Peter Taaffe: Russia: Reform or Political Revolution?

[Militant International Review, No 19, Spring 1980, p. 12-18]

Review article of Roy Medvedev’s ‘On Socialist Democracy’ published by McMillan

Roy Medvedev’s book, “‘On Socialist Democracy”, was first published in Britain in 1975. It is an analysis of the situation which Russia finds itself in 60 years after the Russian Revolution.

Although most of the material which Medvedev draws on is from the 1960s and early 1970s it is still an essential book for understanding the crisis which presently besets the Stalinist regime in Russia. The author is somebody who is participating in the struggle in Russia itself. He is therefore able to draw on sources which are not easily available to critics of Stalinism in the West.

Medvedev produces an abundance of material which demonstrates the colossal achievements of the planned economy in Russia since 1917. He points out that overall industrial production increased by 230% during the 1960s, the production of consumer goods doubled while the production of the means of production increased approximately two and a half times. Capital investment in industry more than doubled, the productivity of labour in industry rose during the decade by 66%, and the basic capital available by two and a half times.

During the 1960s Russia’s overall industrial production reached 75% of the level of production in the United States. There was also an appreciable rise in the average wages of most categories of workers and there was also a corresponding growth in the fields of education and science.

Thus while there were 4.6 million students in the USSR in 1970, with 257,000 graduating in engineering, in America there were only 50,000 graduates in this field in the same year. Yet the author also shows that in comparison to the 1950s Russia’s growth rate in all fields slowed down. In the 1951-60 period, the growth in industrial production was more than 10% and the average for the decade was about 12% per year.

But during the ‘60s only in 1967 did industrial production increase by 10% and the average yearly growth rate for the decade was about 12% But during the ’60s only in 1967 did industrial production increase by 10% and the average yearly growth rate for the decade dropped to 8.5%. In the 1970s there has been an even more catastrophic drop in the rate of growth of the Russian economy. In 1979 it is estimated that the economy grew by 3.6%.

This is an indication of the crisis of the regime. In the past Stalinism played a relatively progressive role in developing industry, science and technique and a modern economy. In a sense it fulfilled the tasks which capitalism in the West played, and which the weak Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of undertaking in developing the means of production.

But as Trotsky pointed out this was at two or three times the cost under capitalism. Capitalism at least has the check of the market. The completely arbitrary methods of the uncontrolled Stalinist bureaucracy has meant that there have been enormous overheads in the development of Russia under Stalinism.

But Stalinism has now become an absolute fetter on the further development of Russian society. It is no longer a backward society with a predominately rural population; it is a highly developed industrial society. The further development of Russia is incompatible with a one party totalitarian regime and the stranglehold of a monstrous bureaucratic elite. This is the conclusion to be drawn from the wealth of data furnished by Medvedev in this book. He shows that not only in comparison with the past but also in relation to the capitalist world Russia and all the other deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe are falling further and further behind even the crisis-ridden capitalist West. Thus Japan’s growth rate, even though it has slowed down in the past period, still exceeds that of Russia. Moreover, Medvedev shows that: “Electric power and production of electricity in the USA is still more than twice that of the USSR. The United States produces within its own borders almost one and a half times as much oil and three times as much natural gas as the Soviet Union. At the end of the ‘60s, the Soviet Union manufactured a quarter of the number of trucks produced in the United States and Japan. We produce far fewer passenger cars than countries like Italy, France, Japan and West Germany. The United States manufactures almost 20 times as many as we.

Sickness and Despair

“We make half as many radios as the United States and one quarter as many as Japan. As to refrigerators we are about on the level of the US in 1950. In the production of synthetic resins and plastics we remain behind almost all the European countries including Italy; the US produces 6 times as much as we do. In 1970 Japan manufactured 5 times and the US 10 times as much synthetic fibre as we did”’ (Page 5-6).

The total extent of the railway network in the US despite a much smaller land area involved is 2½ times as great as in Russia. Russia lags even further behind in the new fields of production such as electronic computers, fully automated machine tools etc. At the same time the US productivity of labour is approximately 2 to 2½ times as high as in Russian industry and in the major capitalist countries of Europe and Japan it is one and a half times to 2 times as high.

