When Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev lead the Soviet Union from 1955-1964, he made radical change and eliminated the repression of Stalin’s time. Khrushchev ended the GULAG and freed the millions of political prisoners. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, exposing the horrors of Stalin’s prison camps, was published, in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. He also brought down the huge secret service from a “Ministry of Internal Affairs#8221; to a smaller “Committee of State Security.” In denouncing Stalin, Khrushchev put an end to the “cult of personality” that treated Stalin like a god, and rehabilitated the millions who died in the purges. He put a moratorium on the death penalty.
Khrushchev also made government positions elected, not simply appointed through a corrupt patronage systems. Government leaders were responsible to the Communist Party, not the other way around like under Stalin when it just rubber stamped his decisions. He also fought to decentralize government administration into regions. His speeches and memoirs often attack careerists who join the party just for a comfy positon and nice desk job. Some of the strongest evidence in Khrushchev’s favor that he fought against bureaucracy and remnants of Stalinism was that the bureaucrats attacked and eventually removed him in 1964.
How did a group of American Socialist labor organizers called the Socialist Union of America, coming from the dissident Bolshevik tradition of Leon Trotsky, see the Soviet Union under Khrushchev? They believed the Soviet Union was a great Socialist society, but nevertheless suffered from remnants of Stalin’s dictatorship and bureaucracy.
The Socialist Union of America (SU) began as a faction in the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1950’s. The SWP belonged to Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky’s organization, the Fourth International, also known as the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI). Both the SWP and the ISFI were founded in 1938, although their roots went back to the opposition to Stalin in the Communist Party. Until the end of World War Two, the SWP was a democratic Marxist-Leninist organization. The leader, James Cannon, was not a dictator and the party held open debates. However Trotsky’s death in 1940 removed Trotsky’s oversight. Mcarthyism in the US tore away members, making the party smaller and more dogmatic. As one of the party’s foremost female leaders said of the late 1940’s, “When Cannon spoke, the discussion tended to come to an end. Was everyone convinced? Or were differences just being dropped, suppressed?” One of the doctrines was Cannon’s “Theses on the American Revolution” from WWII, which said a revolution was in the making and capitalism was entering depression. Although true in the 1930’s, the leadership continued to teach this into the 1950’s. Another holdover from the Stalin era pre-1950’s was a doctrine that the Soviet government was the major impediment to world revolution. Thus the SWP’s continued belief that Communist parties were “counterrevolutionary obstacles,” added to the sectarianism. It was becoming sectarian in the sense of requiring agreement with specific doctrines, a fervor for revolutionary times, and not allying with similar groups.
At the same time, a minority in the SWP opposed these trends. The minority consisted of the party’s base in labor and the ISFI, amounting to 1/3 of the members. They were led by Bert Cochran, Harry Braverman, and Jules Geller, major union figures in the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers, and United Rubber Workers respectively. Milton Zaslow, who led the SWP’s New York City branch, and George Clarke, the party’s delegate to the ISFI also led the opposition. The minority agreed with the views of the ISFI. In the wake of Stalin’s death, the ISFI looked at social changes in Eastern Europe and China. It decided that Communist parties had become revolutionary and it was time to work with or inside them. The ISFI said reforms were another way to democratize Soviet society, but the SWP leaders said the USSR still needed a political revolution.
In the meantime, McCarthyism brought radical workers and the Communist Party closer together because of their common oppression. The leadership of unions like the CIO, the industrial union federation, made a witch hunt to expel radical activists. The unionists of the Cochran opposition allied with the Communists in the CIO to fight the purges. But the SWP leaders rejected this tactic as “soft towards Stalinism.”
Perhaps there were other reasons why the Trotskyist workers were pro-Soviet compared to the SWP leadership. For one, they were low-paid. Sol Dollinger, the UAW organizer in Flint, Michigan, got $5,000 a year and rented a place for his family. According to Trotsky, the Shachtmanites who left the SWP in 1940 had become viciously anti-Soviet because they were isolated from the workers. The workers, on the other hand, had a natural tendency to see through anti-Communist propaganda and admire the Soviet Union because it cared for the poor. In addition, the Trotskyist workers were forged with the Communists in a common struggle against company bosses and bureaucratic union leaders. There were radical activists with shared experiences: Zaslow was an organizer in New York’s Young Communist League until the Moscow Frame-up Trials of Old Guard Bolsheviks in 1937.
What was happening to the Communists, the Cochran group argued, was happening to the whole left in the McCarthy era. Socialists had better understand that the labor movement was in decline. It was time to unite, not break up the movement over doctrines.
