Vadim Rogovin’s Bolsheviks
against Stalinism 1928–1933: Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition
By Andrea Peters
21 December 2019
21 December 2019
“It may well be that the
historical period examined in our book has been subjected to the most biased
assessments. In countless journal articles, Stalin’s ‘great breakthrough’ was
declared to be either the natural continuation of the revolutionary strategy of
Bolshevism, or interpreted as Stalin’s turn to ‘Trotskyism’… From a priori
conceptions about the organic continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism, also
came the version of the absolutely arbitrary nature of Stalin’s repressions. This
version was shared (although for different reasons in principle) by both
Stalinists and anti-communists, who considered that the political regime
created by the October Revolution had not undergone degeneration. The adherents
of this version did not connect the Stalinist terror with the logic of the
inner-party struggle, which compelled Stalin to answer the growing protest
within the party against his policies with monstrous counterblows. In
1928–1933, this process was still far from complete.”—Vadim Rogovin (p.492)
The publication in English
of Bolsheviks against Stalinism 1928–1933: Leon Trotsky and the Left
Opposition by the Soviet Marxist historian and sociologist Vadim Rogovin
(1937–1998) is a major political and intellectual event. The second book in
Rogovin’s seven-volume series Was There an Alternative is a
magnificent account of the political struggle waged by Stalin’s opponents in
the USSR in the years following Leon Trotsky’s exile and up to Adolf Hitler’s
conquest of power. It demonstrates that Stalin’s rise was neither foreordained
nor a natural outgrowth of the October Revolution. Rather, the Great Russian
chauvinist and bureaucrat secured power in ferocious conflict with the
proletariat, peasantry and cadre of the revolutionary socialist movement.
Rogovin produced this volume
and six others in the final years of his life as he simultaneously battled
terminal cancer. For several decades Rogovin worked as a
sociologist studying living conditions in the USSR. He was drawn to
this subject because he wanted to investigate the scale, scope and origins of
stratification in the Soviet Union. Having clandestinely found his way to the
work of Trotsky and the Left Opposition (LO), Rogovin became convinced that
social inequality was the key to understanding Stalinism.
In the early 1990s, Rogovin’s
decades-long political isolation from the world Trotskyist movement finally
came to an end when he made contact with the International Committee of the
Fourth International (ICFI). Bolsheviks Against Stalinism was
Rogovin’s first work written in close political collaboration with the ICFI and
marks a key moment in his development as a Marxist historian.
A short book review cannot
convey the depth and complexity of this fascinating, 500-page volume. Bolsheviks
Against Stalinism is high drama. It interweaves primary and secondary
sources—published speeches and articles, personal correspondence, media
reports, archival documents, personal memoirs, historical accounts and even
novels—to take the reader through the twists and turns of a five-year period of
Soviet history in a series of short and focused chapters that address the
economic crises, political problems and social conditions that drove Stalin’s
policies and led to the continual eruption of opposition. It is an exploration
of the human material of the Bolshevik party, as it alternately confronted, was
swept along by, participated in and challenged a massive nationalist,
bureaucratic reaction to the Russian Revolution.
One of the book’s key findings
is that arrests, expulsions and exile were not enough to shatter the influence
of Trotsky and the Left Opposition. These forces continued to exert immense
sway over the political life of the country and shaped the new, oppositional
forces emerging in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thus, Bolsheviks
Against Stalinism illuminates the political logic driving Stalin’s turn to
mass exterminations during the Great Purge; Trotsky and the Left Opposition
represented an unrelenting threat to the bureaucracy that could only be
contained with physical violence.
When the working class of
Russia overthrew the combined forces of Tsarism and capitalism bringing the
Bolsheviks to power in the fall of that year, the revolution immediately faced
enormous difficulties. World War I had physically devastated Russia, which was
mired in poverty and backwardness. The social democrats of Europe had betrayed
the struggles of their own working classes and the young revolution found
itself isolated. It simultaneously had to combat, across a vast landmass, the
counter-revolutionary forces of imperialism, which sought to destroy the
victory of Russia’s masses and prevent the revolution from extending across the
globe.
The Russian revolution
prevailed against all odds. But even as the Soviet Union formed itself, a
bureaucracy began to emerge within the country that was dedicated not to the
Marxist program of world revolution but to building “socialism in one country.”
Joseph Stalin stood at its helm. Taking advantage of the exhaustion and
isolation of the Soviet working class, this rising apparatus used its position
as the administrator of the country’s economy and political institutions to
secure for itself special privileges.
