Stalin against opportunism
Another View of Stalin
Ludo Martens
We can now address the question: how was the revisionist Khrushchev able to immediately seize power after Stalin's death?
Ludo Martens
We can now address the question: how was the revisionist Khrushchev able to immediately seize power after Stalin's death?
Several aspects show that as early as 1951, Stalin was seriously worried about the Party's state. Before then, from 1945 to 1950, he was forced to concentrate on reconstruction and on international problems.
Bourgeois tendencies in the thirties
The most important bourgeois tendencies that Stalin had to fight during the twenties and thirties were Trotskyism (Menshevism covered up in ultra-leftist rhetoric), Bukharinism (social-democratic deviations), Bonapartism (militarist tendencies within the army) and bourgeois nationalism. These four tendencies all continued to have influence in the years 1945--1953.
Let us give two revealing examples.
After the war, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, a young civil servant of Chechen origin working in the propaganda department of the Central Committee, fled the Soviet Union for the U.S. His ideological past shows the links between the various opportunistic tendencies of the thirties and those that surfaced after 1945: `politically I was a follower of Bukharin'
However, his book The Reign of Stalin is full of praise for Trotsky, `the lion of the October Revolution', who should have, according to Lenin's `Political Testament', run the Party with Bukharin's help.
Ibid. , pp. 38, 41.
Ibid. , p. 79.
Avtorkhanov continued by implying that Trotsky considered that an attempt `in imposing proletarian `socialism' on the most backward agricultural country in Europe' `would likely degenerate into a despotic dictatorship by a handful of anarchic socialists.'
Ibid. , p. 169.
Avtorkhanov was mostly a partisan of social-democratic ideas. For him, `the Bukharin school' defended free competition between the socialist and capitalist sectors: `socialised heavy industry (would) gradually eliminate the capitalist section ... through the free play of competition.' `One should be able to say to the co-operative peasants, `Enrich yourselves!' .... The rural petite bourgeoisie (the kulaks), being unable to withstand the competition of the co-operatives, would gradually disappear'.
Ibid. , p. 123.
`Of all the federated republics, those of the Caucasus had always shown the greatest tendency towards separatism ....
`When in 1921 the Soviet occupied these countries by force, the democrats and the partisans of independence went underground .... There were repeated nationalist revolts in the Caucasus'.
Ibid. , pp. 144--145.
So we see Avtorkhanov expressing sympathy for the four main opportunist tendencies that menaced socialism during the twenties and thirties: Trotskyism, Bukharinism, bourgeois nationalism and militarism. His positions in favor of this last tendency were presented in chapter 7 (page 
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Avtorkhanov's positions during the war and during the period 1945--1950 are significant. Referring to the Nazi aggression, he wrote that what `90 per cent of the population secretly thought and desired ... (was) the end of Stalin, even at the price of Hitler's victory .... The war against the U.S.S.R., which the German soldiers had won in 1941, was lost for them by the S.S.'
Ibid. , p. 158.
Ibid. , p. 237.
After having flirted for some time with Hitler, Avtorkhanov, resolute anti-Communist, finally fell into the hands of the Anglo-American imperialists.
`(D)uring the first two years of the war the peoples of the U.S.S.R. went so far as to prefer Hitler to Stalin ....
`They had a unique chance, rarely encountered in history, of playing the two opponents, German and Russian, against one another, and of winning the war without intervening with their own forces .... The thing became possible on the day when Hitler turned his armies against the East ....
`(W)hen Hitler and Stalin were at grips it would have been possible for the Allies ... to contrive matters that when the crowd got back from burying Hitler they would have to follow Stalin's funeral procession.'
Ibid. , p. 240.
Well received in the U.S., Avtorkhanov became an ardent partisan of U.S. hegemony, which he encouraged to fight against `Communist expansion':
`Faithful to Lenin's teaching, Stalin ... (has) staked everything on world revolution .... The purpose of Stalinism is ... to set up a terrorist world-dictatorship by a single party.'
Ibid. , p. 242.
`Everyone must today realise that the world is faced by a single alternative --- Stalinism or democracy. In order to settle the question during his lifetime, Stalin has mobilised his fifth columns throughout the world.'
`In the end there can be only one solution of the problem for Stalinism --- war.'
Ibid. , p. 245.
Our second example concerns Tokaev's clandestine organization, linked during the thirties to the Bonapartists, the Bukharinists and the bourgeois nationalists. It continued its activity after the war.
In 1947, Tokaev was in Germany, at Karlshorst. A `comrade standing very high' brought along microfilms with the last pieces of Tokaev's personal dossier:
`Far too much was known .... The hunt was uncomfortably close. And when the indictment was ready, there would figure in it deeds of as long ago as 1934'.