The minority explained the fight in the SWP in its open letter The Roots of the Party Crisis of April 1953. It said the SWP leaders used their positions of authority against the minority, even while they tried to maintain unity and both sides agreed there were no “fundamental differences.” The letter claimed that a failure to recognize the decline of radicalism brought the SWP leaders to “a barren sectarianism that makes a doctrinaire panacea of ’independence.’#8221;
The authors wrote that even after the SWP leaders accepted important positions of the Cochran group they learned nothing and continued their attacks. For example, the minority wanted the SWP to emphasize building a mass party controlled by the working class, even if the SWP did not lead it. The SWP leaders denounced this as “liquidationism,” but later adopted the policy. Similarly when Cochran proposed that Eastern European countries were “deformed workers states,” Cannon rejected this as creating “a danger of conciliation with Stalinism.” But after the ISFI Third World Congress accepted Cochran’s definition, so did the SWP.
But the SWP leaders continued to fear “conciliation with Stalinism.” They rejected the minority’s demand for an alliance with the Communists in the unions. At the same time, the union leaders attacked the Communists. The Cochran group said that the SWP’s alliance with “progressive” union bureaucrats against Communists was no longer feasible.
The letter denounced the SWP’s unqualified attacks on the Communists as “vulgar anti-Stalinism.” The authors said that during the Cold War, U.S. imperialism was a greater threat than Stalinist totalitarianism. But the SWP released a “flood of invective, epithet, and incomprehensible characterizations” and failed to distinguish itself from bourgeois anti-Stalinists. The SWP claimed that American workers were “progressive anti-Stalinists#8221;—Socialists who just didn’t like Stalin. But the Cochran group said that McCarthyism made workers in the U.S. unable to distinguish between Soviet Communism and Stalinism. In practice, vulgar anti-Stalinism meant glossing over the second round of anti-Communist trials in the U.S. It could be prevented “based on a realistic Marxist conception of the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.”
The minority members like David Herreshoff believed breaking up the party would be unprincipled. Unfortunately the SWP leaders didn’t see it that way. At the end of October 1953 the Cochran group boycotted the 25th anniversary of the American Trotskyists’ expulsion from the Communist Party. In turn, the Cochran group was expelled from the SWP. In November the SWP left the ISFI.
The Cochran group then became the Socialist Union. Its monthly newspaper was the American Socialist and it had an internal discussion bulletin called the Educator, a name of an earlier auto union bulletin. As the bulletin’s title implied, the SU focused on radical union work and informing students and professors. It was involved in the infant Civil Rights movement—Civil Rights attorney Conrad Lynd was an editor of American Socialist. The SU also focused on a regroupment of revolutionary Socialists, especially on the periphery of the Communist Party. American Socialist published articles by dissident Communist James Starobin, Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, and NAACP founder and Communist WEB Dubois. The SU held forums around regroupment for hundreds of people. It envisioned a nondogmatic organizational structure in the spirit of 1920’s pro-Bolshevik Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs. Deb’s colleague George Shoaff also served on the editing board of American Socialist. On the other hand, the SU was not geared towards winning elections.
The Socialist Union’s delegate to the ISFI was George Clarke, who attended its Fourth Congress in 1954. Erwin Baur, one of the founders of the SWP and the SU recalled that contact with the ISFI was through correspondence. But from the point of view of the ISFI, the SWP was bigger and had a prestigious history. At the same time, the American labor movement was isolated from the European one. The ISFI wanted to heal the hurt, so to speak, from the SWP’s withdrawal from the ISFI and bring everyone back together in a reunification. But the SU didn’t want to be part of the SWP anymore and its work in the ISFI slowed down.
Unfortunately, the SU met the bane of many promising organizations under adverse conditions- not enough revenue. The last edition of American Socialist carries a sad plea to find new readers. That was December, 1959. Only in a few years would the Left experience a rebirth with the Antiwar movement.
Braverman went on to become editor of Monthly Review. Zaslow helped found the revolutionary Socialist organization Solidarity and edit its magazine Against the Current. Baur joined Solidarity and the Communist organization Committees of Correspondence. They also continued in the Fourth International. If ISFI could claim in a 1953 resolution that the SU continued the Trotskyist movement in America, then these organizations carry on the work of the SU.
What was the SU’s view of the Soviet Union during Khrushchev’s time? The articles in American Socialist come from many authors, so one must absorb all the views to get an overall impression.
After Stalin died in 1953, the Chairman Georgy Malenkov took over. But Malenkov was implicated in Stalin’s crimes and agriculture failed, so Khrushchev replaced him in February 1955. In the April edition of American Socialist, Harry Braverman wrote Malenkov’s Fall and the Agricultural Problem in Russia. He said that Malenkov’s peaceful removal was part of “a definite step away from the practices of the past” because it avoided “the violent measures of the Stalin era.”
