Library:The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism/Chapter 5: Soviet Democracy

When the Civil War in Russia was reaching its height and the new Bolshevik state was under threat from the intervention of the Western powers in the autumn of 1918, Lenin wrote a rebuttal of a pamphlet by Karl Kautsky called The Dictatorship of the Proletariat which had recently been published. Kautsky was a veteran and influential leader of the German Social-Democratic Party who had been involved in the historic debate about marxist revisionism with Edouard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg in 1899. His position changed during the First World War when, according to Lenin, he presented “a blend of loyalty to Marxism in word and subordination to opportunism in deed.”The Dictatorship of the Proletariat He was frequently and increasingly criticized by Lenin for turning “Marx into a common liberal”. The offence, however, which spurred Lenin to action in 1918 was Kautsky’s description of Bolshevism as dictatorial. Kautsky presented the Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik strands in the Socialist Movement as “the contrast between two radically different methods: the dictatorial and the democratic.” For Lenin, this raised a fundamental question which was the very essence of proletarian revolution and he was stung into staking the new Bolshevik state’s claim to be democratic. “Proletarian democracy”, he wrote, “of which Soviet government is one of the forms, has brought a development and expansion of democracy unprecedented in the world, for the vast majority of the population, for the exploited and working people . . . Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy: Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic. To fail to see this one must either deliberately serve the bourgeoisie, or be politically as dead as a doornail, unable to see real life from behind the dusty pages of bourgeois books . . .”The definition of democracy in terms of class rule gives Stalin expressed similar sentiments when he described the new Soviet Constitution in 1936. These claims were in direct contrast with the Western stereotype of the Soviet Union and for that reason they were ridiculed. But, as E. H. Carr warned, it “would be a mistake to dismiss such pronouncements as mere propaganda or humbug” and dangerous to regard them as having no relevance for the West by treating “Soviet democracy as primarily a Russian phenomenon without roots in the West or without application to western conditions.”meaning to the concept ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. It

The basis for Lenin’s claim was that economic and political power in Bolshevik Russia had been transferred from a minority bourgeois class to a majority working class. No matter what form of political representation was instituted to enable the working class to govern this was unquestionably an improvement. His argument was based on the assumption that it falsified the definition of power to separate economic from political power. How can there be political equality, he asked “between the exploited and the exploiters”?simply means rule by the proletarian class in its own interests instead of ‘the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ for its own interests. There always has to be class rule, therefore there is Because he believed that democracy had an economic basis, there could never be a pure form. “Pure democracy”, he stated, “is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.”always a dictatorship by one class or another. The concept has In other words, democracy reflects the class basis of society and as that widens, giving economic power to the majority, then so must democracy be more extensive and real. “Bourgeois democracy”, Lenin insisted, “although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”nothing to do with totalitarian government or indeed with any particular form of government. It is an analytical description of the basis of political decision-making in society and it is in this sense that it has been used in the Soviet Union. It is wrong, therefore, to conceptualize the Soviet form of dictatorship as being similar to that practised by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet.

Indeed, those dictators and bourgeois democracy had much in common for they served similar class interests.

The concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has played a vital and continuous part in the history of the Soviet Union for it has been not merely a description of a form of democracy but an expression of the Revolution as something real, permanent and continuous. It is a key to understanding much of the behaviour of the Soviet Union both as a social organism and in its relations with other countries. When workers’ and soldiers’ soviets achieved power in 1917 it was a complete victory, not a step in a transitional process or a bourgeois revolution on the historical route to socialism. Any moves, therefore, to accommodate to hostile capitalist forces would have weakened the Revolution by eroding its base. Compromises with private capital such as concessions to attract international capital or political agreements to share power with contending political forces in the manner of pluralism would have been backward steps and admissions that the Revolution had been over hasty and too ambitious. The Bolsheviks, therefore, rejected such action in order to protect the working class as the suppository of state power. Where they did compromise, as when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, it was to avert economic collapse. As soon as that possibility was removed then the compromise was ended. There was no permanent middle way. The Bolshevik leaders had to choose their course. They decided to maintain the working class as the sole and absolute source of state power. The history of the Soviet Union has been dominated by the consequences of that choice.

The commitment of the Bolshevik leaders to working class power transformed the Bolshevik Revolution from being a single, isolated historical event, confined to the month of November in the year 1917, like the end of a war, the birth of a monarch or the assassination of a president, to an historical process without boundaries or time limitations. Therefore, the Revolution was always being waged in the sense that as both the symbol of the struggle for working class power and the source of that power it became mystified and sanctified in much the same way as property rights have been treated as the sacred source of bourgeois power in capitalist countries. The rights of private property have been written into constitutions, buttressed by laws and sanctified by ideology. In some countries they have become inviolate, protected by the laws of treason in a desperate attempt to facilitate the survival of their power structures.

A consequence of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, at the same time, its moral foundation is the absolute belief in proletarian democracy which pervades Soviet society. The rational basis for this belief is that unless the majority class holds power the workers cannot exercise it through economic and political decisionmaking processes. The preservation of unsullied working class power is then a necessary condition for democratic activity. This condition is not subject to modification in any way. Soviet democracy has never been prepared to countenance the possibility of its own destruction, whether or not a majority wished it, as is the case in Western democracies. There is no possibility of any individual or group being given the right to challenge the legitimacy of working class power. Indeed it is regarded as immoral to want to do so. This constraint is not generally seen as an infringement of individual liberty but as a means of protecting it by preserving the rights of workers as a class. Soviet people are as perturbed and puzzled by the Western tolerance of anti-democratic activities in the name of democracy as the West is critical of the Soviet lack of tolerance for such activities.

(ii) The One-Party State

The second major consequence of the struggle to preserve the Revolution relates to the position of the Communist Party in Soviet society. A major criticism of the Soviet Union by the West is that it is a one-party state and is therefore undemocratic. The political dominance of the Communist Party, however, is a product of Soviet history. In the period between the Revolution and 1922 non-Bolshevik working class parties, the Mensheviks and the Right Social Revolutionaries operated freely. There was, at the same time, an intense debate conducted by factions within the Bolshevik Party. The major figues in the Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, belonged to different and changing groups. This situation altered through the exigencies of war and the attempts of parties and groups to undermine the Revolution for their own ends. The intervention of the Allies and the Civil War created many opportunities for counter-revolutionary activities. The Left Social Revolutionaries who had cooperated with the Bolsheviks on the Council of People’s Commissars until July 1918 attempted an armed insurrection in that same month. At the end of August, Dora Kaplan, a Social Revolutionary, tried to assassinate Lenin, seriously wounding him with a bullet in the lung above the heart and another in his neck. An earlier attempt had been made on his life on 1st January 1918, as he was returning by car from a meeting with Fritz Platten, the secretary of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party. Lenin was unhurt but Platten was wounded. Some members of the government were assassinated; the lives of others were threatened. Both the Mensheviks and the Right Social Revolutionary Parties refused to support the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the Civil War then changed their minds. They were represented in the Soviets where they expressed their vacillating attitudes towards the Bolshevik regime. This all occurred at a most critical time for the Bolsheviks when they controlled only a rump in European Russia with Petrograd under threat and plans being laid for the evacuation of the government from Moscow. The Bolshevik Party responded by resolving on 2nd September, 1918 that “To the White terror of the enemies of the workers’ and peasants’ government, the workers and peasants will reply with mass ‘Red terror’ against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”

The Civil War left its own legacy. The railway system, which was the lifeline of the economy, broke down through physical destruction and depreciation. Industry was starved of raw materials and incapacitated by military action. There were acute shortages of manufactured goods. The countryside too was disrupted. Frequently, even where the peasants had grain and foodstuffs, they refused to release them for the industrial workers, thus considerably worsening their plight and making the production of manufactured goods more hazardous. The various sections of the Soviet economy passed on the effects of the war to each other and thus compounded the problems each one faced. The economy was on a downward spiral.7

The most destructive effect was on the morale of the industrial workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who had supported the Revolution in 1917 and had sustained it throughout the Civil War. Once the military pressures were removed in 1920 the participants were able to stand back and ask themselves what had been achieved. All they could see were controls, requisitioning, acute shortages and real starvation causing many deaths. The Revolutionary fervour which had brought military victory had to be sustained by some material gains and there were none available. Many people, ground down by the past and the present, became disillusioned with Bolshevism. Once the Allied military intervention had failed, the greatest threat to the Bolshevik system came in its aftermath, through its own contradictions. This was expressed by outbreaks of peasant unrest; by what Lenin called “banditism - where tens and hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers, who are accustomed to the toils of war and regard it almost as their only trade return, impoverished and ruined, and are unable to find work”;8 by strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd and Moscow and at the beginning of March 1921, by a mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base where the Baltic Fleet had its headquarters.

The Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party met while the Kronstadt mutiny was under way and Lenin’s speech there dealt with it in relation to what he described as “crop failure, a crisis, ruin and demobilization”. He saw evidence of a petty bourgeois counter-revolution which he regarded as more dangerous than all the White Russian Generals put together. Under such circumstances the Revolution could have disappeared like a whisp of smoke. Lenin’s remedy was to try and heal the breach between workers and peasants and intensify the unity of the Communist Party. He said: “We must bear in mind that the bourgeoisie is trying to pit the peasants against the workers; that behind a facade of workers’ slogans it is trying to incite the petty-bourgeois anarchist elements against the workers. This, if successful, will lead directly to the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, consequently, to the restoration of capitalism and of the old landowner and capitalist regime. The political danger here is obvious. A number of revolutions have clearly gone that way; we have been mindful of this possibility and have warned against it. This undoubtedly demands of the ruling party of Communists, and of the leading revolutionary elements of the proletariat a different attitude to the one we have time and again displayed over the past year. It is a danger that undoubtedly calls for much greater unity and discipline.”9 The Tenth Congress agreed to proposals which led to the New Economic Policy and eased the tensions on peasants. It also banned organized factions in the Communist Party, called for their dissolution and reminded them that “Everyone who criticizes in public must keep in mind the situation of the Party in the midst of the enemies by which it is surrounded . . .” Other political parties were banned by 1921 so the Communist Party assumed its role as the sole political party and took its first official step towards eliminating dissent in its own ranks. It became the sole custodian of the Revolution in a political format which still operates.

The Bolshevik Party10, though it shared government with the Left Social Revolutionaries until July 1918, always was the ruling party in Soviet Russia. It made the decision to wage an armed struggle and gave the Revolution its shape and direction. The Bolshevik state with its new superstructure was the creation of the Bolshevik leaders. So too was the state economic planning mechanism. The communist leaders took all the major decisions between 1917 and 1921. They dissolved the elected Constituent Assembly on 20 January 1918 when it conflicted with the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and framed the declaration made a week later which stated “Russia is declared a republic of workers”. They drafted the first Constitution passed at the Fifth Congress of Soviets in July 1918 which guaranteed the dictatorship of the proletariat for the purposes of “suppressing the bourgeoisie, abolishing the exploitation of man by man, and establishing Socialism”. The Bolsheviks formed the Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (the CHEKA); they banned the Right Social Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties from participating in the Soviets in June 1918 and lifted the banning order later that year; they also made the decisions as to whether or not non-Bolshevik publications should be circulated. There was no question that from the moment a Bolshevik government was formed in November 1917, the Bolshevik Party monopolised political activity as a means of maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat through intensifying crises and that without it the Revolution would have been reversed.11 Thus the events in 1921 merely formalized and institutionalized an already existing power situtation.

The special conditions in the early life of Soviet Russia which led to the dominance of the Communist Party were present in varying degrees throughout most of its history. The country was continually subjected to threats, implicit or overt, during the inter-war years. Stalin talked in the late 1920s about the possibility of being invaded and then, in June 1941, the invasion occurred. Until that time the Soviet Union had lived as in a siege, surrounded by hostile nations, economically and militarily weak in comparison with its capitalist protagonists. It had become fearful to the point of being psychoneurotic about threats to its borders and counter-revolutionary tendencies within them. None of these threats were imaginary. Lenin spoke of the consequential behaviour of the Soviet government. “We were forced to use terror” he stated “in response to the terror employed by the Entente, when the mighty powers of the world flung their hordes against us, stopping at nothing. We could not have lasted two days had we not replied to these attempts of officers and whiteguards in a merciless fashion. This meant the use of terror . . ,”12 The scale of the White Russian terror can be gauged from the fact that in Rostov alone the White Russian occupying forces shot about 25,000 workers.13 For the government, survival entailed imposing extraordinary disciplinary- measures. Yet opposition groups within the Communist Party continued to operate openly until 1929. The prominent leaders of different groups, contended with each other on questions of trade unions, agriculture, industrialization and foreign policy. This tolerance ceased in 1928 when renewed domestic and international pressures produced a radical change both in the organization of Soviet society and its international perspectives. The leaders of the opposition in the Party, Leon Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party on 14 November, 1927 by the 15th Congress. Trotsky was sent into exile in Central Asia and, early in 1929, was forced to leave the country.

A different perception of the one-party state emerged after 1928 and was expressed by Stalin in 1936 when he introduced the revised Soviet Constitution which made provision for only one political party, namely the Communist Party. The programme of collectivization in agriculture and the First Five Year Plan from 1929 created a high degree of class homogeneity by destroying free markets, eliminated the profit-motive and dispossessing the rich peasants. The last remnants of capitalism were dismantled. Thereafter all Soviet citizens were either workers or peasants. There were no antagonistic class relations in the capitalist sense in the Soviet Union from that period. The question then was whether a multi-party system could operate in such a situation. Stalin answered it when he said:

“A party is a part of a class, its most advanced part. Several parties, and consequently freedom for parties, can exist only in a society in which there are antagonistic classes whose interests are mutually hostile and irreconcilable - in which there are, say, capitalists and workers, landlords and peasants, kulaks and poor peasants, etc. But in the USSR there are no longer such classes as the capitalists, the landlords, the kulaks etc.

In the USSR there are only two classes, workers and peasants, whose interests - far from being mutually hostile - are on the contrary friendly. Hence there is no ground in the USSR for the existence of several parties, and consequently for freedom for these parties ... In the USSR only one party can exist - the Communist Party . . .”14

This analysis was essentially valid. There were undoubtedly contradictions along the Soviet road to socialism which created new social class formations. Even when Stalin was speaking in 1936 the Soviet leadership in Moscow was trying to solve the twin problems of inertia and repression by the middle levels of the state and party bureaucracy. Indeed in 1937 radicals in the Communist Party used the democratic provisions of the new Constitution as a weapon against the bureaucracy.15 A closer analysis of the working class and the peasantry might have shown other divisions between town and country, industries and occupations. But none had permanent structural causes. Nor were the emerging relationships antagonistic in the sense of having permanently opposing interests which were irreconcilable and which, therefore, posed contrary courses for the development of the Soviet economy. There may have been individuals who believed that their own special needs could best be served by a return to capitalism but there were no groups or classes in that position. For this reason, there were no interests which were sufficiently clear and entrenched that they needed separate permanent institutional rights. No group’s political rights therefore was harmed by the constitutional provision for a single political party. The Communist Party, in any event, was not a political monolith into which different interests were compressed but an organization which depended for its vitality on the extent to which it reflected the diverse interests of the society.

One further point which needs to be taken into account in connection with the Western aversion to a single party state is that the material conditions in the Soviet Union had given rise to political needs which could not have been met by a multiparty system of the West, where each party feeds on the discomforture, embarrassment and failures of the others. The persistent need in Soviet Russia and subsequently in the Soviet Union was for a politically unifying force which in the first instance could spread the virtues of socialism and then, by example, display the economic, social and political behaviour consistent with socialist values. Thus the Communist Party which had evolved in Czarist Russia as a cadre party retained the need to remain as a cadre party after the Revolution and to provide leadership in all aspects of the life of the society. Throughout its history the Communist Party members were the first to lead by example. This was so during the Civil War when the cadres volunteered for the Red Army; after the Civil War when they created the concept of free labour and devised what were called Subbotniks; during the early 1930s when they worked for the implementation of the collectivization programme; later in the 1930s when they led the drive for higher productivity with the Stakhanovite Movement; and during the Second World War when they maintained the socialist fabric of the society even in defeat and organized armed resistance to the German occupying forces. Thus the Communist Party’s function has always been to reflect the society’s needs and then tackle them through socialist action. It has had both a populist and mobilizing function which has not depended upon pandering to the vacillating tastes of people or on persuading the electorate through various and devious public relations techniques to give its endorsement. It has a legal as well as political responsibility to provide leadership. The 1977 Constitution of the USSR states this in Article 6: “The leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ...” A prominent feature of the life of the Communist Party has been its concern about its function as a cadre party. This concern lay behind much of the turbulence in the Party during the 1930s when there were purges and trials of members. It has resulted in much self-criticism and selfexamination of the kind which would be anathema to Western political parties.

