Reflections on the Class Causes of the Counter-Revolution in the Soviet Union
Alexei Danko
Proletarskaya Gazeta (№26, May 2006)
Original (in Russian)
I do not undertake in a short newspaper article, much less in the absence of sufficient preparation, to give a thorough and complete answer to the essence of this subject. But I consider it my duty at least to draw the attention of the revolutionary proletarian forces to the necessity of a deep scientific study of this problem in the interests of the future class struggle of the Russian and international proletariat. Moreover, Marxists, if we call ourselves Marxists, should not “turn a blind eye to reality”, no matter how bitter and difficult this reality is for us. The workers must be made aware of the truth and explain its essence in principle, otherwise they will fall prey again and again to the deception of the bourgeoisie, which is full of cunning and hypocrisy. It is necessary to explain it scientifically, from the standpoint of dialectical and historical materialism, so that the working class can realize itself as the creator of historical progress and not try to shift its class responsibility for the historical future of Mankind only on the shoulders of its political vanguard or chiefs.
Under the conditions of the bourgeois order, the advanced progressive class is the working class, leading the revolutionary class struggle against the reactionary capitalist class. The Communist Party is essentially the political vanguard, the advanced part of the working class. In the process of the class struggle, the leaders, that is, the most trained and capable of revolutionary struggle, the “best of the best” of the finest layer of professional revolutionaries, emerge from the ranks of the party.
According to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the driving force of the revolution is always the advanced class of a given historical stage of development, opposing the outmoded system and the class personifying the old system. The role of the individual in the process of revolutionary struggle (including any leader) is undoubtedly great, but it can be decisive only in certain tense moments of struggle, that is, for a short time.
It would therefore be fundamentally wrong to assert that the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union was held mainly by the activity and authority of Comrade Stalin and that the counter-revolution in the country, after the death of Comrade Stalin, was won as a result of a conspiracy and at the will of a group of Soviet revisionists (the so-called “Khrushchevites”) who broke through to power.
In the period of socialism, after the victory of the proletarian revolution and the suppression of open resistance by overt class enemies, non-antagonistic, non-hostile classes and social strata, vestiges of capitalism and a certain social inequality still remain for a long time. For this reason it is only natural that under socialism there should also exist, in new forms and manifestations, an ongoing class struggle, and that under certain negative class conditions there might be a threat of counter-revolution. The main revolutionary force capable of averting or suppressing counter-revolutionary threats remains the working class, led by its political vanguard, the Communist Party. Therefore, the most important tasks of the party are the unrelenting and rigid control of the purity of its ranks and the constant principled ideological struggle against political “doctrines” and forces hostile to the proletarian ideology, and of the working class the firm exercise of its dictatorship against all counter-revolutionary manifestations and the all-out aggressive implementation in practice of the party’s policy of eliminating the existing capitalist remnants.
The essence of the existence of the Party is that it is the brain of the working class and essentially forms a single organism with it. A Communist Party isolated from the working class ceases to be its political vanguard and inevitably degenerates as a class, that is, perishes. The Communist Party, in possession of the advanced class revolutionary theory, should be able to foresee the social and class ills of society, to comprehend them in time and to recommend to the working class the most effective methods of “treatment”.
A particular danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat is petty-bourgeois ideology and the strengthening of its position in society. The mass carriers of petty-bourgeois psychology are objectively the intelligentsia (including the officers of the army and punitive structures) and the peasants. The influence of petty bourgeois ideology on the working class is also considerable, since the working class is, to a fairly large extent, recruited from the petty bourgeoisie and is not separated from it by the “Chinese wall”. During the Great Patriotic War, the working class suffered enormous losses from the old cadre of workers who had experience of class struggle and a stable class psychology. They were replaced by young people without sufficient class conditioning.
Proletarian ideology and petty-bourgeois ideology express different class interests. It is therefore necessary to have a very clear idea of the distinction between the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and those of the working class.
It is the petty bourgeoisie which reproduces bourgeois aspirations in socialist society and nurtures new bourgeoisie. Neglect of the struggle against petty-bourgeois ideology and loss of revolutionary vigilance towards this insidious enemy of the dictatorship of the proletariat are fatal to the cause of the proletarian revolution and socialism.