Like other nations the Soviet Union had problems and evolved. Malenkov represented an orientation to consumer goods. Yet consumer goods, like food and clothing relied on agriculture. And Khrushchev said that agriculture was in a crisis. Collectivized agriculture was able to support a larger population than before, but didn’t rise in proportion, so the standard of living didn’t improve much.
Braverman wrote that agriculture wasn’t state owned, like industry. Instead it was run through cooperatives or “collective farms.” The peasants held on to traditional “small-capitalist aspirations,” so the collectives retained capitalist elements. They sold produce to the government and the open market. But the government didn’t have much control over what was sent to the cities. Khrushchev said that the peasants produced more than they reported and were capable of producing even more than that.
Khrushchev was experienced in agriculture. He wanted to merge the collectives into “agro-towns,” but others in the government considered it too much at once for the peasants. Some of his proposals were accepted, like a sharp rise in agricultural prices to provide incentive, but they were not enough. Only small gains registered. The state had to scale down production targets and rely on Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign, which built state farms in unsettled regions.
Braverman said that to increase production the countryside would have to modernize and the peasants would have to receive incentives and manufactured goods. The Soviet Unon had to give up on Malenkov’s consumer goods approach because of the agricultural crisis and Cold War pressure to increase defense spending. Braverman estimated that “a policy of heavy industrial development” would soon dispel “the general air of relaxation” in politics and culture. He turned out to be wrong about the second half.
In the June 1955 article Soviet Peace Offensive the editors of American Socialist described the “diplomatic duel” between NATO and the USSR in the Cold War. “The Soviet Union, forced to bring out further cards in its peace offensive, played them with a flourish.” The recent Bandung conference of Asian-African states showed the third world’s struggle with colonialism and highlighted Communism because China sent delegates, had just “smashed imperialist rule and is committed to a new social system.” The Soviets occupied Austria since WWII and signed a neutrality agreement. They wanted a buffer zone of neutral countries on the border with NATO. But NATO remilitarized the Wehrmacht, or German army, and that frightened the Soviets. As a counterbalance, they set up a unified military command in Eastern Europe.
The Soviets proposed a disarmament plan at the United Nations, but Washington objected because it would dismantle “all foreign military bases in the territory of other states.” As the editors remarked, “Washington is apparently ready to sign a ‘disarmament’ pact which would limit Russian arms, but would make generous ... provision for a rearmed West Germany and for American bomber and warship bases in an iron ring all around the USSR!#8221;
In addition, the article reported that Khrushchev, the First Party Secretary, and Bulganin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers visited Yugoslavia to re-establish close friendly relations with Tito. Stalin had tried to make Yugoslavia a satellite state, but the “Titoists” resisted and broke away. Finally, Khrushchev arranged a meeting in Paris between the major powers. It meant the capitalist ruling class was forced against its will to slacken the Cold War. Secretary of State Dulles favored a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Bloc and the Chinese feared that compromising on Taiwan could eventually result in an invasion of China. The U.S. government did not even recognize the Republic of China. Therefore the Cold War could end only if Wall Street gave up its “insane plan” to restore capitalism by force of arms. A strong and independent antiwar movement could avoid a war. Thus the editors viewed the Soviet Union as seeking peaceful coexistance with the West and blamed the Cold War on Anglo-American capitalism.
Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s Biographer, began the December 1955 article Wages in the Soviet Union by stating that “the struggle against egalitarianism became the outstanding feature of Stalin’s labor policy.” Deutscher asked, “Are [Soviet leaders] breaking with Stalinist tradition in this respect or are they upholding it?#8221;
In 1931 a wage system based largely on piece rates (wages based on output, not hours worked) and big bonuses was used to stimulate the peasants who came to the factories. It created a privileged stratum of workers.
But in the 1950’s the Stalinist wage policy of inequality became an anachronism. Skilled workers became the norm, and almost 75% of the workforce drew the special wages previously reserved for a few. Huge wage differentials ceased to provide stimulation and became superfluous. As technology expanded, labor productivity lagged. Workers easily overfulfilled output goals to get bonuses, and pressured the government to keep targets low. Basic wages had to stay low to make up for huge bonuses. The system of “competitive wages” became a disincentive.
In 1955 Bulganin told the Central Committee of the Communist Party that the wage system needed urgent reform. Deutscher wrote that the government would reduce inequality, raise basic wages and raise output goals. But that could lead to resistance, which under Khrushchev would be larger than ever. Deutscher quoted from Lenin and Trotsky that the dilemma of “the Soviet economic administrator” between antagonizing workers and sacrificing the economy “could not be removed even in the course of a number of decades.”
