Bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR. Quotations on the topic “Bourgeois counter-revolution The connection of two revolutions
One of the serious stumbling blocks in disputes between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet (yes, there are some, I mean rejection of the Union) anti-liberals of the left wing today is the attitude towards the USSR of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev period, some of the realities of which the pro-Soviet ones usually reproach.
In a nutshell, anti-liberal patriots who dislike the USSR in today's Russian Federation argue their rejection of Soviet socialism by the social structure that they found as teenagers and youths and that looked unacceptable to them, the repetition of which they would not want in the new post- liberal sovereign and prosperous Russia, which everyone would like to see on the site of the current colony.
All the obvious (especially against the backdrop of Putin's peripheral colonial capitalism) pluses of the socialist Soviet system fade for them in comparison with these minuses, forcing them to reject the socialist path of development as such when discussing the topic - "where should we go, having done away with the 27-year-old liberal- comprador occupation that has come since the counter-revolution of 1991?
I was looking for arguments for a long time, but now I found them, briefly and accurately formulated, by chance, in a material that did not promise any discoveries, it would seem, which I share with you for discussion...
The main ideological postulate of the article: "Stalinism is an integral part of Marxism."
The main idea is about the intra-party coup that took place simultaneously with the assassination of Stalin, carried out by the majority of the Central Committee of the CPSU, formed from the secretaries of the republics and regions, which, under the conditions of a one-party system, led to a bourgeois coup d'état.
From which it follows that in 1953 the bourgeois counter-revolution in the face of the collective capitalist, the Central Committee of the CPSU, won in the USSR with a further rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which automatically meant the establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship.
All further actions of the ruling class, the highest party nomenklatura, were aimed at creating conditions for the final victory of the counter-revolution: restoration in place of state capitalism - its private property form.
The article, as you probably already understood, is debatable, read and argue -
..Left-wing organizations, large and small, that recognize the role of Stalin in the communist movement, there are many. But all of them were traumatized by Khrushchev's Trotskyism, which under the guise of fighting the "cult of personality" threw Stalinism out of Marxism. Take an interest in their platforms. Everyone has Marxism-Leninism. Where is Stalinism?
It was precisely the exclusion of Stalinism from ideology that led to the fact that Marxism itself among our leftists, without its most important component, fell apart into separate fragments, which now the "communist" Fuhrers are trying to glue into one whole, but they get only a sickening-looking mosaic that cannot even be adapted to today's political realities.
Hence, as a result, the infection of the left masses with the ideas of the need for the theoretical development of Marxism in order to bring it into line with the “weather outside the window”. And the emergence of new "Marxes", such as the famous Podguzov, the inventor of "scientific centralism". I am not even talking about S.E. Kurginyan, who crosses Marxism with metaphysics. It is not even interesting to figure out who they are, these "Marxes", frostbitten swindlers or schizophrenics who have not yet been covered by psychiatric help.
Of course, we are not against the development of Marxism as a science. Any science without development perishes. The only question is what, when, why and to whom to develop. What can be developed today in Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, if this teaching covers the stage of transition from the construction of socialism to the beginning of the construction of communism? Do we have such "weather" outside the window that we are at the stage of formation of a communist state and we need theoretical research for its formation?
Of course, we are aware of the statement attributed to Stalin: “Without a theory, we die.” Our "Marxists", like whom Iosif Vissarionovich aptly called obscurantists, rush about with this statement like idiots with a harmonica, pretending to be a symphony orchestra.
We have no eccentrics in the Movement who believe in this anecdote told by the "outstanding" philosopher Chesnokov. Allegedly, Stalin personally called him on the phone and instructed him to study theory. Only the most natural idiot can believe that the greatest theoretician of Marxism, who developed the Marxist-Leninist theory, lamented the absence of a theory. There are plenty of these idiots among our leftists who believe in Chesnokov.
In reality, the world has not changed since the beginning of the 1950s, when Stalinism took shape as part of Marxism, except that world imperialism in its static, decaying stage continues to accumulate contradictions.
Even the confrontation between the two systems, capitalist and socialist, has not gone away. The main political events in the world take place not in the struggle of the Russian Federation, one of the parts of world imperialism, with the United States, but in the confrontation of the socialist camp, the PRC and its allies, with imperialism. You just need to wipe the lenses of your glasses, spattered with the saliva of false patriotism, to see it.
Of course, this position of ours causes the most vicious hostility on the part of almost all existing leftist organizations and their leaders. Added to this is our attitude towards the post-Stalinist USSR as a non-socialist state in principle.
Apologists for Brezhnev's socialism invented and threw into the masses the theory of the degeneration of socialism in the USSR as a result of the economic reforms of Kosygin-Lieberman. A kind of Bernsteinianism on the contrary.
It was without Stalinism that they had to go to a dizzying trick to explain the reasons for the collapse of the USSR.
They began to adapt the processes in the feudal states to the processes in the Soviet Union, where the bourgeois class was first formed, and then bourgeois revolutions took place. And even such an emerging bourgeoisie was found in the USSR - shadow shop workers.
Those. small groups of criminal speculators who did not own the means of production, engaged in elementary theft, without their own political organization and no influence, became the emerging capitalist class among them.
They even forgot how the authorities during the period of Andropovism dealt with these “capitalists” in a revealing way, so that they would not get under their feet.
As a result of these studies, an outstanding result in terms of the degree of "scientific" was obtained: in 1991, an anti-communist coup took place that eliminated socialism and the USSR. This "coup" was especially noticeable in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Azerbaijan.
Who was turned over there, I wonder if the first secretaries of the republican communist parties, members of the Central Committee of the CPSU, became the presidents of these republics? And how could one not notice the process of formation of Borka Yeltsin, a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, an "oppositionist", with his transfer from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, with his presentation as an antipode to Gorbachev?
Who would benefit as a future head of state from a controlled wino who, on command, handed over the post to the next “manager”? Unless, of course, you believe that an alcoholic is all a cool charisma, as you were drawn ... then okay. It's useless to argue with believers...
But it is necessary to point out the main points.
For example, that we are convinced that an inner-party coup took place simultaneously with the assassination of Stalin, carried out by the majority of the Central Committee of the CPSU, formed from the secretaries of the republics and regions, which, under the conditions of a one-party system, led to an instant and state coup.
And this coup was bourgeois, in 1953 the bourgeois counter-revolution won in the person of the collective capitalist - the Central Committee of the CPSU. Hence the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which automatically meant the establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship. As a sign of this - the armed suppression of workers' demonstrations in Novocherkassk.
All further actions of the ruling class, the highest party nomenklatura, were aimed at creating conditions for the final victory of the counter-revolution: restoration in place of state capitalism - its private property form.
Still striking is the short-sightedness of our obscurantists, whose eyes were blurred by Khrushchev's report at the 20th Congress.
In fact, this report is just one of the episodes of the struggle of the Trotskyite Central Committee with the Stalinist supporters who were no longer in power, but in power structures, who, after speaking out against Nikita in 1957, became known as the “anti-party group”.
But the main events did not take place at all at the 20th Congress. It was the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the “anti-party group”, the 21st congress, at which the moment of their removal from government bodies was fixed, the 22nd congress of the CPSU, at which, under the guise of adopting a program for building communism, the final “farewell” to Stalinism took place, t .e. and with Marxism, the reprisal against the already dead Stalin and the “anti-party group” was completed.
Here, a program of super-industrialization was adopted according to Trotsky's plan, when the rate of development of growth in the production of means of production over the growth in the production of consumer goods, determined by Stalin's 19th congress at 2%, was blown out to 20%, which eventually led to the bankruptcy of the USSR economy, ceased to satisfy the people in its state of deficit, and the creation of prerequisites for privatization.
And so far, no one, except us, has made any effort to restore the good name of those people, Stalin's comrades-in-arms, who to the last resisted the anti-communist coup, who were slandered by presenting conformist members of the "anti-party group": Malenkov, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich. It was the resistance of these people to Khrushchev's bastards that forced the Central Committee of the CPSU to publicly subject them to obstruction at the 21st and 22nd congresses, which in itself was the Central Committee's admission of involvement in the counter-revolutionary coup.
This doomed resistance of the “anti-party members” was their feat...
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Actually, it is stated so clearly and logically that no additions are required, and it becomes clear why the organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the direct successor of the CPSU, refused to publish the material, as was said in the preamble to it.
The main thing that I would single out and emphasize is the attitude towards the post-Stalinist USSR as a state that is not socialist in principle.
This removes all questions for the USSR, which turned into a state moving towards state capitalism after the death of Stalin and the seizure of power by Khrushchev, and then the accession of Brezhnev.
That is, when speaking about the socialist path of development and focusing on the USSR as a historical model, discussing its advantages and disadvantages, successes and defeats, we must keep in mind the Soviet Union Stalin period, which was the only fully Soviet socialist state, after his death, losing ground and transforming into what he had become by the time of his collapse.
In a tougher version, a bourgeois coup took place in the USSR in 1953, and all its further development from that moment inevitably led to what happened in the late 80s and early 90s.
The CPSU, of course, at the same time ceased to be a communist party, in any case, the Central Committee of the CPSU became, at a minimum, an opportunist and revisionist group of the Trotskyist persuasion, which, by the way, perfectly explains the sudden degeneration of Gorbachev's communists into Yeltsin's capitalists ...
Do you agree with this statement, which we can use in further discussions as an axiomatic one?
P.S.
I think it is very useful to deepen the understanding of some aspects of what was the difference between Stalin's and Khrushchev's socialism, the style of governing the country, the managerial paradigm, with the external immutability of the system, it seems, this very curious old interview can become - 
The vast majority of people have finally come to the realization of what happened in October 1993. Under the guise of supposedly the will of the people and with the blessing of the West, primarily the United States, there was a throw of the new government to a state of almost dictatorial lawlessness, which is confirmed not only by the new Constitution, but also by the very spirit of life, where money and violence rule. For their sake, a massacre was arranged. But there was another meaning in all this: when the executive power staggered, it preferred to kill openly, kill by the thousands, cripple the consciousness of the people with the most obscene television in the world, the most corrupt newspapers, illegal lawsuits in order to preserve their own personal power - the power of the SUPER-RICH NOBODIES.
... It was an act of civil war, but why, then, does it cause such indignation? After all, a civil war is, so to speak, a mutual thing, striking equally in all directions. But the fact of the matter is that there was a massacre ...
Everything became possible with the patience of the people. The people did not fight back when prices shot up 10, 100, 1000 times! It was pure robbery, madness, but the people demolished, kept silent ... The people remained silent when the pickets at the Ostankino tower were crushed, and blood was shed. The people silently and humbly endure more and more oppression over themselves, but what oppression: terrible, without justification and examples in the history of crime.
And the cautious, previously fearful authorities began to acquire an insolent, murderous and violent character.
What is going on? Some insignificant parodies of people arrange life - our life, brazenly trampling on our will and mercilessly, savagely stepping on our throats. And we demolish everything, demolish everything without exception - any abuse. Some kind of general clouding of reason, loss of a sense of reality and fascination, humility, insensitivity to evil. Yes, there will be no better fate, is it really unclear ...
... That night I began to fall asleep - and suddenly remembered that the toilet, where I looked seven weeks ago (on the first floor of the House of Soviets, from the entrance number twenty; I had to put myself in order for the last time before speaking live on the Parliamentary hour") - one of those in which the corpses of the defenders of the House of Soviets were stacked. First, the dead were piled up, and then, when the wounded were brought in and finished off, they were added to that pile of corpses. The dead lay up to the ceiling. Blood flowed up to the ankle ... The very place for a walk for Gaidar, Chernomyrdin, Erin, Grachev, Barsukov ... well, their "master" ...
… "Internationalism" is the word that paints our past. But true internationalists are the owners of capital, large and small. All over the world they constitute a single brotherhood, for which peoples, including their own people, are only an unfortunate hindrance in increasing wealth, which gives truly unlimited power over people, peoples and states.
In this internationalist brotherhood of the rich there is perfect mutual understanding, organic community and cruelty, callousness to any form of struggle of working people for a decent life...
At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, there was an active destruction of the USSR and the countries of the socialist camp by agents of Western imperialism who seized power and counter-revolutionaries in the CPSU. During the time of Khrushchevism and stagnation, when elements of the market were introduced in the Soviet planned economy, the party in its composition and legally separated from the Soviet working people, and in the cultural and ideological superstructure, revisionism and narrow-mindedness were planted, led to the fact that in the early nineties among the majority of the peaceful working population did not turn out to be politically literate, capable of resisting the counter-revolutionary actions of the cadres, a lot of blood was shed. The power of the exploiters rests on lies and violence. But they cannot crush the labor movement. What has the power of the capitalists given us except hopeless poverty, devastation, hopelessness, empty promises? By now developing anti-communist hysteria, the bourgeoisie is showing what it fears, what it hates most of all - communism. For this ideology is a direct path to the liberation of the working people from wage slavery, the gravedigger of the last exploiting class in history. Consider the issue of Soviet Romania. How were socialist relations of production destroyed there? What forces supported the coup and why did the working class of the republic not stand up for Ceausescu? What and how does Romania live today?
These days, Romania is celebrating the anniversary of the mass riots from December 16 to 25, 1989, which turned into a bloody massacre and ended with the overthrow of the Chairman of the State Council of the Socialist Republic of Romania (SRR), Nicolae Ceausescu. For the past 20 years, many people in Romania have been associated with a continuous process of impoverishment. If the number of the poor in the country is declining, it is only due to emigration. Unemployment in the country is increasing every year. At the political level, there are simply no measures to combat poverty. 76% of Romanians cannot even dream of a holiday away from home. 49% do not have Personal car, and 19% of citizens are not able to buy meat, chicken or fish. Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Latvia top the poverty pedestal in Europe. But once the same Hungary made locomotives. The Latvian SSR made first-class musical centers, tape recorders and other equipment. But all this has sunk into oblivion... In 1989, under the influence of Gorbachev's perestroika, a wave of coups swept through the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. All of them were presented by the Western media as a spontaneous protest of the population against the communist dictatorship. But these protests were well organized by the United States. as an operation to destroy the socialist community and create conditions for expanding the zone of responsibility of the North Atlantic Alliance to the east. NATO was torn inland, to the east of Europe and the Soviet Union, the capitalists were eager to consolidate the results achieved with bloodshed. However, if in Poland, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, the coups were relatively peaceful, then in Romania the “anti-communist revolution” became bloody. Today, more and more Romanians are convinced that the so-called Romanian “revolution” of 1989, as a result of which the “revolutionaries” killed more than a thousand people, was a well-orchestrated anti-government rebellion and was supported by capital from the West. Surrounded by Ceausescu, there was a group of counter-revolutionary conspirators who wanted to legalize private property and rule in his place. Having taken control of the media, the traitors spread false rumors about some pro-government terrorists killing demonstrators. When the city of Timisoara rebelled, some of whose inhabitants protested against the arrest by the state security authorities of Laszlo Tekes, bishop of the Reformed Church, an ethnic Hungarian and a member of the Hungarian counter-revolutionary underground in Romania, Ceausescu ordered the use of force against the rebels. However, on December 22, 1989, the army, being processed by the fifth column, went over to the side of the demonstrators. There were armed clashes between regular army troops and the forces of the state security service "Securitate". When the military seized the building of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party and the Ceausescu couple was detained, the leaders of the conspirators demanded their speedy execution.
According to the results of the next investigation, the fourth in a row, the military prosecutor of Romania, Marian Lazar, said: "It was definitely a sabotage ... which led to numerous deaths, injuries and economic damage." And in general, there are a lot of questions that are difficult to find the answer even today. “Most of the documents of those days have been destroyed as evidence that the sabotage really took place ... I don’t think that as long as the most important participants in those events are alive, we will be able to find out the truth about what happened,” says the editor-in-chief of the Digi24 TV channel, which specializes in investigation of the bloody events of 1989 by Oan Despa.
Iliescu was the leader of the National Salvation Front (FNS), a political party quickly concocted after the overthrow of Ceausescu. As president, Iliescu showed the fascist essence of the new regime: he suppressed any civil resistance, using the services of people, with reinforcement. Dissatisfied with the policy of the authorities under Iliescu, they were dispersed with blood and victims ... One of the leaders of the protesters, Miron Cozma, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. To know how to strike against the occupation regime. The West strengthened its positions, and presented the terrorist actions of the new government as the triumph of democracy over communism.
Under Iliescu, the fascists raised their heads in Bucharest, and again there were rumors about the “Great Romania” of the times of Hitler’s ally conductor Antonescu, who had a hand in the emergence of nationalist forces in Moldova and Moldova’s attack on Transnistria.
Traian Basescu, the president of Romania in 2004-2014, came from the Federal Tax Service, who supported Viktor Yushchenko’s “orange” coup d’état in Kyiv in 2004, and then, by a dubious decision of the International Court of Justice, took rich wealth from a weakened Ukraine. minerals shelf near Zmeiny Island in the Black Sea. Under Basescu, Romania also claimed the Ukrainian island of Maikan on the Danube and set a course for the absorption of the Republic of Moldova by Romania.
Today Romania is a member of the EU and NATO, the economy depends entirely on the Western masters. Thousands of people are forced to leave the country for at least some meager earnings ... Here it is, the sad result of the bloody farce, which is called the "Anti-Communist Revolution".
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Vasily Koltashov Counter-revolution and restoration in the USSR
1. Connection of two revolutions
The Soviet counter-revolution did not take place in 1991. Attributing the moment of its commission to this time is a common misconception. 1991 was only the year of the restoration of the pre-revolutionary system, the final part of a long chain of counter-revolutionary stages. The counter-revolution in the USSR did not begin with the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. It was not opened by the 20th Congress of the CPSU, at which Nikita Khrushchev spoke with moderate criticism of Stalin's crimes, "drenching the father of true socialism with a dirty stream of lies," as many Stalinists claim. The counter-revolution in the USSR dates back to the early 1920s, when Lenin was still alive.
Restoration of the old socio-economic order and counter-revolution are not synonymous. Counter-revolution and restoration are also not the same when it comes only to the restoration (albeit incomplete) of the pre-revolutionary political order, as was the case in France in 1814 and 1815. Restoration is a kind of completed process, meaning the restoration of orders and relations overthrown by the entrance of major socio-political upheavals. It is possible to restore a revolutionary or reactionary social system. Counter-revolution is a process aimed at strangling the most advanced social forces, the abolition of many revolutionary changes.
Counter-revolution does not necessarily lead to restoration. On the contrary, it can be directed against the restoration of the former system. At the same time, it is certainly focused on the elimination of part of the revolutionary gains, "excessive" in the opinion of the ruling elites. Such was the counter-revolution in France at the end of the 18th century. From the Thermidorian coup in 1794, even from the defeat of the Jacobins of their left wing, it developed to the proclamation of an empire by Bonaparte. The forces of the French counter-revolution were hostile to both the democratic republic of the Jacobins and the feudal monarchy of the Bourbons. The counter-revolution in the USSR was different.
