When Brezhnev introduced the new 1978 constitution of the USSR, he dismissed suggestions (as Stalin had done) that the Soviet state showed no signs of withering away. On the contrary, he insisted that “our statehood is gradually being transformed into communist self-government. This is, of course, a long process, but it is proceeding steadily. We are convinced that the new Soviet constitution will contribute effectively to the attainment of this important goal of Communist construction”. But behind all this rhetoric stood, not a state in transition to communism, but a vast bureaucratic apparatus that dominated all aspects of life. Far from ‘withering away’ it was getting more powerful and grotesque – not the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but the dictatorship over the proletariat of a vast and repressive bureaucratic apparatus.
Lenin envisaged that, as the productive capacity of society increased, and with it the standard of living and cultural level of the population, the functions of running the state and society would gradually be performed by the working class on a rotating basis. Thus, the state itself would become more and more absorbed into society. Instead, the totalitarian monstrosity that was the state under Brezhnev became ever more oppressive, corrupt and divorced from the mass of the population.
This fact cannot be explained by ‘imperialist encirclement’ or by the existence of the ‘remnants of the old regime’ (the usual excuses employed by the apologists of Stalinism). The weak and embattled workers’ state under Lenin and Trotsky, invaded by 21 armies of intervention, maintained a scrupulously democratic regime which protected all the rights of the working people. By the late 1960s, the USSR was the second most powerful country on earth, with a modern economy and a mighty army. Yet the regime could not permit even the slightest concession to democratic rights. This was not because of the external threat, but because the bureaucracy was at war with its own people.
As for the other excuse, what ‘remnants’ are we talking about here? Half a century after the October Revolution, to talk about a threat from ‘capitalist remnants’ was plain nonsense. These had long since disappeared – mainly absorbed into the bureaucratic machine itself. The heirs of the old tsarist state were effectively in control of Russia! Subsequent experience has shown that the real danger to the conquests of October did not come from this quarter, but precisely from that voracious caste which had undermined the planned economy through its bungling, swindles and theft, and a section of which is striving to convert itself into a new class of mafia capitalist oppressors.
Under Lenin and Trotsky, a certain amount of repression against class enemies was made necessary by the extreme backwardness and primitiveness of the state and economy, imperialist intervention and the threat of capitalist counter-revolution. The very weakness of the workers’ state meant that, at times, the struggle assumed very harsh forms. Today, as part of the campaign to discredit Bolshevism, unscrupulous writers exaggerate this repression and try to link it to the horrors of Stalin’s Purges. But even under these conditions, there was an unparalleled flowering of workers’ democracy, which was only destroyed during Stalin’s fight against the Left Opposition, which stood for the defence of Lenin’s ideas of democracy and internationalism.
In place of the democracy and freedom which the working class enjoyed in the period immediately after the October Revolution, there was a system of rigged elections, where everything was decided in advance from the top, i.e. from the privileged ruling elite. Lenin envisaged the gradual withering away of the state from the very beginnings of workers’ power. Instead, we had an enormous growth of the state machine. This had a material basis. The new Tsars jealously protected their swollen privileges and loot. At the same time as they talked about ‘building communism’ and the ‘new Soviet Man’, they clamped down on all forms of dissent and free speech.
State repression assumed new and more refined (though not less cruel) forms. Under Brezhnev the criminal code, already sufficiently draconian, was further tightened up to combat dissidence. The addition of sections 193-1 and 193-3 multiplied the possibilities of repression. Arrest no longer had to be tied to an intent to subvert the Soviet government. Demonstrations (though the articles did not use that word) and the dissemination of any form of material aimed at disrupting the state were punishable, respectively, by three years’ imprisonment and three years’ labour camp.
This measure met with the protests of, among others, the celebrated Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich and a group of Old Bolsheviks. All to no avail. The protests went unanswered, and the decree was confirmed by the Supreme Soviet in December 1966. By January 1967, a wave of arrests were carried out against dissident writers who were tried in kangaroo courts and sent to labour camps. Those who protested about such trials were sacked from their jobs and persecuted. Academics were deprived of their degrees and titles.
