Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. by Robert C. Tucker
Ascher, Abraham
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. by Robert C. Tucker" The general reader may mistakenly discount as imaginary the single most important fact in the book: the existence in China of underground organizations of conspiratorial youth—although not,...
...Second, Marx held that socialism could be established only after the preconditions for such an order had developed within capitalism...
...Be sure to include the line of information above your name...
...Stalinism ...was not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasants...
...In this early period there already existed forced labor camps to which the police could send individuals by administrative fiat if the investigation did not "reveal sufficient evidence" for judicial proceedings...
...It is he who sent troops out to the border areas to crush any national movements for liberation and to set up an empire...
...Had Lenin lived into the 1930s (not at all a fantastic conjecture, since he was only 54 years old when he died in 1924), it is very unlikely that he would have resorted to the barbarities of Stalin...
...The terror, the absence of a legal order, and rule by a hierarchically organized party not only facilitated Stalin's rise to power but also constituted central features of both Leninist Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...and of that reading minority only a small number both comprehend and act upon his instructions...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Circulation Department P.O...
...More recently, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn developed the same thesis in a savage critique of Communism: ...in reality Lenin hail given shape to all' the main aspects [of Communism] before Stalin ever came on the scene...
...Moreover, 34 The American Spectator November 1978 Lenin's abandonment of War Communism was occasioned not by ideological dissatisfaction but rather by a realization that the economy was in shambles and that the peasantry, still the overwhelming majority of the population, was becoming increasingly hostile to the regime...
...Stalin's only innovation, according to Solzhenitsyn, was to base his system of rule on mistrust: "Where it would have been enough—in order to instill general fear—to jail two people, he jailed a hundred...
...Everything we know about him suggests that he would not have ordered the murder of former comrades or of hundreds of thousands of loyal party members...
...This vague formulation was a citizen's nightmare and a policeman's dream...
...And when the basic cadres of the party and state were found to be obstacles to the achievement of these goals, Stalin did not hesitate to destroy this layer of people, just as he had not hesitated in dealing with the well-to-do peasantry or the "bourgeois specialists...
...He is the one who deceived the workers about self-management...
...When Lenin and his tiny party took power in November 1917, the working class represented no more than 3 percent of the Russian people, and by no means all workers supported the Bolsheviks...
...Even so, by Richard J. Whalen is a Washington-based writer whose most recent book is Taking Sides (Houghton Mifflin...
...To express the point differently: Human beings have such divergent interests and propensities that the kind of social harmony Marx envisioned is unrealizable except in a polity where all institutions are tightly controlled by one center, and where the social and political goals for all groups and individuals are defined by that center...
...Senator Howard Baker, Jr...
...After 1921 Lenin did occasionally say that it would be decades before collectivization could be introduced in the countryside, but he did not suggest its abandonment as an ultimate goal...
...Yet we still cost just $1.00 per issue...
...Another stated that "great as the changes have been from 1917 to the present [1949], in its fundamentals Stalin's policy is a further development of Leninism...
...Please check the appropriate boxes and mail this form to: The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...
...So much fantasy has been written about China in the last decade, it seems a folly that Hsia Chih-yen, in the name of honest realism, should concoct more...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 (Please attach address label here...
...But even those who have read some of the thirty-one essays gathered here when they originally appeared inthe Wall Street Journal, the Public Interest, and Commentary will find fresh insights and abundant rewards on rereading them consecutively...
...Stalin stressed only the creation of new institutions and accelerated industrialization...
...Marx emphasized the economic, political, and spiritual liberation of the proletariat...
...Professor David G. Boyd, Naval War College Review The most authoritative, complete assessment of the U.S./ Soviet balance that the American citizen and Congress have had available in unclassified form...
...Throughout the country people appeared to be reasonably content with the state of affairs...
...not merely police repression, or even civil war-style terror, but a holocaust by terror that victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years...
...Briskly written...
...As early as December 1917 the Cheka (political police) was created...
...Publishers Weekly Why did we get involved...
...His very use of the term "totalitarianism" is arresting because most contributors to this volume, and many other historians and political scientists, have in recent years come to reject it as far too imprecise and misleading...
...It is hard to quarrel with this eloquent description...
...New subscription ^ Renewal ^ One year (twelve issues) $12 ^ Two years $22 ^ Three years $30 ^ Payment enclosed ^ Please bill me Canadian and foreign subscribers, please add $1 per year for postage...
