Текст книги "Ford and Stalin. How to Live in Humaneness"
Автор книги: (IP of the USSR) Internal Predictor of the USSR
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Such purposeful policy of eliminating the former ruling “elite’s” representatives which the internazi revolutionaries executed in the course of revolution and the Civil War resulted in the Hebrews’ having an overwhelming majority in the party and government bodies and in the mass media. This has a twofold explanation. First, it was an effect of the internazi’s personnel policy proper: promoting their own kin to key posts. Second, it resulted from the fact that at the end of the 19th century it was the Hebrews who became the best-educated part of the diverse people populating the Russian empire. They were ahead of all other ethnic groups according to statistics on education[221], and working in government bodies required a certain minimal educational level that the rest of the country’s population did not possess.
Yet in the very first years of peaceful life the «world backstage» and its RSFSR-USSR local representatives discovered the fact that most workers and peasants were loyal to the Soviet regime and many of them, especially young people, actively supported it on their own accord.[222] At the same time there was a growth in a certain phenomenon which internazis call anti-Semitism occurring throughout the entire society.[223] Under the social conditions existing at the time individuals like L. Bronstein (Trotsky), L. Rosenfeld (Kamenev), G. Apfelbaum (Zinovyev) and others of their kinship – at the time the cult leaders of the revolution and the «working people» who have won the Civil War – could not personify state power during the long period of building a new social order which then lay yet ahead.[224]
One should also understand that there is one kind of attitude to a revolution and the new power which follows in its wake if the revolution takes place while an imperialist war is going on and while everyone is tired of that war (except the “elite” who make fortunes on it). But there is a completely different attitude to a revolution if the new power arises as a result of a victory won by an aggressor who has started a «revolutionary fight for the sake of liberating fellow workers of another country from the yoke of capital» while those workers themselves have not yet become inspired with the thought of a revolution and a new power.[225] It is equally so if the new power arises through a coup d’etat organized in a country living a peaceful life.[226] Psychic Trotskyites and Marxists in the USSR did not regard those circumstances of great political momentum[227] as a political reality.[228]
Besides, while Russia fought the Civil War the revolutionary situation in European countries came to naught.
Due to these circumstances the «world backstage» had to agree with V. Lenin’s point of view: first establish socialism in a separate individual country, then transition to socialism in all other countries. V. Lenin expressed this point of view in as early as 1915. Among the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) top officials this point of view was shared by J. Stalin.
As noted by some biographers of J. Stalin, in the pre-Revolutionary and the early post-revolutionary years he was among the last to join the (party) majority that had already been formed before. This defined the way he made his party career. His works were written in a language befitting common people (see his Collected works). On the one hand, it made them easily accessible for the understanding of the common working people who were semiliterate and poorly educated. On the other hand, it convinced the intelligentsia who took up the ruling role in the party of J. Stalin’s own illiteracy because he seemed not to be able of mastering that «highly scientific» argot which was used by the party intelligentsia in their oral and written word and which the common people could not understand (e.g., immanent, permanent, fideism, gnoseology and similar words used in the literature of Marxist intelligentsia). Therefore for party leaders of Trotsky’s type Stalin was neither an outstanding party philosopher, economist and publicist writer[229] nor an outstanding orator capable of enticing the crowd towards the feats of revolution by word of mouth. The intelligentsia leaders and their supporters believed him to be an ill-bred (having no good manners), rude, poorly educated (a half-educated seminarian[230]), lazy (has written nothing during his last exile) man and therefore a man incapable of thinking independently.
This created a false impression that J.V. Stalin could be controlled by cleverer and better-educated leaders even if he did become the top party executive. That is why Stalin’s promotions to higher and higher levels of power inside the party produced no objection or opposition of the «world backstage».
Besides, J.V. Stalin was a member of a national minority like the majority of revolution leaders, namely, a Georgian, which seemed to guarantee that he would suppress any threat of «Great Russian» nationalism or Nazism.
All those factors resulted in that the «world backstage» found it plausible to entrust the task of personifying the success of socialism in a separate individual country to J. Stalin.
Bolsheviks, on their part, were also pondering who was to succeed and continue their cause as V. Lenin’s illness resulting from his injury[231] was deteriorating and making him less and less capable of leading the party and the state.
In this connection we shall turn to a document known as «The address to the convention» which is reported by the CPSU’s historic tradition as having been written down from V. Lenin’s words by several of his secretaries and at different times between December 1922 and January 1923.
