From Lenin To Khrushchev

The History Of World Communism

Hugh Seton-Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367008567
• eBook ISBN: 9780429711756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is intended to be both less and more than a survey of communism in the world today or a history of communist movements. It focuses on the relationship of communist movements to social classes and to the internal balance of political power in their respective countries.

Chapter One
Europe before 1914

Communism derives from the European socialist movement, and this has a double origin, in the industrial revolution and in the development of radical political ideas.

The industrial revolution created the industrial working class, which replaced the peasantry at the base of the social pyramid. The peasants, scattered among countless villages, were less accessible to political influences than the workers, concentrated in towns.¹

Precursors of socialism, champions of equalitarian ideas of a rather crude kind, can be found not only in the eighteenth century but in the Middle Ages, and even in the ancient world. In the nineteenth century Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet and others propounded doctrines which contained some of the elements of modem socialism. Karl Marx called them 'Utopian socialists', and claimed for himself the title of 'scientific socialist'. The first crude attempts to put socialist doctrines into practice were made in France in 1848 and in the Commune of 1871.

All this is well known. So are Marx's doctrines. But it is not enough, in order to explain the background to European socialism and communism, to point to these well-known facts. There were great social and political differences between European countries, which were reflected in the different development of their labour movements.

Most western writers on socialism assume that the history of socialism is simply the history of western labour, and that anything outside north-western Europe, France, Germany and north Italy is a quaint subject for erudite experts. More recently a school of western experts on Leninism has appeared: among them is a tendency to ignore western development. But an understanding of modern communism requires at least some knowledge of labour movements throughout Europe, and this requires at least some knowledge of the main social, political and cultural features of Europe in 1914. Moreover these need to be regarded without blinkers, whether of orthodox Marxism, of western liberalism or of conservative nostalgia.

The following brief survey of European society in 1914 suffers inevitably from oversimplification. I hope however that it may provide some guidance for the student of communism.

The economic, social and cultural borderlines of 1914 did not always coincide with state frontiers. But as it was within the framework of states that labour movements had to operate, the survey has to be made within that framework.

Economic and Social Divisions

The extreme economic categories are the predominantly industrial states and the almost purely agrarian. Of the first Britain is the most complete example. Germany too was predominantly industrialised in 1914, though certain large regions—especially the provinces east of the Elbe—remained agricultural. The opposite extreme are the Balkan countries. Of these Serbia and Bulgaria may with little exaggeration be termed purely agrarian, while in Roumania and Greece the first beginnings of industry (oil and shipping) could be observed.

Between these two extremes it is possible to distinguish three types. The first may be described as countries of mixed society. Here industry was already important, was becoming more important, and was to be found in most parts of the country, but did not yet absorb a predominant portion of the nations' labour or wealth. Urban influences were spreading to the countryside, and the differences in outlook and way of life between peasant and townsman were rapidly diminishing. To this type belonged France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia. The second type were countries where this mixed type of economy coexisted with the purely agrarian. The best examples were Italy, Spain and Austria. Here Piedmont and Lombardy, Catalonia, German-Austria and Bohemia had mixed economies; south Italy and the islands, central and southern Spain, Galicia and Dalmatia were agrarian; while Tuscany, parts of Castile and Mediterranean Spain, and Moravia fell somewhere between. The third type were agrarian societies with important industrial islands. Hungary, Poland and Russia were the best examples. The Budapest area, Polish Silesia, Warsaw, Łódẓ, the Moscow area, the Donets Basin, and St. Petersburg were great industrial centres, with large and modernly equipped factories, but a few miles outside the industrial towns was an agrarian society at least as primitive as that of southern Italy or southern Spain, and little less primitive than that of the Balkans.

These five types contained different admixtures of industrial and agrarian economy. It is now necessary to say a few words about the classes of industrial and agrarian society.

