By one of those ironies of history March 2003 saw both the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Stalin and the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of the death of Marx. Despite all bourgeois denigrations (naturally by those who have not read him) Marx demonstrated that capitalist society was not the final stage of human development. He argued that for all the advances that capitalism had brought (and he did not understate them) a still better society was not only possible, but also, inevitable (1). This last word “inevitable” was what brought such fear to the hearts and minds of the bourgeois who profited from the continued career of capitalism. Indeed, so dependent is capitalist society on the creation of huge polarities of wealth and profit that any rational being from another planet, looking objectively at the current famines, malnutrition and wars created by the system on Planet Earth in the midst of so much plenty, could not but conclude that this is a hopeless failure. The vision of Marx that ordinary working people, the proletariat, could do better and go on to create a society where production would be for human need, scarcity would be ended and social development would be planned by all, a society where free development of each individual would be the condition for the development of all, a society whose birth would represent the end of human pre-history and the start of real human history. It would be, in direct contrast to capitalism, a society without classes and social inequality, without states and wars, without nations and frontiers, and without exploitation and money. This vision, naturally brought down upon Marx the full opprobrium of the capitalist establishment in all countries. He advocated a road to real human freedom, in a society without exploitation, in which “freely associated producers” would cooperate together without need of the coercive force of an oppressive state.

But if Marx gave the working class a clear understanding of its goal, Stalin more than any other individual was the biggest gravedigger of that aspiration. Whilst Stalinism was the consequence not the cause of the counter-revolution, “the Stalinist counter-revolution” as we have often referred to it, was the final culmination of the process of isolation which the Russian proletariat had undergone since 1917. The anniversary of Stalin’s death was just one more occasion for the capitalist propaganda machine to hammer home the message that “really existing socialism”, as Stalinism’s defenders always liked to call it, was a monster which was the natural outcome of the proletarian revolution of 1917.

We are not concerned here for the obvious capitalist propaganda of the Robert Conquests, or the Richard Pipes’ schools of academic falsification. By claiming the continuity of Stalin with the October Revolution these hired hacks of the bourgeoisie are doing their job. What we are concerned for is the debate amongst those in the working class for whom the weight of bourgeois ideology has proved too heavy. They have accepted that Stalinism was not only the logical outcome of the Russian Revolution but also the real expression of Marxism. In so doing they reject the one set of ideas which can lead to the establishment of a non-hierarchical, non-exploitative society. Socialism or Communism (for Marx and Engels the terms were interchangeable) has nothing in common with the totalitarian edifice created by Stalin in the USSR in the 1930s. It is however a convenient myth for the capitalists to keep insisting that it was. As a new generation of workers arises who do not know the true history of their own class it is absolutely important for the capitalist lie machine to keep hammering home the message that capitalism, whatever its blemishes is not only the best system, in this, the best of all possible worlds, but is the only system possible. Even the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War has not made the academic press and all shades of political journalism pass up the slightest opportunity to denigrate the Russian Revolution. Their chief weapon in this is to make reference to the Stalinist system which eventually emerged from the defeat of the revolutionary workers of 1917 and which finally collapsed in 1990. The identification of the proletarian October with its Stalinist antithesis is no accident. By constantly referring to Stalinism as the child of October they hope to obscure the fact that the working class have already shown that they can overthrow a capitalist state and begin to construct a new order of their own.

