Unholy
Marriage:
Ideology,
Totalitarianism and the Soviet Project
Part II
Anger
is the readiest response to some of the revisionist discussions of Stalin’s
era. “Social historians” like Sheila Fitzpatrick and the other members
of the so-called “new cohort” of historians try to analyze Stalin’s totalitarian
regime from the point of view of the people, striving to remove the nature
of the regime from the equation. Part of their reasoning behind de-emphasizing
totalitarianism (or arguing it didn’t exist) is a desire to avoid an anti-Soviet
“Cold War bias” they attribute to traditional Sovietologists.
At the risk of hyperbolizing, a value-neutral view of Stalin seems about
as smart as a value-neutral view of Nazism.
In his
review of Francois Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism
in the Twentieth Century, Michael Ignatieff gets the failure of so
many post-WWII Sovietologists exactly right. By turning the Holocaust into
“the unique moral abomination of the century,” it became difficult to adequately
condemn the Soviet experiment’s most tragic results. Besides,
“Uncle Joe” was our ally in WWII, and no amount of anti-communist rhetoric
could airbrush him out of the Yalta family photos. Hitler forced
the West to make a pact with the lesser of two great evils, and the guilt
over our complicity in the fate of Central Europe, largely deserved, means
we have never been able to escape the temptation to minimize Stalin’s crimes.
That minimization
is the most dangerous pitfall inherent in the “new cohort” approach.
As Stephen Cohen (no revisionist when it comes to Stalin) points out, the
effort to avoid bias by not analyzing the Soviet regime often lead these
social historians to overlook Stalin’s crimes entirely.
In all of [the new cohort’s]
publications to date, the terror is ignored, obscured, or minimized ...
by emphasizing the transcendent importance of other developments, by disdaining
relevant sources; by citing very low estimates of its casualties; by defining
it mainly as the purge of 1937-38; by treating it as a quirky form of bureaucratic
‘tensions’ and administrative housekeeping; or by using such euphemisms
as ‘state coercion’ and ‘involuntary mobility.’
One example
of this averted gaze should suffice. “Soviet society actually underwent
a Great Simplification in the course of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’
at the beginning of the 1930s,” Fitzpatrick writes, using remarkably neutral
euphemisms for the mass starvation that Stalin’s forced collectivization
of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry caused. “Kulaks, nepman, and
small traders disappeared from the roster, groups like artisans and peasants
were dispersed, and collectivization leveled old distinctions within the
peasantry.”
Though
Fitzpatrick is discussing the changes in Soviet class structure, it is
worth asking a question she fails to answer – where did the kulaks go?
Could anyone call the Nazi’s Holocaust a “Great Simplification” and get
away with it?
Even Sovietologists
who credit Stalin with the evil he is due don’t seem entirely serious.
One striking anecdote has to do with the controversy over the number of
victims Stalin’s policies claimed; at a conference, Cohen and Robert Conquest,
an expert on the Stalin era, share a laugh over revisionist Jerry Hough’s
sickeningly blithe assertion that the toll was in the thousands.
There is something vaguely offensive about the image, but it illustrates
a valuable point. Not only were there people gullible enough to believe
something so absurd, but even those who knew better were removed enough
to find death tolls funny.
There
remain some important questions about the Stalin era. One is whether
the carnage of the Stalin years was a product of Bolshevism. The
answer, briefly, is yes, in that the Bolsheviks’ unique link between ideology
and totalitarianism opened the door for the wild barbarity of Stalin’s
purges and collectivization.
This is
best seen in the show trials that accompanied the purges. Every victim
had to confess to some crime against the party and thus “recognize their
elimination as just and deserved. ... the victims ... were forced to become
accomplices in their own undoing, thereby both absolving the regime of
its crimes and celebrating the victory of its policies.” Because
ideology remained the basis of the Party’s claims to legitimacy, and therefore
to Stalin’s, it both provided justification for his crimes and made the
Party partly responsible for them.
The main
issue, though, is the continuity between the original Bolshevik ideology,
embodied in Lenin, and the nightmare of Stalinism. It is a crucial
question. At issue is the legitimacy of the entire Soviet project.
If Stalin is an aberration in the development of the state, wholly independent
of the Bolshevik project, then the defenders of the Soviet experiment can
point to the Stalin years as a nightmare the USSR could wake from after
Stalin’s death. If, on the other hand, Stalin’s excesses were a natural
consequence (evitable or no) of the Party’s totalitarianism, Stalin’s reign
stands as an indictment of the entire system.
Arguing
for aberration is Cohen, who along with Leon Trotsky saw “a whole river
of blood” running between the original Bolshevik goals and the realities
of Stalin’s terror. Cohen musters a variety of arguments to
widen this river. The most compelling, and the most problematic for
those who place a heavy emphasis on ideology, is that “official ideology
changed radically under Stalin ... These [changes] were not simply amendments
but a new ideology which was ‘changed in its essence’ and which did not
represent the same movement as that which took power in 1917.’”
Cohen goes on to argue that Stalin destroyed the Party oligarchy which
had ruled the USSR and replaced it with a true dictatorship, a betrayal
of Bolshevik ideals.