The incipient Stalinist
bureaucracy was organically hostile to world revolution. It instinctively
grasped that if the working masses came to power elsewhere, the working class
within the Soviet Union would wage combat against a parasitic elite feeding off
the conquests of the world’s first-ever workers’ state. Therefore, in pursuit
of its policies, the bureaucracy betrayed revolutions abroad and crushed
inner-party democracy within the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist
International. In his last years Lenin anticipated the dangers posed by this
bureaucratic tendency and fought against them. He was joined by Leon Trotsky,
his co-leader of the Russian revolution. When Lenin was incapacitated by
strokes in 1923 and finally died in 1924, Trotsky continued this struggle along
with other members of the Bolshevik Party, forming the Left Opposition (LO) in
1923.
Rogovin places Trotsky’s
writings and those published in the Left Opposition’s Bulletin of the
Opposition at the center of this volume, making clear that they are the
key to unlocking the period’s history. Articles, commentary and correspondence
from Trotsky and the Bulletin, which were often written by oppositionists
in the USSR working underground and then circulated in secret, contain
remarkable insights into the character of Soviet society and outline a
thoroughgoing critique of Stalinism. Of all the oppositional tendencies that
emerged in the Soviet Union, it was only the “alternative of the Left
Opposition”—as Rogovin characterizes it—that was capable of fundamentally
challenging and defeating Stalinism.
When Bolsheviks Against
Stalinism was first published in Russian in 1993, the material covered in
it would have been new to the Soviet reader. Trotsky had been removed from
official annals of Soviet history. Rogovin’s emphasis on the distinctiveness
and importance of the Left Opposition was, and remains today, an open rebuke to
the falsifiers of Soviet history of all political stripes. He was waging a
battle against the powerful Communist Party bureaucracy and its supporters in
the intelligentsia, who were—with the aid of historical falsification—restoring
capitalism in the face of mounting social opposition.
In 1989, for instance, a
letter sent to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by a rank-and-file party member
set off alarm bells. The ideology division of the Communist Party said the
sentiments expressed in the letter were known to be “widespread
(representative) among the working class.” The letter writer described the
Communist Party as made up of “opportunists,” “elites” and bourgeois
“born-againers.” It called for the working class to “take matters into its own
hands as the head of its own party” in order to lead a “class war.” The same
year, massive miners’ strikes erupted in the country. Armed with the knowledge
of their own history, Rogovin understood that the Soviet working class could be
an unstoppable force.
Bolsheviks Against Stalinism begins
with the economic crisis of 1927 and the proceedings of the 15th Congress of
the Communist Party, held in December of that year. The failure of the Stalin
leadership to make changes to the New Economic Policy (NEP) led precisely to
the problems predicted by the Left Opposition—a grain crisis, whereby peasants
refused to part with their harvest because the cities were unable to produce
goods needed on the countryside. NEP allowed for state-regulated production for
profit in manufacturing and agriculture. The result was the emergence of
well-to-do layers in the cities (NEPmen) and countryside (kulaks, in other
words, better-off sections of the peasantry). While the policy kickstarted the
economy, it proved unable to resolve the problems in the country’s industrial
sector, whose development lagged.
The book describes how the
Communist Party, under the leadership of Stalin and Bukharin, responded to the
economic crisis by stepping up attacks on the Left Opposition with arrests and
exile and a relentless campaign of denunciations. Being active in the Left
Opposition had become not just grounds for expulsion from the party, but was
illegal according to Article 58 of the criminal code. While the concept of
“forced pressure on the kulaks” was first formulated in the lead-up to the 15th
Congress by Bukharin, Rogovin notes that coming out of the Congress this was
not official policy, which continued to be committed to the preservation of
NEP.
But when the grain crisis
exploded in early 1928 and famine threatened the cities, the Politburo careened
in the direction of “emergency measures” to force peasants to turn over their
harvest. Rogovin argues that Stalin’s direct involvement was decisive in
driving forward the repressions. He issued orders that contravened the
decisions of the party congress and Soviet law. The result was rising
discontent in the countryside and metastasizing economic problems, which Stalin
sought to blame on the excesses of local officials and the alleged sabotage of
“bourgeois elements.” Directives were issued in secret, as fear grew within the
Stalin leadership that the Trotskyists, who had already been making a powerful
critique of the emergency measures in the Bulletin of the Opposition and
continued to have influence in party cells and workplaces, would gain from the
regime’s failures.
This pattern of economic
crises and wild improvisations, coupled with scapegoating of lower-level party
officials and state administrators, gross violations of Soviet legality, the
denunciation and repression of opponents, rule through secret decrees and
violence aimed at key segments of the population, would repeat itself
continually in the coming years, ultimately escalating into forced
collectivization and mass purges.
As 1929 unfolded, the
Stalinist bureaucracy continued its efforts to stamp out opposition, with
special divisions of the secret services established to search out “rightists”
(those who advocated that restrictions on the market economy be loosened) and Trotskyists
in party bodies and at scientific research and educational institutions. This
corresponded with the shift from “emergency measures” to full-scale forced
collectivization. In December 1929, using a formulation that had not previously
been accepted by the party, Stalin called for “dekulakization.”