In industrial society the dominant element was the business class of great industrialists and bankers. It had been formed partly from the landowning class and partly from the merchants of the pre-industrial age. At the base of the social pyramid the factory working class replaced the peasantry. In Britain this process had made decisive progress by the middle of the nineteenth century, in Germany early in the twentieth. Between the industrialists and the workers was the ill-defined 'middle class', with its three main sub-divisions of small business men and managers, professional men and civil servants. The three subdivisions were closely interconnected, rather than three separate castes. Under a system of liberal economy the small business man had a high social prestige, the professional man was recognised as a useful citizen but was not elevated into a prophet, and the civil servant was encouraged to regard himself as servant rather than master. But though this was generally true of all industrial societies, there were considerable variations due not to economic but to political or cultural factors. Thus, the professional man enjoyed higher prestige and influence in France and Italy than in Britain, the bureaucrat in Germany than in France, the business man in Britain than in Germany.

In agrarian societies the traditionally dominant class were the great landowners, of more or less ancient aristocratic origin. During the nineteenth century however this landowning class lost much of its power, not only in countries that became predominantly or largely industrialised, but also in countries still mainly agrarian. A living had to be found for younger children of the landowning nobility. Towards the end of the century a general crisis of European agriculture ruined many landed estates, and caused even eldest sons to look for an occupation off the land. They became army officers, bureaucrats, professional men or business men. Their distribution between these occupations varied according to political and cultural factors. In Britain and Scandinavia sons of the nobility were less unwilling to enter business than in Germany or Eastern Europe. In Prussia, Hungary and Russia the bureaucracy was swollen with impecunious nobles. These, rather than their more prosperous fellows who retained their landed estates, became the ruling class in the political sense. But on the land the noble landowners remained dominant up till the First World War.

There were countries however where there were no landowners, or where they played a minor part. In France the peasants had acquired ownership of the land in the greater part of the country as a result of the Great Revolution. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries peasant ownership was widespread during the nineteenth century. In the Balkans, the Turkish conquerors had destroyed the old landowning class in the fifteenth century; when Turkish rule was overthrown in the nineteenth, the land became the property of the peasants. In Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece in 1914 large landowners were not a significant political or economic force. It was from the peasantry that the new ruling class of these countries—bureaucrats, army officers, merchants and professional men—was formed.

In the industrial or mixed societies of the countries of Western Europe, the peasantry was increasingly affected by urban influences. Urban bourgeois and medium farmer, urban worker and farm labourer, were growing more and more like each other. In the agrarian societies of Eastern Europe, townsmen and peasants lived in different centuries. Here the peasantry formed the base of the social pyramid. Illiteracy, primitive methods of production and the habits of mind of serfs but recently emancipated, partly accounted for the peasants' poverty. From the end of the nineteenth century a still more important cause was overpopulation. The number of persons engaged in agriculture per unit of agricultural land was higher than in Western Europe, and this discrepancy was growing. The rural surplus of population grew faster than either the output per acre or the supply of jobs outside agriculture. Already before 1914 large parts of Russia, Poland, Italy and the Balkans suffered from overpopulation on the land, and this was threatening to become a serious danger in most of eastern and southern Europe. Marx's prophecy of the concentration of wealth and poverty was at least partly justified in the peasant lands. A rural semi-proletariat constituted an increasing proportion of the peasantry, and the process seemed likely to continue. At the other extremity a class of rich peasants was appearing. This latter process has however been greatly exaggerated by Marxist writers, both in Russia and elsewhere. In Russia itself, it was official policy, during the Premiership of P. A. Stolypin (1906-11), to encourage the formation of this class, known in Russia as kulaks. In some parts of Russia and of other East European countries kulaks were without doubt an important factor: in other parts they hardly existed. Moreover the economic process must be distinguished from its social consequences. Even where kulaks were powerful, it is doubtful whether any consciousness of class conflict existed within the peasantry. The peasants as a whole were aware of their class interests against the great landowners, and against the towns: the class struggle of poor peasants against rich was little more than a theory of Marxist intellectuals. The theory was, in certain cases and at certain periods, based on economic realities, but it had not become a real factor in the life of the peasants.

In Russia and Eastern Europe an industrial working class was growing rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century. The great majority of these new workers were unskilled, and their standard of living was as low as that of the poorer peasants. Not only were they materially poor, and exposed to exploitation by their employers, but they suffered from the mental and emotional bewilderment that resulted from the loss of one social environment—village life—which was not yet compensated by absorption in a new society. This twofold misery of the East European worker in 1910 has its parallel in the situation of the British worker early in the nineteenth century.