The problem
with this argument is that it rests too heavily on the specifics.
In focusing on the ideological trees, so to speak, it loses sight of the
Soviets’ totalitarian forest. From the outset, the Bolsheviks had
utilized totalitarian methods to accomplish their goals. That the
details were different doesn’t matter. Stalin was a natural result
of the Soviet combination of totalitarian method justified by the socialist
ideal.
Nove explains
the logic of continuity in the push to modernize heavy industry, always
a dream of the Party. In the late 1920s, the Party leadership believed
that to build up heavy industry fast enough to match the West a drop in
living standards was unavoidable. It was clear that the peasants
would never voluntary collectivize under those conditions. To achieve
their ideological goals required “a sharp increase in the degree of coercion
... The Party was the one body capable of carrying out enormous changes
and resisting social and economic pressures in a hostile environment. ...
The problems involved in the ‘revolution from above’ intensified the process
of turning it into an obedient instrument for changing, suppressing, controlling.”
The road from Bolshevism to the precipice of forced collectivization was
a straight one.
The thread
of the argument is spun out further by Malia, who argues that the specifics
of Marxist-Leninist ideology were irrelevant. “Ideologies are not
blueprints that adherents can apply point by point so that we can then
say neatly that a given system has betrayed or fulfilled its origins.
Ideologies are worldviews that orient political conduct towards general
goals and within broad parameters.” The Marxist blueprint’s
problem was that it wasn’t convincing enough to create a socialist state.
It took Lenin’s addition of a totalitarian framework to the unrealistic
utopian ideology to push it away from the welfare state compromises of
Western Europe to the strange hybrid socialism of the NEP era. Once
the need for collectivization was agreed upon, it took Stalin’s personality
to crush the dithering of NEP’s “quasi-market” and bring full-fledged Soviet
socialism into the world by force.
Stalin’s
death in 1953 represented the peak of the party’s power. The next
decades would see a slow but steady decline in the power of the Party.
No serious scholar would argue that the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinism
was anything but a totalitarian state. The post-Stalin years, though,
were characterized by a system that often didn’t even approach the specifics
of the model laid out in the 1950s. Kruschev’s attempt to turn back
some of Stalin’s extreme policies and the subsequent slow loosening of
the Party’s control that occurred through the decades after WWII was the
source of controversy for Sovietologists, who debated whether these attempts
at “reform communism” represented a different form of totalitarianism or
a different, more liberal system altogether.
Those
who saw the reforms and relaxation of the Soviet system under the central
post-Stalin leaders (Kruschev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev) as breaking down
the totalitarian essence of the Soviet regime into something more liberal
focus on what they identified as pluralist elements that developed in the
USSR. They argued that these elements – phenomena like the rise of
interest groups, divisions and negotiations within bureaucracy and the
like – indicated that the Party was no longer unified, and that the Party
monolith was not crumbling but rather evolving towards something approaching
democracy. The Party structure’s changes were seen as a positive
movement, the forward evolution of communism into something more democratic
and more in keeping with the supposed ideals of Marxism. The end
of the system showed the error of this optimistic approach. If this
revisionist view of the post-Stalin reformists had been correct, “after
four decades of pluralist evolution the remaining distance to liberal democracy
in the Soviet Union should have been short.” As a decade of
disappointment has demonstrated, the former Soviet Union has a long, long
road to liberal democracy ahead of it.
Another
point of view was more negative, but still against the idea that totalitarianism
was the best way to characterize the Communism of the reform years.
Many, especially in Eastern Europe, saw the process as a protracted devolution.
Andrzej Walicki, in his comprehensive analysis of the Marxist project’s
fate in the Soviet Union, saw the totalitarian model as incapable of maturing
towards democracy. Once it reached its peak under Stalin, disintegration
was the only way it could go.
Its development could
consist only in detotalitarianization – that is, not in the process of
maturation but in the gradual loss of its constitutive features – leading
ultimately to complete disintegration. ... the so-called collapse of communism
was not a sudden, miraculous event but only the last link in a long chain
of less spectacular, sometimes hardly visible events and processes.
The difference
between Walicki’s view and that of Malia, another scholar concerned with
ideology, is one of shading. Malia sees totalitarianism as propping
up the Soviet system until the very end, dismissing the idea that “under
Stalin’s successors the Party-state bureaucracy, local Party ‘prefects,’
and professional ‘interest groups’ provided a functional equivalent to
a normal society” as “social-science double-think.” Malia calls
a monolith a monolith, regardless of its condition, and only when it has
collapsed entirely does it become something else. On this he is supported
by both an observer of the regimes’s final years and the regime’s final
head: “[Malia] is quite right that the totalitarian nature of the regime
never disappeared completely until the regime itself went into its final
collapse ... even Gorbachev himself ... called the system he inherited
totalitarian.” Walicki takes a more nuanced view, drawing a
distinction between Stalin’s intact totalitarianism and the disintegrating
structure of the reform years. The gist of both arguments is the
same, though. After Stalin the regime’s vaunted ability to subjugate
an empire under one party began to unravel.
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