Before looking at Stalinism and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in detail it is necessary to state the general analytical framework in which these events must be understood. This framework is that provided by Marx and developed by the left communist opposition to the Bolsheviks which developed in response to the strengthening of capitalist relations of production in Russia. As Marx had clearly shown, socialism was impossible without the development of the forces of production and the consequent development of the working class. There could therefore be no possibility of establishing socialism in Russia alone in 1917 or indeed 1925 or 1928. However, on a world scale the development of the global forces of production and the global proletariat was sufficient by 1914 to construct socialism on a global scale. The catastrophe of World War 1 showed both the necessity and the urgency of replacing global capitalism by socialism. The revolution of 1917 was made in the hope that it would be the first step in a global revolution which could lay the basis for a new global order. Once political power had been achieved globally by the proletariat the period of transition to socialist production could properly start. This transition would be gradual process lasting at least a generation. Under these circumstances the backwardness of Russia could be overcome in the global process of establishing communist society. The failure of the European revolutions, however, dashed these hopes. In these circumstances Russian backwardness could only be overcome by the path of capitalist development as expected by Marx. The Russian regime which remained after the collapse of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 to 1921 necessarily carried out the tasks of developing Russian capitalism, namely the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Although this development was carried out via state capitalism rather than private capitalism, which was the path of European capitalism in the nineteenth century, it remained capitalist development nonetheless. This text will consider how this process took place and refute the notion that there is a necessary connection between the attempt to create communist society and the barbaric state capitalist society created by Stalinism.

== The Myth of Stalin

So enormous has the question of Stalinism become that one short article cannot possibly address all the problems which it has created for the modern revolutionary movement. During the demonstrations against the war on Iraq we met many young people who wanted to be “revolutionary” but had no idea how to set about it. We encountered young people from South America and Asia who insisted they were “Maoists” and who argued that though Stalin “made mistakes” he had “created socialism” and developed and modernised the Soviet Union. When pressed they actually had no concrete critique of Stalinism at all. All they admired was the Mao-Stalin product of “a command economy” not so much because it was “socialist” but more because it could create a modern state in conditions where there was no strong private bourgeoisie and in which world capitalism is dominated by imperialism. In short they admired Stalin (and Mao) for carrying out the bourgeois task of industrialisation. We will return to the question of the kind of system Stalin promoted in the USSR later. For the moment, for the benefit of these young Maoists, and anyone else ready to study the real story, let us just look at Stalin’s actual record in the Soviet Union in its own terms.

In the first place Stalin was not alone in his recognition that the isolated Soviet Union needed to industrialise. The whole debate in the USSR amongst the leaders of the Communist Party of all factions insisted that the development of industry was necessary as a precursor to socialism. The question was how to deal with the only productive sector of the economy - the peasantry. In the early 1920s Trotsky and his followers had argued for heavier taxation of the peasantry in order to finance “primitive socialist accumulation” (a term coined by the erstwhile Trotsky supporter, Evgeny Preobrazhensky). This was opposed by the so-called Right Opposition of Bukharin who argued that the New Economic Policy had to be maintained so that the peasants could carry on accumulating capital privately in order to be taxed more heavily in the future. Stalin took little part in these debates (except to denounce Trotsky as a “super-industrialiser”!) but by 1928 was in enough control of the USSR to launch his own industrialisation drive. This had to begin in the one area where capital accumulation had taken place in the 1920s, in agriculture. In order to take more surplus value from the peasants Stalin decided on collectivisation but, unlike Trotsky, and the other leading communists in the 1920s, he was not prepared to simply use taxation to bring this about. He went in for “forced collectivisation”. It was a total catastrophe. Thousands were brought to collectivise at gunpoint. Many peasants (and not just the richer kulaks) burned crops, slaughtered their animals and refused to sow new crops. Stalin realised the blunder in 1930 and wrote an article in Pravda blaming local officials for being “Dizzy with Success” and distorting the scheme. Stalin’s shameless hypocrisy did not mean a halt to the tragedy, it meant that the programme was only suspended and then resumed with equal ferocity. It is estimated that by 1932 60% of peasants were in kolkhoz (collective farms) but that between a third and a half of all farm animals were dead. For the first time since the years of war and revolution the 1925 harvest had exceeded that of 1913 but by 1934 famine was so severe that in the Ukraine, for example, the USSR’s richest grain producing area, a military blockade was introduced to prevent news of the disaster reaching the outside world. At least 8 millions died in executions, famines or in deportations. Soviet agriculture never properly recovered from this and was always a weak link in the Soviet economy. The stupidity of the policy is all the more apparent when we remember that Stalin, the high priest of “Marxism-Leninism” had ignored Lenin’s last article on the peasantry which insisted that the peasants could only be brought to socialism via their recognition of the superiority of “cooperation” when the proletariat was able to provide them with more machinery, something which would only have been possible if the European revolutions had succeeded. But this is the most glaring contrast between the two. Lenin consistently maintained that real socialism could only be built by the workers themselves but Stalin made no bones that he was creating socialism “top down”, a theoretical and practical impossibility.