The letter concerns the ways to avoid a party split in future and to ensure the Central Committee’s stability through formal means but not through achieving a unity of opinions on all the issues of party activity, this unity being based on the common methodology of cognition and world understanding shared by the party members.[232]
«I think that the most important people as far as this kind of stability is concerned are such CC[233] members as Stalin and Trotsky. The terms they are on in my opinion comprise the greater half of the danger posed by that kind of split which could be avoided. In my judgment it can be avoided through increasing the number of CC members up to 50 or 100 people among other things.[234]
Having taken the post of general secretary Comrade Stalin has concentrated in his hands a power of limitless authority, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use that power with enough caution or not. On the other hand, comrade Trotsky is distinguished not only by his outstanding abilities[235], as his opposition to the CC in regard to the issue of NKPS[236] has demonstrated.[237] Personally he seems to be the most able man in the current CC, yet he carries it too far with his self-confidence and caring too much for the purely administrative side of our cause.
The above-mentioned two qualities of the two outstanding leaders in our current CC can accidentally lead to a split, and if our party does not take measures to counter it, the split can occur unexpectedly.
I shall not speak any more about the personal qualities of other CC members. I should only like to remind you that the incident with Zinovyev and Kamenev was of course caused not by chance, yet they personally can be hardly blamed for it, just like Trotsky can be hardly blamed for his non-bolshevism» (V. Lenin, Collected works, issue 5, volume 45, the notes of December 24, 1922 continued, dictated by V. Lenin on December 25, 1922).
J. Stalin’s qualities are described further in the addition to the notes of December 25, 1922. This is what was written down by another secretary of V. Lenin, L. Fotiyeva (1881 – 1975) on January 4, 1923:
«Stalin is too rude, and this drawback which is tolerable among ourselves, the communists, becomes intolerable for a man in the office of the general secretary. That is why I suggest the comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin from this post and appoint a different man to it. In all the other respects this man should differ from comrade Stalin in only one way – having the advantage of being more tolerable, loyal, polite and attentive towards comrades, less whimsical, etc. This circumstance might seem to be trivial. But I think that in respect to avoiding a split and to what I said above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky this is not trivial or this is a trifle which could prove to be decisive».
Psychic Trotskyite writers have commented upon the “Address to the convention” by V. Lenin over and over again, making special emphasis on the addition to the address of January 4, 1923. They implied that it contained a Lenin’s warning that nobody listened to. Yet almost the only thing that escaped their understanding is exactly what V. Lenin really warned Bolsheviks from, as well as the fact that in this letter V. Lenin actually recommends J.V. Stalin to the party of Bolsheviks as his successor.
In order to understand what V. Lenin really warned the party from in his «Address to the convention» let us consider the testimonial V. Lenin gave to the members of ACP (B) Central Committee unbiased by turbulent emotions. V. Lenin openly describes all the candidates for the post of party leader (no matter what this post is called) apart from J.V. Stalin as non-Bolsheviks (Trotsky), as people unreliable in business (Kamenev, Zinovyev, Trotsky whom V. Lenin called «little Judas» in one of his works), as bureaucrats who can forget about the true cause carried away by administrative formalism (Trotsky, Buharin[238], Pyatakov[239]).
Thus, only J.V. Stalin remains. He has already concentrated in his hands an enormous power on the post of the general secretary [240]which speaks of his professional qualities as an administrator, of his ability to maintain a certain balance between form (administrative issues) and content (i.e. the cause itself) and of his capabilities as a leader. Yet along with that he is sometimes rude, intolerant, capricious.
Given the testimonies of all the other «leaders» the addition to the «Address» of January 4, 1923 is nothing but empty rhetoric: «We should have appointed somebody else instead of Stalin: someone equal to Stalin professionally but who would not be so rude and intolerant. Do you know someone like that? – I don’t». And at the same time this is a hint to Stalin: «Learn to be tolerant, my dear comrade, or it will cost you your head notwithstanding your good professional qualities. You will end the same way as I did: they will destroy you before you will be able to finish our cause. You see for yourself, there are no bolshevist people capable of being in charge among the party «leaders» … yet we must continue with the cause of bolshevism, otherwise masons and empty talkers from among intelligentsia carried along by them will walk all over the common people».
