Why did Soviet socialism fail?

By Ariel Dacal Díaz / July 30, 2007

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

original
http://www.temas.cult.cu/articulo.php?numfila=554&num=50-51&name=Transiciones%20y%20postransiciones

Extensively covered and discussed, the topic of transition has been the object of several case studies focused, on one hand, on the changes in the very fabric of capitalism, mostly by reference to dictatorial regimes turned democratic. On the other hand, there’s the so-called transition from capitalism to socialism, no less looked-into. Standing out from others in the latter is the attempt to create a «Soviet socialism», with very specific features in that it was the foremost experience pointing to the political assumption of such type of transition and almost a binding rationale for subsequent attempts; hence its usual interest to social sciences. At the same time, given its status of a historically finished process, it’s easier to inquire into the end of the Soviet experiment.
 

The efforts to facilitate transition to a socialist society, as opposed to capitalism’s productive and ideological structures, had in the Soviet project and the resulting Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) their most extended experiment in proportion to the time it took, its geographical scope, and its productive, political, ideological, military and international layout, as well as its postmortem impact.

Ever since the October explosion, Soviet-related events have been a constant feature in political and intellectual circles, most probes into their stages and topics being clearly imbued with ideological bias. Even if the ultimate corollary of these attempts to move on to a non-capitalist society entailed the loss of a wonderful chance to undermine the bases of bourgeois domination, when we reconsider and, above all else, understand what the overall Soviet transition process is about we find the indispensable elements we need to explain what has happened in Russia since 1991 and devise the alternatives to capitalism demanded by the 21st century.
 

Any venture into emancipation from the fringes of capitalism must review, over and over again, the forms, circumstances, contributions and pilferage inherent to that experience. The ninety years separating us from October, 1917 are the steadiest road ever taken by and toward socialism. Should this historical and political premise in the struggle against capitalism be overlooked, any future action would be doomed.
 

Such is the main catalyst for these pages, where I develop some ideas and outline others not from the comfortable and «neutral» point of view of a historical account, but on the basis of a political commitment firmly built on a scientific approach to the process in question and which makes it possible at once to make definite analyses and conclusions and emphasize the legacy of the USSR’s transition to socialism. This is also the historical prelude to the seeds, trends and potential fate of the process of capitalist restoration under way in nations now occupying the post-Soviet space.
 

In order to put these reflections in order, the following questions become imperative: who held power in the Soviet Union? Can we talk about a breakup with the Bolshevik project? Why the historical failure of the Soviet transition to socialism?
 

«The unforeseen class»

As befits the human race since its origins, the fundamental constituent to explain the establishment of institutions, rules of conduct, ideological codes and political strategy itself is the dominator-vs.-dominated relationship fueled by the contradictions between warring or coexisting classes at a given moment in time. As a methodological resource, this benchmark provides a chance to get closer –and with more certainty– to the Soviet process without underestimating the strains it imposed on the theories about class relations.

Bear in mind that one of Russia’s quarreling classes before the 1917 revolutions was the late-ripening, slow-footed national bourgeoisie, in the main subordinated to contemporary imperialist powers like France, England and Germany. By that logic, the February, 1917 revolution gave the bourgeoisie an opportunity to enjoy something it had been unable to accomplish. Actually, there was no bourgeois social basis in Russia capable of seizing, making good use of and maintaining that chance, especially when faced with a booming working class and, most importantly, a revolutionary movement, which highlighted the relevance of both revolutionary processes that year. (1)

For their part, the Russian workers –a minority class with a well-founded vanguard– were not sufficiently developed or mature to exercise power and implement the measures emanating from it. As we will see further on, the events that took place throughout several decades revealed why the dictatorship of the proletariat spelled out by Lenin in “The State and Revolution” as the ruling class never came to anything and became instead, due to its own inner workings, a dictatorship of the Party on behalf of that proletariat.

Within Russia’s socio-classist framework, the peasants accounted for the largest class, of itself a contradictory feature in the face of the post-Revolution workers’ State which made its leaders realize the need to reckon with them in order to preserve their feat. Bureaucracy, by no means a socialist system’s prerogative, played a major role in this regard. In the case of Russia, its origins took root and shape in czarist times, namely in the late e 19^th century. The process of absolutist centralization brought with growing numbers of officials who proved their worth in the exercise of domination. Bureaucracy thus became a pivotal building block in the political structure and a landmark of the czarist state bequeathed to the Soviet State, which had to take in more and more individuals employed by the former governmental apparatus to fulfill technical and other specialized tasks in the new one. With them came a czarist mindset that of course no revolutionary decree could just scratch out.

In the late 1920, the number of State officials had shot from a little over 10,000 to an astronomical 5,800,000, five times more than industrial workers. By August that year, 48,400 former czarist officers had joined the Red Army as military experts. (2) After the civil war many of them took various political and administrative jobs where they implemented their bossy skills as military leaders.