...This means that you can enjoy 20 percent more Spectator each year...
...ever since 1900 Lenin had rejected democracy, and after 1902 he favored the creation of a hierarchical, highly centralized Marxist party possessed of the right to speak and act for the entire working class...
...To understand Stalin's "excesses" it is necessary to take into account what Robert Tucker calls the "personal factor" or the "mind and personality of Stalin...
...The book also contains superb studies of the social background of Stalinism and of the Marxist growth models developed during the 1920s, as well as new material on Stalin's life...
...Nevertheless, by positing an "inevitable" development of one system into another, the writers criticized by Cohen have made it relatively easy for him to marshal refuting evidence...
...Imbalance of Power is MUST reading for every concerned American...
...For example, the author of the article on totalitarianism in the second edition (1968) of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences claimed, among other things, that several of the most important traits usually associated with totalitarianism are found in a wide range of societies, and that consequently the term does not denote a polity that is sui generis . He concluded with the hope that "a third encyclopedia of the social sciences, like the first one, will not list 'totalitarianism.' " At the 1967 meetings of the American Political Science Association, he and another scholar contended that the concept gained currency in the 1950s only because it was the "foundation of [the) American counter-ideology in the cold war...
...Cohen himself has written an impressive biography of Nikolai Bukharin, the chief advocate of the moderate economic policies that prevailed from 1921 to 1928...
...But could such a man have reached the heights and carried out his monstrous policies in a country with firmly established, institutional restraints on the exercise of political power...
...By 1921 the Cheka was formally given the right to impose five-year sentences of prison or exile on "persons recognized as dangerous to the Soviet structure...
...It is no exaggeration to say that the book raises so many fundamental questions about the interpretation of Soviet history that it will exert a major influence on the course of scholarship for years to come...
...involvement from the almost innocuous decade-long advisory role into the morass of an ever-growing commitment...
...The American Spectator is now a fully monthly magazine...
...His haircut, lapels, and ties attest total indifference to changing fashion...
...Although we cannot presume that he would have crushed them the way Stalin did, there is ample evidence to suggest that he was capable of harsh measures...
...Ironically, some of the most ardent defenders and many of the sharpest critics of the Stalinist system have agreed that there was a direct and continuous line of development from Marx through Lenin to Stalin...
...Kolakowski believes that this "romantic vision" could easily be transformed into an ideology of totalitarianism...
...Roy Medvedev makes a similar point when he states: I still think that the main motives for [his] terror [were] Stalin's inordinate vanity and lust for power...
...And yet it cannot be denied that Stalin's "excesses" so drastically changed the system that it is appropriate to consider the Stalinist polity distinctive...
...military forces shakes the foundations of long-held concepts about national strategy...
...But it is also a fact that all of these radical measures were consistent with goals generally favored by Bolsheviks for over a decade and a half...
...defense intelligence and national security, this comparison of U.S.-U.S.S.R...
...Satisfaction guaranteed At your bookstore, or order from Presidio Press Distribution Center, Box 978 SP, Edison, NJ 08817 r ^ SUMMONS OF THE TRUMPET ^ IMBALANCE OF POWER $12.95 ISBN: 0-89141-0414 56.95, paper ISBN: 0-89141-059-7 ^ Latest catalog of books on military history and current affairs...
...Please renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$12...
...We know that people continued to think independently, though secretly, and that emotional and sexual relationships could not be fully subjugated by the state...
...sustained force of intellect and style, Kristol has taught a newly aware and activist—and slowly expanding—minority of corporate business leaders that ideas matter decisively, and that they and their giant enterprises are foredoomed if, like so many dinosaurs, they confront their enemies dumb, empty-headed, and mute...
...Now it is true that the Bolsheviks in 1917 did not have a detailed, coherent economic program and that in large measure War Communism was launched to meet a severe crisis...
...It is true that Lenin favored the NEP, but would he have indefinitely continued policies that tolerated private property and "free enterprise" in a sizable sector of the economy...
...It is too late to tell him that he might do better just to write from his own experience...
...BOOK REVIEW Two Cheers For Capitalism Irving Kristol / Basic Books / $10.00 Richard J. Whalen Ihave known Irving Kristol since the early 1960s, and he remains as he was when we first met: slightly bemused, chain-smoking, and almost as pleased with a well-aimed quip as with a tightly reasoned argument...
