Theories of Stalinism

...technoscientific and intellectual" strata emerged...

...He died in 1923 and thus didn't witness the rise of Stalinism and the first Piatiletka (Five Year Plan...

...Yet, he foundered on this insistence that the proletariat was the dominant class in a situation where it was economically and politically subjugated...

...But the Russian muzhik is czarist...

...For Marx, the subject of revolution, the "we," was the proletariat, the universal class...

...The Mensheviks who did were divided over them...

...The "patrimonial" Muscovite regime fused "sovereignty and ownership, the monarch viewing himself and being viewed by his subjects as both ruler of the realm and its proprietor...

...His account also drew on the ideas of historians like Paul Miliukov (a leader of the Kadets in 1917) and V.O...

...In short, self-declared Marxists came to power in a Russia lacking all preconditions for socialist goals, and had to accomplish what capitalism did in the West—thereby converting Marxism into a program for modernization and industrialization rather than emancipation— while eliminating those segments of the citizenry most "advanced" in know-how and political culture.' The rest of the population— the vast peasant majority—which hadn't been quite remade by 1917 as some Bolsheviks imagined, remained rooted in rural and traditional mores...

...174-75...

...Robert Conquest, in Harvest of Sorrow, his study of the "terror-famine" pursuant to Stalin's brutal collectivization and anti-Ukrainian policies, writes, "The main lesson seems to be that the communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children...

...and finally the dictator will take the place of the central committee...

...Both discerned Stalinism's origins in social conditions, in Russian "backwardness...

...Tucker's Lenin "married the old image of two warring Russias with Marxism...

...Ivan the Terrible, in a sixteenthcentury anticipation of Stalin's assault on the Old Bolsheviks, unleashed terror against the aristocracy, all the while proclaiming himself defender of the lower classes—who were pressed into serfdom in the next century...

...a viralunRussian —logic unfolded with ironclad necessity...

...By socializing production and eliminating classes, the proletarian state sought its own dissolution...

...February 1917 culminated Russia's "unbinding," but October was a reversion to state assertion...

...This transformation, Lewin adds, was missed by conservative social scientists and theorists of totalitarianism (for example, Brzezinski) who were focused on a Kremlin run by gerontocrats...

...Only by identifying it with the party...

...As the regime lacked trained cadres, the door was opened to massive upward social mobility...

...But it was self-evident, continued Trotsky, that the Soviet state was not withering...

...And Vladimir Kirillov: "We are the countless, awesome legions of Labor/ . . . Creative pangs seethe in our collective breast/ . . . We are our own Deity and Judge and Law...

...authoritarian bureaucratism and terrorism are deeply rooted in Russian political culture...

...Recounted in Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution, p. 62 from an article describing the legend published in the spring of 1924...

...Their failure left an isolated Soviet Union susceptible to the slogan of "socialism in one country," an impossible idea...

...Broad historical processes—including those born of state policy—were obscured...

...Now that the Soviet system has collapsed, some six-and-a-half decades after the ascent of the tyrant with "cockroach whiskers," as Mandelstam described him in a verse that probably cost the poet his life, discussion of Stalinism can proceed minus cold war intrusions...

...it needed "a state that [could] match its complexity...

...Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, son of a prominent victim of Stalin, tells of a dinner party in 1927 at which Stalin, after a remark by Kirov concerning the need for cooperative leadership after Lenin's death, commented, "Yes, of course, the Central Committee, the collective...

...When Trotsky had urged the revolution forward, he reports, the bureaucrats retorted with a "gospel of repose" that appealed to weary workers and peasants: "Enough of shake-ups...

...The place of NEP is crucial to both the Princeton School—Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin's biographer—and Moshe Lewin, who chastise historians who fail to differentiate among Lenins: there was Lenin the party theoretician of What is to be Done...

...After Saint-Simon's death, his followers became an authoritarian and romantic sect, fusing his ideas with aspects of Catholic traditionalism...

...The "resurgences" are many: revolution from above has a long czarist lineage...

...Plekhanov, the "father of Russian Marxism," admonished that the implementation of socialist goals in the absence of their socioeconomic preconditions would produce "a political abortion after the manner of the ancient Chinese or Persian empires—a renewal of czarist despotism on a communist basis...

...It then becomes evident that the extent to which Stalinism is comparable to fascism is the extent to which it departed from Marx and (only partly, in my view) from Lenin...

...Under Lenin, the USSR was a one-party state...

...Tucker translates problems of the Russian "spirit" into the more earthly category of political culture...

...At that congress a quarter of the delegates voted against Stalin's re-election to the Central Committee...

...The "revolution from above," contends Tucker, 180 • DISSENT was "a reversion" to an earlier "developmental mode" of Russian state-building.' Stalinism must, therefore, be conceived within the structures of Russian history, not as their negation (as Solzhenitsyn would have it...

...Saint-Simon's other chief disciple, his secretary Auguste Comte, became Pere Supreme of positivism...

...How could this "proletariat" exercise class rule...

...In the 1920s and 1930s, when the USSR was dominated by the "rural nexus," Westernized and "bourgeois" experts were eliminated by the regime and replaced by recruits from the "popular" classes who were ill-prepared to run things, let alone cope with Stalin's crazed socioeconomic goals...

...Lewin doesn't indicate it, but a parallel claim may be made for the Soviet command economy: it proved incapable of adapting to the technological and scientific revolutions of the last decades...

...In the four years between The Revolution Betrayed and his murder, Trotsky moved sometimes toward and sometimes away from allowing that an altogether new formation had arisen in the USSR...

...One cannot disengage Lenin's notion of building a party from above from Stalin's later revolution from above...

...This included SPRING • 1992 • 187 not only "Whites," but Mensheviks, liberals, technicians and "bourgeois specialists...

...It was the Leninist party that created "the first totalitarian state," now reaching its pinnacle in Stalin's "unlimited personal dictatorship...

...In England, serfdom disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century...

...under Stalin it was an unparty state, with (surviving) card holders functioning less as members of a political party than as clergy under an infallible pope...

...Needed: the dictatorship of a vanguard...

...Tucker details how close the structure of the kolkhoz system was to that of serfdom—so close that peasants used "V.K.P...

...While fascism was deemed a buttress to capitalism, some, like Dan, adjudged at least a partial proletarian rationale to Kremlin policies...

...After World War II, urbanization proceeded apace, engendering fundamental social transformation...

...Yet he hoped that social democrats and Bolsheviks might one day be reconciled...

...How this is to be administered in a "non-state" is, I must admit, as mysterious to me as envisioning the German post office as a model for a free society in Russia, a land with a long history of bureaucratic despotism...

...A peasant legend circulated that Lenin had once asked a physician to devise a means by which he would appear dead, so that he might behold what became of the Soviet Union without him...

...During the Stalinshchina, privilege, hierarchy, discipline, and inequality became orders of the Soviet day...

...the latter habitually collapsed into totalitarianism...