The dictatorship of the proletariat and the one-party state must be seen as part of one totality arising out of the same historical and material conditions. They both rest on the premise, in the first instance, that a society can only be democratic if the majority class, namely the working class, holds power. This is more than a necessary condition for effective democracy because, irrespective of forms of representation, workers exercise power through the ordinary day-to-day affairs involved in managing industry and the economy at large in much the same way as the bourgeoisie exercises power through its ownership and control of the means of production. Workers, therefore, take decisions concerning investment, what to produce, where and on what scale, which they are precluded from making where there is private industry. In other words they contribute substantially towards determining their own quality of life. Irrespective of other factors this must be much more democratic than when they are mere sellers of labour power.

Once the members of the working class hold power then the completion of their control over it depends upon the methods they devise for political representation. A defective or inadequate method of representation may have seriously adverse consequences but they will be reversible, for in a socialist society political representation is a matter for experimentation and is not an issue of princple. The most likely defect to occur is through the failure of the Communist Party to represent society’s needs adequately. This has been the experience of the Soviet Union. And although some of the failings have resulted in setbacks they have never had permanent and fundamental consequences for the nature of the society. On a number of occasions deviations have been corrected and wrongs have been righted. This was the case after the death of Stalin and is being further illustrated by the democratic measures introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev. This is indicative of the strength of Soviet democracy. The working class in power always has the means at its disposal to return to the path of socialism.

Dissent

The summation of all the Western criticisms of Soviet democracy is that Soviet citizens are not free as individuals to criticize, oppose or change the political system. It is assumed that it is inconceivable that individuals would naturally refrain from making political criticisms or be disinterested in political opposition and that conformity had to be achieved, therefore, through physical restrictions on individual freedom. Thus the logic of Western thinking is that Soviet society is dominated by mechanisms of control such as the KGB, the Communist Party and various agencies of the state. An image of a Soviet monolith is constructed in which people are frightened, furtive, unsmiling, afraid to speak their minds, always anticipating the early morning police raid, reconciled to arbitrary arrests. Such a society could only be ruled by fear.

The societal contexts in which individuals obtain rights and exercise freedoms vary from one country to another depending upon the class structure and historical experience of each one. Even countries with similar class structures have taken different routes to individual freedom as was indicated in the previous chapter. The class structure of a society determines the substance of individual freedom. If that is changed then the conception of individuality changes too. The notion of an individual, the relationships between individuals and between individuals and society are qualitatively different in a socialist society compared with a capitalist one. When looking at the political rights of Soviet people, then, it has to be recognized first that they live in a wholly different structural context from people in the West and could never be like they are, enjoy similar liberties and suffer similar disabilities.

The Soviet Union is a collectivist society. The assumption underlying all activity there is that collective interests are prior to individual ones. This does not mean that individuals are neglected or subordinated for it is assumed that individuals fulfil themselves more through collectivism than in fragmented free markets. Indeed, the whole purpose of switching to common ownership is to obtain those benefits. Individuality, according to this view, is enriched by enhancing the interests of communities. It has two main consequences. First, most but not all decisionmaking is conducted through collectives. Second, individuals are not permitted the freedom to act contrary to the perceived interests of the collectives.

Under socialism the state itself is a collective. Individuals, therefore, are expected to subordinate themselves to it in order to enhance Soviet society at large. It would be immoral for any persons to project their own special interests in defiance of the wider community. A further constraint on individual action is created by the Soviet view that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is inviolate. No individual has the right to challenge the power which the Bolshevik Revolution brought the working class. No tolerance is extended to anyone who wants to undermine or subvert that power or to introduce other forms of power such as bourgeois democracy. These constraints are facts of life in the Soviet Union and permeate Soviet culture. The vast majority of Soviet people accept them as readily as the majority of Britons accept parliamentary democracy.

The Soviet treatment of dissidence, therefore, has not resulted from the arbitrary use of authoritarianism but is derived from its conception of democracy. The detail of the treatment, however, has been determined by historical circumstances, varying both in method and intensity. Clara Kaplan and other would-be assassins of Lenin, the Social Revolutionaries who aimed for a coup d’etat and the class enemies of the Bolshevik state were countered by the Red Terror. Violence was countered by violence. After factions within the Communist Party were banned in 1921 their composition and policies changed but they remained in existence and argued about political directions until 1928. During that period there was a high level of political diversity with many private printing houses and non-party journals operating. The leaders of the opposition groups were sometimes penalized by being demoted, expelled from the Party or sent into exile but many were later rehabilitated, sometimes back into leadership positions. Many of Trotsky’s supporters were released in 1928 and restored to Party positions. Some, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov and Tomsky who had held senior Party positions were re-admitted back into the higher echelons of the Party. Bukharin who lost his membership of the Politburo, editorship of Pravda and the chairmanship of the Comintern in 1929 returned as editor of the government newspaper, Izvestia, in 1934; Tomsky, who had been dismissed from his chairmanship of the Central Trade Union Council in 1929 and lost his position on the Politburo at the same time, remained on the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was re-elected in 1930. Zinoviev and Kamenev were expelled from the Party in 1927, readmitted the following year, expelled again in 1933 but readmitted again in 1934.16 This period embraced the First Five Year Plan and the major part of the collectivization of agriculture involving the extension of the class struggle into the countryside, but it was described, even by critics of the Soviet Union, as a “liberal communist stage”.'7

The Purges

The period which has been used more than any other to discredit the Soviet Union followed the assassination of S M Kirov on 1st December 1934, a member of the Politburo, recently elected Secretary of the Central Committee and the First Secretary of the Leningrad Party Committee. It lasted until 1939. The events of those years attracted much adverse criticism at the time in the West but it was not until the height of the Cold War that they featured as a major indictment of the Soviet Union.

Kirov was shot in his office by a young communist, Leonid Nikolaev. There was much speculation about Nikolaev’s associates. He was linked with enemies of the state. Repressive counter-measures were introduced by the government such as summary trials of suspected terrorists,the suspension of the right of appeal and mandatory death penalties. In the period which followed there were a number of occasions on which, for different reasons, communist leaders and officials were arrested, tried and executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed for treason and sabotage in 1936; Piatakov and Radek were executed in 1937 and the next year Bukharin and Rykov similarly lost their lives. At the end of September 1936, after a series of explosions at the Kemerovo Mines in Western Siberia in which a dozen miners were killed, N I Ezhov was appointed as head of the NKVD. During Ezhov’s spell of office many amongst the leadership of the Communist Party and the army were arrested and executed. By the beginning of 1939, those who had suffered in this way included all the members of the Politburo during Lenin’s time except Stalin and 98 of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee of the CP elected at the 1934 Congress. 1,108 out of the 1,966 delegates to that Congress were arrested. The head of the Red Army, Marshal Tukhachevsky and other army leaders were arrested in June 1937 and then shot for treason. The regional leadership of the Party and the middle echelons of the army were virtually entirely displaced: many were arrested and an unknown number were executed. People talked of “the Ezhovshchina”, which meant the time of Ezhov.

Western Sovietologists have fitted the events between 1933 and 1939 to match the stereotype of a totalitarian, dictator-led country which had no concern for the human rights of its citizens. For this purpose they made three assumptions about them. Firstly, they lumped everything in those years into a single totality and called it the “Great Purge” or the “Great Terror”. Having done that they made a second assumption that the totality had a single cause, namely Stalin. To complete the picture they assumed, thirdly, that the “Purge” or “Terror” had been conducted on a mammoth scale, pervading the whole of Soviet society.