In view of those facts, Lenin insisted on labeling Russia as a Workers’ State with strong bureaucratic deformations. He explained the rise of bureaucracy as a parasitic, capitalist growth on the organism of the workers' state, which arose out of the isolation of the revolution in a backward, illiterate peasant country. (3)

From this perspective, Joseph Stalin was bureaucracy’s most visible face, and Stalinism, for its part, as the embodiment of Soviet socialism, ended up being the reason for the breakup with Bolshevism. By their nature, both were at once the effect, not the cause, of the way the Revolution evolved. Eventually, Stalinism became the structural, systemic reason for the Soviet failure.

The bureaucratization process had its roots in the very onset of the revolution, but its consecration as society’s dominant sector took place in the 1930s. Its rules, hierarchies and specializations turned the bureaucrats into a stratum almost entirely deprived of creativity. Waiting for instructions from their higher-ups virtually became standard practice and therefore a habit that put to rest all decision-making skills in a body of officials whose only assignments were of a technical nature. As a result of this mimetic dynamics with regard to the boss scattered myriads of little middle-levels dictators all over the Soviet Union who gradually got rid of their rivals by fawning on and kowtowing to their superiors, whose methods they imitated.

When the Revolution broke, there were few Bolshevik political leaders available. Party membership had grown, not so the quality of its cadre. Little by little, second-class revolutionaries rose to the main managerial positions, owing among other reasons to the fact that many of the old first-rate soldiers had either died in the civil war or strayed from the masses when they were given less important jobs, while others adapted themselves comfortably to the new power conditions. This aspect forms part of the Bolshevik project’s degeneration process.

Following Lenin’s death, the Party opened its doors to a new crop known as «Lenin’s promotion». Its ranks teeming with individuals of the most diverse social origins whose political qualifications were not in accordance with Bolshevik tradition, the revolutionary process drowned. These people had been molded by apparatchiks handpicked by Stalin, who since 1919 had been the People’s Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection and as such had followed cadre policy and controlled key positions and figures. Suffice it to say that 75% to 80% of the Party’s rank and file had joined its ranks after 1923, and only 1% had become members before the Revolution. (4)

Soviet bureaucracy, as it turned out the «unforeseen class» (5) in the middle of the face-off between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, enjoyed the State power’s favor and succeeded in managing, and benefiting from, public property. Endowed with no private capital but uncontrolled by other social sectors, they ran the economy, expanded or restricted all branches of production, set prices, laid out distribution, defined surplus’s final destination, oversaw knowledge and its spreading, and controlled the sources of thought. Thus they ministered to the Party, the Army, the police and the propaganda underpinning them, which assured their reproduction for decades to come. (6)

What political culture codes did Soviet bureaucracy rely on to govern? The masses that carried out the Revolution in 1917 still harbored a mentality of servitude and nothing in the way of democratic experience. The development of a class consciousness in the proletariat –destined to be in command of the Revolution– was in the hands of a small group of men, though it was closer to an «advance» in the field of ideas than it was to the historical and material conditions which made class consciousness more comprehensive. A majority those days, the peasant masses were the bearers of the most conservative elements, who found in the existing high levels of illiteracy the raw material they needed to indoctrinate.

The usurping bureaucracy, in turn, was another historic example of how the vanquished imposes its culture upon the conqueror, as Lenin forewarned. Among the codes of domination they inherited in this case were total control, political elitism and the notion that the «populace» could neither administer nor learn to do it and therefore needed a figure who decided on the country’s fate. A trait that the average Russian citizen highly values in a leader is his image as a strong man capable of dealing firmly with the crucial difficulties facing their nation.

As a rule, the top leader of the USSR was not supposed to be liable for any domestic problem, his persona surrounded by an aura of saintliness instead. Rather, the view prevailed in people’s mind that it was in the intermediate layers of management where responsibility for the current state of affairs actually laid.

This was a significant fact within the Russian context, as is evidenced in the revolutionary outbreak of 1905, when the czar’s legitimacy among the masses suffered after a number of demands fell on stony grounds which held that, unbeknownst to the Czar, the public officials were committing excesses and disregarding his decisions. A similar situation took place in the late 1980s with the onslaught against Stalin, also intended to invalidate his regime.

During the Soviet period, the political exercise of bureaucracy put paid to Bolshevism’s aims of bringing forth new codes for politics and the role of the masses not only as subversion’s driving force but also –and given the Soviets’ revolutionary character– as the makers, executors and supervisors of all decisions. Accordingly, these bureaucrats went from being spontaneous organs of mass struggle to holders of State functions. With the advent of Stalinism, the above principles were overturned, and the opportunity for the masses to play a political role severed, including their real and autonomous means of mobilization. Before long, all of these political and mass organizations greatly deteriorated.

What befell Russia right after the Revolution –and pursuant to the existing circumstances– was the emergence of a new dominant sector based not on money or property, but on State power. Seeing themselves as the new strongmen in a non-capitalistic but definitely elitist system, its members had absolutely no control over a people who, faced with the current difficulties, failed to become the political actors of their own emancipation.