`(A)t the end of 1947 the revolutionary democrats of the U.S.S.R. came to the conclusion that they must act: better to die honourably than to drag on as slaves .... we liked to think that parties of a Liberal complexion and those belonging to the Second International abroad would try to help us .... We knew that there were national communists not only in Yugoslavia, but also in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltic States, and we believed that they too would support us where they could though we were not communists at all ....
`But the MVD (state security) won in the race. We were too slow to mobilise. Once again we suffered a catastrophe .... Arrests had begun, and the charges ran all the way back to the assassination of Kirov in 1934 .... Others were charged with Buonapartist (sic) conspiracies in 1937 and 1940, with bourgeois nationalism, with the proposed attempt to overthrow the régime in 1941. As the net closed in round us all, I was given the task ... of saving at least a part of our records.'
Ibid. , pp. 358-359.
After his flight to England, Tokaev published a series of articles in the Western press. He admitted having sabotaged the development of Soviet aviation, and explained it as follows:
`To not try to refrain my compatriots in their insatiable ambition to dominate the world would mean to push them to the fate that Hitler reserved for the Germans.' `It is crucial for the West to understand that Stalin has only one goal: world domination by any means.'
La Libre Belgique, 4 March 1949, p. 1; 6 March 1949, p. 1.
It is important to remember that after their flight to the West, Avtorkhanov and Tokaev, two representatives of bourgeois tendencies in the Soviet Union, supported the most extreme positions of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie during the Cold War.
Weaknesses in the struggle against opportunism
There is no no doubt that Stalin continued, during the latter years of his life, to struggle against social-democratic and bourgeois nationalist tendencies and against Anglo-American subversion.
Nevertheless, it is clear that this struggle was not done to the extent that was necessary to redress and reinvigorate the Party ideologically and politically.
After the war, which had required extraordinary professional effort on the part of military, technical and scientific cadres, the old tendencies of military professionalism and technocratism were substantially reinforced. Bureaucratization and the search for privileges and the easy life were also reinforced. This negative development was encouraged with the `dizziness of success': the tremendous pride that the cadres had developed from the anti-fascist victory often became presumptuousness and arrogance. All these phenomena undermined the ideological and political vigilance that was necessary to fight the opportunist tendencies.
Stalin struggled against particular forms of opportunism and revisionism. He thought that the class struggle in the ideological sphere would continue for a long time. But he was not capable of formulating a comprehensive theory of its basis and its social base. In other words, he was not able to formulate a consistent theory explaining how classes and the class struggle persist in a socialist society.
Stalin had not completely understood that after the disappearance of the economic basis of capitalist and feudal exploitation, that there would still exist in the Soviet Union fertile ground for bourgeois currents. Bureaucracy, technocratism, social inequalities and privileges allowed the development within certain sectors of Soviet society a bourgeois lifestyle and aspirations for the reintroduction of certain aspects of capitalism. The persistence of bourgeois ideology among both the masses and the cadres was an additional factor that encouraged entire sectors to veer towards anti-socialist positions. The adversaries of socialism always had important resources and ideological and material resources from imperialism, which never stopped infiltrating its spies and buying off renegades; the latter never stopped in their efforts to exploit and amplify all forms of opportunism within the Soviet Union. Stalin's thesis, according to which `There is no class basis, there can be no class basis, for the domination of the bourgeois ideology in our Soviet society', was one-sided and undialectic. It introduced weaknesses and errors in the political line.
G. Malenkov, Report to the Nineteenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), p. 126.
Stalin was not able to define the adequate forms of mass mobilization of workers and kolkhozians to combat the dangers of restauration. Popular democracy should have been developed, with the deliberate intention to eliminate bureaucracy, technocratism, ambitiousness, and privileges. But the popular participation in such a defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not ensured as it should have been done. Stalin always underscored that the influence of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism was reflected in the Party through opportunist tendencies. But he was not able to formulate a theory about the struggle between the two lines in the Party. In 1939, summarizing the Great Purge, Stalin focused exclusively on `the espionage and conspiratorial activities of the Trotskyite and Bukharinite leaders' and on the manner in which `the bourgeois states ... take advantage of people's weaknesses, their vanity, their slackness of will'.
Stalin clearly underestimated the internal causes that gave birth to opportunist tendencies, which, once infiltrated by secret services, became linked one way or the other to imperialism. Consequently, Stalin did not think that it was necessary to mobilize all of the Party members to combat opportunistic lines and to eliminate unhealthy tendencies. During the ideological and political struggles, all the cadres and members shoud have educated and transformed themselves. After 1945, the struggle against opportunism was restricted to the highest circles of the Party and did not assist in the revolutionary transformation of the entire Party.
