A new stage has opened in the continuing development of the Russian Revolution. The masses of the Soviet Union, who were politically expropriated by the bureaucracy under Stalin and who suffered its brutal rule for nearly three decades, are evidently once again in motion; they have already forced far-reaching concessions from the ruling bureaucracy and more can be expected to follow. The international repercussions, great as they are, have only begun. The correctness of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism bids to rapidly become a key issue among the ranks of the Communist Parties throughout the world. Stalinism, the main obstacle in the path of the world revolution, faces its death agony. Great new possibilities are now opening up for reassembling the world revolutionary socialist movement on a new plane and thus solving the “crisis of leadership” which has paralyzed the revolutionary proletariat. This is the meaning in brief of the death knell of the Stalin cult sounded at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
East Germany and Vorkuta
After putting Stalin’s corpse on display, the heirs of the dictator attempted to rule in his name as high priests of the cult they had helped establish. But this proved shortlived. To gain the time needed to consolidate their shaky regime, they felt forced to grant actual concessions to the masses and to promise more. These involved primarily better living conditions for the workers and a relaxation of the purge system. The concessions, however, served to hearten the masses who had already felt fresh hope with the death of the foul dictator who had ruled the Soviet Union with blood and terror for some three decades
One of the consequences was the strike movement throughout the Soviet zone of Eastern Europe which culminated in the uprising of the East German workers in June 1953. This was put down. But the uprising served to inspire workers elsewhere under the Kremlin’s heel. Throughout the concentration camps stirrings were apparent. The most dramatic was the strike at Vorkuta where 250,000 slave laborers downed tools. These two events, the East German uprising and the Vorkuta strike, frightened the Kremlin. They revealed the mood of the workers and the abyss separating the ruling strata from the Soviet masses.
Concessions to Workers
The result was the decision to give a really major concession—nothing less than Stalin himself. This was done at the Twentieth Congress, making it a landmark in Soviet history. In addition, other concessions—genuine concessions—were made. These included the promise of a shorter working day, an increase in social benefits, better housing, an end to lawless dictatorial rule, the rehabilitation of victims framed up by Stalin. But the greatest concessions were the promise to return to Lenin and the deliberate destruction of the artificially constructed image of Stalin. This set in motion forces that will inevitably pass beyond the control of the bureaucracy, for the Congress pronouncements on Stalin will become a banner for the masses in marching forward to completely cleanse the Soviet Union of the hated Stalinist system. It legalizes their demand for an end to Stalinism and a return to Lenin. They will know how to put this significant concession to full advantage. The Congress thus marks the beginning of a new, profoundly revolutionary stage in the Soviet Union.
[p. 29]
The immediate reason for the concesssions, as we have indicated, was the palpable pressure of the masses which has grown so great that the bureaucracy calculates it cannot be suppressed simply by sweeping purges as in the days of Stalin—it is more expedient to bend with the pressure in hope of avoiding being broken by it.
The growing mass pressure within the Soviet Union is a consequence of profounder developments. Most important of these is the shift in the balance of world power away from capitalism. The crushing of the Axis powers, accompanied by the extension of planned economy to Eastern Europe, was a blow from which the capitalist system has not been able to recover.
The tremendous victory over German imperialism achieved despite Stalin’s crimes, served to inspire the Soviet working class—already grown in size and skills to second in world importance—with new self-confidence. The incapacity of American imperialism to rebuild Germany and Japan as powerful military threats took away from the bureaucracy the specter of invasion which it had used for decades as a means of diverting attention from itself and securing sullen submission to its dictatorial rule. The post-war wave of revolution and uprisings that swept through the colonial world, above all in China where the greatest victory since 1917 was registered, began to catalyze revolutionary moods among the Soviet masses. These were furthered by the death of Stalin. The success of the Chinese together with the North Koreans in blocking American military power demonstrated in the most vivid way how drastically the balance of power has shifted. This objective weakening of the capitalist structure also objectively weakened the Soviet bureaucracy as a bourgeois growth upon the workers state structure. Tito’s successful challenge was already an intimation of this. Thus precisely when the power of the bureaucracy seemed at its pinnacle, with vast new territories and populations brought under its domain, its fatal internal weakness was revealed. The Russian revolution, heaving up again from the depths, has begun to break the bureaucratic crust.