...For social democrats, these conditions argued against the Bolshevik experiment in the first place...

...Whereas revolutionary struggle molded proletarian cohesion, victory makes part of the class the "agent" of power...

...Therefore, he opposed social democrats (such as Kautsky) who espoused an anti-Bolshevik uprising...

...But this would avoid the issue raised by the question, which is whether the Stalinshchina (Epoch of Stalin) represented more than the culmination of something else—be it "Leninism," "totalitarianism," or, indeed, "Russia...

...In 1934, the year of the "Congress of the Victors," the party still functioned, at least to some degree, as a party...

...Nazism and Stalinism both to leftwing phenomena...

...But odes in the Stalin era were to the Leader...

...The following discussion makes no effort to be comprehensive...

...It remained with him...

...We will build socialist society at home...

...Trotsky, for example, elucidated the bureaucratic nature of the Stalinist social structure with brilliance, but did not make of it a specifically Russian issue...

...Not recognition of oppression but stoicism of the oppressed seems to be Pipes's ideal...

...One is tempted to a brusque riposte: the answer is self-evident to millions of its victims...

...for Lenin, it was the party...

...the world mission of the Third International echoed Orthodox Christian messianism, which saw SPRING • 1992 • 181 Moscow as the Third Rome...

...Lenin the utopian of State and Revolution...

...These themes are drawn upon extensively by Robert C. Tucker in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (1990...

...Many urban newcomers found themselves in new positions for which they were unqualified and in which they were disoriented...

...Russian political culture was rarely addressed directly...

...In 1936, two years before his death, he suggested, however, that though democratization alone could salvage socialism, industrialization might engender "some kind of technocracy...

...For him Stalinism was Marxist-Leninist "totalitarianism full-blown," issued "out of the totalitarian embryo...

...The party became etatized, lost its political nature, and the Stalinist system became a party-state-economy "bureaucratic matrix...

...While he theorized that humanity ascends through theological, metaphysical, and positive stages, Comte contended that in the latter, scientific age, a "religion of humanity" ought to reign, complete with secular sacraments and temples, dogma (science itself), and priests...

...In contrast, Nicolas Berdyaev, a Russian emigre philosopher who passed through Marxist, Kantian, Nietzschian, and religious phases, emphasized, albeit in somewhat mystified form, the Russianness of what unfolded after 1917 in his The Origins of Russian Communism...

...Bolshevism's affliction was, for most social democrats, congenital...

...In contrast, Tucker finds in Stalinism the "dynamic resurgence" of the state against society, a rebinding through revolution from above...

...The Soviet urban population went from 18 percent in 1926 to 32 percent by 1939...

...his dictatorship of the proletariat was Popular Russia in power...

...Where Tucker perceives reversion to patterns of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Harvard's Richard Pipes sees continuity between the late nineteenth-century and the post-1917 regime...

...In a 1928 discussion of "The 'Professional Dangers' of Power," this Bulgarian-born revolutionary traced the problem of bureaucracy to the "inherent difficulties" of a new ruling class in power...

...The repression of the 1880s that Pipes himself describes...

...In the context of these debates the Austro-German social democratic theorist Rudolf Hilferding published a landmark socialist analysis of Stalinism in 1940 in a Menshevik periodical...

...Fitzpatrick's work ignited a major controversy in Russian Review, October 1986 and October 1987...

...In fact, Rakovsky had asserted that "The bureaucracy of the soviets and of the party constitutes a new order...

...We are not concerned with isolated cases...

...Few questions have agitated students of Soviet history more, undoubtedly because one cannot think about Stalinism without interpreting the Russian Revolution and, indeed, Russian history...

...As Saint-Simon suggested a council of specialists to displace the clergy and reorganize society, so Dmitri Pisarev, a central figure in Russian positivist currents, proposed that "thinking realists" guide social progress...

...In what follows I suggest that we look not only to party organization (which was vital) but to what I'll call the positivist core in Leninism—the belief that the party embodied a science that was "objective" like natural science...

...In fact, when Lenin argued for a party embodying the science of society in What is to be Done?, he cited the authority of Kautsky, then known as the "pope" of Marxism...

...By the 1980s, proletarians and white-collar workers, not peasants, composed the majority of the population, changing 188 • DISSENT the country's social, educational, and cultural profile...

...Martov pointed out that the Bolsheviks repudiated "democratic parliamentarism," but once in power ceased repudiating "those instruments of state power to which parliamentarism is a counterweight within bourgeois society: bureaucracy, police, a permanent army...

...The socialist-turned-Duce was grateful to the Vozhd for "doing a notable service to fascism by mowing down in armfuls his enemies...

...6 Populists like Lavrov and Mikhailovsky countered with "subjective sociology...

...It synthesized a "Russian national ethos, the emulation of the extremist element in Leninism and the personality of Stalin...

...This is a valid argument, but only within limits...

...In fact, Lewin's account of Soviet transformation gives reason for a certain optimism...

...As Muscovy consolidated in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, all classes were "bound" to state service...

...In January 1918, when the Bolsheviks proposed to the Trade Union Congress that union autonomy was superfluous now that the state was "proletarian," Lenin's old socialist foe, the Menshevik leader Julius Martov, insisted that there were four requirements for socialism: (a) A large proletariat that could envision no future save socialism...

...Indeed, he wondered aloud if, when the Winter Palace was seized, the red flag had "taken over the palace or vice versa...

...Is it surprising that a country whose political culture and institutions were suffused with theologically justified bureaucratic authoritarianism transmuted into an ideologically justified bureaucratic authoritarianism (or totalitarianism, if you prefer), with heretics dispatched in both cases...

...Indeed, he often spoke in the 1920s as if old Russia had been entirely vanquished: "October . . . gave to everything its own meaning and its own value...

...He wants only one...

...In short, Stalin's revolution from above inaugurated long-term transformations of Soviet society, but the political regime's "anachronistic autocratic features" remained stagnant...

...This is a developmental approach, emphasizing urbanization as the transformative experience of modernity...

...But never before had a bureaucracy obtained "such a degree of independence from the dominating class...

...The social bases for the Stalinist state were, therefore, badly collectivized peasants "flanked by millions" of poorly urbanized peasants governed by ill-prepared bureaucratic strata of rural or semi-rural origin...

...Trotsky threw into sharp relief the problem of bureaucratic power...

...All revolutions, Trotsky argued, engender reactions...

...But in power, save for equalization of wages, the Bolsheviks did the opposite, notably disbanding the Constituent Assembly and using their own political police...

...One cannot read the Marquis de Custine's descriptions of czarist absolutism in 1839—his Letters from Russia provide a fascinating parallel to Tocqueville— without perceiving in them anticipations of the Stalin and Brezhnev eras...

...Its character was "dual" and contradictory: production was socialized, but distribution sustained the advantages of the working classes' " plenipotentiaries . " The original, innovative revolutionary leaders were displaced by people "of the second line, in league with the former enemies of the revolution...