Following these meditations let us comment in greater detail the following phrase of V. Lenin: «the October incident[241] with Zinovyev and Kamenev was of course caused not by chance, yet they personally can be hardly blamed for it, just like Trotsky can be hardly blamed for his non-bolshevism»
The way V. Lenin characterized L.Rosenfeld (Kamenev), G. Apfelbaum (Zinovyev) and L. Bronstein (Trotsky) leads us to compare it with the legal status of slaves in a slave-owning society:
A slave cannot be held responsible for anything by the society of free people. For any damage inflicted by a slave his owner is held responsible. And only the owner has a right of punishing the slave in a way he himself chooses. Nobody from among the free people has a right to impede him in executing that right.[242]
Therefore the testimonial he gave to Bronstein, Rosenfeld, Apfelbaum is synonymous to a definition given to a slave’s legal status, simply in a different wording. Taking this into account and taking into account the knowledge we now have of that era, the above-mentioned testimonial given to that «trio» by V. Lenin can be only understood as a hint that the party «leaders» he mentions are actually puppets, slaves of masonry masters, executive periphery of the «world backstage». And one should not think that this conclusion is a far-fetched one while what V. Lenin meant is something completely different: V. Lenin was a lawyer, he knew legal history starting from the ancient times, and when speaking at the IV Comintern congress in December 1922 he demanded of Communist party members to leave Masonic lodges.[243]
If we attempt to describe how different people not aware of the backstage hidden motives perceive the testimonials of CC members given by V. Lenin in his «Address to the convention» we shall see that they see completely different things as being significant in that address.
That J.V. Stalin is sometimes rude, has the guts not to follow «high society manners» was significant (and is still significant) for representatives of the carelessly babbling intelligentsia among the party ranks and of the leaders who have an intellectual background or have joined intelligentsia while working as professional revolutionaries. They prefer the party leaders to be intelligent talkers like themselves.
But among the common people who are busy doing real vital work (i.e. among the party masses) rudeness was not considered to be a serious vice at the time, like it was the case among the refined intelligentsia. The common people have not paid and do not pay much attention to a man’s rudeness if this man possesses professional qualities useful for the society. The common people are usually intolerant not to rude people but to those who bully others misusing their social status or talents, and one can do this while being at the same time exquisitely polite. Had Lenin written that Stalin mocked and bullied his party comrades, people would have regarded such a warning with an utterly different degree of concern.
Bolshevist party members from among the common people paid attention to the fact that J.V. Stalin had concentrated power in his hands, i.e. he was not afraid of taking the responsibility for their common cause, that he had the qualities of a leader and administrator capable of real work. And rude words and actions do not always reflect spite, and even if they are the case, they have no serious effect… Besides, for a person to lose his temper and start being rude it takes those around him to bring the person into this condition.
One should also bear in mind that the knowledge we have of what Stalin was like in intercourse is based on the reminiscences of his contemporaries. And remember that they were often written down from third persons and were carefully selected by anti-Stalinists later. But in those years not only V. Lenin, N. Krupskaya and other party leaders had a real experience of communicating with Stalin. Therefore there could be opinions on J. Stalin’s «politeness» which were different from the view V. Lenin expressed in his «Address to the convention» and which did not become a part of the cult at the time of the 20th Convention for that very reason.
In the years of Perestroika the «fight against Stalinism» livened up, and the TV broadcast a documentary shot at the place of Stalin’s last exile in the Turukhansky territory. There was nothing underneath the concrete framework of the glass «aquarium» which once protected Stalin’s museum from rough weather. The walls were covered with writings: both condemning Stalin and asking for forgiveness for having not been able to preserve the USSR – the first bolshevist state – after he passed away.
Then they interviewed an old woman, an inhabitant of that village, who remembered Stalin’s living there in exile. She was asked, «What do you remember?» When she heard the question, youth lit up her eyes, and she answered: «He was a kind man. He treated ill people with herbs…»
Thus it seems that J.V. Stalin behaved differently with different people, depending on what those people were like, what their inside was like, and what J.V. Stalin himself thought them to be…
As a result, the Bolsheviks of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) seconded J.V. Stalin and not anyone else as the party leader, judging from the testimonials given to the «leaders» by V. Lenin and from their personal experience of speaking and working with leaders.
Thus both the «world backstage» and Bolsheviks in Russia itself concurred that comrade Joseph Stalin could be entrusted the task of leadership in the cause of building socialism in a separate country. Yet under socialism the «world backstage» and Bolsheviks meant completely different, mutually exclusive ways of socially organizing people’s life. The result of those coinciding social and political processes was J. Stalin’s coming to personify bolshevist statehood in the 20th century.
