisons and isolation camps and convict settlements there remained only some courageous political opponents, devoid of influence, their names destined to oblivion. The majority of Trotskyists were disgraced by their recantations; the remainder, like Koté Tsintsadze, had died in exile. The millions of prisoners and banished, cut off from the national life, could not hope for any amnesty save by some catastrophic war. The person of Stalin was henceforth embodied in a dictatorial majesty, without equal in the world and without precedent in history.
From the course of events, the tracing of history and the unravelling of texts, there emerges in sufficiently clear relief this repulsive character whose prodigious destiny it is so difficult to explain outside of the Soviet Union. We know now the abilities and the weaknesses of Stalin, the excessive disproportion between his intellect and his will, between his knowledge and his savoir-faire, and the reasons for his personal success gained over the ruins of the socialist programme of his Party. We have seen him patient, meticulous, wary of illusions as of words, and strong above all in his contempt for the individual and in his lack of principles and scruples. He is a product of circumstances, he owes his political fortune to his antagonists, though one can say as much of all his dictator contemporaries. He has not succeeded in establishing himself without a certain flair, without natural faculties for intrigue and an effective alloy of coolness and energy. Clever at putting off disadvantageous solutions, at dividing his enemies and getting round obstacles, he shrinks before nothing if he can but attack, strike and crush. He had the dexterity to avoid in the Party the shedding of blood spilt so often in the country, to exhaust opposition by dilatory tactics combined with the gag, the pillory and the whole gamut of sanctions. We recognise him as cunning, crafty, treacherous, but also brutal, violent, implacable, and set always on the exclusive aim of holding the power he has confiscated by an accumulation of petty means. As Bakunin wrote of Nechayev: "Bit by bit he has come to convince himself that to establish a serious, indestructible society you must base yourself on the policy of Machiavelli and adopt completely the Jesuit system, with violence for the body and lies for the mind." In the hardest struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks the latter often taxed the former with Nechayevism and Jesuitism, to the indignation of Lenin and his disciples. But a posthumous revenge was reserved for Martov with the rehabilitation of Nechayev attempted by various communist historians under Stalin, and it is not mere chance that one of them, A. Gambarov, ended his work with the statement that Nechayev's anticipations "have become embodied in full in the methods and practice of the Communist Party of Russia in the course of its twenty-five years of history."
Stalin has obviously not read Machiavelli, still less the astounding Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an anonymous book published in exile by a proscribed republican of the Second Empire, Maurice Joly. But he has followed by instinct the line of conduct traced in this ironical manual of cheating and duplicity whose precepts can be summed up in these almost literal lines:
Separate morality from politics, substitute force and astuteness for law, paralyse the individual intelligence, mislead the people with appearances, consent to liberty only under the weight of terror, pander to national prejudices, keep concealed from the country what is happening in the world and likewise from the capital what is happening in the provinces, transform the instruments of thought into instruments of power, remorselessly inflict executions without trials and administrative deportations, exact a perpetual apology for every act, teach the history of your reign yourself, employ the police as the keystone of the regime, create faithful followers by means of ribbons and baubles, build up the cult of the usurper into a kind of religion, create a void around you thus making yourself indispensable, weaken public opinion until it subsides in apathy, impress your name everywhere as drops of water hollow out granite, profit by the ease with which men turn informers, manipulate society by means of its vices, speak as little as possible, say the opposite of what you think, and change the very meaning of words....
All this appears to have been written for Stalin, and resolves the oft-discussed problem of the traits common to Lenin and his heir. In the latter we can find no trace of the founder of the Soviet State. Ostensible differences apart, what was large and disinterested in Lenin, is shabby and mean in the epigone. On the other hand, there is between Stalin and Trotsky at least an essential psychological resemblance which sets them very much below Lenin: their claim to be infallible. Neither of them has ever sincerely admitted an error, whilst the first of the Bolsheviks had often set the example of an honest self-criticism in his examination of himself. Like Napoleon who said "I was the master, it is on me that all blame lies," even when his incapable lieutenants had done disservice to his plans, Lenin took the entire responsibility of his Party's actions upon himself. "The greatest chief of all times and all peoples" gives his measure by always throwing on other people—on inferiors and humble individuals—the burden of his own incidental or permanent aberrations.
