The Russian revolution, its degeneration and the collapse of Stalinism
The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe is a crucial time for socialists to discuss the nature of the USSR, why the regimes fell, the subsequent consequences this had for the labour and socialist movement in Europe and internationally, and crucially what lessons can we learn to arm us in the campaign for socialism today.
Luke Ivory – International Socialists
In the early 20th century the capitalist system had already outlived any usefulness that it had previously served for humanity. The working class and poor had already ceased to reap any further benefits which capitalism had provided such as advances in areas like science, technology, education, medicine etc. The main feature of capitalism was now the era of imperialism, culminating in the Great War.
Just as the sweeping away of the old feudal regimes and the heralding in of capitalism had achieved great advancements for humanity, the greatest issue of the day for the poor and oppressed was the need to rise up again in order to fight for and win a new political and economic system which distributed power and wealth to the masses. This would then – as it would now – lead humanity to being able to pull together its resources in order to achieve the needs and aspirations of humanity as a whole.
It was the downtrodden Russian masses – the most exploited, oppressed, and ruthlessly sacrificed of all during the Great War – that achieved this heroic feat. Socialists could see that this opened the door for a wave of revolution to sweep away capitalism right across Europe. Socialists were however divided – around the question of reform or revolution – on whether this would be a good thing.
Many on the ‘soft’ or ‘reformist’ left have always opposed the events of October 1917, often on the grounds that revolution, or Marxist theory itself, is violent and / or can lead to greater harm. Such analyses are weak in a number of ways. Marxists believe in the attainment of power for the working class to be achieved in the most peaceful way possible. The difference between Marxists and other socialists, lefts or progressives is that we have a fully rounded out analysis rather than a naïve and confused understanding of exactly how the capitalist state functions, and how the ruling class use the power of the state in order to use any methods they feel they possibly can in order to hold onto their power and wealth. This means the working class must always be prepared and organised in order to protect themselves from the full force of the state. Most of the October revolution – certainly in the capital Petrograd from where the most accurate accounts exist – was actually very peaceful. Due to the sheer volume of the masses involved in the uprising the ruling class were left helpless and put up little resistance.
The best example of why workers need to be armed during turbulent periods of class struggle is the period of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, when the ruling class was backed by invading imperialist armies from over 20 countries. Reformists have normally argued – including in Russia at the time – that the main priority pre October was the defence of the democratic gains made during the February Revolution where powers were transferred to the Duma (Russian Parliament), arguing that the October Revolution was excessive, unnecessary and counter productive. However the ruling classes do not allow power to be wrestled from them without a fight and there always remains a likelihood that they will revert to counter revolution and military coup when their material interests are threatened – especially if they sense a weakness in their opponents. This has been witnessed on countless occasions in Latin America – as well as other areas – most famously during Salvador Allende’s Socialist / Liberal coalition in Chile, where the revolutionary movement of the masses alongside the government was drowned in blood; an event made possible precisely because the masses were not armed by their reformist leadership.
This was likewise the case in Russia between the 1917 revolutions when reaction, with general Kornilov as figurehead, attempted one coup and were mobilising for another, in order to crush the gains made by the February Revolution. The emerging bourgeois class were still too weak to establish and maintain a liberal capitalist system. They could not rely on their class counterparts in Western Europe because the interests of Western capital were intertwined with the Tsarist regime. Kerensky’s coalition of a Liberal government supported by reformist Socialists was also rapidly losing most of their support from the working class, who were increasingly being pushed to breaking point and alienated by the coalition’s further cuts to living conditions and insistence on the continuation of the war. The advanced workers were joining the Bolsheviks in their thousands. Bolshevik membership in Petrograd between February and April grew from between 2000 – 3000 to 16 000, and nationally membership between April and July membership grew from 79 000 to 200 000. The most advanced workers were even growing impatient with the Bolsheviks and were threatening to revolt during the turbulent ‘July Days’. However the astute leadership of Lenin and Trotsky managed to persuade them to wait until further support could be gained, especially from the peasantry, because analysing events from the revolution of 1906 showed a premature uprising would have been fatal.
