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Dear David Johnson
Perhaps you think I wrote a turgid convoluted apology for
Stalin and that makes me a loonie toon not worth an email, but
the truth is that I am an honorary Sovok and I am traumatised by
what happened, like millions of other Sovki (I lived through it
all, I still have family in Russia, and I was not some cosseted ex-
pat either). Probably that explains why I have trouble
formulating my thoughts. Post-traumatic-shock syndrome. Ask
any Russian not driving a foreign car. It makes you feel timid,
confused, apologetic, easy prey for overconfident Washington
professors toting quack nostrums and iron verities. If I now
overcompensate with irascibility, forgive.
When I first went to Russia (1985) I was a self-confessed
socialist. Three weeks of Moscow life morphed me into a
Thatcherite. But ten years later I see it differently. There never
was socialism in Russia (there never was socialism in Britain
either, or anywhere else -- yet -- so Blank, when he says there
was, is tilting at the wrong windmills, and his anticommunism is
just the usual all-American all-white chauvinism and paranoia,
and obviously not based on any reading of actual history or
socialist literature (Oh! Those tedious patristics! But of course,
none of you have actually read Marx or Lenin or any of them,
have you? People like Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes openly
brag about not reading them, and it doesn't stop their lousy
fiction-histories from being acclaimed -- so why should Blank or
any other minor luminary bother?).
Yes, there was no socialist Russia, but no trade union or agri-
co-op or woman's group is ever socialist, either. What they all
have in common is they are attempts by ordinary people to take
matters into their own hands, a process which inevitably sooner
or later brings them not to socialism but into conflict with banks
and commodity-exchange, followed by US marines, body-bags,
covert operations, disappearances, then USAID, professors from
Washington to help reconstruct -- well, we know the rest.
I am a historian and I have just finished a book about 13th
century Mongol invasions of China. It took Genghis-khan a year
to break Beijing in a siege. By that time, the inhabitants were
eating each other. The city fell without a fight in the end, and
after the required massacre and looting, Genghis-khan sent in
food parcels and other forms of aid. Nothing changes. After the
seventy-year siege of Russia, the citizens turned to cannibalism.
The reasons bear thinking about, since hunger was not among
them. And now that the victor powers have completed the
looting of the place and imposed their quisling peace, they also
send certain kinds of aid. They also are sufficiently confident of
their mission for the strut-your-stuff intellectual Rambos like
Blank to find common debating ground, and announce shared
feelings of pity, with handwringing Quakers and angst-ridden
well-intentioned American liberals, (I'm not sure who is the
more odious). (Genghis-khan enjoyed long earnest talks with a
Chinese sage, as a result of which he did not after all turn north
China into pasture, so perhaps there is some point to JRL).
Evidently my idea that there are positive things to be said
about Soviet Russia is too outlandish to contemplate (unless you
are BN wanting reconcilaition, it seems).
But the argument is simple enough. It hasn't changed. It goes
like this:
Capitalism is one, single, world system. Poles of plenty (you
live in one) plunder zones of poverty. The rich get richer. Russia
will now be like Africa, no longer of inrterest since already
plundered. Nothing can stop this process- except struggle. The
idea that Germany or Japan are counter-instances, and that
alternative devleopment strategies are viable, is wishy-washy
utopian nonsense whose only purpose is to get more of your
subscribers onto grant-aided thinktank gravy trains, and
incidentally allow them to make more of those colourful visits
gathering imprressions of misery and squalor in aforesaid
hinterlands.
Postwar miracles happened only because of the existence of
the USSR. Read the history! (You have no time for history, I
see, but I have no time now to go into the reasons, either,
especiually as I am more than half certain you have already
deleted this file without reading even this far).
Since the USSR no longer exists as a threat or (from the
point of view of ordinary people in 1945) a valid alternative,
there is no reason not to just plunder Russia. There will be no
earnest young US Marshall Aid experts helping Russians get
heavy industry back on its feet. None of those fireside chats Ike
made to the Germans explaining to them the benefits of trade
unions (yes really) and constitutions and the like. Just hectoring
Chicago boys...
