The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher 1967
In 1917 Russia lived through the last of the great bourgeois revolutions and the first proletarian revolution in European history. The two revolutions merged into one. Their unprecedented coalescence imparted extraordinary vitality and élan to the new regime; but it was also the source of severe strains and stresses and cataclysmic convulsions.
I should perhaps give here, at the risk of stating the obvious, a brief definition of bourgeois revolution. The traditional view, widely accepted by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike, is that in such revolutions, in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie played the leading part, stood at the head of the insurgent people, and seized power. This view underlies many controversies among historians; the recent exchanges, for instance, between Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and Mr Christopher Hill on whether the Cromwellian revolution was or was not bourgeois in character. It seems to me that this conception, to whatever authorities it may be attributed, is schematic and historically unreal. From it one may well arrive at the conclusion that bourgeois revolution is almost a myth, and that it has hardly ever occurred, even in the West. Capitalist entrepreneurs, merchants and bankers were not conspicuous among the leaders of the Puritans or the commanders of the Ironsides, in the Jacobin Club or at the head of the crowds that stormed the Bastille or invaded the Tuileries. Nor did they seize the reins of government during the revolution or for a long time afterwards, either in England or in France. The lower middle classes, the urban poor, the plebeians and sans culottes made up the big insurgent battalions. The leaders were mostly ‘gentlemen farmers’ in England and lawyers, doctors, journalists and other intellectuals in France. Here and there the upheavals ended in military dictatorship. Yet the bourgeois character of these revolutions will not appear at all mythical, if we approach them with a broader criterion and view their general impact on society. Their most substantial and enduring achievement was to sweep away the social and political institutions that had hindered the growth of bourgeois property and of the social relationships that went with it. When the Puritans denied the Crown the power of arbitrary taxation, when Cromwell secured for English shipowners a monopolistic position in England’s trading with foreign countries, and when the Jacobins abolished feudal prerogatives and privileges, they created, often unknowingly, the conditions in which manufacturers, merchants and bankers were bound to gain economic predominance and, in the long run, social and even political supremacy. Bourgeois revolution creates the conditions in which bourgeois property can flourish. In this, rather than in the particular alignments during the struggle, lies its differentia specifica. [3]
It is in this sense that we can characterise the October revolution as a combination of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, though both were accomplished under Bolshevik leadership. Current Soviet historiography describes the February revolution as bourgeois and reserves the label ‘proletarian’ for the October insurrection. This distinction is made by many Western historians too and is justified on the ground that in February, after the Tsar’s abdication, the bourgeoisie seized power. In truth, the combination of the two revolutions had already appeared in February, but in a shadowy form. The Tsar and his last government were brought down by a general strike and a mass insurrection of workers and soldiers who at once created their councils or soviets, the potential organs of a new state. Prince Lvov, Miliukov and Kerensky took power from the hands of a confused and groping Petrograd Soviet, which willingly yielded it to them; and they exercised it only for as long as the soviets tolerated them. But their governments carried out no major act of bourgeois revolution. Above all, they did not break up the aristocracy’s landed estates and give land to the peasants. Even as a bourgeois revolution, the February revolution was manquée.
All this underlines the prodigious contradiction with which the Bolsheviks undertook to cope when in October they promoted and directed the double upheaval. The bourgeois revolution over which they presided created conditions which favoured the growth of bourgeois forms of property. The proletarian revolution they accomplished aimed at the abolition of property. The main act of the former was the sharing out of the aristocracy’s land. This created a wide potential base for the growth of a new rural bourgeoisie. The peasants who had been freed from rents and debts and had enlarged their farms were interested in a social system that would offer security to their holdings. Nor was this a matter only of capitalist farming. Rural Russia was, as Lenin put it, the breeding ground of capitalism at large — many of Russia’s industrial entrepreneurs and merchants had been of peasant stock; and, given time and favourable circumstances, the peasantry might have bred a far more numerous and modern class of entrepreneurs. All the more ironic was it that in 1917 none of the bourgeois parties, not even the moderate Socialists, dared to sanction the agrarian revolution which was developing spontaneously, with elemental force, for the peasants were seizing the aristocracy’s land long before the Bolshevik insurrection. Terrified by the dangers that threatened property in town, the bourgeois parties refused to undermine property in the country. The Bolsheviks (and the Left Social Revolutionaries) alone placed themselves at the head of the agrarian revolts. They knew that without the upheaval in the country the proletarian revolution would be isolated in town and defeated. The peasants, afraid of a counter-revolution that might bring back the landlords, thus acquired a stake in the Bolshevik regime. But from the outset the socialist aspects of the revolution aroused their misgivings, fears or hostility.
The socialist revolution was supported wholeheartedly by the urban working class. But this was a small minority of the nation. Altogether one-sixth of the population, twenty-odd million people, lived in the towns: and of these only half or so could be described as proletarian. The hard core of the working class consisted at the most of about three million men and women employed in modern industry. Marxists had expected the industrial workers to be the most dynamic force in capitalist society, the main agents of socialist revolution. The Russian workers more than justified this expectation. No class in Russian society, and no working class anywhere in the world, has ever acted with the energy, the political intelligence, the ability for organisation, and the heroism with which the Russian workers acted in 1917 (and thereafter in the civil war). The circumstance that Russia’s modern industry consisted of a small number of huge factories, concentrated mainly in Petrograd and Moscow, gave the massed workers of the two capitals an extraordinary striking power at the very nerve centres of the ancien régime. Two decades of intensive Marxist propaganda, fresh memories of the struggles of 1905, 1912 and 1914, the tradition of a century of revolutionary endeavour, and Bolshevik singleness of purpose had prepared the workers for their role. They took the socialist aim of the revolution for granted. They were not content with anything less than the abolition of capitalist exploitation, socialisation of industry and banking, workers’ control over production, and government by soviets. They turned their backs on the Mensheviks, whom they had followed at first, because the Mensheviks were telling them that Russia was not ‘ripe for a socialist revolution’. Their action, like that of the peasants, had its own spontaneous force: they established their control over production at the factory level well before the October insurrection. The Bolsheviks supported them and turned the factory rebellions into a socialist revolution.
Yet Petrograd and Moscow, and a few other scattered industrial centres, constituted an extremely narrow base for this undertaking. Not only did people over the whole immensity of rural Russia scramble to acquire property while the workers of the two capitals strove to abolish it; not only was the socialist revolution in implicit conflict with the bourgeois one; in addition, it was fraught with its own inner contradictions. Russia was and was not ripe for socialist revolution. She was better able to cope with its negative than with its positive tasks. Guided by the Bolsheviks, the workers expropriated the capitalists and transferred power to the soviets; but they could not establish a socialist economy and a socialist way of life; and they were unable to maintain their dominant political position for any length of time.
At first, the dual character of the revolution was, as has been said, the source of its strength. If a bourgeois revolution had taken place earlier (or if, at the time of the Emancipation, in 1861, the freed serfs had been given land on fair terms), the peasantry would have turned into a conservative force; and it would have opposed proletarian revolution, as it did in Western Europe, particularly in France, throughout the nineteenth century. Its conservatism might then have influenced even the urban workers, many of whom had roots in the country. A bourgeois order would have had far greater staying power than that possessed by the semi-feudal and semi-bourgeois regime. The conjunction of the two revolutions made possible the alliance of the workers and peasants for which Lenin strove; and this enabled the Bolsheviks to win the civil war and withstand foreign intervention. Although the aspirations of the workers were in implicit conflict with those of the peasants, neither of the two classes was as yet aware of this. The workers rejoiced in the muzhiks’ triumph over the landlords; and they saw no contradiction between their own striving for a collectivist economy and the peasantry’s economic individualism. The contradiction became apparent and acute only towards the end of the Civil War, when the peasantry, no longer inhibited by fear of the landlords’ return, forcefully asserted that individualism. [4]
Henceforth the conflict between town and country and the clash between the two revolutions dominated the domestic scene of the USSR for at least two decades, throughout the 1920s and the 1930s; and the consequences overshadow the whole of Soviet history. The vicissitudes of the drama are familiar enough. Lenin, in his last years, attempted to resolve the dilemma peacefully, by means of the New Economic Policy and a mixed economy; but by 1927 or 1928 the attempt had failed. Stalin then sought to resolve the conflict forcibly and embarked on the so-called wholesale collectivisation of farming. He divorced the socialist revolution from the bourgeois one by annihilating the latter.
