In the summer of 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, there was a revolutionary movement of the East German workers. It started with a spontaneous strike of the building workers in Berlin. Protesting against the intolerable conditions and impossibly high norms of production, they downed tools and marched along the Stalinallee, shouting slogans which soon acquired a political character. The demonstration triggered off a mass movement which could have led to the overthrow of the Stalinist regime in East Germany. The regime was powerless. But Moscow could not tolerate such a development, and sent in the tanks to put down the uprising.
In 1956, the movement flared up again, this time in Poland, the beginning of a long-drawn-out struggle of the Polish working class to free itself from bureaucratic rule. Time after time for a period of over three decades, the Polish masses moved into action to throw off the Stalinist yoke, which was all the harder to bear because it was identified with the historical oppression of the Polish people by Russia. In an unclear fashion, the Polish proletariat was striving for a regime of workers’ democracy, which would enable it to live with honour and dignity, as masters in their own house, not slaves of hated foreign rule.
As the bureaucracy had feared, the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress was the immediate spark which ignited the powder keg. The ‘thaw’ had opened up the floodgates. In June 1956, taking advantage of the disarray in Moscow, the Polish masses rose. A general strike in Poznań rapidly spread throughout the country. Workers’ councils were set up in the factories, the embryo of soviets which could have meant the transfer of power to the workers. But the movement was taken over by the Communist Party, which, under the leadership of Władysław Gomułka (who had been imprisoned under Stalin) proclaimed reform and independence.
The so-called ‘Polish road to socialism’ served as a fig leaf for the continued rule of the bureaucracy. But it succeeded in temporarily derailing the movement on nationalist lines. 800,000 demonstrated their support for Gomułka, the representative of the Polish bureaucracy, which in effect was leaning on the Polish masses to gain concessions from Moscow. Realising that an invasion would signify a bloodbath, Khrushchev bowed to the inevitable and arrived at a compromise with Gomułka, satisfied that the ‘fraternal’ Polish bureaucracy would hold the line, and prevent the working class from coming to power.
No sooner had Khrushchev denounced Stalin, when in October the Hungarian Revolution broke out. The Hungarian Revolution of October 1956 was an attempt by the working class to turn Hungary into a healthy workers’ state. The workers organised revolutionary committees, which they did not call soviets, because the rule of the Stalinists had made the word stink. Nevertheless, instinctively they attempted to go back to the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. Had the Hungarian Revolution succeeded, it would have meant the collapse of the bureaucratic regime in Russia. For this reason, Khrushchev had it put down in blood. The Stalinist press denounced the movement of the Hungarian working class as ‘fascists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. However, those Russian soldiers who had been based in Hungary viewed the revolution with sympathy and fraternised with the population. A section went over and joined the fight against the hated AVO (secret police). If a conscious revolutionary leadership with an internationalist programme had been present, it could have been the starting point for a complete transformation in the whole of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The same year had witnessed a general strike in Poland, and Russia itself was in a state of ferment following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU.
Because they could not rely on the Soviet troops in Hungary, Moscow had to withdraw them and replace them with backward troops from the Soviet Far East, who were told that they were being sent to put down a fascist revolt in Berlin. They were moved straight into action in tanks, with no possibility of meeting and fraternising with the population.
Despite overwhelming odds, the Hungarian workers fought like tigers, staging two general strikes and two armed insurrections, both before and after the Russian invasion – hardly the weapons of fascism, as the Stalinists maintained! Years later a Russian army officer who had fought in the Second World War told Alan Woods that he had never seen such ferocious resistance, even in the taking of Berlin in 1945. But inevitably, without an internationalist leadership capable of winning over the Russian troops, the Hungarian workers were defeated.
There are many lessons in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Firstly, as Trotsky had foreseen, when faced with a general uprising of the proletariat, the bureaucracy split. Only a tiny handful of the most corrupt and degenerate elements, mainly those connected with the AVO, were prepared to resist. Thousands of ordinary members of the Communist Party tore up their cards and joined the revolution. The government of Imre Nagy was suspended in mid-air. All power was in the hands of workers’ councils, especially the Budapest workers’ councils, which consisted exclusively of elected delegates from the factories. The programme of the workers’ councils was broadly similar to the four points worked out by Lenin in 1917 as the preconditions for workers’ power. To these points, significantly, the Hungarian workers added a new one – no more one party state! After the experience of Stalinist totalitarianism, never again would the working class entrust power to a single party.