The middle class in agrarian societies was small both in numbers and in influence. Of the three sub-divisions, the business element was the weakest. In many cases it consisted of persons of a nationality different from that of the surrounding countryside and even of the towns—Jewish or German in Poland, Hungary, Roumania and Russia; Greek or Armenian in the Balkans. The professional element was relatively more important. It was essentially a product of western cultural influence. It arose partly in response to economic demands—for the skills of the modern world, and for jobs for children of noble families—and partly as a result of the deliberate policy of the enlightened despots—Joseph II of Austria, Alexander I of Russia. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries intellectuals enjoyed in the countries of agrarian economy a prestige and influence out of proportion to their numbers, and relatively much greater than those of their more numerous and more cultured counterparts in northern and western Europe. The third sub-division, the bureaucracy, was the most important of the three. The growth in its numbers during the nineteenth century was due partly to the demand for jobs for children of the nobility and partly to the expanding field of action of the state. It was especially marked in countries in which the development of industry came late, and was brought about not so much by private initiative as by government policy. Of this Russia is the most striking example. The numbers of the bureaucrats increased more rapidly than the national wealth, and their real income remained low. When thousands of individuals possess power over the lives of citizens but are themselves poor, the incentive to corruption is very strong. This is still more the case when the legal system is cumbrous, obsolete and unjust, and the evasion of its more irksome features can command a market price, Russia and the Balkan states provide good examples. More pernicious than this mass petty corruption was the large-scale corruption sometimes practised by individuals highly placed in the government machine, who, uncontrolled by representative institutions, were able to sell valuable privileges to wealthy buyers, domestic or foreign, for really high prices.

Political Systems

The political systems of Europe before 1914 varied from the completely parliamentary to the almost completely despotic. The most democratic parliamentary system, in the double sense that suffrage was universal and that the government was responsible to the elected assembly, was in France. In Britain government had been responsible at least since the reign of Victoria, but there were still gaps in the franchise. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries too parliamentary government was well established. The strong-hold of autocracy was Russia. In 1905 Tsar Nicholas II had been obliged to grant the beginnings of a constitution, but he was able two years later to take back most of his concessions. Police, army and bureaucracy were at his command, and he could appoint and dismiss ministers as he chose. The parliament (Duma) was elected on an unrepresentative franchise and was seldom able to make itself felt. Between these two forms of government were various transitional types. Germany and Austria had parliaments elected by universal suffrage, but ministers were chosen by the monarchs and responsible only to them. The parliament of Prussia, from which was formed the Prussian state government, which in most matters affecting the daily life of the people was 'the government' of two-thirds of the population of Germany, was elected by an unrepresentative franchise. Italy appeared to have a genuine parliamentary system, with universal suffrage since 1912 and ministries responsible to parliament. This was however modified by the fact that in the south elections were managed by the local landowners or bureaucrats, who were thus in a position to offer blocks of unrepresentative deputies to party leaders seeking to form governments. In Spain these conditions prevailed in most of the country, the local caciques managing elections which were not even nominally based on universal suffrage.¹ In Hungary the franchise was extremely restricted, and though in Budapest at least the urban bourgeoisie could vote freely, in the countryside everything depended on the landlord. In Roumania the situation was similar. In Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece there was universal suffrage and the ministries were nominally responsible to the parliaments. The working of parliamentary government was however hindered by the ignorance and apathy of many of the peasant voters, intimidation at the polls (to some extent equalised by the fact that several parties had their own bands of toughs), and the interference of the monarchs. In general the trend of the last decade before the war was towards parliamentary government. Freedom of speech and conscience was fairly generally recognised, at least in the towns, and the press reflected most political opinions present in each country. Even in Russia there was immensely more freedom in 1914 than in 1900.

Education

Education was essentially a western phenomenon. The educational systems of Eastern Europe, which made great progress from the middle of the nineteenth century, were copied from those of the West. France was the usual model, but by the end of the century Germany was also being widely imitated. The British and Scandinavian systems were less well known. In north-western lands education largely derives from Protestantism, from the habits of Bible-read...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF PERSONS
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS