The Dictator, Revolution, Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin 9781782843610, 9781782843627, 1782843612

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It is a commonplace wisdom that from the authoritarian roots of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew the gulags and the police state of the Stalinist epoch. The Dictator, the Revolution, The Machine overturns that perspective once and for all by showing how October was inspired by a profound mass movement comprised of urban workers and rural poor – a movement that went on to forge a state capable of channelling its political will in and through the most overwhelming form of grass-roots democracy history has ever known. It was a single, precarious experiment whose life was tragically brief. In a context of civil war and foreign invasion the fledgling democracy was eradicated and the Bolshevik party was denuded of its social basis – the working classes. While the party survived, its centrist elements came to the fore as the power of the bureaucracy asserted itself. From the ashes of human freedom there arose a zombified, sclerotic administration in which state functionaries took precedence over elected representatives. One man came to embody the inverted logic of this bureaucratic machine, its remorseless brutality and its parasitic drive for power. Joseph Stalin was its highest expression, accruing to himself state powers as he made his murderous, heady rise to dictator. This book examines his historical profile, its roots in Georgian medievalism, and shows why Stalin was destined to play the role he did. In broader strokes Tony McKenna raises the conflict between the revolutionary movement and the bureaucracy to the level of a literary tragedy played out on the stage of world history, showing how Stalinism’s victory would pave the way for the ‘Midnight of the Century’. Cover illustration courtesy of flickr.com; https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbrazito/8401681543/; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Tony McKenna is a writer whose work has been featured by The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, The United Nations, New Statesman, The Progressive, New Internationalist and New Humanist. His first book, Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective, was published by Macmillan in 2015.

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“In this brilliant, moving and inspiring book, Tony McKenna provides a compelling analysis and portrayal of the historical causes of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s psychological development into a monstrous murderer of millions, and the gritty fearful realities of the lives his regime extinguished. The Dictator, The Revolution, The Machine also shows that the Russian experience doesn’t seal the fate of humankind with respect to the prospects for the creation of a genuinely democratic socialist world. It concludes by affirming the desirability and feasibility of working-class self-emancipation and socialist participatory democracy. By fully confronting the horrors of Stalinist dictatorship while providing a sophisticated account of the historically unique combination of factors that give rise to and sustained it, Tony McKenna affirms the continuing vitality and relevance of revolutionary Marxism. Utterly compelling, a must read.” Brian S. Roper, Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Otago, author of The History of Democracy – A Marxist Interpretation “Tony McKenna is a bona fide public intellectual who contributes to Marxist journals without having any connections to academia or to the disorganized left. This gives his writing a freshness both in terms of political insight and literary panache . . . Although I think that McKenna would be capable of turning a Unix instruction manual into compelling prose, the dead tyrant has spurred him to reach a higher level . . . his study is both an excellent introduction to Stalin and Stalinism as well as one that gives any veteran radical well-acquainted with Soviet history some food for thought on the quandaries facing the left today. Drawing upon fifty or so books, including a number that leftist veterans would likely not be familiar with such as leading Soviet military leader Gregory Zhukov’s memoir, McKenna synthesizes it all into a highly readable and often dramatic whole with his own unique voice. It is a model of historiography and one that might be read for no other reason except learning how to write well.” Louis Proyect, writer and activist, proprietor of The Unrepentant Marxist blog and moderator of Marxmail.org.

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Copyright © Tony McKenna 2016. Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2016. SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS PO Box 139 Eastbourne BN24 9BP, UK and simultaneously in the United States of America and Canada All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78284-361-0 (e-pub) ISBN 978-1-78284-362-7 (e-mobi) ISBN 978-1-78284-363-4 (e-pdf) This e-book text has been prepared for electronic viewing. Some features, including tables and figures, might not display as in the print version, due to electronic conversion limitations and/or copyright strictures.

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Contents Preface

vi

THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE A Political Account of Joseph Stalin

1

Conclusion

145

Notes

175

Bibliography

189

Index

192

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Preface This is a history book but it is unlike others. For a start it has no chapters. I wrote it, quite chaotically, over a short but intense period. It was first meant to be an essay of around 10,000 words. Somehow, though, it kept growing – inevitably, organically – as I saw the life of Joseph Stalin unfold in front of me; as I was pulled, with a sense of morbid fascination, into its terrible darkness. The writing developed this way, in the uneven and messy way of life itself. For that reason it has been impossible to compartmentalize the narrative into discrete and separate phases – a chapter on Stalin’s engagement with Marxism here, a chapter on his foreign policy there. To forcibly cleave the text into a series of segments, each with a single theme, would have felt a little like dismembering the life I had struggled to bring into being through words. As though I were gutting the personality which I had placed in my literary sights of all its richness, its organic wholeness. Not only is the book something of an oddity in terms of its structure but also, perhaps, by way of tone. History, especially as it is taught in universities these days, is supposed to be dispassionate, moderate, and denuded of emotion. This book is none of these. In academia objectivity and truth are often alleged to be anathema to the heat and passion of polemic. The student who succumbs to some form of partisanship, who is unable to relay events in a dry, dispassionate way, is usually dismissed as a naive idealist. A student who hasn’t managed to check the fervour of his or her emotions and has not reached the stage of maturity whereby flash in the pan radicalism has been allowed to graduate into a more moderate and temperate world view. But what of such moderation? What of the idea that the true secret to political and historical objectivity is the ability to avoid extremes? To toe the middle line, to maintain a balance between more radical social polarizations and perspectives? How successfully does such a supposition encompass the reality of the world in which we live? A recent study published by Oxfam showed that sixty-two people, sixty-two billionaires, own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.1 That is to say, those sixty-two shining bastions of humanity have succeeded in accruing to themselves a level of wealth which is equal to that of the combined funds of 3.6 billion others,

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Preface | vii many of whom languish in desperate poverty. The visceral contradiction between wealth and poverty is one which lies at the heart of our social organism. A contradiction between the billions of people who work in the factories and fields, the call centres and the cafes, the stations and the shops; the people who generate the wealth by which everyone lives – and an ever concentrated minority who appropriate that wealth. Such a contradiction seems to me to be decidedly unbalanced. What does it mean to apply a “balanced”, “moderate”, “middle ground” analysis to a situation which is riven by the most extreme, volatile forms of social contradiction and which generates the most profound and abiding human suffering? Above all it means to lose touch with objective reality itself. Not only that, however, this type of “moderation” reveals itself to be an extremely partisan act in its own right. We are living in a period when the anarchy and deregulation of the global market has facilitated a transfer of wealth from the most impoverished to those with riches on a hitherto unimaginable scale. To recommend we pursue the politics of moderation at such a time is inseparable from the demand that the vast leviathan of misery and exploitation the capitalist social system represents remains fundamentally unreformed. Behind the so-called “objective”, “dispassionate” pleas for moderation, often lies a more insidious agenda. That is, a defence of the status quo and a rationalization of the misery which is endured by billions across the globe. In 1917 the Russian people chose to eschew the politics of moderation. Instead they posited a more radical solution to the grievous disparity between the wealthy and the poor. The industrial workers of the cities, alongside millions of poor and landless peasants, actually took control of the factories, doled out between themselves the fields and the farms, and expropriated the wealthy landowners, rentiers, city capitalists and their functionaries in the higher echelons of government. It is the contention of this book that the revolution of October 1917 – far from representing a narrow and sinister coup culminated by an elite cabal of clandestine, shadowy radicals – was in fact the apex of a vast revolutionary awakening which pulled millions into its remit. For the first time, in October 1917, a state was created which channelled the needs and aspirations of the majority of its populace. A form of democracy arose which fused the economic organs of society, the factories and the workplaces, with a political decision-making process where power flowed from the bottom-up. It was nothing other than the single, most precious experiment in all of human history. This book chronicles the way in which that experiment came to fruition, the historical trajectory which led to it, and the manner in which it was drowned in blood. It sets out the way the forces of reac-

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viii | Preface tion in Russia itself – the old landowners, the representatives of the defunct Tsarist regime, the wealthy industrialists – helped foment a wave of bloody counteraction aided and abetted by armies from fourteen capitalist countries of the West. The motivation of the latter was crystal clear; the Russian Revolution was the living example of a way political power had ceased to be monopolized by a tiny group of individuals who would decide the destiny of collective humanity in vast fortified palaces or parliaments cordoned off by rings of security personnel. Instead power had devolved onto the streets as the masses entered into the historical field as protagonists, as arbiters of their own fate. Such a revolutionary excrescence represented an existential threat to those small bands of professional politicians or aristocrats in countries across the world who, weaned on a lifetime of wealth and privilege, were possessed of the certainty that it was their prerogative to direct the lives of the billions below them. The Bolshevik Party survived their onslaught, but the fledgling democracy was annihilated as the workers and peasants were bled dry in the furore of civil war and foreign invasion. It is the contention of this book that the Stalinist regime was premised on the ruins of that democracy, that Stalinism represented the negation of the proletarian revolution in visible form. The bureaucratic regime arose first and foremostly on the bones and shattered skulls of the workers and peasants who had so bravely and tragically fought in defence of the revolution they themselves had called into being. Furthermore, I argue that Stalin himself was the highest expression of the bureaucratic machine. His ruthlessness and mendacity, his secrecy, paranoia and unslakeable yearning for mass murder, were all the horrific accoutrements of a personality which was shaped in accordance with a deeper and more abiding logic; the historical development of the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste which was in the process of prosecuting its interests in an ever more volatile and violent fashion. Such a thesis is neither new nor original. It was first offered up, both elegantly and profoundly, by the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky who was the central leader of the insurrection in October and who would fight the totalitarian regime throughout his life – until that same regime brought that life to its end. Trotsky’s major work in this regard is The Revolution Betrayed, but his numerous writings in the twenties and thirties constitute a remarkable treasure trove of work on the genesis and development of Stalinism as well as the first and to my mind finest historical and sociological account of fascism which has ever been penned. In addition, his book, The History of the Russian Revolution, provides a magisterial unfolding of that event from the purview of the long historical sweep.

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Preface | ix Trotsky was also the first – in combination with his erstwhile colleague Alexander Parvus – to conceptualize the Marxist theory of “permanent revolution”,2 a theory which would locate the historical necessity by which a proletarian revolution would occur initially in the backward economic conditions of Russia – rather than in one of the more developed countries in the West. What is even more remarkable about such a formulation was that it was made by Trotsky in 1905 and would be confirmed in practise by the occurrence of the October Revolution some twelve years later. In its analysis this book draws upon the thought of that brilliant and prophetic thinker – much in the way the author has throughout his political writings. Another debt which remains to be acknowledged is to the historian Roy Medvedev and his Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. But it is a book not without flaws. It does not, in my view, capture the historical thread, the underlying necessity which was carried by the emergence of the bureaucracy in the context of the shattered revolution and the decimation of the industrial working class. For this reason the figure of Stalin appears as an aberration who just happened to come to power, a gruesome, tragic anomaly which is untethered from any deeper historical current. Despite such criticism, however, the work is the product of decades of meticulous, single-minded research. The author himself is a man whose family were victims of the Stalinist purges,3 who grew up and experienced first-hand the terrifying, claustrophobic atmosphere of Stalinist totalitarianism – only to then spend a life devoted to the exposing of it. The writing in his magnum opus is consistently clear, precise and edifying, but what is most remarkable is the sheer welter of primary source material the historian has parsed. Let History Judge represents a mighty work of synthesis, which integrates testimonies from GPU inquisitors, Red Army soldiers, bureaucrats, the victims of the gulags, famines and forced industrialization – along with a vast array of economic data and social statistics buried deep within the Soviet archives. It provides a comprehensive examination of every aspect of Soviet life during the Stalinist epoch and is of inestimable value to any student of the period. Other historians to whom the author has turned in the writing of the current work include Antony Beevor, a military theorist of a liberal bent and consequently a set of politics which is very different to my own. Nevertheless his accounts of the battle of Stalingrad (Stalingrad) and the role of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War (The Battle for Spain) are delicately researched compendiums of both clarity and conscientiousness, works which are particularly helpful in puncturing the myth of Stalin as a great military strategist. Isaac Deutscher’s biogra-

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x | Preface phy Stalin has a lot of useful research, and provides a good deal of insight into the individual psychology of its subject, though in my view it fails to adequately comprehend the historical process which led to Stalinism, and is, therefore, far too forgiving of both its role and consequences. Only One Year, by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, is an autobiography which recounts the author’s experiences growing up in the Kremlin and her eventual defection to the US in the 1960s. It is a fine memoir in its own right, but for the purposes of the current investigation, carries some of the most acute, disturbing glimpses into the emotions and spirit of her father. John Reed’s book Ten Days that Shook the World provides a lucid and journalistic account of the October Revolution from a person who was present on the ground and chronicled the event in real time, so to speak. It is an absolute mustread, providing a powerful tonic to the recycled commonplace that the October Revolution was merely a coup d’état conducted behind the backs of the masses and which never enjoyed any real popular support. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s justifiably famous The Gulag Archipelago again offers up the perspective of an insider, this time an account provided by someone who was shunted through the Gulag system: a moving, powerful document which lays bare not only the suffering of the victims but also the grotesque psychology of the perpetrators. My own book hopes to blend some of the above motifs. I wanted to write something which utilized the power of the Marxist method, which would elucidate the objective trajectory of Stalinism by way of the most profound historical and philosophical analysis; while at the same time creating a work where the lives of the people who were swept up in these great and terrible events would blaze across the page, illuminated by a searing sense of their heroism and tragedy. I wanted to write a historical document which simultaneously resounds with all the pathos of literary tragedy. Most of all I wanted to challenge the assumption that Stalinist totalitarianism was the automatic and inevitable result of a revolution which mobilized the poorest in society, the notion that the exercise of popular power per se must inevitably end up in some kind of bleak and sinister terminus, an Orwellian style end-game. Students of history often get to university level “knowing” that Lenin led to Stalin, that the latter was merely a more concentrated version of the “authoritarianism” espoused by the former. And yet, though they are taught this about the revolution repeatedly and by rote, it is unlikely they have been told about the workers’ democracies which sprang up in the cities or the communes which emerged in the countryside; all of which provided a backdrop and context to the revolution of October and provided the Bolsheviks with their political

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Preface | xi mandate. It is even more unlikely that they have been made aware of the mobilization of Western power with which the revolution was greeted – the invasion of Russia in 1918 by Britain, France et al. For the analysis of Stalinism, in popular history books, has been progressively displaced; from an account of the real social and historical relations thrown up between classes, nations and governments, to an ahistorical and generic assessment which conceives of Stalinism as an almost biological outcrop of Bolshevism or “Leninism”. On top of which there are many on the political left who are themselves – to put it diplomatically – disorientated when it comes to the phenomenon of Stalin and Stalinism. I recently read an interview featuring a cultural commentator of the left. Alongside the interview, a photo appeared of this individual against a backdrop which featured an image of Joseph Stalin. Now, if this same person had been snapped before a picture of Adolph Hitler – Stalin’s contemporary and fellow student of mass murder – there would have been, I suspect, a universal clamour of outrage, and quite rightly so. But the fact that he was posing before a picture of Stalin went rather unremarked upon, at least on the part of the left. This captures something of a more disturbing sensibility on the part of many on the left; a certain wry sympathy for Stalin’s political endeavours, the sense that the “socialist” state was under threat, and he was prepared to get his hands dirty in defence of it, even if that meant resorting to more underhand and unsavoury methods. Such an estimate, of course, does a great disservice to the memory of the millions Stalin had murdered, including many thousands of trade unionists, Marxists, socialists, anarchists, and liberals – dissidents of almost every stripe. So this book is also addressed to those faddish philosophers and dogmatic politicos who even today seek to flirt with the image of Stalin – someone who, incidentally, might not have responded so kindly to their caresses had they been living under the system of mass murder he had so meticulously orchestrated. This book is addressed to those people in the ardent hope that they might discover within themselves a greater level of sympathy for the vast numbers of lives which were disappeared by that regime. Last but not least, any study of this type is open to the following criticism: the assessment of Stalin is bleak and unforgiving, but the analysis of the roles of Lenin and Trotsky works in quite the opposite direction, refusing to elaborate or even recognize their flaws. Such criticism would have some basis. The truth is the author is not uncritical of those two figures. Though I regard both men as exemplary figures I am aware that they committed significant errors in theory and in practise. Lenin helped persuade the Politburo to take military action against Poland in the belief that the Polish workers would see the So-

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xii | Preface viet troops as liberators and rise up in tandem – a disastrous miscalculation. In the debate about trade unions which took place in 1920 Trotsky’s argument to deepen and extend the militarization of labour was a blunder which worked against the Marxian grain of his thought more generally and its powerful democratic element. On the issue of Stalinism itself I disagree fundamentally with Trotsky’s description of the Stalinist regime as “a degenerated workers’ state”. In my view this is to commit the error of substituting legal property relations for those of the historical criterion of production – a state is not proletarian (even in a degenerated guise) simply because the legal move to abolish private property in the means of production has been effected – but because the workers themselves are in control of the workplaces and regulate them on a democratic basis in accordance with their own needs.4 Some of these issues will be of interest to a small coterie of Marxist theorists, and some of them will be compelling to a broader audience. All such issues should be given a full airing, debated vigorously, passionately, polemically but above all openly. I have omitted any real examination of such criticisms in this book more broadly, not because I want to promote an uncritical approach toward Lenin and Trotsky, but because this is a book which is first and foremost about Stalin and to integrate these other concerns – though highly pertinent in their own right – without interrupting the rhythm and flow of the broader narrative was simply beyond my powers. Nevertheless, I am sure this is not the only shortcoming the book has. And like any of the others, such a fault can only be attributed to the author, rather than the people who have been kind enough to comment on the text in various stages on the road to completion.

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For my Goddaughter, Isadora

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During those dark insulting nights, the working people walked through the streets with song, childish joy shining in their eyes. For the first time they clearly saw their power, and themselves were amazed at its significance. They understood their might in life, and good-naturedly exulted, looking at the blinded horses, the motionless dead machines, the dumbfounded police, the closed ever-hungry jaws of the shops and restaurants, the frightened faces, the humble figures of those persons who had never learned to work, but only to eat much, and who therefore considered themselves the best blood in the city. Their power over people had been torn from their impotent hands in these days, yet their cruelty and cunning remained. MAXIM GORKY

What has been won by the Russian Revolution is inalienable. No power on earth can deprive us of that . . . For hundreds of years states have been built on the bourgeois model, and now for the first time a non-bourgeois form of state has been discovered. Maybe our apparatus is particularly bad but they say that the first steam engine invented was bad too: they are not even sure whether it worked or not . . . But the point is that now we have got steam engines. However bad our state apparatus is – still it has been created; a most important historical invention has been made, a proletarian type of state has been created. VLADIMIR ILLYICH LENIN

Death solves all problems – no man, no problem. JOSEPH STALIN

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THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE

A Political Account of Joseph Stalin

For centuries, Georgia had been both an arena of conflict and a crucible of artistic and cultural regeneration. Successful in repelling both the Seljuk Turks and the first onrush of the Mongolian hordes – the region was a unified kingdom at the very height of its powers in the early thirteenth century, when the glittering Georgian renaissance enjoyed under Queen Tamar was to pre-empt its European counterpart by almost two hundred years. And yet, Georgia had always been perched on the precipice; looking out over the vast steppes and plains of central Asia to a vortex of great, interminable migrations which sent rushing back toward her frontiers wave after wave of nomadic invaders. Eventually the cohesion which had been won in the historic period of Georgia’s greatest flourishing was worn away by the pressure from the East; the Turkoman and later Mongols – and in their aftermath, the withering power of those great poles of empire; the Ottomans and the Persians and their crushing gravitational orbits. It was perhaps unsurprising, then, that the invasions and raids caused Georgia’s once resplendent kingdom to slip into the shadows; fragmented and divided, its peoples took shelter under the penumbra of the vast Caucasian mountains which fissured across the region from the north, and provided a natural buffer excluding much of the outside world. This was a centuries long period of stagnation; punctuated only by the restless occupations and incursions of its Ottoman and Safavid overlords, Georgia’s vibrant cultural pool had all but dried up, and by the time at which Georgia had been submitted to the Russian Empire – the pulverized region was the site of stagnant economic development, and a series of decaying semi-feudalities overseen by parasitic princes. These were, in turn, converted into a brutal obeisance courtesy of the imposition of a Russian-style serfdom, returning the country to an even more archaic form of peasant bondage, the likes of which hadn’t been practised in Georgia for centuries. Alongside serfdom, the Russian Empire’s other contribution to the traumatized country seems to have been an intensification in its religiosity; in the very moments when the pall of oppression cast a darkness across the cultural life of the people, it was then when the

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2 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE beautiful, morbid byzantine icons of the Orthodox proliferated in the mud daubed huts of the villages and the brutalized members of the population clutched their crucifixes close. Toward the end of the nineteenth century in keeping with the reforms in Russia more broadly, serfdom was abolished in Georgia, but there was no concomitant impetus to the development of industry, and the economy and people seemed to continue to stagnate under the darkness of ages and the fug of suffocating superstition. It is against this backdrop of dark that a boy named Joseph is born. His origins are wreathed in its shadows. He was born in a small country town called Gori to a young mother whose people were most likely Osetins of Mongolian descent, a people who had long since occupied the rocky crags of the mountainous regions. Ekaterina Djugashvili’s life was equally hard and flinty. By the time of Joseph’s birth she had already lost three children in their infancy. Most of her time was taken up sewing and doing laundry – the intensive, fidgety and restless labour which the well-to-do could command for little more than a pittance. Not much is known about Stalin’s father, and what there is has been rendered murky by the hagiographies of Soviet officialdom, but it seems as though he allowed the poverty and hardship of their familial situation to fall fully on Ekaterina’s weary muzhik shoulders. There is talk of him moving to the city Tiflis at some point and taking up work in a shoe factory, but his spates of labour seem to have been sporadic and haphazard, and it would be less accurate to describe him as a city proletarian than as one of the more lumpen elements which persisted on the fringes. The tenuousness and listlessness of his own existence seems to have translated into a dull but consistent brutality toward the young Joseph whom he beat regularly, and a pitiless indifference to the crushing struggle for survival in which his wife was engaged. The town of Gori itself was at this time little more than an extended, crumbling village with a mainly illiterate peasant population which had only recently been decoupled from the yoke of serfdom, and whose lives – in the words of Leon Trotsky – “still lay outside history”.5 Perhaps this sense of the insular and the provincial, alongside the sheer, backbreaking relentlessness of her workload, and the negligence of her husband; perhaps the feeling that she was entirely isolated, lacking in any means of earthly support or solidarity, meant it was almost inevitable that Ekaterina Djugashvili would turn her eyes to heaven and seek her salvation there. Belief provided respite and meaning in the face of a remorseless, nihilistic reality; when Joseph’s father had once again drunk away her wages, her religious brooding provided Ekaterina with a much need solace; and it was this spiritual

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 3 sensibility, more than anything else, that she endeavoured to transmit to her son: “His father Vissarion wanted to make of Soso a good shoemaker . . . I did not want him to be a shoemaker. I wanted only one thing – that he should become a priest.”6 Joseph would indeed make the grades necessary for his continued study and his elevation to a seminary school in Tiflis. But his experience of early education was not a happy one. He had developed his mother’s unyielding capacity for toil, and his brooding determination seems to have compensated for the lack of any intellectual agility or curiosity on his part. Joseph absorbed things by rote but he took them to heart. At the same time, while he inherited his mother’s work ethic, her sense of religious piety – which perhaps allowed her to evade the more brutal realities of exploitation she endured at the hands of the people around her – in him, this was transformed into a dull but corrosive bitterness. From an early age the social divisions of the world which Ekaterina endured were visible to the naked eye of her young son, as clear as daylight. Joseph saw how his mother would trail from house to house of the more prosperous plying her wares, and he must have registered the mood of those plebeian elements which formed the human material of his own social caste, and who regarded Ekaterina with both sympathy and snobbery, for the sheer harshness of her situation marked her out as someone particularly downtrodden and markedly low in the social hierarchy. Trotsky argues that a similar set of social gradations were reproduced in the schoolyard “where the children of priests, petty gentry and officials more than once made it quite clear to Joseph that he was their social inferior”.7 In every sense, then, the young boy was marked by poverty and grimy hardship; from the pockmarks which cratered across his face from a bout of smallpox, to the taunts of the other boys, and the vicious beatings his own father delivered. Perhaps the only person in his life to show him a little kindness was his mother, but at the same time she became an emblem of his own wretchedness; brow-beaten, hobbled, religiously servile, she was the living reminder of his own lowly status, his degradation, his helplessness. It is perhaps not too much of a stretch to suggest the one person toward whom he should have assumed, if not love, then deep fondness and gratitude, was also the same person whose presence humiliated and repelled him. And it is in this light, that as an established tyrant, Stalin’s later behaviour to his mother is rendered a touch more comprehensible. As Roy Medvedev notes, in an exhaustive study, during “the twenties many Georgian leaders who visited Stalin were surprised and shocked by his rude and cynical comments about his mother”.8

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4 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE A childhood friend recalls how Joseph shed his own religious beliefs at age thirteen, having imbibed Darwin. While this is almost certainly an account which has been filtered through the sources of the official Soviet orthodoxy, engineered so as to exhibit an exaggerated level of precociousness on the part of the small boy – (in the cloistered environment of a small orthodox village school of the late-nineteenth century the chances of them stocking Darwin would be notably slim) – nevertheless all the conditions were in place to make Joseph’s break with religion a caustic and decisive one. It wouldn’t have represented an intellectual break so much as an emotional one: an instinctive sense of the way in which religion could provide the kind of benumbing palliative which would render one softer, more pliant, and more accepting of the slights and insults which life inflicted. It was a truth which had been exhibited in practise by the cringing, bowed example of his mother. Religion, then, aided and abetted powerlessness. From an early age, courtesy of the vicious class dimensions of the society in which he lived, the remorseless mockery of the other children, and the savage violence of his own father – Stalin understood exactly what it meant to be powerless. And it was a feeling he had no intention of indulging. And so by the time he entered the seminary school in Tiflis, any religious sensibility had already been worn away by Joseph’s own social experience; if he wasn’t yet an atheist at a conscious, intellectual level, he was already inured to the presence of God at a more protean point of being. In her book Only One Year, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva provides stark confirmation of this: “My father never had any feeling for a religion”.9 For the brooding swarthy boy on the cusp of pubescence – a boy whose hard experience had already rendered him faithless – one might imagine that a seminary school was far from the ideal destination. What effects did the austere discipline, the intolerance and heavy-handedness of religious dogma, the never-ending recitation of holy mantra have on a boy who at his most fundamental depths already suspected that the whole heavenly project was, in fact, rather more of an earthly racket designed to enforce humiliation and subservience? Again, Alliluyeva’s testimony provides compelling and essential reading: In a young man who had never for a moment believed in the Spirit, in God, endless prayers and enforced religious training could have brought only contrary results: extreme scepticism of everything ‘heavenly’, of everything ‘sublime’. The result was total materialism, the cynical realism of an ‘earthly,’ ‘sober,’ practical, and low view of life.10

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 5 Joseph’s atheism, then, hardened into a stark materialism, and alongside this, Joseph had brought to the seminary his feelings of disempowerment and a smouldering sense of resentment and hatred. Joseph’s experience of the clerical guardians did little to dissuade these elements of his personality; rather the Monseigneurs who used their piety to cloak more brutal and base forms of behaviour provided Joseph with the “close acquaintance with hypocrisy, bigotry, twofacedness, typical of a goodly number of the clergy, who only believe externally – in other words, do not believe at all”.11 And so, to his burgeoning enmity was added the conviction that outward appearances inevitably harbour malicious, malevolent cores. At the same time, such knowledge was welded to the image of a bureaucracy in which hypocritical and ruthlessness manoeuvring was the only way to avoid being crushed by the machinations of others. Ioseb Iremashvili who attended the theological school in Tiflis alongside Stalin, and would go on to provide one of the first biographies of the dictator, draws attention to a gloomy atmosphere in which “youthful joy almost never asserted itself”.12 The suppression of the natural exuberance and the chaotic emotion of teenage life was also complemented by a stifling and snuffing out of intellectual curiosity, because “forbidden to us by the church authorities because we were future priests . . . [t]he works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and other classics”.13 Nevertheless this invoked a certain illicit and clandestine hunger on the part of the student body for the forbidden materials, a desire which would help feed more radical inclinations. For the Georgian students there was a particularly severe repression both of their national language and its literature by the school authorities who were Russifying in their outlook, bound up as they were with the Eastern Orthodoxy and the Tsarist power which, from its wintery, fortified palaces in the Russian mainland, gazed out across its subaltern territories with austere and perpetual watchfulness. And so, even from within the cloistered, narrow environs of the grey seminary school building, the looming presence of the Russian Empire cast its vast shadow. In Joseph’s mind the boys who suffered under the repressions of the stiff, cruel priests began to attain a parity with Georgia itself – a small, intransigent country compressed under the boot of its Russian overlord. Consequently, Joseph’s taste in literature took on a very particular hue; he devoured the work of novelist Alexander Kazbegi who wrote in a romantic vein about the resistance to Russia on the part of the Georgian population, and Stalin was even to adopt as a pseudonym “Koba” – the name of one of the author’s fictional characters who embodied Georgian knightly ideals in the nineteenth century and was devoted to resistance and, above all . . . re-

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6 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE venge. Though the pseudonym was preserved, its literary origins were not; when “Koba” began to consolidate his power, all mention of his early flirtation with Georgian nationalism was erased. But to return to Joseph, now on the cusp of political activism, and about to partake with a handful of other students in a secret meeting arranged from within the walls of the seminary. In this young man already we can discern the lineaments of his future political persona; we can perceive the interminable, lifeless, grinding materialism – the “total materialism” – which condensed in theoretical form the cynical awareness that everything in life was, ultimately, shaped and swayed by the physical forces and pressures it was subject to: from the movement of an atom in the void to the impact of a Monseigneur’s cane against the soft, smarting flesh of a quivering student; from the blows of a father rained down on his son, to the ebb and flow of the historical process which required just the right amount of levering by a ruthless, relentless external power. Coupled with this conviction was the sense that people knew this about the world and yet they were inherently duplicitous; they chose to prettify its dead, grinding motions, its base ends, its spiritless, acquisitive tenor. To obfuscate the fact that each and every one of us is merely one of its particles, and hence we carry within ourselves the world’s underlying baseness and blind impulses, its nihilistic sense of nothingness. If one of the tragic implications of the Platonic legacy on Christianity was the way in which the material was severed from the spiritual – the manner in which we yearn to recapture the more ideal state from the purview of a “fallen” existence – then in Stalin we encounter the suitably more horrific premise; that is to say, he was oblivious to the ideal from the outset in much the same way a person born blind would lack any awareness of colour. Curiosity toward the intellectual and spiritual life of the species was already in him a dim, unformed impulse which had been stunted at birth, and the only faith in ideas he was ever able to glean, was from the warping and corrupting of them into the forms which better facilitated the endeavour to secure his own pre-eminence and will. In the context of the individual life, this made of him a particularly dull, narrow though crafty individual, but raised up to historical prominence by a series of intersecting and fateful social processes, such “dullness” was amplified into a murderousness whose nihilistic scope was almost without limit. All of which awaits on the horizon. For now we are left with a young man, Joseph, who has just entered into the earliest phase of his political activity; alongside some of the other seminary students, he begins to attend secret meetings and appears to have either contributed to or founded an embryonic radical journal carrying clandestine rev-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 7 olutionary propaganda. Such haphazard, hastily scribbled political jotting seems to have involved a crude amalgamation of some of the precepts of revolutionary Marxism with the burgeoning sense of romanticism which the frustrated, fantastical folk tales of Georgian nationalism carried. That Joseph and his fellow Georgians in particular should have drifted toward radical politics is by no means surprising. As Georgians, they formed the poorest caste within the seminary hierarchy; as the sons of petty traders, artisans, more well-to-do peasants – they had a sense of their inferiority foisted upon them from the get-go. In addition, there were no universities at this time; hotbeds of political activity naturally developed in the few environs which could house them, the religious and scholastic centres which were simultaneously the loci of the most backward and reactionary ideological elements and which tethered the culture to its medieval past. This rather anachronistic combination of revolution and reaction helped to cultivate a particularly vulgar and brutal materialism on the part of Joseph; but welded to this was the way in which the religious authorities policed the souls of the boys through a network of informants and lackeys. The Georgian elements often turned to an elementary form of Marxism as something which would alleviate the frustrations of national oppression, but these radical sensibilities were also combined with a coeval appreciation of the secretive, coercive vigilance of the religious masters themselves who infiltrated the ranks of the boys in order to either procure or compel information. In Stalin, then, an intransigent, faithless materialism was first translated into the ideological contours of a Marxism which preserved the flavour of a religious scholasticism albeit one voided of God; such a political education was then crowned by a first-hand masterclass delivered by the authorities on the mechanics of repression. How to exert pressure when required or how to maintain a secretive and implacable demeanour, to cajole and flatter, while seeking to undermine – all in the pursuit of a brutal naked control. Iremashvili describes how Stalin brought these qualities to the political circles he first engaged with. Stalin was able to submit others to himself in and through “crude anger and his vicious mockery. His partisans surrendered to his leadership, because they felt secure under his power . . . types as were quite poor spiritually and inclined to fights could become his friends”.14 The dull grinding materialism at work then in a young man who “saw everywhere and in everything only the negative, the bad side, and had no faith at all in men’s idealistic motives or attributes”,15 who understood, therefore, that the frippery of theory had to be forever beholden to the underlying practical aim – the need to bend the person or the situation into the shape which was

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8 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE most favourable to him: “His concern was not with finding and determining the truth . . . Victory and triumph were much more precious to him.”16 Very quickly two factions emerged; those who were able to tolerate Joseph’s dark temperament and totalitarian sensibilities, and those who could not. Inevitably the group endured an irreconcilable rupture swiftly followed by a permanent spilt. By the turn of the century Stalin had left the seminary school, and by now Georgia itself had finally received some impetus to the development of its belated industrial complex. The oil works which had begun to swell across the Transcaucasian region more broadly required the development of a nexus of railway lines, and all the smaller enterprises which would aid and facilitate extraction and distribution in the oil rich territories. The number of industrial proletarians in Tiflis grew into many thousands, and with it, a coextensive movement of strikes, demonstrations and public protests which expressed the immanent tension between the new forms of social life and the ossified, archaic structures of the feudal regime which still hung across the capital like a shadow. Because of the industrial basis of the political waves which were washing over the region, Marxism began to gain in prestige, for the demands of the struggle were no longer directed only toward “equality” before God or equality before the law, but economic equality too. The struggle took on a broader dimension; the possibility which Marx had foreseen whereby a modern working class could fundamentally challenge private property by appropriating at the level of production its own alienated labour power. Cultivating a radically new form of social organization which was not just democratic in terms of political rights but also at the more fundamental level of the collective control of society’s economic organs. At which point we recover an observation which is crucial. In 1900 a May Day demonstration in Tiflis attracted a crowd of many hundreds of workers and the resultant clash with the authorities and a repression on the part of Cossack troops saw a spate of injuries and arrests. Iremashvili noted “not without alarm”17 that for his clandestine compatriot “Koba” it was the upswing in bloody violence which produced a strong and hearty impression; for it was this, Stalin felt, which would most swiftly lead to the vanquishing of the enemy. This observation should be read in conjunction with another event which took place at around the same time. In 1901 a dispute had broken out in the Tiflis underground organization of which Stalin was a member; a dispute which arose over whether to have in its Central Committee elected representatives from the workers. T. Arkomed describes the heat of the discussion and in particular a younger comrade who offered the following contribution: “Here they flatter the workers; I ask

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 9 you, are there among you even one or two workers fit for the committee? Tell the truth, placing your hand on your heart!”18 In due course, the identity of the speaker was revealed as none other than Joseph Stalin. The two incidents provide a telling contrast. On the one hand the young Stalin was impressed by the physical and organizational capacity of the class to effectively assert itself against the status quo through violent means. But at the same time he was offended by the notion that workers should be included in the political decision-making process. He had absorbed from Marxism the notion that the working class, by virtue of its structure, number and physical capacity, has the ability to make a fundamental dent in the pre-existing social order; but had abstracted this mechanical-structural understanding from the essence of Marxism itself; that is, the theorization of the proletariat as a historical process which has the ability to emancipate society in and through its self-conscious, revolutionary activity. According to classical Marxism, historical development had divested the individual peasant producer of control of his own means of production (the single plot of land, for instance) but in so doing, had reconstituted the productive process in a socialized form; the individual producers were now gathered in vast hubs (factories, offices, shopping malls, call centres, and so on) on a collective basis which often numbered into the thousands. Such a historical transformation offered the possibility for these concentrations of wage labour to take control of the processes of production and distribution at a coordinated and collective level which would not have previously been feasible. The proletariat, according to Marx, could only effect the struggle for human emancipation when it became conscious of the revolutionary necessity bequeathed to it by such a historical development, by the processes of “primitive accumulation” which put an end to the producer in isolation and reconstituted his or her activity as wage labour in a collective form. This historical shift allowed for the potentiality, at least, of organizing the means of production rationally and in accordance with the will, selfdetermination and needs of the producers themselves, namely the vast majority in any given society. To say the same, classical Marxism is democratic to its core; its revolutionary edge is premised on the historically constituted possibility of the collective class taking power in and through its own act and activity – or as Lenin memorably phrased it: “Every cook has to learn how to govern the state.”19 But Stalin was tone deaf to the historical current of emancipation and human freedom which underwrites the Marxist conception; he was aware only of the class in terms of its empirical immediacies, by way of an instrumentalist conception whereby a given group of peo-

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10 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE ple could be organized in just such a way, a human tool which could be shaped and refined and better applied to the job of nullifying the class enemy. Again we encounter this, perhaps the most abiding theme of his being, an inert materialism which remains deadened to historical movement, and which meant – when history threw up vast and vibrant movements and motions that rippled through the political activity of the masses, enlivening them, bringing them onto the historical stage as protagonists – Stalin would always remain instinctively baffled, and even repelled – (“are there among you even one or two workers fit for the committee?”) – by the events which transpired. In such a context he would retreat into the shadows, taking shelter in an organizational bunker, greasing the bureaucratic machine, making contacts which might prove useful, and establishing a stranglehold on the mechanisms of committee and party control. And there he would wait, watchful and quiet, from behind the scenes, suspicious of the upswing in mass activity, biding his time to see what it would yield, and trying to stealthily strengthen his situation come what may. The beginning of the twentieth century was signalized by mass political unrest and a series of burgeoning upheavals, and the most significant of these was the 1905 revolution in Russia, which saw the creation of the “soviets” – organs of workers control which sprang up in factories and workplaces across the cities nationwide, and which represented, in embryo, a more radical form of democratic power. The biographer Jean Jacques Marie forensically characterizes Stalin’s relationship with this revolutionary uprising: When the [1905] revolution began Koba was only a regional activist. The revolution did not change anything for him. It did not ‘discover’ him, as it did Trotsky at the other end of the empire. It passed over him like a shadow. Stalin always was a committee man, who shone in limited groups of leaders . . . Koba did not possess any qualities enabling him to lead the mass movement, neither oratorical talent, liveliness of thought, breadth of vision, a feeling for what the next day would bring, nor enthusiasm. Last of all, in the heat and ardor of a time when in a single moment the masses transcended their everyday existence to make history Stalin, cold and secretive by nature, lost his footing. Quite capable of manoeuvring behind the scenes, he was pushed into the background in 1905, when the focus of politics was in the streets . . . Koba and the revolution did not know each other.20

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 11 Leon Trotsky expresses a similar thought, writing: he regarded it [the soviet] as an alien political machine which directly represented the masses. The Soviet did not submit to the discipline of the Committee, requiring more complex and more resilient methods of leadership. In a certain sense, the Soviet was a mighty competitor of the Committee. So, during the Revolution of 1905, Koba stood with his back to the Soviets. Essentially, he stood with his back to the Revolution itself, as though taking umbrage at it.21 Eventually, however, came a period of downturn. The Tsarist autocracy offered up the Duma as a way to conciliate the liberal bourgeoisie and left-leaning intelligentsia – then it began to undermine the institution, gradually relieving it of what little political power it had, before arresting many of its members and rendering it little more than a symbolic, shambolic shell. The revolutionary tide started to ebb away. Trade unions were repressed, the press was muzzled, and a sense of fear and dislocation settled upon the radical forces like a noxious fog. In its cloying atmosphere, writers, intellectuals and artists more and more began to abandon coherent political themes in favour of the hazy, narcotized aromas of mysticism and romanticism. The God building tendencies of the Bogdanov/Lunarchasky faction which came to the fore in the second part of this decade can be seen as the translation of this mood into the politics of Bolshevism; a danger Lenin foresaw and tried desperately to wake the party from. At the philosophical level, Bolshevism had started to succumb to a mood of gentle fatalism; the softer more soporific notion that the revolutionary achievement would be culminated in a quasi-religious consciousness by which people grew gradually more aware of the organic, transcendental unity of their collective nature. As the social struggles of the proletariat and the peasantry began to ebb and dwindle, the theoretical appreciation of class conflict was muffled by the soft cotton wool of a more dreamy and indistinct ideology, the fantastical ideal of the “God building” project had been born. But what manifested in the philosophical realm as a transcendental idealism couched in the pacifying tone of the religious idiom was, in the arena of political activism, transformed by the historical dialectic into a fundamentally more active and explosive proposition. Here the slowing of the political momentum of the masses toward a sluggish crawl came to create a sudden and violent intensification in the activity of the “politicos” who increasingly felt themselves abstracted from the broader movement, and aimed to compensate by

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12 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE more localized individual and sporadic acts of terror. There developed a stronger leaning toward criminal forms of activity in order to secure political ends, such as the robbing of banks or money trains or the bombing of official buildings. The number of assassinations carried out against hated officials in this period rapidly multiplied. As the methods of activity became increasingly desperate and erratic, the number of spies and agent provocateurs who were able to insinuate themselves into the party rose. One secret agent even became the head of the Moscow organization. And so, the isolation of the party structure from the broader historical currents was compounded by a need to emphasize the centralist aspect of party affairs – in order to lock down the organization and better secure it against infiltration. Purges taking place within the party were complimented by the mass arrests effected by the forces of the state on the outside. Soon, a claustrophobic atmosphere of thick suspicion was cultivated against the backdrop of the type of political action which increasingly began to resemble vicious and self-serving criminal enterprise. Suffice to say if the revolutionary waves of 1905 had washed over Stalin – had almost erased his presence from the political scene, when the radical tide slipped into recession, his personality traits grew visible again. In a period of time when the historical emphasis had passed from the mass movement to the political organization in isolation and the parallel need to shore up its structures and fortify its organizational principles, Stalin’s patience, determination, ruthlessness, secrecy – his conniving nature and his need and aptitude to devote himself to the bureaucracy – were useful qualities. In the time when the focus of politics fell on centralization and the bureaucracy itself, Stalin’s figure gained in stature and the shadow it cast began to lengthen inevitably, falling across the various tiers and levels of the party hierarchy – and leaving in its wake a series of petty resentments, squabbles, lingering grudges, aggressively won loyalties and surreptitiously gleaned favours. At the same time as Stalin worked the party structures from the inside, he was also perfectly attuned to the nature of the semi-criminal activities which were taking place, externally and often autonomously, on the part of lumpen elements who remained on the fringes, somewhere on the fault lines where clandestine and radical forms of subversion met with the criminal underworld. Stalin had always been at ease in the company of such people; brutal, pragmatic, ruthless, selfinterested, they would rarely demonstrate the kind of lively curiosity and wonder before the historical process and its myriad forms; they would never by a grasp of theory cause him – smouldering, inadequate and resentful – to slip back into the shadows. Instead their motives were nearly always crude, base and legible, and Stalin saw in them the

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 13 clarity of a mirror which refracted back his own essential nature. This was something which had become clear in Stalin’s prison days. Trotsky writes: As a general rule, political prisoners tried not to associate with criminals. Koba, on the contrary, ‘could be always seen in the society of ruffians, blackmailers, and among the mauserist robbers’. He felt himself on an equal footing with them . . . And he looked upon politics as a ‘business’ which one should know how to ‘do’ and how to ‘outdo.’ . . . The company of people with higher intellectual interests than his own was irksome to Koba. In the Politburo of Lenin’s day he almost always sat silent, morose and irritable. Conversely, he became more sociable, more even tempered and more human among people of primitive mentality who were unrestrained by any predilection for brains.22 Theory, philosophy, history, economics, the writings of Marx – would always leave him dry, but the frenetic narrative of kidnapping, extortion and assassination was one he assimilated organically, was master over; his soul still very much coloured by its Georgian legacy, a savage medievalism which had been carried by centuries of lethal mountain warfare, and the blood feuds which were passed down across generations. Nikolai Bukharin, one of Stalin’s most visible and tragic victims, had more cause than most to liken the party boss to Genghis Khan, a comparison which seems apt because of the primitiveness and brutality of his methods, his lust for power, and the ruthless means by which he was able to seek its appropriation. But while the comparison is indeed compelling, it is also in danger of obfuscating the more modern elements in Stalin’s political makeup. Genghis Khan was a warrior general, who was capable of inspiring his troops on the battlefield, someone who would lead by example. While it is certainly true that in Stalin we can detect very strongly the rooted medievalism of the vendetta and the blood feud, at the same time, his ability to make himself essential to the bureaucracy by a relentless and slavish attention to the mechanics of routine and micromanagement – bespeak of a far more modern social “type”. And it is this rather lopsided combination which throws into relief the truly horrific dimensions of his personality. In Stalin, the medieval, backward tendency to cast political relations purely in terms of personal, almost arbitrary antagonisms between warring factions, was at the same time abstracted from some of the more chivalrous or communal aspects of feudal or nomadic life more generally.