...As one of her critics, Geoff Eley, admonished, the state "is not something that can be removed or restored by historians at will...

...Once a political party embodies "science," pluralism is inconceivable...

...Here the future dictator entered underground social democratic circles, and the dual training served him well...

...Thus by the 1980s, Soviet society was "straitjacketed" by its political system...

...1905...

...The contradictions of plighting old and new were intrinsic to it, as the work of Tucker and Lewin shows...

...Urbanization had changed the social character of the country, encouraging "critical faculties" and the demand for "intellectual freedom...

...His critique of Soviet bureaucracy began in the early 1920s, SPRING • 1992 • 177 attaining penultimate formulation in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), a relentless vivisection of Stalin's lies...

...In the later Engels and in Kautsky, however, "science" became a positivist dogma rather than the critical tool it was for Marx...

...And as "the industrial era" yielded to "the scientific-industrial-information era," the Soviet intelligentsia was re-created...

...Urban, ed., Stalinism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986...

...Stalin's parents were still serfs...

...In his short, trenchant study, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Lewin links the impact of social changes unleashed by Stalinism to events of the 1980s by conceptualizing "a dynamic historical process" shaped by the relation between the state, urbanization and what he calls Russia's "rural nexus...

...Berlin approximated Nazi ideology, which espoused authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, organic racial hierarchy, an all-powerful state, and the Fiihrerprinzip...

...Worrall argued that the bureaucracy, however different, functioned like a bourgeoisie since it engaged in accumulation...

...Nothing reveals the simplistic nature of Lenin's notion of science more than Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908), in which he expounds that modern physics was "giving birth" to "the only true method and the only true philosophy of natural science" —dialectical materialism...

...Saint-Simon contended that although "the idea 186 • DISSENT of God should not be used in the physical sciences," it could be used politically as "the best means that has been discovered of managing the fundamental political relations...

...For all the parallels between fascism and Stalinism, the differences are no less important, and the differences are obscured when the two phenomena are simplistically compressed into a single mold...

...That, plus a Vozhd and terror, seems to me an excellent metaphor for the Stalinshchina...

...Not only did Trotsky brand Stalinism "totalitarian," but he maintained that despite "a deep difference in social foundations," there was "a deadly symmetry" between it and fascism...

...One sees this in J.L...

...Just as original Christianity, as it was spreading into pagan countries, absorbed elements of pagan beliefs and rites and blended them with its own ideas, so now Marxism, the product of Western thought, was absorbing elements of the Byzantine tradition, so deeply ingrained in Russia and the Greek orthodox style...

...Lewin contrasts sharply here because he emphasizes the interrelation between the political and social...

...Yet other radicals reeled before the "objective" prospect of capitalist oppression...

...In short, metamorphoses of the social and economic bases engendered the need for change in the political superstructure...

...Nor is it to deride all of Russian civilization, as Solzhenitsyn imagines...

...Thus Stalin was "a Bolshevik of the radical right who blended his version of Leninist revolutionism with Great Russian nationalism...

...Consequently, Stalinism was not the necessary result of Leninism...

...The transition from Lenin to Stalin is the transition from the party "we" —more accurately an "it" incarnating the "science of society" —to the "He" of Stalin...

...It may be necessary to grow hair earlier, though, for the lack of cloth...

...For one thing, the fact rather than the content of ideology waxes decisive...

...One might add: had orthodox Marxists not been narrow-minded in their understanding of nationalism, they might have recognized that since, in the Bolshevik version, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to accomplish what capitalism did in the West, and since nationalism arose in the West with the bourgeoisie, Russia's development made it ripe for nationalism synthesized with Bolshevism...

...and Guiseppe Boffa, The Stalin Phenomenon (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992...

...He also could not explain how the first Piatiletka, a vast, tumultuous upheaval affecting every aspect of the country, was carried forth by the conservative votary of a "gospel of repose...

...For just one example, Lenin determined that no party member should earn more than the average skilled SPRING • 1992 • 183 worker...

...Lenin then dissociated Marxism from "Hegelianism, 'faith in the necessity of each country having to pass through the phase of capitalism,' and other nonsense...

...The Revolution was only the beginning of their sorrows...

...He proposed that Bolshevism synthesized Marx and Ivan the Terrible "with the worst coming from Ivan and not from Marx...

...This people long possessed a "religious conception of the czar's authority," and a deep belief that land belonged to God...

...for them, the New Economic Policy (NEP) represented a return from orthodox communism to Russian historical development, a form of "national Bolshevism," as the group's central figure, Nikolai Ustryalov, put it...

...months would be renamed for positivist "saints...

...Success had depended ultimately on assistance from proletarian revolutions in the advanced West...

...Lenin exudes contempt for "professors of philosophy and theology" who derided this author...

...One group, around Fyodor Dan, tended to see the USSR as state capitalist...

...We vow to thee Comrade Lenin, that we shall honourably fulfill this, thy commandment...

...Stalin was not solitary in such devotions...

...It was a terrible but necessary aspect of establishing the industrial preconditions for socialism...

...The Kremlin's overlord declined the appellation "Stalinist," preferring to render himself a humble servant of Marx and Lenin...

...This is all lost in the neoconservative undertow...

...Such notions informed the Smena vekh (Change of Landmarks) exile circle in the early 1920s...

...Between 1934 and Stalin's death in 1953, the party congress met just twice...

...They perceived lethargy when urbanization, education, and technological advance, concurrent with the decline of the rural ethos, were giving birth to a civil society within "broad layers of officials, political opinion makers and the party apparatus...

...The ideal-type of totalitarianism and Soviet reality were frequently conflated by cold warriors, as was the will to total domination with its actualization...

...there were, they contended, dimensions of human existence inexplicable by natural scientific models alone...

...In the analyses of Isaac Deutscher and Otto Bauer, the former a product of the Trotskyist camp and the latter an Austrian social democrat, there emerged parallel instrumentalistdevelopmental conceptions of Stalinism...

...after all, he was a Georgian ex-seminarian turned Russian national Bolshevik...

...Totalitarianism" enabled diverse ideological blurrings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin by academics like Fainsod, Adam Ulam, Carl J. Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Leonard Schapiro, among others...

...8 I draw here from the articles on Russian political culture by Edward Keenan and Robert V. Daniels in Russian Review, April 1987...

...Scientific advance seemed linked to social improvement...

...Here Trotsky drew on the ideas of his friend (and future victim of Stalin) Christian Rakovsky...

...The country began to "unbind...

...Yet it was, as we have seen, initially deployed for opprobrious comparison with Germany by leftwing anti-Stalinists to deny Stalin the socialist mantle...

...The problem was not a "mediocrity" named Stalin, for he was but the gray face and steel hand of a conservative social force that had triumphed over the revolutionary, though now exhausted, masses...

...Long before 1917, he argued that revolutionary potential issued from backwardness...