However if agriculture was a disaster surely we have to recognise Stalin’s achievement’s in the industrialisation of the USSR? Even British school textbooks written during the Cold War used to point to the remarkable success of the Five Year Plans in transforming the Soviet Union from being the most backward of the great powers into a super-power by 1945. This does not stand up to closer examination either. First we have to look at how this success was achieved. The Five Year Plans were based on a military premise. 1928 had seen a false war scare (the fact that the Western states were improving relations with each other caused Stalin to expect an attack from them all). He put to Soviet citizens the question as to why old Russia was always beaten. The answer was economic backwardness.

"We are fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten. Either we do it, or they will crush us."

For this reason the whole of Soviet society was mobilised to fulfil the targets set by the state. Consumer goods disappeared from the shops, endless queuing for even the most basic goods became an everyday fact of life, rationing had to be introduced, wages fell and prices rocketed. Wage differentials increased to the point where social inequality mirrored that in the West. At the very root of the Five Year Plans was the buying of machinery and equipment from abroad by exporting grain. In other words the starvation and deprivation of the mass of population was the basis for this capital accumulation. On top of the coercion of the NKVD and the attempts to increase labour discipline by arresting “saboteurs” who failed to make their targets, many believed that they really were building socialism and that if this generation must sacrifice itself for the next. One can only wonder what they thought when, in the midst of their most miserable exploitation, Stalin announced that “life is getting better, more joyful”!

By this time the cult of personality was in full swing. One poem in Pravda in 1936 described Stalin as “Thou Sun, reflected by millions of hearts”! In 1934 the Party celebrated the First Five Year Plan’s achievements by listening to an impressive list of what we now know to be largely exaggerated figures. In terms of capital accumulation and industrial growth the real achievement was impressive enough but this “Congress of the Victors” carried with it the germ of a further disaster. The elections for the Central Committee had produced their usual result with Stalin receiving the highest number of votes. Well, not quite. Stalin’s ally, Kirov, the popular party boss of Leningrad got more. A few months later Kirov was murdered supposedly by a disgruntled ex-Communist Youth member who was himself mysteriously shot without a trial. Stalin now used this to begin his own “war on terrorism”.

In 1935 Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin’s former Politburo allies, were tried in the first of the Show Trials. This unleashed a wave of state repression probably without historical precedent in terms of the numbers involved. The first victims were members of the Communist Party. Obvious rivals were eliminated. If (after various types of tortures) they would admit publicly to ridiculous charges they were put up for a Show Trial, if they did not they simply “disappeared” or were sent to the Main Prison Camp Administration (or Gulag as it is known). But it did not stop with past opponents of Stalin. Older party members were weeded out, whatever their known views. What has become clear to historians is that Stalin achieved what Hitler and Mussolini only dreamed about. He actually created a state based on cadre whose only loyalty was to him. The young beneficiaries of Stalin’s bloodletting had known no other past and 150,000 of them owed everything to their promotion through the nomenklatura under the Purges. They became the new ruling class. Today the children of these people are the ones who still demonstrate in Red Square on May Day or on the anniversary of the October Revolution (November 7th) with icons of Stalin. They are not the sad remnants of a discredited communist regime as our press portrays them. Their relationship to the proletarian revolution is only via the cult of its gravediggers. 15 to 20 millions were sent to the camps, the vast majority real communists. Some were the political ancestors of Left Communists and Trotskyists today. Many died still resisting in the Gulag.

In this sorry massacre Stalin’s final folly was to almost wipe out the existing officer class of the Red Army thus weakening the very defence force that his Five Year Plan was supposed to be supplying.