The Great French Revolution destroyed feudal vestiges, wrested power from the feudal nobility and handed it over to the bourgeoisie. Having created their own state machine, the capitalist class did everything possible to prevent the restoration of the old order. The French bourgeoisie took over from the aristocracy its palaces, carriages, balls and banquets, but it could not itself become the class that it overthrew, despite the titles invented by Napoleon. In the USSR, the party bureaucracy, which grew up on the soil of backwardness, was never a separate class, but, having politically expropriated the proletariat, it eventually came to the conscious need to become the bourgeoisie itself. The realization of this intention led the USSR to the restoration of capitalism. But preparations for this event began long before 1991, in the course of successive waves of internal counter-revolution.
The French and Russian revolutions are connected not only by the cultural kinship between the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks. There is much in common in the fate of revolutions. Trotsky emphasized this connection more than once. As in France, in Soviet Russia the counter-revolution gained the upper hand from within, with a cruel blow to the most revolutionary forces. Lenin said more than once that the Bolsheviks and Jacobins were related by the traditions of the revolution, but they were also united by tragedy.
However, having gained the upper hand, the counter-revolution, even if it does not go beyond the framework of the new social system, is always historically doomed. She inevitably fails. Until that moment, the changes made at the revolutionary peak seem to many incapable of triumph, forever crushed by reaction. So in the Catholic and monarchist France of Louis XVIII and Charles X, few believed in the new triumph of the Republic, universal suffrage (for men) and liberal freedoms. But after 40-50 years, these "incredible things" turned out to be a reality, despite any "insurmountable" obstacles.
Faith in the possibility of the return of October, the triumph of its ideas and the revival of the conquests is still very weak. This development looks unrealistic even to many communists. Against the backdrop of the omnipotence of the bourgeois bureaucracy and capital, the ubiquitous religiosity, and the might of the police machine, it seems madness to say that capitalism will be overthrown in a few years. Having discarded fear and doubts, this “inconceivable deed” will be done by the very masses, looking at which the left sectarian still does not notice the impending changes.
What is unimaginable today may very soon become a reality.
The immaturity of the revolutionary forces for final victory does not mean that there is no historical prospect of victory. Having suffered a defeat in the 1920s and 1930s, destroyed by the terror of the counter-revolution, Bolshevism did not disappear forever. The missing conditions for the final triumph of the revolution are inevitably being prepared by the entire system of world capitalism, also preparing the political rebirth of Bolshevism. Preparing for a new revolution.
On 9 Thermidor, 1794, the Jacobin dictatorship in France fell. The revolution from that day went on a downward curve. Immediately after the coup committed by the moderate deputies of the National Convention, the leaders of the Jacobins Robespierre, Saint Just, Couthon were executed. They were followed to the guillotine by other prominent figures of the Jacobin party. But the defeat of the Montagnards (the party of the mountain, as the Jacobins were also called) was not a simple matter. With a wide network of revolutionary clubs throughout the country, the Jacobins also had unparalleled prestige. Even opponents recognized the principles, sincerity, devotion to convictions, as well as faith in the triumph of Rousseau's ideas of most of them. By subverting such a party, the Thermidorians had to solve a lot of problems.
Simple rhetoric could explain the execution of the "tyrant" - Maximilian Robespierre, who was at the head of the Committee of Public Safety, the de facto government of the republic. But thousands of supporters of the ideas of the Jacobins remained a difficulty, without eliminating which it was impossible to complete the counter-revolutionary turn begun on Thermidor 9. At any moment, the Montagnards could try to take revenge. Fleron, Barasse and other leaders of the Thermidorian party needed not only to behead the Jacobins, they needed to eradicate the very phenomenon of radical republicanism by morally exposing its adherents.
There is an opinion that the Jacobin terror delayed the triumph of the ideas of bourgeois republicanism in Europe by almost 70 years. Is it true? Indeed, over 300,000 people were executed by guillotine during the period of the revolutionary dictatorship in France. However, such a considerable number of victims (the entire population of France then numbered 27-28 million), like the revolutionary terror in Russia in 1917-1920, was explained by the need to preserve the gains of the revolution. At the same time, the terror of the Montagnards, directed primarily against representatives of the feudal class, did not repel supporters from revolutionary France.
In Rhenish Germany, in northern Italy, in Belgium and the Netherlands, the revolution found many adherents. Foreign formations such as the Polish Legion fought under the banners of the republic. In Germany, in the city of Mainz, even its own Convention met. Other liberated territories had their own, national clubs of radical bourgeois republicans. The oppressed of many countries sympathized with and, wherever they could, assisted revolutionary France. Terror directed against the counter-revolution did not cause rejection of what was attributed to it retroactively.
The fall of the Jacobin dictatorship was logical, although it could have happened somewhat later. The dictatorship of the Jacobins stopped moving along the path of revolution, and the guillotine began to be used against the extreme wing of the Montagnards. The masses, whose problems remained unresolved, lost confidence in the Jacobins. The bourgeoisie no longer wanted to endure the "bloody dictatorship of the mountain". All this set in motion the deputies of the swamp, who, not without reason, feared for their lives and, as a rule, for their recently acquired property. On 9 Thermidor, the dictatorship fell during the uprising in Paris.
What solution to the problem of Jacobinism did the Thermidor party find? To denounce the numerous French revolutionaries arrested everywhere by the new authorities, amalgams were used: accusations of a mixture. The Montagnards were declared hidden supporters of the monarchy, seeking to restore the feudal system in France. The absurdity of such accusations was obvious. But, mixed with the desire attributed to the Jacobins to establish tyranny instead of a "republic of freedom", it could well deceive many. The revolutionaries were also credited with spying for England, the main enemy of republican France. The Thermidorians had no other means of undermining the authority of the Jacobins among the masses.
Simultaneously with the exposure of "traitors and British spies", the counter-revolution had to solve a much more difficult task. Popular demonstrations in Paris during the hungry winter of 1794-1795 showed the Convention that if the masses were silent on 9 Thermidor, this does not mean that they, having felt the deterioration of their situation, are not capable of a new performance. The left Thermidorians, who took the side of the people, were executed or thrown into prisons, already overcrowded with revolutionaries. The terrible specter of Jacobin revenge loomed on the horizon and demanded new measures from the Thermidorians. It was necessary to physically destroy the most dangerous phenomenon: not an ode to a group of leaders, but a whole generation of revolutionaries, destroying the Jacobin tradition at the same time.
The Thermidorians "who had abolished the insane terror" could not afford the mass executions of the Jacobins. Political clubs were closed, and a dangerous enemy was in the hands of the counter-revolution. Very few Montagnards and left revolutionaries close to them remained at large, operating underground. The decision of the Thermidor party was unexpected - the "royalists" were supposed to kill the Jacobins. Blood was shed all over the country again. When the Montagnards were transferred from one prison to another, the prisoners were attacked by policemen and soldiers dressed as rebels. They were not interested in the convoy - they killed Jacobin prisoners. In official reports, everything looked like raids by enemies of the republic, seeking to repel their own. It is not known who invented the method turned out to be extremely effective. Sending "enemies of the republic" to certain death in French Guiana, nicknamed the dry guillotine, could not be compared with him.
The Thermidorian coup in France brought to power the financial bourgeoisie, who made their fortunes during the years of confiscations and terror. However, the political leaders of Thermidor, having ruthlessly destroyed the left flank, soon found themselves on it. During the period of the Directory that replaced the Thermidorian Convention, Jacobins began to be called those who in 1794-1795 fought against real Jacobins. Shortly before the Bonapartist coup of 18 Brumaire, the revived Jacobin party received many votes in the elections. But at the head of it were people involved in the destruction of many revolutionaries. However, the fear of even such an opposition pushed the French bourgeoisie even further to the right - into the strong arms of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The coming to power of General Bonaparte marked a new round of counter-revolution in France. The political system that he established waged a merciless struggle against the "revolutionary infection" in the person of the Jacobins. But who were these revolutionaries? The Jacobians, whom Napoleon so vehemently hated, were no longer the Montagnards of 1793. They were rather moderate bourgeois republicans of the 1799 model. It certainly wasn't the same.
The harsh measures taken by Napoleon, like those of the Thermidorians, proved to be effective. When in 1814 the old monarchy returned to France on the bayonets of the interventionists, the republicans were completely unable even to try to stir up the popular masses to fight. It is significant that Napoleon - "the savior of the bourgeoisie", as the French historian Jean Tulard called him - was betrayed not only by the class of owners, but also by his military-political support: marshals and a significant part of the state apparatus. The bourgeois forces, who left it on the condition of maintaining the inviolability of property acquired during the revolution, certain rights and privileges, helped the return of the Bourbon dynasty. Only the people, even after the defeat at Waterloo, continued to believe that Napoleon would not retreat. However, for the second time (in 1815), having found himself abandoned by the bourgeoisie, the emperor surrendered to the enemy.
The lower strata of French society were unable to nominate new revolutionary leaders in 1815, although they were ready to continue the struggle. One of the main reasons for this impotence was the many years of purges of the Jacobins and the republican tradition. The working class was still weak, the peasantry was fragmented, and the petty-bourgeois strata of the city were politically crushed, bled white by decades of terror and repression. Not at all many Jacobins (mainly of the 1799 model) were able to survive the Thermidorians, the Directory and Napoleon in exile and secret shelters.
Returning from immigration, the royalists unleashed white terror on France. The supporters of the feudal monarchy were eager to take revenge on the rebellious lower classes for the blue terror (the color of the uniforms of the soldiers of the republic was blue, the monarchy was white). In order to save their lives, some royalists, accustomed to good cuisine, were even forced to eat their boots from hunger. The restored old order did not touch the property that had passed into new hands. The people had to pay for everything: a payment of one billion francs was imposed on the French peasantry, a fantastic amount at that time. This money was transferred as compensation to the nobility, and it squandered it without any regard.
The rule of the old aristocracy was so hated by the people that the period Napoleonic Empire seemed like a good time. Following the feudal reaction of Europe, many ordinary French people began to see Napoleon as Robespierre on horseback. The famine years, the police regime, the return of the priests, the arbitrariness of the bureaucracy, the "blood taxes" of which the war demanded, and the shortage of many goods, turned out to be forgotten. It was not until the mid-1820s that Republican traditions began to revive. Despite the persecution of the secret police by Louis XVIII and then Charles IX, secret revolutionary groups began to grow among students and educated petty-bourgeois strata. Even while remaining very moderate, they were much more radical than the liberals, the party of the wealthy bourgeoisie officially admitted to parliament.
The new Republicans lacked autonomy. They trailed behind the liberals, headed by the Marquis de Laffaette, who had repeatedly betrayed the revolution. The Republicans did not have a clear program and often did not see the connection between themselves and the "bloody horrors of the Jacobin tyranny." They believed in the republic as a common cause of the whole people, but remained alien to its radical methods.
In July 1830, after a new round of reaction, Paris revolted. For three days barricade battles raged in the city. The people won. Charles IX fled to Anguilla, and the royalist regime fell. Students with weapons in their hands fought against the troops of the king demanded a republic. Everyone was convinced that the people would now rule in France. However, the liberals, seeing the organizational and political weakness of the Republicans, managed to seize the initiative. Laffatt played on his authority: a new dynasty ascended the throne almost unhindered - the dynasty of bankers. Louis Philippe became king. Political transformations were insignificant and did not affect the bulk of the population. Young Republicans have learned a hard lesson.
The neo-Jacobins and the bourgeois liberals parted ways. The French republicans recognized kinship not only with the moderate Danton, but with Marat and Robespierre. They continued the struggle against the bourgeois-monarchist regime, seeking a republic - a panacea for all ills. During the years 1830-1840, the bourgeois revolutionaries created secret organizations, conducted agitation, and tried to revolt. No setbacks, repressive laws, and Louis Philippe's police efforts could break them. The historical tradition has been restored. Republicans felt the social ground under their feet without even suspecting how much it had changed in 50 years.
The new Jacobins were not shy about the revolutionary terror and the "excessiveness" of the changes that took place in 1793-1794. The constitution of 1793 was a model for them, and small property was an economic ideal. However historical conditions the middle of the 19th century turned out to be completely different from the conditions of France at the end of the 18th century. A new force was entering the political scene - the working class, in which the neo-Jacobins at first did not see anything special that distinguished it from the motley mass of the French people.
3.1. March 1919 and February 1934
In March 1919, at the height of the civil war, the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) was held in Moscow. At it, after a lively discussion, a new program of the Bolshevik Party was adopted. It covered many pressing issues of the ongoing transformation of society, but it did not say a single word about the tasks or goals of building socialism in one single country. This was the revolutionary program of the revolutionary party, which is one of the national factions of the international party - the Comintern.
In his concluding remarks on the report on the party program, Lenin said: “Shall we limit ourselves to saying to all these masses who are now marching with us: “The business of the party is only to carry out socialist construction. The communist revolution is done, carry out communism.” Such a point of view is fundamentally untenable, theoretically incorrect. Lenin negatively assessed the desire of a number of Bolsheviks to give the party program an international character, but emphasized that "the program deals with a social revolution on a world scale."
After the congress was over, the delegates returned to their fighting places in the rear and at the front. The civil war continued, and the adopted party program became a powerful propagandistic weapon, so necessary for victory.
During the Civil War, none of the new Jacobins-Bolsheviks suspected that after only a few years the proletarian republic would face not the triumph of the program ideas of the revolution, but Thermidor. Looking ahead, it was impossible to think that the blow to the gains of October would be dealt not by the white generals, but by the degenerated apparatus of the party. It was even more unthinkable then to assume that Thermidor would be followed by bloody Bonapartism, which, through the destruction of hundreds of thousands of communists, would pave the way for the restoration of capitalism.
In 1934 (from January 26 to February 10), the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks took place in Moscow, which went down in history as the "Congress of the Victors." This was the last congress of the party that still retained a connection with the Bolshevik tradition, despite the already clearly apparatus character of the organization. The Congress was attended by 1966 delegates: 1227 with a decisive vote, 739 with an advisory vote. Stalin's optimistic report caused a storm of applause. However, against the background of the ostentatious triumph of industrialization and general collectivization, as well as the unprecedented praise of Stalin, a hidden struggle was going on at the Congress.
At the apartment of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a meeting of the old Bolsheviks was secretly held. It was about removing the "father of nations" from the post of Secretary General. This issue was also discussed behind the scenes by many delegates, who were aware of how disastrous the situation of a country in which pyrrhic victory ended the unprecedented war with the peasantry. During the Central Committee elections, the Counting Commission found that about 300 votes had been cast against Stalin. However, it was announced that one less vote was cast against Stalin than against Kirov (the latter was offered to become the new General Secretary, which he reported to Stalin).
The "Great Leader" did not forget the lesson learned at the Congress. Subsequently, out of 1996 delegates, the NKVD arrested 1108 people. 848 of them were shot. However, the historical lesson was different. The CPSU(b) ceased to be a party in which not only its members, but also delegates to the Congress, regional functionaries could somehow influence the composition and line of leadership. The old Bolsheviks, who so confidently believed in the 1920s that the real power in the CPSU(b) belonged to them, turned out to be prisoners of the new bureaucracy, which they themselves supported and entered into. From now on, a new stage was opening in the history of the Party and the Soviet Union, and it was opened by Stalin.
3.2. Lenin and the triumvirate
Three people - Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin - joined their efforts in 1923, forming the Politburo of the Central Committee triumvirate. They directed its edge (with the passive support of Bukharin) against Trotsky, the second most influential member of the CPSU (b) after Lenin. The open party struggle was replaced by behind-the-scenes, apparatus. Its essence was not in the opposition of personalities who fought for personal power (although this fully applies to the personal motives of Zinoviev and Stalin). It was about the bureaucratic turn in the party, which the ailing Lenin so feared, unsuccessfully trying to convince Leon Trotsky to become deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and also to lead the attack against Stalin at the XII Congress. Subsequently, Trotsky admitted that the refusal to speak out against the triumvirs at the Congress, dominated by supporters of the Leninist line, was his main mistake: not having received a rebuff, the leaders of the bureaucracy strengthened their position.
Beginning in 1922, Stalin and Zinoviev undertook to expand the material privileges of the leadership of the party. They did their best to promote their supporters to important positions, pushing the unwanted ones aside. At that time, a sharp contradiction arose between Stalin and Lenin on the question of the ways of forming the USSR, that is, on the national question. Stalin insisted on joining the union of national republics as autonomies, Lenin believed that the union should be formed as an equal association of independent republics. The Stalinist project was not only chauvinistic, but also opened up new opportunities for the growth of the power of the bureaucracy. In addition, having met the resistance of the communists of Georgia, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze chose the method of rude pushing through their project.
Lenin, already seriously ill, criticized bureaucratic chauvinism, insisting on the equality of the republics and the right to secede from the union. The implementation of the unequal, Great Russian project of the USSR meant serious difficulties in the formation of the world Soviet Union. New countries, where the revolution could win, found themselves in the conditions of a choice: independence or subordinate entry into the USSR. Lenin considered the imposition of such a choice on the peoples unfair and harmful. However, thanks to complex maneuvers, it was Stalin's project that was put into practice, and Lenin's article on this issue was published only in 1956.
Along with the end of the civil war and the beginning of the NEP, the bureaucracy began to experience a growing need for comfort. At the same time, she needed leaders capable of providing it. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky could fit this role. In the late 1920s, when the process of distributing privileges had already gone quite far, and the reprisal against the opposition was in full swing, Krupskaya stated that if Ilyich were alive now, he would be in prison.
Even at the Eighth Congress of the RCP (b), Lenin said that bureaucracy cannot be avoided until the masses, down to a single person, are drawn into the process of governing the state. But he also understood how backward and war-weary Russia was, how weak its proletariat was. Therefore, Lenin tried with all his might to place the party and state apparatus under workers' control, not allowing it to be reborn, becoming the headquarters of the creeping counter-revolution.
Back in 1919, Lenin noted: “... the low cultural level (of the working masses, approx. V.K.) makes the Soviets, being, according to their program, governing bodies through the working people, in fact, are governing bodies for the working people through the advanced layer of the proletariat but not through the working masses. Lenin saw the overcoming of this problem in "long-term education", which he assessed as an exorbitantly difficult task. He also said: "The bureaucracy can only be supplanted by the organization of the proletariat and the peasantry on a much larger scale than hitherto, along with the actual implementation of measures to attract the workers to management." In the 1920s, this idea became one of the main ones for the left opposition. However, the thin layer of conscious, politically active proletariat, on which the Bolsheviks had to rely, was ruthlessly swept away by the Stalinist faction. Its representatives went to exile and camps.
In the 1920s, it was customary to identify the threat of counter-revolution in the USSR with the petty-bourgeois nature of the peasantry and the apparitions of the Nepmen, the new bourgeoisie. However, as history has shown, the main threat came from the growing Soviet bureaucracy. The Mensheviks, looking with malice at the transition to the NEP taking place in the USSR, concluded: Bolshevism fought against capitalism, and now, when development was impossible without capitalism, he himself had to revive it. The restoration of capitalism from Soviet Russia is inevitable, it has already begun - that was their conclusion. However, the interests of the party-state bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie (both urban and rural - the kulak) soon diverged.