...As one student of Russian political culture, Robert V. Daniels, notes, "Political culture builds up and changes like a series of geological deposits . . . [and] it is not always the oldest and deepest elements of a culture that are most likely to disappear in the face of new experiences...

...For more extensive surveys of the interpretations of Stalinism, to which I am indebted, see Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977...

...They insisted on the primacy of democracy...

...If one thinks of Stalinism, as does Tucker, in light of the binding and unbinding of an active state and passive society in Russia since the fifteenth century, it is difficult to sustain Arendt's celebrated claim that totalitarianism's novelty lay in creating a mass society, the better to assert control from the top down for ideological purposes...

...Below I paraphrase from Hilferding's essay in Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986) 4 Parallel, though not identical, analyses of bureaucratic rule appeared in the work of James Burnham and Bruno Rizzi, among others...

...The result was a government that occupied "in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise...

...After the Great Purges, the party, the Leninist institution par excellence, functioned as a party only in name...

...World war...

...Antonio Gramsci once called October 1917 a revolution against Marx's Capital...

...Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia, All Union Communist party) to mean Vtoroe Krepostnoe pravo—the "Second Serfdom...

...By the 1970s and 1980s a new reality had set in, with professional classes and intellectuals dominating everyday life...

...Because this program was an objective possibility for Soviet historical development, Stephen F. Cohen argues that determining Stalinism to be the "inevitable" consequence of Lenin is teleological reductionism...

...In The Russian Revolution (1990), he determines that the demarche to 1917 began in 1899 when student strikes, born of nonpolitical events, were hijacked by radicals for their own ends, showing "to what extent the Revolution was the result not of insufferable conditions but of irreconcilable attitudes...

...In contrast to orthodox Marxism, for which the state is a means of class rule, Hilferding determined that the totalitarian state lived "by the economy, but not for the economy or even for the class ruling the economy...

...But Marx posed a dilemma, for his socialism presupposed the social, economic, and technological achievements of capitalism...

...6 See Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), p. 246...

...Deutscher's 1949 biography of Stalin upheld that [i]n spite of its "blood and dirt," the English industrial revolution . . . marked a tremendous progress in the history of mankind...

...peasant ways withered and modern urban life coalesced...

...Hilferding pointed out that accumulation was a fact of all economic systems, and he contended that the bureaucracy was an instrument, receiving orders ultimately from Stalin, who "carried on with the job" begun by Lenin and Trotsky...

...This was interrupted, in turn, by NEP...

...Revolution against the Stalinist counter-revolution would have to be social, not just political as Trotsky proposed...

...Such were the assumptions of Bukharin's NEP-based strategy for socialist transformation at a "snail's pace" —not forced collectivization of the peasantry...

...Petr Tkachev, sometimes called the "first Bolshevik," held that "infallible ideology" was possible, but that the people could never attain scientific understanding...

...It is sometimes held that Lenin's reading of Hegel's Logic in the period from 1914 to 1916 transformed him into the dialectician of revolution in 1917...

...Weber, like Lenin, used the German civil service as a model for analysis...

...This scientism helped facilitate, dialectically, as it were, the ideological passage to Stalinism in the context of Russian political culture, "backwardness," and industrialization...

...Indeed, his "April Theses" of 1917, which announced that Russia was already passing from the bourgeois to the proletarian phase of revolution—perhaps the quickest bourgeois stage in history—are congruous with his 1894 critique of Petr Struve's "Legal Marxism," an early form of Russian revisionism, which proposed the importance of capitalist development...

...3 My discussion of the Mensheviks is indebted to and draws from André Liebich, "Marxism and Totalitarianism: Rudolf Hilferding and the Mensheviks," Dissent, Spring 1987...

...This often came of a simplistic conceptual opposition of "individualism" to "collectivism...

...These suddenly became proletarian tools...

...In the past half decade, we've witnessed the consequences...

...and the chastened Lenin who feared Stalin and bureaucratization and came to see NEP, originally a tactical retreat, as a long-term endeavor...

...Some populists had long thought it better to bypass capitalism, to pursue a specifically Russian path to socialism, based on indigenous institutions like the obshchina, the traditional rural commune...

...Her account, however, makes Stalinism an exemplar of a broader modern phenomenontotalitarianism —without adequately specifying its Russian setting...

...Consequently, Martov concluded, workers needed autonomous unions to protect their interests, whatever the party in power...

...In these circumstances the bureaucracy grew "as the bourgeois organ of a workers' state," born of "the poverty of society in the objects of consumption...

...For all its insistence on science and repudiation of earlier belief systems, positivism had a perverse affinity to theology, and adopted many of its ways, sometimes in the intentional form of noble lies and sometimes as fully integrated dogma...

...The Mendel Beilis trial...

...Stalinism was only one objective possibility, but it is the objective possibility that became reality...

...Stalinism may not have been its necessary consequence, but it wasn't an accidental by-product...

...Remarkably, Lenin took this seriously...

...An ap176 • DISSENT propriate way to begin is by reconsidering some of its major interpretations...

...Writing in the same year that Trotsky composed The Revolution Betrayed, Berdyaev was concerned not with the discontinuities between Marx or Lenin and Stalin but with the continuities between Russian history writ large and the events of his day...

...Such thinking was evident among post–World War II theorists of Soviet totalitarianism like Harvard's Merle Fainsod, regarded by many as the father of American Soviet studies...

...b) the proletariat had to possess administrative aptitude...

...Moshe Lewin argues that this gave the notion of totalitarianism an "empty self-sufficiency," yielding "something quite ahistorical: A political system without a social one, a state floating over everything else, over history itself...

...One can admire the writings of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky —some of Solzhenitsyn's too—together with the music of Mussorgsky and the architecture of St...

...But what, within Leninism, mutated into Stalinism—undoing Leninism in turn...

...The intrusion of religious categories was despite the substance of Haeckel ' s science...

...Five years later, this was inconceivable...

...Yet the more Stalinism is seen from the perspective of Russian history, the more problematic her analysis becomes...

...In so doing, he pursued an unfortunate thread within Marxism...

...We' poetry had become 'He' poetry," she writes...

...Czarist political culture was, he argues, imbued with an "image of dual Russia," an opposition of the state as an autocratic, "totalitarianizing" and alien superstructure to a passive society...

...It is notable that, under Lenin, but much more so under Stalin, those within Russian society— and within the Bolshevik party—who were most at home in Western culture and rationalism were repressed and exiled...

...If the collective still marched, it did so awkwardly, on its knees...

...It had deep roots in Russian political culture...

...As for the urban, industrial base, that was absent...

...5 In the following discussion I draw not only from Stalin in Power (New York: Norton, 1990) but also Tucker's Stalin as Revolutionary (New York: Norton, 1973) and several of his essays, including "The Image of Dual Russia" in The Soviet Political Mind (New York: Norton, 1972), "Stalinism as Revolution from Above" in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism and "A Choice of Lenins" in G.R...