Actually, Genghis-khan was better than I credit him for,
comparatively. Your lot are much worse. And since those doing
the plundering know as well as anyone the lessons of history,
there is no point whatever in all the handwringing and abject
pleading, begging your rockribbed readers to lay off a bit and
stop the quiet genocide, give the poor folks down on the
kolkhoz a chance etc. No-one is listening. You must ahve felt
that last night when you (and I, and three other people) grasped
the awesome significance of the Chubais tape, and then found
that not a single British or American newspaper ran it, except
the miserable piece in the Washington whatsit.
But you better watch out -- once they've made their
revolution in Russia, your turn wil be next.
America, pace Blank, does not believe in democracy
anywhere, including America, and certainly not in the southern
hemisphere, or Africa, or any place except possibly China.
America believes in plunder, and if anyone wants to know why
the Dow is on the up-and-up, it's realy no surprise -- check
producer goods and raw materials prices and see how the
plunder of eastern Europe and the super-exploitation of Asian
workers has done wonders for inflation and corproate profits in
the past eight years.
As for the ludicrous idea that Russians like what is happening
and are glad of the new freedom etc, well, you've seen the place
and so have I. They have just lived through one of the most
heroic and horrific sieges in history, and they are demoralised
and defeated. People in Russia are scared witless by what is
happening and has happened and if they cling pathetically to BN
it's for the same reasons Jews in camps collaborated with their
SS tormentors. You know it's true, David. Capitalism hans't
changed. It is just as predatory as ever. Therefore the old mole is
still digging, because capitalism can only produce war and
dictatorship, and crises at the margins. You can bury Lenin a
million times, my friend, you can steal the dead from the living,
but it won't change a damn thing. In fact, capitalism today is
more unstable than ever in its history, and the dangers facing all
life on the planet, greater than ever. You want to know why
Russians are so boringly timid? Why they don't come into the
streets, despite everything? Not only because they are sick and
starving and traumatised and defeated, don't trust themselves
any more, don't believe in anything and can only die in quiet and
darkness.
They don't struggle much for the same reason workers don't
struggle much any place.
Because, for one thing, no-one has any illusions any more.
Everyone knows that revolution is nasty and messy and
terrifying and not a think to go in for chanting verses by William
Morris or singing battle hymns. Everyone knows, apart from a
few American professors, that the era of social reforms is over.
People (I mean workers, ie the majority on this newly-urbainsed
planet, and capitalists too for that matter) know that there is just
no point (I'm not talking about neighbourghood eco-
kindergarten-clean-streets struggles). Nowadays, even the tiniest
struggle has revolutionary implications, or none at all. It is that
knowledge, now seeped deep into the collective pschosis of the
Beltway political class, which has turned the US into not just
any global gendarme, but a panting paranoiac Schwarzennegger
cyborg, with tinny little loudspeakers somewhere around
kneecap level that spout words like 'socialism in Russia from
1917-91 was evil ... millions murdered ...ecological and
demographic disasters for all involved etc. ... overwhelming
evidence on this score ... for all our numerous faults, West is
better, one need only ask those who voted with their feet ...'
voices of people with names like Blank, who obviously do not
really exist except in the weird dreams of some Pentagon lab.
That's what the vicitms hear as they drown and suffocate and are
trampled.
I have been catching up on some reading and read two
excellent books recently. One is Walter Laqueuer's 1992 book
'Black Hundred' about the rebirth of the Russian far right (it
reads like a RAND report written when Zhirinovsky suddenly
began to get pluralities; Laqueur concludes that there is nothing
to worry about, the Russian right are so mad people will prefer
to live like Africans and eat grass than support them, and
anyway Russians are by now inoculated against all forms of
totalitarianism, right or left. So that's OK.)
Laqueur goes on about 'the unmitigated disaster' of Russia's
1917, which destroyed the country perhaps irreparably, and
infected the free, generous, kindly Russian soul with a moral
leprosy which made the camps not just thinkable but a mass
activity.
To reassure his Beltway readers, Laqueur goes on about why
Russians embrace democracy and have come to hate the
hopelessness of the old regime, with its tawdry symbols, its
pokazukha, its endless corruption, its Alice-in-Wonderland logic
which made progress impossible, which left everyone
straitjacketed, which resolutely disallowed personal initiative and
looked with hard and gloomy eyes at anyone intelligent enough
to be visible above the vast grey mass (I paraphrase).
