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The Revolution Betrayed

The Revolution Betrayed
What Is the Soviet Union
and Where Is It Going?
Leon Trotsky
Labor Publications, Inc.
Detroit

Originally published in 1937
© 1991 by Labor Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 0-929087-48-8
Published by Labor Publications, Inc.
PO Box 33023, Detroit, MI 48232
Printed in the United States of America

Note on the Translation
This edition is a revision of the excellent original translation.
We have corrected a few errors, changed the transliteration
of several Russian names according to more modern
usage, and modified some expressions which have become
outdated in the fifty years since the book appeared. In several
cases we have restored paragraph breaks so that they
correspond to the original Russian manuscript. Footnotes
appearing at the bottom of pages are from the original
translation. Additional notes prepared for this edition begin
on page 265.

Contents
Introduction ix
Author's Introduction 1
Chapter One What Has Been Achieved 5
Chapter Two Economic Development and
the Zigzags of the Leadership 19
Chapter Three Socialism and the State 39
Chapter Four The Struggle for
Productivity of Labor 57
Chapter Five The Soviet Thermidor 75
Chapter Six The Growth of Inequality
and Social Antagonisms 99
Chapter Seven Family, Youth and Culture 123
Chapter Eight Foreign Policy and the Army 159
Chapter Nine What Is the USSR? 199
Chapter Ten The USSR in the Mirror of
the New Constitution 219

viii Contents
Chapter Eleven Whither the Soviet Union? 233
Appendix "Socialism in One Country" 249
Notes 265
Biographical & Historical Glossary 273
Index 313

Introduction
In the annals of political literature, few works have
withstood the test of time so well as Leon Trotsky's The
Revolution Betrayed. More than 50 years after its initial
publication, its analysis of the Soviet Union remains unsurpassed.
A single reading of The Revolution Betrayed will still
yield more knowledge of the structure and dynamics of Soviet
society than would be acquired from a systematic review of
the countless thousands of volumes which bourgeois "Sovietology"
has inflicted on the public over the last few decades.
The events of the last five years provide an objective means
of comparing the scientific value of Trotsky's masterpiece of
Marxist analysis to the conformist and pedestrian works of
innumerable stipend-laden academics and prize-winning
journalists. Who among them predicted even after the
accession of Gorbachev to power that the Soviet government
would reject the principle of central planning, repeal all
restrictions on private ownership of the means of production,
proclaim the market to be the highest achievement of
civilization, and seek the complete integration of the USSR
into the economic and political structure of world capitalism?
But as far back as 1936, writing as an isolated political exile
in Norway (from which he was soon to be deported on the
orders of a Social Democratic government), Leon Trotsky
warned that the policies of the Stalinist regime, far from
having assured the triumph of socialism in the USSR, were
actually preparing the ground for the restoration of capitalism.
It can now be said without fear of contradiction that the
course of events since the launching of perestroika in 1985
ix

Introduction
has to an astonishing degree validated Trotsky's hypothetical
formulation of the process through which the overturn of the
nationalized property forms created on the basis of the
October 1917 Revolution might be realized.
The point is not merely that The Revolution Betrayed was
the work of a genius. What sets this book apart from all others
written about the Soviet Union is the analytical method that
its author employed. Trotsky was among the greatest
exponents of the materialist dialectic which was, and
remains, the imperishable contribution of Marxism to the
development of human thought. The aim of The Revolution
Betrayed was to uncover the internal contradictions underlying
the evolution of a state that was the product of the
first socialist revolution in world history. Whereas for
bourgeois scholars and journalists the definition of the Soviet
Union as a "socialist state" has generally been the assumed
and unquestioned premise of their works, Trotsky rejected
the facile use of the term "socialist" to describe the Soviet
reality. The uncritical use of the term, he admonished, served
to obscure rather than illuminate reality. The October
Revolution, he insisted, did no more than lay down the initial
political foundations for the transformation of backward
Russia into a socialist society. Whether or not socialism
finally emerged out of those foundations, and within what
span of time, depended upon a complex interaction of national
and international factors. In any event, maintained Trotsky,
contrary to the boasts of the Stalinist regime, socialism —
using the term as it had been traditionally defined in the
lexicon of Marxism — did not at all exist in the USSR.
But if the Soviet Union was not socialist, could it then be
defined as capitalist? Trotsky rejected this term as well, for
the October Revolution had undoubtedly led to the abolition
of private ownership of the means of production and placed
property in the hands of the workers' state. Therefore, in
defining the Soviet Union Trotsky deliberately eschewed the
use of finished and static categories, such as capitalism and
socialism. Rather, he sought to formulate a concept of the
Soviet Union which reproduced its dynamic features and
indicated the possible forms of their further development.
Trotsky concluded that the Soviet Union was a "transitional"

Introduction xi
society whose character and fate had not yet been decided by
history. If the working class succeeded in overthrowing the
Stalinist regime and, on the basis of Soviet democracy,
regained control of the state, the USSR could still evolve in
the direction of socialism. But if the bureaucracy retained
power and continued to stifle, in the interests of its own
privileged position, the creative possibilities of the nationalized
productive forces and central planning, a catastrophic
relapse into capitalism, ending with the destruction of the
USSR, was also possible.
Trotsky was aware that his "hypothetical definition,"
which projected two diametrically opposed variants of
development for the Soviet Union, would bewilder those
whose thought was guided by the precepts of formal logic.
"They would like," he noted, "categorical formulae: yes —
yes, and no — no." But social reality consists of contradictions
that cannot be comprehended within the rigid framework
of a logical syllogism. "Sociological problems would
certainly be simpler, if social phenomena had always a
finished character. There is nothing more dangerous, however,
than to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical
completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and
tomorrow may wholly overturn it. In our analysis, we have
above all avoided doing violence to a dynamic social formation
which has had no precedent and knows no analogies. The
scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished
definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages,
separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies,
expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of
development, and find in this foresight a basis for action"
(pp. 216-17).
In the course of a theoretical controversy that was to a large
extent inspired by the analysis presented in The Revolution
Betrayed, James Burnham argued that materialist dialectics
was not a scientific method of historical and social investigation,
but only a literary device that Trotsky employed in the
formulation of striking metaphors. 1
A serious examination of
1 James Burnham (1905-1987), who eventually achieved a degree of
political renown in the United States as an ideological leader of the American

X
Introduction
has to an astonishing degree validated Trotsky's hypothetical
formulation of the process through which the overturn of the
nationalized property forms created on the basis of the
October 1917 Revolution might be realized.
The point is not merely that The Revolution Betrayed was
the work of a genius. What sets this book apart from all others
written about the Soviet Union is the analytical method that
its author employed. Trotsky was among the greatest
exponents of the materialist dialectic which was, and
remains, the imperishable contribution of Marxism to the
development of human thought. The aim of The Revolution
Betrayed was to uncover the internal contradictions underlying
the evolution of a state that was the product of the
first socialist revolution in world history. Whereas for
bourgeois scholars and journalists the definition of the Soviet
Union as a "socialist state" has generally been the assumed
and unquestioned premise of their works, Trotsky rejected
the facile use of the term "socialist" to describe the Soviet
reality. The uncritical use of the term, he admonished, served
to obscure rather than illuminate reality. The October
Revolution, he insisted, did no more than lay down the initial
political foundations for the transformation of backward
Russia into a socialist society Whether or not socialism
finally emerged out of those foundations, and within what
span of time, depended upon a complex interaction of national
and international factors. In any event, maintained Trotsky,
contrary to the boasts of the Stalinist regime, socialism —
using the term as it had been traditionally defined in the
lexicon of Marxism — did not at all exist in the USSR.
But if the Soviet Union was not socialist, could it then be
defined as capitalist? Trotsky rejected this term as well, for
the October Revolution had undoubtedly led to the abolition
of private ownership of the means of production and placed
property in the hands of the workers' state. Therefore, in
defining the Soviet Union Trotsky deliberately eschewed the
use of finished and static categories, such as capitalism and
socialism. Rather, he sought to formulate a concept of the
Soviet Union which reproduced its dynamic features and
indicated the possible forms of their further development.
Trotsky concluded that the Soviet Union was a "transitional"

Introduction xi
society whose character and fate had not yet been decided by
history. If the working class succeeded in overthrowing the
Stalinist regime and, on the basis of Soviet democracy,
regained control of the state, the USSR could still evolve in
the direction of socialism. But if the bureaucracy retained
power and continued to stifle, in the interests of its own
privileged position, the creative possibilities of the nationalized
productive forces and central planning, a catastrophic
relapse into capitalism, ending with the destruction of the
USSR, was also possible.
Trotsky was aware that his "hypothetical definition,"
which projected two diametrically opposed variants of
development for the Soviet Union, would bewilder those
whose thought was guided by the precepts of formal logic.
"They would like," he noted, "categorical formulae: yes —
yes, and no — no." But social reality consists of contradictions
that cannot be comprehended within the rigid framework
of a logical syllogism. "Sociological problems would
certainly be simpler, if social phenomena had always a
finished character. There is nothing more dangerous, however,
than to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical
completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and
tomorrow may wholly overturn it. In our analysis, we have
above all avoided doing violence to a dynamic social formation
which has had no precedent and knows no analogies. The
scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished
definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages,
separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies,
expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of
development, and find in this foresight a basis for action"
(pp. 216-17).
In the course of a theoretical controversy that was to a large
extent inspired by the analysis presented in The Revolution
Betrayed, James Burnham argued that materialist dialectics
was not a scientific method of historical and social investigation,
but only a literary device that Trotsky employed in the
formulation of striking metaphors. 1
A serious examination of
1. James Burnham (1905-1987), who eventually achieved a degree of
political renown in the United States as an ideological leader of the American

xii Introduction
the structure of Trotsky's analysis is sufficient to expose the
shallowness of this criticism. Dialectical logic is not a form of
clever argumentation employed by those who possess a talent
for inventing brilliant, but contrived, paradoxes; it is, rather,
the generalized expression in the domain of thought of the
contradictions which lie at the base of all natural and social
phenomena. Trotsky set out to lay bare the antagonistic and
at the same time interdependent economic, social and
political tendencies which determined the movement of Soviet
society.
The October Revolution was itself the product of the
greatest of all historical paradoxes. The first socialist
revolution began in 1917 not in one of the economically
advanced countries of Western Europe and North America,
but in the most backward of the major capitalist countries of
the period — Russia. Within the space of eight astonishing
months, from February to October, the Russian masses
shattered the decrepit feudal institutions of the Romanov
dynasty and, led by the most revolutionary party the world
had ever seen, created a new state form, based on workers'
councils (soviets).
Contrary to the claims of the liberal opponents of Marxism,
the inability of the bourgeoisie to create a viable political
alternative to the tsarist regime stemmed not from the evil
right wing and advocate of a "preemptive" nuclear war against the Soviet
Union, was a socialist in the 1930s and, during the latter half of that decade,
a leading member of the Trotskyist movement As a professor of philosophy
at New York University, his views on logic were greatly influenced by Sidney
Hook For a time Burnham attempted to reconcile his political sympathy for
the views of Trotsky with his increasingly hostile attitude toward the
philosophical validity of dialectical materialism But in May 1940, after a
protracted polemical struggle inside the Socialist Workers Party, Burnham
announced his break with Marxism In 1942, he published The Managerial
Revolution, a volume which was greatly acclaimed even though its thesis
was plagiarized from The Bureaucratization of the World, a work written by
Bruno Rizzi a decade earlier Burnham moved rapidly to the extreme right
and soon became a political adviser of William Buckley's National Review
Shortly before his death, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Ronald
Reagan Bumham's political evolution vindicated the warning which he
received from Trotsky during the polemic of 1939-40: "Anyone acquainted
with the history of the struggles of tendencies within workers' parties knows
that desertions to the camp of opportunism and even to the camp of bourgeois
reaction began not infrequently with rejection of the dialectic."

Introduction xiii
machinations of the Bolsheviks, but from the historically
belated development of capitalism in Russia. In the "classic"
democratic revolutions of England and France, the bourgeoisie
established its political hegemony in the struggle against
feudalism and for national unification under conditions in
which a proletariat, in the modern sense of the term, either
did not exist or was only in the formative stages of its
development as a distinct social class. In Russia, however, the
democratic struggle unfolded when the social and political
development of the proletariat, created by the rapid growth
of industry in the final decades of the nineteenth century,
already outstripped that of the native bourgeoisie. The 1905
Revolution, the great "dress rehearsal" for the October
Revolution twelve years later, saw the eruption of insurrectionary
mass strikes and the emergence of a great soviet in
St. Petersburg (whose chairman was Leon Trotsky), and
confirmed the dominant role of the working class in the
struggle against the autocracy. The upheavals of 1905
convinced the Russian bourgeoisie that it faced in the form
of the socialist proletariat a far more dangerous enemy than
the tsarist autocracy. The more the bourgeoisie recognized its
own inability to politically dominate the working class, the
less willing it became to utilize the methods of revolutionary
mass struggle, with its uncertain consequences, against the
old regime.
The events of 1917 quickly exposed the political paralysis
of the bourgeoisie. Having played virtually no role in the
downfall of the tsar, the bourgeoisie set up a Provisional
Government that was incapable of implementing a single
radical initiative that would satisfy the demands of the
multimillioned peasantry, let alone the urban proletariat
Moreover, hemmed in by its economic dependence upon the
great imperialist powers and determined to satisfy the
unscrupulous territorial ambitions of the Russian bourgeoisie,
the Provisional Government was committed to
continuing Russia's participation in World War I. This set it
on a collision course with the masses, who were demanding
both an end to the war and the complete destruction of the
feudal legacy in the countryside. These demands were
ultimately realized through the victory of the proletarian

xiv
Introduction
revolution in October under the leadership of the Bolshevik
Party. This paradoxical historical outcome — the consummation
of the democratic revolution through the conquest
of state power by the working class — could not but have the
most far-reaching and unprecedented consequences. Led by
the proletariat, the democratic revolution inevitably assumed
a socialist character: that is, the wiping out of all remnants
of feudalism in the countryside was accompanied by deep
inroads into bourgeois property forms and the socialization
of the means of production.
But there was a heavy price to be paid for the tremendous
historical leap of 1917. The circumstances which had
facilitated the conquest of power by the Russian proletariat
created staggering obstacles to the process of socialist
construction in the newly established workers' state. A regime
which had been established on the basis of the most advanced
social program had at its disposal only the most meager
economic resources. Furthermore, the extreme backwardness
of Russian society — the legacy inherited by the Bolshevik
regime from the tsarist past — was compounded by the
economic devastation produced first by the world war and
then by the civil war which erupted in 1918. If considered
only from the standpoint of the situation existing in Russia,
the Bolshevik conquest of power might have appeared to be
a wild and foolhardy adventure. But the calculations of Lenin
and Trotsky were based primarily on international, rather
than national, factors. This was noted approvingly by their
greatest contemporary, Rosa Luxemburg, who, despite her
own critical attitude toward certain aspects of their policies,
wrote in 1918: "The fate of the revolution in Russia depended
fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have
based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian
revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness
and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their
policies" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution [Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961], p. 28). 2
2 There have been countless attempts to counterpose Luxemburg to the
Bolsheviks, tearing her critical observations out of their proper political and
historical context. Permit us, by way of tribute to the memory of this great

Introduction xv
Just as international conditions underlay the eruption of
the Russian Revolution and compelled the Bolsheviks to take
power, 3
the potential for socialist construction in Soviet
Russia was inextricably linked to the international class
struggle. Only the victory of the working class in one of the
European centers of world capitalism — Bolshevik hopes
were centered on events in Germany — would place at the
disposal of backward Russia the highly developed economic
and technological resources upon which socialism depends.
For Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolshevik conquest of power was
revolutionist, to recall her final judgment on the historical significance of
Bolshevism:
"What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the
kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the Bolsheviks. In
the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the
most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our
time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the
capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of
socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first,
those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are
still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: 'I have dared!'
"This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs
is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the
international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the
practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having
advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in
the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be
solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to
'Bolshevism' " (Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, p. 80).
3. That the choice confronting Russia in 1917 was between a proletarian
revolution and a liberal democratic regime modeled on Britain, France or the
United States is a political fantasy. Had the Bolsheviks failed to seize power
in October, the events of 1917 would have in all likelihood concluded with a
successful replay of the counterrevolution which General Kornilov had
attempted in August. The survival of capitalism would have been guaranteed,
at least for a period, on the basis of a military dictatorship that would have
smashed the workers' movement. Not only the socialist revolution but the
democratic struggle would have been aborted Russia would have been picked
apart by the imperialist powers upon the conclusion of the world war and
reduced to a state of semicolonial dependency. Its level of economic, social
and cultural development would today resemble that of India, where
hundreds of millions of peasants remain illiterate and exist on the brink of
starvation. We might add that if Lenin and Trotsky had behaved in 1917 as
"respectable" social democrats, collaborated with the Provisional Government,
cleared the way for Kornilov's victory and then perished in a fascist
debacle, liberal historians today would no doubt write of them as
sympathetically as they do of Salvador Allende.

xvi
Introduction
only the beginning of the world socialist revolution. Its further
development and completion depended upon the efforts of the
world proletariat. The Communist International, in whose
founding the Bolsheviks played the decisive role, was to serve
as the strategical high command of the world struggle against
capitalism.
The Bolshevik victory was, indeed, the beginning of a
massive international upsurge of the working class. But in
no other country did there exist a leadership whose political
qualities approached those of the Bolshevik Party. The party
of Lenin was the product of years of irreconcilable theoretical
struggle against every current of opportunism in the Russian
workers' movement. The significance of the political divisions
within the socialist tendencies existing in Russia and
internationally in 1917 would not have been so clearly defined
had it not been for Lenin's previous labors. The split between
Bolshevism and Menshevism in 1903 anticipated by more
than a decade the split in the Second International produced
by the outbreak of the world war in 1914. Lenin's differentiation
between Marxism and all forms of petty-bourgeois
opportunism made possible the fruitful political struggle
waged by the Bolsheviks in 1917 against the reformist
(Menshevik) allies of the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Even in Germany, no such preparation had preceded the
outbreak of revolutionary struggles. There, the decisive
organizational break with the opportunists and the founding
of the Communist Party took place some six weeks after the
outbreak of the November 1918 revolution. And only two
weeks later, on January 15, 1919, the murder of Luxemburg
and Liebknecht, with the behind-the-scene approval of the
Social Democratic government, deprived the German working
class of its finest leaders. Between 1919 and 1923, the
working class suffered a series of major defeats — in
Hungary, Italy, Estonia, Bulgaria and, worst of all, in
Germany. In each case the cause of the defeat lay in the
treachery of the old Social Democratic parties, which still
commanded the support of a significant section of the working
class, and the political immaturity of the new Communist
organizations.

Introduction xvii
The prolongation of the political and economic isolation of
the Soviet Union was to have unforeseen and tragic
consequences. Though the state created by the first workers'
revolution did not collapse, it began to degenerate. While the
belated development of capitalism in Russia had made
possible the creation of the Soviet state, the unexpected delay
in the victorious development of the world socialist revolution
was the principal cause of its degeneration. The form assumed
by that degeneration was the massive growth of the
bureaucracy in the apparatus of the Soviet state and the
Bolshevik Party and the extraordinary concentration of power
in its hands.
Disdaining historical subjectivism, which replaces the
analysis of social processes with speculation about personal
and psychological motivations, Trotsky demonstrated that
the malignant growth of bureaucracy, culminating in the
totalitarian regime of Stalin, was rooted in material contradictions
specific to a workers' state established in a backward
country. From the standpoint of its property forms, the Soviet
state was socialist. But the full and equal satisfaction of the
material needs of all members of society could not even be
contemplated in the backward, impoverished and faminestricken
conditions of Soviet Russia. The distribution of goods,
under the supervision of the state, continued to be carried
out with a capitalist measure of value and therefore
unequally. That this inequality — or, what is the same thing,
privileges for a minority — was, at least initially, necessary
for the functioning of the state-controlled economy did not
alter the fact that this mode of distribution remained
bourgeois in character.
The Soviet regime expressed the tension between these two
antagonistic functions of the workers' state: defending social
property in the means of production while at the same time
supervising bourgeois methods of distribution and therefore
defending the privileges of a minority. The bureaucracy arose
on the basis of this contradiction: "If for the defense of
socialized property against bourgeois counterrevolution a
'state of armed workers' was fully adequate, it was a very
different matter to regulate inequalities in the sphere of
consumption. Those deprived of privileges are not inclined to

xviii
Introduction
create and defend them. The majority cannot concern itself
with the privileges of the minority. For the defense of
Tbourgeois law* the workers' state was compelled to create a
'bourgeois' type of instrument, that is, the same old gendarme,
although in a new uniform" (p. 47).
The bureaucracy, Trotsky explained, functioned as a social
"gendarme," the policeman of inequality:
"We have thus taken the first step toward understanding
the fundamental contradiction between Bolshevik program
and Soviet reality. If the state does not die away, but grows
more and more despotic, if the plenipotentiaries of the
working class become bureaucratized, and the bureaucracy
rises above the new society, this is not for some secondary
reasons like the psychological relics of the past, etc., but is a
result of the iron necessity to give birth to and support a
privileged minority so long as it is impossible to guarantee
genuine equality" (p. 47).
The bureaucracy arose out of the contradictions of a
backward and impoverished workers' state isolated by the
defeats of the proletarian revolution. But it should not be
imagined that the force of objective contradictions translated
itself immediately and directly into the monstrosities of the
Stalinist regime. The signals emitted from the economic base,
however powerful their source, are received at the outer
layers of the political superstructure and recorded in the form
of program and policy only after they have been mediated by
the contradictory influences of historical tradition, culture,
ideology and even individual psychology. The crystallization
of the bureaucratic strata into a definite political tendency
which ultimately destroyed the Bolshevik Party was a
complex, bitter and protracted process. It would be a mistake
to believe that those who became the representatives of the
bureaucratic faction started out with the aim of betraying and
destroying the work of the Russian Revolution. Certainly, at
the outset of the political struggle within the Bolshevik Party,
Stalin and his supporters did not see themselves as the
defenders of privilege and inequality, i.e., of the bourgeois
function of the workers' state. Stalin's narrow empiricism —
his inability to analyze day-to-day events in relation to more
profound social processes or to follow the trajectory of class

Introduction xix
forces — permitted him to become the leader of the
bureaucracy without being able to foresee the long-term
consequences of his struggle against the Left Opposition. As
Trotsky explained:
"It would be naive to imagine that Stalin, previously
unknown to the masses, suddenly issued from the wings fully
armed with a complete strategical plan. No indeed. Before
he felt out his own course, the bureaucracy felt out Stalin
himself. He brought it all the necessary guarantees: the
prestige of an Old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow
vision, and close bonds with the political machine as the sole
source of his influence. The success which fell upon him was
a surprise to Stalin himself. It was the friendly welcome of
the new ruling group, trying to free itself from the old
principles and from the control of the masses, and having
need of a reliable arbiter in its inner affairs. A secondary
figure before the masses and in the events of the revolution,
Stalin revealed himself as the indubitable leader of the
Thermidorian bureaucracy, as first in its midst" (pp. 80-81).
The Revolution Betrayed was the culmination of the
theoretical and political struggle against the bureaucracy
that Trotsky had initiated in 1923. In the autumn of that
year, Trotsky had written a series of articles, published under
the title The New Course, in which he noted with alarm the
growth of bureaucratic tendencies in the bloated apparatuses
of the Soviet state and Bolshevik Party. He saw the
suffocation of inner-party democracy as a symptom of the
increasingly independent authority of the bureaucracy over
all spheres of Soviet life.
When this struggle began, Trotsky still enjoyed immense
prestige within the Bolshevik Party and among the Soviet
masses. He was, alongside the ailing Lenin, the most
authoritative leader of the October Revolution and the new
Soviet state. His criticisms found broad support within the
Bolshevik Party — especially among those layers which had
played the most outstanding role in the period of the
revolution and civil war. The New Course provided the initial
platform for the creation of the Left Opposition, which sought
to counter the growing influence of the bureaucracy. The
vitriolic response which Trotsky's articles provoked was itself

XX Introduction
an indication that the bureaucracy had already become a
social force that was sufficiently aware of its interests to
defend itself against Marxist criticism.
Lenin died on January 21, 1924. 4
By the autumn of that
year, the divergence between the interests of the Soviet
working class and the increasingly self-conscious bureaucracy
found its expression in the formulation of a political line
which was diametrically opposed to the internationalist
program and perspectives upon which the Bolshevik Party
had been based since its origin. That the development of
socialism in the Soviet Union depended ultimately upon the
victory of the socialist revolution in the advanced European
centers of world capitalism had always been, as we have
already noted, an unquestioned premise of the Bolshevik, i.e.,
Marxist, perspective. As long as Lenin was alive, no one in
the leadership of the Bolshevik Party had ever suggested
that the resources of the Soviet Union were sufficient for the
creation of a self-contained socialist society. In fact, Marxist
theory did not even attribute such possibilities to an advanced
capitalist country. From the writing of the Communist
Manifesto in 1847 to the victory of the October Revolution 70
years later, the guiding principle of the Marxist movement
had been its unshakeable conviction that the achievement of
socialism depended upon the unified international efforts of
the workers of all countries and their victory over world
capitalism.
Thus, when Stalin proclaimed, with the encouragement of
Bukharin, that it was possible to build socialism in one
4 The Soviet historian Roy Medvedev cites evidence that suggests that
Lenin's fatal stroke was brought on by his anguish over the increasingly
ferocious attacks being directed against Trotsky inside the party
"Krupskaya [Lenin's widow] tells us," Medvedev writes, "that on 19 and
20 January 1924 she read out to Lenin the resolutions of the Thirteenth Party
Conference which had just been published, summing up the results of the
debate with Trotsky. Listening to the resolutions — so harshly formulated
and unjust in their conclusions — Lenin again became intensely agitated
Hoping that it would have a calming effect, Krupskaya told him that the
resolutions had been approved unanimously by the Party Conference
However, this was hardly reassuring for Lenin, whose worst fears as
expressed in his Testament were beginning to come true. In the event, it was
on the next day, and in a state of extreme distress, that Lenin died" (On
Stalin and Stalinism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], p 32).

Introduction xxi
country, his declaration represented more than a basic
revision of Marxist theory. Though he did not realize this
himself, Stalin was articulating the views of an expanding
bureaucracy which saw the Soviet state not as the bastion
and staging ground of world socialist revolution, but as the
national foundation upon which its revenues and privileges
were based.
The Stalinist faction did not all at once renounce the goal
of world revolution; rather, it indignantly protested the
accusations of the Left Opposition. Nevertheless, the propagation
of the theory of "socialism in one country" signalled
a profound shift in the direction of the international policy of
the Soviet regime and in the role of the Comintern. 5
The
Stalinists asserted that the USSR could arrive at socialism
if only it was not thrown back by the intervention of
imperialist armies. From this it followed that the realization
of Soviet socialism required not the overthrow of world
imperialism, but its neutralization through diplomatic means.
The Left Opposition did not object in principle to diplomatic
agreements between the Soviet Union and capitalist states.
At the height of Trotsky's political influence, the Soviet Union
had scored triumphs in the sphere of diplomacy, most notably
the successful outcome of the negotiations at Rapallo in 1922.
However, these agreements were frankly characterized as
tactical maneuvers by Soviet Russia, aimed at stabilizing its
position until the international proletariat came directly to
its rescue. It was understood as a matter of course that the
fate of the workers' state was inextricably linked to that of
international socialism. Moreover, the diplomatic initiatives
of the Soviet Union imposed no obligations upon the local
Communist parties, whose main concern had to be the
maximum development of the independent revolutionary
activity of the working class.
But under the influence of the Soviet bureaucracy, the role
of the Comintern was transformed. The new theory of
"national socialism" soon began to affect the strategy and
tactics of the Communist International. The opportunist
5. Comintern was the name by which the Third, or Communist,
International was commonly known

xxii Introduction
alliance formed in 1925 between the inexperienced British
Communist Party and the trade union bureaucrats who
participated in the Anglo-Russian Committee was encouraged
by the Stalinists in the hope that the sympathy of these
influential officials would weaken the anti-Soviet policy of the
British government. Similar considerations provided at least
part of the motivation for Stalin's insistence between 1925
and 1927 that the Chinese Communist Party subordinate
itself to the bourgeois nationalist government of Chiang
Kai-shek. In both cases, the attempts to cultivate friends
overseas at the expense of the political independence of the
working class led to disaster: the British Communist Party's
glorification of the trade union leaders facilitated the betrayal
of the 1926 General Strike; the Chinese Communist Party's
submission to the leadership of the bourgeois Kuomintang led
to the physical annihilation of its cadre by Chiang's army in
1927.
Trotsky never claimed that the defeats in Britain and
China had been consciously desired by the Soviet bureaucracy.
He maintained, rather, that the catastrophic international
setbacks — like the results of so many of his policies
— took Stalin by surprise. But these and other defeats for
which the political line of the Stalinists was responsible had
an objective impact upon class relations within the Soviet
Union. The defeats suffered by the international working
class discouraged the Soviet workers, undermined their
confidence in the perspectives and prospects of world
socialism, and, therefore, strengthened the bureaucracy. It
was by no means accidental that the annihilation of the
Chinese Communist Party in May 1927, which had been
clearly foreseen by Trotsky, set the stage for the political
defeat and expulsion of the Left Opposition from the Soviet
Communist Party. This was followed within a few months by
the arrest of the leaders of the Opposition and their exile to
the distant reaches of the USSR. Trotsky was transported to
Alma-Ata near the border of China. One year later, in
January 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union
to the island of Prinkipo off the Turkish coast.
Stalin had hoped that the expulsion of Trotsky would
deprive him of the possibility of developing the activity of the

Introduction xxiii
Opposition in the Soviet Union. But he had underestimated
Trotsky's ability to command the attention of a world
audience. Though deprived of the trappings of power, Trotsky
was the intellectual and moral embodiment of the greatest
revolution in world history. In contrast to Stalin, who
represented a bureaucratic machine and was dependent upon
it, Trotsky personified a world-historic idea which found
through his writings its most brilliant and cultured expression.
Even within the Soviet Union, it was not always possible
for the Stalinist regime to prevent Trotsky's words from
penetrating the sealed borders and evoking an impassioned
response. 6
Despite the hardships of exile, the endless stream
of political analysis that flowed from Trotsky's pen, combined
with a voluminous correspondence, transformed the Left
Opposition into an international movement.
In the first years of Trotsky's exile, the International Left
Opposition considered itself a faction, albeit, an illegal one,
inside the Communist International. It did not call for the
formation of a new International, but fought for the reform
of the Comintern and its national sections. Trotsky refused
to abandon prematurely the possibility of returning the
Communist parties, which remained the political home of the
most class-conscious sections of the working class, to a
Marxist program. Trotsky's writings were specifically directed
to the hundreds of thousands of workers who had
joined the Communist International because they believed
that it was the instrument of socialist revolution.
The struggle of the International Left Opposition to reform
the Comintern assumed the greatest political urgency in
Germany, where the working class was confronted with the
menace of fascism. Despite the vast potential power of the
German working class, it was disoriented and paralyzed by
6. For example, a young Chinese student who was won to Trotsky's views
while studying in Moscow described the impact of an open letter to the Soviet
workers that Trotsky wrote in 1929 to refute the slanders of the regime: "His
open letter was widely circulated among the masses, and was warmly
received as it was brilliantly written and full of passion I translated it into
Chinese, and although it lost much of its original fire and beauty in the
process, it still greatly charmed and moved our Chinese comrades, some of
whom began to cry as they read it" (Wang Fan-hsi, Chinese Revolutionary
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980], p 93)

xxiv
Introduction
the policies of its mass organizations. While the Social
Democrats pathetically depended upon the bourgeois state
and its Weimar Constitution to save them from the Nazis, the
Stalinists refused to fight for the unity of all working class
organizations in the struggle against fascism. With the
encouragement of Stalin, the German Communist Party
asserted with criminal light-mindedness that there existed
no essential difference between Social Democracy and the
Nazi Party, and that the former were, in fact, "social
fascists." Therefore, the Stalinists claimed, it was impermissible
for the Communist Party to enter into a "united
front" with the Social Democracy in order to conduct a
common defense of the workers' movement against the fascist
hordes. From Prinkipo Trotsky addressed fiery appeals to the
ranks of the German Communist Party, calling upon them
to prevent a catastrophe by reversing the policies of their
leaders and implementing a united front of the entire
workers' movement against the Nazis.
"Worker-Communists," he wrote, "you are hundreds of
thousands, millions; you cannot leave for any place; there are
not enough passports for you. Should Fascism come to power,
it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank.
Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting
unity with the Social-Democratic workers can bring victory.
Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time
left!" (Leon Trotsky, Germany: 1931-32 [London: New Park
Publications, 1970], p. 38).
The German Communist Party refused to change its policy
and direct a unified struggle against the Nazi advance. Thus,
on January 31, 1933 Hitler came to power without a shot
being fired. Within a few months all the trade union and
political organizations of what had been the largest and most
powerful labor movement in Europe were declared illegal and
destroyed. In the face of this unprecedented disaster, the
Communist International issued a statement endorsing the
policies which it had pursued and absolved itself of any
responsibility for the defeat. For Trotsky, the defeat of the
German working class was an event of world-historical
magnitude. As the vote of the Social Democrats for war credits
at the start of World War I in 1914 signified the collapse of

Introduction XXV
the Second International, the Stalinists' complicity in the
tragic debacle of the German workers' movement meant the
collapse of the Third. In the face of the catastrophic defeat of
, t n e German working class, to which the Communist International
responded by voting itself congratulations for the
policies which enabled Hitler to take power, it was impossible
to speak any longer of reforming the Stalinist parties. It was
necessary to begin the work of constructing a new, Fourth
International.
The Moscow leadership has not only proclaimed as
infallible the policy which guaranteed victory to Hitler, but
has also prohibited all discussion of what had occurred. And
this shameful interdiction was not violated or overthrown.
No national congresses; no international congress, no discussions
at party meetings; no discussion in the press! An
organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism
and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the
bureaucracy demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that
nothing can ever revive it. To say this openly and publicly is
our direct duty toward the proletariat and its future. In all
our subsequent work it is necessary to take as our point of
departure the historical collapse of the official Communist
International" (Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky
[1932-33] [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972] pp. 304-5).
Of all the decisions taken by Trotsky in the course of his
life, none was more irrevocable, controversial, profound and
farsighted than the founding of the Fourth International. The
Soviet regime and its international apparatus of toadies
responded with hysterical denunciations that found within a
few years their finished expression in the Moscow Trial
indictments and the assassinations carried out by the
GPU-NKVD, both within and beyond the borders of the Soviet
Union. But even among many who considered themselves
sympathetic to Trotsky, his call for the Fourth International
seemed premature, ill-advised and even rash. These criticisms
were generally based on the apparent "realities" of the
political situation: Trotsky was too isolated to build an
International, his call would go unnoticed, the prestige of the
Comintern was still too great within the international
workers' movement, a new International could only be built

xxvi
Introduction
on the basis of a victorious revolution, etc. But such "realism"
— which amounted to little more than an empirical listing of
conjunctural difficulties — was of a rather superficial
character.
For Trotsky, the criterion of political realism was the
correspondence of program and policy to the essential and
law-governed development of the class struggle. He perceived
that the role played by the Soviet bureaucracy in the defeat
of the German working class and its reaction to this
catastrophe marked a turning point in the political and social
evolution — or, let us say, degeneration — of the Stalinist
regime. Trotsky's call for the Fourth International was not
intended as punishment for the latest and most terrible crime
of the bureaucracy and the Comintern; it was, rather, the
necessary political response to the fact that the Stalinist
regime and the prostituted Comintern were beyond reform.
By giving its assent to the policies which had led to the
destruction of the German workers' movement, the Comintern
demonstrated that it no longer served, even in the most
tenuous manner, the cause of international socialism. The
leaders of the Communist parties affiliated to the Comintern
were hired flunkeys of the GPU-NKVD, prepared to carry out
whatever instructions they received from the Kremlin. The
revival of international Marxism could not be achieved
through the reform of the Comintern, but only in a ruthless
struggle against it. Thus, the only "realistic" course of action
open to those who remained devoted to the cause of world
socialism was to build a new, Fourth, International.
If the old International was beyond reform, so too was the
regime whose orders it obediently executed. In the Soviet
Union, where the Communist Party held state power, the
Fourth International raised the banner of political revolution
against the ruling bureaucracy. The revolutionary overthrow
of the Stalinist regime was necessary because the material
interests of the bureaucracy as a distinct social stratum had
become so profoundly estranged from those of the working
class that its domination of Soviet society was incompatible
with the survival of the USSR as a workers' state.
The political conclusions upon which Trotsky based his call
for the founding of the Fourth International were theoreti-

Introduction xxvii
cally substantiated and given a finished programmatic form
with the writing of The Revolution Betrayed. Herein lies the
essential significance of this work: As Lenin's Imperialism
had demonstrated in 1916 that the betrayal of Social
Democracy was the political expression of its social evolution
into an agency of international capital in the workers'
movement, Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed revealed the
social relations and material interests of which the crimes of
the Stalinist regime were the necessary expression. Like
Social Democracy, Stalinism could not be "reformed," i.e.,
made to serve the interests of the working class, because its
own interests were tied to those of imperialism and hostile
to the Soviet and international proletariat.
It was not long before Trotsky's assessment was confirmed
by events. In the aftermath of Hitler's victory, the Stalinist
regime and the Communist International lunged to the right.
The reaction of the Soviet bureaucracy to the fascist triumph
was to seek membership in the League of Nations, which
Lenin had characterized as a "thieves' kitchen." This decision
was symbolic of the transformation of the Soviet bureaucracy
into a political agency of imperialism in the international
workers' movement. From 1933 on, the essential link between
the defense of the USSR and the cause of world socialist
revolution was repudiated. Instead, with ever greater cynicism,
the Stalinist regime based the defense of the Soviet
Union upon the preservation of the imperialist world order.
Confronted with a fascist regime in Germany, whose existence
was the product of the criminal policies of the Kremlin,
the Stalinist bureaucracy sought salvation through the
promotion of Soviet-imperialist "collective security." The
Communist International was transformed into a direct
instrument of Soviet foreign policy, offering to protect
bourgeois regimes against the threat of an insurgent proletariat
in return for diplomatic agreements with the Kremlin.
This was the essential purpose of the "popular front"
policy introduced by the Communist International in 1935.
Bourgeois governments which professed friendly intentions
toward the USSR and supposedly shared its hostility to Nazi
Germany were to receive political support from the local
Communist parties. All the fundamental Marxist criteria

xxviii Introduction
which traditionally had determined the attitude of the
revolutionary workers' movement to bourgeois parties and
regimes were cast aside. Parties and states were no longer
evaluated on the basis of the class interests and property
forms they defended; instead, the scientific terminology of
Marxism was replaced with deceptive and empty adjectives
like "peace-loving" and "antifascist." The local Communist
parties assumed on behalf of the Kremlin responsibility for
suppressing the struggle of the working class against
governments which were so designated. Seeking alliances
with the "democratic" imperialists — a designation which
turned a blind eye to the plight of the colonial slaves of Britain,
France, Belgium, Holland, etc. — the Soviet bureaucracy did
everything it could to demonstrate that it was committed to the
defense of the imperialist status quo. In an attempt to assuage
the lingering concerns of the imperialists, Stalin told the
Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, in a celebrated interview
conducted on March 1,1936, that fears about the international
revolutionary aims of the Soviet regime were a "tragicomic
misunderstanding." 7
The Soviet bureaucracy's sabotage of
the revolutionary struggles of the international proletariat
found its most complete and bloody expression in Spain,
where the Communist Party aborted the struggle against the
fascists in the interests of defending bourgeois property. With
the aid of the GPU, the bourgeois-liberal government
suppressed the May 1937 uprising of the Catalonian working
class and thereby guaranteed the ultimate victory of Franco.
7 Commenting on this interview, Trotsky suggested that if Stalin had
been able to speak completely openly, without having to take into account
the impact of his words among the more conscious sections of the
international working class, he might have said: " Tn the eyes of Lenin the
League of Nations was an organization for the bloody suppression of the
toilers But we see in it — an instrument of peace. Lenin spoke of the
inevitability of revolutionary wars But we consider the export of revolution
— nonsense. Lenin branded the alliance between the proletariat and the
national bourgeoisie as a betrayal. But we are doing all in our power to drive
the French proletariat onto this road. Lenin lashed the slogan of
disarmament under capitalism as an infamous swindle of the toilers But
we have built our entire policy upon this slogan Your comical misunderstanding'
— that is how Stalin could have concluded — 'consists of the fact that
you take us for the continuators of Bolshevism, whereas we are its
gravediggers' " (Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935-36] [New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1970] p 277)

Introduction xxix
The turn by the USSR toward direct collaboration with the
international bourgeoisie was complemented by the intensification
of state repression within the borders of the degenerated
workers' state. The inner connection between these
parallel processes is generally ignored by bourgeois historians
who find it politically inconvenient to examine why the
heyday of popular frontism — when Stalinism was being feted
in the salons of the intellectual trend-setters — coincided
with the wholesale extermination within the USSR of
virtually all those who had played a leading role in the
October Revolution and the civil war. The blood purges which
were launched with the opening of the first round of the
Moscow Trials in August 1936 were intended not only to
eradicate all those who might become the focus of revolutionary
opposition to the bureaucracy, but also to demonstrate
to the world bourgeoisie that the Stalinist regime had broken
irrevocably with the heritage of 1917. A river of blood now
divided Stalinism from Bolshevism.
Trotsky, living in Norway, completed the introduction of
The Revolution Betrayed and sent the final portions of the
manuscript to the publishers barely two weeks before the
beginning of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev in Moscow.
The timing was fortuitous: One day after the trial's conclusion
and the execution of the 16 defendants, the Norwegian Social
Democratic government, submitting to pressure from the
Kremlin, demanded that Trotsky renounce the right to
publicly comment on contemporary political events, i.e., on
the Moscow frame-up trial. When Trotsky indignantly
refused, the Norwegian Social Democrats issued orders for
his arrest and internment. The police denied Trotsky direct
contact with his political associates, stopped his correspondence,
confiscated his manuscripts and even limited the hours
he was permitted to exercise outdoors. These restrictions had
their intended effect: for four crucial months, Trotsky was
blocked from publicly answering the monstrous charges made
against him by the Stalinist regime. 8
8. With Trotsky interned and unable to reply to his accusers, the
responsibility for exposing the Moscow Trials fell to his son, Leon Sedov.
Within a few weeks, he succeeded in publishing The Red Book on the Moscow
Trials, which tore the indictment to shreds Later, after Sedov's death in

XXX Introduction
The behavior of the Norwegian government was made all
the more scandalous by the way it proceeded to organize the
deportation of Trotsky from the country. Earlier in August,
supporters of Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian fascist
organization, attempted unsuccessfully to burglarize Trotsky's
residence. After they were apprehended, the burglars claimed
that they had discovered material proving that Trotsky had
violated the terms of his Norwegian exile. The police initially
dismissed their outlandish claims. But, responding to pressure
exerted by the Kremlin in the aftermath of the trial of
Zinoviev and Kamenev, the Norwegian government decided
to make opportune use of the lies of the fascist burglars.
When Trotsky appeared to give evidence at a hearing
supposedly called to investigate the burglary, he found
himself instead the subject of an intense interrogation aimed
at proving that he had abused the "hospitality" of Norwegian
democracy. Standing in the Ministry of Justice before Trygve
Lie (the future United Nations Secretary-General) and his
associates, Trotsky confronted the frightened Social Democratic
officials who were using the testimony of fascist
hoodlums as a legal pretext for his deportation from Norway.
"At this point," according to an account based on the
recollection of witnesses to the proceedings and their ironic
aftermath, "Trotsky raised his voice so that it resounded
through the halls and corridors of the Ministry: "This is your
first act of surrender to Nazism in your own country. You
will pay for this. You think yourselves secure and free to deal
with a political exile as you please. But the day is near —
remember this! — the day is near when the Nazis will drive
you from your country, all of you together with your
Pantofj'el-Minister-President.' Trygve Lie shrugged at this odd
February 1938 at the hands of Stalinist assassins, Trotsky recalled his joy
as he read through a copy of The Red Book: "What a priceless gift to us, under
these conditions, was Leon's book, the first crushing reply to the Kremlin
falsifiers. The first few pages, I recall, seemed to me pale That was because
they only restated a political appraisal, which had already been made, of the
general condition of the USSR. But from the moment the author undertook
an independent analysis of the trial, I became completely engrossed Each
succeeding chapter seemed to me better than the last 'Good boy, Levusyatka!'
my wife and I said *We have a defender!' " (Leon Trotsky, Leon Sedov: Son,
Friend, Fighter [New York: Labor Publications, 1977], pp 21-22).

Introduction
xxxi
piece of soothsaying. Yet after less than four years the same
government had indeed to flee from Norway before the Nazi
invasion; and as the Ministers and their aged King Haakon
stood on the coast, huddled together and waiting anxiously
for a boat that was to take them to England, they recalled
with awe Trotsky's words as a prophet's curse come true"
(Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-40 [New
York: Vintage Books, 1963], pp. 341-42).
After his deportation from Norway in December 1936,
Trotsky did not conceal his disgust with the cowardice of the
Norwegian Social Democrats: "When I look back today on
this period of internment, I must say that never, anywhere,
in the course of my entire life — and I have lived through
many things — was I persecuted with as much miserable
cynicism as I was by the Norwegian 'Socialist' government.
For four months these ministers, dripping with democratic
hypocrisy, gripped me in a stranglehold to prevent me from
protesting the greatest crime history may ever know" (Leon
Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1936-37] [New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1970], p. 36).
Even if one does not consider the conditions under which
it was written, The Revolution Betrayed must be judged an
astonishing literary and intellectual achievement. Living in
a remote village in already remote Norway, cut off from all
direct contact with Soviet citizens, compelled to follow events
as best he could through the press, Trotsky nevertheless
succeeded in producing an amazingly detailed, comprehensive,
and enduring analysis of the Soviet Union. A
profound and critical sense of realism animated Trotsky's
work, which sought to uncover and explain the problems of a
backward country which, on the basis of a proletarian
revolution, set out to construct socialism, but without the
necessary economic, technical and cultural resources. In
opposition to the anticommunist literature, The Revolution
Betrayed carefully outlined the genuine and, in many areas,
staggering advances realized by the Soviet state within less
than two decades of its creation. These advances, Trotsky
insisted, demonstrated the creative possibilities of the
proletarian revolution and the vast progressive potential
inherent in the principle of central planning. However, and

xxxii Introduction
here he was answering the numerous intellectual sycophants
of the Kremlin, the policies of the Stalinist regime, despite
the short-term successes, were intensifying the contradictions
of the Soviet state and leading toward its destruction.
Today, the desperate crisis of the Stalinist regime has been
seized upon by the bourgeoisie as final and conclusive proof
that "socialism has failed." However, the value of these
pronouncements may best be judged not by what they say as
by what they leave out It is virtually impossible to find in
either the capitalist press or "respectable" academic treatises
any reference to the Trotskyist, i.e., Marxist, critique of
the Stalinist sabotage of the Soviet economy. Yet Trotsky's
observations were astonishingly prescient. He anticipated
virtually all the problems which have now assumed a
terminal form, and he did this at a time when the successes
of the Soviet economy inspired the uncritical admiration of
broad sections of the Western intelligentsia. Trotsky's insight
into such problems as the productivity of labor, the role of
money in socialist construction, the dangers of inflation, and
the limitations of bureaucratic planning by itself proves that
the attempt to identify Marxism with the bankrupt and
ignorant policies of the bureaucracy is little more than
slander.
Decades before the Soviet press discovered the evils of the
"administrative-command economy," Trotsky wrote:
"Administrative planning has sufficiently revealed its
power — but therewith also the limits of its power. An a priori
economic plan — above all in a backward country with 170
million population, and a profound contradiction between city
and country — is not a fixed gospel, but a rough working
hypothesis which must be verified and reconstructed in the
process of its fulfillment. We might indeed lay down a rule:
the more 'accurately' an administrative task is fulfilled, the
worse is the economic leadership. For the regulation and
application of plans, two levers are needed: a political lever,
in the form of real participation in leadership of the interested
masses themselves; and a financial lever, in the form of a
real verification of a priori calculations with the help of a
universal equivalent, which is unthinkable without a stable
money system" (pp. 58-59).

Introduction
xxxiii
The Revolution Betrayed also provided, many years before
the word nomenklatura entered into the international
vocabulary of sociology and politics, a concise summation of
the social layers of which the bureaucratic elite was
composed. He identified the real social basis of the Stalinist
regime: the bloated general staffs of the state administration,
trade unions, and cooperatives; the tens of thousands of
chairmen and executive committee members of innumerable
town, district and regional Soviets; the upper echelons of the
army, navy and the secret police; etc. Trotsky attempted to
estimate the share of Soviet resources that were plundered
by the vast strata of social parasites: "If you count not only
salaries and all forms of service in kind, and every type of
semilegal supplementary source of income, but also add the
share of the bureaucracy and the Soviet aristocracy in the
theaters, rest palaces, hospitals, sanatoriums, summer resorts,
museums, clubs, athletic institutions, etc., it would
probably be necessary to conclude that 15 percent, or, say,
20 percent, of the population enjoys not much less of the
wealth than is enjoyed by the remaining 80 to 85 percent"
(pp. 121-22).
Trotsky was remarkably attuned to the realities of daily
life in the USSR. He drew from the Soviet press and from the
statements of the exalted leaders fleeting and veiled references
— to homelessness, prostitution, marriages made for
the sake of an extra room — which contradicted the official
tributes to the "happy life" which Stalin had supposedly
bestowed upon the masses. He noted with uncanny sensitivity
those "small details" of life, occasionally reported in the
press, which exposed the growth of social inequality: the
worker employs the formal form of "you" when addressing
the bureaucrat, while the latter utilizes the familiar form in
his reply; workers make do with margarine and makhorka,
while the bureaucrats enjoy butter, fine tobacco, and
limousines. In a characteristic passage, Trotsky commented
indignantly on the arrest of "hungry women who are selling
homemade berets or cotton shirts on the street," and
scathingly dismissed Stalin's pompous and cynical claim that
the basis of speculation had been destroyed in the USSR and
that it persists only due to "a lack of class vigilance."

xxxiv Introduction
"The economic basis of speculation is destroyed?," he
wondered ironically. "But then there is no need of any
vigilance whatever. If the state could, for example, guarantee
the population a sufficient quantity of modest headdresses,
there would be no necessity of arresting those unfortunate
street traders" (p. 104).
The pages of this work resound with Trotsky's angry
protest against the debasement of the socialist vision by
Stalinism. "The school and the social life of the student," he
wrote, "are saturated with formalism and hypocrisy" (p. 137).
All forms of critical thought are stifled: "Gifted writers who
cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a
pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of
quotations. The most eminent artists either commit suicide,
or find their material in the remote past, or become silent"
(p. 156). Trotsky decried the brutal repression of the heritage
and development of the nations which comprise the USSR:
"There can be in reality no talk of uniqueness of national
culture when one and the same conductor's baton, or rather
one and the same police club, undertakes to regulate all the
intellectual activities of all the peoples of the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, or Tiurk newspapers
and books are only translations of the bureaucratic
imperatives into the language of the corresponding nationality"
(p. 150).
Protesting the witless and uncritical descriptions of Soviet
life provided by "radical tourists" like George Bernard Shaw
and the indefatigable Sidney and Beatrice Webb — who
visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of the bureaucracy
and were provided with deluxe accommodations at every stop
on their stage-managed tours — Trotsky admitted that he
found it "impossible not to be indignant at the passive and
essentially indifferent optimism of those who shut their eyes
to the growth of social contradictions, and comfort themselves
with visions of the future, the key to which they respectfully
propose to leave in the hands of the bureaucracy" (p. 135).
Trotsky insisted that the survival of the USSR and its
progress along socialist lines depended upon two interconnected
developments: the resurgence of the revolutionary
movement of the working class in the major centers of world

Introduction
XXXV
imperialism and the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy
by the Soviet working class. But in the absence of these
favorable developments, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the reestablishment of capitalism would prove inevitable.
Within the USSR, the bureaucracy, Trotsky warned, was
the principal social source of counterrevolution. Here it is
necessary to consider briefly his sociological appraisal of the
bureaucracy. On numerous occasions he strenuously objected
to popular definitions of the bureaucracy as a new ruling
class. For Trotsky, the term class was a scientific concept, not
a verbal epithet. From the standpoint of Marxism, a class is
essentially distinguished by its independent roots in the
economic structure of society. Its existence is bound up with
historically specific forms of property and relations of
production, which, in turn, are embodied in the activities of
this social stratum. Within the Soviet Union, however, the
bureaucracy, despite its political power, did not represent
such a historical force. The property forms which prevailed
in the USSR had been produced by a proletarian revolution;
the proletariat, not the bureaucracy, provided the mass
foundation of the new property forms. The bureaucracy
attached itself to these new property forms and, on the basis
of its usurpation of political power, derived its privileges from
them.
However, though not a class, Trotsky conceded that the
Soviet bureaucracy could not be simply compared to state
bureaucracies within other societies: "the very fact of its
appropriation of political power in a country where the most
important means of production are concentrated in the hands
of the state, creates a new and hitherto unknown relation
between the bureaucracy and the riches of the nation. The
means of production belongs to the state. But the state, so to
speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new
relations should solidify, become the norm and be legalized,
whether with or without resistance from the workers, they
would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of the
social conquests of the proletarian revolution" (p.. 211).
Trotsky stressed that the bureaucracy could not convert itself
into a ruling class without first creating "social supports for
its dominion in the form of special types of property"

xxxvi Introduction
(pp. 211-12). But he warned that the social evolution of the
ruling stratum proceeded irresistibly in that direction.
Anticipating by several decades the present political situation
in the USSR, Trotsky declared that the program of capitalist
restoration "would find no small number of ready servants
among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians,
directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in
general" (p. 216).
Trotsky depicted the immediate consequences of counterrevolution:
"A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead
inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus
to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion
between the trusts and the factories within them would fall
away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in
coming out on the road of independence. They might convert
themselves into stock companies, or they might find some
other transitional form of property — one, for example, in
which the workers should participate in the profits. The
collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far
more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship,
if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus
mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic
decline of the economy and culture" (pp. 212-13).
While Trotsky, as we see, did not at all underestimate the
dangers confronting the USSR, he vehemently rejected the
notion that the restoration of capitalism had already been
accomplished or that it could be achieved peacefully and
democratically. Regardless of the initial forms of its development,
a social counterrevolution of such magnitude could be
realized only through the bloodiest and most brutal methods.
Capitalism could not be restored without crushing the Soviet
working class. Thus, the fate of the USSR — towards
capitalism or towards socialism — depended upon, as Trotsky
so clearly foresaw, "a struggle of living social forces, both on
the national and the world arena" (p. 216).
With the completion of The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky
achieved a historic victory over Stalinism. At the height of
Stalin's apparent omnipotence, Trotsky demonstrated, on the
basis of Marxism, the bankruptcy of the tyrant's regime and
the inevitability of its downfall. But the outcome of its

Introduction
xxxvii
downfall depended to a very great extent upon the development
of revolutionary leadership in the working class and its
ability to influence the course of the class struggle. If, outside
the Soviet Union, the corrupt and reactionary bureaucracies
of Social Democracy and Stalinism retained their control over
the mass organizations of the working class and continued
to sabotage the struggle against capitalism; and if, within the
USSR, the working class was unable to create a new
revolutionary organization, overthrow the bureaucracy and
revive the Soviets as genuine organs of the proletarian
dictatorship, the first workers' state would itself perish
beneath the ruins of Stalinism. Having starkly posed the
political and historical alternatives, the task of the Fourth
International was to show the working class the way out of
the impasse created by the betrayals of its old organizations
and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
In the months leading up to the founding congress of the
Fourth International, the GPU carried out a series of
assassinations aimed at eliminating the leading cadre of the
Trotskyist movement. Among its victims were Erwin Wolf, a
political secretary of Leon Trotsky; Ignace Reiss, a defector
from the GPU who denounced Stalin and declared his
allegiance to the Fourth International; Rudolf Element, the
secretary of the Fourth International; and Leon Sedov,
Trotsky's son. Despite these crimes, the founding congress
was held in the suburbs of Paris on September 3, 1938. The
program adopted at the congress, which had been written by
Trotsky, concisely summarized the theoretical conceptions of
The Revolution Betrayed:
"The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution
as a workers' state," it explained. "State ownership of the
means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist
development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the
productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers' state
underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was
transformed from a weapon of the working class into a
weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class
and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country's
economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated
workers' state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into

xxxvi
Introduction
(pp. 211-12). But he warned that the social evolution of the
ruling stratum proceeded irresistibly in that direction.
Anticipating by several decades the present political situation
in the USSR, Trotsky declared that the program of capitalist
restoration "would find no small number of ready servants
among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians,
directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in
general" (p. 216).
Trotsky depicted the immediate consequences of counterrevolution:
"A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead
inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus
to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion
between the trusts and the factories within them would fall
away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in
coming out on the road of independence. They might convert
themselves into stock companies, or they might find some
other transitional form of property — one, for example, in
which the workers should participate in the profits. The
collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far
more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship,
if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus
mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic
decline of the economy and culture" (pp. 212-13).
While Trotsky, as we see, did not at all underestimate the
dangers confronting the USSR, he vehemently rejected the
notion that the restoration of capitalism had already been
accomplished or that it could be achieved peacefully and
democratically. Regardless of the initial forms of its development,
a social counterrevolution of such magnitude could be
realized only through the bloodiest and most brutal methods.
Capitalism could not be restored without crushing the Soviet
working class. Thus, the fate of the USSR — towards
capitalism or towards socialism — depended upon, as Trotsky
so clearly foresaw, "a struggle of living social forces, both on
the national and the world arena" (p. 216).
With the completion of The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky
achieved a historic victory over Stalinism. At the height of
Stalin's apparent omnipotence, Trotsky demonstrated, on the
basis of Marxism, the bankruptcy of the tyrant's regime and
the inevitability of its downfall. But the outcome of its

Introduction xxxvn
downfall depended to a very great extent upon the development
of revolutionary leadership in the working class and its
ability to influence the course of the class struggle. If, outside
the Soviet Union, the corrupt and reactionary bureaucracies
of Social Democracy and Stalinism retained their control over
the mass organizations of the working class and continued
to sabotage the struggle against capitalism; and if, within the
USSR, the working class was unable to create a new
revolutionary organization, overthrow the bureaucracy and
revive the Soviets as genuine organs of the proletarian
dictatorship, the first workers' state would itself perish
beneath the ruins of Stalinism. Having starkly posed the
political and historical alternatives, the task of the Fourth
International was to show the working class the way out of
the impasse created by the betrayals of its old organizations
and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
In the months leading up to the founding congress of the
Fourth International, the GPU carried out a series of
assassinations aimed at eliminating the leading cadre of the
Trotskyist movement. Among its victims were Erwin Wolf, a
political secretary of Leon Trotsky; Ignace Reiss, a defector
from the GPU who denounced Stalin and declared his
allegiance to the Fourth International; Rudolf Klement, the
secretary of the Fourth International; and Leon Sedov,
Trotsky's son. Despite these crimes, the founding congress
was held in the suburbs of Paris on September 3, 1938. The
program adopted at the congress, which had been written by
Trotsky, concisely summarized the theoretical conceptions of
The Revolution Betrayed:
"The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution
as a workers' state," it explained. "State ownership of the
means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist
development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the
productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers' state
underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was
transformed from a weapon of the working class into a
weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class
and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country's
economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated
workers' state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into

xxxviii Introduction
an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing
refutation — not only theoretically, but this time
practically — of the theory of socialism in one country.
"The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it
still remains a degenerated workers' state. Such is the social
diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character:
either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of
the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow
the new forms of property and plunge the country back to
capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy
and open the way to socialism" (Leon Trotsky, The Death
Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International:
The Transitional Program [New York: Labor Publications,
1981] pp. 32-33).
Trotsky noted the divisions that existed within the
bureaucracy itself and allowed that there still remained a
"very small minority" that reflected, albeit passively, the
interests of the working class. But far more powerful and
influential, he warned, were "the fascist, counterrevolutionary
elements, growing uninterruptedly, [who] express with ever
greater consistency the interests of world imperialism. These
candidates for the role of compradors consider, not without
reason, that the new ruling layer can ensure their positions
of privilege only through the rejection of nationalization,
collectivization and monopoly of foreign trade in the name of
the assimilation of Western civilization,' i.e., capitalism"
(Ibid., p. 33).
Trotsky then outlined the transitional demands with which
a Soviet section of the Fourth International would seek to
mobilize the working class for the revolutionary overthrow
of the Stalinist regime: freedom for the trade unions and
factory committees, the regeneration of Soviet democracy, the
legalization of Soviet parties, the ouster of the bureaucracy
from the Soviets and the abolition of its privileges, the revision
of the planned economy in the interests of workers and
consumers, the reorganization of the collective farms in
accordance with the will of the workers, and the replacement
of the bureaucracy's collaboration with world imperialism
with the Marxist program of proletarian internationalism.
The demands, he insisted, could be secured only through "the

Introduction
xxxix
victorious revolutionary uprising of the oppressed masses,"
and the task "of leading the Soviet masses to insurrection"
fell to the Fourth International.
Little more than one year after the founding of the Fourth
International, the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the
eruption of the Second World War, and the Soviet invasion
of Finland led to a sharp conflict within the Trotskyist
movement over the validity of the analysis presented in The
Revolution Betrayed. Prior to August 1939 the attitude of the
liberal intelligentsia to the Stalinist regime was decidedly
sympathetic. Even in the United States, the influence of the
Stalinists was so great that the decision of the aged and
celebrated philosopher John Dewey in the spring of 1937 to
chair a committee created to investigate the Moscow Trial
allegations against Leon Trotsky was an act of considerable
physical, intellectual and moral courage. 9
Trotsky had justly,
if somewhat sardonically, defined popular frontism as the
alliance between bourgeois democracy and the GPU. The
Stalinists supported Roosevelt and endorsed the democratic
pretensions of American imperialism; in return, the liberal
bourgeoisie and the middle class democrats looked the other
way as the GPU slaughtered Old Bolsheviks in Moscow,
tortured and murdered revolutionists in Spain, and kidnapped
and decapitated Trotskyists in Paris. However, when
Stalin, as Trotsky had predicted, suddenly signed his
"nonaggression" pact with Hitler and later invaded Finland,
liberal sentiment turned sharply against the Soviet Union.
It was not the fresh betrayal of the working class that
offended liberal and democratic public opinion; rather, it was
that the Soviet Union had deserted the camp of democratic
imperialism and, therefore, placed itself in opposition to the
foreign policy of the United States.
The shift in public opinion produced a political echo inside
the American section of the Fourth International, which was
then known as the Socialist Workers Party. A faction formed
9. The Dewey Commission travelled to Coyoacan to question Leon
Trotsky, who made all his files available for inspection and submitted to
exhaustive examination that spanned more than a week. In December 1937
the Dewey Commission issued its report It found Trotsky not guilty and
condemned the Moscow Trials as a frame-up,

xl Introduction
by James Burnham, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern
declared that in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler pact, it was no
longer possible to consider the USSR a workers' state, even
one that was degenerated. Therefore, they demanded that the
Fourth International renounce its unconditional defense of
the Soviet Union in a war with a capitalist state.
Trotsky rejected the revision proposed by Burnham,
Shachtman and Abern in the program of the Fourth
International. Marxists, he pointed out, did not change their
definition of the class nature of the Soviet state to avenge the
most recent crimes of the bureaucracy. 10
They studied the
economic structure of Soviet society and sought to determine
whether or not the property forms created on the basis of the
October Revolution still existed or whether they had been
overthrown. If, despite the crimes of the bureaucracy, the
state property forms and central planning still survived, the
Soviet Union remained a workers' state, albeit one that had
undergone a horrifying degeneration. Of course, the regeneration
of that state was impossible without a revolutionary
insurrection which overthrew the bureaucracy. But such a
revolution would be political rather than social in character;
for, once it had overthrown the bureaucracy, the victorious
proletariat would not be compelled to carry through a change
in property relations as it had after the overthrow of the
Provisional Government in October 1917. The revived Soviets
would implement far-reaching and spectacular changes in the
direction of the economy: they would ruthlessly purge the
state budget of bureaucratic extravagance and caprice,
institute strict accounting of the national resources, and
address the pressing social needs of the masses in the area
10 "Those who seek nowadays," Trotsky wrote, "to prove that the
Soviet-German pact changes our appraisal of the Soviet state take their
stand, in essence, on the position of the Comintern — to put it more correctly,
on yesterday's position of the Comintern According to this logic, the historical
mission of the workers' state is the struggle for imperialist democracy The
"betrayal' of the democracies in favor of fascism divests the USSR of its being
considered a workers' state. In point of fact, the signing of the treaty with
Hitler supplies only an extra gauge with which to measure the degree of
degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy and its contempt for the international
working class, including the Comintern, but it does not provide any basis
whatsoever for a reevaluation of the sociological appraisal of the USSR"
(Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism [London: New Park, 1975], pp 3-4)

Introduction xii
of housing, working conditions, medical care, education,
environmental safety, and consumer goods. But these essential
changes, directed by the democratic organs of workers'
power, would take place on the basis of the existing
nationalized property.
Considered from the standpoint of the economic structure
of the Soviet state, a war with a capitalist state would place
at risk something far more important than the heads of
bureaucrats. Therefore, in spite of and in opposition to the
Stalinists, the Fourth International unconditionally defended
the degenerated workers' state against imperialism precisely
because a military defeat raised the danger of the complete
destruction of the remaining social conquests of the October
Revolution.
"We must formulate our slogans," Trotsky wrote, "in such
a way that the workers see clearly just what we are defending
in the USSR (state property and planned economy), and
against whom we are conducting a ruthless struggle (the
parasitic bureaucracy and its Comintern). We must not lose
sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of
overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to
the question of preserving state property in the means of
production in the USSR; that the question of preserving state
property in the means of production in the USSR is
subordinate for us to the question of the world proletarian
revolution" (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 26). n
There was yet another and more profound aspect of the
debate over the class nature of the Soviet state. In the
analysis advanced by Trotsky, the Stalinist regime was an
"abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois
society into a socialist society" (Ibid., p. 11). This relapse
was the product of the specific conditions which confronted
Soviet Russia in the aftermath of 1917: i.e., the legacy of
11. The further development of the war vindicated Trotsky's position The
sudden collapse of the Stalin-Hitler pact and the Nazi invasion of June 1941
called into question the very survival of the Soviet Union. The Fourth
International was not caught unprepared Without retracting or modifying
its irreconcilable hostility to the Stalinist bureaucracy, it called upon the
working class to unconditionally defend the USSR against the fascist
spearhead of world imperialism

xiii Introduction
backwardness, the imperialist encirclement, the defeats of
the European proletariat and the protracted delay of the
world socialist revolution. The Stalinist regime did not
represent the bankruptcy of the socialist perspective in
general, but of the revisionist program of "socialism in one
country." Moreover, Trotsky firmly believed that the resurgence
of the international proletariat would regenerate the
October Revolution and purge Soviet society of the Stalinist
excrescences.
Though the leaders of the SWP minority did not realize
this at the time, the logical development of their arguments
led, as Trotsky immediately recognized, to the denial of the
validity of the Marxist historical perspective. 12
If the Soviet
regime represented the birth of a new form of exploitative
society, in which the bureaucracy functioned as the bearer of
new property forms, then the revolutionary role of the
proletariat was either already exhausted or it had been an
ideological illusion to start with. If that were the case, it was
necessary to acknowledge that the decay of capitalism led not
to socialism, but to an unforeseen "bureaucratic collectivism"
or, as Burnham put it, "managerial society," based on the
exploitation of proletarianized slaves by a technocratic elite.
In accordance with this view, Stalin's soviet system, Hitler's
Third Reich, Mussolini's Corporate State, and even Roosevelt's
New Deal were all forms of this emerging postcapitalist world
order. The predicament of the proletariat, however tragic,
was the outcome of its organic inability to play an independent
historical role in the reorganization of society.
Trotsky rejected these morbid conclusions, which sought
to deduce from the betrayals of the labor bureaucracies,
Stalinist and Social Democratic, the nonrevolutionary character
of the working class. If the proletariat was congenitally
12. The leaders of the minority furiously objected to Trotsky's characterization
of their views as anti-Marxist. Burnham, in the course of his
increasingly bitter polemic with Trotsky, insisted that he remained a firm
partisan of Marxist politics, despite his denial of the philosophical legitimacy
of dialectical materialism. However, in May 1940, barely six weeks after his
break from the SWP, Burnham issued a statement in which he declared his
rejection of Marxism and socialism. Shachtman's political evolution to the
right was a more protracted process; but he ended his days as a supporter of
the Democratic Party and of the US intervention in Vietnam

Introduction
xliii
incapable of becoming a ruling class, then there existed no
ssibility 0f a progressive solution to the contradictions of
capitalism. Ever more horrible wars conducted by totalitarian
regimes were thus the destiny of mankind. In other words,
human society had arrived at an impasse. Such conclusions,
so widespread among the petty bourgeoisie, were, in Trotsky's
view, an expression of moral and intellectual prostration
before the recent defeats of the working class and the force
of triumphant social reaction. In the grip of the embittered
cynicism which so frequently accompanies the shipwreck of
old hopes, the dejected and disillusioned petty-bourgeois
intellectuals could not find the strength to examine the
political process, including the struggle of conflicting tendencies
within the workers' movement, which preceded the
defeats. It was easier to condemn the defeated, silent and
suffering proletariat than to continue the political struggle
against the powerful bureaucracies, Social Democratic and
Stalinist, whose policies had led to catastrophe.
That the development of revolutionary leadership in the
working class had proved to be a task of extraordinary
complexity was readily acknowledged by Trotsky. And yet he
insisted that the history of the Russian Revolution had
demonstrated that such a leadership could be created. Just
as the Russian Marxists had based themselves, during the
many periods of reaction and exile, on the historical
possibilities first revealed in the Paris Commune of 1871 and
then in the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Fourth International
based its own revolutionary optimism on the worldshaking
and history-making power revealed by the working
class in 1917.
Trotsky lived only long enough to witness the opening
stages of World War II. On August 21,1940 he died in Mexico
City of a blow to the head inflicted the day before by an agent
of the GPU. Ten months later, as Trotsky had foreseen, Hitler
threw his armies against the Soviet Union. Rather than the
alliance of totalitarian "bureaucratic collectivist" states
predicted by Burnham, the most awesome and terrible
military conflict the world had ever witnessed unfolded
between imperialist Germany and the Soviet Union. The
rapid collapse of the workers' state anticipated by both Hitler

xliv Introduction
and by many experts in the United States did not materialize.
The war revealed the immense productive capacity of the
Soviet economy (which soon proved to be far superior to that
of the German) and the profound internal bond between the
masses and the USSR despite the Stalinist regime. 13
The Soviet armies won a spectacular victory over German
imperialism; and with the collapse of the fascist regime in
May 1945 the international prestige of the Soviet Union stood
higher than ever. Moreover, the Soviet occupation of Eastern
Europe led gradually, despite the initial opposition of Stalin
himself, to the assumption of power by the local Stalinist
parties, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the statification
of the productive forces.
Beneath the impact of these developments, there emerged
a new challenge to the analysis presented by Trotsky in The
Revolution Betrayed. It argued that Trotsky had been too
categorical in his denunciation of Stalin's regime and had
failed to appreciate its residual revolutionary potential.
Despite the mistakes and even crimes committed by the
Soviet bureaucracy, it was still executing, albeit in its own
brutal and pragmatic way, the historical legacy of the October
13 In 1934, seven years before the outbreak of war between the USSR
and Germany, Trotsky offered this assessment of prospects of war and Soviet
military strength:
"In order to appraise the strength of the Red Army, it is not in the least
necessary to idealize things as they are It is still too soon, to say the least,
to speak about the prosperity of the peoples of the Soviet Union There still
are too much want, misery and injustice and, consequently, dissatisfaction
But the notion that the Soviet national masses tend to await assistance from
the armies of the Mikado or Hitler cannot be regarded as anything except
delirium Despite all the difficulties of the transitional regime, the political
and moral ties between the peoples of the USSR are sufficiently strong; at
any rate, they are even stronger than those among her probable enemies.
What has been said above does not at all imply that a war — even a victorious
war — would be in the interests of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, it
would throw her far back But the preservation of peace depends, at least,
on two sides Facts must be taken as they are: not only is war not excluded
but it is also almost inevitable He who is able and willing to read the books
of history will understand beforehand that should the Russian Revolution,
which has continued ebbing and flowing for almost 30 years — since 1905
— be forced to direct its stream into the channel of war, it will unleash a
terrific and overwhelming force" (Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky
[1933-34] [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972], pp 258-59)

Introduction xiv
Involution and the Bolshevik Party. This theoretical and
political apologia for Stalinism was first advanced in a 1949
biography of Stalin written by Isaac Deutscher, an emigrant
from Poland who had once been active in the International
Left Opposition, but had broken with Trotsky over his
decision to found the Fourth International. 14
Deutscher's
Stalin made it clear that his opposition to the founding of the
Fourth International was not, as he had claimed at the time,
the product of merely tactical differences over the feasibility
of the project. It was rooted in an entirely opposed appraisal
of the nature of the Stalinist regime.
Deutscher rejected Trotsky's insistence on the counterrevolutionary
character of the Stalinist regime. He believed
neither that it represented an instrument of imperialism
within the Soviet and international workers' movement nor
that the Stalinist bureaucracy was preparing the ground for
the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. Furthermore,
Stalin was not, as Trotsky had proclaimed, the
"gravedigger of the revolution." Deutscher wrote that Stalin
belonged "to the breed of the great revolutionary despots, to
which Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon belonged.... He
is great, if his stature is measured by the scope of his
endeavors, the sweep of his actions, the vastness of the stage
he has dominated. He is revolutionary, not in the sense that
he has remained true to all the original ideas of the
revolution, but because he has put into practice a fundamentally
new principle of social organization..." (Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin: A Political Biography [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1949], pp. 565-66).
In the context of the complex and difficult situation which
confronted the Trotskyist movement in the aftermath of
World War II, the views of Isaac Deutscher found a response
and were programmatically formulated by Michel Pablo and
Ernest Mandel, who were then the principal leaders of the
International Secretariat of the Fourth International in
14. In the concluding volume of his later biography of Trotsky, Deutscher
acknowledged that he had authored the arguments against the founding of
the Fourth International advanced by two Polish delegates at the 1938
conference [See The Prophet Outcast, Vintage, p 421.]

xlvi Introduction
Europe. The orthodox Trotskyist perspective seemed to them
highly problematic in the light of postwar developments. Was
it not true, they asked, that the international prestige of the
Soviet regime and the authority of the local Communist
parties were, despite all their crimes and betrayals, greater
than ever? Was it also not true that the overturns of capitalist
property in Eastern Europe were the product not of
proletarian revolutions modeled on 1917 but of the intervention
of the Red Army? Did this not mean that the Soviet
bureaucracy could still play a historically progressive and
even revolutionary role? The outcome of these impressionist
and skeptical speculations was a fundamental revision of the
Trotskyist program that had been developed on the basis of
The Revolution Betrayed. They decided that (1) Soviet
bureaucracy was not an agency of imperialism within the
workers' movement, but its revolutionary adversary; (2) the
Stalinist regime was not a historical regression produced by
the defeats of the international proletariat, but a necessary
and legitimate form of the development of socialism; and (3)
the East European regimes, created under the aegis of the
Soviet bureaucracy, were the historical prototypes of "deformed
workers' states" through which socialism was to be
realized in the course of several centuries.
While the practical political conclusions drawn by Pablo
and Mandel were, on the surface, quite different from those
formulated a decade earlier by Burnham and Shachtman,
their underlying historical perspective was, on a more
profound level, strikingly similar. Both theories rejected the
independent and creative historical role attributed by Marxism
to the working class. While advancing different conceptions
of the character of "postcapitalist" society — totalitariancollectivist
"managerial societies" (Burnham-Shachtman) or
socialist "deformed workers' states" (Pablo-Mandel) — they
agreed that the decisive instrument of the historical transformation
was the bureaucratic elite.
In the formulation of their perspectives, Pablo and Mandel
made the mistake of drawing sweeping theoretical generalizations
from specific political events which they artificially
detached from their international and historical context.
Thus, they attributed great progressive significance to the

Introduction xlvii
Stalinists' expropriation of bourgeois property in Eastern
Europe, while forgetfully, or perhaps conveniently, ignoring
the role played by the Kremlin in sabotaging the revolutionary
movement of the Western European proletariat in the
closing period and immediate aftermath of World War II.
They overlooked the fact that the changes in property
relations carried out bureaucratically in Eastern Europe did
not substantially challenge and, in many respects, fortified
the political accords agreed upon by the Kremlin and the
imperialists at Yalta and Potsdam. More significantly, the
bureaucratic expropriation of the bourgeoisie in territories
occupied by the Soviet Army was accompanied by the ruthless
suppression of all independent and revolutionary political
activity of the working class.
Considered solely within the framework of Eastern European
conditions — that is, abstracted from the international
and historical context — the measures undertaken at the
instigation of the Kremlin were of a progressive character.
But the fact that the regimes erected by the Stalinists in
Eastern Europe following World War II were undoubtedly
superior to the military-fascist regimes of Horthy in Hungary,
Pilsudski in Poland, and Antonescu in Romania, not to
mention those of the other assorted Balkan monarchs, did
not mean that they represented either a legitimate historical
alternative to genuine proletarian revolutions or a new point
of departure in the social development of mankind. Indeed,
to the extent that the postwar policies of the Kremlin
undermined the revolutionary initiative of the working class
internationally and thereby contributed to the stabilization
of the world capitalist order, the balance sheet of events in
Eastern Europe was decidedly negative.
In a brilliant anticipation of the postwar situation, Trotsky
had made precisely this point in late 1939 when he assessed
the political implications of the expropriations carried out in
the territory occupied by the Soviet army following the
invasion of Poland:
"In order to gain the possibility of occupying Poland
through a military alliance with Hitler, the Kremlin for a long
time deceived and continues to deceive the masses in the
USSR and in the whole world, and has thereby brought about

xlviii Introduction
the complete disorganization of,the ranks of its own
Communist International. The primary political criterion for
us is not the transformation of property relations in this or
another area, however important these may be in themselves,
but rather the change in the consciousness and organization
of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for
defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones.
From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics
of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary
character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to
the world revolution....
"The statification of the means of production is, as we said,
a progressive measure. But its progressiveness is relative; its
specific weight depends on the sum-total of all the other
factors. Thus, we must first and foremost establish that the
extension of the territory dominated by bureaucratic autocracy
and parasitism, cloaked by 'socialist' measures, can
augment the prestige of the Kremlin, engender illusions
concerning the possibility of replacing the proletarian revolution
by bureaucratic maneuvers, and so on. This evil by far
outweighs the progressive content of Stalinist reforms in
Poland. In order that nationalized property in the occupied
areas, as well as in the USSR, becomes a basis for genuinely
progressive, that is to say socialist development, it is
necessary to overthrow the Moscow bureaucracy. Our program
retains, consequently, all its validity" (Trotsky, In
Defence of Marxism, pp. 23-24).
When Trotsky wrote those lines he did not expect that the
extension of bureaucratic autocracy and parasitism would
engender illusions about the "progressive" nature of Stalinism
within the leadership of the Fourth International.
"Objective socialist reality," Pablo and Mandel wrote in the
early 1950s, "consists essentially of the capitalist regime and
the Stalinist world" — thereby dismissing the working class
and its class struggle as significant, let alone independent
and decisive, factors in the historical process. This view of
social reality was incompatible with the conception that the
future of mankind depended upon the construction of a mass
revolutionary party in the working class. Pablo and Mandel
reduced the political role of the Trotskyist movement to that

Introduction xlix
of an informal behind-the-scenes adviser to the Stalinist
parties in the creation of deformed workers' states. On the
basis of this incredible perspective — which found its most
bizarre expression in the apocalyptic theory that socialism
would arise out of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union
and the United States — Pablo and Mandel, abusing the
political authority they exercised inside the International
Secretariat, began to systematically dismantle the existing
sections of the Fourth International. For example, when the
leadership of the French section refused to carry out IS
instructions to liquidate the organization into the French
Communist Party, Pablo and Mandel peremptorily expelled
the section's majority from the Fourth International.
Pablo and Mandel found further justification for their
revisions of the Trotskyist program and their proposed
liquidation of the Fourth International in the political turmoil
within the Kremlin following the death of Stalin in March
1953. Not only did they insist that the Soviet bureaucracy
was preparing to carry through its "war-revolution" against
world imperialism; they also argued that it had initiated a
process of progressive self-reform. In the course of carrying
through the historic mission attributed to it by Pablo-Mandel,
the bureaucracy, led by reform-minded elements like
Khrushchev or Mikoyan, would purge itself of its specifically
Stalinist features and be reborn as a Bolshevik organization!
This fantastic conception, like all the other ideas hatched by
the Pablo-Mandel faction, was completely alien to the
scientific analysis of the Stalinist regime presented by
Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. For Trotsky, the essence
of Stalinism did not consist in the specific methods of political
rule employed by the bureaucracy; the social character of the
bureaucracy as a caste whose privileges depended upon its
monopolization of political power determined the specific
methods which it employed to maintain that monopoly. Thus,
for the bureaucracy to reform itself in a fundamental manner
— that is, change its own social essence and cease being a
privileged caste — was politically inconceivable. In words
that brooked no misinterpretation, except by those who did
not agree with what they read, Trotsky wrote: "All indications
agree that the further course of development must inevitably

1 Introduction
lead to a clash between the culturally developed forces of the
people and the bureaucratic oligarchy. There is no peaceful
escape from this crisis. No devil ever yet voluntarily cut off
his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will not give up its
positions without a fight. The development leads obviously
to the road of revolution" (p. 245).
As the political implications of the Pablo-Mandel revisions
became increasingly clear, the orthodox Trotskyists inside the
Fourth International formed the International Committee to
lead the struggle against the International Secretariat's
capitulation to Stalinism. The struggle was initiated by James
P. Cannon, the founder of the Trotskyist movement in the
United States. In an "Open Letter to the World Trotskyist
Movement," written in November 1953, Cannon reasserted
the basic principles upon which Trotsky had founded the
Fourth International. "From its inception," Cannon reminded
the cadre of the world movement, "the Fourth
International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary
overthrow of Stalinism inside and outside the USSR." He
insisted that the main obstacle to the organization of the
working class on the basis of a genuine revolutionary program
remained Stalinism, "which attracts workers through exploiting
the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia,
only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either
into the arms of the Social Democracy, into apathy, or back
into illusions in capitalism" (C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism
Versus Revisionism: A Documentary History [London: New
Park Publications, 1974], vol. 1, p. 300).
Basing themselves entirely on the theoretical conceptions
elaborated in The Revolution Betrayed 17 years earlier, the
orthodox Trotskyists who founded the International Committee
succeeded in producing an analysis of Stalinism in the
aftermath of World War II and the death of Stalin whose
remarkable prescience can best be appreciated in the light of
recent developments. They stressed that the role of the Soviet
bureaucracy at the close of the Second World War was
fundamentally reactionary. "For example," they explained,
"the Kremlin's whole postwar policy toward Germany, the
key country in Europe (its participation in its division, its
regime over East Germany, its diplomatic maneuvers regard-

Introduction li
jng West Germany), aid capitalist reaction and facilitate the
imperialist objectives."
In opposition to the Pabloite glorification of the Stalinist
regimes in Eastern Europe as the political prototypes of a new
world order of bureaucratically-created socialism, the orthodox
Trotskyists declared that these hated regimes were not
historically viable and would themselves fall victim to the
revolutionary movement of the working class. They stated
that the June 1953 uprising of the East German workers
against the Stalinist regime not only demonstrated the
irreconcilable conflict between the parasitic bureaucracy and
the proletariat, but also revealed the shape of future events
throughout Eastern Europe and within the USSR itself. "The
Trotskyists," they wrote, "base their revolutionary perspectives
upon the maturing contradictions between the bureaucratic
setup and the working masses which will lead the latter
toward a forthright challenge to the totalitarian dictatorship.
The East German events prefigure the developments within
the Soviet Union in this respect."
Historical events have vindicated the political and theoretical
struggle waged by the International Committee against
the revisions of Trotskyism by the Pablo-Mandel tendency.
Indeed, the most recent developments have dealt the most
savage blows to the Pablo-Mandel revisionists. The disintegration
of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe constitutes
the most eloquent refutation of the revisionist claim that the
"deformed workers' states" represented the necessary transitional
form to socialism. Rather than spreading throughout
the world and lasting for centuries, the Stalinist regimes
lasted barely four decades. 15
15. We might add that the events in Eastern Europe have been a no less
crushing refutation of the sundry "new class" and "state capitalist" theories.
If anything has been made manifestly clear by the collapse of the Stalinist
regimes, it is that they represented neither a specific form of state-directed
capitalism nor a new form of exploitative society based on historically unique
forms of property worked out by the bureaucracy
On the basis of the various "state capitalist" theories, it is impossible to
explain the changes in property relations now being made in Eastern Europe.
After the liquidation of the East German state, its economic structure could
not simply be merged and integrated into that of West Germany. The

lii Introduction
But history has not been content to merely refute Mandel,
With his own clumsy assistance, it has succeeded in
humiliating him. As recently as 1988, Mandel brought nearly
40 years of pro-Stalinist apologetics to a pathetic climax by
authoring an enthusiastic tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev
entitled Beyond Perestroika. Praising Gorbachev as one of the
greatest political leaders of the twentieth century, Mandel
denounced "the ridiculous theory that the Soviet leader is
trying to reintroduce capitalism into the Soviet Union"
(Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika [New York: Verso, 1988],
p. 129). And in a declaration of political solidarity with the
policies of the Kremlin, Mandel asserted that "if Gorbachev's
reforms are allowed to continue and the impetus is not lost
or reversed: then perestroika will begin to deliver fruits after
a period of time and the living standards of the people will
improve. In such a case, the Gorbachev experience will
succeed" (Ibid., p. xv).
It is hardly necessary to answer Mandel's defense of
Gorbachev against the charge that he is restoring capitalism.
As we have already pointed out, the "ridiculous theory" that
the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy lead inexorably toward
the restoration of capitalism was formulated by Leon Trotsky.
But since the accession of Gorbachev to power, this analysis
is not merely finding a theoretical verification in the form of
a general historical tendency. The deliberate and systematic
destruction of the nationalized property and central planning
foundations of the Soviet economy has already brought the
USSR to the brink of complete economic collapse. The closest
advisers of Mikhail Gorbachev openly acknowledge their
reintroduction of capitalism is being carried out on the basis of a systematic
destruction of the state property
It is also clear that the rule of the bureaucracy was not rooted in forms of
property that represented its own independent historical mission as a new
ruling class Once they were deprived of the support of the armed forces of
the Soviet bureaucracy, the East European regimes lacked all independent
means of sustaining their rule Moreover, the opportunist, parasitic and, to
a large extent, hostile relationship of the bureaucracy to the old nationalized
property relations has been demonstrated by the speed with which large
sections of the bureaucratic elite have embraced the capitalist market No
ruling class in history has ever accepted with such alacrity the destruction
of the property forms and social relations upon which its own existence
depended.

