6.4. Unpreparedness of Russia
for Socialism and its Consequences
Russia was economically, culturally and morally not ready for the socialist mode of life neither in 1917 nor after the Civil War. Everyone knew it[244]: both opponents and advocates of socialism. After the Revolution the camp of advocates of socialism split during the Civil War.
Understanding that Russia is not ready for socialism, some public figures proposed it would transfer to multi-party bourgeois democracy for the culture and economy to have enough time for development and for the objective and subjective precondition of transferring to socialist to appear.
Others — the Bolsheviks headed by Vladimir Lenin and the Trotskyists headed by Leon D. Bronstein — also shared the view that Russia was not ready for socialism in respect of culture and economy. What they insisted on was that only under the guidance of the Bolsheviks’ Party and the Soviets of Workers and Peasants’ deputies is it possible to develop the culture and economy and to build the real socialism. Only under these circumstances will the working class and the peasants be able to escape exploitation by internal and foreign private capital, which will otherwise set in for at least several decades. It was very likely to happen under the conditions of bourgeois democracy civil liberties and private enterprise permissiveness, wherein inter-industry proportions and gross industries’ capacities[245] are determined by the law of value due to the market self-regulation. To ground the above statement we are drawing Lenin’s opinion here:
«…infinitely stereotyped, for instance, is the argument they learned by rote during the development of West-European Social-Democracy, namely, that we are not yet ripe for socialism, but as certain “learned” gentleman among them put it, the objective economic premises for socialism do not exist in our country. Does it not occur to any of them to ask: what about the people that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created during the first imperialist war? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilization that were somewhat unusual?
«The development of the productive forces of Russia has not yet attained the level that makes socialism possible». All the heroes of the Second International, including of course Sukhanov, beat the drums about this proposition. They keep harping on this incontrovertible proposition in a thousand different keys and make it the decisive criterion of our revolution.
(…)
If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism (although nobody can say just what that definite “level of culture” is, for it differs in every Western European country), why can we not begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers’ and peasants’ government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?
(…)
You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very well. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible?
Napoleon, I remember, wrote: “On s’engage et puis... on voit”. Rendered freely this means: “First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens.” Well, we did first engage in a serious battle in October 1917 and then saw such details of development (from the standpoint of world history they were certainly details) as the Brest peace, the New Economic Policy, and so forth. And now there can be no doubt that in the main we have been victorious. (V.I. Lenin. “Our Revolution (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes)”, Lenin, Collected Works, 5th edition, volume 45, p. 378 — 382).
J.V. Stalin wrote on the same issue, but 35 years after the Great October Socialist Revolution:
«The answer to this question was given by Lenin in his writings on the “tax in kind” and in his celebrated «cooperative plan».
Lenin’s answer may be briefly summed up as follows:
a) Favorable conditions for the assumption of power should not be missed — the proletariat should assume power without waiting until capitalism has succeeded in ruining the millions of small and medium individual producers;
b) The means of production in industry should be expropriated and converted into public property;
c) As to the small and medium individual producers, they should be gradually united in producers’ cooperatives, i.e., in large agricultural enterprises, collective farms;
d) Industry should be developed to the utmost and the collective farms should be placed on the modern technical basis of large-scale production, not expropriating them, but on the contrary generously supplying them with first-class tractors and other machines;
e) In order to ensure an economic bond between town and country, between industry and agriculture, commodity production (exchange through purchase and sale) should be preserved for a certain period, it being the form of economic tie with the town which is alone acceptable to the peasants, and Soviet trade — state, cooperative, and collective-farm — should be developed to the fullest and the capitalists of all types and descriptions ousted from trading activity.
The history of socialist construction in our country has shown that this path of development, mapped out by Lenin, has fully justified itself. (“Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.”, “Remarks on Economic Questions Connected with the November 1951 Discussion”, Ch. 2. “Commodity Production under Socialism”).
In fact such policy was initially bound to cause more than one interpretation and to create internal conflicts. Firstly, it implied that the government and party would render support to those implicating the ideals of socialism and the doctrine of its construction according to their own worldview and to the Party leaders’ understanding of it (i.e. in the way it was presented in the official propaganda). Secondly, it implied forcing of the ideologically uncommitted layers of the society to join the socialist mode of life. It concerned the layers who didn’t have any particular ideas about the ideal social order in their minds, whose actions were guided by individualistic interests of a replete and comfortable life for themselves and their families and who would be loyal to any government that could provide acceptable labor conditions and consumers’ well-being. Thirdly, it implies investigating and suppressing anti-socialist activity — in the understanding of the top party leaders.
But this is the ideal version.
In practice actions of all three of the above-mentioned types can be characteristic of the same people when taken in different time and under different circumstances. This is possible owing to the customs and the mentality of the crowd-“elitist” society. This concerns both the sundry rulers implementing the declarations of building the new society and the masses controlled by these rulers. Thus, the personal mistakes and abuse of power by the repression machine workers were made objectively inevitable[246]. Besides, in real life the government can be truly mistaken about the vision of socialism and the methods of building it. As a result, it was those having less misunderstanding about socialism that were bound to become the victims of the repression machine simply because they were unable to convince the party and its machinery of their viewpoint. This is what predetermined personal and subjective mistakes by the top leaders of the party to become the system errors in the social self-government.