...Yes, both Hitler and Stalin "built up the machine of the totalitarian state," but there was no area in which Hitler, in contrast to Stalin, "made the German nation advance beyond the point it had reached before it took power...

...Lenin insisted that his dictatorship of the proletariat was to be a higher democracy, dispatching the frauds of parliamentarism...

...Yes, the peasant had grievances, but, accustomed to patrimonialism, he never thought to articulate them politically...

...it was growing "into a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion...

...By the twentieth century only political patrimonialism remained intact, and government repression of terrorism in the 1870s and 1880s created the basis for "a bureaucratic-police regime with totalitarian overtones...

...If the most important Leninist institution was rendered non-functional for most of the Stalin era—and if most of its elite was liquidated— one can hardly depict the transition from Leninism to Stalinism as a totalitarian fulfillment...

...Whereas urbanization in the 1930s still ruralized the cities, the opposite was true by the 1960s...

...it aimed to free the economy "from the rule of one class" by "vesting" it in "a society which is democratically self-governed...

...Save one: these were objective historical possibilities...

...The tasks, role, and instrumental rationality of bureaucracy would beget an "iron cage...

...3. Stalinism was not the inevitable consequence of Russian history, but given Russian history, it was no accident...

...Max Shachtman's definition of Soviet relations of production as "bureaucratic collectivist" aimed to explain Stalinism and salvage Lenin's legacy by means of Marxist concepts...

...The more one looks at Stalinism as a totality, instead of reducing it to totalitarianism, the more its Russian texture, as opposed to "Marxist ideology," becomes manifest...

...Khrushchev reported that some 70 percent of the Central Committee was incarcerated or executed in the 1930s...

...Leninism entwined the positivist thread in Marxism with Russian positivist motifs...

...Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science," he declared in What is to be Done?, denouncing Russian "Revisionists," "would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old...

...Yet, the USSR would have been very different had there been thirty years of the NEP...

...Deutscher conceives Stalin as Hegel did Bonaparte—the instrument of history's cunning, conveyer of objective progress whatever the subjective motivations, however many the corpses...

...It . . . means a communion of the entire people with civilization...

...In The Russian Revolution we learn from him that "those who experienced and survived the Revolution would never see the return of normalcy...

...After his expulsion from the seminary, he became an organizer especially adept at explaining Marxism to untutored workers because, in Tucker's words, "the seminary gave him a catechistic approach to teaching...

...Only the few understand science, so ideas must "be clothed in forms which make them sacred, in order that they can be taught to the children of all classes and the illiterate, whatever their age...

...Impressed by its industrial development, these exiles hoped that socioeconomic progress would eventually subvert the dictatorial superstructure...

...the latter, he speculated, should rest on agrarian cooperatives...

...In Stalinism, as in positivism, brain surgeon and shaman merged...

...Another problem lay in Lenin's definition of the party as the embodiment of revolutionary consciousness, which he identified with "scientific" knowledge...

...2 In this summary of Martov, I cull from Israel Getzler, Martov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) pp...

...Stalin's reign was "a direct continuation of the Lenin era...

...But absorption was, I've been suggesting, a two-way process, facilitated by the religious moment in positivized Leninist-Marxism...

...The Bolsheviks envisioned the urban sector as the dynamic force impelling development, but czarist cities had been a "semibarbarian branch of the rural world...

...Both the German and Soviet economies were subjected entirely to state purposes, depriving economics of its own laws and autonomy...

...in a classless society politics would be functionless...

...previous state functions would "become so simplified" that they could "be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and checking," and all positions stripped of privilege...

...My discussion of nineteenthcentury Russian intellectual life is indebted to Walicki and to Alexander Vucinich, Social Thought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Science of Society, 1861-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976...

...For "the first time in Russian history," the rural nexus did not dominate society...

...Stalinism did not arise in Manitoba...

...Plekhanov believed "Marxism is Darwinism in its application to social science," and insisted on necessary historical stages...

...In this view of Lenin, Tucker, Cohen, and Lewin parallel that of Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, the first major study of Stalinism to come from the USSR, which underscored the discontinuity between Lenin, especially the later Lenin, and Stalinism...

...It will be objected that Lenin, following Marx, enumerated democratic features of the Paris Commune as those of the dictatorship of the proletariat—universal suffrage, stripping the police of "political attributes," paying everyone workers' wages, and so on...

...on another he listens to factory workers...

...Yet Dunham's suggestive characterization needs amending...

...His successor, Enfantin, a "Pere Supreme" of Saint-Simonianism, combined vocation and profession, becoming both a railway director and leader of a search for a woman messiah...

...Three weeks after his demise is announced, Lenin exits the mausoleum in which his "remains" were placed...

...it is that concept which gives Leninism its consistency...

...In Bolshevism there was an irreconcilable tension between Marxist egalitarianism and Lenin's hierarchical notion of the party...

...Although he came to argue that Russian conditions had transformed the dictatorship of the proletariat into that of a privileged bureaucratic stratum trying to carry out a social revolution, Bauer was induced to SPRING • 1992 • 179 tolerance of Stalinist terror by the economic success of the first Piatiletka...

...Despite differing lineages, these regimes were "drawing close to each other...

...Decades later, just after Lenin's death, he delivered what became known as his "oath" speech before an assembled congregation—in this case the Congress of Soviets...

...The October revolution asserted the "We...

...On the other hand, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) both distinguished Leninism from Stalinism and presented the dynamic, ideological, and terrorist qualities of the totalitarian police-state as something original in the history of oppression...

...whereas he had, like most Marxists, held that bourgeois-democratic revolution was on underdeveloped Russia's agenda, now he knew it necessary to go much further...

...In the meantime the party was transformed from supervisor of change into "an adjunct of the economic bureaucracy...

...Yet because property was socialized, this remained a proletarian state, albeit "degenerated...

...One value of Robert Tucker's description of Stalinism as Russian national Bolshevism is that it allows nuanced comparison between the functions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies within their historical-political settings...

...At the risk of being formulaic, this survey of theories of Stalinism seems to yield these conclusions: 1. Stalinism was not the inevitable consequence of Leninism, but given Leninism, it wasn't an accident...

...For many nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, the possibility of a science of society provided an alluring alternative to the superstitions and SPRING • 1992 • 185 irrationalities of their own social system...

...Kliuchevsky, for whom Russian history was an extended struggle between centralizing (that is, statist) and anarchistic tendencies...

...Indeed, the first Piatiletka's combination of ruthless industrialization and the brutal collectivization of agriculture yielded a regime commanding the economy and, not incidentally, a Vozhd commanding the state...

...Yet Stalinism did emerge out of Lenin's party...

...Evelyne PisierKouchner, Les Interpretations du Stalinisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983...

...Representative institutions were to be converted "from talking shops into 'working bodies.' " Yet the institutions that might have become democratic working bodies, the Soviets, were emasculated as soon as the Bolsheviks couldn't dominate them...

...One can even see the change grammatically...