Karl Marx and his disciples had hoped that proletarian revolution would be free of the feverish convulsions, the false consciousness and the fits of irrationality that had characterised the course of bourgeois revolution. They had, of course, in mind socialist revolution in its ‘pure form'; and they assumed that it would take place in advanced industrial countries, on a high level of society’s economic and cultural development. It is all too easy — but it is also irrelevant — to contrast these confident hopes with the welter of irrationality in this half-century of Soviet history. Much of the irrationality has originated in the contradictions between Russia’s two revolutions, for these produced a long series of crises which could not be managed by normal methods of statecraft, political accommodation or manoeuvre. The combination of the two revolutions became the source of Soviet weakness.
The irrationality of the Puritan and Jacobin revolutions arose largely out of the clash between the high hopes of the insurgent peoples and the bourgeois limitations of those revolutions. To the insurgent masses no revolution is ever bourgeois. They fight for freedom and equality or for the brotherhood of men and the Commonwealth. The crisis comes when the possessing classes grow impatient to have the full benefit of the gains the revolution has brought them and to accumulate wealth. As the revolution constricts them in this they contract out of it, or seek to bring it to a halt, just when the plebeian masses, desperate from privation or hunger, press for more radical social changes. This was what happened in France, at the decline of Jacobinism, when the nouveaux riches clamoured for the abolition of the maximum and for free trade. The plebeians then discovered that their revolutionary conquests were shams, that Liberté was merely the labourer’s liberty to sell his labour force, and that Egalité meant that he could bargain with his employer at the labour market on nominally equal terms. In England that was the moment when the Diggers and the Levellers discovered the power of property in the Commonwealth. Cruel disillusionment sets in. Cleavages appear in the party of the revolution. The leaders are torn by conflicting loyalties. And the intensity of passion and action, which was the revolution’s creative force during its ascendancy, turns into a destructive force in the period of stagnation and decline. We find much of this also in Russia early enough, immediately after the civil war, when the peasantry forced Lenin’s government to proclaim respect for private property and reintroduce free trade, while the Workers’ Opposition denounced this as a betrayal of socialism and clamoured for equality.
The predicament of the Russian revolution became even graver because Russia was also caught up in the contradictions inherent in any socialist revolution occurring in an underdeveloped country. Marx speaks of the embryo of socialism that grows and matures within the womb of bourgeois society. In Russia, it may be said, the socialist revolution intervened at a very early stage of the pregnancy, long before the embryo had had the time to mature. The outcome was not a stillbirth; but neither was it the viable body of socialism.
You may wonder what exactly do Marxists mean by this metaphor? The question is certainly relevant to our theme and — incidentally — to the problems of Western society as well. Marx describes how modern industry, having replaced the independent craftsmen, artisans and farmers by hired workers, has changed thereby the whole process by which man sustains his life, the process of production, transforming it from a mass of disjointed individual pursuits into the collective and aggregate activity of great numbers of associated producers. With division of labour and technological advance our productive forces grow increasingly interdependent; and they become, or tend to become, socially integrated on the national or even on the international scale. This precisely is the ‘socialisation’ of the productive process — the embryo of socialism within the womb of capitalism. This type of productive process calls for social control and planning; private ownership or control is at odds with it. Private control, even as exercised by the big modern corporations, sectionalises and disorganises an essentially integrated social mechanism, which needs to be actually and rationally integrated.
The Marxist case against capitalism rests largely, though not exclusively, on this argument. So does its case for socialism. It sees in the full development of the social character of the productive process the major historic precondition of socialism. Without it socialism would be a castle in the air. To try to impose social control on a mode of production which is not inherently social is just as incongruous and anachronistic as it is to maintain private or sectional control over the productive process that is social.