Helplessly outflanked to the left and right there was no chance of the Kerensky Government lasting in power for any period of time. The reformist Socialists had made the mistake of lagging behind the more militant workers, largely because they fail to understand the nature of the consciousness of the working class and how quickly this can change. It was apparent just to the Bolsheviks that the only way of preserving the gains of the February Revolution was to lead the now revolutionary workers, who were conscious that the one single way to prevent the Kornilov counter revolution from brutally crushing the movement was to go all the way and take power into the hands of the working class and peasantry.
Bloody reaction
Despite the incorrect assertions of right wing historians, further revolutionary uprising from the masses were inevitable because of their abysmal living conditions. The militancy of the most advanced workers was often ahead of even the moderate Bolsheviks based around Stalin, who originally agreed with the Mensheviks and never called for a socialist revolution, settling for the protection of the February gains. In light of a correct assessment of the ‘July Days’ and the already established counter revolutionary forces, the Bolsheviks cannot be blamed for bloodshed. They only played the role of the tactical and theoretical leadership of the already revolutionary masses. The finger of blame must point solely at the forces of reaction that were already planning a bloody revenge just because the creation of a liberal style democracy threatened their own material class interests. The October Revolution must instead be seen in the same light as any other popular uprising of the masses that rise up to overthrow a despotic regime.
The choice was between socialist revolution or the bloody reaction of counter revolution. However, during the Civil War, the liberals in the Cadet party and reformist ‘socialists’ of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were to unite with the counter revolutionary forces of Kornilov, despite the fact that Kornilov’s army were originally launched to crush the Kerensky led coalition.
Many of the opponents of Marxism have also argued that the degeneration of the revolution into a totalitarian dictatorship was inevitable; if not that the new regime was a dictatorship from the outset. These slanders whether deliberate or formulated through confused analysis usually coalesce around a critique of the system of ‘democratic centralism’. Democratic centralism in basic terms is a flexible system of democracy which varies depending on the current conditions. Decisions are always taken democratically, before the whole membership is asked to maintain party discipline and abide by majority rule. The numbers involved in the democratic process vary depending on the conditions of the period. During periods where the party can freely operate then as wide an amount of the membership as necessary should participate in the decision making process.
If on the other hand if we are in a revolutionary era and the party has been driven underground by an autocratic or authoritarian regime, like was often the case for the Bolsheviks, then naturally more decisions will have to be taken by a small but still democratically elected central committee. Because comrades’ lives are at threat people are strongly expected to remain disciplined. Merely because during the Bolshevik era decision making had to be more centralised does not therefore lead to an inevitable slide towards totalitarianism. I’m sure the opponents of Marxism would love it if when membership was proscribed they advertised and held all member conferences in city centres but unfortunately Marxists are not so stupid.
The socialist and labour movement have always contained strong traditions of democratic centralism. This is especially striking in the Trade Unions where due to the crucial importance of unity and solidarity when trying to win industrial disputes all members are expected to support a majority vote to withdraw their labour. It would be a fatal mistake if anybody voting against strike action was encouraged to carry through their own personal decision.
The mistake most critics make is to confuse democratic centralism with ‘bureaucratic centralism’, the Stalinist gross deformation of democratic centralism which was the decision making process in the ‘Communist’ Party after the Stalinist bureaucracy completely dissolved most of the democratic structures that existed within the Bolshevik Party and the early years of the Communist Party.
The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy was by no means inevitable but arose out of a number of factors. One crucial factor being that many of the most politically aware and class conscious Bolsheviks were killed during the Civil War. The same war also created many shortages meaning a number of party officials in charge of distributing rations succumbed to siphoning off extra portions to feed their hungry families, thus becoming a privalaged hierarchy. The fact that the masses were completely exhausted after nearly a decade of World War I, two revolutions and a civil war, thus unable to keep a proper check on all party officials was also vital. Possibly the biggest factor however was the defeat of the German Revolution of 1918 when the reformist ‘socialist’ government of the Social Democrats united with the Christian Democrats and the armed militia proto-fascist Friekorps to crush the socialist uprising. If successful then revolution would have spread throughout Europe as there were already revolutionary waves in many countries, including ‘Red Clydeside’, but the defeat left Russia as a completely isolated, underdeveloped state.