In foreign policy, Khrushchev & Co. did not make any concessions whatsoever that could be interpreted as a return to Lenin’s policy of revolutionary socialism. In fact they openly revised Lenin, declaring that imperialist war on the Soviet Union is no longer inevitable and that socialism can be achieved in capitalist countries along strictly parliamentary paths. These revisions signaled no change in the foreign policy followed by Stalin. In fact, as diplomatic formulations, they served to give notice to the Western powers that the slogan of a return to Lenin was designed to meet domestic pressures. The revisions were calculated primarily as reassurances to the capitalist statesmen that no return to Lenin is envisaged for the foreign Communist Parties even partially or as demagogy for rank and file consumption.
Fresh Betrayals
At the same time the announcement of these revisions was designed to facilitate new fresh betrayals of Leninism by the Communist Parties abroad. Moscow views such betrayals as a way of helping to secure a deal with the Western Powers. As in the time of Stalin, the Kremlin means by “peaceful coexistence” a mutual policy with imperialism of live and let live, or mutual assistance in putting down, derailing and heading off revolutionary movements of the workers and colonial peoples. The present policy of the Communist Party of France in supporting the French imperialist government against the insurgent North Africans is a case in point. Another example is the policy of the U.S. Communist Party in supporting the Democratic Party and attempting to head off all moves of the working class toward independent political action.
The attempt by spokesmen of American imperialism to make out the end of the Stalin cult as due to pressure from abroad is thus false to the core. The imperialists never had any trouble in getting along with Stalin. They even assisted him in building up the cult when it suited their purposes. The Social Democrats likewise never found the cult an obstacle to alliances and coalitions with the Stalinists. The acceptability of Stalinism to both imperialists and Social Democrats during the past 30 years is actually additional proof that the decision to smash the cult was due to internal pressures that threaten the rule of the bureaucracy.
That these pressures are proletarian in character is demonstrated by the simple fact that what the bureaucrats promise in breaking up the Stalin cult is a return to Lenin. This is the most popular promise they could make, the promise best calculated to appease the forces moving against the bureaucracy. A return to Lenin means keeping the planned economy but restoring the workers democracy that existed in Lenin’s time. The slogan “Back to Lenin!” is thus a proletarian slogan which the masses will inevitably fill with their own revolutionary socialist content.
Naturally, this will not occur in a day. The workers are as yet unorganized. The bureaucracy will fight desperately as it nears its doom. The entire process will have its ups and downs and even reversals. The important thing is that the process has begun and in the final analysis it will prove to be irresistible.
‘Collective Leadership’
The bureaucratic tops are seeking to present a solid front. which they call “collective leadership.” They hope to stabilize their enjoyment of special privileges, to end the uncertainty and fear that existed in their own ranks under Stalin’s purge system. But at the Twentieth Congress itself nuances in the “collectivity” were observable. These can be expected to deepen and to be reflected among Stalinist bureaucrats abroad as the mass pressure takes more direct and open forms. The weakening position of the bureaucracy will, as in the case of all other similar formations in history, manifest itself in sharpening internal differences in which some bureaucrats can be expected to cast their lot with the revolutionary movement of the workers. Such splits, of course, are of subordinate importance to the appearance of revolutionary currents among the Soviet workers and the ranks of the Communist Party.
[p. 30]
Differences in the bureaucracy will tend to break out at specific points involving what limits should be set to the concessions. Each new concession will cause fresh tremors among the bureaucratic tops.
Each new revelation constitutes a fresh indictment of their share in Stalin’s crimes. The crimes go back to 1923 and include the crushing of the Left Opposition, the smashing of workers democracy, the slaughter of Lenin’s entire generation of Bolsheviks, the murder of millions of peasants, the establishment of slave labor camps, the decapitation of the Red Army on the eve of war, reliance on the Stalin-Hitler pact to safeguard the Soviet Union, the useless sacrifice of millions of soldiers, the wrecking of scientific institutions, pillaging of Soviet income, repeated blood purges of the working class, imposition of totalitarian regimes on the satellite countries, the smashing of the Communist International and the murder of working-class leaders abroad, the betrayal of one revolution after another beginning with the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, the German revolution that could have prevented the rise of Hitler, the Spanish revolution that could have blocked Franco, and ending with the betrayal of the great post-war revolutionary upheavals in France and Italy. Khrushchev & Co. will not willingly admit their guilt in these crimes.
How Far Can They Go?
Aside from the subjective aspect—and we must recognize that the Soviet workers can force the bureaucrats to admit a great deal—for the bureaucracy as a whole the concessions cannot go so far as to eliminate it as the ruling caste. To go that far would mean to accept the program of Trotskyism; that is, end the rule of the parasitic caste and replace it with genuine workers democracy exercised through revived soviets, trade unions and workers’ political parties. Above all it would mean the end of the special privileges that constitute the material base of the bureaucracy. In this respect, in its tenacious defense of its special privileges, the bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union is akin to a ruling class. The basic conflict is between the organized bureaucracy and the working class which is seeking to overthrow it.