6.4. Unpreparedness of Russia
for Socialism and its Consequences
Russia was economically, culturally and morally not ready for the socialist mode of life neither in 1917 nor after the Civil War. Everyone knew it[244]: both opponents and advocates of socialism. After the Revolution the camp of advocates of socialism split during the Civil War.
Understanding that Russia is not ready for socialism, some public figures proposed it would transfer to multi-party bourgeois democracy for the culture and economy to have enough time for development and for the objective and subjective precondition of transferring to socialist to appear.
Others – the Bolsheviks headed by Vladimir Lenin and the Trotskyists headed by Leon D. Bronstein – also shared the view that Russia was not ready for socialism in respect of culture and economy. What they insisted on was that only under the guidance of the Bolsheviks’ Party and the Soviets of Workers and Peasants’ deputies is it possible to develop the culture and economy and to build the real socialism. Only under these circumstances will the working class and the peasants be able to escape exploitation by internal and foreign private capital, which will otherwise set in for at least several decades. It was very likely to happen under the conditions of bourgeois democracy civil liberties and private enterprise permissiveness, wherein inter-industry proportions and gross industries’ capacities[245] are determined by the law of value due to the market self-regulation. To ground the above statement we are drawing Lenin’s opinion here:
«…infinitely stereotyped, for instance, is the argument they learned by rote during the development of West-European Social-Democracy, namely, that we are not yet ripe for socialism, but as certain “learned” gentleman among them put it, the objective economic premises for socialism do not exist in our country. Does it not occur to any of them to ask: what about the people that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created during the first imperialist war? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilization that were somewhat unusual?
«The development of the productive forces of Russia has not yet attained the level that makes socialism possible». All the heroes of the Second International, including of course Sukhanov, beat the drums about this proposition. They keep harping on this incontrovertible proposition in a thousand different keys and make it the decisive criterion of our revolution.
(…)
If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism (although nobody can say just what that definite “level of culture” is, for it differs in every Western European country), why can we not begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers’ and peasants’ government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?
(…)
You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very well. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible?
Napoleon, I remember, wrote: “On s’engage et puis... on voit”. Rendered freely this means: “First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens.” Well, we did first engage in a serious battle in October 1917 and then saw such details of development (from the standpoint of world history they were certainly details) as the Brest peace, the New Economic Policy, and so forth. And now there can be no doubt that in the main we have been victorious. (V.I. Lenin. “Our Revolution (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes)”, Lenin, Collected Works, 5th edition, volume 45, p. 378 – 382).
J.V. Stalin wrote on the same issue, but 35 years after the Great October Socialist Revolution:
«The answer to this question was given by Lenin in his writings on the “tax in kind” and in his celebrated «cooperative plan».
Lenin’s answer may be briefly summed up as follows:
a) Favorable conditions for the assumption of power should not be missed – the proletariat should assume power without waiting until capitalism has succeeded in ruining the millions of small and medium individual producers;
b) The means of production in industry should be expropriated and converted into public property;
c) As to the small and medium individual producers, they should be gradually united in producers’ cooperatives, i.e., in large agricultural enterprises, collective farms;
d) Industry should be developed to the utmost and the collective farms should be placed on the modern technical basis of large-scale production, not expropriating them, but on the contrary generously supplying them with first-class tractors and other machines;
e) In order to ensure an economic bond between town and country, between industry and agriculture, commodity production (exchange through purchase and sale) should be preserved for a certain period, it being the form of economic tie with the town which is alone acceptable to the peasants, and Soviet trade – state, cooperative, and collective-farm – should be developed to the fullest and the capitalists of all types and descriptions ousted from trading activity.
The history of socialist construction in our country has shown that this path of development, mapped out by Lenin, has fully justified itself. (“Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.”, “Remarks on Economic Questions Connected with the November 1951 Discussion”, Ch. 2. “Commodity Production under Socialism”).
In fact such policy was initially bound to cause more than one interpretation and to create internal conflicts. Firstly, it implied that the government and party would render support to those implicating the ideals of socialism and the doctrine of its construction according to their own worldview and to the Party leaders’ understanding of it (i.e. in the way it was presented in the official propaganda). Secondly, it implied forcing of the ideologically uncommitted layers of the society to join the socialist mode of life. It concerned the layers who didn’t have any particular ideas about the ideal social order in their minds, whose actions were guided by individualistic interests of a replete and comfortable life for themselves and their families and who would be loyal to any government that could provide acceptable labor conditions and consumers’ well-being. Thirdly, it implies investigating and suppressing anti-socialist activity – in the understanding of the top party leaders.