3.3. Intra-party struggle
Immediately after the death of Lenin internal party struggle took on a new urgency. Taking advantage of Trotsky's inaction at the XII Congress of the RCP (b), the triumvirs went on the offensive, strengthening their position. "Lenin's political testament" (a letter in which he proposed to remove Stalin from his secretary post) was shelved. After the congress, Stalin and Zinoviev intensified their efforts to promote their proteges to leading positions in the party. The Bolshevik Party found itself at a turning point: official declarations about the triumph of Lenin's principles were more and more clearly at odds with reality.
"Another undoubted victory for the triumvirate and the party bureaucracy, which was gaining strength, was that in the resolution of the congress on the organizational question, the content of Lenin's ideas about inner-party democracy and the enhancement of the role of the Central Control Commission turned out to be emasculated." The Central Control Commission (CCC) was increased to 50 people. However, it only consisted of a third of the workers, while Lenin demanded that this body be completely formed from representatives of the proletariat. It also created a two-stage purely hardware superstructure: the Presidium and the Secretariat. These structures later played an important role in the fight against all party oppositions.
The result of the Congress was the preservation in the party and the country of the uncontrolled power of the Politburo, where the triumvirs dominated. The policy of the triumvirs was directed against dissidents and, above all, against the supporters of Trotsky. The leaders of the bureaucracy saw the latter as a potential danger. Gradually, they began to push Trotsky, who held the post of People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, from control in the Red Army (RKKA) and navy. In 1924, he was removed from this post, and in 1927 he ceased to be officially a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. At the same time, Stalin and Zinoviev sent a number of Bolsheviks they did not like into diplomatic exile.
However, the leaders of the nascent bureaucracy, busy with personnel changes, overlooked the crisis. In 1923, several waves of strikes swept across the country: a sharp rise in prices for manufactured goods led to a drop in sales, at many enterprises the workers had nothing to pay their wages. The dissatisfaction of the workers grew. In October, 165,000 people went on strike. The peasants also suffered from the economic situation. They were forced to pay a food tax, but could not buy manufactured goods. In the RCP (b) opposition sentiments intensified. Party members even took part in strikes. The Politburo did not offer the country any effective measures to combat the crisis, but obtained from the Central Committee a decision on measures against "opposition groups".
The refusal to openly discuss issues of vital importance to Soviet Russia led to a complication of the intra-party situation. At the same time, largely thanks to the contradictory instructions of the Comintern headed by Zinoviev, the uprising in Germany was defeated. The triumvirs also rejected the request of the German communists to send Trotsky to lead the revolution, fearing the growth of his influence if successful.
Meanwhile, the economic crisis intensified. The Politburo tried to fight him with the administrative command of prices and, on which Stalin insisted, the introduction of a state monopoly on the sale of vodka. The rejection of Prohibition (the legalization of vodka) led to the soldering of workers, which meant a drop in labor productivity and real wages of workers. Trotsky, who led the opposition-minded members of the RCP (b), sharply criticized such measures. He also said that the unplanned approach to the economy only exacerbates the situation. According to the emerging left opposition, the crisis was largely caused by the poor, formal implementation of the economic measures outlined by the party.
After Lenin's death, the triumvirs organized the "Lenin call", attracting to the party a mass of people, not only not ideologically mature, but sometimes outright careerists. Zinoviev, Stalin and Kamenev staked on these shots. The influx of new members eroded the party from within, the Bolsheviks who had gone through the revolutionary school found themselves in a minority among the mass of new party members. Among the new members of the RCP(b) were many former Mensheviks, some of whom played a sinister role in the fate of the revolution. One such figure was Andrei Vyshinsky, the future Prosecutor General of the USSR and prosecutor at the Moscow trials. Under the provisional government, Vyshinsky signed a warrant for the arrest of Lenin, who was declared a German spy. In the 1930s, without any hesitation, this man helped Stalin on falsified charges and sent to death many former revolutionaries.
The triumvirs accomplished what Lenin fought so desperately against, who in recent years sought to purge alien elements from the party. Among the leading cadres of the RCP(b), the number of appointees increased sharply. In 1924-1925, even the secretaries of the primary party organizations were appointed everywhere (voted at the suggestion of the leadership). The internal party regime worsened: democracy was curtailed and freedom of discussion was eliminated. Appeal to the party masses not on behalf of the official leading bodies, which Lenin repeatedly resorted to, passed from the normal form of inner-party life into the category of "violations of party discipline." The formalism of management grew, when command methods increasingly replaced the real authority of the leading cadres. As a result, a new system of party administration emerged - a system of bureaucratic rather than democratic centralism.
The left opposition sharply criticized the implementation of such changes in the RCP (b), demanding effective measures to carry out industrialization and collectivization, the only one capable of creating an alternative to the kulak in the commodity production of products. However, in conditions when the level of development of the consciousness of the working masses did not allow the soviets to become "organs of government through the working people", and the proletariat itself remained a thin layer of society, the struggle against the emerging bureaucracy turned out to be unequal. Despite attempts to appeal to the working class, the Left Opposition was forced to fight mainly within the framework of the degenerating party.
In the last months of his life, it was no coincidence that Lenin sought the creation of institutions capable of placing the bureaucratic organs of the party and state under the control of the working class. The delay was dangerous: Lenina understood how unpredictable the evolution of the apparatus in Russia could be. He saw the growth of chauvinistic bias and administrative omnipotence. All this led to a bureaucratic deformation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and over time threatened to turn into a restoration of capitalism. However, it is unlikely that the measures developed by Lenin could have held back this process for a long time, even if Trotsky had not been inactive at the Twelfth Congress, but had achieved their implementation. The bureaucracy, growing in strength and aware of its special interests, would eventually find a way to get out of the way or undermine the organs of proletarian control from within.
Shortly before 9 Thermidor, Saint Just developed and proposed to Robespierre measures capable of preventing the fall of the Jacobin dictatorship. Saint Just understood: the danger comes from the Convention, in which the majority were people alien to the ideas of the revolution. The Convention had to be cleansed of "traitors and greedists", making it a stronghold of the Jacobins. Saint Just proposed to rely in this matter on the Committee of Public Safety. Then, with the support of the purged Convention and the Commune of Paris, it was possible to remove unreliable members from the Committee, strengthening it too. Only fighters who have proved their devotion to the republic can continue the cause of the revolution until the war is over, the consciousness of the nation is raised and the republican institutions are strengthened - such was the plan of Saint Just. Robespierre rejected it.
The head of the Committee of Public Safety, believed that in the fight against the impending threat of the Thermidorian conspiracy, it was necessary to seek support from the Convention. Robespierre believed that the deputies - the elected representatives of the people and "honest republicans" - would understand and support him, and he would strengthen the Committee, and then with its help the foundations of a new political system. This plan failed miserably, only hastening the fall of the Montagnards. But what would have been if the Jacobins had implemented Saint Just's plan? With the secret police in their hands (founded by Saint Just), the National Guard of the Commune, and many other things, they would have been able to crush the Thermidorian party in the Convention. Would these measures stop the internal counter-revolution? Not! They would only postpone its triumph for a while by showing history another way for the right-wing Republicans to win.
The Jacobin dictatorship could not resist, it achieved the expulsion of the interventionists and the victory over the feudal counter-revolution - the French bourgeoisie had no reason to tolerate it any longer. The social support of the revolutionary dictatorship had already become very narrow in the spring of 1794. The Montagnards were dissatisfied with the peasant owners who wanted economic peace, and not requisitions of bread, the poorest sections of the village - they did not receive land, the workers - the dictatorship did not improve their situation: they were in poverty due to food shortages and low prices for work. Even the petty bourgeoisie wanted stability and a normal market. The position of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s was similar in many respects.
The revolution of 1917 was necessary, objectively conditioned. The contradictions that torn apart tsarist Russia required permission. The small but conscious militant working class of the city turned out to be stronger than the liberal bourgeoisie, which, having received power in February 1917, could offer nothing to the country. The peasants demanded land, the workers - to stop the collapse of industry and human working conditions. No one except the capitalists needed a war.
The old order was overthrown and then smashed in civil war, despite the help given to it by imperialism. But, having taken power and satisfied the demands of the oppressed classes, the Bolsheviks faced a number of problems generated by the backwardness of the country and the devastation caused by two wars. The masses were not "cultured enough" to be actively involved in management. Even the proletariat could not yet transform the soviets into organs of its power in essence, and not in form. Bureaucracy was inevitable. Understanding this, Lenin tried with all his might to put it under the control of the most conscious part of the proletariat.
In order not to lose power, the Bolsheviks were forced in the early 1920s to turn from War Communism to a politically controlled market - the NEP. Freedom in the economy expanded, but in political sphere it was cut back to reduce the threat of counter-revolution. This, of course, was a retreat of the revolution, wrested from the peasantry - the petty-bourgeois class. After the victory over the white movement, which threatened to return the land into the hands of the landowners, the peasants no longer considered it acceptable to seize their grain in the course of food allocations. They demanded "normal conditions," a market, in order to turn the newly obtained land to their advantage.
The conditions of the NEP opened a wide path for the growth of the bureaucracy. At the same time, the merging of party and state bureaucracy went on, which more and more took power into its own hands. Best suited in character and values for the role of the leader of the bureaucracy - Joseph Stalin. Owing to the absence of "revolutionary prejudices," he soon pushed Zinoviev and Kamenev aside. The place of the main ideologist of the party was taken by Bukharin, who announced the growing of the "kulak into Socialism", and then presented the world with the theory of socialism in one single country. Stalin became the leader of the CPSU (b), RCP (b) - now called the All-Russian, and increasingly becoming a party of apparatchiks. "Stalin is Lenin today!" - read a later party slogan designed to mask the counter-revolutionary coup that took place in the party and the USSR.
The left opposition was administratively crushed, its representatives went into exile, Trotsky was illegally deported to Turkey. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who joined the opposition (the United Opposition was created with their participation), "disarmed before the party", repented and, in third roles, were temporarily taken under the bureaucratic wing. As the writer Victor Serge, who actively participated in the opposition struggle, later recalled, the masses of workers crushed by material difficulties did not respond to the call of the Bolshevik-Leninists. Those of the workers - the most conscious, most advanced part of them - who supported the Trotskyists (as the oppositionists were officially called) were severely punished. Even after going through exile and camps, they were destroyed by the bureaucracy in the 1930s.
3.4. Thermidor's victory
The boundary of Thermidor and the revolution was the XII Congress of the RCP (b). Events after him developed downhill, despite all the efforts of the opposition. The counter-revolution in the USSR began. It was not opened by the coming to power of Gorbachev, Brezhnev or Khrushchev, as some "researchers" believe. The first act of the counter-revolution was the instrumental triumph of the triumvirs, imperceptible at first. The second act consisted in the exclusion by Stalin, who had completely taken over the party apparatus, of Zinoviev and Kamenev from among the co-rulers and a turn towards the kulak, allegedly capable of "gradually growing into socialism." The ideologist of this course was Bukharin.
After the marketing crisis of 1923, the economic situation in the USSR was stabilized. The government lowered the prices of many manufactured goods while raising the prices of some agricultural products. The result of such measures was the inhibition of industrial development, which was already extremely slow. Effective demand in 1925-1926 began to outstrip the production of industrial goods. The marketing crisis was replaced by a commodity famine. There were not enough funds for industrialization, and the savings of the village grew. However, the government continued to reduce the agricultural tax: in 1926 it was reduced from 313 to 245 million rubles. The profit from such a policy, first of all, was received by the kulaks and speculators of the city. Collectivization in the countryside was stalling, and the dependence of the city on the kulak, the main producer of marketable grain, grew.
The left opposition considered the economic course pursued by the party to be erroneous, harmful to the development of the country and capable of leading to a bourgeois restoration. Overcoming the industrial weakness of the USSR, the Bolshevik-Leninists argued, is impossible without using the accumulations of the bourgeois strata (the kulaks, first of all) and collectivization.
In 1924-1927, the persecution of the united opposition (it included Zinoviev and Kamenev, who recognized the correctness of the Trotskyists) by supporters of the "general line" was growing. There was a split in the party. Party members suspected of sympathizing with the Bolshevik-Leninists were expelled by the thousands from the RCP (b). The opinions of the party minority were not only not taken into account, as was always the case under Lenin, but they were declared harmful, aimed at destroying "party unity." One of the main accusations of Stalin's supporters directed against the opposition was "factional activity."
At the X Congress of the RCP (b), due to the crisis situation for Soviet Russia (the Kronstadt rebellion was in full swing, the situation in the countryside was alarming), the factions in the party were temporarily banned. The version of the resolution "On the Unity of the Party" proposed to the Congress stated that the rejection of factions was necessary under the present conditions in connection with the threat of penetration of counter-revolutionary elements into it. Also, the majority of delegates critically assessed the activities of the "workers' opposition", who believed that it was an anarcho-syndicalist, petty-bourgeois deviation in the party. However, paragraph 4 of the resolution stated: the party must strictly observe the freedom of criticism, subject to an open, and not narrow group discussion of certain proposals and comments. All the factions that existed at that time were declared dissolved by the Congress.
According to Lenin, such a unity of inner-party freedom of opinion with a ban on factions was supposed to protect the RCP (b) from the corrosive bourgeois elements of the NEP in conditions when the proletariat was still weak. But the renunciation of factional freedom turned out to be a benefit not to the communists standing on Leninist positions, who overlooked the Thermidorian coup at the 12th Congress, but to the bureaucratic counter-revolution. She, in the person of the triumvirs, was the first to form a closed group with internal discipline, directing it against the Trotskyists - "destroyers of party unity." The first meeting of this faction took place in August 1924 during the plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). It did not develop any ideological platform (there was no need for this), but the meeting participants elected their own leadership - the "seven". First of all, it included Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
Many opposition figures insisted on the legalization of party groups, pointing out that without this internal party democracy cannot exist, and the dictatorship of the proletariat is doomed to degradation. However, the bureaucracy, having become a behind-the-scenes faction, became more and more separated from the working class. She did not want to disclose her mercantile interests. The supporters of the "Stalinist course" never had their own platform, preferring to act in an apparatus, relying on the demagogic defense of "party unity". At the same time, it more and more diluted the RCP (b) with opportunists, obscure and careerist-minded elements. In such an environment, it was easier to unleash the unbridled persecution of the opposition.
Already at the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) there was not a single oppositionist delegate with a decisive vote. After him, the Bolsheviks who criticized the Politburo began to be expelled not only for "moral flaws", but also for factional activities. In the 1920s, the ruling faction turned the "anti-friction struggle" into a form of eliminating dissidents and consolidating their dominance. Instead of maintaining party unity, which is possible only if the opinion of the minority is taken into account, and delimiting party and state bodies, as Lenin wished, the opposite happened. All power in the country was in the hands of the apparatchiks grouped around Stalin.
The most powerful theoretical disagreements in 1926-1927 were caused in the party by the question of the possibility of the victory of socialism "in one single country." Stalin and Bukharin announced that socialism could be built in the USSR before the victory of the revolution in the more developed capitalist countries. Meanwhile, the Left Opposition (already driven underground) criticized this postulate, arguing that the socialist construction begun in the USSR cannot be completed in isolation from the rest of the world, in isolation from the world economy. The Stalin faction twisted these arguments, turning them into an alleged refusal of the opposition to build socialism in the USSR, then drawing a false conclusion about the desire of the Trotskyists to restore capitalism.
The Bolshevik-Leninists pointed out that as long as the development of the productive forces in a workers' state does not exceed that of the most developed capitalist countries, all talk of socialism being built is premature. In the new society, the force of state coercion must be replaced by the force of voluntary social self-government of the working people, i.e. the state is dying out. Under socialism there cannot be even traces of hegemonism and inequality of rights both between nations within individual socialist countries and between countries forming a socialist commonwealth. Socialism also presupposes an irreversible movement towards social equality, i.e., the equality of the social and material status of all sections of the population. Only when all this has been achieved is it appropriate to speak of the completion of the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
History has proven the rightness of the Left Opposition. In a country where a higher level of labor productivity than in the advanced capitalist countries remained unattained, it was impossible to declare socialism built, otherwise than by deceiving the working people. Even in the 1970s, the standard of living of workers in capitalist Europe remained higher than in the USSR and other countries of “real socialism”. Announcing the construction of the "foundations of socialism" under Stalin, "socialism in the main" under Khrushchev and "developed socialism" under Brezhnev, the party-state bureaucracy sought to pass off the system of its rule as socialism, which Marx, Engels, Lenin spoke about and for which the Russian proletariat fought . Such deceit undermined the credibility of the new society in the eyes of the working class throughout the world.
The desire of the Stalinist faction to build socialism "in one single country" was caused not by the objective possibility of building it, but by the isolationist desire of the bureaucracy. world revolution, the further, the more it became an inconvenient, superfluous slogan for the administrative layer of the USSR.
Over time, from the course of building socialism in a single country, the conclusion was drawn: the cause of the revolution is the cause of the working class of each individual country, and not of the entire international proletariat. The world revolution was declared to be an ultra-revolutionary, petty-bourgeois and alien to communist ideology slogan. The Marxist understanding of the class struggle on a worldwide scale, where the working class is opposed to the bourgeoisie, was rejected.
Revolutions, being the triumph of the oppressed classes, aroused great anxiety among the bureaucracy. They could stir up the masses of Soviet workers, leading to a left turn in society, and therefore to the end of the omnipotence of the apparatchiks. Therefore, already in the 1920s, the Soviet bureaucracy, with the help of the Comintern, sought to put the world communist movement under control, purging the parties of the International from independent revolutionary cadres. Even where the revolutionary process was forged, it had to be controlled by the Soviet bureaucracy.
In international revolutionary politics in the 1920s, the Stalinist faction set out to persecute the Social Democracy, especially its left wing. The theory of social fascism came to the fore, according to which the social democratic parties were direct accomplices of fascism. The resolution of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern read: “with the progressive disintegration of bourgeois society, all bourgeois parties, and especially social democracy, take on a more or less fascist character, resorting to fascist methods of fighting the proletariat ... Fascism and social democracy are two points of the same weapon of dictatorship big capital. Therefore, Social Democracy can never be a reliable ally in the struggle of the proletariat against fascism. The consequences of the leftist course of the Comintern were the strengthening of the Mussolini regime in Italy and the rise to power of Hitler. In Germany, after years of feuding, the Communists and Social Democrats were unable to join forces to stop the Nazis. Trotsky's calls to create a workers' front and stop the "German Kornilov" were not heeded.
After the collapse of the struggle against social fascism, the Comintern made a sharp turn to the right, abandoning revolutionary agitation and subordinating the communist parties to the bourgeois democrats and social democrats. The new strategy of the International was the course to create Popular Fronts. However, despite all the conciliatory efforts of the communist parties in the conditions of the revolutionary upsurge of 1936-1938 (especially in France and Spain), the parties of bourgeois democracy saw the working class and the Comintern as an enduring threat.