Until recently virtually all Western analysts of the Soviet Union made these three assumptions and set about producing figures of communists who were expelled from the Party, who were arrested, who were tried and executed, in order to confirm their validity. The Soviet government had published details of expulsions from the Communist Party but had provided no data about arrests and executions. The Western Sovietologists were only interested in those who were arrested and imprisoned. Offenders under the Soviet Penal Code in the 1930s could be sentenced to one of three types of punishment. Firstly, they could be compelled to engage in community work without confinement or to stay at their normal place of work and contribute up to 25 per cent of their pay to the state. Second, they could be exiled to remote parts of the Soviet Union without confinement but be compelled to engage in particular work projects. They were not allowed to leave their places of exile until their sentences had been served. Lastly, they could be sent to corrective labour camps administered from about 1929 by a central government department called the Gulag. The Sovietologists have concentrated on this last category and for much of the post-war period have been guessing the size of the forced labour camp population in the 1930s. This numbers game became the central issue for them.

The problem they all faced was that they had no statistical base with which to start so in order to present their case they engaged in an inventive, complex and ingenious deductive process. The first comprehensive study of the Soviet labour camp situation was Forced Labour in Soviet Russia by D J Dallin and B I Nicolaevsky, in 1948. The authors looked for evidence from every conceivable source: “estimates of former officials, former camp inmates, foreign visitors to the Soviet Union, figures based on the reports of former Polish prisoners, estimates based on the numbers and sizes of known camps and camp clusters and . . . estimates based on the reported numbers of newspapers received by places of detention and the reported number of inmates who shared a newspaper.”18 They also reviewed the available data on the scale of economic activities carried out by different parts of the labour camp network. They concluded that the population of Soviet labour camps rose from 2 million in 1932 to 10 million by 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. S G Wheatcroft has described in some detail how various subsequent calculations have been made in an article in Soviet Studies in April 1981. Some discovered new ways of calculating the penal population such as estimating the number of disenfranchised people and assuming that they would be in labour camps. But what is interesting is how the guesses of one became the statistical base for another until the assumptions underlying the original were lost from sight and mind.

The most publicized description of Soviet labour camps was that by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipeligo published in 1973. Many in the West had their image of the Soviet Union reinforced by his partly anecdotal, partly fictionalized story. He asserted, without any empirical evidence, that there had been 12 million people in labour camps at the end of the 1930s, of which 6 million were political prisoners.19 Solzhenitsyn’s figures were sheer invention but were nonetheless used by others as indisputable facts. But the most influential accounts were the reputedly academic ones by Zbigniew Brzezinski who wrote The Permanent Purge in 1956, eight years after leaving Poland as an emigré, and Robert Conquest, whose book, The Great Terror, published in 1968, contains a statistical appendix under the heading of “Casualty Figures”. The estimates of Brzezinski and Conquest entered into anti-Soviet folklore. Both contributed substantially to the grossly exaggerated and distorted picture of the ‘purges’. Zbigniew Brzezinski, commenting on the crucial 18 month period of the Ezhovshchina, January 1937 to June 1938, claimed that during that time 850,000 members were expelled from the Communist Party and that most of them were arrested. This figure was ‘worked on’ and added to by subsequent writers. Brzezinski, however, had made the elementary but intellectually inexcusable mistake of getting his dates wrong. The number of expelled members he quoted referred to the 7 year period from 1932 till 1939 not the 18 month period as claimed by Brzezinski. Moreover there was no correlation between membership expulsions and arrests except in Brzezinski’s mind. He had no data on which to base his correlation. He simply made an unverifiable assumption to provide himself with a statistic which then entered the records as a historical fact. Nonetheless, Robert Conquest referred to Brzezinski’s figure as a “careful estimate” in his book, The Great Terror. He later admitted that Brzezinski had confused his dates but refused to amend his own estimate, based on Brzezinski’s, that there were a million arrests of party members between 1936 and 1939. Conquest cited a claim by Andrei Sakharov, in support of his own estimate, that “in 1936 to 1939 alone more than 1.2 million party members, half of the total membership, were arrested.”20 But Sakharov’s figure, like that of Solzhenitsyn, was imaginary. Communist Party records show that between “October 1936 and the end of 1937 in the terrifying years of the Ezhovshchina only 108,000 party members were expelled and just under half this number; 46,000, were re-instated.” 1 Taking the longer period from May, 1935 till January, 1939 between 200,000 and 240,000 party members were expelled and not re-instated. There is no data which shows how many of these were arrested. Thus this was the way in which the contorting lines of the stereotype were drawn.

Robert Conquest has remained as an authority in the numbers games. He claimed that 9 million people were in labour camps by 1939. To substantiate this figure he drew on the work of S Swianiewicz as well as Brzezinski. Swianiewicz, in his book Forced Labour and Economic Development: an enquiry into the experience of Soviet Industrialization, published in 1965, had estimated that there had been just under 7 million labour camp inmates in 1940. There was a process, it seems, of upward revision. Each analyst claimed to throw new light on the topic, took earlier calculations, refined them and produced a new and higher figure. Conquest added interpretation to Swianiewicz’s “careful and conservative estimate”22 which inflated the total by 2 million. Swianiewicz, however, had based his own estimate on the calculations made by N Jasny in an article called “Labour and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps”, published in the Journal of Political Economy, No 59 in 1952. Jasny's figure had been a modest 3.5 million to which Swianiewicz had added some arbitrary estimates which doubled it. These calculations had no serious empirical basis and should never have been taken seriously by social scientists. In the pure and natural sciences they would have been ridiculed. Yet they have not ended.

The controversy about labour camp numbers in the 1930s was rekindled by an American, Steven Rosefielde, from the University of North Carolina, in 1981. He took Conquest’s figure and added supplementary data from what he called new insights into the scale of the phenomenon.23 The total figure crept up to between 9 million and 11.2 million.24 Rosefielde, like Conquest, cited unsubstantiated claims to support his own. With some enthusiasm he referred to a statement by W. Averell Harriman, former US Ambassador in Moscow, to the effect that there were 12 million forced labourers in the Gulag in the early 1940s.25 Harriman’s figure was based, he claimed, on US Embassy data but though the Embassy files have been declassified the claim has never been substantiated. Rosefielde was keen to show that all the high figures produced out of hats by Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Harriman, were statistically reliable. His motive for doing this and for reviving the controversy was based purely in anti- Sovietism. He stated “one might have supposed that many scholars would have inferred that the success of the Soviet industrialization drive after 1929 was to some significant degree the result of Stalin’s forced labour policies. This, however, has not been the case . . . This paper . . . makes it plain that Soviet economic development cannot be properly understood unless forced labour is endogenized into the growth process.”26 Rosefielde thus moved in the tradition of his predecessors. He united with Dallin and Nicolaevsky, the social democrats; Jasny the friend of Mensheviks; Brzezinski the emigré Pole and Conquest the middle-class English writer, all intensely anti-communist, who utilized their intellectual skills to subvert Soviet communism rather than to reveal and understand the real social forces which comprise the Soviet Union. This was surely an intellectually devious and dishonest process.

It was not necessary to guess about everything. Communist Party memberships, numbers and rates of expulsion, were regularly published and T H Rigby used this data for his book, Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917-1967, published by the Russian Institute of Columbia University in 1968. The book is a valuable data bank which corrects important errors in the works of Brzezinski and Conquest. But Rigby was a conforming creature of his Cold War environment and he placed his own calculations within the same distorted analytical box as the others so that its outcome was pre-determined. He saw Stalin’s lonely hand in all the 1930s events and believed, even, that he had planned them beforehand.27

Brzezinski, Conquest, Rigby and others obtained their data from a variety of sources, but most of it was anecdotal, obtained from emigrees and defectors invariably with limited knowledge and usually with the bias of disaffected people. This heavy reliance on unsubstantiated statements was accompanied by a dismissal of official Soviet sources. Conquest endeavoured to give intellectual credibility to this position, which he in particular adopted. “In a totalitarian country”, he wrote, “the question of evidence assumes a special form. No particular credence can be attached to official pronouncements, many of which, indeed, are extravagant falsehoods. The truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay . . . But of course not all hearsay and not all rumour is true. On political matters basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumour at a high political and police level”.28 On no other subject could rumour be elevated to the status of a source of research information. The data then on which many anti-Soviet works were founded came largely from the recollections of Mensheviks, Trotskyists, former Cadets, ex-army officers, intelligence agents, diplomats. The basis of Brzezinski’s work was his analysis of the sample of 2,725 relatives of Soviet emigre’s who had served sentences in prison camps during the 1930s. Anti- Sovietism is built into this source of information.