...His "hero-identification" with the Russian Lenin allowed Stalin, a Georgian, to become a Russian nationalist (despite Lenin's internationalism...

...Blistering rural poverty...

...This institution was, in Deutscher's words, "half monastery and half barrack," virtually a totalitarian system in miniature with monks dictating ideology and keeping terroristic watch over their novices...

...They had no notions of property akin to those in the West...

...Vera S. Dunham, in her study of Soviet popular literature, In Stalin's Time, speaks of "pronouns in transition...

...But if the latter were the case— and if the proletariat was but a small part of the population—was not October the original error, as Martov held...

...Serfdom, perhaps...

...Stalinism was Russia's unfortunate but necessary road to an advanced economy...

...9 The opposite problem emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the development of a group of "revisionist" historians emphasizing the social dimensions of Stalinism...

...Ironically, cold warriors, who suspected every communist utterance, eagerly concurred with Stalin's self-portrait...

...SPRING • 1992 • 191...

...The relation between Stalinism and religiosity was captured with particular vividness by Deutscher and in Tucker's Stalin as Revolutionary (1973...

...No wonder his ire was roused by contemporary scholars like Robert C. Tucker, for whom the Vozhd (the Leader) was a "national Bolshevik" reinvention of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, or Moshe Lewin, who insists on complexity, not inevitability, in Stalinism's trajectory...

...The collective was no longer its own Deity and Judge and Law...

...The outcome was "a new reactionary hitherto unprecedented state with a new ruling class" and relations of production that were "bureaucratic collectivist," not those of a degenerated workers' state or "state capitalism...

...but backwardness became, a decade after October, central to explaining Stalinism's betrayal of the revolution...

...Socialism, he insisted, was inseparable from democracy...

...Neither Deutscher or Bauer imagined that the economic and political structures would collapse entirely...

...Yet although "well-educated urban citizens, not backward peasants [were now] the largest demographic group" in the USSR, the country was governed by "the institutions and methods of state-building inherited from Stalin [which] were a product of a rural country steeped in the authoritarian tradition that Stalin `perfected' to a monstrous degree...

...He cites the Short Course, the party history published in 1938 under Stalin's tutelage, proclaiming that 1928-33 was a revolution "from above" in which the kulaks were undone as capitalists were by October...

...But I, for one, discern no change in his political behavior, let alone his use of the word "science," subsequent to his study of Hegel...

...an injection of Bolshevik penicillin was required to return the USSR to health...

...What bourgeois revolutions did in the West, he went on, the dictatorship of the proletariat had to achieve in Russia, where the bourgeoisie had been too weak to bring the country "out of barbarism...

...Yet in Russia, the proletariat was small and much of it was barely a step from rural life...

...She quotes Mayakovsky: "Proletarian poets speak neither of T/Nor of the individual...

...He approvingly cites a German social democrat lauding the efficient German post office as the economic paradigm of socialism...

...Marx and Engels, to distinguish themselves from utopian socialism and German idealism, strongly affirmed their allegiance to the spirit of modern science...

...In contrast, Marxism envisioned a classless, humanist "association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (The Communist Manifesto) and the "withering away" of the state...

...Stalin's mother, an illiterate, devout woman, sent her son to the parish school and then, at age fourteen, to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary...

...Initially he identified with Martov, lambasting Bolsheviks for believing in "the supreme power of the machine gun" and the pursuit of socialist goals where their preconditions were absent...

...Needed: a "supplementary" political—though not an economic —revolution...

...Stalin enunciated, one after another, Lenin's ordinances...

...It opened a new and not unhopeful epoch of civilization...

...The "spirit" of the Russians "could very readily pass from one integrated faith to another...

...Petrine Westernizing partly disrupted patrimonialism, especially by introducing notions of private property...

...We must say frankly that things Ustryalov speaks about are possible...

...The concept of totalitarianism becomes misleading unless it is integrated into a broader explanatory framework, a complex historical whole...

...The gulf between the 1920s and the 1930s in the USSR was vast, as Alec Nove and other scholars have emphasized...

...The vanguard party, which was to be overseer and refractor of the bureaucracy, was "devoured" by the administrative apparatus...

...He intoned a sacred pledge to execute each: "In leaving us Comrade Lenin ordained us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the party...

...At other times, however, he described the proletariat as barely emerged "from destitution and darkness," with "no tradition of dominion or command...

...Stalin's industrial revolution can claim the same merit...

...Too much was at historical play...

...Critiques from the Left It is often forgotten that the initial attempts at systematic criticism of Stalinism came largely from the left...

...Such candid enemies, he told the eleventh party congress in 1922, "are useful...

...Lenin thought that the more advanced, sophisticated and large-scale an economy became, the more elementary its administration and oversight...

...Two broad trends, anti-Leninist (mostly social democratic) and Trotskyist, can be distinguished, although neither was monolithic and both had commonalities as well as differences...

...Following the death of Nicholas I in 1855, Russia first experienced a "thaw" —a series of reforms, most important the abolition of serfdom in 1861...

...Socialism's protagonists never imagined dictatorship as the political form of a "managed economy...

...The Stalinists may have retained the property forms (nationalized property) established by Bolshevism, but they had created "new property relations...

...Stalin deployed the state for a "developmental thrust into rural society [that] caused a protracted social crisis," unhinging traditional life, status, and location, creating a "quicksand society...

...His explanation: Haeckel is a "natural-scientific" materialist malgre lui...

...Unfortunately, Pipes laces— and mars—his formidable erudition with neoconservative crankiness...

...Precisely when the state's political power was to be supplemented with enormous economic power, he imagined that the state would become a "non-state...

...Bauer reached a similar conclusion some time earlier...

...Stalinism was radically transformative, horrifically murderous, but not teleologically determined...

...For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn it is a simple matter: there was an absolute historical break in 1917...

...Functional" devolves into "social" differentiation as communist bureaucrats obtain better living standards than workers...

...Mikhailovsky, a critic of Comte and Social Darwinism, argued that social and individual progress were not necessarily concurrent and that universal schemes of obligatory stages of historical development were unsound...

...By 1923 Lenin concluded that a "cultural revolution" was required, especially in the countryside, if the vast peasant majority was to be prepared for a new society...

...The science of society became Diamat, the party catechism, and the Vozhdindustrializer became Pere Supreme, a messianistrailway builder with absolute power...

...Some 84 percent of the population engaged in an "archaic mode of life and production," structured by traditional peasant communal organization...

...By the standards of British history, the fourteenth and twentieth centuries have, in a sense, met in contemporary Russia...

...Unfortunately, her elucidation of social developments makes the state virtually secondary in the Stalinist system...

...The apparatus was "perfected until under Stalin's dictatorship it attained a level of wanton destructiveness never before experienced in human history...

...There were diverse Lenins, but none of them renounced or modified the concept of the vanguard party...

...But history, Hilferding concluded, demonstrated that the administration of things too easily became the administration of people...