Not only has he modified the meaning of words, as if under the inspiration of the apocryphal Machiavelli, but he changes the values of numbers, and accommodates them to the requirements of his personal political calculations, under cover of reasons of State. It is the same with his arithmetic as with his ethics and aesthetics—all are subordinated to the conservation of power. The fewer communists the Party contains, the more members he counts. The total bordered on three million in 1934, including candidates, and more than five million of the youth, and could double at the Secretary's fancy. Statistics string together all sorts of numbers that are without interest or reality, but not those of the suicides, capital punishments, victims of the Plan, deaths due to famine and typhus. We cannot easily find out how many imprisoned and deported keep up the maintenance expenses of the Stalinist order—a number oscillating between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000. The G.P.U. itself would be incapable of giving exact estimates.
A brochure of B. Shirvindt, director of prisons, reveals the number of condemnations pronounced by the tribunals in 1929, for the Russian Republic alone, without the Ukraine and Caucasus, etc.: 1,216,000 against 955,000 the previous year, not including the sentences inflicted by the G.P.U. The death sentences had increased in this one year by 2,000 per cent. These partial investigations throw a terrible light on the repression carried out in the whole of the U.S.S.R. by the two jurisdictions even before the peak was reached at the time of collectivisation. It is easy to understand why the pamphlet of the imprudent official was withdrawn from circulation and the information it contained prohibited. But since 1935, there has been no less conclusive information about the situation in the country as a whole, thanks to Solonevich, who was in a position to verify his calculations. He counts a minimum of 5,000,000 detained in the concentration camps, without including those in the prisons and "isolators" or the various categories of those banished or exiled; and he estimates the total number of condemned at one-tenth the number of adult male inhabitants. It would be fairly near the truth, therefore, to envisage a figure approaching 10,000,000—to speak only of the living.
As far as ribbons and baubles are concerned, Stalin had inherited a military insignia, but he afterwards created two civil decorations, then, in 1934, the new distinction of "Hero of the Soviet Union"—apart from any recompense in money. On all points an intuitive Machiavellism guides him, often in its lowest form. The art of disguising his thoughts has no more secrets for him, his power of dissimulation equals his knowledge of provocation. For a few months in 1932 he absented himself and let rumours spread of his approaching resignation, so as to disorientate his enemies and incite them to vent their satisfaction, to keep his spies supplied with work and to chastise the prattlers on his return. He is undoubtedly the origin of the rumours from which he draws profit. In truth, none of his predecessors has dared to falsify history with so much indecency, to play tricks with the truth, attribute to himself imaginary superiorities and make himself a divine Augustus without the least title to distinction. He even stretches ambition to the point of seconding his flatterers when, as in 1934, they give him credit for—an arctic expedition with which, of course, he had no more connection than with the rhetoric of Aristotle, the "midwifery" of Socrates, the ethics of Spinoza, the metaphysics of Kant or the dialectic of Hegel. His misfortune is that tribute is always paid him by colleagues bound up with his fate, unconvinced underlings, self-interested flatterers or the conquered who are tied hand and foot; never by a man who is in the slightest degree free. He succeeds, however, in mystifying the perverted youth by the credo quia absurdum, taught in the name of Leninism. Brought up from a tender age to ape adults, brigaded in bands of pioneers, spoilt by a parrot-like education and the evil example of their elders, poisoned with careerism and egotism, the younger generation is to him an inexhaustible source for renewing cadres in his own way and completing the servile clientele. The greatest defeat that socialism has ever known is precisely this collective depravity which consists in inculcating into children and adolescents the very opposite of a doctrine while still preserving its vocabulary.
It was not enough for Stalin to vitiate the so-called Soviet youth in this respect. The Third International has grown beneath his hands into a despicable and sterile sect, has been transformed everywhere into an unconscious but active auxiliary of the counter-revolution. Just as the Polish communists had supported the military coup d'état of Pilsudski, before burning their fingers with it, so those in Germany had several times made common cause with Hitler, only to expiate soon after in concentration camps and on the scaffold the insane policy of their bad shepherds. "The Communist International represents nothing and only exists by our support," Stalin said one day before witnesses, and Lominadze took note of the remark; but the cynical "chief of the world proletariat" none the less persists in maintaining the parasitic sections of his fictitious International. However, since 1925, he had decided in common accord with Tomsky to liquidate the affiliated "Red Trade Unions," and accordingly took measures to do so. It would have been but the first step in preparing for a second, according to the logic of his views, bounded as they are by national horizons; what is more it would have been, in spite of himself, in the interest of the workers' movement. The cries of the doctrinaire Left made him abandon his project, and at a later date, when he had overcome all opposition and there was no one to hold him back, he apparently no longer considered the matter urgent. He is, however, quite capable of striking from his budget a puppet International, just as he decreed in the winking of an eye the disappearance of the Association of Proletarian Writers, however small the advantage. He knows that the Comintern will never effect a revolution—"not even in ninety years" as he ironically remarked at the Politbureau in Trotsky's presence. But nothing decisive obliges him yet to get rid of such a tractable instrument, which he believes to be of use to his costly personal renown and to the manoeuvres of his double-faced foreign policy. He will keep it as long as possible at the price of the irremediable discredit of communism in the two worlds.
