Between 1925 and 1928 Bukharin and Stalin seemed to agree on this. But in 1928 the Central Committee, controlled by Stalin, approved the first of the Soviet Union’s Five Year Plans–what Bukharin called a “Genghis Khan Plan”. It was to run from 1928 to 1933 and concentrate on the expansion of heavy industry and intensified requisition of surplus from the peasants. In 1929 Stalin revised it to include the complete, forced collectivisation of agriculture. It was Socialist Accumulation gone nuclear.
Although Trotsky did not endorse every aspect of Preobrazhenski’s concept, Deutscher conceded that in essence “it was still the same case they were both defending”.21 Hence many of his followers, including Preobrazhenski, abandoned the Opposition in 1929 once Stalin embarked on collectivisation of the peasantry. It seemed to them that Stalin, having disposed of Bukharin and the NEP, had adopted the economic programme of the Opposition, and that it was their duty as Bolsheviks to help him carry it out. It encompassed not just the complete collectivisation of Russian agriculture but the elimination of all Kulaks and private traders.
Tens of millions of peasants were forced into “Kolkhoz” or “Sovkhoz” collective farms, with the result that in 1933 alone nearly four million people died of famine. Huge new engineering plants were created. Mining in the Don Basin and the Urals expanded ten-fold. The White Sea-Baltic Canal was blasted into existence. The industrial workforce rose from 3.12 million in 1928 to over 6 million in 1932 and to 12 million by 1937. A mass literacy drive enabled new peasant employees to participate. With the removal of bourgeois “specialists” some workers secured more prestigious positions and rewards. These newly empowered functionaries formed Stalin’s social base, although there was no thought given to production of consumer items for the wider masses.
The Plan’s goals were for more machinery, coal, iron and steel. In the “long wave” of history this was what counted. Despite the drama, violence and suffering of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, when the dust settled the Russian state pulled itself back together and continued its 19th-century pattern of industrialisation. It was a more coercive and dictatorial process than that overseen by Count Witte, but the massive industrialisation delivered in the 1930s was the long-term economic policy of Stalin and Trotsky.
Stalinism reached its dark culmination in the Main Camp Administration, or GULAG. The first seed of the Gulag was planted in 1918 with the special “inner prison” inside Cheka HQ on Lubyanka Square, and then expanded to other prisons such as Butryka, which held political prisoners, mainly socialists and anarchists. In 1920 the first Special Purpose Camp was opened on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea, to which thousands of Kronstadt sailors were sent after the mutiny. In 1923 approximately 300 socialist prisoners were transferred to Solovetsky. By 1925 it held 6,000 prisoners, topped up by White Guard officers, aristocrats, landowners and “speculators”. It is indicative of the conditions on Solovetsky that a quarter of these died in the winter of 1925-26.22 In 1930 the fledgling Gulag system was expanded to contain a flood of new prisoners. By 1932 the camps contained 200,000 prisoners. By 1935 they held 800,000. Then came the Great Purge of 1936-38.
The physical liquidation of huge numbers of the ruling party, government officials and the Red Army were Stalin’s own psychotic policies, but the tracklines of the Gulag were laid by Lenin. Just six weeks after October 1917 the mission of the Cheka established that it was not what a person had done (i.e. specific evidence of a crime or treasonable activity) that determined their guilt, but their supposed sociological position and political opinion as defined by the state police. The Decree on the “Socialist Fatherland” of February 1918 made that explicit and gave the Cheka the right of execution without trial. In June 1919, on the recommendation of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, the first camps with the express purpose of using prisoners for industrial slave labour were opened. Stalin did not pervert this system. He simply enlarged it.
None of this should have come as a shock. In 1939, when considering the rise of Stalin, George Orwell wrote, “The essential act is the rejection of democracy–that is, of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin–or at any rate someone like Stalin–is already on the way”.23 Lenin candidly admitted that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was force unrestrained by law. After October 1917 he labeled all who opposed the Bolshevik Party counter-revolutionary. By 1921 he leveled that accusation at opponents within the party. He had been open about his aims from the formation of the RSDLP. The first Russian edition of What Is To Be Done? reproduced on its frontispiece Ferdinand’s Lassalle’s aphorism, “The Party strengthens itself by purging itself”. Lenin lived by that edict and his political heirs took it to heart.
Trotsky was easily the most impressive of those heirs. Despite his many flaws, follies and crimes, the attraction of the man is obvious. He could write like an angel. He was a supple and provocative thinker and a courageous fighter for his version of social emancipation. Many believe his greatest achievements were during the revolution, in October 1917, and the building of the Red Army shortly after. But these were also the seeds of his downfall, of the hubris that led him to advocate the militarisation of labour and to dismiss any opposition, even socialist opposition, as unnecessary. Martin Amis in Koba the Dread and Clive James in Cultural Amnesia condemned him unreservedly as a mass murderer and criminal. But judgments from Amis, James or historians such as Robert Service are one-sided. They do not condemn Western statesmen like Churchill or Eisenhower or Reagan–whose political policies and military interventions caused far more innocent deaths than those of Trotsky–in the same manner, or hold them to the same standards.
The greatness of Trotsky derives from his struggle against Stalinism in the 1930s, his prescient and insightful warnings about German fascism, and his unflagging resistance, even as friends and family were murdered around him, to Stalin’s enormous corruption of socialism. In that time, most especially in his work with the American liberal John Dewey on exposing the criminal frame-up of the Moscow Trials, he achieved the moral stature of a Cicero, a Luther, a Bertrand Russell or a Noam Chomsky, of a truth-teller who could “do no other”. Many of his works–especially History of the Russian Revolution, Literature and Revolution, My Life and his writings on Germany and Britain–repay rereading today and contain food for thought for socialists struggling with the “forces of conservatism” on both left and right. Yet he, as much as Lenin, was responsible for introducing the structures and institutions of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, for the “substitutionism” against which he warned in 1903.
After Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956 and the acknowledgement of Stalin’s crimes, the myth of the Soviet Union took a severe blow. The New Left which emerged in the early 1960s drew intellectual sustenance from a diverse range of thinkers, such as the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, and E.P. Thompson. In 1959 Thompson described this new young generation of leftists as a
generation which never looked upon the Soviet Union as a weak but heroic Workers’ State; but rather as the nation of the Great Purges and Stalingrad, of Stalin’s Byzantine Birthday and of Khruschev’s Secret Speech; as the vast military and industrial power which repressed the Hungarian Rising and threw the first Sputniks into space […] The young people are enthusiastic enough. But their enthusiasm is not for the Party, or the Movement, or the established Political Leaders […] They prefer the amateur organisation and amateurish platforms of CND to the manner of the left wing professional.24