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14 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE For despite his thirst for revenge, Stalin wholly lacked the sensibilities of honour and clan allegiance which would bind the warlord to his army. Such instincts had in Stalin been thoroughly erased in favour of the modern bureaucrat; the impersonal, rationalistic set of mechanics in which the only thing binding one individual to the next was his place in the formal hierarchy. In the case of Genghis Khan we read how he was opposed by his blood brother Jamukha who led a coalition of hostile tribes against him. When his rival was finally defeated Genghis offered to spare his life, an offer which was rejected when Jamukha famously insisted there could only ever be one sun in the sky. And when Genghis eventually carried out the execution of his erstwhile comrade he had Jamukha buried with a golden belt Genghis had given him some years before as a melancholy remembrance of their brotherhood. It is utterly impossible to imagine Stalin acting in such a way. Rather it seems that Stalin took a particularly malicious and sadistic delight in persecuting and executing the people with whom he had once formed allegiances; as they came to him in order to remonstrate, to plead for their lives, he would assure them in a perverse, soothing fashion that they were in no danger, even as the executioner’s blade hovered above their heads. Stalin could behave in such a way, a way which brought to the fore his almost psychotic malevolence, precisely because he was a creature who was given over to the bureaucracy, and, at some point in his life, the only relation to people he could assume was a purely bureaucratic one; that is, they increasingly took on the appearance of cogs in the machine which could either facilitate his rise or hinder it. This impersonal, dead, materialistic awareness of process and routine bequeathed to him by modernity was at the same time galvanized by an almost infinite level of individual spite and enmity; it is this fusion, which more than anything else, exemplifies the moments of the primitive and the modern at work within the personality of the Soviet dictator. In the period following the 1905 revolution Stalin enjoyed several successes. Perhaps most famous was the robbery of the Tiflis state bank whose booty exceeded three hundred thousand rubles. But despite many of the later propaganda reports to the contrary, Stalin did not actively participate in the heist. As Medvedev states, the robbery itself was “carried out by a group of fighters . . . Stalin and Leonid Krasin organized and planned the operation”.23 Trotsky argues this was true of Stalin in his activities more generally: “Others did the fighting; Stalin supervised them from afar.”24 Again, one receives the impression of the deftness and skill with which Stalin was able to insinuate himself into the bureaucracy; it allowed him to assert control without being placed in the firing line – it provided, so to say, both the

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 15 cloak and the dagger. Again it is clear just how much a creature of the bureaucracy Stalin was; how tightly his fate was bound up with its. When in 1917, the masses began to move, when the revolutionary momentum began to build in and through the mass movement, Stalin reverted to type in two important ways. First, as one of the first leading Bolsheviks to enter the capital city, he attempted to impose his presence and will by sponsoring an editorial coup at the party newspaper Pravda – a paper which had recently been made legal in the aftermath of the Tsar’s overthrow. The action would place Lev Kamenev, Stalin and several others in control of the organ. Second, the new line which Kamenev and Stalin advocated once they had won control of Pravda was both timid and reactionary in the extreme. They argued for conciliation with the Mensheviks and recommended that Russian soldiers should continue to fight in the First World War in order to hold the front. Both positions spoke of an essentially bureaucratic mentality. Shaken by the suddenness and violence of events, it was as though the members of the board were seeking to slow historical time, to establish some solid and unchanging frame of reference, some stable ground beneath their feet. This was the moment in which the organizational form attempts to more fully assert itself, digging in, but in so doing it was instantaneously left behind by the whirlwind rush of events; its position rendered brittle, ossified and lifeless – like a skeleton suddenly uncovered by a blast of desert wind. Alexander Shlyapnikov recalls the reaction to the new Pravda stance among workers on the ground level: When this issue of Pravda reached the factories it produced utter dismay among our party members and sympathizers and sarcastic satisfaction among our opponents . . . Why has our newspaper renounced the Bolshevik line and taken the path of defensism? . . . The indignation in local districts was enormous, and when the workers found out that Pravda had been seized by three former editors of Pravda arriving from Siberia, they demanded their expulsion from the party.25 Stalin’s capacity to theorize was never much more than a sham. The few things of merit he had written by 1917 were either cribbed from Lenin or written under the latter’s guidance. Like a magpie he would snatch the snippets of theory which he could better fashion into some kind of fortification. And yet, as the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel so masterfully noted, eclecticism can so easily pass into its opposite; beneath the clutter and seeming randomness of a set of events can often

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16 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE be discerned the outline of a more fundamental pattern. In the immediate aftermath of February Stalin wrote an article “On the Abolition of National Limitations”. Trotsky cites this piece in both bemusement and disgust: ‘To the extent that the Russian Revolution has won’, the article concluded, ‘it has already created actual conditions [for national freedom] by having overthrown the sovereignty of feudalism and serfdom . . . ’ As far as our author was concerned the Revolution was already completely a thing of the past . . . Yet still untouched was not only capitalistic exploitation, the overthrow of which had not even occurred to Stalin, but even the ownership of land by the landed gentry, something he himself had designated as the basis of national oppression. The government was run by Russian landlords like Rodzianko and Prince Lvov. Such was – hard though it is to believe even now! – Stalin’s historical and political slant a mere ten days before Lenin was to proclaim the course toward socialist revolution . . . To the insurgent masses the meaning of the Revolution was in the abolition of the old forms of property, the very forms the Provisional Government was defending. Stalin presented the irreconcilable class-struggle which, defying all the efforts of the Compromisers, was straining day after day to turn into civil war, as a mere division of labor between two political machines.26 Despite the fact that Stalin would cobble together his theoretical fundaments from whatever practical considerations impelled him in the moment, nevertheless two abiding themes seem to crystallize: an instinctive but overwhelming distrust – not only for the masses but for the process of revolution itself. Also the sense that the meaning and direction of political struggle should be located not in the mass movement but in the mechanisms of bureaucratic organization – “Stalin presented the irreconcilable class struggle . . . as a mere division of labor between two political machines”. Lenin certainly understood the importance of centralization and party organization, but with him it was always a means to an end, an instrument by which the power and the momentum of the working class movement could be transmitted: the moment of centralism was the necessary corollary to one of democracy. For Stalin, however, the organization was not a means but an end in itself; for him it was the class which becomes instrumentalized, converted from a historical process to a purely empirical entity which would better manifest the will of the organization. Lenin’s return to Petrograd in April 1917 was so vital for this reason, for he carried

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 17 within himself a strong sense of the industrial working class and the organic, democratic power of its organs – the soviets. By that point, in and through the sweep of the historical process Lenin had already begun to discern the forms and the outline of a profoundly new and wonderful social vista, and as events accelerated, all his focus was directed toward the revolution which might facilitate it. The possibility of a broader human freedom – which the dialectics of the historical process, the conflicting social tendencies of the present, and the way in which mass struggle might coalesce into the forms of a new social order – was one which Lenin was particularly attuned to, in much the same way that a meteorologist might detect in a change in the pressure of the air an indication of the oncoming storm. Lenin’s conception of the immanence of the proletarian revolution was in one way intuitive and organicist and yet it was also fully rational, grounded on the Marxist methodology which was the first to conceptualize man’s nature as a historical essence unfolded by class contradiction. It was these sensibilities and historical conceptions which Lenin brought to bear on the living Russian reality, and which came to underpin the series of directives in his famous The April Theses and the battle cry of “All Power to the Soviets” which reverberated through it. For Stalin, however, the possibility of discerning a higher emancipation from within the social forms of the present simply didn’t exist. He was as baffled by the direction which Lenin had set out in The April Theses, as he was distrusting of the upswing in revolutionary activity which had energized the factories and the workplaces, and which rippled across the countryside; everywhere that sense of something new, something ripening, from within the collapse of the old. There is something almost anachronistic about a self-styled revolutionary whose constitution remained so deadened and indifferent to the breeze of liberation and mass activity which was passing across the historical panorama in this period. From deep within the inert darkness of his personality, perhaps, Stalin was aware of his inadequacy, his lifelessness, the dearth of joy and love, the absence of curiosity and wonder, all the things which he lacked and which should have been an organic part of the project of human emancipation. Perhaps the sheer venom and murderous hatred which he would later come to evince so terribly had something to do with this, a revenge of a type – on the people around him, on the world itself – for the sluggish nature of his thinking, his narrowness, his dull, deadened limitation. In any event, on his return in April Lenin was able to infect others, to awaken in them a sense of the power and the fecundity of the developing working class movement, and to patiently and carefully translate the political mood into a powerful theoretical conception which

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18 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE provided a call to arms. With his arguments and speeches, he helped arouse the cadres from any tendency to sink back into compromise with the Provisional Government and a concomitant retreat into bureaucratic routine. Lenin’s combination of theoretical prowess and his attunement to the mood of the masses helped to bring the Bolsheviks back onto the streets, helped them to breathe in the radically democratic atmosphere of vast swathes of people who were now in the process of changing the world. Here the founder of Bolshevism appeared at the historical level as the antithesis of the man who would eventually usurp the party leadership. Stalin must have looked at Lenin and sensed at the protean core of his being that the other man’s methods and outlook were the opposite of his own and represented perhaps even an existential threat. Lenin, for his part, set about patiently dismantling the bureaucratic retreat which Stalin had so meticulously engineered. About the conference in April, Trotsky writes of Lenin: “He came into the conference like an inspector entering a classroom. After having heard several sentences, he turned his back on the teacher and with a wet sponge wiped off the blackboard all of his futile scrawls.”27 Lenin, it is true, did not single out Stalin by name, though any perusal of the party notes of the time clearly suggests toward whom Lenin’s criticism was aimed. Lenin, on the whole, was conscientious of the feelings of party members, and went out of his way not to hurt them, for he was aware – with a dispassionate, almost utilitarian sense of responsibility – that political decisions were best taken when they were raised above the issues of individual personalities and private antagonisms: “In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.”28 Again one cannot but be struck by the vividness of the contrast between Lenin and Stalin, perhaps because their personalities were also conduits for deeper historical tendencies. If Lenin in some sense mediated and helped consciously express the political spirit of the burgeoning proletariat, and the mood and movement of the Russian masses more broadly, Stalin was a cipher for the instinctive, creeping roots of the bureaucracy as they sought to nestle and gain purchase, to sink themselves in the living reality, to lay claim to it, and to petrify it. This sense of organic incompatibility in the political animas of both men meant that their eventual conflict had been grafted into the material of their relationship from the outset, and it was to be a conflict which would eventually assume the most terrible and tragic proportions. In the build up to the October Revolution Lenin’s role was particularly important. Not only was he, along with Trotsky, the only Bolshevik to have independently theorized the character and dynamic of

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 19 the immanent revolution as a proletarian one, but he was able to fortify the party during the downturn and repression which followed the protests of the July days, and begin to prepare it tactically for the renewed revolutionary onslaught which would lead to October. It is difficult to adequately represent the feeling of optimism and empowerment which culminated in October but John Reed provides some indication of it when he describes sweeping into Petrograd in the revolutionary aftermath, when the leaders of the Provisional Government had fled, and the workers were now in control of the capital: Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain. The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture – ‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!’29 It was not to last. The flashpoint of revolution also succeeded in fusing the forces of reaction – the coterie of Tsarist officials and officers, the aristocratic landowners, the liberal bourgeoisie, much of the wealthier layers of the peasantry – into a single semblance which began to attain the definition of a storm cloud hovering on the edge of the horizon. To its spectre rallied the armies of the capitalist West whose governments sensed the existential threat to their own social systems the workers’ revolution posed by its very nature. The nation was then plunged into three years of foreign invasion and civil war, as the reactionary forces attempted to scotch the revolutionary ones, and the revolutionary power tried desperately to preserve its fledgling state. At the start of the civil war in 1918, Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities and he was also placed in command of armies on several fronts during the period which followed. His activities, both in the role of commissar and military leader, display many of the personal and political traits which, by this point, had come so clearly to demark him. His tactics were, as ever, resolutely cautious and negative in the first instance; he sought to fortify his position, to machinate from behind the scenes in order to secure positions of authority for his supporters, and he aimed to sow seeds of dissension in order to undermine those he saw as threats – particularly the brilliant revolutionary theorist and creator of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky. As one of the leaders of a vast territory which stretched from the cold, salty waters of the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic North West to

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20 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE the distant and exotic borders of Manchuria almost half a world away in the East, Stalin already had a dizzying, almost narcotic sense of the type of power which – perhaps only a few years before – would have been almost wholly unimaginable. They must have seemed so long ago now – those days spent in the draconian darkness of the seminary school; the boy forced to endure the discipline and petty humiliations inflicted upon him by the priests, before he retreated back into the shadows, smouldering, dreaming of the romantic heroes cum guerrilla fighters of the early Georgian resistance. But Stalin had become one of the heads of the Russian state, and if the downtrodden figure of nationalist resistance embodied in a literary archetype like “Koba” had once provided him with youthful succour, by now he had shed any such sensibility as easily and naturally as a snake sheds its skin. His self-image was reconfigured in line with his increasing power, and it was the mighty, medieval Georgian princes of old whose ghostly presence he could feel stirring within his soul.30 As a Commissar of Nationalities this sense of lofty imperiousness was very quickly combined with Stalin’s brutal materialism, the crude but unyielding application of force to any situation which he wished to master. In 1918, the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets took the decision to try to establish a Soviet government in the Ukraine. It is worth taking a moment to contrast the responses of Lenin and Stalin to this event. Lenin at once applauded the move, sending the congress a telegram of support which told of an “enthusiastic sympathy for the heroic struggle of the laboring and exploited masses of the Ukraine, who are at present one of the advanced detachments of the world socialist revolution”.31 Stalin, on the other hand, issued the following missive: “Enough playing at a government and a republic. It’s time to stop that game; enough is enough.”32 The casual, cavalier disrespect for what was a burgeoning movement fighting for its life at the hands of a German occupation and a pro-monarchist government – was something which provoked both astonishment and outrage on the part of the Ukrainian comrades. But more importantly still it was out of keeping with the Bolshevik policy at the time – a policy which Lenin in particular had fought for – specifically the right of self-determination for nations. This was a policy which had grown out of a more general historical and ontological sensibility, one which was part and parcel of the Marxism which the originators of Bolshevism drew upon. For the fundamental dictum of the Marxist project had always been “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”;33 or to paint the same thing in broader strokes –

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 21 freedom is not something which can be imposed from the outside, but is part and parcel of the immanent struggle of the entity which seeks to bring it about. Such an ontological fact was evinced in concrete historical terms by the revolutions of 1905 and again in 1917, when through political struggle, the workers had formed committees or “soviets” which could act as the means of organizing en masse; the entities through which the political and democratic power of the class could flow at the grassroots level. The possibility of a new form of social organization, therefore, arose by way of the organs which the class developed out of political combat. And this was why it was so important that the political struggles of the working classes and their leadership in other nations not be subordinated to the external directives of the Bolshevik Party in Russia. When and where such struggles arose they had to be given the right to determine their own independent government; the revolutionary form of working class power must achieve fruition and establish the relevant forms of political organization within its own national framework. Not to say that the Bolsheviks wouldn’t provide support and direction and defence. But Lenin and the more progressive Bolsheviks understood, in the last analysis, that what would bind the international working class movement to the Bolshevik Revolution, was not the dictates which were imposed by the power in Moscow from afar; but the universal sense that they were all part and parcel of the unfolding of a more progressive form of human freedom. Such sensibilities were wholly alien to Stalin. An organic sense of internationalism and revolutionary solidarity in light of the immanent unfolding of social and political struggles – were sensibilities with a strong dialectical flavour; in Stalin any such impulses were aborted in favour of a rigid formalism which was indifferent to the living sociopolitical content and sought to impose its own structures come what may. The difference in political approaches between Stalin and Lenin signified the conflict of deeper social tendencies; the antagonism between a developing bureaucracy and the social basis of the Bolshevik Party – the living proletarian movement and its international echoes. The developing contradiction at the heart of the party was noted by Andrea Graziosi in the following terms: This paradox is embodied by the two Bolshevisms of late 1917 – early 1918. On the one side there was the Bolshevism of the peasants and the soldiers, often of the peasant soldiers, but also of the peasant workers and many urban workers . . . The second Bolshevism was the ‘true’ one, i.e. that of a small political elite composed of a few intellectuals and a strong nucleus of pratiki

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22 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE – as Stalin later said with pride – of popular origin and with little or no formal education.34 There is a lot which is off-key in Graziosi’s perspective, particularly the way he conceives a generic essence of Bolshevism which is inherently authoritarian, arguing as he does, that “contempt for democracy, these ideas were indeed present in the Bolshevik original ideological baggage”.35 But though he is antagonistic to Bolshevism from the point of its inception, Graziosi understands that the conflict which was exacerbated by the civil war wasn’t simply to be articulated in terms of ideals – but should also be understood according to a more acute polarization between opposing social-historical tendencies, between the “two Bolshevisms” which represented respectively, a bureaucratic cadre and the will and direction of the revolutionary mass movement. By 1918 Stalin was the highest expression of the former. His personal disdain for the mass movement, the burgeoning sense of nationalism, and the Congress of Soviets – the elements which had developed out of the Ukrainian revolutionary situation – was soon translated into a dull pressure applied from above with a characteristic combination of brute force and bureaucratic manoeuvring. In an act which would sinisterly adumbrate future horror, Stalin surreptitiously backed his lackeys Piatakov and Rakovsky – as a campaign of forced collectivization was enacted against the Ukrainian peasantry alongside a suppression of nationalist stirrings which was expressed in terms of a cultural discrimination against the Ukrainian language. The results of such policy were an unmitigated disaster. A Soviet government was successful in establishing itself for a short period in the Ukraine, but it was fatally undermined by its links with those who had forcibly converted it into a proxy of Russian power – the same power which had, through Stalin, prosecuted a brutal, enforced collectivization and sent the Ukrainian peasant masses into a seething tumult of rebellion. Combined with the catastrophic insensitivity of the bureaucratic campaign to the sharpened sense of national grievance on the part of a country which had for years been repressed by Tsarism – the government which rested upon the Ukrainian soviets was born both premature and artificially weak. Within a year, the forces which the bureaucratic machine sought to suppress had exploded with renewed and embittered energy, and the cohesion of the fledgling workers’ power was dissipated by the force of the blast. This was not, one should add, the end of the experiment in grassroots democracy in the Ukraine; and some months later an anarchist movement with a strong egalitarian sweep would unite in its remit both the peasant masses and the sympathy and allegiance of a far smaller but significant portion of

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 23 workers. The reputation of the Bolsheviks as a vanguard of revolution, however, had been irreparably damaged in that country by this point. Lenin’s criticism of the Ukrainian policy was scathing, and again, at its heart, nestled a fundamentally different ideological vision: “Only a small part of the well-managed farms ought to be turned into Soviet farms, otherwise we will not get a bloc with the peasantry . . . We must therefore now assign a large number of Soviet farms for general land distribution.”36 This is not to say that Lenin wasn’t in favour of supressing sections of the peasantry. The early stages of the revolution had seen uprisings organized by the richer landowning peasants in tandem with clerical and aristocratic proprietors as a response to the Bolshevik decree of 1917 which sought to redistribute the landed estates among the vast bulk of the landless peasantry. This was something which necessitated a forceful response on the part of the new government and Lenin repeatedly encouraged the arrest and even the execution of such resistors. That he was prepared to promote the most ruthless and violent means in order to secure the survival of the new state in the context of civil war and foreign invasion is not in question; but Lenin’s attitude toward the development of communism in the countryside in the long term was always pervaded by the sense that it was something the peasantry would have to realize through a collective exercise in self-determination. It would be won through political education, the allocation of vast resources and a great deal of time and patience: the participation of the entire population in the collective movement requires an entire historical epoch. We may get through the epoch successfully in one or two decades . . . But in any case . . . without literacy, without a sufficient degree of explaining, of teaching the population how to use books, and without a material basis for all of this, without a certain guarantee, if only, let us say, against crop failure, against famine, and so on – without that we shall not attain our goal.37 The demand for violence on the part of Lenin and Stalin, then, issued from a very different ideological basis which was again, in the last analysis, an expression of different and opposed historical forces: Stalin representing the bureaucracy from above, Lenin the need to develop immanently the revolutionary tendencies within the mass movement. The question then arises: Why was it that Stalin was not only tolerated but managed to gain such a significant position in the Bolshevik hierarchy? Why did Lenin and others allow his influence to go so long

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24 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE unchecked? Although later Sovietology attempted to refute this, in the early years of Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin didn’t have a great deal of contact or maintain a particularly close connection. And yet, it was true that there was much which Lenin did value about Stalin. The latter man’s plebeian sense of cunning, his ability to converse with rougher, coarser elements, his shrewd practicality, his determination to achieve results – all of which made him in Lenin’s view a useful Bolshevik. And all of which occluded Lenin’s awareness of the more dangerous and self-serving elements in Stalin’s political psyche. But such personal considerations were underwritten by a more profound shift in the historical dynamic. The survival of the party and the revolution took a vast toll both in lives and resources, and it was one which fell on both the peasantry and the decimated industrial proletariat which had provided the motor for the revolutionary process. The most revolutionary sections of the working classes and the peasantry were often at the forefront of the battle lines, defending the revolution and the gains which had been won on the land, and consequently everywhere suffered the heaviest casualties. As the years of civil war rolled on, the party was exsanguinated – its most vital and radical life force gradually bled out. For this reason it desperately required a transfusion. But the new elements which were streamed into its circulation represented a multifarious and often incoherent conglomeration, a web of different and diffuse social tendencies. These included newly established but politically disorientated workers, clerks, low ranked officials, functionaries of the old regime seeking new career horizons, the social detritus of the city more broadly which was particularly susceptible to the world historic gravity of the revolutionary event. All of these contrary and clashing colours now demanded expression in a single image – and it was in the semblance of the bureaucracy that they began to attain it. Meanwhile the situation in the countryside had grown ever more perilous. Many of the small peasant proprietors who had recently won land from the vast estates of the clergy and the aristocracy had been powerfully in favour of the revolution at its inception for the Bolsheviks had been the only party to both advocate and facilitate the nationalization of the land. But as the war dragged on, as the army and the city hoovered up more and more of their grain surpluses, the newly established socio-economic position of the peasant was increasingly threatened with displacement and destitution. The Bolshevik military machine, powered from the cities, required vast sums of grain from the land, and while this was originally and in the main extracted from the richer peasants (kulaks), as the fighting became more desperate, grain requisitioning was exacted against the mass of the peasantry –

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 25 often by force. As Trotsky comments: “The city gave practically nothing to the village and took almost everything from it, chiefly for the needs of war.”38 And in a sense these two processes – the developing power of the bureaucracy, and the tendency to take ever more hostile measures against an increasingly intransigent peasantry in order to exact surplus product – mutually reinforced one another. As the social basis of the Bolshevik Revolution was increasingly eroded, as the industrial proletariat was progressively annihilated, the bureaucracy began to gain increasing traction, uniting within its remit a series of interim layers, forming them in a caste which more and more fought for its own privileges and independence. And this shift, from the mass revolutionary movement led by the proletariat, to a party at the head of state whose political activity was increasingly directed by the interests of a bureaucratic caste; such a shift received a theoretical expression in the clash of ideologies – between the Marxist/Trotskyist/Leninist perspective of “permanent revolution” and the Stalinist formulation of “socialism in one country”. The theory of “permanent revolution”, developed by Trotsky and Parvus circa 1905, grasped how the proletarian revolution could take place first in Russia, because of its concentrated pockets of industry which attracted great swathes of international capital – precisely because the archaic, autocratic state of that country was able to hold down the price of labour so effectively. What Trotsky argued quite brilliantly, and with such prescience, was that Russia could make a qualitative leap forward, skipping the prolonged bourgeois stage of development that the Western European nations had gone through; that the leadership of the revolution would pass directly to the proletariat in a historical period where the Russian bourgeoisie itself had emerged stillborn and insipid – terrified of the revolutionary upswing from below, incapable of achieving even its own revolutionary agenda. What both Lenin (who arrived at this perspective independently in 1917) and Trotsky realized was the supremely dialectical postulate; that Russia was advanced in lieu of its very backwardness. And they understood the implications of this. While the industrial proletariat could drive the revolutionary process forward in its early phase, the conditions which pertained in the economy – a population the vast majority of which consisted of a peasantry that was subsumed under a set of feudal relations – meant that any proletarian revolution would soon find itself isolated and inevitably forced into abeyance. Indeed, argued Lenin and Trotsky, the logic of revolutionary development according to the nature of the conditions which pertained in Russia meant without a shadow of a doubt that the proletariat could only

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26 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE continue to wield power – if it was aided materially and politically by the emergence of new worker’ states in Western Europe and Germany in particular. To say the same, the revolution must be generalized to the larger world, it must be internationalized, it must be made permanent. In early 1918 Lenin argued – “regarded from the world-historical point of view, there would doubtlessly be no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone . . . It is a lesson, because it is the absolute truth that without a German Revolution we are doomed.”39 But the burgeoning bureaucracy was not premised on the power of the proletariat as a class but was, in fact, grown directly out of its erosion – the negation of its power, in favour of a set of murky and sporadic social elements which flowed into the party in the aftermath of the revolution and which were eventually able to coagulate in a single bloc with its own set of independent interests. It was anathema to such an entity to promote the strengthening of the working class internationally in order to empower it domestically, precisely because the fortitude of the bureaucracy was premised on the interim layers and social strata which had cohered as the direct result of the recession of the revolution’s proletarian basis. At the same time, however, the bureaucratic caste was emerging in the context of an avowedly Marxist political party; its struggle for power, and the nature of its political basis, had to be articulated in and through the letter of Marxism even if it was bereft of the latter’s spirit. It was this contradiction which the theory “socialism in one country” came to express. When Stalin argued that the “proletariat can and must build the socialist society in one country”, he was advocating the very approach which would render socialism impossible, by crippling the possibility of its basis in the international working class; but at the same time, by employing a revolutionary idiom, he was appropriating the legacy of Marxism which had provided to the Bolsheviks their original programme and ideological rationale. More broadly speaking then, “socialism in one country” was the banner under which the emergent bureaucracy cloaked its interests, and it clashed directly with the theory which both Lenin and Trotsky had advocated in order to conceptualize and extend the proletarian struggle – that of “permanent revolution”. Again the theoretical conflict exhibited here was indicative of nothing other than a broader social-historical shift, by which the bureaucracy more and more achieved self-awareness as a parasitical entity latched to the back of the flagging revolutionary movement, draining it of its life, and growing bloated and swollen in inverse proportion. In the furore of the civil war these organic processes and trends

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 27 were catalyzed, accelerated, but they were taking place behind the scenes, they were not yet apparent in the heat and the chaos of the conflict in the way they would be by the time the bureaucracy had more or less consolidated its power with Stalin at its head – the time of 1925, say. 1925 was also the point at which Stalin openly articulated a finished form of the “socialism in one country” thesis. But the years 1918–24 were a period of struggle within the party, where the forces of the bureaucracy were starting to manifest more openly and with more confidence, despite the fact that the revolutionary old guard gradually began to sense the threat and to push back. Stalin had represented the bureaucracy’s interests, for to do so was synonymous with bringing his own power to fruition. In the Ukraine he had machinated behind the scenes in order to denude the revolutionary government of any real power and thus demobilize the workers’ movement. The same pattern would be repeated in the city of Tsaritsyn where, as the official representative of the party and government, Stalin deployed his customary brutality in the forcible extraction of grain, and where – in another pattern which would repeat in future years – such crude, unmediated force produced a counteraction on the part of the local populations who ground in their heels and made of the transportation of the grain a sluggish and interminable process. In fact, argues Trotsky, in this period “all he [Stalin] managed to send, notwithstanding his ruthlessness, was a shipment of three barges, referred to in his telegram of June 26th”.40 As his failures became ever more pronounced, the militarization of his policies grew more acute – “he became dictator of Tsaritsyn . . . He acquired extremely broad and practically unlimited powers . . . He had the right to carry through local mobilization, requisition property, militarize factories, arrest and try, appoint and dismiss. Stalin exercised authority with a heavy hand.”41 In the event, the effects of Stalin’s political activities on the region were so disastrous that the Central Committee issued the order for his recall, but he left in his wake a network of bureaucrats who owed their prestige and position to him, and would become yet another buttress in his bid for supreme power: “The leading spirits of Tsaritsyn became from that time on his principal tools. As soon as Lenin fell ill Stalin, through his henchmen, had Tsaritsyn renamed Stalingrad.”42 In any conscientious account of the Bolsheviks and the civil war one is able to glean a sense of the atmosphere of the period; the mass disruption, the feeling that the newly founded state was really on the edge of the precipice, gazing into the void. It was this furiously chaotic scrabble for survival, in which the revolution tried to mobilize with full effects all the remnants of its desperately depleted resources – it was under these conditions that not

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28 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE only were Stalin’s tactical inadequacies and military blunders partially obscured, but also the far reaching implications of his cynical and relentless machinations. The push to accentuate and refine the organs of administration such that they were wholly and utterly pervaded by his spirit, that its members owed him allegiance either through fear or favour, that he was able to emerge as the living incarnation of the bureaucratic machine. But what truly sends a shiver down the spine when contemplating any account of Stalin’s activity in the civil war is how the use and consolidation of bureaucratic power he effected provides a ghostly whisper which speaks, Cassandra like, of the horrors of the future to come. In the civil war period already we can discern the underlying logic and impetus of Stalin’s future projects of mass murder: we can see at work the earliest forms of brutal, forced collectivization which a decade on would provoke the starvation and forced exodus of millions of peasants, we can see in the militarization of the factory from the top-down – the same rationale which would underpin the five-year plans and the brutalization of the working class alongside the gulags whose slave labour was organized on a vast industrial basis, whose death smog was pumped out night and day. In the period of the Russian Civil War too we also witness a shift in the character of the security apparatus – or the Cheka. From the outset, from its creation in December 1917 – it should be acknowledged that the Cheka functioned, and was intended to function, as an organ of mass repression. In the heady euphoria of October, the Bolshevik Party had – along with a series of highly progressive decrees which included the introduction of gay rights, the right to abortion and the right to divorce – abolished the death penalty. Though he supported the former decrees unreservedly and without hesitation, Lenin had been sceptical about the last measure, for already the prospect of civil war was brewing, and the forces of reaction were rallying their powers. The Cheka, then, evolved out of military necessity – and could not be legitimately abstracted from such a context. Steely-sharp, swift and far-reaching, it was the Russian Revolution’s version of the guillotine – in the words of one of its lead members Jan Sudrabs – “a combat arm operating on the internal front of the civil war, and in the course of its struggle it uses the methods of investigative bodies and courts, military tribunals and outright military forces. It does not try the enemy; it strikes him down.”43 To the contemporary ear, of course, such speechifying is bound to create a shudder – especially given our awareness of the type of regime which would succeed the Russian Revolution in the years to follow. But it is worth noting that such language wouldn’t have seemed unusual among the members of the British military command at the very

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 29 height of the struggle against Nazism in the early forties when the nation was close to being overrun, nor would it have raised an eyebrow in the context of the Spanish revolutionary government several years before, locked in a mortal combat with the fascist forces led by General Franco. That terror, that a mass compulsion – undergirded by murderous, militaristic force – was an absolute requirement in a context where a class or nation state is in the process of fighting for its existence goes more or less without saying, and to deny this is simply to blind oneself to a multitude of historical experience. But during the civil war period of 1918–21 the powers of the Cheka began to change both in terms of their remit and direction. If, at first, they were connected with restoring the cohesion of the militarized fronts by extirpating spies and infiltrators, and providing military discipline through the threat of severe punishment levelled against the troops at large – as the civil war progressed those powers became ever more extensive and far-reaching in their scope. By 1921 Jan Sudrabs was able to posit a more generalized terror which was to graduate from the use of the apparatus against individuals who were harming the military effort to a broader vision: “there are no longer just counterrevolutionary individuals but . . . entire classes that are counterrevolutionary . . . counterrevolution also lurks among the petit bourgeoisie.”44 The generalization of the methods of terror to a social class carte blanche – and specifically the petty bourgeoisie – is far from coincidental. The peasantry was – by virtue of its economic position as a vast network of mainly small, isolated proprietors – in the main petty bourgeois, though many landless labourers continued to operate in the interstices of both the large estates and the smaller farms which had emerged from them. The burgeoning bureaucracy had begun to sink its roots into the peasantry through the intensification of external force and coercion; a process which was beginning to develop its own independent momentum abstracted from the necessities of the war, and indeed, often counterproductive to them. By extending the application of terror beyond the individual case to that of the “petty bourgeoisie” as a whole the bureaucracy was beginning to weave the theoretical rationale for its terrorization of the very group whose surplus product was integral to its own survival. A rationale which would allow it to use more indiscriminate force, not only against the reactionary backlash which had targeted the proletarian revolution but also against those elements – either proletarian or peasant in social essence – which bridled against the increasingly coercive power and needs of the bureaucracy itself. In early January 1921 a Cheka decree acknowledged that “the prisons are filled to overflowing, not just with bourgeois but for the most part with workers and peasants [involved

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30 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE in theft or speculation]”.45 But the Cheka itself was never simply the instrument of the bureaucracy for it was also the creation of the revolution; the nature of its social composition was changing, yes, and this was reflected by the fact that the scope of its terror had been enlarged and was increasingly directed in line with the interests of the bureaucratic caste – but at this point, the deal was still not yet done. The proletarian tendencies within the party still exerted some level of power and influence. The same decree which the Cheka issued, for instance, also recommended that “the prisons must be emptied, and we must carefully see to it that only those who are really dangerous to the Soviet regime should be put there”.46 In the natural world there are several species of wasp that have happened upon a unique incubation system for their young. The adult insect waits until it finds another creature – a fat, healthy caterpillar, for example – before stinging its target, and secreting its egg inside the caterpillar’s body. The egg, over time, hatches, and the larva begins to develop, gorging itself on the healthy, pliant flesh of its host; effectively consuming the creature from the inside out. First the nonessential organs are nuzzled upon, and then, eventually, the larva works its way through the caterpillar’s fundaments, until what is left is merely the husk of the former creature, barely clinging to life, before the fledgling wasp bursts out through the shell of its body destroying it once and for all. The bureaucratic tendency within the Bolshevik Party was so powerful, was so resilient, for it developed in much this way – incubated in the life forces of the party itself, emerging from the inside out, enfeebling its host, draining it of its resources. But as the civil war drew to a close, the development of the bureaucracy began to weigh the party down, and its interests began to conflict more and more openly with the interests of the ebbing revolution. Lenin – who was so attuned to the nature of the mass movement, who had been the figure who most shaped the Bolshevik Party as the instrument through which the proletarian revolution could be channelled – was also the first to sense the peril the bureaucracy represented to the founding ideals of Bolshevism and the spirit of October. The bureaucracy, as we have seen, developed along three central lines: it more and more populated the party’s decision-making organs with its own people, it more and more took control over the process by which surplus product was extracted from the rural periphery, and it increasingly began to fashion the security apparatus in its own image; one which was committed to guarding its own set of independent interests with heightened brutality. In what would be his very final battle, Lenin grappled with it on all three of these fronts.

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 31 In the case of the security apparatus or Cheka Lenin had advocated the use of its lethal violence very early on, but at the same time argued this must be balanced as far as possible by a democratic and judicial counterweight to proceedings. Medvedev relates that as early as “the end of 1918, on a motion by Lenin, the council of Defence granted the people’s commissariats, and the party’s local committees the right to participate, through delegated representatives, in investigations of citizens arrested by the Cheka”.47 Again, one can sense in Lenin’s formulation – not that he disagreed with the intensification in terror per se, but that it should be based on “a politically truthful (and not only a judicially narrow) proposition”;48one which had been grown out of the revolutionary movement and remained mediated by it. Something similar was true of the bureaucracy more generally. Lenin understood that its structures were necessary, that the destruction of the old state machine, and the wielding of power by the new, required an integrated and centralized apparatus which could direct the momentum of the revolution in the most perilous of conditions; but that such an apparatus must not become abstracted from that power – into a standalone entity with its own set of interests and goals. As the bureaucracy more and more took on the appearance of an independent caste, Lenin began to clamour for measures to reduce its influence. For instance, in September 1920 he proposed a motion which was eventually passed by the party at its ninth conference, a motion which led to the creation of a Central Control Commission underpinned by “local control commissions” whose aim was to “fight encroaching bureaucratism, careerism, the abuse of party and Soviet positions by party members, the violation of comradely relations within the party, the spread of unfounded and unverified rumours and insinuations, which discredit the party or its individual members”.49 In early 1923 Lenin was still fighting for a system of popular control when he tried to pass legislation which would radically broaden the character of the Central Control Commission by introducing “75 to 100 new members to the Central Control Commission”50 who would have the rights and powers of Central Committee members. One can see in all this, the desperate attempt to check the bureaucracy, to use the forces from below and the popular movement as a counterbalance to its power – for as Lenin wrote: Our Central Committee has become a strictly centralized and highly authoritative group, but the work of this group is not set up in conditions appropriate to its authority. The reform I am proposing . . . should see to it . . . that no authority – neither that

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32 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE of the General Secretary nor that of any other Central Committee member – stops them from making an inquiry, from checking documents, and in general from achieving unconditional information and the strictest accuracy.51 The document mentions the role of the “General Secretary” in particular – a post which was now occupied by Joseph Stalin. In his attempts to counter the power of the committee men, Lenin couldn’t but help find himself arrayed against the most powerful committee man of all. The trajectory of the conflict between Lenin and Stalin was inevitable; it had been set in motion by the recession of the revolution and the mass movement, and the strengthening of the bureaucracy. Lenin had been the single most important individual impetus to the former, Stalin was the highest and most concentrated expression of the latter. As the historical pendulum swung away from the proletariat, as its most advanced layers were obliterated in the atomic heat of the war frenzy, Lenin’s power and influence began to wane, while Stalin gathered his forces – not quite strong enough to openly oppose the older man who had been so integral to the creation of the Bolshevik movement, but nevertheless, biding his time, looking for the means and the route by which the influence of October’s founding father might eventually be displaced. Stalin always saw the situation in the most crudely practical (though often effective) terms. He hungered for power with every particle of his being; there was no objective outside that, no greater end than his own aggrandizement and the reduction to dust of his enemies. Lenin, for his part, could not but see things through the broadest historical scope. The growing power and gravity of the bureaucracy, and the distorting, perverting effects it was exerting on the direction of the revolution – were in his eyes bound to the international situation and the weakening of the popular movements from below; only now, for the first time, an individual figure was beginning to draw into view – one who had concentrated in his person these broader social historical processes. Lenin had always been fiercely loyal to those who had helped him build the Bolshevik Party even when they erred and endangered the revolution itself, even when he had been desperately furious with them – as had been the case with Zinoviev and Kamenev when they made public the plan for the Bolshevik insurrection on the eve of October. The flaring of what at times could be a quite tremendous anger seemed to dissipate swiftly, perhaps because Lenin understood that people were flawed and fallible, but that he and the other Bolsheviks were – to put it simply – in it together, bonded by the loftiest project of human emancipation.

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 33 By the end of the civil war, though, Stalin’s conduct had begun to merge with the spectre of the bureaucracy and its underlying political logic, and perhaps it is here for the first time Lenin really begins to perceive in Stalin the monstrous outline of the machine and the grotesque implications of its unbridled power. This perception was strengthened by events over a two year period which took place in Georgia. In 1921, Stalin held the post for Commissar for Nationalities. He owed this position, in part, to the fact that he was himself a Georgian, himself a member of a repressed nation and a minority group within the Bolshevik Party. This, along with his sense of determination, hard-headed pragmatism and a rough and ready manner – let it be known he could communicate easily and effectively with some of the battle hardened, beleaguered revolutionary leaders whose sense of class oppression was complimented by a feeling of nationalist grievance; all of which had been hardened and solidified under the relentless pressure of brutal underground struggle. As Trotsky noted, “Stalin knew that life of the aboriginal people of the Caucasus intimately – as only a native could. That aboriginality was in his very blood.”52 But, as was the case with Tsaritsyn and the Ukraine before that, Stalin didn’t approach those he was sent to negotiate and develop relations with so much in terms of comrades or states of a universal standing who were engaged in a common struggle – but rather as a series of separate groups and polities whose very independence demarked them as potential threats to be subdued. They were to be reduced to the status of limbs tethered to the Russian brain. Naturally this was never going to go down well with representatives of such nations whose histories were coloured by their experience of Russian oppression. In the case of Georgia, from his earliest intervention onward, Stalin called for the country’s immediate Sovietization in and through invasion. Again, one can see in Stalin’s politicking the philosophy of formalism raised to the most brutal level; bereft of any trace of dialectics, Stalinist thought remains desensitized to the immanent historical processes which give life to the social metabolism. With regard to the Georgian situation Trotsky, as an exemplary dialectician, immediately placed emphasis on the immanent, organic development – “I stood for a certain preparatory period of work inside Georgia, in order to develop the uprising and later come to its aid.”53 In the event, it was Stalin’s vision which won out – because he was able to exaggerate the strength of the Bolshevik movement within Georgia itself, and present the invasion as something which would dovetail seamlessly with the interests of a mass uprising which was already fully in effect. This, however, was simply not the case, and as Trotsky went on to note – the Georgian masses of the future would almost inevitably

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34 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE see the difficulties and sufferings of the communist struggle, not as elements connected with their own cause, but as “further deprivations . . . a result of the regime imposed from the outside”.54 Stain’s interventions in Georgia, which graduated in terms of their brutality, led many of the leading lights of the Georgian Communist Party and the ranks of the politicos more generally to sense in his work the echoes of Great Russian chauvinism. He spoke in the voice of the Russian state, and his language – a combination of bombast and threat – seemed to revive the idiom of the imperial patriotism of old. But Stalin, as Isaac Deutscher notes insightfully, was never nationalistic in any real sense – “though the charges of Russian nationalism have since been laid against Stalin . . . he was not . . . prompted by any of the ordinary emotions and prejudices that go along with nationalism”.55 Stalin was able to adopt a sense of Russian chauvinism in his capacity as the Commissar for Nationalities – not because he held any affinity for the politics or culture of Russian nationalism, but because Russian chauvinism happened to coincide at that particular point in time with the principle which Stalin represented to the most concentrated degree – “the principle of centralization, common to all modern revolutions”.56 As with the later theorization of “socialism in one country”, the shape of his politics issued forth from the needs of the bureaucracy. His “Russian chauvinism” was nothing other than the ideological form which the bureaucracy donned itself in as it sought to submit the raw human material of the revolution to itself on an international scale. In 1922 Stalin attempted to accelerate this process. In 1922, in an endeavour to strengthen bureaucratic centralism at the international level, Stalin was pushing proposals for a new “Russian Federated Republic”, proposals which quite clearly designated the rule and authority of the Russian centre over and above the outer territories. As Medvedev relays, such proposals both shocked and repelled Lenin – and at once the founder of the Bolshevik Party proposed a series of countermeasures, positing the creation of “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, on the basis of equality among the RSFSR, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the other republics”.57 Later that same year, Stalin continued in his endeavour to subordinate the Georgian comrades to the bureaucratic hierarchy; he attempted to cut off the head of the Georgian Communist Party by removing its leadership and allowing power to devolve onto his own representative – Ordzhonokidze. By this point it was abundantly clear to Lenin that the struggle against the bureaucracy would necessarily find its echo in the struggle against the one figure that had increasingly come to assume its powers, had concentrated them in his hands, and was prepared to use them with ever

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 35 more cunning and ruthlessness. He wrote of Stalin and his conduct with regard to the Georgian situation in particular: From . . . the Georgian incident, I could only draw the greatest apprehensions . . . I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration together with his spite against the notorious ‘national socialism’, played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles . . . .As far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution, thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for us . . . The political responsibility for all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerhinsky.58 This was to be an opening salvo in what would become, as Moshe Lewin put it, “Lenin’s last struggle”. At the start of 1923, he tried to get Trotsky to undertake the defence of the Georgian comrades – which, in the event, was something Trotsky was unable to do due to illness. But more than that, it was the period in which Lenin dictated his famous final “testament”. In those letters/notes, Lenin gave a brief summary of the situation of the party and its leading committee, along with a short sketch of several of the leaders, and some recommendations for changes. Again, one finds the same motif; the need to strengthen the democratic, proletarian elements at the expense of the ossified bureaucracy – “[t]he working-class members of the C.C. must be mainly workers of a lower stratum than those promoted in the last five-years to work in Soviet bodies; they must be people closer to being rank-and-file workers and peasants . . . to work effectively on the renewal and improvement of the state apparatus”.59 This underlying ideal was now bolstered by a couple of direct attacks on Stalin himself. Lenin first observed: ‘Comrade Stalin, having become SecretaryGeneral, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”60 This statement was to be supplemented by a more emphatic condemnation a little over a week later – “Stalin is too rude and this defect . . . becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of transferring Stalin from that post and appointing another man . . . more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious”.61 These words might not seem excessive or declamatory, but when one understands something of Lenin’s political demeanour and his

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36 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE profound reluctance to personalize politics, one can see in his testament the sheer sense of foreboding the bureaucracy had awakened in him, and how he saw the removal of Stalin as being absolutely key to the curtailment of its power. The testament was nothing other than a declaration of war issued to the General Secretary. All the while Lenin continued to argue that the fight against the bureaucracy must be conducted by galvanizing the forces from below, but the assistance the Russian state so desperately craved from the international proletariat abroad was far from forthcoming. The German Revolution of November 1918 had been crushed, its leadership murdered – and soon the mass uprising of 1923 was to go the same way;62 the splendid workers’ councils which had been established in Turin and the subsequent wave of strikes and rebellions which passed across Northern Italy, eventually succumbed to the growing fascist power which was to be subsumed under Mussolini’s march on Rome; while even closer to the Russian periphery the short-lived Soviet Republic in Hungary had experienced the lash of fascist fire when in 1919 it was obliterated by the “white-terror” regime of Miklós Horthy and the whole country was engulfed in political repressions and anti-Semitic pogroms. In 1923, at the point when Lenin was engaged in his fateful “final struggle”, the lineaments of fascism, its snarling visage, had already grown pronounced, hovering over the European horizon like a death’s head – and the workers’ movements had almost everywhere been forced into abeyance. In such a context Lenin’s desperate last ditch attempts to nullify the corrosive nature of the bureaucratic power were inevitably conducted against the backdrop of international reaction; for the same reason, the founder of Bolshevism now appeared as an increasingly lonely figure, an isolated Knut desperately trying to stem the flow of the historical tide. It was this which imbued his last struggle with genuinely tragic dimensions, for Lenin was not simply fighting against a man, or even a party machine in abstraction; with every fibre of his intellect and a political soul devoted utterly to the project of human emancipation, Lenin’s whole being was trained against the reactionary momentum which had come to eclipse an age, and in which so many of the workers’ struggles, misdirected, exhausted, betrayed, were to reach their historical terminus. Consequently, it is hard not to conclude that Lenin’s final struggle was doomed because of the correlation of the broader objective forces. But this is not the same as saying it was wholly futile. Though Lenin could not objectively alter the shift in the historical dynamic, as the pendulum swung from revolution to reaction, as the pressures of civil war had altered and degraded the political composition of Russia’s indigenous proletariat, and the forces of international reaction had

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 37 scotched the revolutions abroad; though he could not annul the historical premise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, nevertheless – by striking at its head, by striking against Stalin, by undermining his immediate power base, by displacing the coterie of officials who surrounded him and broadening the demographic of the CC more generally – Lenin could at least hope to forestall the cancer which was creeping through the bones of the party structures. Eradication was impossible, yes, but remission – perhaps that might not be. Lenin’s influence in the party was still so potent, that even as late as 1923, the testament which he had prepared against Stalin might yet prove decisive, might conceivably shatter the semblance of the latter’s power in the eyes of party members, and indeed, when its existence had been revealed to the inner sanctum of the CC, Bazhanov – one of Stalin’s secretaries – provides a telling description of the momentary vulnerability and helplessness of the General Secretary when he frames Stalin’s response thus: “Stalin, sitting on the steps of the praesidium’s rostrum, felt small and miserable. I studied him closely: not withstanding his self-possession and show of calm, it was clearly evident that his fate was at stake.”63 In the event, however, Stalin was not removed from power. He was not even demoted. How was he able to survive? Two facts are especially salient. First, Lenin had suffered a severe stroke in May 1922, which left him incapacitated and barely able to speak. He recovered some of his faculties gradually. The devastating effect of being stripped of his intellectual powers in a lightening-like instant provoked in this formidable historical figure both a sense of foreboding and childlike wonder. In a conversation with Trotsky, one of the last the two central architects of October would ever share, Lenin referred meekly to the medical event which had felled him: “‘You understand’, he said, quite bewildered, ‘I could not even speak or write, and I had to learn everything all over again.’ And he lifted his eyes questioningly to me.”64 Because of Lenin’s physical vulnerability and his immobility, he spent much of his last two years confined to his house. By now he was already ensnared by a chain of functionaries loyal to Stalin’s every whim, people who stemmed as effectively as possible the information which might reach the dying man from the outside world. His political activity was, in essence, muffled. Lenin could ready his last testament, the bomb which he was preparing against the General Secretary, but he had to rely on a small group of others to see to its detonation. Which brings us to the second fact. At that point in time, the members of the Bolshevik Central Committee were more than aware of the possibility of Lenin’s imminent demise. There was some jostling for position at the highest level between the several candidates who saw

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38 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE in themselves the possibility of assuming the mantle of Lenin’s political authority within the party. In particular the fiercely ambitious Zinoviev was pushing for his own primacy, but he felt threatened by the presence of Trotsky – a revolutionary of formidable gifts who had commonly come to be regarded as the natural successor to Lenin, at least among the bulk of the party membership where he was well known. Together with Kamenev, his closest comrade, Zinoviev would form a bloc with Stalin; a triumvirate whose express purpose was to thwart the possibility of Trotsky’s ascension at any cost. While Lenin lay on his deathbed, this faction endeavoured to politically outmanoeuvre Trotsky, to leave him isolated and bereft. As Isaac Deutscher points out the three men together “virtually controlled the whole party, and through it, the government. Kamenev had acted as Lenin’s deputy and presided over the Moscow Soviet, Zinoviev was the chairman of the Soviet of Petersburg . . . Stalin controlled most of the provinces.”65 In the Politburo, therefore, the motions of the Triumvirate were nearly always carried, and this only served to compound Trotsky’s helplessness. And so, when the testament Lenin had prepared was finally read out at a special session of the Central Committee some months after Lenin’s death, despite Stalin’s obvious vulnerability and fear, the General Secretary was, by this point, already safe – bolstered by his role as a partner in the Triumvirate. Neither Zinoviev or Kamenev wanted to risk losing a man whose considerable power they semicomprehended; they correctly saw him as the lead functionary in a vast mechanism of bureaucracy which stretched its tendrils out into the hinterlands and the provinces; they understood that Stalin was able to attend to this bureaucratic network with a dogged relentlessness which came from his affinity for the empirical and tangible certainties of administrative process. For this reason, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only saw Stalin as someone who was extremely powerful, but as someone who was essentially slavish, devoted to the mechanics of administration and micromanagement; as someone who was unable to think independently outside that context. The assessment was not altogether inaccurate, for as we have seen, Stalin lacked any real political imagination, he was unable to creatively theorize, preferring to pilfer ideas from others and weave them into the material of his immediate advantage. He was a pure pragmatist in the sense that his political actions always flowed from the eternal present of his own self-interest, and there was never a broader historical panorama or theoretical sweep from which his thoughts could derive. Zinoviev and Kamenev were revolutionaries who had spent periods of time abroad, living in Switzerland and Paris respectively,

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 39 and although Zinoviev in particular was especially personally ambitious, both these men – despite their myriad of human flaws and frailties – were utterly devoted to the socialist cause. They contained in themselves a sense of the internationalism and intellectualism of the city cosmopolite, and to them, at this point, Stalin could only ever have appeared as a powerful but essentially grey provincial;66 an auxiliary whose services could be tethered to the grandeur of the ongoing revolutionary project as directed by them. It was this lack of colour which effectively masked the sheer monstrousness of the unslakeable ambition which stirred within their Georgian partner – until, of course, it was too late. And so when that special session of the Central Committee was convened in order to decide whether Lenin’s “testament” should be made public at the upcoming party congress, Zinoviev stood up, and declared his fidelity to Lenin: “We have sworn to fulfil anything the dying Ilyich ordered us to do”, before adding the crucial caveat, “but we are happy to say that in one point Lenin’s fears have proved baseless. I have in mind the point about our General Secretary. You have all witnessed our harmonious cooperation in the last few months.”67 Kamenev followed this up with a plea that Stalin be allowed to retain his post, and so it came to be. Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, disputed the decision to suppress her late husband’s testament but her protests were not heeded. It must also be said that Trotsky did not cover himself with glory in this period. When he should have been raising the alarm bells and rallying for the reversal of such a clandestine act of censorship, instead, in the words of Deutscher, “[Trotsky] was too proud to intervene . . . He kept silent, expressing only through his mien and grimaces his disgust at the scene . . . Stalin could now wipe the cold sweat from his brow.”68 The Triumvirate would have tragic consequences, not least for Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their concern with Trotsky and the strong sense of ambition which mediated it blinded them to much else. Equally important, they regarded Stalin, at times, as little more than a lackey; toward him they cultivated a patronising manner, sometimes barely registering his presence, sometimes speaking over him; causing the third Triumvir to lean back in the shadows, to smoke his pipe in the type of sullen silence which was always so conducive to him. To brood. To watch. To wait. Perhaps there is no other historical figure to whom the chilling epithet – “revenge is a dish best served cold” – can be so accurately applied. This was something Zinoviev and Kamenev would eventually come to understand in practise, and to their mortal cost. But for now the formation and direction of the Triumvirate also provided a vital impetus for the ideological development

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40 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE of Stalinism itself. By attempting to isolate Trotsky, not for reasons of principled political disagreement, but for the purposes of shifting the balance of power – because they wished to arrogate the political potency of Lenin’s legacy to themselves – the arguments the Triumvirate posed necessarily assumed a deeply irrational character which perfectly translated into the spirit of religious dogma. So, for instance, when Trotsky demanded that the Bolsheviks begin at once aiding and abetting plans for insurrection when the German Revolution opened up in 1923, he was wrong most fundamentally, not because of the quality of his analysis of the conditions which pertained on the ground in Germany at this time, but because he had always been insufficiently “Leninist”, because he had never been truly converted to the party gospel. In support of this, the Triumvirate resurrected the records of the dusty debates which had transpired between Lenin and Trotsky in the decades before, and then wielded these – not in the spirit of a sober critical analysis but in the incandescent, hysterical tones of a holy order calling into account the heretic. At which point the delineations of something called “Leninism” drew more sharply into focus; not a Marxist analysis which the Bolshevik leader had applied to the living Russian and international reality during a handful of years, an analysis which had developed and matured over time, and in accordance with a series of historical events which often corrected its errors as much as confirmed its prescience. No, “Leninism” now became a series of static absolutisms, eternal, implacable and immune to criticism; a transcendent set of scriptures which – provided one clutched them close – would automatically ward off the spectres of uncertainty and doubt, and ensure that the pristine, truly revolutionary path was always followed no matter the confluence or chaos of external events. Stalin was bereft of God, yes, but, paradoxically, he wasn’t without religion. The crude and interminable nature of his materialism meant that it was impossible for his stunted mental apparatus to cleave to so fine an abstraction as the divine, but at the same time, having finished his stint in seminary school, he was attuned to the way in which religious dogma could be translated into a palpable and material force of repression. Stalin, therefore, was a natural advocate of the infamous Jesuit principle, “the ends justify the means” – and he was also the inevitable admirer of the early crusading traditions by which closed, secretive, highly disciplined orders of knights carried Christianity forward at the point of a sword. Indeed as his power grew, Stalin would come to liken the clandestine higher echelons of the Bolshevik security apparatus to the small cabals of medieval-religious shocksquadrons whose ruthless will and cunning was manifested by a se-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 41 ries of cloak and dagger operations exacted from the shadows, designed to terrify and paralyze those elements which had hoped to deflect the crusading ethos.69 For Stalin, the tenets of religious dogma were effective precisely because they did not require rationalization according to a broader theoretical schema; religious faith necessitates only the presence of a more powerful entity in which to have faith in – an external power to whom one’s own needs and will and prescience can be submitted. Stalin didn’t believe in God but he did believe in power. For him the party was to be the conductor of all human destiny from the lofty and transcendental position of an absolute arbiter, and it was quite natural this would mesh with religious sensibility. Though the content was different, the underlying logic was the same. Stalin, with his seminary school background, and with the instincts of a dissolute priest who found in proselytization an effective means to submit others to himself – was able to translate the political power of the bureaucracy into a quasi-religious form in and through the evocation of the ideology of “Leninism”. In the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death, Stalin made sure he was the principal speaker at the funeral, and some of the eulogy is reproduced below in order to give a sense of its aesthetic and political spirit without subjecting the reader to its full relentless drudge: Comrades, we Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of a special stuff. We are those who form the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honour of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of member of the Party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin. It is not given to everyone to be a member of such a party. It is the sons of the working class, the sons of want and struggle, the sons of incredible privation and heroic effort who before all should be members of such a party. That is why the Party of the Leninists, the Party of the Communists, is also called the Party of the working class. DEPARTING FROM US, COMRADE LENIN ENJOINED US TO HOLD HIGH AND GUARD THE PURITY OF THE GREAT TITLE OF MEMBER OF THE PARTY, WE VOW TO YOU, COMRADE LENIN, WE SHALL FULFIL YOUR BEHEST WITH HONOUR! . . . DEPARTING FROM US, COMRADE LENIN ENJOINED US TO GUARD THE UNITY OF OUR PARTY AS THE APPLE OF OUR EYE, WE VOW TO YOU, COMRADE LENIN, THAT THIS BEHEST, TOO, WE SHALL FULFIL WITH HONOUR!

