The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher 1967
Let us now examine in general terms the changes that have taken place in the social structure of the USSR — such a survey may present something like an interim sociological balance sheet of these fifty years.
Discussing earlier the question of the revolution’s continuity, I underlined the significance of the circumstance that the state, and not ‘private enterprise’ or the big capitalist corporation, has been in charge of the industrialisation and modernisation of the Soviet Union. This fact has determined the dynamics of Soviet economic growth and the character of the social transformation. There is no need to dwell here on the strictly economic aspect of the problem. We all know that the Soviet Union has risen from the position of the most backward of the great European nations to the rank of the world’s second industrial power — the international consequences of its ascendancy have been with us all the time during these last decades. Still, I must confess, as one of those who witnessed at close quarters the early phases of this rise and the appalling difficulties that attended it, that I have not accustomed myself to take the outcome for granted. I would not have believed, in say 1930, and not even in 1940, that the Soviet Union would progress quite as rapidly as it did and that by 1967 it would produce — to give only one indication — a hundred million tons of steel per year. This is more than Great Britain, the Federal German Republic, France and Italy produce together, and only twenty million tons less than is turned out by the steel mills of the United States. This is the foundation for an engineering industry and an output of producer goods approximately as large as the American. The consumer industries are, of course, lagging far behind. But leaving out further economic statistics, I shall rather consider here the sociological accompaniments and consequences of the economic advance.
Before we proceed any further we ought, perhaps, to remind ourselves that these fifty years have not been a single uninterrupted period of growth and development. Seven or eight of the fifty years were taken up by armed hostilities which resulted in severe setbacks and widespread destruction, unparalleled in any other belligerent country. Another twelve or thirteen years were spent on replacing the losses. The actual periods of growth cover the years from 1928 to 1941 and from 1950 onwards, about thirty years in all. And in these years an unusually high proportion of Soviet resources, about one-quarter of the national income on the average, was absorbed in the arms races that preceded and followed the Second World War. If one could calculate the advance in ideal units of truly peaceful years, one would conclude that the Soviet Union achieved its progress within twenty or, at the most, twenty-five years. This has to be kept in mind when one tries to assess the performance. But, of course, present Soviet society is the product of the turmoil of this half-century so that in its development gain and loss, construction and destruction, have been inseparable; and the combination of productive effort, unproductive work and waste has affected both the material life and the spiritual climate of the USSR.
The first and most striking feature of the transformed scene is the massive urbanisation of the USSR. Since the revolution the town population has grown by over a hundred million people. Here again a corrective in the time-scale is needed. The first decade after 1917 was marked by a depopulation of the cities and a slow reverse movement. The effect of the Second World War was the same, at least in European Russia. The periods of intensive urbanisation were between the years 1930 and 1940 and between 1950 and 1965. About eight hundred big and medium-sized towns and over two thousand small urban settlements were built. In 1926 there were only twenty-six million town dwellers. In 1966 their number was about a hundred and twenty-five million. In the last fifteen years alone the urban population has increased by fifty-three or fifty-four million people, that is by as much as the entire population of the British Isles. Within the lifetime of a generation the percentage of the town dwellers in the total population has risen from fifteen to about fifty-five per cent; and it is fast climbing up to sixty per cent. In the United States — to take the previous record in this field — it took over one hundred and sixty years for the urban population to increase by a hundred million people; or, if the more relevant percentual comparison is made, it took a full century, from 1850 to 1950, for the proportion of the town dwellers to rise from fifteen to sixty per cent. Throughout those hundred years the phenomenal growth of the American cities and towns was stimulated and facilitated by mass immigration, influx of foreign capital and skill, and immunity from foreign invasion and wartime destruction, not to speak of the inducements of climate. Soviet urbanisation, in tempo and scale, is without parallel in history. Such a change in social structure, even if it had taken place in more favourable circumstances, would have created huge and baffling problems in housing, settlement, health and education; and Soviet circumstances were as if designed to intensify and magnify beyond measure the turmoil and the shocks.