One of the most fundamental features of Marxism is that for socialism to succeed it must be international because you ‘cannot build islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism,’ as the old adage goes. This isolation eventually led Stalin to break with any recognisable form of genuine Marxism when he developed the theory of ‘building Socialism in one country’. This alongside the previous erosions of workers’ democracy meant that genuine Marxists could no longer consider the USSR as a genuine Socialist state and subsequently Leon Trotsky created his characterisation of the USSR as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’.
The reason why Trotsky still believed the USSR to be a ‘workers’ state’, albeit a degenerated one, was twofold. Firstly, while power had been heavily centralised, the main organs of workers democracy – the Soviets -still remained intact. This meant that if the working class could regain its previous levels of class consciousness and vitality they could re-enter the Soviets – and also Trade Unions – on mass and from below, and due to strength of numbers they could oust the bureaucratic caste at the top of the system.
Also, whilst some of the gains of the revolution had now been lost, such as workers democracy, women’s rights, national autonomy etc, there were still many gains of the revolution that were still intact, most important being the planned economy. The reason why the theory of ‘state capitalism’ – held by some ‘Trotskyists’ – is so flawed is because there was no element of capitalisms most important feature – the free market – within the USSR. Trotsky correctly outlined state capitalism to be a system with part nationalisation of some key sectors of the economy alongside a free market – basically a mixed economy along a traditional ‘Old Labour’ ideology where there has been a partial negation with capitalism.
The fact that the USSR retained a planned economy meant it was largely immune from some of the inherent contradictions of capitalism such as the ‘crises of overproduction’ and subsequently were pretty much unscathed by the Wall Street crash and the proceeding depression. The rapid growth in the economy of the USSR led to a rise from being a backward, underdeveloped country to being comfortably the second largest economy in the world. Between 1913 and 1963 industrial output rocketed by 53 fold in the USSR compared to USA by 6 and UK by 2.
Planned economy
This rise of the USSR was accompanied by a raising of living standards for many Soviet people. An highly skilled and educated workforce was needed to build and sustain this rapid growth. Eventually one third of Soviet people acquired a university degree and the USSR could boast to have in its ranks a quarter of the planets scientists, pointing towards the USSR having had the best education system in the world. Whilst the human rights abuses and mass oppression of dissent obviously tarnished the reputation of socialism around the globe, the amazing successes of the planned economy – without the extensive waste of the ‘free market’ – proved beyond reasonable doubt that socialism was a superior economic system to capitalism. This would have attracted many millions to the ideas of socialism around the globe. For these reasons, as well as the results a restoration of capitalism would have for the Russian masses, Trotsky was correct to call for the protection of the USSR against imperialism and capitalist restoration.
Despite the initial meteoric rise however, Trotsky was also correct when he claimed that ‘socialism needs democracy like a body needs oxygen’. The Stalinists’ dream of ruling for a thousand years was always just a dream and the outcome of Trotsky’s analysis that the Stalinist regime would either be toppled by a political revolution establishing workers’ democracy, or otherwise by reverting back to capitalist rule was soon to be visible on the horizon. The Stalinist bureaucracy grew increasingly detached from the masses and unable to sustain economic growth. A small amount of people from a ruling bureaucracy eventually cannot successfully plan an economy for people they are so detached from. The workers need to be united in a coherent democratic system and then they can simply work out through basic arithmetic how much of each product needs to be produced for everyone. Massive inefficiencies grew in the Stalinist system.
From the late 1960s economic growth started to decline. The planned economy’s advantages were being eroded as waste in the form of massive corruption from a caste that seemed to think they were invincible, and were more obsessed with lining their own pockets than doing their jobs was beginning to take its toll. Economic output collapsed to 60% of that of the USA, and agricultural output fell to 75% of the USA despite the fact the USSR had double the amount of tractors. A lack of foresight from an incapable ruling caste meant the Soviet economy was not well suited to modern technology and so everything was becoming outmoded. Waste in both material and human terms was encapsulated in some of the world’s best scientists’ careers being squandered working in the creation of a massive nuclear arsenal.
It eventually only became a matter of time before the planned economy would either be given the kiss of life by the carrying through of a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy and establish workers’ democracy, or whether the counter revolution which began with the Stalinist usurping of the revolution in the mid 1920s would be completed with the restoration of capitalism. Throughout the 1980s active opposition to the bureaucracy began to rapidly grow as the lack of economic growth inevitably led to a decline in the living standards of the workers.