...Seen from another angle, the question might be posed: Lenin or Max Weber on bureaucracy...

...4 In usurping and monopolizing political, social, and economic power, and seeking reproduction of the system as a whole, the bureaucracy attained "self-realization . . . as a class...

...However, he contended that the consequence of economic development was increasing social and political complexity and increasingly differentiated administration...

...and (d) the country required a heavy industrial base in major metropolises...

...Stalinism—not NEP as Ustryalov suggested—was "Russian national Bolshevism...

...Russia's misfortune was to be saddled with the incompetent Nicholas II at a time of change, when the power-craving intelligentsia —the New Class of Pipes's Russia— asserted itself: "Nothing . . . inexorably pushed the country toward revolution, except the presence of an unusually large and fanatical body of professional revolutionaries...

...Save by conceptual alchemy, one cannot claim that such ideas were embodied in Stalinist practice, let alone find them symmetrical to Nazism...

...182 • DISSENT Cold Warriors and "Totalitarianism" "Totalitarianism" was the master concept of Western studies of the USSR in the post-World War II era...

...In his last writings, he recommended a "new Christianity" whose scientific and artistic high priests would usher society to salvation— the latter understood as "productivity...

...Indeed, Stalin did not atomize the countryside in order to control it, he collectivized it along lines deeply rooted in Russian historical practices...

...There was a "spontaneous" wave of immigration—some twenty-seven million people—into the cities, where they coped with alien surroundings by creating "a version of the rural world...

...This was just the problem...

...It possessed little managerial competence, and the white-collar strata with administrative skills were hostile to socialization, as were the peasants and small producers...

...became a place of pilgrimage, the queer Mecca of an atheist creed which needed a prophet and Saints, a holy Sepulchre and icons...

...The Central Committee announced, "In the soul of every member of our party there is a particle of Lenin...

...Martov eventually fled Russia, his party splintered and banned, his hope that the revolution might be "corrected" shattered...

...One evening he slips into the Kremlin to hear commissars debating...

...The whole of society" under the dictatorship of the proletariat, commends Lenin, "will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of labor and pay...

...In contrast to theorists of totalitarianism, who imagined that Stalinist ideology remade everything, Lewin argues it was because the regime was losing the ideological battle that it turned to "the ultimate tool that denotes frustration and ineptitude: terror...

...Two decades later, Lenin and a Leninized Trotsky fretted that recalcitrant bureaucracy might undo their revolution...

...The inability of the bureaucracy and society at large to manage this upheaval created a vacuum which "invited an arbitrary and capricious use of power...

...Leninism helped prepare the ground for Stalinism...

...his wide sales revealed that the "masses of readers" had been "won over to his side...

...Indeed, Lenin perceived little danger in the complete rationalization of society...

...And how does post-normal sorrow suit Pipes's concept of continuity...

...Conclusion I posed, at the beginning of this essay, a question of continuity, whether Stalinism was the culmination or incarnation of something else—perhaps Leninism, perhaps totalitarianism, perhaps Russia...

...1 ° Stalinism was not the necessary ideological, historical, or structural continuation of other phenomena...

...Stalin was suited for the transformation of Leninist "science" into religious Diamat...

...They have met in Stalin...

...Deutscher failed to see the flaws in the scientific equipment, the uncritical translation of positivist natural science into a science of society, which in turn was fashioned into political weapons...

...In the same book, Literature and Revolution, he wrote, "Essentially, the Revolution means the people's final break with the Asiatic, with the Seventeenth century, with Holy Russia, with ikons and with roaches...

...So too, if the left had ascended to power after thirty years of Stolypin-like reforms under late czarism or if a broad coalition of the left had come to power in 1917 in pursuit of measured socioeconomic transformation and the fostering of democratic political culture and institutions...

...Late nineteenth-century populists then reinvented duality as a war between "official Russia" and an idealized, revolutionary, peasant Russia...

...Insisting on Marxist orthodoxy, Trotsky recoiled from calling the bureaucracy a "class...

...The Stalinist state was one of the most heinous phenomena of modernity, in no small measure because of its mixture of totalitarian political and extremist economic ambitions, yet it wasn't only modern...

...Lenin's Marxism, especially his concept of the party, melded a positivist notion of an objective science of society with the populist stress on subjectivity and will...

...Most prominent among them was Sheila 190 • DISSENT Theories of StaWdsm Fitzpatrick, who defined herself as a "positivist at heart," free of value-laden concepts like totalitarianism...

...In this work of luminous historical intelligence, the second volume of a projected trilogy, the author argues that Stalinism signified a "second revolution," to be sharply differentiated from 1917...

...For Haeckel, a leading popularizer of Social Darwinism, the riddle was solved by natural science and the theory of evolution...

...184 • DISSENT Organization posed no intrinsic dangers for Lenin...

...Peasant migration into metropolitan areas tended to "ruralize" the municipalities rather than urbanize the new arrivals...

...but rather [with] a new social category...

...That's all very well...

...For Berdyaev, Russian communism was incomprehensible apart from the pervasive historical impact of religion on the Russians...

...But Stalin's preoccupation, according to Tucker, was not just power or ideology, it was psychological—a self-image as the second Lenin accomplishing the Second Revolution...

...This cultural revolution was seen not as a radical assertion of proletarian culture, much less an anticipation of Maoist frenzy, but as an evolutionary, educational enterprise...

...178 • DISSENT Trotsky sometimes conflated an ideal-type of bureaucracy with a messier reality...

...In contrast, Stalinism, for Trotsky, was the "syphilis" of the workers' movement...

...During Peter the Great's purge-filled reign, pursuit of Western know-how by the state amplified its alienation from the populace...

...Questions of Political Culture The strength of left-wing analyses of Stalinism lay in highlighting socioeconomic forces at work...

...the left was biased against explanation through national categories...

...When this "Popular Russia" proved unresponsive to their agitations, some populists turned to Marxism...

...Yet he, like Deutscher, expected that rationalization of the economic base would compel rationalization of the superstructure, that is, democratization...

...This Lenin couldn't abide...

...it would be akin to accepting competition between a brain surgeon and a shaman...

...It was a "caste" or "stratum" that had risen above the workers, governing a "transitional" regime yet building the industrial foundations required for socialism...

...The past receded at once, faded and dropped...

...And Deutscher was persuaded that History would undo Stalinist terror, once its developmental rationale was accomplished...

...I think that fifteen years of a regime like this is enough to make people grow hair and begin barking," wrote this Marxist in a letter in June 1920, shortly before his exodus...

...Thereafter, his "nation, an organism," was infected...

...None less than Benito Mussolini wondered aloud in 1938 if "Stalin could secretly have become a fascist...

...Combining Leninist authoritarianism with industrialization of an oppressed, backward, rural country whose political culture and structures were fused by a theologically justified bureaucratic authoritarianism was no prescription for "liberation...

...One cannot but think of the transition from Lenin to Stalin...