Only a small proportion of the expansion was due to natural growth or to the migration of townspeople. The mass of the new town dwellers were peasants, shifted from the villages, year after year, and directed to industrial labour. Like the old advanced nations of the West, the Soviet Union found the main reserve of industrial manpower in the peasantry. In the early stages the growth of capitalist enterprise in the West was often accompanied by the forcible expropriation of farmers — in Britain by the ‘enclosures’ — and by draconic labour legislation. Later the West relied in the main on the spontaneous work of the labour market, with its laws of supply and demand, to bring the required manpower to industry. This euphemism means that in the course of many decades, if not of centuries, rural overpopulation, and sometimes famine, threw great masses of redundant hands on to the labour market. In the Soviet Union the state secured the supply of labour by means of planning and direction. Its dominant economic position was the decisive factor; without it, it would hardly have been possible to carry out so gigantic a transformation within so short a time.
The transfer of the rural population began in earnest in the early 1930s, and it was closely connected with the collectivisation of farming, which enabled the government’s agencies to lay hands on the surplus of manpower on the farms and to move it to industry. The beginnings of the process were extremely difficult and involved the use of much force and violence. The habits of settled industrial life, regulated by the factory siren, which had in other countries been inculcated into the workers, from generation to generation, by economic necessity and legislation, were lacking in Russia. The peasants had been accustomed to work in their fields according to the rhythm of Russia’s severe nature, to toil from sunrise to sunset in the summer and to drowse on the tops of their stoves most of the winter. They had now to be forced and conditioned into an entirely new routine of work. They resisted, worked sluggishly, broke or damaged tools, and shifted restlessly from factory to factory and from mine to mine. The government imposed discipline by means of harsh labour codes, threats of deportation, and actual deportation to forced labour camps. Lack of housing and acute shortages of consumer goods, due in large measure to deliberate acts of an anti-consumptionist policy — the government was bent on obtaining the maximum output of producer goods and munitions — aggravated the hardships and the turbulence. It was common in the cities, even quite recently, for several families to share a single room and a kitchen; and in the industrial settlements, masses of workers were herded in barracks for many years. Crime was rampant. At the same time, however, many millions of men and women received primary or even secondary education, were trained in industrial skills, and settled down to the new way of life.
As time went on, social friction and conflicts engendered by the upheaval lessened. Since the Second World War the feats of Soviet industry and arms have appeared to justify retrospectively even the violence, the suffering, the blood and the tears. But it may be held, as I have held through all these decades, that without the violence, the blood and the tears, the great work of construction might have been done far more efficiently and with healthier social, political and moral after-effects. Whatever the truth of the matter, the transformation of the social structure continues; and continues without such forcible stimulation. Year after year the urban population is expanding on the same scale as before; and the process, though planned and regulated, obeys its own rhythm. In the 1930s the government had to drag a sullen mass of peasants into the towns; in this last decade or so it has been confronted by a spontaneous rush of people from the country to towns; and it has had to exert itself and make rural life a little more attractive in order to keep young labour on the farms. But the present population trend will probably continue; and in another ten or fifteen years, three-quarters of the population may well live in towns.
The industrial workers, the small minority of 1917, now form the largest social class. The state employs about seventy-eight million people in workshops and offices — it employed twenty-seven million after the end of the Second World War. Well over fifty million people work in primary and manufacturing industries, in building, transport, communications and on state-owned farms. The rest earn their livelihood in various services — thirteen million of them in health, education and scientific research. It is not easy to distinguish with any precision the numbers of manual workers and technicians from those of office workers, because Soviet statistics lump them together — the sociological significance of this will be discussed later. The number of the workers proper may be put at between fifty and fifty-five million.
The working class is highly stratified. Stalin’s labour policy centred on differential scales of salaries and wages and raised the labour aristocracy high above the mass of the underpaid semi-skilled and unskilled workers. To some extent this was justified by the need to offer incentives to skill and efficiency; but the discrepancies in wages went far beyond. Their actual extent was and still is surrounded by extraordinary secrecy. Since the 1930s the government has not published the relevant data about the national wage structure, and students have had to content themselves with fragmentary information. Throughout the Stalin era a ferocious witch-hunt against the levellers — or the ‘petty-bourgeois egalitarians’ — was in progress; but it was less effective than it appeared to be, and certainly less so than the political witch-hunts.