Introduction liii
admiration for the theories of Milton Friedman and the
oolicies of Margaret Thatcher. New Soviet property laws have
been drafted under the supervision of bourgeois professors;
and the economic "shock therapies" being devised by the
Gorbachev regime are reviewed and corrected by the
International Monetary Fund. The integration of the Soviet
Union into the economic and political structure of world
imperialism is far advanced. Thus, all the counterrevolutionary
implications of Stalinism are being practically realized
in Gorbachev's perestroika.
As these lines are being written and the final preparations
for the publication of this new edition of The Revolution
Betrayed are being made, the international press is dominated
by the most recent developments in Moscow, where the
"democratic" Congress of People's Deputies is granting
Gorbachev virtually unlimited powers to deal with the crisis
in the Soviet Union. Only months after receiving from the
bourgeoisie one of its most prestigious accolades, the Nobel
peace laureate is angrily shaking a mailed fist at the
rebellious populace and threatening to restore "law and
order." The sudden collapse of the democratic pretensions
of glasnost vindicates yet another prediction made by
Trotsky: that capitalism cannot be restored peacefully and
democratically in the Soviet Union, and, conversely, that the
restoration of genuine, i.e., soviet democracy in the USSR is
possible only on the basis of an antibureaucratic political
revolution. Or, as Trotsky stated so succinctly, "on the road
to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the
resistance of the workers; on the road to socialism the workers
would have to overthrow the bureaucracy."
9 • 0
Books have their destiny and that of The Revolution
Betrayed has been bound up with the fate of the principles
and ideals it espoused. Within the Soviet Union and the other
countries ruled by Stalinist parties, it was, like all the other
writings of Trotsky, proscribed. Stalin did not attempt to
answer The Revolution Betrayed with arguments; he sent a
murderer to Mexico instead. Even after the death of Stalin,

liv Introduction
the so-called thaw never extended to Trotsky. It was not
enough for the Stalinists to assassinate Trotsky; they sought
to kill his ideas as well. Generations of Soviet students were
given textbooks which systematically falsified the most basic
facts about Trotsky's life and grotesquely distorted his
political ideas. As late as November 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev
delivered a televised speech on the seventieth anniversary of
the revolution in which he did not shrink from lying
shamelessly about Trotsky's role in 1917 and the early years
of the Soviet state. The suppression of Trotsky's writings was
part of the wholesale destruction of the massive edifice of
Marxist political culture that had once thrived within the
Soviet working class and socialist intelligentsia. If in the first
stages of the ongoing political disintegration of the Stalinist
regime the opposition has been dominated by the anticommunist
loudmouths, it is only because the great legacy of the
Marxist struggle against the bureaucracy remains to this day
— but, we are confident, not for much longer — largely
unknown to the Soviet people. If the correspondence from
Soviet workers and intellectuals that now streams into the
offices of the International Committee of the Fourth International
on an almost daily basis can be taken as an indication
of the political renaissance of the Soviet masses from the
Stalinist Dark Ages, then there can be no doubt that The
Revolution Betrayed is destined to play a gigantic role in the
Soviet revolution's resurgence.
But the impact of The Revolution Betrayed will be felt far
beyond the boundaries of the USSR. For decades the
highly-skilled manufacturers of public opinion in the United
States have sought, not without success, to quarantine the
working class and critical elements among the intelligentsia
from Marxism. Their success depended less upon direct
repression than it did upon the activities of the Kremlin
bureaucracy and its political agents. It is not simply a
misunderstanding that accounts for the perennial description
of the Stalinist gangsters as "Marxists" and "communists"
in the bourgeois mass media. Of all the services rendered by
Stalinism to world imperialism, none has been more important
than its discrediting of socialism in the eyes of broad
sections of the working class. The falsification and degrada-

Introduction lv
tion of Marxism by the Stalinists has played the decisive role
in the intellectual and political impoverishment of the
workers' movement in the capitalist countries, above all in
the centers of world imperialism.
But the worsening crisis of the world capitalist order,
combined with the impact of the political convulsions in the
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China, will lead inevitably
to a renewed interest in the Marxist classics. The two great
lies of the post-World War II era — that Stalinism represents
socialism and that capitalism, at least in its metropolitan
centers, is compatible with peace and democracy — are being
shattered by the force of events. Neither the pragmatic
bourgeois nostrums broadcast by the mass media nor the
insipid existential fatalism cultivated in the universities are
capable of satisfying the demands of the working masses for
a way out of the social catastrophe to which capitalism is
leading.
The principles of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International,
so brilliantly expounded in this volume, are destined
to profoundly influence the future course of world history.
David North
Detroit, Michigan
December 29,1990

Author's Introduction
The Purpose of the Present Work
The bourgeois world at first tried to pretend not to notice
the economic successes of the Soviet regime — the experimental
proof, that is, of the practicability of socialist methods.
The learned economists of capital still often try to maintain
a deeply cogitative silence about the unprecedented tempo of
Russia's industrial development, or confine themselves to
remarks about an extreme "exploitation of the peasantry."
They are missing a wonderful opportunity to explain why the
brutal exploitation of the peasants in China, for instance, or
Japan, or India, never produced an industrial tempo remotely
approaching that of the Soviet Union.
Facts win out, however, in the end. The bookstalls of all
civilized countries are now loaded with books about the Soviet
Union. It is no wonder; such prodigies are rare. The literature
dictated by blind reactionary hatred is fast dwindling. A
noticeable proportion of the newest works on the Soviet Union
adopt a favorable, if not even a rapturous, tone. As a sign of
the improving international reputation of the parvenu state,
this abundance of pro-Soviet literature can only be welcomed.
Moreover, it is incomparably better to idealize the Soviet
Union than fascist Italy. The reader, however, would seek in
vain on the pages of this literature for a scientific appraisal
of what is actually taking place in the land of the October
Revolution.
1

2 Author's Introduction
The writings of the "friends of the Soviet Union" fall into
three principal categories: A dilettante journalism, reportage
with a more or less "left" slant, makes up the principal mass
of their articles and books. Alongside it, although more
pretentious, stand the productions of a humanitarian, lyric
and pacifist "communism." Third comes economic schematization,
in the spirit of the old-German Katheder.
Sozializmus. Louis Fischer and Duranty are sufficiently
well-known representatives of the first type. The late
Barbusse and Romain Rolland represent the category of the
"humanitarian" friends. It is not accidental that before
coming over to Stalin, the former wrote a life of Christ and
the latter a biography of Gandhi. And finally, the conservatively
pedantic socialism has found its most authoritative
representation in the indefatigable Fabian couple, Beatrice
and Sidney Webb.
What unites these three categories, despite their differences,
is a kowtowing before accomplished fact and a
partiality for sedative generalizations. To revolt against their
own capitalism was beyond these writers. They are the more
ready, therefore, to take their stand upon a foreign revolution
which has already ebbed back into its channels. Before the
October Revolution, and for a number of years after, not one
of these people, nor any of their spiritual forebears, gave a
thought to the question how socialism would arrive in the
world. That makes it easier for them to recognize as socialism
what we have in the Soviet Union. This gives them not only
the aspect of progressive men, in step with the epoch, but
even a certain moral stability. And at the same time it
commits them to absolutely nothing. This kind of contemplative,
optimistic and anything but destructive literature, which
sees all unpleasantnesses in the past, has a very quieting
effect on the nerves of the reader and therefore finds a cordial
reception. Thus there is quietly coming into being an
international school which might be described as Bolshevism
for the Enlightened Bourgeoisie, or more concisely, Socialism
for Radical Tourists.
We shall not enter into a polemic with the productions of
this school, since they offer no serious grounds for polemic.
Questions end for them where they really only begin. The

The Purpose of the Present Work 3
mose of the present investigation is to estimate correctly
what is, hi order the better to understand what is coming to
be We shall dwell upon the past only so far as that helps us
to see the future. Our book will be critical. Whoever worships
the accomplished fact is incapable of preparing the future.
The process of economic and cultural development in the
Soviet Union has already passed through several stages, but
has by no means arrived at an inner equilibrium. If you
remember that the task of socialism is to create a classless
society based upon solidarity and the harmonious satisfaction
of all needs, there is not yet, in this fundamental sense, a
hint of socialism in the Soviet Union. To be sure, the
contradictions of Soviet society differ profoundly from the
contradictions of capitalism. But they are nevertheless very
tense. They find their expression in material and cultural
inequalities, governmental repressions, political groupings
and the struggle of factions. Police repression stifles and
distorts a political struggle, but does not eliminate it. The
thoughts which are forbidden exercise an influence on the
governmental policy at every step, fertilizing or blocking it.
In these circumstances, an analysis of the development of the
Soviet Union cannot for a minute neglect to consider those
ideas and slogans under which a stifled but passionate
political struggle is being waged throughout the country.
History here merges directly with living politics.
The safe-and-sane "left" philistines love to tell us that in
criticizing the Soviet Union we must be extremely cautious
lest we injure the process of socialist construction. We, for
our part, are far from regarding the Soviet state as so shaky
a structure. The enemies of the Soviet Union are far better
informed about it than its real friends, the workers of all
countries. In the general staffs of the imperialist governments,
an accurate account is kept of the pluses and minuses
of the Soviet Union, and not only on the basis of public reports.
The enemy can, unfortunately, take advantage of the weak
side of the workers' state, but never of a criticism of those
tendencies which they themselves consider its favorable
features. The hostility to criticism of the majority of the
official "friends" really conceals a fear not of the fragility of
the Soviet Union, but of the fragility of their own sympathy

4 Author's Introduction
with it. We shall calmly then pass by all fears and warnings
of this kind. It is facts and not illusions that decide. We intend
to show the face and not the mask.
L. Trotsky
August 4,1936
Postscript. This book was completed and sent to the publishers
before the "terrorist" conspiracy trial at Moscow was
announced. Naturally, therefore, the proceedings at the trial
could not be evaluated in its pages. Its indication of the
historic logic of this "terrorist" trial, and its advance exposure
of the fact that its mystery is deliberate mystification, is so
much the more significant.
September 1936

CHAPTER ONE
What Has Been Achieved
The Principal Indices of Industrial Growth
Owing to the insignificance of the Russian bourgeoisie, the
democratic tasks of backward Russia — such as liquidation
of the monarchy and the semifeudal slavery of the peasants
— could be achieved only through a dictatorship of the
proletariat. The proletariat, however, having seized the power
at the head of the peasant masses, could not stop at the
achievement of these democratic tasks. The bourgeois revolution
was directly bound up with the first stages of a socialist
revolution. That fact was not accidental. The history of recent
decades very clearly shows that, in the conditions of capitalist
decline, backward countries are unable to attain that level
which the old centers of capitalism have attained. Having
themselves arrived in a blind alley, the highly civilized
nations block the road to those in process of civilization.
Russia took the road of proletarian revolution, not because
her economy was the first to become ripe for a socialist
change, but because it could not develop further on a
capitalist basis. Socialized ownership of the means of
production had become a necessary condition for bringing the
country out of barbarism. That is the law of combined
development for backward countries. Entering upon the
socialist revolution as "the weakest link in the capitalist
chain" (Lenin), the former empire of the tsars is even now,
in the nineteenth year after the revolution, still confronted
with the task of "catching up with and outstripping" —
5

6 What Has Been Achieve
consequently in the first place catching up with — Europe
and America. She has, that is, to solve those problems of
technique and productivity which were long ago solved by
capitalism in the advanced countries.
Could it indeed be otherwise? The overthrow of the old
ruling classes did not achieve, but only completely revealed
the task: to rise from barbarism to culture. At the same time
by concentrating the ownership of the means of production
in the hands of the state, the revolution made it possible to
apply new and incomparably more effective economic methods.
Only thanks to a planned directive was it possible in so
brief a span to restore what had been destroyed by the
imperialist and civil wars, to create gigantic new enterprises,
to introduce new kinds of production and establish new
branches of industry.
The extraordinary tardiness in the development of the
international revolution, upon whose prompt aid the leaders
of the Bolshevik Party had counted, not only created immense
difficulties for the Soviet Union, but also revealed its
exceptional inner resources and capabilities. However, a
correct appraisal of the results achieved, their grandeur as
well as their inadequacy, is possible only with the help of an
international scale of measurement. The method of this work
is a historical and sociological interpretation of the process,
not a piling up of statistical illustrations. Nevertheless, in the
interests of the further discussion, it is necessary to take as
a point of departure certain important mathematical data.
The vast scope of industrialization in the Soviet Union, as
against a background of stagnation and decline in almost the
whole capitalist world, appears unanswerably in the following
gross indices. Industrial production in Germany, thanks
solely to feverish war preparations, is now returning to the
level of 1929. Production in Great Britain, propped up by
protectionism, has raised itself 3 or 4 percent during these six
years. Industrial production in the United States has declined
approximately 25 percent; in France, more than 30 percent.
First place among capitalist countries is occupied by Japan,
who is furiously arming herself and robbing her neighbors.
Her production has risen almost 40 percent! But even this
exceptional index pales before the dynamic of development

ipal Indices of Industrial Growth 7
the Soviet Union. Her industrial production has increased
^ riaf this same period approximately 3V2 times, or 250
ercent. The heavy industries have increased their production
during the last decade (1925 to 1935) more than 10 times.
In the first year of the first five-year plan (1928 to 1929),
capital investments amounted to 5.4 billion rubles; for 1936,
32 billion are indicated.
If in view of the instability of the ruble as a unit of
measurement, we lay aside money estimates, we arrive at
another unit which is absolutely unquestionable. In December
1913, the Don basin produced 2,275,000 tons of coal; in
December 1935, 7,125,000 tons. During the last three years,
the production of iron has doubled. The production of steel
and of the rolling mills has increased almost 272 times. The
output of oil, coal and iron has increased from 3 to 3 V2 times
the prewar figure. In 1920, when the first plan of electrification
was drawn up, there were ten district power stations in
the country with a total power production of 253,000
kilowatts. In 1935, there were already ninety-five of these
stations with a total power of 4,345,000 kilowatts. In 1925,
the Soviet Union stood eleventh in the production of
electroenergy; in 1935, it was second only to Germany and
the United States. In the production of coal, the Soviet Union
has moved forward from tenth to fourth place. In steel, from
sixth to third place. In the production of tractors, to the first
place in the world. This also is true of the production of sugar.
Gigantic achievements in industry, enormously promising
beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old
industrial cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase
of the number of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural
demands — such are the indubitable results of the October
Revolution, in which the prophets of the old world tried to see
the grave of human civilization. With the bourgeois economists
we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism
has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das
Kapital, but in an economic arena embracing one-sixth of the
earth's surface — not in the language of dialectics, but in the
language of iron, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet
Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and
the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse — which we

8 What Has Been Achieved
firmly hope will not happen — there would remain as a pledge
of the future this ineradicable fact, that thanks solely to a
proletarian revolution, a backward country has achieved in
less than twenty years successes unexampled in history.
This also ends the quarrel with the reformists in the
workers' movement Can we compare for one moment their
mouselike fussing with the titanic work accomplished by this
people aroused to a new life by revolution? If in 1918 the
Social Democrats of Germany had employed the power
imposed upon them by the workers for a socialist revolution,
and not for the rescue of capitalism, 1
it is easy to see on the
basis of the Russian experience what unconquerable economic
power would be possessed today by a socialist bloc of Central
and Eastern Europe and a considerable part of Asia. The
peoples of the world will pay for the historic crimes of
reformism with new wars and revolutions.
Comparative Estimate of These Achievements
The dynamic coefficients of Soviet industry are unexampled.
But they are still far from decisive. The Soviet Union is
lifting itself from a terribly low level, while the capitalist
countries are slipping down from a very high one. The
correlation of forces at the present moment is determined not
by the rate of growth, but by contrasting the entire power of
the two camps as expressed in material accumulations,
technique, culture and, above all, the productivity of human
labor. When we approach the matter from this statistical
point of view, the situation changes at once, and to the
extreme disadvantage of the Soviet Union.
The question formulated by Lenin — Who shall prevail? —
is a question of the correlation of forces between the Soviet
Union and the world revolutionary proletariat on the one
hand, and on the other, international capital and the hostile
forces within the Union. The economic successes of the Soviet
Union make it possible for her to fortify herself, advance, arm
herself and, when necessary, retreat and wait, in a word, hold
out. But, by its very nature, the question, Who shall prevail
— not only as a military, but still more as an economic
question — confronts the Soviet Union on a world scale.

Q omparative Estimate of These Achievements 9
jylilitary intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap
commodities in the baggage trains of capitalist armies would
be incomparably more dangerous. The victory of the proletariat
in one of the Western countries would, of course,
irrimediately and radically alter the correlation of forces. But
so lo n
§ a s
* n e
Soviet Union remains isolated, and, worse than
that, so long as the European proletariat suffers reverses and
continues to fall back, the strength of the Soviet structure is
measured in the last analysis by the productivity of labor.
And that, under a market economy, expresses itself in
production costs and prices. The difference between domestic
prices and prices in the world market is one of the chief means
of measuring this correlation of forces. The Soviet statisticians,
however, are forbidden even to approach that question.
The reason is that, notwithstanding its condition of stagnation
and rot, capitalism is still far ahead in the matter of
technique, organization and labor skill.
The traditional backwardness of agriculture in the Soviet
Union is well enough known. In no branch of it has progress
been made that can in the remotest degree bear comparison
with the progress in industry. "We are still way behind the
capitalist countries in the beet crop," complains Molotov, for
example, at the end of 1935. "In 1934 we reaped from one
hectare* 82 centners'; in 1935, in the Ukraine with an
extraordinary harvest, 131 centners. In Czechoslovakia and
Germany, they reap about 250 centners, in France, over 300
per hectare." Molotov's complaint could be extended to every
branch of agriculture, textile as well as grain growing, and
especially to stockbreeding. The proper rotation of crops,
selection of seeds, fertilization, the tractors, combines,
blooded stock farms — all these are preparing a truly gigantic
revolution in socialized agriculture. But it is just in this most
conservative realm that the revolution demands time..
Meanwhile, notwithstanding collectivization, the problem
still is to approach the higher models of the capitalist West,
handicapped though it is with the small-farm system.
* Approximately 2 5 acres
f 100 kilograms (approximately 220 pounds)

10 What Has Been Achiei
The struggle to raise the productivity of labor in industry
runs in two channels: adoption of an advanced technique and;
better use of labor power. What made it possible to establish
gigantic factories of the most modern type in the space of a
few years was, on the one hand, the existence in the West of
a high capitalist technique, on the other, the domestic regime
of planned economy. In this sphere, foreign achievements are
in process of assimilation. The fact that Soviet industry, a§
also the equipping of the Red Army, has developed at a forced
tempo, contains enormous potential advantages. The industries
have not been compelled to drag along an antiquated
implementation as in England and France. The army has not
been condemned to carry old-fashioned equipment. But this
same feverish growth has also had its negative side. There is
no correspondence between the different elements of industry;
men lag behind technique; the leadership is not equal to
its tasks. Altogether this expresses itself in extremely high
production costs and poor quality of product.
"Our works," writes the head of the oil industry, "possess
the same equipment as the American. But the organization
of the drilling lags; the men are not sufficiently skilled." The
numerous breakdowns he explains as a result of "carelessness,
lack of skill and lack of technical supervision." Molotov
complains: "We are extremely backward in organization of
the building industry.... It is carried on for the most part in
old ways with an abominable use of tools and mechanisms."
Such confessions are scattered throughout the Soviet press.
As yet, the new technology by no means yields the same
results as in its capitalist birthplace.
The wholesale achievements of heavy industry are an
enormous conquest: only on such a foundation is it possible
to build. However, the test of a modern economy is the
production of delicate mechanisms which demand both
technical and general culture. In this sphere, the backwardness
of the Soviet Union is still great.
Undoubtedly the most important successes, both quantitative
and qualitative, have been achieved in the war industries.
The army and fleet are the most influential clients, and the
most demanding inspectors of goods. Nevertheless in a series
of their public speeches, the heads of the War Department,

Estimate of These Achievements 11
among them Voroshilov, complain unceasingly: "We are not
always fully satisfied with the quality of the products which
u give us for the Red Army." It is not hard to sense the
^jxjety which these cautious words conceal.
The products of machine-manufacture, says the head of
heavy industry in an official report, "must be of good quality
and unfortunately are not." And again: "Machines with us
are expensive." As always the speaker refrains from giving
accurate comparative data in relation to world production.
The tractor is the pride of Soviet industry. But the
coefficient of effective use of the tractors is very low. During
the last industrial year, it was necessary to subject eighty-one
percent of the tractors to capital repairs. A considerable
number of them, moreover, broke down again at the very
height of the tilling season. According to certain calculations,
the machine and tractor stations will cover expenses only
with a harvest of twenty to twenty-two centners of grain per
hectare. At present, when the average harvest is less than
half of that, the state is compelled to spend billions to cover
the deficits.
Things are still worse in the sphere of auto transport. In
America a truck travels sixty to eighty, or even a hundred
thousand kilometers a year; in the Soviet Union, only twenty
thousand — that is, a third or a fourth as much. Out of every
one hundred machines, only fifty-five are working; the rest
are undergoing repairs or awaiting them. The cost of repairs
is double the cost of all the new machines put out. It is no
wonder that the state accounting office reports: "Auto
transport is nothing but a heavy burden on the cost of
production."
The increase of carrying power of the railroads is
accompanied, according to the chairman of the Council of
People's Commissars, "by innumerable derailments and
breakdowns." The fundamental cause is the same: low skill
of labor inherited from the past. The struggle to keep the
switches in neat condition is becoming in its way a heroic
exploit, about which prize switchgirls make reports in the
Kremlin to the highest circles of power. Water transport,
notwithstanding the progress of recent years, is far behind
that of the railroads. Periodically the newspapers are

12 What Has Been Achieved
speckled with communications about "the abominable operation
of marine transport," "extremely low quality of ship
repairs," etc.
In the light industries, the situation is even less favorable
than in the heavy. A unique law of Soviet industry may be
formulated thus: commodities are as a general rule worse the
nearer they stand to the mass consumer. In the textile
industry, according to Pravda, "there is a shamefully large
percentage of defective goods, poverty of selection, predominance
of low grades." Complaints of the bad quality of articles
of wide consumption appear periodically in the press: "clumsy
ironware"; "ugly furniture, badly put together and carelessly
finished"; "you can't find decent buttons"; "the system of
social food supply works absolutely unsatisfactorily." And
so on endlessly.
To characterize industrial progress by quantitative indices
alone, without considering quality, is almost like describing
a man's physique by his height and disregarding his chest
measurements. Moreover, to judge correctly the dynamic of
Soviet industry, it is necessary, along with qualitative
corrections, to have always in mind the fact that swift
progress in some branches is accompanied by backwardness
in others. The creation of gigantic automobile factories is paid
for in the scarcity and bad maintenance of the highways.
"The dilapidation of our roads is extraordinary. On our most
important highway — Moscow to Yaroslavl — automobiles
can make only ten kilometers [six miles] an hour" (Izvestia).
The chairman of the State Planning Commission asserts that
the country still maintains "the traditions of age-old roadlessness."
Municipal economy is in a similar condition. New industrial
towns arise in a brief span; at the same time dozens of old
towns are running to seed. The capitals and industrial centers
are growing and adorning themselves; expensive theaters and
clubs are springing up in various parts of the country; but the
dearth of living quarters is unbearable. Dwelling houses
remain as a rule uncared for. "We build badly and at great
expense. Our houses are wearing out and not being renovated.
We repair little and badly" (Izvestia).

Production Per Capita of the Population 13
The entire Soviet economy consists of such disproportions.
Within certain limits they are inevitable, since it has been
and remains necessary to begin the advance with the most
j mportant branches. Nevertheless the backwardness of
certain branches greatly decreases the useful operation of
others. From the standpoint of an ideal planning directive,
which would guarantee not the maximum tempo in separate
branches, but the optimum result in economy as a whole, the
statistical coefficient of growth would be lower in the first
period, but economy as a whole, and particularly the
consumer, would be the gainer. In the long run, the general
economic dynamic would also gain.
In the official statistics, the production and repair of
automobiles is added in with the total of industrial production.
From the standpoint of economic efficiency, it would be
proper to subtract, not add. This observation applies to many
other branches of industry. For that reason, all total
estimates in rubles have only a relative value. It is not certain
what a ruble is. It is not always certain what hides behind
it — the construction of a machine, or its premature
breakdown. If, according to an estimate in "stable" rubles,
the gross production of major industries has increased by
comparison with the prewar level 6 times, the actual output
of oil, coal and iron measured in tons will have increased 3
to 3V2 times. The fundamental cause of this divergence of
indices lies in the fact that Soviet industry has created a
series of new branches unknown to tsarist Russia, but a
supplementary cause is to be found in the tendentious
manipulation of statistics. It is well known that the organic
need of any bureaucracy is to touch up reality.
Production Per Capita of the Population
The average individual productivity of labor in the Soviet
Union is still very low,, In the best metal foundry, according
to the acknowledgment of its director, the output of iron and
steel per individual worker is a third as much as the average
output of American foundries. A comparison of average
figures in both countries would probably give a ratio of 1 to
5, or worse. In these circumstances the announcement that

14 What Has Been Achiei
blast furnaces are used "better" in the Soviet Union than in
capitalist countries remains meaningless. The function of
technique is to economize human labor and nothing else, 1^
the timber and building industries, things are even less
favorable than in the metal industry. To each worker in the
quarries in the United States falls 5,000 tons a year, in the
Soviet Union, 500 tons, that is, Vio as much. Such crying
differences are explained not only by a lack of skilled workers
but still more by bad organization of the work. The
bureaucracy spurs on the workers with all its might, but is
unable to make a proper use of labor power. In agriculture
things are still less favorable, of course, than in industry. To
the low productivity of labor corresponds a low national
income, and consequently a low standard of life for the masses
of the people.
When they assert that in volume of industrial production
the Soviet Union in 1936 will occupy the first place in
Europe — of itself this progress is gigantic! — they leave out
of consideration not only the quality and production cost of
the goods, but also the size of the population. The general
level of development of a country, however, and especially the
living standard of the masses can be defined, at least in rough
figures, only by dividing the products by the number of
consumers. Let us try to carry out this simple arithmetical
operation. The importance of railroad transport for economy,
culture and military ends needs no explanation. The Soviet
Union has 83,000 kilometers of railroads, as against 58,000
in Germany, 63,000 in France, 417,000 in the United States.
This means that for every 10,000 people in Germany there
are 8.9 kilometers of railroad; in France, 15.2; in the United
States, 33.1; and in the Soviet Union, 5.0. Thus according to
railroad indices, the Soviet Union continues to occupy one of
the lowest places in the civilized world. The merchant fleet,
which has tripled in the last five years, stands now
approximately on a par with that of Denmark and Spain. To
these facts we must add the still extremely low figure for
paved highways. In the Soviet Union 0.6 automobiles were
put out for every 1,000 inhabitants. In Great Britain about 8
(in 1934), in France about 4.5, in the United States 23 (as
against 36.5 in 1928). At the same time, in the relative

Per Capita of the Population 15
umber of horses (about 1 horse to each 10 or 11 citizens) the
Soviet Union, despite the extreme backwardness of its
railroad, water and auto transport, does not surpass either
France or the United States, while remaining far behind them
in the quality of the stock.
In the sphere of heavy industry, which has attained the
most outstanding successes, the comparative indices still
remain unfavorable. The coal output in the Soviet Union for
1935 was about 0.7 tons per person; in Great Britain, almost
5 tons; in the United States, almost 3 tons (as against 5.4
tons in 1913); in Germany, about 2 tons. Steel: in the Soviet
Union, about 67 kilograms [kg = 2.2 lbs. approx.] per person;
in the United States, about 250 kilograms, etc. About the
same proportions in pig and rolled iron. In the Soviet Union
153 kilowatt hours of electric power was produced per person
in 1935; in Great Britain (1934), 443; in France, 363; in
Germany, 472.
In the light industries, the per capita indices are as a
general rule still lower. Of woolen fabric in 1935 less than V2
meter [1 meter = 39.37 in.] per person, or 8 to 10 times less
than in the United States or Great Britain. Woolen cloth is
accessible only to privileged Soviet citizens. For the masses,
cotton print, of which about 16 meters per person was
manufactured, still has to do for winter clothes. The
production of shoes in the Soviet Union now amounts to about
one-half pair per person; in Germany, more than a pair; in
France, a pair and a half; in the United States, about three
pairs. And this leaves aside the quality index, which would
still further lower the comparison. We may take it for granted
that in bourgeois countries the percentage of people who have
several pairs of shoes is considerably higher than in the Soviet
Union. But unfortunately the Soviet Union also still stands
among the first in the percentage of barefoot people.
Approximately the same correlation, in part still less
favorable, prevails in the production of foodstuffs. Notwithstanding
Russia's indubitable progress in recent years,
conserves, sausage, cheese, to say nothing of pastry and
confections, are still completely inaccessible to the fundamental
mass of the population. Even in the matter of dairy
products, things are not favorable. In France and the United

16 What Has Been Achieved
States, there is approximately one cow for every five peoplein
Germany, one for every six; in the Soviet Union, one for
every eight. But when it comes to giving milk, two Soviet
cows must be counted approximately as one. Only in the
production of grainbearing grasses, especially rye, and also
in potatoes, does the Soviet Union, computing by population,
considerably surpass the majority of European countries and
the United States. But rye bread and potatoes as the
predominant food of the population — that is the classic
symbol of poverty.
The consumption of paper is one of the chief indices of
culture. In 1935 the Soviet Union produced less than four kg.
per person; the United States, over thirty-four (as against
forty-eight in 1928); and Germany, more than forty-seven kg.
Whereas the United States consumes twelve pencils a year
per inhabitant, the Soviet Union consumes only four, and
those four are of such poor quality that their useful work does
not exceed that of one good pencil, or at the outside two. The
newspapers frequently complain that the lack of primers,
paper and pencils paralyzes the work of the schools. It is no
wonder that the liquidation of illiteracy, indicated for the
tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, is still far from
accomplished.
The problem can be similarly illumined by starting from
more general considerations. The national income per person
in the Soviet Union is considerably less than in the West. And
since capital investment consumes about twenty-five to thirty
percent, incomparably more than anywhere else, the total
amount consumed by the popular masses cannot help but be
considerably lower than in the advanced capitalist countries.
To be sure, in the Soviet Union there are no possessing
classes, whose extravagance is balanced by an underconsumption
of the popular masses. However the weight of this
corrective is not so great as might appear at first glance. The
fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance
of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may
be in itself, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right
to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership
of the means of production, thus condemning the
economic system to anarchy and decay. In the matter of

production Per Capita of the Population 17
luxuries the bourgeoisie, of course, has a monopoly of
consumption. But in things of prime necessity, the toiling
masses constitute the overwhelming majority of consumers.
We shall see later, moreover, that although the Soviet Union
has no possessing classes in the proper sense of the word,
there is a very privileged commanding layer which absorbs
the lion's share in the sphere of consumption. And so if there
is a lower per capita production of things of prime necessity
in the Soviet Union than in the advanced capitalist countries,
then that means that the living standard of the Soviet masses
still falls below the capitalist level.
The historic responsibility for this situation lies, of course,
with Russia's difficult and gloomy past, with its heritage of
darkness and poverty. There was no other way out upon the
road of progress except through the overthrow of capitalism.
To convince yourself of this, it is only necessary to cast a
glance at the Baltic countries and Poland, once the most
advanced parts of the tsar's empire, and now hardly emerging
from the morass. The undying service of the Soviet regime
lies in its intense and generally successful struggle with
Russia's thousand-year-old backwardness. But a correct
estimate of what has been attained is the first condition for
further progress.
The Soviet regime is passing through a preparatory stage,
importing, borrowing and assimilating the technical and
cultural conquests of the West. The comparative coefficients
of production and consumption testify that this preparatory
stage is far from finished. Even under the improbable
condition of a continuing complete capitalist stagnation, it
must still occupy a whole historic period. This is the first,
highly important conclusion, which we will still need in our
further investigation.

CHAPTER TWO
Economic Development and.
the Zigzags of the Leadership
"War Communism," "The New Economic Policy"
(NEP) and the Course toward the Kulak
The line of development of the Soviet economy is far from
an uninterrupted and evenly rising curve. In the first
eighteen years of the new regime, you can clearly distinguish
several stages marked by sharp crises. A short outline of the
economic history of the Soviet Union in connection with the
policy of the government is absolutely necessary both for
diagnosis and prognosis.
The first three years after the revolution were a period of
overt and cruel civil war. Economic life remained completely
subordinated to the needs of the front. Cultural work took
shelter in out of the way places and was characterized by the
bold sweep of creative thought, especially in Lenin's own
thinking, at a time of extreme scarcity of material resources.
This was the period of so-called war communism (1918-21),
which forms a heroic parallel to the "war socialism" of the
capitalist countries. During those years, the economic tasks
of the Soviet government were mainly reduced to sustaining
military production and utilizing the meager reserves left
from the past for military purposes and for saving the urban
population from destruction. War communism was, by its
very nature, a system of regulating consumption in a besieged
fortress.
19

20
Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leaderskh
It is necessary to acknowledge, however, that in its original
conception it pursued broader aims. The Soviet government
hoped and strove to immediately develop the methods of
regimentation into a system of planned economy both in the
realm of distribution and the sphere of production. In other
words, from "war communism" it hoped gradually, but
without destroying the system, to arrive at genuine communism.
The program of the Bolshevik Party adopted in March
1919 said: "In the sphere of distribution the present task of
the Soviet government is unwaveringly to continue on a
planned, organized and statewide scale to replace trade by
the distribution of products."
Reality, however, came into increasing conflict with the
program of "war communism." Production continually declined,
and not only because of the destructive action of the
war, but also because of the quenching of the stimulus of
personal interest among the producers. The city demanded
grain and raw materials from the village, giving nothing in
exchange except multicolored pieces of paper, which were
called, according to ancient memory, money. And the muzhik
buried his stores in the ground. The government sent out
armed workers' detachments for grain. The muzhik cut back
his sowing. Industrial production for 1921, immediately after
the end of the civil war, amounted at most to one-fifth of the
prewar level. The production of steel fell from 4.2 million tons
to 183 thousand tons, that is, to V23 of what it had been. The
total harvest of grain decreased from 801 million centners to
503 million in 1922. That was a year of terrible starvation!
Foreign trade at the same time plunged from 2.9 billion rubles
to 30 million. The collapse of the productive forces surpassed
anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country,
and the government with it, found themselves at the very
edge of the abyss.
The Utopian hopes of the epoch of war communism were
subsequently subjected to a cruel, and in many respects just,
criticism. The theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains
inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact
that all calculations at that time were based on the
expectation of an early victory of the revolution in the West.
It was considered self-evident that the victorious German

fl/ar Communism, NEP and the Course toward the Kulak 21
proletariat would supply Soviet Russia, on credit against
future food and raw materials, not only with machines and
articles of manufacture, but also with tens of thousands of
highly skilled workers, technicians and organizers. And there
is no doubt that if the proletarian revolution had triumphed
in Germany — and its victory was prevented solely and
exclusively by the Social Democrats — the economic development
of the Soviet Union as well as of Germany would have
advanced with such gigantic strides that the fate of Europe
and the world would today have been incomparably more
auspicious. It can be said with certainty, however, that even
in that happy event, it would still have been necessary to
renounce the direct state distribution of products in favor of
the methods of trade circulation.
Lenin attributed the necessity of restoring the market to
the existence in the country of millions of isolated peasant
enterprises, unaccustomed to defining their economic relations
with the outside world except through trade. Trade
circulation would establish a so-called alliance between the
peasant and nationalized industry. The theoretical formula
for this "alliance" was very simple: industry should supply
the village with necessary goods at such prices as would
enable the state to forego forcible collection of the products
of peasant labor.
To mend economic relations with the rural districts was
undoubtedly the most critical and urgent task of the NEP.
Experience soon showed, however, that industry itself, in
spite of its socialized character, had need of the methods of
money payment worked out by capitalism. A planned
economy cannot rest merely on intellectual data. The play of
supply and demand remains for a long period a necessary
material basis and indispensable corrective.
The legalized market, aided by a stabilized monetary
system, began to do its work. As early as 1923, thanks to an
initial stimulus from the rural districts, industry began to
revive. And, moreover, it immediately hit a high tempo. It is
sufficient to say that production doubled in 1922 and 1923,
and by 1926 had already reached the prewar level, that is,
had grown more than five times its size in 1921. At the same

22
Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leadership
time, although at a much more modest tempo, the harvests
were increasing.
Beginning with the critical year 1923, the disagreements
observed earlier in the ruling party on the relation between
industry and agriculture began to grow sharp. In a country
which had completely exhausted its stores and reserves,
industry could not develop except by borrowing grain and raw
material from the peasants. Too heavy "forced loans" of
products, however, would destroy the stimulus to labor. Not
believing in the future prosperity, the peasant would answer
the grain expeditions from the city by a sowing strike. Too
light collections, on the other hand, threatened stagnation:
not receiving industrial products, the peasants would turn to
their own households to satisfy their own needs, and revive
the old home crafts. The disagreements in the party began
over the question how much to take from the villages for
industry, in order to hasten the period of dynamic equilibrium
between them. The dispute was immediately complicated by
the question of the social structure of the village itself.
In the spring of 1923, at a congress of the party, a
representative of the "Left Opposition" 1
— not yet, however,
known by that name — demonstrated the divergence of
industrial and agricultural prices in the form of an ominous
diagram. This phenomenon was then first called "the
scissors," a term which has since become almost international.
If the further lagging of industry, said the speaker,
continues to open these scissors, then a break between city
and country is inevitable.
The peasants made a sharp distinction between the
democratic and agrarian revolution which the Bolshevik
Party had carried through, and its policy directed toward
laying the foundations of socialism. The expropriation of the
landlords and the state lands brought the peasants upwards
of half a billion gold rubles a year. In the prices of state
products, however, the peasants were paying out a much
larger sum. So long as the net result of the two revolutions,
democratic and socialistic, bound together by the firm knot
of October, reduced itself for the peasantry to a loss of
hundreds of millions, a union of the two classes remained
dubious.

War Communism, NEP and the Course toward the Kulak 23
The scattered character of the peasant economy, inherited
from the past, was aggravated by the results of the October
Revolution. The number of independent farms rose during
the subsequent decade from sixteen to twenty-five million,
which naturally strengthened the purely consummatory
character of the majority of peasant enterprises. That was
one of the causes of the lack of agricultural products.
A small commodity economy inevitably produces exploiters.
In proportion as the villages recovered, the differentiation
within the peasant mass began to grow. This development
fell into the old well-trodden ruts. The growth of the kulak*
far outstripped the general growth of agriculture. The policy
of the government under the slogan "face to the country"
was actually a turning of its face to the kulak. Agricultural
taxes fell upon the poor far more heavily than upon the well
to do, who moreover skimmed the cream of the state credits.
The surplus grain, chiefly in possession of the upper strata
of the village, was used to enslave the poor and for speculative
selling to the bourgeois elements of the cities. Bukharin, the
theoretician of the ruling faction at that time, tossed to the
peasantry his famous slogan, "Get rich!" In the language of
theory that was supposed to mean a gradual growing of the
kulaks into socialism. In practice it meant the enrichment of
the minority at the expense of the overwhelming majority.
Captive to its own policy, the government was compelled
to retreat step by step before the demands of a rural petty
bourgeoisie. In 1925 the hiring of labor power and the renting
of land were legalized for agriculture. The peasantry was
becoming polarized between the small capitalist on one side
and the hired hand on the other. At the same time, lacking
industrial commodities, the state was crowded out of the rural
market. Between the kulak and the petty home craftsman
there appeared, as though from under the earth, the
middleman. The state enterprises themselves, in search of
raw material, were more and more compelled to deal with the
private trader. The rising tide of capitalism was visible
everywhere. Thinking people saw plainly that a revolution
* Well-off peasant, employing labor

24 Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leadership
in the forms of property does not solve the problem of
socialism, but only raises it.
In 1925, when the course toward the kulak was in full
swing, Stalin began to prepare for the denationalization of
the land. To a question asked at his suggestion by a Soviet
journalist: "Would it not be expedient in the interest of
agriculture to deed over to each peasant for ten years the
parcel of land tilled by him?" Stalin answered: "Yes, and
even for forty years." The people's commissar of agriculture
of Georgia, upon Stalin's own initiative, introduced the draft
of a law denationalizing the land. The aim was to give the
farmer confidence in his own future. While this was going on,
in the spring of 1926, almost sixty percent of the grain
destined for sale was in the hands of six percent of the peasant
proprietors! The state lacked grain not only for foreign trade,
but even for domestic needs. The insignificance of exports
made it necessary to forego bringing in articles of manufacture,
and cut down to the limit the import of machinery and
raw materials.
Retarding industrialization and striking a blow at the
general mass of the peasants, this policy of banking on the
well-to-do farmer revealed unequivocally inside of two years,
1924-26, its political consequences. It brought about an
extraordinary increase of self-consciousness in the petty
bourgeoisie of both city and village, a capture by them of
many of the lower Soviets, an increase of the power and
self-confidence of the bureaucracy, a growing pressure upon
the workers, and the complete suppression of party and soviet
democracy. The growth of the kulaks alarmed two eminent
members of the ruling group, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who
were, significantly, chairmen of the Soviets of the two chief
proletarian centers, Leningrad and Moscow. But the provinces,
and still more the bureaucracy, stood firm for Stalin.
The course toward the well-to-do farmer won out. In 1926
Zinoviev and Kamenev with their adherents joined the
Opposition of 1923 (the "Trotskyists").
Of course "in principle" the ruling group did not even then
renounce the collectivization of agriculture. They merely put
it off a few decades in their perspective. The future people's
commissar of agriculture, Yakovlev, wrote in 1927 that,

yjar Communism, NEP and the Course toward the Kulak 25
although the socialist reconstraction of the village can be
accomplished only through collectivization, still "this obviously
cannot be done in one, two or three years, and maybe
not in one decade." "The collective farms and communes,..."
he continued, "are now, and will for a long time undoubtedly
emain, only small islands in a sea of individual peasant
holdings." And in truth at that period only 0.8 percent of the
peasant families belonged to collectives.
The struggle in the party about the so-called "general
line," which had come to the surface in 1923, became
especially intense and passionate in 1926. In its extended
platform, which took up all the problems of industry and
economy, the Left Opposition wrote: "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." On that question the
Opposition gained the day; direct attempts against nationalization
were abandoned. But the problem, of course, involved
more than forms of property in land.
"To the growth of individual farming* 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. The whole work of the cooperatives ought to be
imbued with the purpose of converting small production into
a vast collectivized production." But this broad program of
collectivization was stubbornly regarded as Utopian for the
coming years. During the preparations for the fifteenth party
congress, whose task was to expel the Left Opposition,
Molotov, the future chairman of the Soviet of People's
Commissars, said repeatedly: "Under the present circumstances
it is no longer possible to slip down (!) into poor
peasant illusions about the collectivization of the broad
peasant masses." It was then, according to the calendar, the
end of 1927. So far was the ruling group at that time from its
own future policy toward the peasants!
Those same years (1923-28) were passed in a struggle of
the ruling coalition, Stalin, Molotov, Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin
* Fermerstvo

26
Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leaden
(Zinoviev and Kamenev went over to the Opposition in the
beginning of 1926), against the advocates of "super,
industrialization" and planned leadership. The future historian
will recreate with no small surprise the moods of spiteful
disbelief in bold economic initiative with which the government
of the socialist state was wholly imbued. An acceleration
of the tempo of industrialization took place empirically, under
impulses from without, with a crude smashing of all
calculations and an extraordinary increase of overhead
expenses. The demand for a five-year plan, when advanced
by the Opposition in 1923, was met with mockery in the spirit
of the petty bourgeois who fears "a leap into the unknown."
As late as April 1927, Stalin asserted at a plenary meeting
of the Central Committee that to attempt to build the
Dneprostroi hydroelectric station would be the same thing for
us as for a muzhik to buy a gramophone instead of a cow. 2
This winged aphorism summed up the whole program. It is
worth noting that during those years, the bourgeois press of
the whole world, and the Social Democratic press after it,
repeated with sympathy the official accusation against the
"Left Opposition" of industrial romanticism.
Amid the noise of party discussions, the peasants were
replying to the lack of industrial goods with an ever more
stubborn strike. They would not take their grain to market,
nor increase their sowings. The right wing (Rykov, Tomsky,
Bukharin), who were setting the tone in that period,
demanded a broader scope for capitalist tendencies in the
village through a raising of the price of grain, even at the cost
of lowering the tempo in industry. The sole possible way out
under such a policy would have been to import articles of
manufacture in exchange for exported agricultural raw
materials. But this would have meant to form a "connection"
not between peasant economy and the socialist industries,
but between the kulak and world capitalism. It was not worth
while to make the October Revolution for that.
"To accelerate industrialization," answered the representative
of the Opposition at the party conference of 1926, "in
particular by way of increased taxation on the kulak, will
produce a large mass of goods and lower market prices, and
this will be to the advantage both of the worker and of the

Communism, NEP and the Course toward the Kulak 27
majority of the peasants.... Face to the village does not mean
turn your back to industry; it means industry to the village.
For the 'face' of the state, if it does not include industry, is of
no use to the village."
In answer Stalin thundered against the "fantastic plans"
of the Opposition. Industry must not "rush ahead, breaking
away from agriculture and abandoning the tempo of accumulation
in our country." The party decisions continued to
repeat these maxims of passive accommodation to the well-off
upper circles of the peasantry. The fifteenth party congress,
meeting in December 1927 for the final smashing of the
"superindustrializers," gave warning of "the danger of a too
great involvement of state capital in big construction." The
ruling faction at that time still refused to see any other
dangers.
In the economic year 1927-28, the so-called restoration
period in which industry worked chiefly with prerevolutionary
machinery, and agriculture with the old tools, was coming
to an end. For any further advance, independent industrial
construction on a large scale was necessary. It was impossible
to lead any farther gropingly and without a plan.
The hypothetical possibilities of socialist industrialization
had been analyzed by the Opposition as early as 1923-25.
Their general conclusion was that, after exhausting the
equipment inherited from the bourgeoisie, the Soviet industries
might, on the basis of socialist accumulation, achieve a
rhythm of growth wholly impossible under capitalism. The
leaders of the ruling faction openly ridiculed our cautious
coefficients in the vicinity of fifteen to eighteen percent as the
fantastic music of an unknown future. This constituted at
that time the essence of the struggle against "Trotskyism."
The first official draft of the five-year plan, prepared at
last in 1927, was completely saturated with the spirit of stingy
tinkering. The growth of industrial production was projected
with a tempo declining yearly from nine to four percent.
Consumption per person was to increase during the whole
five years twelve percent! The incredible timidity of thought
in this first plan comes out clearly in the fact that the state
budget at the end of the five years was to constitute in all
sixteen percent of the national income, whereas the budget

28 Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leadership
of tsarist Russia, which had no intention of creating a socialist
society, swallowed eighteen percent! It is perhaps worth
adding that the engineers and economists who drew up this
plan were some years later severely judged and punished by
law as conscious sabotagers acting under the direction of
foreign powers. The accused might have answered, had they
dared, that their planning work corresponded perfectly to the
"general line" of the Politburo at that time and was carried
out under its orders.
The struggle of tendencies was now translated into
arithmetical language. "To present on the tenth anniversary
of the October Revolution such a piddling and completely
pessimistic plan," said the platform of the Opposition,
"means in reality to work against socialism." A year later
the Politburo adopted a new five-year plan with an average
yearly increase of production amounting to nine percent. The
actual course of the development, however, revealed a
stubborn tendency to approach the coefficients of the
"superindustrializers." After another year, when the governmental
policy had radically changed, the State Planning
Commission drew up a third five-year plan, whose rate of
growth came far nearer than could have been expected to the
hypothetical prognosis made by the Opposition in 1925.
The real history of the economic policy of the Soviet Union,
as we thus see, is very different from the official legend.
Unfortunately such pious investigators as the Webbs pay not
the slightest attention to this.
A Sharp Turn: "Five-Year Plan in Four Years" and
"Complete Collectivization"
Irresoluteness before the individual peasant enterprises,
distrust of large plans, defense of a minimum tempo, neglect
of international problems — all this taken together formed
the essence of the theory of "socialism in one country," first
put forward by Stalin in the autumn of 1924 after the defeat
of the proletariat in Germany. Not to hurry with industrialization,
not to quarrel with the muzhik, not to count on world
revolution, and above all to protect the power of the party
bureaucracy from criticism! The differentiation of the peas-

4 Sharp Turn 29
aiitry was denounced as an invention of the Opposition. The
above-mentioned Yakovlev dismissed the Central Statistical
Bureau whose records gave the kulak a greater place than
was satisfactory to the authorities. While the leaders
tranquilly asserted that the goods famine was outliving itself,
that "a peaceful tempo in economic development was at
hand," that the grain collections would in the future be
carried on more "evenly," etc., the strengthened kulak
carried with him the middle peasant and subjected the cities
to a grain blockade. In January 1928 the working class stood
face to face with the specter of an advancing famine. History
knows how to play spiteful jokes. In that very month, when
the kulaks were taking the revolution by the throat, the
representatives of the Left Opposition were being thrown into
prison or banished to different parts of Siberia in punishment
for their "panic" before the specter of the kulak.
The government tried to pretend that the grain strike was
caused by the naked hostility of the kulak (where did he come
from?) to the socialist state, that is, by ordinary political
motives. But the kulak is little inclined to that kind of
"idealism." If he hid his grain, it was because the bargain
offered him was unprofitable. For the very same reason, he
managed to bring under his influence wide sections of the
peasantry. Mere repressions against kulak sabotage were
obviously inadequate. It was necessary to change the policy.
Even yet, however, no little time was spent in vacillation.
Rykov, then still head of the government, announced in
July 1928: "To develop individual farms is ... the chief task
of the party." And Stalin seconded him: "There are people
who think that individual farms have exhausted their
usefulness, that we should not support them.... These people
have nothing in common with the line of our party." Less
than a year later, the line of the party had nothing in common
with those words. The dawn of "complete collectivization"
was on the horizon.
The new orientation was arrived at just as empirically as
the preceding, and by way of a hidden struggle within the
governmental bloc. "The groups of the right and center are
united by a general hostility to the Opposition" — thus the
platform of the Left gave warning a year before — "and the

30
Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leaden
cutting off of the latter will inevitably accelerate the coming
struggle between these two." And so it happened. The leaders
of the disintegrating bloc would not for anything, of course
admit that this prognosis of the left wing, like many others'
had come true. As late as October 19,1928, Stalin announced
publicly: "It is time to stop gossiping ... about the existence
of a Right deviation and a conciliatory attitude towards it in
the Politburo of our Central Committee." Both groups at
that time were feeling out the party machine. The repressed
party was living on dark rumors and guesses. But in just a
few months the official press, with its usual freedom from
embarrassment, announced that the head of the government,
Rykov, "had speculated on the economic difficulties of the
Soviet power"; that the head of the Communist International,
Bukharin, was "a conducting wire of bourgeois-liberal
influences"; that Tomsky, chairman of the all-Russian
Central Council of Trade Unions, was nothing but a miserable
trade unionist. All three, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, were
members of the Politburo. Whereas the whole preceding
struggle against the Left Opposition had taken its weapons
from the arsenal of the right grouping, Bukharin was now
able, without sinning against the truth, to accuse Stalin of
using in his struggle with the Right a part of the condemned
Left Opposition platform.
In one way or another the change was made. The slogan
"Get rich!," together with the theory of the kulak's growing
painlessly into socialism, was belatedly, but all the more
decisively, condemned. Industrialization was put upon the
order of the day. Self-satisfied quietism was replaced by
panic-stricken impetuousness. The half-forgotten slogan of
Lenin, "catch up with and outstrip," was filled out with the
words, "in the shortest possible time." The minimalist
five-year plan, already confirmed in principle by a congress
of the party, gave way to a new plan, the fundamental
elements of which were borrowed in toto from the platform
of the shattered Left Opposition. Dneprostroi, only yesterday
likened to a gramophone, today occupied the center of
attention.
After the first new successes, the slogan was advanced:
"Achieve the five-year plan in four years." The startled

A Sharp Turn 31
empirics now decided that everything was possible. Opportunism,
as has often happened in history, turned into its
opposite, adventurism. Whereas from 1923 to 1928 the
Politburo had been ready to accept Bukharin's philosophy of
a "tortoise tempo," it now easily jumped from a twenty to a
thirty percent yearly growth, trying to convert every partial
and temporary achievement into a norm, and losing sight of
the conditioning interrelation of the different branches of
industry. The financial holes in the plan were stopped up with
printed paper. During the years of the first plan, the number
of bank notes in circulation rose from 1.7 billion to 5.5, and
by the beginning of the second five-year plan, had reached 8.4
billion rubles. The bureaucracy not only freed itself from the
political control of the masses, upon whom this forced
industrialization was laying an unbearable burden, but also
from the automatic control exercised by the chervonets.* The
monetary system, put on a solid basis at the beginning of the
NEP, was once again shaken to its roots.
The chief danger, however, and that not only for the
fulfillment of the plan but for the regime itself, appeared from
the side of the peasants.
On February 15, 1928, the population of the country
learned with surprise from an editorial in Pravda that the
villages looked not at all the way they had been portrayed
up to that moment by the authorities, but on the contrary
very much as the expelled Left Opposition had presented
them. The press which only yesterday had been denying the
existence of the kulaks, today, on a signal from above,
discovered them not only in the villages, but in the party
itself. It was revealed that communist cells were frequently
dominated by rich peasants possessing complicated machinery,
employing hired labor, concealing from the government
hundreds and even thousands of poods' of grain, and
implacably denouncing the "Trotskyist" policy. The newspapers
vied with each other in printing sensational exposures
of how kulaks in the position of local secretaries were denying
admission to the party to poor peasants and hired hands,. All
* Theoretical par = $5 00 (in 1936)
f 1 pood = approximately 36 lbs

32 Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leadei
the old criteria were turned upside down; minuses and pl Ug
changed places. ^
In order to feed the cities, it was necessary immediately to
take from the kulak the daily bread. This could be achieved
only by force. The expropriation of the grain reserve, and that
not only of the kulak but of the middle peasant, was called
in the official language, "extraordinary measures." This
phrase is supposed to mean that tomorrow everything wil]
fall back into the old rut. But the peasants did not believe
these fine words, and they were right. The violent seizures
of grain deprived the well-off peasants of their motive to
increased sowings. The hired hands and the poor peasants
found themselves without work. Agriculture again arrived in
a blind alley, and with it the state. It was necessary at any
cost to reform the "general line."
Stalin and Molotov, still giving individual farming the chief
place, began to emphasize the necessity of a swifter
development of the soviet and collective farms. But since the
bitter need of food did not permit a cessation of military
expeditions into the country, the program of promoting
individual farms was left hanging in the air. It was necessary
to "slip down" to collectivization. The temporary "extraordinary
measures" for the collection of grain developed
unexpectedly into a program of "liquidation of the kulaks as
a class." From the shower of contradictory commands, more
copious than food rations, it became evident that on the
peasant question, the government had not only no five-year
plan, but not even a five-month program.
According to the new plan, drawn up under the spur of a
food crisis, collective farms were at the end of five years to
comprise about twenty percent of the peasant holdings. This
program — whose immensity will be clear when you consider
that during the preceding ten years collectivization had
affected less than one percent of the country — was
nevertheless by the middle of the five years left far behind.
In November 1929, Stalin, abandoning his own vacillations,
announced the end of individual farming. The peasants, he
said, are entering the collective farms "in whole villages,
counties and even provinces." Yakovlev, who two years
before had insisted that the collectives would for many years

^ Sharp Tarn
ain only "islands in a sea of peasant holdings," now
1
Geived an order as people's commissar of agriculture to
liquidate the kulaks as a class," and establish complete
collectivization at "the earliest possible date." In the year
1929 the proportion of collective farms rose from 1.7 percent
to 3 9 percent. In 1930 it rose to 23.6; in 1931, to 52.7; in 1932,
to 61.5 percent.
At the present time, hardly anybody would be foolish
enough to repeat the twaddle of liberals to the effect that
collectivization as a whole was a product of naked force. In
former historic epochs, the peasants in their struggle for land
have sometimes raised insurrections against the landlords,
at another time sent a stream of colonizers into untilled
regions, at still another rushed into all kinds of sects which
promised to reward the muzhik with heavenly expanses for
his crowded existence on earth. Now, after the expropriation
of the great estates and the extreme parcellation of the land,
the combining of these small parcels into larger tracts had
become a question of life and death for the peasants, for
agriculture, and for society as a whole.
The problem, however, is far from settled by these general
historic considerations. The real possibilities of collectivization
are determined, not by the depth of the impasse in the
villages and not by the administrative energy of the
government, but primarily by the existing productive resources,
that is, the ability of the industries to furnish
large-scale agriculture with the requisite machinery. These
material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were
set up with an equipment suitable in the main only for
small-scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly
swift collectivization took the character of an economic
adventure.
Caught unawares by the radicalism of its own shift of
policy, the government did not and could not make even an
elementary political preparation for the new course. Not only
the peasant masses, but even the local organs of power, were
ignorant of what was being demanded of them. The peasants
were heated white hot by rumors that their cattle and
property were to be seized by the state. This rumor, too, was
not so far from the truth. Actually realizing their own former
33

34 Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leadershi
caricature of the Left Opposition, the bureaucracy "robbed
the villages." Collectivization appeared to the peasant
primarily in the form of an expropriation of all his belonging
They collectivized not only horses, cows, sheep, pigs, but even
new-born chickens. They "dekulakized," as one foreign
observer wrote, "down to the felt shoes, which they dragg e

n 35
ASharp1u
48 million poods, that is, to less than half of what it had
!f n But the most devastating hurricane hit the animal
kingdom. The number of horses fell fifty-five percent — from
34 6 million in 1929 to 15.6 million in 1934. The number of
horned cattle fell from 30.7 million to 19.5 million, that is,
forty percent. The number of pigs, fifty-five percent; sheep,
sixty-six percent. The destruction of people — by hunger, cold,
epidemics and measures of repression — is unfortunately less
accurately tabulated than the slaughter of stock, but it also
adds up to millions. The blame for these sacrifices lies not
upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling
methods with which it was carried through. The bureaucracy
foresaw nothing. Even the constitutions of the collectives,
which made an attempt to bind up the personal interests of
the peasants with the welfare of the farm, were not published
until after the unhappy villages had been thus cruelly laid
waste.
The forced character of this new course arose from the
necessity of finding some salvation from the consequences of
the policy of 1923-28. But even so, collectivization could and
should have assumed more reasonable tempos and more
deliberated forms. Having in its hands both state power and
industry, the bureaucracy could have regulated the process
without leading the nation to the edge of disaster. They could
have, and should have, adopted tempos better corresponding
to the material and moral resources of the country. "Under
favorable circumstances, domestic and international," wrote
the emigre organ of the "Left Opposition" in 1930, "the
material-technical conditions of agriculture can in the course
of some ten or fifteen years be radically transformed, and
provide the productive basis for collectivization. However,
during the intervening years, there would be time to
overthrow the Soviet power more than once."
This warning was not exaggerated. Never before had the
breath of destruction hung so directly above the territory of
the October Revolution as in the years of complete collectivization.
Discontent, distrust, bitterness, were corroding the
country. The disturbance of the monetary system; the
mounting up of stable, "conventional," and free market
prices; the transition from a simulacrum of trade between the

36 Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leaden
state and the peasants to a grain, meat and milk levy; th e
life-and-death struggle with mass plunderings of the colle c
tive property and mass concealment of these plunderings; the
purely military mobilization of the party for the struggl e
against kulak sabotage (after the "liquidation" of the kulak s
as a class); together with this, a return to food cards and
hunger rations; and finally a restoration of the passport
system — all these measures revived throughout the country
the atmosphere of the civil war which had seemingly ended
so long ago.
The supply to the factories of food and raw materials grew
worse from season to season. Unbearable working conditions
caused a migration of labor power, malingering, careless
work, breakdown of machines, a high percentage of trashy
products and general low quality. The average productivity
of labor declined 11.7 percent in 1931. According to an
incidental acknowledgment of Molotov, printed in the whole
Soviet press, industrial production in 1932 rose only 8.5
percent, instead of the 36 percent indicated by the year's plan.
To be sure, the world was informed soon after this that the
five-year plan had been fulfilled in four years and three
months. But that means only that the cynicism of the
bureaucracy in its manipulation of statistics and public
opinion is without limit. That, however, is not the chief thing.
Not the fate of the five-year plan, but the fate of the regime
was at stake.
The regime survived. But that is the merit of the regime
itself, which had put down deep roots in the popular soil. It
is in no less degree due to favorable external circumstances.
In those years of economic chaos and civil war in the villages,
the Soviet Union was essentially paralyzed in the face of its
foreign enemies. The discontent of the peasantry swept
through the army. Mistrust and vacillation demoralized the
bureaucratic machine, and the commanding cadres. A blow
either from the East or West at that period might have had
fatal consequences.
Fortunately, the first years of a crisis in trade and industry
had created throughout the capitalist world moods of
bewildered watchful waiting. Nobody was ready for war;
nobody dared attempt it. Moreover, in not one of the hostile

A Sharp Turn
tries w a s there an adequate realization of the acuteness
°f these social convulsions which were shaking the land of
"oviets under the roar of the official music in honor of the
"general line."
In spite of its brevity, our historic outline shows, we hope,
how far removed the actual development of the workers' state
has been from an idyllic picture of the gradual and steady
piling up of successes. From the crises of the past we shall
later on derive important indications for the future. But,
besides that, a historic glance at the economic policy of the
Soviet government and its zigzags has seemed to us
absolutely necessary in order to destroy that artificially
inculcated individualistic fetishism which seeks the origins
of success, both real and pretended, in the extraordinary
qualities of the leadership, and not in the conditions of
socialized property created by the revolution.
The objective superiority of the new social regime reveals
itself, too, of course, in the methods of the leaders. But these
methods reflect equally the economic and cultural backwardness
of the country, and the petty-bourgeois provincial
conditions in which the ruling cadres themselves were
formed.
It would be the crudest mistake to infer from this that the
policy of the Soviet leaders is of third-rate importance. There
is no other government in the world in whose hands the fate
of the whole country is concentrated to such a degree. The
successes and failures of an individual capitalist depend, not
wholly of course, but to a very considerable and sometimes
decisive degree, upon his personal qualities. Mutatis mutan­
dis, 3
the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole
economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in
relation to a single enterprise. The centralized character of
the national economy converts the state power into a factor
of enormous significance. But for that very reason, the policy
of the government must be judged, not by summarized
results, not by naked statistical data, but by the specific role
37

38 Economic Development and the Zigzags of the Leadershh
which conscious foresight and planned leadership have
played in achieving these results.
The zigzags of the governmental course have reflected not
only the objective contradictions of the situation, but also the
inadequate ability of the leaders to understand these
contradictions in season and react prophylactically against
them. It is not easy to express the mistakes of the leadership
in bookkeeper's magnitudes, but our schematic exposition of
the history of these zigzags permits the conclusion that they
have imposed upon the Soviet economy an immense burden
of overhead expenses.
It remains, of course, incomprehensible — at least with a
rational approach to history — how and why a faction the
least rich of all in ideas, and the most burdened with
mistakes, should have gained the upper hand over all other
groups, and concentrated an unlimited power in its hands.
Our further analysis will give us a key to this problem too.
We shall see, at the same time, how the bureaucratic methods
of autocratic leadership are coming into sharper and sharper
conflict with the demands of economy and culture, and with
what inevitable necessity new crises and disturbances arise
in the development of the Soviet Union.
However, before taking up the dual role of the "socialist"
bureaucracy, we must answer the question: What is the net
result of the preceding successes? Is socialism really achieved
in the Soviet Union? Or, more cautiously: Do the present
economic and cultural achievements constitute a guarantee
against the danger of capitalist restoration — just as
bourgeois society at a certain stage of its development became
insured by its own successes against a restoration of serfdom
and feudalism?