But as Medvedev remarks, it was Lenin who pointed out that socialism would be able to guarantee a very much higher productivity of labour than under capitalism.

The figures furnished by Medvedev are sufficient to show that Russia is not „socialist“ despite Medvedev’s constant use of the term in describing present day Russian society.

It is a transitional regime between capitalism and socialism. The existence of a greedy stratum of ruling officials bars the way to the development of Russia towards socialism. Their dead hand which pervades the whole of Russian society has resulted in the complete snarling up of production and the appearance of all the sicknesses common to the capitalist West.

The author gives some well documented facts and figures about the extent of alcoholism and even the appearance of drugs amongst sections of the youth in the past period. The sickness and the despair which particularly afflicts the so-called intelligentsia is graphically described by Medvedev. Such is the hatred of one group, describing itself as “‘the Westerners”, of the insufferable atmosphere created by Stalinism, that they openly identify with the capitalist West.

Another calls itself ‘The Februarists”; they are in favour of the February as against the October revolution! On the other hand, extreme jingoistic and nationalistic (great Russian chauvinists) have also appeared amongst the intelligentsia. This goes together with the revival of religious cults in one form or another, amongst sections of the intelligentsia.

However none of these groupings in which could be included those who support the ideas of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov are completely representative of the opposition to the regime amongst the intelligentsia. In particular, they have nothing in common with the attitude of the majority of the proletariat in their opposition to the Stalinist regime.

As Trotsky once pointed out: ‘The wind blows the tops of the trees first”. The opposition of the intelligentsia is in itself a reflection of the enormous discontent which is festering within the working class and the peasantry in Russia. Because the regime is alleged to rest on the ideas of Marxism the hatred and opposition of some sections of the intelligentsia is also transferred to Marxism itself.

However, the author shows that the commanding stratum in Russian society has nothing in common with Marxism. He points out that there are „No genuinely popular leaders” amongst the ruling elite. The grey mediocrity of this Stalinist elite is shown: „Within the top ranks of the party today there are practically no politicians worthy of the name, no ideologists or theoreticians or even public speakers capable of talking on television for half an hour without reading from semi-prepared texts: instead we find only a multitude of cloistered bureaucrats.”

The growing opposition of the working class will not reject Marxism. On the contrary it will seek in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, not to mention Trotsky, ammunition to be used against the bureaucracy. Indeed this is shown clearly by Medvedev’s book. His arguments against the regime are peppered with quite annihilating quotes from the works of Lenin.

Bureaucracy’s lush life style

He also shows that Lenin’s writings against the bureaucracy are a crushing condemnation of the present regime in Russia. Medvedev writes: “As far as office workers and civil servants are concerned the Paris Commune established the principle that: ‘The salaries of all State officials from the highest to the lowest should be brought into line with ordinary levels of wages paid to workers’” (page 221).

“This was in order to combat careerism and to avoid the emergence of socialist bureaucrats isolated from the people” (ibid). He then goes on to show, that because of the isolation of the Russian revolution and the necessity to encourage skilled engineers and administrators to serve the regime it was necessary for the Bolsheviks to make a retreat and to introduce differentials for these groups.

However, “The first Soviet wage scale established a ratio of 1 : 2.1 between the lowest and highest earnings. At the beginning of 1919 the gap between the two extremes was narrowed even more and became 1 : 1.75, but even after the introduction of the New Economic Policy Lenin made sure that. the ratio between the lowest and the highest salaries did not exceed a fixed limit – during his lifetime the differential apparently was never greater than 1 : 5″. (It was in fact 1 : 4 – PT).

Moreover, „Such high salaries were paid only to specialists who were not members of the party, if a party member found himself obtaining a very high income he became subject to a ceiling and any money above that figure had to be given to the party finance department for its mutual aid fund. This was the origin of the ‘party maximum’, that is a limit to the salary a party member was allowed to receive’ (page 223).