Every manifestation of free and independent thought was looked upon as suspicious. Authors were not allowed to publish anything without the authorities’ permission. Any attempt to do so was punishable by long terms of imprisonment with hard labour (seven and five years in a severe regime camp). The horrific picture of these camps in Anatoly Marchenko’s Testimony shows that, while in some ways the conditions in the camps were better than in Stalin’s day, in some respects they were even worse. Moreover, upon arrival in camp, the prisoners often found that their sentences had been increased by a few more years, and at the end of the period, they would be informed that a new case had been prepared and that if they refused to confess they would get another seven or ten years. In this way, the prisoners could be, in effect, buried alive in the camps, with no prospect of ever getting out alive.
Far worse than this, however, was the ghoulish practice of incarcerating political prisoners in mental hospitals. In an attempt to avoid criticism in the West, they began to send dissidents to mental hospitals. Among other advantages, this meant that the accused did not have to be placed on trial. Perfectly sane people were locked up in this way, simply on the basis of two doctors’ signatures. Of course, anyone who complained about the ‘socialist paradise’ had to be insane! Among others, the former General Petro Grigorenko and Zhores Medvedev were subjected to this inhuman treatment which blackened the name of socialism throughout the world. This phenomenon had already existed under Stalin, but it was developed and perfected in the Brezhnev period, when it became widespread. Grigorenko, who spent years in these awful places, recalls that:
A special psychiatric hospital was opened in Sychyovka in Smolensk province. Then another in Chernyakhovsk. Things moved swiftly. In the late sixties and seventies, the special psychiatric hospitals sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. I know about more than ten: Kazan, Leningrad, Sychyovka, Chernyakhovsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Oryol, Sverdlovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Alma-Ata, and a ‘special psychiatric sanatorium’ in the Poltava-Kiev area. In addition, departments for forced treatment were set up in all of the provincial psychiatric hospitals. Thus were created wide scale opportunities to scatter mentally stable political prisoners among a mass of seriously ill patients. (Grigorenko, op. cit., pp. 408-9.)
And he gives a nightmarish glimpse into the conditions in these hell-holes:
This is the horror of our inhuman system of forced treatment. A healthy person confined among the insane knows that in time he may become one of those he sees suffering around him. This is particularly frightening for people with sensitive psyches who suffer from insomnia, who are incapable of isolating themselves from a hospital’s sounds.
The Special Psychiatric Hospital is located in the building of a former women’s prison, alongside the notorious ‘Kresty’ – Leningrad’s principal prison for political prisoners. Here, as in regular prisons, there is a normal partition only on the ceilings of the cells. The middle of the building is hollow. From the corridor of the first floor you can see the glass skylight of the roof over the fifth floor. Sounds intensify and reverberate as they travel up and down this well. During Stalin’s time, this fact was used to carry out psychic torture.
Luckily I was able to ignore most of what went on in the hospital. I could get used to and not notice the incessant tap-dancing over my head for whole days at a time – with intermissions coming only when the dancer fell into total insensibility. The one thing that I cannot forget and that sometimes awakened me at night was a wild night-time cry, mingled with the sound of breaking glass. In sleep, evidently the nerves are not protected from such stimuli. I can only imagine what a person must suffer whose nervous system takes in everything around him.
A patient in a Special Psychiatric Hospital does not have even the wretched rights of a prisoner. He has no rights. The doctor can do whatever they please to him and no one will interfere, no one will defend him. None of his complaints will ever leave the hospital. He has left only one hope – the honesty of the doctors. (Ibid., p. 295.)
Some of the doctors were indeed honest, and attempted to shield the patients from the worst abuse. But since the whole system was under the control of the KGB, and the chief doctors like the notorious Professor Lunts, were in fact serving KGB officers, such attempts were doomed to impotence. The entire conception of the system deprived the prisoner of all rights. “They are entirely in the power of the personnel of these ‘hospitals’.” (Ibid., p. 407.)
