Kto-kogo - usually glossed as 'who will beat, crush or dominate whom?' - is widely seen as the hard-line heart of Lenin's outlook. Eric Hobsbawm writes: '"Who whom?" was Lenin's basic maxim: the struggle as a zero-sum game in which the winner took, the loser lost all.'[361] This understanding of kto-kogo fits in with a standard account of the origins of Stalin's collectivisation drive that goes like this: the Bolsheviks tried to force communism on the peasants during the period of War Communism but found that the task was beyond their strength. Harbouring a deep contempt and resentment of the peasantry, they retreated in 1921 by introducing NEP (New Economic Policy), after which they waited for the day when they would have the strength to renew their assault on the countryside.
Given the almost folkloric status of kto-kogo as Lenin's favourite phrase, it is something of a shock to discover that Lenin's first and only use of the words kto-kogo is in two of his last public speeches given at the end of his career and that his aim in coining the phrase was to explain the logic of NEP. After the Bolsheviks legalised various forms of capitalist activity at the beginning of NEP, the Bolshevik leaders had to demonstrate - to themselves as well as to their audience - that permitting capitalist activity could actually redound to the ultimate advantage of socialism. In speeches of late 1921 and early 1922, Lenin put it this way: yes, we are giving the capitalists more room to manoeuvre in order to revive the economy - and therefore it is up to us to ensure that this revival strengthens socialist construction rather than capitalist restoration. The question therefore is, who will outpace whom (kto-kogo operedit), who will take ultimate advantage of the new economic policies? This question in turn boiled down to a problem in class leadership:
From the point of view of strategy, the essential question is, who will more quickly take advantage of this new situation? The whole question is, whom will the peasantry follow? - the proletariat, striving to build socialist society, or the capitalist who says 'Let's go back, it's safer that way, don't worry about that socialism dreamed up by somebody.'[362]
Lenin pounded this basic point home in a great many formulations and the phrase kto-kogo would have pass unnoticed if it had not been picked up by Zinoviev when he gave the principal political speech at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Zinoviev glossed the phrase as follows: 'Kto-kogo? In which direction are we growing? Is the revival that we all observe working to the advantage of the capitalist or is it preparing the ground for us? . . . Time is working - for whom?'[363]
Thus the kto-kogo scenario was indeed built around the class struggle, but the enemy class was not the peasantry but NEP's 'new bourgeoisie'. Victory would be achieved by using the economic advantages of socialism to win the loyalty of the peasantry. This scenario was not a product of NEP-era rethinking, but rather a variant of the class leadership scenario operative during the civil-war era. Basing themselves on the peasant scenario of Marx, Engels and Kautsky, the Bolsheviks saw the peasants as a wavering class but a crucial one, since the fate of the revolution would be decided by which class the peasants chose to follow. As the Bolsheviks saw it, they had been compelled during the civil war to place heavy burdens on the peasantry. Nevertheless, when push came to shove, the mass of the peasantry realised that the Bolsheviks were defending peasant interests as the peasants themselves defined them and therefore gave the Bolsheviks just that extra margin of support that ensured military victory. This scenario meant that, far from looking back at the civil war as a time of fundamental conflict between worker and peasant, leaders like Bukharin urged Bolsheviks to look back at the successful military collaboration of the civil war as a model for the economic class struggle of the 1920s.
Official Bolshevik scenarios assumed that complete socialist transformation of the countryside - large-scale collective agricultural enterprises operating as units in a planned economy - would not be possible without an extremely high level of industrial technology. The transformative power of technology was symbolised by the slogans of electrification and tractorisation that Lenin coined prior to NEP. This task of economic transformation was so gargantuan that many Bolsheviks assumed it would not occur until a European socialist revolution released resources unavailable to Russia alone. As good Marxists, the Bolsheviks felt that the use of force to create fundamentally new production relations (as opposed to defending the revolution) was not so much wrong as futile. Precisely in I9I9, when the Bolsheviks were putting extreme pressure on the peasantry in order to retain power, can be found Lenin's most eloquent denunciations of any use of force in the establishment of communes or collective farms.
The kto-kogo scenario is thus an application of an underlying scenario of class leadership of the peasants to the new post-1921 situation of a tolerated market and a tolerated 'new bourgeoisie'. The Bolshevik understanding of the dynamics of this situation was based heavily on pre-war Marxist theories of the evolution of modern capitalism. According to Bolshevik theorists, these evolutionary trends were immanent in any modern economy, whether capitalist or socialist - although of course the socialist version would be more democratic and less socially destructive. General European capitalist trends could thus serve the Bolsheviks as rough guides to their own near future. One such trend was the steady movement towards organised and monopolistic forms and the consequent self-annulment of the competitive market. The Bolsheviks also took over Kautsky's assertion that the city was always the economic leader of the countryside. These two factors together implied a steady process of 'squeezing-out' (Verdmngung, vytesnenie) of small-scale forms by more efficient and larger ones - petty traders by large-scale trading concerns, small single-owner farms by large-scale collective enterprises (which could be either capitalist or socialist).
These perceived trends informed the Bolshevik scenario of class leadership during the I920s. The Bolsheviks had no doubt that the countryside would eventually be dominated economically by large-scale, urban-based and society- wide monopolistic institutions. The perceived challenge was not here but in the kto-kogo question: what class would be running these institutions? To use another term coined by Lenin at the same time as kto-kogo: what kind of smy- chka would be forged between town and country? Smychka is usually translated 'link' but this can be misleading if it is taken to imply that the Bolsheviks were unaware prior to NEP of the need for town-country economic links. The smychka slogan is specific to NEP because it evokes the economic aspect ofthe kto-kogo struggle against a tolerated bourgeoisie for the loyalty of the peasants. As Bukharin put it in 1924: 'The class struggle of the proletariat for influence over the peasantry takes on the character of a struggle against private capital and for an economic smychka with the peasant farm through co-operatives and state trade.'[364] The Bolsheviks assumed that 'the advantages of socialism' - the efficiencies generated by large-scale, society-wide institutions in general and a fortiori by the planned and rationalised socialist version of such institutions - would steadily come into play and fund the class leadership struggle by providing economic benefits to the peasants.
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