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42 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE . . . DEPARTING FROM US, COMRADE LENIN ENJOINED US TO STRENGTHEN WITH ALL OUR MIGHT THE ALLIANCE OF THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS. WE VOW TO YOU, COMRADE LENIN, THAT THIS BEHEST, TOO, WE SHALL FULFIL WITH HONOUR! . . . DEPARTING FROM US, COMRADE LENIN ENJOINED US TO STRENGTHEN AND EXTEND THE UNION OF REPUBLICS. WE VOW TO YOU, COMRADE LENIN, THAT THIS BEHEST, TOO, WE SHALL FULFIL WITH HONOUR!70

These phrases, these mantras, when spoken aloud, produce a benumbing effect on the brain; the steady, relentless repetitions before long create a dirge like slurry by which one word morphs into the next; the coherence of meaning is lost before the monotony of sound. The whole speech retains the glazed-eyed blankness of cultists chanting in tandem; it provides that curious combination of the sinister and the mundane which is given to the zealot who has emptied his mind entirely in order to hand it over to someone else. But in the case of this particular spiel, one must add to the creepy and the boring, the aspect of the obscene. Lenin polemicized against religion vigorously and throughout his life, perhaps because he so vividly registered in it the divestment of the human power onto a supernatural plane, and therefore something which could impede, by virtue of its very essence, the most thorough-going emancipation of the human species. Specifically Lenin was against accruing to any individuals a sense of reverence, of remoulding political leaders as sacred icons, of allowing fallible, fleshand-blood men and women to be shrouded by holy auras. After his shooting by the Social Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan in 1918, Lenin had noted with great displeasure that there were elements which were describing his own role in quasi-religious terms – “my personality is beginning to be extolled. This is annoying and harmful. We all know that our cause is not in a personality.”71 For someone who felt in his bones that the emancipation of the working class had to be an act achieved by the workers themselves, Lenin comprehended the necessity of leadership in the waging of the revolutionary struggle, but was convinced that the revolutionary class needed to maintain control over that leadership; that the leaders were to be the servants of the people – never to earn more than the wage which accrued to a skilled worker and to be subject to instant recall by the workers who elected them. But again the possibility of implementing such principles depended not simply on their validity as ideas in the heads of the people who debated them but on the objective correlation of class forces. Not only had the most radical sections of the

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 43 proletariat been decimated by civil war, but by 1921 the economic pressure on the countryside had become so pronounced that the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon the full scale policy of direct grain requisition on the part of the state which had pertained under “War Communism” and permit the introduction of small scale enterprise in order to help resuscitate an economy which was now on the verge of flatlining. The proletarian basis of the revolutionary party was thoroughly exhausted and demoralized, but under the New Economic Policy the petty bourgeois trend emerged with renewed vigour. In this way, the possibility of the workers and poorer peasants exerting democratic control over the leadership was increasingly narrowed. Their forms of organization (the soviets) had been degraded by civil war and the reintroduction of private property which naturally acted as a break on collective organization – specifically in the rural areas where the individual proprietor tended to assert his isolated economic interests more fully. These processes ensured that the organic links which the revolution had thrown up between the party and the democratic organizations of the masses were eroded, with the consequence that the bureaucracy was increasingly abstracted from the membership. One can sense in this development the basis for an ideology in which an individual leader might be comprehended in romanticized, quasi-religious terms – as an omnipotent figure raised above the ebb and flow of humanity more generally. For once the forms of leadership had begun to take on a separate existence as a caste with a set of interests raised above the social tendencies and conflicts of the larger population, it was then when a leader could appear in a transcendental guise; as a figure who had been elevated beyond the differing competing tendencies and currents within the party itself. A person who was no longer merely a particle of an unfolding debate which arose, in the last analysis, from the crucible of ever shifting historical conditions, but someone who seemed to stand outside such trivialities and uncertainties, able to direct the terms of revolutionary struggle from the transcendental prowess of his own pristine consciousness. When Lenin died in 1924, an individual leader could now be abstracted from the party membership and the masses, could be conceived of in terms of a prophet possessed of a holy semblance, precisely because the heavenly abstraction had been fortified by the earthly one – by way of the bureaucratic power which had already separated itself out from the life and activity of the party membership and the masses per se. The event which revealed just how deep such “religious” sentiment had sunk into both the attitudes of party members and the popular consciousness – was the ghastly appropriation of Lenin’s corpse on the part of the state, which then had the cadaver embalmed and displayed,

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44 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE converted into a holy icon before which people could kneel and venerate. Both Trotsky and Krupskaya protested this act on the grounds of its obscenity, the sheer sense of violation such a spectacle posed to the memory of a man whose life’s work had been about fighting for the dignity of collective freedom and self-determination.72 Their protests were, of course, ignored. And it was against this backdrop of the morbid and the macabre, that Stalin delivers his incantation at Lenin’s funeral. Here the charge of obscenity must be supplemented by one of gross hypocrisy; as Stalin delivered his droning eulogy, he would have been aware of just how desperately Lenin had fought against him in the period toward the end of his (Lenin’s) life. Stalin knew that his own political destiny had been balanced on a knife edge, and was perhaps only rescued by the event of Lenin’s death. But from a psychological perspective the eulogy represents something other than the great and benevolent relief which might flow through a once imperilled politician, someone who now feels a generosity toward an antagonist whose one time threat has been neutralized in the simplest, starkest of ways. Rather, by extolling Lenin in such an explicitly religious prosody, Stalin was very consciously preparing for the reconfiguration of Bolshevism in light of the social realities of the emerging bureaucratic caste; but there is something here, in the language, in its perverse, almost mocking obsequiousness, which goes beyond the remit of political manoeuvre and machination. In the perversely deferential manner which Stalin adopts, one can glimpse a genuine element of sadism; with the mawkish, servile tone which Stalin offered up to “honour” Lenin, he would have been aware that those same vows fell on the legacy of Bolshevism as its sickly, almost pornographic corruptions. One has the feeling that Stalin is enjoying his power in an almost rapine like fashion, purposely and sadistically delighting in the desecrations he could inflict on a political enemy who was in every sense his superior – in terms of intellect, compassion, humanity, conviction, empathy – and yet Stalin, despite his coarseness, his slowness, his lack of light – elements which were perceived by everybody including himself – it was he Stalin who stood at the head of the podium in front of the thousands, and it was the miserable, idealistic and altogether too soft predecessor who now lay supine and cold. As we have seen, the transfiguration of Bolshevism and Lenin’s work into a set of religious proscriptives also provided the ideological cover by which the Triumvirate carried out its struggle against Trotsky. Trotsky was a relatively recent convert to Bolshevism, having joined the party in 1917 on the very eve of revolution. There followed a campaign which sought to emphasize this fact and which was quasi-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 45 religious in tenor – the attempt to portray Trotsky as an outsider, as a heretic, as someone tainted with the “Menshevism” of his past; as a figure who stood as a potential Judas Iscariot in relation to the party Messiahs, the “old Bolsheviks” Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin. Again one has to marvel at the way in which the religious sensibility dovetails so easily with the line of Stalin’s political activity. In the terrain of living ideas, Stalin could prove no match for Trotsky, but in terms of resurrecting dead ones, in terms of locating snatches from arguments which had taken place years before, in doggedly sniffing out isolated quotes which were then ripped out of context and used to taint an opponent, of drawing his adversary’s commitment to the Bolshevik project into question by way of the insidious, backhanded implication; in conducting the argument, not according to the living content of the issues, but by a lifeless and bureaucratic accretion of past statements and thoughts which were then heaped upon the opponent in order to smother him; these were the methods at which Stalin excelled, and Trotsky’s political voice was very rapidly stifled. One cannot but raise an eyebrow at Stalin’s sheer vulpine-like cunning; for although he was facilitating and manoeuvring in exactly this way, when the debates actually took place he allowed Zinoviev and Kamenev to take the lead, while presenting himself as a conciliator. As Trotsky was rapidly frozen out, as Stalin’s machinations eventually ensured Trotsky’s resignation from the Commissariat of War, Stalin nevertheless – as Deutscher would note – portrayed himself as the very voice of moderation: “Up to the last moment Zinoviev clamoured for harsher reprisals against Trotsky, even for his arrest. Stalin countered his demands with a public statement to the effect that it was ‘inconceivable’ that Trotsky should be eliminated from the leadership of the party.”73 Stalin was bringing the power of the bureaucracy to bear on Trotsky, slowly, surreptitiously, but with all the inevitability of its grinding mechanics; and yet in the same moment Stalin still felt compelled to cloak himself, to disown the deed, to use Zinoviev and Kamenev as a deflection. Intuition is not a quality which one would normally associate with Stalin, and yet – perhaps because he was so attuned to the development and prosecution of his own power – he intuited in Trotsky the last fundamental obstacle to it; not in terms of the other man’s intellectual superiority, which undoubtedly irked Stalin, but on a more elemental level, for Trotsky was the creator and the inspirer of the Red Army – he was a mesmerizing almost hypnotic presence who had the ability to crystallize and cohere the revolutionary mood in the form of haunting lyrical spells; he was, in essence, the most visible representative of the spirit of October, of the revolutionary movement

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46 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE from below, and he still maintained a large degree of popularity within the masses and the cadres of the army whose heroic military effort he had so successfully directed. And it was the spirit of the mass movement, of the proletarian uprising, the last fading residues of October’s light, which the dull, swarthy bureaucrat par excellence – the veritable Pharaoh of the functionaries – sensed in the figure of his most dangerous rival. Stalin understood that Trotsky was perhaps the very last impediment to the rise and consolidation of the independent bureaucratic machine. That is why Stalin felt compelled to proceed so cautiously. On some organic, semi-conscious level, he was more aware than his other Triumvirs, of exactly what was at stake, what was being played out – the real nature of the threat Trotsky represented. One can see how, as Hegel might have put it, the appearance was the manifestation of a deeper essence; the clash of personalities signalized at a more fundamental level, a broader and more profound social conflict. The NEP had, as an economic policy, saved the Soviet Government; by legalizing market relations albeit on a limited scale it provided the stimulus by which peasant labour could once again connect with the city and industry in and through free trade. The high levels of grain hoarding which the peasants had carried out in the days of War Communism were, more often than not, a perfectly comprehensible reaction to the economic circumstances they were forced to endure. On a regular basis, the state would pay a price which fell below the value of the commodity itself; indeed the only reason why many peasants were able to sustain was because they were engaged in subsistence agriculture and could supplement the governmental stipend by drawing directly upon their own produce. On the occasions when they refused to hand over the product, this provoked an intensification in forced requisitioning – a process in which the role of Stalin was quite naturally brought to the fore and one which threatened to provoke total economic annihilation. The hope behind the introduction of NEP was that the economic exchange between the countryside and the city would be grounded on mutual economic interest; that the peasant would be able to sell the grain to the tune of a modest profit, and this in turn would go some way to stimulating industrial production which would simultaneously discover in the rural areas a much invigorated market. And so, at first, it proved. Alec Nove records how in the period 1921–3 industrial production jumped from 2004 million rubles to 4005 million, virtually doubling in a two year period. Similarly the grain harvest began to recover rising from 37.6 million tonnes to 56.6 million in the same time frame.74 But these processes were paradoxical, for while they saved the economy from the abyss, they more effectively undermined what remained

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 47 of the social basis of the revolution. They created a more pronounced differentiation in the economic strata of the peasantry itself; the kulaks or rich peasants began to gain real independent power, and the increase in private enterprise called into being a class of merchants and speculators which was parasitical on both the city and the countryside. The development of a more vital petty bourgeoisie in the guise of the private trader increasingly began to circumvent the mechanics of economic planning directed by the state, and from such economic ground inevitably developed a more pronounced strain of wage labour; or to say the same, the miasma of capitalism was everywhere arising from the ruins of revolution. In the recent past, Stalin had gained further purchase on the bureaucracy, had accentuated and developed it in conditions of civil war as a brutal weapon to be levelled against the bulk of the peasantry by means of the forced requisitions carried out in the name of the state. In civil war conditions where an acute level of state planning was necessary, this was the natural route by which Stalin would augment his power. But in the period following, the development of a strong petty bourgeoisie not only provided the key to economic salvation, but, as we have seen, further depressed the remnants of the soviets and the working class movement from below; it therefore provided a natural bulwark by which the bureaucracy could more fully consolidate its power. For this reason the ruling wing of the party now began to levy higher taxes against the poor peasant majority, while giving the emerging class of well-to-do farmers room to consolidate its economic strength in and through tax relief. As these economic policies were crystallized this class began to assert a reciprocal pressure on the government – perhaps best exemplified in the 1925 decree in which the hiring of labour and the renting of land for private interests was made legal in the countryside once more. At this point then, the bureaucracy’s interests and self-confidence was increasingly bound up with the growing power of certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie – a class which it had previously excoriated in order to provide itself with the ideological cover to extend its power through mass requisitions. Now the relationship and content of class forces had altered, one can see Stalin’s great strength was the way in which he sensed this, intuitively, semi-consciously – and how he was able to align the politics of the bureaucracy in accordance with the shift. Again one grasps the nature of Stalin’s political essence; the way in which his sensibilities were fused with the bureaucratic machine; his pragmatism, his stark materialism – merely the means by which it could facilitate its own ends. He has no politics, no ideology, outside this context (something which, incidentally, explains the sheer bank-

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48 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE ruptcy of Stalinism as an intellectual and theoretical legacy). The realignment of the politics of the bureaucracy in accordance with the developing power of the merchant sections of the petty bourgeoisie, the speculators, the farmer/capitalist on the land; such a shift was nursed by Stalin under the cover of Zinoviev and Kamenev’s bid for control of the party, and the oblivion of the ambition which had claimed them. At the same time, however, the Left Opposition, which Trotsky headed, fought against the creeping strength of the petty bourgeoisie and the initiative to facilitate its gains by further undermining one of the most fundamental achievements of the revolution – the nationalisation of the land: “The party ought to resist and crush all tendencies directed to the annulment or undermining of the nationalization of land, one of the pillars of the proletarian dictatorship.”75 The opposition put forward the programme of putting a break on the developing power of the petty bourgeoisie in the countryside by gradually and patiently converting individual farms into farms organized by the poorer layers of the peasantry on a collective basis: “To the growth of individual farming [fermerstvo] in the country we must oppose a swifter growth of the collective farms. It is necessary systematically year by year to set aside a considerable sum to aid the poor peasants organized in collectives.”76 To which the bureaucratic tendency replied with another onslaught on the heresy of Trotskyism – this time making the accusation that the Left Opposition were utopians, were “super industrialists” whose economic adventurism would be certain to wreck the economy. By this point – by around 1926 to 1927 – it seems that Stalin’s power over the party machine was entrenched, for Trotsky had been displaced from his position at the Commissariat of War – and now that the main threat to their own political ascendency had been removed, both Zinoviev and Kamenev were better able to appreciate some of the implications in the economic line the Triumvirate had pursued. They saw how the economic attacks on the poor peasants, the strengthening of the private trader and individual capitalist farmer – over and against the development of industry; all of this had led to the preponderance of the petty bourgeoisie in the lower echelons of what remained of the workers’ democracy in the cities. The consumptive nature of their own private ambitions began to recede before a fear for the genuine gains that the revolution had made; all at once they attempted to reverse course, going over to the side of the Left Opposition in 1926. By which point, of course, it was too late. In the very moment Zinoviev and Kamenev perceived the real threat, the ice beneath their feet had already begun to thin and crack. When they finally came out against Stalin, he no longer needed to uti-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 49 lize them as a launching pad for missiles aimed at Trotsky. At the same time, by their participation in the Triumvirate, both Zinoviev and Kamenev had played a key part in the creation of something called “Leninism” and its heretical afterthought – “Trotskyism”; by going over to the position of the Left Opposition, they were seen to be siding with the very worldview which they had hitherto stigmatized. Stalin was now able to deploy the same inquisitorial methods against Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves. He resurrected debates where they had opposed Lenin, and in particular he raised the question of their opposition to the insurrection in October 1917. It was they who were the heretics now; it was they who experienced the atmosphere of thickening claustrophobia and suspicion, who were made to endure meetings where the sense of hostility was almost palpable; in short it was now Zinoviev and Kamenev who felt pressed against their skin the edge of the very blade they had so meticulously helped to fashion. It was also a moment in which Stalin’s true darkness began to become more apparent. When Zinoviev and Kamenev finally went over to Trotsky, they did so timidly and sheepishly, of course – but now too with the first premonitions of genuine fear. They confided to Trotsky the depth of the danger Stalin now posed, intimating that he was not merely willing to strike out at Trotsky’s ideas, but also his person, and the only reason why Stalin hadn’t done so thus far was that he was still wary about the popular support Trotsky enjoyed – “Zinoviev added ‘He could have put an end to you [Trotsky] as far back as 1924, if he had not been afraid of retaliation – of terrorist acts on the part of the youth. That is why Stalin decided to begin by demolishing the Opposition cadres and postponed killing you until he is certain that he could do it with impunity.’”77 Now that the Triumvirate had been dissolved, Stalin required a new intellectual carapace for his policies, and it was Bukharin who helped provide this. A highly gifted Marxist economist, Nikolai Bukharin became the most important theoretician of the “right” tendency which included Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky and others, alongside Stalin himself who – despite his now considerable authority – still tended to linger in the background. The course that events would take would prove depressingly similar to the development and decline of the Triumvirate. For the most part Stalin let the others do the talking. Bukharin being the theoretical compass of the newly formed bloc – drew up a more in depth and sophisticated rationale to support the rapidly developing power of the kulak proprietor in the countryside, proposing to raise the price of grain and accelerate capitalist tendencies within the villages, even delivering the notorious proclamation which exhorted the peasants to “get rich”. At the same time others in

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50 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE the ruling wing continued pumping out those same vigorous denunciations of “Trotskyism” – that political fairy tale told by bureaucrats, chocked full of sound and fury. As the twenties moved into their pale twilight, the panorama grew ever darker. The atmosphere in the party was almost fully transformed from a setting in which open argument and furious debate had once rung out to an altogether more shadowy place, where committee men conspired from behind the scenes to form the blocs and allegiances which would best assure them favour from the functionaries in the layers above. A network of surreptitious interests developed, channelled through the furious and repeated obeisances made before the altar of “Leninism” and all political relationships were increasingly recast in terms of the power and privilege of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Stalin was now able to fully move against Trotsky, not simply excluding him from the terrain of political debate but exiling him to Siberia in 1928. Now the threat of political intriguing which the dissident voice was faced with had been supplemented by something more fundamental and menacing. As a veil of darkness was drawing down over the party, from the horizons to the Far East the dawn was just breaking over a new and vast revolutionary mobilization. China was a country which had obvious affinities with Russia; for centuries overseen by an archaic state, its road toward modernization was determined by the whip of external necessity, by the threat of the European capitalist nations that had, by the end of the nineteenth century, reduced a country which was once the cradle of global civilization to the role of a semi-colonized power. Like Russia, its economy was in the main agricultural, with a vast peasantry scattered over an almost limitless terrain, and like Russia, the indigenous bourgeoisie had emerged tentative and vacillating; some tethered to the interests of European and US capital, some barely freed from the imperial needs of the dying Qing state. Upon this basic outline was grafted a vicious mosaic of competing social tendencies; the rural warlords who straddled alliances between big landowners, the independent businessmen who merged and shaded into the lumpen, criminal elements in the newly industrializing cities, the urban gangs, and the corrupt army officers; all of whom were pushing their interests from within the interstices of the collapsing, crumbling leviathan of the Manchu Empire. Such a vast terrain, then, was by its very nature unstable, subject to the type of volatile tremors and cracking which were the auguries of an imminent political earthquake. In May 1925 the power of the nascent industries began to assert itself in the form of a general strike which first hit Shanghai and then spread across the cities of the coastal region. The strikes had been sparked by the repressive actions of

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 51 British imperialism, its cavalier disregard for the conditions of foreign labour. The trade union movement swelled by millions and the Communist Party of China added tens of thousands to its ranks, at which point the historical development which underpinned the struggle for modernisation was to yield a cruel and vicious fissure. In the early twenties the Communist Party of China had been advised by the Soviet International to participate in the burgeoning nationalist movement which was represented by the Kuomintang Party – and which was being conducted against various factional interests, regional warlords and their Western supporters. It was a movement which aimed at the unification of China in and through the establishment of a modern bourgeois nation state, but when the explosions of working class activity took place across the vast Chinese landmass, they pulled the peasants into their orbit – as their counterparts in the countryside cultivated a massive rent strike against corrupt landlords. And so, the momentum of the revolutionary movement had passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, in what was a remarkable confirmation of Trotsky’s prognosis of “permanent revolution”.78 Naturally this was not the line of the Moscow Central Committee circa 1925. Now heavily under the Stalinist sway, the leading faction asserted that, despite the proletarian uprising, the country would have to pass through a protracted period of bourgeois development, where that class took the helm – and so the possibility of achieving a newly created proletarian state was shifted onto the hazy vistas of a faraway future. This was the kind of “stagist” theory which had been pursued by the Mensheviks in the decades before, and which conceived the development of the class struggle in purely logical, generic terms; that is, in each individual country, historical development would pass through a feudal (or tributary)79 stage, then a bourgeois stage, and when capitalist social relations had sufficiently matured over a prolonged period, the conditions for bringing communist society to fruition would pertain. The proletarian revolution could be allowed to commence. This abstract logical schema was disadvantaged in as much as it did not speak to the living totality; in global terms, nations were at various stages of development, and furthermore these developments did not take place in a vacuum; rather individual nations and classes were driven into perpetual contact with one another. Such interactions generated “uneven and combined” progressions and trajectories on the part of those same nations and classes – which did not, and could not, conform to a linear evolution in isolation. So, while it was true that Russia was a predominantly feudal territory on the eve of its revolution, it was also true that the small pockets of industrial capitalism which the cities had nurtured were often

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52 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE more advanced and more seismic in nature than their Western counterparts. For the very reason of its archaic feudal absolutism, and the draconian working conditions such a system facilitated, Russia revealed itself to world capital in terms of concentrations of labour power which allowed for the most intensive exploitation. Western capital flooded in, and it brought with it the latest forms of technology and modes of labour organization, and so it was, for instance, that something like the Pulitov factory in St Petersburg had around 30,000 workers80 at the time of 1917 – all contained in the single space of a hulking metal works. In other words, such uneven and combined development on the world scale not only stimulated an advanced development of industry grafted onto an essentially feudal backwater; but also set the basis for a sharpening and refining of revolutionary consciousness in the heat and vapour of some of the biggest industrial factories in the world. It was uneven and combined development which underpinned the revolutionary flashpoint of October, which forged a proletariat whose militancy and concentration allowed it to throw up its own forms of government in the cities, the auguries of a new historical epoch. It was the process of uneven and combined development, envisioned from the purview of the global totality, which was then refracted back – to receive concentrated and sublime expression in the historical realities of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later China, and which provided the conditions by which the revolutionary process – bequeathed to the bourgeoisie or its agents in earlier periods – now passed of necessity to the proletariat. Or to say the same thing at the level of theory, the recognition of uneven and combined development on a world historic scale provided the logical outline for Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution”. In response to the heresy of “permanent revolution”, the Stalinist bureaucracy once more offered up its home-grown notion of “socialism in one country”, and its sibling – the “stagist” theory of history. These schemas tessellated with one another, forming a single theoretical whole which perfectly refracted the interests of the bureaucracy. By arguing that the communist parties abroad were representatives of nations who were still in the “bourgeois” stage of development, funds from those parties could be easier siphoned into what appeared to be the more significant and imperative struggle – that is, the ongoing struggle for “socialism in one country”, the struggle for socialism in the USSR. Or to say the same – stripped of all ideological paraphernalia – funds from abroad could be more easily directed into the coffers of the Stalinist state bureaucracy. More important still, however, was that a successful proletarian led revolution in China would be premised on the development of a grassroots democracy of city work-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 53 ers, poorer peasants and land labourers; a situation where power flowed and flowered from the bottom-up, infusing the forms and the structure of the Chinese Communist Party with its potency; this, in turn, was a situation which would definitively contradict the power of the bureaucratic caste back in the USSR and its ability to impose the political line internationally and from above. By arguing that the proletarian revolution in China was not yet ripe, could not yet be achieved, the Stalinist bureaucracy was not simply evincing an atavistic and muddle-headed form of Marxism, but was expressing perfectly and precisely the tenor of its own best interests; by shifting the emphasis from the proletarian tendency to the bourgeois-nationalist one in China, by insisting on the fusion of the Chinese Communist Party with the political direction of the Kuomintang, Stalin was not only manifesting his organic disgust toward the mass movement from below, but prosecuting the most effective course by which the domination of the Soviet bureaucracy over the Communist Party of China could be preserved and heightened. The situation reached its climax in April 1927. By this point China had been engulfed by revolution, in the villages thousands of co-operatives had been set up, in the towns – an untold number of factories occupied. The social detritus which had accumulated in the aftermath of the Manchu collapse in 1911, the landlords, the money-lenders, the merchant cum speculator – all of which had profited from the desperation and social decay which had everywhere opened up from within the country like a yawning, ravening maw; these elements where now forcibly uprooted, sent scurrying for cover by the force and momentum of the revolutionary event. At once millions began to breathe in newer and fresher air, and in its atmosphere, some of the decadent and awful oppressions which had hung across the dying empire like a curse, began to thin and fade away. Addiction to opium, foot binding, child prostitution; such things started to evaporate in the era’s new light. And at the centre, the vortex of all these vast and sweeping social transformations was Shanghai, where a radical mobilization had ousted the local warlord/governor, and now the city was in the hands of the working classes. It was at this point where the bourgeois-nationalist and the proletarian tendencies threatened to converge with the most devastating of consequences. As the workers’ uprising claimed the city, the Kuomintang army, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, was rolling ever closer to the borders, and when it arrived, its nationalist leadership was unnerved and alarmed by the spectacle of the vast network of proletarian power which had come to fruition. Both these entities, the expressions of two different and distinct historical formations, looked at each other from across the table, cautious, suspi-

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54 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE cious and unblinking; at which point the directive from Moscow arrived, in accordance with the logic of the Stalinist bureaucracy, making it clear that the workers’ fears were unfounded, that the nationalist army should be greeted as liberators, and the proletarians should unarm and demob. The leadership of the Communist Party conveyed the order. The Shanghai workers acquiesced. And Chiang and the nationalists did not for a second hesitate. The massacre which followed took the lives of more than 50,000 people. The nationalist army set upon the unarmed city workers like a rabid animal. The unions were obliterated. The political organizations, the hothouses of radicals and revolutionaries and students and youth, were annihilated within the space of days. That first precious breath of freedom had been stifled. The betrayal of the Chinese Revolution would have world-historic ramifications. It shaped indelibly the character of China’s subsequent historical course, for the Chinese Communist Party was now finished as any type of Marxist organization. Much of its urban membership had been destroyed by Chiang’s forces, and the way in which it had helped facilitate the bloodbath meant that the city workers would never trust in it again. For this reason its centre of gravity was inexorably shifted; from the urban proletariat to the rural peasantry, and its tactics were adjusted in accordance – no longer advocating collective control over the means of production by the working classes, it now promoted guerrilla warfare from the mountains, villages, jungles, grasslands and swamps. This shift in focus would take on a world-historic resonance, stamping the 1949 revolution initiated by Mao Zedong with its character, and creating a situation in which a centralized bureaucratic caste monopolized the state power, absorbed the unions, exacted economic planning from the top-down, forcibly collectivizing the peasantry while suppressing private property – that is, a system which was a variant of Stalinism in all its essentials but specific and peculiar to the conditions of China. In the USSR itself the defeat of the Chinese proletarian revolution of 1925–7 had significant implications. It confirmed, perhaps more fully than any other betrayal or defeat, the utter isolation of the Russian proletariat. For the same reason, it also heralded the complete ascension of the Stalinist bureaucracy. At the same time, however, the economic conditions on the ground in the USSR were themselves reaching a crisis point. The criticisms of the Left Opposition had proved founded; for the unhindered stimulation of the wealthier layers of the peasantry, and the concomitant impulse to a class of private traders and speculators in grain, meant that the state’s control over grain surpluses had been substantially impeded. This in turn, meant any impetus to the development of industry in the big cities was sig-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 55 nificantly weakened. The resultant lag in industrial production then fed back into the economic conditions in the countryside; the vast majority of the peasantry already lacked the purchasing power to pay for what were now ever dwindling levels of manufactured goods;81 goods which were desperately required in order to raise agricultural technique to a modern standard. Toward the end of 1927 the richer stratum of the peasantry, accustomed to the benefits which had accrued to it from private trade, started to hoard vast amounts of grain from the state whose returns were unprofitable in comparison. Medvedev reports that, when it came to the level of grain, by January 1928 “the government had acquired barely 300 million pods – in sharp contrast with the figure of 428 million in January 1927. The supply of bread to the cities and the army was seriously endangered.”82 From buttressing the power of the state bureaucracy, the development of capital accumulation in the countryside was not only exerting a stranglehold on city industry, but was now attempting to hold the state itself to ransom – in order to pursue the logic of its interests; a logic which wound its way inexorably, as the Left Opposition had predicted, toward the full scale restoration of capitalist social relations. So, while the bureaucratic power had leant on the petty bourgeoisie in order to fully consolidate itself against the defeated proletariat, by the time of 1928, its erstwhile ally had come to constitute an existential threat. With the spectre of mass famine looming, and the economic crisis about to reach breaking point, Stalin – now fully master and commander of the party vessel – made a sudden and abrupt reversal of the policy line which he had been advocating for several years. He put into action a plan to take “extraordinary measures” against the “kulaks”, unleashing a wave of violence and grain confiscations which swept the country. But at the party congress which preceded the repression, Stalin presented himself as a paragon of reason, moderation and the respect for law, averring: “The kulak must be taken by economic measures, in accordance with Soviet legality. And Soviet legality is not an empty phrase. Of course, this does not rule out the application of some administrative measures against the kulaks. But administrative measures must not replace economic ones.”83 The disparity of word and deed – something which was always part and parcel of the Stalinist project – was so surprising to local party leaders in this instance, that Stalin was compelled to issue a further order, threatening his functionaries with reprisals, were they not to secure a significant breakthrough in grain procurements. This was perhaps the beginning of a longer lasting pattern by which Stalin sought to abstract himself from the sordid and messy details of repression, allow-

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56 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE ing them to devolve onto others, while presenting himself as an essentially benevolent, but somewhat out-of-touch, ruler – not fully cognisant of events taking place on the ground. It would be a tactic he would resort to over and over, and it would be impossible to deny that it was anything other than effective. But what about the policy itself? In the most fundamental sense it was an utter failure. Under conditions of extreme repression, levels of grain procurements spiked for a short period, but then dropped off almost at once. The “extraordinary measures” deployed against the countryside were little more than a declaration of war. A good proportion of the peasantry, and not simply the richest in their number, responded in kind. Medvedev relates how “hundreds of thousands of the better-off peasants had already countered the use of extraordinary measures by sowing less grain. Many kulaks ‘liquidated themselves’: they sold their basic means of production and hid their money and valuables. Middle peasants had no incentive to increase production since they might then be labelled ‘kulaks.’”84 The lower economic bracket was affected too, for as Trotsky points out, “hired hands and the poor peasant found themselves without work . . . Agriculture again arrived in a blind alley.”85 Medvedev speculates that when Stalin initiated the first set of repressions – “he evidently did not plan to make them the basis of agrarian policy for many years to come . . . Stalin, it seems, only wanted to frighten the kulaks into submission, to make them more compliant about selling their grain to the state.”86 Nevertheless the sudden, violent attempt to obliterate the development of private trade in the countryside, led not only to a weakening of kulak power, but also threatened to decimate the cohesion of agricultural production itself, with both the middling layers losing the incentive to produce, and the more impoverished elements enduring the collapse of a social existence which was increasingly premised on wage labour. The survival of the bureaucracy had necessitated the rapid dismantling of the NEP in the countryside, but at the same time, agriculture again “arrived in a blind alley” which now threatened the prospects of the national economy as a whole. This policy could not be reversed87 for the bonhomie of the wealthier peasants had been irrevocably squandered, and they felt themselves to be locked in a life and death struggle with the state monolith. The whole edifice now teetered on the edge of collapse. The state bureaucracy had arrived at a dead end from which retreat seemed impossible. At this point Stalin reverted to type: the formalism and the crass materialism which were the touchstones of his political psyche were now brought to bear on the economic reality and – untrammelled by any genuine resistance within the party – they would yield the most

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 57 tragic of consequences. The endeavour to control the grain which was under the dominion of the wealthier peasants was now broadened and extended to the peasant economy as a whole; the policy of “extraordinary measures” – of forced grain requisitions against the upper and middling layers – was inexorably cultivated into the broader project of forced collectivization whereby the “kulaks” as a whole social class were to be “liquidated” and the social foundations of agriculture were to be restructured on a collective basis by the means of the most devastating application of state violence. Stalin was acting according to his own lights; his whole existence, from a degraded, brutalized child onward, had taught him that the carapace of the world merely shelters a frenzy of competing, violent, elemental drives and the only way to ensure self-preservation is to make sure the power that you bring to bear shatters the semblance of the entity which opposes you. The entire edifice of reality was in fact a vast mechanism of interminable, grinding forces, and he who controls the machine, controls the world. At this point in time Stalin really must have felt confirmed in his omnipotence, for as Deutscher points out: “All his experience had bred in him an excessive confidence in the power of a closely knit and ruthless administration. Had he not got rid of all his once so powerful rivals merely because he was able to turn that power against them? Had he not been able to tame a party, once so untameable, and reduce it to a body of frightened and meek men always ready to do his bidding?”88 Why then, should not the same methodological practises subdue the countryside and stabilize the seizing economy, while raising the level of agriculture to truly modern proportions? If there had remained something of a credible opposition, if Stalin had any ability to conceive of reality in social-historical terms – as something other than a conglomeration of external, deadened mechanical forces – then perhaps he would have been able to comprehend, however vaguely, that the existing productive and social conditions were profoundly inadequate to the task. As Trotsky would later write – “the collective farms were set up with an equipment suitable in the main only for small-scale farming”.89 They were in essence established on the product and productions of a far less advanced historical epoch. On top of this, the city industries had for a period of years stagnated and were by and large without the wherewithal to supply the countryside with the vast and sophisticated array of technological equipment the collective basis implied. In social terms, the vast nexus of the peasantry was constructed out of millions of individual proprietors, each of whom subsisted in an isolated bubble of economic interest; the social and cultural foundations for a complex of collective labouring units with a higher level of productive technique and

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58 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE technology simply hadn’t had the time to foment and cohere in and through a prolonged period of historical development. Nevertheless Stalin’s formalistic approach was at once consecrated in a series of detailed statistical prognoses which would indicate the direction of the first five-year plan, which confirmed in advance the “brilliance” of Stalin’s thinking and purported to predict in quantitatively precise terms the huge advancements in agriculture and industrialization the new state measures would achieve. Given the actual conditions which pertained, given the nature of the living reality, these statistical assumptions were the purest and most giddy fabulations. But it is illuminating how Stalin’s gift for pragmatism and his supposed sense of level-headed realism – now untethered from the ballast of party opposition – tended toward their opposites, evaporating into the ether of a series of utopic, rainbow dreams. There is almost something pathological in Stalin’s thinking in this period, obsessive, almost feverishly intense, yet utterly disengaged from reality. In the words of Deutscher, Stalin “was now completely possessed by the idea that he could achieve a miraculous transformation of the whole of Russia by a single tour de force. He seemed to live in a half-real and half-dreamy world of statistical figures and indices, of industrial orders and instructions, a world in which no target and no objective seemed to be beyond his and the party’s grasp. He coined the phrase that there were no fortresses which could not be conquered by the Bolsheviks.”90 The variant of the first five-year plan which was adopted at the Sixth Party Congress in April 1929 stipulated a huge and rapid advance in the process of collectivization, subsuming 23 percent of all peasant farms in a period of five years.91 Even the muscular and ruthless Soviet bureaucracy was ill equipped to undertake such a massive task, and so Stalin tried to ease its way by inciting the poorer peasants against the more well-to-do, combining a programme of what was essentially legalized looting, with the forcible top-down conversion of individual property into the vast agricultural hubs. Millions of human beings were uprooted and found themselves corralled toward the collective farms, not so different from the cattle they herded. There was, and could only ever have been, one possible outcome to this reckless, disastrous self-imposed experiment in civil war. Deutscher records the peasant response: The bulk of the peasants decided to bring in as little as possible of their property to the collective farms which they imagined to be state owned factories. In desperation they slaughtered their cattle, smashed implements and burned crops . . . In 1929 Russia

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 59 possessed 34 million horses. Only 16.6 millions were left in 1933 – 18 million horses had been slaughtered. So were 30 millions of large cattle, about 45 percent of the total, and nearly 100 million, or two thirds of all, sheep and goats. Vast tracts of land were left untilled. Famine stalked the towns and the black soil steppe of the Ukraine.92 These rumblings of rebellion fissured across the vast Russian territory and its satellites,93 and again, the state was compelled to intensify repression in response. Still purporting to operate under the rubric of Marxism, the bureaucracy attempted to provide a sociologically precise justification for the repression it was now offering up: it began by the loosely correct classification of the peasantry into three main economic brackets. The kulaks who were the richer peasants and would employ other peasants or provide them with loans or equipment which took the form of interest bearing capital, the middling layers who oscillated between the aforementioned exploiting classes and the lower levels, and finally the poorest who owned either the smallest patches of land or worked the land on behalf of others. But to this characterization the Stalinist ideologues now added one further category – that of “subkulak”. This denoted a peasant who was not a member of the kulak class in terms of the position he occupied in relation to the means of production; he was, in fact, substantially poorer and could not command the labour power or product of others. Nevertheless, the regime stipulated – he was kulak in spirit so to speak; his thoughts, his sensibilities, his political allegiance, his most fundamental feelings – were all bound up with the counter revolutionary interests of the kulak per se. Robert Conquest writes of the categorization of the “subkulak” as: a term without any real social content even by Stalinist standards, but merely rather unconvincingly masquerading as such. As was officially stated, ‘by kulak we mean the carrier of certain political tendencies which are most frequently discernible in the subkulak, male and female.’ By this means, any peasant whatever was liable to dekulakisation; and the subkulak notion was widely employed, enlarging the category of victims greatly beyond the official estimate of kulaks proper even at its most strained.94 Conquest is quite correct here. The category of “subkulak” issued out of the need of the bureaucracy to justify the repression of the peasantry in the broadest possible terms, while still trying to frame it in the

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60 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE language of class struggle; the “subkulak”, then, became a spectral figure which lurked on the periphery of every social class; the counter revolutionary “other” whose haunting, shadowy presence demanded the unstinting and perpetual repression required to preserve that other Stalinist chimera – “socialism in one country”. But when the “subkulak” was actually hunted down and unmasked, when his billowing, ghostly cloak was finally cast off by the powers of this most “revolutionary” of states, what then remained? What lay underneath? This scene from an unpublished novel written by one of the state enforcers who took part in “dekulakization” is perhaps instructive: The door opened. The brigade burst into the house. The GPU officer in charge of the operation was in front, brandishing a revolver. ‘Hands up!’ Morgunov was barely able, in the gloom to make out the frail figure . . . He was wearing white drawers and a dark undershirt, and was barefoot. A tangled beard stuck out on a face that was long unshaven. The eyes, wide with terror, glanced from place to place, The deeply lined face winced; the coarse brown hands were trembling. Hanging by a worn, old cord, on his bare chest was a little cross grown dark with age. . . . suddenly he began to sob. Convulsive sobs doubled up his whole body. He bent over in an unnatural position as his body shook and small gleaming tears followed one another down the calloused, weatherbeaten face. His wife, not a young woman, jumped down from the high sleeping bench and began to wail at the top of her voice. The children began crying. A calf lying beside the stove, apparently not in very good health, began to bawl. Murgunov looked around, aghast. He saw that the hut contained nothing but the one room and the big Russian stove . . . By the stove were some oven forks and buckets of water, and to the left, by the wall, was a large old-fashioned trunk. The class enemy.95 They often came at night. Peasants were deported in exactly this way, their families huddled and terrified, their children weeping. But deported to where? One of the most terrifying things about the totalitarianism which had now come into being was that the state need not provide its victims with an answer to such a question. More often than not the detachments of “communists” who were sent to carry out these expropriations had no idea what would meet the peasants on

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 61 the enforced exodus which had been set into motion nor where they would end up. As Medvedev comments, the state increasingly took the view that “whoever does not join the collective farms is an enemy of the Soviet regime”.96 As the waves of discontent broke against the bows of the state totalitarianism, as the peasants smashed their own equipment and slaughtered their own livestock in desperate protest – the modes of collectivization were to grow ever more murderous. Scores of thousands were deported to the most barren, unpopulated wastelands of Siberia. According to Medvedev, by the end of 1932, it would “hardly be sinning against the truth to put the total number of ‘dispossessed kulaks’ at close to one million families, of which not fewer than half were exiled to the northern and eastern regions of the country”.97 Machine guns were turned on whole villages. Deutscher relays a conversation he had when travelling by train from Moscow to Kharvok in this period. He encountered a colonel of the G.P.U who had been charged with enforcing collectivization in the villages, and the experience had reduced the military man entirely, his voice a broken, husky whisper – “‘I am an old Bolshevik’, he said, almost sobbing, ‘I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the civil war. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine-guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh, no, no!’”98 The colonel’s situation encompassed the anguish of many “old Bolsheviks” – men and women who had fought for the revolution, who had risked life and limb for a sense of idealism and freedom, and now found themselves torn between the need to defend that sacrifice, to maintain the gains of the revolution such as they were – and the sheer disgust they came to evince at the grotesque orders which arrived from on-high, issued from the brutal and arbitrary power of the bureaucratic elite. In its war against the peasantry the regime did not just confine itself to the expropriation of their land and equipment. Parallel to this, the Stalinist bureaucracy attacked some of the central ideological bastions of peasant social life. As 1928 drew to its conclusion, the Orthodox Church was the victim of an intensive repression, and when the village populations were forced into the collectives, the local church was often desecrated or closed down, and much of the religious paraphernalia burnt. The cities were not exempt – many religious buildings which were at the same time historical monuments were pulled down, especially in Moscow, as the grip of the regime began to tighten around the culture’s ideological and spiritual heart. Medvedev reports that by 1930, eighty percent of village churches99 had been closed down and many clergymen now numbered in the ranks of the exiled “subkulaks”.

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62 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE The “revolution” in agriculture was to be accompanied by one in industry, and again, the same ruthless and reckless measures were applied – a brittle, unflinching policy of top-down reorganization exacted through the most intensive application of state force. The results were less of a disaster than the collectivization policies which had been inflicted on the countryside – at least in terms of productivity. At first the progress was sluggish – in 1929 the level of pig iron and steel produced had increased only 200,000 tonnes on the 1928 figure of 600,000 tonnes. Only 3,300 tractors – devices which were urgently required in the countryside – were produced that same year.100 But at the same time, the desperate, haphazard rush toward economic ascendency provided the basis for the development of a whole host of industries which had hitherto barely existed. Plants specializing in tractor, airplane and automobile manufacture sprang up, and these necessitated a rapid development in the steel, synthetic, chemical and machine tool industries; alongside the construction of a vast number of railways and canals which were to provide the arteries by which all these new organs would eventually knit together. Hubs of industry were created on the Russian periphery – in Belorussia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and so on, and the Eastern regions developed into centres of intensive oil exploitation and metallurgy, with scores of new cities springing into being. But despite this, the fantastical targets for that first five-year plan were in no way met (neither its basic nor optimum variants). The Supreme Council of the National Economy had planned that gross industrial output would increase 2.8 times, with heavy industry rising 3.3 times but in actual fact gross industrial output roughly doubled and heavy industry increased only 2.7 times. The output of consumer goods rose by one fourth of the expected level in the same period. And as Medvedev points out, not only were almost none of the targets achieved, but in some cases certain industries faltered and stagnated: In light industry and food processing many important branches showed no growth at all during the first five-year plan. In cotton cloth, for example, 2.678 billion meters were manufactured in 1928 and 2.694 billion in 1932, whereas the plan called for 4.588 billion. Woollen cloth: 86.8 million meters were manufactured in 1928 and 88.7 million meters in 1932, in comparison with the planned 500 million meters. The production of sugar was to have increased twofold; in reality it stood 30 percent lower in 1932 than in 1928. A similar decline occurred in the production of meat and milk.101

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 63 Several historians have been tempted to bifurcate the first five-year plan in their analyses, conceiving in it the separations and exclusivities of industry and agriculture. Collectivization was a disaster on all fronts, so the argument goes, but despite the violence and suffering of the multitudes which experienced the forceful restructuring of industry, nevertheless the statistics show that the gains made in the towns and cities were often real and progressive in productive terms. Such an account – or justification as it might more accurately be termed – fails to comprehend the reciprocal interrelation between the two points of development; that of collectivization in the countryside and the development of the urban industries. In fact the two processes were not mutually exclusive; the devastating consequences of collectivization were absolutely integral to the formation of the labour patterns which would underpin the acceleration in industry. One of the most awful results of Stalinist collectivization was the outbreak of famine in the countryside. In 1930–1, an ever more perilous shortage of food was being experienced in the rural regions as the consequences of collectivization more and more set in; government requisitions had become increasingly extortionate and agricultural production itself was in danger of collapse. By late 1932, vast areas had been afflicted by the relentless blight of mass starvation. The corpses began to pile up, especially those of young children who were particularly vulnerable to the desperate situation. Human beings feasted on weeds and nettles, and, on occasion, one another. Millions perished. Whole rural settlements were reduced to ghost towns. The Soviet writer Aleksei Kosterin describes the atmosphere in sober, striking terms: It was frightening to walk through villages in 1933–1934. . . . Houses with boarded up windows, empty barnyards, abandoned equipment in the fields. And terrifying mortality, especially among children. The fields and household gardens grew wild. In the Kuban the Cossacks grimly joked: the wolves have gathered in the weeds outside the village. And the people wandered about as though they weren’t all there.102 Nobody knows the precise number of casualties. Estimates usually vary from 5 to 8 million. While the ghosts and the dying lingered in the villages, hundreds of thousands more made the attempt to break out of the cycle of starvation and destitution and hopelessness – by fleeing to the cities, and in so doing, they provided the vast reservoir of manpower which the industrial project so desperately required. The industrial working class began to grow exponentially in number. But

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64 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE the Stalinist push toward industrialization stamped a very particular character on the forms of labour which undergirded it. The peasant exodus had been translated into a surfeit of labour in the cities – one which ensured not only the low cost of wages from the purview of the state and its industrializing endeavour, but also created an excrescence of labour which did not find its way into long term employment. The desperation of the starving, destitute peasants was key to the project of industry, but if the economy of the countryside was to survive, the overflow of peasant labour into the urban regions must also be stemmed and regulated. In other words, the momentum of the repressions the state had already carried out was pulling it with an inexorable gravity toward repressions anew. A system of passports now had to be introduced as a way of addressing the problem; current industrial and office workers were issued with this form of internal documentation whereas peasants were not – and so, the mass migrations ceaselessly and perpetually flowing into the cities were restricted and curtailed. The system of internal passports was yet another black chapter in the development of Stalinism, and yet another blot on the revolutionary traditions it claimed to mobilize. One of the most significant strands of struggle which the political underground had conducted in the twilight of the Tsarist autocracy was for the abolition of the passport system in operation at the time. The Tsarist passport system had limited the freedom of the citizens who were subjected to it; by tracking their movements within the country as a bureaucratic and legally enshrined state measure, it facilitated the needs of the sinister and ever vigilant “Okhrana” or secret police. In the aftermath of October, the internal passport system was at once abolished and this was considered to be one of the major gains of the revolution, especially from the purview of the activists and fighters who had suffered from it during the Tsarist heyday. But in 1932 the system of internal passports was reintroduced. The Politburo’s stated aim was to cleanse Leningrad, Moscow and other large cities of “‘superfluous’ [people – G.K.], not involved in production or the work of institutions, as well as of kulak – criminal and other anti-social elements hiding in the towns”.103 The new measure put an end to the freedom of labour which had persisted in the light of the New Economic Policy during the middle twenties. The system of passports helped to bind the peasant to the collective farm, for the cities had been legally locked down, while at the same time, Deutscher observes, the state was able to regulate brutally and decisively the interflow of labour between the town and the countryside – “industrial businesses signed contracts with collective farms, by which the latter were obliged to send specified num-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 65 bers of men and women to factories in the towns”.104 Essentially this heralded a mass system of forced labour which was premised on the very minimum of wages. But it implied more than just forced labour. One need only reference the anonymous, clinical language of the decree, its reference to “superfluous” peoples – to have an intimation of what was to come. Like the “subkulak” those “superfluous” peoples were to be found at every social level: they were the peasants who tried to flee the collectives, they were the starving, huddled individuals who had stolen a loaf of bread, they were the newly created workers who were unfamiliar with industrial machinery and who made mistakes on the factory line, they were the “counter revolutionary agitators” who in hushed, whispered tones repeated “fables” about great famines which had broken out across the countryside. Above all they were the great masses who would now provide the raw human material for the gulags – the vast, hulking industrial prisons which helped to create the railways and the canals erected on the crimped, broken backs of a generation of slave labourers. The forced labour which the passport system facilitated in the cities and the collectives was now complemented in the darkest of all possible ways. The Gulag system proper was introduced by the OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) on 25 April 1930 by way of the Sovnarkom Order105 but the use of slave labour had been codified by way of secret decree in the year before. Again, the contrast with earlier Bolshevik policy should be taken into account. In the youthful period of the Bolshevik government, under the pressure of reaction, civil war conditions and a strengthening bureaucracy – it cannot be denied that a number of people had been incarcerated for spurious and unjust reasons. But at the same time, the moral pulse of the revolution was still detectable beneath the surface of the regime; the workers’ democracy which provided its life support had not yet been fully annihilated. Consequently the penal system was also imbued with a set of progressive features, especially considering it had been set up by revolutionaries who had themselves suffered terribly in the draconian conditions of the Tsarist prisons. As Medvedev points out the “regimen for political prisoners in the twenties was relatively lenient . . . In political jails (politizolyatory) self-government was allowed; the politicals elected ‘elders’, who dealt with the prison administration. They kept their clothes, books, writing materials, pocket knives; they could subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Their imprisonment was regarded as temporary isolation during a national emergency.”106 When one of the founding fathers of anarchist thought, Peter Kroptkin, died a number of his followers were granted temporary release in order to attend his funeral.