All these horrors took place at a time when the government of the USSR was still proclaiming that it was ‘building communism’, that is, the highest form of human civilisation, a classless society in which the state has withered away and the need for coercion has been replaced by a free and voluntary co-operation between the members of society. The leaders of the Communist Parties now wring their hands and express their belated criticisms of all these horrors of which they alone appear to have been ignorant. But nowhere do they offer an explanation of how such monstrosities could occur under ‘real socialism’. Thus, the whole thing is mystified and presented as merely arbitrary actions on the part of individuals. But that relegates them to the status of accidents (that is something which cannot be explained). And that means that this kind of thing can happen in any society, including a socialist one. That is a fine advertisement for socialism! In fact, it can easily be explained by a Marxist as a means whereby a privileged ruling caste tried to defend its power and wealth against the majority of society. Once this fact is grasped, there is nothing mysterious or accidental about it. It merely reproduces a pattern of behaviour which is very familiar to any serious student of history who knows that, in the words of old Engels, in any society where art, science and government are the monopoly of a minority, that minority will use and abuse its position in its own interest.
Capitalists are necessary to capitalism. They are the ‘repositories of the means of production’. The capitalist system cannot function without private profit – the only source of the investment fund. The greed for surplus value is thus the driving-force of the system. The workers see this as quite normal. A worker may demand a larger slice of the surplus value derived from his labour, but it would never occur to him to demand that the bosses should receive no profit. But where does the material wealth of the bureaucracy come from? All they were entitled to from an economic point of view were what Marx called the wages of superintendence. Anything more they got, not as productive agents, but as thieves, parasites and gangsters.
Even the most basic of democratic rights was therefore too dangerous to concede, since the very first point which would be raised was the cutting down of privileges. Of course, from an economic point of view this was absolutely correct. But from the caste standpoint of the bureaucracy, it was the kiss of death. This is the real material basis of the totalitarian regime.
Far from the administration becoming more simplified, with the increased participation of the masses, a monstrous bureaucratic machine had been consolidated, with a far greater rate of officials to workers than in any capitalist nation. Compared to this, even the American state with its vast military-industrial complex seemed small beer. Far from assisting the forward movement of society, the mass of ministries, departments and sub-departments and its mountains of paperwork, directives and red tape constituted one of the main impediments to the development of the productive forces. Not the interests of society and the working class, but the vested interests of the swelling army of functionaries determined policy.
The most criminal thing of all is that, under Brezhnev, the material conditions existed for the Soviet Union at least to begin to move in the direction of socialism. The division of society into classes is historically determined by the division of labour, above all the division between mental and manual labour. But now the material basis existed for the abolition of this division. In 1917, there were only four million workers in Russia. In the Soviet Union in 1980, there were 120 million workers. This was the biggest and probably the most educated working class in the world.
On the basis of the massive development of industry, science and technology, there was no reason why there should not have been the fullest flowering of workers’ democracy. The prior condition for this was that the running of industry and the state be in the hands of the working class. There should have been full rights for all parties and trends to defend their opinions even including those few cranks who wanted to go back to capitalism. Such a regime of real workers’ democracy would have been a preparation for beginning to move towards socialism. But the prior condition for this was the overthrow of the bureaucracy, which was determined to hold onto power by all the means at its disposal.
This contradiction became increasingly clearer, more blatant and more insufferable, not less, as the Soviet Union overcame its backwardness and developed into a modern economy. The rule of the bureaucracy remained an insurmountable obstacle, blocking the road towards socialism. That is why the level of repression increased, instead of decreasing as Lenin had envisaged, and as should have been the case as the material basis for social conflict disappeared. In fact, the Soviet Union was moving further away from socialism, the differentials were growing ever greater, the social antagonisms ever sharper, the rule of the bureaucracy ever more intolerable. The totalitarian state was only the most palpable manifestation of this fact, not its cause.