From Marx to Mao Tse-tung - BANNEDTHOUGHT.NET

that we make the class struggle here is bound to diemore and more, that in proportion to the growth ofour successes the class enemy becornes more andmoretamed....On the contrary, the greater our progress, thegreater our successes, the rnore embittered the remnantsof the smashed, exploiting classes will become,the more quickly they will resort to sharper forms ofstruggle, the more they will do damage to the Sovietstate, the more they will clutch at the most desperatemeans of struggle as the last resort of the doomed.We must ,bear in mind that the remnants of therouted classes in the U.S.S.R. are not alone. Theyhave direct support from our enemies beyond theborders of the U.S.S.R. It would be a mistake tosuppose that the sphere of the class struggle isbounded iby the frontiers of the U.S.S.R. While oneend of the class struggle operates wiurain theU.S.S.R., its other end extends into the bourgeoisstates around us. (SMT z6z.)Here 'the class struggle is again envisaged as continuingand growing more acute.Finally, in his report to the Eighteenth PartyCongress in March 1939, Stalin said :While capitalist society is torn by irreconcilablecontradictions between workers and capitalists andbetween peasants and landlords-resulting in itsinternal instability-Soviet society, liberated fromthe yoke of exploitation; knows no such contradictions,is free of class conflicts, and presents a pictureof friendly collaboration between workers, peasantsand intellectuals. (SL 645.)Here Soviet society is again presented as being free ofclass antagonisms.How are these discrepancies to be explained? Beforer32attempting to answer this question, we must considerthe measures taken d,uring these years to defeat thecounter-revolutionary forces.On the one hand, a nurnber of political leaders,including Bukharin, Rykov and Zinoviev, also severalarmy generals and a chief of police, were tried andconvicted of treason and executed. Common to allthese was the conviction that in the coming war aGerman victory was inevitable. In addition, a largenumber of spies and other enemy agents were eliminated.There can be little doubt that, if thesemeasures had not been taken, the Soviet Union wouldhave been destroyed. On the other hand, in the courseof their counter-espionage activities, the securitypolice, who were subject to no effective control, arrestedon false charges many tens of thousands ofinnocent persons, and large numbers of these wereexecuted without trial. These repressive rneasures weredirected not so much against the workers and peasants,who were relatively unaffected, as against theintelligentsia and above all the Party itself. Not onlydid a large proportion of the victims consist of Partymembers, but many of these were among Stalin's mostloyal supporters. The only intelligible explanation ofthese events is the one that was current at the timeand suibsequently endorsed at the Twentieth PartyCongress (tgS6). Enemy agents had penetrated intothe higher ranks of the security police. Stalin acceptedresponsibility for the purges, and, admitted that theyhad been accompanied by 'grave mistakes' (SL 6a9).They show how narrow was the margin by which thecounter-revolution f ailed.These criminal violations of civic rights stand inflagrant contradiction to the new constitution, inwhich those rights were guaranteed; and this contradictionis clearly related to the contradiction alreadynoted in Stalin's analysis of the state of classes inI33