Stalin’s foreign policy record is totally at variance with his own propaganda. After Stalingrad in 1943 Stalin dubbed himself first Marshal, then gave himself the Francoist title “Generalissimo” for his supposed military skill in defeating the Nazis. A closer examination of both foreign and military policy shows this to be just hubris. The attempt by the Western democracies to try to get Hitler to attack the USSR first led to Stalin’s notorious 1939 pact with the Nazis. In this there is no more to condemn than that of any other capitalist power fighting for its survival (although all those communists and workers who had been conned by Stalin’s anti-fascism could rightly feel betrayed). However Stalin seemed to think that Hitler would stick to his word. When Hitler did invade the USSR on June 22nd 1941 Stalin was dumbfounded. He refused to believe it and gave no orders for defence for two days. When the Politburo assembled Stalin expected to be sacked for his paralysis. Instead he was supported and eventually announced a “scorched earth” policy over 11 days after the invasion. By this time millions of Soviet citizens were already dead or prisoners of the Nazis on their way to being exterminated in the slave labour camps of the Nazi war machine. No wonder Stalin put the survivors who made it back in 1945 into the Gulags. He did not want witnesses to his criminal folly. The Soviet Union therefore survived in spite of Stalin. Indeed it can be argued only the racist genocide of the Nazis that regarded all Slavs as untermenschen rallied the Soviet citizens for the “defence of Mother Russia”. Such nationalism was consistent with Stalin’s other policies. During the war Stalin abandoned the last pretence of supporting world revolution by dismantling the Communist International as part of the price of the alliance with Britain and the USA in 1943. This was further confirmation that the USSR was a part of the imperialist world order. Its conquest of a new empire in Eastern Europe after the Second World War was not a successful extension of international socialism as so many Trotskyists believed but an expression of Great Russian Chauvinism.

So much for the facts of Stalin’s achievements. These were really only of interest to Third World nationalists (Maoists, Castroites, etc.) who thought they could use the model of Stalin’s regime to make their own countries free from “imperialism”. What they did not realise was that a break with Western imperialism meant they had to embrace Stalinist imperialism. Inevitably all the “national liberation” struggles of the 1950s to 1970s ended in failure. But behind their failure to recognise that the USSR was not a disinterested centre of international socialism was the fact that they too accepted the idea that Stalinism was “really existing socialism”. Here we must turn to a more pressing and contemporary problem.

== Modes of Production

Besides our Maoists we also encountered other young people, mainly from the metropolitan countries, on the demonstrations against the war in Iraq. This modern generation knows that “the system stinks”, and they call themselves “anti-capitalist” but they shy away from articulating a real alternative to capitalism. The young people who have marched against war in their millions, and oppose “globalisation” are often under the influence of those who, like Naomi Klein, for example, believe that capitalism can be made to “work for people”. What they all miss is that only a change in the way in which we produce the things we need, a change in the mode of production, can really alter society for the better. Capitalism depends on, and is defined by, the exploitation of wage labour. Labour alone creates the value which capital appropriates for its own use. It appropriates this labour in every way it can and turns this labour itself into a commodity. The only alternative to capitalist exploitation is socialism, a society where goods are free at the point of distribution, and labour is “donated” freely and collectively. This is the crux of the issue: Stalinism was never even close to socialism. If Stalinism were really socialism then it would make sense to warn those who are dissatisfied with the existing world order against any idea of overthrowing capitalism. As it is however, not only Stalin’s “crimes against humanity”, but the centralised command economy which characterised the USSR were as far from Marx’s vision of a society based on “freely associated producers” as it is possible to imagine.