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66 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE As the twenties went on, many of these privileges were worn away. But despite the fact these progressive measures were being corroded, it is difficult to imagine that anyone at this time could have had a true glimmering of the horror to come. And yet it did come; swiftly, mercilessly, passing across the panorama of the fading revolution with all the resonance of a dark angel. By the 1930s prison conditions in general had reached a state of unheard of bleakness and fathomless cruelty. The distinction between the politicos and the common criminals increasingly became one in form alone, and meaningless to wit. By this point the totalitarian regime itself had come to resemble nothing more than a gigantic, gruesome gangster who had hijacked the revolution; it was natural therefore that the state monolith would see in the criminal classes the myriad manifestations of its own bastard offspring – as yet another lever in the mechanism of repression which could be brought to bear on any form of political resistance. With a surreptitious wink and a sneaky grin, a prison guard could let a thuggish criminal know that he, the guard, would turn a blind eye to certain forms of behaviour, especially if they were exhibited against those “superfluous” peoples of a certain political bent. The consequences of this were almost invariably brutal and often tragic – according to V. I. Volgin the criminals: robbed the politicals almost openly, because they had the guards’ protection. They would let the current victim glimpse a knife in their clothes, and shift his things into their own hands . . . we learned about this frightful experience, and no one wanted to lose his liver over a rag.107 The conditions in the everyday civilian prisons were beyond appalling. M. M. Ishov, who was put into the Novosibirsk prison in the later part of the thirties, recalls the atmosphere: If you recall the ancient tales about heaven and hell and try to visualize them, then that cell was real hell . . . About 270 men were kept in a cell 40 square meters in area . . . .People squirmed under the bunks, even on the cover of the big parasha [prison slang for chamber pot] standing in the corner. Prisoners piled up at the doors, in the passageway. There was nowhere to sit down and nowhere to move to. Many, standing on their feet, fainted from exhaustion . . . .There were strong people but there were weak and sick people too. At times it became unbearable to be in the cell. A little window, 30-by-40 centimetres [12 by 16 inches], was open all the time, but the flow of air was negligible.

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 67 The cell was stifling. There was a heavy noisome stench. It became hard to breathe.108 To this sense of oppressive claustrophobia should be added the brutality of the guards, which was unrestrained now, and easily translated into a thousand and one petty forms of abuse and harassment. One must also take into account the indifference of the state to the lives of those it incarcerated; an indifference which was punctuated only by the savage and lethal outbreaks of repression against those who demonstrated or tried to escape. The allocation of food to prisoners was often sporadic and inadequate, rendering those who had been incarcerated as little more than bags of skin and bones. In the Sukhanovo prison outside Moscow the prisoners often lingered on the verge of starvation. The prison itself was located in the basement of a state building; while the people in the lower echelons wasted away, the top floors were reserved for the employees of the NKVD – a pristine recreational area where the bureaucratic leaders of the state security service could intermingle and enjoy the finest foods and wine money could buy. A more exemplary metaphor for the true nature of Stalinist totalitarianism would be hard to find. But if the conditions in these “ordinary” prisons were dank and awful and perilous, the conditions in the gulags plumbed a darkness which was almost without limit. Perhaps – along with the Holocaust which would reach its ghastly fruition only a few years later – the creation of the Gulag was the event to most express, in Victor Serge’s bleak, tragic idiom – “the midnight of the century”. By the twilight of the thirties, the last remaining vestiges of liberalism which remained from the revolution’s heyday had been fully extinguished, and what was left in the aftermath was little more than a hell on earth. The so-called “corrective-labour camps” which encompassed what Solzhenitsyn described as the Gulag Archipelago tended to be dotted across the outlining regions; huge, concrete fortifications which seemed to spring up from the bleak, craggy, harsh terrain; jagged silhouettes of black which loomed like giants through the swirling clouds of snow and the shrieking winds. Those that were able to survive the journeys, those brutal deportations to the farthest, most unforgiving reaches, were then confronted by the fact that the prison regime of the “collective-labour camps” had no interest in preserving life; they had been sent there to be drained of every last spiritual and physical reserve their organisms were capable of mustering; they were expected to labour . . . and then to die. As Medvedev observes, “the regimen in most Kolyma and northern camps was deliberately calculated to destroy people. Stalin and his

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68 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE circle did not want their victims to return; better that they should disappear forever.”109 The labour regimes were “rarely ten hours but more often twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen hours a day, a savage struggle for existence, hunger, ragged clothing, poor medical care – all this was not the exception but the norm of life in the Stalinist camps after 1937”.110 The prisoners were often taken out to work in the very worst conditions. Draped in rags, cloth covering the soles of their feet, they were forced into the type of relentless, crushing labour which involved working the mines or digging trenches in the rain and the bitter frost – with many just giving up, lying down, and expiring in the snow. Others were reduced to physical and mental shells within a matter of weeks, but for the ill there was little respite; more often than not, the only sliver of salvation they could hope to glean would come from other prisoners who might happen to have some kind of medical knowledge. The way in which sickness swept through the camps was something of a boon for the guards however; it allowed them to more effectively cordon off the weak and the decrepit, corralling them toward what the authorities had come to term “padezh” – a reference to an antiquated agricultural practise which involved bringing a group of infected cattle together, separating them from the herd, as they approached their imminent demise. Alongside this, the local camp authorities were given the jurisdiction to expedite these remorseless, horrific processes outright – by a simple bullet to the brain. They could murder prisoners en masse without any recourse to the central authority in Moscow. In 1938, Medvedev points out, some 40,000 prisoners were shot in the Kolyma region alone by the camp authorities and their minions – on the basis of fabricated charges which spoke of “sabotage” and other such hackneyed Stalinist clichés. Medvedev relates how one Colonel Garanin was particularly trigger happy – “arriving at a camp, he would order all ‘shirkers’ to be lined up. This usually meant sick people and physical wrecks. Some could not stand on their feet. Garanin would walk down the line in a fury, shooting many at close range . . . The guards often stacked the corpses at the gates like a dam of timbers”.111 Of the people who were placed in the gulags in 1937–8 it is estimated that only ten to fifteen percent survived.112 Again the estimates of the exact number of victims vary from source to source. Some 14–18 million people were thought to have passed through the Gulag labour camps from 1929 to 1953. According to a study of the Soviet Archives carried out in the early 1990s a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53.113 The journalist and historian Anne Applebaum puts the number at closer to 3 million114 though some estimates have ranged as high as 10 million.

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 69 The regions surrounding the places where the camps once stood are also the sites of mass graves, covered over by the creeping permafrost and the passing of the years. It is impossible to get a handle on the kind of despair which would have pervaded the camps at the time; its hopelessness must have felt as vast and bleak as a Siberian winter. The ex-president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, once described that same country under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein as something which resembled “a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it”.115 The same could be said, and with even greater justification, of Russia at the height of the Gulag period. It is important – even though one is facing an uphill struggle – to at least try to put into words, to make some effort to reference the vast anonymous multitudes of human beings who were cannibalized by this regime – even if its bottomless blackness somehow defies description. It is important for the reason that even today there are significant numbers of people – those that generally run the gamut from the bewildered to the sinister – who still adopt the mantle of Stalinism unabashedly, who see in his regime, in the mass murder of millions of its own citizens – the actions of a brave, plucky state which was carrying forward humanity’s progressive agenda heroically and in the face of unremitting hostility from the larger world. They associate Stalinism not with the set of practises which had come to underpin communism’s funeral rites, but with the true essence of communism itself. It is a bizarre, topsy-turvy inversion to say the least, when the tenor of human freedom and emancipation is to be discerned in the spectre of slave labour and mass graves. From the purview of our own analysis, the slave labour system, which provided a significant bulwark for the projects of industrialization, required the massive extirpation of great swathes of the citizenry in order to provide its labour resources. These people were rarely criminals of the ordinary type, and the harvesting of them demanded an even more pervasive and pernicious apparatus of repression. As we have seen, the corrosion of the revolution and the destruction of the most advanced sections of the industrial working class provided the basis for the ascension of the bureaucracy and the extension of the security apparatus. At first the Cheka was an entity which was designed in a military capacity to instil discipline on the front and to prevent individual acts of sabotage against the revolution at home – all under the extreme duress of civil war conditions. But as the focus of the Cheka was expanded beyond the remit of the individual, it became the means by which the bureaucracy was able to gain control over the requisitioning process and extend its power on a transnational basis, leaving in its wake a rash of bureaucratic organizations which were responsive

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70 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE and loyal to it. This process was intensified as the “extraordinary measures” were graduated into the mass projects of forced collectivization and industrialization at the end of the twenties – the point at which the state began to exert the most draconian stranglehold on living labour, directing its movement and flow from the purview of its own lethal prerogatives. This brutal application of discipline involved not only organizing the vast numbers of people who were to be shunted from countryside to town, but also regulating those who attempted to resist on political, spiritual or material grounds – from the highest echelons of the government to the lowest economic classes of the population. In 1932 the “Law of Three Spikelets” was introduced which decreed the punishment for theft of “kolkhoz” or cooperative property was now to be a death sentence, a sentence which “under extenuating circumstances”116 could be reduced to a minimum of ten years of incarceration. These were the modes by which the gulags were called into being. They provided the means by which the “superfluous” elements could be repressed and at the same time absorbed into the economic cycles of the totalitarian organism as it inflated and expanded – an organism which was now sat squatting over the nation like some gigantic toad. Its metabolism by this point implied a vast process of triangulation: the patterns of labour organization in the cities were more and more dependent on the mechanisms of a security service whose repressions would assure a steady stream of labour, while the mechanisms of the security service were themselves an outcrop of a central bureaucracy whose power had been brought to its fruition in and through the most brutal restructuring of the working populations. At the same time the surplus overflow of workers who had been displaced or arrested became the condition of the formation of the gulags in the first place, and consequently fed the need for an ever more lethal and pervasive security service. In other words, each of these processes simultaneously became the precondition for all the others. And this, more than anything explains the essence of Stalinism. It was driven toward an ever greater degree of centralization, of terror, precisely because of the nature of its own internal logic; each of its component parts was accentuated and inflamed by the development of every other. It cultivated a remorseless cycle by which the regime hurtled ever closer toward achieving a critical mass. The momentum began to build from the late twenties onward. In 1928, on the eve of the massive undertaking of forced collectivization and industrialization, the last flicker of genuine political resistance in the party was snuffed out. Before, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky had spearheaded the drive to bolster the economic position of the wealthier layers of

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 71 the peasantry. Now they attempted to oppose, from behind the scenes, the “extraordinary measures” which Stalin had introduced against the rural population – hoping to halt the process in its tracks, and to spare at least some of the casualties which were beginning to heap up. In the past Stalin had only been able to outmanoeuvre and oust Trotsky and his cohorts over a prolonged period; one which involved populating the caucuses with his (Stalin’s) own men, while trying to goad Trotsky’s followers into actions which could be conceived of as specific breaches of discipline according to the letter of this or that archaic by-law. At the same time the bureaucrats worked to create an insidious and oppressive atmosphere which stifled the cohesion and effectiveness of any oppositional tendency. By the time the Bukharinists went into opposition, however, the situation was already more ominous. The economic repressions which began to gather force in the countryside, now produced an impetus to the development of a more repressive internal political culture. Just as Zinoviev and Kamenev had once appealed to Trotsky, when they became aware of the danger Stalin posed, now Bukharin turned to them. “He will strangle us” Bukharin pleaded with his one-time adversaries, ‘[h]e is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to his appetite for power”.117 For Bukharin this hushed conversation would swiftly become the subject of scrutiny from the security services, and less than a year later he was forced to recant his words, begging for forgiveness from the powers-that-be. As 1928 progressed this cycle of scrutiny, inquisition, recantation began to form the underlying rhythm of party politics, as more and more people hurried to prostrate themselves before Stalin and evade the twin perils of ostracism and exile. As the state tightened its grip on the nation, the culture of political heresy and stigmatization which had been cultivated in the inner sanctum of the party, now began to eke out and bleed into the broader social layers, for the intensification of repression that the five-year plans demanded required a greater degree of ideological cover. In 1928 the first major political trial was manufactured from the fevered, paranoiac psyche of the maturating totalitarianism. Some fifty engineers and technicians who worked in the coal mines in the Donbass region were accused of “wrecking” – that is, they were charged with the intentional sabotage of industrial equipment which they had carried out from a sense of allegiance to the former mine owners – and a loyalty to the old regime thereby. In actual fact the incidents of “wrecking” from this period in industry seem negligible. V. Brodsky, who was in prison from the latetwenties onward, wrote to Medvedev about the issue in the following terms:

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72 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE I saw a countless number of people who had been accused of wrecking and many who were still facing such charges, and all of them denied that even isolated instances of deliberate wrecking by specialists had occurred. There had been cases of damage to equipment, they said . . . but . . . the accidents (particularly in the Donbass) [were] the result of haste in trying to fulfil or overfulfill the plan, incompetence on the part of administrators who were not specialists, and the low level of skill among the workers, most of whom had come from the countryside.118 The evidence here is anecdotal, it is true, and surely overlooks the reality of the spontaneous, sporadic outbreaks of violence which did occur, and which were directed against machinery on the part of a good few frustrated, displaced workers. But the notion of a consciously organized political policy, enacted by a privileged stratum of bourgeois specialists and agitators, was nothing more than the necessary fiction of a state which increasingly sought to cloak its own misdeeds in a funk of national paranoia and resentment. In the “Shakhty affair” – which saw the first big trial of specialists who had been charged with “wrecking” – not only were the majority of charges demonstrably false, but the confessions of the defendants had been extracted by various methods of torture – “uninterrupted interrogation, allowing the accused no sleep . . . as well as solitary confinement and cells with hot or cold floors”.119 In the event, the sentences the sham court handed down to the defendants were remarkably lenient – at least with regard to what was to come a few years down the line. Only five were executed. A few were given suspended sentences, and the majority were jailed for a period of four to ten years. It is almost as though, at this early stage, Stalin is testing the water, seeing how far he could go. And make no mistake, it was Stalin who was the key orchestrator of these developments. He was the one to have so shrewdly sensed how – from a series of isolated, sporadic acts of sabotage real or imagined – could be woven the material of a vast conspiracy theory which would provide the ideological justification for the process by which the bureaucratic machine and the security services were locked into an ever intensive cycle of repression. As soon as the sentences in the “Shakhty affair” had been handed down, Stalin at once went to work in order to generalize the “threat” which “wrecking” posed: The so-called Shakhty affair must not be considered an accident. ‘Shakhtyites’ are now ensconced in every branch of our industry. . . .Wrecking by the bourgeois intelligentsia is one of the most

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 73 dangerous forms of opposition to developing socialism. Wrecking is all the more dangerous in that it is connected with international capital. Bourgeois wrecking is a sure sign that the capitalist elements have by no means laid down their arms, that they are massing their forces for new attacks on the Soviet government.120 Accordingly the terror advanced against “bourgeois specialists” was widened in its scope. When Stalin had enacted forced requisitions and then collectivization, he found it expedient to complement direct economic repression of the peasantry with an attack on rural ideology and culture in and through the decimation of the church. In the case of industry, similar methods would be utilized. He not only repressed, imprisoned and killed people who were directly involved with the processes of industrial production but also attacked those institutions which were in some way affiliated to it on an ideological, political or cultural basis. So, for example, in the Ukraine in 1929, a show trial took place in which the central defendant Serhiy Yefremov also happened to be the vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, while the other victims consisted of scientists, clergymen, medics, and activists in the cooperative movement. They were accused of “bourgeois nationalism”, “wrecking” and having themselves been corrupted by the influence of foreign governments. It was further “established” that they, the accused, had created their own organization – “the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” (SVU). With regard to the charge of “nationalism” – if one concedes the dubious and rather sinister implication that such an expression of cultural identity should be subject to punitive legislation in and of itself – one should probably admit that it was justified. But this was unsurprising to say the least. From 1918 onward Stalin and his political activity had been integral to the suppression of the autonomy of the Ukrainian government, even one which proclaimed a revolutionary character. In addition, the mass famine which had been induced by Soviet policy in the countryside hit the Ukrainians with particular force, not to mention the series of historical repressions that the satellite nation had endured at the hands of its gargantuan neighbour during the Tsarist period. That a strong sense of national identity should have prevailed in the Ukraine under these conditions – that it should have penetrated into the depths and politics of its people – is entirely comprehensible. The other charges, however, were nothing more than bunk and hokum. But they are interesting in as much as they reveal with great clarity the modus operandi which underwrites Stalinist methods of calumny and persecution. First demonize your targets by introducing

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74 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE some vague phrase which has the superficial ring of an objective sociohistorical classification – “petty bourgeois wrecking”. Then manufacture the existence of some covert network or cabal which the defendants are said to be in league with. Next draw attention to the invisible hand of some foreign threat – which finances said network and machinates from behind the scenes in order to undermine the “socialist gains” the regime has achieved. Finally, secure the confessions of those you have implicated under conditions of severe duress and torture. In Moscow a new show trial was initiated – only this time the scope was broader, some two thousand people being accused. Again the same logic was in effect: the defendants were accused on the grounds of “wrecking” which had been conducted on behalf of a secret, clandestine organization – “the Industrial Party” – said to have been founded in the late-twenties. In turn, this organization was alleged to have been acting on behalf of foreign interests, specifically the government of France and its president Raymond Poincare. Of course, many of the defendants coughed up to the charges – again not surprising given the conditions under which the confessions were extracted. In the event the French leader issued a statement refuting the charges, citing the utter lack of evidence, and his outrage was supplemented by an outbreak of protest across Western Europe more broadly. It is difficult to ascertain what the response of the Soviet population was to the case. Perhaps it was muted for the reason that, at this point, confidence in the courts of Soviet Russia had not yet been irrevocably undermined, and the violence and subversion which the leading Western powers had offered up in the aftermath of October 1917 was still emblazoned in the consciousness of a generation of revolutionary fighters. Nor can one ignore the fact that the Soviet press, by this point, was little more than the mouthpiece of the regime, and criticisms of the trials were not sounded. The staged “trials” proliferated. On the conveyer belt of repression, one imaginary political organization succeeded the next: if it wasn’t the “Industrial Party” trying to destroy the nation from within, it was the “Union Bureau” with its devious Menshevik wiles; if it wasn’t the “Union Bureau” it was the “Toiling Peasant Party” with its petty bourgeois deviations, and so on and so forth. In 1931, the trials which were connected with the unmasking of the “Union Bureau” had a very specific thrust; they were directed at those “wreckers” who were involved in the “sabotage” of the drafting up of economic plans. Or to say the same thing, they were directed at those people who recognized the sheer economic fallacies inherent in Stalin’s five-year plans, and were brave enough, or dutiful enough, to raise a note of concerned dissent. One of the main defendants was Isaac Rubin, a professor and

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 75 one of the finest economists ever to have lived. He wrote a truly wonderful history of economic thought and was one of the pioneers in the Marxist field of value theory. Another was Abram Ginzburg,121 also an economist, and someone who had drawn up an earlier five-year plan in 1927. His plan was significantly more modest and viable, and therefore lingered as a testament – an almost mocking reminder – to an alternative Stalin might have opted for, rather than cruising ahead toward calamity. It is clear why economic theory in particular had to undergo a severe repression – both in the academia and the state administration; a repression which became more furious in direct proportion to the disastrous fissures and upheavals Stalinist economic policy was inflicting on the USSR. In trying to elaborate real figures, in developing coherent analyses, the think tanks and the academic institutions were providing a more effective means by which people could question the official state line – even if this was not the active intention of the academics or the statisticians themselves. For it was not always the case that economists like Rubin were actively opposing the regime – though some certainly did – but rather the repression was about something more fundamental. Stalinism sought to attack the ideological organs by which even the potentiality for resistance might be grown. And this, once again, locked the regime into an ever deepening cycle of repression. Economics did not exist in a vacuum. It was a subject which was tied, of necessity, to the transformations in the technology which facilitated agricultural and urban industrial production; these were a component factor in any economic analysis. Economics, therefore, was required to maintain a constant dialogue with science. But once the field of economics had been voided of any integrity, it was only natural that the field of science would be straightjacketed in the same way; required to supplement the conclusions which had been formed in the economic arena, and which were most conducive to regime propaganda. Science was increasingly forced into the narrow, confining parameters of the rigid Stalinist line. As Medvedev comments, with both acuity and pathos, many of the “disputes that began at conferences or in the pages of scientific journals ended in the torture chambers of the NKVD”.122 A coterie of promising physicists were demonized in the press as purveyors of enemy ideas, including the Nobel prize winning Igor Tamm, and many of these were also arrested. Inevitably the repression was most heavily focused on those sciences related to agriculture. Victims included figures like A. I. Muralov, the president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and a man whom Trotsky poignantly memorialised as “a magnificent giant, as fearless as he is kind”.123 Muralov had been an expert in agri-

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76 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE culture in terms of training, but he was also one of the few remaining “old Bolsheviks” to have participated in the 1905 revolution, and he had fought with uncompromising heroism against the squadrons of “Black Hundreds” – the Russian precursors to the fascists. He was shot by the Stalinist regime in 1937. Other prominent victims included G. Meister – a major plant cultivator, N. I. Vavilov – a leading agricultural geneticist, N. Kotsov – an agricultural biologist, S. Levit – the director of the Institute of Medical Genetics, and M. Uranovsky – a renowned Darwinist. More broadly, the ranks of agro chemistry, agricultural science, stockbreeding, and biology were utterly decimated. Naturally, it could not stop there. If science had been refounded as a subordinate discipline which was compelled to tailor its methods and its conclusions to the ideological parameters which served to justify or disguise the vast levels of repression the regime had brought to bear on agriculture and the industrial heartlands; then those disciplines which endeavoured to penetrate the spiritual lives of the human beings living under that great cloud of repression must also be recalibrated in accordance with the same demands. Not only were the citizens made to understand that the objective economic achievements of the regime were glorious and unsurpassed in every single aspect, not only were educational programmes initiated to show that all the major scientific discoveries of world history had actually been initiated by Russians, though often sneakily co-opted by foreigners; but beyond this, through the prism of literature and art, the dark shadow of state totalitarianism was evaporated by the bright beams of an eternal daylight – a never-ending series of books, paintings and films revealing the beaming, well fed natives of the USSR and highlighting the superabundance and joy which the regime, and its wise, benevolent master, provided. Those writers and artists who did not subscribe to such a vision were repressed in their thousands, alongside a vast number of manuscripts, paintings, music scores and film reels; an inestimable cultural reserve forcibly wrenched from historical existence. In the early twenties there had been a vast ferment in cultural and artistic thought, generated by the upheaval of the revolution, and created or developed very much in the spirit of a critical challenge to the arts in the West: the Russian futurists who sought to integrate the dynamism and relentlessness, not just of modern machinery, but also of modern culture into their aesthetic; the symbolism which located the ideal in the lives of the ordinary peasants or soldiers struggling against implacable forces; the constructivism which endeavoured to depict the disorientating, spiralling elements of modern existence in precise, elegant spatial-temporal terms and to see in these constructions the possibilities of human empowerment and human grandeur. Poets, playwrights and

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 77 novelists like Mayakovsky and Pasternak and Babel, were often sympathetic to the revolution as a spectacular phenomenon which had released a vast pent-up plebeian energy, but at the same time were deeply conflicted about its meaning and implications. Consequently, a lively culture of debate arose; from those of a more conservative and dogmatic bent, who dryly averred that art was only truly powerful when it had been directly hitched to the wagon of political interest – specifically those of the proletarian revolution (“Proletkult”) to those who understood how fecund and potent the legacy of “bourgeois” art to be, and how it was imperative to draw upon that heritage in the creation of new and vibrant works of synthesis (Trotsky, Lunacharsky et al.). But as Isiah Berlin wrote, the new orthodoxy, “which became finally established after Trotsky’s fall in 1928, put a firm end to the period of incubation during which the best Soviet poets, novelists, and dramatists, and indeed composers and film producers too, produced their most original and memorable works”.124 In a certain way, the effects of Stalinism on art were even more derogatory than its effects on science. In the scientific realm, some discoveries, methodologies or techniques had to be tolerated despite going against the grain of Stalinist ideology; on occasion, the state would turn a blind eye to this or that scientific practise even if it contravened ideological precepts, because the enforcement of the prohibition would otherwise have had particularly devastating consequences in a given field. In some cases the scientists were arrested anyway, but simply compelled to continue their scientific endeavours as prisoners in laboratories or institutes under NKVD control. But the realm of art was not bound by any such practical considerations. Here works and the human beings who created them could be eliminated ruthlessly and cleanly and without any consequences to the quotas of industrial production or the levels of crop output. Thus the repressions in art and culture which intensified during the mid-thirties were particularly thorough-going. Nearly one third of the overall membership of the Soviet Writer’s Union was physically eliminated.125 Every field of creative endeavour was blighted by the mass repression and the shadow of fear wrought an ossifying, paralyzing effect on the creative act more generally, reaping a sterile, conformist strain of art and literature. Like so many of the regime’s citizens, it seemed as though the visage of art itself had come to adopt a forced, rictus grin; an obscene, fixed smile set against a backdrop of death. These conditions inevitably generated a spiritual and moral malaise, a deep, abiding feeling of despair which seemed to blanket everything, and so the physical repressions were inevitably supplemented by a spate of mass suicides, from the poet Mayakovsky who had killed himself back in 1930, to the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva who

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78 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE ended her own life a little over a decade later. Some artists, it was true, managed to navigate the narrow and incredibly perilous waterway between Scylla and Charybdis, between the complete and utter capitulation to the empty dogmas of the orthodoxy, and the gaping gulf of darkness which was offered up courtesy of an NKVD enforcer and a gleaming black revolver. The playwright and novelist Mikhaíl Bulgakov managed to get at least a few of his plays performed and his stories published because one of his plays had found favour with Stalin back in the early twenties. The satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko was able, for the most part, to cover up his rather biting critiques of the inadequacy and corruption at the heart of bureaucratic process, by the layer of innocents and ingénues who bumble about good-naturedly in the foreground of his stories – until he was eventually censored and denounced in 1946. Generally, however, such figures were the exception rather than the rule. The TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, first screened in the 1980s, is responsible for giving us one of the most sinister, memorable and abiding set of villains in the science-fiction pantheon. The Borg are a parasitic collective of cybernetic organisms which function with a single hive mind; floating through space in a vast ghostly cube they exist only to perpetuate themselves by “assimilating” the technology and material resources of the “imperfect races” they encounter. When other galactic travellers happen to stumble across a world which has been paid a visit by the Borg they are treated to an eerie sight indeed. The surface of the scoured planet bears the remnants of the civilization which once was; you can see the indelible lines of motorways which still criss-cross the landscape, you can see the outline of the shape of great cities traced into the terrain; but where there should be buildings and parks, and streets and structures – instead there are just these huge, open smouldering craters, as though something has arrived and scooped the content out of the planet’s surface. The image so effectively conjures up a feeling, an awareness, of not just absence but abject desolation. When one considers what the Stalinist regime did to the cultural landscape of the Soviet Union, one is inevitably confronted by that same feeling of desolation, the sense that the spiritual and the cultural content has simply been scooped up by some alien, external force, and what remains in the aftermath is dull, smouldering emptiness. To paraphrase Tacitus, the regime had created a desert and called it socialism. But culture, just like nature, abhors a vacuum. Now the regime was compelled to fill the void. The only problem was that it was a parasitical entity which had very little by way of its own organic culture. What type of cultural forms could it now generate? Previously, it had used a crude, bastardized version of Marxism to provide the

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 79 sclerotic idiom by which it rationalized its cult of death. In addition, its historical essence – which consisted in its separation from the life of the masses as an independent, bureaucratic caste – had been expressed at the ideological level in and through the reification of the individual leader and the need to raise him above the politics of the party. And so, once the bureaucracy, through its mass censorship and repression, had opened up this vast cultural vacuum, it could only be filled with the reified expression of its own historical essence; that is, the image of the individual leader, the personality of Stalin himself. This, then, was the necessary basis of the cult of personality which came to so vividly demark the Stalinist epoch. Throughout the thirties, images of Stalin grew ubiquitous. They were to be found in all the public spaces, the shops, the universities, the barracks, the bars and even in the private sphere where a wall at home was regularly reserved for a picture of the bloodthirsty mass murderer; depicted now bathed in gentle hues of golden white light, his arm outstretched, his whole face raised in a benevolent glow, very much in the tradition of the Russian Orthodox icons – the holy fathers of the saintly pantheon. Even in the portrayal of its ghastly figurehead, Stalinism was unable to summon a single original, creative thought and was compelled to loot and appropriate the cultural property of others. The images of Stalin were the sickly symptoms of a moribund totalitarianism, but the cult of personality penetrated far deeper than just the surface. The censorship and repression which had led to the mass exodus of creativity and free thinking from the realm of science and art had left in its wake an equally barren space, and this too was to be permeated by the grim spirit and dull thoughts of the party boss and mass murderer extraordinaire. As Deutscher phrases it – “Stalin’s personal style became, as it were, Russia’s national style. Not only was it a daring deed for any publicist or essayist to compose a paragraph or two including no direct quotation from Stalin. The writer took great care that his own sentences should . . . resemble as closely as possible the quoted text. An indescribably dull uniformity spread over the Russian Press, and most periodicals.”126 This again had a cyclic effect. The assessment of one’s merit in any given career was more and more based not on the truth that the individual in question was able to espouse in lieu of his or her subject matter, but the skill and effort by which he or she was able insinuate Stalin’s personality into the endeavour. The means of promotion was bound up with this form of “intellectual” creation; consequently, a big part of getting ahead in a given field hinged on the sheer levels of conformity you were prepared to evince; the degree to which you would rhapsodize about the genius of Stalin in and through your work, the fervour and feeling you could

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80 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE conjure up – and which was designed to outdo all the others who were also locked into the same grim displays. Many of us have heard the apocryphal tale of a rally at which Stalin made a speech; when the Politburo boss had finished his delivery, a wave of applause broke out which continued indefinitely. No member of the audience wanted to be first to stop clapping. Now in the most immediate sense the tale reflects a culture of fear – the first to stop clapping was just as likely to be the first to stop breathing. But at the same time the pathology of Stalinist totalitarianism implies more than just naked terror. The way in which the extolling of the tyrant was integrated into the recesses and behaviours of everyday life, the way in which, if one wanted a day off, or one wanted a work benefit or a promotion, the request would automatically be pre-empted by the fevered delivery of a series of phrases honouring Stalin – this was more than fear. It was the unthinking monotony of the repressive, robotic regime – evil in its most banal form – which had extruded itself into every pore and cavity of social life. Stalinist totalitarianism itself was stood at the podium and it was the nation as a whole which found itself locked in a never-ending flurry of applause. There is a question which will at some point arise in the mind of anyone who carries out a conscientious study of Stalin and Stalinism. It is a question which at the same time bodies forth in a single gasp of disbelief. How did a regime which had inflicted so much misery and suffering possibly have managed to survive? How did its repression manage to sustain? There are, to be sure, several issues worth scrutinising. Even though terror was not the sole means by which the regime exerted its control over the citizenry it was nevertheless central to the endeavour. And it was horrifically effective. The Russian dissident and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes how the awful sense of repression had come to feel inevitable and inescapable: “There was a general feeling of being destined for destruction, a sense of having nowhere to escape from the GPU-NKVD (which, incidentally, given our internal passport system, was quite accurate). And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away.”127 Because of the sheer level of arrests, the secret police became adept at picking their moment; at snatching someone away at the most opportune time. Often they came at night, for there was less chance of a crowd forming around the event of the arrest, and the victim – recently aroused from slumber – was bemused and vulnerable, and could more easily be sleepwalked into the back of the awaiting vehicle. Also, the arrests varied widely in their character. Sometimes, they were carried

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 81 out with the complicity or active involvement of a friend, confident or lover: “In 1926 Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, obtained through the Comintern two front-row tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. Interrogator Klegel was courting her at the time and she invited him to go with her. They sat through the show very affectionately, and when it was over he took her – straight to the Lubyanka.”128 Sometimes you received a special invitation to: the Gastronome – the fancy food store . . . and [are] arrested there. You are arrested by a religious pilgrim whom you have put up for the night ‘for the sake of Christ!’ You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you in the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theatre. Any one of them can arrest you, and you notice the concealed maroon colored identification card only when it is too late.129 The regime was aided in the efficacy of its repressions by the legacy of the revolution itself. Though many had accommodated themselves to Stalinism for the privileges and power a position in the bureaucracy would grant them, there was still the sense that Stalinism carried the spirit of the revolution, albeit in a degenerated guise. Trotsky, whose lonely but unstinting opposition to Stalin would throw into relief the heroism and the tragedy of his life more broadly – was sometimes less than effective in that opposition, especially in the early twenties, because he was hampered by the axis and alignment of political forces. At the time of Lenin’s death Trotsky was being assailed by the Stalinist clique and demonized as a subverter of “Leninism”, but when it came to the point at which he should have taken to the streets, marshalled popular support, revealed and disseminated Lenin’s “testament” in all the public fora he demurred, for he knew – that by revealing the testament in this way – he could well split the party and provide a stimulus to the many reactionary elements which lingered in the aftermath of the civil war, and hoped to work toward the restoration of the old regime, or something which closely resembled it. In the words of Deutscher he did not “stop opposing the triumvirs who had identified themselves with the party; and yet, even in his rebellion he still remained on his knees before the party”.130 If Trotsky found himself torn in this way, it was certainly true of others. Even after the regime had fully set down its totalitarian roots in the thirties, and was no longer in danger of being undermined by the old bastions of reaction within the country (or the pulverized husks of what remained of

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82 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE them), nevertheless the regime itself played up this fear in order to help create the basis for its elaborate architecture of repression. Confessions were often extracted at the edge of a scalpel but bloody torture was also supplemented by the bewildered faith many of the victims still reposed in the state which was persecuting them. As Medvedev points out, some even experienced the act of damning themselves as the last desperate contribution they could make to the revolutionary ideal: “The only service they can still do for the cause is to strengthen the party’s unity by condemning themselves.”131 This, perhaps more than anything else, provoked scenes weighted down equally by the elements of tragedy and absurdity; the spectacles of defendants being led away to be shot and with their final breaths crying out – “long live Stalin”. As the repressions reached fever pitch in the late-thirties, the dictator himself – a strange combination now of prickly paranoia and a sense of omnipotence – increasingly absented himself from public life, lurking behind the Kremlin walls. On one level this physical absence was carried through into political culture. At first glance, this seems paradoxical – given that Stalin’s image was already always everywhere and his quotes inflicted virtually every text book with their babble. And yet Stalin was able to achieve the rather ingenious feat of disassociating himself from the schemes of repression he had so meticulously orchestrated. In the public consciousness he often appeared as an almost legendary revolutionary figure; a staunchly loyal “old Bolshevik” heroically striving for the Leninist legacy, and the sense of myth which surrounded him seemed to both confirm his omnipotence and at the same time render him remote from the lives of the population. It allowed Stalin to partake in the same political pantomime over and again; when the reforms and repressions the logic of the system demanded were carried out, he, Stalin, was able to dissociate himself from their consequences, making it seem as though local bureaucracies had become overzealous without his knowledge – and now, in the role of a noble conciliator, he would counsel prudence and attempt to reverse some of their errors. As we have seen, this happened after the first bout of forced collectivization, it would happen again after the first big political show trials, and again too after the intensification of repression which occurred in 1937–8. At the broader level many believed that the ravaging of the intelligentsia had somehow been achieved behind the back of Stalin himself. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled a reaction on the part of his fellow novelist Boris Pasternak who had been rendered distraught by the oppressive atmosphere of suffering – “waving his hands among the snowdrifts, [he] kept repeating ‘If only someone would report all

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 83 this to Stalin!’”132 As Medvedev argues, such an attitude informed “the opinion of hundreds and thousands of officials, rank-and-file party members, even many prisoners and their relatives”.133 Last but not least we should revisit the logic which underpinned the repression. It was primarily geared toward a great economic upheaval in and through programmes of forced collectivization and industrialization; it entailed the development and fortification of a vast machine – all of its cogs working in tandem to provide the momentum by which millions of people were to be brutally shunted into different regions and territories, and their economic roles and aspirations vividly reshaped by the most terrific application of force. The claims which issued forth from the state: the claims about “Menshevik deviators”, “bourgeois wreckers”, “imperialist agents”, and so on, were merely the ideological garb in which these more fundamental processes were cloaked; consequently, the action of the state against this or that “criminal” was part of a broader logic and compulsion which had been set into motion behind the back of that individual and in accordance with a set of needs which had little to do with the specifics of his or her personality or what he or she might or might not have done. Or to put the matter a little more baldly – the state simply wasn’t all that concerned with the innocence or guilt of those whom it accused. Solzhenitsyn frames it thus: “Whether our destiny holds a death cell in store for us is not determined by what we have done or not done. It is determined by a great wheel and the thrust of powerful external circumstances.”134 And this too had a powerful bearing on the efficacy of Stalinist repression. Many of the victims, especially those who had identified with the revolutionary ideology that the regime purported to promote; such people – in the moment of their arrest (aware of their loyalty and an absence of any wrongdoing on their part) – were inclined to believe that it was merely a matter of some unfortunate administrative error; that at any second an order would come from on-high correcting the mistake and they would be freed. Such tragically naïve expectations further hampered the possibility of any genuine political resistance because they misconstrued so fundamentally the interminable nature of the mechanics of the repression which had been set into motion against them. All these processes worked together to create a blanket repression which was horrific in terms of both efficiency and consequence. It produced a culture of fear and this, in turn, created a hothouse for the lowest common denominator on the human ambit. Those people who had nurtured grudges with neighbours, those who had become suspicious and exasperated by rivals at work, those who felt overshadowed in any sphere of life; they all now had recourse to a simple measure by

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84 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE which to be rid of the individual who had come to irk them – a single phone call, an anonymous denunciation whispered furtively down the line. In the Stalinist bible it was not the meek who would inherit the earth – but rather the bitter, the resentful, the graspers, the manipulative, the callous and the self-interested; the brown nosing legions of apparatchiks and the bureaucratic sneaks who now crawled from every crevice in order to claim for themselves a positon in the hierarchy. Consider the infamous Lavrentiy Beria, for example, who eventually rose to the position of the head of the security and secret police apparatus, but had started out as an inconspicuous administrator of housing in the city of Baku. He was, at that point, a small time inspector – a fastidious, resentful little man with no real political allegiances or imagination; a natural born bureaucrat desperate to climb the ladder and secure what little prestige and privilege he could. During the upheaval of civil war, his possibilities were expanded; he used his contacts to gain a position in the Cheka, and from there was able to hone his bureaucratic skills; to barter influence and favour from groups which opposed the Soviet Republic while at the same time consolidating his own position within the state apparatus. Under his watch, enemies of the regime were released from prison, surreptitiously and from behind the scenes – provided they were favourable to him of course, while at the same time innocents were condemned and seemed simply to disappear – those who had rubbed him up the wrong way, that is. Beria was, in other words, tailor made for Stalinism, and his own political star rose rapidly with the coming of its night. In any other period of time, in any other epoch, he would have very likely remained what he was: a bespectacled, balding inadequate – a frustrated provincial administrator who exuded resentment and delighted in lording what power he had worked so slavishly to accrue over those unlucky enough to enter the orbit of his repellent, noxious presence. He would have remained a bore at work, and almost certainly an abusive tyrant in the domestic setting to whatever woman had happened to fall foul of him. But by the late-1930s, however, he was so much more; he had untold power and almost limitless privilege; he exercised this in many ways, one of which involved having young women kidnapped off the streets and brought to his dacha (the luxurious state owned residences with which the regime provided its functionaries). He committed an untold number of rapes this way. Those “who resisted were strangled and buried in his wife’s rose garden”.135 Beria was a gruesome, monstrous little gnome of a man who was at the extreme end of the spectrum of sadism for sure, so it would be disingenuous to argue he provides the standard template of the typically Stalinist apparatchik. Nevertheless, the trajectory of his life – the

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 85 transition from petty non-entity to sadistic satrap with unbridled power – does speak to the nature of Stalinism more generally. Beria’s own destiny happened to coincide with the rise of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine, and as a result, every one of his repellent characteristics was harnessed and amplified by that same historical dynamic. The mechanics of the Stalinist bureaucracy often had this eradiating effect on the human personality, mutating dull, narrow anti-social qualities into grotesque, horrific aberrations which became the natural accoutrements of a culture of cruelty. Such social types provided the regime’s genetic code so to say; they became the means by which the repression was able to metastasize and spread, sinking itself into every aspect of the national body. By the mid-1930s one might say the USSR was riddled with them; from a bird’s eye view the whole edifice resembled nothing other than a vast pyramid of power in which Stalin “stood at the peak of a whole system of smaller dictators; he was the head bureaucrat over hundreds of thousands of smaller bureaucrats”.136 The fact that the regime was structured this way had contrary consequences. On the one hand, Stalin was compelled to grant his bureaucrats considerable privileges and powers in order that their base, most acquisitive elements could be encouraged and more effectively energize the valves and pistons of the system of mass repression. In its early days the Bolshevik government had created what was essentially a maximum wage ceiling in order to rein in the privileges of state officials. The historian Marcel Liebman points out that in the period immediately following October “the pay of People’s Commissars was fixed at five hundred roubles a month (plus one hundred roubles for each dependent child) which put them on the same wage level as qualified workers”.137 But as the Stalinist bureaucracy cohered in the context of a broader revolutionary retreat, such a principle was gradually eroded. By the time of the late-twenties, Medvedev observes, “a small circle of high officials began to be protected as early as the first fiveyear plan by the creation of a system of special stores, distributing centres and dining rooms . . . Gradually they acquired other privileges too: their own hospitals, free vacation homes, dachas, and so on . . . On February 8, 1932, the party maximum was formally abolished, bringing a new increase in the real income of leading officials.”138 But in the very moment that the regime strengthened and rewarded the privileged stratum it was simultaneously undermining it. The increase in power and influence on the part of the bureaucrats fed not just the momentum of repression directed toward the masses and the vast project of economic restructuring that the regime had embarked upon; but it was also a power which was refracted back onto the bureaucracy itself. As each individual sought to increase and enliven their

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86 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE career privileges, the measures he took were often at the expense of rivals. Such a character would always require a swift glance over the shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being undermined by others in a similar fashion. Add to this the fact that the whole system was increasingly premised on a culture of denunciation, of severing one’s rival from existence by way of the most immediate, prosaic bureaucratic means, and it is not hard to see why the bureaucracy as a whole was riven by internal contradiction and a desperately enflamed set of rivalries which were often graduated to murderous proportions. The chief of them all, the bureaucrat par excellence, comprehended this better than anyone, for the spirit of the bureaucracy was something which ran through his veins and was embedded in his bones; he was, one might argue, its highest achievement. Stalin knew the repression must of necessity cross over into the higher echelons of the state caste which he himself stood at the head of; he understood this not as the consequence of any grounding in theory or conscious appreciation of historical development, but rather due to the fact that his political existence was nothing other than the organic manifestation of the bureaucratic process at the level of the individual personality. Stalin was the product of the interminable, ceaseless energy of repression the bureaucratic process generated from within itself. Deutscher comments on this in a particularly insightful paragraph: He sent thousands to their death and tens and hundreds of thousands into prisons and concentration camps. The very nature of his design compelled him to do so. He had set out to destroy the men capable of forming an alternative government. But each of these men had behind him long years of service, in the course of which he had trained and promoted administrators and officers and made many friends. Stalin could not be sure that avengers of his victims would not rise from the ranks of their followers. Having destroyed the first team of potential leaders of an alternative government, he could not spare the second, the third, the fourth, and the nth teams. All the party-men who had been raised up by Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov; the diplomats who owed their careers to Rakovsky or Sokolnikov; the officers in whose dossiers at the Military Academy could be found a favourable testimonial signed by Tukhachevsky; the business managers who had worked with Piatakov – all were dangerous, suspect and doomed.139 The Aztec civilization, which was centred on what is now central Mexico, employed the practise of blood sacrifice. Victims would be

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 87 ceremoniously murdered because of the ingrained belief that the shedding of their blood released some sacred energy; a force, a mystical compulsion, which was required in order to keep the universe in motion – to keep the sun burning, and the planets passing across their trajectories in the sky. One can discern, I think, a certain parity with the Stalinist phenomenon and the manner in which its bureaucracy was compelled to enact its own blood sacrifices. The difference lies only in this. If the Aztecs had failed to observe the ritualistic bloodletting, we are safe in assuming that the processes of nuclear fission which take place at the core of the sun would have remained indifferent to their lapse in religious piety, while the planets too would have been untroubled in their interminable, rolling motions. Not so with Stalinism however. If Stalinism had not launched an intermittent, cyclical series of purges, each one deeper and more far reaching than the last, then the Stalinist universe itself would have ground to a halt, collapsed under the weight of its own accumulated contradictions. The purges were as necessary to the internal dynamic of the political bureaucracy, as much as the mass repressions and the creation of the gulags were necessary to redefine the economic pattern of the country in and through a vast network of forced and slave labour. The two processes were in fact organically interlinked. Individual bureaucrats were able to fortify their positions by acquiring an increasing control over the means of repression which the Stalinist system used against the population in order to drive through its economic reforms and secure and bolster its own power. And yet, this very process generated a fundamental friction and destabilization of the bureaucracy itself – as its different elements were thrown into collision with one another in and through the marshalling of their own discrete powers and privileges. What we have here is what the greatest of all the classical German philosophers Hegel referred to as a “bad” or “spurious” infinite – that is, a contradiction whose solution simultaneously produces it anew at another level. The more repression was brought to bear to “solve” the contradictions of the economy, the more those contradictions were reproduced at the level of politics and the bureaucracy; thus, another bout of repression was required to break up the coagulated blocs of power which were threatening to haemorrhage the arteries of the state. But in the moment this had been achieved, the need to repress new sections and elements of the population according to new economic priorities140 at once reasserted itself; henceforth a new set of stolid, bureaucratic sovereignties within the state were again called into being. At the centre of this perpetual, relentless cycle, the lynchpin of the whole process, was the figure of Stalin himself – someone whose power was sufficiently absolute that he could remain out-

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88 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE side the remit of the immediate collisions of competing factions, but at the same time that same power was premised on the layer of the bureaucrats below, so he was compelled to direct the repression downward in order to make sure no single individual or bloc would emerge capable of challenging his own position. In this way, not only was his own personal power preserved but the power of the bureaucracy was to some extent broken up in and through the purges – only as we have already seen, the broader socio-historical contradictions necessitated that such power be reformulated and strengthened once again. In other words Stalin himself was locked into the same cycle, the same “bad infinite” which characterized the totalitarian system as a whole. He would set into motion a vigorous, homicidal purge and then relax the persecution for a period before he was compelled to initiate the next. Historians and psychologists alike have made the point that Stalin exhibited signs of mental illness manifested by an all-encompassing, feverish sense of paranoia. But what they fail to comprehend is that the grim paranoia of a somewhat unhinged mind was also itself a particle of the historical process and an expression of the fact that the owner of that mind was compelled to act in accordance with the logic of the bureaucracy, a logic which necessitated an ever deepening need for repression – but a need for repression which could in no way be satiated, for it would always generate from itself new contradictions and new perils. Trotsky summed up the situation when he noted that Stalin’s paranoia and the concomitant need for repression could never be sated; the Russian dictator resembled, in the words of the Russian revolutionary – nothing so much as “a man who tries to satisfy his thirst with salt water”.141 Resistance to the grim cyclic grind of repression was nearly always sporadic, heroic and deeply tragic. By the 1930s all the leaders of any coherent, credible opposition within the higher echelons of the party had been defeated leaving the rebels broken men and women. Now what little resistance there was took place in the shadows, in conditions of the utmost secrecy, in order that the conspirators might slip under the radar of the secret police. Such pockets of dissent were tiny and isolated, and had little going for them and everything arrayed against them. Like the secret sect which was led by the head of the party committee of Moscow’s Krasnaya Presnya district, for example. M. N. Ryutin was a relatively powerful figure having been active in the Central Committee for some years but even so he was only able to organize a group of some ten to twenty people. They were motivated by the horrors of collectivization and the tightening of repression; they produced documents very much in this spirit and which called for the removal of Stalin from the party leadership. However – because of the

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 89 repression, their numbers, and their lack of resources – the group were unable to effectively disseminate their programme. Inevitably the ever vigilant eye of the OGPU honed in on them, and they were at once denounced in the same familiar, prosaic terms: “counter revolutionary agitators”, “kulak sympathisers”, “degenerate elements”. They were quickly arrested. Other loose reams of resistance evaporated in much the same way – as in the case of the Politburo member Sergei Syrtsov who argued that it was perhaps incautious to talk of a victory of socialism in the countryside. Given the state sanctioned mass murder and the outbreaks of famine which were taking place at the time, one can see why he was given pause for thought. Nevertheless this rather mild spirit of dissent was swiftly snuffed out. The lackeys and informants set into motion the secret police apparatus, and the cover for its repression was provided by a supine state media which provided “proof” of an imaginary bloc which Stalin now accused Syrtsov of having participated in. Outside the immediate party circles other forms of resistance were employed. The policies of forced industrialization had produced a rise in working class populations, and this was accompanied by intermittent outbreaks of protest and strikes here and there. Textile workers in the Ivanovo region were particularly active in fomenting a political opposition which in 1932 was graduated to a mass strike at Teikvovo and an uprising in Vichuga. The strike in Teikvovo had been precipitated by a further depression in the levels of rationing the government had carried out, and it brought within its remit thousands of workers and an eruption of democratic activity in which free and open debates were held in the factory courtyard and the workers’ clubs. Soon the furious energy was too much to be contained, spilling out, forming a turbulent, chaotic stream of people flowing toward the town centre, building in its momentum, drawing artisans, peasants, pensioners, and other bystanders into the lively energy of its own spectacle. Here was a wonderful and rare sight indeed; people who had ceased to march – their faces flinty and impassive – to the grey, sullen tempo of the regime; but who were instead shouty and gregarious and terrified and exhilarated; who were now speaking out loud the truth of the conditions of their lives and discussing the realities of the world around them. Above all, they were behaving as though they were free. There is nothing more subversive to the dynamics of totalitarianism than this last. At once, the brutal, vast mechanisms of the state radar began to move into action like some terrible giant awoken from slumber, and now the danger to the protestors had become a mortal one. In the regime’s remorseless, bureaucratic idiom the working class activists were branded “Trotskyites and class-alien enemies”.142 Hungry,