The suppression of data about the structure of wages and salaries indicates with what guilty conscience the ruling groups, under Stalin and after him, have pursued their anti-egalitarian policy. No such guilty conscience prevents our captains of industry from advertising their profits or inhibits our governments from revealing the facts about our scales of wages and salaries. Of course, nothing like our ‘normal’ inequality between earned and unearned incomes exists in the Soviet Union. The inequality is in the earned incomes. Yet to expose its full extent would evidently be too risky and dangerous an undertaking for any Soviet government. The discrepancies in workers’ earnings seem similar to those that can be found in most other countries; and they are narrowed by the greater value of the Soviet Union’s more comprehensive social services. In recent years the wage structure has been overhauled again and again. The first period of de-Stalinisation brought an evident reduction of inequalities the extent of which it is difficult to assess. Subsequently the new wage policy has met with increasing resistance on the part of the managers and the labour aristocracy. In a continuously and rapidly expanding economy, however, high social mobility does not allow the stratification to become unduly rigid. Great masses of workers are constantly trained for skilled jobs and pass from lower to higher income groups.
The social and cultural stratification of the working class is sometimes even more important than the economic one. This is a subject which does not lend itself to a clear-cut sociological description or analysis; all I can do here is to try to convey a general idea of it and to indicate its complexity. The prodigious growth of the working class has resulted in many social and cultural discrepancies and incongruities, reflecting the successive phases of industrialisation and their overlapping. Each phase brought into being a different layer of the working class and produced significant cleavages. The bulk of the working class is strongly marked by its peasant origins. There are only very few working-class families who have been settled in town since before the revolution and have any sort of industrial tradition and memories of pre-revolutionary class struggle. In effect, the oldest layer of workers is the one which formed itself during the reconstruction period of the 1920s. Its adaptation to the rhythm of industrial life was relatively easy — these workers came to the factory of their own accord and were not yet subjected to strict regimentation. Their children are the most settled and the most distinctly urban element of the industrial population. From their ranks came the vydvizhentsy, the managerial elements and the labour aristocracy of the 1930s and 1940s. Those who remained in the ranks were the last Soviet workers to engage freely, under the New Economic Policy, in trade-union activities, even in strikes, and to enjoy a certain freedom of political expression.
The contrast between this and the next layer is extremely sharp. Twenty-odd million peasants were shifted to the towns during the 1930s. Their adaptation was painful and jerky. For a long time they remained uprooted villagers, town dwellers against their will, desperate, anarchic and helpless. They were broken to the habits of factory work and kept under control by ruthless drill and discipline. It was they who gave the Soviet towns the grey, miserable, semi-barbarous look that so often astonished foreign visitors. They brought into industry the muzhiks’ crude individualism. Official policy played on it, prodding the industrial recruits to compete with one another for bonuses, premiums and multiple piece rates. Worker was thus turned against worker at the factory bench; and pretexts of ‘socialist competition’ were used to prevent the formation and manifestation of any class solidarity. The terror of the 1930s left an indelible imprint on the men of this category. Most of them, now in their fifties, are probably — through no fault of theirs — the most backward element among Soviet workers — uneducated, acquisitive, servile. Only in its second generation could this layer of the working class live down the initial shocks of urbanisation.
The peasants who came to the factories in the aftermath of the Second World War still experienced the trying living conditions, virtual homelessness, severe labour discipline and the terror. But most had come to town voluntarily, eager to escape from devastated and famished villages. They had been prepared for industrial discipline by years of army life and found in their new places an environment better able to absorb and assimilate newcomers than were the towns and factory settlements of the 1930s. The process of adaptation was less painful. It became easier still for the next batches of trainees who arrived in the factories during the post-Stalin years, when the old labour codes were abolished, and who settled down to their occupations in relative freedom from want and fear. The youngest age groups, the latest immigrants and the town-bred children of the earlier ones have arrived in the workshops with a self-confidence which was altogether lacking in their elders and have played a big part in reforming outdated labour routines and in changing the climate of Soviet factory life. Nearly all of them have ('complete or incomplete’) secondary education, and many take extra-mural academic courses. They have often clashed with their less efficient and less civilised foremen and managers. This is probably the most progressive group of the Soviet working class, comprising the builders of nuclear plants, computers and spaceships, workers as productive as their American counterparts, even though the average Soviet productivity per man-hour is still only forty per cent of American productivity or even less. The low average is, of course, due to the great diversity of Soviet industrial manpower, to the many different and uneven levels of culture and efficiency, which I have just tried to trace. Even so, the average Soviet productivity is somewhat ahead of the West European; and it is worth recalling that in the 1920s, when American productivity was about one-third of what it is at present, Soviet production per man-hour was only one-tenth of the American.