Under capitalism, a certain section of the petty bourgeoisie becomes an active ally of the proletariat when the contradictions between the interests of big capital and the petty private sector are exacerbated. Under socialism, the petty bourgeoisie, by virtue of its nature, its class duplicity, can become a dangerous counter-revolutionary force when the struggle of the Communist Party and the working class against petty-bourgeois ideology weakens. The petty bourgeoisie goes on the active offensive when loopholes for individual enrichment open up and there is a shortage of any goods and services in society. The petty bourgeoisie easily transitions from one state to another with the change of circumstances that affect its immediate self-interest as a petty private citizen, since it is guided only by vested individual or family socio-economic interests and base animal instincts and is incapable of thinking about the prospects of life in a principled, global way. In their actions and conduct, the petty bourgeoisie is often quite irresponsible and aggressive.
The realisation of petty bourgeois aspirations under socialism takes place through the presence of the forcedly preserved remnants of capitalism and the operation of the “bourgeois right”, which cannot be eliminated by a voluntary decision and in a short space of time. For example, the distribution according to labour and the resulting property inequalities, the essential difference between mental and physical labour, between town and countryside. Specific manifestations and sources of private property aspirations are the homesteads of peasants, private housing and holiday homes, luxury goods, the special status of managerial and intellectual labour, the existence of commodity-money relations in the distribution of products, goods and services in great demand and the like. This can only be overcome by the offensive but gradual overcoming of the “bourgeois right” in the process of the gradual development of the material and technical basis of socialism. Only in this way can the conditions which reproduce the petty-bourgeois order with all its negative manifestations be eradicated.
The forms of class struggle are varied, ranging from ideological struggle to armed struggle, including civil war. Marxists recognise all forms of class struggle. In order to win the class struggle as a whole, the Leninist Bolsheviks initially had to win the victory in the ideological struggle. They won it. The ideological struggle did not stop there, though. The ideological struggle between petty-bourgeois ideology, which had many varieties, and proletarian ideology continued unceasingly and in various forms, now weakening, now aggravating, in all the years of the proletarian socialist period. Comrade Stalin’s thesis about the continuity of the class struggle in the process of building socialism is convincingly confirmed by real practice, by life itself, and only practice is the criterion of truth.
Marxism-Leninism teaches that the preconditions for the replacement of one social order by another mature within society long before the revolutionary events. I am convinced that this fundamental thesis also applies to the case of counter-revolution in a socialist country.
Since we are talking about the victory of the counter-revolution and the defeat of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR., it follows that in the Soviet Union in the post-war period a decisive change in the balance of class forces occurred not in favour of the proletarian forces — especially within the Bolshevik Party. As a result of the class struggle these anti-proletarian forces won the victory. There can be no other version if we accept the science of class and class struggle.
The attack of Fascist Germany on the Socialist Soviet Union cannot be regarded primitively, from the standpoint of the ordinary aggression of one country against another. In this mortal combat two irreconcilable class forces came together — the most reactionary forces of capitalism on the side of fascist Germany and the progressive communist forces in the face of the Soviet Union, which made a breakthrough into the future of the world civilization that was dangerous for capitalism as a whole. At the cost of enormous sacrifices and hardships, the Soviet people, led by the Bolshevik Party, defended the independence of the proletarian state, expelled the aggressor from the territory of their socialist country and crushed the fascist beast in its own lair. The working class of the Soviet Union defended its revolutionary gains against the most reactionary forces of world capital in a fierce battle. It was a victory for all the progressive forces of the world. But at the same time the class enemy was able to inflict on the Bolshevik Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union the mortal internal wound that later killed the working class power and proletarian socialism in the USSR.
The Bolshevik Party was the vanguard of the working class in the Soviet Union not only because of its special political position. The Bolshevik Party constantly sent the best Party cadres to the most difficult and responsible sections of practical work, where they clearly proved the high authority of Party members to non-Party comrades by their successes and exploits in concrete deeds. During the Great Patriotic War, the Bolshevik Party sent the best Party cadres and the best representatives of the working class to the most difficult sections of the front and the rear. The Communists were the first to go into battle and the first to die. That is why the losses in the Party ranks were extremely high, especially in the first years of the war. However numerically the Party grew. Its ranks were replenished, to a great extent, by the heroes of the front, because at the front not only heroism was massive, but also visible, and the Communists proved to be the best among the heroes. The title of Communist was therefore a kind of special badge of honour.
