Stalin's Russia

And the Crisis in Socialism

Max Eastman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367752248
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000370638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1940, Stalin's Russia is a close study of the development of the Stalinist regime and the flaws in socialist doctrine that made it possible.

The book examines the contrasts between the "free and equal" society heralded by the Marxist-Leninist programme and the totalitarian state that emerged in its place. It makes use of a wealth of material to cast light on the inner workings of Stalin's regime. It explores the significance of the Stalin-Hitler pact, and argues that the word "socialism" itself became a liability to any genuine movement of liberation as a result.

PART ONE The Failure of the Russian Revolution

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161554-1

1 THE END OF SOCIALISM IN RUSSIA

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161554-2

IT WAS a strange experience, for one who had lived through these twenty-five years as a Mandan socialist, to see how in proportion as the Soviet regime dropped overboard one by one every vestige of socialism, the liberal scholars and littérateurs of the whole world, in so far as they were at all flexible, “came over” to socialism, and rallied with extreme emotion to the “defense of the USSR.” Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, George Soule, Waldo Frank, Rockwell Kent, Malcolm Cowley, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski–the list could be extended indefinitely of those representative intellectuals who, having remained cold to the efforts of the Bolshevik party under Lenin and Trotsky to establish a workers’ and peasants’ republic, substantially swallowed down “Marxism” as soon as the official “Marxism” ceased, either within the Soviet Union or anywhere else, to mean business about working-class power, or contain any fighting threat to the existing distribution of wealth.

It was a strange experience, and for one who rests his final hope upon human intelligence, a sad one. A prime factor in the wisdom of Karl Marx was his perception of the discrepancy between the ideas with which men commonly make and write history and the actual forces in play, the actual changes that are in progress. He called these loose-floating ideas ideologies, a term of contempt which he borrowed from Napoleon Bonaparte, and which freely translated into American means “apple-sauce.” And he made heroic efforts to delve down under all ideologies and use his mind in the making of history as a mechanic does in the making of bridges or automobiles. It was by using his mind in this ardently matter-of-fact way that Lenin guided the Russian workers’ and peasants’ revolution to victory and laid what seemed to be the foundations of socialism.

Since Lenin’s death, ideology has prevailed in the ruling circles and the controlled press of Soviet Russia to the practical exclusion of scientific straight-thinking about society and politics. The assertions that they are “building a classless society,” and yet more that “socialism is finally and irrevocably achieved in the Soviet Union,” are but crowning instances of this process of universal self-deception, samples of a particularly sublime “applesauce” under cover of which the exactly opposite process is in full flight–the restoration of class privilege and the soaking out of the foundations of socialism. To my mind there is not a hope left for the classless society in present-day Russia. Inside of ten years, barring revolutionary changes, the Soviet Union bids fair to be as reactionary as any country which has emerged from feudalism.*

* This chapter was mitten in the spring of 1936 and first published as an article in Harpet’s Magazine, January 1937. Some of its statements may seem too moderate now.

THE CULTURAL REACTION

In the summer of 1934 I wrote an article saying every good thing that I could find to say of the socialist experiment in Russia. The theme of my article was that in that country, because of the socialization of industry and the removal of class privilege, progress hitherto considered utopian was being made “in every sphere in which radical reformers and what we call dreamers are wont in our country to beat their brains out against a cold rampart of cynicism and indifference.” I supported this by quoting our own leading authorities who had gone there and seen what was being done, each in his own special field of interest–education, prison reform, public health, women’s freedom, sex and family relations, birth control, prostitution, yellow journalism, drug addiction, alcoholism, rights of national minorities, elimination of anti-Semitism, mental hygiene, administration of justice, peace, war and patriotism, economic planning. My thesis was that the proprietary enjoyment of wealth by a privileged few is what blocks progress on all these fronts and makes the efforts of truly social-minded idealists in capitalist countries all but futile.

I intended to follow my article with another saying the bad things that from the same standpoint an honest mind must say about the Soviet Union–chiefly, that these blessings of achievement, and yet more of hope, had been accompanied by a concentration of political power and privilege in the hands of a bureaucratic caste supporting an autocrat more ruthless than the tzars had been. I intended to point out that this situation, hateful in itself, was also a mortal danger, and if continued, certain death to the whole system. But I was still asserting the existence of the system.

After writing the first article, however, reading it to a group of friends, and showing it to one editor, I put it away in my desk as an anachronism. The conditions it described were disappearing while I wrote. Of the fundamental ones, those three which stand in most vital relation to the property system and the future–education, women’s freedom and the family, peace, war and patriotism–there is now little but a memory and a clinging to the memory left.

