Policies of Stalin's rise echoed in new reforms

Socialist Action, Vol. 6, No. 11 (supplement), November 1988 · scan p. 3 · Joanne Vincolisi · about 1,605 words

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... Soviet democracy Since coming to power in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has regularly leaned on the early record of the Bolsheviks for his support, hoping that it will provide the necessary historical and theoretical precedents for his current policies.

While shoveling more dirt on Stalin's political grave, Gorbachev has resurrected a popular Bolshevik leader, Nicolai Bukharin, to accomplish this task. Bukharin was the chief architect of Stalin's economic policies from 1923 to 1928.

Bukharin and Stalin claimed to base their policies on the New Economic Policy 3$23 (NEP), which the Bolsheviks adopted in 1921. This is not completely accurate. Though some elements were similar, the strategy pursued from 1923 to 1928 was completely opposed to that of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky.

Stalin's and Bukharin's reactionary approach flowed from their defeatist orientation of building "socialism in one country." Lenin and Trotsky maintained the traditional Bolshevik theory of linking the fate of the first workers' state with the advance of the world revolution.

The early Bolsheviks stressed the need for socialist revolutions in every country, especially Germany. It was considered self-evident that the young Soviet republic could only survive with financial credit, raw materials, and tens of thousands of skilled workers supplied by other victorious revolutions.

Non-exploitative international economic (continued from previous page) the revolution. As a result, they were outlawed.

Civil war narrows democracy The civil war, fueled by the invasion of 14 imperialist armies, not only imposed severe physical hardships on the Soviet population, it also gravely altered the political course charted by the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky commented that democracy "narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased. In the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation."

In his book "The Revolution Betrayed," Trotsky stressed that the leaders of the revolution considered any measures in conflict with soviet democracy "not as a principle, but as an episodic act of selfdefense.' As civil-war relationships would have eliminated the capitalist "world market" profit criterion for trade. A new trade basis between countries would develop commensurate with the expansion of productive capacity, eventually leading to a generalized system of planned economy in distribution as well as production.

Revolution makes detour

But these post-World War I revolutions failed. The young Soviet republic was isolated and on the verge of economic collapse after four years of imperialist armed intervention.

In 1921, immediately after the civil war, factory production was one-fifth of the prewar level. The collapse of productive forces surpassed anything history had ever seen.

A devastating chain reaction took effect. The peasants refused to supply food to the cities because factories were not producing commercial products in exchange. The peasants buried their harvested crops, saving them for a better day.

Under civil-war pressures, the government was forced to militarily requisition agricultural products. But that "military communism" policy had to stop when the war ended.

The NEP thus began in 1921. It utilized pre-revolution production incentives such as supply and demand and traditional money payments. Trade between the city and countryside was reestablished on this basis. In this sense, Lenin and Trotsky supported the NEP as a necessary "retreat."

Trotsky describes the objectives of the the Soviet Union in 1921, Lenin and Trotsky were forced to support severe restrictions on the highly valued innerdemocracy of the CPSU. There was a ban on organized internal political groupings apart from the democratically elected leadership of the CPSU.

Trotsky reports that these steps were "again regarded as an exceptional measure to be abandoned at the first serious improvement in the situation ... lest it lead to a strangling of the inner life of the party."

But, unfortunately, temporary measures taken in self-defense perfectly suited the needs of the emerging Stalinist privileged layer to silence all dissent. To this day, even with the much-heralded glasnost, factions and tendencies are strictly prohibited in the CPSU.

Toward socialist democracy

Lenin's last political act before he died was an offer to form a bloc with Trotsky NEP as quite simple: "Industry should supply the rural districts with necessary goods at such prices as would enable the state to forego forcible collection of the products of peasant labor."

But a major dispute soon broke out in 1923, with Trotsky on one side and Bukharin and Stalin on the other. It involved defining the exact character of production incentives. This may appear to have been a rather academic discussion. It wasn't. The results radically altered the future course of the Soviet Union, with many of the same issues resurfacing today.