From Bolshevism to Stalinism

Often noticeable in the steps towards a transition in the Soviet Union is a thin line, to say the least, between Lenin’s and Stalin’s political action. This is neither a secondary topic nor a historic detail worthy of precision. Drawing this line entails in essence making a distinction between a revolutionary political project developed in the middle of the Russian revolution’s ups and downs and the conservative practices that such a complicated historical situation provided as the only choice. It’s not about the formal differences between both figures, but about the necessity to mark the boundaries between different concepts and practices from a common historical viewpoint on the best way to found the new society and define the role of collective intelligence and political creation as part of the structural and cultural subversion that a transition to socialism involves.

There’s certainly no shortage of arguments about Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s significance among people with a wide variety of leanings who cherish his legay, without taking into account those who obviously respond to their different classist origins to distort the Bolshevik genius’s historical virtues. Among the latter are the apologists who keep embalming him, partisans trying to find the right objectivity in his thoughts and works, sentimentals still intent after almost one century on finding in his ideas a solution to present-day’s and future problems, etc. Successful or not, they all take the credit for trying to enshrine Lenin’s revolutionary usefulness in mankind’s never-ending endeavor to change.

However, there’s a no less harmful trend on this side of the discussion. Its advocates try to portray Soviet history as a continued phenomenon, a multi-staged process without any bouts of violence in its wake. What’s contradictory about this posture is that it’s not the brainchild of bureaucrats in power pretending to become legitimate through their evocations of a seamless foundational project, but an idea put forward by honest people taken aback by the outcome of bureaucray’s formal, opportunistic transformation into bourgeoisie in 1991. Their most heartbreaking approach lies on putting Lenin on an equal footing with his successor Stalin, a hopelessly fatal misjudgment. Or worse yet, one which comes in very handy to those trying to bring Lenin’s ideas and works into disrepute, as it suits the bourgeoisie to strengthen their hegemony. Since this false connection is so frequently claimed, we will address again the age-old attempts to separate Lenin from Stalin by going over what each of them did or thought.

While the Bolshevik blowup developed new political codes, the advent of Stalinism made it possible for bureaucracy to implement full control as a code for domination. As the October leader pointed out:

“In our struggle we must remember that Communists must be able to reason. They may be perfectly familiar with the revolutionary struggle and with the state of the revolutionary movement all over the world; but if we are to extricate ourselves from desperate poverty and want, we need culture, integrity and ability to reason.” (7)

On the other hand, the authoritarian nature of Soviet bureaucracy put a damper on the Bolshevik project’s democratic hopes. Social life was affected at all levels, from economic activity to ethnicity, by a lack of real participation, compensating civic spaces and effective control over the powers that be. Under pretext of guiding society, bureaucracy turned the CPSU into a tool to slow down, twist and strike at the act of political creation started by the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s direction. The uncertain connection between Lenin and Stalin is found in the fact that the latter took advantage of some circumstances existing during the former’s lifetime to alter the Party’s course toward totalitarianism. Lenin had organized the Bolshevik Party to lead the workers, not to tame or subjugate them. By converting the Party apparatus into an instrument for mass control, bureaucracy defined the course of future events and the historical sense it gave to the «socialist» transition.

The Revolution spared no sector of Russian society, including its institutions, norms, ideas and values; a sweeping change whereby the Workers’ State awarded the citizens wide-ranging legal and political guarantees such as the right to divorce and have an abortion, elimination of martial authority, and equal rights for legal and common-law marriage, to name a few. From 1926, under Stalin’s regime, civil marriage was once again established as the only type of legal union, and soon afterwards abortion was made illegal and the women’s section of the Central Committee was dissolved, together with its counterparts at various Party levels. In 1934 homosexuality was banned and prostitution became a crime. Failure to respect your family was labeled «bourgeois» or «leftist» behavior by the bureaucrats. Any child born out of wedlock was deemed illegitimate, a status abolished in 1917, and divorce proceedings became very expensive and troublesome. (8)

Stalin developed a subtle, unhurried and all-encompassing mechanism to revise and reverse the October revolution’s accomplishments which at the very outset affected, and managed to get the adherence of, the repressive institutions. Initially, the State Security Comité (KGB) (9), whose goal it was to fight counterrevolution, sabotage and speculation as its self-defense functions to counteract the reactionary opposition hatched by the Revolution. However, as bureaucracy rose to power, those first goals gradually changed until the KGB became the organ in charge of preserving the bureaucratic State’s interests, its sights set on the elimination of any opposition coming from the revolutionary forces themselves.

In need of its own armed institution to protect its interests, especially because of the aggression promptly initiated by fourteen countries in unison, the Workers’ State created the Red Army in January, 1918. As a new concept, Bolshevik leadership’s policies were open to a constant analysis where the army played an important role. Of course, Army, Party and State shared the same ideas, but the former was unable to escape bureaucracy’s die-hard attempts to lure it into its clutches and little by little lost its original popular character.