This all too sketchy description gives us only a general idea of the extraordinary social and cultural heterogeneity of the Soviet working class. The process of transplantation and expansion was too rapid and stormy to allow for the mutual assimilation of the diverse layers, the formation of a common outlook, and the growth of class solidarity. We have seen how a few years after the revolution the shrinkage and disintegration of the working class had permitted the bureaucracy to establish itself as the dominant social force. What came after that allowed it to consolidate this position. The manner in which the new factory hands were recruited and the furious pace of growth kept the working class in a state of permanent disarray and fragmentation, unable to gain cohesion, balance, unity and to find a sociopolitical identity. The workers were incapacitated by the very swelling of their numbers. The bureaucracy did what it could to keep them in this state. Not only did it play them against one another at the factory bench; it fanned all their mutual dislikes and antagonisms. It denied them the right to raise demands and to defend themselves through the trade unions. But these devices and the terror would not have been as effective as they were, if the working class had not been torn by its own centrifugal forces. What made matters worse was that the constant promotion of bright and energetic workers to managerial posts deprived the rank and file of potential mouthpieces and leaders. While education was scarce among the toilers, this brain drain had important consequences: the social mobility which benefited some of the workers, condemned the rest to social and political debility.
If this analysis is correct then the prospect for the future may be more hopeful. An objective process of consolidation and integration is taking place in the working class, and it is accompanied by a growth of social awareness. This — as well as the requirements of technological progress — has compelled the ruling group to sweep away the old factory discipline and to concede to the workers much more elbow room than they had in the Stalin era. There is still a long way from this to freedom of expression and to workers’ genuine participation in control over industry. Yet as the working class grows more educated, homogeneous and self-confident, its aspirations are likely to focus on these demands. And if this happens the workers may re-enter the political stage as an independent factor, ready to challenge the bureaucracy, and ready to resume the struggle for emancipation in which they scored so stupendous a victory in 1917, but which for so long they have not been able to follow up.
The obverse side of the expansion of the working class is the shrinkage of the peasantry. Forty years ago rural smallholders made up more than three-quarters of the nation; at present the collectivised farmers constitute only one-quarter. How desperately the peasants resisted this trend, what furious violence was let loose against them, how they were forced to contribute to the sinews of industrialisation, and how resentfully and sluggishly they have tilled the land under the collectivist dispensation — all this is now common knowledge. But, as Professor Butterfield says in a somewhat different context: ‘It is the tendency of contemporaries to estimate the revolution too exclusively by its atrocities, while posterity always seems to err through its inability to take these into account or vividly appreciate them.’ [8] As one who witnessed the collectivisation in the early 1930s and severely criticised its forcible methods, I would like to reflect here on the tragic fate of the Russian peasantry. Under the ancien régime the Russian countryside was periodically swept by famine, as China’s countryside was and as India’s still is. In the intervals between the famines, uncounted (statistically unnoticed) millions of peasants and peasant children died of malnutrition and disease, as they still do in so many underdeveloped countries. [9] The old system was hardly less cruel towards the peasantry than Stalin’s government, only its cruelty appeared to be part of the natural order of things, which even the moralist’s sensitive conscience is inclined to take for granted. This cannot excuse or mitigate the crimes of Stalinist policy; but it may put the problem into proper perspective. Those who argue that all would have been well if only the muzhiks had been left alone, the idealisers of the old rural way of life and of the peasantry’s individualism, are purveying an idyll which is a figment of their imagination. The old primitive smallholding was, in any case, too archaic to survive into the epoch of industrialisation. It has not survived either in this country or in the United States; and even in France, its classical homeland, we have witnessed a dramatic shrinkage of the peasantry in recent years. In Russia the smallholding was a formidable obstacle to the nation’s progress: it was unable to provide food for the growing urban population; it could not even feed the children of the overpopulated countryside. The only reasonable alternative to forcible collectivisation lay in some form of collectivisation or cooperation based on the consent of the peasantry. Just how realistic this alternative was for the USSR no one can now say with any certainty. What is certain is that forcible collectivisation has left a legacy of agricultural inefficiency and antagonism between town and country which the Soviet Union has not yet lived down.