In my section about education, I quoted from Miss Lucy Wilson, who made her pilgrimage to Russia in 1925 and stayed to 1927, and from John Dewey, who followed her a year later, such ecstatic testimony to the liberation of Russian schools and children from socially irrelevant and spirit-killing regimentation that they sounded like another News From Nowhere. “Almost incredible to me, an eye-witness,” said Miss Lucy Wilson. And John Dewey: “I cannot convey it; I lack the necessary literary skill.”

These utopian conditions were founded upon manifestos and decrees of the Lenin government adopted shortly after the seizure of power, containing phrases such as these:–

‘Pupils of the older classes in the secondary schools, must not, dare not, consider themselves children, and govern their destiny to suit the wishes of parents and teachers…. Utilization of a system of marks for estimating the knowledge and conduct of the pupil is abolished…. Distribution of medals and insignia is abolished…. The old form of discipline which corrupts the entire life of the school and the untrammeled development of the personality of the child, cannot be maintained in the Schools of Labor. The process of labor itself develops this internal discipline without which collective and rational work is unimaginable…. All punishment in school is forbidden…. All examinations–entrance, grade and graduation–are abolished…. The wearing of school uniforms is abolished.”

All this was swept from the earth, letter and spirit, by a “Decree on Academic Reform,” issued by the Stalin government on September 4, 1935, and by instructions following it, of which the following phrases will convey the drift:–

“Instruct a commission …to elaborate a draft of a ruling for every type of school. The ruling must have a categoric and absolutely obligatory character for pupils as well as for teachers. This ruling must be the fundamental document …which strictly establishes the regime of studies and the basis for order in the school as well as the rules of conduct of pupils inside and outside of school…. Introduce in all schools a uniform type of pupils’ report card on which all the principal rules for the conduct of the pupil are to be inscribed. Establish a personal record for every pupil…. Every five days the chief instructor of a class will examine the memorandum, will mark cases of absence and tardiness in it, and will demand the signature of the parent under all remarks of the instructor…. Underlying the ruling on the conduct of pupils is to be placed a strict and conscientious application of discipline…. In the personal record there will be entered for the entire duration of his studies the marks of the pupil for every quarter, his prizes and his punishments…. A special apparatus of Communist Youth organizers is to be installed for the surveillance of the pupil inside and out-side of school.They are to watch over the morality and the state of mind of the pupils…. Establish a single form of dress for pupils of the primary, semi-secondary, and secondary schools, this uniform to be introduced to begin with, in 1936, in the schools of Moscow….” [Italics mine.]

Needless to dwell upon the difficulty I experienced in basing an argument upon John Dewey’s raptures of 1928, when such a back-jump to the complete temper of education under tzarism–spiritual prison uniforms, political surveillance and an–was already in the wind.

In the sphere of sex and family relations, or, in other words, upon the problem of the freedom and rights of woman and the related problem of population control, the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union in the past two years * has been so crudely put over that even our serenest ideologues become uneasy in their dreams of “building socialism in one country.” Everybody who means business about socialism in any country knows that a stoppage of the pressure of population on the means of subsistence is essential to the beginnings of it. In a country like Russia, where mothers in hundreds of thousands are unable to produce, or buy, milk for their babies, and the problem of homeless children is openly acknowledged to be unsolved even in the capital, to come out with a proclamation advocating–or more accurately, decreeing–large families and wholesale human breeding, is not only remote from socialism, but from sane human kindness and sound reason in any of its forms. It is the madness of military nationalism in a power-clique which looks upon the masses of the population as its cattle and its cannon fodder.

* 1935-36.

It is needless to remark that the “holy instinct of motherhood” has once more come into its own as a weapon of this reaction (Pravda, May 28, 1935), and also the proposition that “woman having received rights has therewith received duties” (Pravda, June 7, 1935)-a conception of “rights” known only to those whose permanent prerogative it is to give and withhold them. It is somewhat more surprising to see “chivalry,” and not only “chivalry” but “knightliness”–a word of bitter execration to all Russian revolutionists for a century– now solemnly brought forward in the cause of woman’s re-enslavement. We learn that, having accepted the above duties as well as rights, woman has “put man under the obligation to care for her with special knight-liness.” And this new knightliness is thus defined: “Every girl must be treasured not only as a textile worker, a bold parachute jumper or an engineer, but as a future mother. The mother of one child must be treasured as the future mother of eight.” (Pravda, June 7, 1935.) Just how far the mother of eight children will go as an engineer or a parachute jumper, is well known to those who use their brains when they think.

To give teeth to this reactionary decree, and make clear that it relates only to the ill-paid masses of the workers and the peasants, it is enforced by raising the costs of divorce and alimony beyond the reach of these human cattle, and making abortion, one of woman’s few real guarantees of liberty, once more a crime. That it will not be a crime to those who have money and are in the know–those most particularly who issue the decree- is perfectly well understood by all who understand anything. It is class legislation and discriminatory sex legislation in its foulest form. It is the absolute end of that utopian reign of freedom, justice, and mature intelligence upon all questions relating to sex and family relations which led Cicely Hamilton, returning from her pilgrimage to Moscow in 1933, to report “the most important advance …which has been made since the race developed from brute to human.”