Stalin has had the talent to endure, but only by disavowing his actions under a presumptuous phraseology. In 1934, the Bolshevik Congress ratified a second Five Year Plan, the relative prudence of which scarcely justified the victorious songs in honour of the first. At the preceding Party Conference, the official blusterers had calculated in advance for 1937 a production of a 100 milliard kilowatt-hours, 250 million tons of coal, 80 of naphtha, 22 of cast iron, etc., but the predictions fell to 38 for electricity, 152 for coal, 47 for naphtha and 16 for iron. Again it is only a matter of hypothesis, of which experience has proved the inanity. In other words, if by achieving the impossible, the second plan were better realised than the first, the U.S.S.R. after ten years of planification and twenty of revolution, would only produce about half the cast iron, a third the electricity and coal, and scarcely more than a third of the naphtha obtained in the U.S.A. for 1929 and that for a population more than a third greater. In respect of manufactured articles the comparison would be still more overwhelming. In 1933, at the International Economic Conference in London, Litvinov advanced the proposal of buying a milliard dollars' worth of merchandise, so acute was the lack of goods in the country of records. His country meanwhile has the effrontery to affect a complete disdain for foreign provisions. The very paper which the Bolsheviks use to deceive the public belies their fables of technical progress by its greyish dirty yellow colour and inferior quality. The conditions accepted to obtain de jure recognition from the United States, namely renunciation of subversive propaganda, admission of the clergy to the U.S.S.R., etc., indicated that Stalin was disposed to every type of concession to immortalise his autocracy. He made admiring speeches on President Roosevelt, kept to exclusively Russian problems in his conversations with Americans, predicted in 1933 the end of the world economic crisis, and made bantering jests about Trotsky's internationalism and the "permanent revolution." He was ready on conditions and concessions to adhere to the League of Nations, which, he had lately said, "is rotting while still alive"; and the volte-face was complete in 1934 when he dared to present as a triumph the admittance of the U.S.S.R. into the League of Brigands. But the more external agreements he concluded, the more he concentrated the power at home. Always haunted by the desire to keep a sharper watch on the details of his apparatus, he reformed the police-direction by the interposition of a "procuratorship" between the Politbureau and the G.P.U.; after that he altered the administration, by recastings and transformations, of which he alone had the secret, the Congress which decided knowing only the pretexts. In 1934, he suppressed the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, so dear to Lenin, and replaced it by a Soviet Control Commission, modelled on that of the Party. He reshuffled the staff of the "summits," dismissing some of the People's Commissars; at the base, he multiplied the "political sections," which more directly transmitted the Secretariat's orders; and he placed over all the bureaucracies in the provinces another more authoritative bureaucracy. In the same year, he pretended to diminish the powers of the G.P.U., by transmitting them to the Commissariat of the Interior, but he effaced the name only to retain the system and the personnel, with Yagoda as chief, seconded by Agranov and Prokofiev, so that there was no definite change for the people.