The same intellectual stricture can be levied against the work of Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, published in the USA in 1971 but written in Moscow. Medvedev is a Soviet citizen but this was not a particular advantage, except that he was physically nearer source material than Western writers. The test of a writer’s understanding of a situation does not depend on being there or necessarily being a part of it but on the method of analysis used. Medvedev was a child in the 1930s; his father suffered from the repression towards the end of the decade. Medvedev, however, was acutely critical of bourgeois historians who analyzed the Soviet Union from a “plainly anti-Soviet view”. He accused foreign publications of mixing “invention and rumour, factual inaccuracies and distortions in their accounts . . .”29 Yet his own work was intended to reveal Stalin’s guilt for the events of the 1930s and to locate the cause in Stalin’s criminal character. His work, in consequence, was largely biographical and was uninformative about social forces. It was as self-fulfilling as that of Conquest - like a trial in which the presumption of guilt is made before it begins its examination of the evidence. Its empirical base was as deficient as that of the Western Sovietologists for he too depended on recollections, anecdotes and interviews provided by surviving Party members after 1956. It all makes interesting reading but throws little light on the causes of the events with which it purports to deal.

The only substantial source of archival material in the West which relates directly to the events in the 1930s, and which would pass the test of the most intellectually scrupulous social scientist, is the Smolensk Archive. It is a unique collection. Merle Fainsod who first used it describes its history:

“In mid-July 1941, less than a month after Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union, German army units swept into the city of Smolensk. The local authorities were presumably under instructions to destroy or withdraw their records, but in the general confusion of the evacuation, arrangements went astray. At Party headquarters in Smolensk, where current files were kept, Party officials apparently managed to burn or remove all important documents; at least none of any real significance was found for the period 19391941. The back files, however, covering the period 1917-1938 were stored in another building far from Party headquarters and these remained largely intact. German intelligence officers, who discovered the collection, found it in a state of great disarray and made a rather random selection of more than 500 files containing approximately 200,000 pages of documents which were shipped back to Germany for examination. There at the end of the war they fell into American hands.”30

The American authorities made no attempt to return the documents to their rightful owners after the war. Acting on the principle that “finding is keeping”, the records became the property of the Departmental Records Branch, Office of the Adjutant General of the United States Army. This archive is a collection of Communist Party records from the Western Region in Byelorussia from before 1917 till 1939. It contains the files of the Party organizations from the local city cells to the regional committee. They include membership files, minutes of meetings, letters to and from Moscow, orders and documents front Moscow. Merle Fainsod had access to the Archive for the material for his book, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule. He was a product of the same Russian Research Centre at Harvard as Brzezinski and had already established a reputation in the field of Soviet studies with his work, How Russia is Ruled, in 1953. Unfortunately Fainsod ruined this opportunity to analyze the almost weekly workings of the Communist Party because he was unable to break out of the Cold War mould. In his introduction he described his conceptualization of the Communist Party to which the new data was added. “In the political sphere”, he wrote, “Stalinism spelled the development of a full-blown totalitarian regime in which all the lines of control ultimately converged in the hands of the supreme dictator. The Party became a creature of Stalin’s will ... Its role was reduced to that of a transmission belt, which Stalin used to communicate his directives, to mobilize support for them by propaganda and agitation, and to check on their execution. As the purges of the mid-thirties approached their apogee, terror itself became a system of power, and the secret police flourished and multiplied. The fear which its agents inspired provided the foundation of Stalin’s own security; through them he guarded the loyalty of the Party, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, the intellectuals, and the mass of the population generally.”31 It made a nonsense of the very notion of research to start from such a baseline. Not surprisingly Fainsod’s work created the impression that the Smolensk Archive merely confirmed the widely publicized stereotype. Instead of consulting the Archive, Western Sovietologists since 1958 simply quoted from Smolensk Under Soviet Rule.

This pattern was altered by J Arch Getty. In 1979 Getty was awarded a doctorate for a dissertation at Boston College in the US on The ‘Great Purges’ Reconsidered: The Soviet Communist Party 1933-1939. The dissertation was published in 1985 under the title Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party reconsidered, 1933-1938. Getty’s research was based on an analysis of the Smolensk Archive. Using the same data as Fainsod he contradicted him on every major point. In addition he produced evidence to challenge the presuppositions and conclusions of Brzezinski and Conquest about the scale and character of repression, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state, the operation of the Communist Party and culpability of Stalin as the prime architect. Getty entered the fray as a historian. He was not a marxist. Although he pointed to the need to examine the Soviet state, the Communist Party and Stalin in the context of social forces he did not do that himself but confined his analysis to the main variables which the Smolensk Archive revealed. He produced contentious conclusions such as that the Soviet administration was not totalitarian but chaotic, clumsy and inefficient, that democratic centralism in the Communist Party did not work so that the centre did not control the periphery of the Party and that within the leadership there were factions and arguments, with Stalin often playing a moderating role. But more important for subsequent researchers he clarified the periods, the issues and the events in a way which will encourage them to discard the predominant Western preconception about Stalinism.

Similar work of reappraisal has been undertaken in Britain at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham. There S G Wheatcroft, as part of a research project concerning “Soviet economic balances and trends 1929-1941”, has reassessed the statistics of the purges with the same kind of objectivity as Getty. He approached the issue by critically examining the assumptions underlying the calculations made by Conquest and others and found that they had little basis in reality. So distorted were the assumptions that the calculation of the pre-war penal population derived from them would have meant that nearly one-fifth of all Soviet adult males were imprisoned. Even the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the US Department of State concluded that “So disastrous would have been the demographic and economic consequences of such a situation that its existence seems to have been highly improbable.”32 Wheatcroft’s own conclusions, published in papers in the Journal Soviet Studies, volumes XXXIII and XXXV for 1981 and 1983, are that “the quantitative significance of the 1937- 38 purge has generally been exaggerated” and that in particular Conquest’s “estimates are erroneous or unreliable”. These are rather generous comments about the work of earlier Sovietologists. The American sociologist, Albert Szymanski, who commented on the work of Brzezinski and Conquest came to the political conclusion that “Even though dealing with events of half a century ago, they serve to discredit future possibilities of socialist revolution in other countries, which is why the issue continues to receive such attention.”33 “The exaggerators”, he added, “are rewarded with grants, publications, high positions and personal support in proportion to the outrageousness of the figures they generate”.

The events between 1933 and 1939 comprised three distinct phenomena. There was, first, the “purging” of members from the Communist Party; second, an anti-bureaucratic campaign aimed particularly at the middle layers of the Party and government authority and third, a paranoia about attempts to destabilize the country and stage a military coup d’etat in alliance with Nazi Germany and Japan.34 The three phenomena overlapped in time but they were never confused by Soviet people. Contemporary Western attention was concentrated mainly on the public trials of leading politicians and military officers accused of treason, with some embellishments from the anti-bureaucracy campaign.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union periodically screened its membership in order to eliminate undesirable elements and to maintain its integrity as a cadre party. After the Bolsheviks assumed power, membership of the Party held attractions for different reasons, some of which had nothing to do with socialism. Some people saw membership as a means to individual advancement. On some occasions the Party growth distorted its purpose in that it failed to reflect the occupational, ethnic or sex balance of the society at large. It had, for example, too few workers or women. Whatever the reasons the distortions in the Party were rectified through a chistka, translated into English as a purge but with a much softer meaning in Russian. Chistka is derived from chisteel, the verb to clean.

The first chistka was in 1921. The Communist Party had increased its membership twenty-seven fold between 1917 and 1921 with a half million “untested, unknown and potentially unreliable persons”. Pravda warned against the “over-filling of the party” and expressed concern about careerism by the new members.35 The Party’s reaction was to weed out and expel between 10% and 15% of its members through a process of reregistration in 1919. In Russian this was called pereregistratsiia. It repeated the process in 1921 with both a chistka and a selective recruitment policy.36 The main charges against the 25 per cent of the membership who were expelled were inactivity, careerism, failure to carry out Party instructions, drunkenness, corruption, practising religion and joining the Party with counterrevolutionary intentions. One-third of the white-collar workers were expelled, compared with one-sixth of the manual workers and two-fifths of the peasants. Although there were important political divisions in the Party in 1921 no recognizable oppositionists were expelled.