Trotsky urged a steady increase in industrial growth to supply the peasants with farm equipment and consumer items to serve as necessary production incentives. He correctly predicted that this relationship was the firmest basis for closing the "scissors," a reference to the ever-widening social gap between the city and country.

Industrial expansion, Trotsky argued, would be financed by charging peasants a higher price for commercial goods and paying them less for their agricultural stocks. This unequal exchange—or "borrowing"-from the peasants was absolutely necessary in order to rebuild the devastated economy.

Of course, the price differentials could not be excessive. Trotsky points out that, "Too heavy 'forced loans' of products, however, would destroy the stimulus...[for peasant| labor."

Stalin and Bukharin a completely against the developing bureaucratic deformations in the CPSU and the soviets.

Trotsky waged this battle until he was murdered in 1940 by an assassin carrying out Stalin's orders.

Two years prior to his death, in September 1938, Trotsky and his supporters launched the Fourth International, a new world party committed to socialist revolution. One of Trotsky's closest associates in this effort was Leon Sedov, his youngest son. Sedov was responsible for coordinating the work of Trotsky's supporters inside the Soviet Union.

In October 1936, prior to his mysterious death in a French hospital, Sedov summed up the tasks of Soviet workers in their struggle against the ruling bureaucracy. In an article on the meaning of the Moscow Trials, he wrote:

"The Soviet proletariat can only march toward socialism by the revival and full blossoming of soviet democracy, by the legalization of all soviet parties-above all the party of revolutionary Bolshevism. But the revival of soviet democracy will only be possible through the overthrow of the parasitic bureaucracy. And the overthrow of SOCIALIST AC different approach-one which is remarkably similar to today's perestroika reforms. They introduced capitalist profit incentives to increase production. This only aggravated the imbalance between city and country, while intensifying the oppression of poor peasants by rich landowners, or kulaks.

Perestroika's role model

Bukharin told the peasants to "get rich." Both he and Stalin encouraged the kulaks to let supply and demand market mechanisms exclusively determine the price of their products. Unfortunately, a large number took this advice seriously. A broad layer of Millions of peasants refused to sell their grain to the government unless prices were continually raised.

This price-gouging siphoned away scarce government capital needed to build up industries in the cities. Indeed, kulaks were getting rich, but the cities were starving. By the spring of 1926, over 60 percent of the grain destined for sale was in the hands of only 6 percent of peasant proprietors.

The most ambitious rich peasants even tried to find ways to sell grain for a higher price on the world market, thus violating the monopoly on foreign trade exercised by the Soviet government. If they had been successful in circumventing the government's trade monopoly, there would have been even less grain available for the hungry Soviet people.

Everything came crashing down in 1928. The kulaks convinced the middle peasants to hoard grain and foodstuffs in a calculated joint effort to blackmail the government into raising prices.

"The working class," Trotsky wrote, "stood face to face with the shadow of an advancing famine."

Forced collectivization

Reeling in panic at the threat posed by the kulaks, the state bureaucracy, under Stalin's leadership, broke with Bukharin. Its reaction was brutal. Agricultural products were taken from the peasants with bayonets. The kulak threat was eliminated by attempting to dissolve 25 million individual peasant holdings into 2000 collective farm units within a three-year period.

This forced march toward collectivization caused long-term damage to Soviet agriculture. Millions of peasants were politically alienated from the Soviet regime. And economic results were no better.

Trotsky writes that "the collective farms were set up with ... equipment suitable ... for small-scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivization took the character of an economic adventure."

The forced collectivizations of 1929-31, were a tragic and unnecessary result of the grievously mistaken policies promoted for five years by Stalin and Bukharin. Unfortunately, these same policies serve today as the model for perestroika.

the bureaucracy can only be accomplished by the revolutionary force of the toiling masses.