His rare interviews, accorded for diplomatic ends, when he utters the most outworn truisms of elementary socialism, which exclude frankness almost by definition, contain no matter of new or useful consideration but for one exception. In an interview with a German writer, Emil Ludwig, who obtained an entree by classing him amongst the eminent historical personalities worthy of his studies, the inevitable evocation of Peter the Great incited him to reply by a turn of phrase concealed by a metaphor: "In whatever concerns Peter the Great, he was a drop of water in the sea, and Lenin a whole ocean." He, Stalin, had no other aim than to be a worthy pupil of Lenin, that is to say, comparable to the ocean rather than the drop. He does not understand, among other things, that the worker-Tsar was in his time a leveller like himself, while forming with his "men of service" (sluzhilye liudi) the kernel of a future nobility. In Soviet Russia, levelling has gone on side by side with the formation of a privileged bureaucracy, whose hierarchy conceals the embryo of a class or a dominant caste. The first Emperor of China, Tsin Shih Huang Ti, a great organiser and deporter, who built the Great Wall, created an aristocracy of his own functionaries. In the same way Diocletian gave them titles that were not hereditary. It is not fatal that the Soviet bureaucracy should enlarge and consolidate its distinctive features, for its future will depend on international contingencies, not on the "clairvoyance" of its "genius." A reference by Ludwig to the three hundred years' reign of the Romanovs permitted Stalin to abuse the innocence or courtesy of his questioner, by denying all recourse to intimidation or terror, and alleging the unanimity of the worker and peasant nation. Uprisings have been as frequent under Sovietism as under Tsarism. The insurrections in the Caucasus and in Turkestan after collectivisation indicate that latent exasperation is only waiting for an opportunity to burst out. This is not the place to linger on all the conversations held by Stalin with a journalist in quest of the sensational whom he laughs at shamelessly in ineffably serious tones. Nevertheless, an incidental reflection is still worth examining: "In what concerns our conscientious workers, they remember Trotsky with resentment, even with hatred." Ludwig pretends not to know that in the Soviet Union no worker is allowed the right to a favourable opinion of Trotsky, or to the expression of it. But Stalin's tenacious animosity is an interesting revelation of his basically vindictive character, without generosity or grandeur. Even against the defeated adversary, whom he pretends to fear no longer, and to a visitor doubly strange to Bolshevism, he proffers in security his spiteful and violent words. In the zenith of his power he employs the weapons of the powerless, and at the thought of the "Man of October" he emerges from his false impassivity and in spite of himself ceases to simulate "indifference with a marble pulse."
One is always tempted to try to seize the meaning of a remote historic individuality by comparing it with others that are better known, to establish relations between the great revolutions and their protagonists. But whoever tries to find a figure approximating to Stalin in the French Revolution, where several figures have certain resemblances to Lenin and Trotsky, will not meet him there except by borrowing several types to compose a synthesis. Without losing sight of the difference of place and time, or being too carried away by analogies, one must imagine a Fouché, a man in the middle-distance of the revolution, and in the foreground of the counter-revolution, one who has a few objective characteristics of a Bonaparte without victories. Stalin has not only the principal characteristics of Fouché, virtuosity in intrigue and police methods, but there may be noticed in them both very curious psychological and temperamental concordances, apart from the common origin of their education and the striking similarities in their careers. Fouché also came from a seminary, renounced the sacerdotal calling, and later distinguished himself in "dechristianisation." Pro consul of the Convention in the provinces, he gave proof of exceptional terrorist energy which Stalin was to attain in an identical role—the requisitioning of supplies and the suppression of resistance. He passed through successive stages of revolutionary and counter revolutionary evolution, and adapted himself to each of them. In the year when the Consulate became the Empire, he expurgated the archives of Nantes, his native town, of all papers concerning him. Stalin was one day to do the same, with the same arrière-pensée. If one is careful to observe due proportion, Bonaparte also can be taken as a comparison, for a reason which Jaurès indicates by pointing out that the man of Brumaire struggled against an obsolete form of counter-revolution, but at the same time introduced a new one, "the Caesarian counterrevolution, all the more to be feared because it retained on the surface some of the traits of the revolution which had been perverted." It goes without saying that no analogies can be drawn between the General Secretary and the First Consul in regard to individual dualities—it is their objective role which relates them. If Stalin had followed his inclination to favour private property, he would have become a sort of bureaucratic Bonaparte—less like the uncle than the nephew, the inheritor of a power conquered by others, and endowed with the sole genius of long patience. His schematic and limited socialism restrained him at a moment when the Left Opposition believed in the existence of Thermidor; and he turned against the rural districts after mastering the towns. But even in his war against the mujiks, he remained a peasant in his turn of mind, his manner and natural capacities; and this gives him some affinity with another dictator of a different rural extraction and a different intellectual class, but likewise a peasant—the Iron Chancellor, whose characteristics, as sketched by Engels, are typical of the Steel Secretary:
Bismarck is a man of great practical sense, great cleverness, a born and accomplished man of affairs.... But very often an intelligence so developed in the arena of practical life cannot be separated from a corresponding narrowness of view.... Bismarck has never conceived even a trace of an original political idea. But he assimilated the ideas elaborated by others. This narrowness was fortunate for him. Without it he would never have been able to consider universal history from a point of view specifically Prussian.