CHAPTER THREE
Socialism and the State
The Transitional Regime
Is it true, as the official authorities assert, that socialism
is already realized in the Soviet Union? And if not, have the
achieved successes at least made sure of its realization within
the national boundaries, regardless of the course of events in
the rest of the world? The preceding critical appraisal of the
chief indices of the Soviet economy ought to give us the point
of departure for a correct answer to this question, but we
shall require also certain preliminary theoretical points of
reference.
Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the
fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist
program upon the dynamic of the productive forces. If
you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is going to destroy
our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course,
reject the communist perspective along with much else.
Except for this as yet problematic danger, however, there is
not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in
advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities.
Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that
alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion.
The material premise of communism should be so high a
development of the economic powers of man that productive
labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad,
and the distribution of life's goods, existing in continual
39

40
Socialism and the State
abundance, will not demand — as it does not now in any
well-off family or "decent" boardinghouse — any control
except that of education, habit and social opinion, Speaking
frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider such
a really modest perspective "utopian."
Capitalism prepared the conditions and forces for a social
revolution: technique, science and the proletariat. The
communist structure cannot, however, immediately replace
the bourgeois society. The material and cultural inheritance
from the past is wholly inadequate for that. In its first steps,
the workers' state cannot yet permit everyone to work
"according to his abilities" — that is, as much as he can and
wishes to — nor can it reward everyone "according to his
needs," regardless of the work he does. In order to increase
the productive forces, it is necessary to resort to the
customary norms of wage payment, that is, to the distribution
of life's goods in proportion to the quantity and quality of
individual labor.
Marx named this first stage of the new society "the lowest
stage of communism," in distinction from the highest, where
together with the last phantoms of want, material inequality
will disappear. In this sense socialism and communism are
frequently contrasted as the lower and higher stages of the
new society. "We have not yet, of course, complete communism,"
reads the present official Soviet doctrine, "but we
have already achieved socialism — that is, the lowest stage
of communism." In proof of this, they adduce the dominance
of the state trusts in industry, the collective farms in
agriculture, the state and cooperative enterprises in commerce.
At first glance this gives a complete correspondence
with the a priori — and therefore hypothetical — scheme of
Marx. But it is exactly for the Marxist that this question is
not exhausted by a consideration of forms of property
regardless of the achieved productivity of labor. By the lowest
stage of communism Marx meant, at any rate, a society which
from the very beginning stands higher in its economic
development than the most advanced capitalism. Theoretically
such a conception is flawless, for taken on a world scale
communism, even in its first incipient stage, means a higher
level of development than that of bourgeois society. Moreover,

f he Transitional Regime 41
fllarx expected that the Frenchman would begin the social
revolution, the German continue it, the Englishman finish it;
and as to the Russian, Marx left him far in the rear. But this
conceptual order was upset by the facts. Whoever tries now
mechanically to apply the universal historic conception of
jyjarx to the particular case of the Soviet Union at the given
stage of its development will be entangled at once in hopeless
contradictions.
Russia was not the strongest, but the weakest link in the
chain of capitalism. The present Soviet Union does not stand
above the world level of economy, but is only trying to catch
up to the capitalist countries. If Marx called that society
which was to be formed upon the basis of a socialization of
the productive forces of the most advanced capitalism of its
epoch, the lowest stage of communism, then this designation
obviously does not apply to the Soviet Union, which is still
today considerably poorer in technique, culture and the good
things of life than the capitalist countries. It would be truer,
therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its
contradictoriness, not a socialist regime, but a preparatory
regime transitional from capitalism to socialism.
There is not an ounce of pedantry in this concern for
terminological accuracy. The strength and stability of regimes
are determined in the long run by the relative productivity
of their labor. A socialist economy possessing a technique
superior to that of capitalism would really be guaranteed in
its socialist development for sure, so to speak, automatically,
a thing which unfortunately it is still quite impossible to say
about the Soviet economy.
A majority of the vulgar apologists of the Soviet Union as
it is are inclined to reason approximately thus: Even though
you concede that the present Soviet regime is not yet
socialistic, a further development of the productive forces on
the present foundations must sooner or later lead to the
complete triumph of socialism. Hence only the factor of time
is uncertain. And is it worthwhile making a fuss about that?
However triumphant such an argument seems at first glance,
it is in fact extremely superficial. Time is by no means a
secondary factor when historic processes are in question. It
is far more dangerous to confuse the present and the future

42 Socialism and the State
tenses in politics than in grammar. Development by no means
consists, as vulgar evolutionists of the Webb type imagine
in a steady accumulation and continual "improvement'' 0f
that which exists. It has its transitions of quantity i nt 0
quality, its crises, leaps and backward lapses. It is exactly
because the Soviet Union is as yet far from having attained
the first stage of socialism, as a balanced system of production
and distribution, that its development does not proceed
harmoniously, but in contradictions. Economic contradictions
produce social antagonisms, which in turn develop their own
logic, not awaiting the further growth of the productive forces.
We have just seen how true this was in the case of the kulak
who did not wish to "grow" evolutionarily into socialism, and
who, to the surprise of the bureaucracy and its ideologues,
demanded a new and supplementary revolution. Will the
bureaucracy itself, in whose hands the power and wealth are
concentrated, wish to grow peacefully into socialism? As to
this doubts are certainly permissible. In any case, it would
be imprudent to take the word of the bureaucracy for it. It is
impossible at present to answer finally and irrevocably the
question in what direction the economic contradictions and
social antagonisms of Soviet society will develop in the course
of the next three, five or ten years. The outcome depends
upon a struggle of living social forces — and not only on a
national scale, either, but on an international scale as well.
At every new stage, therefore, a concrete analysis is necessary
of actual relations and tendencies in their connection and
continual interaction. We shall now see the importance of
such an analysis in the case of the state.
Program and Reality
Lenin, following Marx and Engels, saw the first distinguishing
feature of the proletarian revolution in the fact that,
having expropriated the exploiters, it would abolish the
necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus raised above society,
and above all, a police and standing army. "The proletariat
needs a state — this all the opportunists can tell you," wrote
Lenin in 1917, two months before the seizure of power, "but
they, the opportunists, forget to add that the proletariat needs

Program and Reality 43
only a dying state, that is, a state constructed in such a way
that it immediately begins to die away and cannot help dying
away" (State and Revolution). This criticism was directed at
the time against reformist socialists of the type of the Russian
Mensheviks, British Fabians, etc. It now attacks with
redoubled force the Soviet idolaters with their cult of a
bureaucratic state which has not the slightest intention of
"dying away."
The social demand for a bureaucracy arises in all those
situations where there are sharp antagonisms which need to
be "softened," "adjusted," "regulated" (always in the
interests of the privileged, the possessors, and always to the
advantage of the bureaucracy itself). Throughout all bourgeois
revolutions, therefore, no matter how democratic, there
has occurred a reinforcement and perfecting of the bureaucratic
apparatus. "Officialdom and the standing army —"
writes Lenin, "that is a 'parasite' on the body of bourgeois
society, a parasite created by the inner contradictions which
tear this society, yet nothing but a parasite stopping up the
living pores."
Beginning with 1917, that is, from the moment when the
conquest of power confronted the party as a practical problem,
Lenin was continually occupied with the thought of liquidating
this "parasite." After the overthrow of the exploiting
classes — he repeats and explains in every chapter of State
and Revolution — the proletariat will shatter the old
bureaucratic machine and create its own apparatus out of
employees and workers. And it will take measures against
their turning into bureaucrats — "measures analyzed in
detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election but recall at
any time; (2) payment no higher than the wages of a worker;
(3) immediate transition to a regime in which all will fulfill
the functions of control and supervision so that all may for a
time become 'bureaucrats,' and therefore nobody can become
a bureaucrat." You must not think that Lenin was talking
about a task stretching over decades. No, this was the first
step with which "we should and must begin upon achieving
a proletarian revolution."
This same bold view of the state in a proletarian
dictatorship found finished expression a year and a half after

44 Socialism and the State
the conquest of power in the program of the Bolshevik Party
including its section on the army. A strong state, but without
mandarins; armed power, but without the samurai! It is not
the tasks of defense which create a military and state
bureaucracy, but the class structure of society carried over
into the organization of defense. The army is only a copy 0f
social relations. The struggle against foreign danger necessitates,
of course, in the workers' state as in others, a
specialized military technical organization, but in no case a
privileged officer caste. The party program demands a
replacement of the standing army by an armed people.
The regime of proletarian dictatorship from its very
beginning thus ceases to be a "state" in the old sense of the
word — a special apparatus, that is, for holding in subjection
the majority of the people. The material power, together with
the weapons, goes over directly and immediately into the
hands of workers' organizations such as the Soviets. The state
as a bureaucratic apparatus begins to die away the first day
of the proletarian dictatorship. Such is the voice of the party
program, not voided to this day. Strange: it sounds like a
spectral voice from the mausoleum.
However you may interpret the nature of the present Soviet
state, one thing is indubitable: at the end of its second decade
of existence, it has not only not died away, but not begun to
"die away." Worse than that, it has grown into a hitherto
unheard of apparatus of compulsion. The bureaucracy not
only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses,
but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the
masses. The army not only has not been replaced by an armed
people, but has given birth to a privileged officers' caste,
crowned with marshals, while the people, "the armed bearers
of the dictatorship," are now forbidden in the Soviet Union
to carry even nonexplosive weapons. With the utmost stretch
of fancy it would be difficult to imagine a contrast more
striking than that which exists between the schema of the
workers' state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and the
actual state now headed by Stalin. While continuing to
publish the works of Lenin (to be sure, with excerpts and
distortions by the censor), the present leaders of the Soviet
Union and their ideological representatives do not even raise

fhe Dual Character of the Workers' State 45
the question of the causes of such a crying divergence between
program and reality. We will try to do this for them.
The Dual Character of the Workers' State
The proletarian dictatorship forms a bridge between
bourgeois and socialist societies. In its very essence, therefore,
it bears a temporary character. An incidental but very
essential task of the state which realizes the dictatorship
consists in preparing for its own dissolution. The degree of
realization of this "incidental" task is, to some extent, a
measure of its success in the fulfillment of its fundamental
mission: the construction of a society without classes and
without material contradictions. Bureaucratism and social
harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
In his famous polemic against Duhring, Engels wrote:
"When, together with class domination and the struggle for
individual existence created by the present anarchy in
production, those conflicts and excesses which result from
this struggle disappear, from that time on there will be
nothing to suppress, and there will be no need for a special
instrument of suppression, the state." The philistine considers
the gendarme an eternal institution. In reality the
gendarme will bridle mankind only until man shall thoroughly
bridle nature. In order that the state shall disappear,
"class domination, together with the struggle for individual
existence" must disappear. Engels joins these two conditions
together, for in the perspective of changing social regimes a
few decades amount to nothing. But the thing looks different
to those generations who bear the weight of a revolution. It
is true that capitalist anarchy creates the struggle of each
against all, but the trouble is that a socialization of the means
of production does not yet automatically remove the "struggle
for individual existence." That is the nub of the question!
A socialist state even in America, on the basis of the most
advanced capitalism, could not immediately provide everyone
with as much as he needs, and would therefore be compelled
to spur everyone to produce as much as possible. The duty of
stimulator in these circumstances naturally falls to the state,
which in its turn cannot but resort, with various changes and

46 Socialism and the State
mitigations, to the method of labor payment worked out by
capitalism. It was in this sense that Marx wrote in 1875;
"Bourgeois law ... is inevitable in the first phase of the
communist society, in that form in which it issues after long
labor pains from capitalist society. Law can never be higher
than the economic structure and the cultural development of
society conditioned by that structure."
In explaining these remarkable lines, Lenin adds: "Bourgeois
law in relation to the distribution of the objects of
consumption assumes, of course, inevitably a bourgeois state,
for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of compelling
observance of its legal norms. It follows (we are still quoting
Lenin) that under Communism not only will bourgeois law
survive for a certain time, but also even a bourgeois state
without the bourgeoisie!"
This highly significant conclusion, completely ignored by
the present official theoreticians, has a decisive significance
for understanding the nature of the Soviet state — or more
accurately, for a first approach to such understanding. Insofar
as the state, which assumes the task of the socialist
transformation of society, is compelled to defend inequality,
that is, the material privileges of a minority, by methods of
compulsion, insofar does it also remain a "bourgeois" state,
even though without a bourgeoisie. These words contain
neither praise nor blame; they merely name things with their
real names.
The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the
growth of material power, ought to serve socialist aims — but
only in the last analysis. The state assumes directly and from
the very beginning a dual character: socialistic, insofar as it
defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois,
insofar as the distribution of life's goods is carried out with a
capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences
ensuing therefrom. Such a contradictory characterization
may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics; we can only offer
them our condolences.
The final physiognomy of the workers' state ought to be
determined by the changing relations between its bourgeois
and socialist tendencies. The triumph of the latter ought ipso
facto to signify the final liquidation of the gendarme, that is,

fhe Dual Character of the Workers' State 47
the dissolving of the state in a self-governing society. From
this alone it is sufficiently clear how immeasurably significant
is the problem of Soviet bureaucratism, both in itself and as
a symptom!
It is because Lenin, in accord with his whole intellectual
temper, gave an extremely sharpened expression to the
conception of Marx, that he revealed the source of the future
difficulties, his own among them, although he did not himself
succeed in carrying his analysis through to the end. "A
bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie" proved inconsistent
with genuine Soviet democracy. The dual function of the state
could not but affect its structure. Experience revealed what
theory was unable clearly to foresee. If for the defense of
socialized property against bourgeois counterrevolution a
"state of armed workers" was fully adequate, it was a very
different matter to regulate inequalities in the sphere of
consumption. Those deprived of privileges are not inclined to
create and defend them. The majority cannot concern itself
with the privileges of the minority. For the defense of
"bourgeois law" the workers' state was compelled to create
a "bourgeois" type of instrument, that is, the same old
gendarme, although in a new uniform.
We have thus taken the first step toward understanding
the fundamental contradiction between Bolshevik program
and Soviet reality. If the state does not die away, but grows
more and more despotic, if the plenipotentiaries of the
working class become bureaucratized, and the bureaucracy
rises above the new society, this is not for some secondary
reasons like the psychological relics of the past, etc., but is a
result of the iron necessity to give birth to and support a
privileged minority so long as it is impossible to guarantee
genuine equality.
The tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangle the
workers' movement in capitalist countries, would everywhere
show themselves even after a proletarian revolution. But it
is perfectly obvious that the poorer the society which issues
from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the
expression of this "law," the more crude would be the forms
assumed by bureaucratism, and the more dangerous would
it become for socialist development. The Soviet state is

48 Socialism and the State
prevented not only from dying away, but even from freeing
itself of the bureaucratic parasite, not by the "relics" of
former ruling classes, as declares the purely police doctrine
of Stalin, for these relics are powerless in themselves. It i s
prevented by immeasurably mightier factors, such as material
want, cultural backwardness and the resulting dominance
of "bourgeois law" in what most immediately and
sharply touches every human being, the business of insuring
his personal existence.
"Generalized Want" and the Gendarme
Two years before the Communist Manifesto, young Marx
wrote: "A development of the productive forces is the
absolutely necessary practical premise [of Communism],
because without it want is generalized, and with want the
struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all
the old crap must revive." This thought Marx never directly
developed, and for no accidental reason: he never foresaw a
proletarian revolution in a backward country. Lenin also
never dwelt upon it, and this too was not accidental. He did
not foresee so prolonged an isolation of the Soviet state.
Nevertheless, the citation, merely an abstract construction
with Marx, an inference from the opposite, provides an
indispensable theoretical key to the wholly concrete difficulties
and sicknesses of the Soviet regime. On the historic basis
of destitution, aggravated by the destructions of the imperialist
and civil wars, the "struggle for individual existence" not
only did not disappear the day after the overthrow of the
bourgeoisie, and not only did not abate in the succeeding
years, but, on the contrary, assumed at times an unheard-of
ferocity. Need we recall that certain regions of the country
have twice gone to the point of cannibalism?
The distance separating tsarist Russia from the West can
really be appreciated only now. In the most favorable
conditions — that is in the absence of inner disturbances and
external catastrophes — it would require several more
five-year periods before the Soviet Union could fully assimilate
those economic and educative achievements upon which
the first-born nations of capitalist civilization have expended

"Generalized Want" and the Gendarme 49
centuries. The application of socialist methods for the solution
of presocialist problems — that is the very essence of the
present economic and cultural work in the USSR.
The Soviet Union, to be sure, even now excels in productive
forces the most advanced countries of the epoch of Marx. But
in the first place, in the historic rivalry of two regimes, it is
not so much a question of absolute as of relative levels; the
Soviet economy opposes the capitalism of Hitler, Baldwin and
Roosevelt, not Bismarck, Palmerston or Abraham Lincoln.
And in the second place, the very scope of human demands
changes fundamentally with the growth of world technique.
The contemporaries of Marx knew nothing of automobiles,
radios, moving pictures, airplanes. A socialist society today,
however, is unthinkable without the free enjoyment of all
these goods.
"The lowest stage of Communism," to employ the term of
Marx, begins at that level to which the most advanced
capitalism has drawn near. The real program of the coming
Soviet five-year plan, however, is to "catch up with Europe
and America." The construction of a network of autoroads
and asphalt highways in the measureless spaces of the Soviet
Union will require much more time and material than to
transplant automobile factories from America, or even to
acquire their technique. How many years are needed in order
to make it possible for every Soviet citizen to use an
automobile in any direction he chooses, refilling his gas tank
without difficulty en route? In barbarian society the rider and
the pedestrian constituted two classes. The automobile
differentiates society no less than the saddle horse. So long
as even a modest "Ford" remains the privilege of a minority,
there survive all the relations and customs proper to a
bourgeois society. And together with them there remains the
guardian of inequality, the state.
Basing himself wholly upon the Marxian theory of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin did not succeed, as we
have said, either in his chief work dedicated to this question
(State and Revolution), or in the program of the party, in
drawing all the necessary conclusions as to the character of
the state from the economic backwardness and isolatedness
of the country. Explaining the revival of bureaucratism by the

50 Socialism and the State
unfamiliarity of the masses with administration and by the
special difficulties resulting from the war, the program
prescribes merely political measures for the overcoming of
"bureaucratic distortions": election and recall at any time of
all plenipotentiaries, abolition of material privileges, active
control by the masses, etc. It was assumed that along this
road the bureaucrat, from being a boss, would turn into a
simple and moreover temporary technical agent, and the state
would gradually and imperceptibly disappear from the scene.
This obvious underestimation of impending difficulties is
explained by the fact that the program was based wholly upon
an international perspective. "The October Revolution in
Russia has realized the dictatorship of the proletariat.... The
era of world proletarian communist revolution has begun."
These were the introductory lines of the program. Their
authors not only did not set themselves the aim of constructing
"socialism in a single country" — this idea had not
entered anybody's head then, and least of all Stalin's — but
they also did not touch the question as to what character the
Soviet state would assume, if compelled for as long as two
decades to solve in isolation those economic and cultural
problems which advanced capitalism had solved so long ago.
The postwar revolutionary crisis did not lead, however, to
the victory of socialism in Europe. The Social Democrats
rescued the bourgeoisie. That period, which to Lenin and his
colleagues looked like a short "breathing spell," has stretched
out to a whole historical epoch,, The contradictory social
structure of the USSR, and the ultrabureaucratic character
of its state, are the direct consequences of this unique and
"unforeseen" historical pause, which has at the same time
led in the capitalist countries to fascism or prefascist reaction.
While the first attempt to create a state cleansed of
bureaucratism fell foul, in the first place, of the unfamiliarity
of the masses with self-government, the lack of qualified
workers devoted to socialism, etc., it very soon after these
immediate difficulties encountered others more profound.
That reduction of the state to functions of "accounting and
control," with a continual narrowing of the function of
compulsion, demanded by the party program, assumed at
least a relative condition of general contentment. Just this

The "Complete Triumph of Socialism" 51
necessary condition was lacking. No help came from the West.
The power of the democratic Soviets proved cramping, even
unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate
those privileged groups whose existence was necessary for
defense, for industry, for technique and science. In this
decidedly not "socialistic" operation, taking from ten and
giving to one, there crystallized out and developed a powerful
caste of specialists in distribution.
How and why is it, however, that the enormous economic
successes of the recent period have led not to a mitigation,
but on the contrary to a sharpening, of inequality, and at the
same time to a further growth of bureaucratism, such that
from being a "distortion," it has now become a system of
administration? Before attempting to answer this question,
let us hear how the authoritative leaders of the Soviet
bureaucracy look upon their own regime.
The "Complete Triumph of Socialism" and the
"Reinforcement of the Dictatorship"
There have been several announcements during recent
years of the "complete triumph" of socialism in the Soviet
Union — taking especially categorical forms in connection
with the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." On January
30, 1931, Pravda, interpreting a speech of Stalin, said:
"During the second five-year period, the last vestiges of
capitalist elements in our economy will be liquidated."
(Emphasis added.) From the point of view of this perspective,
the state ought conclusively to die away during the same
period, for where the "last vestiges" of capitalism are
liquidated the state has nothing to do. "The Soviet power,"
says the program of the Bolshevik Party on this subject,
"openly recognizes the inevitability of the class character of
every state, so long as the division of society into classes, and
therewith all state power, has not completely disappeared."
However, when certain incautious Moscow theoreticians
attempted, from this liquidation of the "last vestiges" of
capitalism taken on faith, to infer the dying away of the state,
the bureaucracy immediately declared such theories "counterrevolutionary."

52 Socialism and the Stati
Where lies the theoretical mistake of the bureaucracy: i n
the basic premise or the conclusion? In the one and the other
To the first announcements of "complete triumph," the Left
Opposition answered: You must not limit yourself to the
sociojuridical forms of relations which are unripe, contradictory,
in agriculture still very unstable, abstracting from the
fundamental criterion: the level of the productive forces.
Juridical forms themselves have an essentially different
social content depending on the height of the technical level.
"Law can never be higher than the economic structure and
the cultural level conditioned by it" (Marx). Soviet forms of
property on a basis of the most modern achievements of
American technique transplanted into all branches of economic
life — that would indeed be the first stage of socialism.
Soviet forms with a low productivity of labor mean only a
transitional regime whose destiny history has not yet finally
weighed.
"Is it not monstrous?" — we wrote in March 1932. "The
country cannot get out of a famine of goods. There is a
stoppage of supplies at every step. Children lack milk. But
the official oracles announce: 'The country has entered into
the period of socialism!' Would it be possible more viciously
to compromise the name of socialism?" Karl Radek, now a
prominent publicist* of the ruling Soviet circles, parried these
remarks in the German liberal paper, Berliner Tageblatt, in
a special issue devoted to the USSR (May 1932), in the
following words which deserve to be immortal: "Milk is a
product of cows and not of socialism, and you would have
actually to confuse socialism with the image of a country
where rivers flow milk, in order not to understand that a
country can rise for a time to a higher level of development
without any considerable rise in the material situation of the
popular masses." These lines were written when a horrible
famine was raging in the country.
Socialism is a structure of planned production for the best
satisfaction of human needs; otherwise it does not deserve
the name of socialism. If cows are socialized, but there are too
* Written before the arrest of Karl Radek in August 1936 on charges of a
terroristic conspiracy against the Soviet leaders — Trans

fhe "Complete Triumph of Socialism" 53
f ew of them, or they have too meager udders, then conflicts
arise out of the inadequate supply of milk — conflicts between
city and country, between collective farms and individual
peasants, between different strata of the proletariat, between
the whole toiling mass and the bureaucracy. It was in fact the
socialization of the cows which led to their mass extermination
by the peasants. Social conflicts created by want can in
their turn lead to a resurrection of "all the old crap." Such
was, in essence, our answer.
The Seventh Congress of the Communist International, in
a resolution of August 20,1935, solemnly affirmed that in the
sum total of the successes of the nationalized industries, the
achievement of collectivization, the crowding out of capitalist
elements and the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, "the
final and irrevocable triumph of socialism and the all-sided
reinforcement of the state of the proletarian dictatorship is
achieved in the Soviet Union." With all its categorical tone,
this testimony of the Communist International is thoroughly
self-contradictory. If socialism has "finally and irrevocably"
triumphed, not as a principle but as a living social regime,
then a renewed "reinforcement" of the dictatorship is obvious
nonsense. And on the contrary, if the reinforcement of the
dictatorship is evoked by the real demands of the regime,
that means that the triumph of socialism is still remote. Not
only a Marxist, but any realistic political thinker, ought to
understand that the very necessity of "reinforcing" the
dictatorship — that is, governmental repression — testifies
not to the triumph of classless harmony, but to the growth of
new social antagonisms. What lies at the bottom of all this?
Lack of the means of subsistence resulting from the low
productivity of labor.
Lenin once characterized socialism as "Soviet power plus
electrification." That epigram, whose one-sidedness was due
to the propaganda aims of the moment, assumed at least as
a minimum starting point the capitalist level of electrification.
At present in the Soviet Union, there is one-third as
much electrical energy per head of the population as in the
advanced countries, If you take into consideration that the
Soviets have given place in the meantime to an apparatus
that is independent of the masses, the Communist Interna-

54 Socialism and the State
tional has nothing left but to declare that socialism is
bureaucratic power plus one-third of the capitalist electrification.
Such a definition would be photographically accurate,
but for socialism it is not quite enough!
In a speech to the Stakhanovists in November 1935, Stalin,
obedient to the empirical aims of the conference, unexpectedly
announced: "Why can and should and necessarily will
socialism conquer the capitalist system of economy? Because
it can give ... a higher productivity of labor." Incidentally
rejecting the resolution of the Communist International
adopted three months before upon the same question, and
also his own oft-repeated announcements, Stalin here speaks
of the "triumph" of socialism in the future tense. Socialism
will conquer the capitalist system, he says, when it surpasses
it in the productivity of labor. Not only the tenses of the verbs
but the social criteria change, as we see, from moment to
moment. It is certainly not easy for the Soviet citizen to keep
up with the "general line."
Finally, on March 1, 1936, in a Conversation with Roy
Howard, Stalin offered a new definition of the Soviet regime:
That social organization which we have created may be
called a Soviet socialist organization, still not wholly completed,
but at root a socialist organization of society." In this
purposely vague definition there are almost as many
contradictions as there are words. The social organization is
called "Soviet socialist," but the Soviets are a form of state,
and socialism is a social regime. These designations are not
only not identical but, from the point of view of our interest,
antagonistic. Insofar as the social organization has become
socialistic, the Soviets ought to drop away like the scaffolding
after a building is finished. Stalin introduces a correction:
Socialism is "still not wholly completed." What does "not
wholly" mean? By five percent, or by seventy-five percent?
This they do not tell us, just as they do not tell us what they
mean by an organization of society that is "socialistic at
root." Do they mean forms of property or technique? The
very haziness of the definition, however, implies a retreat
from the immeasurably more categorical formulas of 1931
and 1935. A further step along the same road would be to
acknowledge that the "root" of every social organization is

The "Complete Triumph of Socialism" 55
the productive forces, and that the Soviet root is just what is
not mighty enough for the socialist trunk and for its crown:
human welfare.

Money and Plan
CHAPTER FOUR
The Struggle for
Productivity of Labor
We have attempted to examine the Soviet regime in the
cross section of the state. We can make a similar examination
in the cross section of currency. These two problems, state
and money, have a number of traits in common, for they both
reduce themselves in the last analysis to the problem of
problems: productivity of labor. State compulsion like money
compulsion is an inheritance from class society, which is
incapable of defining the relations of man to man except in
the form of fetishes, religious or secular, after appointing to
defend them the most alarming of all fetishes, the state, with
a great knife between its teeth. In a communist society, the
state and money will disappear. Their gradual dying away
ought consequently to begin under socialism. We shall be able
to speak of the actual triumph of socialism only at that
historical moment when the state turns into a semistate, and
money begins to lose its magic power. This will mean that
socialism, having freed itself from capitalist fetishes, is
beginning to create more lucid, free and worthy relations
among men.
Such characteristically anarchist demands as the "abolition"
of money, "abolition" of wages, or "liquidation" of the
state and family, possess interest merely as models of
mechanical thinking. Money cannot be arbitrarily "abol-
57

58 The Struggle for Productivity of Labor
ished," nor the state and the old family "liquidated." They
have to exhaust their historic mission, play themselves out
and fall away. The deathblow to money fetishism will be
struck only upon that stage when the steady growth of social
wealth has made us bipeds forget our miserly attitude toward
every excess minute of labor, and our humiliating fear about
the size of our ration. Having lost its ability to bring happiness
or trample men in the dust, money will turn into mere
bookkeeping receipts for the convenience of statisticians and
for planning purposes. In the still more distant future,
probably these receipts will not be needed. But we can leave
this question entirely to our descendants, who will be more
intelligent than we are.
The nationalization of the means of production and credit,
the cooperativizing or state-izing of internal trade, the
monopoly of foreign trade, the collectivization of agriculture,
the law on inheritance — set strict limits upon the personal
accumulation of money and hinder its conversion into private
capital (usurious, commercial and industrial). These functions
of money, however, bound up as they are with
exploitation, are not liquidated at the beginning of a
proletarian revolution, but in a modified form are transferred
to the state, the universal merchant, creditor and industrialist.
At the same time, the more elementary functions of
money, as measure of value, means of exchange and medium
of payment, are not only preserved, but acquire a broader field
of action than they had under capitalism.
Administrative planning has sufficiently revealed its
power — but therewith also the limits of its power. An
a priori economic plan — above all in a backward country
with 170 million population, and a profound contradiction
between city and country — is not a fixed gospel, but a rough
working hypothesis which must be verified and reconstructed
in the process of its fulfillment. We might indeed lay down a
rule: the more "accurately" an administrative task is
fulfilled, the worse is the economic leadership. For the
regulation and application of plans, two levers are needed: a
political lever, in the form of real participation in leadership
of the interested masses themselves, which is unthinkable
without Soviet democracy; and a financial lever, in the form

Money and Plan 59
of a real verification of a priori calculations with the help of
a universal equivalent, which is unthinkable without a stable
money system.
The role of money in the Soviet economy is not only
unfinished but, as we have said, still has a long growth ahead.
The transitional epoch between capitalism and socialism
taken as a whole does not mean a cutting down of trade, but,
on the contrary, its extraordinary extension. All branches of
industry transform themselves and grow. New ones continually
arise, and all are compelled to define their relations to
one another both quantitatively and qualitatively. The
liquidation of the consummatory peasant economy, and at the
same time of the closed family structure, means a transfer
to the sphere of social interchange, and ipso facto money
circulation, of all the labor energy which was formerly
expended within the limits of the peasant's yard, or within
the walls of his private dwelling. All products and services
begin for the first time in history to be exchanged for one
another.
On the other hand, a successful socialist construction is
unthinkable without including in the planned system the
direct personal interests of the producer and consumer, their
egoism — which in its turn may reveal itself fruitfully only if
it has in its service the customary reliable and flexible
instrument, money. The raising of the productivity of labor
and the improvement of the quality of its products is quite
unattainable without an accurate measure freely penetrating
into all the cells of industry, that is, without a stable unit of
currency. Hence it is clear that in the transitional economy,
as also under capitalism, the sole authentic money is that
based upon gold. All other money is only a substitute. To be
sure, the Soviet state has in its hand at the same time the
mass of commodities and the machinery for printing money.
However, this does not change the situation. Administrative
manipulations in the sphere of commodity prices do not in the
slightest degree create, or replace, a stable money unit either
for domestic or foreign trade.
Deprived of an independent basis, that is, a gold basis, the
money system of the Soviet Union, like that of a number of
capitalist countries, has necessarily a shut-in character. For

60 The Struggle for Productivity of Lab,
the world market the ruble does not exist. If the Soviet Union
can endure the adverse aspects of this money system m 0re
easily than Germany or Italy, it is only in part due to the
monopoly of foreign trade. Chiefly it is due to the natural
wealth of the country. Only this makes it possible not to
strangle in the clutches of autarky. The historic task
however, is not merely to avoid strangling, but to create, face
to face with the highest achievements of the world market, a
powerful economy, rational through and through, which will
guarantee the greatest saving of time and consequently the
highest flowering of culture.
The dynamic Soviet economy, passing as it does through
continual technical revolutions and large-scale experiments,
needs more than any other continual testing by means of a
stable measure of value. Theoretically there cannot be the
slightest doubt that if the Soviet economy had possessed a
gold ruble, the results of the five-year plans would be
incomparably more favorable than they are now. But, of
course, such a standard has simply not existed.* But you
must not make a virtue of necessity, for that leads in turn to
additional economic mistakes and losses.
"Socialist" Inflation
The history of the Soviet monetary system is not only a
history of economic difficulties, successes and failures, but
also a history of the zigzags of bureaucratic thought
The restoration of the ruble in 1922-24, in connection with
the transition to the NEP, was directly bound up with the
restoration of the "norms of bourgeois right" in the
distribution of objects of consumption. So long as the course
toward the well-to-do farmer continued, the chervonets was
an object of governmental concern. During the first period of
the five-year plan, on the contrary, all the sluices of inflation
were opened. From 0.7 billion rubles at the beginning of 1925,
the total issue of currency had risen by the beginning of 1928
to the comparatively modest sum of 1,7 billion, which is
approximately comparable to the paper money circulation of
* Na net i suda net

"Socialist" Inflation 61
tsarist Russia on the eve of the war — but this, of course,
without its former metallic basis. The subsequent curve of
inflation from year to year is depicted in the following feverish
series: 2.0 - 2.8 - 4.3 - 5.5 - 8.4! The final figure, 8.4 billion
rubles, was reached at the beginning of 1933. After that came
the years of reconsideration and retreat: 6.9 - 7.7 - 7.9 billion
(1935).
The ruble of 1924, equal in the official exchange to 13
francs, had been reduced in November 1935 to 3 francs, that
is to less than a fourth of its value, or almost as much as the
French franc was reduced as a result of the war. Both parities,
the old and the new, are very conditional in character; the
purchasing power of the ruble in world prices now hardly
equals 1.5 francs. Nevertheless the scale of devaluation shows
with what dizzy speed the Soviet valuta was sliding downhill
until 1934.
At the height of his economic adventurism, Stalin promised
to send the NEP — that is, market relations — "to the devil."
The entire press wrote, as in 1918, about the final replacement
of merchant sale by "direct socialist distribution," the
external sign of which was the food card. At the same time,
inflation was categorically rejected as a phenomenon inconsistent
with the Soviet system. "The stability of the Soviet
valuta," said Stalin in January 1933, "is guaranteed
primarily by the immense quantity of commodities in the
hands of the state put in circulation at stable prices."
Notwithstanding the fact that this enigmatical aphorism
received neither development nor elucidation (partly indeed
because of this), it became a fundamental law of the Soviet
theory of money, or, more accurately, of that very inflation
which it rejected. The chervonets proved thereafter to be not
a universal equivalent, but only the universal shadow of an
"immense" quantity of commodities. And like all shadows,
it possessed the right to shorten and lengthen itself. If this
consoling doctrine made any sense at all, it was only this:
Soviet money has ceased to be money; it serves no longer as
a measure of value; "stable prices" are designated by the
state power; the chervonets is only a conventional label of the
planned economy, a universal distribution card. In a word,
socialism has triumphed "finally and irrevocably."

62 The Struggle for Productivity ofL ab i
The most Utopian views of the period of war communism
were thus restored on a new economic basis — a little higher
to be sure, but alas still inadequate for the liquidation of
money circulation. The ruling circles were completely possessed
by the opinion that with a planned economy, inflation
is not to be feared. This means approximately that if you
possess a compass there is no danger in a leaking ship. I n
reality, currency inflation, inevitably producing a credit
inflation, entails a substitution of fictitious for real magnitudes,
and corrodes the planned economy from within.
It is needless to say that inflation meant a dreadful tax
upon the toiling masses. As for the advantages to socialism
achieved with its help, they are more than dubious. The
economy, to be sure, continued its rapid growth, but the
economic efficiency of the grandiose construction was estimated
statistically and not economically. Taking command
of the ruble — giving it various arbitrary purchasing powers
in different strata of the population and sectors of the
economy — the bureaucracy deprived itself of the necessary
instrument for objectively measuring its own successes and
failures. The absence of correct accounting, disguised on
paper by means of combinations with the "conventional
ruble," led in reality to a decline of personal interest, to a low
productivity and to a still lower quality of goods.
In the course of the first five-year plan, this evil assumed
threatening proportions. In July 1931, Stalin came out with
his famous "six conditions," whose chief aim was to lower the
cost of industrial production. These "conditions" (payment
according to individual productivity of labor, production-cost
accounting, etc.) contained nothing new The "norms of
bourgeois right" had been advanced at the dawn of the NEP,
and developed at the twelfth congress of the party at the
beginning of 1923. Stalin happened upon them only in 1931,
under the influence of the declining efficiency of capital
investments. During the following two years, hardly an article
appeared in the Soviet press without references to the
salvation power of these "conditions." Meanwhile, with
inflation continuing, the diseases caused by it were naturally
not getting cured. Severe measures of repression against
wreckers and saboteurs did as little to help things forward.

"Socialist" Inflation 63
The fact seems almost unbelievable now that in opening a
struggl e
against "impersonality" and "equalization" —
which means anonymous "average" labor and similar
"average" pay for all — the bureaucracy was at the same
time sending "to the devil" the NEP, which means the money
evaluation of all commodities, including labor power. Restoring
"bourgeois norms" with one hand, they were destroying
with the other the sole implement of any use under them.
With the substitution of "closed distributors" for commerce,
and with complete chaos in prices, all correspondence
between individual labor and individual wages necessarily
disappeared, and therewith disappeared the personal interestedness
of the worker.
The strictest instructions in regard to economic accounting,
quality, cost of production and productivity, were left hanging
in the air. This did not prevent the leaders from declaring the
cause of all economic difficulties to be the malicious
unfulfillment of the six prescriptions of Stalin. The most
cautious references to inflation they likened to a state crime.
With similar conscientiousness, the authorities on occasion
have accused teachers of breaking the rules of school hygiene
while at the same time forbidding them to mention the
absence of soap.
The question of the fate of the chervonets has occupied a
prominent place in the struggle of factions in the Communist
Party. The platform of the Opposition (1927) demanded "a
guarantee of the unconditional stability of the monetary
unit." This demand became a leitmotif during the subsequent
years. "Stop the process of inflation with an iron hand,"
wrote the emigre organ of the Opposition in 1932, "and
restore a stable unit of currency," even at the price of "a bold
reduction of capital investments." The defenders of the
"tortoise tempo" and the superindustrializers had, it seemed,
temporarily changed places. In answer to the boast of sending
the market "to the devil," the Opposition recommended that
the State Planning Commission hang up the motto: "Inflation
is the syphilis of a planned economy."
• • •

64 The Struggle for Productivity ofLab 0f
In the sphere of agriculture, inflation brought no less heavy
consequences.
During the period when the peasant policy was still
oriented upon the well-to-do farmer, it was assumed that the
socialist transformation in agriculture, setting out upon the
basis of the NEP, would be accomplished in the course of
decades by means of the cooperatives. Assuming one after
another purchasing, selling and credit functions, the cooperatives
should in the long run also socialize production itself.
All this taken together was called "the cooperative plan of
Lenin." The actual development, as we know, followed a
completely different and almost an opposite course —
dekulakization by violence and integral collectivization. Of
the gradual socialization of separate economic functions, in
step with the preparation of the material and cultural
conditions for it, nothing more was said. Collectivization was
introduced as though it were the instantaneous realization
of the communist regime in agriculture.
The immediate consequence was not only an extermination
of more than half of the livestock, but more important, a
complete indifference of the members of the collective farms
to the socialized property and the results of their own labor.
The government was compelled to make a disorderly retreat.
They again supplied the peasants with chickens, pigs, sheep
and cows as personal property. They gave them private lots
adjoining the farmsteads. The film of collectivization began
to be run off backwards.
In thus restoring small personal farm holdings, the state
adopted a compromise, trying to buy off, as it were, the
individualistic tendencies of the peasant. The collective farms
were retained, and at first glance, therefore, the retreat might
seem of secondary importance. In reality, its significance
could hardly be overestimated. If you leave aside the collective
farm aristocracy, the daily needs of the average peasant are
still met to a greater degree by his work "on his own," than
by his participation in the collective. A peasant's income from
individual enterprises, especially when he takes up technical
culture, fruit or stock farming, amounts frequently to three
times as much as the earnings of the same peasant in the
collective economy. This fact, testified to in the Soviet press

Rehabilitation of the Ruble 65
itself, very clearly reveals on the one hand a completely
barbarous squandering of tens of millions of human forces,
especially those of women, in midget enterprises, and, on the
other, the still extremely low productivity of labor in the
collective farms.
In order to raise the standard of large-scale collective
agriculture, it was necessary again to talk to the peasant in
the language he understands — that is, to resurrect the
markets and return from taxes in kind to trade — in a word,
to ask back from Satan the NEP which had been prematurely
sent to him. The transition to a more or less stable money
accounting thus became a necessary condition for the further
development of agriculture.
The Rehabilitation of the Ruble
The owl of wisdom flies, as is well known, after sunset,
thus the theory of a "socialist" system of money and prices
was developed only after the twilight of inflationist illusions.
In developing the above enigmatical words of Stalin, the
obedient professors managed to create an entire theory
according to which the Soviet price, in contrast to the market
price, has an exclusively planning or directive character.
That is, it is not an economic, but an administrative category,
and thus serves the better for the redistribution of the
people's income in the interests of socialism. The professors
forgot to explain how you can "guide" a price without
knowing real costs, and how you can estimate real costs if all
prices express the will of a bureaucracy and not the amount
of socially necessary labor expended. In reality, for the
redistribution of the people's income, the government has in
its hands such mighty levers as taxes, the state budget and
the credit system. According to the budget of expenditures for
1936, over 37.6 billion rubles are allotted directly, and many
billions indirectly, to financing the various branches of
economy. The budget and credit mechanism is wholly
adequate for a planned distribution of the national income.
And as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better,
the more honestly they begin to express the real economic
relations of the present day.

66 The Struggle for Productivity of Labor
Experience has managed to say its decisive word on this
subject. "Directive" prices were less impressive in real lif e
than in the books of scholars. On one and the same
commodity, prices of different categories were established.
In the broad cracks between these categories, all kinds of
speculation, favoritism, parasitism and other vices found
room, and this rather as the rule than the exception. At the
same time, the chervonets, which ought to have been the
steady shadow of stable prices, became in reality nothing but
its own shadow.
It was again necessary to make a sharp change of course,
this time as a result of difficulties which grew out of the
economic successes. Nineteen thirty-five opened with the
abolition of bread cards. By October cards for other food
products were liquidated. By January 1936 cards for industrial
products of general consumption were abolished. The
economic relations of the city and the country to the state,
and to each other, were translated into the language of
money. The ruble is an instrument for the influence of the
population upon economic plans, beginning with the quantity
and quality of the objects of consumption. In no other manner
is it possible to rationalize the Soviet economy.
The chairman of the State Planning Commission announced
in December 1935: "The present system of mutual
relations between the banks and industry must be revised,
and the banks must seriously realize control by the ruble."
Thus the superstition of administrative plan and the illusion
of administrative prices were shipwrecked. If the approach
to socialism means in the fiscal sphere the approach of the
ruble to a distribution card, then the reforms of 1935 would
have to be regarded as a departure from socialism In reality,
however, such an appraisal would be a crude mistake. The
replacement of the card by the ruble is merely a rejection of
fictions, and an open acknowledgment of the necessity of
creating the premises for socialism by means of a return to
bourgeois methods of distribution.
At a session of the Central Executive Committee in
January 1936, the people's commissar of finance announced:
"The Soviet ruble is stable as is no other valuta in the world."
It would be wrong to regard this announcement as sheer

fhe Rehabilitation of the Ruble 67
boasting. The state budget of the Soviet Union is balanced
with a yearly increase of income over expenses. Foreign trade,
to be sure, although insignificant in itself, gives an active
balance. The gold reserve of the State Bank, which amounted
in 1926 to 164 million rubles, is now more than a billion. The
output of gold in the country is rising rapidly. In 1936, this
branch of industry is calculated to take first place in the
world. The growth of commodity circulation under the
restored market has become very rapid. Paper-money inflation
was actually stopped in 1934. The elements of a certain
stabilization of the ruble exist. Nevertheless, the announcement
of the people's commissar of finance must be explained
to a considerable extent by an inflation of optimism. If the
Soviet ruble possesses a mighty support in the general rise
of industry, still its Achilles heel is the intolerably high cost
of production. The ruble will become the most stable valuta
only from that moment when the Soviet productivity of labor
exceeds that of the rest of the world, and when, consequently,
the ruble itself will be meditating on its final hour.
From a technically fiscal point of view, the ruble can still
less lay claim to superiority. With a gold reserve of over a
billion, about eight billions of bank notes are in circulation
in the country. The coverage, therefore, amounts to only 12.5
percent. The gold in the State Bank is still considerably more
in the nature of an inviolate reserve for the purposes of war,
than the basis of a currency. Theoretically, to be sure, it is
not impossible that at a higher stage of development, the
Soviets will resort to a gold currency, in order to make
domestic economic plans precise and simplify economic
relations with foreign countries. Thus, before giving up the
ghost, the currency might once more flare up with the gleam
of pure gold. But this in any case is not a problem of the
immediate future.
In the period to come, there can be no talk of going over to
the gold standard. Insofar, however, as the government, by
increasing the gold reserve, is trying to raise the percentage
even of a purely theoretical coverage; insofar as the limits of
bank note emission are objectively determined and not
dependent upon the will of the bureaucracy, to that extent
the Soviet ruble may achieve at least a relative stability.

68 The Struggle for Productivity of'Labor
That alone would be of enormous benefit. With a firm
rejection of inflation in the future, the currency, although
deprived of the advantage of the gold standard, could
indubitably help to cure the many deep wounds inflicted upon
the economy by the bureaucratic subjectivism of the preceding
years.
The Stakhanov Movement
"All economy," said Marx — and that means all human
struggle with nature at all stages of civilization — "comes
down in the last analysis to an economy of time." Reduced
to its primary basis, history is nothing but a struggle for an
economy of working time. Socialism could not be justified by
the abolition of exploitation alone; it must guarantee to
society a higher economy of time than is guaranteed by
capitalism. Without the realization of this condition, the mere
removal of exploitation would be but a dramatic episode
without a future. The first historical experiment in the
application of socialist methods has revealed the great
possibilities contained in them. But the Soviet economy is still
far from learning to make use of time, that most precious raw
material of culture. The imported technique, the chief
implement for the economy of time, still fails to produce on
the Soviet soil those results which are normal in its capitalist
fatherlands. In that sense, decisive for all civilization,
socialism has not yet triumphed. It has shown that it can and
should triumph. But it has not yet triumphed. All assertions
to the contrary are the fruit of ignorance and charlatanism.
Molotov, who sometimes :— to do him justice — reveals a
little more freedom from the ritual phrase than other Soviet
leaders, declared in January 1936 at a session of the Central
Executive Committee: "Our average level of productivity of
labor is still considerably below that of America and
Europe." It would be well to make these words precise
approximately thus: three, five and sometimes even ten times
as low as that of Europe and America, and our cost of
production is correspondingly considerably higher. In the
same speech, Molotov made a more general confession: "The
average level of culture of our workers still stands below the

fhe Stakhanov Movement 69
corresponding level of the workers of a number of capitalist
countries." To this should be added: also the average
standard of living. There is no need of explaining how
mercilessly these sober words, spoken in passing, refute the
boastful announcements of the innumerable official authorities,
and the honeyed outpourings of the foreign "friends"!
The struggle to raise the productivity of labor, together
vyith concern about defense, is the fundamental content of the
activity of the Soviet government. At various stages in the
evolution of the USSR this struggle has assumed various
characters. The methods applied during the years of the first
five-year plan and the beginning of the second, the methods
of "shock brigade-ism" were based upon agitation, personal
example, administrative pressure and all kinds of group
encouragements and privileges. Attempts to introduce a kind
of piecework payment, on the basis of the "six conditions" of
1931, came to grief against the spectral character of the
valuta and the heterogeneity of prices. The system of state
distribution of products had replaced the flexible differential
valuation of labor with a so-called "premium system" which
meant, in essence, bureaucratic caprice. In the strife for
copious privileges, there appeared in the ranks of the shock
brigades an increasing number of chiselers with special pull.
In the long run, the whole system came into complete
opposition with its own aims.
Only the abolition of the card system, the beginning of the
stabilization of the ruble, and the unification of prices, created
the conditions for the application of piecework payment. Upon
this basis, shock brigade-ism was replaced with the so-called
Stakhanov movement. In the chase after the ruble, which had
now acquired a very real meaning, the workers began to
concern themselves more about their machines, and make a
more careful use of their working time. The Stakhanov
movement to a great degree comes down to an intensification
of labor, and even to a lengthening of the working day. During
the so-called nonworking time, the Stakhanovists put their
benches and tools in order and sort their raw material, the
brigadiers instruct their brigades, etc. Of the seven-hour
working day there thus remains nothing but the name.

70 The Struggle for Productivity of Labor
It was not the Soviet administrators who invented the
secret of piecework payment. That system, which strains the
nerves without visible external compulsion, Marx considered
"the most suitable to capitalistic methods of production."
The workers greeted this innovation not only without
sympathy, but with outright hostility. It would be unnatural
to expect any other reaction from them. The participation in
the Stakhanov movement of the genuine enthusiasts of
socialism is indubitable. To what extent they exceed the
number of mere careerists and cheaters, especially in the
sphere of administration, it would be hard to say. But the
main mass of the workers approaches the new mode of
payment from the point of view of the ruble, and is often
compelled to perceive that it is getting shorter.
Although at a first glance the return of the Soviet
government, after "the final and irrevocable triumph of
socialism," to piecework payment might seem a retreat to
capitalist relations, in reality it is necessary to repeat here
what was said about the rehabilitation of the ruble: It is not
a question of renouncing socialism, but merely of abandoning
crude illusions. The form of wage payment is simply brought
into better correspondence with the real resources of the
country. "Law can never be higher than the economic
structure."
However, the ruling stratum of the Soviet Union cannot
yet get along without a social disguise. In a report to the
Central Executive Committee in January 1936, the chairman
of the State Planning Commission, Mezhlauk, said: "The
ruble is becoming the sole real means for the realization of
the socialist [!] principle of payment for labor." Although in
the old monarchy everything, even down to the public
pissoirs, was called royal, this does not mean that in a
workers' state everything automatically becomes socialist.
The ruble is the "sole real means" for the realization of the
capitalist principle of payment for labor, even though on a
basis of socialist forms of property. This contradiction is
already familiar to us. In instituting the new myth of
"socialist" piecework payment, Mezhlauk added: "The fundamental
principle of socialism is that each one works
according to his abilities and receives payment according to

fhe Stakhanov Movement 71
the labor performed by him." These gentlemen are certainly
not diffident in manipulating theories! When the rhythm of
labor is determined by the chase after the ruble, then people
do not expend themselves "according to ability"— that is,
according to the condition of their nerves and muscles — but
in violation of themselves. This method can only be justified
conditionally and by reference to stern necessity; but to
declare it "the fundamental principle of socialism" means
cynically to trample the idea of a new and higher culture in
the familiar filth of capitalism.
Stalin has taken one more step upon this road, presenting
the Stakhanov movement as a "preparation of the conditions
for the transition from socialism to communism." The reader
will see now how important it may be to give a scientific
definition to those notions which are employed in the Soviet
Union according to administrative convenience. Socialism,
or the lowest stage of communism, demands, to be sure, a
strict control of the amount of labor and the amount of
consumption, but it assumes in any case more humane forms
of control than those invented by the exploitive genius of
capital. In the USSR, however, there is now taking place a
ruthlessly severe fitting in of backward human material to
the technique borrowed from capitalism. In the struggle to
achieve European and American standards, the classic
methods of exploitation, such as piecework payment, are
applied in such naked and crude forms as would not be
permitted even by reformist trade unions in bourgeois
countries. The consideration that in the Soviet Union the
workers work "for themselves" is true only in historical
perspective, and only on condition — we will anticipate
ourselves to say — that the workers do not submit to the
saddle of an autocratic bureaucracy. In any case, state
ownership of the means of production does not turn manure
into gold, and does not surround with a halo of sanctity the
sweatshop system, which wears out the greatest of all
productive forces: man. As to the preparation of a "transition
from socialism to communism," that will begin at the exactly
opposite end: not with the introduction of piecework payment,
but with its abolition as a relic of barbarism.

72 The Struggle for Productivity of Lab,
9 ® ®
It is still early to cast the balance of the Stakhanov
movement, but it is already possible to distinguish certain
traits characteristic not only of the movement, but of the
regime as a whole. Certain achievements of individual
workers are undoubtedly extremely interesting as evidence
of the possibilities open only to socialism. However, from
these possibilities to their realization on the scale of the whole
economy is a long road. With the close dependence of one
productive process upon another, a continual high output
cannot be the result of personal efforts alone. The elevation
of the average productivity cannot be achieved without a
reorganization of production both in the separate factory and
in the relations between enterprises. Moreover, to raise
millions to a small degree of technical skill is immeasurably
harder than to spur on a few thousand champions.
The leaders themselves, as we have heard, complain at
times that the Soviet workers lack skill. However, that is only
half of the truth, and the smaller half. The Russian worker
is enterprising, ingenious and gifted. Any hundred Soviet
workers transferred into the conditions, let us say, of
American industry, after a few months, and even weeks,
would probably not fall behind the American workers of a
corresponding category. The difficulty lies in the general
organization of labor. The Soviet administrative personnel is,
as a general rule, far less equal to the new productive tasks
than the worker.
With a new technique, piecework payment should inevitably
lead to a systematic raising of the now very low
productivity of labor. But the creation of the necessary
elementary conditions for this demands a raising of the level
of administration itself, from the shop foreman to the leaders
in the Kremlin. The Stakhanov movement only in a very
small degree meets this demand. The bureaucracy tries
fatally to leap over difficulties which it cannot surmount.
Since piecework payment of itself does not give the immediate
miracles expected of it, a furious administrative pressure
rushes to its help, with premiums and ballyhoo on the one
side, and penalties on the other.

f he Stakhanov Movement 73
The first steps of the movement were signalized with mass
repressions against the technical engineering personnel and
the workers accused of resistance, sabotage and, in some
cases, even of the murder of Stakhanovists. The severity of
the repressions testifies to the strength of the resistance. The
bosses explained this so-called sabotage as a political
opposition. In reality, it was most often rooted in technical,
economic and cultural difficulties, a considerable portion of
which found their source in the bureaucracy itself. The
"sabotage" was soon apparently broken: the discontented
were frightened; the perspicacious were silenced. Telegrams
flew round about unheard-of achievements. And in reality,
so long as it was a question of individual pioneers, the local
administrations, obedient to orders, arranged their work with
extraordinary forethought, although at the expense of the
other workers in the mine or guild. But when hundreds and
thousands of workers are suddenly numbered among "Stakhanovists,"
the administration gets into utter confusion. Not
knowing how, and not being objectively able, to put the regime
of production in order in a short space of time, it tries to
violate both labor power and technique. When the clockworks
slow down, it pokes the little wheels with a nail. As a result
of the "Stakhanovist" days and ten-day periods, complete
chaos was introduced into many enterprises. This explains
the fact, at first glance astonishing, that a growth in the
number of Stakhanovists is frequently accompanied, not with
an increase, but a decrease of the general productivity of the
enterprise.
At present, the "heroic" period of the movement is
apparently past. The everyday grind begins. It is necessary
to learn. Especially those who teach others have much to
learn. But they are just the ones who least of all wish to learn.
The name of that social guild which holds back and paralyzes
all the guilds of the Soviet economy is — the bureaucracy.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Soviet Thermidor
Why Stalin Triumphed
The historian of the Soviet Union cannot fail to conclude
that the policy of the ruling bureaucracy upon great questions
has been a series of contradictory zigzags. The attempt to
explain or justify them by "changing circumstances" obviously
will not hold water. To guide means at least in some
degree to exercise foresight. The Stalin faction have not in
the slightest degree foreseen the inevitable results of the
development; they have been caught napping every time.
They have reacted with mere administrative reflexes. The
theory of each successive turn has been created after the fact,
and with small regard for what they were teaching yesterday.
On the basis of the same irrefutable facts and documents, the
historian will be compelled to conclude that the so-called Left
Opposition offered an immeasurably more correct analysis of
the processes taking place in the country, and far more truly
foresaw their further development.
This assertion is contradicted at first glance by the simple
fact that the faction which could not see ahead was steadily
victorious, while the more penetrating group suffered defeat
after defeat. That kind of objection, which comes automatically
to mind, is convincing, however, only for those who think
rationalistically, and see in politics a logical argument or a
chess match. A political struggle is in its essence a struggle
of interests and forces, not of arguments. The quality of the
75

76 The Soviet Thermidor
leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference fb r
the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and
in the last analysis is not decisive. Each of the struggling
camps moreover demands leaders in its own image.
The February Revolution raised Kerensky and Tseretelh"
to power, not because they were "cleverer" or "more astute"
than the ruling tsarist clique, but because they represented,
at least temporarily, the revolutionary masses of the people
in their revolt against the old regime. Kerensky was able to
drive Lenin underground and imprison other Bolshevik
leaders, not because he. excelled them in personal qualifications,
but because the majority of the workers and soldiers
in those days were still following the patriotic petty
bourgeoisie. The personal "superiority" of Kerensky, if it is
suitable to employ such a word in this connection, consisted
in the fact that he did not see further than the overwhelming
majority. The Bolsheviks in their turn conquered the
petty-bourgeois democrats, not through the personal superiority
of their leaders, but through a new correlation of social
forces. The proletariat had succeeded at last in leading the
discontented peasantry against the bourgeoisie.
The consecutive stages of the great French Revolution,
during its rise and fall alike, demonstrate no less convincingly
that the strength of the "leaders" and "heroes" that replaced
each other consisted primarily in their correspondence to the
character of those classes and strata which supported them.
Only this correspondence, and not any irrelevant superiorities
whatever, permitted each of them to place the impress
of his personality upon a certain historic period. In the
successive supremacy of Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre,
Barras and Bonaparte, there is an obedience to objective law
incomparably more powerful than the special traits of the
historic protagonists themselves.
It is sufficiently well known that every revolution up to
this time has been followed by a reaction, or even a
counterrevolution. This, to be sure, has never thrown the
nation all the way back to its starting point, but it has always
taken from the people the lion's share of their conquests. The
victims of the first reactionary wave have been, as a general
rule, those pioneers, initiators, and instigators who stood at

Why Stalin Triumphed 77
the head of the masses in the period of the revolutionary
offensive. In their stead people of the second line, in league
with the former enemies of the revolution, have been
advanced to the front. Beneath this dramatic duel of
"coryphees" on the open political scene, shifts have taken
place in the relations between classes, and, no less important,
profound changes in the psychology of the recently revolutionary
masses.
Answering the bewildered questions of many comrades as
to what has become of the activity of the Bolshevik Party and
the working class — where is its revolutionary initiative, its
spirit of self-sacrifice and plebeian pride — why, in place of
all this, has appeared so much vileness, cowardice, pusillanimity
and careerism — Rakovsky referred to the life story
of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, and
offered the example of Babeuf, who on emerging from the
Abbaye prison likewise wondered what had become of the
heroic people of the Parisian suburbs. A revolution is a mighty
devourer of human energy, both individual and collective.
The nerves give way. Consciousness is shaken and characters
are worn out. Events unfold too swiftly for the flow of fresh
forces to replace the loss. Hunger, unemployment, the death
of the revolutionary cadres, the removal of the masses from
administration, all this led to such a physical and moral
impoverishment of the Parisian suburbs that they required
three decades before they were ready for a new insurrection.
The axiom-like assertions of the Soviet literature, to the
effect that the laws of bourgeois revolutions are "inapplicable"
to a proletarian revolution, have no scientific content
whatever. The proletarian character of the October Revolution
was determined by the world situation and by a special
correlation of internal forces. But the classes themselves were
formed in the barbarous circumstances of tsarism and
backward capitalism, and were anything but made to order
for the demands of a socialist revolution. The exact opposite
is true. It is for the very reason that a proletariat still
backward in many respects achieved in the space of a few
months the unprecedented leap from a semifeudal monarchy
to a socialist dictatorship, that the reaction in its ranks was
inevitable. This reaction has developed in a series of

78 The Soviet Thermidor
consecutive waves. External conditions and events have vied
with each other in nourishing it. Intervention followed
intervention. The revolution got no direct help from the West
Instead of the expected prosperity of the country, an ominous
destitution reigned for long. Moreover, the outstanding
representatives of the working class either died in the civil
war or rose a few steps higher arid broke away from the
masses. And thus after an unexampled tension of forces
hopes and illusions, there came a long period of weariness
decline and sheer disappointment in the results of the
revolution. The ebb of the "plebeian pride" made room for a
flood of pusillanimity and careerism. The new commanding
caste rose to its place upon this wave.
The demobilization of the Red Army of five million played
no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy. The
victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local
Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently
introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured
success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were
pushed away gradually from actual participation in the
leadership of the country.
The reaction within the proletariat caused an extraordinary
flush of hope and confidence in the petty-bourgeois strata of
town and country, aroused as they were to new life by the
NEP, and growing bolder and bolder. The young bureaucracy,
which had arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began
now to feel itself a court of arbitration between the classes.
Its independence increased from month to month.
The international situation was pushing with mighty forces
in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more
self-confident the heavier the blows dealt to the world
working class. Between these two facts there was not only a
chronological, but a causal connection, and one which worked
in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted
the proletarian defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the
bureaucracy. The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection and
the inglorious retreat of the German workers' party in 1923,
the collapse of the Estonian attempt at insurrection in 1924,
the treacherous liquidation of the general strike in England
and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers' parties at

Why Stalin Triumphed 79
the installation of Pilsudski in 1926, the terrible massacre of
t ne Chinese revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more
ominous recent defeats in Germany and Austria 1
— these are
the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet
masses in world revolution, and permitted the bureaucracy
to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.
As to the causes of the defeat of the world proletariat during
the last thirteen years, the author must refer to his other
works, where he has tried to expose the ruinous part played
by the leadership in the Kremlin, isolated from the masses
and profoundly conservative as it is, in the revolutionary
movement of all countries. Here we are concerned primarily
with the irrefutable and instructive fact that the continual
defeats of the revolution in Europe and Asia, while weakening
the international position of the Soviet Union, have vastly
strengthened the Soviet bureaucracy. Two dates are especially
significant in this historic series. In the second half of
1923, the attention of the Soviet workers was passionately
fixed upon Germany, where the proletariat, it seemed, had
stretched out its hand to power. The panicky retreat of the
German Communist Party was the heaviest possible disappointment
to the working masses of the Soviet Union. The
Soviet bureaucracy immediately opened a campaign against
the theory of "permanent revolution," and dealt the Left
Opposition its first cruel blow. During the years 1926 and
1927 the population of the Soviet Union experienced a new
tide of hope. All eyes were now directed to the East where the
drama of the Chinese revolution was unfolding. The Left
Opposition had recovered from the previous blows and was
recruiting a phalanx of new adherents. At the end of 1927 the
Chinese revolution was massacred by the hangman Chiang
Kai-shek into whose hands the Communist International had
literally betrayed the Chinese workers and peasants. A cold
wave of disappointment swept over the masses of the Soviet
Union. After an unbridled baiting in the press and at
meetings, the bureaucracy finally, in 1928, ventured upon
mass arrests among the Left Opposition.
To be sure, tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters
gathered around the banner of the Bolshevik-Leninists. The
advanced workers were indubitably sympathetic to the

78 The Soviet Thermidor
consecutive waves. External conditions and events have vied
with each other in nourishing it. Intervention followed
intervention. The revolution got no direct help from the West.
Instead of the expected prosperity of the country, an ominous
destitution reigned for long. Moreover, the outstanding
representatives of the working class either died in the civil
war or rose a few steps higher and hroke away from the
masses. And thus after an unexampled tension of forces,
hopes and illusions, there came a long period of weariness,
decline and sheer disappointment in the results of the
revolution. The ebb of the "plebeian pride" made room for a
flood of pusillanimity and careerism. The new commanding
caste rose to its place upon this wave.
The demobilization of the Red Army of five million played
no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy. The
victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local
Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently
introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured
success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were
pushed away gradually from actual participation in the
leadership of the country.
The reaction within the proletariat caused an extraordinary
flush of hope and confidence in the petty-bourgeois strata of
town and country, aroused as they were to new life by the
NEP, and growing bolder and bolder. The young bureaucracy,
which had arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began
now to feel itself a court of arbitration between the classes.
Its independence increased from month to month.
The international situation was pushing with mighty forces
in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more
self-confident the heavier the blows dealt to the world
working class. Between these two facts there was not only a
chronological, but a causal connection, and one which worked
in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted
the proletarian defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the
bureaucracy. The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection and
the inglorious retreat of the German workers' party in 1923,
the collapse of the Estonian attempt at insurrection in 1924,
the treacherous liquidation of the general strike in England
and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers' parties at

Why Stalin Triumphed 79
the installation of Pilsudski in 1926, the terrible massacre of
the Chinese revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more
ominous recent defeats in Germany and Austria 1
— these are
the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet
masses in world revolution, and permitted the bureaucracy
to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.
As to the causes of the defeat of the world proletariat during
the last thirteen years, the author must refer to his other
works, where he has tried to expose the ruinous part played
by the leadership in the Kremlin, isolated from the masses
and profoundly conservative as it is, in the revolutionary
movement of all countries. Here we are concerned primarily
with the irrefutable and instructive fact that the continual
defeats of the revolution in Europe and Asia, while weakening
the international position of the Soviet Union, have vastly
strengthened the Soviet bureaucracy. Two dates are especially
significant in this historic series. In the second half of
1923, the attention of the Soviet workers was passionately
fixed upon Germany, where the proletariat, it seemed, had
stretched out its hand to power. The panicky retreat of the
German Communist Party was the heaviest possible disappointment
to the working masses of the Soviet Union. The
Soviet bureaucracy immediately opened a campaign against
the theory of "permanent revolution," and dealt the Left
Opposition its first cruel blow. During the years 1926 and
1927 the population of the Soviet Union experienced a new
tide of hope. All eyes were now directed to the East where the
drama of the Chinese revolution was unfolding. The Left
Opposition had recovered from the previous blows and was
recruiting a phalanx of new adherents. At the end of 1927 the
Chinese revolution was massacred by the hangman Chiang
Kai-shek into whose hands the Communist International had
literally betrayed the Chinese workers and peasants. A cold
wave of disappointment swept over the masses of the Soviet
Union. After an unbridled baiting in the press and at
meetings, the bureaucracy finally, in 1928, ventured upon
mass arrests among the Left Opposition.
To be sure, tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters
gathered around the banner of the Bolshevik-Leninists. The
advanced workers were indubitably sympathetic to the

80 The Soviet Thermidor
Opposition, but that sympathy remained passive. The masses
lacked faith that the situation could be seriously changed by
a new struggle. Meanwhile the bureaucracy asserted: "For
the sake of an international revolution, the Opposition
proposes to drag us into a revolutionary war. Enough of
shake-ups! We have earned the right to rest. We will build
the socialist society at home. Rely upon us, your leaders!"
This gospel of repose firmly consolidated the apparatchiki and
the military and state officials and indubitably found an echo
among the weary workers, and still more the peasant masses.
Can it be, they asked themselves, that the Opposition is
actually ready to sacrifice the interests of the Soviet Union
for the idea of "permanent revolution?" In reality, the
struggle had been about the life interests of the Soviet state.
The false policy of the International in Germany resulted ten
years later in the victory of Hitler, that is, in a threatening
war danger from the West. And the no less false policy in
China reinforced Japanese imperialism and brought very
much nearer the danger in the East. But periods of reaction
are characterized above all by a lack of courageous thinking.
The Opposition was isolated. The bureaucracy struck while
the iron was hot, exploiting the bewilderment and passivity
of the workers, setting their more backward strata against
the advanced, and relying more and more boldly upon the
kulak and the petty-bourgeois ally in general. In the course
of a few years, the bureaucracy thus shattered the revolutionary
vanguard of the proletariat.
It would be naive to imagine that Stalin, previously
unknown to the masses, suddenly issued from the wings fully
armed with a complete strategical plan. No indeed. Before
he felt out his own course, the bureaucracy felt out Stalin
himself. He brought it all the necessary guarantees: the
prestige of an Old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow
vision, and close bonds with the political machine as the sole
source of his influence. The success which fell upon him was
a surprise at first to Stalin himself. It was the friendly
welcome of the new ruling group, trying to free itself from the
old principles and from the control of the masses, and having
need of a reliable arbiter in its inner affairs A secondary
figure before the masses and in the events of the revolution,

fhe Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party 81
Stalin revealed himself as the indubitable leader of the
Xhermidorian bureaucracy, as first in its midst.
The new ruling caste soon revealed its own ideas, feelings
and, more important, its interests. The overwhelming majority
of the older generation of the present bureaucracy had
stood on the other side of the barricades during the October
Revolution. (Take, for example, the Soviet ambassadors only:
Troyanovsky, Maisky, Potemkin, Suritz, Khinchuk, 2
etc.) Or
at best they had stood aside from the struggle. Those of the
present bureaucrats who were in the Bolshevik camp in the
October days played in the majority of cases no significant
role. As for the young bureaucrats, they have been chosen and
educated by the elders, frequently from among their own
offspring. These people could not have achieved the October
Revolution, but they were perfectly suited to exploit it.
Personal incidents in the interval between these two
historic chapters were not, of course, without influence. Thus
the sickness and death of Lenin undoubtedly hastened the
denouement. Had Lenin lived longer, the pressure of the
bureaucratic power would have developed, at least during the
first years, more slowly. But as early as 1926 Krupskaya said,
in a circle of Left Oppositionists: "If Ilych were alive, he would
probably already be in prison." The fears and alarming
prophecies of Lenin himself were then still fresh in her
memory, and she cherished no illusions as to his personal
omnipotence against opposing historic winds and currents.
The bureaucracy conquered not only the Left Opposition.
It conquered the Bolshevik Party. It defeated the program of
Lenin, who had seen the chief danger in the conversion of the
organs of the state "from servants of society to lords over
society." It defeated all these enemies, the Opposition, the
party and Lenin, not with ideas and arguments, but with its
own social weight. The leaden rump of the bureaucracy
outweighed the head of the revolution. That is the secret of
the Soviet Thermidor.
The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party
The Bolshevik Party prepared and insured the October
victory. It also created the Soviet state, supplying it with a

82 The Soviet Thermidor
sturdy skeleton. The degeneration of the party became both
cause and consequence of the bureaucratization of the state.
It is necessary to show at least briefly how this happened.
The inner regime of the Bolshevik Party was characterized
by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of
these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the
least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only
that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also
that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the
actual right to define the direction of the party policy.
Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an
irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present
doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth
of the epoch of decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism
is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could
a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task
of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the
most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and
develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and
temporary factional formations? The farsightedness of the
Bolshevik leadership often made it possible to soften conflicts
and shorten the duration of factional struggle, but no more
than that. The Central Committee relied upon this seething
democratic support. From this it derived the audacity to
make decisions and give orders. The obvious correctness of
the leadership at all critical stages gave it that high authority
which is the priceless moral capital of centralism.
The regime of the Bolshevik Party, especially before it
came to power, stood thus in complete contradiction to the
regime of the present sections of the Communist International,
with their "leaders" appointed from above, making
complete changes of policy at a word of command, with their
uncontrolled apparatus, haughty in its attitude to the rank
and file, servile in its attitude to the Kremlin. But in the first
years after the conquest of power also, even when the
administrative rust was already visible on the party, every
Bolshevik, not excluding Stalin, would have denounced as a
malicious slanderer anyone who should have shown him on
a screen the image of the party ten or fifteen years later.

fhe Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party 83
The very center of Lenin's attention and that of his
colleagues was occupied by a continual concern to protect the
Bolshevik ranks from the vices of those in power. However,
the extraordinary closeness and at times actual merging of
the party with the state apparatus had already in those first
years done indubitable harm to the freedom and elasticity of
the party regime. Democracy had been narrowed in proportion
as difficulties increased. In the beginning, the party had
wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle
within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced
stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition
parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure,
obviously in conflict with the spirit of soviet democracy, the
leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as a principle, but as an
episodic act of self-defense.
The swift growth of the ruling party, with the novelty and
immensity of its tasks, inevitably gave rise to inner disagreements.
The underground oppositional currents in the country
exerted a pressure through various channels upon the sole
legal political organization, increasing the acuteness of the
factional struggle. At the moment of completion of the civil
war, this struggle took such sharp forms as to threaten to
unsettle the state power. In March 1921, in the days of the
Kronstadt revolt, 3
which attracted into its ranks no small
number of Bolsheviks, the tenth congress of the party thought
it necessary to resort to a prohibition of factions — that is, to
transfer the political regime prevailing in the state to the
inner life of the ruling party. This forbidding of factions was
again regarded as an exceptional measure to be abandoned
at the first serious improvement in the situation. At the same
time, the Central Committee was extremely cautious in
applying the new law, concerning itself most of all lest it lead
to a strangling of the inner life of the party.
However, what was in its original design merely a
necessary concession to a difficult situation proved perfectly
suited to the taste of the bureaucracy, which had then begun
to approach the inner life of the party exclusively from the
viewpoint of convenience in administration. Already in 1922,
during a brief improvement in his health, Lenin, horrified at
the threatening growth of bureaucratism, was preparing a

84 The Soviet Thermidor
struggle against the faction of Stalin, which had made itself
the axis of the party machine as a first step toward capturing
the machinery of state. A second stroke and then death
prevented him from measuring forces with this internal
reaction.
The entire effort of Stalin, with whom at that time Zinoviev
and Kamenev were working hand in hand, was thenceforth
directed to freeing the party machine from the control of the
rank-and-file members of the party. In this struggle for
"stability" of the Central Committee, Stalin proved the most
consistent and reliable among his colleagues. He had no need
to tear himself away from international problems; he had
never been concerned with them. The petty-bourgeois outlook
of the new ruling stratum was his own outlook. He profoundly
believed that the task of creating socialism was national and
administrative in its nature. He looked upon the Communist
International as a necessary evil which should be used so far
as possible for the purposes of foreign policy. His own party
kept a value in his eyes merely as a submissive support for
the machine.
Together with the theory of socialism in one country, there
was put into circulation for the bureaucracy a theory that in
Bolshevism the Central Committee is everything and the
party nothing. This second theory was in any case realized
with more success than the first. Availing itself of the death
of Lenin, the ruling group announced a "Leninist levy." The
gates of the party, always carefully guarded, were now thrown
wide open. Workers, clerks, petty officials, flocked through
in crowds. The political aim of this maneuver was to dissolve
the revolutionary vanguard in raw human material, without
experience, without independence, and yet with the old habit
of submitting to the authorities. The scheme was successful.
By freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian
vanguard, the "Leninist levy" dealt a death blow to the party
of Lenin. The machine had won the necessary independence.
Democratic centralism gave place to bureaucratic centralism.
In the party apparatus itself, there now took place a radical
reshuffling of personnel from top to bottom. The chief merit
of a Bolshevik was declared to be obedience. Under the guise
of a struggle with the Opposition, there occurred a sweeping

The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party 85
replacement of revolutionists with chinovniks.* The history
of the Bolshevik Party became a history of its rapid
degeneration.
The political meaning of the developing struggle was
darkened for many by the circumstance that the leaders of
all three groupings, Left, Center and Right, belonged to one
and the same staff in the Kremlin, the Politburo. To
superficial minds it seemed to be a mere matter of personal
rivalry, a struggle for the "heritage" of Lenin. But in the
conditions of iron dictatorship social antagonisms could not
show themselves at first except through the institutions of
the ruling party. Many Thermidorians emerged in their day
from the milieu of the Jacobins, to whom Bonaparte himself
belonged during his early years; subsequently it was from
among former Jacobins that the First Consul and Emperor
of France selected his most faithful servants. Times change
and the Jacobins with them, not excluding the Jacobins of the
twentieth century.
Of the Politburo of Lenin's epoch there now remains only
Stalin. Two of its members, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin's
closest collaborators during the long years of emigration, are
serving ten-year prison terms for a crime which they did not
commit. Three other members, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky,
are completely removed from the leadership, but as a reward
for submission occupy secondary posts. f
* Professional governmental functionaries
And, finally, the
author of these lines is in exile. The widow of Lenin,
Krupskaya, is also in disfavor, having proved unable despite
all her efforts to adjust herself completely to the Thermidor.
The members of the present Politburo occupied secondary
posts throughout the history of the Bolshevik Party. If
anybody in the first years of the revolution had predicted their
future elevation, they would have been the first to be
surprised, and there would have been no false modesty in
their surprise. For this very reason, the rule is more stern at
t Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed in August 1936 for alleged
complicity in a "terroristic plot" against Stalin; Tomsky committed suicide
or was shot in connection with the same case; Rykov was removed from his
post in connection with the plot; Bukharin, although suspected, is still at
liberty. — Trans. 4

86 The Soviet Thermidor
present that the Politburo is always right, and in any case
that no one can be right against the Politburo. But, moreover,
the Politburo itself cannot be right against Stalin, who is
unable to make mistakes and consequently cannot be right
against himself.
Demands for party democracy were through all this time
the slogans of all the oppositional groups, as insistent as they
were hopeless. The above-mentioned platform of the Left
Opposition demanded in 1927 that a special law be written
into the criminal code "punishing as a serious state crime
every direct or indirect persecution of a worker for criticism."
Instead of this, there was introduced into the criminal code
an article against the Left Opposition itself.
Of party democracy there remained only recollections in
the memory of the older generation. And together with it had
disappeared the democracy of the Soviets, the trade unions,
the cooperatives, the cultural and athletic organizations.
Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited
hierarchy of party secretaries. The regime had become
"totalitarian" in character several years before this word
arrived from Germany. "By means of demoralizing methods,
which convert thinking communists into machines, destroying
will, character and human dignity," wrote Rakovsky in
1928, "the ruling circles have succeeded in converting
themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy,
which replaces the class and the party." Since those
indignant lines were written, the degeneration of the regime
has gone immeasurably farther. The GPU has become the
decisive factor in the inner life of the party. If Molotov in
March 1936 was able to boast to a French journalist that the
ruling party no longer contains any factional struggle, it is
only because disagreements are now settled by the automatic
intervention of the political police. The old Bolshevik Party
is dead, and no force will resurrect it.
• • •
Parallel with the political degeneration of the party, there
occurred a moral decay of the uncontrolled apparatus. The
word "sovbour" — soviet bourgeois — as applied to a

The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party 87
privileged dignitary appeared very early in the workers'
vocabulary. With the transition to the NEP, bourgeois
tendencies received a more copious field of action. At the
eleventh congress of the party, in March 1922, Lenin gave
warning of the danger of a degeneration of the ruling stratum.
It has occurred more than once in history, he said, that the
conqueror took over the culture of the conquered, when the
latter stood on a higher level. The culture of the Russian
bourgeoisie and the old bureaucracy was, to be sure,
miserable, but alas the new ruling stratum must often yield
before that culture. "Four thousand seven hundred responsible
communists" in Moscow administer the state machine.
"Who is leading whom? I doubt very much whether you can
say that the communists are in the lead...." In subsequent
congresses, Lenin could not speak. But all his thoughts in the
last months of his active life were of warning and arming the
workers against the oppression, caprice and decay of the
bureaucracy. He, however, saw only the first symptoms of the
disease.
Christian Rakovsky, former chairman of the Soviet of
People's Commissars of the Ukraine, and later Soviet
ambassador in London and Paris, sent to his friends in 1928,
when already in exile, a brief inquiry into the Soviet
bureaucracy, which we have quoted above several times, for
it still remains the best that has been written on this subject.
"In the mind of Lenin, and in all our minds," says Rakovsky,
"the task of the party leadership was to protect both the party
and the working class from the corrupting action of privilege,
place and patronage on the part of those in power, from
rapprochement with the relics of the old nobility and
burgherdom, from the corrupting influence of the NEP, from
the temptations of bourgeois morals and ideologies.... We
must say frankly, definitely and loudly that the party
apparatus has not fulfilled this task, that it has revealed a
complete incapacity for its double role of protector and
educator. It has failed. It is bankrupt."
It is true that Rakovsky himself, broken by the bureaucratic
repressions, subsequently repudiated his own critical
judgments. But the seventy-year-old Galileo too, caught in
the vise of the Holy Inquisition, found himself compelled to

88 The Soviet Thermidor
repudiate the system of Copernicus — which did not prevent
the earth from continuing to revolve around the sun. We do
not believe in the recantation of the sixty-year-old Rakovsky,
for he himself has more than once made a withering analysis
of such recantations. As to his political criticisms, they have
found in the facts of the objective development a far more
reliable support than in the subjective stout-heartedness of
their author.
The conquest of power changes not only the relations of the
proletariat to other classes, but also its own inner structure.
The wielding of power becomes the specialty of a definite
social group, which is the more impatient to solve its own
"social problem," the higher its opinion of its own mission.
"In a proletarian state, where capitalist accumulation is
forbidden to the members of the ruling party, the differentiation
is at first functional, but afterward becomes social. I do
not say it becomes a class differentiation, but a social one...."
Rakovsky further explains: "The social situation of the
communist who has at his disposition an automobile, a good
apartment, regular vacations, and receives the party maximum
of salary, differs from the situation of the communist
who works in the coal mines, where he receives from fifty to
sixty rubles a month."
Counting the causes of the degeneration of the Jacobins
when in power — the chase after wealth, participation in
government contracts, supplies, etc. — Rakovsky cites a
curious remark of Babeuf to the effect that the degeneration
of the new ruling stratum was helped along not a little by the
former young ladies of the aristocracy to whom the Jacobins
were very susceptible. "What are you doing, small-hearted
plebeian?" cries Babeuf. "Today they are embracing you and
tomorrow they will strangle you." A census of the wives of
the ruling stratum in the Soviet Union would show a similar
picture. The well-known Soviet journalist, Sosnovsky, pointed
out the special role played by the "automobile-harem factor"
in forming the morals of the Soviet bureaucracy. It is true
that Sosnovsky, too, following Rakovsky, recanted and was
returned from Siberia. But that did not improve the morals
of the bureaucracy. On the contrary, that very recantation is
proof of a progressing demoralization.

fhe Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party 89
The old articles of Sosnovsky, passed about in manuscript
from hand to hand, were sprinkled with unforgettable
episodes from the life of the new ruling stratum, plainly
growing to what vast degree the conquerors have assimilated
the morals of the conquered. Not to return, however, to past
years, for Sosnovsky finally exchanged his whip for a lyre in
1934, we will confine ourselves to wholly fresh examples from
the Soviet press. And we will not select the abuses and
so-called excesses, either, but everyday phenomena legalized
by official social opinion.
The director of a Moscow factory, a prominent communist,
boasts in Pravda of the cultural growth of the enterprise
directed by him. "A mechanic telephones: 'What is your order,
sir, check the furnace immediately or wait?' I answer:
*Wait.' "* The mechanic addresses the director with extreme
respect, using the second person plural, while the director
answers him in the second person singular. And this
disgraceful dialogue, impossible in any cultured capitalist
country, is related by the director himself on the pages of
Pravda as something entirely normal! The editor does not
object because he does not notice it. The readers do not object
because they are accustomed to it. We also are not surprised,
for at solemn sessions in the Kremlin, the "leaders" and
people's commissars address in the second person singular
directors of factories subordinate to them, chairmans of
collective farms, shop foremen and working women, especially
invited to receive decorations. How can they fail to remember
that one of the most popular revolutionary slogans in tsarist
Russia was the demand for the abolition of the use of the
second person singular by bosses in addressing their subordinates!
These Kremlin dialogues of the authorities with "the
people," astonishing in their lordly ungraciousness, unmistakably
testify that, in spite of the October Revolution, the
nationalization of the means of production, collectivization,
and "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class," the relations
* It is impossible to convey the flavor of this dialogue in English. The
second person singular is used either with intimates in token of affection, or
with children, servants and animals in token of superiority.