What best reflects this process was the decree restoring the officers’ corps, a deadly blow to the revolutionary principles which gave rise to this armed institution, one of whose ends was precisely to do away with that corps and give right-of-way to commanding positions guaranteed by study, endowment, character, experience, etc. It was the fervent mission of the officers’ corps to see to the soldiers’ «purity» and loyalty to the «Party» and the «socialist State». Likewise, the spirit of freedom and debate that prevailed in the ranks died down gradually, in keeping with the canon that «no army can be more democratic than the regime which nourishes it». (10)

Among the most sensitive elements is the breakup with a key provision of the Bolshevik program, namely, that a top official’s salary should not exceed the average worker’s. Under Lenin’s mandate, the maximum differential was kept at a 1-to-4 rate, a level qualified by Lenin himself as «capitalist differential».

Known as «the Party maximum», the rule preventing a Communist Party official from being paid more than a skilled worker was made null and void on February 8, 1938. By 1940, while a worker earned 250 rubles a month, a deputy made 1,000; the president of a Republic 12,500, and the president of the USSR 25,000 (11). In perestroika years, the nomenklatura were entitled to the well-known «special supply» system, and their purchasing power increased to levels well above those of a worker or an engineer.

In 1921, due to the unbridled growth of Party membership, Lenin undertook an internal «purge» involving the expulsion of 200 000 members in order to preserve the ideas and traditions of October from the serious threat posed by individuals who jumped onto the revolutionary wagon when they were still politically immature. This «purge» had nothing in common with Stalin’s crimes or the widespread paranoia he sowed in the USSR, for there was no secret police, no political trials, and no prison camps under Lenin.

Recomposing the Party was a crucial step in the process to define the Soviet regime’s Stalinist frameworks. Recorded data clearly show the coordinates of those transformations: between 1930 and 1934, the Party stopped being a de facto workers’ organization; in 1930, workers accounted for 49% of its members; by 1934, this proportion had fallen to 9,3%, as the «managing class» had an almost total monopoly on the Party. In 1923, only 23% of all Soviet factory managers were Party members, and nearly 100% by 1936 (12), and this rate became a constant feature. In 1986, less than 30% of the SUCP’s 19 million members were workers.

Austerity and ethics, a Bolshevik’s characteristic traits pursuant to their commitment to the masses, were rendered increasingly useless by Stalin and his clique. The Bolshevik leaders remained close to the workers and peasants, wandering the streets unguarded and taking no heed of hierarchy. If we look at all the luxury and privileges that Stalin’s bureaucrats afforded themselves, isolated from the population and protected by security walls and bodyguards, the ethical gulf separating the Bolshevik’s project from the Stalinist decadence is easier to grasp.

For decades, the Soviet State related to the outside world in manners which proved Lenin’s fears were well founded. Based on facts he had to cope with in his last months of political life, he had foreseen the danger that «the great Russian» inherited from a past of czarist rule and exploitation would remain active in the new State’s politics with the consequent degeneration of the internationalist role the USSR was called to play. Lenin said:

"It is quite natural that in such circumstances the 'freedom to secede from the union' by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riff-raff like a fly in milk.” (13)

The actual fact, despite the spirit of the Law of all laws and other regulations, made it impossible to expect the Soviet State republics to coordinate their activity with the Center, for they reported directly to Moscow. All Stalin did was appoint political leaders from his seat. For all their somehow important positions, the republics’ elite could hardly get any important job at Union level, where Russian predominance carried the most weight. The head of the Russian Revolution paid special attention to concepts emanating from political practice with regard to the Union:

“The need to unite against the Western imperialists, defenders of a capitalist world, is one thing. There is no doubt about that [?]. Another thing altogether is when we lead ourselves, even if in small details only, into assuming imperialist attitudes toward the oppressed nationalities and thus undermine the sincerity of our principles our whole defense of the principles of struggle against imperialism.” (14)

As a corollary to those distinctive remarks, Lenin himself, aware of the influence of a personality on a historical process, underscored Stalin’s incompatibility with the USSR’s topmost political position.

Lenin advocated the removal of Stalin from the post of General Secretary, ostensibly on grounds of "rudeness" - but advocating his replacement with a man "who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority - namely, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This may seem a trivial detail, but I believe that in order to protect ourselves from a split [?] it’s a detail which can acquire a decisive significance". (15)

To replace is not to excel

The main lesson learned from Stalin’s botched attempt was the failure to understand that it was not a question of replacing capitalism, but excelling it. Real socialism’s economic and political institutions were different from those of capitalism; its ideological precepts broke away from those proclaimed by the belligerent bourgeoisie, the canons of art were anti-establishment in form and content, and all cultural fulcrums took different shapes, but no subversion of capitalism ever sprouted from the organic integration of these spaces, for a definite quality, the ingredient of an efficient, everlasting revolution, was missing from this instrument: the overcoming of bourgeoisie and its hegemony.

Therefore, the idea that revolution means full-fledge extermination of the old society led to overlook the necessary reference and connection between things old and new. A project of changes cannot be built on chimeras or good intentions; it’s important to weigh the real state of affairs in the clash with capitalism and use science to make forecasts, which implies breaking with any tendencies toward the insubstantial accommodation of knowledge (16) or, to put it another way, turning mediocrity into a virtue.