The bourgeoisie preferred the "triumph of order" to the concessions to the working people that the Popular Fronts were seeking. “Better fascism than the Popular Front!” - such was the slogan of "democratic" capital. The policy of the Popular Fronts turned into new defeats: bourgeois circles betrayed the idea of the notorious popular unity against fascism. The politicians of France and Republican Spain capitulated to Hitler and Franco.
In the 1920s, the "Bolshevization" of the Communist Parties took place. The regime established in the RCP(b) was transferred to all sections of the Comintern. The most severe centralism was established in the parties of the Third International, a line was drawn towards complete subordination to the Comintern, which was entirely controlled at first by the triumvirs, and then by the Stalinist faction. There were purges of parties and their leadership, often in violation of all established norms, appointed from Moscow. It was thanks to the establishment of the regime of complete subordination of foreign communist parties to the Soviet bureaucracy, to the purge of all independent-thinking communists from them, that numerous failures in the policy of the Third International were possible, and then its liquidation in 1943.
The Soviet bureaucracy that seized power was not a special class. It represented a certain social stratum, which, due to the backwardness of the country, managed to usurp all power. The Soviets, trade unions and all the levers of executive power were found in the hands of the party apparatus. The bureaucracy was characterized by an understanding of its own interests: having defeated the opposition, it received numerous privileges into its own hands. The party maximum was abolished, which limited the material remuneration of members of the RCP (b) who held responsible positions.
The salary of a communist, according to the party maximum, was significantly inferior to the payment of a specialist who was not a member of the party. For a person interested in his material gain, joining the RCP (b) did not result in an increase in income. On the contrary, it meant a reduction in wages. The director of a plant who was not a member of the party could receive much more than the head of a communist enterprise. The Stalinist bureaucracy eliminated this inconvenient norm for it.
However, among the party apparatchiks who dealt with Trotskyism, the traditions of Bolshevism were alive. Even sending their recent comrades into exile, political isolation and camps, Stalin's supporters continued to remain ideologically and historically connected with the great October 1917, the underground struggle and the spirit of revolutionary Marxism. The contradiction between the bureaucratic way of "building socialism" that had gained the upper hand and the bearers of the traditions of Bolshevism had to be resolved. The elimination of the “old Bolsheviks” turned out to be inevitable in the process of the development of the counter-revolution, the final act of which was 1991.
Assessing the coup, Trotsky later wrote: “The bureaucracy defeated not only the left opposition. She defeated the Bolshevik Party. She defeated the program of Lenin, who saw the main danger in the transformation of state organs "from servants of society into masters over society." She defeated all these enemies - the opposition, the party and Lenin - not with ideas and arguments, but with her own social burden. The leaden backside of the bureaucracy has outweighed the head of the revolution. Such is the solution to the Soviet Thermidor.
3.5. Changes in the USSR
The triumph of Bukharin's policy proved short-lived. In 1927-1928 a new crisis broke out - the crisis of grain procurements. One of its reasons was the same "scissors" (price difference between industrial and agricultural goods). The policy of administrative price cuts for industrial products led to their shortage. Accumulating funds, the peasants could not spend them. In 1927, having paid a small tax to the state, the village decided to wait until spring to sell grain, until prices rise. Difficulties arose with the supply of cities.
In response to the "kulak grain strike", the leadership of the USSR raised the tax and lowered the price of grain. Seizures of surplus grain began throughout the country. Peasants who refused to hand over grain at state prices were prosecuted as speculators. The CPSU (b) urgently took a course towards complete collectivization. In essence, this meant the recognition of the collapse of the Bukharin-Stalinist line in the countryside, which strengthened the kulak and did not develop collective farms.
A bloc of the bureaucracy and the kulak - which turned out to be one of the winners of the revolution - was seen in the 1920s as a convincing prospect. However, it was decisively destroyed by the world economic crisis, which exacerbated economic contradictions in the USSR. The bureaucracy, the rural bourgeoisie, and with it the urban bourgeoisie, turned out to be opposed to each other. The kulak and the middle peasant did not need the Thermidorian administration, which interfered with the free use of the land, and the bureaucracy saw that it could no longer count on the petty bourgeois. By virtue of its revolutionary nature, as well as its material interests, it could not capitulate to the resurgent bourgeoisie, and then leave the historical stage. Therefore, a collision was inevitable.
In 1925-1927, according to Bukharin's thought, the collective farms were not considered a "high road" to socialism. In the politics of the second ruling faction after the triumvirate, this idea was the guiding one. But the supposed peaceful growth of capitalist elements, primarily the kulaks, into socialism, with industrialization financed by them, turned into a long-term war against the petty-bourgeois countryside. By refusing to sell grain at state rates, the peasants thereby refused to finance industrialization according to the strategy worked out by the CPSU(b). “Grain exports fell sharply: from 2177.7 thousand tons in the 1926-1927 season. up to 344.4 thousand tons in 1927/1928". At the same time, in connection with the beginning of a new global economic crisis, the price of bread on the world market also dropped rapidly.
The leadership of the USSR was at an impasse. The grain procurement crisis caused a new division in the party. Bukharin admitted mistakes in price policy, proposing: to raise purchase prices, to increase the mass of commodities sent to the countryside, and to reduce the export of grain abroad. It turned out to be objectively impossible to carry out these measures (initially adopted by the Party) on a full scale. Procurement of grain in 1928 again became "emergency", and the number of "speculators" brought to trial increased significantly.
Stalin and his group made an empirical turn to the left, declaring kulak sabotage to be the cause of the crisis. The next step along this path was "complete collectivization" and "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." Criticizing the construction of emergency measures in the system of the "Rights", headed by Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, were quickly defeated. Stalin drove them into opposition, making them responsible for the failures of policy in the countryside. The Bukharinites were forced to capitulate, having "disarmed before the Party." The peasants responded to the seizure of grain and forced collectivization with mass slaughter of livestock and armed rebellions.
Instead of creating and supporting collective farms, increasing their share in the production of marketable grain, the bureaucracy wasted several years on fruitless games of "growing the kulak into socialism." As a result: the industrialization of the country progressed slowly. The demands of the opposition to immediately switch to planned industrialization were ignored by the ruling faction. Only in 1928-1932 the first five-year plan was implemented in the USSR. It took place in the most difficult conditions of forced collectivization, and in fact a civil war with the countryside, a chronic shortage of food and money.
The methods of collectivization and industrialization in the USSR during the years of the first and subsequent five-year plans were of a bureaucratic, even totalitarian nature. In order to cover the costs of industrialization, almost all grain was often withdrawn from the collective farms, which caused a famine in 1932-1933 in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga and Kazakhstan. Local conditions, such as crop failure, were not taken into account - full implementation of plans was required. Everything went for export, the connection of the USSR with the world capitalist market increased.
The costs of industrialization were also covered by the emission of money, which caused inflation and a reduction in the real wages of workers. The sale of vodka was increased. At the same time, the chasm between the workers, collective farmers and a layer of the Soviet bureaucracy became wider, which increasingly increased the pressure on the working people.
As a result of the first five-year plan, the country pulled ahead. New industries were created, more than 1,500 large industrial enterprises were built. The import of equipment from abroad is declining, it is beginning to be replaced by domestic engineering. However, the overestimated production targets were not achieved, and the output of the main types of light industry products in 1933 remained almost the same as in 1927. On the collective farms, the gigantic loss of working livestock was only to a small extent compensated for by the use of machines.
After collectivization and the elimination of the NEP in the city, the economy of the USSR turned out to be completely state-owned. Collective farms were only formally considered "independent". The subordination of the collective farmers to the state machine was even greater than that of the workers. Until the 1950s, rural workers did not have passports, the free right to leave the collective farm and move to the city. Instead of a form of distribution of collective-farm profits according to work, the labor day was the distribution of a small part of the harvest left by the bureaucracy. The position of collective farmers was similar to the position of state serfs. Under Stalin, villages were attached to large state dignitaries, such as marshals. Such a "donation" of villages often meant relief for the collective farmers.
"Commanding heights in the economy" - the nationalized industry of the 1920s - was replaced in the 1930s by the complete stateization of industry, agriculture and trade. In the management of the economy, as in the CPSU (b), bureaucratic centralism was established, which from the first years became a constant disease of the economy of the USSR. At the same time there was a forced separation of the USSR from the world market. "It was caused by a chronic lack of funds and the oppressed (after collectivization) state of agriculture, which previously acted as the main export industry."
During the years of the first five-year plan, the bureaucracy completely liberated itself from control by the working people. Political changes in the USSR by 1934 were evident: instead of identity cards, passports were introduced and the freedom of movement and residence of citizens was abolished everywhere, the GPU finally rose above the party, in fact, personally subordinate to Stalin. The last remnants of Soviet democracy were liquidated - administrative-command methods of management began to dominate everywhere. Violence against the masses has become the main instrument of the policy of the bureaucracy and at the same time a form of preserving its privileges. A totalitarian regime was established in the USSR, which in these years can rightly be called Bonapartist.
As in France XVIII century Thermidor in Soviet Russia meant the removal of the masses from the political helm. The fate of the workers was now decided by the bureaucracy. However, as in the days of the Great french revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, the white emigration vainly interpreted the counter-revolutionary changes in their favor. Neither the French Thermidorians, nor the Thermidorian bureaucracy in the USSR wanted to restore the old order. Having naively accepted the extermination of the Bolsheviks by Stalin in 1937-1938 as a signal to return to the "cleansed paradise", many former White Guards fell into the thick of it. Despite the manifested "proletarian" internationalism in the war with Franco in the Pyrenees, they ended up in secret prisons of the NKVD in Spain or the Gulag. Few were able to pass through the dense sieve of the NKVD: to stay alive and return to their homeland.
In 1928-1933 the Thermidorian phase of the counter-revolution in the USSR ended. The counter-revolution did not take the path of the merging of the bureaucracy with the bourgeoisie in the countryside towards the restoration of capitalism, as the Left Opposition assumed. Under the pressure of internal economic contradictions and the global crisis, the apparatus layer of the USSR was forced to carry out collectivization and accelerate the industrialization of the USSR. At the same time, she decided on the complete liquidation of her recent allies - kulaks and Nepmen.
The turn made by the bureaucracy under the leadership of Stalin, in spite of all the leftistness of the phrase covering it, meant in relation to the socio-economic, political, cultural gains of the working people a new - Bonapartist - stage of counter-revolution. Having eliminated the petty bourgeoisie, the ruling stratum continued to change, threatening in time to become a new capitalist class. Only two obstacles remained in his path: the tradition of Bolshevism, of which he was still the bearer, and the proletariat, placed under tight control, but capable of reclaiming its rights over time. The combination of these two threats threatened the bureaucracy with a political fall, and therefore with the deprivation of all privileges.
3.6. Stalin and the Stalinist Opposition
In 1934, the "old guard" tried to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary without electing him to the Central Committee. But the initiative of the "Leninist cadres", the Bolsheviks with pre-revolutionary experience, failed. The 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks clearly demonstrated the administrative might of the General Secretary. Not popular among the masses because of the eight years of the "emergency", but on the other hand, it has become bureaucratically more powerful. The results of the secret ballot were falsified, Stalin retained his post. His positions in the Central Committee (mainly due to new nominees) were strengthened. What was the reason for such behavior of party cadres who supported Stalin for more than ten years, among whom were such old comrades as Sergo Ordzhonikidze?
1934 was the first peaceful year for the country that went through the most difficult period of forced collectivization. The civil war with the countryside ended with the complete victory of the apparatus, and the first five-year plan ended. Throughout the difficult period from 1927 to 1934 in the CPSU (b), no major clashes were noticeable to an external observer, with the exception of the defeat of the "right deviation" Bukharin-Rykov in the party. However, during these years the political regime in the country underwent serious changes: it became even more rigid, even more centralized and anti-democratic. Internal democracy in the party has shrunk to the last limit. Initially, emergency measures have become the norm.
Everything that happened was perceived by many old Bolsheviks as measures necessary for the USSR to get out of the crisis, but nothing more. After the victory over the difficulties, it seemed reasonable to return to a softer bureaucratic regime, the model of 1926-1927. The old Bolshevik core of the CPSU(b) was not ready to prolong and intensify the state of emergency, did not consider it expedient. Meanwhile, during the period of wholesale collectivization, opposition moods also existed in the party and, moreover, secretly grew.
The "Leninist cadres" in the CPSU(b) sympathized with the workers who found themselves in the most difficult material conditions, and critically assessed the violent methods of collectivization. Opinions were expressed that, having removed Stalin from the main party post, one could then easily eliminate all his closest associates. Indirectly recognizing the correctness of the left opposition on many issues, the opposition of the "Old Bolsheviks" did not consider their actions to defeat it wrong. Remaining on a more right-wing position than the repressed supporters of Trotsky, the cadres opposed to Stalin's line turned out to be the new "left opposition" in the CPSU (b).
The abolition of "Leninist principles" in the internal life of the party also worried the "old guard". Many recognized that Stalin had betrayed the cause of the revolution, that his reactionary policy was destroying its gains one by one. The increasingly large-scale and ugly personality cult of the bureaucratic leader was also rejected. Martemyan Ryutin, a prominent non-Trotskyist opposition figure, wrote: “The task is to immediately begin to mobilize and unite the party forces on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, on the basis of preparations for the destruction of Stalin's dictatorship. The party and the working class in their overwhelming majority are against Stalin and his clique. It is only necessary to unite these dispersed and terrorized forces, inspire faith in this cause and begin to work to eliminate the Stalinist leadership.
However, the political conditions of the early 1930s did not allow the left Stalinists to fight for the preservation and return of the "true foundations of Bolshevism" except in a covert, half-conspiratorial way. But against such methods of resistance of a significant part of the apparatus, Stalin had a powerful weapon - the political police of the OGPU. Having concentrated even more power in his hands during the years of collectivization and the first five-year plan, the “father of peoples” was practically invulnerable to the statutory methods of removing him from the state helm. This was clearly demonstrated by the 17th Congress of the CPSU(b). The Bolshevik apparatchiks with a revolutionary past who fought against Trotskyism in the 1920s could themselves very soon find themselves in the position of "Trotskyist wreckers" or even "counter-revolutionary espionage packs."
In the years after collectivization, the conditions really arose for some softening of the political regime. Many Bolsheviks thought it reasonable to pay more attention to the development of the production of consumer goods, which, after the liquidation of the NEP, became terribly lacking. Further expansion of privileges seemed to the "old guard" inexpedient, alien to the principles of the proletarian revolution, only discrediting the ideas of socialism. It was considered possible to soften the regime for prisoners, reforging them for the new everyday life of a country under construction. The material situation of the workers needed to be improved. In particular, this was insisted on by Kirov and the Leningrad group, which came to conflict with members of the Politburo who were entirely loyal to Stalin.
However, from 1927 to 1934, other forces also gained strength in the party and bureaucratic bodies. In the even more expanded state-party apparatus there were many cadres not connected with the revolutionary tradition, often young unprincipled careerists. Stalin, who did not see a reliable support in the ranks of the "old guard", increasingly made his bet on them. Among the most notable new nominees were such figures as Nikolai Yezhov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lev Mekhlis and Lavrenty Beria. In addition to people close to the "father of nations", there were hundreds of thousands of young people who dreamed of a bureaucratic career, which meant privileges and an incredibly luxurious life in comparison with the position of the working people. But on the way to it stood "Lenin's old people" (in fact, not at all elderly people), who occupied the majority of managerial posts.
From the speech of the opposition delegates at the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Stalin concluded that it was impossible for him to maintain his position without eliminating the entire old Bolshevik core of the party. Hardened in the underground, connected by strong friendship that arose during the years of emigration, exile and imprisonment, two revolutions and a civil war, these people could not become a reliable support for the new political regime in the USSR. The bureaucratic regime itself had to either take a new step to the right, or stabilize at the level reached by the end of the 1920s. The efforts of the opposition of the "Old Bolsheviks" were directed to this.
However, the victory of the “Leninist cadres” of the Soviet bureaucracy meant for Stalin the end of unlimited power and political career. He was directly responsible for numerous economic failures, the failures of the international communist movement, the starvation of millions of peasants, the creation of an intolerable intra-party regime, and much more. The Bolshevik core of the CPSU(b) did not trust the "brilliant leader, great friend and teacher of the Soviet people." The empiric, not collegially thought out (even in the bureaucratic sense of collegiality), dramatically changing methods of the Stalinist leadership cost the USSR dearly. All this was more than enough to remove Stalin from the leadership of the country and the party, while at the same time restoring the "Leninist" collegial-bureaucratic principles of governance.
The “father of peoples” appeared before the eyes of young apparatchiks in a completely different form. For them, he was the distributor of all life's blessings, an unmistakably wise, all-knowing and understanding leader. The bureaucratic cadres not connected with revolutionary ideas were ready to cynically accept any turns in the fate of the country and the CPSU (b) if they received material gain from this. They were a huge faceless force, which Stalin was able to appreciate perfectly. The “old Bolsheviks” could not do anything with her, who themselves nurtured her in the fight against Trotskyism. The radical change that took place in the USSR in 1928-1933 significantly raised the importance of this young party-state swamp.
The subjective interests of Stalin, who did not want to part with power, and the younger generation of apparatchiks coincided. It is precisely this, and not only the presence in the hands of the “father of the peoples” of the apparatus of suppression, that explains his success in the fight against the “Leninist guard”. The NKVD, the prosecutor's office and the police might not have worked. The Red Army, led by civil war cadres, could intervene and change the balance of power. The risk was great. Therefore, Stalin carefully thought out his plan of reprisals against the real and potential opposition in the CPSU (b), disguising it with his alleged willingness to compromise. The masterpiece of Stalin's deceit was the new Constitution of the USSR, which had never been in force, but was immediately declared the most democratic in the world. At the same time, the Secretary General stepped up the apparatus work on the selection of new nominees.
3.7. The eve of a new counter-revolution
After the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Stalin decided to exterminate all party members standing in his way, without regard to their number and consequences for the USSR. This was also to help him finally crack down on the leftist opposition that still existed. Despite fierce repression, she continued to operate underground. The leftist threat remained extremely dangerous for Stalin.
Trotskyism had a political program and had the most systematic and consistent criticism of the regime existing in the USSR, which since the autumn of 1936 was officially called the “socialist state of workers and peasants”. In order to neutralize it ideologically, the ruling bureaucracy changed the degree of criticism of the left oppositionists. They were falsely declared traitors to the cause of communism, wreckers and spies of the imperialist powers. However, to stop the political revival that took place in the mid-1930s was not an easy task for the NKVD, freed from control even by party apparatchiks. Leaflets of the left opposition appeared more and more often in the workshops, student circles arose one after another.
The youth began to carefully study the works of Lenin, Trotsky and other revolutionaries. In 1935, an underground organization arose even in the holy of holies of the CPSU (b) - the Higher Party School. Leaflets outlining the Trotskyite program went from hand to hand at the VPSh. "The students of the Higher School of Education, who studied Marx and Engels "from primary sources", became clear that "Trotskyism", branded by Stalin as a heresy, is in fact genuine Marxism-Leninism.