Bolsheviks Against Stalinism highlights
the powerful critique made of forced collectivization and its inevitable
consequences by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and traces out the different
stages of the “civil war” against the peasantry, documenting in detail the
methods used, the violent responses of the villages, the desperate efforts of
local party bodies to carry out reckless and impossible measures, the
extraordinary human suffering that resulted—including famines in Ukraine and
elsewhere that took the lives of millions—and the efforts by Stalin to cover up
the state’s crimes and blame the disaster on the peasants themselves, as well
as underlings and political opponents.
The volume investigates the
toll exacted from the working masses due to collectivization and Stalin’s
frenzied drive for industrialization based on fantastical demands that the
Soviet Union outstrip its own planned development targets. The spread of
piecework, production speed-up, food rationing in the cities, growing wage
inequality, punitive restrictions on labor turnover, all contributed to falling
living conditions for masses of workers and a growing gap between them and the
privileged bureaucrats allied to the Stalin regime. Addressing the social
foundations of Stalinism, Rogovin rejects:
… the favorite thesis of
contemporary “democrats” that Stalin expressed the interest of new layers of
the uneducated and de-politicized working class formed in the years of the
first Five-Year Plan, and that the “lumpen who yearned for egalitarianism” had
become the social base of support for Stalin’s regime. In actuality, it was
precisely on these new layers of the Soviet working class, making up its least
skilled segment, that the burden of Stalin’s repressive labor legislation fell
particularly heavily, as it relentlessly toughened the sanctions for
“violations of labor discipline.” (p 283)
One of the most remarkable
chapters in the book, “The Social and Class Meaning of the ‘Great
Breakthrough,’” discusses the origins of Stalinism. Rogovin takes on the claims
of those who argue that Stalinism emerged solely in the aftermath of NEP, when
rapid industrialization and forced collectivization took hold. He insists that
the NEP actually laid the groundwork for a massive growth in the bureaucracy,
as a huge administrative apparatus charged with overseeing distribution and
managing class relations was necessary in order to regulate the market economy
that had been legalized in cities and on the countryside. Stalin and his allies
cultivated this burgeoning bureaucracy by ensuring its access to privileges.
This was accompanied by a political and ideological attack on the principle of
equality. While initially accommodating and encouraging the growth of
well-to-do peasants in the villages and petty bourgeois layers in the cities,
the bureaucracy ultimately came into sharp conflict with them, as the
full-scale restoration of capitalism would have undermined its own power and
privileges.
The sharp twists and turns in
official policy and their calamitous consequences, the extreme social tensions
building in the country and the crushing of inner-party democracy called forth
waves of discontent, criticism and opposition from within the Communist Party,
even from those layers who had previously played a central role in purging the
Left Opposition. At times, this took the form of organized efforts that raised
the necessity of removing Stalin from power. Other times it manifested as
hostile moods and views broadly pervasive in party bodies, workplaces and
institutions.
Rogovin introduces readers to
Stalin’s veteran opponents and those drawn into struggle during the five years
covered in his book, excavating their political biographies. He characterizes
in detail their political programs, assesses their strengths and weaknesses,
considers their attitude to Trotskyism, and documents their political fates.
In the recounting the history
of the oppositional forces in the USSR, Nikolai Bukharin figures prominently in
the book. An old Bolshevik, close comrade of Lenin’s and “rightist” who had
advocated the further extension of market relations, Bukharin had been Stalin’s
close ally in the suppression of the Trotskyists. By mid-July 1928, however, he
was probing the possibility of an alliance with former oppositionists Kamenev
and Zinoviev, who had recently renounced their criticisms and been brought back
to Moscow. Kamenev described Bukharin’s views as ones of “absolute hatred” and
“absolute rupture” with Stalin, combined with hysteria. Rogovin notes, “[He]
had no precise and consistent political program or clear idea about what
methods to use in fighting against Stalin. He was in a panic and in the grip of
conflicting moods that followed one after the other.” (p. 59)
Over the course of the
subsequent five years, Bukharin would repeatedly raise stinging rebukes of
Stalin’s policies, methods and distortions of socialist theory, but prove
unable to mount any consistent and principled fight. He vacillated, acting at
times as a slavish supporter of Stalin and toeing the party line. All the while
he sought allies, engaged in political skullduggery and draped his criticisms
of Stalin in the mantle of anti-Trotskyism. None of this worked to his
advantage. The charge of “enemy of the people” was first directed against
Bukharin and he was persecuted as a “right deviationist.” Rogovin’s analysis of
the political history of the “right opposition,” why there was no “right-left”
oppositional bloc and Bukharin’s unraveling is detailed and compelling.