Khrushchev & Co. are conscious of this, for they accompanied their denunciation of Stalin with praise for his purges of Trotskyists and other oppositionists. They are attempting to justify the early years of Stalin’s rule when the cult was established and the bureaucracy consolidated its rule. And Pravda has already begun denouncing “rotten elements”—that is, workers and their spokesmen who want to carry the ending of the Stalin cult beyond the narrow limits within which the bureaucracy would like to keep it. By bringing the dead Stalin partially to justice for his monstrous crimes, crimes that were really due to the entire system of bureaucratic rule, Stalin’s heirs hope to retain this system which they helped Stalin establish and which they now head. This aim sets the ultimate limits to the concessions they will grant.
Thus in conceding to the masses on the Stalin cult, the bureaucracy will find itself in a worse predicament. Taking this concession with relief and joy, the masses will demand more. Each new concession will further heighten the self-confidence of the masses and bring closer the decisive point where political revolution can break out in the Soviet Union. An attempt by the bureaucracy to turn back now to the use of savage repressions as in Stalin’s time can precipitate the coming political revolution that will overthrow their rule. Thus neither concessions nor repressions can long delay the Soviet masses from once again putting in power a government that represents their will. The bureaucracy faces a contradiction it cannot escape.
Trotsky Vindicated
The bureaucracy has no intention of rehabilitating Trotsky or of permitting the Soviet public to read his works. Yet despite their intention, Trotsky’s great struggle in defense of the conquests of the Russian revolution against Stalinist degeneration is being vindicated point by point. All of those issues that seemed to have receded into history are now being reviewed by world public opinion as if they were fresh living events. This is what always happens when the truth catches up with the lie.
The historical review became inevitable once the Kremlin began admitting the frame-ups of the final years of Stalin’s rule. Already, in trying to appease the Soviet people who suffered some 40,000,000 casualties in World War II, they have been forced to go back to the key period of the infamous Moscow frame-up trials. The confession that Tukhachevsky and the other Red Army generals, plus some 5,000 officers, were slaughtered by Stalin in a frame-up confirms what Trotsky said at the time. The confession about the fearful costs of Stalin’s policy to the defense of the Soviet Union confirms one of Trotsky’s main charges against Stalin. In face of such admissions the verdict of the Dewey Commission in 1937 that Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov were innocent of the charges levelled by Stalin and that the Moscow Trials were frame-ups gains fresh force.
In the Soviet Union itself, the whole structure of slanders against Trotsky must crumble along with the plaster statues of Stalin that are now being hammered to powder. The truth will begin to spread among the masses about Trotsky’s proposing the first five-year plan, advocating industrialization against Stalin’s opposition, collectivization against the Stalin-Bukharin bloc, friendly alliance with the peasantry, balanced production of heavy and consumers goods, continuation abroad of Lenin’s policy of furthering the world revolution as against Stalin’s policy of blocking it under guise of building “socialism in one country.” Trotsky will emerge as the revolutionary socialist hero who joined Lenin in 1923 in beginning the fight against Stalinism and who remained true to that struggle until he was struck down by Stalin’s pick-axe.
This is certain to happen because the Soviet workers with their socialist consciousness will not be satisfied with the explanation that Stalin’s crimes were due to his paranoiac aberrations. In dumping the cult which ascribed all good in the Soviet Union to Stalin’s remarkable personality, the bureaucracy will not succeed in turning the cult into its opposite, ascribing all the evils of bureaucratic rule to Stalin’s villainous personality, From the Marxist outlook, how can it be explained that a bloodthirsty lunatic could become personal dictator in the Soviet Union? This question must loom large right now in the USSR. Marxism demands an analysis of the social forces making such a phenomenon possible. Trotskyism has already provided that analysis just as Trotskyism is now providing the Marxist analysis of the social forces bringing an end to the cult of this madman. Soviet Marxists among the masses, whose names we do not yet know, are surely making their own independent analysis, demonstrating that the degeneration of the Russian revolution was due to the formation of a parasitic caste which put Stalin in power. When their voices are heard they will prove to be the voices of Russian Trotskyism, the leaders of the regenerating Russian revolution
[p. 31]
Since Stalin usurped power, the Soviet Union survived the pressure of encircling capitalism thanks to the power of planned economy. The new property forms established by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky proved incomparably more powerful than even the founders of the Soviet Union with all their great confidence dreamed. Despite Stalinist degeneration and mismanagement, planned economy brought the Soviet Union victory in World War II against the full weight of German imperialism, the conqueror of the European continent. From the weakness of Czarist Russia, this country has emerged as the second most powerful in the world, the only one outside the United States capable of developing atomic energy out of its own resources. The new property forms have proved even more powerful than the Stalinist degeneration, for the Stalinists themselves despite their own intentions were forced to extend them by military-bureaucratic means.
The Conscious Factor
This long and painful state is now closing. The conscious factor is coming to the fore. It is visible in the pressure the masses are exerting upon the bureaucracy. Revolutionary consciousness is moving toward reasserting its rightful rule in the Soviet Union. When this occurs revolutionary socialism will appear once again on a world scale—if this has not happened already by then—in the form of mass parties as it did in the early years of the Communist International. This time the power of socialist consciousness will prove to be decisive in the struggle to replace capitalism with the superior order of socialism.
The end of the Stalin cult is a great victory for revolutionary socialism. No worse mistake could be made than to dismiss or underestimate the significance of this event. The verdict of the impartial Dewey Commission discredited Stalin in the eyes of informed public opinion. The verdict of the very partial bureaucracy discreditis Stalin among the rank and file of the Communist Parties throughout the world. This opens up wholly new perspectives for removing the obstacle of Stalinism and bringing the Trotskyist program to the workers whose minds are now being freed of the Stalin cult.
Trotskyists works now acquire burning actuality, with fresh facts pouring in every day to confirm our entire position on the Soviet Union. In historic perspective our movement is seen to have been preparing for this great turn since the days of the Left Opposition when Trotsky first organized the struggle against Stalin.
In contrast, the entire Stalinist movement, large and powerful as it is, finds itself in utter confusion and consternation. What doesn’t it have to revise in its ideology? What book does it have that must not be converted into pulp? What pamphlet even? All its histories must be rewritten and the new ones will remain suspect so long as they attack Trotskyism. All the resolutions and pronouncements must be scrapped, the entire education of the rank and file admitted to be loaded with lies and perversions of the truth.
None of the groups in the Stalinist periphery can escape these devastating consequences. What are the dissident Stalinists, for instance, left with? Nothing but a record of boasts about their exemplary loyalty to the paranoiac butcher.
Those circles who pretended to be independent of Stalinism but who always managed to end up approving the purges and frame-ups and false confessions are now seen for what they are—either ignorant dupes or conscious apologists for the fiendish crimes of a modern Ivan the Terrible.
Victory for Marxist Theory
The groups here and there who decided that Trotskyism had been bypassed by history and that the wave of the future belonged to Stalinism are now confounded by each fresh concession calling the world’s attention to the fact that Trotskyism was the only force that told the truth about Stalinism. The politics of betrayal narrows down for these groups to vying with the worst Stalinist hacks in providing rationalizations for the bureaucracy, painting up the desperate efforts at rehabilitation in face of the mass pressure as “self-reform” of the bureaucracy. Deutscherism, which leaves out the Soviet masses as if the bureaucracy were a rational autonomous power, turns out to be the ideology best suited to assist the demagogy of the Khrushchevs. .
Among the victories that the end of the Stalin cult gives Trotskyism in the field of theory, two are outstanding. The contention that Stalinism was the logical continuation of Leninism has now been repudiated by its originators, Stalin’s own hand-picked political gangsters. They are forced to confess what Trotsky insisted upon from the beginning, that Stalin was not the continuator of Lenin but his opposite. The bourgeois ideologues who also tried to make out that Stalinism was the continuation of Leninism are not much better off. To explain why Stalin has been dumped and the banner of Lenin raised again, they must explain the differences between the two. Rather than do this they have for the present preferred to maintain a discreet silence about the subject.
The other theory that has been dealt a mortal blow by the new stage of the Russian revolution now opening up is “bureaucratic collectivism.” According to this theory, planned economy upon superseding capitalism becomes the economic base for a new type of ruling class never before seen in history, a “bureaucratic collective” that exploits the working class through its control of the state. This view is a revision of the basic theoretical structure of Marxism, inasmuch as Marxism puts planned economy—in its full, rational development—as the essential and sufficient economic requisite for the coming classless society.