Protest moods grew everywhere in the cities. Often there were strikes. Calls for "belt tightening" coming from a privileged bureaucracy leading a luxurious life only increased the indignation of the workers, on whose shoulders the main burdens of forced industrialization fell. Angry inscriptions directed against Stalin appeared on the factory walls. The workers called the "beloved father of the peoples" a "bloodsucker", a "filthy contra" and an "executioner of the revolution". In response, the bureaucracy stepped up pressure on the working masses. Not only the resources of the political police - the NKVD, and the entire repressive machine, but also the accusation of those who fought against the reactionary regime in Trotskyism, and therefore - terrorist complicity with all external and internal enemies of the USSR, went into action.
“Opposition sentiments in the country were for the most part communist in nature and originated primarily in the party milieu. Therefore, during the years 1933-1936, Stalin led the party through three official purges, which threw hundreds of thousands of people out of its ranks. These measures prepared the next step of his policy - the destruction of all figures associated with the revolutionary tradition, including many persons who were part of his own environment. After the failure of the attempt to remove Stalin at the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the “old Bolsheviks” could not oppose anything to this. As Trotsky noted, “after the bureaucracy had suppressed inner life party, the Stalinist elite suppressed the inner life of the bureaucracy itself. The next stage of the counter-revolution was approaching.
The opposition "Old Bolsheviks" were powerless to resist the growing absolutist terror in 1934-1936. On the one hand, they remained opponents of the left opposition, stigmatized by Trotskyism. On the other hand, they could not stand at the head of the discontented masses against the regime, of which they themselves were a part. The bureaucratic "old guard", which, as it should have played its role as an intermediate counter-revolution, was cut off from all sides. She could not put up serious resistance to Stalin. Socially isolated, having lost faith in themselves, the "Leninist guard", and with it the broad mass of members of the CPSU (b) was soon to become a victim of a new stage of counter-revolution in the USSR. She was to die along with those against whom she fought so mercilessly for more than ten years - along with tens of thousands of left oppositionists, Bolshevik-Leninists.
In the USSR, on the eve of the great Stalinist terror, "the function of management is concentrated in the hands of an ever narrower circle of people." After the mass annihilation of the Bolsheviks, Stalin will collect all the power in his hands, without convening meetings of the Politburo for months. The party tradition of regular congresses will disappear, the meetings of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks will finally turn into formal apparatus events. The International will cease for a long time to be the anthem of the party, and the ideas of the world revolution will also be done away with. It will be declared Trotskyist, ultra-revolutionary and alien to genuine communism, forgetting the lines of the anthem of the Comintern: "... to be replaced by a single world Soviet Union."
National "socialism" will strengthen its position. In 1943, the Third International will be dissolved, as if it had completed the tasks assigned to it. Historians' textbooks will be rewritten. The name of the great Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky will be trampled into the dirt by his own students. His famous mass textbook on the history of Russia, brilliantly written from a Marxist position, containing a deep class analysis, will begin to be withdrawn as early as the mid-1930s, turning it into a bibliographic rarity today. Other books harmful to the totalitarian regime will also be subject to mass seizure. Fyodor Raskolnikov, the leader of the revolutionary sailors of 1917 and a prominent Soviet diplomat in the 1930s, recalled how shocked he was when he saw huge lists of books sent to Soviet libraries for immediate destruction. "Against the names of many authors was "destroy all books, pamphlets and portraits"".
Stalin will add new ones to the previous miscalculations and counter-revolutionary crimes. After mass destruction commanders The Red Army, the rejection of the developed military doctrines (tank corps will be disbanded - the pride of the executed red marshals Tukhachevsky, Blucher, Yegorov), the USSR will be unprepared for war. In the first weeks of the war, fascist aviation would be able, almost with impunity, to bomb Soviet aircraft dumped at field airfields on the command of Beria (who oversaw the construction of permanent airfields). Hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers will be captured through the fault of the top leadership. They will be equated with traitors to the motherland. On the move, the country will have to restore a military organization close to that canceled after 1937. The losses of the USSR and the destruction of the national economy will be colossal. Only the great courage of the Soviet people will ensure victory.
In 1935-1936 not everything was decided yet. In cells of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, among the commissars and commanders of the Red Army, among the managerial cadres in industry, moods opposed to Stalin and his politics prevailed. That is why, in the terrible years of the counter-revolutionary terror of the bureaucracy, among the victims were not only communists and workers, but engineers, doctors, teachers, directors, artists.
Preparing his crushing blow, Stalin felt more and more confident after 1934. He firmly decided to destroy the entire stratum of society ideologically connected with the revolution, without looking back at the terrible economic, military-political and cultural consequences for the USSR. His opponents were divided. Some, right-wing communists from the "old guard", missed their chance in 1934, hoping to comply with statutory norms, which in reality no longer mattered. They were entangled by the spy networks of the NKVD, preventing the only remaining ones from acting - by conspiratorial methods. Others, the left opposition, were disorganized by repression, deprived of central leadership and ties with Trotsky, who had been expelled from the USSR. Many prominent figures of the left opposition capitulated to the bureaucracy, laying down their ideological weapons. For Stalin, this was a major victory. Despite the growth of opposition sentiments in the city and the discontent of the collectivized peasantry, the masses did not have sufficient strength.
The proletariat, which had grown in numbers during the first years of industrialization, consisted mainly of recent peasants. They had neither the experience of pre-revolutionary workers who went through the harsh school of class struggle, nor their fighting consciousness. Relying on the bureaucratized and completely subservient trade unions, the NKVD, the entire administrative machine of power and pseudo-revolutionary propaganda, the Stalinist bureaucracy was able to suppress the indignation of the workers. At factories where opposition leaflets appeared, the NKVD immediately carried out arrests. Party apparatchiks everywhere supplemented the pressure with demagogic measures. However, the main reason for the failures of the red opposition in the 1920s and 1930s was not the growing power of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, but the weakness of the working class. Had the situation with regard to the proletariat been different, even from the wreckage of the Left Opposition a single revolutionary force could have arisen.
3.8. 18 Brumaire Joseph Stalin
The denouement of the knot of contradictions was detonated by the assassination of Kirov, organized by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin. It was followed by arrests, as well as open trials that shocked the USSR and the rest of the world. Carefully trained in the "laboratories" of the NKVD, they had to prove to the shocked Soviet citizens, foreign workers and communists that all the difficulties in the Soviet Union were not caused by the policy of the General Secretary's clique, but by widespread sabotage, betrayal and terrorism. The main ideological target of the processes was the left opposition and Leon Trotsky, who was in exile.
New amalgams went into action - false accusations that weaved together the past or present, genuine or attributed opposition with a fictitious desire to restore capitalism. Prominent figures of the revolution, party and government of the USSR were on the dock as "evil enemies of the Soviet power", "spies of the imperialist powers", "vile Trotskyite traitors". They confessed to ridiculous and absurd crimes before the eyes of the whole world. Few people knew that those accused in the trials of 1936-1937 who refused to acknowledge the correctness of the charges were not taken to open court. However, both were destined for inevitable death. The promise to save lives in exchange for a "saving lie" in the name of further victories of socialism was a hoax. None of the communists prepared by the NKVD for open trials survived the Stalinist era.
Following the public trials, the time of mass terror quickly set in. Not fully relying on the old cadres of the NKVD, Stalin changed the leadership of the commissariat. Yagoda's place was taken by Yezhov. Relying on new personnel, he, a few months after his appointment, carried out an unprecedented in scale, carefully prepared purge. The leaders of the NKVD, investigators and other employees were taken by surprise. The younger generation of unprincipled, executive, greedy for privileges people has replaced the employees, at least somehow connected with revolutionary ideas. Stalin resolved the torment of conscience of the Chekists who were preparing open trials with one blow, simply destroying the entire old backbone of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. "The plan for the physical destruction of all NKVD officers who knew the sinister behind-the-scenes side of the Moscow trials was developed by Stalin and Yezhov with thoroughness worthy of a military operation." Following the Chekists who were in the USSR, it was the turn of the NKVD officers who worked abroad.
Relying on the new cadres of the NKVD, it was easy for Stalin to move on to solving the main task: the liquidation of the old Bolsheviks and the complete subordination of the party. In 1937-1938, a campaign of expulsions from the Central Committee unfolded. One after another, the plenums of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks expelled dozens of communists from the governing body and the party. Many of them had already been arrested by that time. Not a single candidate was subjected to a personal trial, except for Bukharin and Rykov, who were expelled until big company purges in the Central Committee. "After the February-March 1937 plenum, decisions to expel members of the Central Committee were made on a poll basis and approved by the list." During three plenums (in June and October 1937 and in January 1938), more than half of the composition of the Central Committee was expelled by voting by lists: 75 people, of which 36 were members and 39 were candidates. All of them were declared enemies of the people.
It is not true to believe that the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) allowed itself to be destroyed without hindrance. Resistance to the Stalinist terror arose at the plenum of the Central Committee, held on June 23-29, 1937. The plenum unearthed Yezhov's report on the uncovered grandiose conspiracy involving prominent party and state leaders. The discussion of this issue continued for the first four days of the plenum. However, the plenum was not attended by 46 members and candidates elected at the XXVII Congress. But even among the members of the Central Committee admitted to work, there were communists who dared to speak out against the Stalinist terror.
Almost nothing is known about what happened at the June plenum. The meetings were not transcribed. The plenum was the only, dying for the Central Committee, an attempt to resist the "old guard". Yezhov demanded that emergency powers be granted to the NKVD. Yezhov's report and demand, as well as Stalin's proposal to all participants in the plenum to tell about the crimes of their comrades known to them, struck the Central Committee. The Communists expressed distrust of Yezhov's apparatus, demanding an inspection of the internal affairs bodies. The figures of the Bolsheviks arrested by the NKVD were voiced. The old Bolshevik Osip Pyatnitsky, who was in charge of one of the departments of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, made a bold critical speech. The communists pointed to the massive falsification of charges and the use of illegal methods of influence by the NKVD on those under investigation. During the breaks, the question of the need to remove Stalin from power was discussed. All this was not part of the plans of the "father of the peoples", who kept the NKVD apparatus at the ready.
The victory over the Central Committee was won by Stalin thanks to the use of powerful pressure on the participants in the plenum, combined with arrests between meetings of the Bolshevik oppositionists. The very next day after the performance, people disappeared from the hall, and often officially declared themselves to be arrested enemies of the people. The Central Committee, which had undergone an unprecedented purge, granted Yezhov emergency powers. The NKVD was also given the shameful right to use torture. As a result of the Plenum, the Politburo formed regional and republican "troikas" intended to issue extrajudicial sentences. They included: the head of the NKVD Department, the head of the Police Department and the regional prosecutor. Stalin's victory over the Central Committee opened a wide path for mass terror, without regard to the norms of Soviet law.
“Out of 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress, 98 people were repressed in 1936-1940, including 44 (out of 71) members of the Central Committee and 55 (out of 68) candidate members of the Central Committee.” Over 80% of them were under 50 at the time of their arrest. "During the period between the 17th and 18th Congresses, the composition of the Central Committee decreased by 108 people, or 78 percent." That is, most of it was exterminated. Not a single person escaped the execution. Over half of the repressed candidates and members of the Central Committee were subjected to group executions. In relation to the Politburo, the Central Committee finally turned after 1937 into a secondary, subordinate body for the formal approval of decisions. In this form, he remained until the liquidation of the CPSU in 1991.
Following the Central Committee, the repressions fell upon the entire party, Komsomol and state apparatus, and then on the masses of rank-and-file communists and non-party people infected with discontent. "The scale of the extermination of apparatchiks reached unprecedented proportions during the period of the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which Stalin called "the most free and truly democratic elections, the example of which history does not know." An important result of the destruction of the old apparatus that unfolded in 1937-1938 was the facilitation of the further course of the counter-revolution in the USSR. When the restoration of capitalism took place in the early 1990s in the Soviet Union, no change in the state apparatus was required. Almost ready-made, he moved into a new economic system. Only the ideological wing of the CPSU turned out to be unclaimed capitalism. But the critics of Trotskyism and the singers of developed socialism, "finally victorious in the USSR," were not idle. They found their place in the leadership and apparatus of the Communist Party.
In 1937-1938, the hunt for "enemies of the people" swept not only the party, where the NKVD carried out mass arrests in waves, but also the pride of the country - the Red Army. Thousands of experienced military men, tested by the civil war, were dismissed from the Red Army. Repressions first of all hit the color of the command staff. "During the party purges of 1933-1933, the Soviet press praised the reliability and purity of the selection of army personnel". By these and other measures, Stalin tried to lower the vigilance of the command staff of the Red Army, avoiding the dangerous intervention of the military in the planned defeat of the CPSU (b).
The start of the purges of the command staff of the Red Army was given by the massacre of eight generals who were executed in July 1937 on false charges of treason and spying for Germany. Among the first convicted were the legendary Red commanders, the pride of the country and its armed forces. The trial of the military lasted only one day and was not open. The sentence was followed by an immediate execution. The Soviet Union lost such prominent people like Marshal Tukhachevsky, commanders of the 1st rank Yakir and Uborevich, as well as other prominent military leaders. In 1938-1939, at the hands of Stalin's executioners two more of the five red marshals were killed: Yegorov and Blucher. Not giving in to the NKVD, Gamarnik, the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, shot himself on the eve of his arrest.
In the article “The Decapitation of the Red Army,” Trotsky wrote: “The ‘Old Guard’, in whose name the struggle against ‘Trotskyism’ began in 1923, was politically liquidated long ago. Its physical extermination is now being completed in the Stalinist style, combining sadistic brutality with bureaucratic pedantry. In any case, he (Stalin - approx. V.K.) dealt a terrible blow to the Red Army. As a result of a new judicial forgery, she immediately became several goals lower. The morale of the army is shaken to its very foundations. The interests of defense have been sacrificed to the interests of self-preservation of the ruling clique. However, the leader of the IV International, who was being created abroad, could not know exactly the reasons that prompted Stalin to inflict such a crushing blow on the command staff of the Red Army.
Among the hysterics, the debate continues about whether there was a conspiracy of the military against Stalin or the initiative belonged entirely to the "leader". Direct evidence of a conspiracy of the command staff of the Red Army was not found. However, there is reason to believe that the preparation of a military coup in the USSR in order to remove Stalin and his clique from power took place. The head of the NKVD in Spain, General Orlov, who escaped Stalin's reprisals, claimed that a group of senior military commanders and party leaders were preparing to overthrow the "leader."
The Gorals were still at the stage of gathering forces and had not developed a final plan for the coup, when the "father of peoples" struck his preemptive strike. “We even knew the date of the conspiracy,” Molotov later recalled. Stalin's circle also knew many details of the plan of the military leaders, including information about who and when was supposed to kill Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Kaganovich. Tukhachevsky proposed to capture Stalin at a military meeting and shoot him, then blocking the approaches to the Kremlin by the NKVD troops with two specially selected regiments of the Red Army. Stanislav Kosior, a prominent party and state Soviet figure, considered it necessary to immediately convene a plenum of the Central Committee, presenting evidence of Stalin's connection with the tsarist secret police, which the conspirators probably had at their disposal. The question of whether Stalin was a provocateur or not is still open. But regardless of the answers that time may bring here, Stalin remains the true leader of the bureaucratic counter-revolution of the 1920s and 1950s.
The military-political coup that was being prepared was not right-wing, reactionary, aimed at restoring the pre-revolutionary system, as some Stalinist "researchers" try to depict it without evidence. On the contrary, in the event of the success of the red generals, who acted together with part of the "Leninist cadres", the counter-revolutionary process could be stopped in the USSR, making it difficult for the bureaucracy to further restore capitalism. However, the alignment of forces in 1937 did not leave the Red Army and the party "old guard" great chances. The forces opposed to the "leader" began active conspiratorial actions relatively late, when the initiative was entirely in Stalin's hands.
Immediately after the sentencing of the generals, they were arrested and, for the most part, all their relatives and relatives were shot. The ease with which the confessions of the arrested military leaders were obtained is obviously not a simple consequence of torture and moral pressure, but is due to the fact that they were really preparing a military-political coup. It is possible that the NKVD investigators who processed the military commanders managed to convince them to admit the correctness of the accusation, using as an argument the complete failure of the conspirators. “Evidence of persons directly involved in the “military conspiracy” will hardly ever be discovered. All the people who could know about him were destroyed during the years of great terror (already nine days after the trial of the generals, the number of those arrested on charges of involvement in this conspiracy reached almost a thousand people).
Hysterical persecution of "enemies of the people" unfolded in the Red Army. The armed forces were overwhelmed by a wave of suicides. Expecting arrest, many red commanders preferred to settle accounts with life before falling into the hedgehog clutches of the NKVD. From 1937 to 1938, 1,560 cases of suicide and attempted suicide were registered in the Red Army. During these years, 3 marshals out of 5, 3 commanders of the 1st rank out of 5, 10 commanders of the 2nd rank out of 10, 50 out of 57 commanders - 50, out of 186 commanders - 154, out of 16 army commissars I and II ranks - 16, out of 26 corps commissars - 25, out of 64 divisional commissars - 58, out of 456 regimental commanders - 401. The total number of victims of terror in the army and navy was in the tens of thousands. In 1941, the defeat of the commanding staff of the armed forces organized by Stalin resulted in colossal losses of manpower and equipment for the USSR.
During 1937-1938, 96 out of 128 members and candidate members of the Central Committee were arrested in the VLKSM. All regional Komsomol organizations were swept by mass purges. A powerful blow fell upon the leadership of the foreign Communist Parties and the apparatus of the Comintern. People who until recently were considered "faithful Leninists and Stalinists" suddenly turned into "enemies of the people", "fascist-Trotskyite traitors", "saboteurs and spies of the three intelligence agencies." At the same time, cadres were promoted to the thousands of vacated posts, expressing personal loyalty to Stalin and considering ideology only as a tool. Formally, they swore allegiance to the precepts of October from the stands, but in reality they were ready to accept and justify any political turn that came from the leadership. The motives of personal gain became the main ones, not contradicting the ideals of communism in the minds of the new apparatchiks, as was the case with the "old guard".
The bureaucracy addressed the masses with the slogan: “First think about the Motherland, and then about yourself!” Within the ruling stratum, this call to the masses to work selflessly turned into a saying with the opposite meaning: "Think of yourself and do not forget about your homeland." This was the motto of the new, extremely cynical bureaucracy, over which the masses of working people did not even have any moral power.
In 1939, Stalin could breathe easy. His power became absolute. The Trotskyist opposition was destroyed by the bloody machine of the NKVD, the ideas of the Bolshevik-Leninists were distorted and discredited by millions of copies of newspapers, magazines, books and pamphlets. All "harmful" literature was confiscated and destroyed. The history of the party was now reduced to a "Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" prepared with the active participation of Stalin and falsely exalting his role in the revolution. The "Old Guard" no longer existed. From the pre-revolutionary generation of Bolsheviks, only a few party icons or completely safe people remained at large, many of whom miraculously survived Yezhov's terror.