These calamities have been aggravated by yet another blow the peasantry has suffered, a blow surpassing all the atrocities of the collectivisation. Most of the twenty million men that the Soviet Union lost on the battlefields of the Second World War were peasants. So huge was the gap in rural manpower that during the late 1940s and in the 1950s in most villages only women, children, cripples and old men were seen working in the fields. This accounted in some measure for the stagnant condition of farming, and for much else besides: for dreadful strains on family relations, sexual life and rural education; and for more than the normal amount of apathy and inertia in the countryside.
The peasantry’s weight in the nation’s social and political life has, in consequence of all these events, steeply declined. The condition of farming remains a matter of grave concern, for it affects the standard of living and the morale of the urban population. A poor harvest is still a critical event, politically; and a succession of bad harvests contributed to Khrushchev’s downfall in 1964. Nor has the peasantry been truly integrated into the new industrial structure of society. Much of the old individualistic farming, of the pettiest and most archaic kind, is still going on behind the façade of the kolkhoz. Within a stone’s throw of automated computer-run concerns there are still shabby and Oriental bazaars crowded with rural traders. Yet the time when the Bolsheviks were afraid that the peasantry might be the agent of a capitalist restoration has long passed. True, there are rich kolkhozes and poor ones; and here and there a crafty muzhik manages to by-pass all rules and regulations and to rent land, employ hired labour surreptitiously, and make a lot of money. However, these survivals of primitive capitalism are hardly more than a marginal phenomenon. If the present population trend — the migration from country to town — continues, the peasantry will go on shrinking; and there will probably be a massive shift from the collectively owned to the state-owned farms. Eventually, farming may be expected to be ‘Americanised’ and to employ only a small fraction of the nation’s manpower.
Meanwhile, even though the peasantry is dwindling, the muzhik tradition still looms very large in Russian life, in custom and manners, in language, literature and the arts. Although a majority of Russians are already living in town, most Russian novels, perhaps four out of five, still take village life as their theme and the muzhik as their chief character. Even in his exit he casts a long melancholy shadow on the new Russia.
And now we come to what is in any sociological description of the USSR the most complex and puzzling problem, that of the bureaucracy, the managerial groups, the specialists and the intelligentsia. Their numbers and specific weight have grown enormously. Between eleven and twelve million specialists and administrators are employed in the national economy, compared with only half a million in the 1920s, and fewer than two hundred thousand before the revolution. To these we must add between two and three million regular members of the political hierarchies and of the military establishment. In sheer numbers all these groups, amounting to about one-fifth of the total of those employed by the state, are almost as large as the collectivised peasantry (the kolkhozes have only seventeen million members). Their social weight is, of course, immeasurably greater. We must not, however, lump all these groups together and label them as the bureaucracy or the managerial class. A sharp distinction ought to be made between the specialists and administrators with higher education and those with only a secondary one. The actual managerial elements are in the former category, although they are not identical with it. The specialists with higher education form about forty per cent of the total, that is, over four and a half million people, or perhaps five and a half million if party cadres and military personnel are included.