The predominant replenishment of the Party from among front-line soldiers with no Party experience and no political training began to considerably dilute the class composition of its ranks. As a result of this recruitment, particularly at the end of the war, the Party suffered a significant qualitative loss in the political sense. However, this cannot be regarded as an omission or political short-sightedness on the part of the Bolshevik Party. During the war the fate of the proletarian state was decided at the front. Hence the main political aim, slogan and task at that time was “ALL FOR VICTORY”. The whole policy and life of the Bolshevik Party was subordinated to this. It was because of this that the heroes of the front were not merely heroes, but were the political vanguard at the forefront of the practical class struggle, that is, they actually constituted the basis of the Party under the given conditions. This was fully in keeping with Party policy and the class requirements of wartime, but it carried the danger of petty-bourgeois contamination of the ranks of the Party, especially on the part of the peasant and intelligentsia.
During the war years the psychology of the toiling peasant prevailed in the minds of the peasant masses. Why? The proletarian revolution and the successes of socialism improved the life of the peasantry very considerably and demonstrably. The proletarian government provided the peasants with land and necessary farmland, modern agricultural machinery on concessionary terms through the creation of machine and tractor stations (MTS), guarantees in case of crop failure, many social and cultural benefits, freed them from the pernicious risk of the market element in selling their produce, and so on. Under tsarism the peasants could not even dream of such a thing. That is why the peasant fighters showed wonders of heroism at the front, defending their vested interests, and through that, the gains of the proletarian revolution and the proletarian state against the encroachments of the fascist invaders. That is why communist psychology prevailed in the minds of the peasant toilers during the war years, creating an urge to join the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, which defended at the front the vested interests of the Soviet working peasantry at the cost of many lives of the best sons of the Party.
In the post-war period the situation changed fundamentally. Having returned from the front, the peasants faced considerable hardship. The collective farms, half-destroyed by the war, were barely able to cope with government deliveries. Industry was in a hurry to switch from war to peacetime production and was therefore unable to supply peasants with all the manufactured goods and machinery they needed, but justifiably demanded an increased supply of foodstuffs and agricultural raw materials. The backyards of the peasants were often in a state of disrepair; they were short of food, clothing and many other necessities for modest family life. The former soldiers had the hardships of war, the glory of battle and the dream of a more or less prosperous life behind them. This pushed the peasants in their current lives to take care mainly of their own pecuniary well-being, including hiding behind military glory and partisanship. This gave rise to the flourishing of private property encroachments amongst the peasantry. However, because of the dual psychology of the peasant — the psychology of the small proprietor and the psychology of the toiler, the bulk of the peasantry trusted the Bolshevik party to build communism at the country level, because they had already experienced the real economic benefits of the socialist system. On the other hand, the peasant, in his concrete life and activity, tended to put his own petty proprietary interests above those of the public interest.
Such was the dialectic of the psychology of the peasant, the petty proprietor and the toiler, which was inherited and particularly persistent by those who were settled in the cities, often even more aggressively than the peasants themselves.
It was already very difficult to protect the ranks of the party from the dangerous contamination of elements with the psychology of the petty privateer. Firstly, such elements were already in considerable numbers in the Party. Secondly, these elements had military merit for the socialist fatherland in the recent past, and this gave them a safe shelter from the criticism of their comrades in the Party.
Intellectuals, by virtue of their social position, in any system are called upon to serve the interests of the ruling class.
Under capitalism, intellectuals, on the one hand, also belong to the exploited part of society. On the other hand, by the nature of its social function it itself participates in the exploitation of the workers and peasants, because through the intelligentsia the capitalist class realizes and regulates their direct oppression, that is, the intelligentsia is used by the bourgeoisie as an instrument for the exploitation of the workers and peasants.
Under socialism, intellectuals have to do the will of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Many intellectuals are inadvertently burdened by such “service” to the dictatorship of the proletariat, because they have to serve the interests of workers and peasants, whom intellectuals are traditionally used to placing below their social position. The welfare of intellectuals largely depends on their position and position in society. This explains the susceptibility of intellectuals to such social ills as careerism, bureaucratism, tendency to idealism, an exaggerated view of their social importance, the desire to occupy a special position in society. To a large extent this explains the desire of the intelligentsia to join the ruling Bolshevik party. Owing to their social and class characteristics, the duality of their class position, the intelligentsia easily succumbed to petty-bourgeois influence and decay.