The post-Stalin government gave up on Stakhanovism, the system of highly paid miracle-workers. It declared labor should maintain average intensity and the workday be shortened. Most of the bonuses and high piece rates should disappear. According to Deutscher, fighting inequality would reduce the well-off workers’ privileges, and eventually the bureaucracy. He also described the Soviet Union as a society in transition from capitalism to socialism, with the wage system belonging more to the former. He believed that the growth of “socialist elements” would make inequality wither away.
Thus Deutshcher saw the Soviet Union as a “post-Stalinist society” progressing on the path to Socialism, facing the same dilemma in wages it would under Lenin, and with a leadership in the process of breaking with Stalinist traditions.
In April 1956, right after Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress, the editors of American Socialist penned The Russians Revolt against Stalin in April 1956. They wrote that the USSR became a modern industrial power with modernized agriculture, urbanization improvements in the standards of living. Hostile capitalist nations no longer encircled the USSR, rather the Soviet bloc included 1/3 of the world’s population. The nation’s new status and corresponding unleashed democratic aspirations of the people conflicted with the former system of “one-man dictatorship” and “ubiquitous police rule.” The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party realigned the USSR with the new reality and birthed a “New Russia” that “finds Stalin’s despotism odious.”
The Congress revamped the archaic structure and gave it modern and stable foundations. A “broader committee” ruled the government and deeply resolved against “the old way” of bloody struggles for power. The campaign against Stalin’s “cult of personality” and denunciation of his “20 years of dictatorship” showed that the desire for “the Leninist method of collective leadership” was real. The American Socialist’s editors applauded the deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan, for rehabilitating Trotsky’s associate Antonov-Ovseenko and referring to Lenin’s Last Testament, which the editors thereupon reprinted in full. Lenin’s Last Testament was previously suppressed because it favored Trotsky over Stalin and recommended removing the latter from the position of General Secretary.
According to the editors, the Soviet leaders hated Stalin’s system because it “degraded the individual” and “held a whole bureaucracy in the grip of unutterable fear.” They resolved to totally destroy Stalin’s cult to “make impossible a recrudescence of personal dictatorship” and assure “the millions in the government and party staffs” that they can rally behind a “whole collective committee.” In addition, the leaders loosened and decentralized the government’s top heavy structure. They regularized local congresses and gave greater autonomy in local matters. These and other measures were intended to “reestablish influence with the rank and file,” the editors wrote.
In the effort to catch up with the United States, the government would expand heavy industry. Even though it would be many years before the Soviet Union caught up, the “socialist mode” increased the nation’s industrial output 25 times and created a strong trend in its favor. The economy would focus less on living standards, but those would improve too. For example, the work week would decrease and tuition for education would end. The party would overhaul its ideology to make it “workable.” It decided to junk the “Stalin mythology,” rehabilitate some of the old names,” and “lift the dead hand of bureaucracy” from the arts and sciences. In the international sphere the government embarked on a policy of friendship with neutral nations, dealing with other Socialist countries on the basis of mutual sovereignty, and loosening its hold on satellite states. Soviet leaders talked over the heads of Western governments to their citizens on behalf of peace, the poor countries’ economic needs, and their fight against imperialism. The editors said the new policy was “undeniably a step toward a return to an internationalist perspective as against Stalin’s long night of national self-exclusiveness.”
On the other hand, the dictatorship was not a thing of the past, they said. “The stratification of Russian society ... remains the working basis of the system.” Although steps toward equality were being taken, Khrushchev’s argument that the country was not ready for the “transition to communism#8221;—the term for a communal society based on full equality and lack of government—meant that major inequalities would remain.
The editors applauded the Soviet leaders for closing “most of” Stalin’s forced labor camps, rehabilitating the inmates, and announcing a reorganization of the judicial system. Nevertheless the article said that Soviet criminal and constitutional law was unsatisfactory and lacked safeguards for civil liberties. Although the government stabilized itself through a “considerable break with past Stalinist practices in major fields,” it retained “right now” a hierarchical stratification, an obsession with monolithism, and a lack of recognition for opposition. The editors therefore were unaware of how extensive Khrushchev’s changes were—he shut down the whole GULAG. Nor did they know the exact nature of his Secret Speech until later.
In describing the pattern of events, the editors wrote that “historically, the new regime has to be considered a transient stage toward the establishment of a full political democracy of socialism.” They predicted that the Twentieth Congress set the trend for the Soviet Union and the coming years would bring more loosening up. Just as the country’s previous backwardness formed a “governing elite” under Stalin, the high level of culture in the 1950’s Soviet Union would inspire the people to democratize the nation.