Communism as conspiracy, pathology, a social virus like
National Socialism or fascism.
Of course, there is truth in this. And the seeds were always
there. Lenin was a great conspirator, I don't deny it. But it is a
half truth which ignores the fact that 1917 was inevitable, was
not the work of one man's will, not an act of historical
irresponsibility on Lenin's part. It happened because Russia lost
a war to an enemy which was the defeated itself, and could not
inflict a victor's peace. A historical and geographical vacuum
briefly existed in central and eastern Europe, and two forces
rushed in -- socialism from the east and the American agenda for
the coming century from the west: Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Sorry to bang on about history after all, David (why are all
Americans innoculated against it, even the professors? Especially
them?). But I have to come back to this question of the starting-
point. I mean, what happened when the World Revolution didn't.
You may think, boring, I know all this, but hang on a minute!
If you know it, all of you, why is it never reflected in your
discourse?
Look, the creation of a militarised party and a huge standing
army were the first results of the 1918-21 Civil War -- itself the
product of the defeat of revolution in Germany. And these
mutations -- Cheka, monolithism, suppression of the SRs etc. --
were further accelerated by other acts of the outside capitalist
world -- of the subsequent "Encirclement" and "containment",
put in place after Rappallo (1923) and while Hitler was brewed
in the beast's belly. The distortion went deeper. Lenin said that
soviet democracy, for all its shortcomings, was a 'million times
more democratic' than bourgeois democracy -- because it was
not based on private property and the alienation of the worker
from the products of his labour, or of the peasant from the land;
or of the alienation of the whole community from the natural
world -- yes, he said all that. What we got was the opposite --
but why?
Why do you want to pretend that history never happened,
except when it suits you? Why do even the academics, especially
them, always take the easy way out: Lenin was a liar, a
hypocrite, ate babies at breakfast, etc, his program was
unconscionable irresponsibility or else deceit, and anyway life
teaches that these utopian experiments always end badly et
cetera...
Lenin's utopic vision, like that of certain premarket societies,
was based on a different relationship to the land -- coexistence
and respect, not plunder and use. Read the _April Theses_ (it's
quite short) and _State and Revolution_. From them came what?
Not the 'toilers' kingdom of heaven on earth' he spoke of. Not
the utopic dream of a garden-socialism. Came instead, the
behemothic scale of Soviet industrialisation, where mountains
like Magnitka were turned into holes in the round, and this was
hailed under the sign of the conquest of nature, and the Five
Year Plans legitimised the specifically Soviet despoliation of
nature, with its mindlessness, its rapacity, its mind-boggling
scale. But why? As Lenin might have said, _Encirclement,
Encirclement and again, Encirclement_.
The Soviet Commune had to defend itself and built heavy
industry for that purpose -- and pretended and soon believed this
out-of-control monster of heavy industry was a stepping stone
to socialism. The Commune was forced into the absurdity of
building Socialism in One Country, because and only because of
_Encirclement_. Or do we think that Trotsky, or Keresnky, or
Emma Goldman, had some magic cure-all alternative? Before
forgetting what happened in Soviet times, as you are all in
danger of doing, let us think for a moment why it happened.
Mayakovsky said, _look at my Soviet passport and envy me_.
But Socialism in One Country had to begin by confiscating the
passports. Because it cannot exist without a tremendous
mobilisation of every social resource, including crucially the
intelligentsia. And naturally, middle class intellectual wankers do
not like this. So they leave the country to work in the US. You
don't think so? Well, come on!
Once the passports were gone, the madhouse began. Read
Platonov! Every relationship, even between motherhood, was
perverted to one of potential criminality and denunciation. The
proletarian project became overnight a prison camp. Criminality
thereupon flourished with literally no limit, since there were no
longer even the conventional borders which exist in the west
between crime and lawfulness. It was enough to have your
motives suspected, in Socialism in One Country, to end up in a
labour camp. But, tell me please, how could it be otherwise,
given the baleful, omnipresent reality of Encirclement?