In Russia this basic precondition of socialism was lacking, as it must be lacking in any underdeveloped country. Farming, in which more than three-quarters of the people earned their living, was atomised into twenty-three or twenty-four million smallholdings, controlled by the spontaneous forces of the market. Nationalised industry was a small enclave in this primitive and anarchic economy. This meant that Russia did not possess another essential prerequisite of socialism: an abundance of goods and services which society must have if it is to meet — on a high level of civilisation — the needs of its members in any manner approaching equality. Not so long ago Russian industry could not even turn out the goods that any modern nation requires for its normal functioning. Yet socialism cannot be founded on want and poverty. Against these all its aspirations are powerless. Scarcity inexorably breeds inequality. Where there is not enough food, clothing and housing for all, a minority will grasp what it can; while the rest go hungry, clothed in rags and crowded in slums. All this was bound to happen in Russia.
In addition, the real starting point was one of utter disaster. After the years of world war, civil war and foreign intervention the little industry that Russia had possessed collapsed into ruin. Machinery and stocks were used up. Economically, the nation was thrown back by more than half a century. Townspeople burnt their furniture to warm their dwellings. Scores of millions of peasants were hit by famine and wandered over the country in search of food. The few million workers who had manned the barricades in 1917 had become dispersed and, as a coherent social force, ceased to exist. The bravest had perished in the civil war; many had taken up posts in the new administration, army and police; great numbers had fled from the famished cities; and the few who stayed behind spent more time trading than working, became déclassés and were swallowed up by the black markets. These were the formative circumstances at the time when the Bolsheviks, in the early 1920s, were trying to give shape to their regime and consolidate it. In doing so, they could not rely on the class of which they had considered themselves the vanguard, the class that was supposed to be the master in the new state, the mainstay of the new democracy, the chief agent of socialism. That class had physically and politically faded out. Thus, while the bourgeois revolution, despite the famine in the country, survived in the tangible realities of rural life, the socialist revolution was like a phantom suspended in a void.
These were the authentic origins of the so-called bureaucratic degeneration of the regime. In the circumstances as they were, ‘proletarian dictatorship’, ‘soviet democracy’, ‘workers’ control of industry’ were almost empty slogans, into which no one could breathe any content. The idea of soviet democracy, as Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin had expounded it, presupposed the existence of an active, eternally vigilant, working class, asserting itself not only against the ancien régime but also against any new bureaucracy that might abuse or usurp power. As the working class was bodily not there, the Bolsheviks decided to act as its locum tenentes [5] and trustees until such time as life would become more normal and a new working class would come into being. Meanwhile, they considered it their duty to exercise the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ on behalf of a non-existent, or almost non-existent, proletariat. That way lay bureaucratic dictatorship, uncontrolled power and corruption by power.
It was not that the Bolsheviks were unaware of the danger. They would hardly have been startled by Lord Acton’s dictum about power. [6] They would have agreed with him. Moreover, they understood something that Lord Acton and his disciples missed, namely, that property is also power, concentrated power, and that the quasi-monopolistic property of the big corporations is absolute power which acts all the more effectively when it is enfolded in a parliamentary democracy. The Bolsheviks were also quite well aware of the dangers of power in post-capitalist society — not for nothing did they dream about the withering away of the state. I, at least, know of no book that goes deeper to the roots of corruption by power than does Lenin’s (somewhat scholastically and dogmatically written) State and Revolution. There was thus a tragic element in Bolshevik fortunes: all their profound and acute awareness of the danger did not save them from it; and all their abhorrence of the corruption did not prevent them from succumbing to it.