It was by analyzing these weaknesses that Mao Zedong formulated his theory about continuing the revolution:
`Socialist society covers a fairly long historical period. In the historical period of socialism, there are still classes, class contradictions and class struggle, there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and there is the danger of capitalist restoration. We must recognize the protracted and complex nature of this struggle. We must heighten our vigilance. We must conduct socialist education .... Otherwise a socialist country like ours will turn into its opposite and degenerate, and a capitalist restoration will take place.'
Mao Tse-tung and Lin Pao, Post-Revolutionary Writings (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 429.
Beria's and Khrushchev's revisionist groups
This political weakness was further aggravated by revisionist tendencies within the leadership of the Party that emerged at the end of the forties.
To direct the different sectors of the Party and the State, Stalin had always relied on his closest collaborators. Since 1935, Zhdanov had played an essential rôle in the Party consolidation work. His death in 1948 left a vacuum. In the beginning of the fifties, Stalin's health took a dramatic turn for the worse after the overwork incurred during the war. The problem of Stalin's succession posed itself for the near future.
It was around this time that two groups of revisionists within the leadership became visible and started to plot their intrigues, while preaching fidelity to Stalin. Beria's group and Khrushchev's contituted two rival revisionist factions that, while secretly undermining Stalin's work, were waging war with each other.
Since Beria was shot by Khrushchev in 1953, soon after Stalin's death, it might be supposed that he was an adversary of Khrushchevian revisionism. This is the position that Bill Bland took in a well documented study of Stalin's death.
Bill Bland, `The ``Doctors' case'' and the death of Stalin' (London: The Stalin Society, October 1991), Report.
However, testimony from diametrically opposite sources concur in their affirmation that Beria held rightist positions.
For example, the Zionist author Thaddeus Wittlin published a biography of Beria in the nauseating style of McCarthyism. Here is an example: `the Dictator of Soviet Russia looked down at his peoples as if he were the merciless new god of millions of his people'.
Thaddeus Wittlin, Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 354.
Literally. But, presenting the ideas developed by Beria towards 1951, Wittlin claimed that he wanted to authorize private enterprise in light industry and `to moderate the collective farm system', as well as `by returning to the approach of the pre-Stalin era, the NEP'. `Beria ... was against the Stalin policy of Russification of non-Russian nations and republics'. Beria wanted `Better international relations with the West' and `also intended to restore relations with Tito'.
Ibid. , pp. 363--365.
This homage to Beria's `reasonable politics' stands out, coming from such a sickening anti-Communist pen.
Tokaev, clandestine opponent, claimed that he knew Beria and others in the thirties, `not of servants, but of enemies of the régime'.
Ibid. , p. 101.
`In the last years of Stalin's life Beria used to express his disrespect for Stalin more and more baldly.'
Ibid. , p. 311.
`It seemed sometimes that Stalin was afraid of Beria and would have been glad to get rid of him but didn't know how to do it.'
Ibid. , p. 250.
We should not forget Molotov's opinion. He and Kaganovich were the only leaders to remain faithful to their revolutionary past.
`I cannot exclude the possibility that Beria provoked Stalin's death. I felt it through what he was saying. May Day 1953, on the Tribune of the Mausoleum, he made such allusions. He was looking for complicity. He said, ``I made him disappear''. He tried to implicate me. ``I saved you all''.'
`I consider Khrushchev as rightwing, but Beria was even more rightwing. Both were rightwing. And Mikoyan too. But they had different personalities. Khrushchev was to the right and completely rotten, but Beria was even more to the right and even more rotten.'
Ibid. , p. 335.
`Without question, Khrushchev was reactionary and succeeded in infiltrating into the Party. Of course, he believed in no form of communism. I consider Beria as an enemy. He infiltrated himself into the Party with destructive goals. Beria was a man without principles.'
Ibid. , p. 323.
During Stalin's last years, Khrushchev and Mikoyan clearly hid their political ideas to better place themselves after the succession.
`In my opinion it was during the war that Stalin started to be quite right in the head.'
Ibid. , p. 311.
At `the end of 1949', a `sickness ... began to envelop Stalin's mind'.
Ibid. , p. 246.
Enver Hoxha noted Khrushchev's impatience for Stalin to die. In his memoirs, he noted a discussion that he had had in 1956 with Mikoyan:
`Mikoyan himself told me ... that they, together with Khrushchev and their associates, had decided to carry out a ``pokushenie'', i.e., to make an attempt on Stalin's life, but later, as Mikoyan told us, they gave up this plan.'
Enver Hoxha, With Stalin: Memoirs (Toronto: Norman Bethune Institute, 1980), p. 31.
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