Hitherto the bureaucracy had always relied on either maintaining a passive working class – made possible through a rise in living standards arising from the long period of rapid economic growth and with the workers being in fear of the return of imperialism, or through divide and rule tactics such as when the uprisings in Budapest in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were suppressed by troops from the Eastern USSR who were told they were suppressing a Fascist uprising. The masses can only be relied upon for acquiescence during times of growth and decent living conditions. Now with the inept Stalinist bureaucrats presiding over rusting factories and decaying machinery the means of production were beginning to grind to a halt and often did as strikes and demonstrations became far more commonplace across the USSR and the deformed workers’ states (deformed meaning unlike the USSR they were never genuine socialist states but deformed Stalinist caricatures from birth) of Eastern Europe.
Collapse of Stalinism
The question of political revolution was now firmly on the agenda with workers across the Eastern bloc searching for an alternative to the oppressive Stalinist regimes whilst still opposing capitalism and desiring to remain in some kind of socialist system. The surest sign that the ruling elite are feeling the heat in a crisis is when they become publicly divided. If this is accompanied by a united, militant working class with its own independent organisations and a politically advanced leadership then democratic socialist change can become not just possible but likely. This appeared to be the case in the mid to late 1980s when the ruling elite divided into two factions. In such turbulent periods these two factions invariable become one which wishes to suppress dissent with increased force, which became the dominant faction in the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre; the other wishing to quell unrest by granting limited reforms.
The latter became the dominant faction amongst the USSR’s elite and the reforms were encapsulated in the form of Gorbachev’s Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring).
These reforms were ultimately incapable of rescuing the Stalinist system from irreversible decline as the economy continued to stagnate. Glasnost predictably never went as far as allowing the rehabilitation of the ideas of Leon Trotsky and genuine democratic socialism. It was increasingly clear from a Trotskyist perspective that the regime was on its last legs and at some stage be replaced with either of the two possibilities of poltical revolution and workers’ democracy or the counter revolution of capitalist restoration.
Unfortunately differing levels of consciousness were becoming apparent. There were many sympathisers of Trotsky and support for maintaining a socialist system alongside opposition to the establishment was evident on demonstrations and marches with banners demanding ‘People’s Perestroika’ and ‘Real Socialism not Stalinism’. On the other hand there were others, including many intellectuals who began to make democratic demands of a more liberal nature, essentially a return to capitalism. This grouping would eventually find its leadership amongst a new faction of the bureaucracy based around Boris Yeltsin.
Despite a mass workers’ movement involving widespread strikes and demonstrations, often in their tens or even hundreds of thousands, a key ingredient for the successful political revolution, an organised independent party of the working class, did not exist and could not be created soon enough. A lack of understanding as to where to go next, alongside the spectacular 80s boom of global capitalism coinciding with the rapid nosedive of the Soviet economy, allowed Yeltsin to gain support. The momentum Yeltsin was now gaining ultimately allowed him to come to power as large sections of workers began to look towards him on the basis of his image as being the most radical reformer. Gorbachev had now become squeezed with Yeltsin on the reform wing and Ligachev on the Conservative wing. Yeltsin however never actually spoke of a restoration of capitalism in the run up to his election victory – aware this would be met with hostility from many workers who still opposed capitalism while neither having much faith left in socialism.
Nevertheless a return to capitalism was essentially what his programme offered and he duly set about a ruthless programme of ‘shock therapy’ privatisation and a complete overhaul of the state. In his classic 1936 work The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky predicted that if a return to capitalism was to materialise it would be a barbarous and authoritarian version rather than something similar to the liberal democracies in the West. This was borne out with the gangster capitalism subsequently witnessed in Russia after the oligarchs battled it out for their share of the new private industries stolen from the Russian working class, and also in the highly centralised, autocratic regime of Putin and now his new sidekick Medvedev.
The Committee for a Workers’ International correctly predicted that these events would have a devastating effect on the lives of ordinary Russians. Between 1989-98 the already faltering economy lost 45% of its economic output resulting in some being plunged into levels of poverty akin to the undeveloped world, life expectancy falling below what it was at the turn of the previous century, suicides doubling and the third highest murder and crime rate in the world below only South Africa and Colombia – at least fifteen times higher than Western Europe. Russia has actuallt still not reached, in manufacturing production at least, the levels of 1989.