Is this then the privileged bureaucracy at which Trotsky once pointed as the new enemy of the workers? Or is this Djilas’s New Class? (Trotsky, as you may remember, did not take the view that the bureaucracy was a new class.) I must admit that I hesitate to answer these questions too categorically. I cannot here go into the semantics of the problem and discuss the definition of class. Let me say only this: I make a distinction between economic or social inequality and class antagonism. The difference between highly paid skilled workers and unskilled labourers is an example of an inequality which does not amount to class antagonism; it is a difference within the same social class. To my mind Djilas’s view of the ‘new class of exploiters’ and similar ideas about the Soviet ‘managerial society’ are simplifications which, far from clarifying the issue, obscure it. The status of the privileged groups in Soviet society is more ambiguous than the one or the other label suggests. They are a hybrid element; they are and they are not a class. They have certain features in common with the exploiting classes of other societies; and they lack some of the latter’s essential characteristics. They enjoy material and other advantages which they defend stubbornly and brutally. Here again we should beware of sweeping generalisations. About one-third of the total number of specialists are poorly paid teachers — the Soviet press has recently voiced many complaints about their living conditions. The same is true about most of half a million doctors. Many of the two million engineers, agronomists and statisticians earn less than the wage of a highly skilled worker. Their standard of living is comparable to that of our lower middle class. This is admittedly well above the standard of living of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers. But it would be poor sociology, Marxist or otherwise, to condemn this modest prosperity as based on the exploitation of labour. Only the upper strata of the bureaucracy, of the party hierarchy, the managerial groups and the military personnel, live in conditions comparable to those enjoyed by the rich and the nouveaux riches in capitalist society. It is impossible to define the size of these groups — let me repeat that statistical data about their numbers and their incomes are carefully concealed. What these groups have in common with any exploiting class — I am using the term in the Marxist sense — is that their incomes are at least partly derived from the ‘surplus value’ produced by the workers. Moreover, they dominate Soviet society economically, politically and culturally.
But what this so-called new class lacks is property. They own neither means of production nor land. Their material privileges are confined to the sphere of consumption. Unlike the managerial elements in our society, they are not able to turn any part of their income into capital: they cannot save, invest and accumulate wealth in the durable and expansive form of industrial stock or of large financial assets. They cannot bequeath wealth to their descendants; they cannot, that is, perpetuate themselves as a class. [10] Trotsky once predicted that the Soviet bureaucracy would fight for the right to bequeath their possessions to their children and that they might seek to expropriate the state and become the shareholding owners of trusts and concerns. This prediction, made over thirty years ago, has not come true so far. The Maoists say that capitalism is already being restored in the Soviet Union; presumably they refer to the present decentralisation of state control over industry. The evidence for these assertions has been less than scanty so far. Theoretically, it is possible that the present reaction against the Stalinist overcentralised economic control may stimulate neo-capitalist tendencies among industrial managers. I think that signs of some such development may be detected in Yugoslavia — I would not put it higher than that. Yet it is unlikely that such tendencies should gain the upper hand in the USSR, if only because the abandonment of central economic planning would be a crippling blow to Russia’s national interest and position in the world.
Speculation apart, the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy has not so far obtained for itself ownership in the means of production accounts for a certain precariousness and perishableness of its social domination. Property has always been the foundation of any class supremacy. The cohesion and unity of any class depends on it. Property is for the class that owns it a character-forming factor. It is also the positive element to the defence of which the class rallies. The battle cry of any possessing class is the ‘sanctity of property’, and not just the right to exploit others. The privileged groups of Soviet society are not united by any comparable ties. They are in command of industry, as our business managers are; and they exercise command in an absolute manner. But behind our business managers there are the shareholders, especially the big ones. Soviet managers have not only to acknowledge that all shares belong to the nation, but to profess that they act on the nation’s behalf, and especially on behalf of the working class. Whether they are able to keep up this pretence or not depends solely on political circumstances. The workers may allow them to keep it up or they may not. They may, like a sluggish lot of shareholders, accept bad managers; or they may dismiss them. In other words, bureaucratic domination rests on nothing more stable than a state of political equilibrium. This is — in the long run — a far more fragile foundation for social dominance than is any established structure of property relations sanctified by law, religion and tradition. There has been much talk recently about the antagonism, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, between the political hierarchies and the technocrats; and some young theorists treat these two groups as fully fledged and opposed social classes, and speak about their ‘class struggle’ very much as we used to speak about the struggle between landlords and capitalists. The technocrats, one is told, with whom the workers may ally themselves, aim at overthrowing the ‘central political hierarchy’ which has usurped power since the revolution. Yet if the ‘new class’ that has ruled the Soviet Union all these decades has consisted solely of the ‘central political hierarchy’, then its identity is very elusive indeed. Its composition has been repeatedly and sweepingly changed in purge after purge, during Stalin’s lifetime and after. Indeed, this ‘new class’ looks very much like a sociologist’s Cheshire cat.