As well as pereregistratsiia and chistka the Communist Party carried out proverka which involved the verification of membership cards and also resulted in expulsions. In 1928 the membership was “screened” in seven Party regions resulting in 13 per cent of their members being expelled. The following year there was a chistka with an expulsion rate of 11 per cent, amounting to 170,000 members. On each occasion expelled members had the right of appeal. In 1929, 37,000 people were re-instated, reducing the expulsion rate to 8 per cent.37 Each time the membership was reviewed in response to special circumstances. Following the introduction of the First Five Year Plan and the collectivization of agriculture in 1929 there was strong pressure on workers to join the Party, identify with the new policies and supervise their application. Almost one million new members were enrolled in 1931. Recruitment was eased off in 1932 and halted at the beginning of 1933. But by then the membership of the Party had increased by 131.6 per cent since 1929. This fact alone gave rise to concern about the state of the Party. At the same time as recruitment was suspended the Central Committee decided to conduct another chistka. A special Central Purge Commission was formed at the head of a hierarchy of ad hoc commissions at all levels of the Party. At the point where the credentials of the members were actually examined were the regional committees, comprised of communists of at least 10 years’ standing. Eighteen per cent of the membership was expelled for moral corruption, careerism, violating party discipline, passivity, for hiding their social background and for acting as bureaucrats.38

These Soviet purges were not aimed at political dissent. When, for instance, a verification of Communist Party cards was held in 1935 the Smolensk City Communist Party Committee warned, in line with the Regional Committee, “That secretaries of the raion committees and leaders of party organizations must not transform the work of verifying party documents into a campaign of unmasking, but rather must ensure, by conducting the necessary organizational measures and by improving methods of party work, a constant increase in party awareness, a raising of integrity in the struggle to strengthen the ranks of party organizations . . ,”39 This was a far cry from the manner in which the purges were interpreted in the West where the expulsion of members was deemed to be part of a pattern of violence, arrests, prosecutions, trials and executions. Purges were such a systematic organizational practice in the Soviet Union that books and articles were published on the theme advising how to conduct one in such a way as to strengthen rather than weaken the Party.

The second phenomenon which Western sovietologists lumped with the chistka to discredit the Soviet Union was the anti- bureaucratic campaign which eventually decimated the lower and middle levels of the Party. This was unrelated to the chistka except that in the process of checking Party members an awareness of the obstructiveness and inefficiency of the regional party organizations began to spread. Criticisms of the Party were made both formally within the Party and publicly in the media. In November, 1933 the Central Committee ordered local organizations to be more efficient in keeping membership records. Then at the seventeenth Party Congress early in 1934 a member of the Central Purge Commission, Ian Rudzutak, spoke of chaos in membership accounting. No one, he and others claimed, knew who was in the Party and who was not.40 The outcome was a Central Committee decision in October 1934 to conduct a general registration of membership, known as the proverka or Verification of Party Documents, the following year.

A variety of factors concerning the character of the Soviet Communist Party began to coalesce from 1935 in a manner no- one could have predicted and with wholly unexpected consequences. The proverka, a serious matter from the point of view of the Central Committee, was bungled by the inertia of regional secretaries to whom the task had been entrusted. Where they did not ignore the proverka they passed on the job of interviewing each of their members to their subordinates who in turn gave it little attention. The Central Committee became dissatisfied with the bureaucratic manner in which the operation was handled though it also had misgivings about disorders in the membership accounting system. It was stated, for example that: “Leaders did not know their members; glaring discrepancies existed between records and real membership; party cards had been given out wholesale; genuine members did not have cards at all; and expelled persons had kept their membership cards . . . Party cards of dead persons were being used by relations, spies, White Guard, Trotskyists, and various alien elements.”41

A twist was given to the proverka by the reaction to Kirov’s assassination in December, 1934. The Central Committee, believing that it was the work of Trotskyist groups, ordered local Party organizations to search out their Trotskyist members. The task of “unmasking” became appended to the proverka though by coincidence rather than design. This did not visibly affect the results but introduced an air of scepticism, suspicion and criticism which affected the relations between party organs and members and between members themselves.

Through its dissatisfaction with the proverka the Central Committee ordered a second Verification of Party Documents from July, 1935. This time it publicized its criticisms, named some of the officials involved and called on the rank and file to participation through a series of local meetings. Communists were encouraged to engage in open criticisms of each other and of the local Party functionaries. In effect the central leadership appealed to the ordinary members to tackle the deficiencies at regional and local level. The attention of the Party was directed more and more to its bureaucratic middle. The expelled members during the chistka had been mainly rank and filers without any formal positions but during 1935 lower-level office-bearers were expelled. As each stage unfolded the locus of the criticisms moved closer to the middle and upper level power-holders.

Altogether, nine per cent of the membership was expelled during the proverka. Thus between the beginning of the 1933 chistka and the end of the first proverka in May 1935, about 613,000 members were expelled. There were three grades of membership: full member, candidate member and sympathiser. During that period, however, 1.3 million people left the Party which meant that 469,000 simply failed to appear before the Party organizations to account for their membership and, therefore, voluntarily left the Party. The most important single reasons for the fall in Party membership were clearly apathy amongst members and incompetence on the party organs to keep track of their members.42

The proverka was followed by an Exchange of Party Documents in 1936 and this completed the analysis of the Party membership. This last stage was necessary, it was stated, because many Party cards needed to be replaced in order to reconsider questionable cases of Party membership and to provide those expelled or censured with the possibility of reinstatement. The instructions for conducting the Exchange were meticulous and based on “sound accounting procedures and careful regulation of membership cards”43 The Central Committee added that “in the exchange, they must turn their principal attention toward freeing themselves of passive party members not deserving the high title of member of the party; of people who accidently find themselves in the VKP(b)”44 In the period between May, 1935 and September 1936 about 261,000 Party members were expelled by their local committees but more than 167,000 of these were reinstated on appeal.

The anti-bureaucratic pressures came to a head in 1937. They received increasing encouragement from the central leadership. As the Exchange of Party Documents was nearing its end, Pravda reported that there had been too many hasty, wrongful expulsions on insufficient grounds; that lower party organizations had been far too free in their censures, reprimands and expulsions; that too much had been decided in closed meetings of Party committees; that the rules on appeals procedures were not being followed. Expelled members complained to the Central Committee of wrongful expulsion. Local Party secretaries were criticized for being too formal, bureaucratic and mechanical. There was increasing comment about heartless bureaucrats. A circular letter from the Central Committee on 24 June 1936, stated: “Many regional party organizations have acted in an intolerably arbitrary manner with respect to expelled persons. For concealing their social origins and for passivity, and not because of hostile activity against the party and the Soviet power, they have been automatically fired from their jobs, deprived of their apartments, etc.”45

The momentum to condemn bureaucratic officials was heightened by events outside the Party. As a reflection of the success of the First Five Year Plan and the confident feeling that Soviet society was maturing, the Seventh Congress of Soviets decided in February, 1935 to bring the 1924 Soviet Constitution up to date. A Constitutional Commission under the chairmanship of Stalin was established in July 1935, and, eleven months later, submitted a new draft Constitution for discussion. 60 million copies of the Constitution were distributed throughout the country. Public discussion was widespread and intense. An estimated 527,000 meetings were held, attended by over 36 million people, to discuss its terms and suggest amendments. Much of the discussion was about the rights and duties of Soviet citizens for the draft proposed direct elections for all organs of state power. There was to be a single franchise for all citizens at 18 years of age, a secret ballot, candidates were to be nominated by the branches of working class and peasant organizations, they were required to have a 50 per cent majority in at least a 50 per cent poll to be elected, and successful candidates were liable to recall by their constituents.46 Altogether 150,000 amendments were submitted to the Constitutional Commission. The Constitution came into force in December 1936 and much of 1937 was spent by organizations in every part of the Soviet Union in preparing for the elections for which it provided.

A single candidate was nominated for each constituency but before this happened there was a selection procedure which was conducted in a variety of ways such as primaries or election conferences and through which encumbents were criticized and sometimes rejected. One third of the local and national successful candidates were elected for the first time in 1937.

A similar process of criticism and selection took place in the Communist Party after the Central Committee had launched its “democracy/anti-bureaucracy” campaign in February 1937 to mobilise rank and file opposition to bureaucratic inertia. The Communist Party leadership responded to the mismanagement revealed by the chistka and proverka. At other levels dissatisfaction about the conduct of the party was expressed by the new generation of political activists who had been completely educated under socialist conditions. These came from working class and peasant backgrounds but belonged to a new socialist intelligentsia. They were impatient with the older, less-educated body of leaders who had remained relatively unchallenged for most of the time since the Revolution, who had become fixed in their ways and, as Pravda commented, thought of their positions as fiefs.