But Stalin as a representative par excellence of the millions of officials of the army, the police, the party and the state machine, gradually abolished the limitations imposed by the Bolsheviks and Lenin.

Inequality was proclaimed as the greatest virtue. The party maximum was abolished and “Senior officials earned not 2 to 5 times but rather 10 to 20 times as much as factory and office workers” (page 224). Moreover the system of secret rewards called “Packets” was gradually introduced, The heirs of Stalin – Brezhnev, Kosygin etc. – live in sumptuous surroundings in comparison to the average Russian worker.

The difference between the workers, the management and bureaucracy in general is greater than even exits in capitalist factories in the West. As Medvedev points out “In a small research institute concerned with the problems of training manual and professional workers where I was employed for 10 years the difference between the lowest salary for a research assistant, 60 to 70 rubles a month, and that of the most highly paid section head was in the order of 1 : 13. In the larger institutes of the academy of sciences the ratio between the salary of a laboratory assistant or a junior research worker with no degree and that of a top academic in charge of a department is 1 to 15 or 1 to 20.

“In the soviet ministries and the important military establishments the ratio between the highest and the lowest rates of pay is also 1 to 20 or even 1 to 30, but if one takes into consideration the many services available to officials at public expense (food coupons, medical treatment, holidays, personal transport etc.) the total value translated into monetary terms would make the ratio of 1 to 50 or sometimes even 1 to 100” (page 224-5). In a masterly understatement Medvedev comments, “Obviously this is quite excessive for a socialist country.”

The author also indicates the tremendous resentment and even hatred which is piled up in the ranks of the working class at the lifestyles and sumptuous living of this usurping elite. He also gives evidence that the most conscious elements are returning to the first heroic period of the revolution and the works of Lenin.

“Several letters written by old Bolsheviks and sent to the 23rd and 24th party congresses contained rather more concrete proposals. They called for a return to the principle of a party maximum or at least to a maximum differential of 1 to 5 between the lowest and the highest rates of pay“ (ibid).

Justification for these demands as the author shows is to be found in the literature about the Bolsheviks which freely circulates in Russia itself. The Russian masses cannot help but compare the lifestyle of the ruling elite with that of Lenin: “Memoirs about Lenin recall how on the day of the victorious uprising in Petrograd he simply went by tram to rest in the apartment of one of his comrades. When he visited the Kremlin barber, Lenin insisted on waiting his turn and sat quietly reading the newspaper.

“He often drove to the countryside without a bodyguard and on one occasion was attacked by a gang of thieves who made off with his car. When Lenin moved into the Kremlin he occupied a small room which had belonged to one of the former servants. In „State and Revolution” he expressed the view that the leaders of the new state should not have their expenses paid out of public funds” (page 226).

Medvedev as a representative of the so-called ‘liberal’ trend within the so-called Communist Party itself, opposes ‘extreme demands’ to cut down inequality, but nevertheless argues for a lowering of the differentials between the – bureaucracy and the working class.

However, there are great weaknesses in the analysis of Medvedev, particularly in his attempts to explain the historical roots of Stalinism itself.

He gives no real Marxist explanation of the reasons why this privileged caste has arisen in Russia. Nor is a clear programme outlined by the author to remove from power this greedy and obsolete caste.

On the one side, he hints that the development and growth of the bureaucracy resulted from the cultural backwardness of Russia, and the isolation of the revolution to a predominately backward and peasant country.

Some features of the analysis of Trotsky and the Left Opposition of the causes and the growth of Stalinism is shown in the following: “The pre-revolutionary autocracy in Russia was essentially bureaucratic, even officials who possessed the highest personal qualities were almost transformed into bureaucrats under the Tsarist regime. Before the October revolution, the organisation of soviets was extremely democratic but after the victory of soviet power bureaucracy re-emerged and soon began to penetrate every pore of the new soviet and party organisation.