90 The Soviet Thermidor
among men, and that at the very heights of the Soviet
pyramid, have not only not yet risen to socialism, but in many
respects are still lagging behind a cultured capitalism. I n
recent years, enormous backward steps have been taken in
this very important sphere. And the source of this revival of
genuine Russian barbarism is indubitably the Soviet Thermidor,
which has given complete independence and freedom
from control to a bureaucracy possessing little culture, and
has given to the masses the well-known gospel of obedience
and silence.
We are far from intending to contrast the abstraction of
dictatorship with the abstraction of democracy, and weigh
their merits on the scales of pure reason. Everything is
relative in this world, where change alone endures. The
dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party proved one of the most
powerful instruments of progress in history. But here too, in
the words of the poet, "Reason becomes unreason, kindness
a pest." 5
The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after
it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factions ended
in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leader.
The police-manufactured monolithism of the party resulted
in a bureaucratic impunity which has become the source of
all kinds of wantonness and corruption.
The Social Roots of Thermidor
We have defined the Soviet Thermidor as a triumph of the
bureaucracy over the masses. We have tried to disclose the
historic conditions of this triumph. The revolutionary vanguard
of the proletariat was in part devoured by the
administrative apparatus and gradually demoralized, in part
annihilated in the civil war, and in part thrown out and
crushed. The tired and disillusioned masses were indifferent
to what was happening in the upper echelons. These
conditions, however, important as they may have been in
themselves, are inadequate to explain why the bureaucracy
succeeded in raising itself above society and getting its fate
firmly into its own hands. Its own will to this would in any
case be inadequate; the arising of a new ruling stratum must
have deep social causes

fhe Social Roots of Thermidor 91
The victory of the Thermidorians over the Jacobins in the
eighteenth century was also aided by the weariness of the
masses and the demoralization of the leading cadres, but
beneath these essentially incidental phenomena a deep
organic process was taking place. The Jacobins rested upon
the lower petty bourgeoisie lifted by the great wave. The
revolution of the eighteenth century, however, corresponding
to the course of development of the productive forces, could
not but bring the great bourgeoisie to political ascendancy in
the long run. Thermidor was only one of the stages in this
inevitable process. What similar social necessity found
expression in the Soviet Thermidor?
We have tried already in one of the preceding chapters to
make a preliminary answer to the question why the gendarme
triumphed. We must now prolong our analysis of the
conditions of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and
the role of the state in this process. Let us again compare
theoretical projections with reality. "It is still necessary to
suppress the bourgeoisie and its resistance," wrote Lenin in
1917, speaking of the period which should begin immediately
after the conquest of power, "but the organ of suppression
here is now the majority of the population, and not the
minority as has heretofore always been the case.... In that
sense the state is beginning to die away." In what does this
dying away express itself? Primarily in the fact that "in place
of special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged
officials, commanders of a standing army), the majority itself
can directly carry out" the functions of suppression. Lenin
follows this with a statement axiomatic and unanswerable:
The more universal becomes the very fulfillment of the
functions of the state power, the less need is there of this
power." The annulment of private property in the means of
production removes the principal task of the historic state —
defense of the proprietary privileges of the minority against
the overwhelming majority.
The dying away of the state begins, then, according to
Lenin, on the very day after the expropriation of the
expropriators, that is, before the new regime has had time to
take up its economic and cultural problems. Every success in
the solution of these problems means a further step in the

92 The Soviet Thermidor
liquidation of the state, its dissolution in the socialist society.
The degree of this dissolution is the best index of the depth
and efficacy of the socialist construction. We may lay down
approximately this sociological theorem: The strength of the
compulsion exercised by the masses in a workers' state is
directly proportional to the strength of the exploitive
tendencies, or the danger of a restoration of capitalism, and
inversely proportional to the strength of the social solidarity
and the general loyalty to the new regime. Thus the
bureaucracy — that is, the "privileged officials and commanders
of a standing army" — represents a special kind of
compulsion which the masses cannot or do not wish to
exercise, and which, one way or another, is directed against
the masses themselves.
If the democratic Soviets had preserved to this day their
original strength and independence, and yet were compelled
to resort to repressions and compulsions on the scale of the
first years, this circumstance might of itself give rise to
serious anxiety. How much greater must be the alarm in view
of the fact that the mass Soviets have entirely disappeared
from the scene, having turned over the function of compulsion
to Stalin, Yagoda and company. And what forms of compulsion!
First of all we must ask ourselves: What social cause
stands behind this stubborn virility of the state and especially
behind its policification? The importance of this question is
obvious: depending upon the answer, we must either radically
revise our traditional views of socialist society in general, or
as radically reject the official estimates of the USSR.
Let us now take from the latest number of a Moscow
newspaper a stereotyped characterization of the present
Soviet regime, one of those which are repeated throughout
the country from day to day and which school children learn
by heart: "In the Soviet Union the parasitical classes of
capitalists, landlords and kulaks are completely liquidated,
and thus is forever ended the exploitation of man by man.
The whole national economy has become socialistic, and the
growing Stakhanov movement is preparing the conditions for
the transition from socialism to communism" (Pravda, April
4, 1936). The world press of the Communist International, it
goes without saying, has no other thing to say on this subject.

fhe Social Roots of Thermidor 93
gut if exploitation is "ended forever," if the country is really
n 0w on the road from socialism, that is, the lowest stage of
communism, to its higher stage, then there remains nothing
for society to do but to throw off at last the straitjacket of the
state. In place of this — it is hard even to grasp this contrast
with the mind! — the Soviet state has acquired a totalitarianbureaucratic
character.
The same fatal contradiction finds illustration in the fate
of the party. Here the problem may be formulated approximately
thus: Why, from 1917 to 1921, when the old ruling
classes were still fighting with weapons in their hands, when
they were actively supported by the imperialists of the whole
world, when the kulaks in arms were sabotaging the army
and food supplies of the country — why was it possible to
dispute openly and fearlessly in the party about the most
critical questions of policy? Why now, after the cessation of
intervention, after the shattering of the exploiting classes,
after the indubitable successes of industrialization, after the
collectivization of the overwhelming majority of the peasants,
is it impossible to permit the slightest word of criticism of the
unremovable leaders? Why is it that any Bolshevik who
should demand a calling of the congress of the party in
accordance with its constitution would be immediately
expelled, any citizen who expressed out loud a doubt of the
infallibility of Stalin would be tried and convicted almost as
though a participant in a terrorist plot? Whence this terrible,
monstrous and unbearable intensity of repression and of the
police apparatus?
Theory is not a note which you can present at any moment
to reality for payment. If a theory proves mistaken, we must
revise it or fill out its gaps. We must find out those real social
forces which have given rise to the contrast between Soviet
reality and the traditional Marxian conception. In any case
we must not wander in the dark, repeating ritual phrases,
which might be useful for the prestige of the leaders, but
which nevertheless slap the living reality in the face. We shall
now see a convincing example of this.
In a speech at a session of the Central Executive Committee
in January 1936, Molotov, the chairman of the Council of
People's Commissars, declared: "The national economy of the

94 The Soviet Thermidor
country-has become socialistic (applause). In that sense [?]
we have solved the problem of the liquidation of classes
(applause)." However, there still remain from the past
"elements in their nature hostile to us," fragments of the
former ruling classes. Moreover, among the collectivized
farmers, state employees and sometimes also the workers,
"petty speculators"* are discovered, "grafters in relation to
the collective and state wealth, anti-Soviet gossips, etc." And
hence results the necessity of a further reinforcement of the
dictatorship. In opposition to Engels, the workers' state must
not "fall asleep," but on the contrary become more and more
vigilant.
The picture drawn by the head of the Soviet government
would be reassuring in the highest degree, were it not
murderously self-contradictory. Socialism completely reigns
in the country: "in that sense" classes are abolished (if they
are abolished in that sense, then they are in every other). To
be sure, the social harmony is broken here and there by
fragments and remnants of the past, but it is impossible to
think that scattered dreamers of a restoration of capitalism,
deprived of power and property, together with "petty
speculators" (not even speculators!) and "gossips" are
capable of overthrowing the classless society. Everything is
getting along, it seems, the very best you can imagine. But
what is the use then of the iron dictatorship of the
bureaucracy?
Those reactionary dreamers, we must believe, will gradually
die out. The "petty speculators" and "gossips" might
be disposed of with a laugh by the superdemocratic Soviets.
"We are not Utopians," responded Lenin in 1917 to the
bourgeois and reformist theoreticians of the bureaucratic
state, and "by no means deny the possibility and inevitability
of excesses on the part of individual persons, and likewise the
necessity for suppressing such excesses. But... for this there
is no need of a special machine, a special apparatus of
repression. This will be done by the armed people themselves,
with the same simplicity and ease with which any crowd of
civilized people even in contemporary society separate a
Spekulantiki

fhe Social Roots of Thermidor 95
couple of fighters or stop an act of violence against a woman."
Those words sound as though the author had especially
foreseen the remarks of one of his successors at the head of
the government. Lenin is taught in the public schools of the
Soviet Union, but apparently not in the Council of People's
Commissars. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain
Molotov's daring to resort without reflection to the very
construction against which Lenin directed his well-sharpened
weapons. The flagrant contradiction between the founder and
his epigones is before us! Whereas Lenin judged that even the
liquidation of the exploiting classes might be accomplished
without a bureaucratic apparatus, Molotov, in explaining why
after the liquidation of classes the bureaucratic machine has
strangled the independence of the people, finds no better
pretext than a reference to the "remnants" of the liquidated
classes.
To live on these "remnants" becomes, however, rather
difficult since, according to the confession of authoritative
representatives of the bureaucracy itself, yesterday's class
enemies are being successfully assimilated by the Soviet
society. Thus Postyshev, one of the secretaries of the Central
Committee of the party, said in April 1936, at a congress of
the League of Communist Youth: "Many of the saboteurs ...
have sincerely repented and joined the ranks of the Soviet
people." In view of the successful carrying out of collectivization,
"the children of kulaks are not to be held responsible for
their parents." And yet more: "The kulak himself now hardly
believes in the possibility of a return to his former position
of exploiter in the village." Not without reason did the
government annul the limitations connected with social
origin! But if Postyshev's assertion, wholly agreed to by
Molotov, makes any sense it is only this: not only has the
bureaucracy become a monstrous anachronism, but state
compulsion in general has nothing whatever to do in the land
of the Soviets. However, neither Molotov nor Postyshev agrees
with that immutable inference. They prefer to preserve their
power even at the price of self-contradiction.
In reality, too, they cannot reject the power. Or, to translate
this into objective language: The present Soviet society cannot
get along without a state, nor even, within certain limits,

96 The Soviet Thermidor
without a bureaucracy. But the cause of this is by no means
the pitiful remnants of the past, but the mighty forces and
tendencies of the present. The justification for the existence
of a Soviet state as an apparatus of compulsion lies in the
fact that the present transitional structure is still full of social
contradictions, which in the sphere of consumption, most
closely and sensitively felt by all, are extremely tense, and
forever threaten to break over into the sphere of production.
The triumph of socialism cannot therefore be called either
final or irrevocable.
The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in
objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each
against all. When there are enough goods in a store, the
purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there are
few goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line.
When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a
policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the
power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get
something and who has to wait.
A raising of the material and cultural level ought, at first
glance, to lessen the necessity of privileges, narrow the sphere
of application of "bourgeois law," and thereby undermine the
standing ground of its defenders, the bureaucracy. In reality
the opposite thing has happened: the growth of the productive
forces has been so far accompanied by an extreme development
of all forms of inequality, privilege and advantage, and
therewith of bureaucratism. That too is not accidental.
In its first period, the Soviet regime was undoubtedly far
more egalitarian and less bureaucratic than now. But that
was an equality of general poverty. The resources of the
country were so scant that there was no opportunity to
separate out from the masses of the population any broad
privileged strata. At the same time, the "equalizing"
character of wages, destroying personal interestedness,
became a brake upon the development of the productive
forces. Soviet economy had to lift itself from its poverty to a
somewhat higher level before fat deposits of privilege became
possible. The present state of production is still far from
guaranteeing all necessities to everybody But it is already
adequate to give significant privileges to a minority, and

The Social Roots of Thermidor 97
convert inequality into a whip for the spurring on of the
majority. That is the first reason why the growth of
production has so far strengthened not the socialist, but the
bourgeois features of the state.
But that is not the sole reason. Alongside the economic
factor dictating capitalistic methods of payment at the
present stage, there operates a parallel political factor in the
person of the bureaucracy itself. In its very essence it is the
planter and protector of inequality. It arose in the beginning
as the bourgeois organ of a workers' state. In establishing and
defending the advantages of a minority, it of course draws off
the cream for its own use. Nobody who has wealth to
distribute ever omits himself. Thus out of a social necessity
there has developed an organ which has far outgrown its
socially necessary function, and become an independent
factor and therewith the source of great danger for the whole
social organism.
The social meaning of the Soviet Thermidor now begins to
take form before us. The poverty and cultural backwardness
of the masses has again become incarnate in the malignant
figure of the ruler with a great club in his hand. The deposed
and abused bureaucracy, from being a servant of society, has
again become its lord. On this road it has attained such a
degree of social and moral alienation from the popular masses
that it cannot now permit any control over either its activities
or its income.
The bureaucracy's seemingly mystic fear of "petty speculators,
grafters, and gossips" thus finds a wholly natural
explanation. Not yet able to satisfy the elementary needs of
the population, the Soviet economy creates and resurrects at
every step tendencies to graft and speculation. On the other
side, the privileges of the new aristocracy awaken in the
masses of the population a tendency to listen to anti-Soviet
"gossips," that is, to anyone who, albeit in a whisper,
criticizes the greedy and capricious bosses. It is a question,
therefore, not of specters of the past, not of the remnants of
what no longer exists, not, in short, of the snows of yesteryear,
but of new, mighty and continually reborn tendencies to
personal accumulation. The first still very meager wave of
prosperity in the country, just because of its meagerness, has

98
The Soviet Thermidor
not weakened, but strengthened, these centrifugal tendencies.
On the other hand, there has developed simultaneously
a desire of the unprivileged to slap the grasping hands of the
new gentry. The social struggle again grows sharp. Such are
the sources of the power of the bureaucracy. But from those
same sources comes also a threat to its power.

CHAPTER SIX
The Growth of Inequality
and Social Antagonisms
Want, Luxury and Speculation
After starting out with "socialist distribution," the Soviet
power found itself obliged in 1921 to return to the market.
The extreme stretching of material means in the epoch of the
five-year plan again led to state distribution, that is, a
repetition of the experiment of "war communism" on a higher
basis. This basis too, however, proved inadequate. In the year
1935, the system of planned distribution again gave way to
trade. Thus, a second time it is made evident that practicable
methods of distribution depend more upon the level of
technique and the existing material resources than even upon
forms of property.
The raising of the productivity of labor, in particular
through piecework payment, promises in the future an
increase of the mass of commodities, a lowering of prices and
a consequent rise in the standard of living of the population.
But that is only one aspect of the matter — an aspect which
has also been observed under capitalism in its flourishing
epoch. Social phenomena and processes must, however, be
taken in their connections and interactions. A raising of the
productivity of labor on the basis of commodity circulation,
means at the same time a growth of inequality. The rise in
the prosperity of the commanding strata is beginning to
exceed by far the rise in the standard of living of the masses.
99

100 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
Along with an increase of state wealth goes a process of new
social differentiation.
According to the conditions of its daily life, Soviet society
is already divided into a secure and privileged minority, and
a majority getting along in want. At its extremes, moreover,
this inequality assumes the character of flagrant contrast.
Products designed for broad circulation are as a rule, in spite
of their high prices, of low quality, and the farther from the
centers the more difficult to obtain. Not only speculation but
the downright theft of objects of consumption assumes in
these circumstances a mass character. And while up to
yesterday, these acts supplemented the planned distribution,
they now serve as a corrective to Soviet trade.
The "friends'' of the Soviet Union have a professional habit
of collecting impressions with closed eyes and cotton in their
ears. We cannot rely upon them. The enemies frequently
propagate malicious slanders. Let us turn, therefore, to the
bureaucracy itself. Since it is at least not hostile to itself, its
official self-accusations, evoked always by some sort of urgent
practical demand, deserve a great deal more confidence than
its more frequent and noisy self-praise.
The industrial plan of 1935, as is well known, was more
than carried out. But in the matter of housing, it was only
55.7 percent carried out. And, moreover, the construction of
houses for the workers proceeded most slowly, badly and
sloppily of all. As for the members of collective farms, they
live, as formerly, in the old huts with their calves and
cockroaches. On the other hand, the Soviet dignitaries
complain in the press that not all the houses newly
constructed for them possess "rooms for house-workers" —
that is, for domestic servants.
Every regime has its monumental reflection in buildings
and architecture. Characteristic of the present Soviet epoch
are the numerous palaces and houses of the Soviets, genuine
temples of the bureaucracy sometimes costing as much as ten
million rubles, expensive theaters, houses of the Red Army,
that is, military clubs chiefly for officers, and luxurious
subways for those who can pay, under conditions of an
extreme and unchanging backwardness in the construction
of workers' dwellings even of the barrack type.

Want, Luxury and Speculation 101
In the matter of transporting state freight on the railroads,
genuine progress has been attained. But the simple Soviet
human being has gained very little from that. Innumerable
orders from the heads of the Department of Roads and
Communications complain of "the unsanitary condition of the
cars and passenger stations," of "the intolerable fact of
inaction in the service of passengers on the road," "the great
number of abuses, thieveries and cheatings with railroad
tickets ... concealment of vacant seats and speculation on
them, bribe-taking ... robbing of luggage at the stations and
on the road." Such facts are "a disgrace to socialist
transport!" As a matter of fact, they are criminal offenses in
capitalist transport. These repeated complaints of the eloquent
administrator bear certain witness to the extreme
inadequacy of the means of transport for the use of the
population, the bitter want of those products which are
transported, and, finally, the cynical neglect of simple mortals
on the part of railroad officials as of all other persons in
authority. The bureaucracy is admirably able to provide
service for itself on land and water and in the air, as we learn
from the great number of Soviet parlor cars, special trains
and special steamers — and these more and more giving place
to the best of automobiles and airplanes.
In characterizing the successes of Soviet industry, Zhdanov,
the representative of the Leningrad Central Committee, to
the applause of his immediately interested audience, promised
that in a year "our active workers will arrive for the
conference not in the present modest Fords, but in limousines."
Soviet technique, insofar as its face is turned toward
mankind, directs its efforts primarily to satisfying the
high-class demands of a chosen minority. The streetcars,
where they exist at all, are as before filled to suffocation.
When the people's commissar of food industries, Mikoyan,
boasts that the lowest kind of confections are rapidly being
crowded out of production by the highest, and that "our
women" are demanding fine perfumes, this only means that
industry, with the transfer to money circulation, is accommodating
itself to the better qualified consumer. Such are the
laws of the market, in which by no means the last place is
occupied by the highly placed "wives." Together with this it

102 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
becomes known that sixty-eight cooperative shops out of
ninety-five investigated in the Ukraine in 1935 had no confections
at all, and that the demand for pastries was only fifteen
to twenty percent satisfied, and this with a very low quality
of goods. "The factories are working," complains Izvestia,
"without regard to the demands of the consumer." Naturally,
if the consumer is not one who is able to stand up for himself.
Professor Bakh, who approaches the question from the
standpoint of organic chemistry, finds that "our bread is
sometimes intolerably bad." The working man and woman,
although not initiated into the mysteries of yeast and its
fermentation, think the very same thought. In distinction
from the esteemed professor, however, they have not the
opportunity to express their appraisal on the pages of the
press.
In Moscow, the garment trust advertises variegated
fashions of silk dresses designed by the special "house of
fashions." In the provinces, even in the great industrial
cities, the workers as formerly cannot, without standing in
lines and submitting to other vexations, obtain a cotton-print
shirt: there aren't enough! It is much harder to supply the
needs of the many than to supply luxuries to the few. All
history vouches for that.
In listing his achievements, Mikoyan informs us: "The
oleomargarine industry is new." It is true that this industry
did not exist under the old regime. We need not rush to the
conclusion, however, that the situation has become worse
than under the tsar. The people saw no butter in those days,
either. But the appearance of a substitute means at least
that in the Soviet Union there are two classes of consumers:
one prefers butter, the other gets along with margarine. "We
supply plenty of makhorka to all who need it," boasts the
same Mikoyan. He forgets to add that neither Europe nor
America ever heard of such low-grade tobacco as makhorka.
One of the very clear, not to say defiant, manifestations of
inequality is the opening in Moscow and other big cities of
special stores with high-quality articles under the very
expressive, although not very Russian, designation of "Luxe."
At the same time, ceaseless complaints of mass robbery in the
food shops of Moscow and the provinces mean that foodstuffs

Want, Luxury and Speculation 103
are adequate only for the minority, although everybody would
like to have something to eat.
The worker-mother has her view of the social regime, and
her "consumer's" criterion, as the functionary — very
attentive, by the way, to his own consumption — scornfully
expresses it, is in the last analysis decisive. In the conflict
between the working woman and the bureaucracy, Marx and
Lenin, and we with them, stand on the side of the working
woman. We stand against the bureaucrat, who is exaggerating
his achievements, blurring contradictions, and holding
the working woman by the throat in order that she may not
criticize.
Granted that margarine and makhorka are today unhappy
necessities. Still it is useless to boast and ornament reality.
Limousines for the "activists," fine perfumes for "our
women," margarine for the workers, stores "de luxe" for the
gentry, a look at delicacies through the storewindows for the
plebs — such socialism cannot but seem to the masses a new
refacing of capitalism, and they are not far wrong. On a basis
of "generalized want," the struggle for the means of
subsistence threatens to resurrect "all the old crap," and is
partially resurrecting it at every step.
• ® ®
Present market relations differ from relations under the
NEP (1921-28) in that they are supposed to develop directly
without the middleman and the private trader between the
state cooperative and collective farm organizations and the
individual citizen. However, this is true only in principle. The
swiftly growing turnover of retail trade, both state and
cooperative, should in 1936, according to specifications,
amount to one hundred billion rubles. The turnover of
collective farm trade, which amounted to sixteen billion in
1935, is to grow considerably during the current year. It is
hard to determine what place — at least not an insignificant
one! — will be occupied by illegal and semilegal middlemen
both within this turnover and alongside it. Not only the
individual peasants, but also the collectives, and especially
individual members of the collectives, are much inclined to

104 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
resort to the middleman. The same road is followed by the
home-industry workers, cooperators and the local industries
dealing with the peasants. From time to time, it unexpectedly
transpires that the trade in meat, butter or eggs throughout
a large district, has been cornered by "speculators." Even the
most necessary articles of daily use, like salt, matches, flour,
kerosene, although existing in the state storehouses in
sufficient quantity, are lacking for weeks and months at a
time in the bureaucratized rural cooperatives. It is clear that
the peasants will get the goods they need by other roads. The
Soviet press often speaks of secondhand dealers as of
something to be taken for granted.
As for the other forms of private enterprise and accumulation,
they play, it seems, a smaller role. Independent cabmen,
innkeepers, solitary artisans, are, like the independent
peasants, semitolerated professions. In Moscow itself there
are a considerable number of private small business and
repair shops. Eyes are closed to them because they fill up
important gaps in the economy. An incomparably greater
number of private entrepreneurs work, however, under the
false label of all kinds of artels and cooperatives, or hide under
the roofs of the collective farms. As though for the special
purpose of emphasizing the rifts in the planned economy,
criminal investigators in Moscow arrest from time to time,
as malicious speculators, hungry women who are selling
homemade berets or cotton shirts on the street.
"The basis of speculation in our land is destroyed,"
announced Stalin in the autumn of 1935, "and if we have
speculators nonetheless, it can be explained by only one fact:
lack of class vigilance and a liberal attitude toward the
speculators in various links of the Soviet apparatus." An
ideally pure culture of bureaucratic thinking! The economic
basis of speculation is destroyed? But then there is no need
of any vigilance whatever. If the state could, for example,
guarantee the population a sufficient quantity of modest
headdresses, there would be no necessity of arresting those
unfortunate street traders. It is doubtful, indeed, if such a
necessity exists now.
In itself the number of the private traders above mentioned,
like the quantity of their business, is not alarming.

The Differentiation of the Proletariat 105
You cannot really fear an attack of truck drivers, traders in
berets, watchmakers and buyers of eggs, upon the fortresses
of state property! But still the question is not decided by bare
arithmetical correlations. An abundance and variety of
speculators coming to the surface at the least sign of
administrative weakness, like a rash in a fever, testifies to
the continual pressure of petty-bourgeois tendencies. How
much danger to the socialist future is represented by the
speculation bacillus is determined wholly by the general
power of resistance of the economic and political organism of
the country.
The mood and conduct of the rank-and-file workers and
collective farmers, that is, about ninety percent of the
population, is determined primarily by changes in their own
real wages. But no less significance must be given to the
relation between their income and the income of the
better-placed strata. The law of relativity proclaims itself
most directly in the sphere of human consumption! The
translation of all social relations into the language of money
accounting will reveal to the bottom the actual share enjoyed
by the different strata of society in the national income. Even
when we understand the historic necessity of inequality for
a prolonged period, questions remain open about its admissible
limits and its social expediency in each concrete case. The
inevitable struggle for a share of the national income
necessarily becomes a political struggle. The question whether
the present structure is socialist or not will be decided, not
by the sophisms of the bureaucracy, but by the attitude
toward it of the masses themselves, that is, the industrial
workers and collectivized peasants.
The Differentiation of the Proletariat
One would think that in a workers' state data about real
wages would be studied with special care — indeed that all
statistics of income according to categories of the population
would be distinguished by complete lucidity and general
accessibility. As a matter of fact, this whole question, which
touches the most vital interests of the toilers, is surrounded
with an impenetrable veil. The budget of the worker's family

106 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
in the Soviet Union, unbelievable as this may be, is a
magnitude incomparably more enigmatical for the investigator
than in any capitalist country. We have tried in vain to
plot the curve of real wages of the different categories of the
working class even for the period of the second five-year plan.
The stubborn silence of the sources and authorities on this
subject is as eloquent as their boasting about meaningless
totals.
According to the report of the commissar of heavy industry,
Ordzhonikidze, the monthly output of the worker rose, during
the decade 1925 to 1935, 3.2 times, and money wages, 4.5
times. What part of the latter so impressive-looking figure is
swallowed by specialists in the upper layers of the working
class — and not less important, what is the expression of this
nominal sum in real values — of this we can find out nothing
either from his report or from the commentaries of the press.
At a congress of the Soviet Youth in April 1936, the secretary
of the Komsomol, Kosarev, declared: "From January 1931 to
December 1935 the wages of the youth rose 340 percent!"
But even from the carefully selected young decoration
wearers, generous in ovations, whom he addressed, this boast
did not evoke one handclap. The listeners, like the orator,
knew too well that the abrupt change to market prices had
lowered the material situation of the basic mass of the
workers.
The "average" annual wage per person, if you join together
the director of the trust and the charwoman, was about 2,300
rubles in 1935, and was to be in 1936 about 2,500 rubles, that
is, nominally 7,500 French francs, although hardly more than
3,500 to 4,000 in real purchasing power. This figure, very
modest in itself, goes still lower if you take into consideration
that the rise of wages in 1936 is only a partial compensation
for the abolition of special prices on objects of consumption,
and the abolition of a series of free services. But the principal
thing is that 2,500 rubles a year, or 208 rubles a month, is,
as we said, the average payment, that is, an arithmetical
fiction whose function is to mask the real and cruel inequality
in the payment of labor.
It is indubitable that the situation of the upper layer of the
workers, especially the so-called Stakhanovists, has risen

fhe Differentiation of the Proletariat 107
considerably during the last year. The press is not without
foundation in eagerly listing the number of suits, boots,
gramophones, bicycles or jars of conserves this or that
decorated worker has bought himself. Incidentally, it becomes
clear how little these benefits are accessible to the rank-andfile
worker. Speaking of the impelling motives of the
Stakhanov movement, Stalin declared: "Life has become
easier, life has become happier, and when life is happy then
work goes fast." In that optimistic illumination of the
piecework system, extremely characteristic of the ruling
stratum, there is this amount of prosaic truth, that the
formation of a workers' aristocracy has proven possible only
thanks to the preceding economic successes of the country.
The motive force of the Stakhanovists, however, is not a
"happy" mood, but a desire to earn more money. Molotov
introduced this correction of Stalin: The immediate impulse
to high productivity on the part of the Stakhanovists is a
simple interest in increasing their earnings." That is true.
In the course of a few months, an entire stratum of workers
has arisen whom they call "thousand men," since their
earnings exceed a thousand rubles a month. There are others
who earn even more than two thousand rubles a month, while
the workers of the lower categories often receive less than a
hundred.
It would seem as though this divergence of wages alone
establishes a sufficient distinction between the "rich" and
"unrich" workers. But that is not enough for the bureaucracy.
They literally shower privileges upon the Stakhanovists.
They give them new apartments or repair their old ones.
They send them out of turn to rest-houses and sanatoriums.
They send free teachers and physicians to their houses. They
give them free tickets to the moving pictures. In some places,
they even cut their hair and shave them free and out of turn.
Many of these privileges seem to be deliberately calculated
to injure and insult the average worker. The cause of this
importunate good will on the part of the authorities is, in
addition to careerism, a troubled conscience. The local ruling
groups eagerly seize the chance to escape from their isolation
by allowing the upper stratum of the workers to participate
in their privileges. As a result, the real earnings of the

108
The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
Stakhanovists often exceed by twenty or thirty times the
earnings of the lower categories of workers. And as for
especially fortunate specialists, their salaries would in many
cases pay for the work of eighty to a hundred unskilled
laborers. In scope of inequality in the payment of labor, the
Soviet Union has not only caught up to, but far surpassed the
capitalist countries!
The best of the Stakhanovists, those who are really
impelled by socialist motives, are not happy in their
privileges, but irked by them. And no wonder. Their
individual enjoyment of all kinds of material goods on a
background of general scarcity surrounds them with a ring
of envy and ill will, and poisons their existence. Relations of
this kind are farther from socialist morals than the relations
of the workers of a capitalist factory, joined together as they
are in a struggle against exploitation.
In spite of all this, everyday life is not easy even for the
skilled worker, especially in the provinces. Aside from the
fact that the seven-hour working day is being more and more
sacrificed to higher productivity, no small number of hours
are expended in a supplementary struggle for existence. As
a symptom of the special prosperity of the better workers of
the Soviet farms, for example, they point to the fact that the
tractor men, combine operators, etc. — an already notorious
aristocracy — own their own cows and pigs. The theory that
socialism without milk is better than milk without socialism
has been abandoned. It is now recognized that the workers
in the state agricultural undertakings, where it would seem
there is no lack either of cows or pigs, are compelled in order
to guarantee their subsistence to create their own pocket
economies No less striking is the triumphal announcement
that in Kharkov 96,000 workers have their own gardens —
other towns are challenged to vie with Kharkov. What a
terrible robbery of human power is implied by those words
"his own cow" and "his own garden," and what a burden of
medieval digging in manure and in the earth they lay upon
the worker, and yet more upon his wife and children!
As concerns the fundamental masses, they, of course, have
neither cows nor gardens, nor even in large part their own
homes The wages of unskilled workers are 1,200 to

The Differentiation of the Proletariat 109
1,500 rubles a year and even less, which under Soviet prices
means a regime of destitution. Living conditions, the most
reliable indicator of the material and cultural level, are
extremely bad, often unbearable. The overwhelming majority
of the workers huddle in common dwellings, which in
equipment and upkeep are considerably worse than barracks.
When it is necessary to justify industrial unsuccesses,
malingerings and trashy products, the administration itself
through its journalists gives such a picture as this of living
conditions: "The workers sleep on the floor, since bedbugs eat
them up in the beds. The chairs are broken; there are no
mugs to drink water from, etc." "Two families live in one
room. The roof leaks. When it rains they carry the water out
of the room by pailfuls." "The latrines are in a disgusting
condition." Such descriptions, relating to different parts of
the country, could be multiplied at will. As a result of these
unbearable conditions, "the fluidity of labor" — writes, for
example, the head of the oil industry — "has reached a very
high point.... Owing to lack of workers, a great number of the
drills are altogether abandoned." There are certain especially
unfavorable regions, where only those will consent to work
who have been fined or discharged from other places for
various violations of discipline. Thus at the bottom of the
proletariat, there is accumulating a layer of rejected Soviet
pariahs, possessing no rights, and of whom nevertheless such
an important branch of industry as oil production is compelled
to make use.
As a result of these flagrant differences in wages, doubled
by arbitrary privileges, the bureaucracy has managed to
introduce sharp antagonisms in the proletariat. Accounts of
the Stakhanov campaign presented at times the picture of a
small civil war. "The wrecking and breaking of mechanisms
is the favorite [!] method of struggle against the Stakhanov
movement," wrote, for example, the organ of the trade
unions. "The class struggle," we read farther, "makes itself
felt at every step." In this "class" struggle, the workers are
on one side, the trade unions on the other. Stalin publicly
recommended that those who resist should get it "in the
teeth." Other members of the Central Committee have more
than once threatened to sweep the "insolent enemies" from

110 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
the face of the earth. The experience of the Stakhanov
movement has made especially clear the deep alienation
between the authorities and the proletariat, and the furious
insistence with which the bureaucracy is applying the
maxim — not, it is true, invented by itself: "Divide and
conquer!" Moreover, to console the workers, this forced
piecework labor is called "socialist competition." The name
sounds like a mockery!
Competition, whose roots lie in our biological inheritance,
having purged itself of greed, envy and privilege, will
indubitably remain the most important motive force of culture
under communism too. But in the closer-by preparatory epoch,
the actual establishment of a socialist society can and will be
achieved, not by these humiliating measures of a backward
capitalism to which the Soviet government is resorting, but
by methods more worthy of a liberated humanity — and above
all not under the whip of a bureaucracy. For this very whip
is the most disgusting inheritance from the old world. It will
have to be broken in pieces and burned at a public bonfire
before you can speak of socialism without a blush of shame.
Social Contradictions in the Collective Village
If the industrial trusts are "in principle" socialist enterprises,
this cannot be said of the collective farms. They rest
not upon state, but upon group property. This is a great step
forward in comparison with individual scatteredness, but
whether the collective farm enterprises will lead to socialism
depends upon a whole series of circumstances, a part lying
within the collectives, a part outside them in the general
conditions of the Soviet system, and a part, finally, no less a
part, on the world arena.
The struggle between the peasants and the state is far from
ended. The present still very unstable organization of
agriculture is nothing but a temporary compromise between
the struggling camps, following the dreadful outbreak of civil
war between them. To be sure, ninety percent of the peasant
farms are collectivized, and ninety-four percent of the entire
agricultural product is taken from the fields of the collective
farms. Even if you take into consideration a certain percent-

Social Contradictions in the Collective Village 111
age of fictitious collectives, behind which essentially individual
farmers are hiding, you still have to concede, it would
seem, that the victory over individual economy is at least
nine-tenths won. However, the real struggle of forces and
tendencies in the rural districts is far from contained within
the framework of a bare contrast between individual and
collective farmers.
With the purpose of pacifying the peasants, the state has
found itself compelled to make very great concessions to the
proprietary and individualist tendencies of the village,
beginning with the triumphant transfer to the collectives of
their land allotments for "eternal" use, that is, in essence,
the liquidation of the socialization of the land. Is this a legal
fiction? Depending on the correlation of forces, it might prove
a reality and offer in the very near future immense difficulties
for planned economy on a statewide scale. It is far more
important, however, that the state was compelled to restore
individual peasant farming on special midget farms with their
own cows, pigs, sheep, domestic fowls, etc. In exchange for
this transgressing of socialization and limiting of collectivization,
the peasant agrees peaceably, although as yet without
great zest, to work in the collective farms, which offer him
the opportunity to fulfill his obligation to the state and get
something into his own hands. The new relations still assume
such immature forms that it would be difficult to measure
them in figures, even if the Soviet statistics were more honest.
Many things, however, permit the conclusion that in the
personal existence of the peasant his own midget holdings
have no less significance than the collectives. This means
that the struggle between individualistic and collective
tendencies is still in progress throughout the whole mass of
the villages, and that its outcome is not yet decided. Which
way are the peasants inclined? They themselves do not as yet
exactly know.
The people's commissar of agriculture said, at the end of
1935: "Up to recent times, we have met great resistance from
the side of the kulak elements to the fulfillment of the state
plan of grain provisioning." This means, in other words, that
the majority of collectivized peasants "up to recent times"
(and today?) considered the surrender of grain to the state

112 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
as an operation disadvantageous to them, and were tending
toward private trade. The same thing is testified to in another
manner by the draconian laws for the protection of collective
property against plunder by the collectivized peasants
themselves. It is very instructive that the property of the
collectives is insured with the state for twenty billion rubles,
and the private property of the collectivized peasants for
twenty-one billion. If this correlation does not necessarily
mean that the peasants taken separately are richer than the
collectives, it does at any rate mean that the peasants insure
their personal more carefully than their common property.
No less indicative from our point of view is the course of
development in stockbreeding. While the number of horses
continued to decline up to 1935, and only as a result of a series
of governmental measures has begun during the last year to
rise slightly, the increase of horned cattle during the
preceding year had already amounted to four million head.
The plan for horses was fulfilled in the favorable year 1935
only up to ninety-four percent, while in the matter of horned
cattle, it was considerably exceeded. The meaning of these
data becomes clear in the fact that horses exist only as
collective property, while cows are already among the
personal possessions of the majority of collectivized peasants.
It remains only to add that in the steppe regions, where the
collectivized peasants are permitted as an exception to
possess a horse, the increase of horses is considerably more
rapid than in the collective farms, which in their turn are
ahead of the Soviet farms. From all this it is not to be inferred
that private small economy is superior to large-scale socialized
economy, but that the transition from the one to the
other, from barbarism to civilization, conceals many difficulties
which cannot be removed by mere administrative
pressure.
"Law can never stand higher than the economic structure
and the cultural development of society conditioned by it."
The renting of land, although forbidden by law, is really very
widely practiced, and moreover in its most pernicious form
of share-cropping. Land is rented by one collective farm to
another, and sometimes to an outsider, and finally, sometimes
to its own more enterprising members. Unbelievable

Social Contradictions in the Collective Village 113
as it is, the Soviet farms — that is, the "socialist"
enterprises — resort to the rental of land. And, what is
especially instructive, this is practiced by the Soviet farms of
the GPU! Under the protection of this high institution which
stands guard over the laws, the director of the Soviet farm
imposes upon the peasant renter conditions almost copied
from the old landlord-serf contracts. We thus have cases of
the exploitation of peasants by the bureaucrats, no longer in
the character of agents of the state, but in the character of
semilegal landlords.
Without in the least exaggerating the scope of such ugly
phenomena, which are of course not capable of statistical
calculation, we still cannot fail to see their enormous
symptomatic significance. They unmistakably testify to the
strength of bourgeois tendencies in this still extremely
backward branch of economy which comprises the overwhelming
majority of the population. Meanwhile, market
relations are inevitably strengthening the individualistic
tendencies, and deepening the social differentiation of the
village, in spite of the new structure of property relations.
On the average, the income of each collective farm in 1935
was about 4,000 rubles. But in relation to the peasants,
"average" figures are even more deceptive than in relation
to the workers. It was reported in the Kremlin, for example,
that the collective fishermen earned in 1935 twice as much
as in 1934, or 1,919 rubles each, and the applause offered to
this last figure showed how considerably it rises above the
earnings of the principal mass of the collectives. On the other
hand, there are collectives in which the income amounts to
30,000 rubles for each household, not counting either income
in money and kind from individual holdings, or the income
in kind of the whole enterprise. In general, the income of every
one of these big collective farmers is ten to fifteen times more
than the wage of the "average" worker and the lower-grade
collectivized peasant.
The gradations of income are only in part determined by
skill and assiduousness in labor. Both the collectives and the
personal allotments of the peasants are of necessity placed
in extraordinarily unequal conditions, depending upon climate,
soil, kind of crop, and also upon position in relation to

114 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
the towns and industrial centers. The contrast between the
city and the village not only was not softened during the
five-year plan, but on the contrary was greatly sharpened as
a result of the feverish growth of cities and new industrial
regions. This fundamental social contrast in Soviet society
inevitably creates derivative contradictions among the collectives
and within the collectives, chiefly thanks to differential
rent.
The unlimited power of the bureaucracy is a no less
powerful instrument of social differentiation. It has in its
hands such levers as wages, prices, taxes, budget and credit.
The completely disproportionate income of a series of central
Asiatic cotton collectives depends much more upon the
correlation of prices established by the government than upon
the work of the members of the collectives. The exploitation
of certain strata of the population by other strata has not
disappeared, but has been disguised. The first tens of
thousands of "well-off collectives have prospered at the
expense of the remaining mass of the collectives and the
industrial workers. To raise all the collectives to a level of
well-being is an incomparably more difficult and prolonged
task than to give privileges to a minority at the expense of
the majority. In 1927 the Left Opposition declared that "the
income of the kulak has increased immeasurably more than
that of the workers," and this proposition retains its force
now too, although in a changed form. The income of the upper
class of collectives has grown immeasurably more than the
income of the fundamental peasant and worker mass. The
differentiation of material levels of existence is now, perhaps,
even more considerable than on the eve of dekulakization.
The differentiation taking place within the collectives finds
its expression partly in the sphere of personal consumption;
partly it precipitates itself in the personal enterprises
adjoining the collectives, since the fundamental property of
the collective itself is socialized. The differentiation between
collectives is already having deeper consequences, since the
rich collective has the opportunity to apply more fertilizer and
more machines, and consequently to get rich quicker. The
successful collectives often hire labor power from the poor
ones, and the authorities shut their eyes to this. The deeding

The Social Physiognomy of the Ruling Stratum 115
over of land allotments of unequal value to the collectives
greatly promotes a further differentiation between them, and
consequently the crystallizing of a species of "bourgeois"
collectives, or "millionaire collectives" as they are even now
called.
Of course the state power is able to interfere as a regulator
in the process of social differentiation among the peasantry.
But in what direction and within what limits? To attack the
kulak collectives and members of collectives would be to open
up a new conflict with the more "progressive" layers of the
peasantry, who are only now, after a painful interruption,
beginning to feel an exceptionally greedy thirst for a "happy
life." Moreover — and this is the chief thing — the state
power itself becomes less and less capable of socialist control.
In agriculture as in industry, it seeks the support and
friendship of strong, successful "Stakhanovists of the fields,"
of millionaire collectives. Starting with a concern for the
development of the productive forces, it invariably ends with
a concern about itself.
It is exactly in agriculture, where consumption is so closely
bound up with production, that collectivization has opened
up grandiose opportunities for the parasitism of the bureaucracy,
and therewith for its intergrowth with the upper circles
of the collectives. Those complimentary "gifts," which the
collective farmers present to the leaders at solemn sessions
in the Kremlin, are only the symbolic expression of an
unsymbolic tribute which they place at the disposal of the
local representatives of power.
Thus in agriculture immeasurably more than in industry,
the low level of production comes into continual conflict with
the socialist and even cooperative (collective farm) forms of
property. The bureaucracy, which in the last analysis grew
out of this contradiction, deepens it in turn.
The Social Physiognomy of the Ruling Stratum
In Soviet political literature you often meet with accusations
of "bureaucratism" as a bad custom of thought or
method of work. (The accusation is always directed from
above downward and is a method of self-defense on the part

116 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
of the upper circles.) But what you cannot meet anywhere is
an investigation of the bureaucracy as a ruling stratum: its
numbers and structure, its flesh and blood, its privileges arid
appetites, and the share of the national income which it
swallows up. Nevertheless it exists. And the fact that it so
carefully conceals its social physiognomy proves that it
possesses the specific consciousness of a ruling "class" which,
however, is still far from confident of its right to rule.
It is absolutely impossible to describe the Soviet bureaucracy
in accurate figures, and that for reasons of two kinds.
In the first place, in a country where the state is almost the
sole employer, it is hard to say where the administrative
apparatus ends. In the second place, upon this question the
Soviet statisticians, economists and publicists preserve, as
we have said, an especially concentrated silence. And they
are imitated by their "friends." We remark in passing that
in all the twelve hundred pages of their labor of compilation,
the Webbs never once mention the Soviet bureaucracy as a
social category. And no wonder, for they wrote, in essence,
under its dictation!
The central state apparatus numbered on November 1,
1933, according to official figures about 55,000 people in the
directing personnel. But in this figure, which has increased
extraordinarily in recent years, there are not included, on the
one hand, the military and naval departments and the GPU,
and, on the other, the cooperative centers and the series of
so-called social organizations such as the Ossoaviokhim.*
Each of the republics, moreover, has its own governmental
apparatus.
Parallel with the state, trade union, cooperative and other
general staffs, and partly interwoven with them, there stands
the powerful staff of the party. We will hardly be exaggerating
if we number the commanding upper circles of the Soviet
Union and the individual republics at 400,000 people. It is
possible that at the present time, this number has already
risen to the half-million mark,, This does not include
functionaries, but, so to speak, "dignitaries," "leaders," a
* Society for the Defense of the Soviet Union and Development of Its
Aviation and Chemical Industries

The Social Physiognomy of the Ruling Stratum 117
ruling caste in the proper sense of the word, although, to be
sure, hierarchically divided in its turn by very important
horizontal boundaries.
This half-million upper caste is supported by a heavy
administrative pyramid with a broad and many-faceted
foundation. The executive committees of the district, town,
and regional Soviets, together with the parallel organs of the
party, the trade unions, the Communist Youth, the local
organs of transport, the commanding staffs of the army and
fleet, and the agentry of the GPU, should give a number in
the vicinity of two million. And we must not forget also the
chairmen of the Soviets of six hundred thousand towns and
villages!
The immediate administration of the industrial enterprises
was concentrated in 1933 (there are no more recent data) in
the hands of 17,000 directors and vice directors. The whole
administrative and technical personnel of the shops, factories
and mines, including lower links down to and including the
foremen, amounted to about 250,000 people (although, of
these, 54,000 were specialists without administrative functions
in the proper sense of the word). To this we must add
the party and trade union apparatus in the factories, where
administration is carried on, as is well known, in the manner
of the "triangle." A figure of half a million for the
administration of the industrial enterprises of all-union
significance will not be at the present time exaggerated. And
to this we must add the administrative personnel of the
enterprises of the separate republics and of the local Soviets.
In another cross section, the official statistics indicate for
1933 more than 860,000 administrators and specialists in the
whole Soviet economy — in industry over 480,000, in
transport over 100,000, in agriculture 93,000, in commerce
25,000. In this number are included, to be sure, specialists
without administrative power, but on the other hand neither
collective farms nor cooperatives are included. These data,
too, have been left far behind during the last two and a half
years.
For 250,000 collective farms, if you count only the
presidents and party organizers, there are a half-million
administrators. In actual reality, the number is immeasur-

118 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
ably higher. If you add the Soviet farms and the tractor and
machinery stations, the general number of commanders of
the socialized agriculture far exceeds a million.
The state possessed, in 1935, 113,000 trade departments,
the cooperatives, 200,000. The leaders of both are in essence
not commercial employees, but functionaries of the state, and
moreover monopolists. Even the Soviet press from time to
time complains that "the cooperators have ceased to regard
the members of the collective as their electors" — as though
the mechanism of the cooperatives could be qualitatively
distinguished from that of the trade unions, Soviets and the
party itself
This whole stratum, which does not engage directly in
productive labor, but administers, orders, commands, pardons
and punishes — teachers and students we are leaving
aside — must be numbered at five or six million. This total
figure, like the items composing it, by no means pretends to
accuracy, but it will do well enough for a first approximation.
It is sufficient to convince us that "the general line" of the
leadership is not a disembodied spirit.
In the various stages or stories of this ruling structure,
passing from below upward, the communist portion amounts
to from twenty to ninety percent. In the whole mass of the
bureaucracy, the communists together with the Communist
Youth constitute a block of 1.5 to 2 million — at present, owing
to continuous purges, rather less than more. This is the
backbone of the state power. These same communist administrators
are the backbone of the party, and of the Communist
Youth. The former Bolshevik Party is now no longer the
vanguard of the proletariat, but the political organization of
the bureaucracy. The remaining mass of the members of the
party and the Communist Youth serve only as a source for
the formation of this "active," that is, a reserve for the
replenishment of the bureaucracy. The nonparty "active"
serves the same purpose.
Hypothetically, we may assume that the labor and
collectivized peasant aristocracy, the Stakhanovists, the
nonparty "active," trusted personages, their relatives and
relatives-in-law, approximate the same figure that we
adopted for the bureaucracy, that is, five to six million. With

The Social Physiognomy of the Ruling Stratum 119
their families, these two interpenetrating strata constitute
as many as twenty to twenty-five million. We make a
comparatively low estimate of the numbers in a family for the
reason that often husband and wife, and sometimes also son
and daughter, occupy a place in the apparatus. Moreover, the
wives of the ruling group find it much easier to limit the size
of their family than working women, and above all peasant
women. The present campaign against abortion was set in
motion by the bureaucracy, but does not apply to it. Twelve
percent, or perhaps fifteen percent, of the population — that
is the authentic social basis of the autocratic ruling circles.
Where a separate room and sufficient food and neat
clothing are still accessible only to a small minority, millions
of bureaucrats, great and small, try to use the power
primarily in order to guarantee their own well-being. Hence
the enormous egoism of this stratum, its firm inner solidarity,
its fear of the discontent of the masses, its rabid insistence
upon strangling all criticism, and finally its hypocritically
religious bowing down before "the Leader," who embodies
and defends the power and privileges of these new lords.
The bureaucracy itself is still far less homogeneous than
the proletariat or the peasantry. There is a gulf between the
president of the rural soviet and the dignitary of the Kremlin.
The life of the lower functionaries of various categories
proceeds essentially upon a very primitive level, lower than
the standard of living of the skilled worker of the West. But
everything is relative, and the level of the surrounding
population is considerably lower. The fate of the chairman of
the collective farm, of the party organizer, of the lower order
of cooperator, like that of the highest bosses, does not in the
least depend upon so-called electors. Any one of these
functionaries can be sacrificed at any moment by the bosses
next above, in order to quiet some discontent. But, moreover,
each of them can on occasion raise himself a step higher.
They are all, at least up to the first serious shock, bound
together by mutual guarantees of security with the Kremlin.
In its conditions of life, the ruling stratum comprises all
gradations, from the petty bourgeoisie of the backwoods to
the big bourgeoisie of the capitals. To these material
conditions correspond habits, interests and circles of ideas.

120
The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
The present leaders of the Soviet trade unions are not much
different in their psychological type from the Citrines,
Jouhauxes and Greens. Other traditions, other phraseology,
but the same scornfully patronizing relation to the masses,
the same unconscionable astuteness in second-rate maneuvers,
the same conservativism, the same narrowness of
horizon, the same hard concern for their own peace, and
finally the same worship for the most trivial forms of
bourgeois culture. The Soviet colonels and generals are in the
majority little different from the colonels and generals of the
rest of the earth, and in any case are trying their best to be
like them. The Soviet diplomats have appropriated from the
Western diplomats not only their tailcoats, but their modes
of thought. The Soviet journalists fool the readers no less
than their foreign colleagues, although they do it in a special
manner.
If it is difficult to estimate the numbers of the bureaucracy,
it is still harder to determine their income. As early as 1927,
the Left Opposition protested that the "swollen and privileged
administrative apparatus is devouring a very considerable
part of the surplus value." In the Opposition platform, it was
estimated that the trade apparatus alone "devours an
enormous share of the national income — more than
one-tenth of the total production." After that the authorities
took the necessary measures to make such estimates
impossible. But for that very reason overhead expenses have
not been cut down, but have grown.
It is no better in other spheres than in the sphere of trade.
It required, as Rakovsky wrote in 1930, a fleeting quarrel
between the party and the trade union bureaucrats in order
that the population should find out from the press that out
of the budget of the trade unions, amounting to 400,000,000
rubles, 80,000,000 go for the support of the personnel. And
here, we remark, it was a question only of the legal budget.
Over and above this, the bureaucracy of the trade unions
receives from the industrial bureaucracy in token of friendship
immense gifts of money, apartments, means of transport,
etc. "How much goes for the support of party, cooperative,
collective farm, Soviet farm, industrial and administrative
apparatus with all their ramifications?" asked Rakovsky.

The Social Physiognomy of the Ruling Stratum 121
And he answered: "We possess not even hypothetical
information."
Freedom from control inevitably entails abuse of office,
including pecuniary malfeasance. On September 29,1935, the
government, compelled again to raise the question of the bad
work of the cooperatives, established over the signatures of
Molotov and Stalin, and not for the first time, "the presence
of immense plunderings and squanderings and losses in the
work of many of the rural consumers' societies." At a session
of the Central Executive Committee in January 1936, the
people's commissar of finance complained that local executive
committees permit completely arbitrary expenditures of state
funds. If the commissar was silent about the central
institutions, it was only because he himself belongs to their
circle.
There is no possibility of estimating what share of the
national income is appropriated by the bureaucracy. This is
not only because it carefully conceals even its legalized
incomes. It is not only because standing on the very boundary
of malfeasance, and often stepping over the boundary, it
makes a wide use of unforeseen incomes. It is chiefly because
the whole advance in social well-being, municipal utilities,
comfort, culture, art, still serves chiefly, if not exclusively,
this upper privileged stratum.
With regard to the bureaucracy as a consumer, we may,
with the necessary changes, repeat what would be said about
the bourgeoisie. There is no reason or sense in exaggerating
its appetite for articles of personal consumption. But the
situation changes sharply as soon as we take into consideration
its almost monopolistic enjoyment of the old and new
conquests of civilization. Formally, these good things are, of
course, available to the whole population, or at least to the
population of the cities. But in reality they are accessible only
in exceptional cases. The bureaucracy, on the contrary, avails
itself of them as a rule when and to what extent it wishes as
of its personal property. If you count not only salaries and all
forms of service in kind, and every type of semilegal
supplementary source of income, but also add the share of the
bureaucracy and the Soviet aristocracy in the theaters, rest
palaces, hospitals, sanatoriums, summer resorts, museums,

122 The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms
clubs, athletic institutions, etc., etc., it would probably be
necessary to conclude that fifteen percent, or, say, twenty
percent, of the population enjoys not much less of the wealth
than is enjoyed by the remaining eighty to eighty-five percent.
The "friends" will want to dispute our figures? Let them
give us others more accurate. Let them persuade the
bureaucracy to publish the income and expense book of Soviet
society. Until they do, we shall hold to our opinion. The
distribution of earthly goods in the Soviet Union, we do not
doubt, is incomparably more democratic than it was in tsarist
Russia, and even than it is in the most democratic countries
of the West. But as yet it has little in common with socialism.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Family, Youth and Culture
Thermidor in the Family
The October Revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in
relation to woman. The young government not only gave her
all political and legal rights in equality with man, but, what
is more important, did all that it could, and in any case
incomparably more than any other government ever did,
actually to secure her access to all forms of economic and
cultural work. However, the boldest revolution, like the
"all-powerful" British parliament, cannot convert a woman
into a man or rather, cannot divide equally between them the
burden of pregnancy, birth, nursing and the rearing of
children. The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the
so-called family hearth, that archaic, stuffy and stagnant
institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs
galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family
as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to
the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation:
maternity houses, nursery schools, kindergartens,
schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations,
hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, cinemas,
theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping
functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society,
uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to
bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real
liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. Up to now this
123

124 Family, Youth and Culture
problem of problems has not been solved. The forty million
Soviet families remain in their overwhelming majority nests
of medievalism, female slavery and hysteria, daily humiliation
of children, feminine and childish superstition. We
must permit ourselves no illusions on this account. For that
very reason, the consecutive changes in the approach to the
problem of the family in the Soviet Union best of all
characterize the actual nature of Soviet society and the
evolution of its ruling stratum.
It proved impossible to take the old family by storm — not
because the will was lacking, and not because the family was
so firmly rooted in men's hearts. On the contrary, after a short
period of distrust of the government and its nursery schools,
kindergartens and like institutions, the working women, and
after them the more advanced peasants, appreciated the
immeasurable advantages of the collective care of children
as well as the socialization of the whole family economy.
Unfortunately society proved too poor and little cultured. The
real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and
intentions of the Communist Party. You cannot "abolish" the
family; you have to replace it. The actual liberation of women
is unrealizable on a basis of "generalized want." Experience
soon proved this austere truth which Marx had formulated
eighty years before.
During the lean years, the workers wherever possible, and
in part their families, ate in the factory and other social dining
rooms, and this fact was officially regarded as a transition to
socialist forms of life. There is no need of pausing again upon
the peculiarities of the different periods: war communism, the
NEP and the first five-year plan. The fact is that from the
moment of the abolition of the food-card system in 1935, all
the better-placed workers began to return to the home dining
table. It would be incorrect to regard this retreat as a
condemnation of the socialist system, which in general was
never tried out. But so much the more withering was the
judgment of the workers and their wives upon the "social
feeding" organized by the bureaucracy. The same conclusion
must be extended to the social laundries, where they tear and
steal linen more than they wash it. Back to the family hearth!
But home cooking and the home washtub, which are now half

Thermidor in the Family 125
shamefacedly celebrated by orators and journalists, mean the
return of the workers' wives to their pots and pans, that is,
to the old slavery. It is doubtful if the resolution of the
Communist International on the "complete and irrevocable
triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union" sounds very
convincing to the women of the factory districts!
The rural family, bound up not only with home industry
but with agriculture, is infinitely more stable and conservative
than that of the town. Only a few, and as a general rule,
anaemic agricultural communes introduced social dining
rooms and nursery schools in the first period. Collectivization,
according to the first announcements, was to initiate a
decisive change in the sphere of the family. Not for nothing
did they expropriate the peasant's chickens as well as his
cows. There was no lack, at any rate, of announcements about
the triumphal march of social dining rooms throughout the
country. But when the retreat began, reality suddenly
emerged from the shadow of this bragging. The peasant gets
from the collective farm, as a general rule, only bread for
himself and fodder for his stock. Meat, dairy products and
vegetables, he gets almost entirely from the adjoining private
lots. And once the most important necessities of life are
acquired by the isolated efforts of the family, there can no
longer be any talk of social dining rooms. Thus the midget
farms, creating a new basis for the domestic hearthstone, lay
a double burden upon woman.
The total number of steady accommodations in the nursery
schools amounted, in 1932, to 600,000, and of seasonal
accommodations solely during work in the fields to only about
4,000,000. In 1935 the cots numbered 5,600,000, but the
steady ones were still only an insignificant part of the total.
Moreover, the existing nursery schools, even in Moscow,
Leningrad and other centers, are not satisfactory as a general
rule to the least fastidious demands. "A nursery school in
which the child feels worse than he does at home is not a
nursery school but a bad orphan asylum," complains a
leading Soviet newspaper. It is no wonder if the better-placed
workers' families avoid nursery schools. But for the fundamental
mass of the toilers, the number even of these "bad
orphan asylums" is insignificant. Just recently the Central

126 Family, Youth and Culture
Executive Committee introduced a resolution that foundlings
and orphans should be placed in private hands for bringing
up. Through its highest organ, the bureaucratic government
thus acknowledged its bankruptcy in relation to the most
important socialist function. The number of children in
kindergartens rose during the five years 1930-1935 from
370,000 to 1,181,000. The lowness of the figure for 1930 is
striking, but the figure for 1935 also seems only a drop in the
ocean of Soviet families. A further investigation would
undoubtedly show that the principal, and in any case the
better part of these kindergartens, appertain to the families
of the administration, the technical personnel, the Stakhanovists,
etc.
The same Central Executive Committee was not long ago
compelled to testify openly that the "resolution on the
liquidation of homeless and uncared-for children is being
weakly carried out." What is concealed behind this dispassionate
confession? Only by accident, from newspaper remarks
printed in small type, do we know that in Moscow
more than a thousand children are living in "extraordinarily
difficult family conditions"; that in the so-called children's
homes of the capital there are about 1,500 children who have
nowhere to go and are turned out into the streets; that during
the two autumn months of 1935 in Moscow and Leningrad
"7,500 parents were brought to court for leaving their
children without supervision." What good did it do to bring
them to court? How many thousand parents have avoided
going to court? How many children in "extraordinarily
difficult conditions" remained unrecorded? In what do
extraordinarily difficult conditions differ from simply difficult
ones? Those are the questions which remain unanswered. A
vast amount of the homelessness of children, obvious and
open as well as disguised, is a direct result of the great social
crisis in the course of which the old family continues to
dissolve far faster than the new institutions are capable of
replacing it.
From these same accidental newspaper remarks and from
episodes in the criminal records, the reader may find out
about the existence in the Soviet Union of prostitution, that
is, the extreme degradation of woman in the interests of men

Thermidor in the Family 127
who can pay for it. In the autumn of the past year, Izvestia
suddenly informed its readers, for example, of the arrest in
Moscow of "as many as a thousand women who were secretly
selling themselves on the streets of the proletarian capital."
Among those arrested were 177 working women, 92 clerks, 5
university students, etc. What drove them to the sidewalks?
Inadequate wages, want, the necessity to "get a little
something for a dress, for shoes." We should vainly seek the
approximate dimensions of this social evil. The modest
bureaucracy orders the statistician to remain silent. But that
enforced silence itself testifies unmistakably to the numerousness
of the "class" of Soviet prostitutes. Here there can
be essentially no question of "relics of the past;" prostitutes
are recruited from the younger generation. No reasonable
person, of course, would think of placing special blame for
this sore, as old as civilization, upon the Soviet regime. But
it is unforgivable in the presence of prostitution to talk about
the triumph of socialism. The newspapers assert, to be
sure — insofar as they are permitted to touch upon this
ticklish theme — that "prostitution is decreasing." It is
possible that this is really true by comparison with the years
of hunger and decline (1931-1933). But the restoration of
money relations which has taken place since then, abolishing
all direct rationing, will inevitably lead to a new growth of
prostitution as well as of homeless children. Wherever there
are privileged there are pariahs!
The mass homelessness of children is undoubtedly the
most unmistakable and most tragic symptom of the difficult
situation of the mother. On this subject even the optimistic
Pravda is sometimes compelled to make a bitter confession:
"The birth of a child is for many women a serious menace to
their position." It is just for this reason that the revolutionary
power gave women the right to abortion, which in conditions
of want and family distress, whatever may be said upon this
subject by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is one of
her most important civil, political and cultural rights.
However, this right of women too, gloomy enough in itself, is
under the existing social inequality being converted into a
privilege. Bits of information trickling into the press about
the practice of abortion are literally shocking. Thus through

128 Family, Youth and Culture
only one village hospital in one district of the Urals, there
passed in 1935 "195 women mutilated by midwives" —
among them 33 working women, 28 clerical workers, €5
collective farm women, 58 housewives, etc. This Ural district
differs from the majority of other districts only in that
information about it happened to get into the press. How
many women are mutilated each year throughout the extent
of the Soviet Union?
Having revealed its inability to serve women who are
compelled to resort to abortion with the necessary medical aid
and sanitation, the state makes a sharp change of course, and
takes the road of prohibition. And just as in other situations,
the bureaucracy makes a virtue of necessity. One of the
members of the highest Soviet court, Soltz, a specialist on
matrimonial questions, bases the forthcoming prohibition of
abortion on the fact that in a socialist society where there are
no unemployed, etc., etc., a woman has no right to decline
"the joys of motherhood." The philosophy of a priest endowed
also with the powers of a gendarme. We just heard from the
central organ of the ruling party that the birth of a child is
for many women, and it would be truer to say for the
overwhelming majority, "a menace to their position." We
just heard from the highest Soviet institution that "the
liquidation of homeless and uncared for children is being
weakly carried out," which undoubtedly means a new
increase of homelessness. But here the highest Soviet judge
informs us that in a country where "life is joyful" abortion
should be punished with imprisonment — just exactly as in
capitalist countries where life is grievous It is clear in
advance that in the Soviet Union as in the West those who
will fall into the claws of the jailer will be chiefly working
women, servants, peasant wives, who find it hard to conceal
their troubles. As far as concerns "our women," who furnish
the demand for fine perfumes and other pleasant things, they
will, as formerly, do what they find necessary under the very
nose of an indulgent justiciary. "We have need of people,"
concludes Soltz, closing his eyes to the homeless. "Then have
the kindness to bear them yourselves," might be the answer
to the high judge of millions of toiling women, if the
bureaucracy had not sealed their lips with the seal of silence.

Thermidor in the Family 129
These gentlemen have, it seems, completely forgotten that
socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to
abortion, and not force her into the "joys of motherhood"
with the help of foul police interference in what is to every
woman the most intimate sphere of life.
The draft of the law forbidding abortion was submitted to
so-called universal popular discussion, and even through the
fine sieve of the Soviet press many bitter complaints and
stifled protests broke out. The discussion was cut off as
suddenly as it had been announced, and on June 27 the
Central Executive Committee converted the shameful draft
into a thrice shameful law. Even some of the official apologists
of the bureaucracy were embarrassed. Louis Fischer declared
this piece of legislation something in the nature of a
deplorable misunderstanding. In reality the new law against
women, with exceptions in favor of ladies, is the natural and
logical fruit of Thermidorian reaction!
The triumphal rehabilitation of the family, taking place
simultaneously — what a providential coincidence! — with
the rehabilitation of the ruble, is caused by the material and
cultural bankruptcy of the state. Instead of openly saying,
"We have proven still too poor and ignorant for the creation
of socialist relations among men, our children and grandchildren
will realize this aim," the leaders are forcing people to
glue together again the shell of the broken family, and not
only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme
penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is
hard to measure with the eye the scope of this retreat.
Everybody and everything is dragged into the new course:
lawgiver and litterateur, court and police, newspaper and
schoolroom. When a naive and honest communist youth
makes bold to write in his paper: "You would do better to
occupy yourself with solving the problem of how a woman can
get out of the clutches of the family," he receives in answer
a couple of good smacks and — is silent. The ABCs of
communism are declared a "leftist excess." The stupid and
stale prejudices of uncultured philistines are resurrected in
the name of a new morale. And what is happening in daily
life in all the nooks and corners of this measureless country?

130 Family, Youth and Culture
The press reflects only in a faint degree the depth of the
Thermidorian reaction in the sphere of the family.
Since the noble passion of evangelism grows with the
growth of sin, the seventh commandment is acquiring great
popularity in the ruling stratum. The Soviet moralists have
only to change the phraseology slightly. A campaign is opened
against too frequent and easy divorces. The creative thought
of the lawgivers had already invented such a "socialistic"
measure as the taking of money payment upon registration
of divorces, and increasing it when divorces were repeated.
Not for nothing we remarked above that the resurrection of
the family goes hand in hand with the increase of the
educative role of the ruble. A tax indubitably makes
registration difficult for those for whom it is difficult to pay.
For the upper circles, the payment, we may hope, will not offer
any difficulty. Moreover, people possessing nice apartments,
automobiles and other good things arrange their personal
affairs without unnecessary publicity and consequently
without registration. It is only on the bottom of society that
prostitution has a heavy and humiliating character. On the
heights of the Soviet society, where power is combined with
comfort, prostitution takes the elegant form of small mutual
services, and even assumes the aspect of the "socialist
family." We have already heard from Sosnovsky about the
importance of the "automobile-harem factor" in the degeneration
of the ruling stratum.
The lyrical, academic and other "friends of the Soviet
Union" have eyes in order to see nothing. The marriage and
family laws established by the October Revolution, once the
object of its legitimate pride, are being made over and
mutilated by vast borrowings from the legislative treasuries
of the bourgeois countries. And as though on purpose to stamp
treachery with ridicule, the same arguments which were
earlier advanced in favor of unconditional freedom of divorce
and abortion — "the liberation of women," "defense of the
rights of the individual," "protection of motherhood" — are
repeated now in favor of their limitation or complete
prohibition.
The retreat not only assumes forms of disgusting hypocrisy,
but also is going infinitely further than what is demanded by

Thermidor in the Family 131
iron economic necessity. To the objective causes producing
this return to such bourgeois forms as the payment of
alimony, there is added the social interest of the ruling
stratum in the deepening of bourgeois law. The most
compelling motive of the present cult of the family is
undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable
hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by
means of 40,000,000 points of support for authority and
power.
While the hope still lived of concentrating the education of
the new generations in the hands of the state, the government
was not only unconcerned about supporting the authority of
the "elders," and, in particular of the mother and father, but
on the contrary tried its best to separate the children from
the family, in order thus to protect them from the traditions
of a stagnant mode of life. Only a little while ago, in the course
of the first five-year plan, the schools and the Communist
Youth were using children for the exposure, shaming and in
general "reeducating" of their drunken fathers or religious
mothers — with what success is another question. At any
rate, this method meant a shaking of parental authority to its
very foundations. In this not unimportant sphere too, a sharp
turn has now been made. Along with the seventh, the fifth
commandment is also fully restored to its rights — as yet, to
be sure, without any references to God. But the French
schools also get along without this supplement, and that does
not prevent them from successfully inculcating conservatism
and routine.
Concern for the authority of the older generation, by the
way, has already led to a change of policy with regard to
religion. The denial of God, his assistants and his miracles,
was the sharpest wedge of all those which the revolutionary
power drove between children and parents. Outstripping the
development of culture, serious propaganda and scientific
education, the struggle with the churches, under the leadership
of people of the type of Yaroslavsky, often degenerated
into buffoonery and mischief. The storming of heaven, like
the storming of the family, is now brought to a stop. The
bureaucracy, concerned about their reputation for respectability,
have ordered the young atheists to surrender their

132 Family, Youth and Culture
fighting armor and sit down to their books. In relation to
religion, there is gradually being established a regime of
ironical neutrality. But that is only the first stage. It would
not be difficult to predict the second and third, if the course
of events depended only upon those in authority.
The hypocrisy of prevailing opinion develops everywhere
and always as the square, or cube, of the social contradictions.
Such, approximately, is the historic law of ideology translated
into the language of mathematics. Socialism, if it is worthy
of the name, means human relations without greed, friendship
without envy and intrigue, love without base calculation.
The official doctrine declares these ideal norms already
realized and with more insistence the louder the reality
protests against such declarations. "On a basis of real
equality between men and women," says, for example, the
new program of the Communist Youth, adopted in April 1936,
"a new family is coming into being, the flourishing of which
will be a concern of the Soviet state." An official commentary
supplements the program: "Our youth in the choice of a
life-friend — wife or husband — know only one motive, one
impulse: love. The bourgeois marriage of pecuniary convenience
does not exist for our growing generation" {Pravda,
April 4, 1936). So far as concerns the rank-and-file workingman
and woman, this is more or less true. But "marriage for
money" is comparatively little known also to the workers of
capitalist countries. Things are quite different in the middle
and upper strata. New social groupings automatically place
their stamp upon personal relations. The vices which power
and money create in sex relations are flourishing as
luxuriously in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy as though
it had set itself the goal of outdoing in this respect the
Western bourgeoisie.
In complete contradiction to the just quoted assertion of
Pravda, "marriage for convenience," as the Soviet press itself
in moments of accidental or unavoidable frankness confesses,
is now fully resurrected. Qualifications, wages, employment,
number of chevrons on the military uniform, are acquiring
more and more significance, for with them are bound up
questions of shoes and fur coats and apartments and
bathrooms and — the ultimate dream — automobiles. The

Thermidor in the Family 133
mere struggle for a room unites and divorces no small number
of couples every year in Moscow. The question of relatives has
acquired exceptional significance. It is useful to have as a
father-in-law a military commander or an influential communist,
as a mother-in-law, the sister of a high dignitary. Can
we wonder at this? Could it be otherwise?
One of the very dramatic chapters in the great book of the
Soviets will be the tale of the disintegration and breaking up
of those Soviet families where the husband as a party
member, trade unionist, military commander or administrator,
grew and developed and acquired new tastes in life, and
the wife, crushed by the family, remained on the old level.
The road of the two generations of the Soviet bureaucracy is
sown thick with the tragedies of wives rejected and left
behind. The same phenomenon is now to be observed in the
new generation. The greatest of all crudities and cruelties are
to be met perhaps in the very heights of the bureaucracy,
where a very large percentage are parvenus of little culture,
who consider that everything is permitted to them. Archives
and memoirs will some day expose downright crimes in
relation to wives, and to women in general, on the part of
those evangelists of family morals and the compulsory "joys
of motherhood," who are, owing to their position, immune
from prosecution.
No, the Soviet woman is not yet free. Complete equality
before the law has so far given infinitely more to the women
of the upper strata, representatives of bureaucratic, technical,
pedagogical and, in general, intellectual work, than to the
working women and yet more the peasant women. So long as
society is incapable of taking upon itself the material concern
for the family, the mother can successfully fulfill a social
function only on condition that she has in her service a white
slave: nurse, servant, cook, etc. Out of the 40,000,000 families
which constitute the population of the Soviet Union, five
percent, or maybe ten, build their "hearthstone" directly or
indirectly upon the labor of domestic slaves. An accurate
census of Soviet servants would have as much significance for
the socialistic appraisal of the position of women in the Soviet
Union as the whole Soviet law code, no matter how
progressive it might be. But for this very reason the Soviet

134 Family, Youth and Culture
statistics hide servants under the name of "working woman"
or "and others"!
The situation of the mother of the family who is an
esteemed communist, has a cook, a telephone for giving orders
to the stores, an automobile for errands, etc., has little in
common with the situation of the working woman who is
compelled to run to the shops, prepare dinner herself, and
carry her children on foot from the kindergarten, if, indeed,
a kindergarten is available. No socialist labels can conceal
this social contrast, which is no less striking than the contrast
between the bourgeois lady and the proletarian woman in any
country of the West.
The genuinely socialist family, from which society will
remove the daily vexation of unbearable and humiliating
cares, will have no need of any regimentation, and the very
idea of laws about abortion and divorce will sound no better
within its walls than the recollection of houses of prostitution
or human sacrifices. The October legislation took a bold step
in the direction of such a family. Economic and cultural
backwardness has produced a cruel reaction. The Thermidorian
legislation is beating a retreat to the bourgeois models,
covering its retreat with false speeches about the sanctity of
the "new" family. On this question, too, socialist bankruptcy
covers itself with hypocritical respectability.
There are sincere observers who are, especially upon the
question of children, shaken by the contrast here between
high principles and ugly reality. The mere fact of the furious
criminal measures that have been adopted against homeless
children is enough to suggest that the socialist legislation in
defense of women and children is nothing but crass hypocrisy.
There are observers of an opposite kind who are deceived by
the broadness and magnanimity of those ideas that have been
dressed up in the form of laws and administrative institutions.,
When they see destitute mothers, prostitutes and
homeless children, these optimists tell themselves that a
further growth of material wealth will gradually fill the
socialist laws with flesh and blood. It is not easy to decide
which of these two modes of approach is more mistaken and
more harmful. Only people stricken with historical blindness
can fail to see the broadness and boldness of the social plan,

The Struggle against the Youth 135
the significance of the first stages of its development, and the
immense possibilities opened by it. But on the other hand, it
is impossible not to be indignant at the passive and essentially
indifferent optimism of those who shut their eyes to the
growth of social contradictions, and comfort themselves with
visions of the future, the key to which they respectfully
propose to leave in the hands of the bureaucracy. As though
the equality of rights of women and men were not already
converted into an equality of deprivation of rights by that
same bureaucracy! And as though in some book of wisdom it
were firmly promised that the Soviet bureaucracy will not
introduce a new oppression in place of liberty.
How man enslaved woman, how the exploiter subjected
them both, how the toilers have attempted at the price of
blood to free themselves from slavery and have only
exchanged one chain for another — history tells us much
about all this. In essence, it tells us nothing else. But how in
reality to free the child, the woman and the human being?
For that we have as yet no reliable models. All past historical
experience, wholly negative, demands of the toilers before all
else an implacable distrust of all privileged and uncontrolled
guardians!
The Struggle against the Youth
Every revolutionary party finds its chief support in the
younger generation of the rising class. Political decay
expresses itself in a loss of ability to attract the youth under
one's banner. The parties of bourgeois democracy, in withdrawing
one after another from the scene, are compelled to
turn over the young either to revolution or fascism. Bolshevism
when underground was always a party of young
workers. The Mensheviks relied upon the more respectable
skilled upper stratum of the working class, always prided
themselves on it, and looked down upon the Bolsheviks.
Subsequent events harshly showed them their mistake. At
the decisive moment, the youth carried with them the more
mature strata and even the old folks.
The revolution gave a mighty historical impulse to the new
Soviet generations. It cut them free at one blow from

136 Family, Youth and Culture
conservative forms of life, and exposed to them the great
secret — the first secret of the dialectic — that there is
nothing unchanging on this earth, and that society is made
out of plastic materials. How stupid is the theory of
unchanging racial types in the light of the events of our epoch!
The Soviet Union is an immense melting pot in which the
characters of dozens of nationalities are being mixed. The
mysticism of the "Slavic soul" is coming off like scum.
But the impulse given to the younger generations had not
yet found expression in a corresponding historic enterprise.
To be sure, the youth are very active in the sphere of the
economy. In the Soviet Union there are 7,000,000 workers
under twenty-three — 3,140,000 in industry, 700,000 in the
railroads, 700,000 in the building trades. In the new giant
factories, about half the workers are young. There are now
1,200,000 Communist Youth in the collective farms. Hundreds
of thousands of members of the Communist Youth have
been mobilized during recent years for construction work,
timber work, coal mining, gold production, for work in the
Arctic, Sakhalin, or on the Amur where the new town of
Komsomolsk is in process of construction. The new generation
is putting out shock brigades, champion workers, Stakhanovists,
foremen, low-level administrators. The youth are
studying, and a considerable part of them are studying
assiduously. They are as active, if not more so, in the sphere
of athletics in its most daring or warlike forms, such as
parachute jumping and marksmanship. The enterprising and
audacious are going on all kinds of dangerous expeditions.
"The better part of our youth," said recently the wellknown
polar explorer, Schmidt, "are eager to work where
difficulties await them." This is undoubtedly true. But in all
spheres the postrevolutionary generations are still under
guardianship. They are told from above what to do, and how
to do it. Politics, as the highest form of command, remains
wholly in the hands of the so-called Old Guard, and in all the
ardent and frequently flattering speeches they address to the
youth, the old boys are vigilantly defending their own
monopoly.
Not conceiving of the development of a socialist society
without the dying away of the state — that is, without the

The Struggle against the Youth 137
replacement of all kinds of police oppression by the selfadministration
of educated producers and consumers —
Engels laid the accomplishment of this task upon the younger
generation, "who will grow up in new, free social conditions,
and will be in a position to cast away all this rubbish of
state-ism." Lenin adds on his part: "every kind of state-ism,
the democratic-republican included." The prospect of the
construction of a socialist society stood, then, in the mind of
Engels and Lenin approximately thus: The generation which
conquered the power, the "Old Guard," will begin the work
of liquidating the state; the next generation will complete it.
How do things stand in reality? Forty-three percent of the
population of the Soviet Union were born after the October
Revolution. If you take the age of twenty-three as the
boundary between the two generations, then over fifty
percent of Soviet humanity has not yet reached this boundary.
A big half of the population of the country, consequently,
knows nothing by personal recollection of any regime except
that of the Soviets. But it is just this new generation which
is forming itself, not in "free social conditions," as Engels
conceived it, but under intolerable and constantly increasing
oppression from the ruling stratum composed of those same
ones who — according to the official fiction — achieved the
great revolution. In the factory, the collective farm, the
barracks, the university, the schoolroom, even in the
kindergarten, if not in the nursery school, the chief glory of
man is declared to be: personal loyalty to the leader and
unconditional obedience. Many pedagogical aphorisms and
maxims of recent times might seem to have been copied from
Goebbels, if he himself had not copied them in good part from
the collaborators of Stalin.
The school and the social life of the student are saturated
with formalism and hypocrisy, The children have learned to
sit through innumerable deadly dull meetings, with their
inevitable honorary presidium, their chants in honor of the
dear leaders, their predigested righteous debates in which,
quite in the manner of their elders, they say one thing and
think another. The most innocent groups of school children
who try to create oases in this desert of officiousness are met
with fierce measures of repression. Through its agentry, the

138 Family, Youth and Culture
GPU introduces the sickening corruption of denunciations
and betrayal into the so-called socialist schools. The more
thoughtful teachers and children's writers, in spite of the
enforced optimism, cannot always conceal their horror in the
presence of this spirit of repression, falsity and boredom
which is killing school life.
Having no past experience of class struggle and revolution,
the new generations could have ripened for independent
participation in the social life of the country only in conditions
of soviet democracy, only by consciously working over the
experience of the past and the lessons of the present.
Independent character, like independent thought, cannot
develop without criticism. The Soviet youth, however, are
simply denied the elementary opportunity to exchange
thoughts, make mistakes and try out and correct mistakes,
their own as well as others. All questions, including their very
own, are decided for them. They are called upon only to carry
out the decisions and sing the glory of their elders. To every
word of criticism, the bureaucracy answers with a twist of the
neck. All who are outstanding and unsubmissive in the ranks
of the young are systematically destroyed, suppressed or
physically exterminated. This explains the fact that out of the
millions upon millions of Communist youth, there has not
emerged a single major figure.
In throwing themselves into engineering, science, literature,
sport or chess playing, the youth are, so to speak,
winning their spurs for future great action In all these
spheres, they compete with the badly prepared older generation,
and often equal and beat them. But at every contact
with politics, they burn their fingers. They have, thus, but
three possibilities open to them: participate in the bureaucracy
and make a career; submit silently to oppression, retire
into economic work, science or their own petty personal
affairs; or, finally, go underground and learn to struggle and
to temper their character for the future. The road of the
bureaucratic career is accessible only to a small minority. At
the other pole, a small minority enter the ranks of the
Opposition. The middle group, the overwhelming mass, is in
turn very heterogeneous. But in it, under the iron press,
extremely significant although hidden processes are at work

The Struggle against the Youth 139
which will to a great extent determine the future of the Soviet
Union.
The ascetic tendencies of the epoch of the civil war gave
way in the period of the NEP to a more epicurean, not to say
avid, mood. The first five-year plan again became a time of
involuntary asceticism, but now only for the masses and the
youth. The ruling stratum had firmly dug themselves in
positions of personal prosperity. The second five-year plan is
undoubtedly accompanied by a sharp reaction against
asceticism. A concern for personal advancement has seized
upon broad circles of the population, especially the young.
The fact is, however, that in the new Soviet generation,
well-being and prosperity are accessible only to that thin layer
who manage to rise above the mass and one way or another
accommodate themselves to the ruling stratum. The bureaucracy
on its side is consciously developing and sorting out
machine politicians and careerists.
The main speaker at a Congress of the Communist Youth
(April 1936) declared: "Greed for profits, philistine pettiness
and base egotism are not the attributes of Soviet youth."
These words sound sharply discordant with the reigning
slogans of a "prosperous and handsome life," with the
methods of piecework, premiums and decorations. Socialism
is not ascetic; on the contrary, it is deeply hostile to the
asceticism of Christianity. It is deeply hostile, in its adherence
to this world, and this only, to all religion. But socialism has
its gradations of earthly values. Human personality begins
for socialism not with the concern for a prosperous life, but
on the contrary with the cessation of this concern. However,
no generation can jump over its own head. The whole
Stakhanov movement is for the present built upon "base
egotism." The very measures of success — the number of
trousers and neckties earned — testifies to nothing but
"philistine pettiness." Let us even suppose that this historic
stage is unavoidable. All right. It is still necessary to see it
as it is. The restoration of market relations opens an
indubitable opportunity for a considerable rise of personal
prosperity. The broad trend of the Soviet youth toward the
engineering profession is explained, not so much by the
allurements of socialist construction, as by the fact that

140 Family, Youth and Culture
engineers earn incomparably more than physicians or
teachers. When such tendencies arise in circumstances of
intellectual oppression and ideological reaction, and with a
conscious unleashing from above of careerist instincts, then
the propagation of what is called "socialist culture" often
turns out to be education in the spirit of the most extreme
antisocial egotism.
Still it would be a crude slander against the youth to
portray them as controlled exclusively, or even predominantly,
by personal interests. No, in the general mass they
are magnanimous, responsive, enterprising. Careerism colors
them only from above. In their depths are various unformulated
tendencies grounded in heroism and still only awaiting
application. It is upon these moods in particular that the
newest kind of Soviet patriotism is nourishing itself. It is
undoubtedly very deep, sincere and dynamic. But in this
patriotism, too, there is a rift which separates the young from
the old.
Healthy young lungs find it intolerable to breathe in the
atmosphere of hypocrisy which is inseparable from Thermidor
— from a reaction, that is, which is still compelled to
dress in the garments of revolution The crying discord
between the socialist posters and the reality of life undermines
faith in the official canons. A considerable stratum of
the youth takes pride in its contempt for politics, in rudeness
and debauch. In many cases, and probably a majority, this
indifferentism and cynicism is but the initial form of
discontent and of a hidden desire to stand up on one's own
feet. The expulsion from the Communist Youth and the party,
the arrest and exile, of hundreds of thousands of young "white
guards" and "opportunists," on the one hand, and "Bolshevik-
Leninists" on the other, proves that the wellsprings of
conscious political opposition, both right and left, are not
exhausted. On the contrary, during the last couple of years
they have been bubbling with renewed strength. Finally, the
more impatient, hot-blooded, unbalanced, injured in their
interests and feelings, are turning their thoughts in the
direction of terrorist revenge. Such, approximately, is the
spectrum of the political moods of the Soviet youth.