In the case of economics, the challenge for socialism lies in being more productive at work by making the most of technological progress to bring prices down and erode capitalism in the process. Along those lines, winning out over the capitalist society involves full mastery of both the bourgeoisie’s science and its wealth-making capacity, but nothing of its dogmatic negation, and never should mankind’s scientific and technical patrimony be neglected.

Trotsky understood that the Soviet Union was more at risk of a flood of low-priced capitalist goods than it was of a military intervention. His hypothesis was validated, on one hand, by the extreme case of World War II, when the country unleashed its potential to cope with contingencies and achieved a resounding victory based on the Soviet people’s epic effort. Nevertheless, it was unable to hold its own when faced with the avalanche of cheap products arrived as soon as it opened its economy to the West in the 1970s.

One key issue in the debate about the Soviet Union’s significance as a model of socialist development to backward countries was the country’s capacity to become industrialized during Stalin’s regime. This view skips over the fact that Western capitalism’s ability to build many state-of-the-art factories in just a few years was assured, on one hand, by its high technological development and, on the other, its economic planning. In this respect, the USSR had witnessed the assimilation of someone else’s achievements rather than the creation of new conditions and means as befitted a viable development model for a peripheral, anti-capitalistic economy.

Since the late 1920s, the Soviet economic model curbed specialization and the introduction of new technologies, thus preventing a rational use of resources. Because of the vertical, inflexible structure imposed on the production process and the absence of a proper integration, some sectors developed in detriment of others. In line with this scheme of things, the production units, far from being autonomous, were seized by the excessive precedence of political criteria over economic needs (a further departure from the original provisions).

Two sets of figures shed light on the above statement: by 1987, the country had 3.6 times more engineers than the United States, but its productivity was comparatively lower. While the USSR manufactured 801 million pairs of leather shoes in a given amount of time, the U.S. had to make do with only 290 in the same period. Yet, there was no shortage of shoes in America and its stores offered variety and quality at affordable prices, whereas strictly speaking there were plenty of shoes in the Soviet Union, but hardly any was worth buying. (17)

Every new society springs from, and improves, what the previous one built. To Trotsky, that was a major difficulty in the Soviet Union, where «production and technical problems had to be solved which advanced capitalism [had long] solved». Starting from this premise, there could not be talk of a socialist stage in the Soviet process, like they did in the Kremlin. Accordingly, the Soviet Union’s commercial structure was fitting of an underdeveloped country, as it exported raw materials and fuels and imported industrial and high technology items, a situation that put it at a disadvantage in the world market’s correlation of forces and made it dependent on other powers. The Soviet Union’s foreign debt in 1986 is estimated to have been near 41 billion dollars.

Together with this, a system of equal salaries to cut out individual bonuses in the production of goods and services became a barrier to the development of productive forces and, eventually, had influence over the socialization of poverty. Its proponents failed to understand that, rather than assuming poverty, socialism points to its elimination.

In Soviet times, there was a thick veil drawn over salary-related statistics, itself a contradiction since it was a «workers’ State» and this issue was at the heart of its working class’s vital interests. No objective analysis could be made of the existing situation without such data, more readily available in any capitalist country –paradoxical though it may seem– unless otherwise dictated by any class interest.

In short, instead of being enhanced, the capitalist production relations came to a standstill in the name of productive structures and systems thought to be characteristic of socialism even if a mix of structures had been promoted. In this context, the workers remained dissociated from the wealth-generating means, which they never managed to own because bureaucrats and administrators alike kept them at safe distance from effective property. Under these circumstances, the new allegedly socialist organization of production was formal at best.

It was when the nationalization of property was mistaken for socialization that the socialist goal became adulterated and Marx’s ideas to overcome capitalism’s system of production were oversimplified (18). Those truths outplayed many of the successful achievements in fields like education, instruction, health care, social security and scientific activity. As determined by the minimum allowed by the socialist model, availability of food, housing, clothes and even leisure time was lower than in the West, even if the levels of social distribution were higher and results were attained never before seen in the country thanks to the benefits of a planned economy.

Nevertheless, it was a matter of distributing wealth, not poverty; hence the goodness and novelty of a tool for social distribution will serve no useful purpose when disconnected from a social resource-generating system which makes it operational and suitable. That is the functional contradiction between a flawed profit-yielding mechanism and the poor distribution of its output, and the seed of the socialism «of wants» that epitomized the Soviet model.

Nor was capitalism outranked in the political arena. People counted on no effective mechanism to take part in the decision-making process at any level, not even to discuss its conformation. The dictatorial model implemented in the Soviet Union and its mimetic expansion to other experiences clouded all attempts to have a true power of the people, either as the driving force to seize such power or as the active subject in its reproduction. Having monopolized authority, the Party-State turned its back on the progress that the oppressed has fought so much to achieve at various levels and stages of capitalism, even on the indispensable experience of the Soviets themselves, gone from being a spontaneous organ of mass struggle to holders of State functions.