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90 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE weakened but incredibly brave, after a week’s protest, and months of privation, the workers rallied, and on 14 April 1932 they formed in another mass procession. “Since we started trouble and began the strike, let’s carry it through to the end”143 – announced one of the leaders of the march in the very moment when the shadow of the state had fallen across them. Exhausted and desperate the marchers were able to push forward, successfully repelling police incursions, until they reached the borders of the town Ivanovo where local and central state forces had been mobilized. The marchers were herded onto a train which had been wheeled out in advance for the purpose. Some of the workers escaped only to be arrested later. The strike was broken and its main leaders were exiled. Some of the agitators were sent off to the labour camps. Some never returned from the train. We have already referenced the way the Stalinist regime provided what was the original Orwellian inversion. In the very moments when it had reduced and immiserated vast numbers of its population, it would reflect back to them a surreal and strange world from behind the mirror of its propaganda; a place where peasants worked happily in sun-drenched fields, and factories were humming with muscular, well-fed workers who laboured away in an endless state of spiritual and ideological harmony. The regime’s art, literature and journalism purveyed this same illusion at every cultural level; the same lifeless, degraded lie produced and reproduced in perpetuum, so that those contented smiles, those happy faces, must have increasingly come to appear to the people on the other side in terms of a distorted set of mocking grimaces and sadistic sneers. But it was the Archipelago which more than anything else gave the lie to Stalinism. The regime could pump out its endless trinkets and emblems in order to generate the artistic mirage of its eternal self-regard, but it was the Archipelago – that scattered set of vast dark fortresses, the sinews of human misery which fissured black and jagged across the wastelands and the peripheries – which more than anything told the truth, for the network of the gulags was the true aesthetic expression of Stalinism; it was the essence of Stalinism risen up from the blackness of the world and ossified in a ghastly, skeletal architecture – shrivelling and flattening all those which it oppressed. And perhaps that’s why it was in the gulags more than anywhere else where the resistance to Stalinism appeared in its most heroic and most tragically doomed guise. In fact one of the most searing monuments to heroism and the human spirit was to occur one year after Stalin’s death, in the midst of the Archipelago itself. At Kengir, a gulag in the Kazakh SSR, there had been a steady slowburn of intransigence on the part of the brutalised prisoners toward the sadistic and mur-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 91 derous masters of the camp. Solzhenitsyn relates how in “less than a year the guards at Kengir opened fire several times on innocent men; and it cannot have been unintentional”.144 An open breach of discipline occurred when a prisoner was murdered in cold blood and the guards were attempting to drag his body into the “boundary zone” so it might seem as though he had lingered in a prohibited area with a mind to escape. When they were confronted by the prisoners, the guards said the dead man had been hurling rocks at a prison tower – to which Solzhenitsyn responds acidly: “Can they have had time to read his identity card; did they know he had three months more to go and was an Evangelical Christian?”145 The incident was one of those moments in history where unbridled power, ever more cavalier in its application, calls forth a monumentally stupid, ugly and senseless act of injustice, and this act becomes the focal point of a whole group of people oppressed and maddened by the broader regime. In disbelief and fury, using the picks and shovels – the very implements of the repression the slave labour system visited upon them – the prisoners drove the guards back and claimed the murdered man’s body. They resolved to carry him back to the camp with dignity. This was an act which involved more than just a breach of discipline, however. It was also an indictment of the murderous corruption of the prison regime itself. The guards blocked them. Now the situation could only escalate. The following day two of the camps divisions refused to report for work. The camp bosses were so disturbed by the outbreak of rebellion that they resorted to what had been a common Stalinist tactic; they bussed in hundreds of common criminals in order that they might brutalize the others, and thus throw the sharpening political tenor of the developing resistance into chaos. And yet . . . that is not what happened. Instead the prisoners – so long repressed, brutalized, so long driven to look upon one another as alien prospects, as strangers wandering befuddled through the mists of some collective nightmare – were suddenly seized by the certainty that their fellows were as themselves, that they were bound together by the bonds of their repression, or as Solzhenitsyn so movingly describes it: “So long suppressed, the brotherhood of man had broken through at last.”146 But it wasn’t just the “brotherhood of man” which had broken through. As the prisoners rose up and took control of the camp, the uprising united the men with the women who had been interned in a separate space. A part of the culture of confinement had involved illicit snippets of conversation between the male and female prisoners snatched from across walls and barbed wire. Now, the prisoners who had whispered those small romantic consolations to one another in secret finally met out in the open. They saw each other’s faces for the

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92 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE first time. There was an awakening of freedom and joy, all the more resplendent because its light poured forth from conditions of such obsidian darkness. Prisoners raided the stocks of what remained of their civilian clothing, replacing the uniform greyness with an assortment of colours. They held an election and a former Red Army lieutenant, Kapiton Kuznetsov, was chosen as their democratic representative. Art, poetry recitals, hastily improvised plays, lectures on the sciences from the various interned specialists, religious hymns, and weddings all became a feature of life, for just like the agitators and protestors of Teikvovo, the rebellious prisoners were now behaving as though they were free. Such a sudden and precious eruption of freedom simply could not be allowed to survive. The inmates managed to hold on for a period of forty days while the regime endeavoured to disrupt and slander them. The lie was propagated that the female prisoners had been the victims of mass rapes at the hands of the males. The high ranking prisoners were offered clemency if only they might incite racial, and in particular anti-Semitic violence, within the ranks. These measures were, of course, a prelude to an open, savage repression, and after those forty heroic, hectic days the camp was raided by soldiers and tanks, and hundreds of prisoners were executed. The bonds of solidarity which had been forged between the prisoners were strong though, perhaps especially so between the newly united men and women who had formed the first tentative romantic connections. Solzhenitsyn describes the fate of one such couple: “Semyon Rak and his girl threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms and ended it that way.”147 Such organized, coherent and collective expressions of political dissent under Stalinism were, however, the exception rather than the rule. Resistance was rarely universalised into a cohesive political movement. Far more commonplace was the recourse to isolated acts of individual terror. In 1930, for example, a wave of petty disturbances swept across the landmass in response to collectivization – “13,754 mass disturbances, over one thousand assassinations of officials.”148 This was, as we have seen, a result of the horrific, disorientating forms of repression which the regime was able to bring to bear. But it was also more than that. The processes of forced industrialization created an unprecedented growth in the working classes, but it was an increase which was premised on the meagre peasant proprietor forcibly transmuted into the manual factory worker in a single instant. The burgeoning proletariat absorbed into itself much of the social psychology of the peasant outlook or the urban bourgeois who had fallen on hard times and found themselves cast onto the factory floor. As Medvedev comments – in “1929–1935 new workers of these types were several

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 93 times more numerous than the working class of the past”.149 These complex social processes intertwined with Stalinist political repression which had absorbed the unions into the state, smashed dissent, and – in and through a deep and abiding censorship – ensured that the recovery of the genuine revolutionary traditions of the past was a difficult, dangerous and clandestine affair. All of these intersecting dynamics provide the key to the isolated character, the individualistic tenor and terroristic aroma, which was to form the mainstay of political resistance in the Stalinist epoch. Nevertheless, as the 1930s drew to a close the resistance toward the regime began to sharpen and change in character. Though the security services were all encompassing and lethally effective, the process of Stalinism itself was a historical juggernaut, hurtling forward, compelled by the weight of a myriad of contradictions to initiate a periodic spate of purges against every level of the state apparatus – each purge of necessity deeper and more far reaching than the last. The logic of the repression which the bureaucracy employed, the same logic which drove it to oust the Left Opposition, and then rout the Bukharinists on the right as it sought to consolidate its own political power – had eventually driven it toward the intermittent but unending repression of the bureaucrats and functionaries themselves. A new epoch had opened up; one in which the Stalinist regime resembled a starving man who is compelled to gorge on his own arm in order to satisfy, if only for a moment, deep pangs of hunger. The bureaucrats themselves were now in thrall to a paralyzing level of fear and uncertainty. Trotsky describes the situation in the years following 1936: None of the bureaucrats can now feel safe and secure. Stalin has dossiers on all political and administrative figures of any importance at all. These dossiers contain notes on all sins of any kind (incautious handling of public money, love affairs, suspicious personal relationships, compromising relatives, etc.) Local satraps have similar files on their subordinates. At any moment Stalin can overthrow and crush any of his collaborators, not even excluding members of the Politburo . . . From 1936 on he started openly to play with the lives of his collaborators . . . Using the bureaucracy, Stalin crushed the people; now he is terrorizing the bureaucracy itself.150 By this point the contradictions which beset the Stalinist regime had become so pronounced that the repression was to be extended to the Red Army itself – that is, the military wing of the Soviet regime. True to form, in 1937 Stalin concocted a series of forged documents which

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94 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE “demonstrated” that several key generals led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky were fomenting a plot against the government – once more in the name of “Trotskyism” – this time allied with German imperialism. But although the charges were patently fabricated, the fact that they were made at all indicates the very real tension and resentment which existed in the military layers with regard to the incursions the Stalinist bureaucracy was making into their own forms of organization. As Trotsky argues, the generals had “rushed to defend the Red Army from the demoralizing intrigues of the GPU. They defended the best officers from false accusations. They resisted the establishment of the GPU’s dictatorship over the Red Army.”151 The purge of the generals naturally flowed into a broader purge of the rank and file which is estimated to have eliminated 3.7%–7.7% of the overall numbers in the Red Army152 (the original figure was significantly higher – some of the soldiers who had been purged were later readmitted in light of the war effort). By the early 1940s, then, one has the impression of a regime which is straining to retain cohesion, which is waterlogged by a flooding sense of paranoia, and where even the highest and most powerful in the land have the sense that they are barely able to keep their heads above the surface – that at any moment they might slip under overwhelmed by the waves. As Trotsky points out, such a state of affairs could not but seep into the consciousness of the masses, themselves frustrated and oppressed by the deluge of oppressions which confronted them in terms of their day-to-day existence: The closest collaborators of Stalin are looking behind them and mentally asking each other: whose turn tomorrow? At the same time the popular masses cannot but ask themselves: who is ruling us? How can people who until yesterday occupied the most important positions suddenly turn out to be serious criminals . . . The political system of the USSR has entered an epoch of deep and severe crisis.153 It is never easy to engage in counterfactual hypotheses regarding historical development, but it seems to me that by the early 1940s the Stalinist regime was ripe for overthrow. In both the Russian and the French Revolutions, the revolutionary event was precipitated by a crisis in the ruling circles; in the French example, by the aristocrats who broke away in response to the tax legislation the crown had sought to impose, in the Russian case by the “minor” rebellion which saw the grand dukes strike out at the religious totem of the Tsarist power, the debauched, grizzly figure of the mad monk Rasputin. In neither case could the aristocracy decisively intercede and displace the mechanics

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 95 of absolutism with its own content, but that was not the fundamental issue. What was more important was that the ruling class itself was reaching a point of acute convulsion and this flowed into a broader stream of mass discontent which eventually culminated in revolutionary upheaval. On top of which both situations – the Russian and the French – had been compounded by crises in the army and hostility or a marked indifference in certain of its sections toward the old regime. And so, a growing sense of mass unrest, a ruling class which was in equal measure fearful of and hostile to the leader, and a churning discontent within the ranks of the armed forces; all these conditions were in place at the point Stalinism had reached in the late-thirties and early forties. And yet, Stalinism wasn’t swallowed up by the forces it had called into being in this period. There was no revolution which developed against it. The explanation for this, however, can no longer be sought in the regime’s own internal dynamic but rather in its relation to another historical phenomenon which was maturing and deepening across Western Europe in the same period. In the early thirties, when the shadow of totalitarianism had fallen across the USSR, when the emissaries of the OGPU were mounting stealthy, silent nightime raids on those citizens the regime had come to label “superfluous” – to the West a more strident sound rang out. In Germany the clatter of jackboots hitting the ground in unison echoed across the dying Weimar Republic as the Nazi stormtroopers more and more began to build militaristic momentum, and the burgeoning fascist movement more and more pulled the disaffected and the ruined into its remit. Fascist movements had been gathering strength, in Finland, in Hungry, in Poland, in Austria, and most notably in Italy, where the movement had come to power some years earlier. But the succession of fascism in a country which – even though diminished and debilitated by economic crisis and post-war debt – was nevertheless in possession of the most powerful economy in Western Europe, posed a particularly lethal conundrum for not only the USSR with its ostensibly “communist” ideology, but also for the capitalist powers which surrounded Germany. Perhaps the most striking thing in this period is the number of blunders committed by those powers toward fascism and which were based on a theoretical ignorance which was compounded by a strong streak of the most immediate self-interest. A large number of the British ruling class, for instance, were convinced that Hitler was a reasonable, and even an estimable individual, because he was able to utter, so loudly and with such murderous conviction, their own feelings of loathing toward communist ideology. Further still they saw in a Nazi Germany a useful means by which “communism” might be restrained or extinguished in the East. Indeed

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96 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE the Daily Mail, a virtual mouthpiece of elite sensibility, ran an article in 1934 which read “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”,154 and throughout the 1930s gave support for the Nazis in Germany, alongside praise it offered up to the indigenous fascist movement headed by Oswald Mosley back in Britain. But there was one source alone which would offer the most credible and forensic analysis of the fascist phenomenon; which would comprehend it in terms of its historical genesis and development, and which would perceive in its essence the most awful, existential threat to civilization itself. Such analysis would come not from a powerful state or ruling group, nor from the universities and colleges of academia, nor from the think tanks which were designed to promote public policy in any of the nations across the world. Instead it would emanate from a single individual, a lonely and isolated figure, who had been exiled to the far reaches – first of Europe and then the world – and who was now being pursued, doggedly and relentlessly, by the flitting figures of shadowy assassins. Leon Trotsky had been expelled from one country to the next, and he was forced to bear witness to the murder of colleagues, friends and family members including his own children. Stalin’s pursuit of him was senselessly vindictive, bringing the might of the Soviet state to bear, rendering him impoverished and unwelcome as he crossed borders into alien terrains and slipped onto ships in the dead of night. And yet, his mighty capacity for thought was not in the slightest bit dimmed. Even in rags he was no less the visionary. Lonely and persecuted, he cast his gaze across the panorama of Europe, working tirelessly to analyse the growing menace of fascism, particularly the development and trajectory of National Socialism or Nazism in Germany. As with all his analysis – a body of work which is quite dizzying in terms of its depth, range and scope – Trotsky began from a historically materialist premise, and a Marxist and Leninist sense of the immanence of the proletarian revolution; the sense that a new historical epoch and its forms were all the time being called into being in a thousand and one ways from within the fabric of the present. It was inevitable, then, that his account of fascism would be situated in this broader historical unfolding. Fascism, he argued, represented the most brutal and ugly counteraction; the process by which the old order – teetering ever closer to the abyss and confronted by a vast revolutionary upswing in the working classes – sought to mobilize the most vicious and dissolute elements from within the petty bourgeoisie and lumpen layers – ex army officers, embittered soldiers, ruined small business persons, petty proprietors, small time landlords, artisans who were seeing their market drying up day by day – all the social elements

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 97 which were on the verge of dispossession, on the edge of being sucked into either pauperism or the anonymous masses of the propertyless proletarians, a prospect which galvanized their instincts of fury, superiority and disgust: At the moment that the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.155 The forces of capitalist power, of high finance, would sponsor these elements as a desperate means by which to destroy developing proletarian power, but in order for this to succeed, Trotsky noted, one other criterion should pertain. Alongside the mobilization of a mass proletarian movement, it was necessary that the social democrats which had put themselves at the head of the movement should shy away from its revolutionary consequences. As Trotsky observed vis-à-vis the development of fascism in Italy: From the time the [first world] war ended, there was an upward trend in the revolutionary movement in Italy, and in September 1920 it resulted in the seizure of factories and industries by the workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat was an actual fact; all that was lacking was to organize it and draw from it all the necessary conclusions. The social democracy took fright and sprang back. After its bold and heroic exertions, the proletariat was left facing the void. The disruption of the revolutionary movement became the most important factor in the growth of fascism.156 In Italy, the social democrats had been discombobulated by the spectacle of proletarian power such that they were able to overlook the mortal danger fascism posed. Their first concern was to depoliticize and pacify the workers’ movement and from there, proceed to reorder the politics of the country on the programme of a liberal rationalism which resembled nothing so much as a professor rearranging books on the shelves in his study, sweeping away the dust, and making things as a whole nicer, more orderly and kind. Such an approach was oblivious to the fact that the workers’ movement and the fascist reaction

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98 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE represented more than just political units or programmes to be readjusted or rearranged at whim but were the expressions of the most fundamental and irreconcilable social processes which had grown out of a capitalist economy in a state of the most acute and terminal crisis. The social democrats imagined that if the left forces could be checked in their extremism, if they could be made to behave “reasonably”, this would act as a natural counterweight to the extremism on the right. In such a context, those who occupied the middle ground – that is, themselves – would be able to will away the social polarization which had convulsed the country, and begin to govern again, stably and rationally, and with the aid of the more “reasonable” conservative forces who understood that a liberal compromise was in the best interests of all – like those in the upper layers of the bourgeoisie or King Victor Emmanuel, for instance. And so the social democrats did everything they could to diffuse working class power. Then, like a splash of icy water, came the shocking surprise. The king and the higher echelons of the bourgeoisie chose to eschew the rational exhortations of social democracy in favour of their own class interests. They united with the fascist bands, for they had been galvanized by their own need to crush the workers’ organizations. At this point, the social democrats could only have appeared as an obstacle to be ridden over in the same unceremonious vein. For the first time, fascism’s snarling visage was fully apparent to the social democrats for now they could feel its hot breath against their faces. By then, of course, it was already too late. As Trotsky writes: Convinced at the last moment that fascism was not to be checked by obedience, the social democrats issued a call to the workers for a general strike. But their proclamation suffered a fiasco. The reformists had dampened the powder so long, in their fear lest it should explode, that when they finally with a trembling hand did apply a burning fuse to it, the powder did not catch.157 The pathway to power was now open. The fascists came to government in the guise of a coalition, for Mussolini was still cautious and wished to appear as innocuous as possible; for a similar reason he did not at first touch the liberal constitution. At the same time, however, fascism began to manifest its raison d’être, for while Mussolini’s ministers ticked boxes and signed parliamentary agreements with sunny smiles, “the fascist bands were busy at work with clubs, knives, and pistols. Only thus was the fascist government created slowly, which meant the complete strangulation of all independent mass organizations.”158 In his analysis, then, Trotsky had been able to metic-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 99 ulously trace the trajectory of Italian fascism, to extrapolate from this fascism’s historical role, and he would go on to use these conclusions to understand and anticipate the development of German fascism and its ascent to power some years later. But Trotsky was rarely mechanical in his thinking; he did not simply stamp the conditions on the ground in Germany with the Italian template. Indeed, though he understood that both German and Italian fascism served the same historical need – “to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat” – he was aware that in Germany the working class was far more powerful in numerical and industrial terms; social antagonisms were more acute, and the character of fascist repression would, therefore, assume a more terrible tenor – “the hellish work of Italian fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of German national socialism”.159 Above all, Trotsky understood the terrible consequences which a victorious Nazism would hold for the German working class: “Workers, Communists . . . should fascism come to power it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle . . . Make haste you have very little time left!”160 But he was also able to draw from these the possible future outline of Nazi policy on the international stage. In its first period, Trotsky predicted, German fascism would be little likely to make any incursions into international territory, for at that point it would be fully occupied with the disruption and destruction of the forms of organization it would have to target during its civil war against the German proletariat. But once the “skulls and spines”161 of those workers had been driven over, Trotsky argued, Nazi Germany would be driven inexorably into a period of military expansion which would become a “triumph of world imperialism”162 in its most “heinous and bloodthirsty”163 form; one which would eventually culminate in “an inevitable war against the USSR”.164 Such a war, he suggested, would not only engulf Europe but also the globe itself. Trotsky made these particular predictions in 1931, but his writings on fascism throughout the thirties, throughout the period in which the storm clouds were gathering, are beacons of prescience in an otherwise murky blackness. In a sense they shine all the more brightly, for they are not simply the fragments of the most elegant and forensic socio-historical analysis – though they are that too, of course – but they are also desperate warnings issued to the European and the Russian working classes, as well as to their governments, frantically trying to stave off the approaching cataclysm. Despite its almost prophetic power, his figure in this period appears slight, almost tiny; a lone voice imbued with truly tragic dimensions for it cannot be

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100 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE heard over the rumble of the terrible forces which are now amassing. And still it calls out. In vain, Trotsky appealed to the Stalinists and the communists across nations, to make their cause with the social democrats. Not because he had any truck for the latter, for Trotsky himself had been the most relentless cataloguer of the series of blunders and betrayals they had committed – but because, for Trotsky, there was nothing more imperative than the fight against fascism; every possible social power must be exercised in the struggle against it. For this reason he called for a “united front” – a unity of struggle which would involve social democrats, Stalinists and radical leftists – anything in order to stunt, interrupt, and abnegate the processes of fascist development; anything to scotch the serpent in the egg. This, however, was not to become the policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the twenties Stalinist policy had tended to give succour to the social democrats. It had perpetuated the “stagist” theory which argued that societies must go through a prolonged period of bourgeois rule before the conditions for proletarian revolution had ripened, and this in turn, had provided the social democrats with a certain level of ideological cover when they had vacillated before – or indeed actively betrayed – the revolutionary movements whose leaderships they had come to assume. At the same time, the “stagist” policy helped paralyze those international revolutionary organizations which were under the sway of the Comintern, and might have otherwise helped drive revolutionary developments into an open challenge for power. The energy of the revolution which developed in Germany in 1923 was squandered in exactly this way, most tragically, for its defeat represented the removal of yet another obstacle in the ongoing course of the development of fascism in that country. Stalin – because of the deeply moulded contours of his own political psyche, because he was the expression of a strengthening bureaucracy – couldn’t but despise the revolutionary movement from below, for the prospect of its power posed an existential threat to the historical nature of his own social role. In such a context, then, a bourgeois leadership of a given nation comprised of social democrats was infinitely preferable; but he was still antagonized by the latter, who were themselves nearly always strategically and ideologically opposed to the USSR. As early as 1924, Stalin had demonstrated his hostility toward social democracy by applying to it a very particular and peculiar characterization. As with all his theoretical forays, this analysis had been filched from another (in this case Zinoviev), but what Stalin essentially laid out was the idea that social democracy was “the moderate wing of fascism . . . .Those organizations do not contradict but supplement one another. They are not antipodes but twins.”165

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 101 In the same period, then – the period in which Trotsky was desperately fighting for the “united front” against fascism – Stalin brought his own characterization to bear: the policy of “social fascism” which indicated that fascism and social democracy were, in essence, the same. As was so often the case, the two positions – the Trotskyist and the Stalinist – were polar opposites. Under the influence of its Russian Big Brother, the German Communist Party – the KPD – denounced Trotsky’s tactic of the “united front” vehemently, with its leader, Ernst Thälmann, describing the policy in the following terms: “Either the Communist Party will make a bloc with the social democracy or the German working class is lost for 10–20 years. This is the theory of a completely ruined fascist and counter revolutionary . . . the worst theory, the most dangerous theory and the most criminal that Trotsky has constructed in the last years of his counter revolutionary propaganda”.166 It is worth noting that the apparatchik who delivered these lines with such self-righteous gusto was languishing in a Nazi prison cell six months after the fascists had come to power in Germany. By then the damage had been done. In blurring the lines between social democracy and fascism, the Stalinist regime had dissipated the possibility of a coherent and collective strike against the latter. Instead fascism was increasingly seen as a flash in the pan which would burn itself out, and then it would be the turn of the communists in government. In the meantime communist workers were incited to violence against those workers with social democratic allegiances, with the same Thälmann putting forward the obtuse and utterly catastrophic slogan: “Chase the social fascists from their jobs in the plants and the trade unions.”167 The parties of the Communist International followed the lead of their Stalinist masters unanimously. In Britain, the organ of the Communist Party declared: “Trotsky has come out in defence of a united front between the Communist and Social Democratic Parties against fascism. No more disruptive and counter revolutionary class lead could possibly have been given at a time like the present.”168 The German proletariat was the most powerful working class in Europe. In the last free election before Hitler took power the combined vote of the socialists and communists exceeded that of the Nazis by around 1.5 million – reaching a figure of 13,232,000. Even though the Nazis had the single largest electoral bloc – precisely a result of the division between the socialists and the communists – they still didn’t possess an overall mandate within the Reichstag itself. But when this difficulty was overcome, when Hitler was awarded the title of Chancellor (authoritarian powers being handed to him on a plate by the upper middle classes) – the Communist Party of Germany never-

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102 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE theless continued to concentrate its fire on the social democracy. The social democrats, for their part, declared to their working class supporters that Hitler’s new powers were legal, that the workers should acquiesce benignly, without providing the Nazis with an excuse to use the forces of the state against them. Even by this point, the venerable liberals still didn’t get it. The Nazis didn’t need an excuse. The demand to mount a murderous onslaught against the workers was built into their raison d’être, it was encoded in their political DNA. The German proletariat had been decisively split and immobilized by the perfidy of the Stalinists and the cowardice of the social democrats. Its power had been neutered in advance. There could now be but one conceivable outcome. As Hitler was later able to boast, fascist reaction would come to power “without breaking a window pane”,169 and at once – just as Trotsky had forewarned – the stormtroopers, the army, and the police were mobilized against the workers and the so-called “communists” who claimed to represent their best interests. The Reichstag fire which the Nazis themselves had ignited was provided as the pretext for the repression. Now the fascists really were able to assure a decisive parliamentary majority, for their political rivals had been beaten down and incarcerated. Over a period of several years the Nazis effected the utter destruction of the workers’ organizations, smashing the trade unions and the parties, and imprisoning their members – communists and social democrats alike. The path toward the concentration camps had been cleared. And in the far distance, the silhouette of the gas chambers was already beginning to take shape. Once German fascism had subdued the workers’ movement and established a corporate, militarized state, Hitler was free to pursue his broader imperial ambitions. He was able to begin the military expansion into Europe, one which was fuelled by a vulgar set of Wagnerian dreams. Infused with a hazy paganism which conjured up the image of a fantastical folk past, such saccharine sentimentalism was then welded to the brutal dogmas of a pseudo-scientific race craft where certain groups were labelled genetically inferior, and deemed ripe for expropriation and extermination thereby. Such groups included, most tragically of all, the Jewish people, but Hitler also implicated the Russian Slavs in the category of an “inferior race” which should be brought to heel, not least in light of the pernicious “communism” which had infected so much of the Slavic territories. The expansion began tenuously at first. In 1935 the Saarland was once more absorbed back into Germany, while a year later the rich industrial region of the Rhineland was again assimilated. In the same period, Germany began to build its military infrastructure on a grand scale, in contravention of the postWorld War 1 Treaty of Versailles. In 1935 the German army was in-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 103 creased to over half a million men, while in the same year the AngloGerman Naval agreement was signed which allowed Germany to begin building its naval fleet anew – with Britain’s rather nervy acquiescence. In the international situation, as with the domestic one, Hitler was able to achieve a great deal “without breaking a window pane”. This also helped to strengthen the fascist movement across Europe. Having witnessed the way in which Hitler was able to flout the terms set down by the League of Nations, Mussolini felt emboldened to launch a war of conquest against Ethiopia which led to the Italian occupation of that country. In addition, fascism was energized in Austria, Finland, Hungary, Belgium, Britain, Greece, Serbia, and even places as far away as Canada and Chile developed National Socialist inspired movements. In Europe it seemed as though one was witness to an emerging fascist bloc and the danger to the Soviet Union was increasingly palpable. The anti-Russian propaganda which was part and parcel of Nazism’s vicious project of pseudo-scientific raceology was now translated into a coherent political form with the 1936 Anti Comintern pact signed between Germany and Japan – a military bargain levelled against the USSR which aimed at the disruption and destruction of the Communist International. An earlier pact of nonaggression signed between Germany and Poland – the country which provided the gateway into Russia through Western Europe – must have also set off warning bells in the Soviet dictator’s head. Discreetly but inexorably Stalin changed tack. The concept of “social fascism” was gradually phased out. As with all Stalin’s political calculations, this was made not in line with a more general theory about the nature of fascism as a historical phenomenon and the relation of the working class to it; but rather from the point of view of the immediate practical interests of the Soviet state and the bureaucracy which straddled it. This is important to bear in mind, for it is key to comprehending the course Soviet foreign policy was to take in the critical period from the mid- to late-thirties. Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s Soviet foreign policy had acted to enfeeble the international proletariat, partly out of the utter incompetence of policies like “social fascism”, but also because its own bureaucratic power was better premised on an international working class which was supine and subordinate, without its own independent organization and leadership – and thoroughly in thrall to the policies which issued forth from the Comintern. Stalinism could not, therefore, encourage the one social entity which had the power to break fascism at a stroke, for to do so would have meant undermining the control of the Soviet bureaucracy over its power basis abroad.

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104 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE But if Stalinism, as a result of its own historical formation, was unable to decisively develop and direct working class power against the fascists, where could it seek its own salvation in the face of the Nazi menace? The question necessitated a pragmatic answer – it would have to turn to the big bourgeois-democratic nations, like Britain and France, both of whom had come to feel their own imperial gains threatened by Hitler and Mussolini. In the latter part of 1934 Russia joined the League of Nations, and in early 1935 Stalin received the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in the Kremlin. In the same year a Russo-French pact was achieved. Such a contract was surely signed with a hesitant hand. Even though the USSR was no “workers’ state”, and was, in fact, the very antithesis of the communism which Marx and Engels had envisaged, it nevertheless, for the main part, had succeeded in repressing and abolishing the private ownership of the means of production. For this reason, the Western powers were doubly repelled; the USSR represented not only a rival strain of imperialism but one which was conditioned by a mode of being which offered up a direct challenge to the forms of generalized commodity production – or capitalism – their own societies were grounded on. Stalin felt that the British and French establishment were more than capable of reneging on any pacts of mutual assistance, for they were not averse to the prospect of a war opening up between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia – a war which would see both combatants reduced to dust, and would allow Britain and France to hoover up the spoils in the aftermath. In this, Stalin was surely correct. As an arch pragmatist, therefore, Stalin was sending out diplomatic feelers to Nazi Germany in the very period in which he was also making overtures to Britain and France. To say the same, by the time of the mid-thirties, the attitude of the Soviet government to the international situation was riven with contradictions, and these spilled over into what became the most important military and socio-political event before 1939. The Spanish Civil War – in many ways an augury of the global slaughter to come – pitched the fascists of that country against a motely combination of liberals, socialists, anarchists, Marxists and Stalinists. In 1931 a republic had been established after the overthrow in the previous year of the dictatorial regime headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The king had also been driven from the country, and a government of republicans and socialists had arisen on the back of a popular movement of militant workers and peasants clamouring for land reform. It was, however, a government riven with uncertainty from the beginning; torn between the need to satisfy the expectations of the masses who had brought it to power and the interests of the industrial capi-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 105 talists and the landed bourgeoisie who bridled at the revolution’s gains – it was given over to unhappy compromises. It initiated a land reform, but one of a watered down character; the peasants were not apportioned land as freehold properties but merely granted the rights of lease owners – or to say the same thing the power on the land passed from the archaic, aristocratic bastions of semi-feudalism to an agrarian bourgeoisie which manifested its property rights in and through an updated liberal state. There were those who despised the idea of the Republic in the first place, who felt that it had enfeebled the country by striking out at the power of the church and the monopoly of land which had been enjoyed by the Jesuits. By attacking religion and tradition and giving voting rights to women – the effete, liberal upstarts were weakening the social cohesive which guaranteed the stability and power of a great and venerable nation, one which taught those at the bottom to esteem their aristocratic patrons and accept meekly the guidance of their church fathers. Increasingly such haughty, decadent aristocratic sensibilities were refracted through the modern, lethal operations of a fascism which expressed the grim overarching power of financial capital and the agonized frenzy of an international petty bourgeoisie wracked by world economic crisis. While the Republican government vacillated, and on occasion, actively repressed worker170 and peasant unrest, the character of Spanish fascism increasingly acquired definition. The workers were pushed back but refused to rest on their laurels. As they felt the revolutionary promise of their struggles being squandered – an anxiety which was exacerbated by the rise of Hitler in Germany and the massacres and repressions visited upon their comrades there – a rising tide of radicalisation was generated which culminated in the electoral victory of the “popular front”; a political slate which came to power offering the workers holidays with pay, a 44 hour week, and a legal obligation imposed on employers to make a series of wage hikes. The working class, having learnt from the betrayals of the Republican government the first time round, immediately began to move on its own initiative, freeing political prisoners, and compelling the employers to honour the new legal terms the government had proclaimed. At once the fascist movement began to sharpen and coalesce; the monarchists, the generals, the most reactionary seam of the old political order, alongside the fascist gangs at the street level – began to marshal their forces from behind the scenes, to coordinate and conspire, and in July 1936, this process reached its apogee when the inevitable military coup was launched against the terrified and desperately vacillating government. 100,000 workers at once rose up in Madrid, clamouring for arms. Masses of

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106 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE people in Barcelona and cities across Spain followed suit. The civil war had begun. Stalin’s initial response to the conflict was muted. At first he refused to intervene. This was because he was still courting some form of alliance with Britain and France, and didn’t want the upper classes in those countries to further their sense that the USSR was active in subverting the political dynamics of developing capitalist nations with an eye to installing “communist” regimes. At the same time, however, Hitler’s military powers had been greatly augmented, and his sabre rattling speeches had become ever more bellicose. In 1936, for instance, Hitler made a flammable speech in which he declared emphatically that the territories of the Ukraine and Siberia belonged to the German Lebensraum. The ascension of fascism in Spain was now a significant threat. But because Stalin was endeavouring to attain rapprochement with Britain and France by showing them he would not interfere with the development of Western European countries, while at the same time he was also hoping to undermine the fascist forces in Spain on the sly, he was unable to achieve either task – rapprochement or intervention – with any cohesion or clarity. He began to send weapons to the Republican forces in order to aid them in their struggle against Franco, but on a far smaller scale than the weapons which were being supplied by Hitler and Mussolini to the Generalissimo in that same period. The historian Antony Beevor describes the quality of the first consignment of weapons the Russian regime sent to the Spanish anti-fascists: Rifles and field guns were often in a bad state and obsolete. One batch of guns of Tsarist vintage was known as ‘the battery of Catherine the Great’. The ten different sorts of rifles came from eight countries and required rounds of six different calibres. Many of them had been captured during the First World War and some of them were 50 years old. The T-26 tanks and later BT-5 tanks, on the other hand, were entirely modern and better than the opposing German models. The aircraft, although modern by Soviet standards, were soon out-fought and outflown by the new German aircraft which came into service the following year.171 In general, then, the quantity of the weaponry delivered was low and its quality left much to be desired. The poor quality was also indicative of the fact that Stalin had another motive for providing the Republic with arms – one of profit. As Medvedev comments “when arms began to reach Spain from the Soviet Union the Spanish Repub-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 107 lic sent to the USSR the greater part of its gold reserves”.172 The USSR insisted that the gold was not a payment for military products but “it is nevertheless highly unlikely that the Soviet Union ever returned the gold to Spain”.173 In addition, the numbers of personnel the Soviet Union sent in order to help defend the Republic were of a meagre reckoning. The vast majority of assistance the Spanish Republicans received in fighting the fascists came from the International Brigades, the military units comprised of heroic volunteers from across Europe. Beevor notes that altogether “30 Soviet officers were sent to Spain as commanders in the International Brigades”174 while he estimates that the total amount of Soviet personnel who served in the civil war “appears to have been a maximum of 2,150, of whom 600 were non-combatant, including interpreters”.175 One might argue, of course, this was better than nothing, but before we arrive at such a conclusion it is important to draw out the consequences of the Stalinist military intervention in Spain. Stalinism itself was embroiled in a paradox: on the one hand it sought the defeat of Franco’s fascists, and the most viable way to achieve this was to bolster and assist the power of the working classes and the peasantry on the ground in Spain – and yet, at the same time, working class power was anathema to the historical basis of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Inevitably, the top-down logic of the bureaucracy began to assert itself. As Beevor observes, regional “commanders were sometimes forced to become members of the Communist Party, to ensure that their men received ammunition and medical care. The advisors . . . took all the decisions, often without consulting their Spanish colleagues”.176 In Catalonia the movement of the workers and peasants had a particularly potent and fiercely independent character. Its leadership was anarchist-syndicalist in political orientation and it was able to oversee the process by which the Catalans placed into their own hands the control of the banks in order to more effectively accelerate the war effort. Antonov-Ovseyenko was a Soviet official who was witness to the anarchist movement in Catalonia, but he was not an apparatchik of the standard Stalinist brand. He had been a comrade of Trotsky and a member of the Left Opposition. He was later forced to renounce such allegiances, and was perhaps even banished to Spain as a result of his “unreliable” character. For he clearly had the sensibilities of an “old Bolshevik”, someone who had experienced the October Revolution, who had led the military soviet which was responsible for the storming of the Winter Palace, who had thoroughly imbibed the sense of liberation, of mass awakening, which the revolutionary event presupposed. For this reason, when he was made witness to the eruption of peoples’ power, of self-determination, on the part of the Catalan

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108 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE masses, even though it was enacted under the banner of a political philosophy which was different to his own – such a movement couldn’t fail to command Antonov-Ovseyenko’s admiration and respect. The Stalinist regime did not, and could not, share his attitude. The independence of the Catalan political centre repelled the centralists back in Moscow, who derided the mass movement, describing it as “the kingdom of the Makhnovist faction”.177 Antonov-Ovseyenko criticised this view, giving his support to the Catalans, and when attacked by the Russian authorities, he replied in the simplest of terms: he was “a revolutionary, not a bureaucrat”,178 he declared. The statement pithily condensed the ambitions of the Stalinist project more generally. It also sealed his fate. A short period later he was executed. The Stalinists battled the anarchists consistently, however they did not reserve their ire for the anarchists alone. The POUM (The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was also influential in Catalonia, and was suspicious of Stalinism’s role in Spain. The party had been formed, in part, as a grassroots reaction to the increasing bureaucratization and authoritarianism of so-called communism in the USSR. It was highly cognisant of the way in which the Stalinists were using the Spanish terrain to play out their own foreign policy vis-à-vis France and Britain – “Stalin’s concern . . . is not really the fate of the Spanish and international proletariat but the protection of the government in accordance with the policy of pacts made by certain others”.179 The POUM’s analysis here tallied with reality. Not only was Stalin repelled by any genuine demonstration of collective control which the workers and peasants were able to establish; he very consciously eschewed this in favour of a strategy which, as Beevor notes, “helped landowning peasants and attracted the middle classes”. Stalin’s line in Spain was conducted with the overall aim of establishing a reinvigorated bourgeois state which would have two possible advantages for the position of the USSR: on the one hand, it avoided further “provoking Nazi Germany, and on the other”180 it would leave the way open for “a rapprochement with Britain and France”.181 For this reason the POUM’s criticisms cut to the quick. The Stalinist response was instantaneous and predictably monotone – it might have been generated by the algorithms of a computer programme rather than composed by a set of human beings. The POUM were stigmatized as “Trotskyite conspirators” – which was strange given that the party had broken with Trotsky some time before. Simultaneously, the Stalinists declared, they had sold their souls to “international fascism” – the very political force the POUM was locked in a life and death struggle against. The charge of fascism levelled by the Stalinists against the POUM is really up there in the pantheon of Stalinist hypocrisy, especially given

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 109 the course Stalinist foreign policy was shortly to take. In any event, the Stalinists moved against the POUM with their customary brutality in order to exact a ferocious extermination of the POUM cadres and the murder of several of its key leaders, during a period of particularly fierce unrest in mid-1937 which was dubbed “the May days”. The Stalinist repression spread to the ranks of the International Brigades more generally. The Soviet officials who oversaw particular detachments of volunteers became ever more brutal in the type of discipline they exacted. Andre Martin, a Soviet commander who had cultivated his own military fiefdom saw it as his personal duty to exterminate en masse the “Fascist-Trotskyist” spies, and this strutting apparatchik gained a particularly fearsome reputation for his swift resort to summary execution.182 He was by no means unique. In 1937 it was revealed that the “communist” in charge of public order Jose Cazorla “had organized secret prisons holding socialists, anarchists and republicans, many of whom had been freed by popular tribunals, to torture and execute them as spies or traitors”.183 Under such conditions, the outcome of the Spanish Civil War seemed almost preordained, the fascist victory inevitable. It wasn’t that the Stalinists consciously set out to aid the fascists, but again, the historical logic of the Moscow bureaucracy meant that in order to proceed the Stalinists were once more compelled to break down any expression of genuine working class and peasant autonomy and the political organizations which facilitated it. In addition, at a time when the USSR’s position on the world stage was precarious, the need to fight for the rehabilitation of a defunct bourgeois state at the expense of the more radical left forces – was a need which issued from the USSR’s own attempt to walk the tightrope of diplomacy between a recalcitrant England and France, and an increasingly bellicose Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union, in and through its emissaries in Spain, prosecuted these objectives with a heightened brutality, and created an atmosphere on the ground of stifling secrecy and covert paranoia, an obvious overflow from the terrible purges which were reaching a crescendo in the Soviet Union during the same period. For all of this, the Soviet intervention in the Spanish struggle was utterly catastrophic; not simply because the Soviet forces were repressive, though they were that also, but because they were inexorably driven to open up what Antony Beevor has acutely and accurately termed “a virtual civil war within the civil war”.184 The Stalinists were the single most divisive force in Spain, and their activity once and for all smashed the semblance of Republican unity. It has been argued by some that, if the left forces had triumphed in the Spanish Civil War, if fascism had been defeated in Spain, then the

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110 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE global implosion which followed might have been averted. This seems unlikely in the extreme. It is certainly true, however, that the fascist position and confidence would have been significantly undermined going into the Second World War had the Republicans triumphed. Stalin’s intervention in Spain cost yet another opportunity to forge a united front against fascism on the part of left forces internationally by turning “communists” (many of whom even at this stage believed that the USSR was a communist country and represented the continuation of the legacy of October) against socialists, anarchists, Trotskyists and the like. But even on its own terms, Stalin’s policy was an abject failure. It didn’t diminish by one iota the ideological distrust for the Soviet regime which both the British and French ruling classes harboured. It didn’t win the USSR any kudos with the states it endeavoured to appease. The only tangible gain was a tawdry material one; the price in gold which the regime managed to extract by means of the meagre supply of often shoddy armaments and a group of totalitarian infiltrators whose political “idealism” barely masked callous self-interest. As the war progressed, as the left forces increasingly fragmented, Stalin’s interest began to wane, perhaps because it was clear that the political manoeuvring he had been engaged in had refused to yield any real dividends. Having squeezed the juice from the anti-fascist struggle, he tossed the husk aside and abandoned Spain to its fate. The Soviet dictator’s gaze now settled upon a new agenda; as was so often the case, untrammelled by any ideological aspiration except the crassest self-interest, Stalin was able to initiate a political U-turn on the basis of a vulgar pragmatism. The reversal he would make now was perhaps the most dizzying and unscrupulous twist in the history of diplomatic relations, and its consequences would be etched out in the blood of twenty million people. The so-called “communist” state made common ground with the fascist one; in 1939 Stalin signed a pact of non-aggression with Hitler. The manoeuvre was typically Stalinist. It was ruthless and unexpected, designed to outflank Britain and France, whose ruling stratums (as Stalin correctly perceived) would have welcomed an all-out conflict between the USSR and Germany. Stalin, those yellow jaundiced eyes of his gleaming with peasant cunning, always took an exhilarated delight in outfoxing his opponents especially when the stakes were life and death; his survival, their annihilation. As well, the pact would allow for an immediate gain of territory; Russia would be granted the northern half of Poland, an old historical enemy, as the newly consecrated allies flexed their military might in a joint invasion of that country. But in playing out the politics of pragmatism on the international stage, Stalin once again blinded himself to the social-historical essence of fascism itself, and as a con-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 111 sequence, he lacked the ability to read its most lethal exponent – Adolph Hitler. In the standard textbooks of classroom history, Hitler and Stalin are often portrayed as kindred spirits. It’s understandable, given that both men stood at the helms of the two most pernicious forms of totalitarianism humanity has been subject to. They were both mass murderers on an unimaginable scale. They both took a grim pleasure in the use of the most unadulterated violence. They were both chock full of the most primitive and archaic prejudices and beliefs. They were both individuals who could conceive of the organization of human relations only through the application of the most brutal and naked controls and oppressions. In each, that pathological need to assert such control ultimately came from the same fundamental place; a deep-seated sense of inadequacy and disillusionment with the world, and an insatiable desire to be revenged upon it. They were both capable of making a volte-face at any moment and without the slightest provocation; not only with regard to the masses of people whom they brutalized and oppressed, but also in relation to those who inhabited their closest, innermost circles. And both only felt truly at home when the atmosphere of terror which surrounded them had been ratcheted up to its zenith. And yet, despite all this, on another level, the two men were diametrically opposed. The historical processes which had brought each to power had a fundamentally different character. Hitler, an ex-soldier, a failed artist, had soaked up his politics in an atmosphere of impotence and fury – in the decaying Weimar Republic of twenties Germany where a post-war settlement and economic crisis had inaugurated the endless breadlines, the shuffling shadows of the legions of the unemployed, and the broken, mutilated forms of veterans lying prostrate in the streets, begging for alms. Hitler felt in his very marrow the insulted pride of the defeated patriot and military man, he was made bereft by the tragedy of a “great” nation rendered low by the scheming wiles of corrupt bureaucrats and foreign oppression. Through the chimeric figure of the “Jew”, a thousand and one petty, miserable, bitter resentments were refracted; in the “Jew” – who represented at the same time the frigid communist hostile to the national spirit and the scheming capitalist determined to suck the nation’s resources dry – in the “Jew”, the responsibility for every social ill, every anti-patriotic evil, was condensed. Over a prolonged period Hitler refined his ability to draw on these wayward, toxic, militantly nationalistic and virulently anti-Semitic currents; he was able to crystallize in his speeches the mood and the motivation of the angry mob, always teetering on the verge of dispossession and pauperism,

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112 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE anguished by the thought of a glorious future so cruelly snatched away, hungry for a compensation which was to be writ large in blood and suffering. Hitler understood such people because he was at the same time the most concentrated expression of their values; his whole political persona arose from the milieu of their movement, the test of his ideas lay in the way he was able to pull more and more people into its seething, swirling vortex. For this reason he believed absolutely in the savage, frenzied millenarianism he had helped birth, he believed in the supremacy of the pure Aryan race which had been laid low by a foreign contagion, and he believed that – in rousing the mass movement from its slumber – he would be able to inaugurate those thousand years of untrammelled domination which would follow the unleashing of “blood and honour” on a global scale. As vulgar, crass and obscene as all these ideas were, Hitler believed in them absolutely; they were the salvation and redemption for every slight he had ever endured, every disappointment he had ever faced. His belief attained all the intensity and delirium of religious fever; his eyes alive with the glint of a bloodthirsty Messianic destiny; his, therefore, was the darkest idealism to have ever bubbled up from the cauldron of human suffering. Stalin’s political psyche, on the other hand, contained not a speck of idealism. His political sensibilities had not been formed in and through contact with a mass movement but had instead been tailored according to a more utilitarian and functional set of aspirations; the need to adopt the politics which would best facilitate a concentration of power in his hands and aid his uplift through the closed circle of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Ideas did not and could not inspire him with the sublime qualities of their own content, for they were merely devices to expedite the immediate, practical ends of this type of power play. For this reason, Stalin believed in nothing, could believe . . . in nothing; he felt only the gravity of the cynicism, distrust and ambition which moved him; and an individual of this type, experiencing only these things, cannot but sense them in others. He knew that everybody was as self-serving as he was, as brutal and nasty and corrupt as he; the only difference was that he played the game better, was that much more cunning – was that much more ruthless. The fact that he couldn’t but see in others anything but the distorted features of his own reflection blinded him to the element of idealism and romanticism which was a part and parcel of the Nazi project, and an integral component of its leader’s psyche. Naturally Stalin understood that Hitler hated the Jews (Stalin himself was an anti-Semite), that Hitler really did believe that those of the Slavic “mould” were inherently inferior, but what Stalin would never be able to grasp is how any of these things

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 113 could have overridden the more practical aspect of Hitler’s politics. Once the Soviet–German pact had been signed, Stalin committed to it absolutely. He followed it up by ratifying another treaty – the German Soviet Friendship and Border Treaty of September the same year. He supplied Germany with grain and raw materials, and in the most bitterly ironic gesture of all, he even assured Hitler of weapon supplies – armaments which would, in the immanent future, be put to good use against the Soviet regime itself. In the meantime, on the domestic front, the ideological direction of the Soviet propaganda regime was pulled into full reverse; before Stalin was indicting Germany, Japan and Italy as the imperial aggressors in the building global conflict – now his opprobrium was reserved for Britain and France alone. All critique and the negative mention of fascism simply disappeared from the press as if overnight. It wasn’t that Stalin was oblivious to the level of vitriol Nazi propaganda evinced toward the Soviet peoples, for he had heard the speeches and read the cuttings, and there is no shadow of a doubt he was remarkably well informed. Rather Stalin’s misapprehension lay in the fact that he believed Hitler could shed his ideological beliefs as easily as Stalin had shed his own. Just as Soviet propaganda had denuded itself of its anti-Nazi aspect – so too could Hitler’s ideological project divest itself of its racially driven animosity toward Russia – at least in light of its practical aim of conducting war against England and France, and not opening up another flank on the Eastern Front (the very mistake the German war machine had committed in the First World War, and Napoleon Bonaparte a century before that). But Stalin had not registered the component of sacrosanct destiny which was embedded in Nazi millenarianism, nor the frenzied, rabid nature of the campaigns it was capable of generating – especially when compounded by the pressure and contradictions of a global war. In the very moments Nazism felt it was overstretched, felt its military machine creaking under the pressure of the mass slaughter, it was then when the demented promise of its bloodthirsty utopia felt closest and most vivid; it was then when the notion of lebensraum or “living space” seemed most viable – a space which was to be opened up in the East by the sweeping away of millions of Russian corpses. For all of this, Stalin’s appeasement of the Nazis was not simply a desperate rouse to give Soviet Russia a little breathing space in which to better arm itself against the German imperial menace – as his defenders nearly always try to argue. In fact, everything suggests that Stalin didn’t believe there was any danger of Hitler mounting an attack in the near future once the pact had been signed – despite all the available and steadily mounting information to the contrary. Stalin’s myopia on the crucial question of evidence cannot be overstated.