The Struggle against the Youth 141
The history of individual terror in the Soviet Union clearly
marks the stages in the general evolution of the country. At
the dawn of the Soviet power, in the atmosphere of the still
unfinished civil war, terrorist deeds were perpetrated by
white guards or Social Revolutionaries. When the former
ruling classes lost hope of a restoration, terrorism also
disappeared. The kulak terror, echoes of which have been
observed up to very recent times, had always a local character
and supplemented the guerrilla warfare against the Soviet
regime. As for the latest outburst of terrorism, it does not
rest either upon the old ruling classes or upon the kulak. The
terrorists of the latest draft are recruited exclusively from
among the young, from the ranks of the Communist Youth
and the party, not infrequently from the offspring of the
ruling stratum. Although completely impotent to solve the
problems which it sets itself, this individual terror has
nevertheless an extremely important symptomatic significance.
It characterizes the sharp contradiction between the
bureaucracy and the broad masses of the people, especially
the young.
All taken together — economic hazards, parachute jumping,
polar expeditions, demonstrative indifferentism, "romantic
hooliganism," terroristic mood, and individual acts of
terror — are preparing an explosion of the younger generation
against the intolerable tutelage of the old. A war would
undoubtedly serve as a vent for the accumulating vapors of
discontent, but not for long. In a war the youth would soon
acquire the necessary fighting temper and the authority
which it now so sadly lacks. At the same time, the reputation
of the majority of "old men" would suffer irremediable
damage. At best, a war would give the bureaucracy only a
certain moratorium. The ensuing political conflict would be
so much the more sharp.
It would be one-sided, of course, to reduce the basic political
problem of the Soviet Union to the problem of generations.
There are many open and hidden foes of the bureaucracy
among the old, just as there are hundreds of thousands of
perfected yes-men among the young. Nevertheless, from
whatever side the attack came against the position of the
ruling stratum, from left or right, the attackers would recruit

142
Family, Youth and Culture
their chief forces among the oppressed and discontented
youth deprived of political rights. The bureaucracy admirably
understands this. It is in general exquisitely sensitive to
everything which threatens its dominant position. Naturally,
in trying to consolidate its position in advance, it erects the
chief trenches and concrete fortifications against the younger
generation.
In April 1936, as we have said, there assembled in the
Kremlin the tenth congress of the Communist Youth. Nobody
bothered to explain, of course, why in violation of its
constitution, the congress had not been called for an entire
five years. Moreover, it soon became clear that this carefully
sifted and selected congress was called at this time exclusively
for the purpose of a political expropriation of the youth.
According to the new constitution, the Communist Youth
League is now even juridically deprived of the right to
participate in the social life of the country. Its sole sphere
henceforth is to be education and cultural training. The
general secretary of the Communist Youth, under orders from
above, declared in his speech: "We must ... end the chatter
about industrial and financial planning, about the lowering
of production costs, economic accounting, crop sowing, and
other important state problems as though we were going to
decide them." The whole country might well repeat those
last words: "as though we were going to decide them!" That
insolent rebuke: "End the chatter!," welcomed with anything
but enthusiasm even by this supersubmissive congress, is the
more striking when you remember that the Soviet law defines
the age of political maturity as eighteen years, giving all
electoral rights to young men and women of that age, whereas
the age limit for Communist Youth members, according to the
old constitution, was twenty-three years, and a good third of
the members of the organization were in reality older than
that. This last congress adopted two simultaneous reforms:
It legalized membership in the Communist Youth for people
of greater age, thus increasing the number of Communist
Youth electors, and at the same time deprived the organization
as a whole of the right to intrude into the sphere, not
only of general politics — of that there can never be any
question! — but of the current problems of economy. The

The Struggle against the Youth 143
abolition of the former age limit was dictated by the fact that
transfer from the Communist Youth into the party, formerly
an almost automatic process, has now been made extremely
difficult. This annulment of the last remnant of political
rights, and even of the appearance of them, was caused by a
desire fully and finally to enslave the Communist Youth to
the well-purged party. Both measures, obviously contradicting
each other, derive nevertheless from the same source: the
bureaucracy's fear of the younger generation.
The speakers at the congress, who according to their own
statements were carrying out the express instructions of
Stalin — they gave these warnings in order to forestall in
advance the very possibility of a debate — explained the aim
of the reform with astonishing frankness: "We have no need
of any second party." This argument reveals the fact that in
the opinion of the ruling circles, the Communist Youth
League, if it is not decisively strangled, threatens to become
a second party. As though on purpose to define these possible
tendencies, another speaker warningly declared: "In his time,
no other than Trotsky himself attempted to make a demagogic
play for the youth, to inspire it with the anti-Leninist,
anti-Bolshevik idea of creating a second party, etc." The
speaker's historic allusion contains an anachronism. In
reality, Trotsky "in his time" only gave warning that a
further bureaucratization of the regime would inevitably lead
to a break with the youth, and produce the danger of a second
party. But never mind: the course of events, in confirming
that warning, has converted it ipso facto into a program. The
degenerating party has kept its attractive power only for
careerists. Honest and thinking young men and girls cannot
but be nauseated by the Byzantine slavishness, the false
rhetoric, concealing privilege and caprice, the braggadocio of
mediocre bureaucrats singing praises to each other — at all
these marshals who because they can't catch the stars in
heaven have to stick them on their own bodies in various
places.* Thus it is no longer a question of the "danger" as it
was twelve or thirteen years ago of a second party, but of its
* The phrase "he does not catch the stars in heaven" is a proverbial way
of saying that a man is mediocre — Trans

144 Family, Youth and Culture
historic necessity as the sole power capable of further
advancing the cause of the October Revolution. The change
in the constitution of the Communist Youth League, although
reinforced with fresh police threats, will not, of course, halt
the political maturing of the youth, and will not prevent their
hostile clash with the bureaucracy.
Which way will the youth turn in case of a great political
disturbance? Under what banner will they assemble their
ranks? Nobody can give a sure answer to that question now,
least of all the youth themselves. Contradictory tendencies
are furrowing their minds. In the last analysis, the alignment
of the principal mass will be determined by historic events of
world significance: by a war, by new successes of fascism, or,
on the contrary, by the victory of the proletarian revolution
in the West. In any case, the bureaucracy will find out that
these youth deprived of rights represent a historic charge
with mighty explosive power.
In 1894 the Russian autocracy, through the lips of the
young Tsar Nicholas II, answered the Zemstvos, which were
timidly dreaming of participating in political life, with the
famous words: "Meaningless fancies!" In 1936 the Soviet
bureaucracy answered the as yet vague claims of the younger
generation with the still ruder cry: "Stop your chatter!"
Those words, too, will become historic. The regime of Stalin
may pay no less heavily for them than the regime headed by
Nicholas II.
Nationality and Culture
The policy of Bolshevism on the national question, having
ensured the victory of the October Revolution, also helped the
Soviet Union to hold out afterward, notwithstanding inner
centrifugal forces and a hostile environment. The bureaucratic
degeneration of the state has rested like a millstone
upon the national policy. It was upon the national question
that Lenin intended to give his first battle to the bureaucracy,
and especially to Stalin, at the twelfth congress of the party
in the spring of 1923. But before the congress met, Lenin had
gone from the ranks. The documents which he then prepared
remain even now suppressed by the censor.

Nationality and Culture 145
The cultural demands of the nations aroused by the
revolution require the widest possible autonomy. At the same
time, industry can successfully develop only by subjecting all
parts of the Union to a general centralized plan. But economy
and culture are not separated by impermeable partitions. The
tendencies of cultural autonomy and economic centralism
come naturally from time to time into conflict. The contradiction
between them is, however, far from irreconcilable.
Although there can be no once-and-for-all prepared formula
to resolve the problem, still there is the resilient will of the
interested masses themselves. Only their actual participation
in the administration of their own destinies can at each new
stage draw the necessary lines between the legitimate
demands of economic centralism and the living gravitations
of national culture. The trouble is, however, that the will of
the population of the USSR, in all its national divisions, is
now wholly replaced by the will of a bureaucracy which
approaches both economy and culture from the point of view
of convenience of administration and the specific interests of
the ruling stratum.
It is true that in the sphere of national policy, as in the
sphere of economy, the Soviet bureaucracy still continues to
carry out a certain part of the progressive work, although
with immoderate overhead expenses. This is especially true
of the backward nationalities of the Union, which must of
necessity pass through a more or less prolonged period of
borrowing, imitation and assimilation of what exists. The
bureaucracy is laying down a bridge for them to the
elementary benefits of bourgeois, and in part even prebourgeois,
culture In relation to many spheres and peoples,
the Soviet power is to a considerable extent carrying out the
historic work fulfilled by Peter I and his colleagues in relation
to the old Muscovy, only on a larger scale and at a swifter
tempo.
In the schools of the Union, lessons are taught at present
in no less than eighty languages. For a majority of them, it
was necessary to compose new alphabets, or to replace the
extremely aristocratic Asiatic alphabets with the more
democratic Latin. Newspapers are published in the same
number of languages, papers which for the first time acquaint

146 Family, Youth and Culture
the peasants and nomad shepherds with the elementary ideas
of human culture. Within the far-flung boundaries of the
tsar's empire, a native industry is arising. The old semiclan
culture is being destroyed by the tractor. Together with
literacy, scientific agriculture and medicine are coming into
existence. It would be difficult to overestimate the significance
of this work of raising up new human strata. Marx was
right when he said that revolution is the locomotive of history.
But the most powerful locomotive cannot perform miracles.
It cannot change the laws of space, and can only accelerate
movement. The very necessity of acquainting tens of millions
of grown-up people with the alphabet and the newspaper, or
with the simple laws of hygiene, shows what a long road
must be traveled before you can really pose the question of a
new socialist culture. The press informs us, for example, that
in western Siberia the Oirots, who formerly did not know
what a bath means, have now "in many villages baths to
which they sometimes travel thirty kilometers to wash
themselves." This extreme example, although taken at the
lowest level of culture, nevertheless truthfully suggests the
height of many other achievements, and that not only in the
backward regions. When the head of a government, in order
to illustrate the growth of culture, refers to the fact that in
the collective farms a demand has arisen for "iron bedsteads,
wall clocks, knit underwear, sweaters, bicycles, etc.," this
only means that the well-off upper circles of the Soviet
villages are beginning to use those articles of manufacture
which were long ago in common use among the peasant
masses of the West. From day to day, in speeches and in the
press, lessons are pronounced on the theme of "cultured
socialist trade." In essence, it is a question of giving a clean
attractive look to the government stores, supplying them with
the necessary technical implements and a sufficient assortment
of goods, not letting the apples rot, throwing in darning
cotton with stockings, and teaching the selling clerk to be
polite and attentive to the customer, in other words, acquiring
the commonplace methods of capitalist trade. We are still far
from solving this extremely important problem, in which,
however, there is not a grain of socialism.

Nationality and Culture 147
If we leave laws and institutions aside for a moment, and
take the daily life of the basic mass of the population, and if
we do not deliberately delude our minds or other's, we are
compelled to acknowledge that in life customs and culture,
the heritage of tsarist and bourgeois Russia in the Soviet
country vastly prevails over the embryonic growth of
socialism. Most convincing on this subject is the population
itself, which at the least rise of the standard of living throws
itself avidly upon the ready models of the West. The young
Soviet clerks, and often the workers too, try both in dress and
manner to imitate American engineers and technicians with
whom they happen to come in contact in the factories. The
industrial and clerical working girls devour with their eyes
the foreign lady tourist in order to capture her modes and
manners. The lucky girl who succeeds in this becomes an
object of wholesale imitation. Instead of the old bangs, the
better-paid working girl acquires a "permanent wave." The
youth are eagerly joining "Western dancing circles." In a
certain sense, all this means progress, but what chiefly
expresses itself here is not the superiority of socialism over
capitalism, but the prevailing of petty-bourgeois culture over
patriarchal life, the city over the village, the center over the
backwoods, the West over the East.
The privileged Soviet stratum does its borrowing meanwhile
in the higher capitalistic spheres. And in this field, the
pacemakers are the diplomats, directors of trusts, engineers,
who have to make frequent trips to Europe and America.
Soviet satire is silent on this question, for it is simply
forbidden to touch the upper "ten thousand." However, we
cannot but remark with sorrow that the loftiest emissaries
of the Soviet Union have been unable to reveal in the face of
capitalist civilization either a style of their own, or any
independent traits whatever. They have not found sufficient
inner stability to enable them to scorn external shine and
observe the necessary aloofness. Their chief ambition ordinarily
is to differ as little as possible from the most finished snobs
of the bourgeoisie. In a word, they feel and conduct
themselves in a majority of cases not as the representatives
of a new world, but as ordinary parvenus!

148 Family, Youth and Culture
To say that the Soviet Union is now performing that
cultural work which the advanced countries long ago
performed on the basis of capitalism, would be, however, only
half the truth. The new social forms are by no means
irrelevant. They not only give to a backward country the
possibility of gaining the level of the most advanced, but they
permit it to achieve this task in a much shorter space of time
than was needed formerly in the West. The explanation of
this acceleration of tempo is simple. The bourgeois pioneers
had to invent their technique and learn to apply it in the
spheres both of economy and culture. The Soviet Union takes
it ready-made in its latest forms and, thanks to the socialized
means of production, applies the borrowings not partially and
by degrees, but at once and on a gigantic scale.
Military authorities of the past have more than once
celebrated the role of the army as a carrier of culture,
especially in relation to the peasantry. Without deceiving
ourselves as to the specific kind of "culture" which bourgeois
militarism inculcates, we cannot deny that many progressive
customs have been instilled in the popular masses through
the army. Not for nothing have former soldiers and underofficers
in revolutionary and especially peasant movements
usually stood at the head of the insurrectionists. The Soviet
regime has an opportunity to influence the daily life of the
people not only through the army, but also through the whole
state apparatus, and interwoven with it the apparatus of the
party, the Communist Youth and the trade unions. An
appropriation of ready-made models of technique, hygiene,
art, sport, in an infinitely shorter time than was demanded
for their development in their homeland, is guaranteed by the
state forms of property, the political dictatorship and the
planned methods of administration.
If the October Revolution had given nothing but this
accelerated forward movement, it would be historically
justified, for the declining bourgeois regime has proved
incapable during the last quarter century of seriously moving
forward any one of the backward countries in any part of the
earth. However, the Russian proletariat achieved the revolution
in the name of much more far-reaching tasks. No matter
how suppressed it is politically at present, in its better parts

Nationality and Culture 149
it has not renounced the communist program nor the mighty
hope bound up with it. The bureaucracy is compelled to
accommodate itself to the proletariat, partly in the very
direction of its policy, but chiefly in the interpretation of it.
Hence, every step forward in the sphere either of economy or
culture, regardless of its actual historic content or its real
significance in the life of the masses, is proclaimed as a
hitherto unseen and unheard-of conquest of "socialist culture."
There is not a doubt that to make toilet soap and a
toothbrush the possession of millions who up to yesterday
never heard of the simplest requirements of neatness is a
very great cultural work. But neither soap nor a brush, nor
even the perfumes which "our women" are demanding, quite
constitute a socialist culture, especially in conditions where
these pitiable attributes of civilization are accessible only to
some fifteen percent of the population.
The "making over of men" of which they talk so much in
the Soviet press is truly in full swing. But to what degree is
this a socialist making over? The Russian people never knew
in the past either a great religious reformation like the
Germans, or a great bourgeois revolution like the French.
Out of these two furnaces, if we leave aside the reformationrevolution
of the British Islanders in the seventeenth century,
came bourgeois individuality, a very important step in the
development of human personality in general. The Russian
revolutions of 1905 and 1917 necessarily meant the first
awakening of individuality in the masses, its crystallization
out of the primitive medium. That is to say, they fulfilled, in
abridged form and accelerated tempo, the educational work
of the bourgeois reformations and revolutions of the West.
Long before this work was finished, however, even in the
rough, the Russian Revolution, which had broken out in the
twilight of capitalism, was compelled by the course of the class
struggle to leap over to the road of socialism. The contradictions
in the sphere of Soviet culture only reflect and refract
the economic and social contradictions which grew out of this
leap. The awakening of personality under these circuit
stances necessarily assumes a more or less petty-bourgeois
character, not only in the economy, but also in family life and
lyric poetry. The bureaucracy itself has become the carrier of

150 Family, Youth and Culture
the most extreme, and sometimes unbridled, bourgeois
individualism. Permitting and encouraging the development
of economic individualism (piecework, private land allotments,
premiums, decorations), it at the same time ruthlessly
suppresses the progressive sides of individualism in the realm
of spiritual culture (critical views, the development of one's
own opinion, the cultivation of personal dignity).
The more considerable the level of development of a given
national group, or the higher the sphere of its cultural
creation, or, again, the more closely it grapples with the
problems of society and personality, the more heavy and
intolerable becomes the pressure of the bureaucracy. There
can be in reality no talk of uniqueness of national culture
when one and the same conductor's baton, or rather one and
the same police club, undertakes to regulate all the intellectual
activities of all the peoples of the Soviet Union. The
Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, or Tiurk newspapers
and books are only translations of the bureaucratic imperatives
into the language of the corresponding nationality.
Under the name of models of popular creativeness, the
Moscow press daily publishes in Russian translation odes by
the prize poets of the different nationalities in honor of the
leaders, miserable verses in reality which differ only in the
degree of their servility and want of talent.
The Great Russian culture, which has suffered from the
regime of the guardhouse no less than the others, lives chiefly
at the expense of the older generation formed before the
revolution. The youth are suppressed as though with an iron
plank. It is a question, therefore, not of the oppression of one
nationality over another in the proper sense of the word, but
of oppression by the centralized police apparatus over the
cultural development of all the nations, starting with the
Great Russian. We cannot, however, ignore the fact that
ninety percent of the publications of the Soviet Union are
printed in the Russian language. If this percentage is, to be
sure, in flagrant contradiction with the relative number of the
Great Russian population, still it perhaps the better corresponds
to the general influence of Russian culture, both in its
independent weight and its role as mediator between the
backward peoples of the country and the West. But with all

Nationality and Culture 151
that, does not the excessively high percentage of Great
Russians in the publishing houses (and not only there, of
course) mean an actual autocratic privilege of the Great
Russians at the expense of the other nationalities of the
Union? It is quite possible. To this vastly important question
it is impossible to answer as categorically as one would wish,
for in life it is decided not so much by collaboration, rivalry
and mutual fertilizations of culture, as by the ultimate
arbitrament of the bureaucracy. And since the Kremlin is the
residence of the authorities, and the outlying territories are
compelled to keep step with the center, bureaucratism
inevitably takes the color of an autocratic Russification,
leaving to the other nationalities the sole indubitable cultural
right of celebrating the arbiter in their own language.
• • •
The official doctrine of culture changes in dependence upon
economic zigzags and administrative expediencies. But with
all its changes, it retains one trait — that of being absolutely
categorical. Simultaneously with the theory of "socialism in
one country," the previously frowned-on theory of "proletarian
culture" received official recognition. The opponents of
this theory pointed out that the regime of proletarian
dictatorship has a strictly transitional character, that in
distinction from the bourgeoisie the proletariat does not
intend to dominate throughout a series of historical epochs,
that the task of the present generation of the new ruling class
reduces itself primarily to an assimilation of all that is
valuable in bourgeois culture, that the longer the proletariat
remains a proletariat that is, bears the traces of its former
oppression, the less is it capable of rising above the historic
heritage of the past, and that the possibilities of new creation
will really open themselves only to the extent that the
proletariat dissolves itself in a socialist society. All this
means, in other words, that the bourgeois culture should be
replaced by a socialist, not a proletarian, culture.
In a polemic against the theory of a "proletarian art"
produced by laboratory methods, the author of these lines
wrote: "Culture feeds upon the juices of industry, and a

152 Family, Youth and Culture
material surplus is necessary in order that culture should
grow, become more complex and refine itself." Even the most
successful solution of elementary economic problems "would
far from signify as yet a complete victory of the new historic
principle of socialism. Only a forward movement of scientific
thought on an all-national basis and the development of a new
art would mean that the historic kernel had produced a
blossom as well as a stalk. In this sense the development of
art is the highest test of the viability and significance of every
epoch." This point of view, which had prevailed up to that
moment, was in an official declaration suddenly proclaimed
to be "capitulatory," and dictated by a "disbelief in the
creative powers of the proletariat. There opened the period
of Stalin and Bukharin, the latter of whom had long before
appeared as an evangel of "proletarian culture," and the
former never given a thought to these questions. They both
considered, in any case, that the movement toward socialism
would develop with a "tortoise stride," and that the
proletariat would have at its disposal decades for the creation
of its own culture. As to the character of this culture, the ideas
of these theoreticians were as vague as they were uninspiring.
The stormy years of the first five-year plan upset the
tortoise perspective. In 1931, on the eve of a dreadful famine,
the country had already "entered into socialism." Thus,
before the officially patronized writers, artists and painters
had managed to create a proletarian culture, or even the first
significant models of it, the government announced that the
proletariat had dissolved in the classless society. It remained
for the artists to reconcile themselves with the fact that the
proletariat did not possess the most necessary condition for
the creation of a proletarian culture: time. Yesterday's
conceptions were immediately abandoned to oblivion. "Socialist
culture" was placed instantly upon the order of the day.
We have already in part become acquainted with its content.
Spiritual creativity demands freedom. The very purpose of
communism is to subject nature to technique and technique
to plan, and compel the raw material to give unstintingly
everything to man that he needs. Far more than that, its
highest goal is to free finally and once and for all the creative
forces of mankind from all pressure, limitation and humiliat-

Nationality and Culture 153
ing dependence. Personal relations, science and art will not
know any externally imposed "plan," nor even any shadow
of compulsion. To what degree spiritual creativity shall be
individual or collective will depend entirely upon its creators.
A transitional regime is a different thing. The dictatorship
reflects the past barbarism and not the future culture. It
necessarily lays down severe limitations upon all forms of
activity, including spiritual creation. The program of the
revolution from the very beginning regarded these limitations
as a temporary evil, and assumed the obligation, in proportion
as the new regime was consolidated, to remove one after the
other all restrictions upon freedom. In any case, and in the
hottest years of the civil war, it was clear to the leaders of the
revolution that the government could, guided by political
considerations, place limitations upon creative freedom, but
in no case pretend to the role of commander in the sphere of
science, literature and art. Although he had rather "conservative"
personal tastes in art, Lenin remained politically
extremely cautious in artistic questions, eagerly confessing
his incompetence. The patronizing of all kinds of modernism
by Lunacharsky, the people's commissar of art and education,
was often embarrassing to Lenin. But he confined himself to
ironical remarks in private conversations, and remained
remote from the idea of converting his literary tastes into
law. In 1924, on the threshold of the new period, the author
of this book thus formulated the relation of the state to the
various artistic groups and tendencies: "while holding over
them all the categorical criterion, for the revolution or against
the revolution, to give them complete freedom in the sphere
of artistic self-determination."
While the dictatorship had a seething mass-basis and a
perspective of world revolution, it had no fear of experiments,
searchings, the struggle of schools, for it understood that only
in this way could a new cultural epoch be prepared. The
popular masses were still quivering in every fiber, and were
thinking aloud for the first time in a thousand years. All the
best youthful forces of art were touched to the quick. During
those first years, rich in hope and daring, there were created
not only the most complete models of socialist legislation, but
also the best productions of revolutionary literature. To the

154 Family, Youth and Culture
same times belong, it is worth remarking, the creation of
those excellent Soviet films which, in spite of a poverty of
technical means, caught the imagination of the whole world
with the freshness and vigor of their approach to reality.
In the process of struggle against the party Opposition, the
literary schools were strangled one after the other. It was not
only a question of literature, either. The process of extermination
took place in all ideological spheres, and it took place
more decisively since it was more than half unconscious. The
present ruling stratum considers itself called not only to
control spiritual creation politically, but also to prescribe its
roads of development. The method of command-withoutappeal
extends in like measure to the concentration camps,
to scientific agriculture and to music. The central organ of the
party prints anonymous directive editorials, having the
character of military orders, in architecture, literature,
dramatic art, the ballet, to say nothing of philosophy, natural
science and history.
The bureaucracy superstitiously fears whatever does not
serve it directly, as well as whatever it does not understand.
When it demands some connection between natural science
and production, this is on a large scale right; but when it
commands that scientific investigators set themselves goals
only of immediate practical importance, this threatens to seal
up the most precious sources of invention, including practical
discoveries, for these most often arise on unforeseen roads.
Taught by bitter experience, the natural scientists, mathematicians,
philologists and military theoreticians avoid all broad
generalizations out of fear lest some "red professor," usually
an ignorant careerist, threateningly pull up on them with
some quotation dragged in by the hair from Lenin, or even
from Stalin. To defend one's own thought in such circumstances,
or one's scientific dignity, means in all probability
to bring down repressions upon one's head
But it is infinitely worse in the sphere of the social sciences.
Economists, historians, even statisticians, to say nothing of
journalists, are concerned above all things not to fall, even
obliquely, into contradiction with the momentary zigzag of
the official course. About Soviet economy, or domestic or
foreign policy, one cannot write at all except after covering

Nationality and Culture 155
his rear and flanks with banalities from the speeches of the
"leader," and having assumed in advance the task of
demonstrating that everything is going exactly as it should
go and even better. Although this hundred percent conformism
frees one from everyday unpleasantnesses, it entails
the heaviest of punishments: sterility.
In spite of the fact that Marxism is formally a state doctrine
in the USSR, there has not appeared during the last twelve
years one Marxian investigation — in economics, sociology,
history or philosophy — which deserves attention and
translation into foreign languages. The Marxian works do not
transcend the limit of scholastic compilations which repeat
the same old ideas, endorsed in advance, and shuffle over the
same old quotations according to the demands of the current
administrative conjuncture. Millions of copies are distributed
through the state channels of books and brochures that are
of no use to anybody, put together with the help of mucilage,
flattery and other sticky substances. Marxists who might say
something valuable and independent are sitting in prison, or
forced into silence, and this even though the evolution of
social forms is raising gigantic scientific problems at every
step!
Befouled and trampled underfoot is the one thing without
which theoretical work is impossible: scrupulousness. Even
the explanatory notes to the complete works of Lenin are
radically worked over in every new edition from the point of
view of the personal interests of the ruling staff: the names
of "leaders" magnified, those of opponents vilified; tracks
covered up. The same is true of the textbooks on the history
of the party and the revolution. Facts are distorted,
documents concealed or fabricated, reputations created or
destroyed. A simple comparison of the successive variants of
one and the same book during the last twelve years permits
us to trace infallibly the process of degeneration of the
thought and conscience of the ruling stratum.
No less ruinous is the effect of the "totalitarian" regime
upon artistic literature. The struggle of tendencies and
schools has been replaced by interpretation of the will of the
leaders. There has been created for all groups a general
compulsory organization, a kind of concentration camp of

156
Family, Youth and Culture
artistic literature. Mediocre but well-intentioned storytellers
like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics.
Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves
are pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness
and dozens of quotations. The most eminent artists
either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote
past, or become silent. Honest and talented books appear as
though accidentally, bursting out from somewhere under the
counter, and have the character of artistic contraband.
The life of Soviet art is a kind of martyrology. After the
editorial orders in Pravda against "formalism," there began
an epidemic of humiliating recantations by writers, artists,
stage directors and even opera singers. One after another,
they renounced their own past sins, refraining, however —
in case of further emergencies — from any clear-cut definition
of the nature of this "formalism." In the long run, the
authorities were compelled by a new order to put an end to
the too copious flow of recantations. Literary estimates are
transformed within a few weeks, textbooks made over, streets
renamed, statues erected, as a result of a few eulogistic
remarks of Stalin about the poet Maiakovsky. The impressions
made by the new opera upon high-up auditors are
immediately converted into a musical directive for composers.
The secretary of the Communist Youth said at a conference
of writers: 'The suggestions of Comrade Stalin are a law for
everybody," and the whole audience applauded, although
some doubtless burned with shame. As though to complete
the mockery of literature, Stalin, who does not know how to
compose a Russian phrase correctly, is declared a classic in
the matter of style. There is something deeply tragic in this
Byzantinism and police rule, notwithstanding the involuntary
comedy of certain of its manifestations.
The official formula reads: Culture should be socialist in
content, national in form. As to the content of a socialist
culture, however, only certain more or less happy guesses are
possible. Nobody can grow that culture upon an inadequate
economic foundation. Art is far less capable than science of
anticipating the future. In any case, such prescriptions as,
"portray the construction of the future," "indicate the road
to socialism," "make over mankind," give little more to the

Nationality and Culture 157
creative imagination than does the price list of a hardware
store, or a railroad timetable.
The national form of an art is identical with its universal
accessibility. "What is not wanted by the people," Pravda
dictates to the artists, "cannot have aesthetic significance."
That old Narodnik formula, rejecting the task of artistically
educating the masses, takes on a still more reactionary
character when the right to decide what art the people want
and what they don't want remains in the hands of the
bureaucracy. It prints books according to its own choice. It
sells them also by compulsion, offering no choice to the reader.
In the last analysis, the whole affair comes down in its eyes
to taking care that art assimilates its interests, and finds
such forms for them as will make the bureaucracy attractive
to the popular masses.
In vain! No literature can fulfill that task. The leaders
themselves are compelled to acknowledge that "neither the
first nor the second five-year plan has yet given us a new
literary wave which can rise above the first wave born in
October." That is very mildly said. In reality, in spite of
individual exceptions, the epoch of Thermidor will go into the
history of artistic creation preeminently as an "epoch" of
mediocrities, laureates and toadies!

CHAPTER EIGHT
Foreign Policy and the Army
From "World Revolution" to "Status Quo"
Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of
domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class
and pursues the same historic goals. The degeneration of the
governing stratum in the Soviet Union could not but be
accompanied by a corresponding change of aims and methods
in Soviet diplomacy. The "theory" of socialism in one country,
first announced in the autumn of 1924, already signalized an
effort to liberate Soviet foreign policy from the program of
international revolution. The bureaucracy, however, had no
intention to liquidate therewith its connection with the
Communist International. That inevitably would have converted
the latter into a world oppositional organization, with
resulting unfavorable consequences in the correlation of
forces within the USSR. On the contrary, the less the policy
of the Kremlin preserved of its former internationalism, the
more firmly the ruling clique clutched in its hands the rudder
of the Communist International. Under the old name it was
now to serve new ends. For the new ends, however, new
people were needed. Beginning with the autumn of 1923, the
history of the Communist International is a history of the
complete renovation of its Moscow staff, and the staffs of all
the national sections, by way of a series of palace revolutions,
purges from above, expulsions, etc. At the present time, the
Communist International is a completely submissive appara-
159

160 Foreign Policy and the Army
tus in the service of Soviet foreign policy, ready at any time
for any zigzag whatever.
The bureaucracy has not only broken with the past, but
has deprived itself of the ability to understand the most
important lessons of that past. The chief of these lessons was
that the Soviet power could not have held out for twelve
months without the direct help of the international, and
especially the European, proletariat, and without a revolutionary
movement of the colonial peoples. The only reason the
Austro-German military powers did not carry their attack
upon Soviet Russia through to the end was that they felt
behind their back the hot breath of the revolution. In some
three-quarters of a year, insurrections in Germany and
Austro-Hungary put an end to the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The
revolt of the French sailors in the Black Sea in April 1919
compelled the government of the Third Republic to renounce
its military operations in the Soviet south. The British
government, in September 1919, withdrew its expeditionary
forces from the Soviet north under direct pressure from its
own workers. After the retreat of the Red Army from the
vicinity of Warsaw in 1920, only a powerful wave of
revolutionary protests prevented the Entente from coming
to the aid of Poland and crushing the Soviets. The hands of
Lord Curzon, when he delivered his threatening ultimatum
to Moscow in 1923, were bound at the decisive moment by the
resistance of the British workers' organizations. These clear
episodes are not peculiar. They depict the whole character of
the first and most difficult period of Soviet existence.
Although the revolution triumphed nowhere outside the
limits of Russia, the hopes of its triumph were far from being
futile.
During those years, the Soviet government concluded a
series of treaties with bourgeois governments: the Brest-
Litovsk peace in March 1918; a treaty with Estonia in 1920;
the Riga peace with Poland in October 1920; the treaty of
Rapallo with Germany in April 1922; 1
and other less
important diplomatic agreements. It could never have
entered the mind of the Soviet government as a whole,
however, nor any member of it, to represent its bourgeois
counteragents as "friends of peace," and still less to invite

From "World Revolution" to "Status Quo" 161
the Communist parties of Germany, Poland or Estonia to
support with their votes the bourgeois governments which
had signed these treaties. It is just this question, moreover,
which is decisive for the revolutionary education of the
masses. The Soviets could not help signing the Brest-Litovsk
peace, just as exhausted strikers cannot help signing the
most cruel conditions imposed by the capitalists. But the vote
cast in favor of this peace by the German Social Democrats
in the hypocritical form of "abstention," was denounced by
the Bolsheviks as a support of brigandage and brigands.
Although the Rapallo agreement with democratic Germany
was signed four years later on a formal basis of "equal rights"
for both parties, nevertheless if the German Communist
Party had made this a pretext to express confidence in the
diplomacy of its country, it would have been forthwith
expelled from the International. The fundamental line of the
international policy of the Soviets rested on the fact that this
or that commercial, diplomatic or military bargain of the
Soviet government with the imperialists, inevitable in the
nature of the case, should in no way limit or weaken the
struggle of the proletariat of the corresponding capitalist
countries, for in the last analysis the safety of the workers'
state itself will be guaranteed only by the growth of the world
revolution. When Chicherin, during the preparations for the
Geneva Conference, proposed for the benefit of "public
opinion" in America to introduce certain "democratic"
changes in the Soviet constitution, Lenin, in an official letter
of January 23, 1922, urgently recommended that Chicherin
be sent immediately to a sanatorium. If anybody had dared
in those days to propose that we purchase the good favor of
"democratic" imperialism by adhering, let us say, to the false
and hollow Kellogg Pact, or by weakening the policy of the
Communist International, Lenin would indubitably have
proposed that the innovator be sent to an insane asylum —
and he would hardly have met any opposition in the Politburo.
The leaders of those days were especially implacable in
relation to all kinds of pacifist illusions — League of Nations,
collective security, courts of arbitration, disarmament, etc. —
seeing in them only a method of lulling the toiling masses in
order to catch them unawares when a new war breaks out.

162 Foreign Policy and the Army
In the program of the party, drafted by Lenin and adopted
at the congress of 1919, we find the following unequivocal
lines on this subject: "The developing pressure of the
proletariat, and especially its victories in individual countries,
are strengthening the resistance of the exploiters and
impelling them to new forms of international consolidation
of the capitalists (League of Nations, etc.) which, organizing
on a world scale the systematic exploitation of all the peoples
of the earth, are directing their first efforts toward the
immediate suppression of the revolutionary movements of the
proletariat of all countries. All this inevitably leads to a
combination of civil wars within the separate states with
revolutionary wars, both of the proletarian countries defending
themselves, and of the oppressed peoples against the yoke
of the imperialist powers. In these conditions the slogans of
pacifism, international disarmament under capitalism, courts
of arbitration, etc., are not only reactionary Utopias, but
downright deceptions of the toilers designed to disarm the
proletariat and distract it from the task of disarming the
exploiters." These lines from the Bolshevik program constitute
an advance estimate, and moreover a truly devastating
one, of the present Soviet foreign policy and the policy of the
Communist International, with all its pacifistic "friends" in
every corner of the earth.
After the period of intervention and blockade, the economic
and military pressure of the capitalist world on the Soviet
Union did, to be sure, prove considerably weaker than might
have been feared. Europe was still thinking of the past and
not the future war. Then came the unheard of economic world
crisis, causing prostrations in the ruling classes of the whole
world. It was only thanks to this that the Soviet Union could
survive the trials of the first five-year plan, when the country
again became an arena of civil war, famine and epidemics.
The first years of the second five-year plan, which have
brought an obvious betterment of internal conditions, have
coincided with the beginning of an economic revival in the
capitalist world, and a new tide of hopes, appetites, yearnings
and preparations for war. The danger of a combined attack
on the Soviet Union takes palpable form in our eyes only
because the country of the Soviets is still isolated, because to

From "World Revolution" to "Status Quo" 163
a considerable extent this "one-sixth of the earth's surface"
is a realm of primitive backwardness, because the productivity
of labor in spite of the nationalization of the means of
production is still far lower than in capitalist countries, and,
finally — what is at present most important — because the
chief detachments of the world proletariat are shattered,
distrustful of themselves and deprived of reliable leadership.
Thus the October Revolution, in which its leaders saw only a
prelude to world revolution, but which in the course of things
has received a temporary independent significance, reveals
in this new historic stage its deep dependence upon world
development. Again it becomes obvious that the historic
question, who shall prevail? cannot be decided within
national boundaries, that interior successes and failures only
prepare more or less favorable conditions for its decision on
the world arena.
The Soviet bureaucracy — we must do it this justice — has
acquired a vast experience in directing popular masses, in
lulling them to sleep, dividing and weakening them, or
deceiving them outright for the purpose of unlimited domination
over them. But for this very reason it has lost every trace
of the faculty of revolutionary education of the masses.
Having strangled independence and initiative in the lower
ranks of the people at home, it naturally cannot provoke
critical thought and revolutionary daring on the world arena.
Moreover, as a ruling and privileged stratum, it values
infinitely more the help and friendship of those who are kin
to it in social type in the West — bourgeois radicals, reformist
parliamentarians, trade union bureaucrats — than of the
rank-and-file workers who are separated from it by a social
chasm. This is not the place for a history of the decline and
degeneration of the Third International, a subject to which
the author has dedicated a series of independent investigations
published in almost all the languages of the civilized
world. The fact is that in its capacity as leader of the
Communist International, the nationally limited and conservative,
ignorant and irresponsible Soviet bureaucracy has
brought nothing but misfortunes to the workers' movement
of the world. As though in historic retribution, the present
international position of the Soviet Union is determined to a

164 Foreign Policy and the Army
far higher degree by the consequences of the defeat of the
world proletariat, than by the successes of an isolated socialist
construction. It is sufficient to recall that the defeat of the
Chinese revolution in 1925-27, which untied the hands of
Japanese militarism in the East, and the shattering of the
German proletariat which led to the triumph of Hitler and
the mad growth of German militarism, are alike the fruits of
the policy of the Communist International.
Having betrayed the world revolution, but still feeling loyal
to it, the Thermidorian bureaucracy has directed its chief
efforts to "neutralizing" the bourgeoisie. For this it was
necessary to seem a moderate, respectable, authentic bulwark
of order. But in order to seem something successfully and for
a long time, you have to become it. The organic evolution of
the ruling stratum has taken care of that. Thus, retreating
step by step before the consequences of its own mistakes, the
bureaucracy has arrived at the idea of insuring the inviolability
of the Soviet Union by including it in the system of the
European-Asiatic status quo. What could be finer, when all
is said and done, than an eternal pact of nonaggression
between socialism and capitalism? The present official
formula of foreign policy, widely advertised not only by the
Soviet diplomacy, which is permitted to speak in the
customary language of its profession, but by the Communist
International, which is supposed to speak the language of
revolution, reads: "We don't want an inch of foreign land, but
we will not surrender an inch of our own." As though it were
a question of mere quarrels about a bit of land, and not of the
world struggle of two irreconcilable social systems!
When the Soviet Union considered it more sensible to
surrender the Chinese Eastern Railroad to Japan, this act of
weakness, prepared by the collapse of the Chinese revolution,
was celebrated as a manifestation of self-confident power in
the service of peace. 2
In reality, by surrendering to the enemy
an extremely important strategic highway, the Soviet government
promoted Japan's further seizures in North China and
her present attempts upon Mongolia. That forced sacrifice did
not mean a "neutralization" of the danger, but at the best a
short breathing spell, and at the same time a mighty stimulus
to the appetites of the ruling military clique in Tokyo.

The League of Nations and the Communist International 165
The question of Mongolia is already a question of the
strategic positions to be occupied by Japan in a future war
against the Soviet Union. The Soviet government found itself
this time compelled to announce openly that it would answer
the intrusion of Japanese troops into Mongolia with war.
Here, however, it is no question of the immediate defense of
"our land": Mongolia is an independent state. A passive
defense of the Soviet boundaries seemed sufficient only when
nobody was seriously threatening them. The real method of
defense of the Soviet Union is to weaken the positions of
imperialism, and strengthen the position of the proletariat
and the colonial peoples throughout the earth. An unfavorable
correlation of forces might compel us to surrender many
"inches" of land, as it did at the moment of the Brest-Litovsk
peace, the Riga peace, and in the matter of the handing over
of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. At the same time, the
struggle for a favorable change in the correlation of world
forces puts upon the workers' state a continual obligation to
come to the help of the liberation movements in other
countries. But it is just this fundamental task which conflicts
absolutely with the conservative policy of the status quo.
The League of Nations and the Communist International
The rapprochement and subsequent outright military
treaty with France, the chief defender of the status quo — a
policy which resulted from the victory of German National
Socialism — is infinitely more favorable to France than to the
Soviets. 3
The obligation to military support from the side of
the Soviets is, according to the treaty, unconditional; French
help, on the contrary, is conditioned upon a preliminary
agreement with England and Italy, which opens an unlimited
field for hostile machinations against the Soviet Union. The
events connected with the Rhineland demonstrated that, with
a more realistic appraisal of the situation, and with more
restraint, Moscow might have gotten more serious guarantees
from France — if indeed treaties can be considered "guarantees"
in an epoch of sharp changes of circumstances,
continuous diplomatic crises, rapprochements and breaks. 4
But this is not the first time it has become evident that the

166
Foreign Policy and the Army
Soviet bureaucracy displays much greater fortitude in its
struggles against the advanced workers of its own country
than in negotiations with the bourgeois diplomats.
Assertions that help from the side of the Soviet Union is
of little consequence in view of the fact that it has no common
boundary with Germany are not to be taken seriously. In case
Germany attacks the Soviet Union, the common boundary
will obviously be found by the attacking side. In the case of
an attack by Germany on Austria, Czechoslovakia and
France, Poland cannot remain neutral for a day. If she
recognizes her obligations as an ally of France, she will
inevitably open the road to the Red Army; and if she breaks
her treaty of alliance, she will immediately become a
helpmate of Germany. In the latter case, the Soviet Union
will have no difficulty in finding a "common boundary."
Moreover, in a future war, the sea and air "boundaries" will
play no less a role than those on land.
The entrance of the Soviet Union into the League of
Nations — represented to the Russian population, with the
help of a stage management worthy of Goebbels, as a triumph
of socialism and a result of "pressure" from the world
proletariat — was in reality acceptable to the bourgeoisie only
as a result of the extreme weakening of the revolutionary
danger. It was not a victory of the Soviet Union, but a
capitulation of the Thermidorian bureaucracy to this hopelessly
compromised Geneva institution, which, according to
the above-quoted words of the Bolshevik program, "will direct
its future efforts to the suppression of revolutionary movements."
What has changed so radically since the days of the
Magna Carta of Bolshevism: the nature of the League of
Nations, the function of pacifism in a capitalist society or —
the policy of the Soviets? 5
To ask the question is to answer it.
Experience quickly proved that participation in the League
of Nations, while adding nothing to those practical advantages
which could be had by way of agreements with separate
bourgeois states, imposes at the same time serious limitations
and obligations. These the Soviet Union is performing with
the most pedantic faithfulness in the interest of its still
unaccustomed conservative prestige. The necessity of accommodation
within the League not only to France, but also to

The League of Nations and the Communist International 167
her allies, compelled Soviet diplomacy to occupy an extremely
equivocal position in the Italian-Abyssinian conflict. 6
At the
very time when Litvinov, who was nothing at Geneva but a
shadow of Laval, expressed his gratitude to the diplomats of
France and England for their efforts "in behalf of peace,"
efforts which so auspiciously resulted in the annihilation of
Abyssinia, oil from the Caucasus continued to nourish the
Italian fleet. Even if you can understand that the Moscow
government hesitated openly to break a commercial treaty,
still the trade unions were not obliged to take into consideration
the undertakings of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade.
An actual stoppage of exports to Italy by a decision of the
Soviet trade unions would have evoked a world movement of
boycott incomparably more real than the treacherous "sanctions,"
measured as they were in advance by diplomatists
and jurists in agreement with Mussolini. And if the Soviet
trade unions never lifted a finger this time, in contrast with
1926, when they openly collected millions of rubles for the
British coal miners strike, it is only because such an initiative
was forbidden by the ruling bureaucracy, chiefly to curry
favor with France. In the coming world war, however, no
military allies can recompense the Soviet Union for the lost
confidence of the colonial peoples and of the toiling masses
in general.
Can it be that this is not understood in the Kremlin? "The
fundamental aim of German fascism" — so answers the
Soviet official newspaper — "is to isolate the Soviet Union....
Well, and what of it? The Soviet Union has today more friends
in the world than ever before" (Izvestia, September 17,1935).
The Italian proletariat is in the chains of fascism; the Chinese
revolution is shattered, and Japan is playing the boss in
China; the German proletariat is so crushed that Hitler's
plebiscites encounter no resistance whatever; the proletariat
of Austria is bound hand and foot; the revolutionary parties
of the Balkans are trampled in the earth; in France, in Spain,
the workers are marching at the tail of the radical bourgeoi­
sie. 7
In spite of all this, the Soviet government from the time
of its entrance into the League of Nations has had "more
friends in the world than ever before"! This boast, so fantastic
at first glance, has a very real meaning when you apply it not

168 Foreign Policy and the Army
to the workers' state, but to its ruling group. Was it not indeed
the cruel defeats of the world proletariat which permitted the
Soviet bureaucracy to usurp the power at home and earn a
more or less favorable "public opinion" in the capitalist
countries? The less the Communist International is capable
of threatening the positions of capital, the more political
credit is given to the Kremlin government in the eyes of
French, Czechoslovak and other bourgeoisies. Thus the
strength of the bureaucracy, both domestic and international,
is in inverse proportion to the strength of the Soviet Union
as a socialist state and a fighting base of the proletarian
revolution. However, that is only one side of the medal. There
is another.
Lloyd George, in whose jumps and sensations there is often
a glimmer of shrewd penetration, warned the House of
Commons in November 1934 against condemning fascist
Germany, which, according to his words, was destined to be
the most reliable bulwark against communism in Europe.
"We shall yet greet her as our friend." Most significant
words! The half-patronizing, half-ironical praise addressed
by the world bourgeoisie to the Kremlin is not of itself in the
slightest degree a guarantee of peace, or even a simple
mitigation of the war danger. The evolution of the Soviet
bureaucracy is of interest to the world bourgeoisie in the last
analysis from the point of view of possible changes in the
forms of property. Napoleon I, after radically abandoning the
traditions of Jacobinism, donning the crown and restoring the
Catholic cult, remained nevertheless an object of hatred to
the whole of ruling semifeudal Europe, because he continued
to defend the new property system created by the revolution.
Until the monopoly of foreign trade is broken and the rights
of capital restored, the Soviet Union, in spite of all the services
of its ruling stratum, remains in the eyes of the bourgeoisie
of the whole world an irreconcilable enemy, and German
National Socialism a friend, if not of today, at least of
tomorrow. Even during the negotiations of Barthou and Laval
with Moscow, the big French bourgeoisie, in spite of the
critical danger from the side of Hitler, and the sharp turn of
the French Communist Party to patriotism, stubbornly
refused to stake its game on the Soviet card. 8
When he signed

The League of Nations and the Communist International 169
the treaty with the Soviet Union, Laval was accused from the
left of frightening Berlin with Moscow, while seeking in
reality a rapprochement with Berlin and Rome against
Moscow. This judgment was perhaps a little premature, but
by no means in conflict with the natural development of
events.
However one may judge the advantages or disadvantages
of the Franco-Soviet pact, still, no serious revolutionary
statesman would deny the right of the Soviet state to seek
supplementary supports for its inviolability in temporary
agreements with this or that imperialism. It is only necessary
clearly and openly to show the masses the place of these
partial and tactical agreements in the general system of
historic forces. In order to make use particularly of the
antagonism between France and Germany, there is not the
slightest need of idealizing the bourgeois ally, or that
combination of imperialists which temporarily hides behind
the screen of the League of Nations. Not only Soviet
diplomacy, however, but in its steps the Communist International
systematically paints up the episodical allies of Moscow
as "friends of peace," deceives the workers with slogans like
"collective security" and "disarmament," and thus becomes
in reality a political agent of the imperialists among the
working classes.
The notorious interview given by Stalin to the president of
the Scripps-Howard newspapers, Roy Howard, on March 1,
1936, is a precious document for the characterization of
bureaucratic blindness in the great questions of world politics,
and of that false relation which has been established between
the leaders of the Soviet Union and the world workers'
movement. To the question, Is war inevitable? Stalin
answers: "I think that the position of the friends of peace is
growing stronger; the friends of peace can work openly, they
rely upon the strength of public opinion, they have at their
disposal such instruments, for instance, as the League of
Nations." In these words there is not a glimmer of realism.
The bourgeois states do not divide themselves into "friends"
and "enemies" of peace — especially since "peace" as such
does not exist. Each imperialist country is interested in
preserving its peace, and the more sharply interested, the

170 Foreign Policy and the Army
more unbearable this peace may be for its enemies. The
formula common to Stalin, Baldwin, Leon Blum and others,
"peace would be really guaranteed if all states united in the
League for its defense," means merely that peace would be
guaranteed if there existed no causes for its violation. The
thought is correct, if you please, but not exactly weighty. The
great powers who haven't joined the League, like the United
States, obviously value a free hand above the abstraction of
"peace." For just what purpose they need these free hands
they will show in due time. Those states which withdraw from
the League, like Japan and Germany, or temporarily take a
"leave of absence" from it, like Italy, also have sufficiently
material reasons for what they do. Their break with the
League merely changes the diplomatic form of existent
antagonisms, but not their nature and not the nature of the
League. Those virtuous nations which swear eternal loyalty
to the League compel themselves the more resolutely to
employ it in support of their peace. But even so there is no
agreement. England is quite ready to extend the period of
peace — at the expense of France's interests in Europe or in
Africa. France, in her turn, is ready to sacrifice the safety of
the British naval routes — for the support of Italy. But for
the defense of their own interests, they are both ready to
resort to war — to the most just, it goes without saying, of all
wars. And, finally, the small states, which for the lack of
anything better seek shelter in the protection of the League,
will show up in the long run not on the side of "peace," but
on the side of the strongest combination in the war.
The League in its defense of the status quo is not an
organization of "peace," but an organization of the violence
of the imperialist minority over the overwhelming majority
of mankind. This "order" can be maintained only with the
help of continual wars, little and big, today in the colonies,
tomorrow between the great powers. Imperialist loyalty to
the status quo has always a conditional, temporary and
limited character. Italy was yesterday defending the status
quo in Europe, but not in Africa. What will be her policy in
Europe tomorrow, nobody knows. But already the change of
boundaries in Africa finds its reflection in Europe. Hitler
made bold to lead his troops into the Rhineland only because

The League of Nations and the Communist International 171
Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It would be hard to number
Italy among the "friends" of peace. However, France values
her friendship with Italy incomparably more than her
friendship with the Soviet Union. England on her side seeks
a friendship with Germany. The groupings change; the
appetites remain. The task of the so-called partisans of the
status quo is in essence to find in the League the most
auspicious combination of forces, and the most advantageous
cover for the preparation of a future war. Who will begin it
and how depends upon circumstances of secondary importance.
But somebody will have to begin it, because the status
quo is a cellarful of explosives.
A program of "disarmament," while imperialist antagonisms
survive, is the most pernicious of fictions. Even if it
were realized by way of general agreement — an obviously
fantastic assumption! — that would by no means prevent a
new war. The imperialists do not make war because there are
armaments; on the contrary, they forge arms when they need
to fight. The possibilities of a new, and, moreover, very
speedy, arming lie in contemporary technique. Under no
matter what agreements, limitations and "disarmaments,"
the arsenals, the military factories, the laboratories, the
capitalist industries as a whole, preserve their force. Thus
Germany, disarmed by her conquerors under the most careful
control (which, by the way, is the only real form of
"disarmament!") is again, thanks to her powerful industries,
becoming the citadel of European militarism. She intends, in
her turn, to "disarm" certain of her neighbors. The idea of a
so-called progressive disarmament means only an attempt to
cut down excessive military expenses in time of peace. It is a
question of funds and not of the love of peace. But that task,
too, remains unrealized. In consequence of differences of
geographic position, economic power and colonial saturation,
any standards of disarmament would inevitably change the
correlation of forces to the advantage of some and to the
disadvantage of others. Hence the fruitlessness of the
attempts made in Geneva. Almost twenty years of negotiations
and conversations about disarmament have led only to
a new wave of armaments, which is leaving far behind
everything that was ever seen before. To build the revolution-

172
Foreign Policy and the Army
ary policy of the proletariat on a program of disarmament
means to build it not even on sand, but on the smoke screen
of militarism.
The strangulation of the class struggle in the interests of
an unhindered progress of imperialist slaughter can be
ensured only through the mediation of the leaders of the
mass workers' organizations. The slogans under which this
task was fulfilled in 1914: "The last war," "War against
Prussian militarism," "War for democracy," are too well
discredited by the history of the last two decades. "Collective
security" and "universal disarmament" are their substitutes.
Under the guise of supporting the League of Nations,
the leaders of the workers' organizations of Europe are
preparing a new edition of the "Sacred Union," a thing no
less necessary for war than tanks, airplanes and the
"forbidden" poison gases.
The Third International was born of an indignant protest
against social patriotism. But the revolutionary charge placed
in it by the October Revolution is long ago expended. The
Communist International now stands under the banner of the
League of Nations, as does the Second International, only
with a fresher store of cynicism. When the British Socialist,
Sir Stafford Cripps, called the League of Nations an
international union of brigands, which was more impolite
than unjust, the London Times ironically asked: "In that case,
how explain the adherence of the Soviet Union to the League
of Nations?" It is not easy to answer. Thus the Moscow
bureaucracy brings its powerful support to that social
patriotism, against which the October Revolution had previously
dealt a crushing blow.
Roy Howard tried to get a little illumination on this point
also. What is the state of affairs — he asked Stalin — as to
plans and intentions with regard to the world revolution?
"We never had any such plans or intentions." But, well....
"This is the result of a misunderstanding." Howard: "A tragic
misunderstanding?" Stalin: "No, comic, or, if you please,
tragicomic." The quotation is verbatim. "What danger,"
Stalin continued, "can the surrounding states see in the ideas
of the Soviet people if these states really sit firmly in the
saddle?" Yes, but suppose — the interviewer might ask —

The League of Nations and the Communist International 173
they do not sit so firm? Stalin adduced one more quieting
argument: "The export of revolution is nonsense. Every
country if it wants one will produce its own revolution, and
if it doesn't, there will be no revolution. Thus, for instance,
our country wanted to make a revolution and made it...."
Again, we have quoted verbatim. From the theory of socialism
in a single country, it is a natural transition to that of
revolution in a single country. For what purpose, then, does
the International exist ? — the interviewer might have asked.
But he evidently knew the limits of legitimate curiosity. The
reassuring explanations of Stalin, which are read not only
by capitalists but by workers, are full of holes. Before "our
country" desired to make a revolution, we imported the ideas
of Marxism from other countries, and made use of foreign
revolutionary experience. For decades we had our emigres
abroad who guided the struggle in Russia. We received moral
and material aid from the workers' organizations of Europe
and America. After our victory, we organized, in 1919, the
Communist International. We more than once announced the
duty of the proletariat of countries in which the revolution
had conquered to come to the aid of oppressed and
insurrectionary classes, and that not only with ideas but if
possible with arms. Nor did we limit ourselves to announcements.
We in our own time aided the workers of Finland,
Latvia, Estonia and Georgia with armed force. We made an
attempt to bring aid to the insurrection of the Polish
proletariat with the campaign of the Red Army against
Warsaw We sent organizers and commanders to the help of
the Chinese in revolution. In 1926, we collected millions of
rubles for the aid of the British strikers. At present this all
seems to have been a misunderstanding. A tragic one? No, it
is comic. No wonder Stalin has declared that to live in the
Soviet Union has become "joyful." Even the Communist
International has changed from a serious to a comic
personage.
Stalin would have made a more convincing impression
upon his interviewer if, instead of slandering the past, he had
openly contrasted the policy of Thermidor to the policy of
October. "In the eyes of Lenin," he might have said, "the
League of Nations was a machine for the preparation of a new

174 Foreign Policy and the Army
imperialist war. We see in it an instrument of peace. Lenin
spoke of the inevitability of revolutionary wars. We consider
the export of revolution to be nonsense. Lenin denounced the
union of the proletariat with the imperialist bourgeoisie as
treason. We with all our power impel the international
proletariat along this road. Lenin slashed the slogan of
disarmament under capitalism as a deception of the workers.
We build our whole policy upon this slogan. Your tragicomic
misunderstanding" — Stalin might have concluded — "lies
in your taking us for the continuers of Bolshevism, when we
are in fact its gravediggers."
The Red Army and Its Doctrine
The old Russian soldier, brought up in the patriarchal
conditions of the rural commune, was distinguished above all
by a blind herd instinct. Suvorov, the generalissimo of
Catherine II and Paul, was the unexcelled master of an army
of feudal slaves. The great French Revolution destroyed
forever the military art of the old Europe and of tsarist
Russia. The empire, to be sure, still continued to add gigantic
territorial conquests to its history, but it won no further
victories over the armies of civilized nations. A series of
external defeats and inward disturbances was needed in order
to reforge the national character in their fires. The Red Army
could only have been formed on a new social and psychological
basis. That long-suffering herd instinct and submissiveness
to nature were replaced in the younger generations by a spirit
of daring and the cult of technique. Together with the
awakening of individuality went a swift rise of the cultural
level. Illiterate recruits became fewer and fewer. The Red
Army does not let anybody leave its ranks who cannot read
and write. All sorts of athletic sports developed tumultuously
in the army and around it. Among the workers, officials and
students the badge of distinction for marksmanship enjoyed
great popularity. In the winter months, skis gave the
regiments a hitherto unknown mobility. Startling successes
were achieved in the sphere of parachute jumping, gliding
and aviation. The arctic flights and flights into the strato-

The Red Army and Its Doctrine 175
sphere are known to everybody. These high points speak for
a whole mountain chain of achievements.
It is unnecessary to idealize the organizational or operational
level of the Red Army during the years of the civil war.
For the young commanding staff, however, those were years
of a great baptism. Rank-and-file soldiers of the tsar's army,
underofficers and corporals, disclosed the talents of organizers
and military leaders, and tempered their wills in a
struggle of immense scope. These self-made men were more
than once beaten, but in the long run they conquered. The
better among them then studied assiduously. Among the
present higher chiefs, who went clear through the school of
the civil war, the overwhelming majority have also graduated
from academies or special final courses. Among the senior
officers about half received a higher military education; the
rest a cadet course. Military theory gave them the necessary
discipline of thought, but did not destroy the audacity
awakened by the dramatic operations of the civil war. This
generation is now about forty to fifty years old, the age of
equilibrium of physical and spiritual forces, when bold
initiative rests upon experience, but is not yet smothered by
it.
The party, the Communist Youth, the trade unions — even
regardless of how they fulfill their socialist mission — the
administration of the nationalized industries, the cooperatives,
the collective farms, the Soviet farms—even regardless
of how they fulfill their economic tasks — are training
innumerable cadres of young administrators, accustomed to
operate with human and commodity masses and to identify
themselves with the state. They are the natural reservoir of
the commanding staff. The high preservice preparation of the
students creates another independent reservoir. The students
are grouped in special training battalions, which in case of
mobilization can successfully develop into emergency schools
of the commanding staff. To measure the scope of this source,
it is sufficient to point out that the number of those graduated
from the higher educational institutions has now reached
80,000 a year, the number of college and university students
exceeds half a million, and that the general number of

176 Foreign Policy and the Army
students in all the academic institutions nationwide is
approaching 28,000,000.
In the sphere of economics and especially industry, the
social revolution has provided the enterprise of national
defense with advantages of which the old Russia could not
dream. Planning methods mean, in the essence of the matter,
a continual mobilization of industry in the hands of the
government, and make it possible to focus on the interests of
defense even in building and equipping new factories. The
correlation between the living and mechanical forces of the
Red Army may be considered, by and large, as on a level with
the best armies of the West. In the sphere of artillery
reequipment decisive successes were obtained already in the
course of the first five-year plan. Immense sums are being
expended in the production of trucks and armored cars, tanks
and airplanes. There are at present about half a million
tractors in the country. In 1936, 160,000 are to be put out,
with a total horsepower of 8.5 million. The building of tanks
is progressing at a parallel rate. The mobilization plans of the
Red Army call for thirty to forty-five tanks per kilometer of
the active front.
As a result of the Great War, the navy was reduced from
548,000 tons in 1917 to 82,000 in 1928. Here we had to begin
almost from the beginning. In January 1936, Tukhachevsky
announced at a session of the Central Executive Committee:
"We are creating a powerful navy. We are concentrating our
forces primarily upon the development of a submarine fleet."
The Japanese naval staff is well informed, we may assume,
as to the achievements in this sphere. No less attention is now
being given to the Baltic. Still in the coming years, the navy
can pretend only to an auxiliary role in the defense of the
coastal front.
But the air force has advanced mightily. Over two years
ago, a delegation of French aviation engineers was, in the
words of the press, "astonished and delighted" by the
achievements in this sphere. They had an opportunity in
particular to convince themselves that the Red Army is
producing in increasing numbers heavy bombers for action
on a radius of 1,200 to 1,500 kilometers. In case of a war in
the Far East, the political and military centers of Japan would

The Red Army and Its Doctrine 177
be subject to attack from the Soviet coast. According to data
appearing in the press, the five-year plan of the Red Army for
1935 contemplated sixty-two air regiments capable of bringing
simultaneously 5,000 airplanes into the line of fire. There
is hardly a doubt that the plan was fulfilled, and probably
more than fulfilled.
Aviation is closely bound up with a branch of industry,
almost nonexistent in tsarist Russia, but lately advancing by
leaps and bounds: chemistry. It is no secret that the Soviet
government, and incidentally the other governments of the
world, does not believe for a second in the oft-repeated
"prohibitions" of the use of poison gas. The work of the
Italian civilizers in Abyssinia has again plainly shown what
these humanitarian limitations of international brigandage
are good for. We may assume that against any catastrophic
surprises whatever in the sphere of military chemistry or
military bacteriology, these most mysterious and sinister
enterprises, the Red Army is as well equipped as the armies
of the West.
As to the quality of the articles of military manufacture,
there may be a legitimate doubt. We have noted, however,
that instruments of production are better manufactured in
the Soviet Union than objects of general use. Where the
purchasers are influential groups of the ruling bureaucracy,
the quality of the product rises considerably above the
average level, which is still very low. The most influential
client is the war department. It is no surprise if the machinery
of destruction is of better quality, not only than the objects
of consumption, but also than the instruments of production.
Military industry remains, however, a part of the whole
industry and, although to a lesser degree, reflects all its
inadequacies. Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky lose no opportunity
publicly to remind the industrialists: "We are not always
fully satisfied with the quality of the products which you
supply to the Red Army." In private sessions the military
leaders express themselves, we may assume, more categorically.
The commissary supplies are, as a general rule, of lower
quality than the munitions. Boots are poorer than the
machine gun. But also the airplane motor, notwithstanding
indubitable progress, still considerably lags behind the best

178 Foreign Policy and the Army
Western types. In the matter of military technology as a
whole, the old task is still there: to catch up as soon as possible
to the standard of the future enemy.
It stands worse with agriculture. In Moscow they often say
that since the income from industry has already exceeded
that from agriculture, the Soviet Union has ipso facto changed
from an agrarian-industrial to an industrial-agrarian country.
In reality, the new correlation of incomes is determined
not so much by the growth of industry, significant as that is,
as by the extraordinarily low level of agriculture. The unusual
lenience of Soviet diplomacy for some years toward Japan
was caused, among other things, by serious food-supply
difficulties. The last three years, however, have brought
considerable relief, and permitted in particular the creation
of serious military food-supply bases in the Far East.
The sorest spot in the army, paradoxical as it may seem,
is the horse. At the height of complete collectivization, about
fifty-five percent of the country's horses were killed. Moreover
in spite of motorization, a present-day army needs, as during
the time of Napoleon, one horse for every three soldiers.
During the last year, however, things have taken a favorable
turn in this matter: the number of horses in the country is
again on the increase. In any case, even if war broke out in
the coming months, a state with 170 million population will
always be able to mobilize the necessary food resources and
horses for the front — to be sure, at the expense of the rest
of the population. But the popular masses of all countries in
the case of war can, in general, hope for nothing but hunger,
poison gas and epidemics.
© © ©
The great French Revolution created its army by amalgamating
the new formations with the royal battalions of the
line. The October Revolution dissolved the tsar's army wholly
and without leaving a trace. The Red Army was built anew
from the first brick. A twin of the Soviet regime, it shared its
fate in great things and small It owed its incomparable
superiority over the tsar's army wholly to the great social
revolution. It has not stood aside, however, from the processes

The Red Army and Its Doctrine 179
of degeneration of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, these
have found their most finished expression in the army. Before
attempting to describe the possible role of the Red Army in a
future military cataclysm, it is necessary to dwell a moment
upon the evolution of its guiding ideas and structure.
The decree of the Soviet of People's Commissars of January
12,1918, which laid the foundation for the regular armed
forces, defined their objective in the following words: "With
the transfer of power to the toiling and exploited classes, there
has arisen the necessity to create a new army which shall be
the bulwark of the Soviet power... and will serve as a support
for the coming socialist revolution in Europe." In repeating
on the first of May the "socialist oath" — still retained since
1918 — the young Red Army soldier binds himself "before the
eyes of the toiling classes of Russia and the whole world" in
the struggle "for the cause of socialism and the brotherhood
of nations, not to spare his strength nor even his life itself."
When Stalin now describes the international character of the
revolution as a "comic misunderstanding" and "nonsense,"
he displays, besides all the rest, an inadequate respect for
basic decrees of the Soviet power that are not annulled even
to this day.
The army naturally was nourished by the same ideas as
the party and the state. Its printed laws, journalism, oral
agitation, were alike inspired by the international revolution
as a practical task. Within the walls of the War Department,
the program of revolutionary internationalism not infrequently
assumed an exaggerated character. The late S. Gusev,
once head of the political administration in the army, and
subsequently a close ally of Stalin, wrote in 1921, in the
official military journal: "We are preparing the class army of
the proletariat ... not only for defense against the bourgeoislandlord
counterrevolution, but also for revolutionary wars
(both defensive and offensive) against the imperialist powers."
Moreover, Gusev directly blamed the then head of the
War Department for inadequately preparing the Red Army
for its international tasks. The author of these lines,
answering Gusev in the press, called his attention to the fact
that foreign military powers fulfill in a revolutionary process,
not a fundamental, but an auxiliary role. Only in favorable

180 Foreign Policy and the Army
circumstances can they hasten the denouement and facilitate
the victory. "Military intervention is like the forceps of the
physician. Applied in season, it can lighten the birthpains;
brought into operation prematurely, it can only cause a
miscarriage" (December 5, 1921). We cannot, unfortunately,
expound here with sufficient completeness the history of this
not unimportant problem. We note, however, that the present
marshal, Tukhachevsky, addressed to the Communist International
in 1921 a letter proposing to create under his
presidency an "international general staff." That interesting
letter was then published by Tukhachevsky in a volume of his
articles under the expressive title: "The War of the Classes."
The talented but somewhat too impetuous commander ought
to have known from printed explanations that "an international
general staff could arise only on the basis of the
national staff of several proletarian states; so long as that is
impossible, an international staff would inevitably turn into
a caricature." If not Stalin himself, who in general avoids
taking a definite position upon questions of principle,
especially new ones, at least many of his future close
associates stood in those years to the "left" of the leadership
of the party and the army. There was no small amount of
naive exaggeration, or, if you prefer, "comic misunderstanding,"
in their ideas. Is a great revolution possible, however,
without such things? We were waging a struggle against these
left "caricatures" of internationalism long before it became
necessary to turn our weapons against the no less extreme
caricature involved in the theory of "socialism in a single
country."
Contrary to the retrospective representations of it, the
intellectual life of Bolshevism at the very heaviest period of
the civil war was bubbling over like a spring. In all the
corridors of the party and the state apparatus, including the
army, discussion was raging about everything, and especially
about military problems. The policy of the leaders underwent
a free and frequently a fierce criticism. Regarding certain
excesses of the military censors, the then head of the War
Department wrote in the leading military journal: 9
willingly acknowledge that the censor has made a mountain
of errors, and I consider it most necessary to assign that
"I

The Red Army and Its Doctrine 181
respected personage a more modest place. The censorship
ought to defend military secrets ... and it has no business
interfering with anything else" (February 23,1919).
The question of an international general staff was only a
small episode in an intellectual struggle which, while kept
within bounds of the discipline of action, led even to the
formation of something in the nature of an oppositional
faction within the army, at least within its upper strata. A
school of "proletarian military doctrine" to which belonged
or adhered Frunze, Tukhachevsky, Gusev, Voroshilov and
others, started from the a priori conviction that, not only in
its political aims but in its structure, strategy and tactics, the
Red Army could have nothing in common with the national
armies of the capitalist countries. The new ruling class must
have in all respects a distinct military system; it remained
only to create it. During the civil war the thing was limited,
of course, chiefly to protests in principle against the bringing
into service of the "generals" — former officers, that is, of
the tsar's army — and back-kickings against the high
command in its struggle with local improvisations and
particular violations of discipline. The extreme apostles of the
new word tried in the name of strategic principles, of
"maneuverism" and "offensivism" pushed to the absolute,
to reject even the centralized organization of the army, as
inhibiting revolutionary initiative on future international
fields of battle. In essence, this was an attempt to extend the
guerrilla methods of the first period of the civil war into a
permanent and universal system. Several of the revolutionary
commanders came out the more willingly for the new doctrine,
since they did not want to study the old. The principal center
of these moods was Tsaritsyn (now Stalingrad) where
Budenny, Voroshilov, and afterward Stalin, began their
military work.
Only after the war ended was a more systematic attempt
made to elevate these innovative tendencies into a finished
doctrine. The initiator was one of the outstanding commanders
of the civil war, the late Frunze, a former political
hard-labor prisoner, supported by Voroshilov and to some
extent by Tukhachevsky. In essence, the proletarian military
doctrine was wholly analogous to the doctrine of "proletarian

182 Foreign Policy and the Army
culture," completely sharing its metaphysical schematism.
In certain works left by the advocates of this tendency, this
or that practical prescription, usually far from new, was
arrived at deductively from the standard characteristics of
the proletariat as an international and aggressive class, that
is, from motionless psychological abstractions, and not from
real conditions of time and place. Marxism, although
acclaimed in every line, was in reality replaced by pure
idealism. Notwithstanding the sincerity of these thought
wanderings, it is not difficult to see in them the germ of the
swiftly developing self-complacence of a bureaucracy which
wanted to believe, and make others believe, that it was able
in all spheres without special preparation and even without
the material prerequisites to accomplish historic miracles.
The then head of the War Department answered Frunze
in the press: "I also do not doubt that if a country with a
developed socialist economy found itself compelled to wage
war with a bourgeois country, the picture of the strategy of
the socialist country would be wholly different. But this gives
no basis for an attempt today to suck a 'proletarian strategy
out of our fingers.... By developing socialist economy, raising
the cultural level of the masses ... we will undoubtedly enrich
the military art with new methods." But for this it is
necessary assiduously to learn from the advanced capitalist
countries, and not try to "infer a new strategy by speculative
methods from the revolutionary nature of the proletariat"
(April 1, 1922). Archimedes promised to move the earth if
they would give him a point of support. That was not badly
said. However, if they had offered him the needed point of
support, it would have turned out that he had neither the
lever nor the power to bring it into action. The victorious
revolution gave us a new point of support, but in order to
move the earth it is still necessary to build the levers.
The proletarian military doctrine" was rejected by the
party like its elder sister, the doctrine of "proletarian
culture." However, in subsequent years, at least so it
appears, their destinies diverged. The banner of "proletarian
culture" was raised by Stalin and Bukharin, to be sure
without visible results, in the course of the seven-year period
between the proclamation of "socialism in one country" and

The Abolition of the Militia 183
of the abolition of all classes (1924-31). The "proletarian
military doctrine," on the contrary, notwithstanding that its
former advocates soon stood at the helm of state, never had
any resurrection. The external difference in the fates of these
two so closely related doctrines is of profound significance in
the evolution of Soviet society. "Proletarian culture" had to
do with imponderable matters, and the bureaucracy was the
more magnanimous about granting this moral compensation
to the proletariat, the more rudely it pushed the proletariat
from the seats of power. Military doctrine, on the contrary,
goes to the quick, not only of the interests of defense, but of
the interests of the ruling stratum. Here there was no place
for ideological pamperings. The former opponents of the
enlistment of the "generals" had themselves meantime
become generals. The prophets of an international general
staff had quieted down under the canopy of the general staff
of a "single country." The "war of the classes" was replaced
by the doctrine of "collective security." The perspective of
world revolution gave place to the deification of the status
quo. In order to inspire confidence in possible allies, and not
overirritate the enemies, the demand now was to differ as
little as possible, no matter what the cost, from capitalist
armies, and to resemble them as much as possible. Behind
these changes of doctrine and repaintings of facade, social
processes of historic import were taking place. The year 1935
was for the army a kind of two-fold state revolution — a
revolution in relation to the militia system and to the
commanding staff.
The Abolition of the Militia and the
Restoration of Officers' Ranks
To what extent do the Soviet armed forces at the end of the
second decade of their existence correspond to the type which
the Bolshevik Party inscribed upon its banner?
The army of the proletarian dictatorship ought to have,
according to the program, "an overtly class character, that is,
to be composed exclusively of the proletariat and the
semiproletarian layers of the peasantry close to it. Only in
connection with the abolition of classes will such a class army

184 Foreign Policy and the Army
convert itself into a national socialist militia." Although
postponing to a coming period the all-national character of
the army, the party by no means rejected the militia system.
On the contrary, according to a resolution of the eighth
congress (March 1919): "We are shifting the militia to a class
basis and converting it into a Soviet militia." The aim of the
military work was defined as the gradual creation of an army
"as far as possible by extra-barrackroom methods — that is,
in circumstances close to the labor conditions of the working
class." In the long run, all the divisions of the army were to
coincide territorially with the factories, mines, villages,
agricultural communes and other organic groupings, "with a
local commanding staff, with local stores of arms and of all
supplies." The regional, scholastic, industrial and athletic
ties of the youth were to more than replace the corporative
spirit instilled by the barracks, and inculcate conscious
discipline without the elevation above the army of a
professional officers' corps.
A militia, however, no matter how well corresponding to
the nature of the socialist society, requires a high economic
basis. Special circumstances are built up for a regular army.
A territorial army, therefore, much more directly reflects the
real condition of the country. The lower the level of culture
and the sharper the distinction between village and city, the
more imperfect and heterogeneous the militia. A lack of
railroads, paved roads and water routes, together with an
absence of major highways and a scarcity of automobiles,
condemns the territorial army in the first critical weeks and
months of war to extreme slowness of movement. In order to
ensure a defense of the boundaries during mobilization,
strategic transfers and concentrations, it is necessary, along
with the territorial detachments, to have regular troops. The
Red Army was created from the very beginning as a necessary
compromise between the two systems, with the emphasis on
the regular troops.
In 1924, the then head of the War Department wrote: "We
must always have before our eyes two circumstances: If the
very possibility of going over to the militia system was first
created by the establishment of a Soviet structure, still the
tempo of the change is determined by the general conditions

The Abolition of the Militia 185
of the culture of the country — technique, means of
communication, literacy, etc. The political premises for a
militia are firmly established with us, whereas the economic
and cultural are extremely backward." Granted the necessary
material conditions, the territorial army would not only
not stand second to the regular army, but far exceed it. The
Soviet Union must pay dear for its defense, because it is not
sufficiently rich for the cheaper militia system. There is
nothing here to wonder at. It is exactly because of its poverty
that the Soviet society has hung around its neck the very
costly bureaucracy.
One and the same problem, the disproportion between
economic base and social superstructure, comes up with
remarkable regularity in absolutely all the spheres of social
life. In the factory, the collective farm, the family, the school,
in literature, and in the army, the basis of all relations is the
contrast between a low level of productive forces, low even
from a capitalist standpoint, and forms of property that are
socialist in principle. The new social relations are raising up
the culture. But the inadequate culture is dragging the social
forms down. Soviet reality is an equilibrium between these
two tendencies. In the army, thanks to the extreme definiteness
of its structure, the resultant is measurable in quite
exact figures. The correlation between regular troops and
militia can serve as a fair indication of the actual movement
toward socialism.
Nature and history have provided the Soviet state with
open frontiers 10,000 kilometers apart, with a sparse
population and bad roads. On October 15, 1924, the old
military leadership, then in its last months, once more urged
that this not be forgotten: "In the next few years, the creation
of a militia must of necessity have a preparatory character.
Each successive step must follow from the carefully verified
success of the preceding steps." But with 1925 a new era
began. The advocates of the former proletarian military
doctrine came to power. In essence, the territorial army
deeply contradicted that ideal of "offensivism" and "maneuverism"
with which this school had opened its career. But
they had now begun to forget about the world revolution. The
new leaders hoped to avoid wars by "neutralizing" the