They had, as a revolutionary party, no choice, unless they abdicated and divested themselves of power, yielding it in effect to their enemies whom they had just vanquished in the Civil War. Saints or fools might have done this; but the Bolsheviks were neither. They found themselves unexpectedly in a position which, mutatis mutandis, was comparable to that of the Decembrists, Populists and Narodnovoltsy in the nineteenth century, the position of a revolutionary élite, without a revolutionary class behind it. But the élite was now the government, holding a besieged fortress which it had precariously saved but which had still to be defended, rebuilt from ruins, and turned into the base of a new social order. Besieged fortresses are hardly ever ruled in a democratic manner. Victors in a civil war can rarely afford to allow freedom of expression and organisation to the vanquished, especially when the latter are backed by powerful foreign states. As a rule, civil war results in the victors’ monopoly of power. [7] The single-party system became for the Bolsheviks an inescapable necessity. Their own survival, and no doubt the survival of the revolution, depended on it. They had not aimed at it with any premeditation. They established it with misgivings as a temporary expedient. The single-party system went against the inclinations, the logic and the ideas of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Lunacharsky, Rykov and so many others. But then the logic of the situation took over and ran roughshod over their ideas and scruples. The temporary expedient became the norm. The single-party system acquired a permanence and a momentum of its own. By a process akin to natural selection, the party hierarchy found its leader, after Lenin’s death, in Stalin, who, because of an outstanding ability allied to a despotic character and utter unscrupulousness, was best suited to wield the monopoly of power. Later we shall examine the use he made of it in transforming the social structure of the Soviet Union and see how this very transformation, which constantly kept society in a tremendous flux, helped to perpetuate his power. Yet even Stalin considered himself the trustee of the proletariat and of the revolution. Khrushchev, in his 1956 exposure of Stalin’s crimes and inhumanity, said of him: ‘Stalin was convinced that this was necessary for the defence of the interests of the working classes... He looked at all this from the standpoint... of the interest of the labouring people... of socialism and communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. In this lies the whole tragedy.’ However, if the Bolsheviks at first felt entitled to act as trustees for the working class only during the interim of its dispersal and virtual absence, Stalin held autocratic power with all his might long after that, in the face of a reassembled and rapidly growing working class; and he used every device of terror and deception to prevent the workers, and the people at large, from claiming their rights and their revolutionary heritage.
The party’s conscience was in perpetual conflict with these realities of the monopoly of power. As early as 1922 Lenin, pointing from his deathbed at Stalin, warned the party against the ‘Big Bully’, the dzierzhymorda, the Great Russian chauvinist, who was coming back to oppress the weak and the helpless; and he confessed that he felt himself to be ‘deeply guilty before the workers of Russia’ for not having given them this warning earlier. Three years later Kamenev tried in vain to recall to a stormy party congress Lenin’s testament. In 1926 Trotsky, at a session of the Politbureau, also pointing at Stalin, threw in his face the words: ‘Gravedigger of the revolution.’ ‘He is the new Genghiz Khan’ — this was Bukharin’s terrified premonition in 1927 — ‘He will slaughter us all... He is going to drown in blood the risings of the peasants.’ And these were not random remarks made by a few leaders. Behind these men ever new oppositions rose, seeking to bring the party back to its revolutionary-democratic traditions and socialist commitments. This is what the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists tried to do as early as 1921 and 1922, what the Trotskyists did from 1923 onwards, the Zinovievists from 1925 till 1927, the Bukharinists in 1928 and 1929, and lesser and less articulate groups, even Stalinist ones, at various other times.
I cannot here go into the story of these struggles and purges — I have related it elsewhere. Clearly, as the successive schisms were being suppressed, the monopoly of power grew ever more narrow and rigid. At first the single party still left freedom of expression and political initiative at least to its own members. Then the ruling oligarchy deprived them of that freedom; and the monopoly of the single party became in fact a monopoly of a single faction, the Stalinist faction. In the second decade of the revolution the totalitarian monolith took shape. Finally, the rule of the single faction turned into the personal rule of its chief. The fact that Stalin could establish his autocracy only over the dead bodies of most of the original leaders of the revolution and their followers, and that he had to climb over the corpses even of good Stalinists, gives a measure of the depth and strength of the resistance he had to break.
The political metamorphoses of the regime were accompanied by a debasement of the ideas of 1917. People were taught that socialism required not merely national ownership and planning, rapid industrialisation, collectivisation and popular education, but that somehow the so-called cult of the individual, crude privilege and vehement anti-egalitarianism, and omnipotence of the police were all part and parcel of the new society. Marxism, the most critical and irreverent of doctrines, was emptied of its content and reduced to a set of sophisms or quasi-ecclesiastical canons, designed to justify every one of Stalin’s decrees and every one of his pseudo-theoretical whims. The devastating effects that all this had on Soviet science, art, literature, and on the country’s moral climate are well known. And, as Stalinism was, over three decades, the official doctrine of a world organisation, this debasement of socialism and Marxism had momentous repercussions in the international field as well, especially in the Western labour movement; and I intend to examine these in a different context.
