THE RISE OF STALINISM

RISE OF STALINISM

The new regime had been affected by its comrades’ post-war defeats as much as they had been. On the one hand it continued to be isolated without aid from any possible new Workers’ States, particularly that which it had hoped to see in industrialGermany. At the same time, its victory over its own counter-revolution had been bought at the price of weakening further its own economy.

It suffered from famine and shortages of consumer goods. It suffered too the loss of some of its best political cadres. Many were promoted to succeed them in State office, among them those who tended to be either greedy or over-cautious or both.

They began to look to the protection of their actual status as their first priority. This bureaucracy found its mouthpiece in 1922 with the appointment of the new Communist Party General Secretary, Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). This growing Russian State and Party bureaucracy was the major basis for the degeneration of the Comintern.

The bureaucracy’s immediate political expression was in its opportunistic readiness to take short cuts to achieve its ends. It attempted to end the State monopoly of foreign trade and it reacted, literally, brutally to what it regarded as the 28 awkwardness of the Georgian Communist leaders. Suchexamples multiplied on Lenin’s illness and eventual death over 1923 and early 1924. They were encouraged in the Comintern by its President, Gregory Zinoviev (1883-1936), who chose to block with Stalin to isolate Trotsky (who had been Lenin’s ally in an abortive attempt to stop the rot). Zinoviev’s period as President of the International without Lenin to guide him lasted from 1923 to 1925.

These years are often excused by the ultra-left, who tend to date the Comintem’s (as distinct from the Russian Party’s) decline from the latter date. Certainly Zinoviev’s failures were less extensive than those of his successors. Nonetheless, there were enough of them to show a pattern. They were stimulated in 1923 by the defeats of risings in Germany and Bulgaria. These were held to justify a policy that the Comintern’s Fifth Congress ratified in 1924 (two years after its predecessor : a shift to a long-term period of decreasingly frequent Congresses). This policy comprised a series of adventures involving far closer alliances of Communist Party and bourgeoisie than could have been permitted under the decisions of the International’s first four Congresses. Such moves were not initiated everywhere (the British Party enjoyed its best political period) but they occurred too widely for the organization’s health.

In the U.S.A., it inspired the Communists to organize a Farmer- Labour Party asa front, albeit under a bourgeois figurehead. In China, the Party was directed to do entry work in the national bourgeois Kuomintang. In Ireland, the tiny Party was liquidated into a Syndicalist Irish Worker League to keep James Larkin (1876-1947), then the leading Irish Socialist figure, loyal to the Comintern. These moves were covered by an ultra-left phraseology. For example, it was at this time that Stalin first described Social Democracy as Social Fascism. Zinoviev allied with Stalin but found, eventually, that he could not accept fully the logic of the politics of the Russian bureaucracy. Its shortsighted, essentially conservative perspectives caused it to centre its attack on Trotsky in a denial of his strategy of Permanent Revolution, in particular the idea that the International extension of the Russian Revolution was necessary if that Revolution were not to be reversed.

However, at the end of 1924 Stalin capped this denial with the old Revisionist idea of the possibility and desirability of “Socialism in a single country.” When Zinoviev 29 and his third ally, Lev Kamenev (1883-1936) protested, Stalin used his position in the bureaucracy and the intellectual prestige of a new ally, Nicolai Bukharin (1888-1938) to force them out of power.

A new factor in this coup affected the International. In many cases, as in Germany where the national leadership had been too identified with Zinoviev, it was purged on orders from Moscow. Elsewhere, in America for example, Moscow’s plenipotentiaries overturned the national Congress’s decision in order to ensure a leadership more favourable to Bukharin, who led the Comintern from 1926, and his ally Stalin. All this was accomplished without any new World Congress.

Bukharin’s period as head of the Comintem did not suffer from the contradictions of Zinoviev’s later years in this role. On the other hand this was only because it abandoned the latter’s ultra-left excrescences and took a consistently reformist and_ class-collaborationist line.