186
Foreign Policy and the Army
bourgeoisie. In the course of the next few years, seventy-four
percent of the army was reorganized on a militia basis!
So long as Germany remained disarmed, and moreover
"friendly," the calculations of the Moscow general staff in the
matter of western boundaries were based on the military
forces of the immediate neighbors: Romania, Poland, Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, with the probable
material support of the most powerful of the enemies, chiefly
France. In that far-off epoch (which ended in 1933), France
was not considered a providential "friend of peace." The
surrounding states could put in the field together about 120
divisions of infantry, approximately 3,500,000 men. The
mobilization plans of the Red Army tried to insure on the
western boundary an army of the first class amounting to the
same number. In the Far East, under all conditions in the
theater of war, it could be a question only of hundreds of
thousands, and not millions of troops. Each hundred fighters
demands in the course of a year approximately seventy-five
men to replace losses. Two years of war would withdraw from
the country, leaving aside those who return from hospitals
to active service, about ten to twelve million men. The Red
Army up to 1935 numbered in all 562,000 men — with the
troops of the GPU, 620,000 — with 40,000 officers. Moreover,
at the beginning of 1935, seventy-four percent, as we have
already said, were in the territorial divisions, and only
twenty-six percent in the regular army. Could you ask a better
proof that the socialist militia had conquered — if not by one
hundred percent, at least by seventy-four percent, and in any
case "finally and irrevocably?"
However, all the above calculations, conditional enough in
themselves, were left hanging in the air after Hitler came to
power. Germany began feverishly to arm, and primarily
against the Soviet Union. The prospect of a peaceful
cohabitation with capitalism faded at once. The swift
approach of military danger impelled the Soviet government,
besides bringing up the numbers of the armed forces to
1,300,000, to change radically the structure of the Red Army.
At the present time, it contains seventy-seven percent of
regular, or so-called kadrovy divisions, and only twenty-three
percent of territorials! This shattering of the territorial

The Abolition of the Militia 187
divisions looks too much like a renunciation of the militia
system, unless you forget that an army is needed not for times
of peace, but exactly for the moments of military danger.
Thus, historical experience, starting from that sphere which
is least of all tolerant of jokes, has ruthlessly revealed that
only so much has been gained "finally and irrevocably" as is
guaranteed by the productive foundation of society.
Nevertheless, the slide from seventy-four percent to
twenty-three percent seems excessive. It was not brought to
pass, we may assume, without "friendly" pressure from the
French general staff. It is still more likely that the
bureaucracy seized upon a favorable pretext for this step,
which was dictated to a considerable degree by political
considerations. The divisions of a militia through their very
character come into direct dependence upon the population.
This is the chief advantage of the system from a socialist point
of view. But this also is its danger from the point of view of
the Kremlin. It is exactly because of this undesirable
closeness of the army to the people that the military
authorities of the advanced capitalist countries, where
technically it would be easy to realize, reject the militia. The
keen discontent in the Red Army during the first five-year
plan undoubtedly supplied a serious motive for the subsequent
abolition of the territorial divisions.
Our proposition would be unanswerably confirmed by an
accurate diagram of the Red Army previous to and after the
counterreform. We have not such data, however, and if we
had we should consider it impossible to use them publicly.
But there is a fact, accessible to all, which permits of no two
interpretations: at the same time that the Soviet government
reduced the relative weight of the militia in the army to
fifty-one percent, it restored the cossack troops, the sole
militia formation in the tsar's army! Cavalry is always the
privileged and most conservative part of an army. The
cossacks were always the most conservative part of the
cavalry. During the war and the revolution they served as a
police force, first for the tsar and then for Kerensky. Under
the Soviet power they remained perpetually Vendean. 10
Collectivization — introduced among the cossacks, moreover,
with special measures of violence — has not yet, of course,

188
Foreign Policy and the Army
changed their traditions and temper. Moreover, as an
exceptional law the cossacks have been restored the right to
possess their own horses. There is no lack, of course, of other
indulgences. Is it possible to doubt that these riders of the
steppes are again on the side of the privileged against the
discontented? Upon a background of unceasing repressions
against oppositional tendencies among the workers' youth,
the restoration of the cossack stripe and forelock is undoubtedly
one of the clearest expressions of the Thermidor!
• • •
A still more deadly blow to the principles of the October
Revolution was struck by the decree restoring the officers'
corps in all its bourgeois magnificence. The commanding staff
of the Red Army, with its inadequacies, but also with its
inestimable merits, grew out of the revolution and the civil
war. The youth, to whom independent political activity is
closed, undoubtedly supply no small number of able representatives
to the Red Army. On the other hand, the progressive
degeneration of the state apparatus could not fail in its turn
to reflect itself in the broad circles of the commanding staff.
In one of the public conferences, Voroshilov, developing
truisms in regard to the duty of commanders to be models to
their men, thought it necessary just in that connection to
make this confession: "Unfortunately, I cannot especially
boast;" the lower ranks are growing while "often the
commanding cadres lag behind." "Frequently the commanders
are unable to answer in a suitable manner" new
questions, etc. A bitter confession from the most responsible,
at least formally, leader of the army, a confession capable of
evoking alarm but not surprise. What Voroshilov says about
the commanders is true of all bureaucrats. Of course the
orator himself does not entertain the thought that the ruling
upper circles might be numbered among those who "lag
behind." No wonder they are always and everywhere
shouting at everybody, and angrily stamping their feet, and
giving orders to be "at your best." In simple fact, it is that
uncontrolled corporation of "leaders" to whom Voroshilov

The Abolition of the Militia 189
himself belongs which is the chief cause of backwardness and
routine, and of much else.
The army is a copy of society and suffers from all its
diseases, usually at a higher temperature. The trade of war
is too austere to get along with fictions and imitations. The
army needs the fresh air of criticism. The commanding staff
needs democratic control. The organizers of the Red Army
were aware of this from the beginning, and considered it
necessary to prepare for such a measure as the election of the
commanding staff. "The growth of internal solidarity of the
detachments, the development in the soldier of a critical
attitude to himself and his commanders ..." says the basic
resolution of the party on military questions, "will create
favorable conditions in which the principle of electivity of the
commanding personnel can receive wider and wider application."
Fifteen years after this resolution was adopted — a
span of time long enough, it would seem, for the maturing of
inner solidarity and self-criticism — the ruling circles have
taken exactly the opposite turn.
In September 1935, civilized humanity, friends and enemies
alike, learned with surprise that the Red Army would
now be crowned with an officers' hierarchy, beginning with
lieutenant and ending with marshal. According to
Tukhachevsky, the actual head of the War Department, "the
introduction by the government of military titles will create
a more stable basis for the development of commanding and
technical cadres." The explanation is consciously equivocal.
The commanding cadres are reinforced above all by the
confidence of the soldiers. For that very reason, the Red Army
began by liquidating the officers' corps. The resurrection of
hierarchical caste is not in the least demanded by the
interests of military affairs. It is the commanding position,
and not the rank, of the commander that is important.
Engineers and physicians have no rank, but society finds the
means of putting each in his needful place. The right to a
commanding position is guaranteed by study, endowment,
character, experience, which need continual and moreover
individual appraisal. The rank of major adds nothing to the
commander of a battalion. The elevation of the five senior
commanders of the Red Army to the title of marshal, gives

190 Foreign Policy and the Army
them neither new talents nor supplementary powers. It is not
the army that really thus receives a "stable basis," but the
officers' corps, and that at the price of aloofness from the
army. The reform pursues a purely political aim: to give a new
social weight to the officers. Molotov thus in essence defined
the meaning of the decree: "to elevate the importance of the
guiding cadres of our army." The thing is not limited, either,
to a mere introduction of titles. It is accompanied with an
accelerated construction of quarters for the commanding
staff. In 1936, 47,000 rooms are to be constructed, and
fifty-seven percent more money is to be issued for salaries
than during the preceding year. "To elevate the importance
of the guiding cadres" means, at a cost of weakening the
moral bonds of the army, to bind the officers closer together
with the ruling circles.
It is worthy of note that the reformers did not consider it
necessary to invent fresh titles for the resurrected ranks. On
the contrary, they obviously wanted to keep step with the
West. At the same time, they revealed their Achilles' heel in
not daring to resurrect the title of general, which among the
Russian people has too ironical a sound. In announcing the
elevation to marshals of the five military dignitaries — choice
of the five was made, be it remarked, rather out of regard for
personal loyalty to Stalin than for talents or services — the
Soviet press did not forget to remind its readers of the tsar's
army, its "caste and rank worship and obsequiousness." Why
then such a slavish imitation of it? In creating new privileges,
the bureaucracy employs at every step the arguments which
once served for the destruction of the old privileges. Insolence
takes turns with cowardice, and is supplemented with
increasing doses of hypocrisy.
However surprising at first glance the official resurrection
of "caste and rank worship and obsequiousness," we must
confess that the government had little freedom of choice left.
The promotion of commanders on a basis of personal
qualification can be realized only under conditions of free
initiative and criticism in the army itself, and control over the
army by the public opinion of the country. Severe discipline
can get along excellently with a broad democracy and even
directly rely upon it. No army, however, can be more

The Soviet Union in a War 191
democratic than the regime which nourishes it. The source
of bureaucratism with its routine and swank is not the special
needs of military affairs, but the political needs of the ruling
stratum. In the army these needs only receive their most
finished expression. The restoration of officers' castes eighteen
years after their revolutionary abolition testifies equally
to the gulf which already separates the rulers from the ruled,
to the loss by the Soviet army of the chief qualities which
gave it the name of "Red," and to the cynicism with which
the bureaucracy elevates these consequences of degeneration
into law.
The bourgeois press has appraised this counterreform as
it deserves. The French official paper, Le Temps, wrote on
September 25, 1935: "This external transformation is one of
the signs of a deep change which is now taking place
throughout the whole Soviet Union. The regime, now
definitely consolidated, is gradually becoming stabilized.
Revolutionary habits and customs are giving place within the
Soviet family and Soviet society to the feelings and customs
which continue to prevail within the so-called capitalist
countries. The Soviets are becoming bourgeoisified." There
is almost nothing to add to that evaluation.
The Soviet Union in a War
Military danger is only one expression of the dependence
of the Soviet Union upon the rest of the world, and
consequently one argument against the Utopian idea of an
isolated socialist society. But it is only now that this ominous
"argument" is brought forward.
To enumerate in advance all the factors of the coming melee
of nations would be a hopeless task. If such an a priori
calculation were possible, conflicts of interest would always
end in a peaceful bookkeeper's bargain In the bloody equation
of war, there are too many unknown quantities. In any case,
there are on the side of the Soviet Union immense favorable
factors, both inherited from the past and created by the new
regime. The experience of intervention during the civil war
proved once more that Russia's greatest advantage has been
and remains her vast spaces. Foreign imperialism overthrew

192 Foreign Policy and the Army
Soviet Hungary, though not, to be sure, without help from the
ill-starred government of Bela Kun, in a few days. 11
Soviet
Russia, cut off from the surrounding countries at the very
start, struggled against intervention for three years. At
certain moments the territory of the revolution was reduced
almost to that of the old Moscow principality. But even that
proved sufficient to enable her to hold out, and in the long run
triumph.
Russia's second great advantage is her human reservoir.
Having grown almost 3,000,000 per year, the population of
the Soviet Union has apparently now passed 170,000,000. A
single recruiting class comprises about 1,300,000 men. The
strictest sorting, both physical and political, would throw out
not more than 400,000. The reserves, therefore, which may
be theoretically estimated at 18 to 20 million, are practically
unlimited.
But nature and man are only the raw materials of war. The
so-called military "potential" depends primarily upon the
economic strength of the state. In this sphere the advantages
of the Soviet Union by comparison with the old Russia are
enormous. The planned economy has up to this time, as we
have said, given its greatest advantages from the military
point of view. The industrialization of the outlying regions,
especially Siberia, has given a wholly new value to the steppe
and forest spaces. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union still
remains a backward country. The low productivity of labor,
the inadequate quality of the products, the weakness of the
means of transport, are only to a certain degree compensated
by space and natural riches and the numbers of the
population. In times of peace, the measuring of economic
might between the two hostile social systems can be
postponed — for a long time, although by no means forever —
with the help of political devices, above all the monopoly of
foreign trade. During a war the test is made directly upon the
field of battle. Hence the danger.
Military defeats, although they customarily entail great
political changes, do not always of themselves lead to a
disturbance of the economic foundations of society. A social
regime which guarantees a higher development of riches and
culture, cannot be overthrown by bayonets. On the contrary,

The Soviet Union in a War 193
the victors take over the institutions and customs of the
conquered, if these are beyond them in evolution. Forms of
property can be overthrown by military force only when they
are sharply out of accord with the economic basis of the
country. A defeat of Germany in a war against the Soviet
Union would inevitably result in the crushing, not only of
Hitler, but of the capitalist system. On the other hand, it is
hardly to be doubted that a military defeat would also prove
fatal, not only for the Soviet ruling stratum, but also for the
social bases of the Soviet Union. The instability of the present
structure in Germany is conditioned by the fact that its
productive forces have long ago outgrown the forms of
capitalist property. The instability of the Soviet regime, on
the contrary, is due to the fact that its productive forces have
far from grown up to the forms of socialist property. A military
defeat threatens the social bases of the Soviet Union for the
same reason that these bases require in peaceful times a
bureaucracy and a monopoly of foreign trade, that is, because
of their weakness.
Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come
out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly
posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should
remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be
inevitable. In a technical, economic and military sense,
imperialism is incomparably more powerful. If it is not
paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep
away the regime which issued from the October Revolution.
It may be answered that "imperialism" is an abstraction,
for it too is torn by contradictions. That is quite true, and
were it not for those contradictions the Soviet Union would
long ago have disappeared from the scene. The diplomatic
and military agreements of the Soviet Union are based in
part upon them. However, it would be a fatal mistake not to
see the limits beyond which those contradictions must
subside. Just as the struggle of the bourgeois and pettybourgeois
parties, from the most reactionary to the Social
Democratic, subsides before the immediate threat of a
proletarian revolution, so imperialist antagonisms will always
find a compromise in order to block the military victory
of the Soviet Union.

194 Foreign Policy and the Army
Diplomatic agreements, as a certain chancellor with some
reason once remarked, are only "scraps of paper." It is
nowhere written that they must survive even up to the
outbreak of war. Not one of the treaties with the Soviet Union
would survive the immediate threat of a social revolution in
any part of Europe. Let the political crisis in Spain, to say
nothing of France, enter a revolutionary phase, and the hope
propounded by Lloyd George in savior-Hitler would irresistibly
take possession of all bourgeois governments. On the
other hand, if the unstable situation in Spain, France,
Belgium, etc., should end in a triumph of the reaction, there
would again remain not a trace of the Soviet pacts. And,
finally, if the "scraps of paper" should preserve their validity
during the first period of military operations, there is not a
doubt that groupings of forces in the decisive phase of the
war would be determined by factors of incomparably more
powerful significance than the oaths of diplomats, perjurers
as they are by profession.
The situation would be radically different, of course, if the
bourgeois allies received material guarantees that the
Moscow government stands on the same side with them, not
only of the war trenches, but of the class trenches too.
Availing themselves of the difficulties of the Soviet Union,
which will be placed between two fires, the capitalist "friends
of peace" will, of course, take all measures to drive a breach
into the monopoly of foreign trade and the Soviet laws on
property. The growing "defensist" movement among the
Russian white emigres in France and Czechoslovakia feeds
wholly upon such calculations. And if you assume that the
world struggle will be played out only on a military level, the
Allies have a good chance of achieving their goal. Without the
interference of revolution, the social bases of the Soviet Union
must be crushed, not only in the case of defeat, but also in the
case of victory.
More than two years ago the programmatic document, The
Fourth International and War, outlined this perspective in
the following words: "Under the influence of the critical need
of the state for articles of prime necessity, the individualistic
tendencies of the peasant economy will receive a considerable
reinforcement, and the centrifugal forces within the collective

The Soviet Union in a War 195
farms will increase with every month.... In the heated
atmosphere of war we may expect... the attracting of foreign
'Allied' capital, a breach in the monopoly of foreign trade, a
weakening of state control of the trusts, a sharpening of
competition between the trusts, conflicts between the trusts
and the workers, etc In other words, in the case of a long
war, if the world proletariat is passive, the inner social
contradictions of the Soviet Union not only might, but must,
lead to a bourgeois Bonapartist counterrevolution." The
events of the last two years have redoubled the force of this
prognosis.
The preceding considerations, however, by no means lead
to so-called pessimistic conclusions. If we do not want to shut
our eyes to the immense material preponderance of the
capitalist world, nor the inevitable treachery of the imperialist
"Allies," nor the inner contradictions of the Soviet regime,
we are, on the other hand, in no degree inclined to
overestimate the stability of the capitalist system, either in
hostile or Allied countries. Long before a war to exhaustion
can measure the correlation of economic forces to the bottom,
it will put to the test the relative stability of the regimes. All
serious theoreticians of future slaughters of the people take
into consideration the probability, and even inevitability, of
revolution among its results The idea, again and again
advanced in certain circles, of small "professional" armies,
although little more real than the idea of individual heroes
in the manner of David and Goliath, is so fantastic that it
reveals the reality of the dread of an armed people. Hitler
never misses a chance to reinforce his "love of peace" with a
reference to the inevitability of a new Bolshevik storm in case
of a war in the West. The power which is restraining for the
time being the fury of war is not the League of Nations, not
mutual security pacts, not pacifist referendums, but solely
and only the self-protective fear of the ruling classes before
the revolution.
Social regimes like all other phenomena must be estimated
comparatively. Notwithstanding all its contradictions, the
Soviet regime in the matter of stability still has immense
advantages over the regimes of its probable enemies. The
very possibility of a rule of the Nazis over the German people

196 Foreign Policy and the Army
was created by the unbearable strain of social antagonisms
in Germany. These antagonisms have not been removed, and
not even weakened, but only suppressed, by the lid of fascism.
A war will bring them to the surface. Hitler has far less
chances than had Wilhelm II of carrying a war to victory.
Only a timely revolution, by saving Germany from war, could
save her from a new defeat.
The world press portrayed the recent bloody attacks of
Japanese officers upon the ministers of the government as
the imprudent manifestation of a too flaming patriotism. In
reality these attacks, notwithstanding the difference of
ideology, belong to the same historic type as the bombs of the
Russian nihilists against the tsarist bureaucracy. The
population of Japan is suffocating under the combined yoke
of Asiatic agrarianism and ultramodern capitalism. Korea,
Manchukuo, China, at the first weakening of the military
pincers, will rise against the Japanese tyranny. A war will
bring the empire of the Mikado the greatest of social
catastrophes.
The situation in Poland is but little better. The regime of
Pilsudski, least fruitful of all regimes, proved incapable even
of weakening the land slavery of the peasants. The western
Ukraine (Galicia) is living under a heavy national oppression.
The workers are shaking the country with continual strikes
and rebellions. Trying to insure itself by a union with France
and a friendship with Germany, the Polish bourgeoisie is
incapable of accomplishing anything with its maneuvers
except to hasten the war and find in it a more certain death.
The danger of war and a defeat of the Soviet Union is a
reality, but the revolution is also a reality. If the revolution
does not prevent war, then war will help the revolution.
Second births are usually easier than first. In the new war,
it will not be necessary to wait a whole two years and a half
for the first insurrection. Once it is begun, moreover, the
revolution will not this time stop half way. The fate of the
Soviet Union will be decided in the long run not on the maps
of the general staffs, but on the map of the class struggle.
Only the European proletariat, implacably opposing its
bourgeoisie and in the same camp with them the "friends of
peace," can protect the Soviet Union from destruction, or

The Soviet Union in a War 197
from an "Allied" stab in the back. Even a military defeat of
the Soviet Union would be only a short episode, in case of a
victory of the proletariat in other countries. And on the other
hand, no military victory can save the inheritance of the
October Revolution, if imperialism holds out in the rest of the
world.
The henchmen of the Soviet bureaucracy will say that we
"underestimate" the inner forces of the Soviet Union, the
Red Army, etc., just as they have said that we "deny" the
possibility of socialist construction in a single state. These
arguments stand on such a low level that they do not even
permit a fruitful exchange of opinions. Without the Red Army,
the Soviet Union would be crushed and dismembered like
China. Only her stubborn and heroic resistance to the future
capitalist enemy can create favorable conditions for the
development of the class struggle in the imperialist camp.
The Red Army is thus a factor of immense significance. But
this does not mean that it is the sole historic factor. Sufficient
that it can give a mighty impulse to the revolution. But only
the revolution can fulfill the chief task; to that the Red Army
alone is unequal.
Nobody demands of the Soviet government international
adventures, unreasonable acts, attempts to force by violence
the course of world events. On the contrary, insofar as such
attempts have been made by the bureaucracy in the past
(Bulgaria, Estonia, Canton, etc.), they have only played into
the hands of the reaction, and they have met a timely
condemnation from the Left Opposition. 12
It is a question of
the general direction of the policies of the Soviet state. The
contradiction between its foreign policy and the interests of
the world proletariat and the colonial peoples finds its most
ruinous expression in the subjection of the Communist
International to the conservative bureaucracy with its new
religion of inaction.
It is not under the banner of the status quo that the
European workers and the colonial peoples can rise against
imperialism, and against that war which must break out and
overthrow the status quo almost as inevitably as a developed
infant destroys the status quo of pregnancy. The toilers have
not the slightest interest in defending existing boundaries,

198
Foreign Policy and the Army
especially in Europe, either under the command of their
bourgeoisies, or, still less, in a revolutionary insurrection
against them. The decline of Europe is caused by the very
fact that it is economically split up among almost forty
quasinational states which, with their customs, passports,
monetary systems and monstrous armies in defense of
national particularism, have become gigantic obstacles on the
road of the economic and cultural development of mankind.
The task of the European proletariat is not the perpetuation
of boundaries but, on the contrary, their revolutionary
abolition, not the status quo, but a Socialist United States of
Europe!

CHAPTER NINE
What Is the USSR?
Social Relations in the Soviet Union
In the industries, state ownership of the means of
production prevails almost universally. In agriculture it
prevails absolutely only in the Soviet farms, which comprise
no more than ten percent of the tilled land. In the collective
farms, cooperative or group ownership is combined in various
proportions with state and private ownership. The land,
although legally belonging to the state, has been transferred
to the collectives for "perpetual" use, which differs little from
group ownership. The tractors and elaborate machinery
belong to the state; the smaller equipment belongs to the
collectives. Each collective farmer moreover carries on
individual agriculture. Finally, more than ten percent of the
peasants remain individual farmers.
According to the census of 1934, 28.1 percent of the
population were workers and employees of state enterprises
and institutions. Industrial and building trades workers, not
including their families, amounted in 1935 to 7.5 million. The
collective farms and cooperative crafts comprised, at the time
of the census, 45.9 percent of the population. Students,
soldiers of the Red Army, pensioners, and other elements
directly dependent upon the state made up 3.4 percent.
Altogether, 74 percent of the population belonged to the
"socialist sector," and 95.8 percent of the basic capital of the
country fell to the share of this 74 percent. Individual
199

200 What Is the USSR?
peasants and craftsmen still comprised, in 1934, 22.5 percent,
but they had possession of only a little more than 4 percent
of the national capital!
Since 1934 there has been no census; the next one will be
in 1937. Undoubtedly, however, during the last two years the
private enterprise sector has shrunk still more in favor of the
"socialist." Individual peasants and craftsmen, according to
the calculations of official economists, now constitute about
10 percent of the population that is, about seventeen million
people. Their economic importance has fallen very much
lower than their numbers. The secretary of the Central
Committee, Andreyev, announced in April 1936: "The relative
weight of socialist production in our country in 1936 ought
to reach 98.5 percent. That is to say, something like an
insignificant 1.5 percent still belongs to the nonsocialist
sector." These optimistic figures seem at first glance an
unanswerable proof of the "final and irrevocable" victory of
socialism. But woe to him who cannot see social reality behind
arithmetic!
The figures themselves are arrived at with some stretching:
it is sufficient to point out that the private allotments
alongside the collective farms are entered under the "socialist"
sector. However, that is not the crux of the question. The
enormous and wholly indubitable statistical superiority of the
state and collective forms of economy, important though it is
for the future, does not remove another and no less important
question: that of the strength of bourgeois tendencies within
the "socialist" sector itself, and this not only in agriculture
but in industry. The material level already attained is high
enough to awaken increased demands in all, but wholly
insufficient to satisfy them. Therefore, the very dynamic of
economic progress involves an awakening of petty-bourgeois
appetites, not only among the peasants and representatives
of "intellectual" labor, but also among the upper circles of
the proletariat. A bare antithesis between individual proprietors
and collective farmers, between private craftsmen and
state industries, does not give the slightest idea of the
explosive power of these appetites, which imbue the whole
economy of the country, and express themselves, generally

Social Relations in the Soviet Union 201
speaking, in the desire of each and every one to give as little
as possible to society and receive as much as possible from it.
No less energy and ingenuity is being spent in solving
money-grubbers' and consumers' problems than upon socialist
construction in the proper sense of the word. Hence
derives, in part, the extremely low productivity of social labor.
While the state finds itself in continual struggle with the
molecular action of these centrifugal forces, the ruling group
itself forms the chief reservoir of legal and illegal personal
accumulations. Masked as they are with new juridical norms,
the petty-bourgeois tendencies cannot, of course, be easily
determined statistically. But their actual predominance in
economic life is proven primarily by the "socialist" bureauc­
racy itself, that flagrant contradictio in adjecto, 1
that
monstrous and continually growing social distortion, which
in turn becomes the source of malignant growths in society.
The new constitution — wholly founded, as we shall see,
upon an identification of the bureaucracy with the state, and
the state with the people — says: "the state property — that
is, the possessions of the whole people." This identification
is the fundamental sophism of the official doctrine. It is
perfectly true that Marxists, beginning with Marx himself,
have employed in relation to the workers' state the terms
state, national and socialist property as simple synonyms.
On a large historic scale, such a mode of speech involves no
special inconveniences. But it becomes the source of crude
mistakes, and of downright deceit, when applied to the first
and still unassured stages of the development of a new
society, and one moreover isolated and economically lagging
behind the capitalist countries.
In order to become social, private property must as
inevitably pass through the state stage as the caterpillar in
order to become a butterfly must pass through the pupal
stage. But the pupa is not a butterfly. Myriads of pupae perish
without ever becoming butterflies. State property becomes
the property of "the whole people" only to the degree that
social privilege and differentiation disappear, and therewith
the necessity of the state. In other words: state property is
converted into socialist property in proportion as it ceases to
be state property And the contrary is true: the higher the

202
What Is the USSR?
Soviet state rises above the people, and the more fiercely it
opposes itself as the guardian of property to the people as its
squanderer, the more obviously does it testify against the
socialist character of this state property.
"We are still far from the complete abolition of classes,"
confesses the official press, referring to the still existing
differentiation of city and country, intellectual and physical
labor. This purely academic acknowledgment has the advantage
that it permits a concealment of the income of the
bureaucracy under the honorable title of "intellectual" labor.
The "friends" — to whom Plato is much dearer than the
truth — also confine themselves to an academic admission
of survivals of the old inequality. In reality, these much
put-upon "survivals" are completely inadequate to explain
the Soviet reality. If the differences between city and country
have been mitigated in certain respects, in others they have
been considerably deepened, thanks to the extraordinarily
swift growth of cities and city culture, that is, of comforts for
an urban minority. The social distance between physical and
intellectual labor, notwithstanding the filling out of the
scientific cadres by newcomers from below, has increased, not
decreased, during recent years. The thousand-year-old caste
barriers defining the life of every man on all sides — the
polished urbanite and the uncouth muzhik, the wizard of
science and the day laborer — have not just been preserved
from the past in a more or less softened form, but have to a
considerable degree been born anew, and are assuming a
more and more defiant character.
The notorious slogan: "The cadres decide everything,"
characterizes the nature of Soviet society far more frankly
than Stalin himself would wish. The cadres are in their very
essence the organs of domination and command A cult of
"cadres" means above all a cult of bureaucracy, of officialdom,
an aristocracy of technique. In the matter of advancing
and developing cadres, as in other matters, the soviet regime
still finds itself compelled to solve problems which the
advanced bourgeoisie solved long ago in its own countries.
But since the soviet cadres come forward under a socialist
banner, they demand an almost divine veneration and a
continually rising salary. The development of "socialist"

Social Relations in the Soviet Union 203
cadres is thus accompanied by a rebirth of bourgeois
inequality.
From the point of view of property in the means of
production, the differences between a marshal and a servant
girl, the head of a trust and a day laborer, the son of a people's
commissar and a homeless child, seem not to exist at all.
Nevertheless, the former occupy lordly apartments, enjoy
several summer homes in various parts of the country, have
the best automobiles at their disposal, and have long ago
forgotten how to shine their own shoes. The latter live in
wooden barracks often without partitions, lead a half-hungry
existence, and do not shine their own shoes only because they
go barefoot. To the bureaucrat this difference does not seem
worthy of attention. To the day laborer, however, it seems,
not without reason, very essential.
Superficial "theoreticians" can comfort themselves, of
course, that the distribution of wealth is a factor secondary
to its production. The dialectic of interaction, however, retains
here all its force. The destiny of the state-appropriated means
of production will be decided in the long run according as
these differences in personal existence evolve in one direction
or the other. If a ship is declared collective property, but the
passengers continue to be divided into first, second and third
class, it is clear that, for the third-class passengers,
differences in the conditions of life will have infinitely more
importance than that juridical change in proprietorship. The
first-class passengers, on the other hand, will propound,
together with their coffee and cigars, the thought that
collective ownership is everything and a comfortable cabin
nothing at all. Ar-tagonisms growing out of this may well
explode the unstable collective.
The Soviet press relates with satisfaction how a little boy
in the Moscow zoo, receiving to his question, "Whose is that
elephant?" the answer: "The state's," made the immediate
inference: "That means it's a little bit mine too." However,
if the elephant were actually divided, the precious tusks
would fall to the chosen, a few would regale themselves with
elephantine hams, and the majority would get along with
hooves and guts The boys who are done out of their share
hardly identify the state property with their own. The

204 What Is the USSR?
homeless consider "theirs" only that which they steal from
the state. The little "socialist" in the zoological garden was
probably the son of some eminent official accustomed to draw
inferences from the formula: "L'etat — c'est moi." 2
If we translate socialist relations, for illustration, into the
language of the market, we may represent the citizen as a
stockholder in a company which owns the wealth of the
country. If the property belonged to all the people, that would
presume an equal distribution of "shares," and consequently
a right to the same dividend for all "shareholders." The
citizens participate in the national enterprise, however, not
only as "shareholders," but also as producers. On the lower
stage of communism, which we have agreed to call socialism,
payments for labor are still made according to bourgeois
norms, that is, in dependence upon skill, intensity, etc. The
theoretical income of each citizen is thus composed of two
parts, a b — that is, dividend wages. The higher the
technique and the more complete the organization of
industry, the greater is the place occupied by a as against b,
and the less is the influence of individual differences of labor
upon standard of living. From the fact that wage differences
in the Soviet Union are not less, but greater than in capitalist
countries, it must be inferred that the shares of the Soviet
citizen are not equally distributed, and that in his income the
dividend as well as the wage payment is unequal. Whereas
the unskilled laborer receives only b, the minimum payment
which under similar conditions he would receive in a
capitalist enterprise, the Stakhanovist or bureaucrat receives
2a b, or 3a b, etc., while b also in its turn may become 2b,
3b, etc. The differences in income are determined, in other
words, not only by differences of individual productiveness,
but also by a masked appropriation of the products of the
labor of others. The privileged minority of shareholders is
living at the expense of the deprived majority.
If you assume that the Soviet unskilled worker receives
more than he would under a similar level of technique and
culture in a capitalist enterprise — that is to say, that he is
still a small shareholder — it is necessary to consider his
wages as equal to a b. The wages of the higher categories
would be expressed with the formula: 3a 2b, 10a 15b, etc

Social Relations in the Soviet Union 205
etc. This means that the unskilled worker has one share, the
Stakhanovist three, the specialist ten. Moreover, their wages
in the proper sense are related as 1:2:15. Hymns to the sacred
socialist property sound under these conditions a good deal
more convincing to the manager or the Stakhanovist, than
to the rank-and-file worker or collective peasant. The
rank-and-file workers, however, are the overwhelming majority
of society. It was they, and not the new aristocracy, that
socialism had in mind.
"The worker in our country is not a wage slave and is not
the seller of a commodity called labor power. He is a free
workman" (Pravda). For the present period, this unctuous
formula is impermissible bragging. The transfer of the
factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only
juridically. In reality, he is compelled to live in want and
work a definite number of hours for a definite wage. Those
hopes which the worker formerly had placed in the party and
the trade unions, he transferred after the revolution to the
state created by him. But the useful functioning of this
implement turned out to be limited by the level of technique
and culture. In order to raise this level, the new state resorted
to the old methods of pressure upon the muscles and nerves
of the worker. There grew up a corps of slave drivers. The
management of industry became superbureaucratic. The
workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of
the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of
material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police
repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard
indeed for the worker to feel himself a "free workman." In
the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the
employer. Free labor is incompatible with the existence of a
bureaucratic state.
With the necessary changes, what has been said above
relates also to the country. According to the official theory,
collective farm property is a special form of socialist property.
Pravda writes that the collective farms "are in essence
already of the same type as the state enterprises and are
consequently socialistic," but immediately adds that the
guarantee of the socialist development of agriculture lies in
the circumstance that "the Bolshevik Party administers the

206
What Is the USSR?
collective farms." Pravda refers us, that is, from economics
to politics. This means in essence that socialist relations are
not as yet embodied in the real relations among men, but
dwell in the benevolent heart of the authorities. The workers
will do very well if they keep a watchful eye on that heart.
In reality the collective farms stand halfway between
individual and state economy, and the petty-bourgeois
tendencies within them are admirably helped along by the
swiftly growing private allotments or personal economies
conducted by their members.
Notwithstanding the fact that individual tilled land
amounts to only four million hectares, as against one hundred
and eight million collective hectares — that is, less than four
percent — thanks to the intensive and especially the
truck-garden cultivation of this land, it furnishes the peasant
family with the most important objects of consumption. The
main body of horned cattle, sheep and pigs is the property of
the collective farmers, and not of the collectives. The peasants
often convert their subsidiary farms into the essential ones,
letting the unprofitable collectives take second place. On the
other hand, those collectives which pay highly for the working
day are rising to a higher social level and creating a category
of well-to-do farmers. The centrifugal tendencies are not yet
dying, but on the contrary are growing stronger. In any case,
the collectives have succeeded so far in transforming only the
juridical forms of economic relations in the country — in
particular the methods of distributing income — but they
have left almost without change the old hut and vegetable
garden, the barnyard chores, the whole rhythm of heavy
muzhik labor. To a considerable degree they have left also the
old attitude to the state. The state no longer, to be sure, serves
the landlords or the bourgeoisie, but it takes away too much
from the villages for the benefit of the cities, and it retains
too many gluttonous bureaucrats.
For the census to be taken on January 6,1937, the following
list of social categories has been drawn up: worker; clerical
worker; collective farmer; individual farmer; individual
craftsman; member of the liberal professions; minister of
religion; other nonlaboring elements. According to the official
commentary, this census list fails to include any other social

Social Relations in the Soviet Union 207
characteristics only because there are no classes in the Soviet
Union. In reality the list is constructed with the direct
intention of concealing the privileged upper strata, and the
more deprived lower depths. The real divisions of Soviet
society, which should and might easily be revealed with the
help of an honest census, are as follows: heads of the
bureaucracy, specialists, etc., living in bourgeois conditions;
medium and lower strata, on the level of the petty bourgeoisie;
worker and collective farm aristocracy, approximately
on the same level; medium working mass; medium strata of
collective farmers; individual peasants and craftsmen; lower
worker and peasant strata passing over into the lumpenproletariat;
homeless children, prostitutes, etc.
When the new constitution announces that in the Soviet
Union "abolition of the exploitation of man by man" has been
attained, it is not telling the truth. The new social differentiation
has created conditions for the revival of the exploitation
of man in its most barbarous form — that of buying him into
slavery for personal service. In the lists for the new census
personal servants are not mentioned at all. They are,
evidently, to be dissolved in the general group of "workers."
There are, however, plenty of questions about this: Does the
socialist citizen have servants, and just how many (maid,
cook, nurse, governess, chauffeur)? Does he have an automobile
at his personal disposal? How many rooms does he
occupy? etc. There is not a word in these lists about the scale
of earnings! If the rule were revived that exploitation of the
labor of others deprives one of political rights, it would turn
out, somewhat unexpectedly, that the cream of the ruling
group are outside the bounds of the Soviet constitution.
Fortunately, they have established a complete equality of
rights ... for servant and master!
Two opposite tendencies are growing up out of the depth
of the Soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a
decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces; it is
preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that,
for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and
more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it
is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contradiction
between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot

208 What Is the USSR?
grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norms must in one
form or another spread to the means of production, or,
conversely, the norms of distribution must be brought into
correspondence with the socialist property system.
The bureaucracy dreads the exposure of this alternative.
Everywhere and all the time — in the press, in speeches, in
statistics, in the novels of its litterateurs, in the verses of its
poets, and, finally, in the text of the new constitution — it
painstakingly conceals the real relations both in town and
country with abstractions from the socialist dictionary. That
is why the official ideology is all so lifeless, talentless and
false!
State Capitalism?
We often seek salvation from unfamiliar phenomena in
familiar terms. An attempt has been made to conceal the
enigma of the Soviet regime by calling it "state capitalism."
This term has the advantage that nobody knows exactly what
it means. The term "state capitalism" originally arose to
designate all the phenomena which arise when a bourgeois
state, takes direct charge of the means of transport or of
industrial enterprises. The .very necessity of such measures
is one of the signs that the productive forces have outgrown
capitalism and are bringing it to a partial self-negation in
practice. But the outworn system, along with its elements of
self-negation, continues nevertheless to exist as a capitalist
system.
Theoretically, to be sure, it is possible to conceive a
situation in which the bourgeoisie as a whole constitutes itself
as a stock company which, by means of its state, administers
the whole national economy. The economic laws of such a
regime would present no mysteries. A single capitalist, as is
well known, receives in the form of profit, not that part of the
surplus value which is directly created by the workers of his
own enterprise, but a share of the combined surplus value
created throughout the country proportionate to the amount
of his own capital. Under an integral "state capitalism," this
law of the equal rate of profit would be realized, not by devious
routes — that is, competition among different capitals — but

State Capitalism? 209
immediately and directly through state bookkeeping. Such a
regime has never existed, however, and, because of profound
contradictions among the proprietors themselves, never will
exist — the more so since, as the universal repository of
capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object
for social revolution.
During the war, and especially during the experiments in
fascist economy, the term "state capitalism" has most often
been understood to mean a system of state interference and
regulation. In this case, the French employ a much more
suitable term — etatism. There are undoubtedly points of
contact between state capitalism and "state-ism," but taken
as systems they are more opposed than identical. State
capitalism means the substitution of state property for
private property, and for that very reason remains partial in
character. State-ism, no matter where — in Mussolini's Italy,
in Hitler's Germany, in Roosevelt's America, or in Leon
Blum's France — means state intervention on the basis of
private property, and with the goal of preserving it. Whatever
be the programs of the governments, state-ism inevitably
leads to a transfer of the damages of the decaying system from
strong shoulders to weak. It "rescues" the small proprietors
from complete ruin only to the extent that their existence is
necessary for the preservation of big property. The planned
measures of state-ism are dictated not by the demands of a
development of the productive forces, but by a concern for the
preservation of private property at the expense of the
productive forces, which are in revolt against it. State-ism
means applying brakes to the development of technique,
supporting unviable enterprises, perpetuating parasitic social
strata. In a word, state-ism is completely reactionary in
character.
The words of Mussolini: "Three-fourths of Italian economy,
industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state" (May
26,1934), are not to be taken literally. The fascist state is not
an owner of enterprises, but only an intermediary between
their owners. These two things are not identical. Popolo
d'ltalia says on this subject: "The corporative state directs
and integrates the economy, but does not run it (dirige e porta
alia unita I'economia, ma non fa I'economia, non gestisce),

210 What Is the USSR?
which, given a monopoly of production, would be nothing but
collectivism" (June 11,1936). Toward the peasants and small
proprietors in general, the fascist bureaucracy takes the
attitude of a threatening lord and master. Toward the
capitalist magnates, that of a first plenipotentiary. "The
corporative state," correctly writes the Italian Marxist,
Feroci, "is nothing but the sales clerk of monopoly capital....
Mussolini takes upon the state the whole risk of the
enterprises, leaving to the industrialists the profits of
exploitation." And Hitler in this respect follows in the steps
of Mussolini. The limits of the planning principle, as well as
its real content, are determined by the class dependence of
the fascist state. It is not a question of increasing the power
of man over nature in the interests of society, but of exploiting
society in the interests of the few. "If I desired," boasts
Mussolini, "to establish in Italy — which really has not
happened — state capitalism or state socialism, I would
possess today all the necessary and sufficient objective
conditions." All except one: the expropriation of the class of
capitalists. In order to realize this condition, fascism would
have to go over to the other side of the barricades — "which
really has not happened," to quote the hasty assurance of
Mussolini, and, of course, which will not happen. To
expropriate the capitalists would require other forces, other
cadres and other leaders.
The first concentration of the means of production in the
hands of the state to occur in history was achieved by the
proletariat with the method of social revolution, and not by
capitalists with the method of state trustification. Our brief
analysis is sufficient to show how absurd are the attempts to
identify capitalist state-ism with the Soviet system. The
former is reactionary, the latter progressive.
Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class?
Classes are characterized by their position in the social
system of economy, and primarily by their relation to the
means of production. In civilized societies, property relations
are validated by laws. The nationalization of the land, the
means of industrial production, transport and exchange,

Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class? 211
together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitute the
basis of the Soviet social structure. Through these relations,
established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the
Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined.
In its intermediary and regulating function, its concern to
maintain social ranks, and its exploitation of the state
apparatus for personal goals, the Soviet bureaucracy is
similar to every other bureaucracy, especially the fascist. But
there are also vast differences. In no other regime, outside
the Soviet, has a bureaucracy ever achieved such a degree of
independence from the dominating class. In bourgeois society,
the bureaucracy represents the interests of a possessing and
educated class, which has at its disposal innumerable means
of everyday control over its administration of affairs. The
Soviet bureaucracy has risen above a class which is hardly
emerging from destitution and darkness, and has no tradition
of dominion or command. Whereas the fascists, when they
find themselves in power, are united with the big bourgeoisie
by bonds of common interest, friendship, marriage, etc., the
Soviet bureaucracy takes on bourgeois customs without
having beside it a national bourgeoisie. In this sense we
cannot deny that it is something more than a bureaucracy.
It is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and
commanding stratum in Soviet society.
Another difference is no less important. The Soviet
bureaucracy has expropriated the proletariat politically in
order by methods of its own to defend the proletariat's social
conquests. But the very fact of its appropriation of political
power in a country where the most important means of
production are concentrated in the hands of the state, creates
a new and hitherto unknown relation between the bureaucracy
and the riches of the nation. The means of production
belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, "belongs" to
the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new relations should
solidify, become the norm and be legalized, whether with or
without resistance from the workers, they would, in the long
run, lead to a complete liquidation of the social conquests of
the proletarian revolution. But to speak of that now is at least
premature. The proletariat has not yet said its last word. The
bureaucracy has not yet created social supports for its

212 What Is the USSR?
dominion in the form of special types of property. It is
compelled to defend state property as the source of its power
and its income. In this aspect of its activity, it still remains a
weapon of proletarian dictatorship.
The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class
of "state capitalists" will obviously not withstand criticism.
The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited,
supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative
hierarchy, independently of any special property relations
of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit
to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state
apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the
form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income; it pretends
that as a special social group it does not even exist. Its
appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the
character of social parasitism. All this makes the position of
the commanding Soviet stratum in the highest degree
contradictory, equivocal and undignified, notwithstanding
the completeness of its power and the smoke screen of flattery
that conceals it.
Bourgeois society has in the course of its history displaced
many political regimes and bureaucratic castes, without
changing its social foundations. It has preserved itself against
the restoration of feudal and guild relations by the superiority
of its productive methods. The state power has been able
either to cooperate with capitalist development, or put brakes
on it. But in general the productive forces, upon a basis of
private property and competition, have been working out
their own destiny. In contrast to this, the property relations
which issued from the socialist revolution are indivisibly
bound up with the new state as their repository. The
predominance of socialist over petty-bourgeois tendencies is
guaranteed, not by the automatism of the economy — we are
still far from that — but by political measures taken by the
dictatorship. The character of the economy as a whole thus
depends upon the character of the state power.
A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the
collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of
state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts
and the factories within them would fall away. The more

Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class? 213
successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the
road of independence. They might convert themselves into
stock companies, or they might find some other transitional
form of property, one, for example, in which the workers
should participate in the profits. The collective farms would
disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily. The fall
of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not
replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return
to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of the
economy and culture.
But if a socialist government is still absolutely necessary
for the preservation and development of the planned economy,
the question is all the more important, upon whom the
present Soviet government relies, and in what measure the
socialist character of its policy is guaranteed. At the eleventh
party congress in March 1922, Lenin, in practically bidding
farewell to the party, addressed these words to the commanding
group: "History knows transformations of all sorts. To
rely upon conviction, devotion and other excellent spiritual
qualities — that is not to be taken seriously in politics." Being
determines consciousness. During the last fifteen years, the
government has changed its social composition even more
deeply than its ideas. Since of all the strata of Soviet society
the bureaucracy has best solved its own social problem, and
is fully content with the existing situation, it has ceased to
offer any subjective guarantee whatever of the socialist
direction of its policy. It continues to preserve state property
only to the extent that it fears the proletariat. This saving
fear is nourished and supported by the illegal party of
Bolshevik-Leninists, which is the most conscious expression
of the socialist tendencies opposing that bourgeois reaction
with which the Thermidorian bureaucracy is completely
saturated. As a conscious political force, the bureaucracy has
betrayed the revolution. But a victorious revolution is
fortunately not only a program and a banner, not only political
institutions, but also a system of social relations. To betray
it is not enough. You have to overthrow it. The October
Revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not
yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding
with the established property relations, with the living force

214 What Is the USSR?
of the proletariat, the consciousness of its best elements, the
impasse of world capitalism, and the inevitability of world
revolution.
The Question of the Character of the Soviet Union
Not Yet Decided by History
In order better to understand the character of the present
Soviet Union, let us make two different hypotheses about its
future. Let us assume first that the Soviet bureaucracy is
overthrown by a revolutionary party having all the attributes
of the old Bolshevism, enriched moreover by the world
experience of the recent period. Such a party would begin
with the restoration of democracy in the trade unions and the
Soviets. It would be able to, and would have to, restore
freedom of Soviet parties. Together with the masses, and at
their head, it would carry out a ruthless purge of the state
apparatus. It would abolish ranks and decorations, all kinds
of privileges, and would limit inequality in the payment of
labor to the vital necessities of the economy and the state
apparatus. It would give the youth free opportunity to think
independently, learn, criticize and grow. It would introduce
profound changes in the distribution of the national income
in correspondence with the interests and will of the worker
and peasant masses. But so far as concerns property
relations, the new power would not have to resort to
revolutionary measures. It would retain and further develop
the experiment of planned economy. After the political
revolution — that is, the deposing of the bureaucracy — the
proletariat would have to introduce in the economy a series
of very important reforms, but not another social revolution.
If — to adopt a second hypothesis — a bourgeois party
were to overthrow the ruling Soviet caste, it would find no
small number of ready servants among the present bureaucrats,
administrators, technicians, directors, party secretaries
and privileged upper circles in general. A purge of the state
apparatus would, of course, be necessary in this case too. But
a bourgeois restoration would probably have to clean out
fewer people than a revolutionary party. The chief task of the
new power would be to restore private property in the means

Character of the Soviet Union Not Yet Decided 215
of production. First of all, it would be necessary to create
conditions for the development of strong farmers from the
weak collective farms, and for converting the strong collectives
into producers' cooperatives of the bourgeois type, into
agricultural stock companies. In the sphere of industry,
denationalization would begin with the light industries and
those producing food. The planning principle would be
converted for the transitional period into a series of
compromises between state power and individual "corporations"
— potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet
captains of industry, the emigre former proprietors and
foreign capitalists. Notwithstanding that the Soviet bureaucracy
has gone far toward preparing a bourgeois restoration,
the new regime would have to introduce in the matter of forms
of property and methods of industry not a reform, but a social
revolution.
Let us assume — to take a third variant — that neither a
revolutionary nor a counterrevolutionary party seizes power.
The bureaucracy continues at the head of the state.
Even under these conditions, social relations will not jell.
We cannot count upon the bureaucracy's peacefully and
voluntarily renouncing itself in behalf of socialist equality. If
at the present time, despite the too obvious inconveniences
of such an operation, it has considered it possible to introduce
ranks and decorations, it must inevitably in future stages
seek supports for itself in property relations. One may
argue that the big bureaucrat cares little what are the
prevailing forms of property, provided only they guarantee
him the necessary income. This argument ignores not only
the instability of the bureaucrat's own rights, but also the
question of his descendants. The new cult of the family has
not fallen out of the clouds. Privileges have only half their
worth if they cannot be transmitted to one's children. But the
right of testament is inseparable from the right of property.
It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary
to be a stockholder. The victory of the bureaucracy in this
decisive sphere would mean its conversion into a new
possessing class. On the other hand, the victory of the
proletariat over the bureaucracy would insure a revival of the
socialist revolution. The third variant consequently brings

216 What Is the USSR?
us back to the two first, with which, in the interests of clarity
and simplicity, we set out.
• s •
To define the Soviet regime as transitional, or intermediate,
means to abandon such finished social categories as
capitalism (including "state capitalism"), and also socialism.
But besides being completely inadequate in itself, such a
definition is capable of producing the mistaken idea that from
the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is
possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly
possible. A more complete definition will of necessity be
complicated and ponderous.
The USSR is a contradictory society halfway between
capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces
are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist
character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation
created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the
planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a
bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation
of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering
the situation of the toilers, promotes the swift formation of a
privileged stratum; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, the
bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste
alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the
ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the
consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development
of the accumulated contradictions can as well lead to
socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism
the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of
the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would
have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the
question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces,
both on the national and the world arena.
Doctrinaires will doubtless not be satisfied with this
hypothetical definition. They would like categorical formulae:
yes — yes and no — no. Sociological problems would certainly
be simpler, if social phenomena had always a finished
character. There is nothing more dangerous, however, than

Character of the Soviet Union Not Yet Decided 217
to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical completeness,
elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may
wholly overturn it. In our analysis, we have above all avoided
doing violence to a dynamic social formation which has had
no precedent and knows no analogies. The scientific task, as
well as the political, is not to give a finished definition to an
unfinished process, but to follow all its stages, separate its
progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their
mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development,
and find in this foresight a basis for action.

CHAPTER TEN
The USSR in the
Mirror of the New Constitution
Work "According to One's Abilities"
and Personal Property
On June 11, 1936, the Central Executive Committee
approved the draft of a new Soviet constitution which,
according to Stalin's declaration, repeated daily by the whole
press, will be "the most democratic in the world." To be sure,
the manner in which the constitution was drawn up is enough
to cause doubts as to this. Neither in the press nor at any
meetings was a word ever spoken about this great reform.
Moreover, as early as March 1, 1936, Stalin declared to the
American interviewer, Roy Howard: "We will doubtless adopt
our new constitution at the end of this year." Thus Stalin
knew with complete accuracy just when this new constitution,
about which the people at that moment knew nothing at all,
would be adopted. It is impossible not to conclude that "the
most democratic constitution in the world" was worked out
and introduced in a not quite perfectly democratic manner.
To be sure, in June the draft was submitted to "discussion"
by the people of the Soviet Union. It would be vain, however,
to seek in this whole sixth part of the globe one communist
who would dare to criticize a creation of the Central
Committee, or one nonparty citizen who would reject a
proposal from the ruling party. The discussion reduced itself
to sending resolutions of gratitude to Stalin for the "happy
219

220 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
life." The content and style of these greetings had been
thoroughly worked out under the old constitution.
The first section, entitled "Social Structure," concludes
with these words: "In the Soviet Union, the principle of
socialism is realized: From each according to his abilities, to
each according to his labor." This inwardly contradictory,
not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or not,
from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully
deliberated text of the fundamental state law. It bears
witness not only to a complete lowering of theoretical level
in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with which, as a mirror
of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It is
not difficult to guess the origin of the new "principle." To
characterize communist society, Marx employed the famous
formula: "From each according to his abilities, to each
according to his needs." The two parts of this formula are
inseparable. "From each according to his abilities," in the
communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now
ceased to be an obligation, but has remained an individual
need; society has no further use for any compulsion. Only sick
and abnormal persons will refuse to work. Working "according
to their abilities" — that is, in accord with their physical
and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves —
the members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique,
sufficiently fill up the stores of society so that society can
generously endow each and all "according to their needs,"
without humiliating control. This two-sided but indivisible
formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality,
an all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural
discipline.
The Soviet state in all its relations is far closer to a
backward capitalism than to communism. It cannot yet even
think of endowing each "according to his needs." But for this
very reason it cannot permit its citizens to work "according
to their abilities." It finds itself obliged to keep in force the
system of piecework payment, the principle of which may be
expressed thus: "Get out of everybody as much as you can,
and give him in exchange as little as possible." To be sure,
nobody in the Soviet Union works above his "abilities" in the
absolute sense of the word, that is, above his physical and

Work "According to One's Abilities" 221
psychic potential. But this is true also of capitalism. The
most brutal as well as the most refined methods of
exploitation run into limits set by nature. Even a mule under
the whip works "according to his ability," but from that it
does not follow that the whip is a socialist principle for mules.
Wage labor does not cease even under the Soviet regime to
wear the humiliating brand of slavery. Payment "according
to labor" — in reality, payment to the advantage of
"intellectual" at the expense of physical, and especially
unskilled, labor — is a source of injustice, oppression and
compulsion for the majority, of privileges and a "happy life"
for the few.
Instead of frankly acknowledging that bourgeois norms of
labor and distribution still prevail in the Soviet Union, the
authors of the constitution have cut this integral communist
principle into two halves, postponed the second half to an
indefinite future, declared the first half already realized,
mechanically hitched on to it the capitalist norm of piecework
payment, named the whole thing "the principle of socialism,"
and upon this falsification erected the structure of their
constitution!
Of greatest practical significance in the economic sphere
is undoubtedly Article X, which in contrast to most of the
other articles has quite clearly the task of guaranteeing,
against encroachment from the bureaucracy itself, the
personal property of the citizens in their articles of domestic
economy, consumption, comfort and daily life. With the
exception of "domestic economy," property of this kind,
purged of the psychology of greed and envy which clings to it,
will not only be preserved under communism but will receive
an unheard of development. It is subject to doubt, to be sure,
whether a man of high culture would want to burden himself
with a rubbish of luxuries. But he would not renounce any
one of the conquests of comfort. The first task of communism
is to guarantee the comforts of life to all. In the Soviet Union,
however, the question of personal property still wears a
petty-bourgeois and not a communist aspect. The personal
property of the peasants and the not well-off city people is the
target of outrageous arbitrary acts on the part of the
bureaucracy, which in its lower ranks frequently assures by

222 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
such means its own relative comfort. A growth of the
prosperity of the country now makes it possible to renounce
these seizures of personal property, and even impels the
government to protect personal accumulation as a stimulus
to increase the productivity of labor. At the same time — and
this is of no small importance — the protection by law of the
hut, cow and home furnishings of the peasant, worker or
clerical worker, also legalizes the town house of the bureaucrat,
his summer home, his automobile and all the other
"objects of personal consumption and comfort," appropriated
by him on the basis of the "socialist" principle: "From each
according to his abilities, to each according to his labor." In
any case, the bureaucrat's automobile will be protected by the
new fundamental law more firmly than the peasant's wagon.
The Soviets and Democracy
In the political sphere, the distinction of the new constitution
from the old is its return from the Soviet system of
elections according to class and industrial groups, to the
system of bourgeois democracy based upon the so-called
universal, equal and direct vote of an atomized population.
This is a matter, to put it briefly, of juridically liquidating the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Where there are no capitalists,
there is also no proletariat — say the creators of the new
constitution — and consequently the state itself from being
proletarian becomes national,, This argument, with all its
superficial lure, is either nineteen years late or many years
in advance of its time. In expropriating the capitalists, the
proletariat did actually enter upon its own liquidation as a
class. But from liquidation in principle to actual dissolution
in society is a road more prolonged, the longer the new state
is compelled to carry out the rudimentary work of capitalism.
The Soviet proletariat still exists as a class deeply distinct
from the peasantry, the technical intelligentsia and the
bureaucracy — and moreover as the sole class interested
right up to the end in the victory of socialism. The new
constitution wants to dissolve this class politically in "the
nation," long before it is economically dissolved in society.

The Soviets and Democracy 223
To be sure, the reformers decided after some waverings to
call the state, as formerly, Soviet. But that is only a crude
political ruse dictated by the same considerations out of
regard for which Napoleon's empire continued to be called a
republic. Soviets, by their very essence, are organs of class
rule, and cannot be anything else. The democratically elected
institutions of local self-administration are municipalities,
dumas, zemstvos, anything you will, but not Soviets. A general
state Legislative Assembly on the basis of democratic
formulas is a belated parliament (or rather its caricature),
but by no means the highest organ of the Soviets. In trying
to cover themselves with the historic authority of the soviet
system, the reformers have merely shown that the fundamentally
new direction which they are giving to the state life dare
not as yet come out under its own name.
Of itself, an equalization of the political rights of workers
and peasants might not destroy the social nature of the state,
if the influence of the proletariat upon the country were
sufficiently guaranteed by the general state of economy and
culture. The development of socialism certainly ought to
proceed in that direction. But if the proletariat, while
remaining a minority of the population, is really ceasing to
need political ascendancy in order to guarantee a socialist
course of social life, that means that the very need of state
compulsion is reducing itself to nothing, giving place to
cultural discipline. The abolition of elective inequality ought
in that case to be preceded by a distinct and obvious
weakening of the compulsive functions of the state. Of this,
however, there is not a word said either in the new
constitution or, what is more important, in life.
To be sure, the new charter "guarantees" to the citizens
the so-called freedoms of speech, press, assemblage and street
processions. But each of these guarantees has the form either
of a heavy muzzle or of shackles upon the hands and feet.
Freedom of the press means a continuation of the fierce
advance-censorship whose chains are held by the secretariat
of a Central Committee whom nobody has elected. Freedom
of Byzantine flattery is thus, of course, fully "guaranteed."
Meanwhile, the innumerable articles, speeches and letters of
Lenin, ending with his "testament," will continue under the

224 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
new constitution to be locked up merely because they rub the
present leaders the wrong way. That being the case with
Lenin, it is unnecessary to speak about other authors. The
crude and ignorant command of science, literature and art
will be wholly preserved. "Freedom of assembly" will mean,
as formerly, the obligation of certain groups of the population
to appear at meetings summoned by the authorities for the
adoption of resolutions prepared in advance. Under the new
constitution as under the old, hundreds of foreign communists,
trusting in the Soviet "right of asylum," will remain
in prisons and concentration camps for crimes against the
dogma of infallibility. In the matter of "freedom," everything
will remain as of old. Even the Soviet press does not try to sow
any illusions about that. On the contrary, the chief goal of the
new constitutional reform is declared to be a "further
reinforcement of the dictatorship." Whose dictatorship, and
over whom?
As we have already heard, the ground for political equality
was prepared by the abolition of class contradictions. It is no
longer to be a class but a "people's" dictatorship. But when
the bearer of dictatorship becomes the people, freed from class
contradictions, that can only mean the dissolution of the
dictatorship in a socialist society — and, above all, the
liquidation of the bureaucracy. Thus teaches the Marxist
doctrine. Perhaps it has been mistaken? But the very authors
of the constitution refer, although very cautiously, to the
program of the party written by Lenin Here is what the
program really says: "Deprivation of political rights, and all
other limitations of freedom whatsoever, are necessary
exclusively in the form of temporary measures... In proportion
as the objective possibility of the exploitation of man by
man disappears, the necessity of these temporary measures
will also disappear." Abandonment of the "deprivation of
political rights" is thus inseparably bound up with the
abolition of "all limitations of freedom whatsoever." The
arrival at a socialist society is characterized not only by the
fact that the peasants are put on an equality with the
workers, and that political rights are restored to the small
percentage of citizens of bourgeois origin, but above all by the
fact that real freedom is established for the whole one

The Soviets and Democracy 225
hundred percent of the population. With the liquidation of
classes, not only the bureaucracy dies away, and not only the
dictatorship, but the state itself. Let some foolhardy person,
however, try to utter even a hint in this direction: the GPU
will find adequate grounds in the new constitution to send
him to one of the innumerable concentration camps. Classes
have been abolished, the Soviets exist in name only, but the
bureaucracy still remains. The equality of the rights of
workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of
rights before the bureaucracy.
No less significant is the introduction of the secret ballot.
If you take it on faith that the new political equality
corresponds to an achieved social equality, then there
remains a puzzling question: In that case why must voting
henceforth be protected by secrecy? Whom exactly does the
population of a socialist country fear, and from whose
attempts must it be defended? The old Soviet constitution saw
in open voting, as in the limitation of elective rights, a weapon
of the revolutionary class against bourgeois and pettybourgeois
enemies. We cannot assume that now the secret
ballot is being introduced for the convenience of a counterrevolutionary
minority. It is a question, evidently, of defending
the rights of the people. But who is feared by a socialistjpeople
which has recently thrown off a tsar, a nobility and a
bourgeoisie? The sycophants do not even give a thought to
this question. Yet there is more content in it than in all the
writings of the Barbusses, the Louis Fischers, the Durantys,
the Webbs, and the like of them.
In a capitalist society, the secret ballot is meant to defend
the exploited from the terror of the exploiters. If the
bourgeoisie finally adopted such a reform, obviously under
pressure from the masses, it was only because it became
interested in protecting its state at least partially from the
demoralization introduced by itself. But in a socialist society
there can be, it would seem, no terror of the exploiters. From
whom is it necessary to defend the Soviet citizens? The
answer is clear: from the bureaucracy. Stalin was frank
enough to recognize this. To the question: Why are secret
elections necessary? he answered verbatim: "Because we
intend to give the Soviet people full freedom to vote for those

226 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
whom they want to elect." Thus humanity learns from an
authoritative source that today the "Soviet people" cannot
yet vote for those whom they want to elect. It would be hasty
to conclude from this that the new constitution will really
tender them this opportunity in the future. Just now,
however, we are occupied with another side of this problem.
Who, exactly, is this "we" who can give or not give the people
a free ballot? It is that same bureaucracy in whose name
Stalin speaks and acts. This exposure of his applies to the
ruling party exactly as it does to the state, for Stalin himself
occupies the post of general secretary with the help of a
system which does not permit members of the ruling party
to elect those whom they want. The words "we intend to give
the Soviet people" freedom of voting are incomparably more
important than the old and new constitutions taken together,
for in this incautious phrase lies the actual constitution of the
Soviet Union as it has been drawn up, not upon paper, but
in the struggle of living forces.
Democracy and the Party
The promise to give the Soviet people freedom to vote "for
those whom they want to elect" is rather a poetic image than
a political formula. The Soviet people will have the right to
choose their "representatives" only from among candidates
whom the central and local leaders present to them under the
flag of the party. To be sure, during the first period of the
Soviet era, the Bolshevik Party also exercised a monopoly.
But to identify these two phenomena would be to take
appearance for essence. The prohibition of opposition parties
was a temporary measure dictated by conditions of civil war,
blockade, intervention and famine. The ruling party, representing
in that period a genuine organization of the
proletarian vanguard, was living a full-blooded inner life: the
struggle of groups and factions to a certain degree replaced
the struggle of parties. At present, when socialism has
conquered "finally and irrevocably," the formation of factions
is punished with concentration camp or firing squad. The
prohibition of other parties, from being a temporary evil, has
been elevated into a principle. The right to occupy themselves

Democracy and the Party 227
with political questions has even been withdrawn from the
Communist Youth, and that at the very moment of publication
of the new constitution. Moreover, male and female
citizens enjoy the right to vote from the age of eighteen, but
the age limit for Communist Youth existing until 1936
(twenty-three years) is now wholly abolished. Politics is thus
once for all declared the monopoly of an uncontrolled
bureaucracy.
To a question from an American interviewer as to the role
of the party in the new constitution, Stalin answered: "As
soon as there are no classes, as soon as the barriers between
classes are disappearing ["there are no classes, the barriers
between classes — which are not! — are disappearing" —
L.T.], there remains only something in the nature of a not at
all fundamental difference between various little strata of the
socialist society. There can be no nourishing soil for the
creation of parties struggling among themselves. Where there
are not several classes, there cannot be several parties, for a
party is part of a class." Every word is a mistake and
sometimes even two! It appears from this that classes are
homogeneous; that the boundaries of classes are outlined
sharply and once for all; that the consciousness of a class
strictly corresponds to its place in society. The Marxist
teaching of the class nature of parties is thus turned into a
caricature. The dynamic of political consciousness is excluded
from the historical process in the interests of administrative
order. In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by
inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common
problems by no other means than through an inner struggle
of tendencies, groups and parties. It is possible, with certain
qualifications, to concede that "a party is part of a class."
But since a class has many "parts" — some look forward and
some back — one and the same class may create several
parties. For the same reason, one party may rest upon parts
of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding
to one class is not to be found in the whole course of
political history — provided, of course, you do not take the
police appearance for reality.
According to its social structure, the proletariat is the least
heterogeneous class of capitalist society. Nevertheless, the

228 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
presence of such "little strata" as the workers' aristocracy
and the workers' bureaucracy is sufficient for the creation of
opportunistic parties, which are converted by the course of
things into one of the weapons of bourgeois domination.
Whether, from the standpoint of Stalinist sociology, the
difference between the workers' aristocracy and the proletarian
mass is "fundamental" or only "something in the nature
of" matters not at all. But it is precisely from this difference
that the necessity arose in its time for breaking with the
Social Democracy and creating the Third International.
Even if in Soviet society "there are no classes," this society
is nevertheless incomparably more heterogeneous and complex
than the proletariat of capitalist countries, and consequently
can furnish adequate nourishing soil for several
parties. In making this imprudent excursion into the realm
of theory, Stalin proved a good deal more than he wanted to.
From his reasonings, it follows not only that there can be no
different parties in the Soviet Union, but that there cannot
even be one party. For where there are no classes, there is in
general no place for politics. Nevertheless, from this law
Stalin draws a "sociological" conclusion in favor of the party
of which he is the general secretary.
Bukharin tries to approach the problem from another side.
In the Soviet Union, he says, the question where to go —
whether back to capitalism or forward to socialism — is no
longer subject to discussion. Therefore, "partisans of the
hostile liquidated classes, organized in parties, cannot be
permitted." To say nothing of the fact that in a country of
triumphant socialism partisans of capitalism would be merely
ludicrous Don Quixotes incapable of creating a party, the
existing political differences are far from exhausted by the
alternative: to socialism or to capitalism. There are other
questions: How to advance toward socialism, with what
tempo, etc.? The choice of the road is no less important than
the choice of the goal. Who is going to choose the road? If the
nourishing soil for political parties has really disappeared,
then there is no reason to forbid them. On the contrary, it is
time, in accordance with the party program, to abolish "all
limitations of freedom whatsoever."

Democracy and the Party 229
In trying to dispel the natural doubts of his American
interviewer, Stalin advanced a new consideration: "Lists of
nominees will be presented not only by the Communist Party,
but also by all kinds of nonparty social organizations. And
we have hundreds of them.... Each one of the little strata [of
Soviet society] can have its special interests and reflect
[express?] them through the existing innumerable social
organizations." This sophism is no better than the others.
The Soviet "social" organizations — trade union, cooperative,
cultural, etc. — do not in the least represent the interests of
different "little strata," for they all have one and the same
hierarchical structure. Even in those cases where they
apparently represent mass organizations, as in the trade
unions and cooperatives, the active role in them is played
exclusively by representatives of the privileged upper groups,
and the last word remains with the "party" — that is, the
bureaucracy. The constitution merely refers the elector from
Pontius to Pilate.
The mechanics of this are expressed with absolute precision
in the very text of the fundamental law. Article 126, which is
the axis of the constitution as a political system, "guarantees
the right" to all male and female citizens to group themselves
in trade unions, cooperatives, youth, sport, defensive, cultural,
technical and scientific organizations. As to the party
— that is, the concentration of power — there it is not a
question of the right of all, but of the privilege of the minority.
"The most active and conscious [so considered, that is, from
above — L.T.] citizens from the ranks of the working class
and other strata of the toiling masses, are united in the
Communist Party ... which constitutes the guiding nucleus
of all organizations, both social and governmental." This
astoundingly candid formula, introduced into the text of the
constitution itself, reveals the whole fictitiousness of the
political role of "social organizations" — these subordinate
branches of the bureaucratic firm.
But if there is not to be a struggle of parties, perhaps the
different factions within the one party can reveal themselves
at these democratic elections? To the question of a French
journalist as to the groupings of the ruling party, Molotov
answered: "In the party... attempts have been made to create

230 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
special factions ... but it is already several years since the
situation in this matter has fundamentally changed, and the
Communist Party is actually united." This is proven best of
all by the continuous purges and the concentration camps!
After the commentary of Molotov, the mechanics of democracy
are completely clear. "What remains of the October Revolution,"
asks Victor Serge, "if every worker who permits
himself to make a demand, or express a critical judgment, is
subject to imprisonment? Oh, after that you can establish as
many secret ballots as you please!" It is true: even Hitler did
not infringe upon the secret ballot.
The reformers have dragged in theoretical arguments
about the mutual relations of classes and parties by the hair.
It is not a question of sociology, but of material interests. The
ruling party which enjoys a monopoly in the Soviet Union is
the political machine of the bureaucracy, which in reality has
something to lose and nothing more to gain. It wishes to
preserve the "nourishing soil" for itself alone.
® © ©
In a country where the lava of revolution has not yet cooled,
privileges burn those who possess them as a stolen gold watch
burns an amateur thief. The ruling Soviet stratum has
learned to fear the masses with a purely bourgeois fear. Stalin
gives the growing special privileges of the upper circles a
"theoretical" justification with the help of the Communist
International, and defends the Soviet aristocracy from
popular discontent with the help of concentration camps. In
order that this mechanism should keep on working, Stalin is
compelled from time to time to take the side of "the people"
against the bureaucracy — of course, with its tacit consent.
He finds it useful to resort to the secret ballot in order at least
partially to purge the state apparatus of the corruption which
is devouring it.
As early as 1928, Rakovsky wrote, discussing a number of
cases of bureaucratic gangsterism which were coming to the
surface: "The most characteristic and most dangerous thing
in this spreading wave of scandals is the passivity of the
masses, and the communist masses even more than the

Democracy and the Party 231
nonparty.... Owing to fear of those in power, or simply owing
to political indifference, they have passed these things by
without protest, or have limited themselves to mere grumbling."
During the eight years which have passed since that
time, the situation has become incomparably worse. The
decay of the political machine, exposing itself at every step,
has begun to threaten the very existence of the state — no
longer now as an instrument for the socialist transformation
of society, but as a source of power, income and privileges for
the ruling stratum. Stalin was compelled to give a glimpse of
this motive to the reform. "We have not a few institutions,"
he told Roy Howard, "which work badly.... Secret elections
in the Soviet Union will be a whip in the hands of the
population against badly working organs of power." A
remarkable confession! After the bureaucracy has created a
socialist society with its own hands, it feels the need ... of a
whip! That is one of the motives of the constitutional reform.
There is another no less important.
In abolishing the Soviets, the new constitution dissolves the
workers into the general mass of the population. Politically
the Soviets, to be sure, long ago lost their significance. But
with the growth of new social antagonisms and the awakening
of a new generation, they might again come to life. Most of
all, of course, are to be feared the city Soviets with the
increasing participation of fresh and demanding communist
youth. In the cities the contrast between luxury and want is
too clear to the eyes. The first concern of the Soviet aristocracy
is to get rid of worker and Red Army Soviets. With the
discontent of the scattered rural population it is much easier
to deal. The collectivized peasants can even with some success
be used against the city workers. This is not the first time
that a bureaucratic reaction has relied upon the country in its
struggle against the city.
Whatever in the new constitution is principled and
significant, and really elevates it high above the most
democratic constitutions of bourgeois countries, is merely a
watered-down paraphrase of the fundamental documents of
the October Revolution. Whatever has to do with estimating
the economic conquests, distorts reality with false perspective
and braggadocio. And finally whatever concerns freedom and

232 The USSR in the Mirror of the New Constitution
democracy is saturated through and through with the spirit
of usurpation and cynicism.
Representing, as it does, an immense step back from
socialist to bourgeois principles, the new constitution, cut and
sewn to the measure of the ruling group, follows the same
historic course as the abandonment of world revolution in
favor of the League of Nations, the restoration of the
petty-bourgeois family, the substitution of the standing army
for the militia, the resurrection of ranks and decorations, and
the growth of inequality. By juridically reinforcing the
absolutism of an "extraclass" bureaucracy, the new constitution
creates the political premises for the birth of a new
possessing class.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Whither the Soviet Union?
Bonapartism as a Regime of Crisis
The question we previously raised in the name of the
reader: "How could the ruling clique, with its innumerable
mistakes, concentrate unlimited power in its hands?" — or,
in other words: "How to explain the contradiction between
the intellectual poverty of the Thermidorians and their
material might?" — now permits a much more concrete and
categorical answer. Soviet society is not harmonious. What
is a sin for one class or stratum is a virtue for another. From
the point of view of socialist forms of society, the policy of the
bureaucracy is striking in its contradictions and inconsistencies.
But the same policy appears very consistent from the
standpoint of strengthening the power of the new commanding
stratum.
The state support of the kulak (1923-28) contained a mortal
danger for the socialist future. But then, with the help of the
petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy succeeded in binding the
proletarian vanguard hand and foot, and suppressing the
Bolshevik Opposition. This "mistake" from the point of view
of socialism was a pure gain from the point of view of the
bureaucracy. When the kulak began directly to threaten the
bureaucracy itself, it turned its weapons against the kulak.
The panic-stricken aggression against the kulak, spreading
also to the middle peasant, was no less costly to the economy
than a foreign invasion. But the bureaucracy had defended
233

234 Whither the Soviet Union?
its positions. Having barely succeeded in exterminating its
former ally, it began with all its power to cultivate a new
aristocracy. Thus undermining socialism? Of course — but
at the same time strengthening the commanding caste. The
Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready
to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the
sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an
unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges. The
more alarmed becomes the mood of the new lords of the
situation, the higher the value they set upon ruthlessness
against the least threat to their acquired rights. It is from
this point of view that the caste of parvenus selects its leaders.
Therein lies the secret of Stalin's success.
The growth of power and independence in a bureaucracy,
however, is not unlimited. There are historical factors
stronger than marshals, and even than general secretaries.
A rationalization of the economy is unthinkable without
accurate accounts. Accounts are irreconcilable with the
caprices of a bureaucracy. Concern for the restoration of a
stable ruble, which means a ruble independent of the
"leaders," is imposed upon the bureaucracy by the fact that
their autocratic rule is coming into greater and greater
contradiction with the development of the productive forces
of the country — just as absolute monarchy became in its
time irreconcilable with the development of the bourgeois
market. Money accounting, however, cannot fail to give a
more open character to the struggle of the different strata for
the distribution of the national income. The question of the
wage-scale, almost a matter of indifference during the epoch
of the food-card system, is now decisive for the workers, and
with it the question of the trade unions. The designation of
trade union officials from above is destined to meet ever
greater resistance. More than that, under piecework payment,
the worker is directly interested in a correct ordering
of the factory management. The Stakhanovists are complaining
more and more loudly of the faults of organization in
production. Bureaucratic nepotism in the matter of appointing
directors, engineers, etc., is becoming ever more intolerable.
The cooperatives and the state trade are coming much
more than formerly into dependence upon the buyer. The

Bonapartism as a Regime of Crisis 235
collective farms and the individual collective farmers are
learning to translate their dealings with the state into the
language of figures. They are growing unwilling to endure
submissively the naming from above of leaders whose sole
merit is frequently their closeness to the local bureaucratic
clique. And, finally, the ruble promises to cast a light into
that most mysterious region: the legal and illegal incomes of
the bureaucracy. Thus, in a politically strangled country,
money circulation becomes an important lever for the
mobilization of oppositional forces, and foretells the beginning
of the end of "enlightened" absolutism.
While the growth of industry and the bringing of agriculture
into the sphere of state planning vastly complicates the
tasks of leadership, bringing to the forefront the problem of
quality, bureaucratism destroys the creative initiative and
the feeling of responsibility without which there is not, and
cannot be, qualitative progress. The ulcers of bureaucratism
are perhaps not so obvious in heavy industry, but they are
devouring, together with the cooperatives, the light and
food-producing industries, the collective farms, the small local
industries — that is, all those branches of the economy which
stand nearest to the people.
The progressive role of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides
with the period devoted to introducing into the Soviet Union
the most important elements of capitalist technique. The
rough work of borrowing, imitating, transplanting and
grafting was accomplished on the bases laid down by the
revolution. There was, thus far, no question of any new word
in the sphere of technique, science or art. It is possible to build
gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern
by bureaucratic command — although, to be sure, at triple
the normal cost. But the further you go, the more the economy
runs into the problem of quality, which eludes the bureaucracy
like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though
branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a
nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of
producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative
— conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear,
lies and flattery.