October’s slow death began when the Soviets became little more than part of the furniture in the USSR’s political system, their principles downgraded with the advent of Stalinism and the chance to let the masses participate in politics, as well as any real and autonomous mechanism for their mobilization, nipped in the bud. The political and mass organizations suffered from a considerable atrophy as a result which laid the foundations of a specific type of political culture among the citizens in general and the workers in particulars.

As the sum and substance of the democratic deficit of these methods, the one-party scheme capitalized on a single concept of truth deprived of any real room for questioning with political subjects other than those who were Party members. Owing to the process of distortion of Bolshevism’s initial political practice, the SUCP dropped from its position as the mediator with the highest real, legitimate and developed ideological capacity to being judge and jury (19). The conversion of necessity into virtue, as Rosa Luxemburg feared, explains why the single party changed from being a seasonal measure (1921) to becoming a fundamental, constitutionally upheld feature of the system.

A distinctive trait of the Soviet political model from Stalin’s day till the USSR breathed its last, the system required full Pary supremacy through actions to suppress –or at least cripple– any social force as yet uncontrolled by or subordinated to its dictates. The Party merged its day-to-day activity with the administrative apparatus and its institutions and got hold of the government and its functions. That is why it is known as the Party-State.

No mass entity in the political and civil society was out of the Party-State’s reach; they all echoed its political ruling and followed its provisions to the letter without the slightest hint of objection or opposition to the system. They were, no doubt, efficient devices of political control rather than a self-governing force at the civil society’s disposal. The Party’s and the State’s social duties within a society in the making were thus altered in wayward and costly ways.

Consequently, during the decades of Stalinist power the state organs and institutions became simple executors of the guidelines coming from above, taking no responsibility whatsoever for what was going on in production or politics. It was from that model that the «higher-ups»’s totalitarianism saw the light of day.

The SUCP was a social control instrument, its membership equally craved by those seeking to become «career politicians» and all citizens who hoped to rise and succeed in any professional field of work. Jobs, positions, acknowledgements and other values supposedly linked to a person’s professional quality, talent and social contribution were contingent on Party membership and the possession of the relevant «card», which in many cases certainly favored the advantages of mediocrity and opportunism over virtue and talent.

In sum, the key elements of the political model put into practice by the Soviet bureaucracy were: a) extreme State centralization; b) distortion of the Party’s role in society; c) the ability to decide on all aspects of society was in the hands of a small elite; d) immobilization of concepts, given the deterioration of critical social thinking; and e) invalidation of any differing opinion, sometimes by violent means. Ergo, capitalism won in the field of politics too.

An example of that disastrous mistake were the efforts to dilute individuality in an increasingly abstract collectiveness without any respect for things different and schematize a picture of harsh, willful citizens, as if a new kind of human being could materialize by decree, everything against the backdrop of a too simplistic portrayal of man where his psyche –and any modifications therein according to the surrounding environment– were totally unaccounted for.

As further evidence of this aberrant practice we can mention the spirit of self-criticism –still another deviation from the original design– that institutions and individuals alike were forced to accept. Every time and everywhere, self-criticism was centered on the lower layers of executors, always berated as undeserving of the higher, decision-making bodies, an effective tactics which for decades distracted attention from the regime’s structural and other basic problems and left it to the masses to find a «solution» to petty problems and cope with the consequences while the root causes remained untouched.

The power-truth machine that the Soviet regime set in motion had awful results. Official speeches containing ample revelations of wise moves and tailored to fit in the proper statements supplanted dialogue and joint dedication, bringing to the masses nothing but deep-seated resentment against values once shared, loss of any hopes on the chance to ever revert the current situation and widespread apathy.

Not that debate is to be assumed as a safety valve for issues on the periphery of political decisions. On the contrary, it’s called to be a means to expose the truth in its various forms and understood as an ongoing process to penetrate our modern and extremely complex social world and its transformation. When attended to by just a few, culture degenerates and counterproductive contradictions arise in detriment of a system’s ability to change. In the 1980s, the Soviet experience made people aware of what they didn’t want, but not of what they wanted. A destructive force erupted which, far from fostering reflection and dialogue, became what some sociologists described as «mass hysteria».

When Lenin died, his body was embalmed –a ghastly symbol of what the Soviet Union was to become– but also his thoughts, cloistered in manuals designed to indoctrinate the illiterate Russian masses. As a result, Marxism was denatured and used as a stiff, unchanging doctrine to justify rather than enlighten. Social thinking was confined in a straitjacket, prevented from engaging in scientific confrontations with other currents or even enriching the ideas developed by Marx. The scientific theories saw their meaning fade out –their immanence, for lack of a better expression– and the spirit of the Great October Revolution was put to death.

Thinking otherwise was dangerous to the «Soviet socialism»’s chosen few, its leaders unable, as it turned out, not only to keep alive the revolutionary flame in their daily dealings with the historical times they lived through, but also to bear with any sign of differing, faultfinding, power-challenging thought. That is why, as Jorge Luis Acanda said, «they found the concept of freedom of expression impossible to digest» (20).