Well, I grant you, it could have been otherwise.
There was an alternative.
Not, however, the optimistic variants of history-falsification
of Norman Stone et al, or the spooky fantasies of some of your
correspondents.
They always forget that the Bolsheviks could not precede
themselves and were the product of a colossal breakdown in the
world capitalist system, that it was the system which produced
the mutations including both Lenin and Hitler.
No, the alternative to Bolshevism was _Africa*.
That was what they dreamt of, not just Hitler, but the
Harmsworths, the Hearsts -- the Rupert Murdochs of their day -
- and many many others.
Victory by Hitler. No more Russians alive anywhere.
You think that wasn't the alternative to Socialism in One
Country? But I assure you, it definitely was. And before we shed
any more crocodile tears on behalf of the split homes, the broken
lives, the KGB victims. etc., let us dwell on this.
Or do we prefer to believe that Africa is like it is _because of
the Africans_? Is that our unspoken and racist collective
understanding of the matter?
Well, I continue. My point is this: Socialism in One Country
required the sacrifice of the one to the many, and the sacrifice
was made not with justice but expediency, and survival in mind.
And all the time that Encirclement cast its shadow, the
Comrades perversely made a glorious success out of the
desperate straits Encirclement forced on them, out of the Alice-
in-Wonderland it made of socialism. This was the petard they
hoist themselves, by foolishly making a virtue out of a dire
necessity.
Thus, when crises erupted and difficulties flowed -- famines
from collectivisation, the effects of the purges -- it was explained
or justified not as contradictions and deformations resulting from
the defence of socialism, as the price to be paid for preserving
the fundamental gains of the revolution (And they could have,
could easily demonstrate that it was no argument that human
rights were paramount, for example the right to work or not to
work, or the right to travel and to leave the country. Such
individual rights were secondary to the rights enjoyed by the
mass -- were self-evidently injurious to the socialism which
brought them all so many material benefits, gave them security
and most of all gave them hope. You simply couldn't, in a
nutshell, allow engineers, let alone doctors, physicists,
composers, metallurgists etc., leave for the States).
Because to allow such things would collapse the system,
which depended upon a total politicising of society, total
conscription of the workforce, total mobilisation of all
resources, especially human ones _in conditions of
encirclement, ie siege_. The right to emigrate would cause a
mass exodus under conditions of forced mass mobilisation
required to build the country in the early years. But the
alternative was to return to markets and a restoration of
capitalism in Russia, which I repeat would inevitably doom the
country to become another Africa, one on the very doorstep of
Europe, one to which merchant adventurers would not need to
travel by uncertain ocean voyages, and then to live in disease-
ridden, unfamiliar surroundings; Russia was only a drive down
an autobahn after all, as Hitler's Wehrmacht knew.
People in the West cannot imagine what backwardness means
until they see it and touch it. It is not a matter for the
imagination, because all that faculty can do is to rework the
contents of real experience. Russia is still today a backward
country and that backwardness is seen in the psychology of the
average Russian, especially one who lives in the provinces:
suspicion, distrust of novelty, shiftiness, tactical opportunism,
laziness, thieving, irresponsibility are all characteristics of people
whose level of understanding of what it means to live in a civil
society is primitive, for whom civilisation is still in fact
something threatening, foreign, burdensome. Imagine the
situation sixty or seventy years ago, then, when the Bolsheviks
announced the dream of constructing a vast modern industrial
society to these people's grandparents, who knew only the
village, who had never seen perpendicular lines, who wore bast
shoes made of straw and lynched the first teams of agricultural
engineers sent to demonstrate to them the workings and
potentialities of the few dozen - pitifully small number - of
Fordson tractors which Lenin had imported for the purpose -
because they convinced themselves that this was the devil's
work, believing satanic imps lived inside the noisy, fuming
engines.