236
Whither the Soviet Union?
Behind the question of quality arise more complicated and
grandiose problems which may be comprehended by the
concept of independent, technical and cultural creativity. The
ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things.
No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas
is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means
by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that
very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly
favorable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the
arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider
scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship.
Socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying
away of the state. In that simple and unshakable historical
law is contained the death sentence for the present political
regime in the Soviet Union. Soviet democracy is not the
demand of an abstract policy, still less an abstract moral. It
has become a life-and-death need of the country.
If the new state had no other interests than the interests
of society, the dying away of the function of compulsion would
gradually acquire a painless character. But the state is not
pure spirit. Specific functions have created specific organs.
The bureaucracy taken as a whole is concerned not so much
with its function as with the tribute which this function brings
in. The commanding caste tries to strengthen and perpetuate
the organs of compulsion. To make sure of its power and
income, it spares nothing and nobody. The more the course
of development goes against it, the more ruthless it becomes
toward the advanced elements of the population. Like the
Catholic Church it has put forward the dogma of infallibility
in the period of its decline, but it has raised it to a height of
which the Roman pope never dreamed.
The increasingly insistent deification of Stalin is, with all
its elements of caricature, a necessary element of the regime.
The bureaucracy has need of an inviolable superarbiter, a first
consul if not an emperor, and it raises upon its shoulders him
who best responds to its claim for lordship. That "strength
of character" of the leader which so enraptures the literary
dilettantes of the West is in reality the sum total of the
collective pressure of a caste which will stop at nothing in
defense of its position. Each one of them at his post is

Bonapartism as a Regime of Crisis 237
thinking: L'etat — c'est moi. In Stalin each one easily finds
himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his
own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy.
That is the substance of his political personality.
Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the
scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle
of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the
nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence
of classes — in reality, only the freedom necessary
for a defense of the privileged. The Stalinist regime, rising
above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and
officers' corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is
obviously a variation of Bonapartism — a Bonapartism of a
new type not before seen in history.
Caesarism arose upon the basis of a slave society shaken
by inward strife. Bonapartism is one of the political weapons
of the capitalist regime in its critical periods. Stalinism is a
variety of the same system, but upon the basis of a workers'
state torn by the antagonism between an organized and
armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses.
As history testifies, Bonapartism gets along admirably with
a Universal, and even a secret, ballot. The democratic ritual
of Bonapartism is the plebiscite. From time to time, the
question is presented to the citizens: for or against the leader?
And the voter feels the barrel of a revolver against his temple.
Since the time of Napoleon III, who now seems a provincial
dilettante, this technique has received an extraordinary
development. The new Soviet constitution which establishes
Bonapartism on a plebiscite basis is the veritable crown of
the system.
In the last analysis, Soviet Bonapartism owes its birth to
the belatedness of the world revolution. But in the capitalist
countries the same cause gave rise to fascism. We thus arrive
at the conclusion, unexpected at first glance, but in reality
inevitable, that the crushing of Soviet democracy by an
all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois
democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same
cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the
problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite
of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical

238 Whither the Soviet Union?
phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly
similarity. A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe
would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet
Bonapartism. In turning its back to the international
revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy was, from its own point
of view, right. It was merely obeying the voice of selfpreservation.
The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with "Class Enemies"
From the first days of the Soviet regime, the counterweight
to bureaucratism was the party. If the bureaucracy managed
the state, still the party controlled the bureaucracy. Keenly
vigilant lest inequality transcend the limits of what was
necessary, the party was always in a state of open or disguised
struggle with the bureaucracy. The historic role of Stalin's
faction was to destroy this bifurcation, by subjecting the party
to its own apparatus and by merging the latter with the state
apparatus. Thus was created the present totalitarian regime.
It was his doing the bureaucracy this not unimportant service
that guaranteed Stalin's victory.
During the first ten years of its struggle, the Left
Opposition did not abandon the program of ideological
conquest of the party for that of conquest of power against
the party. Its slogan was: reform, not revolution. The
bureaucracy, however, even in those times, was ready for any
revolution in order to defend itself against a democratic
reform. In 1927, when the struggle reached an especially
bitter stage, Stalin declared at a session of the Central
Committee, addressing himself to the Opposition: "Those
cadres can be removed only by civil war!" What was a threat
in Stalin's words became, thanks to a series of defeats of the
European proletariat, a historic fact. The road of reform was
turned into a road of revolution.
The continual purges of the party and the soviet organizations
have the object of preventing the discontent of the
masses from finding a coherent political expression. But
repressions do not kill thought; they merely drive it
underground. Wide circles of communists as well as nonparty
citizens, keep up two systems of thought, one official and one

The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with "Class Enemies" 239
secret, Spying and denunciations are corroding social relations
throughout. The bureaucracy unfailingly depicts its
enemies as the enemies of socialism. With the help of judicial
forgeries, which have become the normal thing, it imputes to
them any crime it finds convenient. Under threat of the firing
squad, it extracts confessions dictated by itself from the weak,
and then makes these confessions the basis for accusations
against its more steadfast enemies.
"It would be unpardonably stupid and criminal," teaches
Pravda of June 5, 1936 — commenting upon the "most
democratic constitution in the world" — notwithstanding the
abolition of classes to assume that "class forces hostile to
socialism are reconciled to their defeat.... The struggle
continues." Who are these "hostile class forces?" Pravda
answers: "Relics of counterrevolutionary groups, White
Guards of all colors, especially the Trotskyist-Zinovievist."
After the inevitable reference to "spywork, conspiracies and
terrorist activity" (by Trotskyist-Zinovievists!), the organ of
Stalin gives this promise: "We will in the future .too^beat
down and exterminate with a firm hand the e'nemres"oi^*he .
people, the Trotskyist reptiles and furies, no matter how
skillfully they disguise themselves." Such threats, daily
repeated in the Soviet press, are merely accompaniments to
the work of the GPU.
A certain Petrov, member of the party since 1918,
participant in the civil war, subsequently a Soviet agricultural
expert and member of the Right Opposition, who
escaped from exile in 1936, writing in a liberal emigre
paper, now characterizes the so-called Trotskyists as follows:
"The Lefts? Psychologically, the last revolutionists, genuine
and fervent. No gray bargaining, no compromises. Most
admirable people. But idiotic ideas ... a world conflagration
and suchlike raving." We will leave aside the question of
their "ideas." This moral and political appraisal of the Left
from their enemy on the right speaks for itself. It is these
"last revolutionists, genuine, fervent" that the colonels and
generals of the GPU are arraigning for ... counterrevolutionary
activity in the interests of imperialism.
The hysteria of bureaucratic hatred against the Bolshevik
Opposition acquires an especially sharp political meaning in

240 Whither the Soviet Union?
connection with the removal of limitations upon people of
bourgeois origin. The conciliatory decrees in relation to their
employment, work and education are based upon the
consideration that the resistance of the former ruling classes
dies away in proportion as the stability of the new order
becomes clear. 'There is now no need of these limitations,"
explained Molotov at a session of the Central Executive
Committee in January 1936. At the same moment, however,
it was revealed that the most malicious "class enemies" are
recruited from among those who struggled throughout their
whole lives for socialism, starting with the closest coworkers
of Lenin, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev. Unlike the
bourgeoisie, the "Trotskyists," according to Pravda, become
more desperate, "the more clearly the features of a nonclass
socialist society are drawn." The delirious character of this
philosophy, arising from the necessity of covering up new
relations with old formulas, cannot, of course, conceal a real
shift in the social antagonisms. On the one hand, the creation
of a caste of "gentry" opens broad opportunities for careers
to the more ambitious offspring of the bourgeoisie: there is
no risk in giving them equal rights. On the other hand, the
same phenomenon produces a sharp and extremely dangerous
discontent in the masses, and especially the worker
youths. Hence, the exterminating campaign against "furies
and reptiles."
The sword of the dictatorship, which used to fell those who
wanted to restore the privileges of the bourgeoisie, is now
directed against those who revolt against the privileges of the
bureaucracy. The blows fall not upon the class enemies of the
proletariat, but upon the proletarian vanguard. Corresponding
to this basic change in its functions, the political police,
formerly recruited from especially devoted and self-sacrificing
Bolsheviks, is now composed of the most demoralized part of
the bureaucracy.
In their persecution of revolutionists, the Thermidorians
pour out all their hatred upon those who remind them of the
past, and make them dread the future. The prisons, the
remote corners of Siberia and Central Asia, the fast
multiplying concentration camps, contain the flower of the
Bolshevik Party, the most steadfast and true. Even in. the

The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with "Class Enemies" 241
solitary confinement prisons of Siberia, the Oppositionists are
still persecuted with searches, postal blockades and hunger.
In exile wives are forcibly separated from their husbands,
with one sole purpose: to break their resistance and extract
a recantation. But even those who recant are not saved. At
the first suspicion or denunciation from some informer
against them, they are subjected to redoubled punishment.
Help given to exiles even by their relatives is prosecuted as
a crime. Mutual aid is punished as a conspiracy.
The sole means of self-defense in these conditions is the
hunger strike. The GPU answers this with forcible feeding
or with an offer of freedom to die. During these years
hundreds of Oppositionists, both Russian and foreign, have
been shot, or have died of hunger strikes, or have resorted to
suicide Within the last twelve years, the authorities have
scores of times announced to the world the final rooting out
of the Opposition. But during the "purge" of the last months
of 1935 and the first half of 1936, hundreds of thousands of
members of the party were again expelled, among them
several tens of thousands of "Trotskyists." The most active
were immediately arrested and thrown into prisons and
concentration camps. As to the rest, Stalin, through Pravda,
openly advised the local organs not to give them work. In a
country where the sole employer is the state, this measure
means death by slow starvation. The old principle: "who does
not work shall not eat," has been replaced with a new one:
"who does not obey shall not eat." Exactly how many
Bolsheviks have been expelled, arrested, exiled, or exterminated
since 1923, when the era of Bonapartism opened, we
shall find out when we go through the archives of Stalin's
political police. How many of them remain in the underground
will become known when the downfall of the bureaucracy
begins.
How much significance can twenty or thirty thousand
Oppositionists have for a party of two million? In such a
question, the mere juxtaposition of figures means nothing.
Ten revolutionists in a regiment is enough to bring it over,
in a red-hot political atmosphere, to the side of the people.
Not for nothing does the staff mortally fear tiny underground
circles, or even single individuals. This reactionary general

242 Whither the Soviet Union?
staff fear, which imbues the Stalinist bureaucracy throughout,
explains the mad character of its persecutions and its
poisonous slanders.
Victor Serge, who lived through all the stages of the
repression in the Soviet Union, has brought startling news
to Western Europe from those who are undergoing torture for
their loyalty to the revolution and hostility to its gravediggers.
"I exaggerate nothing," he writes. "I weigh every word.
I can back up every one of my statements with tragic proof
and with names. Among this mass of martyrs and protestants,
for the most part silent, one heroic minority is nearer
to me than all the others, precious for its energy, its
penetration, its stoicism, its devotion to the Bolshevism of the
great epoch. Thousands of these communists of the first hour,
comrades of Lenin and Trotsky, builders of the Soviet
Republic when Soviets still existed, are opposing the principles
of socialism to the inner degeneration of the regime, are
defending as best they can (and all they can is to agree to all
possible sacrifices) the rights of the working class.... I bring
you news of those who are locked up there. They will hold
out, whatever be necessary, to the end. Even if they do not
live to see a new revolutionary dawn.... The revolutionists of
the West can count upon them. The flame will be kept
burning, even if only in prisons. In the same way they are
counting upon you. You must — we must — defend them in
order to defend workers' democracy in the world, in order to
revive the liberating image of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, and some day restore to the Soviet Union its
moral greatness and the confidence of the workers...."
The Inevitability of a New Revolution
Discussing the dying away of the state, Lenin wrote that
the custom of observing the rules of social life can lose all
need of compulsion "if there is nothing which provokes
indignation, protest and revolt, and thus creates the necessity
for repression." The essence of the matter lies in that if. The
present regime in the Soviet Union provokes protest at every
step, a protest the more burning in that it is repressed. The
bureaucracy is not only a machine of compulsion but also a

The Inevitability of a New Revolution 243
constant source of provocation. The very existence of a greedy,
lying and cynical caste of rulers inevitably creates a hidden
indignation. The improvement of the material situation of the
workers does not reconcile them with the authorities; on the
contrary, by increasing their self-respect and freeing their
thought for general problems of politics, it prepares the way
for an open conflict with the bureaucracy.
The unremovable "leaders" love to issue statements about
the necessity of "studying," of "acquiring technique,"
"cultural self-education," and other admirable things. But
the ruling layer itself is ignorant and little cultured; it studies
nothing seriously, is disloyal and rude in social contacts. Its
pretension to patronize all spheres of social life, to take
command not only of cooperative shops but of musical
compositions, is the more intolerable for that. The Soviet
population cannot rise to a higher level of culture without
freeing itself from this humiliating subjection to a caste of
usurpers.
Will the bureaucrat devour the workers' state, or will the
working class deal with the bureaucrat? Thus stands the
question upon whose decision hangs the fate of the Soviet
Union. The vast majority of the Soviet workers are even now
hostile to the bureaucracy. The peasant masses hate them
with their healthy plebeian hatred. If in contrast to the
peasants, the workers have almost never come out on the
road of open struggle, thus condemning the protesting
villages to confusion and impotence, this is not only because
of the repressions. The workers fear lest, in throwing out the
bureaucracy, they will open the way for a capitalist restoration.
The mutual relations between state and class are much
more complicated than they are represented by the vulgar
"democrats." Without a planned economy, the Soviet Union
would be thrown back for decades. In that sense the
bureaucracy continues to fulfill a necessary function. But it
fulfills it in such a way as to prepare an explosion of the whole
system which may completely sweep out the results of the
revolution. The workers are realists. Without deceiving
themselves with regard to the ruling caste — at least with
regard to its lower tiers which stand near to them — they see
in it the watchman for the time being of a certain part of their

244 Whither the Soviet Union?
own conquests. They will inevitably drive out the dishonest,
impudent and unreliable watchman as soon as they see
another possibility. For this it is necessary that in the West
or the East another revolutionary dawn arise.
The cessation of visible political struggle is portrayed by
the friends and agents of the Kremlin as a "stabilization" of
the regime. In reality it signalizes only a temporary
stabilization of the bureaucracy, with popular discontent
driven deep. The younger generation feels with special pain
the yoke of this "enlightened absolutism," in which there is
much more absolutism than enlightenment. The increasingly
ominous vigilance of the bureaucracy against any ray of living
thought, and the unbearable tensity of the hymns of praise
addressed to a blessed providence in the person of the
"leader," testify alike to a growing separation between the
state and society. They testify to a steady intensifying of inner
contradictions, which press against the walls of the state,
seek a way out and will inevitably find one.
In a true appraisal of the situation, the not infrequent
terrorist acts against representatives of power have a very
high significance. The most notorious of these was the murder
of Kirov, a clever and unscrupulous Leningrad dictator, a
typical representative of his corporation. In themselves,
terrorist acts are least of all capable of overthrowing a
Bonapartist oligarchy. Although the individual bureaucrat
dreads the revolver, the bureaucracy as a whole is able to
exploit an act of terror for the justification of its own violence,
and incidentally to implicate in the murder its own political
enemies (the affair of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others).*
Individual terror is a weapon of impatient or despairing
individuals, belonging most frequently to the younger generation
of the bureaucracy itself. But, as was the case in tsarist
times, political murders are unmistakable symptoms of a
stormy atmosphere, and foretell the beginning of an open
political crisis.
In introducing the new constitution, the bureaucracy shows
that it feels this danger and is taking preventive measures.
* The reference here is to the January 1935 trial and not the August 1936
trial, the lines having been written prior to the latter — Trans.

The Inevitability of a New Revolution 245
However, it has happened more than once that a bureaucratic
dictatorship, seeking salvation in "liberal" reforms, has only
weakened itself. While exposing Bonapartism, the new
constitution creates at the same time a semilegal cover for
the struggle against it. The rivalry of bureaucratic cliques at
the elections may become the beginning of a broader political
struggle. The whip against "badly working organs of power"
may be turned into a whip against Bonapartism. All
indications agree that the further course of development
must inevitably lead to a clash between the culturally
developed forces of the people and the bureaucratic oligarchy.
There is no peaceful escape from this crisis. No devil ever yet
voluntarily cut off his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will
not give up its positions without a fight. The development
leads obviously to the road of revolution.
With energetic pressure from the popular masses, and the
disintegration inevitable in such circumstances of the government
apparatus, the resistance of those in power may prove
much weaker than now appears. But as to this only
hypotheses are possible. In any case, the bureaucracy can be
removed only by a revolutionary force. And, as always, there
will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack.
To prepare this and stand at the head of the masses in a
favorable historic situation — that is the task of the Soviet
section of the Fourth International. Today it is still weak and
driven underground. But the illegal existence of a party is
not nonexistence. It is only a difficult form of existence.
Repressions can prove fully effective against a class that is
disappearing from the scene — this was fully proven by the
revolutionary dictatorship of 1917 to 1923 — but violence
against a revolutionary vanguard cannot save a caste which,
if the Soviet Union is destined in general to further
development, has outlived itself.
The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against
itself will not be social, like the October Revolution of 1917.
It is not a question this time of changing the economic
foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property
with other forms. History has known in the past not only
social revolutions which substituted the bourgeois for the
feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, without

246
Whither the Soviet Union?
destroying the economic foundations of society, swept out an
old ruling upper crust (1830 and 1848 in France, February
1917 in Russia, etc.). 1
The overthrow of the Bonapartist caste
will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in itself it
will be confined within the limits of political revolution.
This is the first time in history that a state resulting from
a workers' revolution has existed. The stages through which
it must go are nowhere written down. It is true that the
theoreticians and creators of the Soviet Union hoped that the
completely transparent and flexible soviet system would
permit the state peacefully to transform itself, dissolve, and
die away, in correspondence with the stages of the economic
and cultural evolution of society. Here again, however, life
proved more complicated than theory anticipated. The
proletariat of a backward country was fated to accomplish the
first socialist revolution. For this historic privilege, it must,
according to all evidence, pay with a second supplementary
revolution — against bureaucratic absolutism. The program
of the new revolution depends to a great extent upon the
moment when it breaks out, upon the level which the country
has then attained, and to a great degree upon the international
situation. The fundamental elements of the program
are already clear, and have been given throughout the course
of this book as an objective inference from an analysis of the
contradictions of the Soviet regime.
It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for
another, but of changing the very methods of administering
the economy and guiding the culture of the country.
Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to soviet democracy.
A restoration of the right of criticism and a genuine freedom
of elections are necessary conditions for the further development
of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of
soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a
resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy
into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests
of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will
decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and
zigzags. Expensive playthings — palaces of the Soviets, new
theaters, show-off subways — will be crowded out in favor of
workers' dwellings. "Bourgeois norms of distribution" will

The Inevitability of a New Revolution 247
be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and, in step
with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist
equality. Ranks will be immediately abolished. The tinsel of
decorations will go into the melting pot. The youth will receive
the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes,
and grow up. Science and art will be freed of their chains.
And, finally, foreign policy will return to the traditions of
revolutionary internationalism.
More than ever the fate of the October Revolution is bound
up now with the fate of Europe and of the whole world. The
problems of the Soviet Union are now being decided on the
Spanish peninsula, in France, in Belgium. 2
At the moment
when this book appears, the situation will be incomparably
more clear than today, when civil war is in progress under
the walls of Madrid. If the Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with
its treacherous policy of "popular fronts," in insuring the
victory of reaction in Spain and France — and the Communist
International is doing all it can in that direction — the Soviet
Union will find itself on the edge of ruin. A bourgeois
counterrevolution rather than an insurrection of the workers
against the bureaucracy will be on the order of the day.. If, in
spite of the united sabotage of reformists and "Communist"
leaders, the proletariat of Western Europe finds the road to
power, a new chapter will open in the history of the Soviet
Union. The first victory of a revolution in Europe would pass
like an electric shock through the Soviet masses, straighten
them up, raise their spirit of independence, awaken the
traditions of 1905 and 1917, undermine the position of the
Bonapartist bureaucracy, and acquire for the Fourth International
no less significance than the October Revolution
possessed for the Third. 3
Only in that way will the first
workers' state be saved for the socialist future.

APPENDIX
"Socialism in One Country"
The reactionary tendencies of autarchy are a defense reflex
of senile capitalism to the task with which history confronts
it, that of freeing the economy from the fetters of private
property and the national state, and organizing it in a planned
manner throughout the earth.
In Lenin's "Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and
Exploited People" — presented by the Soviet of People's
Commissars for the approval of the Constituent Assembly
during its brief hours of life — the "fundamental task" of the
new regime was thus defined: "The establishment of a
socialist organization of society and the victory of socialism
in all countries," The international character of the revolution
was thus written into the basic document of the new
regime. No one at that time would have dared present the
problem otherwise! In April 1924, three months after the
death of Lenin, Stalin wrote, in his brochure of compilations
called The Foundations of Leninism: "For the overthrow of
the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are enough — to
this the history of our own revolution testifies. For the final
victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production,
the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country
like ours, are not enough — for this we must have the efforts
of the proletarians of several advanced countries." These
lines need no comment. The edition in which they were
printed, however, has been withdrawn from circulation.
The large-scale defeats of the European proletariat, and
the first very modest economic successes of the Soviet Union,
249

250 Appendix
suggested to Stalin, in the autumn of 1924, the idea that the
historic mission of the Soviet bureaucracy was to build
socialism in a single country. Around this question there
developed a discussion which to many superficial minds
seemed academic or scholastic, but which in reality reflected
the incipient degeneration of the Third International and
prepared the way for the Fourth.
Petrov, the former communist, now a White emigre,
whom we have already quoted, tells from his own memories
how fiercely the younger generation of administrators
opposed the doctrine of the dependence of the Soviet Union
upon the international revolution. "How is it possible that
we in our own country cannot contrive to build a happy life?"
If Marx has it otherwise, that means that "we are no
Marxists, we are Russian Bolsheviks — that's what!" To
these recollections of disputes in the middle of the twenties,
Petrov adds: "Today I cannot but think that the theory of
building socialism in one country was not a mere Stalinist
invention." Completely true! It expressed unmistakably the
mood of the bureaucracy. When speaking of the victory of
socialism, they meant their own victory.
In justifying his break with the Marxist tradition of
internationalism, Stalin was incautious enough to remark
that Marx and Engels were not acquainted with the law of
the uneven development of capitalism, supposedly first
discovered by Lenin. In a catalog of intellectual curiosities,
that remark ought really to occupy a foremost place
Unevenness of development permeates the whole history of
mankind, and especially the history of capitalism. The young
Russian historian and economist, Solntsev, a man of exceptional
gifts and moral qualities tortured to death in the
prisons of the Soviet bureaucracy for membership in the Left
Opposition, offered in 1926 a superlative theoretical study of
the law of uneven development in Marx. It could not, of
course, be printed in the Soviet Union. Also under the ban,
although for reasons of an opposite nature, is the work of the
long dead and forgotten German Social Democrat, Vollmar,
who as early as 1878 developed the perspective of an "isolated
socialist state" — not for Russia, but for Germany —

Appendix 251
containing references to this "law" of uneven development
which is supposed to have been unknown until Lenin.
"Socialism unconditionally assumes economically developed
relations," wrote Georg Vollmar, "and if the question
were limited to them alone, socialism ought to be strongest
where the economic development is highest. But the thing
does not stand that way at all. England is undoubtedly the
most developed country economically, yet we see that
socialism plays there a very secondary role, while in
economically less developed Germany, socialism has already
such power that the entire old society no longer feels stable."
Referring to the multitude of historic factors which determine
the course of events, Vollmar continued: "It is clear that with
an interrelation of such innumerable forces the development
of any general human movement could not, and cannot, be
identical with regard to time and form even in two countries,
to say nothing of all.... Socialism obeys the same law.... The
assumption of a simultaneous victory of socialism in all
cultured countries is absolutely ruled out, as is also, and for
the same reasons, the assumption that all the rest of the
civilized states will immediately and inevitably imitate the
example of a socialistically organized state...." Thus —
Vollmar concludes — "we arrive at the isolated socialist state,
concerning which I trust I have proven that it is, although
not the only possibility, nevertheless the greatest probability."
In this work, written when Lenin was eight years old,
the law of uneven development receives a far more correct
interpretation than that to be found among the Soviet
epigones, beginning with the autumn of 1924. We must
remark, incidentally, that in this part of his investigation,
Vollmar, a very second-rate theoretician, is only paraphrasing
the thoughts of Engels — to whom, we are told, the law of the
unevenness of capitalist development remained "unknown."
"The isolated socialist state" has long ceased to be a
historic hypothesis, and become a fact — in Russia to be sure,
not Germany. But this very fact of isolation is also a precise
expression of the relative strength of world capitalism, and
the relative weakness of socialism. From an isolated "socialist"
state to a socialist society once for all done with the state

252 Appendix
remains a long historic road, and this road exactly coincides
with the road of international revolution.
Beatrice and Sidney Webb on their part assure us that
Marx and Engels did not believe in the possibility of building
an isolated socialist society only because neither of them "had
ever dreamt" of such a powerful weapon as the monopoly of
foreign trade. One can hardly read these lines from the aged
authors without embarrassment. The taking over by the state
of commercial banks and companies, railroads and mercantile
marine is as necessary a measure of the socialist revolution
as the nationalization of the means of production, including
the means employed in the export branches of industry. The
monopoly of foreign trade is nothing but a concentration in
the hands of the state of the material instruments of export
and import. To say that Marx and Engels "never dreamt" of
the monopoly of foreign trade is to say that they never dreamt
of the socialist revolution. To complete the picture, we may
note that in the work of the above-quoted Vollmar, the
monopoly of foreign trade is presented, quite correctly, as one
of the most important instruments of the "isolated socialist
state." Marx and Engels must then have learned about this
secret from Vollmar, had he himself not learned about it
earlier from them.
The "theory" of socialism in one country — a "theory"
never expounded, by the way, or given any foundation, by
Stalin himself — comes down to the sufficiently sterile and
unhistoric notion that, thanks to the natural riches of the
country, a socialist society can be built within the geographic
confines of the Soviet Union. With the same success you might
affirm that socialism could triumph if the population of the
earth were a twelfth of what it is. In reality, however, the
purpose of this new theory was to introduce into the social
consciousness a far more concrete system of ideas, namely:
the revolution is wholly completed; social contradictions will
steadily soften; the kulak will gradually grow into socialism;
the development as a whole, regardless of events in the
external world, will preserve a peaceful and planned character.
Bukharin, in attempting to give some foundation to the
theory, declared it unshakably proven that "we shall not
perish owing to class differences within our country and our

Appendix 253
technical backwardness, that we can build socialism even on
this destitute technical basis, that this growth of socialism
will be many times slower, that we will crawl with a tortoise
tempo, and that nevertheless we are building this socialism,
and we will build it." We remark the formula: "Build
socialism even on a destitute technical basis," and we recall
once more the genial intuition of the young Marx: with a low
technical basis "only want will be generalized, and with want
the struggle for necessities begins again, and all the old crap
must revive."
In April 1926, at a plenum of the Central Committee, the
following amendment to the theory of the tortoise tempo was
introduced by the Left Opposition: "It would be a fundamental
error to think that in a capitalist environment we can go
towards socialism at an arbitrary tempo. Our further
approach to socialism will be ensured only on condition that
the distance separating our industry from the advanced
capitalist industry shall not increase, but clearly and palpably
decrease." Stalin with good reason declared this amendment
a "masked" attack upon the theory of socialism in one
country, and categorically rejected the very inclination to link
up the tempo of domestic construction with the conditions of
international development. Here is what he said verbatim,
according to the stenographic report of the plenum: "Whoever
drags in here an international factor does not understand the
very form of the question. He is either confused in the matter
because he does not understand it, or he is consciously trying
to confuse the question." The amendment of the Opposition
was rejected.
But the illusion of a socialism to be built at a tortoise
tempo, on a destitute basis in an environment of powerful
enemies, did not long withstand the blows of criticism. In
November of the same year, the fifteenth party conference,
without a word of preparation in the press, acknowledged
that it would be necessary "in a relatively [?] minimal historic
period to catch up to and then surpass the level of industrial
development of the advanced capitalist countries." The Left
Opposition at any rate was here "surpassed." But in
advancing this slogan — catch up to and surpass the whole
world "in a minimal period" — yesterday's theorists of the

254 Appendix
tortoise tempo had fallen captive to that same "international
factor" of which the Soviet bureaucracy had such a
superstitious fear. Thus in the course of eight months, the
first and purest version of the Stalinist theory was liquidated.
Socialism must inevitably "surpass" capitalism in all
spheres — wrote the Left Opposition in a document illegally
distributed in March 1927 — "but at present the question is
not of the relation of socialism to capitalism in general, but
of the economic development of the Soviet Union in relation
to Germany, England and the United States. What is to be
understood by the phrase 'minimal historic period'? A whole
series of future five-year plans will leave us far from the level
of the advanced countries of the West. What will be happening
in the capitalist world during this time?... If you admit the
possibility of its flourishing anew for a period of decades, then
the talk of socialism in our backward country is pitiable tripe.
Then it will be necessary to say that we were mistaken in our
appraisal of the whole epoch as an epoch of capitalist decay.
Then the Soviet Republic will prove to have been the second
experiment in proletarian dictatorship since the Paris
Commune, broader and more fruitful, but only an experiment...
Is there, however, any serious ground for such a
decisive reconsideration of our whole epoch, and of the
meaning of the October Revolution as a link in the
international revolution? No!... In finishing to a more or less
complete extent their period of reconstruction [after the war]
... the capitalist countries are reviving, and reviving in an
incomparably sharper form, all the old prewar contradictions,
domestic and international. This is the basis of the proletarian
revolution. It is a fact that we are building socialism. A
greater fact, however, and not a less — since the whole in
general is greater than the part — is the preparation of a
European and world revolution. The part can conquer only
together with the whole.... The European proletariat needs a
far shorter period for its takeoff to the seizure of power than
we need to catch up technically with Europe and America....
We must, meanwhile, systematically narrow the distance
separating our productivity of labor from that of the rest of
the world. The more we advance, the less danger there is of
possible intervention by low prices, and consequently by

Appendix 255
armies The higher we raise the standard of living of the
workers and peasants, the more truly shall we hasten the
proletarian revolution in Europe, the sooner will that
revolution enrich us with world technique, and the more truly
and genuinely will our socialist construction advance as a
part of European and world construction," This document,
like the others, remained without answer — unless you
consider expulsions from the party and arrests an answer to
it.
After the abandonment of the idea of a tortoise tempo, it
became necessary to renounce the idea bound up with it of
the kulak's growing into socialism. The administrative
extermination of kulakism, however, gave the theory of
socialism in one country new nourishment. Once classes are
"fundamentally" abolished, this means that socialism is
"fundamentally" achieved (1931). In essence, this formula
restored the conception of a socialist society built upon "a
destitute basis." It was in those days, as we remember, that
an official journalist explained that the absence of milk for
babies is due to a lack of cows and not the shortcomings of the
socialist system.
A concern for the productivity of labor, however, prevented
any long resting upon these sedative formulae of 1931, which
had to serve as moral compensation for the devastations
effected by complete collectivization. "Some think," Stalin
unexpectedly announced in connection with the Stakhanov
movement, "that socialism can be strengthened by way of a
certain material equalization of people on the basis of a
pauper life. That is not true.... In reality, socialism can
conquer only on the basis of a high productivity of labor,
higher than under capitalism." Completely correct! However,
at the very same time, the new program of the Communist
Youth — adopted in April 1936 at the same congress which
withdrew from the Communist Youth its last remnant of
political rights — defined the socialist character of the Soviet
Union in the following categoric terms: "The whole national
economy of the country has become socialist." Nobody
bothers to reconcile these contradictory conceptions. Each one
is put into circulation in accord with the demands of the
moment. It does not matter, for no one dares to criticize.

256 Appendix
The spokesman at the congress explained the very
necessity of the new program for the Communist Youth in the
following words: "The old program contains a deeply mistaken
anti-Leninist assertion to the effect that Russia 'can
arrive at socialism only through a world proletarian revolution.'
This point of the program is basically wrong. It reflects
Trotskyist views" — that is, the same views that Stalin was
still defending in April 1924. Aside from that, it remains
unexplained how a program written in 1921 by Bukharin, and
carefully gone over by the Politburo with the participation of
Lenin, could turn out after fifteen years to be "Trotskyist,"
and have to be revised to an exactly opposite effect! But logical
arguments are powerless where it is a question of interests.
Having won their independence from the proletariat of their
own country, the bureaucracy cannot recognize the dependence
of the Soviet Union upon the world proletariat.
The law of uneven development brought it about that the
contradiction between the technique and property relations
of capitalism shattered the weakest link in the world chain.
Backward Russian capitalism was the first to pay for the
bankruptcy of world capitalism. The law of uneven development
is supplemented throughout the whole course of history
by the law of combined development. The collapse of the
bourgeoisie in Russia led to the proletarian dictatorship —
that is, to a backward country's leaping ahead of the advanced
countries. However, the establishment of socialist forms of
property in the backward country came up against the
inadequate level of technique and culture. Itself born of the
contradiction between high world productive forces and
capitalist forms of property, the October Revolution produced
in its turn a contradiction between low national productive
forces and socialist forms of property.
To be sure, the isolation of the Soviet Union did not have
those immediate dangerous consequences which might have
been feared. The capitalist world was too disorganized and
paralyzed to unfold to the full extent its potential power. The
"breathing spell" proved longer than a critical optimism had
dared to hope. However, isolation and the impossibility of
using the resources of the world economy even upon
capitalistic bases (the amount of foreign trade has decreased

Appendix 257
from 1913 four to five times) entailed, along with enormous
expenditures upon military defense, an extremely disadvantageous
allocation of productive forces, and a slow raising of
the standard of living of the masses. But a more malignant
product of isolation and backwardness has been the octopus
of bureaucratism.
The juridical and political standards set up by the
revolution exercised a progressive action upon the backward
economy, but on the other hand they themselves felt the
lowering influence of that backwardness. The longer the
Soviet Union remains in a capitalist encirclement, the deeper
runs the process of the degeneration of the social fabric. A
prolonged isolation would inevitably end not in national
communism, but in a restoration of capitalism.
If the bourgeoisie cannot peacefully grow into a socialist
democracy, it is likewise true that the socialist state cannot
peacefully grow into the world capitalist system. On the
historic order of the day stands not the peaceful socialist
development of "one country," but a long series of world
disturbances: wars and revolutions. Disturbances are inevitable
also in the domestic life of the Soviet Union. If the
bureaucracy was compelled in its struggle for a planned
economy to dekulakize the kulak, the working class will be
compelled in its struggle for socialism to debureaucratize the
bureaucracy. On the tomb of the latter will be inscribed the
epitaph: "Here lies the theory of socialism in one country."
The "Friends" of the Soviet Union
For the first time a powerful government provides a
stimulus abroad not to the respectable right, but to the left
and extreme left press. The sympathies of the popular masses
for the great revolution are being very skillfully canalized and
sluiced into the mill of the Soviet bureaucracy. The "sympathizing"
Western press is imperceptibly losing the right to
publish anything which might aggrieve the ruling stratum of
the USSR. Books undesirable to the Kremlin are maliciously
passed over in silence. Noisy and mediocre apologists are
published in many languages. We have avoided quoting
throughout this work the specific productions of the official

258 Appendix
"friends," preferring the crude originals to the stylized
foreign paraphrases. However, the literature of the "friends,"
including that of the Communist International, the most
crass and vulgar part of it, presents in cubic meters an
impressive magnitude, and plays not the last role in politics.
We can't help but devote a few concluding pages to it.
At present the chief contribution to the treasury of thought
is declared to be the Webbs' book, Soviet Communism. Instead
of relating what has been achieved and in what direction the
achieved is developing, the authors expound for twelve
hundred pages what is contemplated, indicated in the
bureaus, or expounded in the laws. Their conclusion is: When
the projects, plans and laws are carried out, then communism
will be realized in the Soviet Union. Such is the content of
this depressing book, which rehashes the reports of Moscow
bureaus and the anniversary articles of the Moscow press.
Friendship for the Soviet bureaucracy is not friendship for
the proletarian revolution, but, on the contrary, insurance
against it. The Webbs are, it is true, ready to acknowledge
that the communist system will sometime or other spread to
the rest of the world. "But how, when, where, with what
modifications, and whether through violent revolution, or by
peaceful penetration, or even by conscious imitation, are
questions we cannot answer." This diplomatic refusal to
answer — or, in reality, this unequivocal answer — is in the
highest degree characteristic of the "friends," and tells the
actual price of their friendship. If, for example, everybody had
thus answered the question of revolution before 1917, when
it was infinitely harder to answer, there would have been no
Soviet state in the world, and the British "friends" would
have had to expend their fund of friendly emotion upon other
objects.
The Webbs speak about the vanity of hoping for a European
revolution in the near future as of something which goes
without saying and they gather from that a comforting proof
of the correctness of the theory of socialism in one country.
With the authority of people for whom the October Revolution
was a complete, and moreover an unpleasant, surprise, they
give us lessons in the necessity of building a socialist society
within the borders of the Soviet Union in the absence of other

Appendix 259
perspectives. It is difficult to refrain from an impolite
movement of the shoulders! In reality, our dispute with the
Webbs is not as to the necessity of building factories in the
Soviet Union and employing mineral fertilizers on the
collective farms, but as to whether it is necessary to prepare
a revolution in Great Britain and how it shall be done. Upon
that question the learned sociologues answer: "We do not
know." They consider the very question, of course, in conflict
with "science."
Lenin was passionately hostile to the conservative bourgeois
who imagines himself a socialist, and, in particular, to
the British Fabians. By the biographical glossary attached to
his "Works," it is not difficult to find out that this attitude
to the Webbs throughout his whole active life remained one
of unaltered fierce hostility. In 1907 he first wrote of the
Webbs as "obtuse eulogists of English philistinism," who "try
to represent Chartism, the revolutionary epoch of the English
labor movement, as mere childishness." Without Chartism,
however, there would have been no Paris Commune. Without
both, there would have been no October Revolution. The
Webbs found in the Soviet Union only an administrative
mechanism and bureaucratic plans. They found neither
Chartism nor Communism nor the October Revolution. A
revolution remains for them today, as before, an alien and
hostile matter, if not indeed "mere childishness."
In his polemics against opportunists, Lenin did not trouble
himself, as is well known, with the manners of the salon. But
his abusive epithets ("lackeys of the bourgeoisie," "traitors,"
"boot-lick souls") expressed during many years a carefully
weighed appraisal of the Webbs as the evangels of Fabianism,
that is, of traditional respectability and worship for what
exists. There can be no talk of any sudden change in the views
of the Webbs during recent years. These same people who
during the war supported their own bourgeoisie, and who
accepted later at the hands of the King the title of Lord
Passfield, have renounced nothing, and changed not at all,
in adhering to communism in a single, and moreover a
foreign, country. Sidney Webb was colonial minister — that
is, chief jail-keeper of British imperialism — in the very
period of his life when he was drawing near to the Soviet

260 Appendix
bureaucracy, receiving material from its bureaus, and on that
basis working upon this two-volume compilation.
As late as 1923, the Webbs saw no great difference between
Bolshevism and tsarism (see, for example, The Decay of
Capitalist Civilization, 1923). Now, however, they have fully
recognized the "democracy" of the Stalin regime. It is
needless to seek any contradiction here. The Fabians were
indignant when the revolutionary proletariat withdrew
freedom of activity from "educated" society, but they think
it quite in the order of things when the bureaucracy
withdraws freedom of activity from the proletariat. Has not
this always been the function of the Labourite workers'
bureaucracy? The Webbs swear, for example, that criticism
in the Soviet Union is completely free. A sense of humor is
not one of the features of these people. They refer with
complete seriousness to that notorious "self-criticism" which
is enacted as a part of one's official duties, and the direction
of which, as well as its limits, can always be accurately
foretold.
Naivete? Neither Engels nor Lenin considered Sidney
Webb naive. Respectability rather. After all, it is a question
of an established regime and of hospitable hosts. The Webbs
are extremely disapproving in their attitude to a Marxian
criticism of what exists. They consider themselves called to
preserve the heritage of the October Revolution from the Left
Opposition. For the sake of completeness, we observe that in
its day the Labour Government in which Lord Passfield
(Sidney Webb) held a portfolio refused the author of this work
a visa to enter Great Britain. Thus Sidney Webb, who in those
very days was working on his book about the Soviet Union,
is theoretically defending the Soviet Union from being
undermined, but practically he is defending the Empire of
His Majesty. Injustice be it said that in both cases he remains
true to himself.
© © ©
For many of the petty bourgeoisie who master neither pen
nor brush, an officially registered "friendship" for the Soviet
Union is a kind of certificate of higher spiritual interests.

Appendix 261
Membership in Freemason lodges or pacifist clubs has much
in common with membership in the society of "Friends of the
Soviet Union," for it makes it possible to live two lives at
once: an everyday life in a circle of commonplace interests,
and a holiday life elevating to the soul. From time to time the
"friends" visit Moscow. They note down in their memory
tractors, nursery schools, Pioneers, parades, parachute girls
— in a word, everything except the new aristocracy. The best
of them close their eyes to this out of a feeling of hostility
toward capitalist reaction. Andre Gide frankly acknowledges
this: "The stupidity and dishonesty of attacks against the
Soviet Union have brought it about that we now defend it
with a certain obstinacy." But the stupidity and dishonesty
of one's enemies is no justification for one's own blindness.
The working masses, at any rate, have need of clearsighted
friends.
The epidemic sympathy of bourgeois radicals and socialistic
bourgeois for the ruling stratum of the Soviet Union has
causes that are not unimportant. In the circle of professional
politicians, notwithstanding all differences of program, there
is always a predominance of those friendly to such "progress"
as is already achieved or can easily be achieved. There are
incomparably more reformers in the world than revolutionists,
more accommodationists than irreconcilables. Only in
exceptional historic periods, when the masses come into
movement, do the revolutionists emerge from their isolation,
and the reformers become more like fish out of water.
In the milieu of the present Soviet bureaucracy, there is
not a person who did not, prior to April 1917, and even
considerably later, regard the idea of a proletarian dictatorship
in Russia as fantastic. (At that time this "fantasy" was
called ... Trotskyism.) The older generation of the foreign
"friends" for decades regarded as realpolitik the Russian
Mensheviks, who stood for a "people's front" with the liberals
and rejected the idea of dictatorship as arrant madness. To
recognize a dictatorship when it is already achieved and even
bureaucratically befouled — that is a different matter; these
"friends" are precisely equal to such a task. They now not
only pay their respects to the Soviet state, but even defend it
against its enemies — not so much, to be sure, against those

262 Appendix
who yearn for the past, as against those who are preparing
the future. Where these "friends" are active patriots, as in
the case of the French, Belgian, English and other reformists,
it is convenient to them to conceal their solidarity with the
bourgeoisie under a concern for the defense of the Soviet
Union. Where, on the other hand, they have unwillingly
become defeatists, as in the case of the German and Austrian
social patriots of yesterday, they hope that the alliance of
France with the Soviet Union will help them deal with Hitler
or Schussnigg. Leon Blum, who was an enemy of Bolshevism
in its heroic epoch, and opened the pages of Le Populaire for
the express purpose of publicly slandering the October
Revolution, would now not print a line exposing the real
crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy. Just as the Biblical Moses,
thirsting to see the face of Jehovah, was permitted to make
his bow only to the rearward parts of the divine anatomy, so
the honorable reformists, worshipers of the accomplished fact,
are capable of knowing and acknowledging in a revolution
only its meaty bureaucratic posterior.
The present communist "leaders" belong in essence to the
same type, After a long series of monkey jumps and grimaces,
they have suddenly discovered the enormous advantages of
opportunism, and have seized upon it with the freshness
proper to that ignorance which has always distinguished
them. Their slavish and not always disinterested kowtowing
to the upper circles in the Kremlin alone renders them
absolutely incapable of revolutionary initiative. They answer
critical arguments in no other way than with snarling and
barking; and, moreover, under the whip of the boss they wag
their tails. This most unattractive aggregation, which in the
hour of danger will scatter to the four winds, considers us
flagrant "counterrevolutionists." What of it? History, in spite
of its austere character, cannot get along without an
occasional farce.
The more honest or open-eyed of the "friends," at least
when speaking tete-a-tete, concede that there are spots
on the Soviet sun. But substituting a fatalistic for a dialectic
analysis, they console themselves with the thought that "a
certain" bureaucratic degeneration in the given conditions
was historically inevitable. Even so! The resistance to this

Appendix 263
degeneration also has not fallen from the sky. Necessity has
two ends: the reactionary and the progressive. History
teaches that persons and parties which drag at the opposite
ends of necessity turn out in the long run on opposite sides
of the barricade
The final argument of the "friends" is that reactionaries
will seize upon any criticism of the Soviet regime. That is
indubitable! We may assume that they will try to get
something for themselves out of the present book. When was
it ever otherwise? The Communist Manifesto spoke scornfully
of the fact that the feudal reaction tried to use against
liberalism the arrows of socialist criticism. That did not
prevent revolutionary socialism from following its own road.
It will not prevent us either. The press of the Communist
International, it is true, goes so far as to assert that our
criticism is preparing ... military intervention against the
Soviets. This obviously means that the capitalist governments,
learning from our works of the degeneration of the
Soviet bureaucracy, will immediately equip a punitive
expedition to avenge the trampled principles of October! The
polemists of the Communist International are not armed with
rapiers but wagon tongues, or some still less nimble
instrument. In reality, Marxist criticism, which calls things
by their real names, can only increase the conservative credit
of Soviet diplomacy in the eyes of the bourgeoisie.
It is otherwise with the working class and its sincere
champions among the intelligentsia. Here our work may
actually cause doubts and evoke distrust — not of the
revolution, but of its usurpers. But that is the very goal we
have set ourselves. The motor force of progress is truth and
not lies.

Notes
Chapter One. What Has Been Achieved
1. In November 1918 the German emperor, Wilhelm II, was overthrown.
Workers' and soldiers' committees took power in a number
of cities and the Social Democratic Party formed a government, The
leaders of this party, however, who had supported the imperialist
war and gone over openly to their own bourgeoisie, now sought only
to curb the revolution in order to preserve capitalism. The workers'
committees were stripped of their power and an uprising launched
by the workers in Berlin in January 1919 was suppressed, The
revolutionary leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were
assassinated with the complicity of the Social Democratic traitors.
Chapter Two. Economic Development and
the Zigzags of the Leadership
1. Trotsky is here referring to himself,
2 The Dneprostroi hydroelectric station was one of the early heavy
engineering projects undertaken by the Soviet state Constructed
on the Dneper River in the Ukraine between 1927 and 1932, it was
the largest in Europe when it was built, Trotsky, at the time
president of the Commission on Electrification, was an enthusiastic
supporter of the project Stalin, on the other hand, opposed it.
Trotsky refers here to Stalin's ridicule expressed during the Central
Committee debate on the issue. This did not prevent Stalin from
later attempting to take credit for its construction and using it as a
model for parts of his later industrialization program, for example,
the Magnitogorsk steel works in the Urals The Dneprostroi station
was totally destroyed by the Nazis in 1942 and was rebuilt from
1944 to 1950.
3. Mutatis mutandis, (Lat.) Taking into consideration the necessary
differences in detail (when making a comparison).
265

266 Notes
Chapter Five. The Soviet Thermidor
1, Bulgaria: In June 1923, the regime of the peasant leader Stambuliski
was overthrown by the fascist leader Tsankov. The Communist
Party abstained during the peasant uprising which this provoked,
characterizing the situation as a struggle between bourgeois cliques.
In the face of this passivity, a mood of impatience developed in a
section of the party membership. Then Tsankov launched an attack
on the Communist Party, forcing it underground. The crisis in the
party was exacerbated by the fact that the leadership, under
Kolarov, the official representative of the Bulgarian Communists in
Moscow, denied that the party had suffered any defeat. The
adventurist mood grew, with some members resorting to acts of
terrorism. The leadership then declared for an insurrection, but
proceeded without the necessary political preparation. The attempt,
when it took place in September, was defeated. Workers in only a
few isolated villages took part. The defeat was followed by systematic
repression in which the party, formerly one of the strongest in the
Comintern, was virtually destroyed. Within the party, great
opposition to the Kolarov-Dimitrov leadership developed.
Germany (1923): Trotsky wrote: "The Bulgarian revolution ought
to have been a prelude to the German revolution. Unfortunately,
the bad Bulgarian prelude led to an even worse sequel in Germany
itself (The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25 [New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1975], p. 201). Germany in 1923 was experiencing
a worsening economic crisis. Under the terms of the predatory
Versailles Treaty, dictated by the victorious imperialist powers
at the end of World War I, Germany was obliged to pay a heavy
burden of financial reparations. When Germany fell behind on
these payments, French troops occupied the mining and industrial
area of the Ruhr valley. A mass movement developed against the
treaty, with the rapidly growing Communist Party at its head.
An exceptionally favorable opportunity for the seizure of
power, however, was missed in October when the German party
leaders panicked and cancelled the planned insurrection at the
last minute. An isolated uprising took place in Hamburg, where
the leadership was not informed of the cancellation in time.
Stalin and Zinoviev, then leading the Comintern, played a major
part in this debacle. Convinced that any attempt at insurrection
was doomed to defeat, they urged the Germans to hold back. The
German Communist Party leader Brandler became the scapegoat for
the defeat.
Estonia: An adventurist attempt was made to seize power in
Estonia in 1924. On December 1, an insurrection was begun in the
capital of Estonia, then known by its German name of Reval (today
called Tallinn), by some 200 armed Communists. It was put down
within hours.
England: The British General Strike of May 1926 was betrayed
by the reformist leaders of the Trades Union Council The
Comintern, under the leadership of Stalin, was complicit in this
betrayal, as it had allied itself with the "lefts" in the TUC

Notes 267
bureaucracy through the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee.
This committee, formed in May 1925, served to provide the
reformists with protection against criticism from the left. Trotsky
had warned about the conciliationist line in relation to the
Anglo-Russian Committee, and demanded the dissolution of the
Committee after the betrayal of the general strike, but it was
dissolved only in September 1927 when the reformists, no longer
seeking a left cover, withdrew.
Poland: In May 1926, Josef Pilsudski (1867-1935), a Polish
nationalist, overthrew the Wito government, which was attempting
to introduce a fascist regime. Under the leadership of Stalin, the
Comintern had converted the struggle of the Communist Party to
secure the support of the peasantry for the proletarian insurrection
into "the policy of dissolving the proletariat into the petty
bourgeoisie" (Trotsky). The disorientation which this produced in
the Polish Communist Party was demonstrated when it supported
Pilsudski's coup on the grounds that it represented the movement
of the peasantry and would remove the threat of fascism. On taking
power, Pilsudski rejected the Social Democrats' proposal for a left
coalition government and established his own dictatorship. Trotsky
characterized Pilsudskism as a form of fascism. (See "Pilsudskism,
Fascism, and the Character of Our Epoch," Writings of Leon Trotsky
[1932] [New York: Pathfinder, 1973], pp. 156.65).
China: The bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, under the leadership
of Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), carried out a massacre of the
revolutionary proletariat in Shanghai in April 1927. On the
instructions of the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party had
entered the Kuomintang in 1923 Chiang had been hailed as a
revolutionary by the leaders of the Comintern, who made him an
honorary member of the Executive Committee of the Third
International.
Germany and Austria (1932-33): In Germany the Communist
Party, under the leadership of the Comintern, pursued an ultraleft
policy of denouncing the Social Democrats as "social fascists" and
kept the working class divided, thus allowing Hitler to come to power
in 1933. This was part of the suicidal ultraleftism decreed as an
international policy and imposed on all the parties of the Comintern
during the so-called Third Period. The German working class, held
back by its leadership, was crushed without a struggle, signalling
the collapse of the Third International and the going over of the
Stalinist leadership to a policy of conscious counterrevolution.
The Austrian elections in 1932, held under conditions of great
economic and financial crisis, brought to power the right-wing
Christian Socialist government of Engelbert Dolfuss, who ruled by
decree after March 1933. Class conflict reached the level of armed
struggle on February 12, 1934, when four days of fighting ended in
a victory for Dolfuss's Bonapartist regime.
2. Trotsky develops this point further in his article "The Workers'
State, Thermidor and Bonapartism," Writings [1934-35] [New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1972], pp.. 175-76),

268 Notes
3. In March 1921, the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base near
Petrograd (now Leningrad) mutinied against the Soviet regime,
opposing many of the harsh measures necessitated by the civil war.
The Bolsheviks were obliged to suppress the uprising, which even
had the support of a section of the party. The Kronstadt rebellion
was one factor in the Bolsheviks' decision to implement the New
Economic Policy, in an effort to repair the strained alliance between
the proletariat and the peasantry
4. This was written in 1936. Bukharin, although earlier demoted and
disgraced, had been allowed to resume activity and was named editor
of Izvestia in 1933. In 1937, however, he was expelled from the party,
and he was a defendant in the last of the Moscow Trials, in 1938,
after which he was shot.
5 "Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohltat — Plage": Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749-1832), Faust, Part I.
Chapter Eight. Foreign Policy and the Army
1. Brest-Litovsk Treaty: The Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with
Germany on March 3, 1918 in this Russian town near the Polish
border. Some of the negotiations were conducted by Trotsky. The
terms of the treaty were extremely disadvantageous to the Soviet
Union. The party was deeply divided over the signing. Lenin was
in favor of signing immediately; Trotsky argued for declaring the
war at an end but refusing to sign, and for prolonging the
negotiations in the expectation of a revolutionary rising in Germany;
Bukharin led a group opposed to signing in principle and in favor
of resuming the war with Germany. When the German army
resumed its attack on the Soviet Union, the majority of the Central
Committee supported signing the treaty. Trotsky abstained from the
voting so that Lenin's position could be carried. The treaty was
annulled in 1919 after the defeat of Germany.
The treaty with Estonia in 1920 and the Riga peace with Poland
in October 1920 were two of the treaties signed by the Bolsheviks
at the conclusion of the civil war. Peace talks were opened with
Estonia on December 5, 1919, and a treaty was signed in Yuriev
(Tarty) on February 2,1920.
The Riga peace ceded large parts of Byelorussia and the Ukraine
to Poland, which invaded the Ukraine in March 1920. The Red
Army had been able to repulse the attack and pursue the offensive
to the outskirts of Warsaw, but they were then driven back The
actual date of the signing of the treaty was March 18,1921.
The treaty of Rapallo: Germany became the first country to
recognize the Soviet Union officially in a treaty signed in April 1922.
2 The section of the Trans-Siberian Railroad that went through
Manchuria to Vladivostok was sold by Stalin in 1935 to the Japanese
puppet government of Manchukuo. Trotsky opposed the handing
over of "so important an instrument as the Chinese Eastern from
the hands of the Russian Revolution to those of the Chinese

Notes 269
counterrevolution" (Problems of the Chinese Revolution [London:
New Park Publications, 1969], p.. 187).
3 A nonaggression pact between France and the Soviet Union was
announced in Moscow on May 2, 1935. Trotsky called Stalin's open
repudiation of revolutionary internationalism "the death certificate
for the Third International "
4. The position of French imperialism was such that in March 1936,
when Hitler used the Franco-Soviet pact as an excuse to remilitarize
the Rhineland, France was unable to take any effective retaliatory
action
5. The Magna Carta (Great Charter) guaranteed certain civil and
political rights to the English people. King John was forced to sign
it by the English barons in 1215. By the "Magna Carta of
Bolshevism" Trotsky means the basic principles on which the
Bolsheviks were founded and fought He is contrasting the entrance
of the Soviet regime into the League of Nations with the attitude of
Lenin, who referred to it as a "thieves' kitchen,."
6. The Soviet Union continued to supply fascist Italy with oil even after
it had invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935.
7 Austria: This is another reference to the defeat of the Austrian
working class in 1934. See note 1, chapter 5.
Balkans: The Communist parties were outlawed and suppressed
in one Balkan country after another during the 1930s,
France and Spain: In 1936 popular front governments came to
power in France and Spain, with the political support of the Stalinist
parties. In Spain the new government was elected on February 16.
The popular front electoral alliance was made up of the bourgeois
parties Republican Left, Republican Union and Catalan nationalists,
together with the Socialist and Communist Parties. In France the
alliance was between the bourgeois Radical Party, the Socialist
Party and the Communist Party The popular front government
came to power in May 1936.
8 After the bourgeois government of France negotiated a treaty with
the Soviet Union in May 1935, the French Communist Party began
to support national defense.
9. Trotsky is referring to himself.
10 The Vendee was an economically backward region of western
France which was the center of two reactionary revolts against the
French Revolution in October 1793 and the summer of 1795. It was
dominated politically by the clergy and the monarchists.
11 The crisis of bourgeois rule had become so great in Hungary by
March 1919 that the Communist Party was able to seize power
virtually without a struggle. The policies of the leadership of the
party, however, weakened the revolution, first, by not granting the
land to the peasantry and thus securing the support of the peasantry
for the proletarian dictatorship and, second, by fusing the party with
the left reformists Both these errors contributed to the overthrow
of the regime by the bourgeoisie.
12. Regarding Bulgaria and Estonia: See note 1, chapter 5.
Canton: During the Canton insurrection, on December 11, 1927,
several thousand workers were killed. It was the outcome of the

270 Notes
adventurist policy of the Comintern, as the Stalin leadership sought
to cover its tracks in the face of the Left Opposition's ruthless
criticism of its opportunist capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek
Chapter Nine. What Is the USSR?
1„ Latin: a contradiction in terms,
2. French: "I am the state." Attributed to King Louis XIV (1638-1715).
See also p 237.
Chapter Eleven. Whither the Soviet Union?
1. France (1830): The French Revolution of 1789, which established
the rule of the bourgeoisie, was followed by a series of revolutions
which, while not changing the property relations, brought to power
different sections of that class. Between 1815 and 1830, capitalism
grew rapidly, bringing about a corresponding development of the
industrial bourgeoisie. However, state power was wielded by only
the biggest bourgeois landowners together with the remaining
noblemen. The liberal bourgeois under Thiers grew increasingly
dissatisfied with their political disenfranchisement. However, when
a popular uprising broke out in 1830 after the Bourbon King Charles
X dissolved parliament, the three days of barricade fighting by the
workers of Paris which followed so alarmed the liberal bourgeoisie
that Thiers proposed the replacement of Charles by Louis Philippe,
from the Orleans branch of the same House. The outcome of the
revolution of 1830 was the transfer of power from the big capitalist
landowners to the financial bourgeoisie. The new regime lasted until
1848, when it was in turn overthrown.
France (1848): Despite the growing antagonism between the
proletariat and bourgeoisie, they temporarily united at the beginning
of 1848 to overthrow the monarchy and the ruling clique of
finance capitalists. Once again the workers took to the streets and
after three days of barricade fighting, the Second Republic was
proclaimed and a provisional government was formed. Although the
workers had two representatives in the new government, its
character was thoroughly bourgeois. The concessions won by the
workers were soon rescinded and in June a new uprising of the
workers was bloodily suppressed. In December, Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte came to power, declaring himself emperor in 1851 and
ruling until 1871.
Russia (1917): The revolution of February 1917 overthrew Tsar
Nicholas, the last representative of the Romanov dynasty, which
had ruled Russia since 1613, and brought to power the bourgeois
Provisional Government in which one of the leading figures was
Kerensky. The Provisional Government held power until the
Bolshevik insurrection in October.
2. In 1936 in Spain and France, a revolutionary situation was being
betrayed by the Communist parties. Bourgeois popular front

Notes 271
governments came to power in February in Spain and in June in
France, and were supported by the Stalinist parties. In France in
June some seven million workers were involved in strikes and
occupations. A wave of strikes swept Belgium the same month.
3. 1905 and 1917: The revolutionary traditions of the Russian
proletariat. 1905 was the year of the first Russian revolution
Provoked by a worsening economic crisis and political repression
exacerbated by the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of
1904-5, the workers and peasants rose in revolt. The working class
organized independently of the liberal bourgeoisie. At the height of
the movement, millions were involved in strikes and began to form
Soviets The revolution was defeated, but was referred to by Lenin
as the "dress rehearsal" for 1917,
Nineteen-seventeen was the year of the second and third Russian
revolutions, the February overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and the
October seizure of the power by the Bolsheviks to inaugurate the
first workers' state. By the traditions of 1917 Trotsky refers to the
enormously rich revolutionary experiences of that year, and the
political struggle conducted by the Bolshevik Party which enabled
it to win the leadership of the majority of the working class and lead
it to power with the support of the peasantry.

Biographical & Historical Glossary
ANDREYEV, ANDREI ANDREYEVICH (1895-late 1970s?). A former
worker, Andreyev served as head of the Railway
Workers Union from 1922-1927. A staunch supporter of
the Stalinist apparatus, he was brought onto the Central
Committee of the Communist Party to oust members of
the Joint Opposition. A member of the Political Bureau
(1932-1952), commissar of Transport, chairman of the
Supreme Soviet, and commissar of Agriculture, Andreyev's
policies were criticized in the late 1940s and
he was disgraced after 1952. His name is not mentioned
after 1970.
APRIL 1917 The date of V.I. Lenin's return to Russia from exile
abroad. It is significant politically because on his arrival
in Petrograd, Lenin decisively opposed the line of
Pravda, central organ of the Bolshevik Party, which
offered critical support to the bourgeois Provisional
Government. Lenin explained that it was a capitalist
government which had to be overthrown. The immediate
task of the Bolsheviks was to win the support of the
workers and peasants for this policy. Lenin's line was
adopted later that month by a party congress after a
major political struggle within the Bolshevik ranks. This
represented a crucial turning point in the development
of the revolution. Lenin's article, "The Tasks of the
Proletariat in the Present Revolution," published in the
April 7,1917 issue of Pravda, contains the famous April
Theses.
273

274 Biographical & Historical Glossary
ARCHIMEDES (C. 287-212 BC ). A major Greek mathematician
and physicist, who discovered the principles of the lever
and of specific gravity.
BABEUF, FRANCOIS-NOEL (1760-1797). A leader of the extreme
left wing of the plebeian forces in the French Revolution.
He sought to establish a workers' dictatorship through
a revolutionary uprising (the "Conspiracy of Equals"
of 1795). Frederick Engels characterized the movement
of Babeuf and his followers as one of the "independent
outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more
or less developed, of the modern proletariat."
BAKH, ALEKSEI NIKOLAIEVICH (1857-1946). An eminent scientist
and political opponent of tsarism from the 1880s who
won international recognition abroad. Returning to the
Soviet Union after the October Revolution, he established
the Biochemical Institute of the People's Commissariat
of Health in 1920.
BALDWIN, STANLEY (1867-1947). A Conservative Party prime
minister of England in 1923, and again from 1924-1929
and 1935-1937. Baldwin achieved notoriety as the leader
of the British bourgeoisie's sustained attacks on the
working class following the defeat of the 1926 General
Strike.
BARBUSSE, HENRI (1873-1935). An antimilitarist French writer
who joined the Communist Party in 1923. Barbusse
remained politically confused and mystical all his life,
serving Stalinism by joining the circle of writers
attached to the Kremlin.
BARRAS, PAUL FRANCOIS JEAN NICOLAS, VICOMTE DE (1755-1829).
A member of the Directory which succeeded the rule of
the Jacobins in the period of the decline of the French
Revolution. Barras was responsible for the arrest of
Robespierre, and functioned as a member of the ruling
triumvirate from 1797-1799. A figure of the Thermidorean
reaction, Barras was the only member of the

Biographical & Historical Glossary
275
Directory to remain in office until Napoleon's coup
d'etat, which he assisted in bringing about.
BABTHOU, JEAN LOUIS (1862-1934). A right-wing French politician,
who served in many cabinets. As foreign minister
in 1934, Barthou held negotiations with Soviet Foreign
Affairs Minister Maxim Litvinov. He was assassinated
in October 1934, along with King Alexander of Yugoslavia.
BISMARCK, OTTO (1815-1898). A Prussian statesman and diplomat,
representative of the interests of the Prussian
Junkers. Bismarck was chancellor of the German
Empire (1871-1890), during which time he proved
himself to be a vicious enemy of the working class
movement, authoring the Anti-Socialist Law and other
measures.
BLUM, LEON (1872-1950). The leader of the French Socialist
Party from the time of its split with the Communist
Party in 1920. A right-wing reformist, Blum became
prime minister of the popular front government in 1936
on a wave of workers' struggles, and pursued a
determined policy of defending capitalism. The Stalinists
supported his appeals for the reformist defense of
bourgeois democracy against fascism. Blum was one of
the leading figures responsible for the betrayal of the
French working class and its revolutionary strivings on
the eve of the second imperialist war.
BOLSHEVISM The Bolsheviks, named after the Russian word
bolshintsvo or "majority," began as a faction in the
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903 as a
result of a split with the Menshevik minority. The 1903
split, of decisive historical significance, occurred over
the nature of the party required by the working class in
its struggle to take power. The correctness of Lenin's
insistence on the need for a centralized and disciplined
revolutionary party was demonstrated in October 1917,
when the Bolsheviks took power at the head of the

276 Biographical & Historical Glossary
working class. In 1918 the party was renamed the
Communist Party. See also Mensheviks.
BONAPARTE, NAPOLEON (1769-1821). An officer of the army of
the French Revolution, Napoleon carried out a coup
d'etat on the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799) which
signalled a decisive turning point in the Thermidorean
reaction. As emperor of France (1804-1814 and 1815),
he conducted a series of military campaigns which
consolidated the bourgeois revolution in France and led
to the final breakdown of feudalism in many parts of
Europe.
BRISSOT DE WARVTLLE, JACQUES PIERRE (1754-1793). A Parisian
lawyer and representative of the radical bourgeois
intelligentsia during the French Revolution. Brissot was
a leader of the Girondins, the "defenders of property,"
backed by industrialists and financiers, in the National
Convention. "Only what Brissot wanted was, that once
that point had been reached [the shattering of the ancien
regime], and the authority of the King was overthrown,
the Revolution might cease the same day" (Kropotkin,
The Great French Revolution). Brissot was executed by
Marat and his supporters.
BUDENNY, SEMEON MIKHAILOVTCH (1883-1973). A tsarist cavalry
sergeant during World War I, Budenny joined the
Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became a Red Army
commander during the civil war. He was a member of
the so-called Tsaritsyn clique, which, under Joseph
Stalin's influence, opposed Trotsky's policy of using
tsarist military specialists and centralizing the Red
Army. A willing tool during the bloody army purges of
the late 1930s, Budenny proved himself incapable of
understanding modern warfare during World War II and
was removed from the front to an administrative post.
BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH (1888-1938). A leading member
of the Bolshevik Party and a major figure in the first
workers' state. One of the youngest leaders of the
Russian Revolution, Bukharin had joined the Bolsheviks

Biographical & Historical Glossary 277
in 1906, suffering arrests, imprisonment and exile before
escaping to Germany in 1911. He was elected to the
Central Committee of the party in July 1917. After
October 1917, he took up the post of Pravda editor.
Trotsky described Bukharin as "a pure theoretician,
lecturer and writer devoid of organizing skill." Adopting
a "left" Communist position, Bukharin came into bitter
conflict with Lenin over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. He
put forward the view at the Third Congress of the
Comintern that since capitalism had exhausted itself,
victory could be attained "through an uninterrupted
revolutionary offensive." In his "Testament," Lenin
paid tribute to Bukharin as a "most valuable and major
theorist of the party," and its "favorite," but added
that he could "be classified as fully Marxist only with
great reserve, for there is something scholastic about
him...." After Lenin's death, Bukharin became the
leading spokesman for the right wing of the party,
providing the theoretical justification for the official
campaign against Trotsky and the Left Opposition from
1924-1929. During this period, he elaborated the theory
of "socialism in one country," as well as the theory of
the kulak growing into socialism, coining the slogan
directed at the wealthy peasants: "Enrich yourselves!"
After Zinoviev's dismissal as president of the Communist
International, Bukharin became its leader; it was
his Draft Program and its rejection of internationalism
which Trotsky subjected to withering criticism in 1928.
In 1929, Stalin turned on the Right Opposition and
Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo. After several
recantations and years of being assigned to "educational
work," he was appointed editor of Izvestia in 1934. The
reprieve was short-lived, however; arrested in February
1937, Bukharin was tried and sentenced to death in the
last of the Moscow Trials in March 1938. Seeking to
make a historical association with Bukharin's rightwing
economic policies of the 1920s, the Gor ^chev
regime recently rehabilitated him.

278
Biographical & Historical Glossary
CHARTISM A movement of the British working class between
1837 and 1848 which demanded universal suffrage and
other reforms. It was centered on the "People's Charter"
published by the London Workingmen's Association
on May 8,1838 in the form of a bill to be submitted
to Parliament. The Chartists presented three petitions
to Parliament, but they were rejected in 1839,1842 and
1849. The methods of the Chartist movement also
included strikes and armed insurrection.
CHERVONETS The first effective gold currency established after
the October Revolution, equal to ten rubles.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK (1887-1975). The leader of the nationalist
Chinese bourgeoisie from 1926. Chiang was made an
honorary member of the Comintern by Stalin, who
insisted on subordinating the Chinese Communist Party
to the bourgeois Kuomintang. The advanced sections of
the Chinese proletariat were politically disarmed as a
result of the Stalinist policy and Chiang was able to
organize a bloody massacre of the Shanghai workers in
April 1927. This effectively destroyed the working class
base of the Chinese Communist Party. Chiang was
overthrown by the forces of Mao Zedong in 1949 and fled
to Taiwan.
CHICHERIN, GEORGI VASBLIEVICH (1872-1936). A diplomat by
profession, Chicherin was forced to emigrate from
Russia in 1904 as a result of his revolutionary views.
He was active for a decade in the socialist movements
in England, France and Germany and adopted an
internationalist stance during World War I. On returning
to Russia in 1918, Chicherin joined the Bolsheviks,
serving from March 1918 until 1930 as commissar of
Foreign Affairs. Forced by ill health to resign, he died,
under Stalin, in isolation and disgrace.
CITRINE, WALTER MCLENNAN (1887-1983). An extreme rightwing
reformist, general secretary of the British Trades
Union Congress from 1926-1946. Citrine was a member
of the TUC delegation to the USSR in 1925. He

Biographical & Historical Glossary 279
participated in the historic betrayal of the 1926 General
Strike and was knighted in 1935 for his services to the
bourgeoisie.
COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL The international organization of
Communist parties established in March 1919 under the
leadership of Lenin and Trotsky to organize the world
socialist revolution after the betrayal and collapse of the
Second International. The work of the first four
congresses (1919-1922) of the Communist International
(Comintern or Third International) represented an
ineradicable contribution to the development of revolutionary
strategy and tactics. The Comintern degenerated
into a tool of Stalinist foreign policy by the late
1920s, held its last congress in 1935, and was officially
dissolved by Stalin, to please his imperialist allies, in
1943.
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. The first programmatic document of
the Communist movement for the liberation of the
working class, written by Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels in 1847. It ends with the appeal, "Workers of the
world, unite!"
COPERNICUS, NICOLAUS (1473-1543). A Polish astronomer who
postulated the theory that the planets revolve around
the sun and that the turning of the earth on its axis
accounts for the apparent rising and setting of the stars.
This formed the basis of modern astronomy.
CURZON, GEORGE NATHANIEL, 1ST MARQUESS (1859-1925). A rightwing
Tory, bitterly anti-Soviet, Curzon as foreign
secretary delivered an ultimatum to the Soviet government
on behalf of British imperialism in May 1923. This
"note" demanded the abandoning of alleged anti-British
activities by the Soviet state and the Comintern,
especially in countries where Britain had particular
interests, such as India, and threatened to abrogate the
Anglo-Soviet trade agreement signed in March 1921.

280
Biographical & Historical Glossary
DUHRING, KARL EUGEN (1833-1921). A German petty-bourgeois
professor, whose philosophy eclectically combined elements
of positivism, vulgar materialism and subjective
idealism. Duhring's reactionary ideas made inroads
inside the German Social Democratic Party in the 1870s.
Engels answered him in his famous work, Anti-Duhring,
which set out the principles of revolutionary Marxism
in the course of demolishing Duhring's absurd pretensions.
DuRANTY, WALTER (1884-1957). The British-born chief of the
New York Times Moscow bureau from 1922-1936. A
notorious and slavish apologist for Stalinism, particularly
its annihilation of the Trotskyist Opposition,
Duranty was an ardent defender of the Moscow Trials.
Trotsky wrote about him: "In fact, the 'friendship' [of
individuals like Duranty and Louis Fischer] with
Moscow signified the reconciliation of bourgeois liberalism
with the bureaucracy, which had strangled the
October Revolution. The more extensive the privileges
of the new leading stratum became, and the more
conservative it grew in the defense of its privileges —
the greater became the number of its friends among the
bourgeois intellectuals and the liberals, snobs who keep
up with the vogue of the day" (Trotsky, "The Priests of
Half-Truth").
ENGELS, FREDERICK (1820-1895). The lifelong collaborator of
Karl Marx, a brilliant revolutionary thinker of enormous
breadth and the cofounder of the Communist movement.
The co-author of the Communist Manifesto with Marx,
Engels dedicated his entire conscious life to the political
development of the international working class. Spending
much of his life in England, Engels participated in
the establishment of the First and Second Internationals.
Lenin wrote of him: "After his friend Karl Marx,
Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern
proletariat in the whole civilized world" ("Frederick
Engels"). Engels was the author of many indispensable
Marxist works, including Dialectics of Nature, The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,

Biographical & Historical Glossary 281
Anti-Duhring, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy.
ENTENTE The military alliance of France, Russia, Britain and
Serbia arrayed against Germany and Austria-Hungary
at the outset of World War I in August 1914.
FABIAN SOCIETY Fabianism was a petty-bourgeois, opportunist
trend in the British labor movement. The Fabian Society
was established in 1884, taking its name from the
Roman commander Quintus Fabius Maximus (d. 203
BC), famous for his tactics in the Second Punic War of
harassing Hannibal's army without risking a full-scale
battle. The Fabians denied the need for class struggle
by the proletariat and opposed the social revolution,
claiming that socialism could only be achieved through
an accumulation of social reforms. The Fabian Society
acted as a conductor of bourgeois influence, held back
the struggles of the British working class and functioned
as one of the ideological sources of Labour Party
reformism. Well-known Fabians included George Bernard
Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and H.G. Wells.
FEROCI The pseudonym of Alfonso Leonetti, a founding
member of the Italian Communist Party, who joined the
Left Opposition in 1930 and participated in the French
Trotskyist movement. He fought in the Communist
Party-led French resistance during World War II and
eventually capitulated to Stalinism
FISCHER, LOUIS (1896-1970). The Moscow correspondent for the
liberal US journal the Nation. Along with Walter
Duranty, Fischer distinguished himself as an infamous
apologist for the Soviet bureaucracy, defending the
Moscow Trials and the treacherous Stalinist line in the
Spanish Civil War. He broke with the Stalinists at the
time of the Nazi-Soviet pact and later became a violent
anticommunist.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL The World Party of Socialist Revolution,
founded by Trotsky and his cothinkers in 1938,

282
Biographical & Historical Glossary
after the betrayal of the Stalinist Comintern, to resolve
the crisis of working class leadership. In the words of its
founding document, The Transitional Program: "The
present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the
proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united
in the Fourth International, show the class the way out
of the crisis. They offer a program based on international
experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all
the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a
spotless banner." The International Committee of the
Fourth International, formed in 1953 to defeat a
revisionist trend led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel,
is the representative of Trotskyism today.
FREEMASON LODGES The branches of an international secret
society which dates back to the Middle Ages. In France
and other European countries, the Freemasons, in the
early part of the twentieth century, constituted a link
between the workers' parties and the left wing of the
bourgeoisie, serving as a mechanism for corrupting the
socialist movement with an alien ideology. Trotsky
conducted a struggle against the influence of the
Freemasons in the French Communist Party in the early
days of the Comintern. Associated in the past with
liberal traditions, in recent years Freemason lodges in
Italy have been connected to fascist conspiracies.
FRUNZE, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH (1885-1925). A revolutionary
military commander, Frunze played a heroic role during
the civil war. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1904,
organizing textile workers near Moscow and leading
several large strikes in 1905. Imprisoned and exiled,
Frunze escaped in 1916, and joined the tsarist army to
carry out Bolshevik propaganda on the western front.
During the civil war, he gained fame as a talented
organizer and commander, leading the Red armies
which conquered central Asia. A member of the Central
Committee from 1921, Frunze served as commissar for
military and naval affairs and replaced Trotsky as
commissar of war in 1925. He was politically close to
Zinoviev. Frunze died under the surgeon's knife in

Biographical & Historical Glossary
283
November 1925, having been ordered by Stalin's Politburo
to undergo an operation despite the knowledge
that his heart could not withstand the effects of
chloroform. This incident became the basis of Boris
Pilnyak's "Story of the Unextinguished Moon."
GALILEI, GALILEO (1564-1642). The great Italian Renaissance
astronomer and physicist who made enormous contributions
to materialism. In response to his work in
developing the telescope and demonstrating the Copernican
theory, Galileo was condemned for heresy by the
Inquisition in 1633. He publicly recanted his views,
under the threat of torture.
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND (MAHATMA) (1869-1948).A leader
of the bourgeois Indian Congress Party and prominent
in the independence struggle against British imperialist
domination. Gandhi insisted on methods of nonviolence
and civil disobedience. His precapitalist policies were
incapable of solving the national and democratic tasks
of the Indian revolution and his ideology served to hold
back the movement of the Indian masses. Gandhi was
assassinated after independence.
GIDE, ANDRE PAUL GUILLAUME (1869-1951). A major French
novelist, author of The Immoralist, Strait is the Gate,
The Counterfeiters and other works. A fellow traveler of
Stalinism during the 1930s, Gide became disillusioned
with communism along with its Stalinist perversion
after visiting the Soviet Union in 1936. He was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.
GLADKOY FEDOR VASILIEVICH (1883-1958). A Russian novelist,
encouraged and influenced by Maxim Gorki, Gladkov
joined a Bolshevik group in 1904. His work, Cement,
published in 1925, depicts social and personal life in
postrevolutionary Russia. A leading (and heroic) character
in this novel was assumed to have been modeled on
Trotsky. In later years, Gladkov became a slavish
follower of Stalinist directives on literature.