The editors also noted that the doctrinal discussions at the Congress meant “a determined effort to again infuse Russian Marxism” with a pre-Stalin spark of life. They approved of Khrushchev’s diplomatic proposals to end the arms race and neutralize Europe. They also approved of the Soviet Communist party’s recommendation that foreign Communists engage in “united action” with Social Democrats. But the editors disagreed with the Communist parties’ tactic of “Peoples Front” coalitions with liberal capitalist parties because it would not succeed in any fundamental changes in the capitalist system. The article summarized its attitude toward the Soviet Union quite well in the words: “American socialists must ... have an attitude of friendship for Soviet Russia and all socialist countries ... But we socialists must retain our critical faculties about the doings in the socialist countries as about all other matters.”
In July 1956 the editors reviewed Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in the articleThe Speech that Shook the World. They said that the spectacle of Stalin’s followers and “co-workers” destroying the statues and legends of Stalin stunned the world. That Soviet society survived Stalin and that the country’s rulers could still carry with confidence after an “annihilating self-exposure” attested to the human explosive force unleashed by the 1917 revolution.
All the history books became unusable and the teaching of modern history had to be suspended. The editors added that they could not accept Khrushchev’s version of history although it was probably “several thousand percent closer” to historical truth than Stalin’s. They said Khrushchev revealed that the old Bolsheviks confessed to frame-up charges at the 1930’s purge trials because of torture. Khrushchev exposed Stalin for personally directing the police’s mass terror. Khrushchev also “admitted, in effect, that the Trotsky and Bukharin oppositionists ... were not enemies of the people, but simply political opponents of Stalin’s.” Khrushchev agreed with Stalin’s fight in the “ideological” sense but attacked the repressive measures as “a brutal violation of revolutionary legality.”
The article remarked that the end of the slave labor camps meant that they were not a component of socialist economics, but of Stalin’s terror. Although it was previously difficult to “maintain one’s faith” that beneath Stalin’s regime “a superior economic system was still at work,” increasing democratization showed “that Stalinism was an incubus, not the crowning glory, of the new socialist society.” As for Khrushchev’s lack of explanation for Stalin’s tyranny besides paranoia and “raising himself above the party,” the editors believed Russia’s headlong rush to industrialize and prior backwardness were strong factors.
They also applauded Khrushchev’s revelations for its effect on the American Communist Party. American Communists rejected the system of “frameup, terror and dictatorship” as a model and renounced their harsh judgments on Americans who criticized Stalin’s rule. Even though the Communists admitted that it equated injustices with Socialism and caused disillusionment, the editors wrote that the revelations “thoroughly discredited” the American Communist Party as an established hierarchical machine, and estimated that the mass Communist Parties in Western Europe “would not avoid crises in the days ahead.” Communists would have to make a new start on a new basis if it was going to rally American radicals once more.
Later in What’s Happening in Russia, the American Socialist’s editors described the battles within the Soviet leadership since 1953 between Stalin’s Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Malenkov on one side and Khrushchev and the famous World War II Marshall Georgy Zhukov on the other. While the reformist Malenkov was in power from 1953 to 1955, he focused more on consumer goods than on the common hopes of loosening up after Stalin’s death. But Khrushchev would not accept improvements in living standards at the price of a sharp decrease in heavy industry, the article said. So at first he joined with Stalinist leaders like Molotov to make Malenkov resign from the chairmanship. Molotov was a “diehard Stalinist” in the sense that he favored Stalin, his methods and rigidity, and opposed reforms. But Khrushchev quickly broke off his “alliance” with Molotov and promoted “peaceful coexistence” in the international sphere.
Although the reforms leading up to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech were considerable, they aggravated tensions at the base of Soviet society because they did not satisfy people’s democratic desires. At the Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev exposed Stalin and dealt a crushing blow to his “Stalinist diehard” opponents. But Khrushchev the administrator had let the genie out of the bottle in his liberalizations. “Questions began to be asked” and discussions climaxed in revolutions in Hungary and Poland. But after the outbursts, “the Stalinist die-hards, reinforced by new supporters moved in ... The revolution in Hungary was put down by brute force.” Malenkov felt strong enough to attack economic planning under Khrushchev, who was hard-pressed to “rediscover that ‘Stalin was a great Marxist.’” The editors said that in late 1956, the Malenkov and Stalinist diehard groups were “ascendant.”
Nevertheless, Khrushchev enjoyed “great support in the party machine,” agricultural success, and launched an offensive in March 30, 1957 to decentralize industry from vertical trusts to regional economic councils. He carried the day at the Supreme Soviet meeting of May 7, 1957, broke up and reshuffled the industrial bureaucracy with ease. The editors mentioned that Isaac Deutscher said Khrushchev rested on a nation-wide revulsion against the bureaucracy and set the provincial bureaucrats against Moscow hierarchs.