The political blows Stalin
delivered against his opponents did not, however, resolve any of the crises
that gripped the Soviet Union. Opposition to his rule continued to emerge, from
both old and new quarters, and even among those routed by Stalin, expelled from
the party, demoted, arrested and exiled. The reader will learn about these
oppositional tendencies, the figures involved, their demands, their documents,
their efforts to establish contact with one another, their origins in different
layers of society, their attitude toward the Left Opposition and how the
Stalinist apparatus sought to handle them.
In September 1930, for
instance, workers from Podolsk met with representatives from Moscow’s largest
factories and sent a letter to three leading Bolsheviks in which they denounced
“Stalin’s unrestrained, autocratic rule” and threatened an appeal to the masses.
Around the same time, an oppositional group formed around Sergei Syrtsov, a
leading party and state official, and drew in other top figures in a
self-declared “right-ultraleft bloc,” which was in contact with political
figures extremely close to Stalin. In 1932, the Union of Marxist-Leninists,
organized by M.N. Riutin and V.N. Kaiurov, produced a lengthy document, “Stalin
and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship.” Rogovin uses the Riutin platform
throughout the book and makes a careful analysis of the political character of
the document, considering what it expressed about the outlook of the forces
marshaling against Stalin and their attitudes towards the Left Opposition.
Bolsheviks against Stalinism makes
clear that Stalinism was in constant political crisis, as the growth of the
bureaucracy, the strangling of Soviet democracy, the intense exploitation of
the working class and the war against the peasantry came into conflict with the
Soviet Union’s revolutionary socialist traditions and cadre. Rogovin writes:
Stalin’s familiarity with the
“Riutin platform”; with letters from the USSR published in the Bulletin of
the Opposition; with investigative materials and agents’ reports from the GPU,
recording the activity and moods of old and new opposition groups—all this
showed that not only many former oppositionists were sharply against his
policy, but even many communists who had not participated in the 1920s in any
oppositions, and who had voted “unanimously” at official party meetings. (p.
424)
Not even the mass purges
during this period, which saw 800,000 people driven out of the Communist Party,
could stabilize the regime. The Left Opposition, working in exile, fought to
establish contact with oppositional tendencies developing inside the USSR. The
stage was set for the Great Terror, which Rogovin deals with in his subsequent
volumes in the series.
The book also contains a
fascinating discussion of the agenda that drove the post-Stalin rehabilitations
of Stalin’s victims during Khrushchev’s reign and later. While certain truths
were admitted, new falsifications were developed in order to deny that that
there existed genuine opponents of Stalin and a fundamental alternative to his
rule. One of the most interesting features of this volume is Rogovin’s ability
to explain to the reader the contemporary political and historiographical
debates surrounding Soviet history.
For instance, Rogovin writes:
At the end of the 1980s, the
majority of works devoted to a critique of Stalinism paid attention to its
extremely cruel repressive side, but did not reveal its common, everyday
appearance, expressed in striking social contrasts…The bearer of these
tendencies wished that the result of “perestroika” would be a society with
social differentiation that would be just as strong as it was under Stalin, but
that would avoid Stalin’s repressive measures…The ideological and psychological
heritage of Stalinism was deeply rooted in the consciousness of those who, in
the years of stagnation and “perestroika,” were inclined to cultivate moods of
elitism, clannishness, and a caste mentality that had been widespread in
Stalin’s time. (p. 296)
The final chapters of Bolsheviks
against Stalinism deal with Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, the
responsibility of the Stalinist bureaucracy for this crime, and the response of
the Left Opposition. Trotsky would call for the formation of a new communist
international in 1933, which he achieved with the founding of the Fourth
International in 1938. The internationalism of the LO was distinctive and what
allowed the movement to be the most intransigent, unwavering opponent of
Stalin. The monstrous domestic policies implemented under Stalin, the growth of
a privileged bureaucracy, the attack on social equality, the suppression of
inner-party democracy, all of these flowed, Trotsky insisted, from Stalin’s
rejection of world revolution and promotion of Russian nationalism.
Apart from this crucial
episode, international events are not the focus of Bolsheviks against
Stalinism, which concentrates on the history of Stalinism and the oppositions
within the Soviet Union’s borders. As Rogovin’s thinking evolved in the coming
years due to his close political relationship with the International Committee
of the Fourth International, he would devote ever-greater attention to
Stalinism’s battle against world revolution in the subsequent five volumes of
his series, Was There an Alternative?
Rogovin’s achievement
with Bolsheviks against Stalinism is difficult to overstate. He
combines innovative research with a penetrating and a dramatic retelling of
history. He restores Trotsky and the Left Opposition to their rightful place in
the Soviet history. Readers who come into contact with this work will be deeply
moved—in all senses of the word, politically, psychologically,
intellectually—to seek out the full truth of the struggle against the Stalinist
counter-revolution.
Bolsheviks Against Stalinism
1928–1933; Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition is available here from
Mehring Books.
No comments:
Post a Comment