State capitalism
Others claiming the Trotskyist mantle while proposing the alternative theory of ‘state capitalism’, saw the USSR in much the same light as they saw the capitalist powers and so analysed the restoration of capitalism as a ‘sideways’ step. They failed to support the planned economy and susequently never even opposed Yeltsin’s privatisation measures. This led them to believe that the 90s would be a favourable period for Marxists, failing to recognise that the defeat of the planned economy would be a blow to the belief of many workers worldwide that socialism and the planned economy was a viable and indeed superior system.
Events in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, as well as the rest of the world have emphatically proven Trotsky correct to have declared that socialists internationally should have supported the USSR against imperialism and capitalist restoration.
Francis Fukuyama’s famous (perhaps now infamous!) quote about human civilisation now reaching the ‘end of history’ with the triumph of capitalism, and the Wall Street Journal’s front page headline ‘We Won!’ are just two examples of how the global capitalist propaganda machine went into overdrive in declaring socialism to be dead for ever. This facilitated a lurch to the right in the labour movement with the traditional workers’ parties adopting neo-liberalism as their holy grail and the trade union leaders capitulating to the market economy, limiting themselves to politely asking the bosses if there were any scraps from their table left for the workers. The resultant lowering of class consciousness and support for socialism internationally then had a knock on effect on even the ‘state capitalist’ ‘Trotskyists’, who subsequently lurched to the right after they realised that the time wasn’t going to be as great a period for growth as they had expected. Devoid of faith in the working class for the best part of a decade, they held a position of abandoning socilaist campaigning, even suggesting that socialists should not even mention the word ‘socialism’ – because it would ‘scare people away’ from getting involved in progressive politics – before finally being pulled back to the left by the force of events in the shape of the biggest global recession since the thirties.
What they did not realise was that the opening up of new markets and cheap labour for capitalism in the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe & the former USSR, China and then India – an area containing over a third the world’s population – allowed for a prolonged upturn for global capitalism. This further compounded the difficulties for the left to grow and subsequently the working class have been left without a political home for around 20 years. This has led to record low turnouts in elections right across Europe which is clear evidence that while support for socialism may well have declined over the last two decades, the working class have certainly never embraced capitalism in the Western Europe and its popularity in Eastern Europe has continued to decline as people have realised that promises of a standard of living equal to Western Europe were an outright lie.
The coverage of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin was a blatant attempt of the bourgeoisie to gloss over the inadequacies of capitalism by trying to force upon the masses a notion of how free we are compared to the horrors of the Socialist/Communist East. It has failed miserably. Polls broadcast by the BBC during the brief periods when they shed a light on how people in the East actually feel revealed that only 11% of people in the former East Germany think that capitalism is working well, and 2/3 of people want a fairer system with a more equal distribution of wealth. In Ukraine, over the last twenty years those who support capitalism have dropped in number from 72% down to 30%.
These numbers will dwindle further as more and more people realise that there is not going to be a quick way out of capitalisms crisis. The overriding task of Socialists and Marxists today is the creation of new workers’ parties and the building of them into mass parties of the working class, containing a strong Marxist trend capable of leading the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Failure to do so will enable the continued growth of the far right whose advance is never going to be halted by the meek neo-liberal parties whose policies, by alienating the working class, are responsible for their rise in the first place. The workers of Eastern Europe still have a memory of how the planned economy allowed greater security for them financially. A new generation of workers in the West are realising that it is not inevitable that there is a linear improvement in living conditions from generation to generation under capitalism, because many cannot appear to dream of getting jobs on the same pay and conditions as their parents enjoyed.
The history of the working class – none more so than in Russia in 1917 – shows that its consciousness can, and does, change very rapidly. We are undoubtedly entering such a period today. People are looking for alternatives and the potential for the growth of left wing or socialist parties exists. In the coming period tens of millions of people across Europe are going to be moved to fight cuts in living standards and they will be looking for a political home. Building movements and parties from a small and weak position is never easy. But not for at least a couple of decades has the ground been so fertile for the ideas of socialism to grow. It is therefore up to socialists to grasp the nettle.