But the opposition was really biding its time. They welded together a majority at a small Presidium meeting in June 17, 1957, but Khrushchev demanded a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He commanded such a majority that with the help of Georgy Zhukov he expelled Malenkov, Molotov, and the other Stalinists from the Central Committee and gave them lesser posts. As Khrushchev designated the deposed group as the “anti-party group,” he has succeeded in removing his rivals.
The editors concluded that the Twentieth Party Congress did not basically affect the dictatorial apparatus of the government because there were no other ways to resolve disputes than through intrigues and coup-d’etats. The people did not have control over the government’s decisions and party members had to follow their leaders. The changes would probably not transgress the bounds of a non responsible police state, and although it tried to relieve tensions, it fears “any initiative and independent organization from below.” Despite continuing methods of intrigues, the reforms show that the leaders were being carried along by the swift currents of history.
Nevertheless, analysis should not be based on Khrushchev’s power moves alone. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev came forward when the people’s thirst for democracy contradicted the dictatorial structure’s wastefulness. The structure remained unstable because it did not end the contradictions between modernism and an outdated police-like bureaucracy. Some forcible pressure from below would be necessary to create the conditions for a democratic Socialist government, although, the editors concluded, the path to those changes no one could fully predict. Thus the editors’ tone was more negative tone than in their earlier articles because of the events in Hungary and Khrushchev’s victory over his rivals, although the editors favored his positions more.
In his 1961 book The Cross of the Moment, Bert Cochran remarked on the effect of the Soviet Union on the United States. He said that the “Russian Sputniks” and Soviet achievements made Americans receptive to new impressions and gave them interest in contrast to their previous passivity and dependence on governing elites to formulate perspectives. Bert Cochran described the effect of Soviet achievements like Sputnik on American society. He said it became more receptive to and interested in foreign affairs. In addition, Soviet achievements “drastically altered” the world balance of power. The post Stalin shakeup destroyed the western caricature of Soviet society because it meant Russia was not a frozen solid block but changed over time. Uninhibited exchange trips also revealed “what was mystery and enigma before.” (to alter a quote of Winston Churchill.” In fact, Soviet society was no less stable “than most of the Western nations.” The question for Western scholars was no longer whether Soviet society could work, nor was it efficient, but how efficient. However the managerial class was growing ...
Thus the Socialist Union of America, an offshoot of the American SWP, retained a sympathetic attitude towards Khrushchev’s Soviet Union because it was a socialist country, had a collective leadership, and moved in the direction of full democratic socialism. Nevertheless the SU retained criticisms of it in regards to remaining dictatorship, inequality, and bureaucracy.
Appendix: Interview with Paul Siegel, April 12, 2004. Siegel edited the SWP’s book Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art. He also wrote for the American Socialist and is currently member of Socialist Action. April 12, 2004.
The Cochran group charged the SWP with sectarianism and Siegel agrees with them on the charge. He joined the Cochran group because he felt the SWP had become sectarian. It was using old language and not reaching out to the American people.
Siegel contributed mostly book reviews to the magazine Braverman edited. He went to work in Nippins, Wisconsin in the post war jobs splurge. However there wasn’t any opportunity to play an important role in that area. [considering what had gone on in the Great Depression radicalization] However, the local university trustees were highly conservative, led by Russell Kirk. Siegel called on the trustees to withdraw their resolution to create a conservative institute there. Siegel had tenure, but they were happy to release him when he later found a job in Long Beach, NY. Siegel was active in the antiwar movement, which was significant. In 1978 he rejoined the SWP through SWP leader George Novack.
Siegel said that there is no question Cochran became demoralized: not long ago he told Siegel, “I have undergone a reincarnation” and given up on revolutionary politics. [Paul Leblanc in History of U.S. Trotskyism explains that Cochran did not see prospects for a revolution in the 1980’s.] On the other hand “Braverman became the editor of Monthly Review. Braverman is an independent Socialist. Braverman was able to work with Socialist Action, but didn’t rejoin. There were not too many in the SU and they went in different directions.” Siegel maintains personal friendships, and spoke to them.
“For a while they [the SU] were carrying on. They had hopes. They did some achievements and a magazine. It petered out, but played a role.” [I asked, “the main accusation of the SWP against the SU was ’demoralization.’ Was that true?#8221;] “No, that wasn’t the SWP’s accusation, because they [in the SU] were active. Their main concern was with Ernest Mandel.”
Additional interviews taken with
Erwin Baur, April 11, 2004. (who had a soft voice)
Frank Fried, April 7, 2004. (who was quite lively)
David Herreshoff, April 8, 2004.