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114 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE Medvedev argues that the “intensive transfer of German troops and equipment to the Soviet border began in 1940. Early in 1941 it was sharply increased, becoming an interrupted flood in March and April.”185 He also points out how “the command of the Soviet border troops sent regular reports on the situation at the border to the party’s Central Committee , to the Sovnarkom, and to the foreign affairs and defense commissariats”.186 As well, between October 1939 and December 1940, over five thousand German secret agents had either been captured or killed within Soviet borders.187 Deutscher, who is far more sympathetic to Stalinism than ever he should be, takes up the same theme in earnest, pointing out how, at the end of April 1941, “Stalin received the British message, which Churchill was to mention in his speech of 22 June, warning him of the imminence of the German attack”.188 Similar warnings from Roosevelt, Sorge and even the German ambassador Schulenberg all fell on deaf ears. In the very week before the German offensive was launched against Russia, Deutscher goes on to note, Stalin issued a “bizarre statement”, a “comic-tragic effort” which “praised before the whole world those who next week were to unmask themselves as Russia’s mortal enemies and taunted those who next week would be her only allies”.189 Stalin had authorized a statement through his news agency that “credited Germany with ‘fulfilling to the letter’ her agreements with Russia”190 while at the same time deriding the British Ambassador for irresponsibly cooking up false rumours of an impending Russo-German war. How was such catastrophic blindness allowed to go unchecked? How could Stalin remain so blithely unaware of the danger even when the wolves had gathered and were now baying at the gate? Clearly, by this point, he had come to believe his own hype. Stalin had in his political career enjoyed astronomical success. He had thwarted each and every possible opposition to his power, so it was not surprising that he had come to believe in his abilities so completely; in his skill to locate the self-interest at work in other political players, and the finesse with which he was able to play the one entity off against the other. But there was something more fundamental at work too. Throughout the thirties, Stalin’s every pronouncement had been rendered reverent; in every subject – science, economics, philosophy, linguistics – the smallest throw-away statement from him, would be snatched up and advertised as a game changing revelation which would invigorate and ignite the whole field. Every order Stalin issued personally was received and carried out with the same hysterical reverence. The dictator’s activity was more and more shrouded in a kind of papal infallibility supplemented by the sinister shadow of reprisal. Such a situation inevitably produced a cloying, toadyish environment where it was in-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 115 creasingly difficult for the competent to draw attention to errors or miscalculations in the dictator’s projects – and nigh on impossible for Stalin himself to register such shortcomings over the cacophony of toneless praise always ringing in his ears. Reality, however, cared not a jot for the meticulously constructed edifice of his megalomania, and would shatter it brutally and without a second thought. On 22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the USSR – the single bloodiest invasion ever conducted in world history. When the news came through to the dictator at the top, it is worth noting Stalin’s reaction in its detail: I asked him to call Stalin to the phone. ‘What? Now Comrade Stalin is asleep.’ ‘Wake him at once. The Germans are bombing our cities.’ About three minutes later Stalin picked up the receiver. I reported the situation and requested permission to begin retaliatory action. Stalin was silent. I heard only the sound of his breathing. ‘Do you understand me?’ I said. Silence again. At last Stalin asked: ‘Where is the commissar of defence?’ ‘Talking with the Kiev district.’ . . . The commissar of defence and I were called in. Stalin, his face white, was sitting at the table cradling a tobacco-filled pipe in his hand. He said: ‘We must immediately phone the German embassy.’ . . . A while later Molotov hurried into the office and said, ‘The German government has declared war on us.’ Stalin lowered himself to his chair and fell into deep thought. A long and heavy pause ensued. I took the risk of breaking the prolonged silence and proposed that we come down with all the strength of our forces in the border districts upon the enemy units that had broken through in order to detain any further enemy advance. ‘Not detain, but destroy,’ Timoshenko corrected me. ‘Issue a directive,’ said Stalin.191 This snippet of conversation, of actual conversation, from within the inner sanctum of the Soviet command, provides a tonic to the drooling accounts pitched by later Sovietologists – of Stalin as the steely communist – the implacable, lantern-jawed foe of fascism, prepared from the outset for the grim, inevitable battle to the death. Rather we are made to see a different image of the leader altogether;

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116 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE a disorientated old man awoken from sleep, hesitant, befuddled – helpless even – note how it is now the subordinates who are proactive, who have to pull things together and take the initiative for plans to orchestrate some kind of defence. But what is more remarkable still is Stalin’s behaviour in the aftermath. He withdraws entirely and isolates himself at his dacha in the countryside in a fug of hopelessness and despair. For the two weeks after Hitler launched the invasion, Medvedev observes, the central archives of the Soviet army contains “not a single document issued by Stalin”.192 Now one might argue, given the perilous nature of the situation which had just opened up, burying his head in the sand was not the most unusual or reprehensible thing Stalin could do. On one level, perhaps, it allows a glimpse of humanness to slip through the dictatorial façade, it indicates that Stalin could be as vulnerable as anyone. The point, however, is that Stalin was far from just anyone. He was a leader who had ruthlessly fashioned perhaps the most centralized top-down system of administration in the history of statecraft. His functionaries lived – quite literally – in the mortal fear that any independent decision would fail to live up to the private machinations which were taking place inside the dictator’s head; for this they feverishly courted his approval. The sudden event of Stalin’s disappearance, therefore, left them paralyzed with shock and helplessness. Having been actuated by the fear of death to gain the rubber stamp of the leader’s approval on every major decision – none now wanted to push through a given military action, for they could not know if Stalin would disapprove of it retrospectively. The Soviet military command was rendered inert. As Medvedev concludes, “Stalin’s absence from his post as head of the state and the party from June 23 to the beginning of July was an important reason why the Nazis penetrated so swiftly and so deeply into the Soviet Union.”193 To which one should also add that the Soviet army was without a viable battle plan for the event of a German invasion, because its Commander-in-chief had, by and large, ruled out the possibility of such an invasion in advance.194 On top of this we have to bear in mind that the Red Army had been purged, its leadership decapitated, so that altogether “66,671 officers were executed, imprisoned or dismissed and out of the 706 officers of the rank of brigade commander and above, only 303 remained untouched”.195 Last but not least, the army which was menacing them had been heavily fortified by Soviet arms and supplies. If Stalin had actually, consciously, attempted to sabotage the Soviet war effort, he would have struggled to have done a better job. The rest, as they say, is history. The lethally effective German forces, honed by years of combat, spread deep into Russian territories

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 117 like a cloud of locust across a field of corn, eating up Soviet resources and lives with a veracious, murderous hunger. As Beevor notes, the Germans “had assembled the largest invasion force ever seen, with 3,350 tanks, around 7,000 field guns and over 2,000 aircraft”.196 The Soviet forces, immobilized and utterly unprepared, were as sitting ducks. On the first day alone 1,200 Soviet aircraft were destroyed197 and within three weeks the Red Army had lost 3,500 tanks, over 6,000 aircraft and some two million men, including a significant portion of the Red Army officer corps.198 A Nazi general would describe the attacks on the Russian air force as the equivalent of “infanticide”.199 He might just as well have been talking about the ease of success of the German military campaign more generally. Some of the detachments advanced through Russia at a rate of almost 50 miles a day.200 How was Russia’s survival even conceivable? Above everything else, the bravery, resourcefulness and determination of its peoples who would have to pay what is a simply unimaginable price. The brutality of the German soldiers was often untrammelled, heightened by the years of exposure to a doctrine of racial supremacy which was able to radically obscure the humanity of its victims, presenting them as swarthy sub humans, as communist automatons who lacked the crispness of thought, culture and individuality which made life worth savouring. Extirpating such people, eliminating such people, was less of a moral question than a logistical one, and such a conviction helped facilitate the most appalling war crimes against Russian civilians. If a fascist regiment found itself low on supplies, the soldiers had little compunction; they would enter a village, steal food from the inhabitants, and sometimes even strip the clothes from their backs, before leaving the villagers to their fate which involved, more often than not, prolonged starvation. The attempts to sneak away resources, to conceal food, or to lie about its whereabouts on the part of the peasants, were regularly met with summary execution. The racialist ideology which undergirded Nazism allowed the German military machine to free itself from the fetters and residues of any universalizing moral code regarding the conduct of war, and its penetration into the Russian heartlands could only ever have led to an orgiastic outpouring of bloody mass murder, directed not just at combatants but also civilians. But as the news of the invasion spread, as the Russian troops on the ground finally managed to organize and more effectively deploy, something like a popular uprising rippled across Russia’s vast territories, motivated by the disgust at German atrocities, and utter revulsion toward the creed of racial purity which inspired them. A deep-rooted sense of patriotism now nestled in the bones of the civilian popula-

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118 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE tion, and vast swathes of people – untutored in battle but peerlessly brave, wholly underequipped but utterly driven – threw themselves into the theatre of war and death. “Four million people”, writes Beevor, “volunteered or felt obliged to volunteer for the apolchensty militia. The waste of lives was so terrible, it is hard to comprehend . . . untrained soldiers, often without weapons and many still in civilian clothes, were sent against the Wehrmacht’s panzer formations”.201 Even the highly disciplined and regimented German battalions were forced to acknowledge the courage and the determination of their adversaries. General Halder remarked how “everywhere the Russians fight down to the last man . . . They capitulate only occasionally”,202 while much in the same vein German soldiers were compelled to admit that “the dogs fight like lions”.203 The German advance began to slow. The bright light of late autumn began to fade and now the temperature started to fall. Hitler had refused to sanction winter clothes and equipment for the Nazi troops for he was adamant that Russia would succumb to the same blitzkrieg tactics which had obliterated the French defence – alongside the forces on the ground which had outflanked the Maginot line, and taken Paris in little over a month. But Hitler was wrong. The winter did arrive. And when it came it was the type of Russian winter where the temperature plummeted to 20 degrees below zero, where the frost petrified the trees, and clung to the telegraph lines, and crept brittle and biting across the hard metal of the guns and the equipment, before working its way into the skin and bones of the men that operated them. Sometimes, in the solitary stillness which followed a blizzard the silhouette of the devastated terrain would appear momentarily tinged by an artic blue. From everywhere a dull, ghostly white light fell. The German soldiers, grim, shivering, pushed forward; their footsteps clanging across a broken ground which had already frozen over in icy sheets. Food supplies dwindled. The frozen flesh of animal meat could no longer be cleaved away with a knife, only a hacksaw would do the job now. Even the engines of tanks became frozen solid. In that first bitter winter well over 100,000204 German soldiers contracted frost bite. Still they marched on. Battalions carried radios, and from these crackled the voice of their fuming Führer back in Berlin, exhorting them toward further “honour”, further bloodshed, only his words were at once swallowed up by the screaming Siberian winds. The sense of ominousness must have been almost palpable, hanging across the nightime silence, and the vast blackness of an alien sky. Icy winter mists fell, veiling the soldiers on the land and engulfing the planes in the air, severely hampering the efficacy of the German military thrust, and yet still the divisions pressed ahead, until it seemed, in the words of one German general,

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 119 that “the vastness of Russia devours us”.205 Every trace of the euphoria which had accompanied the Wehrmacht’s dizzy, bloodying successes at the outset of the invasion was evaporated. They realized now they were engaged in a prolonged and inescapable fight to the death. The change in tenor and tone of the conflict would further highlight Stalin’s incompetence as a military leader. As the Germans were ever more helplessly bogged down, as the Soviet countermeasures began to take heavy tolls, Stalin grew excessively confident and became convinced that the German army was on the verge of collapse. Just as with all his other utopic schemas – the forced collectivization, the militarization of the factories – he understood that the only thing required to realize his goal was a sudden bout of the most unadulterated force. At once he made the arrangements to commit to a massive onslaught which would see offensives mobilized in the North around Leningrad and across the South where the territories of the Ukraine and Crimea were to be swiftly recaptured. The most significant and able general in all Stalin’s staff, Georgy Zhukov, tried to warn him of the dangers of such overarching ambition, but the warnings fell on deaf ears. When the offensives were launched, Zhukov’s concerns and those of others, proved prescient. Beevor describes how “Stalin’s general offensive deteriorated into a series of flailing brawls. Several Soviet formations were at once cut off as they broke through the German front with insufficient support. Stalin had underestimated the capacity of German troops to recover from a reverse.”206 In the event, neither power was able to strike the decisive blow, and the conflict deteriorated into a prolonged war of attrition, a sporadic and bloody grapple from which neither side could extricate itself. The death lock was eventually broken as the pitch and tenor of the violence took on visceral, unheard of dimensions at the battle of Stalingrad half a year on. The siege of Stalingrad began in August 1942. Stalingrad (now Volgograd) was an industrial and strategic centre, with its back to the great Volga River and to its north the Urals – rich in ore and minerals. In the city and throughout the region, the whole population rose against the Germans in a single wave, “all available men and women between sixteen and fifty-five – nearly 200,000 – were mobilized in ‘workers’ columns’”.207 The resistance of Russian women during Stalingrad was particularly noteworthy. They dug trenches in the snow, they formed anti-aircraft batteries to defend the borders, and some, barely out of high school and with no knowledge of weaponry, became the front line volunteers who formed the barrier between the city in the north west, and the advancing Panzer tanks. No more than teenagers, in another life the pain they would encounter would come from a bad exam result or from a messy break up with some awkward

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120 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE teenage boy. That, however, was a reality they would never know. Instead, they stepped up to defend everything which was sacred to them, firing their weaponry wildly and desperately against the forces which were moving against them, before the inevitable happened. They were, quite simply, obliterated. Words capture such heroism and such appalling human tragedy loosely at best. The city itself became the emblem of Russian resistance, and perhaps this was part of the reason why Hitler devoted so much manpower to the attempt to take it. He threw almost everything against it. The aerial assault against Stalingrad produced one of the most concentrated and sustained bombardments of the whole war in the East; in the first day alone “aircraft flew a total of 1,600 sorties . . . and dropped 1,000 tons of bombs for the loss of only three machines”.208 Estimates suggest that up to “40,000 were killed during the first week”.209 The technological supremacy of the Nazis was opposed by the sheer doggedness of a population who correctly perceived in their hastily cobbled together and utterly heroic resistance, the very last line of defence against the fascist threat. While the German planes were screeching overhead, the guns from the Nazi tanks pumped out night and day, flattening buildings and shredding bodies, creating an inferno of fire and scorched earth. For a time the civilian and military defence forces of Stalingrad really were teetering on a knife’s edge. But the results of such a terrible bombardment also had an unforeseen consequence. The city had been reduced to a husk of its former self; a multitude of collapsed roofs and barely standing walls which jutted out like broken shards – punctuated only by the smouldering craters and unearthed cellars which had been opened up in the ground. Across the ruins the billowing, acrid smoke from a thousand detonations drifted. The detritus of war was everywhere; tanks, burned out and immobilized, sat like ancient statues slowly sinking into the ground – snapped signal wires coiled around crumbling walls like weeds creeping across the remnants of some long lost civilization. The ghostly glimpses of a life which once was – the wooden frame of a bed, a desk covered in dust, a blackened bookshelf, a vase of withered flowers – peeked out through the wreckage. The Russians had, in general, fared poorly against the more militarily sophisticated and regimented Germans when it came to the long plains and vast open spaces, but the nooks and crannies, and the ledges and the basements, invited the possibility of a different type of war altogether; a guerrilla war which saw the Russian fighters capitalize on their indigenous sense of the city; which saw the devastated topography of Stalingrad become a lethal form of camouflage in its own right. From far above, in a hollowed out five

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 121 storey building, a German soldier might well catch the wink of a sniper’s lens in the high midday sun, but it is likely that was the last thing he would ever see. Skirmishes now took place in the ruins and the shadows, in the darkness below ground, or the blast which arrived from within the closing, suffocating space of some abandoned attic. As the Germans pressed deeper into the labyrinthine warren of the city’s heart, the shadows of the Soviet fighters would flit through the mists like ghosts, the wispy, whispering promise of death intimate and close at hand now. “The enemy is invisible”, wrote one German general, “ambushes out of basements, wall remnants, hidden bunkers and factory ruins produce heavy casualties among our troops”.210 Under such horrific and unrelenting pressures the cohesion of the German offensive inevitably began to fragment. As the tide began to change, the Russian military command started to sense the vast historical implications; a victory for the Russians at Stalingrad would mean sending the German war machine into reverse, and could be the event which would change the direction of the world war in its entirety. In 1942 Soviet industry had rallied and tank production rose “from 11,000 during the first six months to 13,600 during the second half of the year . . . .Aircraft production was also increasing from 9,600 during the first six months of the year, to 15,800 for the second.”211 The most experienced of the generals realized now was the perfect time in which to launch a massive counteroffensive. But once again they had to overcome the resistance of Stalin. If before he had marked himself out by his excessive confidence, now the dictator had moved to the opposite pole, becoming overly cautious, refusing to commit. The Soviet leader suggested a meeker strategy but eventually he was won over by the talented Zhukov and finally Stalin granted permission for the full on offensive which was to be dubbed “Operation Uranus”. Toward the end of November “three ‘Stalingrad axis’ fronts, just over one million men were now assembled . . . Orders were given three hours before the attack . . . the Germans did not know what was going to hit them”.212 Again the loss of life was staggering. The Germans and their Romanian allies, taken by surprise, fought furiously, but the overwhelming thrust of the Russian forces, assisted by the icy conditions and the blanket winds, managed to break through the lines, forcing a retreat. The forms of harried German soldiers, freezing and often starving, separated from their divisions, now flooded the villages dotted around the River Don on its east bank, but there was no respite, for artic winds had frozen its waters over, providing an easy crossing, and it was only a matter of time before the Soviet tanks emerged from the rolling winter mists in their wake. The Sixth Army, the most significant division of the German military engaged at the battle of Stalingrad, had cru-

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122 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE cially been immobilized by the strategy of its high commander, by the increasingly shrill ravings of a Führer whose supreme belief in the triumph of the will had blinded him to the objective, material conditions in Russia, and had made him demand that troops under the command of General Paulus hold their ground. Hampered by such suicidal stratagems, the Sixth Army were swiftly encircled and cut off. For the Germans now there was no way back. Christmas night of 1942 must have been the absolute pinnacle of loneliness for the exhausted and battered foreign invaders. For a few, the more they sunk into a morass of hunger and cold, the more vividly they felt the words of Adolf Hitler, the more profoundly they discerned in his image the power of a holy icon which had the capacity to reverse all their woes – by marshalling some last minute, midnight offensive that might return to them their lives and deliver them from the oblivion of the icy winter abyss. The older and more seasoned troops, however, were able to glean that the central command back in Berlin had little to offer them now, and – not withstanding Hitler’s belligerent rhetoric to the contrary – they were more or less on their own. For all the men without exception that Christmas took on a particularly poignant quality; as they huddled in shelters and bunkers and encampments, they endeavoured to brush up against their homeland one last time. They sang German carols in broken whispers; from the meagre resources to hand they fashioned Christmas displays replete with makeshift crowns and tiny trees, and one group would slaughter a horse in order to make not-quite-traditional German sausages which could stand in for Christmas presents. Anything to feel like they were home. On 10 January the final Soviet offensive began. Less than a month later, the German forces in Stalingrad had collapsed, and the remnants who had managed to escape were, more often than not, being cut to shreds by the guns of the vengeful Russian soldiers who were pursuing them across the snow-caked steppe. The Russians, having experienced months and months of the most terrible depredations at the hands of the fascist forces, having borne witness to the most horrific atrocities committed against civilian populations, were in little mood to show mercy. Many of the captured Germans were shot outright. Others were led to captivity across the ice in what Beevor says “can only be described as death marches”.213 Left without food or water, those who could not walk any longer perished in the snow. The historian Giles MacDonogh estimates that of the 90,000 German soldiers that surrendered at Stalingrad only 5,000 ever returned home.214 In retrospect, Stalin’s role as a military leader is not difficult to assess. He was at best incompetent, and at worst his megalomania and

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 123 his insularity brought the USSR to the very verge of destruction. His capitulation to Hitler in 1939 was one of the grossest errors in the history of military diplomacy, and in coordinating the stratagems of active battle he proved equally inept. He cared not a jot for the lives of the troops and in those four years of war he made only one trip to the front. At worst, he ignored the advice of his finest generals thereby courting disaster; at best he permitted himself the luxury to vacillate, thereby courting delay. One might argue that he was a past master in instilling in the troops the type of brutal discipline all-out war inevitably necessitates, and while there is some truth to this, it is clear that here too he overplayed his hand. The discipline he enforced was of such an unforgiving character that it often bordered on the senseless. Those who fled battle were to be shot – not an unusual practise at a time of war admittedly – but on top of this their commanders could also be held accountable and executed for the actions of men they had often barely spoken to. Those troops who surrendered to the enemy, under any circumstance, were by the decree of Order No 227 condemned as traitors “to the motherland”.215 Such “traitors” would often find their families imperilled back at home. Civilians too were held accountable to the same brutal discipline – Beevor provides the example of a woman who fled her village when it was bombed, and was then locked up for six months in a labour camp for “deserting her place of work”.216 In a sense much of this was inevitable. Just as with the Spanish Civil War, the logic of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the purges it generated began to intrude and manifest in the military arena, and – just as with Spain and the Republican forces – it also helped to thwart the competence of Russia’s own military effort. The Stalinist authorities executed around 13,500217 of their own troops at Stalingrad alone and such bloody coercion also helps to explain why – despite the sheer vileness of Nazi ideology – a minority of Soviet citizens or troops were persuaded to trade allegiances and fight on the German side. At Stalingrad some 50,000218 Soviet fighters and citizens were wearing German uniforms, and while some were forced into it others were volunteers. The 297th Infantry division of the German army contained no less than 780 “combat-willing Russians”.219 Last, but by no means least, the ultimate condemnation of Stalin’s ability as a military leader might well come from the single devastating fact: despite the Soviet victory, Soviet losses numbered over 20 million whereas the defeated Germany lost a little under a third of that.220 The persecutions of civilians and military personnel undoubtedly hampered the USSR’s military effort, but they were about more than simple military tactics. Stalin himself had lived through a world war, and he knew from his own experience the way in which such a global

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124 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE upheaval could facilitate revolution in the countries which had been engulfed by it. The corollary of being faced with death by a foreign army on the frontline – and on a day-to-day basis – was you often started to lose your fear of the regime back home. As Beevor argues, a level of frankness developed, which saw some soldiers declare that, should they survive, “life after the war should be different. The terrible existence for those who worked on collective farms and in factories must be improved and the privileges of the nomenklatura restricted.”221 The Stalinist repressions were intended for these people, and as the war came to an end, the NKVD brutally and efficiently mopped up any sign of dissention on the part of the pulverized and battle weary Russian troops. In addition Stalin used the ghastly chaos of the war to more effectively further his own political ends on an international scale – not solely in terms of destroying belligerent enemy armies, but by repressing nationalities and ethnicities whose futures he wished to coerce. So, for example, in 1943–4 “by order of the State Defence Committee a new wave of deportations began . . . of several nationalities in the Northern Caucasus and Volga regions. The Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, Karachai and Balkar peoples were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their national autonomous districts were abolished and their property confiscated.”222 The Crimean Tartars suffered particularly heavily from the enforced deportations and it is estimated – on their own account – that nearly half their population was eradicated due to the terrible conditions of famine and disease. Many of these different peoples continued to feed the Gulag Archipelago which, despite the disruption of war and invasion, continued to grind its limitless supplies of human meat. At the point at which the Second World War had concluded Stalin was perhaps the most fortuitous leader in the world. No matter that he, more than any other individual, had helped smooth the path for the rise of fascism over a period of two decades (albeit through an unintended combination of incompetence and bureaucratic self-interest). No matter that he, more than any other, had most effectively stymied the military efficacy of the USSR on the very eve of its invasion. The point was that the population in general had been kept in the dark about these things. Stalin’s inability to comprehend Russia’s immanent peril at the hands of the Nazis was now recycled by propaganda into a stunningly precipitous military gambit; the government, so its lackeys in the press would have it, had delayed in order to deceive, had used the interim and lull as a means to more effectively build its resistance, so that it might strike at Nazi Germany at the opportune moment. Stalin’s blunders during the engagement itself were also rendered invisible by a supine press. Beevor concludes, quite accurately,

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 125 that Stalin’s position was fortified “by the political ignorance of the majority of the population. Few outside the nomenklatura and the well-connected intelligentsia linked him directly with the refusal to acknowledge the threat from Germany and the disasters of late June.”223 Perhaps even more significant, however, was the nature of the war itself. The character of the First World War had been markedly different to the one which would succeed it. Over twenty years before, that conflict had helped set the basis for revolution in both Russia and Germany, partly because the embattled soldiers came to see in one another the elements they shared in common; more and more they felt themselves hurled into the slaughter on the basis of a very clearly delineated system of class oppression, with the old, autocratic monarchies indifferent to the lives of the peasants and workers who were forced to bleed into the lands their overlords were scrabbling over. In the Second World War, however, the possibility of any kind of class solidarity forming between the Russian and German armies was fatally hampered by the awful racial ideology many of the German soldiers espoused, and the level to which civilians were brutalized as a result. An irreconcilable rift emerged which precluded the development of a revolutionary mood within the troops across international class lines. The ideological fervour of the Russian soldiers was, of necessity, channelled in a very different direction. An extremely radical and belligerent spirit of patriotism infected the soldiers and the masses, and it was his ability to locate and exploit this mood which marked one of the few effective military stratagems Stalin was able to originate. It again tallied with the perspective of the bureaucracy and its ideological reflection in the theory of “socialism in one country”. By rejecting the role of the international working class as the key to genuine socialism, it was inevitable that Stalin’s “revolutionary” propaganda would more and more take on a nationalist hue – with the context and conditions of the Second World War providing a natural accelerant for such a process. Deutscher references a November 1942 decree in Pravda which stipulated that the “soldier had no Socialist obligations whatsoever and that his job was simply to serve his fatherland, as his forebears had done”,224 while at the same time Deutscher notes, “the army regulations of Peter the Great were recalled as a model for imitation. Guards regiments and guards divisions – their very names recalled Tsarist days – were created . . . Saluting was made obligatory and enforced. Exclusive officers’ clubs and strictly separate messes for the junior and senior officers were opened.”225 The propounding of nationalist ideology was coextensive with the endeavour to enforce a more totalitarian form of discipline in the ranks. But it also provided an effective

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126 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE and powerful means by which the war effort could be galvanized – by winning the hearts and minds of the troops to an imaginary and nostalgic vision of an ancient and venerable fatherland. When the war had indeed been won, despite its immense toll, the outbreak of patriotic fervour which had occurred seemed vindicated by the gargantuan and heroic struggles and the eventual triumph of the people themselves. Throughout the thirties the resistance toward Stalinism had been building; exacerbated by the cycle of purges – toward the end of the decade it had assumed a particularly volatile potential. The discontent and resentments of the population on the ground threatened to connect with pockets of resistance which were starting to cohere in the auxiliaries and extensions of the state like the military – and also in the heart of the bureaucracy itself where Stalinist totalitarianism now seemed hell bent on cannibalizing at the highest level the very set of functionaries who carried forth its demands. The regime was, almost certainly, approaching some kind of critical mass. But Russia’s entry into the Second World War changed that. The heat and the resistance which had been building against Stalinism was now diverted – channelled toward the one regime in all human history which could conceivably be considered worse than Stalin’s own – that is, Germany under the sway of National Socialism. Stalin’s history of complicity with fascism and his crimes back home were effectively erased, washed away by the tide of patriotism which had engulfed the national consciousness. Stalin, in some sense, was transformed; he became the crusty emblem of Russia’s dogged military resistance; the old, dogmatic revolutionary, a seasoned fighter whose inflexible, leaden principles would not allow him to bend before the most cataclysmic of evils. Winston Churchill channelled the feeling of many when he wrote: “It is very fortunate for Russia in her agony to have this great rugged war chief at her head. He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy time in which his life has been cast.”226 The eloquence of the assessment notwithstanding, it is quite catastrophically out of sync with the reality of Stalin’s role in the build up to the war and his actions during the prosecution of it. And yet, such an image – of a brutal, stormy uncompromising figure whose brittle exterior cossetted a deep-seated moral drive; it is this fabulation which the Stalinists of today look back on with all their addled, masochistic nostalgia. This sense of Stalin as the staunch, bristling leader of unwavering conviction coalesced with the sense of a USSR which had been bled white but was still standing. People felt, and quite rightly so, that the Russian masses, and the peoples on the periphery, had absorbed the most horrific, sustained violence and massively lessened the burden

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 127 of war in many other territories thereby. For this reason, the “great rugged war chief” was in an extremely strong position when the victor countries met around the bargaining table to decide how the territories of the vanquished should be divvied up. Stalin may have been myopic and wrongheaded as a war leader, but when it came to the game of negotiating in the name of self-interest, slyly assessing the limitations and hidden motivations of those he was haggling with, swiftly grasping the opportunity to sow seeds of dissension among his rivals; in all these respects he was something of a past master. His game was further aided by the fact that the two other representatives – Roosevelt and Churchill – were also somewhat at odds from the outset. In a series of meetings – which took place in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam227 respectively – the “Big Three” endeavoured to hammer out a new European and global topography but a certain tension could be detected between Churchill and Roosevelt from the start – perhaps because they represented very different phases in the history of empire. Churchill, with his staunchly aristocratic and elitist upbringing, had been weaned on the ideology of British colonialism and the white man’s burden; everything he knew and loved was bound up with the grandeur and décor of a “superior” civilization which – through noble war – would cleave its way across the globe, cutting a path through world history, becoming the universal repository of politics and culture; a contemporary imperium, a modern day Athens, or better yet, Rome. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the scion of a wealthy industrialist family; his imperial pretentions were premised on a different dynamic. His was the philosophy of the American dream; the entrepreneur, the hard-headed businessman who would maintain his position as a result of his own resourcefulness, guile and pragmatism. The pomp and ceremony of the archaic British Empire could not fail to strike him as vulgar and vaguely absurd, with its stuffy, old fashioned sense of entitlement and its antiquated old boys’ colonial network. Roosevelt stood at the helm of a power which had long since surpassed Britain in economic terms and wished to prosecute its own imperial ambitions by way of creating open, stable, global markets, which it would dominate not only via its own productive superiority, but also without the need to install an imperial government in the regions it sought to pacify. The sheer breadth of the decaying British Empire was something of an annoying obstacle to this; a rump, a relic, from an older and more inefficient time, and in Churchill, Roosevelt must have beheld yet another old ruin; a belligerent, bullish eccentric who would fight to the last brandy-addled breath in order to defend the gains of a vanishing past. As Deutscher points out, such tension be-

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128 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE tween the Prime Minster of Great Britain and the President of the United States could only have “had a soothing effect on Stalin”,228 for it would have made the Russian dictator’s bargaining position all the stronger. Although both Roosevelt and Churchill were anxious to limit the territorial remit of the USSR, this was something they struggled to achieve. Stalin had already effected the invasion of eastern Poland, and while Churchill and Roosevelt wanted to return the country to independence by supporting its domestic government which was now in exile back in London, Stalin – his case bolstered by the fact that neither the US nor the UK had been overrun by the Nazis – had managed to extract from Roosevelt and Churchill the sketchy concession that any country which bordered the USSR must have, de facto, a government with pro-Russian sympathies. The Polish exiles holed up in London were, for obvious reasons, anything but pro-Russia. Thus, at Potsdam, Stalin was able to successfully decouple British and American support for an independent Polish government, and ensure their recognition of the Soviet conquest of eastern Poland – while in the rest of the country anti-communist forces were repressed so that the country as a whole was now under Soviet sway. Stalin was able to push through a broader imperial expansion; with the acquiescence of his Western allies, the Soviets not only re-annexed eastern Poland, but also Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina. The Baltic States were taken, though these conquests were not recognized by Britain or the United States. Pomerania, Silesia, and southern East Prussia were absorbed into Soviet Poland while northern East Prussia along with the city of Koenigsberg became part of the “Soviet Socialist Republic”. As part of an ironically named treaty of “friendship” signed between the Soviet Union and the restored state of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union annexed interwar Czechoslovakia’s easternmost province, Transcarpathian Rus. At the same time Soviet troops helped install local “communist” dictatorships in Romania and Bulgaria, while separatist “communist” movements established dictatorships in Yugoslavia and Albania in 1945. In addition, in 1949, the Soviet Union created the “Communist German Democratic Republic” in its occupation zone of Germany. Stalin was, however, compelled to give way on other issues. He agitated for territories in North Africa which he was not to receive. In a meeting with Churchill in Moscow in 1944 he signed the so-called “percentages agreement”. This was, to say the least, a shady, faithless deal – part of which involved the agreement on Stalin’s part to abandon the communist partisans and the popular radical movement which had developed in Greece – to their fate at the hands of the British who were desperate to frustrate the possibility of a leftist government emerging in that country. It al-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 129 most goes without saying that this was classical Stalinism – pragmatism over principle, wrought to lethal effect. On its own terms, Stalin’s role as a negotiator and diplomat in the aftermath of the Second World War has to be judged as a success. He used his cunning, his shrewdness and his pragmatism to push forward his advantage, and as a consequence, the USSR came away from the table in control of the vast majority of the territories it had annexed during the war. Stalin had helped set the foundations for a global imperialism on the part of the USSR and, consequently, the kind of bipolar world which was to be wracked by the type of nuclear tensions which underpinned the Cold War. In terms of pragmatic gain, in terms of territory acquired, resources to be devoured, money to be made, new groups of people to be subdued and controlled and exploited – Stalin’s performance as a negotiator was an almost unqualified triumph which yielded great dividends. But somewhere in the background, there lurked the inevitable ghost at the feast. The faint, distant outline of Lenin, and the October Revolution; the suppressed memory of a communism developed in and through a vast democratic movement whereby millions of people had, for a short precious period, the chance to shape the course of the politics which would come to determine their lives. The contrast between the Bolshevism of that time, of 1917, and the Stalinism circa 1944 was thrown into relief by the way negotiations were conducted in the periods following both world wars. In 1917 the Bolshevik Government published the secret treaties which had been conducted between the Tsar (and later the Provisional Government) – and their imperial allies during the First World War. These documents revealed nakedly and starkly the way in which the “Allies” intended to carve up the territories of their defeated foes in the event of a victory against German imperialism. Trotsky justified the decision of the Bolsheviks to avail the public of such documents on the following grounds: Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level . . . The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice.229 Such revelations scandalized governments and well-to-do people the world over. Was it not, after all, an incredibly cynical, populist

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130 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE and demagogic manoeuvre? To reveal openly and expressly the political plans an elite coterie of privileged politicians had for the vast swathe of humanity? After all, we all know the majority of human beings are never going to be educated enough, sophisticated enough, significant enough – to make the decisions which truly affect the course of history. Such decisions must, of necessity, devolve onto a small section of elite professionals who have the expertise and experience to intelligibly govern. Those who have attended the finest universities, who have come from the most “cultured” backgrounds. Suffice to say, the disgust and loathing which was evinced toward the Bolsheviks and the radical experiment in peoples’ democracy which they represented was – by those who occupied the higher echelons in the class hierarchy – virtually unlimited. In fact, such a reaction was not so far from the way in which the powerful and their cohorts in the media have demonized the phenomenon of WikiLeaks in our own age. How obscene is the very notion that the majority should have access to the plans and formulations, interactions and activities of the governments which claim to represent their best interests. Contrast the open diplomacy of the Bolsheviks with the way in which Stalin conducted his own diplomatic endeavours decades later. As evidence of this, we have at our disposal no less of a personage than Winston Churchill. In his memoirs, Churchill recalls drawing up an agreement which he scrawled across a half sheet of paper, and which proposed that the Soviet Union should have 90 percent influence in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria; the United Kingdom should have 90 percent in Greece; and they should have 50 percent each in Hungary and Yugoslavia. At which point he (Churchill) testifies – “I pushed this across to Stalin, who by then had heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil, and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us . . . ‘Let us burn the paper.’”230 Note that “large tick” made by the “blue pencil”, an absurd, almost comic touch – a child’s colouring tool so to speak – such was the means by which the fate of millions was to be scrawled out. Note also the addendum . . . the “Let us burn the paper”231 . . . for we, as powerful men, as seasoned diplomats and warmongers and as the scions and guardians of the most privileged and wealthy, would never want the masses to learn of the way in which we play chess with their lives. The agreement was qualified and refined in all sorts of ways subsequently, but the spirit in which it was drawn up pertains even to this day. And how different it was from all the expectations and optimism of the October Revolution and its political crest. From the purview of the vast majority of humanity, how truly and utterly tragic a shift it was; from the revo-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 131 lutionary awakening of 1917 to the Stalinism which had so ruthlessly and relentlessly helped extinguish it. In the period which followed the end of the First World War the revolutionary eruptions which sprang up across the world were often inspired by the Bolshevik example. In 1917, Deutscher rightly argues, the premise for the spread of Bolshevism internationally was nearly always the “mighty popular movement”.232 In the aftermath of the Second World War too, there was no shortage of “mighty popular movements”. Between 1944 and 1948, anti-imperialist or proletarian uprisings took place in Albania, Algeria, Bulgaria, Burma, China, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Korea, Malaya, Palestine, Poland, Rumania, Syria, Thailand, Vietnam and Yugoslavia. But Stalin wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in furthering these movements. Instead Stalinism spread its influence where it could by a combination of vote rigging, invasion, repression and behind-the-scenes deals with corrupt local governments. Its first concern, Deutscher notes, was to establish a police force of enormous power in the territory it sought to control; a police force which would proceed to shape the regime according to the dictates and prerogatives of Stalinist totalitarianism – “captured or built up by the Communist party, the police appeared to be the demiurge of social transformation”.233 In 1947 Stalin founded the Cominform, an organization which cloaked itself in the banner of international revolution, but really aimed at the expansion of Stalinist totalitarianism into the satellite and periphery regions on the cusp of the USSR, with the end goal of fortifying a vast imperial bloc against Western power and especially the influence of the United States.234 Through a series of smaller and integrated bureaucratic bodies, Stalin was able to assert control over many of the economies in Eastern Europe, so that “Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania delivered to Russia their coal, machines, bauxite, oil, and wheat either as reparations or at extremely low prices, while their own peoples suffered want and poverty”.235 The extension of the apparatus of repression and the secret police helped muffle the waning traditions of popular protest in the areas which now fell under the penumbra of Soviet power. Any independent initiative on the part of local “communist” leaders was met by hostility and repression by Stalin – a repression which was by and large effective, though there were some exceptions such as the case of Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia who, riding a wave of strong nationalist discontent, sought to ensure his country would be something more than a mere proxy of the Russian Politburo. In response, Stalin levied an economic and military blockade against Yugoslavia which only served to strengthen the re-

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132 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE solve of the separatist movement and saw Tito emerge as an “attractive” alternative in the eyes of the other nations in the region. This was a period when Soviet power was, through its own actions, increasingly unmasked as a vast imperial monolith – as opposed to the servant of international revolution which Stalin’s latest bouts of disambiguation endeavoured to suggest. Perhaps the only nation which was not simply co-opted by Soviet power at this time but which chose to assimilate of its own “free will” was Czechoslovakia – in 1948 the “communists” in this country had stood at the head of what was a genuine popular movement with pro-Stalinist sympathies. Nevertheless that didn’t stop them, in cahoots with their Moscow masters, from very swiftly transforming what had been a parliamentary system into a one party state. Historians and economists sometimes point out how – in the period following the Second World War – the Soviet economy grew considerably in terms of output. By 1948–9 it had reached its pre-war level, and in the final few years of Stalin’s life in the early fifties it had already risen 50 percent above that.236 These things are certainly true. But they are also deceptive if considered in isolation. They should be articulated only in the broader context of the repression and plunder of a network of satellite states – not to mention the immiseration of the majority of the Russian people themselves who were still living in a murky world of gloomy, gas-lit hovels crammed full of families who were dressed in rags and whose diets consisted almost exclusively of cabbage and potatoes. The productive power of the huge factories which had come to assume such awesome and modern dimensions was thrown into relief by the living conditions of the masses – who had their wages held down, or their labour enforced, or their persons enslaved – and who were unable to avail themselves of the kind of consumer goods which their Western counterparts, average conditions pertaining, had access to. There was a classically Marxist irony inherent in all of this. The more the individual laboured, the more the productive forces he called into being took on gargantuan, implacable proportions – the more his own existence was reduced, diminished and overawed as a consequence. In historical terms such “alienation” was evinced most vividly in the case of Berlin where, in 1961, the Berlin Wall had to be erected in order to stem the flow of refugees from East to West and who were desperate to escape such soulless, grey conditions of life. It is certainly true, of course, that the citizens in the Soviet territories had been spared the rapacious caprice of capitalist market conditions, and all the crushing insecurities and impoverishments which came with them, but again the historian must always return to the essential question: At what cost?

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 133 In the capitalist countries themselves Stalinism continued to exert a tremendous sense of threat, providing a persuasive ideological bogeyman which the politicians of the West could conjure up – especially in the context of the fear and paranoia of the Cold War period. But in retrospect, the real damage that Stalinism did to the Western countries was felt most fundamentally in terms of their own indigenous communist movements. In the period immediately following the end of the war Stalin had cooperated quite merrily with the ruling classes in several of the major capitalist countries: in England he had supported Tory candidate Winston’s Churchill’s237 bid for re-election over and against the Labour opposition. In France a strong current in the PCF (French Communist Party) agitated for a revolution in the aftermath of the German retreat but Stalin instructed the leadership against this and instead demanded they adopt a policy of class collaboration as part of a new united front government. The demand was noted and followed. In Rumania Stalin permitted the survival of the pre-war monarchy and King Michael who would take the throne in 1944, bolstered by an unholy coalition of Stalinists, proto-fascists and wealthy financiers – all on the condition that the monarch sustain the capitalist system in that country. Stalin tailored his policy in this way in order to conciliate the Western powers so that he might at the same time wheedle as much territory as possible in and through the diplomatic haggling which took place in the post-war negotiations. But once the tide had turned, however; once Stalin had consolidated such territory and the outline of both Soviet and US imperialism had become fully visible, set out across the globe; once the tentative and fragile set of alliances which emerged during the Second World War between the USSR and the Western nations had been evaporated in their entirety – Stalinism could have no further interest in promoting capitalism. Again, its ideology was simply tail spun into reverse: leaders like Winston Churchill, who had yesterday been presented as friends and allies, were now depicted in the blackest possible terms. Of course, none of this was new; cynical pragmatism was part and parcel of Stalinism’s life blood. But it had a particularly debilitating effect on the communist parties of the West. In the USSR the lies of the government were backed up by the totalitarian application of violence, the manoeuvring and the vulgar pragmatism of the regime glossed over and obfuscated by a slavish press. But in the Western nations people didn’t join the communist parties because they were compelled to by force, or because their own media flattered the Russian regime, or because it would better serve their career interests. It was ideology which, in the first instance, bound those people to those parties; the belief that the disasters of both world wars, and the sheer level of suffering human

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134 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE beings had endured, meant that the historical logic of capitalism and imperialism simply had to be subverted; that a better system of social relations between people could be established. And many saw the basis for such a system in the Bolshevik Revolution and the form of workers’ democracy it had helped instigate. More often than not, they saw Stalinism as the natural continuation of this tradition, and they dismissed or downplayed stories of the regime’s repression of its own citizens as the exaggerations perpetrated by a hostile capitalist press. But the zig-zags in foreign policy which arrived to them from on-high in Soviet Russia proved increasingly difficult to assimilate or rationalize. Western communists often lacked a cogent sociological interpretation, a class based analysis – by which Stalinism could be comprehended as the excrescence which grew out of the shift away from proletarian and peasant power that the European-wide counterrevolution to October had provoked. The direction of Stalin’s foreign policy three decades later, therefore, could only appear as perplexing, for it had not been understood according to the historical genesis of the bureaucracy and the set of social interests which underpinned it. When Stalinism fluctuated between condemning capitalist governments as “social fascists” in one moment, while heaping legitimacy on them by advocating a united front policy in the next, those partisans of communism in the Western sphere were more and more inclined to take a simple and uncomplicated leap of faith. The seemingly irrational, erratic and arbitrary nature of Stalinist foreign policy could only truly be factored into the “communist” experience of many of the party members in the Western world by an act of unqualified belief in the powers-that-be and the conviction that Stalinism truly maintained the legacy of October, despite the baffling and often quite horrifying anomalies which served to indicate the opposite. In other words faith in Stalinism often represented an authentic and heartfelt protest against the horror and suffering global capitalism had unleashed. But such faith had attained a fetishized character – that is to say, the genuine possibilities for human emancipation which emerged in and through the historical process had come to be displaced onto a purely idealized realm – “Stalinism” – and the set of invented traditions by way of which it presented itself to the world. Such a fetish, of course, was constantly called into conflict with the historical realities of Stalinism itself. And, just as with much religious dogma, the more the waves of reality broke against its precepts, the more its followers closed their eyes to the world – the more they immersed themselves in their belief absolutely as the only form of solace and salvation. As Stalinism tightened its stranglehold on the countries

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 135 it had infiltrated in the post-war period, the repressions it carried out abroad were of an increasingly visible and brutal character, but many of the lay activists in the European communist parties chose to turn a blind eye to these. In 1953, for instance, a strike of workers in East Berlin led to a widespread uprising which was suppressed by the USSR, and the repression was supported by the various journals and papers of the European communist parties. Perhaps the most revealing and tragic example of all would occur in 1956 in Hungary, three years after Stalin’s death, where a student protest had sparked a revolutionary conflagration which swept across the country and drove the pro-Soviet government from power. The most striking detail about the uprising – coeval with the protests which broke out everywhere at the time – was the creation en masse of workers councils; committees of organized workers who had seized control of the means of production. The workers had wrested power from the old regime; as György Litván would note, “heads of local party and government organizations had either fled or attempted to adjust to the new situation. Grassroots committees (revolutionary councils, national committees) formed everywhere taking in hand the public business of their localities.”238 They had, in effect, become their own form of government; the workers and students were beginning to organize their economic activities in accordance with their political ends in and through their own political forms. This was nothing other than the type of communism which Marx and Engels had envisaged. Inevitably the Soviet tanks rolled in to crush this experiment in peoples’ power a mere three months after it had been born. The Soviet repression, however, bore not just the hallmark of tragedy, but also that of farce. The Soviet Union had been named in honour of the “soviets” – that is, the system of workers’ councils and workers’ democracy which had emerged in the context of the 1905 revolution in Russia. The Stalinist regime was, therefore, actively and obviously engaging in the murder of the very peoples and political forms it claimed to hold sacred. The massacre sent a tremor shuddering across the fault lines of European communism. Many of the communist activists in the West watched events unfold with horror and disbelief, and a few of them, like Peter Fryer,239 endeavoured to speak out. Fryer was one of the few communists from Western Europe who happened to be on the ground when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, and he was inspired and moved by the phenomenon of the workers’ councils to the same degree he was appalled and horrified by the destruction of them at the hands of the Stalinists. He penned a frantic, heady, emotive document chronicling the trajectory of the tragedy; describing the genesis of the revolutionary movement, the rise of the workers’

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136 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE councils, and the quashing of political democracy which the USSR achieved by military means. One would imagine that the Communist Party of Great Britain would be desperate to get their hands on a text which provided a first-hand account of the early development of communism in a living society taking place in real time, but this, unfortunately, was not the case. Instead Fryer was expelled from the party post-haste, as they turned their back on reality; a tightened, closed set of ideologues repeating their mantras, setting themselves against the world. 1956, therefore, put an extreme stress on the communist movement. A good few people were so appalled by what had happened that they either left the European communist parties or they were expelled. Some of them, disillusioned, set adrift – rapidly became depoliticized and took up new interests and careers. Others drifted into the minuscule Trotskyist sects which – although they had maintained a noble and lonely opposition to both Stalinism and fascism throughout – also tended to be isolated and underfunded, and locked into the vicious process of devouring one another, riven as they were by sectarian bitterness and strife. For all of this the character of the larger Western European communist parties increasingly tended to take on the cloistered, sterile atmosphere of holy orders – in which members who were the most deferential to Moscow were also considered to be the most fully committed and genuine communists. For those that had remained after 1956 were seen to uphold the “faith” above all else. Naturally this helped cultivate an environment of careerists and lackeys; a series of well-ordered bureaucracies which were low on creativity and intellectual ideas but high on the dogmas of “orthodoxy” and the desire to ridicule or ostracize those who begged to differ or dissent. Many of the communist parties of the contemporary left still suffer from this kind of atmosphere today. But without a doubt the most damaging legacy bequeathed by Stalinism was the stain it left on the idea of communism in the popular consciousness. Stalinism’s authoritarianism, corruption and betrayal on a world historic scale left in its wake an abiding hopelessness; such a feeling was then easily translated into the belief that the most fundamental struggle for human freedom – unfolded through the activities of the vast majority of working people – would always, and of necessity, end up corrupted by the vicissitudes and baseness of an ahistorical and transcendental “human nature”. Such a view, hypnotized by the horrors of Stalinism, ignored the realities of historical development and the fact that the October Revolution and its social basis in the working class had been physically annihilated in a civil war and the invasion of over a dozen armies from the West. It was a view which addressed the formal aspect of the question in isolation. The revolu-

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 137 tion which had cast off the shackles of one form of tyranny (Tsarism) had also preceded another (Stalinism) – ergo those who imposed tyranny and those who struggled against it, would ultimately end up in the same place – locked, as they were, in an underlying identity which was to be filtered through the static abstraction – “human nature”. It was this view to which George Orwell gave credence and dramatic life, when, in the concluding pages of his bleak children’s fable Animal Farm, he wrote: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”240 In Russia, in the post-war period, Stalinism maintained its essential patterns. Just as before the draconian system of forced and slave labour which set the basis for an increase in industrial output in the cities also retarded economic development in the countryside;241 creating the same schism, the same “price scissors” effect – by which the prices for agricultural goods plummeted while the prices for industrial goods remained steady or rose. This phenomenon had bedevilled the Soviet economy throughout the twenties and the thirties. In the postwar period the cyclic effects of terror and purges which had grown out of this fundamental contradiction at the economic level began to build again. In the aftermath of the war the repressions were by no means as acute as they had been at the end of the late-thirties. Nevertheless Stalin continued his suppression of the Red Army perhaps because the conditions were so favourable to him at this point. The soldiers were exhausted, and the possibility of marshalling any type of resistance against the state on whose behalf they had suffered such awful depredations was slim to say the least. Stalin wanted to be rid of those strategists, officials and high commanders who had come to prominence during the war effort, and whose power and reputation might at some point down the line become a threat to his own. In the air force a good few highly placed men, men such as A. I. Shakhurin – who was the minster of the aviation industry – were arrested on the familiar and bogus charge of having tried to purposefully sabotage the war effort. The navy was also purged of major figures including Admiral M. A. Galler who was the deputy commissar and V. A. Alfuzov who had been the chief of staff. Marshall Zhukov, who had been perhaps the finest military strategist of the Soviet military command during the war, and was certainly the person who was most responsible for militating against the effects of Stalin’s incompetence – now found himself exiled from Moscow, and all mention of his military glories was erased from the press and the national record. Many other famous wartime figures would vanish from the public consciousness by way of a similar route.

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138 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE Purges were launched once more against the higher reaches of the party. The most infamous of these actions occurred in 1949–51 with the “Leningrad Affair” in which prominent members of the Leningrad organization were arrested, including the First Secretary and others. The purge was extended to the staff more broadly with factory managers, scientists, those in higher education, and many others falling victim to it. Thousands were arrested, many of whom perished in confinement, some of whom were shot outright. In addition, in 1946, Stalin resumed his persecution of the intelligentsia and the artists. The event of war, as great historical upheavals are wont to do, would almost certainly create the kind of climate in which composers, writers, poets, and artists might re-examine the realties in which they were situated, rethinking them, reimagining them. Stalin and his minions once more endeavoured to erect a cordon sanitaire around this process, halting it in its tracks before it could help transmit that most vile and insidious of all contagions to the population at large – free thought. Artists were expelled from their guilds and subject to demonization in the press, figures like Pasternak, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Eisenstein and Grossmann were all pilloried – at which point in 1948 the arrests began once more in earnest. The Stalinist regime had always been insular and paranoid, but perhaps because of the way in which the war had been conducted, the way in which the last residues of socialist sensibility had been transmuted into a rabid strain of nationalism – now any kind of foreign cultural influence was policed to the nth degree, and those who corresponded with or even quoted foreign sources in their work risked being driven from their jobs or worse. Finally the persecution of minorities continued unabated. Stalin had used the war to clamp down on and repress various minorities within the periphery of the Soviet Union by displacing them from their homelands. Now the conditions of their exile were made permanent by a decree launched by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet which read – “Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars . . . are to remain in those places forever, and in the case of flight from their place of registration will be sentenced to twenty years hard labour”.242 This was nothing other than an act of ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, Russian emigres scattered across the globe launched a campaign to return to their homeland, in the belief they could help bolster the efforts of economic reconstruction. Thousands heeded the call. But although the Soviet state often made pledges guaranteeing such people their safety, many were arrested anyway; some of whom had been oppositionists to the Soviet regime in bygone times, but a good few were the children of the people of that generation, and were setting foot in Russia for the first time. Their optimism and illusions were shattered in the cruellest of ways.

