Dear David Johnson
Perhaps you think I wrote a turgid convoluted apology for Stalin and that
makes me a loonie toon not
worth an email, but the truth is that I am an honorary Sovok
and I am traumatised by what happened, like millions
of other Sovki (I lived through it all, I still have
family in Russia, and I was not some cosseted ex-pat either). Probably that
explains why I have trouble formulating my thoughts. Post-traumatic-shock
syndrome. Ask any Russian not driving a foreign car. It makes you feel
timid, confused, apologetic, easy prey for overconfident
When I first went to
Yes, there was no socialist
But the argument is simple enough. It hasn't changed. It goes like this:
Capitalism is one, single, world system. Poles of plenty (you live in one)
plunder zones of poverty. The rich get richer.
Postwar miracles happened only because of the existence of the
Actually, Genghis-khan was better than I credit him for, comparatively. Your
lot are much worse. And since those doing the
plundering know as well as anyone the lessons of history, there is no point
whatever in all the handwringing and abject pleading,
begging your rockribbed readers to lay off a bit and stop
the quiet genocide, give the poor folks down on the kolkhoz a chance etc.
No-one is listening. You must ahve felt that last
night when you (and I, and three other people) grasped the awesome significance
of the Chubais tape, and then found that not a single
British or American newspaper ran it, except the miserable piece in the
But you better watch out -- once they've made their revolution in
As for the ludicrous idea that Russians like what is happening and are glad
of the new freedom etc, well, you've seen the place and so have I. They have
just lived through one of the most heroic and horrific sieges in history, and
they are demoralised and defeated. People in
They don't struggle much for the same reason workers don't struggle much any place.
Because, for one thing, no-one has any illusions any more. Everyone knows that revolution is nasty and messy and terrifying and not a think to go in for chanting verses by William Morris or singing battle hymns. Everyone knows, apart from a few American professors, that the era of social reforms is over. People (I mean workers, ie the majority on this newly-urbainsed planet, and capitalists too for that matter) know that there is just no point (I'm not talking about neighbourghood eco-kindergarten-clean-streets struggles). Nowadays, even the tiniest struggle has revolutionary implications, or none at all. It is that knowledge, now seeped deep into the collective pschosis of the Beltway political class, which has turned the US into not just any global gendarme, but a panting paranoiac Schwarzennegger cyborg, with tinny little loudspeakers somewhere around kneecap level that spout words like 'socialism in Russia from 1917-91 was evil ... millions murdered ...ecological and demographic disasters for all involved etc. ... overwhelming evidence on this score ... for all our numerous faults, West is better, one need only ask those who voted with their feet ...' voices of people with names like Blank, who obviously do not really exist except in the weird dreams of some Pentagon lab. That's what the vicitms hear as they drown and suffocate and are trampled.
I have been catching up on some reading and read two excellent books recently. One is Walter Laqueuer's 1992 book 'Black Hundred' about the rebirth of the Russian far right (it reads like a RAND report written when Zhirinovsky suddenly began to get pluralities; Laqueur concludes that there is nothing to worry about, the Russian right are so mad people will prefer to live like Africans and eat grass than support them, and anyway Russians are by now inoculated against all forms of totalitarianism, right or left. So that's OK.)
Laqueur goes on about 'the unmitigated disaster' of Russia's 1917, which destroyed the country perhaps irreparably, and infected the free, generous, kindly Russian soul with a moral leprosy which made the camps not just thinkable but a mass activity.
To reassure his Beltway readers, Laqueur goes on about why Russians embrace democracy and have come to hate the hopelessness of the old regime, with its tawdry symbols, its pokazukha, its endless corruption, its Alice-in-Wonderland logic which made progress impossible, which left everyone straitjacketed, which resolutely disallowed personal initiative and looked with hard and gloomy eyes at anyone intelligent enough to be visible above the vast grey mass (I paraphrase). Communism as conspiracy, pathology, a social virus like National Socialism or fascism.
Of course, there is truth in this. And the seeds were always there. Lenin
was a great conspirator, I don't deny it. But it is a half truth which ignores
the fact that 1917 was inevitable, was not the work of one man's will, not an
act of historical irresponsibility on Lenin's part. It happened because
You may think, boring, I know all this, but hang on a minute! If you know it, all of you, why is it never reflected in your discourse?
Look, the creation of a militarised party and a huge standing army were the first results of the 1918-21 Civil War -- itself the product of the defeat of revolution in Germany. And these mutations -- Cheka, monolithism, suppression of the SRs etc. -- were further accelerated by other acts of the outside capitalist world -- of the subsequent "Encirclement" and "containment", put in place after Rappallo (1923) and while Hitler was brewed in the beast's belly. The distortion went deeper. Lenin said that soviet democracy, for all its shortcomings, was a 'million times more democratic' than bourgeois democracy -- because it was not based on private property and the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, or of the peasant from the land; or of the alienation of the whole community from the natural world -- yes, he said all that. What we got was the opposite -- but why?