The habit of shifting the responsibility for governing the life of society, including the party, on the shoulders of the leaders is also characteristic of the intelligentsia and peasant milieu, prone to petty-bourgeois individualist psychology.
In the post-war period the Bolshevik Party was dangerously contaminated by petty-bourgeois elements.
It must be especially recalled that “If we do not close our eyes to reality, we must admit that at present the proletarian policy of the party is not determined by its composition, but by the enormous undivided authority of the thinnest layer which might be called the old party guards. All it takes is a little internal struggle in this stratum, and its authority will be, if not undermined, then at least weakened so much that the decision will no longer depend on it.” (Lenin. 1922)
As a result of the class struggle in the pre-war and war period, this “thinnest layer… of the old Party guard” suffered the greatest losses and became even thinner, and after Comrade Stalin’s death “a little internal struggle” weakened it to the point where “the decision no longer depended on him”.
The war and its gravest military consequences not only inflicted class, material and human losses on the Soviet Union, but also exacerbated a number of other extremely dangerous tendencies for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The requirements of wartime war compelled the economy, the development of the productive forces and the efforts of society as a whole to reorient itself completely to the needs of the struggle against fascist aggression. Production relations were also altered to meet this challenge, with a forced skewing towards extremely rigid vertical subordination. This distortion took place not only in the organisation of the economy, but also in the whole life of society, including the political life. The necessity of rapidly eliminating the gravest consequences of the war also made it necessary to force the reconstruction and development of the productive forces of the peaceful economy in mobilisation mode.
As a result, the development of production relations began to lag behind the rate of development of the productive forces because of these emergency measures and conditions, and not only because of the greater inertia inherent in the development of production relations in general.
Under the pressure and cover of these unfavourable causes, among others, substantial distortions arose in the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the development of proletarian democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat became rigidly exercised from above downwards — mainly at the expense of the activities and authority of the governing bodies of the Bolshevik Party, and the development of proletarian democracy in society was actually confined to the framework of approval of state assignments and Party resolutions passed down from above.
Strict vertical subordination in the management of the economy and the life of society severely weakened class control from below over the activities of the managerial apparatus and the intellectual elite. The lack of control from below contributed to their social isolation and petty-bourgeois decay. As a result, the petty-bourgeois interests and actions of the managerial and intellectual elite began to diverge from the class interests of the proletariat.
The situation was aggravated by the unequal replacement of the managerial cadres in the class-political sense because of their acute shortage as a result of human losses during the war. They were replaced by demobilized army cadres of commanders and specialists of the military industry, who traditionally, because of the organizational specifics of their previous activities, were in every way opposed to the development of proletarian democracy in industrial and social relations, most probably not even aware of the latent danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism in this.
The class and socio-economic phenomena described above posed a considerable danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but during Comrade Stalin’s lifetime the proletarian forces within the Bolshevik Party still managed to keep the situation within the Party and in society in general under political control. How can this be explained?
The sincere and supreme confidence of the Soviet people in the Bolshevik Party and the proletarian power was generated by real life and tested in the harsh years of the war. It was the class monolithism of the Bolshevik Party and the working class in alliance with the other non-party working masses of the Soviet Union that was one of the main circumstances which conditioned the successful and rapid advance in all directions of the practical life of socialist society. It is therefore outrageous and ridiculous today to hear from the bourgeois villeins the lie that the Bolsheviks and their leaders allegedly usurped power and held power by means of mass violence and terror. Such illiterate nonsense and insolent slander would not hesitate to reject even the most avowed enemy of the Bolsheviks and the dictatorship of the proletariat at that time.
We say Lenin, we mean the Party. Similarly, the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union during the so-called Stalinist period was embodied by the name of Stalin. This was not only due to the great merits of the leaders to the Bolshevik Party and the working class. Such personification also had a socio-class explanation. The victory of the proletarian revolution and the enormous demonstrable successes of socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party gave rise in the masses of the people to a strong moral uplift and a very real hope for a brighter future. Dreams of a better life were being systematically and rapidly transformed into reality. The petty bourgeoisie, especially the peasants and intelligentsia, were used to associating the good or bad of their lives, victories or defeats, with the name of some concrete hero, leader or leader, and not with the policies of the ruling class — in this historical case, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat headed by the Bolshevik party. This was clearer and more accessible to the common man’s mind, and the country’s successes were, indeed, legendary. Therefore, during Comrade Stalin’s lifetime, through such personification, the proletarian nucleus in the Party was strengthened by the authority of the Bolshevik Party and the working class of the entire previous period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. All the more so as the Marxist-Leninist line of the Bolshevik Party remained unchanged, and the Party formally demonstrated the class monolithy of its ranks — this applies to the post-war period during Comrade Stalin’s lifetime.