But this is the ideal version.
In practice actions of all three of the above-mentioned types can be characteristic of the same people when taken in different time and under different circumstances. This is possible owing to the customs and the mentality of the crowd-“elitist” society. This concerns both the sundry rulers implementing the declarations of building the new society and the masses controlled by these rulers. Thus, the personal mistakes and abuse of power by the repression machine workers were made objectively inevitable[246]. Besides, in real life the government can be truly mistaken about the vision of socialism and the methods of building it. As a result, it was those having less misunderstanding about socialism that were bound to become the victims of the repression machine simply because they were unable to convince the party and its machinery of their viewpoint. This is what predetermined personal and subjective mistakes by the top leaders of the party to become the system errors in the social self-government.
That is why one should not think that the history of Russia-USSR in the first half of the twentieth century could have been less mean and sanguinary had L. Bronstein or any another of the protagonists of any kind of socialism been at the head of the Party and the state after Lenin’s disease. Neither would it be so if Soviet government had admitted that Russia was not ready for socialism and thus it had introduced a multi-party system in the country[247]. As a result of this, the state machinery would fall under the control of the advocates of the class-caste-based regime or of those relying on the civil society of capitalism, based on the hierarchy of the purses. Everything happened in the best possible way anyway, taking into consideration the customs of the society and the ethics pertaining to it[248].
But at that moment Russia was still expecting to solve the conceptual uncertainty in the society and the culture: either the righteous communal life, or however you may call it, where your personal development is ensured and where everyone is protected against parasitism on his or her labor and life; or the hierarchy of mutual oppression and claims to oppress the neighbors, where parasitism on one another and on the biosphere altogether is inevitable. These two conceptions cannot coexist in one society under any circumstances. It only depends on by what means they struggle against each other.
It is appropriate to draw the utterance of Decembrist Pavel Pestel[249] as far as the policy of the Soviet State during the period of Stalin’s real socialism building is concerned:
«The experience of all centuries and of all the states proved that the people are
Although Pestel speaks of the government and the laws, what is meant here is the bearers of the conceptual power who arbitrarily shape the society, for they control the state government, lawmaking (as a component of the state power) and partly the execution of the laws, which are expressing a certain conception of social order as well as people’s attitude towards it and towards the conceptual power, which initializes this order. The real and potential differences between the various governments and laws, proposed by Pestel, which determine the peoples of countries as well as a particular people of a certain country viewed over different periods, inevitably implies differences in the conceptions, some of which may even be mutually exclusive within one national or multi-national society; or within the humanity – if taken on the global scale.
Having said this we may pass over to the analysis of the achievements and underachievements of Bolshevism in Stalin’s epoch.
6.5. «Social Realism»
as a Means of Overcoming the Power of Marxism
If building socialism is regarded as establishing a social order (i.e. in a broader sense of the word than the definition for economic structure given in chapter 6.1) it includes three interconnected and mutually dependant processes:
personal development of people belonging to actively living adult generations. It ensures that they re-define their attitude to life, become a part of socialism which is being built and turn into its advocates. They join the socialist society in a natural process, freeing themselves from the norms of crowd-“elitist” culture they have been imposed on in their childhood and adolescence in the course of up-bringing and education, which norms are characteristic of certain social groups in non-socialist social and economic structures;
development of the society’s culture on the whole and of its subcultures. It forms the basis and means of molding the morals, ethics and world understanding of future generations which would make the ideals of righteous community (socialism and communism) their natural life ideals and would render crowd-“elitism”, along with oppression of human beings and parasitism on life and labor, impossible in their society, neither in overt (openly proclaimed) nor in covert (when people are not aware of them) forms;
implementing the principles of socialism into the economic production and consumption activity of the technical civilization, carried out with the state’s support (first of all, planned economy directed towards safeguarding the demographically grounded needs of the population in the succession of generations).
Though it is the third issue which is the most visible phenomenon in social life, the priority of importance corresponds to the order in which the above-mentioned processes have been listed. (This priority is understood in terms of the irreversible nature of consequences for the society’s life which happen during the time period of one social development cycle. This cycle corresponds to the interval between one point at which the past is provided a new understanding and plans for the future are worked out and the next such point)
In other words, personal development is the main thing in building socialism. And because socialism in the broad sense of the word is an image of the society’s life, building socialism achieves the greater success, the more people are active in their personal development in accordance to God’s Will.