The Russian revolution had some streaks of irrationality in common with the bourgeois revolutions of which it was the last. This is, in a sense, the bourgeois element in its character. As the master of the purges, Stalin was Cromwell’s and Robespierre’s descendant. His terror was far more cruel and repulsive than theirs, for he exercised power over a much longer period, in more daunting circumstances, and in a country accustomed over the ages to barbarous brutality in its rulers. Stalin, we should remember, was also the descendant of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas I and Alexander III. Indeed, Stalinism may be described as the amalgam of Marxism with Russia’s primordial and savage backwardness. In any case, in Russia the aspirations of the revolution and its realities were far wider apart than anywhere else; and so it took far more blood and far greater hypocrisy to cover up the terrible discrepancy.
In what then, it will be asked, lies the continuity of the revolution? What reality has it after all these political and ideological metamorphoses, after so many eruptions of terror and other cataclysms? Similar questions have arisen with reference to other revolutions. Where and when, for instance, did the French revolution come to a close? Was it when the Jacobins were suppressing the Commune and the Enragés? Or when Robespierre mounted the steps of the guillotine? At the moment of Napoleon’s coronation? Or at his dethronement? Most of these events, despite their drastic character, are wrapped in ambiguity; only Napoleon’s fall marks unequivocally the end of the historical cycle. In Russia a similar ambiguity surrounds events such as the Kronstadt rising of 1921, the defeat of Trotsky in 1923, his expulsion in 1927, the purges of the 1930s, Khrushchev’s disclosures about Stalin in 1956, to mention only these. Sectarians will argue endlessly about these breaks in continuity and point out at which of these the revolution was ‘finally’ betrayed and defeated. (Curiously, Trotsky himself, in the years of his last exile, tried to persuade some of his overzealous supporters that the revolution had not come to an end with his own deportation.) These sectarian disputes have their own significance, especially for historians who may glean from them quite a few grains of truth. French historians, the best of them, are till this day divided into pro- and anti-Jacobins, Dantonists, Robespierrists, Hébertists, defenders of the Commune, Thermidorians and anti-Thermidorians, Bonapartists and anti-Bonapartists; and their controversies have always had a close bearing on the current political preoccupations of Frenchmen. I am convinced that Soviet historians will likewise be divided for many generations, just as we participants of the Communist movement in the 1920s and the 1930s were, into Trotskyists, Stalinists, Bukharinists, Zinovievists, Decemists and so on; and I hope that some of them will be able to produce, without fear or embarrassment, apologies for the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries as well.
But the question about the continuity of the revolution is not resolved in such disputes — it transcends them. It must be, and it is, judged by other, wider criteria. We need not go as far as Clemenceau, who once said that ‘the revolution is a single block from which nothing can be detracted’. But something may be said for the Clemenceau approach, even though the ‘block’ is an alloy with a great deal of base metal in it.
One way of dealing with our problem is to say that the contemporaries of a revolution acknowledge its continuity by the attitudes they take up towards it, by their policies and deeds. They do so in our time as well. The great divide of 1917 still looms as large as ever in the consciousness of mankind. To our statesmen and ideologues, and even to ordinary people the issues posed by it are still unresolved. And the fact that the rulers and leaders of the Soviet Union have never stopped invoking their revolutionary origins, has also had its logic and its consequences. All of them, including Stalin, Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s successors, have had to cultivate in the minds of their people the sense of the revolution’s continuity. They have had to reiterate the pledges of 1917, even while they themselves were breaking them; and they have had to restate, again and again, the Soviet Union’s commitment to socialism. These pledges and commitments have been inculcated into every new generation and age group, at school and in the factory. The tradition of the revolution has dominated the Soviet system of education. This in itself is a potent factor of continuity. True enough, the pattern of the education is designed to conceal the breaks in continuity, to falsify history and to explain away its contradictions and irrationalities. Yet, despite all this, the educational system has constantly reawakened in the mass of the people an awareness of their revolutionary heritage.