As to the foundation laid by Lenin of a revolutionary policy and high public temper upon the problems of peace, war, and patriotism, there is not the shadow of it left. Even in my article I was compelled to point into the past for this. It was on May 29, 1934, that Litvinov announced in Geneva that the Soviets would abandon their anti-war alliance with the workers and oppressed peoples of the earth, and play the game of military diplomacy with the capitalist nations. It was not long after that Stalin himself issued a joint statement with the French premier Laval in which he “fully approved the national defense policy of France in keeping her armed forces on a level required for security.” To “vote war credits,” even after a world war began, was the crime of treason to Marxian principle which caused Lenin to abandon the Second International and the word “social-ism,” and form a Third for which he took the uncorrupted term “communism” from the banners of the civil wars of 1848. In the name of Lenin, the Third International now supports the armies of imperialistic governments in time of peace. Having handed the power to Hitler without shaking a fist, this “Leninist” organization makes Hitler a pretext to enter again the old system of military alliances which turned Europe in Lenin’s eyes into “one bloody lump.” And to bathe this change in the appropriate emotions, Pravda, the official organ of Lenin’s party, hauls down the Marxian banner, “Workers of the world unite!” and runs up the slogan of all mad dogs of war: “Defense of the fatherland is the supreme law of life.” Let us taste a few sentences from Pravda’s editorial of June 9, 1934:–

“For the fatherland! That cry kindles the flame of heroism, the flame of creative initiative in all fields in all the realms of our rich, of our many-sided . . .

“For the fatherland! That cry raises tens of millions of toilers to the defense of their great fatherland and them in readiness.

“Millions and tens of millions of people acclaim in our brave fliers great patriots of their fatherland, for whom the honor, glory, might and prosperity of the Soviet Union is the law of their lives….

…“The defense of the fatherland is the supreme law of life….

“For the fatherland! For its honor, glory, might and prosperity.”

Compare that with the language of Lenin:–

“The essential thing is for us to be, even when times are most trying, real internationalists in deed…. There is one and only one kind of real internationalism_ hard work at developing the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own land, and support (by propaganda, sympathy, material aid) of such, and only such, struggles and policies in every country without exception.”

Compare the two and you have a measure of the change since Lenin died.

And if you want a measure of the extremes to which ideology can go where criticism is stifled, you need only be informed that the above affirmation of universal hysteric passion for the fatherland was the preface to a decree–printed immediately below it–making it a crime of treason to “escape over the border” of this same fatherland, and punishing this crime by “shooting and confiscation of all property.” Moreover, if it is a soldier who thus “escapes abroad”–for “abroad” and “over the border” are the same word in Russian–the grown members of his family who knew of his intention and did not notify the police, so that he could be shot before he went, get five to ten years in prison with confiscation of property; and those who did not know of it, but lived with or were supported by him at the time of his contemplated act, may be “deprived of citizenship and exiled for five years to a remote region of Siberia.”

It is only necessary to add that this abandonment of every vestige of Lenin’s policy of socialist internationalism has been followed by a reorganization of the army on the Western plan, abolition of the militia system, restoration of the titles, ranks, and privileges of officers, and revival of the uniforms and special rights of Cossack troops.

I need not go through the whole index of my utopian article, and examine to what extent the cultural counter-revolution has affected each one of those ideal reforms, or manifestations of unfettered social intelligence, upon which I was proposing to base so grand an argument. These three are vital–education, sex and family relations, and the stand on peace and war. With high intelligence abrogated in these spheres, we can cherish few extreme hopes in others. Whether my argument is abstractly valid or not, it no longer applies to the Soviet Union.

POLITICAL TYRANNY

The fact that these reactionary decrees are being issued on the theory of a “complete triumph of socialism” in the political and economic spheres, and on the plea that what is oppressive in a capitalist society is progressive under socialism, that what is tyranny here is freedom there, merely reveals the degree to which critical thinking about real facts has been supplanted by ideology, honesty by crude deception.

In the spring of 1935 Stalin’s government issued a decree which made the death penalty for theft–adopted for adults three years before–applicable to minors from the age of twelve. When this fact was announced at a congress of the French Teachers’ Federation in August of the same year, the Stalinsts in the Federation indignantly denied it. Being shown a copy of lzvestia (April 8, 1935) containing the decree, they lapsed into silence, but they were ready next day with the information that “under socialism children are so precocious and well educated that they are fully responsible for their acts”! It is but a reflection of the manner in which this ideology is being stretched to cover every saddest thing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part One The Failure of the Russian Revolution
• Part Two Socialism Reconsidered
• Index