You need only change the last word to recognise certain traits of Stalin, who has them to a greater degree.
Soviet subjects do not have to go so far to find the complete model of their despot. They may find it in the national and classical history of their country, notably in the caricatured image of a hero of Shchedrin in the Story of a Town, a work unknown in the west but very much prized in Russia, which owes a renewed vogue to the antipathy which Stalin inspires. In a town, or rather an allegorical region, where each house, each social unit, has its "commander and spy," and where the inhabitants, constrained to a barrack-like discipline, have on fête-days "the freedom of making forced parades instead of working," a brute of a governor, Ugrium-Burcheyev, wields his savage rule, a symbol beyond all doubt of bureaucracy in uniform. In these pages, which cannot be condensed, Shchedrin gives an unforgettable silhouette of the "hermetically sealed personage" whose visage is stamped with "a military and tranquil certainty that all questions have long ago been solved," and who, having drawn a line, "believes he has enclosed the whole visible and invisible world within it." The contemporary Russian reader does not weary of seeing Stalin in this parodied reincarnation of the Minister Arakcheyev, only too well known by his colonies of soldier-peasants. Informed of this by the G.P.U., Stalin has taken upon himself in his turn to read the Story of a Town and to make the best of a bad bargain by risking a placid allusion to the author. But nobody is deceived, and the bitter Shchedrin satire is propagated to the great prejudice of the invincible "field-marshal." Stalinist functionaries have exerted their zeal in editing a Soviet fairy-tale for children in which Lenin, a prisoner on a desert island, flies away on a black swan in the company of a faithful Stalin, who proves his devotion and friendship by cutting off a finger to feed the carnivorous bird on the journey. But, Ugrium-Burcheyev also cut off his finger as a pledge of love and abnegation for his chief.... Whether the coincidence be voluntary or fortuitous, the effect produced is the same in ridiculousness.
Any portrait of Stalin would be premature before his fall or his death. The most necessary documentation has disappeared through the care of the party most interested. Of his former comrades of the Caucasus, some are languishing in exile, others have their mouths sealed. The coffers of the Party, the G.P.U., and the Lenin Institute will not give up their secrets until after a veritable historical upheaval—if indeed there still remain any secrets in the dossiers. The dictatorial entourage will remain silent so long as it fears the dictator or his creatures. Till then the bringing to light of new material, correspondence buried in the cachettes, and memoirs of contemporaries who have had the good luck to survive him, will have to be awaited. Stalin has no friend, no confidant. He loves nobody, as far as anyone knows, and nobody loves him. Among his partners he can count only acolytes whose company he avoids frequenting, so much is he bored by their intellectual mediocrity. The only man whose contact he has sought was Gorky, a captivating conversationalist as well as a great writer, and since his return to Russia Stalin's guilty conscience. Perhaps later in Gorky's papers, precious notes on his conversations with Stalin will be found. But the future Suetonius of this short-coated Caesar could only be one of his close police-auxiliaries—Yagoda for example. Biographers inclined to study his private life, his family, his customs, will be interested through professional duty in his first wife, Catherine Svanidze, sister of a third-rate Bolshevik, and in James Djugashvili, the son she left on her death. They will seek the truth of the suicide of his second wife, the only daughter of Serge Alliluyev. According to a laconic communiquê published in the press, Nadiejda Alliluyeva died suddenly in the night of the 9th of November, 1932. She left two young children, Basil and Svatlana. The next day the rumour spread in Moscow of a suicide. There are still no written proofs nor public testimony, but to appreciate the knouto-Soviet State, the incontestable truth of the fact is less important than the general immediate conviction, suicide being the only possible manifestation of a sincere opinion under Stalin.