Behind these ideological and political phenomena there is the real continuity of a system based on the abolition of private ownership and the complete nationalisation of industry and banking. All the changes in government, party leadership and policies have not affected this basic and inviolable ‘conquest of October’. This is the rock on which the ideological continuity rests. Property relations or forms of ownership are not a passive or indifferent factor in the development of society. We know how profoundly the change from feudal to bourgeois forms of property has altered the way of life and the shape of Western society. Now, comprehensive, full national ownership of the means of production entails an even more many-sided and fundamental long-term transformation. It would be erroneous to think that there is only a quantitative difference between the nationalisation of, say, twenty-five per cent of industry and one hundred per cent public ownership. The difference is qualitative. In a modern industrial society comprehensive public ownership is bound to create an essentially new environment for man’s productive activity and cultural pursuits. Since post-revolutionary Russia was not a modern industrial society, national ownership per se could not create that qualitatively new environment, but only some elements of it. Even this was enough to influence decisively the evolution of the Soviet Union and give a certain unity to the processes of its social transformation.
I have spoken about the incongruity of the attempt to establish social control over a productive process which is not social in character, and also about the impossibility of a socialism founded on want and scarcity. The whole history of the Soviet Union in these fifty years has been a struggle, partly successful and partly not, to resolve this incongruity and to overcome want and scarcity. This meant, in the first instance, intensive industrialisation as a means towards an end, not an end in itself. Feudal and even bourgeois property relations may be compatible with economic stagnation or a sluggish tempo of growth. National ownership is not, especially when it has been established in an underdeveloped country by way of a proletarian revolution. The system carries within it the compulsion to rapid advance, the necessity to strive for abundance, and the urge to develop that social productive process which calls for rational social control. In the course of the advance, which was made for Russia far more difficult than it need have been by wars, arms races and bureaucratic waste, ever new contradictions arose; and means and ends were perpetually confused. As national wealth was being accumulated, the mass of consumers, who are also the producers, were exposed to continued and even aggravated want and poverty; and bureaucratic control over every aspect of national life substituted itself for social control and responsibility. The order of priorities was as it were reversed. The forms of socialism had been forged before the content, the economic and cultural substance, was available; and as the content was being produced the forms deteriorated or were distorted. At first, the socio-political institutions created by the revolution towered high above the actual level of the nation’s material and cultural existence; then, as that level rose, the socio-political order was depressed beneath it by the sheer weight of bureaucracy and Stalinism. Even the end was brought down to the level of the means: the ideal image of a classless society was dragged down to the miseries of this period of transition and to the crude necessities of a primitive accumulation of wealth.
This reversal of social priorities, this confusion of ends and means, and the resulting disharmony between the forms and the content of national life are the deepest sources of the crises, the ferments and the agitation of the post-Stalin era. Bureaucratic control, that substitute for social control, has become a brake on further progress; and the nation is longing to manage its own wealth and to be master of its own destinies. It does not quite know how to voice its aspirations and what to do about them. Decades of totalitarian rule and monolithic discipline have robbed the people of their capacity for self-expression, spontaneous action and self-organisation. The ruling groups tinker with economic reforms, loosen their grip on the nation’s mind, and yet do what they can to keep the people inarticulate and passive. These are the limits of the official de-Stalinisation, behind which there lurks an unofficial de-Stalinisation, a widespread expectation of root-and-branch change. Both the official policy and the unofficial moods feed on undispelled or revived memories of the early heroic period of the revolution with its far greater freedom, rationality and humanity. This apparent return to the past, with the ceaseless pilgrimage to Lenin’s tomb, probably covers an awkward pause between the Stalin era and some new start in the Soviet Union’s creative thinking and historic action. Whatever may be the truth, the malaise, the heart-searchings and the gropings of the post-Stalin era testify in their own way to the continuity of the revolutionary epoch.