In 1916 the British sent an armoured-car brigade,
Dunsterforce, to bolster up the sagging moral of the Tsar's
troops. These English heroes found themselves thrown into the
whirlpool of revolution and, forgotten by their masters in
Whitehall, left to fend for themselves, struggling across
European Russia, ending up in the Carpathians, from where they
intended to attack the Turkish army. By that time, the war was
over as far as Russia was concerned. It was 1917; the peasants
had climbed out of the trenches and gone home to argue things
out with their Tsar, and when they finished arguing there was no
more Tsar. And the gallant soldiers of Dunsterforce, seeing all
this, for the most part joined the Bolsheviks in their struggle
against the Whites, because the justice of their cause - the
people's cause - simply seemed self-evident to them.
If Bolshevism made sense even to English soldiers - ones
who'd had time to live amongst the Russians and see something
of their problems - you may be sure it made sense to many
others. Forget Lenin's utopian promise of building heaven on
earth; Bolshevism offered land to the peasants, bread to the
hungry cities, peace to all. If any kind of viable capitalist
alternative had existed, Lenin never would have succeeded. He'd
have failed just as surely as Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
failed in Germany, when the Kaiser too was swept away, but in
Germany February was not followed by October; there was no
second revolution. There, it was Woodrow Wilson who gave the
bread and the peace to the German people; the land they already
had, for the most part. In small packets. Capitalism already
existed in Germany. Capitalism existed in Russia too, even in
Tsarist times. But Russia was not capitalist. Russia was the
village. Even Moscow was just a sprawling, wooden-walled
village. Only St Petersburg looked like a real European town. So
Lenin won, because the alternative was not a native, home-
grown Russian capitalism; it was colonial plunder, the
dismembering and death of a nation. The Civil War was death
made visible; the Intervention, when eleven states from Japan to
the USA, showed them what to expect if they could not defend
themselves. Seven million died, and many of those by the
catastrophic mistakes Bolsheviks themselves made, mistakes
which Bolshevik indifference made into crimes, as famine came
to be seen as one more weapon in the war to defend the
Commune, even against its own recalcitrant peasantry.
In the Soviet Union it was always clear that capitalist
encirclement posed its own direct threat to the continuation of
the regime, but that fact was a source of hope for the regime's
enemies as well as of fear for its defenders. It was always a
conditioning factor on the modalities of repression in the Soviet
Union. It made the creation of the Gulag Archipelago an
intrinsic outcome, absolutely entailed and required by everything
which had gone before, by the whole situation in the country,
which required vast masses of easily-mobilised cheap labour and
also required the coercive effect on society as a whole which just
knowing about the camps imparted. The camps were a brilliant
solution to the problem of creating and defending Socialism in
One Country.
The Commune failed.
But it was not Socialism which failed. It was not Lenin's great
dream which failed. They were never even tried and as Lenin
knew and said, there can only be socialism in the world as a
whole. There cannot be socialism in one country.
Those who think or pretend that the iniquities and crimes
committed in the Soviet era were the inevitable result of what is
seen as an arbitrary abandonment of the laws of the market and
of the civilised values and human rights and freedoms which
arise from them, are wrong. Encircled, damaged by the folly of
its rulers, savaged by the armies of Hitler, Soviet socialism,
which was not true socialism but only a pale shadow of it, still
managed to guarantee its citizens higher living standards, more
creature comforts, better medical care, a higher life expectancy,
more personal security, than they will experience again in this
century. The Soviet Union is by no means evidence of the failure
of socialism, on the contrary.
Thew other book I read and heartily recommend is Stephen
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. I have spent time in Magnitogorsk
so I particualrly appreciated this account of the first Five-Year
Plan.
Before Blank rubbishes Soviet history he should address
some of Kotkin's concerns. Magnitka was the microcosm of the
new world they were intent on creating, with its emphasis on
work and welfare, on planned cities, with urban environments
not like industrial cities in the west or the shanty-towns of
developing countries, but with all the facilities necessary for
raising cultural levels and opportunities for self-improvement;
with housing guaranteed for all as a social right, and every form
of communal provision encouraged - in Magnitka there was
everything, from public lending libraries which even by 1936 had
gramophone record depts, to cinemas, schools, clubs, institutes,
nurseries, trade union palaces of culture, communal laundries,
communal eating facilities - and in the first super-blocks of
workers housing, the workers each were given a cell; everything
was done communally and the family itself was set to wither
away, until it was rehabilitated in 1936. But all these grandiose
visions and social goals conflicted not only with the privations
caused by want of everything, so that many workers lived in
tents and mud huts for years at a time, while the socialist utopia
was built around them (and the bosses lived in 'Amerikanka' -
the settlement of big dachas originally meant for American
engineers, where the plant director Iakov Gugel lived in
splendour, with chauffeur-driven cars, horses, a sleigh, a
carriage, servants, a music room, billiards room etc. - until his
arrest by the NKVD as an Enemy of the People - he was
executed in 1937).