...It is argued . . . that it has perpetuated cruelties excusable in earlier centuries but unforgivable in this...

...At the time of NEP, Lewin argues, the new Bolshevik state faced a land "even more rural, and equally—if not more— backward than Tsarist Russia...

...Other Mensheviks decried such thinking as a dangerous accommodation to repugnant politics in the name of economic advance...

...However, transformations wrought by the Piatiletka rapidly expanded the need for new bureaucrats...

...2. Though "totalitarianism" —the will to dominate all dimensions of life—describes the Stalinshchina, it is inadequate to understand it, and can obscure it by eclipsing its socioeconomic and Russian historical dimensions...

...Lenin reified science...

...The claim that a "new class" ruled communist societies was popularized in the 1950s by Milovan Djilas, but it had already been developed in Trotskyist and ex-Trotskyist circles on the eve of World War II...

...This attitude also governs State and Revolution, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is a centralized "organization of violence" which will transform bureaucrats into "foremen and accountants...

...Similarly, whereas Martov insisted that the Russian proletariat did not approximate Marx's formulations, Trotsky often spoke as if, in 1917, it were fully formed and had overthrown "capitalism" —though Russia was hardly a capitalist society...

...The Bolsheviks then fashioned its "mirror image...

...it was, like all historical forces, the product of a constellation of circumstances and a melding of factors...

...9 At its ideological and teleological worst, the notion of "totalitarianism" blurs Marx, Lenin, SPRING • 1992 • 189 and Stalin into one another—a profound historical distortion, since the first foes of Leninism were Marxists (the Mensheviks) and among the leading victims of Stalinism were Leninists (indeed, the Leninist party itself...

...3 "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy" was prompted by an article by R. L. Worrall, a British socialist who contended that the USSR was "state capitalist...

...and Russian peasants perceived Stalin's collectivization less as the onslaught of "totalitarianism" than as a return to the ancien regime...

...The dissolution of this tension, the subsuming of egalitarianism by hierarchy, was a key feature of the emergence of Stalinism...

...He claimed to have transcended the opposition between mind and matter and to have invented "his own religion" —an atheistic, Spinozistic one...

...Basil's while recognizing a profound historical problem in Russian political culture...

...Isaac Deutscher once described Lenin as a "critical thinker in the laboratory of thought...

...Talmon's distinction, in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, between "liberal" and "totalitarian" democracy and in Hayek's reduction, in The Road to Serfdom, of Nazism to collectivism, collectivism to socialism, Stalinism to socialism and—presto...

...Plekhanov concluded that there was no way for his country but capitalist development...

...While the state terror apparatus was, in the 1920s, deployed against foes—imagined or real—of the party and regime, a distinguishing feature of Stalinism was its use against the party, making of it the Vozhd's pliant tool...

...2 Of course there was another implication: a "proletarian state" was certain to founder in Russian conditions...

...In short, there was no possibility of generalizing proletarian interests to society at large...

...Yet in Russia Under the Old Regime (1974), he didn't discern the origins of "twentieth century totalitarianism in Western ideas" but in Russian institutional life, most important in the absence, between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, of private property...

...According to Dmitri Volkogonov's Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy— the first biography based on access to Kremlin archives due to glasnost—Stalin read Trotsky's book "in a single night, seething with bile...

...This, then, was the Soviet "Thermidor...

...Hilferding countered that a state-owned economy that governed production according to a plan and determined wages, prices, profits, and distribution exclusive of a market could not be called "capitalist," state or otherwise...

...it must be conceived in a historically complex and not ideological monocausal way...

...As early as 1885 G.V...

...Importantly, Russian religious energy was capable of "switching over and directing itself to purposes which are not merely religious, for example, to social objects...

...His notion of continuity rests uneasily with his caricature of intellectuals as the pestilence of Russian — indeed, of all—modernity...

...Lenin's party, conceived as the embodiment of the science of society, was an impossible midwife for emancipating Russia, if emancipation means a society in which citizens control their lives and have reasonable prospects for social justice and decent living standards...

...History knows all sorts of metamorphoses...

...it was to have broken irrevocably with previous forms of the "state," whose task was to subject the majority to a ruling class...

...One need be no Leninist to wonder what constituted pre-sorrow normalcy...

...By the 1930s, the Mensheviks were speaking of "totalitarianism" and comparing Berlin and Moscow, although not assimilating the two regimes to one another...

...Only sectarians, wed to eternal bifurcation between capitalism and socialism, could fail to grasp that something new had emerged, neither socialist nor state capitalist...

...Russia had been belated in her historical development...

...the central committee will take the place of the organization...

...Russian Marxism was partly formulated in opposition to such assertions...

...Shortly after the Bolshevik-Menshevik split Lenin denounced Martov's "idea of building the Party from the bottom upward" as "false 'democracy.' " "My idea, on the other hand," Lenin continued in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "was `bureaucratic' in the sense that the Party was to be built from the top downward...

...Not only did Stalin end this practice, but in 1931 he became the champion of wage differentials, deriding "petty bourgeois egalitarianism...

...As to party structure: the young Trotsky captured the problem when, criticizing Lenin in 1903, he uttered his celebrated (if nowadays belabored) warning: "The organization of the party will take the place of the party...

...But, Lenin noted, there was a strange, indeed theological, twist in Haeckel...

...A decade and a half later, Lenin explained to his party's seventh congress (March 1918) that it ought to be renamed "Communist" because "Social Democratic" was "scientifically incorrect...

...He and Rakovsky spoke as if differentiation and fluidity within the proletariat were largely postrevolutionary phenomena...

...She contends that by disaggregating Stalinism and revealing its social dimensions, she finds that the regime had far less control than it claimed...

...We have earned the right to rest...

...They read Saint-Simon, Feuerbach, John Stuart Mill's study of Comte, and Henry T. Buckle, all at a time when natural science flowered and Darwinism spread in Russia...

...c) the peasants and small producers— Russia's nonproletarian majority—had to be persuaded that socialism represented their best alternative...

...subsequently he observes peasants.' Deutscher's description of the actual memorial organized by the Bolsheviks for Lenin might lead one to surmise that SaintSimon or Comte reigned in Moscow: To myriads of peasants whose religious instincts were repressed under the revolution, the Mausoleum...

...A privileged stratum materializes, specified Trotsky, where true equality is impossible, "where sharp antagonisms require to be `softened,"adjusted,"regulated.' " Citing Lenin's State and Revolution, he maintained that the proletarian state was to have been strong but without "mandarins...

...In an obscure but revealing passage, he lauds Ernst Haeckel's Die Weltratsel (1899)— "The Riddle of the Universe" —as "a weapon in the class struggle...

...Of course historical "what ifs" don't permit definitive statements...

...10 To say that Russian political culture was deeply authoritarian is not to presume it to be immutable...

...It is not a Stalinist state that I, in any event, recognize...

...For many Western scholars, especially theorists of totalitarianism, the Stalinist political system received pride of analytic place...