After the death of Comrade Stalin, the petty-bourgeois forces in the Party (the Soviet revisionists, the so-called “Khrushchevites”) concentrated their efforts on seizing key Party posts, since seizing the levers of Party control gave them the opportunity to seize political and ideological power. However, in order to change CPSU policy in the opposite class direction, i.e. to bring it in line with real power, it was necessary to politically discredit and crush the Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat by isolating it from the Leninist Bolshevik Party. The Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat always followed firmly the line of the Leninist party of the Bolsheviks.
This is precisely what it took at the 20th Congress of the CPSU to replace the class dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard role of the Bolshevik Party with the “personality cult of Stalin”, to replace the class struggle with the individual dictate of the leader and to slander his name posthumously. This is in complete contradiction to Marxism-Leninism as a science about classes and class struggle and the entire world practice of the class struggle, but it is easily understood by the primitive philistine mind.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU should be regarded as the formal date of the defeat of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR and of the implementation of the counter-revolutionary coup.
The counter-revolution did not shy away from using slander, behind-the-scenes intrigue, terror and the direct threat of armed force in its struggle for power.
It is true that not all the leaders of the Party obediently accepted the concrete actions of the class enemy who had seized power. In particular, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Shepilov and a number of other Party men made an attempt some time later to remove Khrushchev from his high leading Party post. But their actions did not reflect the class struggle and had the character of an upper-class struggle for power — as if they were not dealing with the class struggle and the class enemy, but with private intraparty organizational questions. It is for this reason that their “struggle” was not an example of revolutionary class action. Khrushchev and his supporters declared this group “anti-party” and expelled them in their entirety from the party leadership.
Power in the territory of the Soviet Union found itself entirely in the hands of the new class forces generated by the petty-bourgeois milieu, which had defeated the dictatorship of the proletariat in a class struggle.
They were communists in word and capitalists in deed. The new leaders of the CPSU had to, first of all, bring the basic party documents into line with the essence of the established power and the real situation in society. Such fundamental class notions as “dictatorship of the proletariat”, “class struggle”, “political vanguard of the working class” and similar concepts which formed the basis of Marxist-Leninist doctrine disappeared from them. At the same time, theses about “the complete and final victory of socialism in the USSR” were introduced — which unprovenly pointed to the impossibility of restoring capitalism and excluded any class struggle whatsoever, about “the party of all the people”, about a “nation-state” and the like. That is, Marxism-Leninism underwent a frank and thorough petty-bourgeois revision. However, all the external attributes of the CPSU remained intact, the party retained its communist name, the state was socialist, the party propaganda proclaimed allegiance to Marxism-Leninism and so on. This was also fully in line with the psychology of the average Soviet average citizen of that period. The revision of Marxism-Leninism had another ulterior motive — the revisionists hid their true (bourgeois) face in the name of Lenin.
They had turned Lenin into an icon for mass worship — harmless to the established authorities, and Marxism-Leninism had been turned into scholarly petty-bourgeois coddling under the guise of its “creative development” and had ceased to be in this form a guide to action for the revolutionary working class and communists.
The representatives of the petty-bourgeois forces who seized power and destroyed the dictatorship of the proletariat gained possession of all the public means of production of the country, that is to say, they actually became their corporate owners — the capitalists. From this moment we are already dealing with a bourgeois state and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
It is now necessary for the corporate capitalist, in accordance with the basic economic law of capitalism, the law of the production of maximum profit, to dispose of his means of production as profitably as possible for himself. These class aspirations necessitate fundamental changes in the basis at all levels in relation to the ownership of the means of production and the consolidation of these changes in state policy.
A fundamental example of such a change in the basis is the decision to abolish the machine and tractor stations (MTS). The liquidation of the MTS meant the elimination of public ownership of the instruments of production in agriculture, a return to group private ownership of agricultural machinery and its inclusion in the system of commodity-money relations, i.e. a fundamental turn in the economic relations between industry and agriculture at this level towards capitalist relations.
The dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie determines whether socialism or capitalism exists — there is no intermediate stage between the two.