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 139 Such terror tactics were extended to the territories which Stalin had seized in the wake of the war. The defection of Yugoslavia and the need to maintain a combative stance against US imperialism alongside the reconstruction of an economy which had been shattered by war – all meant that the Stalinist bureaucracy was compelled to retrieve as much surplus product as possible from the various countries it had subjugated in and through its diplomatic and military manoeuvres. This meant that the processes of collectivization and industrialization had to be intensified in those regions which, in turn, meant that the application of terror had to be notched up. With it came the interminable cycle of purges and show trials. The preparation for such trials was often conducted from Moscow with many of the prisoners being shipped in from their respective countries. Whereas before the Stalinist bureaucracy had sought to justify its crimes by reference to the “Trotskyite” threat, now they had a new bogeyman; “Titoist” saboteurs and wreckers were disclosed everywhere. Everywhere Stalin’s lackeys in the rather absurdly named “peoples’ democracies” enforced a mass repression on the party rank and file. Boleslaw Beirut in Poland, Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia, Enver Hoxha in Albania, Viko Chervenkov in Bulgaria and Mátyás Rákosi in Poland – acted out Stalinism’s grotesque theatrics at a local level: the staged show trials, the hysterical denunciations, and the monotone confessions uttered in grey, soulless rooms and delivered under threat of death. Perhaps the one slight respite was provided by the figure of Stalin himself; weakening and decrepit, the despot was edging his way out of life now. His last years make for a gloomy, crepuscular study; he left Moscow for long periods, retreating to his dachas in the countryside, nestled in the hills and the woods, cut off from the world. Such an unremarkable almost quaint vision of “retirement” must be tempered by the fact that in the case of this particular elderly “gent” the idyllic surroundings he enjoyed had been filled with booby traps and mines. In his dotage Stalin occupied an isolated twilight world in which he was rarely ever glimpsed by those outside the small, lethal circle of his praetorian guard. When he needed to take a trip into Moscow, two or three short trains would be deployed with Stalin in one of them, and the tracks would be studded with MVD troops along the way. All other train services would simply be frozen. The decades of occupying the heady, lonely precipice of absolute power had of necessity cultivated in Stalin an absolute sense of suspicion and paranoia, and now, as the night fell, as his mind began to dim and fade, those feelings overwhelmed all else. Those who were summoned to meet him in one of his dachas were meticulously searched, and the person who had en-

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140 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE joyed an audience with him could never be sure how such a meeting would conclude; whether Stalin would allow him to leave under his own auspices, whether he would ever see his family again. In these final years Stalin’s suspicions extended even to those officials who had been closest and most loyal to him such as Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Medvedev reports how “Molotov’s wife was arrested and exiled, and Kaganovich’s brother was driven to suicide.”243 In 1952 Stalin publically branded Molotov and Voroshilov as British spies. In the same period Stalin had his personal secretary Poskrebyshev banished from the Kremlin, even though the latter had held the post for twenty years previous. Late one evening in March 1953, in the shadowy gloom of one of his dachas, the degeneration of Stalin’s health finally reached a violent and sudden nadir. He collapsed from a severe brain haemorrhage. He was not killed outright, however. In the closing years of his life, the fug of fear and paranoia which surrounded him must have been absolutely stultifying. Now, in his death throes, that fug seemed to engulf Stalin himself – the morbid, decrepit old man seemed to disappear into it. His daughter writes of his death in the following terms: My father died a difficult and terrible death . . . His face altered and became dark. His lips turned black and the features became unrecognizable . . . At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second . . . He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above or bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible but full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed.244 Shortly after that gesture “full of menace”, the heart of perhaps the most ruthless dictator the world had ever seen . . . ceased to beat. From an emotional point of view, Stalin’s death must have come as a great relief, not only to the party members in the broader layers who were more and more menaced by the building repression, but also to the higher, closed level of leaders. Even those sadists and satraps who were very much created in the “great” leader’s image and had significant power in their own right must have felt, for the first time, as though their heads had finally broken the waves – that a feeling of suffocation had been lifted, and they were able to breathe anew. From an intellectual perspective, Stalin’s death poses several interesting issues. If

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 141 Stalin hadn’t died, if he had lived some years more, what would he have gone on to do? What schemes was he planning before the buildup of blood in his brain severed him from them? Again, the conjuring of counterfactuals, the hypothesizing of alternative realities, are terrains across which any historian has to tread tentatively. And yet there are certain, strong indications which evidence what Stalin might have done – had he not been so rudely interrupted by the fact of his own mortality. In particular his behaviour toward the end of his life suggests that Stalin was once again preparing the ground for the type of massive, allencompassing purge – the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the end of the 1930s. Deutscher points out that just before his death Stalin had almost doubled the size of the Central Committee. For politicians at the time, this was a known manoeuvre on Stalin’s part; one which would precede a thorough-going repression, for it was one by which Stalin was able to introduce “understudies for the men he had marked for destruction”.245 The tension in the party began to ratchet up – “the air grew heavy with terror . . . Hardly a day passed without mysteriously inspired vicious attacks on men eminent in the party and the professions; without allegations of a criminal lack of vigilance in the highest places; without dark hints about the infiltration of ‘enemies of the people’ and spies”.246 Deutscher draws attention to another factor. In previous times the purges had been justified by the suggestion that the accused had prepared an attempt on the lives, not just of Stalin, but other high ranking officials such as Kaganovich, Molotov, and others. This list of the supposed victims of an imaginary conspiracy also became a very real indicator of precisely the leaders Stalin himself most favoured. But such men had already been repeatedly attacked and denounced as traitors or incompetents. They were not now put forward as potential victims of a conspiracy. Instead it seemed they would be condemned as the orchestrators of one. And so, everything suggested that the new purge would involve a prolonged cleansing at the very highest level. Like Deutscher, Medvedev also argues that Stalin was about to undertake a new and massive purge at the time of his death. Medvedev cites the behaviour of the press in the period as preparing the ground for this. He notes how the newspapers “began to stress once again the thesis that class struggle intensifies as the country moves closer to socialism”,247 and this, in turn, would provide the violence of any new repression with the requisite ideological justification. Finally there is one further, chilling factor left to be referenced. Stalin’s anti-Semitism was well known for he had expressed it on a regular basis through a variety of behaviours. Politically, it had often proved a useful tool for him. Toward the late-nineteenth century, the

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142 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE repression of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia in particular had taken on a particularly hate filled character, with legalized apartheid which excluded Jews from various social levels – being supplemented by the rampant, all out murderousness of mass pogroms. Anti-Semitism had penetrated deep into Russian cultural soil, and at the same time it had produced a particularly radical intelligentsia among the Jews themselves who were bound up with the revolutionary project precisely because of the extent and depth of the repression they had endured. For this reason, a high number of Jews became revolutionaries, and many Jews crossed over from the October Revolution to the Stalinist period occupying positions in the government or the broader bureaucracy. One of Stalin’s most successful tactics as he cultivated the crimes of the bureaucracy and the security apparatus – was to abstract himself from them; to present himself as a distant and somewhat out of touch figure – and to allow the guilt and responsibility for the repressions to attach itself to local, corrupt elites. The anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew was very useful in this regard. Stalin could be presented as an individual cast as a very specific social type; rugged, earthy and committed, he channelled the spirit of the old Russian peasant laboriously working the land. He presented himself as delivering a traditional, honest, no-nonsense approach to politics, a leader who laboured on a global scale to raise the USSR from the mire with all the steady and interminable determination of a muzhik straining at the plough. To this could be neatly counterposed the anti-Semitic vision of the “Jew”, the rootless cosmopolite who had no history, no tradition, and merely sought to attach himself to the different levels of the body politic as a means to glean material and financial advantage. That the local “communist” bureaucracies were riddled with corruption, that they heaped upon their officials all sorts of privileges and perks, while bleeding the populations they oversaw dry – all of this was undoubtedly true, but it was also a direct product of the historical processes of Stalinism itself which required such fortified bureaucracies as the basis of its rule. The caricature of the “Jew” allowed such corruption to be separated out from its historical basis in the logic and nature of Stalinism, and to be reimagined as the result of some external and insidious power which had penetrated Stalinism from the outside, a foreign contagion which had insinuated itself into the authentic and explicitly national project of “socialism in one country”. The references in the media to “rootless cosmopolitans”248 were codified hints which directed the most backward and reactionary elements of the population to focus their ire on Jews, and as “socialism in one country” was more and more transfigured into an open ideology of imperial nationalism and

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A Political Account of Joseph Stalin | 143 outright xenophobia, the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of the regime increasingly presented in naked and explicit terms. At the end of the 1940s several Jewish newspapers had been shut down, and the only Jewish language magazine published in Moscow was terminated. But Stalin’s anti-Semitism was more than just a function of his politics. It seemed as though this lethal and diseased ideology was something he had fully assimilated at the core of his being. His rural backwardness, the dark, stunted and brutalized development he had experienced as a child, the almost medieval conditions of degradation he had endured as a member of a lowly and despised social caste, and the sense of inferiority which came with it; all of this made the bitterness and snarling self-superiority which the ideology of anti-Semitism so effectively harnesses persuasive to him. An illicit, clandestine, secretive and surreptitious form of the purest type of hate, it would have been something he could draw to him, hold close, in the darkest and most isolated moments of his youth. It was something he was forced to renounce, at least formally, with his entry into the politics of Bolshevism, but as his own tyranny began to reach its zenith, all that darkness came percolating up from the depths of his being once more. The consequences of this were ever more apparent. He made his children divorce their Jewish spouses. He pressed for the arrest of Jewish writers, not based on the political content of their work, but on the fact that they had written in Yiddish.249 He introduced percentage quotas which would regulate the number of Jews entering into higher education. In short, he helped exhume the dark reservoirs of bitter and backward prejudice which had accumulated across the ages, and which the October Revolution had sought to bury once and for all. Perhaps the most tragic and awful result of this was a single act of military policy in the Second World War. In 1943, the Jews who had been ghettoised in Warsaw rose up against their Nazi oppressors writing one of the single, most poignant chapters in the history of human heroism. They were defeated, but the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto helped inspire an even broader movement; a year later ghettoised Jews and Polish workers acting in tandem with the Polish resistance army effected an uprising which spread across the whole city, establishing control of the centre. At which point the Red Army was bearing down on Warsaw – and combined with the fighting which was taking place on the inside, this was the perfect moment for Stalin’s forces to achieve what would have been a devastating victory against the Nazis. The anti-fascist forces within Warsaw radioed their Red Army counterparts, who were within 10 kilometres of the city, pleading for assistance. And yet, under Stalin’s orders, the Red Army was made to retreat. Furthermore, Stalin refused to allow British planes, which were

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144 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE endeavouring to provide arms and food to the insurgents, to land on Russian airfields.250 Stalin’s behaviour helped stifle the struggle of the desperate and utterly heroic insurgents. It allowed the Nazis to regroup. And it allowed them to go on to murder 200,000 people. It is hard not to imagine that the deep seam of anti-Semitism which pervaded Stalin was not partially responsible for such a bizarre and horrendous tactic. For all of this it seems as though one can fairly adduce the following: at the time of Stalin’s death, a repression was being planned, and it was one which would have been lethal and pervasive, and also one which would have been marked by an anti-Semitic character. There is a final piece to the puzzle which makes such a conclusion seem almost irrefutable. Generally, the purges tended to follow the same logic; that is, the events of an individual conspiracy were unearthed and this imaginary plot – said to be conducted by a small group of accused people – would then provide the premise for a broader, more thorough-going repression. At the time of Stalin’s death, this first step – the “discovery” of a small group of conspirators – had already been taken. In the so-called “Doctors’ plot” a group of prominent doctors – the majority of them Jewish – were accused of fabricating a plan to assassinate leading officials. Simultaneously the media mounted an intensive campaign directed against the threat of “Zionism”. The unfortunate doctors were themselves said to be connected with “the international Jewish organization Joint”.251 At the same time in “medical schools, hospitals and many other institutions thousands of Jewish specialists were expelled as a ‘prophylactic measure’”.252 The death of Stalin halted this process in its tracks. Had he lived, however, it seems as though all that had happened thus far would have provided a prelude to the type of nightmarish pogrom which would go on to engulf the vast territories of the USSR, very possibly sweeping millions into its blackness. Many years before, when the revolution had been in its infancy, Lenin had already begun to apprehend the threat of counterrevolution channelled through the power of a burgeoning Soviet bureaucracy. A short time later he came to recognize the dark, swarthy figure of the man who personified that threat above every other. In 1921 he tried to alert the party to the danger when he said the following of Stalin. “This cook will prepare only spicy dishes”253, he warned. In 1953, and on the eve of his death, the Soviet dictator was preparing his spiciest dish yet.

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Conclusion I wrote this biography of Stalin – and this account of Stalinism – in the second half of 2015. For those on the left, 2015 was an interesting year, politically speaking, for all sorts of reasons, but two in particular stick in mind. First was the train of events taking place in Greece. Greece – a country which had been heavily hit by the global financial crisis of 2007–8 – had seen as a consequence a vivid social polarization occur between an elite and an increasingly poverty-stricken majority. It was this majority who were bearing the brunt of the austerity measures imposed on the nation by a Greek government in collusion with an international “troika” consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Greece was not alone in this, of course. Governments across the board had done an effective job of imposing neoliberal austerity measures on their populations in the context of what was perhaps the single biggest crisis of the global market in history. Most audaciously of all, they pressed ahead with these measures – which attacked social welfare and hurt the very poorest in society – while at the same time effecting the biggest transfer of wealth in human history to the upper echelons: to the system of banking and high finance – that is, the very system whose deregulation had allowed for the rapacious and unbridled cycle of speculation which had brought the banking system to its knees, and precipitated the crash in the first place. It was, quipped one commentator, a vast expropriation of wealth on the part of the state which constituted nothing less than an act of socialism – only it was a “socialism for the rich”.254 In the same period the international left proved itself woefully incapable of meeting the ideological challenge. Isolated, fragmented, more often than not its organizations descended into internecine conflict fomented by sectarian bitterness, as in one country after the next, governments assured their populations in wistful, sorrowful tones that there simply was no alternative; they would have to cough up and pay the bankers’ bill. When the left might well have hoped to find its feet, to create an effective anti-austerity narrative which would have pulled into its vortex millions of people, instead its forces remained marginalized and on the periphery, by and large condemned to sit back and watch.

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146 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE All of which makes what happened in Greece particularly incredible. Perhaps because the level of debt repayment – or “restructuring” as the IMF so euphemistically describe it – was particularly extortionate especially given the relatively small size of the Greek economy; but in any event the misery the population was made to endure was profound and swiftly translated into breadlines, mass suicides, brutal police repression and a significant increase in militancy and political activity on the part of the public. Greece saw the rise of Golden Dawn, a fascist party which began to poll heavily in the parliament and infiltrate the police – but alongside this, a coalition of radical left forces which had been formed in 2004 also came to prominence. Indeed Syriza, as this latter was known, went from strength to strength on a platform which did not seek to displace the causes of the economic crisis onto the immigrants – as both the fascist propagandists of Golden Dawn and the social democrats of the ruling party New Democracy had sought to do. Rather Syriza chose to place the blame where it actually lay; on the shoulders of big business and high finance – and to lay out the case against them on the political stage in no uncertain terms. The party tapped into a deep well of public sympathy and agreement, and in accordance with this, it devised a set of political proposals which rejected the “bailout” deals which were imposed on the country in 2010 and 2012, and rejected the debts with which the people had been saddled in the aftermath. For all of this, in January 2015 Syriza swept to power in a landslide election victory on a powerful anti-austerity mandate. For many on the left it was an ecstatic moment, the victory felt like a fundamental shift in the tide of political struggle and a harbinger of things to come. The forces on the right, both nationally and internationally, perhaps too experienced a sense of prescience – which explains something of the ferocity with which they began to attack and undermine the newly formed government. For the reaction on the right was never simply about recouping loans. Rather, the bailout was a device which justified the implementation of austerity measures in and through the specific form of neoliberal ideology in which the whole of Europe was enmeshed – as the larger economies pumped surplus product from the smaller ones. The proposal of Syriza to reject outright the terms of austerity represented an existential threat to this process. If Greece had chosen to default, the larger economies could have borne the brunt of the loss of what was, in the scheme of things, a negligible sum. The point was, however, that such a default would have provoked a massive rupture in the veneer of ideology which overlay a vast system of exploitation: If Greece could do it, then why not Portugal, why not Ireland? For this reason, Syriza’s political agenda had to be thwarted at all costs.

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Conclusion | 147 And so the forces of the right levelled against the fledgling party every possible threat. Big business within the country promised capital flights abroad, the Troika threatened to cut off all financial “assistance” at a stroke, the mainstream media aided and abetted by painting the new government in ideological terms as a group of fanatics and cranks. A slew of articles appeared in the world press explaining how the Greeks were lazier than other nationalities, how they were innately irresponsible and liable to shirk their debts given the slightest chance.255 In the negotiations which followed, the Troika applied implacable and unbending pressure to the point at which Syriza were compelled to put the question to the population in terms of a referendum. Should they accept the conditions of the bailout and the austerity measures or not? The people returned a stunning majority of over 60 percent in favour of “No”. Again the forces of the left the world over were galvanized by the triumph of the “Oxi” (“No”) movement in Greece, for it was about more than a simple referendum. More profoundly, it had involved the vivid and coherent mobilization of peoples’ power against a form of regulation from above by an elite cabal of international high finance. But within four days of the people’s verdict being delivered, something devastating happened. The Syriza government capitulated completely. They passed through the parliament a set of austerity reforms which would see the retirement age go up by 5 years, a double in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, huge cuts in the public sector, and cuts in fuel subsidies for farmers. Moreover the government took a pledge to take no unilateral measures to repudiate Greece’s 300 billion euro debt, and promised not to introduce controls restricting capital flight abroad. The Syriza government then attempted to depict this as somehow being a victory for “democracy”, rendering that word empty and meaningless, the type of non-sequitur which powerful elites so regularly resort to as a way to mask their own agenda. For people on the left who had been following the situation in Greece internationally, and from a distance, the about-turn of the government came as a desperate shock. For the people in Greece – those who had fought for Syriza, those who formed the movement which would bring the government to power, and those who would be imperilled as a consequence of the austerity measures – for these people the government’s betrayal must have meant so much more. It had arrived out of the blue like a body blow, crippling and asphyxiating. And for the movements which had been gathering strength internationally, like Podemos in Spain, Syriza’s reversal must have felt like an ominous and demoralizing portent. On the other hand, for those people in such parties who enjoyed the flirtation with radical ideas but felt in their heart-of-hearts that an accommodation to the

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148 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE powers-that-be was the only truly sensible course – such an event would have gladdened and relieved. In any case the capitulation of Syriza meant not just the ruination of the party itself, for it had decisively broken with the social movement which had brought it to power – but undoubtedly a calamity for the international left more broadly. The other event I would like to direct attention to is something which happened in the UK in that same year. Previously, the two main parties of the Westminster parliament – the Conservatives and Labour – held, for all intents and purposes, the same economic line. They were both committed to the austerity narrative, they signed up to an agreement to implement the same austerity measures, and both parties competed with one another to show just how tough on immigrants they were prepared to be. Labour, it is true, endeavoured to sweeten the harshness of their economic programme by offering some cosmetic concessions to the left; a mild taxation on the most expensive mansions was floated at one point, for example. But in essence the two central parties at this point in time resembled very much what one politician memorably described as being “two cheeks of the same arse”.256 Because the Labour Party were unable to decisively differentiate themselves from the Conservatives, because they were unable to provide a coherent alternative – when the general election came in May 2015 – they suffered a comprehensive defeat. Following the election, the Labour leader (Ed Miliband) resigned and a contest was held to determine his successor. Four of the candidates who stood were very much in the mould of the previous leader. Professional parliamentarians of the centre; innocuous, bland politicians whose every word had been greased by the sleek lubrications of the PR machine – the faceless and anodyne defenders of the status quo. But the fifth candidate, a man named Jeremy Corbyn, was of a very different political pedigree. Here was a man in his mid-sixties who had spent much of his political life on the backbenches and had a history of grassroots activism which had seen him oppose the reforms and the wars of the rich and the powerful over many years – consistently, quietly, and from behind-the-scenes. He was the very antithesis of a high-flier and would often be snapped in some faded photograph wearing the kind of loose sleeved shirt and baggy trousers which one might associate with a dishevelled radical from the 1960s. Inevitably his style, alongside his political message – the demand to relinquish nuclear weapons, to invest more in schools and hospitals and social services – was met with tolerant, condescending smiles on the part of the slick, younger, high powered media-savants he had elected to run against. The press too, on the occasions when they noticed him at all, were liable to remark on his presence with the same faint trace of condescension, as

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Conclusion | 149 though they were dealing with some ancient, doddery relation who had put in an awkward appearance at a once a year family get together. The bookmakers put the odds of his winning the contest at 100-1. But then something odd started to happen. This non-descript figure began to garner support. Party members began to enthuse about the simplicity and the authenticity of his message. Twenty-first century Britain had been wracked by the spectre of illegal wars in the Middle East and the corrupt links between big business, the media and the political classes – exhibited through a series of scandals involving dodgy dossiers, irregular expenses, the “flipping” of houses and the hacking of phones. In this Britain, where the power of a tiny elite seemed ever more unbridled, the image of this elderly gent in his donkey jacket and sandals – a man who owned his own allotment, who got his kicks from pot-plants and pacifism – started to resonate in the public consciousness. Among the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Labour Party members a sense of excitement and possibility began to stir, and in the broader population more and more people attached themselves to this man’s gentle but persistent conviction. Thousands, younger people in particular, flocked to the Labour Party in order to support the issues that Corbyn was putting on the agenda: most importantly of all, the notion that the poor shouldn’t be made to suffer for an economic crisis which had been visited on the country by the rich. There was, Corbyn argued, a real and viable alternative to the policies of austerity. The faint, patronising tones with which the career politicians of the establishment had addressed this rather strange and awkward interloper in their midst were at once evaporated, replaced with something significantly more savage and personal. Corbyn was a reckless communist, an old-world, cold war warrior who had unlimited sympathy for every type of murderous despot; he was someone who would gleefully gamble Britain’s national security away, for he was secretly and subversively against the national interest. What they really meant by this of course, what the “national interest” so often acts as a surrogate for – is the interests of a tiny, ruthless elite minority who have been inculcated from birth into believing that they have the preordained right and ability to direct the lives of the millions below them. But the ideological war which the politicians and the media directed at the candidature of Jeremy Corbyn was launched too late. He swept into office as new leader with a landslide majority and yet the vitriol which the establishment had directed toward him was not for a second interrupted in its stream. Conservative ministers appeared everywhere in order to explain how glad they were that Corbyn had been elected,

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150 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE for his appointment meant that Labour would never stand a chance at regaining power in as much as the good, steadfast, British people would never elect someone who was such a combination of the kooky and the sinister. Corbyn was, they averred, the best thing to happen to the Conservative Party in generations. And yet, one could note in their smug visages, an element of creeping tightness – the slightest contraction in those broad, beaming grins. The need to sardonically celebrate the election of the rank outsider was in fact indicative of a deeper, almost elemental sense of unease. From the moment that Corbyn became leader, the media bombast was graduated to almost shrieking proportions – everything he said and did was threaded through the prism of a heightened hysteria. On the occasion of a Remembrance Day service, for example, the media carried a series of shrill missives in various papers which indicted Corbyn for his lack of respect – he hadn’t, they argued, bowed sufficiently low. It was the kind of politics which verges on parody. At the same time, however, it wasn’t just an external backlash Corbyn had to deal with. There were too the young, ambitious politicians who had arisen in his own party during the Tony Blair years. Such slick, savvy individuals had been weaned on the philosophy of New Labour and the Third Way; the expert means by which the terrible divide between those with the most and those with the least could be glossed over by PR and smiley references to “working together” and a “better Britain”.257 Even after the years of wars and cuts, even after income inequality continued to rise under Blair and his successor Gordon Brown,258 the same New Labour mantras, the same PR prosody, the same glib and meaningless appeal to a “better Britain” were still ringing hollow on the lips of New Labour aficionados whose hegemony in the party was to be so rudely interrupted by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the popular movement which backed him. Their bitterness, the almost organic sense of disgust toward him was unlimited. And so the media demonization of Corbyn was supplemented by the crocodile smiles of those who were inside the party cabinet and were machinating against every move Corbyn made. The leader of the Labour Party remained, to his credit, patient and for the most part uncompromising. He is still so, at the time of writing, but the possibilities of him retaining control of the party, while effectively pursuing his line remain, in my view, slim. The problem of pushing through the type of radical policy which fundamentally challenges the political consensus in Westminster is a thorny one to say the least. It is a problem which was evinced in Corbyn’s first term as leader by way of a specific event. At the start of December, following a terrorist attack on the streets of Paris by the Islamic

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Conclusion | 151 fundamentalist group ISIS – a vote was taken in Parliament as to whether to take military action in Syria (a country riven by civil war in which ISIS – at the time of writing – is particularly active). Corbyn opposed the military intervention: he pointed out, in his calm, measured way, that ISIS itself was a product of Western intervention in the first place – specifically the US and British sponsorship of the Shia regime which went on to repress the Sunnis in Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion of that country in 2003. Naturally, however, the Blairites, the very elements who had so giddily pressed for the war on that occasion were enveloped by the same blood lust and same underlying sense of imperial superiority. The question of whether the UK was to go to war once more came down to a single, critical moment; many Conservatives were for it but the Labour Party was far more divided. Corbyn had the opportunity to use the “whip” – that is, the mechanism which impels MPs in a particular party to vote in a particular way in order to ensure the policy of the leadership is followed. At which point the media swung into action. Corbyn, with all his communist (Stalinist) sensibilities, would surely reveal his dictatorial nature – by forcing those MPs who wished to go to war to reverse their decision and go against their individual consciences. The only way Corbyn could have averted war was to utilize the whip in his role as leader of the party. To create the number of Labour votes which might have stymied the plans of the Conservatives in their tracks. But the pressure of the media, alongside the internal pressure of the Labour MPs who were constantly threatening rebellion; unfortunately both elements combined to make Corbyn relent and allow his MPs to make up their own minds. That last sentence seems strange, and perhaps even ominous. How can such a thing be described as “unfortunate”? Why shouldn’t MPs be allowed to vote according to their own freedom of conscience on such a significant decision? Well, for the following two reasons. In reality, the majority of the Labour Party members were against prosecuting yet another war in the Middle East.259 The press played it so it might seem if Corbyn had used the whip to compel his MPs to vote against a bombardment of Syria, he would be acting in an anti-democratic manner. But in fact, by ensuring that the will of the majority of the party be followed, that the decision of the mass of its grassroots members and supporters be respected, Corbyn would have achieved democracy on a more fundamental level. But of equal importance was this; as the press screeched about how Corbyn was about to usurp the whole democratic process and reveal his true nature as some kind of tyrant waiting in the wings, that same press – so utterly concerned with the spirit of democracy –

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152 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE failed to publicize that the leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron, had imposed the whip on the members of his own party, so he could gain a decisive majority in the lead up to the parliamentary push toward war. Because of the howling fury of the press, because of the pressure and simmering resentment which was building against him in the ranks of the MPs in his own party – Jeremy Corbyn, in his turn, chose not to use the whip and to leave the decision to the conscience of the individual MPs. In so doing, he perhaps overlooked the fact that not all of them had one. In any event, several of the members took the opportunity to grandstand, generating speech after speech which suggested how pulverizing yet another Middle Eastern country in and through bombs and drones was really the only possible way to ensure a noble and heroic defence of “democracy”. When the Labour MP Hilary Benn delivered another exhortation toward yet more slaughter in the name of “freedom”, everyone in the British press entered into a frenzy of adulation. Benn’s speech, so the rhetoric went, was the equivalent of the homilies Churchill delivered during the frantic and fatal grapple with the Nazis at the time of the Second World War. And so, we encounter two separate and in some ways discrete events. The inability of Jeremy Corbyn – as the leader of the British Labour Party – to stop the country from going to war even though he had a mandate which came from the grassroots majority of party members. And the inability of Syriza to reject the terms of austerity and the bailout imposed on Greece – despite the fact that Syriza had the authority to do so delivered to them by the overwhelming majority of the Greek people. What is clear here – over and above the moral intentions of the authors (Syriza, Jeremy Corbyn) – is that we are dealing with a more fundamental paradox. The etymological root of the word “democracy”, in its original ancient Greek, means the government of the “demos” – or “common people”. Yet with Syriza in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK – in both these instances – we have a political context which is understood to be a democratic one; and yet the process by which the “common people” were able to transmit their will through the mechanisms of government was in fact abnegated in advance. In the case of Syriza a majority of their MPs decided to follow the direction of the leader Alexis Tsipras, and impose a set of austerity measures which directly contravened the referendum which had taken place the week before. They were induced to do this, for sure, by the power and the threats of an international ruling class which had united around the politics of austerity, and had – in tandem with Greece’s own elites and the mainstream media – endeavoured to close the possibility to any other alternative. In the case of Corbyn, the me-

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Conclusion | 153 dia – combined with the professional politicians in both the Labour and Conservative parties – went on to create such a brouhaha, that they were able to destabilize the process by which the collective will of the majority was transmitted through the higher echelons of the party structure. In both cases the decisions that were finally enacted favoured the proclivities of a small elite; the modes and forms of democracy, then, had proved to be profoundly undemocratic. And this is what is fundamentally important – it doesn’t matter whether one believes Corbyn was right to reject the proposal of war or whether one thinks that Syriza was right to reject the austerity terms in the first instance. What is so significant is how in both cases the democratic decision of the majority was undermined by the mechanisms of those democracies themselves. And this can’t help but raise the question, the question of what democracy must entail? What is the essence of the idea? How different is it from what we experience around us? We have referenced its origins in the Ancient Greek world, and as most people are aware – the democracy of the Ancient Athenian polis had its own shortcomings. Women were not allowed to participate, nor could non-citizens, nor slaves. Nonetheless, for the citizens who were able to involve themselves in the political process, it was a far more profound and meaningful experience. The decisionmaking process flowed from the majority upward in and through a system which couldn’t simply be thwarted by an elite group at the top. In brief, neighbourhoods or “demes” voted for their assemblies which would in turn select members of a higher council – the “Boule” – which formed the executive body of the state. The number of the population in each “deme” informed how many assembly members it would have in the “Boule”, and these members held office for one year. Any given individual who had been elected was only entitled to hold office twice in their lifetime. In this way the possibility of the formation of a political elite which could decisively abstract itself from the mass of voters and use its power to subvert the democratic process was rendered significantly more implausible. The citizenry, whether poor or rich, would assemble in order to debate the issues of the day in the public spaces, to elect representatives to address the issues of their “deme” and in addition form in a broader body – “the assembly” – which met forty times a year to address the issues confronting the polis as a whole – namely public laws, war and taxation.260 On top of all this, the elected officials – at least in the golden age of Ancient Greek democracy – were subject to the practise of ostracism. That is, the citizenry – if enough of them concurred – had the power to banish those officials who were seen to have accrued too much wealth or influence, or were not thought to be acting in accordance with the

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154 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE wishes of the electorate. Such officials were then exiled from the city for a period of ten years. Nowadays it is hard to imagine such an almost . . . oppressive democracy; oppressive, that is, in terms of the way the majority was able to forcibly assert its will over the minority – a minority who were elected, most often, from their own ranks. For the same reason, it was a democracy which was fundamentally responsive. The turnover of elected officials was almost perpetual, and the practise of politics was ever present in the streets – in as much as the citizenry in and through the “demes” were drawn into a constant flow of debate and decisionmaking to which the elected representatives were in thrall. In today’s world there are very few of us who imagine we can simply stroll out into the streets and start debating the issues of the day with our neighbours, and that on this basis several of us are going to be elected that week by a neighbourhood council and go on to serve in parliament within the next few months. That’s almost inconceivable because we have absorbed organically, from the cradle to the grave, a very different vision of what democracy is – what it must be. In our own period democracy almost always involves the assumption of a series of individuals who have come from the wealthiest sections of society, who have been to the finest schools and universities, who have undergone a series of apprenticeships in the most renowned law firms, or financial or media institutions, and who then enter into parliament as the scions of the elite. Youthful, exuberant, but utterly confident – they have absorbed organically the sense that it is their destiny to lead the majority. In and through such a political existence, they will enact all sorts of resolutions: but such resolutions, however well intended, will nearly always be formed in a hermetically sealed bubble of vested interest which is abstracted from the direct activities and life experiences of the populous at large. It is far easier to develop a “realist”, “pragmatic” view of the need for austerity – to understand why, for example, funding to public housing should be cut, if you yourself have never lived in an ordinary house. It is easier to declaim that cuts in unemployment benefit simply must be made, if you yourself have never needed to resort to the dole. Conversely it is far harder to enforce significant taxes on the super profits of multi-national corporations when you have sat on their boards, when you have dined at the mansions of their directors, when every political instinct you have informs you at the most profound level that these people, like you, are responsible for the political, economic and spiritual welfare of society as a whole; without them the impetus to social development would inevitably lack. Such neoliberal dogma is remarkably resilient in the face of every calamity reality seeks to inflict upon it; no matter how many rapa-

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Conclusion | 155 cious wars, no matter the number of political crises world capitalism yields, no matter what the tempo of inflation and recession and crash, no matter how wide the divide between those who create the wealth and those who accumulate it – nevertheless capitalism’s representatives still understand in the very marrow of their bones that the bankers, financiers, hawks, speculators, property developers, investors, arms merchants et al are absolutely necessary to the function of any humane, rational, sane society; that, to paraphrase Leibniz, capitalism is for the best in the best of all possible social outcomes. Such dogma is so fundamentally entrenched not because it stems from a clinical and rational assessment of the objective historical realities and the material conditions of billions of the world’s people but because it springs directly from the fact of the physical and social abstraction of a series of “representatives” from the people they are supposed to represent. We are, through the very forms and structures of social existence, acculturated into the belief that the essence of democracy – the only possible kind of democracy – consists in voting for a selection of besuited, immaculate wealthy figures whose discussions about our future take place in vast regal buildings fortified by every level of security. Such individuals and groups are elected every four or so years to act as our political guardians, but their lives and their interests seem so remote from our own. And yet, it seems to us this is what democracy truly is. I don’t mean to suggest, however, that parliamentary legislation is worthless. Of course, there have been many great parliamentary reforms enacted which have improved the lives of the majority at different times and in different ways. Likewise I do not mean to say that politicians who either come from the lower classes, or express fundamentally the interests of those at the bottom – can never find their way into positions of power. It does, of course, happen. It happened with Syriza for a short time. It is happening with Jeremy Corbyn. My point, rather, is this. Even though on occasion it does occur, it is nevertheless extremely difficult for a person or group of people who are members of the middle and lower economic bracket to garner the kind of financial means necessary to form a modern political party. Such a project generally involves a team of paid staff, advertising space in the national media, deep wells of campaign funding and the means by which this can be utilized and distributed by an army of specialists who are trained in the field, and so on. In 2008, for instance, in the presidential election in the United States, the eventual winner, Barack Obama, received many small donations from people who had been enthused by his populist message – and yet at the same time he also had to rely on the 43% of all donations261 which came from individ-

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156 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE uals who gave $1,000 or more; that is, from people who were almost certainly from the higher economic stratum. This included around $1 million262 from the “employees” at Goldman Sachs, one of the companies whose executives had so comprehensively fleeced its clients during the financial bubble. They had assembled a series of shoddy mortgage bonds strung together in “subprime” packages which were then recommended to their clients – despite the fact that the company was aware of the toxic financial risks they carried.263 The bank then bet against the very financial packages it had offloaded reaping for itself “extraordinary profits”264 – and on top of everything, several of its executives went on to perjure themselves before Congress by lying about the fact. That Goldman Sachs, and companies like them, were required to pump funds into the coffers of even supposedly progressive parties like the Democrats perhaps explains why – even though the period of the mortgage bubble produced perhaps the greatest financial crime wave in history (“a million fraud cases a year”)265 – nevertheless, at the time of writing, only one financial head from the mortgage scandal has been indicted (Lee Farkas).266 For this reason, even when an individual or party with a vaguely progressive agenda manages to gain power it is often beholden to the claims and influences of a myriad of powerful financial interests in advance. If it somehow manages to achieve prominence on an independent and genuinely radical platform, when it enters the corridors of power, it is at once abstracted from its social basis. It is more and more subject to the pressures of a ruling class which has constructed the forms of the democracy very much in its own image – in and through the set of individuals dotted across the political parties, the higher echelons of big business and the media who act as its surrogates. In such a democracy, in our modern democracies, the mass majority can avail itself of a formal vote, it is true, but the political system their “representatives” then enter into is already heavily weighted in accordance with the needs and the prerogatives of a wealthy and powerful minority. The kind of pressure this minority, on both a national and international basis, is capable of exerting against a government which develops a programme that fundamentally challenges its interests was exhibited most vividly in the case of Syriza; within one week of the popular referendum which returned the “No” vote, only two of the 149 Syriza members267 who sat in parliament voted “no” in support of the people they claimed to represent. This was perhaps the most dizzying and rapid volte-face ever performed in the history of left wing politics. And it also helps shine a light on the nature of democracy itself, in particular the distinction which Rousseau had long ago drawn between older democracies like those of ancient Athens,

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Conclusion | 157 the Swiss cantons and the Italian city states of the late medieval period – and the more modern democracy which evolved out of the English revolution in the seventeenth century and which provided an early prototype for the democracies of today. Rousseau argued that the older form of democracy could be termed “direct” because it involved the direct and perpetual participation of the citizenry – as opposed to the more modern form of democracy which he described as “representative”, for those who make the decisions are only ever the people’s agents. In his magisterial study on the Ancient Greco-Roman world, G. E. M. De Ste Croix teases out something similar, only he grounds it in explicitly class orientated terms. He argues that the democracy of ancient Athens placed the mechanisms of the political decision-making process in the hands of the broader citizenry, and because the vast majority of them owned little or no property, the “democracy played a vital part in the class struggle by mitigating the exploitation of poorer citizens by richer ones – a fact that seldom receives the attention it deserves”.268 For this reason, one could do worse than to argue that the structure of both types of democracy (representative, direct) was itself the product of a historical process driven by the conflict between classes. In the case of ancient Athens, direct democracy arose as part of a protracted, panoramic process whereby the peasants had freed themselves from debt bondage on the land, in order to unite with the artisans and wage labourers of the city in an innovative and new form of political mobilization (democracy) which helped them sustain a level of economic independence and restrict the degree of labour exploitation a city elite and landed aristocracy could inflict on them. Hence democracy took a form which was expressly geared to manifest the will and interests of the majority of the citizenry. But modern democracies emerge out of a very different historical context. In England, France and the US, such democracies were the eventual products of the revolutions which sought to impose the interests and power of a nascent bourgeoisie against feudal absolutism – or in the case of the US against an imperial but constitutional monarchy which held the thirteen colonies in its sway from across the waves. These revolutions were huge historical upheavals, profoundly progressive it is true, and yet each one sought to impose the hegemony of a small elite which helped usher into being a new historical epoch – the capitalist one. As these revolutions sucked into their vortex the broader masses, their representatives were required not only to fight against the old-world regimes they sought to replace, but also to subdue and smash the more radical forces which were starting to take shape from below. Each one of the revolutionary events is fissured by this contradiction. In the Eng-

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158 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE lish case, the forces from below expressed themselves through the ranks of the New Model Army – here the plebeian soldiers, under the influence of the radical ideas of sects like the Levellers and the Diggers, proceeded to organize themselves independently of the officer class, forming in “regiments” which went on to elect “agitators” from their number – “agitators” who would in turn promote and coordinate the interests and issues of the rank and file in a single body known as a “committee”.269 The figure of Cromwell, then, was required by the historical moment, not only to provide the focal point by which sections of the agrarian and commercial bourgeoisie could direct their rebellious energies against the old feudal order – but also as the means by which the radical explosion of direct democracy which had broken out in the army could be suppressed. The leadership of the New Model Army endeavoured to impose an anti-Leveller manifesto in order to compromise the radical elements from below, some of whom then mutinied and were in turn repressed.270 In the French case a similar though distinct pattern can be observed. As the revolution developed, as it was faced with internal reaction and international invasion – these pressures fused and compounded radical forces into the type of mass movement which was required to expel the standing armies of the European monarchs from French lands. Such a movement necessitated a high degree of self-organization – “it was within the popular movement that supported the Jacobins that direct forms of democracy reached their highest point in the revolution. For example, in Paris, where the city was divided into 48 sections, each with its own assembly.”271 Such direct democracy was in its turn repressed by the Thermidorian majority in the National Assembly who used military force to achieve its destruction. At which point a “republic of proprietors”272 took control of the reins of the state and introduced a new and more conservative constitution in 1795 – or to say the same thing, the propertied elements from the ranks of the bourgeoisie had managed to forge a state which was now capable of catering for their own interests at the expense of the old reactionary feudal elements and the nascent popular movements in turn. The “formal” or representative democracy which emerged from the context of the French revolution was stamped with the character of this historical requirement; it allowed the interests of a propertied elite to be refracted in and through a parliamentary institution whose bulwark was formed from the members of that same social class or at least those on its periphery or those who had a stake in acting in its interests. In the American example too, the formal (representative as opposed to direct) democracy which eventually came to predominate was again formed at the expense of a more popular movement and conse-

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Conclusion | 159 quently took on a narrower character which was, of necessity, abstracted from mass activity. Just as in the English and French cases, the American bourgeoisie was eventually compelled to suppress popular mobilizations from below. In 1786–7 a series of protests (“Shays’ rebellion”) erupted on the part of small American farmers against the debts they had found themselves shackled with. A large proportion of these people had formed the plebeian backbone of the military effort which had repelled the British, but now, as they began to assert their own interests against the power of the wealthier propertied elements, the elite layers of the Patriots recruited an army to defeat the uprising and many of its leaders were executed. As a result, just as in the French case, a new constitution was drafted which was more centralized in nature – and was able to further distance the populous from direct involvement in the mechanisms of government by developing a series of parliamentary institutions in which a small group of men with “substantial property [were] best qualified to speak on behalf of the labouring multitude, including not just wage labourers, but also farmers with small holdings”.273 In summary then, the direct democracy of the Athenian polis tended to work from the bottom-up because of the specific nature of its own historical formation – girded, as it was, toward the transmission of popular power over and against the propertied classes. “Formal” or representative democracies, on the other hand, were formed in the context of a propertied class which was fighting not only to displace absolutist or international tyrannies with its own social content but also sought to fortify its power and interests against the popular movements from below; ergo, the form of its political decision-making process necessarily tended to work from the top-down. The way in which Syriza relinquished their popular mandate, and Corbyn failed to ensure the success of an anti-war vote even though the majority of the popular membership were for it – such paradoxes cannot be understood according to the specific issues in isolation, but must more broadly be located in the historical genesis of the forms and structures of representative democracy itself. It is necessary to see that such structures came into being, at least in part, as a result of the need to curtail and neutralize burgeoning popular power. This does not mean that issues or reforms which express the interests of the majority can never be pushed through such structures – any more than it meant, on occasion, that reforms which benefited the elites could not be passed in and through the structures of the direct democracy of the ancient Athenians. It does, however indicate that passing the type of reforms which work in the popular interest by fundamentally reducing the power and the rate of exploitation achieved by a propertied elite at the top – are

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160 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE increasingly difficult to smuggle through, especially in late capitalism where the distance between the wealthy and the poor has become overarching such that it guarantees the overwhelming predominance of the former in the various national parliaments and congresses, while ensuring the almost total absence of the latter. In saying this, one should not seek to idealize the democracy of the Ancient Greeks. It was deficient in ways in which more modern paradigms of democracy are not. First and foremost in terms of its subjugation of women and slaves. It is certainly true that in the aftermath of the French revolution, Napoleonic France continued to trade in slaves and fought to maintain its slave colonies abroad, and in Britain too, slavery wouldn’t be abolished fully until 1834. The southern states of the newly federated North America wouldn’t relinquish slavery as a mode of production until 1865 and then only under compulsion of force by their Union adversaries during civil war. Likewise, the democratic rights which were to accrue to women (and somewhat earlier to men without property) were hundreds of years in the making – not introduced in the US until 1920, Britain 1928, and in the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité – not until 1944. But despite the length of time these changes took, they were, in the philosophical sense of the word “necessary” – that is to say they were built into the ontological features of the bourgeois revolutions and the ideological project of Enlightenment by which those revolutions were justified. Such revolutions signalized the epoch of capital; the means by which generalized commodity production was to eventually penetrate every aspect of social life. All were to be rendered (formally) equal before an increasingly global market which cared – in the processes of its blind, unconscious working out – not a jot whether you were a man or a woman, an aristocrat or commoner, black or white; but only whether it could commodify and exploit the innate ability which human beings contain within themselves as a universal potency; that is, the ability to labour. For this reason the philosophies of Enlightenment tended to carry with them a push toward universalism: “All men are created equal.” At the same time such an abstraction glossed over the fact that, in reality, the way in which wealth and private property are accumulated in the capitalist epoch, and the social relations of exploitation which underpin this – mean, at the fundamental economic level, men (and women) often remain desperately unequal. Some have inherited or amassed vast reserves of wealth which they can employ as capital in order to invest in the activity of others who have nothing but their labour power to sell; in and through this process those who invest are able to accrue more wealth to themselves from the labour product of

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Conclusion | 161 those they subsume. Indeed this forms the fundamental premise of capitalist society. And yet, a formal equality between the two parties sustains. The seller of labour power is no slave, for the employee has a right to sell his or her labour power, and in the same way the employer has the right to purchase it. This right, this equal right, pertains over and above the vast discrepancies in economic wealth which exist, behind the scenes, between the employee and the employer – and which actively compel the employee to sell his labour power while allowing the employer the luxury of purchasing it. Again, the content, the direct economic content, is obscured by the abstract political right which overlays it; a right which seems to bind the economic actors in a relation of equality. A wealthy entrepreneur and a poor land labourer, for instance, both enjoy the political/legal right to stand for election in any typical bourgeois democracy – in actual practise, however, if you had to bet on the one who will make it into the corridors of power, the one who will even make it onto an electoral platform in the first place – which would be your choice? And so the abstraction of parliament from the people which takes place under bourgeois “formal”, representative democracy can also be understood, in the last analysis, as a product of the development of the fundamental relation between capital and labour power on which a fully-fledged capitalist economy is premised. The Ancient Greek democracy provides in many ways the inverse image of this state of affairs. If bourgeois democracy increasingly tends toward a formal equality which at the same time abstracts the direct producers, the majority, from the political decision-making process – a process which is, in the main, carried out by those who exploit their labour or their moneyed representatives – then in the case of Ancient Greece it is the other way round. Here the direct producers are more fully in control of the political process but at the expense not only of the elites who exploit their labour – but even more importantly perhaps – at the expense of the possibility of any kind of formal equality which encompasses the society at large; the type of universalism which the Enlightenment project so nobly and powerfully promotes. Whereas the development of modern capitalism tends toward democracies which, of necessity, grant political rights to anyone274 who can be subsumed under the process by which capital exploits labour – namely virtually every adult of working age – the Ancient Greek democracy had built into its ontological essence the reverse proposition; political rights would and could accrue only to those labourers and peasants who held the title of “citizen” – over and above the women and slaves excluded from that category. If bourgeois democracy involved a universality which was bereft of content, then the antique democracy con-

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162 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE tained a content which was bereft of universality. Mature capitalist social relations could not tolerate the slave mode of production, whereas the Greek democracy was, of necessity, premised on it. It implied slavery and the subjugation of women, to an extent to which capitalism, in its developed form, never can. And this was partly to do with the level of technique the Ancient World had achieved. In short, the means by which the direct producers – the peasants, slaves, labourers – produced and reproduced the conditions (the food, the shelter, the resources) by which the society was able to sustain itself; the technological means by which this was accomplished were not of a sufficient level as to generate the type of superabundance by which the direct producers as a whole could participate in the life of the democracy. If the “citizen peasant”, or the “citizen labourer”, or the “citizen artisan” was able to enjoy a reduced work schedule which allowed them to commit to the many free days in any given year which were required to take part in the “Boule”, or the Assembly, or the debates which took place at the level of the “demes”; or the free time which was needed to participate as jurors in the political trials and legal disputes which occurred;275 if the whole web of democratic procedures was to draw in a vast number of citizens who were at the same time direct producers – then there had to be an underclass of slaves whose efforts would relieve those citizens of a portion of the necessary labour required in order to keep the society turning over. In a similar vein, there had to be a large section of people who would be compelled to take the burden of domestic labour upon themselves (often in tandem with house slaves) – namely the Athenian women. This problem, this paradox – the notion that a participatory democracy, a direct democracy, automatically implies a system of slavery and the subjugation of women – is something we moderns find particularly difficult to digest. Because we are children of the Enlightenment, but also because we are living in the interstices of a vast global market in which the trillions of economic exchanges which are effected every day subsume the productive activities of billions of people – men and women alike – in their remit, thereby bringing the labour activity of those individuals into an equalization in and through the exchange of commodities.276 It is the relation of exchange posited at the level of economic existence which, in the last analysis, underpins the template of universality and equal rights which has grown out of Enlightenment thought from the seventeenth century onward. But such an Enlightenment morality simply could not have arisen in Greek democracy for it lacked the basis in the forms and structures of the polis at the level of social existence – specifically the absence of a highly devel-

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Conclusion | 163 oped division of labour and an advanced system of commodity production and exchange.277 In Ancient Greek times to morally condemn slavery and the repression of women would, as paradoxical as the formulation sounds, be synonymous with the unconscious wish to obviate the ancient democracy itself. The conundrum of Athenian democracy was a structural one. It could not, in its own time, be solved by the moral condemnation of (and a corresponding ideological movement against) – the appalling and horrific injustice of slavery and a systematic and embedded strain of misogyny. Rather the solution to the problem could only be achieved as part of an on-going historical process which saw the fundamental structures and forms of the polis transformed; such that they were raised to a social and productive level whereby the material possibility existed for the lower classes as a whole – the direct producers across the board – to collectively and as one participate in the mechanisms of state. Such a possibility – inheres in the fabric of our own present, and furthermore it is the great achievement of Marxism to have theorized the means by which it reaches its fruition in and through the historical process. In the period which marks the decline of feudalism, individual peasant proprietors who originally “owned” or controlled the means of production – the tools and the land (individual plot) on which they worked – are increasingly relieved of such control over the centuries long processes of “primitive accumulation”. As a consequence, they are reconstituted according to a different labour paradigm – now the direct producers are compelled to sell their labour power to the capitalist who controls the means of production in and through his capital; who owns the tools and the factory, and exploits the labour of the dispossessed in its abstract, commodified form – that is, in the form of labour power. In selling her labour power, in labouring for a given period of time and receiving a wage for those hours, the worker is not simply producing a product but is also producing herself; that is, by selling her labour power in its abstract, commodified form on the market she brings it into an interrelation, an equalization, with all the other workers who are engaged in the same process. It does not matter that she is working in a train station, while her counterpart is working on the tills in a shop, or his counterpart is working in a salad packing factory; the specific forms of their labour activity are dissolved in the general category of labour time – all the concrete richness and diversity of the various labour operations are subsumed under this abstraction in social practise – by the very act of selling labour power on the market for a given amount. In selling her labour power as a commodity on the market, the worker brings her labour activity into alignment with all the other workers who similarly sell their