At the February plenum of the Central Committee in 1937 Andrei Zhdanov who had succeeded Kirov as the Leningrad First Secretary and member of the Politburo, spoke strongly against bureaucratic methods of leadership and in favour of increased participation of rank and file members. He proposed direct elections by secret ballot for the Communist Party. Based on his speech the Central Committee ordered the immediate abolition of cooption to committees, voting by lists instead of individuals and insisted that secret ballot elections should be held for all Party organizations up to the level of oblat or region by 20 May 1937. At the plenum Zhdanov was generally supported by Stalin.4

The elections were held in the Spring accompanied by a widespread press campaign with articles headed “Under the banner of self-criticism and connection to the masses” and dealing with the issues of self-criticism, democracy, learning from the rank and file and verifying the leaders. At some meetings of raion or district committees the denunciations of the officials were so intense that they were voted out of office before the elections were held. There was a widespread protest vote. Altogether, 55 per cent of the committees were voted out of office throughout the country. In the Leningrad region 48 per cent of the raion committees were new. In most of the large towns about 20 per cent of the Secretaries and party organizers were elected for the first time. Many of the officials were young worker-Stakhanovites or technical workers.48 The elections, however, did not remove the regional leaderships, even where they had been strongly criticized. For that to happen the anti-bureaucratic campaign had to be taken further by the Central Committee.

The secretariat of the obkom, the regional committee, was elected from that committee with the endorsement of the Central Committee. It was difficult for rank and file protests to maintain their momentum through to that level. The First Secretary of an obkom was a powerful person in his own right, usually surrounded by supporters through patronage and cooption. Take the position of First Secretary Ivan Petrovitch Runyantsev of the Western oblat, centred on Smolensk in Byelorussia at that time. His region had a population of 6.5 million, bigger than some countries. It encompassed 110 districts each with between 50,000 and 75,000 inhabitants. It included 3 substantial cities. Runyantsev, moreover, was from 1934, a member of the Central Committee. It needed more than encouragement to depose him and others like him. Indeed only four regional secretaries out of the twenty-five whose regional conferences were reported in the press were removed by conference decisions in 1937.49

It was at this point that the anti-bureaucratic campaign merged at the edges with the third phenomenon, the Ezhovshchina, the period of mass arrests. Soviet society felt increasingly vulnerable to attack following the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and the widespread preparations for war. It expressed its nervousness after the Kirov assassination when accusations were made against the opposition groups led by Trotsky and Zinoviev and a wave of arrests was initiated. This resulted, however, in relatively few expulsions from the Party. Zinoviev, Kamenev and thirteen of their associates were arrested and tried for the assassination but were found guilty only of moral complicity. The reaction from the assassination had dissipated by the middle of 1935 and for a year there was no evidence of any political arrests. There was a renewal of the unease from the middle of 1936 when extraordinary powers were given to the political police to counter ‘enemies of the people’. The NKVD was authorized to arrest and sentence non-Party members suspected of counter-revolutionary activities without trial or right of appeal. This was a recipe for oppression because people, in their jumpiness, began accusing each other. The first of the renown “Moscow trials” occurred in August 1936 when Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others were charged again with the Kirov assassination and on this occasion found guilty.

The second major trial was held when Radek, Piatakov and 15 others were found guilty of ’wrecking’ and economic sabotage in January 1937. They were alleged to have acted in complicity with German and Japanese intelligence forces. Trotsky was implicated. There was an understandable fear of war in the Soviet Union. A classical war set piece was being tried out in Spain by Germany and Italy following the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July, 1936 with the Soviet Union in opposition on the side of the Republicans. Hitler had spoken of the attractions to Germany of the fertile plains of the Ukraine and the raw materials of the Urals. 50 Then at the end of 1936 Germany and Japan concluded an ‘Anti-Commintern Pact’. The view that an invasion was imminent spread throughout the country. The search for ‘enemies of the people’ began to assume a new and desperate dimension at all levels of Soviet society.

The trial of the military leaders in 1937 activated the convergence of many factors which created the period in Soviet history described as Ezhovshchina. It stemmed from allegations which came from Germany via Czechoslovakia that the Soviet military leaders were planning a coup d’etat to coincide with a German- Japanese invasion. Documents were leaked which linked two Deputy People’s Commissars for Defence, Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik and a number of generals with the Germans. Marshall Tukhachevsky, the leading Soviet military expert, and army commanders covering various regions of the Soviet Union were arrested in May and tried and executed in June. The regional army commanders had close links with the Regional Communist Party Secretaries so suspicion fell on them too. Evidence about the complicity of the Regional Secretaries is contradictory51 but there was another reason for indicting them. They had survived the anti-bureaucratic campaign from the rank and file members. Extra-ordinary meetings of the Regional Committees were convened at which members of the Politburo were present. In Smolensk, for example, L M Kaganovitch attended an extraordinary plenum of the Western Obkum when the Regional Secretary and his secretariat were removed from office. G Malenkov went first to Byelorussia and then with A Mikoyan to Armenia; L Beria went to Georgia while Molotov, Ezhov and Khrushchev went to the Ukraine. The removal of the Regional Secretaries was unpopular only with those who had received patronage from them. The ordinary members welcomed the opportunity to unleash their criticisms on those who had been insulated from them before.

The decision to implicate the Regional Secretaries was clearly made by Stalin and the Politburo but the consequences which flowed from it were not the result of a disciplined and coordinated approach to repress dissent. Concern about spies, a fear of war, the attack on bureaucracy and the eagerness of Soviet workers to criticize generated a paranoia within the Communist Party at all levels. Members informed against each other for being enemies of the people and were then informed against themselves. Some used the occasion to settle old scores. Others cleared out adversaries or those they mistrusted. The political police were the weapon of repression. Party members had always been protected from the arbitrary acts of the NKVD but late in 1937 the NKVD acquired the authority to arrest those in the Party who had not been subject to Party discipline or expelled. The NKVD, however, was also the subject of repression. The Commissar of Internal Relations, G G Iagoda, was removed from his post in September, 1936, allegedly for laxity in exposing the Trotksy and Zinoviev group. Later he and many leading officials of the NKVD were arrested. Iagoda was tried with Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938, found guilty and executed. The regional and local officials of the NKVD were caught up in the maelstrom of political violence and put under pressure to uncover spies, saboteurs and wreckers. Arrests followed arrests as threads linked the exposures and confessions. Officials who did not respond to accusations put themselves under suspicion for complicity. They arrested many innocent people out of sheer inefficiency and by the same standard allowed others to get away. Getty reports that “a person who felt that his arrest was imminent could go to another town and, as a rule, avoid being seized."52 Yet the NKVD was not seen in the public eye as an oppressor but as a saviour. There was an Ezhov - NKVD cult in the press. Many NKVD officials received honours from the state. It was a complex period, containing many contradictions.

The Ezhovshchina in Perspective

In so far as it is possible to identify the main characteristics of the Ezhovshchina from the evidence available they have little in common with the widely projected Western view. There is general agreement that the repression was extensive and painful, resulting in many personal tragedies and leaving scars on Soviet society which are still present. But there the agreement ends. The repression, in the first instance, did not extend through the years from 1933 to 1939 but was concentrated into a period of about 7 months, from the trial of Marshall Tukhachevsky in June 1937 to the early part of 1938. There was, of course, a building up stage and a trailing off period but the Ezhovshchina as described by Brzezinski and Conquest was of short duration. Secondly it was neither planned nor in any sense intended. There was in 1937 a coincidence of circumstances which interacted with and on each other to produce a collective hysteria about enemies within and without. The arrest of military leaders arose from allegations of treason which were never proved or disproved; the anti- bureaucratic campaign led the central leadership to attack the middle levels of the Party, some sections of which were associated with the military leaders; ordinary communists exploited their new-found freedom to criticize officials and played a pivotal role in removing and punishing them. The deteriorating international situation led many people at all levels to believe that the Soviet Union was going to be invaded with the complicity of Britain and the USA and generated a nervousness about ‘spies’ and ‘wreckers’. All of these forces coalesced to produce a national paranoia through which, Medvedev stated, “Hundreds of thousands of Communists voted for the expulsion of ‘enemies of the people’ (and) millions of ordinary people took part in meetings and demonstrations demanding severe reprisals against ‘enemies’.”53

