Stalinism meant the obliteration of basic workers’ rights – the right to strike, organise, freedom of speech, etc. – that exist in the ‘democracies’ of the capitalist West. Political counter-revolution had already begun in 1924 with the intrigues of Stalin and his domination of the Party and state apparatus. However, it was a protracted process. The old cadres of the revolution were gradually eliminated and replaced by the all-powerful bureaucracy. By the early 1930s, the defeat of the Left and then the Right Oppositions cleared the way for the complete domination by the Stalinist faction. “The Jacobins have been pushed out by the Thermidorians and Bonapartists,” Trotsky wrote. “Bolsheviks have been supplanted by Stalinists.”
From 1932 to 1947 no trade union congresses were held in the USSR. The trade unions were transformed into mere appendages of the state. The soviets had long ago changed into organs of bureaucratic rule. Stalin drew up a new constitution in 1936 and hailed it the “most democratic” in the world. On the eve of the 1937 general elections, Stalin declared: “Never before – no, really never – has the world ever seen elections so completely free, and so truly democratic! History has recorded no other example of the kind.” (JV Stalin, Speeches at Pre-election Meetings of the Stalin Election District in Moscow Province. 11 December 1937 and 9 February 1946 (Russian), Moscow 1946, p. 5. Quoted by T. Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, p. 121.) However, this ‘democratic’ constitution did not prevent the rigging of all elections with the CP candidate getting around 99.9 per cent of the votes. At one election to the local soviets on 21 December 1947, Stalin polled 2,122 votes, despite the fact that the constituency only had 1,617 voters! This was explained by Pravda the following day: “The extra ballot papers were put into the urns by citizens of neighbouring constituencies anxious to seize the opportunity to express their gratitude to their leaders.”! (Ibid., p. 121.)
Blatant ballot rigging was clearly revealed in the referendum in Lithuania on 12 July 1940 concerning the union of Lithuania with the USSR. Through bungling, Moscow announced the result after the first day of a two-day referendum! As one commentator explained: “It was an unfortunate slip by which a London newspaper published the official results from a Russian news agency twenty-four hours before the polls were officially closed.” (Ibid, p. 122.)
The bureaucracy, with Stalin at its head, was consolidating its hold over power. By the mid-1930s, the bureaucracy had secured for itself a privileged and powerful position far greater than any other bureaucracy in history. Using the whip of bureaucratic commandism, and its auxiliary in the Stakhanovite movement, the productivity of labour as a whole rose substantially in these years. This propelled industry forward, but it also provided greater privileges for the bureaucracy. The increase of production “on the basis of commodity circulation, means at the same time a growth of inequality”, noted Trotsky. “The rise in the prosperity of the commanding strata is beginning to exceed by far the rise in the standard of living of the masses. Along with an increase of state wealth goes a process of new social differentiation.” (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 115-6.) While rationing was abolished, and real wages increased for the majority, the privileges of the bureaucracy grew enormously. With economic growth came, not growing equality, but increased social division. There thus occurred a division not only between the workers and bureaucracy, but also between the lower and higher paid workers.
As the economy leapt forward, the wages and perks of top officials grew much faster than the real wages of the workers. Some bureaucrats held several positions, thereby drawing several salaries. A system of subsidies for officials was also introduced from the level of chairman of a city soviet upwards. As Marx explained, on the basis of “generalised want”, the struggle for existence threatens to revive “all the old crap”. Under the Stalin regime, this took an aggravated form. “Always and in every regime,” notes Trotsky, “the bureaucracy devours no small portion of the surplus value.”
The rule preventing Communist Party officials receiving more than a skilled worker (the ‘party maximum’) was formally abolished on 8 February 1932. The bureaucracy was eager to share in the growing surplus produced by the labour of the Russian working class. It devoured, wasted and embezzled a considerable proportion of the national income. A small group of top officials were receiving privileges as early as the first Five-Year Plan by the creation of a system of special shops, distributing centres and dining-rooms, where goods could be obtained at fixed prices – a great privilege in a period of high inflation. Other privileges were gradually built up: special hospitals, holiday homes, dachas, etc. Extra perks were also received by Party officials for conferences, congresses and so on. As parasites, the bureaucracy sought a bigger and bigger share of the national wealth. To prevent collapse, this corruption had to be curtailed or limited in order to preserve the well-being of the bureaucratic caste as a whole. This was the role of the chief arbiter, Stalin.