...So it is not surprising that the Tucker volume contains two essays that disagree sharply in their interpretations of Stalin's link to Marx...
...In fact...
...He is the one who created the concentration camps...
...In his essays Kristol has been working out a kind of personal dialectic, synthesizing intellectual values and socioeconomic institutions into a new reformist political program which combines the virtues of the free-market system with the advantages of the welfare state...
...You will receive more fun, more insightful analysis, and more thoughtful opinions than before, at the same price per issue...
...One of the most thought-provoking books of our generation...
...Yet this mild-mannered, almost diffident man is, quite simply, one of the most influential social and political commentators in America, an eminence won in part through a seemingly impossible feat: He has managed to impress at least some American business leaders with the power and importance of ideas...
...not merely a Thermidorian revival of nationalist tradition, but an almost fascist-like chauvinism...
...He aspired to autocratic one-man rule, with no restraints whatsoever...
...He also does not consider War Communism, the harsh economic policies of the years 1918 to 1921, as necessarily a true reflection of Lenin's views on Russian economic development...
...In 1918 he attacked as "a narrow-minded intelligentsia" those Communists who "sob and fuss" over the Cheka's mistakes: "When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism...
...In the opening chapter of this collection of essays, Stephen Cohen points out that the notion of a "fundamental continuity" between Leninist Bolshevism and Stalinism has been a premise of most Western IF YOU WANT THE FACTS SUMMONS OF THE TRUMPET U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective Dave Richard Palmer A comprehensive, objective, and highly creditable synthesis of America's involvement in Vietnam...
...Kolakowski, however, insists—rightly in my view—that by the 1930s the Sovietsystem had become totalitarian, by which he means that the state sought to control every form of human activity—economic, political, and cultural...
...Finally, Marx viewed capitalism as a historically necessary phase in human history—progressive compared to previous orders—that had to be "transcended" by a more advanced order...
...Professor Cohen objects to this "continuity" thesis on philosophical as well as factual grounds...
...There remains the question of the Bolsheviks' economic policies...
...A combination of the work of two of the best-qualified analysts of U.S...
...Cohen himself admits that "the party's growing centralization, bureaucratization, and administrative intolerance after 1917 certainly promoted authoritarianism in the one-party system and abetted Stalin's rise...
...He writes of mistakes, aggression, and brutality on both sides, and of lessons that must not be lost...
...For these pieces form, as Kristol acknowledges in a preface, "a kind of intellectual autobiography, explaining how and why someone who was once simply content to regard himself as a 'liberal' has come to be a `neoconservative...
...It is painful to learn that Hsia, evidently encouraged by the success of the original version of his book in Japan—a baffling phenomenon in itself—is at work on a second novel of this genre...
...The best evidence for this is the Criminal Code of 1922, which adopted the essence of Lenin's draft of a statement on discretionary power: Propaganda, or agitation, or participation in an organization, or co-operation with organizations, having the effect (i.e., the propaganda or agitation) of helping in the slightest way that part of the international bourgeoisie...which is endeavoring to overthrow [the Communist system] by force, whether by intervention, or blockade, or by espionage, or by financing of the press, or by other means—is punishable by death or imprisonment...
...Indeed, in several rural areas riots increased at an alarming rate...
...Naturally, those self-consciously stationed on the ideological flanks reject such synthesizing notions out of hand...
...To be sure, the political leadership did not succeed in regulating the Soviet population as closely as it wished...
...Marx's writings, spanning some four decades and covering innumerable theoretical and practical issues, contain opinions that can be cited to justify diverse and often contradictory policies...
...Although initially its powers were limited to investigation and the only punishments it could mete out were the "confiscation of property and deprivation of ration cards," the political police soon disregarded these restrictions and began to dispose of cases without trial, often executing suspects...
...BOOK REVIEW Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation Ed...
...To make sure you get your copy of The American Spectator each-month (we often sell out at newsstands) lust fill out the order form below and send us your check...
...Colonel Palmer traces U.S...
...Just, one of the political fanatics of the French Revolution: "One must rule with iron when one cannot rule with law...
...The same can be said of Bukharin, had he triumphed over Stalin...
