Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

"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."