“Today, 14 November 1956, the delegates from the District Workers’ Councils formed the Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest”, reads the Council statement. “The Central Workers’ Council has been given the power to negotiate in the name of the workers in all the factories of Budapest, and to decide on the continuation of the strike or return to work. We declare our unshaken loyalty to the principles of socialism. We regard the means of production as collective property which we are at all times ready to defend.” (Quoted in Eyewitness in Hungary, by Bill Lomax (editor), p. 177.)
In a short time, the workers learned fast. This is shown by the fact that the first broadcast of radio Budapest was an appeal for help to the United Nations, but the last appeal was to the workers of the world. This was a heroic episode, similar to the Paris Commune. It showed what could have happened in Russia if the movement had spread, which was a real possibility above all if there had there been a conscious leadership, like that of the Bolshevik Party in 1917. From the very beginning, they would have made a revolutionary appeal to the workers of Poland, of the whole of Eastern Europe, and above all to the workers of the USSR. Either the greatest of victories or the greatest of defeats. There was never any other alternative for the Hungarian workers in 1956.
The delay of the political revolution in Russia, and the fact that the bureaucratic regime lasted another 35 years, had a very negative effect on the consciousness of the masses. It has meant that the impasse of Stalinism has, at least for the time being, led to a movement in the direction of capitalism. The lesson is clear. There is no substitute for the revolutionary party and leadership. No automatic mechanism exists whereby the lessons of one generation can be transmitted to the next. Without the party, every generation must painfully relearn the lessons of the past through their own experience. That is why Lenin always insisted on the need for a vanguard party composed of cadres, as the memory of the class. All subsequent history, that of 1956 included, has shown this to be absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, the working class of Eastern Europe and Russia will have to learn all the lessons over again. But learn they undoubtedly will.
On 4 October 1957 Russia launched the first Sputnik, followed by the first man into space in 1961. More than twice the number were employed on the Soviet space programme as on the American. Such was the confidence of the Russian bureaucracy, that at the 21st Congress of the CPSU the goal was proclaimed of “building communism” (!) within 20 years. In October 1961, at the 22nd Congress Khrushchev announced Russia’s intention of overtaking the United States by 1980. Accordingly, “labour productivity in Soviet industry will exceed the present level of productivity in the USA by roughly 100 per cent”. (The Road to Communism – Report of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, p. 515.) Khrushchev announced: “We will bury you!”
Nowadays, this is ironically dismissed as an idle boast. On the contrary. On the basis of Soviet growth rates of 10 per cent the target of overtaking America in 20 years would have been entirely possible. That, of course, would not have meant that socialism had been built in the USSR, let alone communism, a classless society, in which inequality, the state and money had become distant memories of the past, and laws and coercion are replaced by an association of free producers. Nevertheless, under the planned economy, formerly backward Russia had developed industry, science and technique to a point where the material conditions now existed for beginning to move in the direction of socialism, which, as Marx explained, requires a level of development at least as high as the most advanced capitalist country. Now the Soviet Union was within striking distance of drawing level with the USA. Only the bureaucracy stood in the way. And the bureaucracy had shown in Hungary that it had no intention of withering away.
Despite what they now say, the meteoric advance of the Soviet economy seriously alarmed the ruling class of the West. Russian industrial production had reached 75 per cent of the US level during the 1960s. The bureaucracy believed it could rule forever. It seemed the Stalinist regime thought things could only go forward. Nothing could stand in their way. The continuous high rate of growth served to explain the stability enjoyed by the bureaucratic regime for the last period. Under Stalin, the bureaucracy ruled by naked terror. But for the last three decades or more, it was able to maintain its rule mainly because of the inertia of the working class. This, in turn, was explained by two factors: on the one hand, the fear of imperialist intervention, and on the other because the masses felt that, in spite of everything, the bureaucracy was still capable of carrying society forward. All the factors which enabled the bureaucracy to survive for so long dialectically turned into their opposite.
Agriculture remained the weakest point of the regime. Food shortages and rising prices were a major cause of discontent. The 1963 grain harvest was bad, and Russia was forced to import large amounts of wheat from the West. There was difficulty in supplying bread, especially flour. Discontent was growing. Khrushchev’s policy had been to carry out a controlled reform from the top, in order to prevent a social explosion from below. The events in Hungary served a serious warning on the regime of what they might expect. However, this policy was not without dangers. The French historian-sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his classic study The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, that the most dangerous moment for an autocracy is precisely when it attempts to loosen the screws after a long period of repression. This was underlined in an episode that has been generally passed over in silence – the Novocherkassk events.