Whereas the logic of capitalism consists in concentrating property in the hands of a few as it nurtures dreams of prosperity even among its poorest citizens, its upper class is undoubtedly competent in the hegemonic exercise of supporting the system, the incongruity notwithstanding. However, the Soviets socialized material possessions and privatized people’s dreams (21), restricting the ability to provide a social alternative to a small group of individuals.

An overview of the facts so far presented leads to the conclusion that the new system provided no cultural substitute inasmuch as it failed to overcome the constant pressure of capitalism’s distinguishing features, nor did it manage to outstrip what the West had long been doing, a reflection of its overall social development. In its place prevailed a tendency to yearn for and mimic things which, having been produced beyond the border, hinted at higher levels of workmanship and satisfaction, both materially and spiritually.

The Soviet government’s inability to stop the cultural bombardment from the West had a profound impact on the average person’s thirst for consumption, a long-denied material and ethical alternative. Moreover, the leaders themselves felt tempted, never mind that their purchasing power was a far cry from what the official speech asserted. This issue arose at the very outset of bureaucratic power, whose elite formally changed their shoes but essentially maintained their flamboyant, ostentatious, traditionally bourgeois spirit as they longed with a peasant’s zeal for the ordinary Westerner’s way of life.

Another major lesson learned from the Soviet process was that no force can have a monopoly on the Revolution’s know-how or possess infallible skills to appraise every revolutionary utterance. Russia’s level of development, revolutionary practice itself and the world’s need of a Revolution nullified any hopes to construct socialism –in its Stalinist version, at least– in a single country.

In general, the doings of the USSR’s foreign policy fused together the interests of international revolution and those of the domestic ones, a major setback both to the emancipation movement and the very notion of a worldwide socialist revolution as the only foreseeable way to subvert global capitalism.

On a theoretical plane, they did their best to liken all subsequent revolutions to what happened in Russia, to the point of invoking far-fetched similarities, even in the smallest details, with entirely different processes, which no doubt eroded and shackled Revolution’s theory and practice.

At any rate, the possibility to start a one-country socialist revolution was confirmed, not so the likelihood that it could be brought to a successful conclusion in those conditions. It is beyond denial that a country’s particular experience is the permanent source of nourishment for a global emancipation project focused on the elimination of every form of bourgeois domination.

Despite the relatively scheduled implementation of new economic structures and political and ethical trends, there was not a real historic substitution. This made it possible for the long dormant forces of capitalism to come to the surface when least expected, get hold of political power and change everything around them. Actually, the Soviet model could neither overturn the antagonistic system nor withstand the economic and technological challenge it represented.

Trotsky’s assertion that « it is far more dangerous to confuse the present and the future tenses in politics than in grammar» (22) found its validation in the institutional changes, the simulation of new values in the official speech, and the invocation of future glories as a fact beyond question.

When we look now at the Soviet experience from the standpoint of its efforts in the past to establish a libertarian society, we can discern the dilemma –as Hal Draper pointed out– between socialism-from-above and socialism-from-below as one of the key reasons for the Soviet failure worthy of our full attention but addressed by these pages barely as a narrative statement. Draper himself remarked that «the history of socialism can be read as a continuous but repeatedly failed effort to get rid of the old tradition of emancipation-from-above» (23), as evidenced by the breakdown of the Soviets’ potential in face of bureaucracy’s single party.

From that viewpoint, the struggle for socialism –not to replace but to excel capitalism’s production system– becomes an urgent historical requirement: socialism-from-below vs. socialism-from-above, a demand more easily verified in the light of Stalinism. In other words, given the systemic mechanism built on their behalf, neither the Soviet citizens in general nor the Russian workers in particular were able to create their own emancipation (24).

With the passing of time and due to the dictatorial fallout of Stalin’s system and conception, further emphasis was made on political governance on behalf of the oppressed but by no means with their direct participation. Marx called this problem an essentially revolutionary challenge:

“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again [as it happened from 1991 in the USSR]. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves.” (25)

Post-Lenin Soviet socialism was not a valid, articulate or viable alternative to capitalism because the arrogating bureaucracy was not –nor could it be– the carrier of a higher ideology and a cultural project assumed as a surgical instrument to bear a new society or provide the conditions to do it. This is one historical reason that the Soviet transition to socialism went wrong.

The men who seized power were not the reflective, educated communists Lenin had foreseen as the indispensable raw material to face up to and overcome the great historical challenge that Russia had accepted in 1917. Actually, their political doings did away with that principle. Once they gained an increasingly strong foothold in society and became the ruling class, these men proved themselves to be a by-product of the revolution and disclosed their incompetence to take the helm of history and set a course for socialism.