Masses of communists, leftist Stalinists in their views, were shot, died of torture or perished in starvation camps. After doing the dirty work of massacring the communists, the NKVD apparatus was updated. It was headed by Lavrenty Beria, a person personally devoted to the "leader". "Stalin's dwarf" - Yezhov was killed in prison. No one else said “you” or “Koba” (Stalin’s party nickname) to the “leader”, behind the back of his eyes those close to him called him “master”. Not only the Central Committee and the Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, but even meetings of the Politburo could be held not when the charter required, but when the "leader" considered it necessary.
To reinforce the loyalty of the bureaucratic stratum, Stalin introduced the procedure for issuing money in envelopes. In addition to official salaries and considerable privileges due to their position, important apparatchiks received a large amount in an envelope every month. Such a system of "bonuses" was abolished under Malenkov in the mid-1950s, but until the restoration of capitalism, it evoked pleasant memories in the bureaucratic environment.
By 1939, a new, Bonapartist, stage of the counter-revolution had ended in the USSR. Joseph Stalin carried out his own coup on 18 Brumaire. The victims of the Bonapartist counter-revolution were not only the "eternal enemies of communism" - the left oppositionists, but also a huge number of Soviet Thermidorians - the "Old Bolsheviks" who interfered with it. Terrorist strikes by the NKVD were also inflicted on all structures of Soviet power, public and international organizations. In 1937-1938, the SEU (Society of Esperantists) was liquidated. Most of its leaders and activists are repressed and branded as "petty-bourgeois cosmopolitans". Members of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers, which was closed in 1935, were also under the blow of repression.
Together with the extermination of the left, the Bonapartist regime in the USSR significantly changed the official ideology, completely breaking with the Marxist idea of world revolution. Only as a result of the extermination of the communists in 1939 did the shameful rapprochement between the USSR and Nazi Germany become possible. But what the Thermidorian "old guard" considered unacceptable to itself was not a problem for the Bonapartist bureaucracy. The new apparatchiks, who went down in history under the name "nominees of 1937", easily handled ideological and moral instruments. They had nothing in common with Marxism and Bolshevism. On the contrary, Stalin and the bureaucratic stratum that followed him were not the ultimate, but the distinct embodiment of the counter-revolution.
3.9. The personality of Stalin and Bonapartism
The dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR was not liquidated by 1939. As long as the nationalized industry remained intact, the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union remained unfinished. The workers' state survived, but acquired a deformed character. Power in it was concentrated in the hands of the bureaucracy, and the masses of the working people were reduced to the position of executors of its will. It was not the apparatus in the USSR that was a mechanism subordinate to the proletariat, but the working class, deprived of political power, had to meekly carry out the commands of the bureaucracy. Stalin showed unprecedented cruelty in the massacre of the communists. However, he did not seek to restore capitalism.
The British Marxist Ted Grant called the regime established in the USSR "proletarian Bonapartism". It is noteworthy that Stalin, like Napoleon, was a representative of a culturally more backward people. It was deeply imbued with patriarchal traditions and had little to do with the ethics of Bolshevism. It was precisely such features of the psyche that allowed him, without playing a noticeable role in revolutionary events, to lead the most reactionary forces of the bureaucracy at that time during the period of bureaucratic counter-revolution. Also lost on the podium, Napoleon, with his clan representations of a Corsican, was more suitable for strangling the revolution than for the triumph of its ideas. A Rousseauist and republican in his younger years, he quickly became a bourgeois monarchist when he gained power.
Unlike the USSR, Bonapartism in France did not lead to the abolition of the economic gains of the revolution. On the contrary, in the interests of the bourgeoisie, he tried to protect them from feudal restoration and "arrogant inclinations" from the left, repressing the Jacobins. Napoleon's empire, by the standards of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, was very progressive, completely devoid of the spirit of revolutionary solidarity. The Soviet Union also, until its collapse, remained for many peoples a model of possible achievements. However, it was not socialist, and the counter-revolutionary processes that developed unevenly in it led to the restoration of capitalism.
Napoleon's struggle against the Jacobins served to strengthen the victorious bourgeoisie. Contributed to the concentration of wealth, the growth of large-scale production. Ultimately, French Bonapartism created the conditions for the maturation of a new class - the proletariat. At the next stage of French history, it was no longer the petty-bourgeois republicans that opposed the big bourgeoisie, which had rallied around the military dictatorship. The entire capitalist class was opposed to a new political subject - the proletariat.
Stalin's struggle with Bolshevism opened the way to the restoration of the former socio-economic system. That is, it was deprived of progressive principles, since the bureaucracy did not intend to use the material goods created by the working people for the benefit of the politically expropriated masses. All the material and social improvements the working people received in the USSR under their own pressure, which threatened the bureaucracy with the loss of control over the situation. As their consciousness matured, the apparatus stratum of Soviet society saw more and more clearly the favorable prospects for bourgeois restoration. The restoration of capitalism meant for her not the return of the old landowners and bankers from immigration, but her own transformation into unlimited owners of the wealth of the Soviet Union.
3.10. Liquidation of Bolshevism
Stalin well prepared a terrorist attack on the party. From 1933 to December 31, 1934, a "general purge" of the CPSU (b) took place. In May 1935, it was resumed, the exceptions continued. As a result of the purge, the Communist Party lost 18.3% of its members (the membership of the party before that was 1916.5 thousand people). Immediately after the purge, the VKP(b) opened a "verification of party documents", which continued until December 1935. She added another 10-20 thousand excluded. On January 14, 1936, the "replacement of party documents" was announced. As a result of the exchange of party cards, 18% of the members of the CPSU (b) were expelled.
As inequality increased in the USSR, the contradiction between the working masses and the privileged bureaucracy also grew. However, this process caused an increase in the contradiction between the Bonapartist part of the bureaucracy and the Thermidorian "Leninist guard". Heading the young bureaucratic swamp, Stalin sought to eliminate the old Bolsheviks who interfered with his personal power. To the slogan of a return to the Leninist precepts of party life, he countered the demand for "solidity" in following the party's "general line." Having a powerful apparatus and police resource "leader" in 1936-1938, without much resistance, he was able to break the "old guard" by sending thousands of communists to camps and to be shot.
The result of the great purge was the transformation of the CPSU (b) from the communist party (albeit the apparatus-Thermidorian) into the “order of the swordsmen”, completely subordinate to the will of the “brilliant leader”. During the Stalinist terror in the CPSU(b), the last traces of centralist democracy were destroyed. The death of party cadres associated with the revolution eliminated the heterogeneity of the ruling stratum, strengthening its political positions. The bureaucracy rallied around Stalin, seeing in him the support of their position.
Stalin dealt a particularly cruel blow to the Left Opposition, which still remained in the camps. Thousands of Bolshevik-Leninists were exterminated by the NKVD or died of starvation, torture and exhausting labor. Not only former or current oppositionists were repressed, but also members of their families. Persons who took place in the 1930s on cases marked KRDT (Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyist Activities) had practically no chance of surviving. "The most large-scale operation for the mass destruction of Trotskyists was called the" Vorkuta tragedy "". In its course, 2901 prisoners were shot. All of them were communists who joined the party before 1917 or during the period of the revolution.
The wholesale destruction of the Trotskyists in 1938-1938 led to a break in the revolutionary tradition. Even decades after the extermination of the Bolshevik-Leninists who were in the camps, the ruling bureaucracy did not meet such a united and ideologically consistent opposition in the country. The terror of the NKVD rooted out the revolutionary forces capable of eventually leading the masses, preventing the capitalist restoration.
As a result of repressions in 1937-1938, according to the certificate of the chairman of the Commission of the Presidium of the Central Committee Shvernik, drawn up in early 1963, more than 1,372,329 people were arrested. More than half of them were shot, many died in the camps. In 1936, 1,118 people were shot on political charges. In 1937 - 353,074 people. In 1938 - 328,618 people. In 1939-1940, 4,201 people were shot. "The number of those executed in 1937-1938 is more than 7 times higher than the number of those executed during the remaining 22 years of Stalinist domination". In 1930-1936 and 1939-1953, 94,390 people were shot.
More than half of all victims were communists. Of the total number of those arrested in 1936-1938, party members and expelled Bolsheviks numbered over 1.2 million people. Only 50,000 of them survived. The rest were shot or died in camps. The total number of communists who died in the bloody millstones of the Bonapartist machine is colossal. Nowhere and never in history has any reactionary regime carried out such a massive extermination of communists.
3.11. Restoration of capitalism in the USSR
By the beginning of World War II, the USSR had overcome the absolute lag behind the advanced capitalist countries in terms of the production of the main types of industrial products. "The production of electricity, fuel, steel, cement in 1940 surpassed the corresponding indicators of Germany, England and France, or came close to them." New industries emerged: aviation, automotive, aluminum, bearings, tractor and tank building. In 1937, the volume of industrial output produced in the USSR amounted to 429% of the level of 1929, while in the capitalist countries it exceeded the pre-crisis level by only 4%.
The situation in Soviet agriculture was completely different. Despite the increased use of technology in the prewar years, the valuation of gross agricultural output in the last prewar years exceeded the corresponding figures at the end of the NEP by only 5%. Losses in livestock due to mass slaughter during the years of forced collectivization could not be restored. By the beginning of 1941, the number of cattle reached 54.5 million heads, which was 3.7 million heads less than on January 1, 1929. All this affected the food supply of the growing cities.
“Even in the reconstructed or newly created sectors of the heavy and defense industries of the USSR, labor productivity was significantly lower than in the United States and Western European countries, although the technical equipment of these industries, equipped with imported latest technology, was slightly inferior to American or Western European” . The Stalinist terror caused enormous damage to the Soviet economy. In terms of growth rates of industrial production, 1936 was the most successful year. However, as a result of mass arrests of managerial and engineering personnel in 1937, they fell by at least half. Labor productivity declined even more radically in the prewar years. In 1939-1940, there was a tendency to reduce the production of the main types of industrial products. The output of steel, rolled metal and pig iron declined in 1939 compared with the previous year. In 1940, compared with 1939, the production of automobiles fell by 28%, tractors - by 25%.
Planned economic management in the USSR provided the economy with high growth rates. During the Second World War, it became an important factor in victory, allowing Soviet Union quickly raise military production, multiplying losses in weapons. However, the successes of the Soviet economy in 1941-1945 and the period of restoration of the national economy were primarily achieved thanks to popular enthusiasm. The Soviet people fought against fascism and worked for the front not for the sake of the privileges of the party bureaucracy. They sought to protect the remaining gains of the revolution and sincerely hoped for a change for the better after victory. Faced with the threat of the death of the USSR, the Soviet bureaucracy during the war went to a temporary easing of relations in society. However, she feared a mass upsurge and sought to keep it under her control everywhere. The ruling stratum tried to replace the class character of the armed struggle with slogans of defending the fatherland from a foreign conqueror. Feeling fear of the revolution, the Stalinist elite entered into a secret agreement with England and the USA. Under pressure from Moscow, the communists of France, Italy and Greece became weapons to the bourgeois governments. Despite the support of the masses, they shamefully refused to continue further struggle.
The bureaucratic management system established in the USSR did not allow any production democracy, "which is not some kind of abstract principle indifferent to the development of the economy, but the only possible mechanism for the successful development of a truly socialist economic system." Management decisions were made not as a result of democratic discussions, but exclusively through apparatus voluntarism. The bureaucracy did not allow any open discussion of various economic issues, ways to improve the efficiency of economic management. The interests of producers and the needs of producers did not find their expression, since there was no "deployed democracy of producers and consumers" . The Stalinist bureaucracy could not allow it either before or after the World War, without losing its power and without ceasing to ruthlessly rob the working people. Only a political revolution in the USSR could throw off the administrative fetters that held back the economic development of the country.
In terms of absolute output in 1940, only the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union. The share of the USSR in world industrial production reached almost 10%. However, the per capita share of industrial output in the USSR ranged from 1/5 to 2/3 of the level achieved by the advanced capitalist countries.
During the years of the first three five-year plans, the social composition of the population of the USSR has seriously changed. The working class grew from 8-9 million in 1928 to 23-24 million in 1940. The size of the industrial proletariat increased from 4 to 10 million people. The population of cities has doubled. The proportion of people employed in the country's agriculture fell from 80% in 1928 to 54% in 1940. From 1928 to 1940, the number of intelligentsia (especially engineering and technical) increased noticeably.
Against the backdrop of the economic successes of the USSR, the position of the working people of town and countryside did not change for the better during the first three five-year plans. The living conditions of the bulk of the workers remained extremely poor. In 1940, each urban dweller had a little over 6 square meters. m useful and about 5 sq. m of living space. It was "about the same as before the revolution, and almost one and a half times less than in the mid-1920s." Workers' incomes have declined due to inflation. State retail prices increased from 1928 to 1940 by 6-7 times, while the average normal wage of workers and employees increased only by 5-6 times. With an average monthly salary of a worker of 300-350 rubles, the income of a collective farmer in 1940 was about 200 rubles, half of them related to the results of labor in the subsidiary plot. The financial situation of rural residents was much worse than before collectivization.
Collective farms did not function as enterprises where income according to work is divided among workers, they were so only in theory. As their share in the "income of the collective farms", the peasants received a part of the little that the state left for the collective farms. Prices for the purchase of foodstuffs were underestimated, and planned targets for collective farms were overstated. Collective farmers paid high taxes to the state for household plots and personal livestock. Until the mid-1950s, the ruthless exploitation of the countryside remained one of the main sources of financing for industrialization.
“In the mid-1930s, the working class was deprived of its educational benefits (preferential conditions for admission to universities). This trend in education culminated in 1940 with the introduction of high school fees. high school and in high school» . In the USSR, work books were introduced, where the reason for the dismissal of an employee was noted and a regime was established for attaching workers to their place of residence - registration. Freedom to choose their own place of residence was severely limited. Collective farmers were generally deprived of passports and the right to move out of the villages without official permission.
In the late 1930s, the country established criminal penalties for being late for work and other violations of labor discipline. The length of the working week has increased from 40 to 48 hours and more, and only one day off per week has been retained. There was a chronic shortage of basic necessities in the country, in order to purchase which it was necessary to stand in queues for many hours. The villagers didn't even have that opportunity. The bureaucracy did not consider it necessary to solve the problems of the workers. Instead, a regime of total terror and denunciation was established at the enterprises. Under such conditions, strikes were impossible. The workers' social protest manifested itself in growing apathy towards work and distrust of official propaganda.
The economic system of the USSR, created as a result of bureaucratic counter-revolution, could remain effective only up to a certain limit. The growth of the Soviet economy objectively caused its crisis, requiring a change in management methods, relations in production, and the creation of mechanisms for material interest in labor. All this directly related to the conditions of existence of workers and collective farmers. The widely practiced increase in the intensity of labor, through lowering prices, led to an increase in defects and a decrease in the quality of products, although it was officially proclaimed an increase in labor productivity.
There is a well-known Soviet anecdote in which a worker who knocked together wooden boxes explained to the personnel department the reason for his dismissal by the fact that the box would not hold on to four nails. Every time the factory administration halved the price of work, the worker reduced the number of nails driven into the box by the same amount. When the limit was reached, he wrote a letter of resignation. Raising the requirements for workers, reducing prices without technical re-equipment of production, the bureaucracy received in response a passive protest of the workers. The transition of the Soviet economy from extensive growth to intensive development remained since the 1940s the main problem that the bureaucracy could not solve. Despite individual successes (primarily in the military-industrial complex), after the “big breakthrough” of 1928-1940, the national economy of the USSR accumulated a backlog.
Since 1936, the process of crushing the people's commissariats has been actively going on. After the war, the number of ministries increased. The system of government became bureaucratized as the economy grew. After the completion of the post-war restoration of the national economy, the need to improve the system of economic management increased. In March 1953, the powers of the ministries were sharply increased. However, the modernization of bureaucratic schemes could not produce an economic effect without improving the situation of the working people, abandoning the daily repressive pressure. It was also necessary to deploy social programs, including the development of housing construction, trade, health care, to weaken censorship, providing greater freedom for cultural life. Objective conditions forced the bureaucracy to make all these concessions, which found expression in the reforms of Malenkov and the Khrushchev Thaw. However, the ruling stratum abruptly pulled back, barely feeling threatened. A powerful signal for the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy was the protests of the workers in 1956 in Hungary and Poland (the Poznań uprising).
The number one problem for the Soviet economy was agriculture. By the beginning of the 1950s, the flight of people from the villages became a mass phenomenon, despite the existence of a passport regime in cities. From 1949 to 1953, the number of able-bodied collective farmers in the collective farms (excluding the western regions of the country) decreased by 3.3 million people. The deep crisis of agriculture created the threat of famine. Food shortages increased the tense situation in the industrial centers. Planned reductions in retail prices every spring naturally led to an imbalance in trade, and there was a shortage of the simplest consumer goods.
The lower classes did not want to live in the old way. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, underground communist youth circles began to re-emerge. In them miraculously preserved documents of the Left Opposition, Lenin's political testament went from hand to hand. The Soviet bureaucracy seriously feared that if the crisis of the national economy went further, it would encounter an upswing in the working-class movement, which could be headed by young Trotskyists. Despite the merciless Stalinist terror, the emasculation of Marxism, the falsification of history, censorship and total police surveillance, revolutionary ideas found their way again. To prevent them from becoming a serious force, the bureaucracy had to make concessions to the masses, combining them with repressive measures against the left underground.
Changes began immediately after the funeral of the "great leader". The same people who helped Stalin during the years of the most terrible terror undertook to carry them out. To overcome the crisis in the countryside, the Soviet government went to increase purchase prices. Retail prices have dropped. A campaign for the development of virgin lands was launched, which provided a solution to the issue of food shortages. The expansion of the use of technology, which remained bureaucratically wasteful, the sharp increase in oil production made it possible to cover the reduction in the able-bodied population in the countryside by an increase in production. Harsh measures directed against rural workers were abolished. Collective farmers received passports, like other Soviet citizens. They were able to move more freely to cities to work or study. The financial situation of rural residents has improved dramatically.
In 1953, the working time reform took place. The working day was normalized in all institutions. Slowly, but began to increase the production of consumer goods. Investment in light and food industry increased. The material well-being of the people began to improve. The rejection of Stalin's repressive policy gave impetus to the growth of the national economy. Even before Khrushchev came to power, the political regime was softened, military spending was reduced, and the costs of the apparatus of the Ministry of State Security (MGB). By special order of Beria, the investigator was forbidden to use torture. About 1 million people were released from the camps. 200 thousand people.
After Stalin's death, a struggle for power unfolded at the top of the bureaucracy. The omnipotent head of the political police, Lavrentiy Beria, was assassinated. Another associate of Stalin and friend of Beria, Georgy Malenokov, was removed from his post as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The measures he had taken to weaken the party bureaucracy and strengthen the economic bureaucracy were cancelled. Political power ended up in the hands of Nikita Khrushchev, who was supported by the apparatus of the CPSU. A number of Stalin's close associates lost their positions, were expelled from the party and were sent to a "deserved rest."