Why do you want to pretend that history never happened, except when it suits you? Why do even the academics, especially them, always take the easy way out: Lenin was a liar, a hypocrite, ate babies at breakfast, etc, his program was unconscionable irresponsibility or else deceit, and anyway life teaches that these utopian experiments always end badly et cetera...
Lenin's utopic vision, like that of certain premarket societies, was based on a different relationship to the land -- coexistence and respect, not plunder and use. Read the _April Theses_ (it's quite short) and _State and Revolution_. From them came what? Not the 'toilers' kingdom of heaven on earth' he spoke of. Not the utopic dream of a garden-socialism. Came instead, the behemothic scale of Soviet industrialisation, where mountains like Magnitka were turned into holes in the round, and this was hailed under the sign of the conquest of nature, and the Five Year Plans legitimised the specifically Soviet despoliation of nature, with its mindlessness, its rapacity, its mind-boggling scale. But why? As Lenin might have said, _Encirclement, Encirclement and again, Encirclement_.
The Soviet Commune had to defend itself and built heavy industry for that
purpose -- and pretended and soon believed this out-of-control monster of heavy
industry was a stepping stone to socialism. The Commune was forced into the
absurdity of building Socialism in One Country, because and only because of _Encirclement_.
Or do we think that Trotsky, or Keresnky, or Emma
Goldman, had some magic cure-all alternative? Before forgetting what happened
in Soviet times, as you are all in danger of doing, let us think for a moment
why it happened.Mayakovsky said, _look at my Soviet
passport and envy me_. But Socialism in One Country had to begin by
confiscating the passports. Because it cannot exist without a
tremendous mobilisation of every social resource,
including crucially the intelligentsia. And naturally, middle class
intellectual wankers do not like this. So they leave
the country to work in the
Once the passports were gone, the madhouse began. Read Platonov! Every relationship, even between motherhood, was perverted to one of potential criminality and denunciation. The proletarian project became overnight a prison camp. Criminality thereupon flourished with literally no limit, since there were no longer even the conventional borders which exist in the west between crime and lawfulness. It was enough to have your motives suspected, in Socialism in One Country, to end up in a labour camp. But, tell me please, how could it be otherwise, given the baleful, omnipresent reality of Encirclement?Well, I grant you, it could have been otherwise.There was an alternative.
Not, however, the optimistic variants of history-falsification of Norman Stone et al, or the spooky fantasies of some of your correspondents.
They always forget that the Bolsheviks could not precede themselves and were the product of a colossal breakdown in the world capitalist system, that it was the system which produced the mutations including both Lenin and Hitler.No, the alternative to Bolshevism was _Africa*.That was what they dreamt of, not just Hitler, but the Harmsworths, the Hearsts -- the Rupert Murdochs of their day -- and many many others.
Victory by Hitler. No more Russians alive anywhere.You think that wasn't the
alternative to Socialism in One Country? But I assure you, it definitely was. And before we shed any more crocodile tears on behalf of the split
homes, the broken lives, the KGB victims. etc., let us dwell on this.Or do we prefer to believe that
Well, I continue. My point is this: Socialism in One Country required the sacrifice of the one to the many, and the sacrifice was made not with justice but expediency, and survival in mind.And all the time that Encirclement cast its shadow, the Comrades perversely made a glorious success out of the desperate straits Encirclement forced on them, out of the Alice-in-Wonderland it made of socialism. This was the petard they hoist themselves, by foolishly making a virtue out of a dire necessity.