This is the scale of the problem we are left with. Not only did Stalin create a material hell for genuine communists in his lifetime, his legacy “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (Marx) today. Politically rejecting Stalin and Stalinism (as, for example, most Trotskyists do) is not enough. We have to do so on the basis of a restatement of the Marxist definition of a communist mode of production. Communism is not state capitalism with “nice” leaders. Communism arises from the mass struggle against the whole idea of any state that takes decisions for us and oppresses us. Communism is not only “fairer” and more egalitarian than current capitalist democracy but is a direct expression of the will of its “citizens”. Ironically the Russian Revolution which eventually degenerated into Stalinism also gave us a glimpse of a communist future. The establishment of soviets or workers’ councils solved one of the greatest problems of mass society. How could there be a body that would combine executive and legislative functions and yet be subject to the immediate influence of the mass of the population? Soviets embryonically provided an indication of the way in which millions could take part in running their own affairs. The Soviets failed in Russia but their failure was neither planned nor inevitable. What we have to do is understand the causes and the trajectory of the counter-revolution since that understanding directly affects how we prepare programmatically for the future proletarian revolution.

== The Course of the Counter-Revolution

The Russian Revolution was a unique experience in world history. (2) Never before had the proletariat taken power in any state and the victory of the Russian working class in October 1917 seemed, for a brief few years to open up the prospect of a new world of real freedom and equality around the world. However when the German workers were defeated (and this occurred after the March Action of 1921 although it was not clear to those who lived at that time), the prospects for world revolution faded. The Bolsheviks had led the overthrow of the Provisional Government because they expected other, “more advanced” contingents of the international working class to take inspiration and follow the lead of the Russian workers. In March 1917 Lenin had written

"Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward of European countries. Socialism cannot triumph there directly and immediately … But the peasant mass can bring the inevitable and matured agrarian upheaval to the point of confiscating all the immense holdings of the nobility … Such a revolution would not, in itself, be socialism. But it would give a great impetus to the world labour movement."

This was no more than Marx had stated the year before he died. Arguing that the Russian tradition peasant commune (the mir) could be turned into a basic form of socialist organisation only

"… if the Russian revolution serves as a signal for the workers’ revolution in the west, so that the two complement each other." (quoted in E.H Carr The Bolshevik Revolution Vol. 2 p.387, Pelican edition)

However history did not quite turn out that way in 1917-18. With the main European capitalist states on the brink of collapse and the danger that the Russian Revolution would have sequel further west, the First World War was rapidly ended in the face of the revival of workers struggles everywhere. Contrary to bourgeois historians (like Evan Mawsdley in -The Russian Civil War_ (Berlin, 2000) who insist that the whole idea of world revolution in 1918 was “a myth” (a view shamefully shared by the Socialist Party/World Socialist Movement), the idea that the Russian Revolution would only be a signal for the world-wide revolution had a sound material basis. Mutinies had broken out in the French and British armies in 1917 and strikes had begun in Germany in early 1918. The British Government hastily widened the franchise (to all male workers and to women over 30) in January 1918 and when shop stewards in Sheffield and Glasgow threatened to organise rationing, introduced it for the whole country in the summer of 1918. Once the war was over however revolutions in Berlin, Hungary and Bavaria were militarily crushed and the struggles, which affected the whole planet from Lima to Seattle and Winnipeg across to Red Clydeside and the Italian factory occupations, all came to nothing. The capitalists made peace with each other in order to make war on the workers in their own countries. Their success in doing this left the Russian Soviet experiment isolated.

Now the Russian proletariat found itself in a unique historical position. What happens in an area where the working class have overthrown the local ruling class but then find themselves isolated in a hostile capitalist world? There was nothing in previous working class experience to answer that question, although previous class struggles had thrown up similar problems. Engels’ history The Peasant War in Germany described the dilemma of the Anabaptist leader, Thomas Müntzer thus,

"The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not on him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in an insoluble dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the asseveration that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost." (op. cit. Moscow 1977, p. 115)

The Bolsheviks and the Russian working class as a whole were about to experience precisely this problem. The situation was desperate on the economic and very soon on the military front. The idea of extending the world revolution was foremost in the minds of all the leading Bolsheviks but this was not just a question of just having the right ideas - it required the right material conditions. As the post-war world settled down the tide of history turned against the working class. On top of this a revolutionary party now found itself in charge of administering a state in a country where the mass of the population was illiterate - a task for which it was not ideally suited. All these problems were to a great degree inter-related and the real course of the counter-revolution can only be understood when we look at them as a whole.