The attempt under Khrushchev to decentralize economic management by creating economic councils (sovnarkhozes) was unsuccessful. It did not assume any real consideration of the opinion of workers, even as consumers. On the contrary, the bureaucracy more than once used troops to suppress the spontaneous uprisings of the workers, whose financial situation worsened by 1962-1963. In Novocherkassk, troops fired on a peaceful workers' demonstration, and force was used in other parts of the country. Mass riots also took place in Murom, Biysk, Alexandrov, Krasnodar, Krivoy Rog and Sumgayit. There were many underground communists in prisons who distributed leaflets and agitated the workers for the overthrow of the degenerated bureaucracy, which had betrayed the ideals of the revolution. For the most part, the communists of those years did not have a clear idea of what happened in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s.
In cracking down on the "accomplices of imperialism," the ruling stratum did not act as a special class of society, which it was not. Using tough measures, the bureaucracy tried to hide them, maintaining the appearance that nothing had happened. Shooting workers, throwing underground fighters into prisons and psychiatric hospitals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), the apparatus layer continued to emphasize its commitment to the ideals of communism. In case of further growth of the labor movement, its radicalism and self-organization, the cynicism of the bureaucracy could become obvious to everyone. This again threatened the ruling stratum with a fall. New concessions, more significant than before, were required to forestall the maturing action of the masses. Relying on the economy in the old form, it was impossible to implement them. Until the control of the situation slipped from the hands of the party-state apparatus, the tough and stubborn "voluntarist" Khrushchev was removed from all posts. Leonid Brezhnev became the head of the party and the country.
In the mid-1960s, the reform of Alexei Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, began. It provided for the transfer of enterprises to self-financing. It gave them the right to determine their own buyers and suppliers, set contractual prices, allowed them to spend part of the profits on the development of production and stimulation of the team. The number of planned indicators lowered to enterprises from above was reduced. As before, administrative pricing was maintained, but the planned unprofitability and price distortions began to be regarded as an exception. Economic councils were abolished and branch ministries were restored.
Kosygin's reform expanded the use of market mechanisms, had a positive effect on the material situation of workers, and improved the situation on the commodity market. At the same time, it was called upon to raise the efficiency of the Soviet economy and make concessions to the working class of the USSR after the strikes that swept in 1962-1963. Back in 1962, the bureaucracy did not consider it necessary to reform the economy. “We need to work better, that's the whole reform!” said Andrei Kirilenko, secretary of the Central Committee, at a meeting with the Italian communists. However, after the mass actions of the proletariat, which had to be suppressed by force, the Soviet bureaucracy was forced to start economic reforms.
Without improving the work of enterprises, the workers had nothing to pay for the concessions. Realizing the need for concessions, as a measure to preserve the political system, the bureaucracy went in 1964 to an unprecedented increase in the wages of workers. This year , the average growth rate of wages jumped almost 2.5 times . Since 1968, workers in the USSR received a second day off per week. For the first time since the 1920s, the country established a 40-hour work week. In 1965 and 1966 there was a boom in housing construction. Since 1967, the production of passenger cars began to grow. The production of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, televisions increased sharply. The production of everyday items went up: clothes, shoes, fabrics and knitwear. Since 1969, the number of sanatoriums, boarding houses and rest houses began to grow rapidly.
Having made concessions to the working people, the party and state apparatus left them as before politically disenfranchised. The KGB resolutely baked any attempts to create Marxist circles, both among the workers and among the intelligentsia. The practice of placing opposition communists in psychiatric clinics run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs was widespread.
After 1973, when the price of oil skyrocketed on the world market, the bureaucracy curtailed economic reforms, but did not abandon the policy of appeasing the masses through material concessions. The USSR began to massively export oil and gas to Western Europe. Pipelines were built that provided a large influx of foreign currency into the country. These funds went to support the conservation of public relations in the Soviet Union.
The expansion of self-financing, objectively necessary for the development of the national economy, led to the abandonment of administrative methods of forced labor and the inclusion of mechanisms for the economic interest of the worker. Ensuring the development of the internal market of the USSR, this also contributed to the growth of the economic consciousness of the workers. Stalin's management of the economy was built on the priority of non-economic coercion to work and control over the fulfillment of tasks. Material interest in the form of piecework existed, as a rule, in relation to an individual worker. In the course of the reform of 1964-1973, the method of team work with collective economic interest began to be widely used. It had a positive effect on labor productivity, but carried in itself dangerous beginnings for the power of the ruling stratum.
Faced with the threat of a mass uprising of workers in 1963, the ruling stratum realized how dangerous it was for them to awaken the masses. The growth of the economic consciousness of the workers quite logically pushed them to political analysis, which subsequently led to a political revolution. By bribing the working people with concessions, the bureaucracy sought to corrupt them, to deprive them of their class consciousness, accustoming them to state tutelage and the “nationwide” nature of the state. It was the oil decade after 1973 that provided a turning point in the minds of the working people, leaving them mostly helpless observers as the bureaucracy moved on to the restoration of capitalism.
The years of cost accounting had a significant impact on the consciousness of the party and state apparatus. Giving enterprises more economic autonomy and initiative allowed managers to create loopholes for appropriating part of their income. Underground workshops were created at many enterprises, producing unscheduled products, the profit received from the sale of which went into the pockets of the directors and their associates. The increase in turnover in the retail trade led to numerous violations in this area, when the management of the stores became more and more concerned about their own economic interests. Under the dominance of the bureaucratic machine, the spread of cost accounting led to a further degeneration of the bureaucracy.
The curtailment of Kosygin's reforms after the jump in oil prices in 1973 not only did not stop this process, but, on the contrary, accelerated it. The growth of the USSR's ties with the world market further contributed to the change in the consciousness of the ruling stratum. Once the "impractical" Brezhnev cohort of apparatchiks went to their graves and oil prices went down, changes were not long in coming. The social system of the USSR found itself in a deep crisis. Perestroika has begun. The restoration of the bourgeois social system became a matter of the coming years.
From 1968 to 1973, the reforms progressed with difficulty. After 1973, when there was a turning point in the world economy, the USSR lagged behind the advanced capitalist countries. Made Soviet science developments were not implemented in production. The bureaucracy could build factories according to Western models, but was unable to technologically re-equip the economy, even with all the necessary discoveries at hand. She brushed aside the proposal to introduce electronic systems of economic management, which made it possible to drastically reduce the size of the apparatus, actively including workers in the decision-making process in production. Developments in industrial robotics have also been shelved for the most part.
The Brezhnev bureaucracy feared both the bourgeoisie of its own stratum and the possible uprisings of the proletariat. The further development of the Soviet economy required the expansion of market relations, which, given the removal of workers from power, accelerated the proprietary evolution of the bureaucracy. The Brezhnev elite sought to restrain this process, at the same time not allowing the workers to control at any cost. But, despite the refusal to further spread the cost accounting, even curtailing its use, the conservative part of the bureaucracy could not long teeter on the brink.
In the mid-1970s, the ruling Soviet stratum found itself in a dilemma. The further development of the Soviet economy led to an aggravation of the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the working class, which now included many professions that were privileged in the Stalin years. Either the proletariat regained the power it had taken away in the 1920s, or the apparatus stratum had to complete the counter-revolutionary process by restoring capitalism. The resolution of the issue was delayed by high world oil prices. The influx of petrodollars spared the conservative Soviet bureaucracy the need to reform.
Thanks to the expansion of the USSR's ties with the world market, the bureaucracy took a new step in its evolution towards a class. When oil prices went down, the USSR was already a completely different country than in 1962 or 1973. The conservative Stalinist forces in the CPSU were significantly weakened and market sentiment increased. At the same time, the masses of working people turned out to be spoiled by the state's social care and were incapable of resolute resistance to bourgeois restoration. Persecuted even in the materially prosperous 1970s, the left was very weak. The working masses easily succumbed to liberal propaganda, demonstrating the weakness of their class consciousness.
In 1968-1982, the USSR missed a real chance to get ahead, becoming the most advanced country on the planet. During this period, the world economy entered a period of crises that marked the change of global economic waves. The period of expensive labor and capital shortages that had lasted since 1945 was coming to an end. The time began when, instead of technological renewal of production, the bourgeoisie sought to reduce the cost of labor, through the proletarianization of millions and millions of peasants in the periphery. The transfer of production to the "third world" was unfolding. With a large portfolio scientific discoveries, the Soviet Union could modernize its economy by radically improving the living conditions of working people. However, this required the entry of the working class into politics, completely expropriated by the bureaucracy. The management layer itself did everything possible to prevent this scenario from being realized.
It was no coincidence that the working class of Soviet society was unable to regain the lost power by restoring the gains of the revolution. The weakness of the leftist organizations of the 1940s and 1980s fully reflected the weakness of the class consciousness of the proletariat. It was only in the last years of perestroika that trade unions independent of the bureaucracy arose, and from the underground communist groups persecuted by the KGB, a transition began to the construction of party structures. The new trade unions easily became hostages of the market promises of the bureaucracy that prepared the restoration. The labor movement, especially the miners' protests, helped the liberal majority of the ruling class to remove the conservative apparatchiks from power. The attempts of the leftists to awaken revolutionary consciousness among the masses remained ineffectual, stumbling upon a deaf misunderstanding or irritated indignation at the "boring totalitarianism." However, it would be wrong to believe that the class consciousness of the proletariat was washed away only by the years of Brezhnev's oil stagnation.
The working class of the USSR at the time of the restoration was very young and immature. It has not yet completed its transformation into a class in itself in order to become a class for itself again. The formation of the class consciousness of the workers was hampered by the contradictory nature of the Soviet state, which carried out a lot of progressive transformations, modernized society, but did not involve the participation of ordinary people in management. The oppression of the proletariat by the bureaucracy was carried out not in the form of exploitation, when one class according to all laws (its own) appropriates the results of the work of another, but in the form of robbing the working people by their own hired managers, who took all political power for themselves. To avoid retribution, the bureaucracy periodically made concessions to the workers, forming in them the habit of paternalistic guardianship. Suppressing any organized or individual actions against itself, the Soviet bureaucracy covered itself not with its “natural right”, but with false accusations against the left oppositionists. She attributed to them the desire to restore capitalism by destroying socialism, or simply declared them crazy, really driving people crazy or crippling them in the hospitals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Throughout Soviet history Beginning with industrialization and ending in 1991, the masses of urban workers were steadily expanding due to the movement of labor from the countryside, again and again bringing with them petty-bourgeois notions. The passion of millions of Soviet workers remained unproductive picking in the ground, demonstrating how far their psychology had gone from the ideals of the peasantry. Even in the first decade of the restoration, instead of fighting to improve their financial situation, the masses of working people tried to solve problems by digging up vegetable gardens on land plots allocated to them by the state. Without receiving a salary, people continued to go to work, surviving at the expense of subsistence farming. Up to a certain point, such "agrarian insanity" suited the bourgeoisie quite well. The end was laid for him when capital required the full involvement of the wage worker in the production process. During the years of economic recovery that followed the crisis of 1998-1999, a huge number of plots were abandoned.
The ease with which liberal economic illusions took root in the minds of Soviet workers and intellectuals is explained by the deep connection between Soviet people and the petty-bourgeois psychology of the countryside. The collective farm system could not destroy it in any way, since it only suppressed the possessive instincts of the peasant, but did not eradicate them. On the ladder of evolution of the organization of production, collective farms occupied an intermediate position between a simple cooperative and an industrial enterprise, an agricultural assembly line in which there are no peasants, but if only hired workers. The promise to satisfy consumer dreams turned out to be quite enough for millions to give their formal means of production, and with them many social rights, to the new bourgeoisie - the former Soviet bureaucracy.
Modern bourgeois states emerged from the ruins of the USSR. The restoration destroyed the economic structures of Soviet society, inscribing the former Soviet republics into the world economy as peripheral countries, economically dependent on the centers of capitalism - the USA, the EU and England. The deep economic crisis in Russia in 1991-1999 interrupted the process of formation of class consciousness for almost two decades, which was resumed under new conditions.
The impetus for the revival of the labor movement and the revolutionary struggle was given by the economic crisis of 1998-1999, after which rapid economic growth began. The era of Russia's capitalist rise gave rise to economic illusions of the masses, the collapse of which became possible already under the impact of a new global crisis.
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Rogovin V.Z. Was there an alternative:
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How Beria was killed: -tv.ru/common/2455/
"Kosygin" reform:
Social aspects of the "Kosygin" reform in the mid-1960s - 1970s. Analysis of the dynamics of indicators of the standard of living of the population:
Let's just say that the topic is big and very painful for many. It requires detailed consideration, and the framework of a small brochure will not do here.
Therefore, we will speak as briefly as possible, citing for the most part the conclusions from what is already known to the research group of the KRD "Working Way". For detailed explanations on this issue, see a separate large publication dedicated to the bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR, which is scheduled for release at the end of 2014-beginning of 2015.
First, not only Gorbachev's perestroika directly, i.e., should be called bourgeois counter-revolution. the period of the USSR from 1985 to 1991, as is usually done in the leftist and near-communist environment. Perestroika was only the final stage of the counter-revolution. And the counter-revolution began much earlier - in 1953 with the "creeping counter-revolution", which for more than thirty years perfectly prepared Soviet society for the restoration of capitalist relations in the USSR, which was carried out during Perestroika.
In this connection, the history of the USSR can be divided into 2 stages:
Stage 1 - the period of growth of the socialist revolution (from October 1917 to mid-1953), when Soviet society purposefully and consciously moved towards communism, destroying capitalist production relations and actively developing socialist production relations.
Stage 2 - the period of the bourgeois counter-revolution (from mid-1953 to December 1991), when the movement towards communism began to slow down more and more, and bourgeois phenomena and trends in Soviet society began to grow and intensify. By 1985, the newly resurgent exploiting class of the bourgeoisie in the USSR had grown so strong that it moved to decisive action. Over the next few years, he was able to finally wrest political power from the hands of the Soviet working class and legitimize other property relations in the country, thereby restoring the capitalist mode of production in the USSR.
Secondly, revisionism became the "Trojan horse" of capitalism in the USSR. It was with its help that under the guise of Marxism-Leninism, bourgeois ideas were gradually implanted in Soviet society, and the dialectical-materialist worldview of the Soviet workers and, first of all, the working class and its vanguard - the communists was replaced by false idealism and mechanism, which are the basis of the bourgeois worldview, class position bourgeoisie.
Here we should remind our readers that the economy of a socialist society is the result of the conscious activity of people. Socialist relations of production do not arise spontaneously, like the production relations of class societies, which arise of their own accord within previous socio-economic formations, being a natural consequence of the growth of their productive forces. The socialist economy is being built by the people themselves, systematically and systematically in accordance with the objective laws of social development, transforming and organizing in a new way the productive forces that capitalism left them as a legacy, developing their socialist productive forces on this basis. And knowledge of the objective laws of social development provides nothing more than a revolutionary theory of a progressive social class - the working class, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. (Revolutionary means transforming the world).
Whence it directly follows that the economy, as well as the policy of a socialist country, is directly determined by the ideology of this country - its correspondence to Marxism-Leninism, which is nothing more than the worldview of the class that dominates under socialism - the working class.
The bearer and guardian of Marxism-Leninism is the Communist Party, the political organization of the working class. The Communist Party is the leading and guiding force of the working class and the entire socialist society; it is the main and most important organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat, indicating exactly where the country should go in order to reach communism, to the complete destruction of class society and the construction of a classless society in its place.
Therefore, any deviation from Marxism-Leninism is always a concession to the class enemy - the bourgeoisie, and it inevitably affects not only the party itself, but also all spheres of socialist society - its politics, economy, social sphere and the consciousness of its citizens.
This is the first moment. Second important point.
Socialism is not a stable and definitively established system; in its essence, it is still only a transition to a new social system following capitalism - communism. Like any social system, socialism is not a state, but a process. This means that the class struggle is still going on in socialist society, insofar as classes still exist in it (the class struggle cannot but go on under socialism, since this is not communism, but only a transition to it!). It is this struggle that is the source of the development of socialist society, its main driving force.
In this class struggle, the working class can only win if it knows exactly what is going on. If he is guided in his actions not by illusions and abstract ideas that came to someone's head, but by objective reality, which can be correctly reflected and known only by being guided by a dialectical-materialistic approach to the study of social events and phenomena. And such an approach is the basis of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, of truly scientific knowledge.
Those. ideology (in the above sense) acquires colossal significance in a socialist society. It is she who determines exactly where the socialist society will move - forward to communism or back to capitalism.
It is no coincidence that the struggle in the sphere of ideology, in the theoretical sphere, has been going on in the party from the very beginning of its formation and, especially in an acute form, since the victory of the working class in October 1917. It could not be otherwise. The classes leaving the historical arena never give up without a fight. Moreover, the bourgeoisie, the last exploiting class in the history of human society, could not help but resist with all its might, overthrown by those whom it had previously oppressed - the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry.
After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the conquest of political power in the country by the working class, the bourgeois class in the USSR used all forms of struggle - military, political and economic, but was defeated everywhere. What was left for him? Only the sphere of ideology, the sphere of revolutionary theory, distorted and replaced by bourgeois ideas, could count on the revival of capitalist relations in the country. It was a long way, but after the victory of the USSR in the Second World War, there simply did not exist.
The direction of the main blow of the bourgeois elements (both preserved from the old times and newly emerging in connection with the existence of commodity-money relations in Soviet society) was the Communist Party as the main bearer and guardian of revolutionary theory. To destroy the ties that bound the Party to the working masses, to undermine the confidence of the masses in it, to emasculate the revolutionary, transforming essence of Marxism-Leninism in order to prevent the final liquidation of all relations of production still preserved from capitalism, and, above all, commodity-money - that is which became the main goal of the class enemy, who learned how to perfectly disguise himself under the guise of a "Bolshevik devoted to the working class", a "loyal Leninist" and a "convinced communist".
Until March 1953, the representatives of true Marxism-Leninism managed to successfully fight against all revisionist trends in the party - the high authority of I.V. Stalin and his deep knowledge of Marxist-Leninist theory played a far from the last role here. But after his death, when the class struggle in the party flared up with renewed vigor, the victory, unfortunately, went to the revisionists - the conductors of bourgeois ideology in the labor movement.
The answer to the question why the revisionists then in 1953 were able to defeat the Marxist-Leninists, to be honest, is not completely clear to us. Much is already known to our research group, but there are also questions that we still do not have answers to, including because there is very little information on this period in the history of the USSR and many archives of this period of time are still closed.
But what caused the bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR, and why the class enemy launched a decisive offensive precisely after the death of Stalin in 1953, and not earlier and not later, we know for sure. And this is not at all a "struggle for power in the leadership of the USSR," as modern ideologists of the bourgeoisie like to explain what was happening at that time in the Soviet country.
That is, the struggle for dominance in the party, and hence for influence on the politics and economy of the Soviet Union, of course, took place, only this struggle was not a struggle of individuals for their personal power, it was a struggle of classes. Specific actors expressed not so much their will as the will of those classes and strata of Soviet society that they represented.
