The founders of the Bolshevik regime accepted that post-revolutionary society would need a professional bureaucracy, but only for a limited time. It was expected to decline in importance and soon die away. After the defeat of the counter-revolutionary forces, society would have no need for internal state violence.[75] However, the actual development of Soviet society was in the opposite direction. The level of bureaucracy was increasing, material inequalities between citizens were becoming greater not less, repression by the state instead of dying away was increasing by leaps and bounds, real democratic rights were withering not growing; the regime appeared to be heading in exactly the opposite direction to socialism. The goals of the October Revolution had been strongly egalitarian but the reality of Soviet society was a new privileged layer and increasing social stratification and differentiation, creating conflicting social interests.
The Russian bureaucracy was built on a pyramid of privileges and thus Stalin was consistently hostile to egalitarian ideas. After Lenin’s death and throughout the thirties, wage and salary differentiation was pushed to extremes. On 5 January 1931, the CC announced an increase in wage differentials and Pravda led a press campaign against egalitarianism.[76] The regime used legitimate arguments against petty-bourgeois ideas of egalitarianism during the transition to socialism to justify pay differentials within the workforce. In this way they hoped to gain support amongst the more skilled and better paid workers for the system of pay differentials and privileges of which they were the main beneficiaries. In 1932 Stalin condemned egalitarianism in remuneration as ‘anti-socialist’ and approved the removal of the partmaksimum, which had limited the maximum salaries of Party members to about 250 to 300 rubles a month. This opened the floodgates of privilege.[77,78]
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Lenin, V. Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, October 1917, CW26:87-136.
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Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution, CUP 1988.
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Chattopadhyay, K. The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Progressive Publishers, India, 2006, p393.
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Stalin, J. New Tasks in Economic Construction, June 23, 1931, CW13: 53-82.