== The Civil War and Imperialist Intervention

Lenin’s initial answer to the problem of feeding Russian workers in a backward peasant economy was the grain monopoly. In a telegram of June 27th he insisted that it

"is one of the most important methods for gradual transition from capitalist commodity exchange to socialist product-exchange." (Quoted in R.W. Davies The Socialist Offensive p.2)

Even at the end of the civil war in late 1920 Lenin maintained that forcible seizure of grain was essential. The arrival of famine, and the increase of both peasant discontent and workers’ strikes in the winter of 1920-1, was to change all that. As Lenin himself admitted the Bolsheviks were forced to sound a “retreat” on the economic front and try to hold on until the next surge of working class struggle came to their rescue. The NEP was intended to restore the free (capitalist) market in grain in order to get peasant production started again. Although there had been some hopes that the emergency policies (collapse of money, distribution by rationing, etc.) of the period of so called “war communism” were steps towards socialism (and Bukharin argued just this in his Economics of the Transition Period, a book which was warmly regarded by Lenin) fundamentally there was no question of the Bolsheviks changing the mode of production in Russia to socialism. When Lenin called for nationalisations of parts of the Russian economy in 1917 he insisted that these were

"measures which do not in any way constitute the “introduction” of socialism... (3)"

Far from thinking that a top-down introduction of socialism was possible, Lenin understood that the transformation of society could only be done by the mass of the working class “when they had learned to do it for themselves”. This was a much more difficult question than simply overthrowing the existing capitalist political order. Even here Lenin had insisted that the Bolsheviks were not Blanquists. They did not believe a minority could or should seize power on its own. This is why Lenin opposed the July 1917 demonstrations of the Kronstadt sailors as premature. Only after September 1917, once the Bolsheviks had an overwhelming majority in the centres of proletarian power, the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, did Lenin advocate the overthrow of the Kerensky regime.

And it is the insistence of the sovereignty of the soviet system based on armed workers' councils that allows revolutionaries to refer to the regime that was established in November 1917 as “the dictatorship of the proletariat” or “a workers’ state”. The establishment of a workers’ state though did not mean the establishment of socialism since “socialism cannot be implemented by decree” (Lenin). Lenin knew that the revolution would have to extend itself internationally, and in terms of the class consciousness of the Russian workers, if it was to reach socialism.

On both fronts the revolutionary hopes of 1917 were to be dashed by 1921. (4) Not only did the international revolution fail to emerge but the civil war, which the Bolsheviks militarily won, cost them their proletarian base. The Kronstadt revolt was only one symbol of how the soviets had become empty shells. By 1921 57% of the factory workers of 1917 had left the factories either to fight in the Red Army or to return to the land. As Lenin remarked at this time

"We are the representatives of a class which has ceased to exist."

In its place arose the Communist Party; from being the proletarian revolutionary party of 1917 it now was becoming a huge bureaucratic apparatus. The revolutionary party which, even when it had thousands of members, Jakob Sverdlov and two secretaries had run from a single office, was now gradually taking over the state apparatus. Sverdlov’s death in 1919 helped speed up the transformation of the once-revolutionary party into the governing body but it was already a process which was irresistible. By the time Stalin was made General Secretary of the Party in 1922 the dictatorship of the proletariat had truly passed over to the dictatorship of the party. The Civil War had also transformed the situation. Its viciousness forced former revolutionaries to become ruthless state functionaries simply in order to ensure the survival of the Soviet experiment. No-one escaped this pollution. The decision at the Tenth Party Congress to ban factions was aimed at the Communist Left oppositions such as the Workers’ Opposition of Kollontai and Shlyapnikov, the Democratic Centralists such as Sapronov and Ossinsky and other groups like Myasnikov’s Workers Group. These peop