Practically destroyed in previous years by the dictatorship of the proletariat, but constantly reborn again due to the preservation of commodity production in the country, the exploiting class of the bourgeoisie fought for its survival against the working class, which owned political and economic power in the USSR. It is precisely in this way and in no other way, from the positions of Marxism-Leninism, that what happened in the spring and summer of 1953 and up to 1957 in the party leadership of the USSR is explained. And it is precisely here that lies the reason for the "unexpected" anti-Stalinist domestic policy Khrushchev, which initiated the creation in the USSR of the conditions necessary for the active revival and strengthening of the bourgeoisie - the exploiting class, which, 30 years later, during Perestroika, was already able to openly declare its claims to political power in the country.
As for the time of the beginning of the bourgeois counter-revolution, the point is not that "the tyrant died, and the whole of Soviet society was finally able to breathe freely," as they try to explain to us the inner-party struggle in the CPSU in the mid-1950s. bourgeois ideologists.
Even if Stalin had been alive, the remaining bourgeois elements in the country, a significant part of which, as we now know, worked in the party and state authorities of the USSR, would still go on the offensive. It is another matter that the revisionists would then have little chance of victory. And here, again, the point is not in the authoritarianism of the Soviet leader, who, generally speaking, did not exist, because authoritarianism rests on force, on coercion, and Stalin's power was based on his highest authority in the party and Soviet society, on the endless trust of the working masses in him , on his deep knowledge of Marxist-Leninist theory and vast experience in the fight against counter-revolution in general and revisionism in particular.
So what made the barely alive, practically destroyed class enemy counterattack the Soviet working class in the spring and summer of 1953?
One event that happened in the Soviet Union about half a year before Stalin's death, but which now, for obvious reasons, is rarely mentioned, and if they are mentioned, they never say the main thing, talking about secondary things. But the event is of colossal significance. Let's just say one thing - if then in 1953 the bourgeois counter-revolution had not begun in the USSR, if the revisionists had not won then in the CPSU, we would definitely live under communism today, and the world could well look different. At least, on the threshold of a new world imperialist war, as now, he would not stand.
So what happened in 1952? Just another congress of the Communist Party, the 19th in a row. But what! No less important for the history of the party and the entire USSR, and comparable in importance only to the X, XIV or XV Congresses, which at one time launched the NEP, the industrialization and collectivization of the country - the processes of a gigantic historical significance, without which there would be no Great USSR.
The XIX Congress of the CPSU was held on October 5-14, 1952. And the main issue at it was not a discussion of what had been done by the party and the Soviet people for more than 13 years since the last XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (March 1939) and not the expansion of the Central Committee and the Politburo, renamed the Presidium, as the "Great Soviet encyclopedia" (1969-1978), and a discussion of the conditions for the transition of Soviet society to communism!
These conditions were indicated by I.V. Stalin in the work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR", written shortly before the congress following the results of the economic discussion in 1951.
In particular, among other conditions (the predominant development of the production of means of production and the reduction of working hours of the working people), it was stated in it that in order to pass to communism, it was necessary to raise collective farm property to the level of public property and replace commodity circulation with a system of product exchange. Moreover, it was especially noted that for the USSR these are not issues of the distant future, but the task of today, since these preserved "birthmarks of capitalism" - commodity production and collective collective farm ownership are already hindering the economic development of the country. Remember, this was 1952.
The 19th Congress fully agreed with Stalin's position and decided to work out, on the basis of Stalin's proposals, and at the next congress adopt a new Party Program, which would indicate specific paths for the transition of Soviet society to communism.
Given that until now all the programs adopted by the party have been strictly implemented, for the bourgeois elements in the USSR this meant nothing more than complete and final death without any hope of revival.
Why? Yes, because thereby the very foundation of capitalism was destroyed - commodity production and those remnants of the market that still existed in the USSR! This means that the money would be destroyed! They would simply not be needed! And how can one exploit and accumulate capital if there is no market, no commodity, no money? Where are the opportunities for capitalist relations here? They are not - they disappear completely!
One of the conditions indicated by Stalin - the reduction of the working hours of the Soviet workers directly threatened the well-being of the party and economic bureaucracy, which managed to find a way to settle comfortably within the framework of a socialist society.
The question of the survival of the bourgeois elements and the party and economic officials adjoining them in their class essence, from among those who were most concerned about their own well-being, stood squarely. Under no circumstances should the development of the country be allowed to develop along the path approved by the congress.
And how to do it, because Stalin's ideas were supported by the whole congress, in fact, the whole party, and therefore the entire working class of the country of Soviets? How can you "turn the steering wheel" in the other direction in these conditions?
It is impossible to act openly - the working masses will not support it. There was only one thing left - to act by cunning. And here, as is not the first time in the history of the world revolutionary movement, opportunism and its manifestation in ideology - revisionism - come to the rescue.
Revisionism replaces the Marxist-Leninist theory with bourgeois ideas, at the same time accusing the real Marxist-Leninists and, first of all, Stalin, who proposed such a "vile" idea as the transition to communism, of all mortal sins.
Let us explain to our readers what revisionism is, so that they can understand what has been said.
Revisionism is an opportunist trend within the revolutionary working-class movement, which, under the pretext of a creative understanding of the phenomena of reality, carries out a revision of the fundamental provisions of Marxist-Leninist theory confirmed by practice.
A distinction is made between right-wing revisionism, which replaces Marxist propositions with bourgeois-reformist views, and left-wing revisionism, which replaces them with anarchist, Blanquist, voluntarist attitudes.
In its origin, revisionism is the result of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois influence on the revolutionary working-class movement, and in its class nature it is one of the forms of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, the "labor aristocracy", relatively well-to-do hired workers from among the employees and the intelligentsia (the so-called "middle class").
In its social function, revisionism acts as a conductor of the influence of the bourgeoisie in the revolutionary workers' movement.
The methodological basis of revisionism is an eclectic mixture of subjectivism, dogmatism, mechanistic materialism, as well as schematism and one-sidedness. (TSB)
Since revisionism is opportunism in ideology, in the field of theory, replacing the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism with subjectivist ideas that are safe and useful for the bourgeoisie, a few words should also be said about opportunism, because without this it will not be entirely clear how the revisionists managed to deceive the Soviet working class.
Opportunism (French opportunisme, from Latin opportunus - convenient, profitable) in the labor movement, theory and practice, contrary to the real interests of the working class, pushing the labor movement onto a path beneficial to the bourgeoisie. Opportunism, directly or indirectly, through conciliation and open capitulation, or through unjustified and provocative actions, adapts and subordinates the working-class movement to the interests of its class enemies.
Opportunism appears together with the development of the revolutionary movement of the working class in the second half of the 19th century. Initially, its ideological basis was various forms of pre-Marxist socialism, and its tactics were borrowed from liberal reformists, as well as from various anarchist groups ...
After the victory of Marxism in the working-class movement, opportunism changes its ideological garb and, as a rule, comes forward under the guise of Marxist phrases.
By its class nature, opportunism within the revolutionary working-class movement is a manifestation of petty-bourgeois ideology and politics; theoretically, it reveals itself now as revisionism, now as dogmatism; in organizational terms, it turns out to be either liquidationism or sectarianism (both of them disintegrate the party and destroy its ties with the masses - approx. L.S.); in the direction of its influences on the revolutionary movement, it appears now as right, now as left opportunism; at the same time, one type of opportunism can develop into another. (TSB)
This is the last quality of opportunism - the ability of its left and right varieties to turn into each other (and, therefore, of left and right revisionism) V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin specifically pointed out. And it was precisely this process that took place at the initial stage of the development of the bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR, when one type of revisionism smoothly flowed into another.
If from mid-1953 to October 1964 (the period of Soviet history known as the “Khrushchev thaw”) the ideas of “left” revisionism in the form of Trotskyism dominated the party leadership, then from October 1964 to March 1985 (i.e. n. "era of stagnation"), bourgeois influence increased significantly and the leading role in the worldview of the party began to play "right" revisionism in its most diverse forms. Let us recall that Trotskyism and "right" revisionism are forms of Menshevism.
The worldview of Trotskyism is mechanistic materialism. In public life, Trotskyism is characterized by vivid subjectivism, a misunderstanding of the dialectics of social development, schematism and dogmatism in assessing events and phenomena, adventurism and unexpected concessions to the bourgeoisie in politics, voluntarism and “cavalry attacks in the field of economics,” TSB reports on Trotskyism. As you can see, Khrushchev's personality and his policies are reflected quite accurately - all of the above was manifested quite clearly in his policy.
The philosophical basis of "right" revisionism is idealism and mechanism. In public life - the denial of the inconsistency of development, dogmatism, subjectivism, the substitution of a sober account of objective conditions with admiration for the spontaneous economic development, petty reforms instead of a revolutionary transformation of reality, the denial of the class struggle under socialism, the class essence of the socialist state and the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat up to the complete building of a communist society, concessions to the bourgeoisie in all areas.
How did the decade of the triumph of Trotskyism in the ideology of the party affect the economy and public life of the USSR?
On all those points that were indicated by Stalin as the conditions necessary for the country's further movement towards communism, they did exactly the opposite.
The priority development of the production of means of production, although they were still talking from high tribunes, in fact, they began to pay much more attention to the production of consumer goods, arguing this with the sophism typical of Trotskyists that supposedly the satisfaction of the needs of Soviet citizens can be achieved only by an abundance of goods. This mechanistic concept was even reflected in the seven-year national economic plan of the USSR (1959-1965).
At first they tried to destroy collective collective farm property with the voluntarism characteristic of Trotskyism by force - by decree, starting with small collective farms. But Potov, seeing that such a policy only led to a drop in agricultural production, shied away in the opposite direction, selling the means of production (tractors and other agricultural equipment previously owned by the state-owned MTS) to the collective farms and declaring that collective-farm cooperative ownership would continue right up to communism itself. ! The latter was even indicated in the Party Program adopted at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961, which cannot be called anything other than a "revisionist program".
Elements of the market began to be introduced into the Soviet economy. An important criterion for the activity of state and collective-farm cooperative enterprises began to be considered profitability. Commodity-money relations were not only preserved, but also significantly strengthened. No serious measures were taken to reduce the working day and involve workers in government. On the contrary, the vector of the cultural and educational policy of the Soviet state has changed by 180 degrees. Now the Soviet working class was diverted from politics in every possible way and tried to close it within the boundaries of everyday life, material security and family relations.
And in order to provide an ideological basis for this, the Party Program of 1961, already mentioned above, stated that there was no longer any class struggle in Soviet society, and the Soviet state had become the state of the entire Soviet people. There the Soviets were called public organizations, and not the most important part of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Lenin and Stalin considered them.
At the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the Charter of the Party, adopted in the latest edition by the 19th Congress of the CPSU, was also amended. The rights of rank and file members of the party were significantly curtailed, and the party leadership, respectively, increased. In this way, the party bureaucracy of the revisionist CPSU, the locomotive of the counter-revolution, defended itself well from possible encroachments on its power, simultaneously creating all the conditions for the emergence and development of the bourgeois class in the country.
During the "epoch of stagnation" (from October 1964 to March 1985), which the modern Russian layman considers the "golden time" of the USSR, all the above phenomena in the public life of the Soviet Union were significantly strengthened. The contradictions that Stalin warned about back in 1952, against the backdrop of Khrushchev's economic policy, escalated to the limit, practically driving the country's agricultural industry into a crisis.
However, the revisionists did not even think of abandoning what held back the development of the country - commodity-money relations, because it was sacred. On the contrary, they tried to cure themselves of the elements of capitalist production relations that had not yet been eliminated in socialist society ... by the market!
Kosygin's economic reform, which provided significant economic independence to enterprises, started because of the impossibility of organizing full-fledged centralized planning of the entire national economy of the country, did not want to reckon with the source of all problems in the Soviet economy - the presence in the country of collective farm-cooperative property, which just did not allow planning within the framework of the entire national economy of the USSR.
But Stalin pointed to this specifically. But by that time, no one had read his works, they were issued in libraries only with special permission, and his very name was actually banned. Marxism-Leninism, after a decade of intensive propagandistic processing by revisionist ideas, ranging from textbooks to articles in the main theoretical journals of the USSR "Communist" and "Problems of Philosophy", was already known to few, if at all. Communism for Soviet workers became a distant and abstract dream, and they cared little about what the Soviet government was doing there in the economy.
On the other hand, this economic reform was very important for the rising Soviet bourgeoisie, whose interests were increasingly expressed by the party and economic leadership of the country, which was left virtually without the control of the working people. Opportunities to snatch a piece of the state pie from the bourgeois elements in the USSR, thanks to this reform, became much greater.
What are the results of the Kosygin reform of 1965?
She failed. Which, as we now understand, was quite natural. The socialist economy cannot be treated with capitalism. The end result is capitalism. Or, at the very least, it will get much worse. This has long been proven theoretically. Now, unfortunately, it has also been tested in practice.
If the results of the first five-year plan after the start of the Kosygin reform (the 8th five-year plan, 1965-1970) were not bad, in 1966-1979. the average annual growth rate of national income in the USSR was 6.1%, then in the future such negative consequences manifested themselves, due to which the reform, in fact, had to be curtailed. A tendency towards rising prices (in fact, inflation!), the desire of enterprises to increase production costs in every possible way and avoid the introduction of new equipment and technologies, the pursuit of profitability at the expense of product quality, increasing imbalance in the economy, insurmountable stagnation in agriculture, the inability to develop unprofitable, but necessary the national economy of the country, directions - this is an incomplete list of what the Kosygin reform led to. "These were not reforms, but a road to nowhere ..." - one of the Soviet economists correctly noted later.
The development of the Soviet country in the 70s. slowed down even more. And against this background, Stalin's successes in the economy began to seem simply fabulous, unreal. But on the other hand, the shadow economy (in fact, capitalist) grew by leaps and bounds, already exerting a tangible impact on the social life of the USSR.
What about the Soviet society - did it not notice what was happening?
Recall that the party, as the leading and guiding force of Soviet society, set the tone in all areas of the country's public life - from the economy to science and culture. Since revisionism in all its forms and forms was presented by the party leadership as pure Marxism-Leninism, and the authority of the party in Soviet society after the numerous victories of the USSR (from October revolution and before the Great Patriotic War and the post-war restoration of the national economy) was the highest, then few objected to such a substitution. Unless only those who owned the Marxist-Leninist theory at a high level. And there were, unfortunately, very few such people in the country already in Khrushchev's time. And then they were quickly isolated, depriving them of the opportunity to expose their class enemies in public.
In Brezhnev's time, they simply had nowhere to come from, because Marxism-Leninism was no longer taught in universities and party schools, instead of Marxism-Leninism they drove revisionism into their heads, the consequences of which we still feel, listening to the speeches of former Soviet social scientists, often from head to toe. heads hung with honorary scientific regalia and titles. By the 70s, there was simply no one to figure out what was really happening in the country.
These two first stages of the bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR - the "Khrushchev thaw" and the "era of stagnation" - we called the period of "creeping counter-revolution", since it was carried out secretly, secretly even from the overwhelming majority of party members. Lacking proper political knowledge, ordinary communists, who sincerely considered themselves real Marxist-Leninists, could not figure out what was happening in time, and as a result, they became toys in the hands of the growing bourgeoisie and world capital in the country.
During these three decades, the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism, while retaining its name, was gradually replaced by petty-bourgeois ideology, which was reflected in all spheres of social life in the USSR - in politics, economics, science and culture, and, most importantly, in the minds of Soviet people, which later became the most important a condition for the success of Gorbachev's “Perestroika.
The working class in this period of Soviet history was more and more removed from the government. Workers were gradually accustomed to the idea that they only need to work at their workplace, and others will think for them and run the country - "those who are supposed to do this according to their position." It was instilled into the Soviet working people that there was no longer any class struggle in Soviet society, that the revolutionary period had long since ended, that all the enemies of the people had been defeated, and therefore the Soviet state was the state of all the people.
It was the same ideology, which no longer had anything to do with Marxism-Leninism, with which Soviet society approached Perestroika ...
The final stage of the counter-revolution - Perestroika and its results
In March 1985, MS Gorbachev occupied the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU through undercover intrigues, and from that moment a new phase of bourgeois counter-revolution began in the Soviet Union - an active one, known as "Perestroika".
The class of the bourgeoisie, which has grown up again in the post-Stalin USSR, has grown so strong over the decades of the triumph of revisionism and directly related changes in the economic life of the country that it no longer considered it necessary to hide, and went on the offensive. In the course of Perestroika, political power was finally wrested from the hands of the Soviet working class, and the victorious bourgeois class began to purposefully dismantle socialist production relations in the country. By March 14, 1990, the process of restoring capitalism in the USSR was basically completed and even legalized, and then this social system only settled comfortably on the territory recaptured from socialism, subordinating all aspects of Soviet life to the old capitalist production relations.
A lot has been written about Perestroika, both in Russian and foreign literature. Another thing is that there is still no full-fledged study that could rightfully be called scientific. Yes, and it could not appear until it was precisely clarified from the Marxist positions what exactly happened in the USSR in the period preceding Perestroika, the same one that we wrote about in the previous chapter, since these processes are closely interconnected, and there is no way to separate one phenomenon from another. it is forbidden.
Modern bourgeois reference books and encyclopedias give a fairly detailed chronology of perestroika events. But one should not trust the way they interpret them, since the most important thing - the class content of the events that took place in the USSR, is not in their interpretation.
For example, the same Wikipedia, the main source of knowledge for young Russians, divides the Perestroika period into 3 stages, at the same time characterizing these stages as follows:
1) March 1985 - January 1987 The initial stage, when the existing shortcomings of the social system began to be openly recognized in the country and some attempts were made to correct it.
2) January 1987 - June 1989 The period of attempts to reform the system in the spirit of "democratic socialism". Viki considers the January plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU to be the beginning of perestroika, at which perestroika was declared the direction of development of the Soviet state.
3) June 1989 - September 1991 The final stage, when the main idea is no longer the "improvement of socialism", but the building of democracy and a market economy of the capitalist type.
In general, Wikipedia clearly and unambiguously carries out the following idea: Soviet society and the economy of the USSR by the mid-80s. turned out to be in a state of deep crisis, and all attempts by the country's leadership to eliminate this crisis did not lead to anything. In this connection, the Soviet Union, they say, had to return to capitalism, since the socialist system turned out to be unviable.
This conclusion is not new and actually repeats what has been stated in many Russian bourgeois publications, ranging from school and university textbooks to articles in scientific journals of the Russian Federation. It can be said that this is the general and fundamental thesis of the ideologists of the bourgeoisie in relation to Perestroika, invented specifically to be introduced into the consciousness of the Russian population.
In fact, everything was completely different - and the content of the events was different, and the goals of those who led the "perestroika" process in the USSR were also different.
No attempts were made to really improve the Soviet socialist system! Although, of course, there was something to improve - the Soviet political and economic system was far from ideal and in it, as in any living and real system, there were contradictions. But the whole point is that from the very beginning of Perestroika, the actions of the "perestroika" were subordinated to one goal - the destruction of socialist production relations in the country and the restoration of capitalist production relations, which were required by the growing bourgeois class in the USSR for further development!
As for the "economic crisis" in the USSR, which is sometimes referred to as "economic collapse" by bourgeois sources, the following must be said - there could be no question of any crisis in the pre-perestroika USSR, if we keep in mind those economic crises that regularly capitalist countries are "sick".
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