‘Social Fascism’ was pigeonholed while the short-cuts initiated by Zinoviev were codified and elevated to the level of an International strategy. This was codified finally in the International’s Programme, which was presented to its Sixth Congress in 1928 and which is best known today for Trotsky’s Critique of its draft. Close collaboration with ‘friendly’ trade union bureaucrats (as in Britain and indeed Ireland)

and, in the colonial world, entry into bourgeois nationalist parties (as in China) became the basis for action.

The justification for this was no longer the immediate possibility of quick gains to extend the revolution but the need to struggle against war and, in particular, against the capitalist’s desire to resume their war against the Soviet Union and abort Socialism in that one country.

Trotsky and his concept of Permanent Revolution were denounced more than ever. Even before the Comintern’s Programme had been passed by the International’s Bukharinist Congress, three of its chief national strategies had been defeated. In 1926 in Poland, Joseph Pilsudski (1867-1935) - like Mussolini an ex- Social Democrat albeit a Revisionist - overthrew the Parliament and established a weak form of Fascist regime, at first with the support of the Communist Party. In Britain, the Communist Party there concentrated on working with left trade union bureaucrats apparently friendly to Russia who supported the right-wingers in abandoning the 1926 General Strike and then turned to witch-hunt their former allies and accept the Conservative Government’s ending of Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations. In China, the Communists’ allies in the Kuomintang turned and massacred them.

The Party sought to ally with the Kuomintang’s left wing, which ‘ repeated the attack. Such defeats did not hurt the Stalin- Bukharin leadership of the Comintern. In the first place it did not pretend to expect much from the non-Russian Communists. (Stalin did not expect a successful revolution outside Russia for 90 years).

Rather than trying to educate the latter as it had before 1922, it accepted their weakness. This both stimulated and was stimulated by the perspectives of “Socialism in one country’. Second, the said perspectives were justified and made to fulfil real emotional needs created precisely by these defeats. Once again, the leaders of the Comintern had been betrayed by its member parties but, happily, the U.S.S.R.

could yet build Socialism in its own country. Only the Left Opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev suggested differently and it was accused of breaking national morale in a time of emergency caused by these defeats. Its leaders were forced either to conform (Zinoviev) or go into exile (Trotsky). Despite the latter’s Critique, the Sixth Congress of the International passed Bukharin’s Draft Programme. Even so, the Critique did win, at the eleventh hour, a nucleus of what became the 100 North American Communists to support Trotsky. What did lead to Bukharin losing the Comintern’s Presidency was the failure of his economic policy in Russia itself. He preached that So- 30 cialism could be won by allowing the peasants to ‘enrich yourselves’.

All that happened was that the peasants, particularly the larger peasants, got richer at the expense of the town workers. A famine began to threaten. Stalin reacted in two ways; based on the State and Party bureaucracy, he moved against Bukharin, (whose strengths were prestige and popularity )with a programme of an even stronger regime (on the excuse that as Socialism approached, class struggle intensified) and forced, panicky industrialization at the peasantry’s expense.

He tried to block with Trotsky on this, but Trotsky wanted more democracy, notless. However, many of Trotsky’s followers were recruited and their leader was expelled from the Soviet Union. Stalin then moved against Bukharin and his supporters, who were stripped of their power.

As in 1925-1926, this was an International purge. Such figures as Jay Lovestone (1898-) in the USA and Heinrich Brandler (1881-1967) in Germany were expelled from their Parties with their followers. They formed with Bukharinites in other countries, an international Right Opposition. This was larger: and more impressive at first than the 200 or so in Trotsky’s Left Opposition but it declined during the thirties, mainly because it had no programme save that it be readmitted to the Comintern : it disappeared, like the revived Second International, 31 when the Second World War began in 1939, At the top of the Comintern, Bukharin was replaced by Stalin’s leading supporter, Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1987), the only other consistent Russian Stalinite to have been a leading Communist in Lenin’s time, but even less of an Internationalist than his leader. In 1930 he succeeded the Bukharinite, Alexei Rykov (1881-1938) as President of the Soviet Union. His post remained vacant. The International was now headed by its new Secretary, Dimitri Manuilsky (1883- 1952), a complete nonentity but a competent demagogue and loyal to Stalin. None of these changes were even reported to any new World Congress. Joseph Stalin (4379_ 1953)