Planned economy has the capacity to eliminate the scarcity that nourished all previous class formations. The Soviet economy was confined to one country, and hampered and distorted in its development by a bureaucratic caste formation, parasitic in character. The caste, enjoying bourgeois privileges, represented the tendency toward restoration of capitalism. The caste is basically alien to planned economy and not, as the bureaucratic collectivist theory holds, inherent to it. It is parasitic and not exploitative. Therefore the caste lacks the stability of a true ruling class.
[p. 32]
The Hypnosis is Broken
Trotsky maintained that in the Soviet Union the development of planned economy, as it revealed its enormous potentialities and heightened the industrial level at a new and unprecedented rate, would undermine the caste—not strengthen it—and create the necessary economic and social conditions for its overthrow. He predicted that the further development of Soviet planned economy would, therefore, be accompanied by increasingly severe manifestations of the basic instability of the bureaucracy’s rule. Trotsky’s Marxist position has now received the most powerful confirmation as against the novel theory of bureaucratic collectivism, for the first stirrings of the Soviet working class in the new stage of the Russian Revolution shook down the central ideology which had bound the bureaucracy together for three decades. Moreover, the bureaucrats themselves were forced to confess to the precariousness of their positions under Stalin, thus adding graphic testimony to the instability of the caste’s place in Soviet society.
Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism has likewise received the most powerful confirmation as against the defeatist line of the bureaucratic collectivists and others of similar views. It was the new self-confidence of the Soviet workers, gained through their victory in World War II, the consequent extension of state ownership and planning into Eastern Europe and the victory of the Chinese revolution, that resulted in today’s demolition of the Stalin cult as a harbinger of the overthrow of the bureaucracy and the restoration of democratic workers rule.
The entire Stalinist movement has been hit by the most profound ideological crisis since its origin. The sacred Kremlin texts have been thrown into the ash can. The Stalinist parties are in a state of shock. The hypnosis that closed the eyes and ears of the Stalinist rank and file has been broken. They are now compelled to think. They are beginning to ask searching questions. Many of them, it is true, especially the older generation will drop aside in demoralization. The cynical hard core will continue to serve the new Kremlin masters as they did the old. The Stalinist youth, however, will prove increasingly willing to discuss with Trotskyists and the best of them can be won over to revolutionary socialism. Already, with deep shame, they are dropping the epithets they were taught to use like robots in referring to Trotskyists such as “Hitlerite agents,” “fascist mad dogs,” “cohorts of the Titoite scum,” and so on. All the elements are present for profound differentiations within the boasted monolithism of the Stalinist machine. In countries such as France and Italy, where great mass Communist parties exist and where the Stalinist bureaucrats are going to new lengths in supporting the imperialist government, the opportunities are especially favorable.
Seize the Opportunity!
To realize these opportunities, however, requires the utmost attention on the part of the Trotskyists. Aloofness to this work would be sterile sectarianism. We have prepared for this for more than 25 years. Now we must move in, and move energetically. Campaign methods must be used to bring the message of Trotskyism to rank and file Communist Party members. Our press must turn full attention to this task, attentively following the developments in the new stage of the Russian Revolution and making sure that the Marxist interpretation is consistently brought to the attention of the Communist Party rank and file. This means that they must be persistently sought out, their attention called to pamphlets and books in our rich arsenal elucidating the events of the past that are now being relived in the world press and in the consciousness of millions as Stalin’s victims are rehabilitated. The Communist Party rank and file can and must be made to know the truth about Trotsky’s fight against Stalin. They can and must be taught the truth about the stubborn fight of the Fourth International to keep alive the tradition of Leninism.
This campaign must not be viewed as a short-term proposition but as a sustained effort, primarily educational in character. The objective must be to win Communist Party members to the program of Trotskyism without the slightest illusions about reforming the apparatus that has been rotting for more than a quarter of a century. Some, it is true, will go all the way in repudiating Stalinism. But most of this apparatus, their hands dripping with the blood they helped Stalin spill, will sooner or later depart from the scene as discredited, as despised and as hated as the master they served. But the rank-and-file members who joined the Communist Party because they thought it was genuinely revolutionary will draw the bitter lesson of their experience and become key cadres in the reassembling of forces now made possible by the death of the Stalin cult.
The great victory won by world Trotskyism should serve to inspire the entire movement to follow up in the most vigorous way. The Russian Revolution by rudely pushing over the Stalin idol and forcing concessions from Stalin’s heirs has again proved its vitality. We must now prove ourselves capable of seizing the opportunities it opens up for revolutionary socialism in other lands. That is the best way to help the Soviet workers as they move forward to a final settling of accounts with the Stalinist system.