“It was clear that even after a socialist revolution a considerable amount of authoritarian administration was unavoidable, given the size of the country and its economic and cultural backwardness. The population was predominately peasant and petit-bourgeois whose inadequate educational level deprived the Bolsheviks of potential support, but the bureaucratic mentality was not confined to bourgeois specialists or former Tsarist officials employed by the new state in lower and middle levels of administration. Even former revolutionary leaders finding themselves in power were most of the time forced to resort. to authoritarian methods: they simply gave orders often in a high handed and bureaucratic way.”

Medvedev is undoubtedly correct when he suggests that the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian revolution was inevitable given the isolation of the revolution. The Russian Revolution was seen by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks as the prologue of the international revolution. None of the leaders of the revolution ever faintly imagined that it would be possible to construct socialism in one country, particularly a backward country, such as Russia.

The beginning of socialism, according to the great teachers of Marxism would mean a level of production, and culture, higher than the highest level reached by capitalism. In other words, it would have to be higher than even in capitalist America today. Only on this basis would it be possible to dismantle the state, money, classes and all the other vestiges of class society.

This, in turn would have been possible only on the basis of a world socialist federation. The leaders of the Russian revolution hoped that the October revolution would have provided the spark which would have initiated revolutionary explosions throughout Europe. This in turn could have led to the establishment of a Socialist Federation of Europe, as a springboard towards a Socialist Federation of the globe.

Because of the betrayal of the social-democratic leaders in western Europe, in Germany and Italy in particular – the revolutionary wave which followed the Russian revolution was defeated, and the Russian revolution was isolated for a whole historical epoch. Given this isolation the growth of a bureaucratic caste was inevitable. The rise and development of Stalin was a personification of the gradual development of this caste and its usurpation of power from the working class.

Will bureaucracy reform itself?

However, despite the above remarks, Medvedev, in another part of the book in commenting on “ethical socialism“, shows that he doesn’t really grasp the reasons and the causes for the growth of Stalinism. He writes: „Disregard for the ethical side of socialism has led to a number of distortions that for a long time were not exceptional but rather the norm of life in our society. Failure to respect the interests of the individual disguised by fine words about the interests of the collective, a peculiar kind of party egotism that illegitimately identifies the interests of the party elite with those of the interests of the party as a whole (and then the interests of the party-with those of the whole people and the interest of the soviet people with the interest of the whole of mankind), total indifference to certain elementary standards of justice, the restriction of people’s spiritual freedom, the notion of people only as cogs in some kind of complicated social machine. All such perversions of socialism have done our movement and our country enormous political and moral damage“ (page 75).

But the role of the Russian bureaucracy is determined not by its morals or lack of them but by its social role in society. Indeed, its morals, or lack of them, its ignorance, hooliganism and social parasitism is in fact a product of its role in Russian society. Yet because of Medvedev’s own political position he is incapable of fully grasping the role of the bureaucracy, or of elaborating a programme and course of action which can eliminate this monstrous incubus on Russian society.

He is in fact a representative of the “Liberal trend“ within the bureaucracy itself. He calls himself a „party democrat“ and puts forward the utopian hope that the bureaucracy will reform itself out of existence, liquidate itself as a privileged group in society. At best his arguments are an attempt to convince the bureaucracy that it must carry through reforms from the top, in order to prevent colossal upheavals in Russian society in the next period.

The weakness of his position is indicated by the following: “It must be said straight away that at the moment it is evidently the weakest trend, both within and outside the party … The party democrats are at

the moment almost completely unrepresented in the highest organs of the party” (page 57). In other words, the reforming trend within the bureaucracy has very little support in Russia at the present time.

Brezhnev and Co. have decided that the way to meet the mounting resistance of practically the whole of the population, to the bureaucracy’s arbitrary rule, is by screwing down the lid even tighter. Medvedev compares his struggle against bureaucracy to the one that was conducted by Lenin just before his death. But this is to completely misunderstand the enormous change in the character and social role of the bureaucracy, that has taken place in Russian society in the last 50 years.