284 Biographical & Historical Glossary
GOEBBELS, JOSEPH PAUL (1897-1945). The Nazi minister of
propaganda in the Third Reich, master of the "Big Lie,"
and infamous for his assertion, "When I hear the word
culture, I reach for my gun."
GPU (GOSUDARSTVENNOE POLITICHESKOE UPRAVLENIIE). The State
Political Administration, i.e., the Soviet secret police,
later called the NKVD, KGB, etc. The GPU was utilized
after the consolidation of power by the Stalinist
bureaucracy to liquidate revolutionary opponents of its
rule, including Trotsky, his son Leon Sedov and many
leading members of the Fourth International.
GREAT WAR The first imperialist war, 1914-1918.
GREEN, WILLIAM (1873-1952). The right-wing president of the
American Federation of Labor. Along with the majority
of the AFL leadership, Green bitterly opposed the
organization of unskilled production workers. A number
of member unions broke away from the AFL in 1935 to
form the Committee for Industrial Organization, which
became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
in 1938.
GUSEV, SERGEI IVANOVICH (YAKOV DAVJDOVICH DRABKIN) (1874-
1933). An Old Bolshevik, a member of the RSDLP since
1896, Gusev was secretary of the Petrograd Military
Revolutionary Committee in 1917. He was head of the
political administration of the Red Army in 1921 and
chief of the press department of the Central Committee
from 1925-1926. From 1928 until his death, Gusev
worked on the Executive Committee of the Comintern.
A major rewriter of the history of the civil war in favor
of Stalin, Gusev was a leading practitioner, along with
Yaroslavsky, of the "Stalin school of falsification."
HITLER, ADOLF (1889-1945). The fascist demagogue who became
the spokesman and all-powerful dictator on behalf
of decaying German imperialism. From petty-bourgeois
origins, Hitler was embittered by Germany's defeat in
World War I and the conditions of veterans under the

Biographical & Historical Glossary 285
Weimar Republic. A sworn enemy of the proletariat and
communism, he expounded his racist and reactionary
views in Mein Kampf. He became a leader of the German
National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis), which, backed
by big capital and taking advantage of the impotence of
the Communist and Social Democratic parties, took
power in 1933. Trotsky described Hitler's role in this
way: "Political art consisted in fusing the petty bourgeoisie
into oneness through its common hostility to the
proletariat. What must be done to improve things? First
of all, throttle those who are underneath. Impotent
before big capital, the petty bourgeoisie hopes in the
future to regain its social dignity through the ruin of the
workers" ("What is National Socialism?").
HOWARD, ROY (1883-1964). An American journalist and newspaper
publisher who became a partner of Scripps-
Howard newspapers in 1925.
JOUHAUX, LEON (1879-1954). A reformist French trade union
leader, the head of the CGT (General Confederation of
Labor) at the time of Trotsky's writing. Jouhaux played
a rotten role as a rabid patriot and chauvinist during
World War I, opposed the Russian Revolution and led
the split away from the revolutionary tendency in the
CGT in 1921. He became one of the central leaders of
the opportunist Amsterdam Trade Union International.
Rejoining the CGT in 1935 when the unions were
reunified, Jouhaux split again after the signing of the
Nazi-Soviet pact and formed the anti-Communist CGT-
Force Ouvriere in 1947.
KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH (ROSENFELD) (1883-1936). A leading
Bolshevik and outstanding figure of the Russian revolutionary
movement, Kamenev was one of the Old Bolsheviks
whom Lenin mercilessly criticized in 1917 and whose
fatal political and theoretical weaknesses were played
on by the bureaucracy in their undermining and
destruction of the Bolshevik Party. Educated in Tiflis,
Kamenev became involved in revolutionary activity
while studying law at Moscow University. He joined the

286 Biographical & Historical Glossary
RSDLP in 1901, emigrating as a Bolshevik in 1903.
While abroad, he formed, along with Lenin and Zinoviev,
the central leadership of the party. Kamenev was
arrested in 1915, sent to Siberia and freed after the
February 1917 revolution. He led the Bolsheviks until
Lenin's return, editing Pravda and taking a position of
critical support for the bourgeois Provisional Government.
He opposed the insurrection of October 1917 as
an adventure doomed to failure. Other principal innerparty
opponents of the seizure of power included
Zinoviev, Rykov, Nogin, Miliutin, Shlyapnikov, Ryazanov,
Larin and Lozovsky.
Kamenev held various leading posts in the first
workers' state: chairman of the Second Congress of
Soviets, chairman of the Central Executive Committee,
deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars.
He was nominated by Lenin to execute his will. Kamenev
sided with Zinoviev and Stalin (the "Triumvirate")
against the Left Opposition from 1923-1925. In 1926,
he and Zinoviev broke with Stalin and joined Trotsky's
faction, forming the Joint Opposition. After the bureaucracy
counterattacked, expelling the leaders of the
Opposition from the party, Kamenev, along with Zinoviev,
rapidly capitulated to the Thermidorean reaction.
Trotsky commented: "As in 1917, on the eve of October,
they had become frightened of a break with the
petty-bourgeois democracy, so ten years later they
[Zinoviev and Kamenev] became frightened of a break
with the Soviet bureaucracy." Despite abasing himself
before the bureaucracy, Kamenev was never restored to
a position of authority. He was arrested in 1935, made
a defendant in the first Moscow Trial in 1936 and shot.
Kamenev was rehabilitated in 1988.
KATHEDER-SOZIALISMUS. "Socialism of the [professorial] chair."
A trend in bourgeois ideology between 1870 and 1890,
represented primarily by economics professors in Germany.
They claimed that socialism could be achieved
only through the gradual extension of state ownership
and the introduction of factory acts to regulate working

Biographical & Historical Glossary 287
conditions, i.e., without infringing on the rights of the
capitalists.
KELLOGG PACT. A worthless international agreement signed
by fifteen countries in 1928 renouncing war as an
instrument of foreign policy. It was later ratified by
sixty-three nations, including the USSR. It drew its
name from Frank Kellogg (1856-1937), US Secretary of
State.
KERENSKY, ALEKSANDER FEDOROVICH (1881-1970). A Russian
petty-bourgeois politician who became the leader of the
bourgeois Provisional Government which was overthrown
by the October Revolution. Kerensky originally
gained fame as a defense lawyer in political cases. A
member of the Duma, leader of the Trudovik (Labor)
group, Kerensky officially joined the Social Revolutionary
Party in March 1917. After the February Revolution,
Kerensky became the deputy head of the Provisional
Committee of the Duma (precursor to the Provisional
Government) and deputy chairman of the Petrograd
Soviet. He served as minister of justice (March-May
1917), minister of defense (May-September 1917) and
prime minister from July 21 until the October Revolution.
Kerensky's administration held power as long as
the masses had illusions in the petty-bourgeois democracy.
He edited the Social Revolutionary newspaper in
Berlin and Paris, 1922-1932, moving to the US in 1940.
He died in New York City.
KHINCHUK, LEV MIKHAILOVICH (1868- ?). One of a group of Soviet
diplomats appointed by Stalin (others included Alexander
Troyanovsky, Ivan Maisky, Vladimir Potemkin,
Yakov Suritz), who had been open enemies of the
October Revolution. These former opponents of Bolshevism
joined the Communist Party as part of an enormous
influx of petty-bourgeois and careerist elements after
the consolidation of the Soviet state. Khinchuk himself
was a Menshevik from 1903 and opposed the insurrection
of 1917. He became a member of the counterrevolutionary
"Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland

288 Biographical & Historical Glossary
and the Revolution" in 1917-1918, joining the Bolshevik
Party only in 1920. Khinchuk supported Stalin's faction
and served as ambassador to Germany from 1930-1934.
He was arrested in 1937 and died in prison.
KIROV, SERGEI MIRONOVICH(KOSTRIKOV) (1886-1934). A Bolshevik
since 1904, Kirov was a close collaborator of Stalin
beginning in the early 1920s, and became leader of the
Leningrad party after Zinoviev's removal. His assassination
in December 1934 by a minor party official, Leonid
V. Nikolayev, became the pretext for the bloody purges
which led to the complete destruction of the Bolshevik
Party and the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks in the
Moscow Trials. Trotsky wrote, The assassination of
Kirov was nothing more than a by-product of a police
amalgam concocted by Stalin and Yagoda to accuse the
oppositional leaders of terrorism" (The Role of Yagoda").
KOSAREV, ALEKSANDR VASILIEVICH (1903-1939). The general
secretary of the Komsomol (League of Communist
Youth) from 1929 and a specialist in anti-Trotskyism.
Kosarev played a central role in organizing a purge of
Zinoviev's supporters from the Komsomol after the
latter's break with Stalin in 1925. Trotsky said of him,
"generally known to be a moral degenerate who misused
his high position to advance his personal objectives."
Like many other loyal Stalinists, Kosarev was nevertheless
arrested, along with most of the Komsomol Central
Committee, in 1938, and tortured and shot. He was
posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.
KREMLIN This became the seat of the Soviet government after
1918 when the Bolsheviks were obliged by the civil war
to move to Moscow from Petrograd, which was considered
too vulnerable. The kremlin of a Russian city is its
fortified citadel.
KRUPSKAYA, NADEZDHA KONSTANTINOVNA (1869-1939).. The lifelong
companion and collaborator of Lenin. Born into the
intelligentsia, from her late teens Krupskaya played an
active part in revolutionary politics in St. Petersburg,

Biographical & Historical Glossary
289
where she met Lenin. They were married in exile in
Siberia. Krupskaya functioned as the secretary of the
Bolshevik Central Committee Abroad. After the victory
of the October Revolution, she worked in the People's
Commissariat of Education. The rude and brutal
behavior of Stalin toward Krupskaya brought about
Lenin's rupturing of personal relations with him in
March 1923. After Lenin's death, she participated briefly
in the Joint Opposition of 1926, but capitulated under
extreme pressure from the bureaucracy. From that point
on, her life took on an extremely tragic character. "On
the surface," Trotsky wrote, "she was treated with
respect, or rather with semi-honors. But within the
apparatus itself she was systematically discredited,
blackened and subjected to indignities...."
KUN, BELA (1886-1939?). A Hungarian Communist leader.
Born in Transylvania, Kun joined the Hungarian Social
Democrats as a youth. He came into contact with the
Bolsheviks as a prisoner of war in Russia. Kun was
leader of the Hungarian Communist Party and of the
short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Held in
low regard by Lenin, he rose to prominence in the
Comintern during the period of its degeneration. Kun,
who had supported Zinoviev before attaching himself to
Stalin, was tried by a tribunal in 1937 and probably
executed in 1939.
LAVAL, PIERRE (1883-1945). The foreign minister of France in
1934-1935 and prime minister in 1935-1936, Laval
negotiated the Franco-Soviet pact. For his collaboration
with the occupying German forces, he was summarily
executed at the end of World War II.
LEAGUE OF NATIONS The imperialist talk-shop established by
the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Hailed by the
European reformists as a means of preventing war, it
was in reality a mechanism of domination by the major
imperialist powers. Lenin referred to it as a "thieves'
kitchen." During the 1930s, as the conditions of the
masses grew worse and worse, the league compiled

290 Biographical & Historical Glossary
reports "of use to no one," in Trotsky's words. The
Soviet Union was admitted as a member and given a
seat on its council in September 1934.
LEFT OPPOSITION Under the leadership of Trotsky, the Left
Opposition (the Bolshevik-Leninists or Leninist Opposition)
was formed in Moscow in 1923 to combat the
growing bureaucratization of the Communist Party and
to fight for the organization of long-term industrial
planning. Outstanding figures of the original Left
Opposition included YL. Pyatakov, E.A. Preobrazhensky,
N.I. Muralov and others. In 1926, it was joined by the
Leningrad Opposition of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya
and other leading figures, in opposition to the policies
of Stalin and Bukharin, which promoted the development
of the rich peasants, or kulaks, and to the "theory"
of "socialism in one country." Most of the Leningrad
leaders capitulated to Stalin after 1927. In 1930 the
International Left Opposition was formed as a faction
of the Comintern with the express aim of returning it
to revolutionary principles. After the betrayal of the
German working class which led to Hitler's taking power
in 1933, and the failure of the Comintern even to
acknowledge the defeat or its responsibility, Trotsky
called for the building of the Fourth International.
LENIN, VLADIMIR ILYICH (ULYANOV) (1870-1924). The leader of the
October Revolution and the first workers' state. Together
with Trotsky, one of the two greatest revolutionary
Marxist leaders of the twentieth century. Lenin
applied Marxism to the modern epoch in developing the
theory of the revolutionary vanguard party, necessary
for the proletariat to seize power. He fought for the
understanding that scientific socialism had to be
brought into the labor movement from outside the
day-to-day economic struggles in a conflict with the
spontaneous consciousness of the working class. This
theoretical conception is summed up in What Is To Be
Done? (1902). Lenin developed the Marxist analysis of
imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, the epoch

Biographical & Historical Glossary 291
of wars and revolutions. An indefatigable opponent of
opportunism in all forms, after the historic betrayal of
the Second International in August 1914 Lenin set out
to construct a Third (Communist) International. He
played the indispensable role in April 1917 of theoretically
rearming the Bolshevik Party, and together with
Trotsky, was the leader of the insurrection of October
1917. Lenin was the undisputed leader of the Bolshevik
government and the new Communist International.
Shortly before his death, he initiated the struggle
against the developing bureaucracy.
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM (1809-1865). An American bourgeois revolutionary
leader and president of the United States
(1861-1865) during the Civil War, which saw the
triumph of capitalist interests over the slaveowners of
the South. His revolutionary program of freeing the
slaves assured the victory of the union forces.
LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH (MEER GENOKH MOISEYEVICH WAL-
LAKH) (1876-1951). A Soviet diplomat and people's
commissar of foreign affairs. Having joined the RSDLP
in 1898, Litvinov was responsible for smuggling Bolshevik
propaganda into Russia and arms to the revolutionaries
in 1905. After 1908 he moved to England and
married the daughter of an English journalist. In the
Bolshevik government, he served in numerous diplomatic
capacities, including ambassador to Estonia and
deputy commissar of foreign affairs. Litvinov functioned
as people's commissar of foreign affairs from 1930-1939,
including the period in which Stalin was seeking
alliances with the "democratic" imperialist powers. He
was replaced by Molotov just before the Stalin-Hitler
pact.
LLOYD GEORGE, DAVID (1863-1945). A class-conscious British
bourgeois politician and leader of the Liberal Party,
prime minister from 1916-1922. Lloyd George was a
significant figure in British politics even when out of
office. He was one of the authors of the Versailles Treaty
at the end of World War I.

292 Biographical & Historical Glossary
LUNACHARSKY, ANATOLY VASILIEVICH (1875-1933). A leading Bolshevik
intellectual, Lunacharsky joined a clandestine
Marxist circle as a school boy. At Zurich University,
where he was a fellow student of Rosa Luxemburg, he
came under the influence of the positivist outlook of
Avenarius. Lunacharsky played an invaluable role as
Lenin's collaborator in defending Bolshevism in 1904,
but in the years of reaction that followed the 1905
Revolution, he drifted into mysticism. This inner-party
struggle is recorded in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism. After October, Lunacharsky served as the
people's commissar of education from 1917-1929. Appointed
ambassador to Spain in 1933, he died a broken
man before he could take up the post.
MAIAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH (1893-1930). A Russian
Futurist poet and a major figure in world literature.
Imprisoned in his teens for revolutionary activities,
Maiakovsky fully supported the October Revolution and
dedicated his considerable talents to it. After the
introduction of the NEP, Maiakovsky's poetry concerned
itself more and more frequently with attacks on
bureaucracy and the resurgent bourgeoisie. His play,
The Bath House, produced in Leningrad in 1930, was a
failure. Maiakovsky came under increasing attacks from
the bureaucracy and was driven to suicide in April 1930.
After his death, Stalin cynically had Maiakovsky
declared the official poet of the Soviet state.
MAISKY, IVAN MIKHAILOVICH (LIAKHOVITSKY) (1884-1975). A rightwing
Menshevik from 1903 on, Maisky emigrated and
spent a number of years in England studying the trade
union movement. He went over to Kolchak's counterrevolutionary
forces in 1918 and served as a minister in
the Siberian White Government. Maisky joined the
Bolsheviks in 1921, later serving as ambassador to
Finland from 1929-1932, ambassador to Britain from
1932-1943, and deputy commissar of foreign affairs and
head of the Allied reparation commission from 1943-
1946. He took part in the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences

Biographical & Historical Glossary 293
MANCHUKUO A state which existed in eastern Asia at the time
Trotsky was writing. It was established by Japanese
imperialism in 1932 and included Manchuria. Manchukuo
was abolished in 1945 with Japan's defeat in
World War II.
MARX, KARL (1818-1883). The founder of scientific socialism,
one of the towering intellectual geniuses and revolutionary
thinkers and fighters in history. Together with
Frederick Engels, Marx developed the materialist conception
of history. He co-authored the Communist
Manifesto with Engels. Marx was a lifelong participant
in the struggle to make the international working class
conscious of its historic role, playing a central role in the
establishment of the First International, the International
Workingmen's Association. He spent decades
researching and writing Capital, the definitive analysis
of the objective laws of capitalism. Particularly in his
works The Class Struggle in France, 1848-1850, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and The Civil
War in France, Marx produced a revolutionary-critical
analysis of the decisive class struggles of the nineteenth
century.
MENSHEVISM An opportunist trend amongst Russian Social
Democrats which emerged in the RSDLP in 1903. This
tendency is named after the Russian word for minority,
menshinstvo. The Mensheviks became a separate party
in 1912 after they were expelled from the RSDLP. They
rejected the Bolshevik perspective that the working
class must lead the revolutionary struggle, according
first place instead to the liberal bourgeoisie. The
majority of the Mensheviks supported the imperialist
policy of the bourgeois Provisional Government after
February 1917. Leading Mensheviks joined the Provisional
Government as cabinet ministers and attempted
to suppress the struggles of the workers and the poor
peasants. They resolutely opposed the Bolshevik seizure
of power in October 1917. Significant sections of the
Menshevik Party joined forces with the counterrevolutionary
Whites against the workers' state, participating

294 Biographical & Historical Glossary
in the terror against the revolutionary workers and
peasants.
MEZHLAUK, IVAN IVANOVICH (1891-1941). A Bolshevik from 1918,
Mezhlauk served as military commissar of the Volga
District. He played a role as part of the military
opposition to Trotsky in the Red Army. Mezhlauk joined
Stalin's faction and rose in the bureaucracy, serving as
commissar for heavy industry in 1937.
MIKADO; HIROHITO (1901-1989). The emperor of Japan from
1926 until his death. He renounced most of his powers
in 1946 under American occupation of Japan.
MIKOYAN, ANASTAS IVANOVICH (1895-1978). A longtime Stalinist
bureaucrat, Mikoyan originally joined the Bolshevik
Party in 1915. During the civil war, in a famous incident,
he was one of the twenty-seven Baku commissars
arrested by the counterrevolution; the other 26 were
shot. Mikoyan survived every twist and turn of Stalinist
policy shifts for three decades. He held many government
posts, including commissar of internal trade,
commissar of supplies, deputy prime minister, and
commissar of foreign trade. Mikoyan, a close ally of
Khrushchev, associated himself with "de-Stalinization"
in 1956 and salvaged his career. He was responsible for
organizing the bloody Soviet intervention against the
Hungarian Revolution in 1956. It was Mikoyan who
telephoned Khrushchev at his Crimean holiday dacha,
summoning him to Moscow to be dismissed.
MIRABEAU, HONORE GABRIEL RIQUETI, COMTE DE (1749-1791). A
constitutional monarchist significant in the early days
of the French Revolution. On June 23, 1789, Mirabeau
made an eloquent and defiant speech in the newlyproclaimed
National Assembly, informing Louis XVI
that the deputies of the Third Estate held the authority
of the people and that they would only leave by the force
of the bayonet. After his death, it was revealed that
Mirabeau had sold his influence to the king shortly

Biographical & Historical Glossary
295
afterward for a pension of 50,000 francs a month for
four months.
MOLOTOV, VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH (SKRIABIND (1890-1986).
Stalin's right-hand man during the 1930s. Trotsky called
Molotov, "The most complete embodiment of the bureaucracy
that rose on the wave of the reaction in
1924-29 and is deeply convinced that all problems are
to be resolved by financial or administrative measures."
A member of the Bolshevik group since 1906, Molotov
was a little-known figure before the October Revolution.
After the 1917 February Revolution, due to the absence
of prominent leaders of the party, Molotov held a
number of significant posts, including Central Committee
member, editor of Pravda and member of the
Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. He
resolutely supported Stalin in the struggle with the Left
Opposition, earning the nickname "stone backside" for
his ability to sit through interminable party committee
meetings. Molotov functioned as president of the
Comintern during the disastrous ultraleft "Third Period,"
president of the Council of People's Commissars
from 1930-1941, and commissar of foreign affairs,
accompanying Stalin to the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam
Conferences. He opposed Khrushchev and the limited
revelations of Stalin's crimes in 1956, and was ousted
from the leadership. Molotov was expelled from the
CPSU in 1961, but was readmitted in 1984.
MUSSOLINI, BENITO (1883-1945). The fascist leader who ruled
Italy from 1922-1945. Mussolini started his career as a
left-wing Socialist, editing the party's central organ,
Avanti. In 1914, he was expelled from the Italian
Socialist Party for his rabid, social patriotic support for
World War I. In 1919, Mussolini organized a militantly
antisocialist and semimilitary fascist movement. After
the betrayal of the revolutionary upsurge in 1920-1921,
he gained the support of the Italian bankers, industrialists
and the House of Savoy. Mussolini rose to power in
October 1922 and organized the first fascist regime.
After 1926, bourgeois democratic forms were abolished

296 Biographical & Historical Glossary
and the labor movement was drowned in blood. Mussolini
was captured and executed by Communist Partyled
partisans in 1945.
MUZHIK A Russian peasant.
NAPOLEON I See Bonaparte.
NEP. The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin and the
Bolsheviks in 1921, after the devastation of the imperialist
war and the civil war, in order to allow the capitalist
market to assist economic recovery. The central levers
of the economy remained firmly in the hands of the
workers' state. "Nepman" became a term of abuse
directed at an entire layer of petty-bourgeois traders,
middlemen and opportunists of every stripe.
NIHILISTS A political trend which was prominent in Russia
during the 1860s. Many of its supporters employed
terrorist methods against tsarist reaction and joined the
populist Narodnik movement in the 1870s.
OCTOBER REVOLUTION The opening shot of the world socialist
revolution, the first successful taking of power by the
working class and the oppressed masses. The seizure of
state power from the bourgeois Kerensky government
by the Russian proletariat was carried out under the
leadership of the Bolshevik Party on October 25, 1917
(November 7 under the modern calendar).
ORDZHONIKIDZE, GRIGORI KONSTANTINOVICH (1886-1937). A Georgian
Old Bolshevik, member of the first Bolshevik
Central Committee, Ordzhonikidze joined the party in
the Caucasus and took part in the revolution of 1905.
As a leader of the Red Army, he participated in Stalin's
military clique. Lenin sharply criticized Stalin and
Ordzhonikidze for their Great-Russian chauvinist policy
toward national minorities in 1922. A member of the
Central Committee from 1921 and the Politburo from
1930, Ordzhonikidze was a significant ally of Stalin in
the bureaucracy's struggles against "Trotskyism." He

Biographical & Historical Glossary
297
served as commissar of heavy industry from 1932 until
his death, which was either a murder or suicide.
PALMERSTON, HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, 3RD VISCOUNT (1784-1865). A
Tory politician, responsible for British foreign policy
from 1830-1865.
PILSUDSKI, JOSEPH (1867-1935). The fascist dictator of Poland
after coming to power in a coup in 1926. See note p. 267.
POPOLO D'ITALIA. Founded by Mussolini, it became the official
organ of the Italian fascist movement.
LE POPULAIRE. The daily newspaper of the French Socialist
Party.
POPULAR FRONT. In August 1935, the Seventh Congress of the
Communist International, by now a completely subservient
instrument of counterrevolutionary Stalinist foreign
policy, adopted the policy of popular fronts or people's
fronts. This policy called for alliances between the
workers' parties and liberal wing of the imperialist
bourgeoisie, in the name of a struggle against war and
fascism. The popular front replaced the ultraleft "Third
Period" policy of adventurism and sectarianism, which
had been advanced in 1928. Popular front governments
came to power in France and Spain in 1936. By
subordinating the independent interests of the proletariat
to the so-called democratic capitalists, popular
frontism led the working class to historic and bloody
defeats, and opened the door to war and fascism. The
strategic experiences in France and Spain are examined
in detail in Trotsky's writings of the period, including
Whither France? and The Spanish Revolution 1931-
1939.
POSTYSHEV, PAVEL PETROVICH (1887-1939). Postyshev rose to the
post of secretary of the Central Committee thanks to his
ardent participation in the campaign against Trotskyism.
Stalin's henchman in the Ukraine in 1933, he purged
the party and state apparatus of "nationalists," and
drove the Ukrainian people's commissar, Skrypnik, (a

298
Biographical & Historical Glossary
"100% Stalinist," in Trotsky's words) to suicide. Trotsky
characterized Postyshev as "a careerist, one of the most
obsequious of Stalin's lackeys."
POTEMKIN, VLADIMIR PETROVICH (1874-1946). The Soviet ambassador
to France from 1934-1937. A bourgeois professor
of history before and during the revolution, Potemkin
joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919.
PRAVDA. The Russian word for "truth." The official organ of
the Bolshevik Party from 1912, Pravda became a daily
newspaper in March 1917. After Lenin's death it became
a mouthpiece for the Stalinist bureaucracy.
RADEK, KARL BERNARDOVICH (SOBELSOHN) (1885-1939). A revolutionary
journalist, prominent in the revolutionary
movement in Poland and Germany before World War I,
who became a leader of the Bolshevik Party, a supporter
of the Left Opposition, and then a leading capitulator
to Stalinism. Radek was active in the Social Democratic
Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1906,
he was arrested in Warsaw, along with Leo Jogiches and
Rosa Luxemburg, for revolutionary activity. In Germany
from 1908-1914, he continued his political and journalistic
career, gaining recognition for his writing and
polemical skills. Radek took a clearly internationalist
stance during World War I, working closely with Lenin
and Zinoviev in organizing and preparing the Zimmerwald
Conference in September 1915, which he attended
as a delegate. Radek accompanied Trotsky to Brest-
Litovsk, adopting a "left" position on the treaty. He
participated in the German Revolution of 1918-1919,
helping to unite the factions which formed the Communist
Party of Germany on January 1, 1919. Radek
wavered between the Right and Left Oppositions during
the mid-1920s, finally joining Trotsky and Zinoviev in
the Joint Opposition. He was expelled at the fifteenth
party congress and exiled to Siberia.
In May 1929, after a number of vacillations, Radek
wrote a letter to Izvestia abandoning the Opposition and
declaring his wish to build "socialism in a single

Biographical & Historical Glossary
299
country." Trotsky, who had polemicized against Radek's
attacks on the theory of permanent revolution, called
him "the most odious figure of the Left Opposition ... not
only a capitulator but a traitor." Perhaps the most
talented and dangerous of the capitulators, Radek
penned a 12,000-word article in Pravda, New Year's Day
1934, entitled "The Architect of Socialist Society," a
fawning eulogy of Stalin. His last article gives an
indication of his moral and political decline: "The
Trotskyite-Zinovievite Fascist Gang and Its Helmsman
Trotsky." Radek's testimony during the second Moscow
Trial in January 1937 was dissected by Trotsky before
the Dewey Commission in April 1937. In 1929, Trotsky
characterized Radek as "unquestionably one of the best
Marxist journalists in the world. It is not only the
precision and strength of his style. No, it is first of all
his ability to react with amazing quickness to new
phenomena and tendencies and even to their first
symptoms. This is Radek's strong point. But the
strength of a journalist becomes a source of weakness
in a politician. Radek exaggerates and anticipates too
much."
RAKOVSKY, CHRISTIAN GEORGIEVICH (1873-1941). An outstanding
Marxist, internationalist, leader of the Left Opposition
and intimate friend of Trotsky's over a period of three
decades. Rakovsky led one of the richest and most active
lives of any of the great leaders of the Marxist
movement. At age fourteen, in his native Bulgaria, he
was expelled from school for leading a student revolt.
At seventeen, he helped publish a work by Engels and
was banned from the school system forever. He then
attended medical school in Geneva, meeting the Russian
revolutionaries Axelrod, Plekhanov and Zasulich, and
becoming a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg. In 1893, he
organized the Second International Congress of Socialist
Students. In the same year, he represented Bulgaria at
the International Socialist Congress in Zurich. He
served in the Romanian army as a doctor, being
discharged January 1, 1900. He participated in the

300 Biographical & Historical Glossary
struggle against "legal Marxism" in Russia, which
earned him an expulsion from the tsarist regime. He
represented the Bulgarian and Serbian parties at the
Amsterdam Congress in 1904. He led a campaign in
defense of the Potemkin sailors when they landed in
Romania in 1905. He was active in reviving Romanian
Marxism and played a leading role in the organization
of trade unions in that country. After expulsion from
Romania to France, he lived in that country from
1907-1912, attending trade union congresses and battling
such figures as Jouhaux and Gompers. After
August 1914, Rakovsky took an internationalist position
and attended the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915.
He arrived in Russia in May 1917, although he did
not officially join the Bolshevik Party until November
1917. He was named chairman of the Council of People's
Commissars for the Ukraine and gained enormous
popularity there among the workers and poor peasants
for his role in establishing soviet power. As a leading
member of the Left Opposition, Rakovsky made a
penetrating analysis of the Thermidorean reaction and
"the occupational risks of power." Refusing to join the
capitulators in 1928, Rakovsky wrote from exile in
Astrakhan: "It is unavoidable that some of us will have
to leave those who have not thought out our policies,
those who dream of a quiet life.... Only those members
will be left who do not regard the program as 'a la carte'
dishes from which to pick and choose. The program
remains the expression of Leninism at war, and only if
it is applied in its entirety can the party and the
proletariat's homeland escape from the dead end into
which they were led by the centrist leadership." After
six years in exile and an unsuccessful escape attempt,
with his morale broken and his health failing, Rakovsky
capitulated in 1934. He was arrested again in December
1936, and, after eight months of torture, mental cruelty
and deprivation of medical care, he confessed A
defendant in the third Moscow Trial, Rakovsky was
reportedly shot in October 1941. He was rehabilitated
in February 1988.

Biographical & Historical Glossary 301
ROBESPIERRE, MAXIMILIEN MARIE ISIDORE (1758-1794). The leader
of the left wing of the Jacobins during the French
Revolution. Robespierre called for the execution of Louis
XVI and became head of the revolutionary government
during the second period of the revolution from 1793-
1794. Directing the Reign of Terror against the aristocracy,
his administration expressed the interests of the
petty bourgeoisie, supported by the working masses of
Paris. Robespierre was executed the morning after his
regime was overthrown by a counterrevolutionary coup
on the 9 Thermidor (July 24,1794).
ROLLAND, ROMAIN (1866-1944). A French novelist who opposed
both the First World War and the Russian Revolution
from a pacifist position. Rolland supported the Congress
of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935, which was
aimed at building a pro-Stalinist movement among
French intellectuals. He was one of those liberals and
pacifists who became "friends of the Soviet Union"
precisely in response to the degeneration of the October
Revolution. On the eve of the Moscow Trials, Rolland
defended the repression in the Soviet Union by declaring
that Kirov had been "murdered by a fanatic, who was
secretly supported by such people as Kamenev and
Zinoviev." Trotsky denounced Rolland for having stepped
forward "as an advocate of Thermidorean terror."
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN DELANO (1882-1945). Thirty-second president
of the United States. President from 1933-1945,
Roosevelt was brought to power during the height of the
Great Depression by the most conscious sections of the
bourgeoisie to forestall the development of social
revolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy enthusiastically
supported Roosevelt, a class-conscious representative
of American imperialism, in its campaign for "collective
security" and search for imperialist allies.
RYKOV, ALEKSEI IVANOVICH (1881-1938). A leading member of
the Bolshevik Party and the president of the Council of
People's Commissars after Lenin's death. Rykov joined
the Bolshevik Party as a student in Kazan in 1899, was

302 Biographical & Historical Glossary
elected to its first Central Committee and participated
in the 1905 Revolution. Arrested many times, Rykov
was one of Lenin's closest collaborators after the victory
of the October Revolution. Trotsky described Rykov as
"devoid of theoretical interests," "possessing a clear
political mind and exceptional ability as an administrator,"
and "an orator of great force." He played a leading
role in formulating economic policy, opposing the Left
Opposition demands for central economic planning.
Rykov was a leader of the right wing in the party, along
with Bukharin and Tomsky. He was declared a "terrorist"
at the first Moscow Trial in 1936 and expelled. After
a brief reprieve, he was arrested, framed up in the third
Moscow Trial, and shot in 1938.
SACRED UNION The support by the opportunist leaders of the
working class movement for their national bourgeoisie
during the first imperialist war. In France, this policy
was known as the Union sacree, in Germany as
Burgfrieden, or "civil peace," named after the medieval
tradition that private quarrels should be set aside when
the castle was under siege. The opportunists attempted
to create a truce in the class struggle on the grounds
that the war to defend the national interest superseded
the struggle between worker and capitalist.
SCHMIDT, OTTO YULIEVICH (1891-1956). A Soviet scholar and
specialist in mathematics and astronomy. Schmidt
joined the Communist Party in 1918 and functioned as
the director of the State Publishing House from
1921-1924. In the 1930s he led several famous Soviet
Arctic expeditions.
SCHUSCHNIGG, KURT VON (1897-1977). The Christian Democratic
chancellor of Austria. After the murder of Dolfuss
in 1934, he succeeded him as chancellor until March
1938 when Hitler occupied Austria. Imprisoned by the
Nazis, he was released by US troops in 1945. He was
professor of political science at St. Louis University in
the US from 1948 to 1969.

Biographical & Historical Glossary 303
SERAFIMOVICH, ALEKSANDR (POPOV) (1863-1949). A Russian novelist,
associated with Gorky. Serafimovich worked as a
Pravda correspondent from 1918-1922. He was best
known as the author of The Iron Torrent, which
described the civil war in southern Russia.
SERGE, VICTOR (1890-1947). A writer and Left Oppositionist
who fought courageously against Stalinism and then
became an opponent of the Fourth International after
leaving the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. An anarchist
in his youth, Serge participated in the workers' movement
in Belgium, France, Spain and the Soviet Union.
He arrived in Petrograd in 1919 as a supporter of the
Bolshevik government and was appointed editor of the
journal Communist International. Serge was expelled
from the party and arrested in 1928 for his participation
in the Left Opposition. He was released by the Stalinist
authorities and arrested again in 1933. Serge left the
Soviet Union after an international campaign for his
release, coming quickly into conflict with Trotsky and
the supporters of the Fourth International over his
defense of Andres Nin and the centrist POUM in the
Spanish Civil War. Trotsky called Serge a "strikebreaker"
and declared that his solidarity with the
centrists against the revolutionary Marxists "strengthened
the opportunist tendencies of the POUM in the
most critical situation." Serge died in exile in Mexico.
SOCIAL DEMOCRATS In 1889 the European Social Democratic
parties were organized into the Second International. A
conflict existed within the international from the outset
between the Marxist trend and the growing opportunist
and reformist tendency, encouraged by the relatively
peaceful growth of capitalism in the period of 1871-1914.
When the First World War broke out, most national
sections betrayed the interests of the international
proletariat and supported the imperialist bourgeoisie
in their respective countries. The Marxist tendency
opposed this historic betrayal and concluded that the
Second International no longer existed as a revolutionary
instrument. Under the leadership of Lenin and

304 Biographical & Historical Glossary
Trotsky, the revolutionary wing, a small minority,
undertook to construct the Third International, founded
in the Soviet Union in 1919. Before August 1914, the
term Social Democrat was synonymous with Marxist or
revolutionary. From 1914 onwards, the term Social
Democrat has been used by revolutionaries to designate
opportunists and reformists. See note 1, chapter 1.
SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES The Russian Social Revolutionary
Party (or SRs), a petty-bourgeois formation founded in
1900, was influential among the peasantry. Social
Revolutionaries, including Kerensky and others, played
leading roles in the successive Provisional Government
cabinets in 1917. In October, the left wing of the SRs
formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks.
They broke with the Bolshevik Party leadership at the
time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918, assassinating
Uritsky, a Central Committee member, and attempting
to kill Lenin.
SOLNTSEV, ELEAZAR B. (1901?-1935). A Communist Party
member and Red Army soldier during the civil war,
despite his youth. An outstanding member of the Left
Opposition (in Trotsky's words, "one of the most brilliant
of the young generation in the Soviet Union"), Solntsev
made significant contributions as a theoretician. He was
arrested by the Stalinist regime in 1928 and sentenced
to five years imprisonment in the Verkhne-Uralsk
Isolator. After this term in the isolator, Solntsev was
sent into exile in Siberia and separated from his wife
and family. In 1935 he was again arrested and sentenced
to a further five years. He declared a hunger strike and
after starving for eighteen days, Solntsev was told by
the authorities that he would be transferred to another
place of exile instead of prison. However, due to his
weakened condition, he died en route. Solntsev never
capitulated.
SOLTZ, ARON ALEKSANDROVICH (1872-1945). An Old Bolshevik
from the 1890s, Soltz worked on Lenin's Iskra in 1901.
He was repeatedly arrested and spent time exiled in

Biographical & Historical Glossary 305
Siberia from 1907-1910. After the February Revolution,
he was a member of the Moscow Bureau of the RSDLP.
A Pravda staff member, a "left" in the dispute on the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Soltz was a member of the
judiciary from 1921. After 1934, he was Soviet deputy
prosecutor-general, then president of the Supreme
Court.
SOSNOVSKY, LEV SEMYANOVICH (1886-1937). In 1929, Trotsky
described Sosnovsky as "one of the leaders of the
Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition" and "an incomparable
publicist and social commentator." A journalist, he
joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and took an active part in
the 1905 Revolution. Sosnovsky edited the newspaper
Bednota after the October Revolution. He was expelled
from the party in 1927 and imprisoned. His name is
often linked with Rakovsky's; the two were among the
earliest leaders of the Left Opposition and among the
last to capitulate. He was murdered without trial by the
GPU in 1937.
STAKHANOV, ALEKSEI GRIGORIEVICH (1906-1977). A Donbass
miner, publicized in August 1935 for astonishing
achievements in productivity, subsequently shown to
be largely spurious. He joined the CPSU in 1936.
STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH (DZHUGASHVTLI) (1879-1953). The
leading spokesman for the Thermidorean reaction in the
Soviet Union who became the all-powerful Bonapartist
dictator ruling on behalf of the privileged layers in the
USSR and world imperialism. Stalin (party name Koba)
joined the revolutionary movement in Tiflis in 1901,
suffering arrest and exile to Siberia a number of times.
Although a Bolshevik, Stalin was always characterized
by a nationalist, pragmatic and antitheoretical outlook,
referring to the conflict between Menshevism and
Bolshevism as late as 1911 as "a tempest in a teapot."
Along with a number of other Old Bolsheviks, he took
the line of giving critical support to the bourgeois
Provisional Government before Lenin's arrival in April
1917. Stalin played an insignificant role in the actual

306 Biographical & Historical Glossary
seizure of power in October 1917. He transformed his
position of general secretary of the party, previously an
organizational post, into the center of political power.
In his "Testament," Lenin recommended Stalin's removal
from the secretaryship. Under conditions of the
isolation and backwardness of the USSR, Stalin came
forward as the leading representative of the pettybourgeois
layers who became concerned with the
advancement of their own increasingly distinct interests
at the expense of the international working class. His
qualifications as an Old Bolshevik and his undoubted
organizational skills made him useful as the spokesman
for the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy. Trotsky wrote,
in his biography of Stalin: "in selecting men for
privileged positions, in welding them together in the
spirit of the caste, in weakening and disciplining the
masses, Stalin's attributes were truly invaluable and
make him the leader of the bureaucratic reaction."
Stalin organized the destruction of the Bolshevik Party
and the annihilation of the leadership of theJRussian
Revolution. He directed the assassination of Trotsky in
August 1940. Stalin was responsible for the murder of
more communists than Hitler and Mussolini combined.
SURITZ, YAKOV (1881-1952). A Menshevik before 1917, Suritz
joined the Bolsheviks after the revolution and served
as ambassador to Germany from 1934-1937.
SUVOROV, ALEKSANDR VASILIEVICH (1730-1800). A commander of
the tsarist armies in the wars against the French
Revolution.
THERMIDOR The month in the calendar introduced by the
French Revolution during which Robespierre and the
Jacobins were overthrown by reactionary forces. The
Thermidorean coup did not, however, represent or bring
about the restoration of feudal property relations.
Trotsky utilized the term "Thermidor" as part of a
historical analogy to indicate that the seizure of power
from the working class by the Stalinist usurpers had not
brought about the restoration of capitalist property

Biographical & Historical Glossary 307
relations. He warned, however, that such a restoration
was inevitable if the proletariat failed to overthrow the
bureaucracy in a political revolution.
TOMSKY, MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH (1880-1936). A printing worker,
Tomsky joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and spent ten
years in prison and exile. Trotsky called him "one of the
strongest personalities in the Soviet Union" and "the
greatest figure the Russian proletariat has produced
from its own ranks in thirty years." In Lenin's day,
Tomsky sat on the Politburo, served as secretary of the
powerful all-Russian trade union federation and headed
the state publishing house. A leader of the Right
Opposition along with Bukharin and Rykov, Tomsky
took his own life after being denounced at the Moscow
Trials in 1936. Trotsky remarked that Tomsky's suicide
closed one historical epoch and opened a new one.
TROYANOVSKY, ALEKSANDR (1882-1955). A Bolshevik for a brief
time in 1904, Troyanovsky adopted a social patriotic
stance during World War I. Between 1914 and 1920, he
was an implacable adversary of Lenin and the October
Revolution. Troyanovsky joined the CPSU after the Left
Opposition had been expelled. He was Stalin's ambassador
to the US from 1934-1939.
TSERETELLI, IRAKLII GEORGIEVICH (1882-1959). A Menshevik
leader, member of the Second Duma and a prisoner in
Siberia, Tseretelli returned after the February Revolution
and sat on the Executive Committee of the
Petrograd Soviet. Along with Dan, Skobelev and Cheidze,
he was one of the most prominent and outspoken of the
opportunist Mensheviks. From May 1917, Tseretelli
functioned as the minister of mail and telegraph
communications in the Provisional Government. He was
a leader of the Compromise Bloc between March and
October 1917, suppressing workers' struggles and propping
up capitalist rule. Tseretelli was completely hostile
to the October Revolution and emigrated in 1923.

308 Biographical & Historical Glossary
TUKHACHEVSKY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAEVTCH (1893-1937). A Bolshevik
military leader under Trotsky during the civil war and
a prominent figure in the Red Army. A graduate of the
Aleksandrovskoe Military School in 1914, Tukhachevsky
joined the exclusive Semenovsky guards regiment,
serving as a lieutenant during the First World War. A
German prisoner, he returned to Russia after the
revolution and joined the Red Army in 1918.
Tukhachevsky commanded the southern front and later
the Caucasian and western fronts in 1920-1921. On the
basis of some hastily absorbed elementary Marxist
formulas, he developed the "new military doctrine,"
coming into conflict with Trotsky. During the 1920s,
Tukhachevsky played a significant role in modernizing
and mechanizing the Red Army. On May 11, 1937,
Tukhachevsky was suddenly removed from his post as
vice commissar of defense and transferred to a minor
post in the provinces. Commanders of military districts
and other prominent generals were likewise transferred.
Tukhachevsky was executed in June 1937, leading to a
bloodbath in which the entire leadership of the Red
Army was decapitated.
VOLLMAR, GEORG VON(1850-1922). A right-wing Bavarian social
democrat and Reichstag deputy from Munich. In an
1879 article, "The Isolated Socialist State," Vollmar
advanced the idea that the triumph of socialism was
possible in a single country in these words: "I believe ...
that the final victory of socialism is not only historically
more likely primarily in a single state, but that nothing
stands in the road of the existence and prosperity of the
isolated socialist state."
VOROSRTLOV, KLIMENTI EFREMOVICH (1881-1969). A factory worker
and an Old Bolshevik, Voroshilov "displayed indubitable
personal courage" during the civil war, Trotsky wrote,
as well as "a complete lack of military and administrative
talent, and, besides, a narrow, provincial outlook."
His membership in the Tsaritsyn military opposition
and a close personal friendship with Stalin were the
only qualifications for his rise in the Soviet power

Biographical & Historical Glossary 309
structure. Voroshilov played a major role in the purge
/ of the Red Army from 1936-1938 and served as
commissar of defense from 1934-1940. He was criticized
by Khrushchev and resigned for "health" reasons.
WEBB, BEATRICE POTTER (1858-1943) and SIDNEY JAMES, BARON
PASSFIELD (1859-1947). Well-known reformist figures in
the British labor movement and members of the Fabian
Society. She was a daughter of a wealthy industrialist
and served as a member of the Royal Commission on the
Poor Laws. He was a founder of the Fabian Society with
Bernard Shaw in 1883, author of a major study of the
trade unions, and a leading economist within the Labour
Party. Founded the New Statesman in 1913. The Webbs
were social chauvinists during the imperialist war. He
authored the Decay of Capitalist Civilization in 1923
and was knighted by the British ruling class in 1929.
The Webbs became enthusiastic admirers of the Soviet
government after the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy
had consolidated its power.
WILHELM II, KAISER (1859-1941). The Hohenzollern emperor
from 1888 and ruler of Germany during World War I.
In November 1918, the sailors in Kiel mutinied and
seized the city. Revolution spread throughout Germany
and Wilhelm abdicated, fleeing the country. He lived
prosperously the rest of his life on the income of his
German properties.
YAGODA, GENRIKH GRIGORIEVICH (1891-1938). One of the foulest
figures of the Thermidorean reaction, Yagoda was a
Bolshevik from 1907, working as a statistician and later
in the medical insurance office of the Putilov Works.
After October, he held various military posts, beet axing
a leader of the Cheka in 1920 and deputy chairman of
the GPU in 1924. The entire struggle against the Left
Opposition from 1923 on, which took the form of a chain
of growing falsifications and frame-ups, was car ied out
with Yagoda in the leadership of the GPU. He was
responsible for the first execution in 1929, that of
Blumkin, who had been betrayed by Radek to the GPU.

310 Biographical & Historical Glossary
Yagoda organized the early stages of the show trials,
but fell victim to the bloody purge himself. He was
sentenced to death at the third trial and shot in 1938
with Rykov and the Right Opposition.
YAKOVLEV, YAKOV ARKADIEVICH (1896-1939). A Bolshevik from
1913, Yakovlev held various posts after the revolution,
rising to prominence during the wave of reaction in the
mid-twenties. Among other duties on behalf of the
bureaucracy, he wrote lying accounts of Bolshevik
history. In 1927, Yakovlev uttered the immortal assertion
that "collective farms and communes are at the
present time and will for a long time yet undoubtedly
be only islets in the sea of the peasant economy." In
1929, as commissar for agriculture, he was responsible
for carrying out forced collectivization and the "liquidation
of the kulaks as a class," a policy which led to the
deaths of millions of peasants and the near-collapse of
the Soviet economy. Yakovlev played the role of a
"witness" in the first Moscow Trial, a so-called Trotskyist
terrorist. He was himself executed in 1939.
YAROSLAVSKY, EMEJAN MIHAILOVICH (MINEI IZRAILEVICH GUBELMAN)
(1878-1943). A member of the RSDLP from 1898, a
"left" communist in 1918, Yaroslavsky became one of
the chief falsifiers of the history of the Bolshevik Party
and the October Revolution. In 1923 Yaroslavsky wrote
panegyrics to Trotsky; in 1925 he wrote of his agreement
with Zinoviev; and in 1927 he wrote that Bukharin
expressed no deviations whatsoever and that he was
educating the youth in the spirit of Leninism. Trotsky
labeled Yaroslavsky "the official historiographer of the
Stalin faction," and caustically referred to his "complete
willingness to rewrite history, including that of ancient
Egypt, according to the demands of the bureaucratic
stratum led by Stalin." In 1927 Yaroslavsky initiated
charges against Trotsky and Zinoviev before the Central
Committee Control Commission. He was largely responsible
for History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course,
a mass of lies about the roles played in the revolution
by Trotsky, Stalin and other major figures.

Biographical & Historical Glossary 311
ZEMSTVOS A form of rural administration introduced in the
central Russian provinces in 1864 and dominated by the
nobility. Toothless bodies, with jurisdiction over purely
local matters, such as hospitals and roads, any of their
decisions could be canceled by the Ministry of the
Interior.
ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEKSANDROVICH (1896-1948). Stalin's lieutenant
on cultural matters during the 1940s. A Bolshevik
from 1915, Zhdanov was one of the regional
secretaries upon whom Stalin leaned in his rise to power.
He served as Leningrad leader, replacing the assassinated
Kirov, from 1934-1944, and became a Politburo
member in 1939. The spokesman for the official party
line at the First Congress of Party Writers on "socialist
realism," in 1946 Zhdanov bitterly attacked Akhmatova,
Pasternak and Zoschenko for their "decadent,
apolitical and vulgar" writings. "Zhdanovism" became
a term of opprobrium identified with the worst bureaucratic
regimentation and suppression of intellectual and
artistic work. It has been speculated that the prominence
which his "esthetic" pronouncements brought
him caused Stalin to envy or fear Zhdanov and
eventually have him murdered, subsequently laying the
blame for his death on "Jewish doctors."
ZINOVIEV, GRIGORI EVSEYEVICH (RADOMYSLSKY) (1883-1936). A
founding member and leader of the Bolshevik Party, and
Lenin's closest collaborator in exile from 1903-1917.
Zinoviev began work as a teacher at the age of fifteen
and participated in strikes in 1900-1901. He joined the
RSDLP in 1901 and the Bolsheviks in 1903, immediately
after the Second Congress, and became a member of the
party's Central Committee in 1907. Renowned as an
agitator, Zinoviev took an active part in the Zimmerwald
and Kienthal Conferences, and co-authored (with Lenin)
Against the Stream, a work aimed at explaining the
crisis in the international labor movement and laying
the foundation for a new revolutionary international.
Returning with Lenin on the "sealed train" in 1917,
Zinoviev at first opposed the April Theses, as well as the

312
Biographical & Historical Glossary
October insurrection later in the year. After October
1917, Zinoviev became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet
and head of the Communist International from its
founding until 1926. He was a member of the Triumvirate"
which arrayed itself against Trotsky and the Left
Opposition from 1923-1925. In July 1926, at a plenum
of the Central Committee, Zinoviev declared that "on
the question of the apparatus-bureaucratic repression
Trotsky was correct against us." He further acknowledged
that his mistake in waging a struggle against
"Trotskyism" had been even more dangerous than his
mistake in 1917. Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with
Stalin in 1926, but on a series of fundamental questions
(the proletariat and the peasantry, the "democratic
dictatorship," permanent revolution), they stood between
the Thermidorean bureaucracy and the Marxist
Opposition. "Theoretical amorphousness avenged itself
inexorably, as it always does, in practice," Trotsky
wrote. Adopting a spirit of going halfway — "Everything
except expulsion from the party" — Zinoviev and
Kamenev capitulated to the bureaucracy in late 1927.
After that, Zinoviev's life became a series of arrests,
recantations and political abasements. He was framed
up on absurd charges and executed in the first of the
Moscow Trials in August 1936. Trotsky wrote of Zinoviev
and Kamenev, "Their personal fate is profoundly tragic.
If the future historian will try to show how pitilessly the
epochs of great revolutions destroy people, he will give
the example of Zinoviev and Kamenev."

Index
Abortion, 119,127-30,134
Abyssinia, 167,171,177
Administrators, 71-73,116-19,175,
214, 250
Adventurism, 31, 33-34
Agrarian revolution, 22
Agriculture, Soviet, 7, 9,14-15, 58,
178; Left Opposition statements
on, 22, 25-27, 35, 52; number
of administrators in, 117-18,
205; policy of the bureaucracy
in, 21-36, 40, 64-65, 108, 205;
social conditions in, 14-15,110-
15, 125; state ownership in,
199-200, 235; the struggle in
the party on (1923-1928), 21-27.
See also Collective farms;
Collectivization; Kulaks; Peasantry;
Soviet farms
Air Force, Soviet, 176-77
All-Russian Central Council of
Trade Unions, 30
America. See United States
Anarchy of capitalist economic system,
16
Andreyev, Andrei, 34, 200
Archimedes, 182
Armed people, the, 44, 47, 95
Art, 148,151-53,156-57, 224, 235,
247; "proletarian," 151
Austria, 79,166
Austro-Hungary, 160
Autarchy, 60,249
Babeuf, Francois-Noel, 77, 88
Backwardness, cultural and eco­
313
nomic, of Russia, 5-6, 8,10,13,
17, 37, 48-49, 68, 73, 87, 89-90,
97, 124, 129, 134, 147, 184-85,
246,253, 256-57
Bakh, Professor, 102
Baldwin, Stanley, 49,170
Baltic countries, 17
Barbarism, 5-6, 49
Barbusse, Henri, 2, 225
Barras, Paul, 76
Barthou, Jean Louis, 168
Belgium, 194, 247
Berliner Tageblatt, 52
Bismarck, 49
Black Sea, revolt of French sailors
in, 160
Blum, Leon, 170, 209, 262
Bolshevik Opposition. See Left Opposition
Bolshevik Party, 6, 22, 29-30, 63,
77, 85-86, 93, 116, 118, 128,
141, 143, 148, 161, 175, 183,
205, 240-41, 246, 250; Central
Committee of, 26,30,34,82-84,
200, 219, 223, 238, 253; Congresses
and conferences of, 25-
27, 30, 83, 87, 93, 183, 213,
253; degeneration of, 81-90,262-
63; factions in, 3, 27, 30, 38,63,
75, 83-86, 105, 180-81, 226,
229; in 1917 Revolution, 76, 81;
program of, 20, 44, 47, 50-51,
162, 166, 224; prohibition of
factions in, 83, 105, 226, 229;
struggle in, 22, 25, 28, 63,
83-85, 238. See also Central

314 Index
Executive Committee; Democracy;
Democratic centralism;
Left Opposition; Lenin
Bolshevik-Leninists, 213. See also
Left Opposition
Bolshevism, 82-84, 135, 144, 174,
180,214, 242, 260,262
Bonaparte. See Napoleon
Bonapartism, 195, 233-38, 241,
244-47
Bourgeois democracy, 222
Bourgeois economists, 1, 7
Bourgeois law, 46-48,96,131,134.
See also Law
Bourgeois norms of distribution,
46, 70, 97, 207-8,221, 246
Bourgeois revolution, 5,43,77,149
Bourgeois state, 47, 208, 225; in
the Soviet Union, 46
Bourgeoisie, 16-17, 211, 225, 257;
Czechoslovak, 168; French, 91,
168; Russian, 5,27, 76,87, 206
"Breathing spell," the, 50,256
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 160-61,
165
Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre,
76
British Empire, 259-60
British workers, 160,167
Budenny, Semeon, 181
Bukharin, Nikolai, 23, 25-26, 30-
31, 85,152,182, 228, 252,256
Bulgaria, 78,197
Bureaucracy, 13, 42-44, 224-25,
228,234; British Labourite, 260
Bureaucracy, Soviet, 75, 233; corruption
and crimes of, 87-88,
92, 97, 202, 211, 250, 261-62;
dictatorship of, 94, 97, 227;
exploitation of peasants by, 113;
as instrument of social differentiation,
97, 114, 204; international
role, 163-64,166,256-58,
263; origins of, 24, 43, 75-81,
96, 98, 257; relation to proletariat,
31, 44, 71, 80, 84, 92, 97,
110, 142, 163, 166, 211, 213,
256-57; role as bourgeois organ,
97, 113, 207-8, 211, 213, 215,
232; role in Soviet economy, 14,
31, 38, 62-63, 65, 67, 72-73,
145, 235; similarity to fascist,
211; structure of, 115-22. See
also Privileges. For specific policies,
see separate headings.
Bureaucratism, 45, 47, 49, 50-51,
83, 96,115,190,235,238,256
Caesarism, 237
Canton, 197
Capitalism (capitalist), 6, 16, 40,
45-48, 50, 99, 148, 193, 195,
208, 216, 220-21, 225, 227-28,
237, 250-51, 256; crisis of, 5-6,
8, 36, 214, 256; in Russia, 77,
256; in the Soviet Union, 21,
23, 51, 58, 220, 222; market
relations of, 21, 113; need to
surpass level of, 8-9, 40-41,
68-69,71,147,182,254; revolutionary
overthrow of, 17, 195.
See also Restoration, capitalist
Caste, ruling, 78, 81, 117, 214,
216,240
Catherine II, 174
Catholic church, 168,236
Caucasus, 167
Censorship, 44,144,180-81, 223
Census, 199,206-7
Central Executive Committee: January
1936 sessions, 66, 68, 70,
93, 121, 129, 176, 240; June
1936,125-26, 219
Central Statistical Bureau, 28
Chartism, 259
Chervonets, 31,60-61, 63,66
Chiang Kai-shek, 79
Chicherin, Georgi, 161
Children, 52, 95,126-29,131,134-
35,137-38, 207
China, 1, 80,196
Chinese Eastern Railroad, 164-65
Chinese revolution, 79, 164, 167,
173
Chinovniks, 85
Citrine, Walter McLennan, 120
Civil war: Russian, 19, 48, 78, 90,
139,175,188,191,239; internal
democracy during, 83, 93, 153,
180-81, 226. See also "War
communism"

Index
Class nature of political parties,
227
Glass struggle, 138,172,196-97
Classless society, 3, 45, 95, 151,
202, 225, 228
Collective farms, 53, 65, 117, 175,
185, 194-95, 199, 206, 235;
conditions in, 100, 110-15,125;
future evolution of, 213, 215;
peasant attitude toward, 64,
105, 111; private plots and, 64,
108, 111, 113, 125, 200, 206;
Stalinist policy for, 25, 32-35,
40, 111-15, 205. See also Agriculture;
Collectivization; Kulaks;
Peasantry; Soviet farms
Collectivization, 9, 24-25, 29, 32-
35, 53, 58, 64, 93, 95, 111, 125,
178, 255; of cossacks, 187
Colonial peoples, 160,197
Combined development, Law of
See Law
Commisariat of Foreign Trade, 167
Communism, 39-41,46,49, 57, 71,
92, 110, 129, 152-53, 204, 220-
21, 259
Communist International: under
Bolshevism, 161, 172-73, 180,
247; under Stalinist bureaucracy,
30, 53-54, 79-80, 82, 84,
92, 125, 159, 162-74, 197, 230,
247, 250, 258, 263
Communist Manifesto, 48, 263
Communist Party. See Bolshevik
Party
Communist Youth League, 142-44
Communist Youth, 117-18,131-32,
136,139-42,148,156,175,227,
255-56; tenth congress of, 139,
142,255
Communist, 219, 224, 238, 242,
247
Competition, 110
Concentration camps, 154, 224,
226, 230, 240-41
Constituent Assembly, 249
Constitution, Soviet, 161,201,207-
8, 219-32, 237, 239, 244
Cooperatives, 25, 40, 64, 103-4,
118, 121, 175, 199, 215, 229,
234-35, 243
315
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 88
Cossacks, 187-88
Council of People's Commissars,
11, 93-95
Counterrevolution, 47, 179 195
247
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 172
Culture, 3, 8, 145-57, 185, 192,
198, 205, 221, 223, 243, 246;
Great Russian, 150-51; socialist,
140,152,156, 236. See also
Art; Backwardness; Education;
Literature; "Proletarian culture"
Curzon, Lord, 160
Czechoslovakia, 9,166,194
Das Kapital, 7
"Declaration of the Rights of the
Toiling and Exploited People,"
249
Democracy: in the trade unions,
214; party, 82-83, 86, 226-32;
soviet, 58, 83, 86, 138, 222-26;
restoration of, 214, 236, 246
Democratic centralism, 82, 84
Democratic revolution, 22. See also
Bourgeois revolution
Denmark, 14
Department of Roads and Communications,
101
Dialectics, 7,136, 203, 262
Dictatorship of the proletariat: established
in 1917, 77, 245, 256;
Marxist doctrine of, 25, 43-44,
49-50, 53, 212, 224-25, 236,
242, 254; the bureaucracy and,
53, 94, 212, 222, 224, 236, 240,
261; the Red Army and, 183;
transitional character of, 151,
153. See also State; Transitional
regime
"Disarmament," 162, 169, 171-72,
174
Distribution of goods: Soviet, 46,
51, 60, 66,122; socialist, 99
Divorce, 130,134
Dneprostroi, 26, 30
Duhring, Karl Eugen, 45
Duranty, Walter, 2, 225

316 Index
Education, 40, 131, 137,145,163,
185
Electrification, 7,15,26, 53
Engels, Frederick, 42-45, 94, 137,
250-52, 260
England, 6, 10, 14-15, 78, 165,
167,170-71,251,254,259
Entente, 160
Estonia, 78,160-61,173,197
Europe, 6, 16, 21, 68, 162, 168,
170,174,198, 247, 254
European proletariat, 160,172-73,
196-98,238,247, 249,254
European revolution, 179, 194,
238, 247, 254-55, 258
Europe, Socialist United States of,
198
Exile of Oppositionists, 29, 85,
140, 240-41
Fabians, 2, 43, 259-60
Family, the, 59, 123-35, 185, 215,
232
Famine, 29, 52,152
Fascism, 50,135,144,165,167-68,
196, 209-11, 237-38, See also
Hitler
February Revolution, 76, 246
Feroci, 210
Films, Soviet, 154
Finland, 173,186
Fischer, Louis, 2,129, 225
Five-year plans, 7, 30, 48-49, 51,
60, 69, 114, 131; effects of, 99,
106, 139, 152, 157, 162; "Five-
Year Plan in Four Years,"
28-37; the Left Opposition and,
26, 254; the Red Army and,
176-77,187
Food card system, 36, 61, 66,124,
234
Foreign trade, 20, 24, 67; state
monopoly of, 58, 60, 168, 192-
94, 211, 252
Foreign policy, Soviet, 159-74,178,
193-98, 247
Foundations of Leninism, The, 249
Fourth International, 194, 245,
250; Soviet section of, 247
"Fourth International and War,
The," 194
France, 196; class struggle in, 167,
194, 246-47; foreign policy of,
165-66, 169-70, 196; relations
with Soviet Union, 165-68,170,
186-87, 262; Soviet production
compared with, 6, 9-10, 14-15;
Soviet treaty with, 165, 169,
262; Russian emigres in, 194.
See also Black Sea
French Communist Party, 168
French Revolution, 76-77, 91,174,
178
"Friends of Peace," 160, 169, 171,
194,196
"Friends of the Soviet Union,"
2-3, 69,100,116,122,130,162,
167-68, 202, 258, 260-61, 263
Frunze, Mikhail, 181-82
Galicia, 196
Galilei, Galileo, 87
Gandhi, Mahatma, 2
"General Line," 25, 28, 32, 37, 54
General strike: England, 78,167
Geneva Conference, 161
Georgia, 24,173
German Communist Party, 79,161
German revolution: betrayal and
defeat of, 20-21,28, 78-79
Germany: class struggle in, 20-21,
28, 78-79, 160, 164, 167, 193,
196; economy of, 60, 193, 209,
251; foreign policy of, 160-61,
166-71, 186, 193, 196; militarism
in, 164, 186; Nazi rule in,
164-65, 195; Social Democrats
in, 8, 21, 161, 250-51; Soviet
production compared with, 6,
8-9,14-16, 254
Gide, Andre, 261
Gladkov, Fedor, 156
Goebbels, Joseph, 137,166
Gold standard
GPU, 86, 113, 116, 138, 186, 225,
239, 241
Great Britain, See England
Great War See World War I
Green, William, 120
Gusev, Sergei, 179,181
Hitler, Adolf, 49, 80, 164, 167,

Index
169-70, 186, 194-96, 209-10,
230,262
Homeless, 126-28,134, 204, 207
Housing, for workers, 12,100,109,
247
Howard, Roy, 54, 169, 172, 219,
231
Hungary, Soviet, 192
Illiteracy, 16
Imperialism, 162,169-70,174,179,
193-95, 259-60; revolutionary
struggles against, 162,165,193,
197
Incomes, 16, 65, 105, 113; of the
bureaucracy, 120-22,202
India, 1
Industrialization, 6, 26, 30,192
Industry, Soviet, 1, 5-17, 20-22,
27, 31
Inequality, social: in the USSR, 3,
97, 99-122, 127, 134, 202-5,
214, 232
Inflation, Soviet, 60-63, 67-68
International revolution. See world
revolution
Internationalism, revolutionary,
179, 247
Intervention against the Soviet
Union, 9, 78, 93, 160, 162,
191-92,226, 254-55, 263
Isolated socialist state, perspective
of, 250-52
Italy, 1, 60, 165, 167, 170-71, 177,
209-10
Izvestia, 12,102, 127,167
Jacobins (Jacobinism), 85, 88, 91,
168
Japan, 1, 6, 80, 164-65, 167, 170,
176,178, 196
Jouhaux, Leon, 120
Kamenev, Lev, 24, 26, 84-85, 240,
244
Katheder-Sozialismus, 2
Kellogg Pact, 161
Kerensky, Aleksandr, 76,187
Kharkov, Aleksandr, 108
Khinchuk, Lev, 81
Kirov, Sergei, 244
317
Komsomol, 106
Komsomolsk, 136
Korea, 196
Kosarev, Alexandr, 106
Kronstadt revolt, 83
Krupskaya, Nadezdha, 81, 85
Kulak: bureaucracy's support for,
23-24, 26, 80, 95, 233, 252;
bureaucracy's turn against, 30-
32, 233, 255; liquidation as a
class, 33-34, 36, 51, 53, 64, 93,
95,114,255, 257; resistance by,
28, 36,42,93, 111, 141 See also
Agriculture; Collectivization;
Peasantry
Kun, Bela, 192
Labor power, 10,14, 23,63, 205
Land, 22-23, 33, 112, 199, 206,
210; denationalization of, 24;
expropriation of, 22, 33
Landlords, 22, 33,113, 206
Latvia, 173,186
Laval, Pierre, 167-69
Law: and economic structure, 46,
52, 70, 112; of combined development,
5,256; of uneven development
of capitalism, 250-51,
256. See also Bourgeois law
he Populaire, 262
Le Temps, 191
League of Communist Youth, 95
League of Nations, 161-62,166-67,
169,172-73,195, 232
Left Opposition, 25-31, 52, 75, 79,
81, 84-85, 114, 120, 154, 239,
260; 1927 Platform of, 28-29,
63, 86, 120; perspective of reforming
the party, 238; policies
of, 22, 25, 27, 34, 63, 75, 79-80,
114, 197, 238, 250, 253-55;
reasons for defeat by Stalin,
75-81; Stalinist persecution of,
25, 29, 79, 81, 86, 140, 233,
239-41, 250; support for, 24, 26,
79-80, 138, 241. See also Bolshevik
Party
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: in 1917,
76, 91, 94; on art, 153; collaborators
of, 85, 240, 242; death of,
81, 84, 249; distorted by Stalin-

318 Index
ists, 64,84,155,223-24,250-51;
on Fabians, 259-60; and perspective
of world revolution, 5, 8,
249, 256; policies of, 19, 21, 30,
48, 50, 53, 87, 93, 137, 144,
155, 161-62, 173, 224, 249; on
the state, 42-44, 46-47, 49, 91,
94-95, 137, 242; and struggle
against bureaucracy, 81,83-84,
87, 94-95, 103,144, 213; works
of, 44,49,155, 249
"Lenin's testament," 223
"Leninist levy," 84
Lincoln, Abraham, 49
Literature, 138,153-56,224
Lithuania, 186
Litvinov, Maxim, 167
Lloyd George, David, 168,194
Lumpenproletariat, 207
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 153
Maiakovsky, Vladimir, 156
Maisky, Ivan, 81
Manchukuo, 196
Market relations, 61, 99,113
Market, laws of, 101
Marx, Karl, 41, 49, 52, 68, 70,146,
250, 252-53; on communism,
40,46-48,220; on the liberation
of women, 103, 124; on the
state, 42-44,201
Marxism, 39-40, 53,155,173,182,
201,224,227,250,263
Means of production, 6,16, 46, 71,
148,163,199,203, 211,214-15,
252
Mensheviks, 43,135,261
Mezhlauk, Ivan, 70
Mikado, 196
Mikoyan, Anastas, 101-2
Military titles introduced, 189-90,
232
Militia, 184-85, 232
Mirabeau, Honor6, 76
Molotov, Vyacheslav, 9-10, 25, 32,
36, 68, 86, 93, 95, 107, 121,
189, 229-30, 240
Monarchy, 5, 77, 234
Money system, Soviet, 20, 31, 35,
57-68,127, 235. See also Chervonets;
Inflation; Ruble
Mongolia, 164-65
Monopoly of foreign trade. See
Foreign trade
Moscow Trial, 4, 244
Mussolini, Benito, 167,171,209-10
Muzhiks. See Peasantry
Napoleon, 76, 85,168,178, 223
Napoleon III, 237
Narodnik, 157
National Socialism. See Fascism;
Hitler
Nationalities, Soviet, 136, 144-51,
156-57
Nationalization: of land, 24-25,
210; of means of production, 58,
89,163, 210,252
Nazis. See Germany
"Neutralizing" the bourgeoisie,
164,185-86
New Economic Policy (NEP), 19-
20, 31, 60-65, 78, 87, 103, 124,
139
Nicholas II, 144
Nihilists, 196
Nursery schools, 123-25, 261
October Revolution, 1-2, 16, 26,
28, 77, 81, 137, 144, 247, 256,
258-60, 262; achievements of,
7, 130, 148-49, 157, 178, 193,
197, 231, 247, 259; betrayed by
bureaucracy, 81,172,174,188,
213, 230-31; and world revolution,
50, 77,163,247,254, 259
Officer corps reintroduced, 44,188-
91, 237
Oirots, 146
Opportunism, 31, 42, 140, 228,
259, 262
Opposition of 1923, 24. See also
Left Opposition
Ordzhonikidze, Grigori, 106
Ossoaviokhim, 116
Pacifism, 161,166,195,261
Palmerston, Henry, 49
Parasitism: of bureaucracy, 212
Paris Commune, 254, 259
Passfield, Lord, 259-60. See also
Webb, Sidney

Index
Passport system, 36
Paul, 174
Peasantry, 1, 23, 25, 33, 59, 119,
125, 146, 199, 202, 222, 249;
Bolshevik policy and, 20-22,27,
76, 214, 255; differentiation
within, 23,29,31-32; resistance
of, 20, 22, 26, 29, 33-34, 53,
110, 243; Stalinist policy and,
23-26, 28, 31-36, 64-65, 104,
111, 206, 221-22,224, 231, 243
Peoples front. See Popular front
Permanent revolution: campaign
against theory of, 79-80
Peter 1,145
Petrov, 239, 250
Petty-bourgeois tendencies, 37,84,
113, 147, 149, 200-1, 206, 212,
221, 225, 232
Petty bourgeoisie, 24,76,193,260;
in French Revolution, 91; Soviet,
78, 80,119,207, 233
Piecework payment, 69-72,99,107,
110,139,150, 205, 220-21, 234
Pilsudski, Joseph, 79,196
Planned economy, 6,10,20-21,53,
58-59, 62-63, 145, 176, 192,
212,214-16,243,257; and agriculture,
111
Plato, 202
Poland, 160-61,166,186,196
Police, repression, 3, 93, 129, 137,
144.156, 205, 238,243, 245
Polish workers, 78
Politburo, 28, 31, 85-86,161, 256
Political parties, prohibition of, 83,
90, 226-29
Political revolution, 214, 245-46
Political struggle, 3, 75, 83,105
Popolo d'ltalia, 209
Popular fronts, 247, 261
Population, Soviet, 14, 192, 199-
200
Postyshev, Pavel, 95
Potemkin, Vladimir, 81
Pravda, 12, 31, 51, 89, 92, 127,
132.157, 205-6,239, 241
Preparatory stage, 17, 41
Press, Soviet, 63, 89, 92,104,118,
125-29,145,150,167, 208, 219,
319
223, 253 See also Izvestia,
Pravda
Prices, 9, 22, 35, 59, 66, 99, 114.
See also Inflation
Primitive accumulation, 216
Prison, 29, 85, 224, 230, 240-42,
250
Private property in the means of
production, 16, 91, 199, 201,
209, 212, 214
Privileges of the bureaucracy, 17,
88, 96-97, 101, 107, 120-22,
132, 190, 214-15, 222, 230-31,
240. See also Inequality
Productive forces, 55, 91, 208-9,
212; basis for communism, 39-
41,48; in conflict with property
relations, 185, 193, 209, 212,
256; in Germany, 193; in the
Soviet Union, 20,40,42,52,96,
185,193, 207,234
Productivity of labor, 8, 40-41, 54,
57-73, 222, 255; in USSR, 9-10,
13-14, 36, 53, 67-69, 72, 99,
163,192, 201,254-55
"Proletarian art," 151
"Proletarian culture," 151-52,181-
82
Proletarian dictatorship. See Dictatorship
of the proletariat
"Proletarian military doctrine,"
181-83,185
Proletarian revolution, 42-43, 48,
58, 193, 246, 252, 254; and
bureaucracy, 42-43; in Russia,
5, 8, 58, 77, 211-12, 246; relation
to democratic revolution,
22; world, 144,168,195
Proletarian state, 211. See also
Workers' state
Proletarian vanguard, 80, 84, 90,
118, 233, 240, 245
Proletariat, 40; Austrian, 167; differentiation
within, 88, 105-10,
227-28; German, 28; international,
8-9, 78-79, 160, 164-66,
174,179,197,256; Italian, 167;
Polish, 173; Soviet, 5, 76-80,
105-10,148,200, 211,214, 222,
243, 255. See also European
proletariat

320 Index
Property, personal, 221-22
Prostitution, 126-27,130,134,207
Protectionism, 6
Quality, 12,235-36
Radek, Karl, 52
Railroads, 11,15,101,184, 252
Rakovsky, Christian, 77, 86-88,
120, 230
Rapallo, treaty of, 160-61
Red Army, 10-11, 36, 44, 78, 100,
148,160,166,173-91,197,199,
231
Reformism (reformists), 8,43,163,
247, 261-62
Religion, 39,131-32,139
Restoration, capitalist, 38, 92, 94,
168,207, 213-16, 228,243, 257
Revolution, 76; of 1905,149
Revolutionary party,, See Bolshevik
Party
Revolutionary vanguard. See Proletarian
vanguard
Revolutionary wars, 162,173,179
Rhineland, 165,170
Riga, peace of, 160,165
Right Opposition, 29-30,85,239
Robespierre, Maximilien, 76
Rolland, Romain, 2
Romania, 186
Roosevelt, Franklin, 49, 209
Ruble, 13, 60, 62, 65-70,129, 234
See also Money system
Russification, 151
Rykov, Aleksei, 25-26, 29-30, 85
Sabotage, accusations of, 28, 62,
73,95; kulak, 36
Schmidt, Otto, 136
Schools, See Education
Schussnigg, Kurt von, 262
Science, 153-54, 202, 224, 235,247
"Scissors, the," 22
Scripps-Howard, 169
Second International, 172
Secret ballot, 225-26,230, 237
Serafimovich, Aleksandr, 156
Serge, Victor, 230, 242
Servants, domestic, 100, 133-34,
207
Social antagonisms, 42-43,53,203,
216, 231, 237, 240
Social Democratic, 8, 21, 50, 161,
193,228
Social patriotism, 172, 262
Social revolution, 40, 176, 178-79,
209-10,216,245-46
Social Revolutionaries, 141
Social Sciences, 154
"Socialism in one country," theory
of, 28, 50, 84, 151, 159, 173,
180,182,191,197, 249-63
Socialism, 62, 66, 68, 71-72, 92-93,
103,149,152,216,253,255; the
kulak and, 23, 42, 252; principles
of, 3,40,52-53,57, 71,132,
139, 205, 223, 249; and the
state, 39-55,136-37
Socialism achieved in USSR?, 2,
7,24,38,53,70,105,249; claim
by bureaucracy, 39, 51-55, 61,
70, 94,125, 200, 207, 220, 226;
proof against, 39-42, 54, 70, 94,
122, 127, 147, 200, 207, 216,
220
Socialist oath, 179
Socialist revolution. See Proletarian
revolution
Socialist society, 224, 255, 258
Socialist United States of Europe,
198
Solntsev, Eleazar, 250
Soltz, Aron, 128-29
Sosnovsky, Lev, 88-89,130
Soviet Communism, 258
Soviet economy, 6-38, 96-97, 117;
claim as socialist, 255
Soviet farms, 108, 112-13,199
Soviet industry. See Industry
Soviet of People's Commissars,
179 249
Soviets, 44, 51, 53-54, 78, 83, 92,
94,117, 214, 220-26, 230, 242
Spain, 14,167,194, 247
Stakhanov movement, 54, 68-73,
92, 106-10, 115, 118, 136, 139,
205,234, 255
Stalin, Joseph, 2, 44, 82, 180-81,
219; and bureaucratism, 48, 75,
80-81, 84-86, 92-93, 121, 143-
44, 236-38, 241; and culture,

Index
137, 152, 154, 156, 182; economic
policies of, 24-27, 29-30,
32,61-62,65,109; foreign policy
of, 169-70,172,174,179; interviewed
by Roy Howard, 54,
169-70, 172-74, 219; and Red
Army, 180-81, 190; socialism
achieved, claim, 51,54,71,104,
107, 256; and "socialism in one
country," 28, 50, 249-50, 252-
53; and Soviet constitution, 219,
225-26, 228
Stalinism, 237, 250, 254
Standard of living, Soviet, 17, 69,
99, 255, 257
State: dying away of the, 42-45,
47-48, 51, 58, 91, 136-37, 236,
242, 246; the fascist, 209-10;
Marxist view of the, 42-48, 57,
96-97, 137, 225; the Soviet, 3,
26, 44-45, 50, 88, 93, 95-97,
202, 211-12, 220, 241, 243-44,
257, 261. See also Bourgeois
state
State and Revolution, 43,49
State Bank, 67
"State capitalism," 207-10, 212,
216
State Planning Commission, 12,
28, 63, 66, 70
State property, 105, 201, 203,
212-13, 216
State-ism, 209-10
Students, 137,174-76,199
Suritz, Yakov, 81
Suvorov, Aleksandr, 174
Technique, productive, 14, 39, 99,
152, 256; capitalist, 8-10, 41,
49, 68, 209; need to catch up
with capitalist, 6, 8-10, 41,148,
185, 235, 255; socialism and,
41, 49, 52, 204, 220; under the
Stalinist bureaucracy, 51, 54,
71-72, 101, 174, 202, 205, 235,
243,256
Terrorism, 4,140-41, 239, 244
Thermidor, 81, 85, 90-91, 97, 130,
134, 140, 157, 173, 188; roots
and development of, 75-98
321
Third International. See Communist
International
Third Republic (Prance), 160
Times, London, 172
Tomsky, Mikhail, 25-26, 30, 85
Totalitarian regime, 86, 93, 155,
235, 238
Trade unions, Soviet, 86,109,120,
167, 175, 205, 214, 229, 234,
246
Transitional regime, 39-42,52,59,
91, 96, 153, 216-17; definition
of the Soviet Union as, 216
Trotsky, Leon, 85,143,242
Trotskyism" (Trotskyists"), 24,
27, 31, 239-41, 256, 261
Trotskyist-Zinovievist," 239
Troyanovsky, Aleksandr, 81
Tsarist regime, 5, 13, 17, 28, 48,
61, 77, 89, 102, 122, 146-47,
174, 177, 244, 260; army of,
175,178,187,190
Tseretelli, Iraklii, 76
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 176-77,
180-81,189
Ukraine, 9,102,196
Uneven development, law of. See
Law
United States, 5,11,13-16, 45, 49,
68,161,170, 209, 254
Vollmar, Georg, 250-52
Voroshilov, Klimenti, 11,177,181,
188
Wage payment, system of, 21, 40,
46, 57, 70, 97, 204, 221
Wages: in USSR, 96, 105-9, 113,
132, 204-5,214, 234
"War communism," 19-20, 62, 99,
124
War Department, 10, 177, 179-80,
182,184, 189
War, 36, 165, 169-71, 174, 178,
192-93, 195-97; the Soviet Union
in, 191-98
Water transport, 11-12,15
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 2, 28,
42,116, 225, 254, 258-60

322 Index
White guards, 140-41, 239
Wilhelm II, 196
Women, condition of, 65, 101-2,
104,123-35
Workers' state, 3, 40, 44-48, 70,
92, 97,105,165, 168, 201, 237,
243,247
World capitalism, 30,256
World market, 69
World revolution: Bolshevik perspective
of, 6,50,153,161,163,
179, 183, 214, 237, 252, 254,
256; Soviet masses and, 79-80,
179; Stalinist rejection of, 28,
79-80, 159-65, 172, 179, 183,
185, 232,238,250, 256
World War 1,176
Yagoda, Genrikh, 92
Yakovlev, Yakov, 24, 28, 32
Yaroslavsky, Emilian, 131
Youth, 106, 131, 135-44,150,184,
188, 214, 229, 231, 240, 244,
247. See also Communist Youth
Zemstvos, 144,223
Zhdanov, Andrei, 101
Zinoviev, Grigori, 24, 26, 84-85,
240,244