Paul Spiegel, April 12, 2004.
# Khrushchev saw himself as a man of the 1920's, going back to his service in the Russian Civil War, between the Communist and Monarchist armies. When Khrushchev led the Soviet Union, he was always trying to return it to #822o;Leninist norms,#8221; meaning the way it had been before Stalin. People learned once again that Trotsky was one of the main leaders in the Russian Revolution and that Stalin's trials of the old Bolsheviks were frame ups, after it had been hidden from them for so long.#
When Leon Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks fought Stalin, Khrushchev was just a low-ranking party member in the Ukraine. At first he sympathized with local Communists from his area who opposed Stalin. But one of Stalin#8217;s followers named Kaganovich befriended Khrushchev and tricked him to believe in Stalin, like many other naïve citizens did.
Khrushchev stayed in the Ukraine during the Stalin#8217;s terror and was not one of its leaders. He was especially disillusioned when he realized Stalin's incompetence in WWII. Why then did he keep silent? This was one question a delegate passed on up to Khrushchev at a Congress where he revealed the crimes. Khrushchev shouted demonstratively, #8220;who wrote this?#8221; Nobody answered. #8220;Now you understand why I did not speak up,#8221; he said. At first, Khrushchev and other low-level party members were sucked in to believing Stalin was the best political leader. He fooled them with democratic pretensions. Later it was a mix of heavy deception, when even honest people from other countries could not detect false confessions, and fear for his own safety that kept him from speaking up.
However, Trotsky and victims in the Moscow frame up Trials were not rehabilitated until Gorbachev#8217;s time. In his memoirs, Khrushchev claims they weren#8217;t rehabilitated earlier because of pressure from foreign Communist leaders. #8220;What one doesn#8217;t do, another will do,#8221; he predicted. But foreign sectors were not the only places pressure would have come from. During Brezhnev#8217;s time, several books came out attacking Trotsky.
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003).
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).
Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev (Boston : Little, Brown, 1990).
On the web:
Khrushchev's Secret Speech:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html
Kaganovich accuses Khrushchev of "Trotskyism":
http://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv5n1/khrushch.htm
See also:
Bryan Palmer, Before Braverman: Harry Frankel and the American workers' movement
(http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1132/8_50/53972890/p1/article.jhtml)
# Paul LeBlanc, Trotskyism in the United States (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1996), 201.
One of the Socialist Union founders, David Herreshoff said, speaking of the post-war years that the SWP #8220;tended to become more and more tight laced as time went on.#8221; He said there was religiosity, for example one of the leaders, George Novack incanted #8220;The party is ordained by history. We need a revolution.#8221; With less than a thousand members, the leaders spoke as if they commanded millions. But Herreshoff also said that Cannon was not an authoritarian dictator.
David Herreshoff, phone interview, April 7, 2004.
# Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism 1929-1985 A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 826, 839.
# Al Hansen, Introduction, in James P. Cannon, Speeches to the Party (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 16-17.
# Alexander, 836-838.
Cochran was the SWP#8217;s Trade Union Committee chairman and ISFI organizer during and after WWII. Some say he was the main candidate for SWP leader when Cannon retired.
As with the Cochran group, the SWP accused the ISFI of #8220;capitulation to Stalinism.#8221;
(see: Fourth International Resolution. November 20, 1953. Declaration of IS Bureau of the FI.) This resolution repeats the Educator in stating the Cochran minority was 1/3 of the SWP members.
# Louis Proyect, The Cochran-Braverman Legacy (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/Cochranite.htm last accessed 4-17-04).
# Karin Baker and Patrick Quinn, Remembering Milt and Edith Zaslow: A lifetime for Socialism (http://solidarity.igc.org/atc/baker71.html last accessed 4-17-04).
Louis Proyect, Remembering Sol Dollinger (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/SolDollinger.htm last accessed 4-17-04).
# Cochran Faction, The Roots of the Party Crisis-Its Causes and Solution, SWP Internal Bulletin, April 1953. It gives an example of the procedures against the minority: when election costs strained party finances, Clarke, the remaining minority member on the SWP#8217;s full time staff, was removed during a downsizing operation.
# Cochran Faction, The Roots of the Party Crisis—Its Causes and Solution.
According to the letter, the long term effect of adapting to the U.S. workers#8217; #8220;progressive anti-Stalinism#8221; appeared in the Shactmanites#8217; and Socialist Party#8217;s acceptance of U.S. imperialism. Years later the truth of this analysis was borne out when Max Shachtman supported the Vietnam War. It was only late in the war when the Socialist leader Michael Harrington objected.