Between 1917 and 1923, Russia was a relatively healthy workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions. Because of the cultural poverty of the Russian masses the Bolsheviks were forced to rule with the aid of the old Tsarist civil servants. In the Red Army also the great majority of the officers initially were drawn from the ranks of the Tsarist army. In the words of Lenin the state which the Bolsheviks were forced to rely on was the “same old Tsarist State machine with a thin veneer of socialism.”

The Bolsheviks looked towards the victory of the international revolution to come to the assistance of a backward and beleaguered Russia with technical, educational and other aid. A Socialist Federation of Europe would undoubtedly have laid the basis for a rapid development of industry and culture in Russia. The raising of the cultural level of the masses would have allowed the flowering of the soviets and the full involvement of the Russian working class in the democratic management and. control of society. However events turned out differently.

The further isolation of the Russian revolution, which was a consequence of the defeats of the revolutions in the West, which in turn were promoted by the false policies of Stalin, resulted in the gradual elbowing aside of the masses in Russia, from any control or say in the organisation of society, or of the state machine. The bureaucratic caste, with Stalin at its head, completely usurped power. It came to oppose and look with mortal dread on the prospect of revolution in the capitalist countries.

A successful socialist revolution in any of the advanced capitalist countries threatened not just the capitalists but the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia itself. This was clearly demonstrated by the Spanish revolution which Stalin responded to by conducting the infamous ‘purge’ trials as a one-sided civil war against the last remnants of the Bolshevik party.

Yet the author writes: ‘Reform must also be gradual because of the peculiar nature of bureaucracy. As Lenin often pointed out, there is no way to ‘lance the bureaucratic boil, to wipe bureaucracy from the face of the earth’ – the only possibility is cure. ‘Surgery in this case’, wrote Lenin, ‘is absurd, it cannot work. There can only be a slow healing process – other alternatives are fraudulent or naive,” (page 314).

But it is Medvedev who shows incredible naivety. A chasm, a river of blood, separates the regime of Lenin and Trotsky from the present Stalinist regime in Russia.

To compare the state of Lenin and Trotsky to the present Russian state is like comparing a pimple, which can be eradicated through a „cure“ (i.e. reform of the state) with a monstrous boil which needs to be “lanced“ from the body (through political revolution). Medvedev goes to great lengths to distance himself from what he calls the ‘ultra left’.

Thus he condemns Grigorenko, the famous Red Army General who is now imprisoned in a Stalinist jail, for including in the programme of his group a call for the complete liquidation of the KGB, and all secret service and oppressive apparatus. He justifies this on the grounds that it’s necessary for every state to retain some security apparatus!

Yet a few pages later he points out that these organs of the state are almost solely directed against internal opponents of the regime. He declaims against any ‘illegal’ methods of struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy! “As for ways and means of political struggle they must be absolutely legal and constitutional, there are certain extreme groups that believe in the use of illegal methods including for example the organisation of underground printing presses” (page 314).

Yet he himself points out that the regime prohibits almost all voluntary associations including innocent “groups of cactus growers“. But it is clear from this book, that Medvedev opposes not just the methods of some underground groups, which he doesn’t name, but also their whole approach.

He is honest enough to quote the comments of one of his opponents who level the charge of ‘utopianism’ against Medvedev: „You believe that the leadership would support a certain degree of democratisation, but this would amount to the leadership liquidating itself and the whole of political history confirms the unreality of such an expectation. No government withdraws of its own free will. Your ideas are harmful because they create illusions about the ease with which your proposed programme of reforms might be realised. You suggest that because of a change in social and political conditions, fresh forces will become part of the ‘apparat’ and transform its bureaucratic style. But this only encourages the false idea of an automatic and spontaneous process – in reality these fresh forces will undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance” (page 313).

This critic is more correct than Medvedev on the attitude and outlook of the bureaucracy. If possible the bureaucracy may loosen the screws a little. They may attempt reforms at the top, sometimes in order to prevent revolution from below.

This is what Khrushchev did in the aftermath of Stalin’s death. But even then this provoked the East German uprising in 1953 and in 1956 the Hungarian and Polish revolutions. 10 years ago in 1968, the bureaucracy could not afford even concessions of this character in relation to Czechoslovakia because of the changed situation, not only in Eastern Europe, but in Russia itself.