...He is the one who turned the trade unions into organs of oppression...
...It was Lenin who deceived the peasants about their land...
...But there can be little doubt that Lenin's legacy, ideological as well as institutional, helped pave the way for Stalinism...
...The critical point is that throughout the eleven years of Bolshevik rule prior to Stalin's ascendancy a legal order did not exist in the Soviet Union...
...During this period of the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), the government tolerated a private sector in small farming and manufacturing, trade, and service enterprises...
...Still, civil society was virtually destroyed and the massive terror had the effect of atomizing the citizens into isolated and powerless individuals...
...They were reduced to a "sack of potatoes," to use the term Marx once applied to French peasants...
...For the latter, the demonstration of such links reinforces their conviction that the attempt to implement utopian goals inevitably leads to disastrous consequences...
...Stalin simply repudiated bourgeois society as "evil, oppressive, full of contradictions...
...Why did we stay...
...Norton / $19.95 Abraham Ascher For decades students of the Soviet Union have grappled with the question of the relationships between Stalinism and Leninist Bolshevism and between Stalinism and Marxism...
...Thus, one writer contended that Stalinism was "a logical and probably inevitable stage in the organic development of the Communist Party...
...He contentedly patronizes the same West Side Manhattan restaurants and, for all I know, he continues to order the same dishes that he did decades ago, for the sufficient reason that he still likes them...
...The issue bears not only on our understanding of historical events but also on our analysis of current Soviet affairs, and thus on our estimates of the probable directions of Soviet policies...
...Kristol, the Hubert Humphrey liberal of a decade ago, now finds much to commend in the person and program of Congressman Jack Kemp, the conservative proponent of radical tax cuts as the cure for our worsening economic ills...
...Tucker himself contributes a brilliant article, "Stalinism as Revolution from Above," in which he places the events of the 1930s and 1940s in the broad context of Russian history dating back to the fifteenth century...
...In short, did Leninism contain features conducive to the rise of a Stalin...
...Within short order all non-socialist and then all non-Bolshevik political parties were outlawed, as was the non-Bolshevik press...
...Or we'll gladly bill you...
...he wished to take undeserved credit for building up the Soviet state and Communist party and to those ends he promoted the cult of himself...
...not merely a leader cult, but deification of a despot...
...Stalin identified socialism with the mere expropriation of private property in the means of production, even though poverty, agriculture, and authoritarianism still prevailed...
...Although Tucker's volume highlights the question of the relationships among Stalinism, Leninist Bolshevism, and Marxism, it would be misleading to leave the impression that no other issues are explored...
...After all, he was a Marxist, utterly convinced that the abolition of private ownership in the means of production was necessary and desirable...
...The question of the relationship between Stalinism and Marxism is even more complicated...
...this view in order to legitimate Stalin's policies...
...Payment enclosed ^ Please bill me (please print) Name Address City State Zip Date of change X71 Manqoi The,American Spectator The American Spectator is now published twelve times a year rather than ten...
...When writing to us about your subscription, always attach your address label or print your name and address exactly as they appear on your address label...
...In the 1920s there existed alternatives other than Stalinism, and it was not a foregone conclusion that all of them would be rejected by the leadership of the Communist Party...
...But in his incisive essay, "Marxist Roots of Stalinism," Leszek Kolakowski argues even more plausibly that Stalinism constituted a legitimate, if not the only possible, interpretation of Marx, and that "every attempt to implement all basic values of Marxian socialism [is] likely to generate a political organization that would Changing Your Address...
...Forcible requisition of grain from the peasants, the unleashing of class warfare in the countryside, nationalization of major industries without compensation—in short, the " statization" of the economy—all this was undertaken, according to Cohen, because the Soviet regime faced the dual threat of civil war and declining supplies of food and industrial goods...
...In three basic respects Stalin discarded the master's teachings: First, in developing the objectives of the proletarian revolution the Soviet ruler paid no attention to the humanistic concerns that were critical for Marx...
...A one-time Marxist who became an early and singularly effective anti-Communist, Kristol in these essays subjects the present conflict between the private and public sectors to rigorous class-interest analysis, and identifies its source, not in benign "misunderstanding" (as some naive executives suppose), but in a struggle for power and moral influence between corporate business and the "New Class"—that educated elite which has carried the anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois values of the campus-based adversary culture into our society's dominant bureaucratic power centers...