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164 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE labour power in its commodity form; in selling her labour activity in this way, the labourer is as well universalising it; and in universalising it, she simultaneously universalises herself. She becomes a member of a class of people whose billions of diverse labour operations which span labour activities of a vast and multifarious character are crystallised in a universal form – or to put it as Marx does, in selling her labour power, she constitutes herself as a member of a “universal class”. The notion of this historically formed universal class lies at the core of Marxism. The modern proletariat, the modern sellers of labour power at the level of direct production and distribution – contain in their social activity a form of a universality which is unknown to any other exploited group in history. In the Ancient Greek world, the direct producers were arrayed into different classes with fundamentally opposed social interests. The slaves who worked the silver mines in Attica could not make any kind of common cause with the peasant small holder who was simultaneously citizen; indeed the latter’s democratic rights were guaranteed by the former’s subservience. The citizen’s active role in the political decision-making process was ensured by the existence of a whole class of forced labourers which lay outside it. In feudal times, the serfs who were scattered across much of medieval Europe were not only, for the most part, cut off from the guilds which sprang up in the newly reviving towns, but also from one another. Vast distances opened up between various villages but more than this, each proprietor worked his plot in conditions of virtual isolation; labour patterns attained a very individualized and discrete character even if the social life of the village implied a strong sense of community bonded by familial connection and religious piety. For this reason, the limits of peasant revolt were curtailed in advance – they could not abandon their lands for long periods of fighting, and when rebellions broke out, their revolutionary possibilities were nearly always limited to the set of grievances which were unique to a particular village in isolation and the character of the oppression which had been visited upon them by the caprices of a specific feudal lord. When local rebellions did manage to coalesce into broader revolutionary movements, such movements were sometimes able to advance on the cities, on the citadels of power, and even inflict heavy and heroic defeats on regional armies, but at the same time they would nearly always dissipate their revolutionary energies in the ether, for they did not contain within themselves, the possibility of a collective and unified action which would not only resist the old forms of exploitation, but radically transform them in accordance with a fundamentally different economic model; they did not contain within their forms and struc-

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Conclusion | 165 tures of organization the blueprint of a new world. Marx’s great achievement was to note that the epoch of industrial capitalism also implied the socialization of labour; the individual proprietor was converted by the capital-labour power relation and the demand to extract surplus value (profit in its abstract form) into an ever more homogeneous group concentrated in the factories and the shops, in the offices and the stations, in the hotels and the docks, the trains and the steam ships; the propertyless labourers on the land and those in the towns. He understood that this group, called into being by modern industry, had the potential to fundamentally transform the social relations of capitalist exploitation – a possibility which was bequeathed to them by the radical necessity of capitalism itself. Individual capitals were driven by the economic logic of competition to intensify the rate of exploitation of the proletariat, thus calling forth the need on the part of the power which provided the motive force of production to take control of that productive process in its own name, abolishing the capitalwage labour relation, and indeed its own social character as an exploited class – as proletariat – in the act. But what form would such a revolutionary awakening take? If the citizen-peasant of the Athenian epoch had shaped the character of the ancient democracy as a means by which he was able to more effectively manifest his own class power – how would the modern worker create something similar? How would his or her creation be structured? This was something to which Marx had not provided an answer. Nor would the answer come from the pen of any other philosopher. Instead it would issue out of the historical activity of the proletariat in practise. 1917 would witness the culmination of a new social form; the creation of a direct democracy which developed out of the activity of the industrial working class in Russia, and to a lesser degree encompassed swathes of the peasantry and various sectors of the military too. The workers councils or “soviets” evolved in a very particular way. The need for them was not consciously adduced in advance. They were not set up according to any pre-existing Marxist or anarchist or communalist paradigm. Indeed when they did appear for the first time in 1905 it is worth noting that the greatest Marxist figure of his generation – V. I. Lenin – regarded them with a certain level of anxiety and suspicion. Rather the soviets emerged organically in and through the life experiences and struggles of the Russian proletariat. Indeed the basis for their development was not, in the first instance, political at all. It was directly economic. We have previously outlined some of the main features of Russian society at the time; it was a predominantly feudal world still in the grip of an absolutist monarchy, but for the same reason the power and militancy of the in-

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166 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE dustrial working class was unusually potent, for the regime had encouraged its intensive exploitation by the forces of international capital in and through draconian working conditions and a lack of what were often the most elementary political rights. The workers in the industrial heartlands were forged into great fiery concentrations by the intensity of their repression and under the impetus of foreign capital and technique, their political protests assumed a particularly voluble character, for they were played out against a backdrop of life and death. The police would use the most brutal means to enforce reactionary legislation, and when the workers went on strike, they were often met with the most murderous repressions. Worker occupations of the hulking factories had certain advantages over strikes in isolation, for they avoided the risk of pitch battles in the open streets against a clearly superior and lethally militarized force. But here too the responses of the state were swift and decisive; the police could isolate an occupied factory or workplace, waiting for the workers to weaken and weary, and often the moral fortitude and material resources the workers could draw upon depended on the ability to communicate with other factories, other workers – who were also protesting. Initially such protests attained an isolated economic character; that is, they were about low wages and the deprivations endured by a population in a context of autocracy and international war.278 They were about the desperate need to avoid the immiseration of meagre pay; to ensure working class families could feed themselves, that their children had access to viable medical assistance – “they began to demand a reduction in the hours of work, and improvements in sanitary conditions and health treatment”.279 But under the pressure of state repression the workers were compelled to make contact with “other factories to win support for their action, they sparked discussion . . . Soon the talk was not only of bread, work and survival, but also of freedom.”280 Out of the economic demands began to grow the semblance and outline of a broader political unity. As the protests proliferated, and as the state countermeasures intensified, the links between groups of workers in many different factories and workplaces grew inevitably more pronounced. They provided the basis by which occupied factories could share information about the activity of the police and the state, and also the mode by which resources and supplies could be exchanged. But all of this required an increasingly sophisticated form of organization at the level of the individual workplace or factory; the workers had to be able to reach collective decisions which related to the way resources could be allocated and make decisions about the strategies of resistance which should be taken. Such decisions had to

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Conclusion | 167 be arrived at quickly, and yet they also had to include all the workers who were now in control of the factory floor, and who had direct knowledge of the resources and productive techniques in any given workplace. Dialogues and debates broke out, and the questions which were raised were often resolved by a show of hands. Because factories were required to communicate with other factories – other battalions of organized workers – delegates were needed, and they too were elected on the factory floor by a show of hands. In other words the purely economic struggle increasingly came to attain the most profound political dimensions. The desperate need to secure what were often the most humble economic demands forced the rhythm of the struggle, the ebb and flow of occupation and strike, to take on a more pronounced political tempo. The forms of organization which were created in and through the struggle for better wages, had managed – by taking the factory or workplace under collective control – to pose the political question of abolishing the wage relation more generally. For the factories were now often being run without the control of the owners. The mode of production was under the control of the very people whose mental and physical powers truly set the basis for it. And such control, of necessity, took the form of a democracy which flowed from the bottom-up; a direct democracy which was responsive to the thoughts and feelings of the direct producers, day by day, week by week, month by month. The elected delegates of these factories and workplaces formed in broader bodies known as “soviets”, and these bodies were able to elect political parties at a city level in order to take political decisions from the purview of a regional politics. Finally the apex of the democratic process was culminated in an All Russian Congress of Soviets which coordinated and implemented action at the national level. The soviets would select a particular party based on the level of support it had in their respective memberships; but such a democratic link between masses, soviet and party, could not be subverted for the delegates of the soviet were subject to instant recall – that is, they could be replaced, not every three or four years, but – should the workers wish it – every other month. Members of the All Russian Congress of Soviets were subject to re-election at least twice a year.281 By June 1917, soviets had sprung up in over five hundred cities.282 It was in this way the Bolshevik Party came to power. By October the Bolsheviks had obtained, in the words of Lenin, “a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and soldiers’ deputies”,283 and thus it was incumbent on them to assume power. As Brian Roper points out, “the insurrection received overwhelming post-facto endorsement: 505 out of 670 delegates to [the] Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets voted for ‘All power to the Soviets’’’.284 Much has been made, of course, over the

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168 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE fact that when the Bolsheviks came to power, one of their first measures was to close down the Constituent Assembly, the parliamentary body which followed the defunct Duma, and had been inaugurated by the newly established Provisional Government after the February Revolution. This act of repression by the Bolsheviks – and it certainly was exactly that – has generated a hue and cry across all shades of the political spectrum, and has been mobilized in the service of the depiction of the Bolsheviks as a totalitarian grouping from the outset. But such criticisms ignore the historical substance of the issue. It was not just that many of the parties in the Constituent Assembly had demonized the Bolsheviks as “traitors” and “German spies” in the period before October. It was not just that many of their leaders had mobilized the forces of the state against the Bolsheviks and had had Bolshevik leaders arrested and imprisoned. More profoundly, the termination of the Constituent Assembly was the product of the irreconcilable difference between “formal” and “direct” democracy, and the class character which underpins each. An organ of government which operates on the basis of formal democracy – that is, on the basis of enshrining the political power of a propertied elite over and against a majority cannot co-exist with a direct democracy whose raison d’être is expressed in and through the activity of the propertyless and dispossessed.285 Formal democracy was heralded by the triumph of the bourgeoisie revolution and the opening up of the capitalist historical epoch – whereas the direct democracy of the soviets sounded its death knell. The ontological assumption of formal democracy involves the abstraction of the political sphere from the economic one. Those in political control of the state on a day-to-day basis are not from the class of direct producers whose economic activities provide the means by which society sustains. The ontological assumption of direct democracy is the inverse for it involves the fusion of the political and economic spheres. The direct producers at the economic level are also in day-to-day control of the state apparatus at the political level. In ancient Athens, the basis for this was achieved at the expense of a fissure in the stratum of the producers themselves; the democratic activity of the citizen class was premised on the exploitation of the slave class. But the Bolshevik democracy of 1917 did not and could not take such a form, for there was no slave class beneath it for the proletariat to exploit. In this aspect, the modern proletariat is most truly described as a “universal class” and with its entrance into the historical field as a protagonist historical forms of democratic organization have the potential to achieve their most profound, unified and harmonious expression. I do not want to argue, however, that the democracy which reached its fruition in October 1917 was unblemished or unproblematic in

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Conclusion | 169 every way. For a start, although peasants established soviets in many areas, they (the soviets) were unable to effectively encompass the peasant majority – in as much as that great mass was still labouring, in the main, under feudal conditions: millions of isolated, disparate producers dotted across a vast panorama of rolling plains and mountain steppes.286 Nevertheless, the Soviet democracy remains the first form of democracy in human history which was not premised on some manner of class exploitation – and this was the consequence of its genesis in the activity of what Marx described as the “universal class”. And it was for this reason that proletarian democracy implied more than just an innovative and emancipatory political mechanism; more profoundly it revealed in itself the schematic of a new historical epoch. Its emergence had not been contrived by a set of brilliant individuals in advance but was rather a product of the form and development of the capitalist mode of production – which called forth from itself more workers and more workplaces, which compelled an ever more intensive exploitation of labour power on the part of capital, and which set the basis by which forms of worker organization might develop and reach fruition in and through conditions of the most profound political and economic struggle. The outline of the new world, then, was forged in the furnace of the old, for “communism” was not an idea which had arisen first in the head of individuals, but rather a historical force which was already latent in the forms and structures of social existence, in the fabric of capitalism itself. Marxism, it is true, provides the most refined theoretical compass by which this process can be understood, by which the proletariat is perceived as a historical process that, of necessity, carries within itself the possibility by which the capital-wage labour relation can be abolished, and human history released from the clutch of class conflict thereby. But Marxism only provides the theoretical echo of the practical fact. It provides the most sublime theoretical critique of the capitalist system precisely because it is premised on the one social power which can critique that same system in practise; for the proletariat itself is capitalism’s living negation. And this is the reason why, when the proletariat took power in Russia in October 1917, it was an event which implied more than just a struggle for political power between different social interests within a national framework. For the first time, the capitalist social system was overturned by the act of the direct producers asserting control over the means of production. The product of their labour ceased to assume an alienated form as capital, an almost spectral presence which was indifferent to their inner lives, and yet reduced and immiserated them in and through the broader and inexorable logic of profit and ac-

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170 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE cumulation. The communist revolution abolished the capital-labour relation, thereby abolishing the gap which had been opened up between the producer and his product; setting the basis for a new mode of production in which the labouring individual was to be made whole again, his essential spiritual and physical powers returned to him in and through the manifest control over their creations. The Russian Revolution represented not so much a utopic pipe dream which was instigated at the behest of a small cabal of shady revolutionary figures – as is so often presented – but rather it was the point at which the forms of the future perforated the fabric of the present, and through the rupture could be glimpsed the shimmering possibilities of a new world. This, more than anything, explains why the capitalist nations of the Western world at once began to amass their forces, to move against the fledgling revolution while it was still in its infancy. The workers’ democracy was able to survive for a period of a few precious months – as John Reed wrote, up until “February 1918 anybody could vote for delegates to the Soviets”287 – but what had been accomplished by the soviets simply couldn’t be sustained under civil war conditions and an invasion mounted by fourteen countries “including all of the major western powers”.288 It was an offensive which provided “military support, including equipment, munitions and more than 200,000 troops for the White armies simply because they were opposed to the Bolshevik government”.289 It was something which was enacted with a certain sense of historical inevitability; for the capitalist powers understood what the Bolshevik Revolution truly implied; that is, the existential threat to their own form of life, an ideological time bomb which could go off at any time, firing the need for self-determination on the part of the workers and peasants who numbered in the millions in their own countries. The single, underlying motivation of this book has been the attempt to show that Stalinism was the product of the clash between the forms of an old world and the possibilities of a new one. The workers’ democracy carried the form of a new society latent within the womb of the old order, and for this reason, those classes whose social power was predicated on the exploitation of labour by capital, both nationally and internationally, recognized in it the germ of their own dissolution. Thus they hastened to perform the most bloody, back alley abortion; they sought to mutilate the developing democracy in utero so to speak, and like the titan Cronus hungrily devouring his son, they hoped to put off in perpetuity the historical moment of their own usurpation. It was a critical juncture indeed; the old world was, in a fundamental sense, dying – but the new one was not yet developed

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Conclusion | 171 enough to fully force its way into the light. The “white” counterrevolution, aided and abetted by the powers of the capitalist West, was sufficiently strong such that it could drag the Soviet democracy into the mire, that it could drown it in blood – by decimating the proletarian masses who had provided its backbone in the fury and frenzy of civil war; but at the same time the revolutionary movement, the child of the new epoch, still had enough vim and vigour in its organism to kick out and push back its antagonists. Reaction was unable to restore the old regime, but revolution was unable to secure the new one. The Bolshevik Party had remained in power, had survived the civil war, but was now bereft of the living proletarian democracy which had breathed life into it; hence the party structures, bled dry of the social substance which once infused them, immediately began to ossify. A bureaucratic caste began to develop which was in some way able to raise itself up above the competing class interests of the revolutionary proletariat and bourgeois and feudal reaction – interests which had fought each other to a standstill. This then, was the historical genesis of Stalinism; it was the effects of the counterrevolution channelled through what was left of the beleaguered structures and remnants of proletarian power which then, in a truly necrotic fashion, began to revive and assume new form; the sclerotic, remorseless, murderous aspect of a zombified bureaucracy. I have also hoped to demonstrate, in the course of this book, that Stalin’s political persona cannot be apprehended outside this context. Of course, this is neither history nor biography in any conventional sense. While not denying the facts – while not disputing the specific fact that Russia was indeed swamped by foreign invasion in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution – conventional historiographies rarely care to reference it either. I do not mean to suggest this is the result of some pre-arranged conspiracy of silence – nothing quite so grand in fact. If you understand historical development from the point of view of a static template of human nature – one which itself provides a fetish of the capitalist mode of development; one which locates in the individual an innate, acquisitive tendency which happens to conform to the logic and demands of a generalized market economy; if one registers in the generic personality, in the words of Adam Smith, the need to “truck, barter and exchange” – if history is nothing other than the manifestation of such an abstract human essence which always and forever teeters toward immediate, material self-interest – then how important is it what kind of forms of self-organization the working class developed in 1917 or whether Russia was invaded by the West in the same period? Why should the historian consider those issues in any depth? Such facts are largely immaterial. What is signif-

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172 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE icant, however, is that the Bolshevik Revolution eventually became Stalinism; in other words, the true reality of the human essence will always be evinced no matter what utopian dreams emanate from the minds of the desperate or the demagogic. Sad but true. People are selfish by virtue of their very nature. One does, frequently and inevitably, encounter such a perspective. And if you put forward the fantastical and hideously Marxist or anarchist view that the masses of people who work in the factories, call centres, shopping malls, hotels, airports and so on, might one day be in a position to control the very institutions their labour sustains – you are always in danger of receiving a look from your interlocutor somewhere between pity and amusement. If you go further, if you try to elaborate the logic of a historical process which generates from within itself, the possibilities, at least, of a broader, emancipatory current – you know you run the risk of making the person you are speaking to shift from one foot to another with a growing discomfort. They might look at you with a gaze of moist sympathy, they might explain to you in the soft, belaboured tones usually reserved for a young child: “Yeah, I am sure that would be really nice and everything, but it’s not really realistic is it? I mean someone’s always got to sweep the streets. Someone’s got to do the donkey work. And others will always take advantage of that. I mean, that’s just human nature, isn’t it? And though what you are saying sounds very nice, those type of utopian ideas can be dangerous in the wrong hands. After all, everybody knows what happened in Russia!” “Utopian” – that is the criticism which currently holds the most currency. That sense of a utopia in the imaginations of revolutionaries which can so swiftly deteriorate into a hell on earth in the lives of the “ordinary” people. First Lenin, and then, with iron like inevitability – Stalin. But linger for a few moments, if you will – consider what is truly implied here. The possibility of a fundamental transformation of a given social system capitalism – which is structured on the basis of the labour power of billions who are impoverished and traumatised by it – into a system which is more fully responsive to their hopes and needs: such a possibility is deemed utopian, and dismissed in advance. The implication, of course, is a clear one; capitalism can be “reformed” perhaps – one hopes it can be made kinder to those who are crushed by it290 – but it can never be fundamentally changed because it expresses perfectly the realities of “human nature”. This is akin to arguing that the epoch of capitalism, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, provides “the end of history” – and will last indefinitely and eternally, for no matter how much we struggle against it, our own natures return us to its embrace by virtue of their true impulses and in-

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Conclusion | 173 clinations. And yet, is not such a world view the very essence of the utopic? When one looks at history from the purview of the longue durée, when one sees even the longest lasting epochs, often culminating in the mightiest empires – the Romans, the Mongols, the Incas, the Manchu – who can deny that the logic of historical development folded them up in the briefest of moments when their time had come. History, it would seem, has little compunction when turning the page. Despite both the profundity and the alacrity of his thought, despite the fact that he was the greatest philosopher of antiquity and that in reading him one is struck by a sense of prescience and modernity even today – nevertheless Aristotle was unable to conceive of a society which wasn’t underpinned by slavery. Slavery to him was the most inevitable, the most human, of all conditions, for the forms and structures of his own social existence were largely premised on it. We find such a view untenable now, of course, not because we are higher moral and intellectual beings than Aristotle, but because slavery has been relegated to the past in practise in and through historical development and, dare I use the word . . . revolution. Is it “utopic” then, to argue that the social and class contradictions which inhere in the present, might well relegate the exploitation of the capitalist world to the historical past – transcending it in practise in much the same way Roman slavery was transcended and so too the feudal system which developed in its aftermath? Is to argue such a point of view, with reference to the way in which human beings produce and reproduce the means of their existence and the social epochs which evolve and decline in accordance with this end, is to pose history on this basis – namely, the Marxist one – of necessity a misty, dewy-eyed project which smacks of utopianism? Or is it possible that those who never really think about history, except to see in it an accretion of lifeless facts which have no real interconnection and only serve to validate the forms of the present; is it possible that these people, with their weary knowing cynicism, with the certainty that the world that they have grown up in, is the only possible one – is it not perhaps the case that they are the most utopic of all? They often present themselves as having been battered by life, as being au fait with the realities of the “real world”; but at the heart of every such performance lies something not fully formed and adult but rather something protean and entirely childlike. An underlying anxiety, an unconscious fear – the fear that the forces latent in the world around them might one day shatter the semblance of everything which feels solid and permanent. And so they cling to the feeling that the world in which they exist could not be other than it is, even if such a world view contradicts their own interests. Even if they are not invested in the process

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174 | THE DICTATOR, THE REVOLUTION, THE MACHINE of capital reproduction – even if they are damaged by them. They cling to the certainty the world they know offers them, they cling to it in the same way a child grasps a security blanket, and that is why it hurts more than anything, to let those views go. And so, those who gravitate toward a more revolutionary perspective, will often find themselves subject to the most visceral hostility. Not just from those who are directly invested in the mechanics of exploitation or even from those who provide its ideological veneer in much of the media and the legal system but also from many who have been set adrift by modernity – powerless, disparate, and yet nevertheless find themselves clinging to the ideology of the status quo in the same way a drowning man might clutch a rock. To question the shelf life of capitalism, to question the vast economic inequalities which undergird the system, to posit a different kind of world – at once invokes a strident, unanimous voice which echoes into your soul the same underlying rebuke: “You can’t complain because someone toiling away in some far off sweat shop on the edge of the world is working for far less than you and would kill to be in your position. But sympathy for those who are worse off will not be indulged either for what is that but a by-product of the same bleeding-heart delusion? If you continue to clamour for fundamental political change you are, therefore, either a fool or a hypocrite. The only worldly, reasonable position for you to take in the circumstances is to resign yourself to the fundamentals of capitalist reality, for some people will always exploit others, and there must of necessity always be those who are rich and those who are poor. It is, after all, in our nature.” It is a voice which is streamed from a thousand and one directions, parsed from a million sources: the newspapers, the TV, the politicians and the pundits, and each and every person in between. It is a voice which speaks in a single tone and timbre, and no matter what the severity of the crisis, no matter how bad the devastation the capitalist market wreaks upon the human beings who are in thrall to it – this voice will tell you over and over that there is and there can be . . . no other way. But there is one thing it will never tell you. And that’s the simplest thing of all. You have a world to win.

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Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

“62 people own same as half world”, Oxfam, 18 January 2016: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/62people-own-same-as-half-world-says-oxfam-inequality-reportdavos-world-economic-forum There are vague adumbrations of the theory in the work of Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and also Marx himself in his writings on Russia. His father A. R. Medvedev died in the gulags in 1941. So, for instance, a regime like Castro’s Cuba could have at no point been considered communist (in the Marxist sense) because even though capital had been expropriated, the state was monopolized by a small bureaucracy, and was not under the sway of the vast majority of the population in and through their control of the means of production. L. Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941), p. 4. E. Djugashvili cited in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 26– 27. S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year (London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1969), p. 341. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 341. I. Iremashvili cited in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 14. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 29. T. Arkomed cited in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 30. V. I. Lenin cited in F. Becker, “Woman’s Place”, New International vol. 2, no. 5, August 1935, pp. 175–76. J. J. Marie, Staline 1878–1953 (Paris: J’ai lu, 2003), p .37. L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 65.

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176 | Notes to the Text 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30

31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39

40 41

Ibid., p. 119. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 32. L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 103. A. Shlyapnikov cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 43. L. Trotsky, Stalin – An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, “The Year 1917”, Marxist internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/stalin/ch07.htm Ibid. V. I. Lenin, Last Testament, “The Question of Nationalities”, 1922, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm J. Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, “Victory”, 1919, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1919/ 10days/10days/ch9.htm This might seem like conjecture but in fact the fantasy ideal of a great prince was something Stalin clearly cleaved to. Nigel Cawthorne describes how Stalin once slapped a 9 year old boy, the son of a Bolshevik, who was “chatting amiably” with him. “Don’t cry little boy”, said Stalin, “Remember today, Stalin talked to you.” Sometime later the baffled parents discovered that such face slapping was a Georgian custom performed to mark the visit of a powerful prince. Cited in N. Cawthorne, The Crimes of Stalin: The Murderous Career of the Red Tsar (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2012), p. 134. V. I. Lenin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 50. J. Stalin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 50. K. Marx, “Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Workingmen’s Association”, International Workingmen’s Association, 1867, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1867/rules.htm A. Graziosi, Stalin, Collectivization and the Great Famine (Cambridge Massachusetts: The Ukrainian Studies Fund, 2009), pp. 12– 14. Ibid., p. 31. V. I. Lenin cited in L. Trotsky, Stalin Volume Two – The Revolutionary in Power (London: Panther, 1969), p. 42. V. I. Lenin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 214. L. Trotsky, “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt”, The New International, vol. 4, no. 4, April 1938, pp. 103–106. V. I. Lenin, “Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)”, 6– 8 March 1918, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists. org/archive/lenin/works/1918/7thcong/01.htm L. Trotsky, Stalin Vol. 2, p. 71. Ibid., p. 71.

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Notes to the Text | 177 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62

63 64

65 66

Ibid., p. 76. J. Sudrabs cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 653. Ibid., p. 653. “Cheka decree, 1921” cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 655. Ibid., p. 655. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 664. V.I. Lenin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 665. Ibid., p. 709. V. I. Lenin, “How we should reorganize the workers’ and peasants’ inspection”, Lenin’s Collected Works vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 481–86. Ibid. L. Trotsky, Stalin vol. 2, p. 33. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 47. I. Deutscher, Stalin – A Political Biography (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 244. Ibid. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 71. V. I. Lenin, “The Question of Nationalities”, December 1922, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm V. I. Lenin, “Letter to the Congress”, December 1922, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/ 1922/dec/testamnt/congress.htm Ibid. Ibid. The situation in Germany in 1923 again clarified the difference between the bureaucratic standpoint and the revolutionary one back in the USSR, with Trotsky arguing for plans to prepare the insurrection and Stalin stating “the Germans must be restrained and not encouraged”. J. Stalin cited in P. Schwarz, “The German October: The missed revolution of 1923 – part 2”, World Socialist Website, 31 October 2008: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/1923o31.html B. Bazhanov cited in L. Trotsky, Stalin vol. 2, p. 192. V. I. Lenin cited in L. Trotsky, My Life, “Lenin’s Illness”, 1930, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch39.htm I. Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 258–59. Zinoviev and Kamenev were far from alone in this view. In the early twenties, Deutscher recounts an episode when Stalin tried to become more involved in a disagreement about theory, only to be inter-

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178 | Notes to the Text

67 68 69

70

71 72

73 74 75

76

77 78

79

rupted sarcastically by the old Marxist scholar David Riazanov – “Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows that theory is not exactly your field.” D. Riazanov cited in I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 291. G. Zinoviev cited in I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 274. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 275. In 1947 Stalin likened the Russian Communist Party to “a kind of Order of Knights of the Sword within the Soviet state”. J. Stalin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 74. J. V. Stalin, “On the Death of Lenin”, Pravda, January 30 1924: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/01/30 .htm V.I. Lenin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 317. Even in our own time, noted the late Paul Foot, “millions of people from all over the world . . . come to pay their respects to the mummified and petrified body of a man whose whole life was dedicated to the ending of mummification and petrification”. P. Foot, Articles of Resistance (London, Bookmarks: 2000), p. 23. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 299. A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 94. L. Trotsky, “Platform of the Joint Opposition”, 1927, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/ opposition/ L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, “Economic Growth and the Zigzags of the Leadership”, 1936, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch02.htm#ch 02-1 L. Trotsky, Stalin Vol. 2, pp. 249–50. It should be noted that Trotsky applied his theory only belatedly to the situation in China; at the time he was still mistakenly arguing that the revolution would in essence be bourgeois in character, albeit brought to fruition by a workers’ and peasants’ movement. But his position was not the same as the Stalinists for he argued that the revolutionaries maintain organizational independence from the nationalists, and that the activity of the working classes be unrestrained – whatever the political course the bourgeois parties sought to follow. To be precise, in a purely logical and abstract development, the feudal stage should follow on from the tributary stage, as it is only in feudalism, where the merchant class achieves a sufficient degree of independence, and the impulse toward individual private property becomes sufficiently pronounced; thus providing a condition

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Notes to the Text | 179

80 81

82 83

84 85

86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104

(though not the only condition) for the development of capitalist social relations. M. D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution (USA: Yale University, 2001), p. 188. Medvedev records that at end of 1927 “the manufacture of goods for general consumption was only 1 to 2 percent above the previous year”. R Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 216. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 217. J. Stalin, “The Fifteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.”, 2–19 December 1927, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/12/02.htm R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 219–20. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, “Economic Growth and the Zigzags of the Leadership”, 1936, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch02.htm#ch 02-1 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 219. In the interim which followed the “extraordinary measures” this was something the Soviet government tried and failed to do. I. Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 329–30. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, “Economic Growth and the Zigzags of the Leadership”, 1936, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch02.htm#ch 02-1 I. Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 329–30. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 222. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 325 In the regions where collectivization was forced through. R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 119. M. N. Averbakh cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 235– 36. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 225. Ibid., p. 234. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 325. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 230. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 252. A. Kosterin cited in R Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 243. C.f. Istochnik cited in G. Kessler, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940”, Cahiers du Monde Russe vol. 42, nos. 2–4, April–December 2001, pp. 477–504. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 334.

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180 | Notes to the Text 105 “Sovnarkom order”, 7 April 1930: http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/r1/r1-4.htm 106 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 501. 107 V. I. Volgin cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 506. 108 M. M. Ishov cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 503. 109 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 509. 110 Ibid., p. 508. 111 Ibid., p. 512. 112 Ibid., p. 510. 113 J.A. Getty, G.T. Rittersporn, V.N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence”, The American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, October 1993, pp. 1017–49. 114 A. Applebaum cited in “The World of the Gulag”, Newsweek, 28 April 2003: http://europe.newsweek.com/world-gulag-134537? rm=eu 115 J. Talabani cited in “Blair makes troops pledge to Iraq”, BBC News, 6 October 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4314308.stm 116 Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia , “Law of Spikelets”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Spikelets 117 N. Bukharin cited in I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 315. 118 V. Brodsky cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 259. 119 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 259. 120 J. Stalin, “The Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U”, Speech delivered at the Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the C.P.S.U.(B.), April 1929, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/04/22 .htm 121 M. McCauley, Whose Who in Russia since 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 93. 122 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 437. 123 L. Trotsky, My Life, “From July to October”, 1930, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ ch26.htm 124 I. Berlin, “The Arts in Russia under Stalin”, The New York Review of Books, 19 October 2000: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/ archives/2000/oct/19/the-arts-in-russia-under-stalin/ 125 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 446. 126 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 363. 127 A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Great Britain: Collins/Fontana, 1974), p. 11. 128 Ibid., p. 8. 129 Ibid., p. 10. 130 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 279.

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Notes to the Text | 181 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

141

142

143

144

145 146 147 148

149 150

R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 382. I. Ehrenburg cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 524. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 524. A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 441. M. Sixsmith, “Russia, The Wild East series 2, episode 17”, BBC Radio 4, 2 August 2011. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 692. M. Liebman, The Russian Revolution (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 325. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 842. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 377. So, for example, in the period of 1934–6 Stalin introduced a series of measures which were dubbed the “neo-NEP” – which once more legalized a level of market relations in the countryside, no doubt to give the regime some breathing space after it had enacted the first phase of collectivization. At the same time, the period was succeeded by a rise in repressions in the bureaucratic apparatus, for the new economic policy had allowed for the reconditioning of power relations within the bureaucracy. Stalin sought to regulate the newly formed powerful bureaucratic elements by means of a new outbreak of violence against his peers, one which used the very likely Stalin sponsored event of the Kirov assassination as its pretext. L. Trotsky, “Trotsky Reviews Elements of New Trial; Cites Efforts to Gag Him”, February/March 1938, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/03/trial.htm J. Rossman, “Strikes against Stalin in 1930s Russia”, libcom.org, 17 June 2011: https://libcom.org/history/strikes-against-stalin1930s-russia-jeffrey-rossman V.F. Shishkin cited in J. Rossman, “Strikes against Stalin in 1930s Russia”, libcom.org, 17 June 2011: https://libcom.org/history/ strikes-against-stalin-1930s-russia-jeffrey-rossman A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–56: An Experiment in Literary Investigation – Abridged Edition (London: The Harvill Press, 2003), p. 403. Ibid., p. 404. Ibid., p. 405. Ibid., p. 416. L. Viola, “Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 45–69. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 693. L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1936–37], “The End?” (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), p. 188.

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182 | Notes to the Text 151 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1937–38], “Army Opposed to Stalin” (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), p. 223. 152 S. Lee, European Dictatorships 1918–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 56. 153 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1936–37], “The End?” (Pathfinder Press, New York: 1978), p. 189. 154 “Lord Rothermere’s ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ article”, The Spectator Archive, 19 January 1934: http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/19th-january-1934/6/lord-rothermeres-hurrah-for-the-blackshirt s-articl 155 L. Trotsky, “Fascism – What is it?”, The Militant, 16 January 1932: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944fas.htm#p1 156 L. Trotsky, “How Mussolini Triumphed”, What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat, 1932, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944fas.htm#p1 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid. 159 L. Trotsky, “Germany, The Key to the International Situation”, Bulletin of the Opposition, nos. 25–26, November–December 1931, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ trotsky/germany/1931/311126.htm 160 L. Trotsky, “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism”, Bulletin of the Opposition, no. 27, March 1932, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/ 311208.htm 161 L. Trotsky, “Germany, The Key to the International Situation”, Bulletin of the Opposition, nos. 25–26, November–December 1931, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ trotsky/germany/1931/311126.htm 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 165 J. Stalin, “Concerning the International Situation”, Bolshevik no. 11, 20 September 1924, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/09/20 .htm 166 E. Thälmann, “Closing speech at the 13th Plenum”, Communist International nos. 17–18, September 1932, p. 1329. 167 E. Thälmann cited in T. Grant, “Why Hitler came to power”, Socialist Appeal, December 1944: http://www.socialist.net/why-hitlercame-to-power.htm 168 Editorial, Daily Worker, 26 May 1932.

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Notes to the Text | 183 169 A. Hitler cited in R. Sewell, Germany – From Revolution to Counterrevolution, “The Nazi Terror”, In Defence of Marxism, April 1998: http://www.marxist.com/oldsite/germany/chapter8.html 170 It is worth noting that the miners’ strike in Asturias in Northern Spain which broke out in 1934 was brutally repressed when the government employed a young general who brought in Moroccan mercenaries and Spanish foreign legion troops in order to crush the workers mercilessly. The name of that general was Francisco Franco, and the slaughter of the workers under the pretext of a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” would give Franco valuable practise in the art of mass murder which he would bring to bear in the civil war two years later. 171 A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Orion Books, 2007), p. 171. 172 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 724. 173 Ibid. 174 A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain, p. 182. 175 Ibid., p. 183. 176 Ibid., p. 171. 177 Nestor Makhno was a Ukrainian anarchist who had fought with, and then against, the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. 178 Antonov-Ovseyenko cited in A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain, p. 175. 179 La Batalla (newspaper of the POUM), cited in A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain, p. 207. 180 A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain, p. 287. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid., p. 181. 183 Ibid., p. 291. 184 Ibid., p. 207. 185 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 736. 186 Ibid., p. 736. 187 Ibid., p. 737. 188 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 443. 189 Ibid., p. 445. 190 Ibid., p. 445. 191 G. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections (Soviet Union: Progress Publishers, 1985), pp. 254–55. 192 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 754. 193 Ibid., p. 754. 194 In response to war plans drawn out in July 1940 by the generals, and which suggested that German forces in the event of an attack would come through Belorussia, Stalin argued that if the German attack did come (he still didn’t believe it was imminent at this stage) it would be focussed on the Ukraine. Subsequently, the military staff

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184 | Notes to the Text

195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214

215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229

were compelled to adopt Stalin’s motion. When the German attack did come, naturally enough, it came through Belorussia. A. Beevor, Stalingrad (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.23. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 28. General F. Halder cited in A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 31. H.S. Gefr cited in A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 206. A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 40. Field Marshall von Ronstedt cited in A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 40. A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 43. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 106. General Strecker cited in A. Beevor, p. 149. A. Beevor, Stalingrad (Penguin Books, London: 1999), p. 223. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 411. N. Jones, “How three million Germans died after VE Day”, The Telegraph, 18 April 2007: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ books/3664526/How-three-million-Germans-died-after-VEDay.html A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 85. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., p. 353. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 770. A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 288. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 772. A. Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 27. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 476. Ibid., p. 476. W. Churchill cited in D. Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Great Britain: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 102. In point of fact Roosevelt wasn’t present for the third conference in Potsdam as he had passed away. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 492. L. Trotsky, “Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties”, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy vol. 1, 1917–1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 8–9.

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Notes to the Text | 185 230 W. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflen, 1954), p. 228. 231 Churchill’s suggestion incidentally, not Stalin’s. 232 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 522. 233 Ibid., p. 522. 234 This was after President Trumann had terminated US financial aid to the Soviet Union in 1945 and the US was itself fashioning an imperial alliance in Europe in the form of NATO to act as a counterweight to Soviet power. 235 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 571. 236 Ibid., p. 586. 237 Interesting to note that despite the almost uniform adulation professed by the mainstream media toward Churchill in Britain today, the war leader was voted out by the people in 1945 in a contest which saw Labour score a landslide victory. 238 G. Litván, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression (London: Longman, 1996), p. 66. 239 “Hungarian Tragedy – Peter Fryer”, libcom.org, 15 June 2013: https://libcom.org/library/hungarian-tragedy-peter-fryer 240 G. Orwell, Animal Farm (London: Heinemann Education Books, 1987), p. 89. 241 In the final few years of Stalin’s rule the grain harvest amounted to 80 million tonnes per year – in 1913 it was already numbering at 86 million. I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 586. 242 “Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1948” cited in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 789. 243 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 863. 244 S. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: HarperCollins, 1967), p. 10. 245 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 603. 246 Ibid., p. 603. 247 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 865. 248 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 807. 249 Ibid., pp. 806–7. 250 I. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 510. 251 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 805. “Joint” is an organization which was set up in 1914 in order to provide Jewish humanitarian assistance. 252 Ibid., p. 805. 253 V. I. Lenin cited in L. Sedov, Red Book: On the Moscow Trial, “Why Did Stalin Need this Trial?”, 1936, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/sedov/works/red/ch01. htm 254 O. Jones, “It’s socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us

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186 | Notes to the Text

255

256 257 258

259

260 261

262 263

264 265 266 267

268 269 270 271 272 273 274

in Britain”, The Guardian, 29 August 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/29/socialism-for-the-rich As though the nature of debt agreements between states can be comprehended in terms of the psychological characteristics at the level of the individual personality. For a criticism of such quasi-racist narratives see T. Mckenna, “The Greek Paradox”, The Huffington Post, 16 January 2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tonymckenna/the-greek-paradox_b_1276360.html G. Galloway, “Rescuing something labour from the wreckage”, The Guardian, 9 May 2006. T. Blair, “Labour Party Manifesto”, 1997: http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab97.htm M. Brewer, “Have the poor got poorer under Labour?”, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 13 October 2009: http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4637 Up to 75 percent of all Labour party members were against the war as of November 2015. See “Cameron rushing to war in Syria because his case is ‘falling apart’ – Corbyn”, Russia Today, 1 December 2015: https://www.rt.com/uk/324098- syria-airstrikes-cameroncorbyn/ B. S. Roper, The History of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p. 25. A. D. Holan, “Obama campaign financed by large donors, too”, Politifact, 22 April 2010: http://www.politifact.com/truth-ometer/statements/2010/apr/22/barack-obama/obama-campaignfinanced-large-donors-too/ Ibid. M. Taibbi, “The People vs. Goldman Sachs”, Rolling Stone Magazine, 11 May 2011: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/thepeople-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. S. Jay, “The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism”, libcom, 5 January 2016: https://libcom.org/library/postmodern-leftsuccess-neoliberalism G. E. M. De Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 2001), p. 284. B. S. Roper, The History of Democracy, p. 106. Corkbush Field Mutiny, November 1647. B. S. Roper, The History of Democracy, p. 174. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 144. This is by no means absolute. The development of capitalism in

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Notes to the Text | 187

275 276

277 278 279 280 281

282 283 284 285

286

287

288 289 290

China was not coeval with the process of increased rights, precisely because the new economic model was grafted onto the old state which had been constructed along the lines of Maoist bureaucratic centralism. And which the state enabled its poorer citizens to participate in by way of monetary compensation. On a generalized, society wide basis which encompasses labour power itself. I am not, of course, arguing that commodity exchange didn’t take place in the ancient world. Including the commodification of labour power itself, one should again emphasize. The 1905 revolution was preceded by a war against Japan, just as the revolution of 1917 emerged in the context of World War 1. S. Wright, Russia: The Making of the Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1984), p. 295. Ibid., p. 295. J. Reed, “Soviets in Action”, The Liberator, October 1918: http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext8/Soviets. html D. Gluckstein, The Western Soviets (London: Bookmarks, 1985), p. 21. V. I. Lenin, “The Bolsheviks must assume power”, Lenin: Collected works, vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 19. B. S. Roper, The History of Democracy, p. 267. As we have seen, the impossibility of any such co-existence was demonstrated in practise in as much as the emergence of the earliest elements of formal democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was also predicated on the destruction of embryonic forms of direct democracy during the bourgeois revolutions which took place in those periods. For this reason the position of the Bolshevik leaders of 1917 tended to be an internationalist one; they understood that the revolution could not survive unless it was exported abroad, unless proletarian democracy was established in countries with more developed economies, which would then help to bolster the Russian proletariat and the poorer rural elements back in Russia. J. Reed, “Soviets in Action”, The Liberator, October 1918: http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext8/Soviets.ht ml B. S. Roper, The History of Democracy, p. 272. Ibid., p. 272. This is an abiding theme. Every generation forms a new layer of politicians who understand that they are going to tame the beast, that they are going to be kinder, more resourceful, more rational;

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188 | Notes to the Text that they will take control of the economy, that they will end the anarchy of boom and slump, or they will end world hunger, and generation after generation their prognoses are refuted by war, mass starvation, disease and every other graduation on the gamut of human suffering.

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Bibliography S. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: HarperCollins, 1967). S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year (London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1969). A. Beevor, Stalingrad (London: Penguin Books, 1999). A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Orion Books, 2007). D. Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Great Britain: Manchester University Press, 2000). N. Cawthorne, The Crimes of Stalin: The Murderous Career of the Red Tsar (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2012). W. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflen, 1954). R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). G. E. M. De Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 2001). N. Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed – Trotsky: 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). I. Deutscher, Stalin – A Political Biography (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1972). H. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution – I: State and Bureaucracy (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977) . F. Engels, Selected Writings (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967). N. Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World (London: Pluto Press, 2013). P. Foot, Articles of Resistance (London: Bookmarks, 2000). J. A. Getty, G. T. Rittersporn, V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence”, The American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, October 1993. D. Gluckstein, The Western Soviets (London: Bookmarks, 1985). A. Graziosi, Stalin, Collectivization and the Great Famine (Cambridge MA: The Ukrainian Studies Fund, 2009).

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190 | Bibliography C. Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Verso, 2008). G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1969). E. V. Illyenkov, Dialectical Logic (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977). G. Kessler, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940”, Cahiers du Monde Russe vol. 42, nos. 2–4, April–December 2001. S. Lee, European Dictatorships 1918-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2008). V. I. Lenin, Last Testament, 1922, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/ index.htm. V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of V.I. Lenin (London: Pluto Press, 2008). M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). M. Liebman, The Russian Revolution (New York: Random House, 1972). G. Litván, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression (London: Longman, 1996). G. Lukács, Lenin – A Study on the Unity of his Thought (London: New Left Books, 1971). E. Mandel, Introduction to Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1982). J. J. Marie, Staline 1878-1953 (Paris: J’ai lu, 2003). K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969)–. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume One (England: Penguin Books, 1990). M. McCauley, Whose Who in Russia since 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2002). R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1975). G. Orwell, Animal Farm (London: Heinemann Education Books, 1987). J. Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, 1919, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1919/10days/10days/ index.htm. A. Richardson (ed.), In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings, 1917–1923 (London: Porcupine Press, 1995). B. S. Roper, The History of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2013). I. I. Rubin, A History of Economic Thought (London: Pluto Press, 1989). S. Sayers, Marx & Alienation – Essays on Hegelian Themes (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–56: An Experiment in

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Bibliography | 191 Literary Investigation - Abridged Edition (London: The Harvill Press, 2003), p. 403. J. V. Stalin, “On the Death of Lenin”, Pravda, January 30, 1924: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/ 01/30.htm. M. D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution (USA: Yale University, 2001). L. Trotsky, “Platform of the Joint Opposition”, 1927, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/. L. Trotsky, My Life, 1930, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/index.htm. L. Trotsky, “Fascism – What is it?”, The Militant, 16 January 1932: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/ 1944-fas.htm#p1. L. Trotsky, ‘What is National Socialism?’, 1933, Marxist Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/ 330610.htm. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1936, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm. L. Trotsky, “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt”, The New International, vol. 4, no. 4, April 1938. L. Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941). L. Trotsky, Stalin Volume Two – The Revolutionary in Power (London: Panther, 1969). L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008). L. Viola, “Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 2000. M. E. Wood, Citizens to Lords (London: Verso, 2011). S. Wright, Russia: The Making of the Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1984). G. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections (Soviet Union: Progress Publishers, 1985).

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Index Alliluyeva, Svetlana, x, 4 Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vladimir Alexandrovich, 107–8 Applebaum, Anne, 68 Aristotle, 173 Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich, 77 Beevor, Antony, ix, 106–9, 117–19, 122–5 Beirut, Boleslaw, 139 Beria, Lavrentiy, 84–5 Berlin, Isiah, 77 Blair, Tony, 150 Bogdanov, Alexander Aleksandrovich, 11 Bukharin, Nikolai, 13, 49, 70–1, 86, 93 Bulgakov, Mikhaíl, 78 Cameron, David, 152 Chang, Kai-Shek, 53–4 Cheka (secret police, security apparatus), 28–31, 69, 84 Chervenkov, Viko, 139 Churchill, Winston, 114, 126–8, 130, 133, 152 Collectivization, 22, 57–8, 61–5, 70, 73, 82, 88, 92, 119, 124, 139 Conquest, Robert, 59 Constructivists, Constructivism, 76 Corbyn, Jeremy, 148–53, 155, 159 Cromwell, Oliver, 158 Darwin, Charles, 4 Deutscher, Isaac, ix, 34, 38–9, 45, 57–8, 61, 64, 79, 81, 86, 114, 125, 127, 131, 141 Dialectics, 17, 21, 25, 33 Djugashvili, Ekaterina, 2–3

Doctors’ plot (alleged conspiracy), 144 Eden, Anthony, 104 Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich, 82 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 138 Engels, Friedrich, 104 Five-year plan(s), 58, 62–3, 71–2, 74–5 Franco, General, 106–7 Fryer, Peter, 135–6 Fukuyama, Francis, 172 Futurists, Futurism, 76 Genghis, Khan, 13–14 Graziosi, Andrea, 21–2, Grossman, Vasily Semyonovich, 138 Goldman Sachs, 156 Gottwald, Klement, 139 GPU (secret police, security apparatus), 60–1, 80, 94 Gulag, gulags, ix, 65, 67–70, 87, 90, 124 Halder, General, 118 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15, 46, 87 Hitler, Adolph, xi, 95, 101–6, 110–13, 115–16, 118, 120, 122–3 Horthy, Miklós, 36 Hussein, Saddam, 69 Industrialization, see Five-year plan(s) International Monetary Fund (IMF), 145–6 Iremashvili, Ioseb, 5, 7–8

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Index | 193 Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich, 140–1 Kamenev, Lev Borisovich, 15, 38–9, 45, 48–9, 71, 86 Kaplan, Fanny, 42 Kazbegi, Alexander, 5 Kengir (uprising), 90–1 Kosterin, Aleksei, 63 Kroptkin, Peter, 65 Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna, 39, 44 Labour camps, see Gulag, gulags Left Opposition, 48–49, 54–55, 93, 107 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 155 Lenin, Vladimir, Illyich, xi, xii, 9, 11, 15–18, 20–1, 23–44, 81, 129, 144, 165, 167, 172 Leningrad Affair (purge), 138 Liebman, Marcel, 85 Litván, György, 135 Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich, 11, 77 Makhno, Nestor, 108 Marie, Jean Jacques, 10 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 77 MacDonogh, Giles, 122 Marx, Karl, 8–9, 104, 164–5, 169 Marxism, Marxist, xii, 7–9, 17, 20, 25–6, 59, 78, 96, 104, 163–5, 169, 173 Medvedev, Roy, ix, 3, 14, 31, 34, 55–6, 61, 65, 67–8, 71, 75, 82–3, 85, 92, 106, 113, 116, 140–1 Miliband, Ed, 148 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, 115, 140–1 Mosley, Oswald, 96 Mussolini, Benito, 36, 98, 103–4 New Economic Policy, 43, 46, 56, 64 NKVD (secret police, security

apparatus), 67, 75, 77–8, 80, 124 MVD (secret police, security apparatus), 139 Obama, Barack Hussein, 155 OGPU (secret police, security apparatus), 65, 89, 95 Operation Barbarossa, 115 Orwell, George, 90, 137 Parvus, Alexander, ix, 25 Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 77, 82, 138 Permanent revolution (theory of), ix, 25–6, 51–2 Poincare, Raymond, 74 Political trial, see Show trial(s) Primo de Rivera, General, 104 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich, 138 Proletkult, 77 Purge, purges, 87, 93–4, 109, 116, 123, 126, 137–9, 141, 144 Rákosi, Mátyás, 139 Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich, 94 Red Army, ix, 19, 92–4, 116–17, 137, 143 Reed, John, x, 19, 170 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 114, 127–8 Roper, Brian, 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 156–67 Rubin, Isaak Illich, 74–5 Rykov, Alexei Ivanovich, 49, 70, 86 Ryutin, Martemyan Nikitich, 88 Serge, Victor, 67 Shakhty affair, 71 Shays’ rebellion, 159 Shlyapnikov, Alexander, 15 Shostakovich, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, 138 Show trial(s), 71, 73–4, 82, 139 Smith, Adam, 171 Socialism in one country (theory of), 25–7, 52, 60, 125, 141

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194 | Index Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, x, 67, 80, 83, 91–2 Soviets (workers’ councils), 17, 21, 107, 135, 165, 167–70 Stalingrad (battle of), 119–22 Ste. Croix, Geoffrey de, 157 Sudrabs Jan, 28–9 Symbolists, symbolism, 76 Syriza, 146–8, 152–3, 155, 156, 159 Syrtsov, Sergei Ivanovich, 89 Tacitus, 78 Talabani, Jalal, 69 Tamm, Igor, 75 Teikvovo (strike), 89, 92 Thälmann, Ernst, 101 Tito, Marshall, 131–2, 139 Tomsky, Mikhail Pavlovich, 49, 70 Trotsky, Leon, viii, ix, xi, xii, 2–3, 10–11, 13, 16, 18–19, 25–7, 33, 35, 37–40, 44–6, 48–9,

51–2, 57, 71, 75, 77, 81, 93–4, 96–102, 107–8 Tsipras, Alex, 152 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 77 Tukhachevsky, General, 86, 94 Vichuga (uprising), 89 Voroshilov, Kliment Yefremovich, 140 Warsaw Ghetto (uprising), 143 War Communism (policy of), 43, 46 WikiLeaks, 130 Zedong, Mao, 54 Zhukov, Marshall, 119, 121, 137 Zinoviev, Grigory Yevseevich, 32, 38–9, 45, 48–9, 71, 86, 100 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 78