So rotted is the Stalinist regime, so isolated from the majority of the population is the uppermost strata of the bureaucracy, that even the smallest concessions threaten to ignite an explosion that will result in the toppling of Brezhnev, Kosygin and their clique. The bureaucracy is fully aware of this. It is for this reason that they’re unlikely to heed the ‘good advice’ of Medvedev.

The bureaucracy will do anything for the workers except get off their backs! Medvedev shows in this book an honest distaste for the rule of the bureaucracy.

But in the final analysis his fears of an enormous upheaval of “‘disorder and anarchy” in Russia overcomes his opposition to the bureaucracy.

His real feelings are betrayed in the following remarks: „Overhasty reform can also cause problems with the socialist bloc (as the experience of Czechoslovakia has shown)!” (Page 314).

When he writes like this Medvedev appears as an unashamed if benevolent adviser of the bureaucracy.

One could say that the whole book is in effect an appeal to the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia to carry through the democratisation of Russian society. He draws an analogy between the struggle for bourgeois democracy with the struggle for democratisation in Russia at the present time.

It is true that the bourgeoisie has been enabled to switch from Bonapartism (military police rule) to bourgeois democracy. This was from its point of view a different and cheaper form of class rule, than a dictatorial regime or military police dictatorship. The bourgeoisie is a class with roots in society through its ownership of the means of production.

Workers’ democracy

As supervisors, as the „trustees” of the means of production in the words of Marx, the bourgeoisie was necessary for the development of capitalism. But the bureaucracy is an excrescence. It is a totally unnecessary and privileged caste that is clogging up and hampering the further development of Russian society. Once democracy, to be precise, workers’ democracy, is established, the greedy, privileged, and inefficient rule of the bureaucracy would immediately be eliminated. It is for this reason that the bureaucracy¢y will put up a more ferocious resistance than even the capitalists in an attempt to retain its rule in society.

The wave of repression directed at dissidents both in Eastern Europe and Russia is a graphic reflection of the social crisis of the Stalinist regimes.

Medvedev is correct when he writes: ‘“There is now a very widespread feeling that the way we live and work has become untenable, and this applies not just to the intelligentsia but also to much of the working class, white collar workers, and perhaps some of the peasantry” (page 314). Although not visible at this moment there is an enormous subterranean opposition which is gathering in the ranks of the proletariat, particularly amongst the youth.

The main actor in Medvedev’s scenario for the future is not the working class. Nevertheless this will be the decisive force which will shape the future of Russian society. He does give some figures to indicate the colossal developments and growth of the proletariat in Russia. From a minority of the population, about 10% at the time of the revolution, the proletariat is now the overwhelming majority of Russian society.

He shows that the numbers of the working class has increased by 2 to 3 million every year since the end of the second world war. Once this mighty force moves into action, it will be the beginning of the end of the Stalinist regime. In the process of the struggle against the Stalinist dictatorship, this proletariat will rediscover all the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in establishing a healthy workers’ state.

It will end the arbitrary rule of the bureaucracy, and establish all those features which marked out the first period of the Russian revolution as the most democratic in the history of the world. As with the Hungarian revolution the working class will rediscover and establish soviets, will demand the election of all officials and the right of recall, with no official receiving more than the average wage of a skilled worker.

It will also demand the abolition of a standing army, and its replacement with an armed militia, an armed people.

In opposition to a permanent bureaucracy it will establish a situation in the words of Lenin, “where everyone is a bureaucrat, nobody is a bureaucrat’. Once this programme becomes a reality it will mean not just the end of Stalinism in the East, but the beginning of the end of capitalism in the West.

Although it has many deficiencies, nevertheless, Medvedev’s book is a valuable contribution to understanding developments in Russia at the present time. It provides the necessary raw material in order to arm the advanced workers in the West, with an understanding of developments in Russia and the enormously favourable prospects that exist throughout the Stalinist States for a movement to overthrow the bureaucracy and usher in a period of workers’ democracy.


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