Before we concern ourselves with the critics, we must form a more precise idea of what it is they criticize. ‘Autocracy’ and ‘Stalinism’ are concepts too general for use as scientific terms. A degree of concreteness and precision is needed here: what do you understand by these words? In Strömungen und Tendenzen in Neomarxismus, Holz wrote:
The term ‘Stalinism’ confuses the question, because it personalizes a particular phase in the development of the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement. Analysis, leaving aside the personality of Stalin, must be objective in character in order that we may understand what is meant by ‘Stalinism’.3
The history of the Russian state and the Russian intelligentsia begins, as we all know, not in 1917 but much earlier, and anyone who studies Russia’s autocracy discovers here some very serious differences from the history of the other countries of Europe.
Marx used the concept ‘the Asiatic mode of production’. At first, following Hegel, he distinguished Asiatic despotism as a purely political phenomenon. Only later, in the 1850s, did he come to the conclusion that what was involved was a more profound difference between Europe and Asia. Above all, private property in the European sense was almost unknown in Asia. Engels explains this by arguing that the huge expanses of territory and the need to organize large-scale irrigation and other public works entail the necessity of a strong state. Such a state can arise and develop only if it has economic support in the form of a state monopoly of land, which in the given conditions is the principal means of production (or some sort of mediated state ownership of the principal means of production — including, of course, human beings). In short, the despotic ruling power appears as both the supreme property-owner and as an economic power. Marx noted features of this Asiatic mode of production in Russia as well.
Russian serfdom cannot be equated with European feudalism. In the West the development of feudal relations first gave rise to decentralization, and then absolutism consolidated political authority while allowing a certain economic autonomy to both the feudal landlords and the bourgeoisie. In the economic sphere both groups were able to operate not as subjects of the state but as free property-owners (although the degree and type of freedom they enjoyed varied in different countries and for different estates); in any case, as independent individuals. The state did not subordinate the entire life of society but dominated the political sphere alone. In Russia, however, as a result of the Tatar yoke and the general backwardness, there arose a system akin to the Asiatic type. Here the landlord appeared also in the role of local representative of the central authority. ‘Every landlord’, writes Herzen, ‘played the part of the Grand Prince of Muscovy in miniature.’4 The state, the landlord class and the sadly celebrated Russian bureaucracy formed a single entity. ‘The privileges of officialdom in Russia represent another side’, wrote Lenin, ‘of the privileges and agrarian power of the landed nobility.’5 While Marx’s formula about the state expressing the interests of the ruling class is correct for the West, in Russia this class was itself the state. Similarly, there was never any ‘free’ capitalism in Russia — not only in the sense of the absence of bourgeois democracy but also in that of the absence of free competition and the other features of liberal capitalist economics. The Russian state was itself the biggest entrepreneur; it had its own ‘state factories’, it constantly intervened in business life, regulating relations between capitalists and workers (in such a way, moreover, that both parties lost by this interference). A notable example of this was the creation of the ‘Zubatov trade unions’ with official support. The Bolshevik historian M.N. Pokrovsky recalls:
In that same year, 1903, when the fight against Zubatovism was being waged, on the initiative of some large-scale entrepreneurs they were working in the Ministry of Finance on the question of freedom of combination — under the peculiar conditions characteristic of Russia, of course, but all the same, with freedom to strike, in the European style. When they were regaled with such an Asiatic method of solving the labour question as a class organization of the proletariat functioning under the aegis of the police, but directed against the immediate economic interests of the capitalists, the entrepreneurs naturally groaned with dismay.6
In short, Russian Tsardom retained features of Asiatic despotism even at the beginning of the twentieth century. The autocracy was unlike any other monarchy in Europe, its rule far more all-embracing than even the Western absolutisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But for this very reason the conflict between the state and the civil society that was coming into existence — between the government which strove to subject to itself as completely as possible all spheres of economic, political and spiritual life, and the developing intelligentsia, asserting its independence — could not be other than all-embracing, acute and chronic. In a society where the state tries to control each and every activity, any independent action, even if it has no conscious political content, turns out to be an act of rebellion. A social group which is engaged in creative activity will inevitably, from the standpoint of the authorities, behave ‘suspiciously’ or even ‘defiantly’.
Pre-Petrine Russia had a popular church-and-state culture, but it lacked a stratum of professional intellectuals. In the West, as Gramsci pointed out, the Church and its apparatus engendered such a stratum even in the Middle Ages. Russia’s priests, however, were for the most part ‘civil servants in the department of spiritual affairs’, and the Orthodox Church, unlike the Catholic Church, created no intelligentsia. Characteristic was the complete absence of even the embryo of university education. ‘In Muscovite Russia,’ wrote Nikolai Berdyaev, ‘there existed a real fear of education. Science aroused suspicion as being “latinising”.’7
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, however, mastery of the basics of Western civilization became for Russia, in the words of P. Milyukov, ‘a question of self-preservation — not moral or national but simply physical’.8 The Russian intelligentsia came into being thanks to Peter’s reforms: to the partial Europeanizing of society. Having entered the European political sphere, Russia made contact with European civilization, with a certain type of culture and certain cultural tasks; an inevitable result was the appearance of a social stratum occupied with the performance of those tasks.
One must not conclude from this that the intelligentsia was an ‘alien’ phenomenon in Russia, introduced from without, and so on. Successful intellectual activity proved possible in Russia only because the cultural tasks common to Europe were coped with on our national soil, in a Russian manner. On the one hand the Russian intelligentsia faced towards the West; on the other it became firmly rooted in its native soil. Herzen’s English biographer wrote: ‘The Russian intelligentsia as a whole would draw from foreign thinkers those elements which helped them to solve their own problems. When they were enamoured of a whole body of these ideas, they interpreted them in accordance with their predilections.’9