Before the Second World War, Trotsky calculated that the Soviet bureaucracy – made up of the officials of the state apparatus, the party, trade unions, co-operatives and the military-industrial complex – together with their families and dependants, constituted as many as 20-25 million people, which was 12-15 per cent of the population. However, the bureaucracy was not a homogeneous grouping, unlike the proletariat or peasantry. The ruling caste in the proper sense of the word, was likely to be made up of around 500,000 persons, resting upon a “heavy administrative pyramid with a broad and many-faceted foundation”. It was a heterogeneous grouping ranging from Kremlin dignitaries to local Party and state officials. Trotsky was very careful not to describe these parasitic strata as a new social class.
Exiled to Alma-Ata and then expelled from the borders of the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky undertook the organisation of an international Left Opposition to continue the defence of the ideas and traditions of Bolshevism. In order to defeat Stalinism, it became essential to define and understand the nature of the bureaucratic reaction within the Soviet Union. With the degeneration of the Comintern, Trotsky devoted the remainder of his life to organising and theoretically rearming the young revolutionary cadres of the Marxist movement. At a time when the world was mesmerised by the startling advances of the Soviet Union under the original Five-Year Plans, Trotsky was the only one to provide an exhaustive scientific analysis of Stalinism. For this achievement alone, his place in history as one of the great pioneers of Marxist thought would be guaranteed. Yet he did not immediately arrive at a fully-fledged conclusion. This flowed from the nature of the phenomenon itself. The bureaucratic degeneration did not take place overnight. It was a contradictory process, which unfolded over a period of more than a decade. This explains the on-going nature of Trotsky’s evaluation of Stalinism. Scrupulously following the dialectical method, he carefully charted all the twists and turns, laying bare at each stage the contradictory tendencies, and showing how the process was likely to unfold.
In their drive against ‘Trotskyism’ from 1924 onwards, the Stalinists carried through a purge of the Communist Parties internationally in the name of Bolshevisation. These organisational methods had caused splits and divisions in all the national sections. It resulted in a layer of members and ex-members of the Communist Parties who opposed Stalinism moving in all kinds of political directions. Some moved towards Menshevism and accepted that capitalism had been restored in Russia. Others defined it as ‘state capitalism’ or some kind of new exploitative society, which for them meant the total eradication of the Soviet regime. Others simply renounced the revolutionary movement altogether. Trotsky took issue with these ‘new’ theories which abandoned the USSR as a workers’ state. Such ideas even began to surface within the international Left Opposition itself, reflecting the prevailing moods of pessimism and despair in the face of the apparently irresistible advance of the Stalinist political counter-revolution. Trotsky, in an article written in 1929, entitled Defence of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition, took up sharply a leading German Oppositionist, Hugo Urbahns, for misinterpreting his views on the class nature of the Soviet state and asserting that the capitalist counter-revolution had been completed and everything had been lost. Trotsky argued that, while a degeneration had taken place, the basic gains of the revolution were still intact:
We fight against the Stalinist course. But Soviet Russia is something quite different from Stalin. Despite all the degeneration, which we fight and will continue to fight most resolutely, so long as the class-conscious workers are armed, Soviet Russia remains for us a proletarian state, which we defend unconditionally in our own interests, in peace as in war, in spite of Stalin, and precisely in order to defeat Stalin, who is incapable of defending it with his policy. Whoever is not absolutely firm on this question of the proletarian character of Soviet Russia hurts the proletariat, hurts the revolution, hurts the Communist Left Opposition. (Trotsky, Writings 1929, pp. 284-5.)
Trotsky at that time described the Soviet bureaucracy as a form of bureaucratic centrism, reflecting Stalin’s shift from left to right and back again. It reflected the attempts of the bureaucracy to regulate the antagonisms in Soviet society, between the workers’ state and world imperialism, but in an increasingly Bonapartist manner. For Trotsky, the task facing the Left Opposition was not to form another party, but to fight for the reform of the Communist Party as a faction within it; and to struggle not for a new revolution, but for reform of the USSR. This position was staunchly defended by the International Left Opposition up until 1933, when events in Germany forced Trotsky to re-evaluate his position. He regarded the catastrophe in Germany, culminating in the victory of Hitler, as the historical equivalent of the betrayal of Social Democracy in August 1914. This time, the part played by the leaders of the German Communist Party and the Comintern was even more disastrous. With their mad policies of ‘Social Fascism’, and the so-called united front from below, the German Communist leaders, together with the miserable role of the Social-Democratic leaders, split the working-class movement and delivered it without a struggle into the hands of Fascism. The theory of ‘Social Fascism’ held that all political parties, with the exception of the Communist Party, were fascist. This idea was summed up in Stalin’s notorious phrase “objectively, Social Democracy and Fascism are not antipodes, but twins”.