They also conflicted with the reality of encirclement, (Japan,
Germany) which fuelled the paranoia at the centre and created
the atmosphere of intense suspicion which existed at the base,
where communality was mainly an opportunity for surveillance,
for spies and informers, for neighbours sending anonymous
letters about each other to the authorities. The question of
political loyalty mattered first, last and foremost - but it need not
have been this way. Encirclement was the main thing which
dripped the acid into socialism, burning its way into everyone's
soul. The NKVD, mass repression, the purges, the police state,
the dragooning of thought, the monopoly of ideology, the
culture of monolithism, the politicising of everyday life and the
whole of society, the extending of the public domain throughout
private life so that no-one had any privacy, to live, to cook, to
make families, to write - all were activities within the purview of
the state, to some degree - all followed the logic of encirclement
like night follows day. It could not be otherwise; to lift up
society, to raise people and production from their backwardness,
meant a total mobilisation, from which no-one was exempt. The
whole population was conscripted and had no right to refuse.
The whole population was required to parade on official
holidays carrying portraits of the leaders and shouting hurrah,
and no-one had the right to refuse that either, because under
conditions of encirclement, the whole project would unravel
within weeks or months once such rights were allowed - once
allegiance became wholly voluntary and not a a strange product
of real belief and blind terror. In fact, that is what happened - the
Soviet Union collapsed when the myth of Stalin was finally
destroyed in 1988, and until that moment the whole world was
so blinded by the myth and its hold on the minds of its subjects
that few expected the place to fall apart the way it did.
In the 1930s the Terror and the Plan were two sides of the
same coin; it was impossible to have the one without the other.
There was no strong state at this time; there was enormous
social chaos, and the heart of chaos was the Party itself. The
whole of society ceased to exist, in fact, except for these two
things: the chaos of the Purges, and the chaos of the Plan; and
the only thing which came to matter was the fulfilment of the
plan. In 1931 Stalin said 'We have ten years or they will bury us'.
In 1941, Hitler attached, but by then the country had an army, an
airforce, a big heavy industry and everything necessary to defend
itself. That was the paradoxical consequence of the Terror.
In every respect, Stalinism was part of our world. Woodrow
Wilson answered Lenin's call for World Revolution, which so
electrified people in the collapsing empires of Germany and
Austro-Hungary and which resonated throughout the working
classes of the western world, with a call for the self-
determination of nations and the creation of a League of
Nations. Ireland won its (partial) freedom thereby. Read the
history!
In subsequent decades the great social experiment in Russia
stimulated or forced its capitalist competitors to emulate it:
Roosevelt's New Deal; the creation of welfare states in post-war
Europe - all took as their model the kinds of social provision
first elaborated in the great social experiments in Russia. But the
Bolsheviks themselves based their conception of socialism on an
idea of industrial organisation which was not their own, but was
copied directly from the most advanced developments within
capitalism: the factories of Henry Ford and the great American
steelworks were the models they followed. So what is the enemy
Blank fears, and you fear?
Soviet socialism was a part of the twentieth century's
accommodation with the vast upheavals of the nineteenth
century, when masses of peasants were decanted from the land
and sent to work in satanic industrial cities. In fact, Soviet
socialism exhausted its historical potential by 1945. From that
time onwards it became a deeply conservative force, a roadblock
in the way of history. Once it was swept away, a fortress of old
resistance to the curses of capitalism, nothing was left to prevent
the final emergence of a truly global capitalism and its social
counterpart, a truly global working class.
Perhaps the liquidation of the Soviet Commune has now
created, not the capitalist utopia Blank craves, but the
preconditions for the World Revolution which Lenin dreamt of.
Regards,
Mark jones
majones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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