Thus, when crises erupted and difficulties flowed -- famines from collectivisation, the effects of the purges -- it was explained or justified not as contradictions and deformations resulting from the defence of socialism, as the price to be paid for preserving the fundamental gains of the revolution (And they could have, could easily demonstrate that it was no argument that human rights were paramount, for example the right to work or not to work, or the right to travel and to leave the country. Such individual rights were secondary to the rights enjoyed by the mass -- were self-evidently injurious to the socialism which brought them all so many material benefits, gave them security and most of all gave them hope. You simply couldn't, in a nutshell, allow engineers, let alone doctors, physicists, composers, metallurgists etc., leave for the States). Because to allow such things would collapse the system, which depended upon a total politicising of society, total conscription of the workforce, total mobilisation of all resources, especially human ones _in conditions of encirclement, ie siege_. The right to emigrate would cause a mass exodus under conditions of forced mass mobilisation required to build the country in the early years. But the alternative was to return to markets and a restoration of capitalism in Russia, which I repeat would inevitably doom the country to become another Africa, one on the very doorstep of Europe, one to which merchant adventurers would not need to travel by uncertain ocean voyages, and then to live in disease-ridden, unfamiliar surroundings; Russia was only a drive down an autobahn after all, as Hitler's Wehrmacht knew. People in the West cannot imagine what backwardness means until they see it and touch it. It is not a matter for the imagination, because all that faculty can do is to rework the contents of real experience. Russia is still today a backward country and that backwardness is seen in the psychology of the average Russian, especially one who lives in the provinces: suspicion, distrust of novelty, shiftiness, tactical opportunism, laziness, thieving, irresponsibility are all characteristics of people whose level of understanding of what it means to live in a civil society is primitive, for whom civilisation is still in fact something threatening, foreign, burdensome. Imagine the situation sixty or seventy years ago, then, when the Bolsheviks announced the dream of constructing a vast modern industrial society to these people's grandparents, who knew only the village, who had never seen perpendicular lines, who wore bast shoes made of straw and lynched the first teams of agricultural engineers sent to demonstrate to them the workings and potentialities of the few dozen - pitifully small number - of Fordson tractors which Lenin had imported for the purpose - because they convinced themselves that this was the devil's work, believing satanic imps lived inside the noisy, fuming engines.
In 1916 the British sent an armoured-car brigade, Dunsterforce, to bolster up the sagging moral of the Tsar's
troops. These English heroes found themselves thrown into the whirlpool of
revolution and, forgotten by their masters in
In the
The Commune failed.
But it was not Socialism which failed. It was not Lenin's great dream which failed. They were never even tried and as Lenin knew and said, there can only be socialism in the world as a whole. There cannot be socialism in one country.
Those who think or pretend that the iniquities and crimes committed in the
Soviet era were the inevitable result of what is seen as an arbitrary
abandonment of the laws of the market and of the civilised
values and human rights and freedoms which arise from them, are wrong.
Encircled, damaged by the folly of its rulers, savaged by the armies of Hitler,
Soviet socialism, which was not true socialism but only a pale shadow of it,
still managed to guarantee its citizens higher living standards, more creature
comforts, better medical care, a higher life expectancy, more personal
security, than they will experience again in this century. The
The other book I read and heartily recommend is Stephen Kotkin,
Before Blank rubbishes Soviet history he should address some of Kotkin's concerns. Magnitka was the microcosm of the new world they were intent on creating, with its emphasis on work and welfare, on planned cities, with urban environments not like industrial cities in the west or the shanty-towns of developing countries, but with all the facilities necessary for raising cultural levels and opportunities for self-improvement; with housing guaranteed for all as a social right, and every form of communal provision encouraged - in Magnitka there was everything, from public lending libraries which even by 1936 had gramophone record depts, to cinemas, schools, clubs, institutes, nurseries, trade union palaces of culture, communal laundries, communal eating facilities - and in the first super-blocks of workers housing, the workers each were given a cell; everything was done communally and the family itself was set to wither away, until it was rehabilitated in 1936. But all these grandiose visions and social goals conflicted not only with the privations caused by want of everything, so that many workers lived in tents and mud huts for years at a time, while the socialist utopia was built around them (and the bosses lived in 'Amerikanka' - the settlement of big dachas originally meant for American engineers, where the plant director Iakov Gugel lived in splendour, with chauffeur-driven cars, horses, a sleigh, a carriage, servants, a music room, billiards room etc. - until his arrest by the NKVD as an Enemy of the People - he was executed in 1937).
They also conflicted with the reality of encirclement, (
In subsequent decades the great social experiment in Russia stimulated or forced its capitalist competitors to emulate it: Roosevelt's New Deal; the creation of welfare states in post-war Europe - all took as their model the kinds of social provision first elaborated in the great social experiments in Russia. But the Bolsheviks themselves based their conception of socialism on an idea of industrial organisation which was not their own, but was copied directly from the most advanced developments within capitalism: the factories of Henry Ford and the great American steelworks were the models they followed. So what is the enemy Blank fears, and you fear?
Soviet socialism was a part of the twentieth century's accommodation with
the vast upheavals of the nineteenth century, when masses of peasants were
decanted from the land and sent to work in satanic industrial cities. In fact,
Soviet socialism exhausted its historical potential by 1945. From that time
onwards it became a deeply conservative force, a roadblock in the way of
history. Once it was swept away, a fortress of old resistance to the curses of
capitalism, nothing was left to prevent the final emergence of a truly global
capitalism and its social counterpart, a truly global working class.Perhaps the liquidation of the Soviet Commune has now
created, not the capitalist utopia Blank craves, but the preconditions for the
World Revolution which Lenin dreamt of.
Regards,Mark jones