Stripped of the power they had achieved in struggle, the Russian working class’s political participation never became effective. The bureaucrats needed the process of capitalist restoration started in 1991 to preserve their privileges, reluctant as they were to promote efficient systems to control the workers and foster political participation against their interests. Never has there been a historical process where the ruling class revolted against itself. Years of bureaucratic dictatorship spoiled the Russian workers’ political will and rendered them useless to coordinate their own interests through conscious organization and carry out a political revolution from below.

The conditions leading up to the October Revolution have changed but still exist, and capitalism has been unable to deal with them. And in spite of the final outcome of the Soviet attempt and its quandaries, its experience is yet to conclude, since the need for a social change far exceeds the Russian-Soviet boundaries.

An anti-capitalist, and more specifically, a socialist revolution, still ranks high in the world’s agenda. That an initially pro-independence event has failed is by no means a reason to assure that, under other historical circumstances and sustained by different objective and subjective factors, the socialist project will suffer a similar fate, much less to believe the false conviction about the impossibility of replacing capitalism with socialism. (26)

Regardless of the postponement of the transition to socialism that the events occurred in the USSR impose on Russia and the rest of the world, the subversive effort started with the Bolshevik project is still on, latent beneath the wreckage of bureaucracy’s dictatorship. In 1922, Lenin predicted:

“Our machinery of government may be faulty, but it is said that the first steam engine that was invented was also faulty. No one even knows whether it worked or not, but that is not the important point; the important point is that it was invented. Even assuming that the first steam engine was of no use, the fact is that we now have steam engines. Even if our machinery of government is very faulty, the fact remains that it has been created; the greatest invention in history has been made; a proletarian type of state has been created.” (27)

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Notes

1. Christopher Hill, La Revolución rusa, Edición Revolucionaria, La Habana, 1990, p. 18.

2. Ted Grant, Russia, from revolution to counterrevolution, Fundación Federico Engels, Madrid, 1997, p. 108.

3. Ted Grant and Alan Word, Lenin and Trotsky, what they really stood for, Fundación Federico Engels, Madrid (Taken from www.Engels.org)

4. Ted Grant, ibid. p. 118.

5. From Alexei Goussev’s article The unforeseen class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky (From www.herramienta.com).

6. A most controversial cornerstone of the analysis of bureaucracy is found in its connection with or independence from other classes. While some authors have it that bureaucracy would never be central to a steady system since it could do nothing but convey another class’s interests –in the Soviet case, according to this approach, it swayed from the interests of the proletariats and those of the owners; Leon Trotsky was a major supporter of this view– others assure that it expressed no alien interests, nor did it fluctuate between two poles, showing itself instead as a conscious social group with interests of its own. Milovan Djilas is an important example of this view with his book The New Class.

7. Vladimir I. Lenin, Report to the 11^th Congress of the Party, in Lenin’s last struggle; Speeches and writings, 1922-1923, Pathfinder, New York, 1997, p. 65.

8. Adriana D’Atri, Un análisis del rol destacado de las mujeres socialistas en la lucha contra la opresión y de las mujeres obreras en el inicio de la Revolución rusa (Taken from www.rebelión.org, October 20, 2003. In his article A great initiative, Lenin explains the revolutionary purpose of these measures as one of the Revolution’s most important steps forward in the validation of its communist nature.

9. Until Stalin’s death, the USSR Secret Service operated under various names: Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, MGB. In 1953 the MGB (Ministry of State Security) merged with the MVD (Ministry of Domestic Affairs) and took the name of Komitei Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the notoriously feared KGB.

10. Leon Trotsky, What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?, in The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder, New York, 1992, p. 184.

11. Suzanne Labin, Stalin el Terrible, Editorial Huapes, S.A., Buenos Aires, 1947. p. 136.

12. Ted Grant, ibid. p. 398.

13. Vladimir I. Lenin, ibid. p. 204.

14. Ibíd. p. 210.

15. Idem.

16. Dolores Vilá Blanco, Las reformas y su lugar en la transición al socialismo, from Teoría sociopolítica. Selección de temas, t. I, Editorial Félix Varela, La Habana, 2000.

17. Abel Aganbeguian, El ser humano y la economía, from Socialism: Theory and Practice, No. 4, Moscow, April 1988.

18. Jorge Luis Acanda, Sociedad civil y hegemonía, Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, La Habana, 2002, p. 264.

19. Fernando González Rey, Acerca de lo social y lo subjetivo en el socialismo, from Temas, No. 3, La Habana, julio-septiembre de 1995.

20. Jorge Luis Acanda, ibid.

21. Frei Betto, Mística y socialismo, Casa de las Américas, No. 185, La Habana, 1991.

22. Leon Trotsky, ibid. p. 49.

23. Hal Draper, The two souls of socialism (Taken from www.Marxists.org.

24. The first paragraphs of the general rules drafted by Marx for the First International reads: «The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves». This is the prime principle of his whole work. Quoted by Hal Draper, ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Adolfo Sánchez, ¿Vale la pena el socialismo?, El Viejo Topo, No. 172, Barcelona, November 2002.

27. Vladimir I. Lenin, ibid. p. 70.

Source: Journal Temas, Cuba, No. 50-51: 4-15, April-September 2007.

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