In truth, Soviet bureaucracy has exercised power greater than that wielded by any possessing class in modern times; and yet its position is weaker and more vulnerable than that normally held by any such class. Its power is exceptional because it is economic, political and cultural at the same time. Yet, paradoxically, each of these elements of power has had its origin in an act of liberation. The bureaucracy’s economic prerogatives are derived from the abolition of private property in industry and finance; the political ones from the workers’ and peasants’ total victory over the ancien régime; and the cultural ones from the assumption by the state of full responsibility for the people’s education and cultural development. Because of the workers’ inability to maintain the supremacy they held in 1917, each of these acts of liberation turned into its opposite. The bureaucracy became the master of a masterless economy; and it established a political and cultural tutelage over the nation. But the conflict between the origins of the power and its character, between the liberating uses for which it was intended and the uses to which it has been put, has perpetually generated high political tensions and recurrent purges, which have again and again demonstrated the lack of social cohesion in the bureaucracy. The privileged groups have not solidified into a new class. They have not eradicated from the popular mind the acts of liberation from which they derive their power; nor have they been able to convince the masses — or even themselves — that they have used the power in a manner compatible with those acts. In other words, the ‘new class’ has not obtained for itself the sanction of social legitimacy. It must constantly conceal its own identity, which the bourgeoisie and the landlords have never had to do. It has the sense of being history’s bastard.
I have already mentioned the guilty conscience that compels the ruling groups to lump together ‘workers’ and ‘employees’ in one statistical total and to make a state secret of the wage structure and of the distribution of the national income. The ‘new class’ thus disappears in the huge grey mass of ‘workers and employees’. It hides its face and conceals its share in the national cake. After so many witch-hunts against the levellers it dare not affront the egalitarianism of the masses. As one Western observer neatly put it: ‘Whereas in our middle classes the rule is to keep up with the Joneses, in the Soviet Union the privileged people must always remember to keep down with the Joneses.’ This brings home to us something of the ethos of Soviet society, something of its underlying morality, and, again, something of the vitality and compelling force of the revolutionary tradition.
Moreover, the Soviet Joneses are coming up en masse. They are being educated en masse. Where social stratification is based solely on income and function, and not on property, the progress of mass education is a powerful and ultimately irresistible force for equality. We have seen that the number of Soviet specialists with higher and secondary education has risen, within a relatively short period, from half a million to twelve million. This goes on. In a society expanding on so vast a scale and so rapidly, the privileged groups have to be constantly absorbing new plebeian and proletarian elements, whom they find increasingly difficult to assimilate, which again prevents the ‘new class’ from consolidating itself socially and politically. [11]
I have referred to the brain drain which, over a long period, reduced the Soviet working class to a meek and inert mass. Now an opposite process is taking place: mass education is spreading faster than the privileged groups expand, faster even than the needs of industrialisation require. It is indeed running ahead of the country’s economic resources. According to recent educational surveys, eighty per cent of the pupils of Soviet secondary schools, mostly children of workers, demand to be admitted to the universities. The universities cannot accept them. The expansion of higher education cannot keep pace with the spread of secondary education; and industry needs hands. And so these huge numbers of young people are being turned away from the gates of the universities towards the factories. For all the difficulties that this situation creates, it is also unique. It illustrates with dramatic effect how the gulf between brain and brawn is in fact narrowing in the USSR. The immediate consequence is a relative overproduction of the intelligentsia which is being pressed into the ranks of the working class. The worker-intellectuals are a creative but potentially also an explosive element in the body politic. The force of the revolutionary tradition has been great enough to compel the bureaucracy to give the workers much more education than has been required on narrow economic grounds, and perhaps more than is safe for the privileged groups. It may be argued that the bureaucracy is thus breeding its own grave-diggers. Such a view may well overdramatise the prospect. But clearly the dynamics of Soviet society are becoming enriched with new contradictions and tensions which will not, I think, allow it to stagnate and ossify under the domination of a ‘new class.’