...This and other themes in Kristol's writing are not unfamiliar, especially as neo-conservatism has enjoyed a kind of celebrity of late...
...General W. C. Westmoreland A nonpartisan account . . . enhanced by on-the-scene reportage...
...Within the Communist Party intense debates over policies were conducted...
...So the NEP, like War Communism, was launched in response to a crisis of monumental proportions...
...Of course, many more businessmen skip Kristol's essays in the Wall Street Journal than read them...
...For example, conservative economic journalist William Wolman, reviewing Kristol's book 36 The American Spectator November 1978...
...A History Book Qub selection IMBALANCE OF POWER Shifting U.S.-Soviet Military Strengths John M. Collins/Anthony H. Cordesman A superb handbook which collects masses of comparative data in one volume, presents it in a highly usable form, and provides cogent and useful analyses...
...Moreover, during those early years there existed an "officially tolerated social pluralism [in] cultural, intellectual, and even...political life...
...Mihailo Markovic, a Yugoslav philosopher, rejects the notion that Stalinism was a legitimate offspring of Marxism...
...How long he would actually have waited had he lived to old age is, of course, a matter about which one can only speculate...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip X71 The American Spectator November 1978 35 bear marks unmistakably analogous to Stalinism...
...In fact, in the Soviet Union the transformation occurred not because Marx deliberately intended it, but because the "basic values" of his notion of a "perfectly unified mankind[could] hardly be materialized otherwise...
...Lenin understood that refusal to make concessions to the peasants could mean the loss of power...
...At the same time, Marxist critics of the Stalinist order (most notably Trotsky and his followers) and a growing number of scholars contend that the dictator either betrayed the master's principles or, for one reason or another, pursued policies that constituted a decisive break with Leninist traditions and practices...
...Please send titles checked to: Name Address City State Zip ^ Payment enclosed...
...Interestingly, as late as 1925 Bukharin, Mr...
...The general reader may mistakenly discount as imaginary the single most important fact in the book: the existence in China of underground organizations of conspiratorial youth—although not, according to certain young Chinese emigrants, in the numerical force described by Hsia...
...Occasionally some Communists criticized the Cheka's excessive powers, but Lenin defended the political police...
...IMPORTANT: allow six weeks for address change...
...The former take Abraham Ascher is professor of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York...
...A Marxist in power is likely to promote the development of such a society because his doctrine insists on the inevitability of a "perfect unity of mankind," that is, an order in which all social conflict ceases...
...by Robert C. Tucker / W.W...
...It was only after Stalin had triumphed in the bitter struggle for leadership of the party and embarked on his program of breakneck industrialization that a radically new order was introduced...
...Cohen's hero, justified the Bolshevik terror of the Civil War years (1918-1921) with a quotation from St...
...The distinguishing feature of the new order, according to Cohen, was "excess, extraordinary extremism...
...Sooner or later he, too, would have moved against the peasants who owned land and they would have resisted...
...and artists as well as writers still enjoyed a considerable degree of freetiom of self-expression...
...Print your new address and mail this form to The American Spectator...
...This involves more than a dispute over ideological consistency, since our assessment of Communism's capacity to undergo fundamental change depends largely on how we interpret the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...Markovic's analysis, much richer than is suggested by this summary, has a ling of plausibility...
...Moreover, since Marx never occupied a position of political power, we are on even shakier ground in trying to describe how he thought his ideals should be realized than we are in grappling with Lenin's views on this subject...
...It implies a deterministic view of the historical process, which in any case ill accords with the course of events...
...The real question is whether Bolshevism made Stalinism, or a variant of it, possible or probable...
...He insists that except for some "generally held goals and tenets [such as] socialism, workers' control, nationalization, large-scale farming, planning, and the like," the Bolsheviks before 1917 had no "practical economic policies...
...Charge my ^MC ^Visa 0 American Express Card Number Expires The American Spectator November 1978 33 scholarship on the Soviet Union...
...Professor Cohen takes to task those historians who assert that the NEP was merely a "tactical maneuver" to be replaced by genuinely socialist measures as soon as conditions were propitious...
...Please attach the address label from the most recent issue of your American Spectator in the space below...
...For Kolakowski, any realization of Marxist ideals necessarily involves the creation of a totalitarian polity...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