This is not all, however, for the assassination of Kirov by a Bolshevik in December 1934, shows that the arm of despair may still serve, and for tyrannicide as well. Stalin's immunity in the classic field of terrorism, in the country of Karakozov, Zasulich, Khalturin, Jeliabov, Perovskaya, Sazonov, and Kalyayev, seemed for a long time inexplicable. Nevertheless in intimate discussions among communists, it was explained by various circumstances. Some considered as responsible the monstrous hypertrophy achieved by the police, the perfection of its preventive technique, the elaborate mass of precautions taken to guard the Supreme Secretary, the pitiless system of hostages and the terrifying zeal in reprisals. (Under Tsarism, political assassins sacrificed their own lives without the responsibility of risking that of their relatives and children.) Others maintained that individuals holding power have too little time to serve as targets—the apparent responsibility shared by dictatorial institutions preserves each dictator in particular. Moreover, they added, modern methods of deceiving opinion and spreading myths count a lot in the security of the rulers. These explanations contain some truth, but none of them demonstrates it completely. It is important not to forget that the people, although dissatisfied with the present, definitely do not desire a return to past conditions but can conceive of no better future. In this impasse, reformative goodwill loses its edge, and long years pass before a new revolutionary ideology is elaborated, susceptible of awakening pioneering abnegation in its militants. But it is not surprising that terrorism in high places awakens a terrorism below. Nothing is known of the activities of Nikolayev, Kirov's assassin, nor of the circumstances of his act, nor of the subversive group to which he belonged, nor of a so-called plot against Stalin. Stalin was able to execute fourteen communists in order to silence them, after having ordered 103 prisoners to be put to death without involving them in the least suspicion of culpability or complicity, not to speak of proof. He was able to re-arrest and cast in prison the pitiable Zinoviev and Kamenev, whose retractions, humiliations and abasements can no longer be counted. With them were condemned 17 other ultra-Leninists, such as Yevdokimov, who had gone over to the Opposition, and then many times repented, and 78 of their deported comrades including Zalutsky, Safarov and Vardin. He was able to forge an extravagant tale of preparations for assassination in order to throw mud upon gaged rebels, to overwhelm defenceless penitents, to attempt to compromise the inevitable Trotsky, in exile in a French province, and to present members of his "monolithic" and permanently purified Party as "class enemies" seeking to provoke heaven knows what "armed foreign intervention" by the murder of one Russian by another Russian, one communist by another. No sincere person gives any credence to such fables, which have no more truth in them than the alleged confessions, dragged out under pain of death, or the repentance that follows, or immediately precedes. All that we know is that Stalin, in a panic, sacrificed 117 victims, not so much to the shades of Kirov as to his personal anxiety.
Before attempting to investigate whether Nikolayev represented a superior ideal, or whether this family massacre of Bolsheviks announced any turn, we must recall to the "terrorised terrorists" who continuously quote Marx and Engels, the phrase where the one stresses the specifically Russian modus operdandi of the narodovoltsy: "They can be as little moralised upon, one way or another, as the catastrophe of Chios"; and also that phrase of the other apropos of the terror, the result of "the useless cruelties committed for self-reassurance by people who are afraid themselves." Stalin's hand does not tremble to deliver innocent prisoners to the executioner, but both of them trembled, Rykov says, the day the Right sent him in a triple resignation. This man, who is supposed to be physically brave, has no moral courage whatsoever. He is not capable of looking a contradiction in the face, accepting the responsibility for his actions, hearing friendly criticism or asserting himself before an objector, and there is no meanness he will not stoop to if it is a question of conserving his power. One hundred and seventeen corpses are the ransom he exacts when a young militant, a son of the Bolshevik revolution, and brought up in the ranks of the Communist Party, resolves to translate a collective opinion in terms of revolver shots, through lack of being able to express it by legal and normal means. But he has created a state of affairs in which all serious antagonism must result sooner or later in suicide, like Skrypnik's, or assassination, like Kirov's. Between differentiated bureaucratic fractions with their Stalins of every description and their Molotovs of every calibre, between their clans and their cliques, life and death are permanently burning questions.
In the famous article, Better less, but better, that shone with the last brilliance of his mind, Lenin glimpsed a final clash between the East and the West—between the revolution and imperialism. "The issue of the struggle will depend in the end on the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., constitute the gigantic majority of the population. But the certainty of a definite socialist victory for all time does not guarantee our immediate perspectives. To assure our existence until the approaching armed conflagration between the counter-revolutionary and imperialist West and the nationalist revolutionary East, that is, between the most civilised states in the world and the revolutionary States, backward as are all Oriental States, but which nevertheless constitute the majority, this majority must have the time to civilise itself." And he underlined "We are not yet civilised enough to pass directly to socialism." For quarter of a century, he dilated on an idea that Stalin has never been able to understand: "Socialism is impossible without democracy." And when speaking of electricity, he explicitly envisaged the whole of culture. For him, as for his masters in doctrine, civilisation, democracy, and socialism are inseparable. And if Lenin's last words have the least value, they foretell no glory for Leninists like Stalin who have too consistently misunderstood one of the essential springs of history—what the two initiators of modern communism knew in their time as "the power of expansion of democratic ideas, and humanity's innate thirst for liberty."