The letter also explained that the SWP should engage in more propaganda work to attract the vanguard of the workers. The SWP was a party in program and hopes, but not yet in fact because there was little class-consciousness. Raising it would do much more than elections. Thus the open letter contained both criticisms and advice.
# Alexander, 323, 840.
The SWP and Gerry Healy in Britain set up the International Committee of the Fourth International. It did not have congresses and the SWP rejoined the ISFI in 1963, now renamed the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI).
# Louis Proyect, Reflections on the Cochranites" (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/reflections_on_the_cochranites.htm last accessed 4-17-04).
The issue of the environment was also raised: Reuben Borough from Upton Sinclair#8217;s End Poverty Campaign wrote in the American Socialist that corporate greed depletes the environment. Public enterprise could develop renewable energy, not businesses focused on immediate profit. Here we could give as an example the Hoover Dam or Sweden#8217;s solar power. Herreshoff later became active in Western Canada#8217;s environmental movement.
Deb#8217;s colleague George Shoaff was another editor of American Socialist
# Alexander, 548.
# Interview with Erwin Baur, April 11, 2004.
# American Socialist, December 1959.
# Interview with Baur.
# Fourth International Resolution. November 20, 1953. Declaration of IS Bureau of the FI.
Baur and other SU members continued in the unions. Cochran wrote Labor and Communism, the Conflict that Shaped American Unions. (Old copies of this book are available in Russian libraries.) According to Leblanc in History of US Trotskyism, in later works later Cochran remained radical, but tried to be realistic in terms of revolution. He claimed American workers didn#8217;t have a #8220;will to power#8221; but that a socio-economic crisis would cause a populist upsurge. Dollinger was in the anti Vietnam war movement and the Peace and Freedom Party. Later Dollinger and his wife Genora were in the movies The Great Sit-Down Strike, With Babies and Banners and about 1930's auto strikes. Clarke died tragically in a car accident at a young age.
We mustn#8217;t judge the SWP harshly. Braverman #8220;did, however, reject Cannonism as too sectarian and dogmatic, while at the same time respecting the SWP#8217;s work in defense of the Cuban revolution, the African-American struggle, and in the movement against the Vietnam War. He also never lost his respect and admiration for James Cannon.#8221;
Michael G. Livingston, Harry Braverman: Marxist Activist and Theorist (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/harry_braverman.htm last accessed 4-26-04)
See also:
Bryan Palmer, Before Braverman: Harry Frankel and the American workers#8217; movement (http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1132/8_50/53972890/p1/article.jhtml)
# Harry Braverman, Malenkov#8217;s Fall and the Agricultural Problem in Russia, American Socialist 2, no.4 (1955): 12.
# Braverman, Malenkov#8217;s Fall and the Agricultural Problem in Russia, 13, 12-15.
Agriculture failed relative to the rapid rise in industry. It did not fail in absolute terms—the per capita output of wheat transcended that of the U.S.
Khrushchev remarked in 1953 that sometimes a local official #8220;makes a tour of the collective farms in an automobile, covers half the district in one day, and not infrequently gives his instructions without even stepping out of the car.#8221; One of his later proposals was to send thousands of agronomists from desk jobs into the farm regions.
# Soviet Peace Offensive, American Socialist 2, no. 6 (1955): 3.
# Soviet Peace offensive, 3.
# Soviet Peace offensive, 4.
# Here #8220;Titoists#8221; means #8220;followers of Tito.#8221; Similarly, those who follow Mao Tse-Tung are called #8220;Maoists.#8221; Before Khrushchev came, the Cochran group sometimes referred to Communists as #8220;Stalinists#8221; because they followed Stalin. Khrushchev#8217;s ideal was to return the Soviet Union to its days under Lenin, and people often call him a #8220;Marxist-Leninist.#8221;
# Soviet Peace offensive, 3-5.
# Isaac Deutscher, Wages in the Soviet Union, American Socialist 2, no.12 (1955): 14.
The three volumes of Deutscher's biography of his friend Trotsky are entitled Trotsky: the Prophet Armed; the Prophet Unarmed; and the Prophet Outcast.
# Deutscher, Wages in the Soviet Union, 17.
# Deutscher, Wages in the Soviet Union, 14-17.
Soviet worker productivity had reached Western European standards, but it was still lagging because it was only a third of American standards and its equipment was comparable.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, American Socialist 3, no. 4 (1956): 3.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 4.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 5.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 5-6.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 6.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 6-7.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 7.
# The Russians Revolt Against Stalin, 7-8.
The editors also write that the Twentieth Congress thrust the world Communist Parties into a crisis and raised the #8220;question of whether parties can by little dictators who are themselves only robots.#8221;