The repression had both irrational and rational qualities. It was irrational in that many unsuspecting and innocent people were caught up in it. Agents provocateurs were active;old scores were settled; false accusations were made; conspiracies were imagined; accidents became sabotage. “The smallest error of a manager, miscalculation of an engineer, misprint overlooked by an editor or proofreader, publication of a bad book, was taken to be deliberate wrecking and cause for arrest. People looked everywhere for secret signs or fascist symbols, and found them in drawings in books, in note-books, in scout badges. Even such difficulties as the low pay of teachers, shortages of funds, high drop-out rates from high school, the wearing out of equipment, were demagogically attributed to sabotage.”5

At the same time there was an element of rationality about it. For many people the Ezhovshchina had a definite and legitimate purpose. The rank and file members of the Party defined their adversaries as those with authority over them and these suffered the greatest toll. The main casualties were the elite of Soviet society, the administrative and managerial personnel, army officers, party functionaries and intellectuals. Ordinary Party members were relatively untouched by the Ezhovshchina.55 Many, indeed, benefited from its consequences. Numberless vacancies were created in every field of public activity. “In the five years from 1933 to 1938”, Isaac Deutscher commented, “about half a million administrators, technicians, economists, and men of other professions had graduated from the high schools . . . This was the new intelligentsia whose ranks filled the purged and emptied offices. Its members . . . were either hostile to the men of the old guard or indifferent to their fate. They threw themselves into their work with a zeal and enthusiasm undimmed by recent events . . .”56 Hundreds of thousands of skilled men and women whose paths had been blocked by the rigid bureaucracy of the middle layers suddenly found welcoming avenues opening for them. Stakhanovite workers became factory directors; rank and file scientists took over research institutes while ordinary soldiers moved rapidly up the military hierarchy. Ironically, the repression which created so many gaps in the decision-making processes generated a sense of solidarity which was reflected in the commitment with which the new cadres approached their tasks. It created a mobility within the Communist Party which had rejuvinating effects and served it well during the critical years of the war.

An examination of the membership changes in the Communist Party during 1937 confirms that the Ezhovshchina was not directed at ordinary members. There was not a mass expulsion of members. Indeed the rate of expulsions fell after the 1933 chistka and reached its lowest level in 1937. The number of members expelled during the whole of 1937 was less than 100,000, amounting to about 5 per cent of the total membership.“7 This was little more than half of those expelled in the 1935 proverka and one eighth of the number expelled in the 1933 chistka. The statistics for the Moscow Party which suffered inordinately from the repression show a similar picture. There, 33,000 members were expelled in 1937 compared with 45,500 in 1935 and 133,000 in 193 3.58 Moreover, although Party members suffered most during the Ezhovshchina, the Party itself was not tarnished by it. Recruitment to the Party was suspended in January, 1933 for almost 4 years. It was the longest moratorium on recruitment in the history of the Party. The moratorium was eased at the end of 1936 and gradually lifted during 1937. Recruitment took place on an increasing scale during the Ezhovshchina. There was little sign of any reluctance by people to join the Party though local branches proceeded cautiously by carefully vetting applicants. The “number of new candidates rose from 12,000 in the eight months November 1936 to June 1937, to 28,000 in the second half of 1937, to 109,000 in the first half of 1938, and in the second half of that year apparently totalled over 400,000. This acceleration continued after the Eighteenth Congress in March 1939, and the party grew by the record number of 1,100,000 in that year”.59 If mass arrests and executions had been associated with Communist Party membership as Brzezinski and Conquest assert, then the eagerness of the young non-members to belong to the Party would be inexplicable except as a desire for self-destruction.

In conclusion, the Ezhovshchina was not by itself or in conjunction with the expulsions from the Communist Party during the previous four years, including the ‘Great Trials’, either Stalin’s Purge or a reign of terror imposed by a totalitarian system to stamp out dissent and annihilate all possible contenders for Stalin’s leadership position. What happened resulted from social forces and not evil machinations of individuals or, as Medvedev contends, of one individual. Many ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who had served with Stalin during the Revolution suffered from the repression. But they as persons were not the targets of the repression. They suffered because the targets of the anti- bureaucratic bias during the Ezhovshchina were office-holders, many of whom were communists who had joined the Party before 1917. “Old Bolsheviks fell”, Getty maintained “because of their leadership positions in 1937, not because of their age or past experience.”60 He believed that “It is not inconsistent with the evidence to argue that the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched office holders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism”.61

Stalin’s part in this process was undoubtedly important though it was by no means as crucial as the Western obsession with the cult of the personality suggests. He worked within social forces which he did not and could not control but even at the institutional level of activity he moved between alternative courses of action advocated by other members of the Politburo, between Molotov who urged rapid industrialization and Serge Ordzhonikidze who believed in cautious development, between Ezhov who acted through repression and Andrei Zhdanov who saw the solution to the Communist Party’s problems in terms of political education and propaganda. During the course of the 1930s he moved from a moderate to a radical stance but he frequently had to find a balance between competing forces. It is a malevolent distortion to portray the Politburo as his plaything as did Adam Ulam, yet another product of the Russian Research Centre at Harvard University. Ulam wrote that from 1936 “the Politburo’s function even as an advisory organ was challenged”,62 in support of his contention that Stalin masterminded “an incredible plan of repression and terror”, had “a thirst for blood”, pushed his scheme “to the border of madness”63 The Politburo, Ulam insisted, was comprised of “half-men, who even in their criminality were pale imitations of their leader.”64 But as Getty observed, Stalin could not control everything that happened in the Party and country. “The number of hours in the day, divided by the number of things for which he was responsible, suggests that his role in many areas could have been little more than occasional intervention, prodding, threatening, or correcting. In the course of a day, Stalin made decisions on everything from hog breeding to subways to national defense. He met with scores of experts, heard dozens of reports, and settled various disputes between contending factions for budgetary or personnel allocations. He was an executive, and reality forced him to delegate most authority to his subordinates, each of whom had his own opinions, client groups, and interests.”65 His political subordinates were powerful in their own right, representing interests and reflecting social forces.

Stalin, the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party were responsible for the Ezhovshchina in that the state agencies through which it was mediated and applied were under their direction. Through this they were guilty of failing to identify and reverse negative forces. They were, in fact, carried along by those forces and, in this sense were guilty of complicity at least. There is no doubt that their responses both facilitated and legitimized the repression. The Politburo, including Stalin, however, took a hard line over the alleged treachery of the military and favoured both the trial and the sentences it produced. Both he and members of the Politburo regarded the extension of the anti-bureaucratic campaign to Regional Secretariats as prophylactic and assisted in their removal. Stalin presumably endorsed making the link between regional military commanders and Regional Party Secretaries which resulted in the arrest of many of them. But what neither he nor members of the Politburo did was to plan the interaction of the various elements which resulted in the Ezhovshchina. Indeed as no one could have foreseen the outcome of that interaction such a plan was inconceivable. Getty, giving a more cautious estimate, stated that his study “more than once failed to conclude that the events were part of a coherent plan . . . Careful analysis of archival, documentary, press, creditable memoir sources neither supports nor disproves the existence of a plan . . . the evidence indicates that a master Stalin plan must remain an a priori assumption, an intuitive guess, or a hypothesis ”66

The precise policies which Stalin supported in the Politburo are not known. The main indicators of his views are his public statements. Speeches by the General Secretary of the Communist Party were an important means for communicating policies. They were not instruments for persuasion in order to raise the poll ratings. They usually simply informed people about Politburo and Central Committee deliberations. Insofar as they dealt with controversial issues they reflected Stalin’s approach to them. It is significant then that mostly in public Stalin sided with Andrei Zhdanov’s view that only political measures could solve the Party’s problems. He quickly became concerned about the turn Ezhovshchina had taken. In little over six months after the June trial of Marshall Tukhachevsky there were signs that the Ezhovshchina was beginning to end. The Central Committee in January 1938 roundly turned on Party officials who had abused their power through their heartless and bureaucratic attitude towards communists accused of being enemies of the people. It did not criticize the political police though the rate of arrests fell sharply. In the Party the number of expulsions declined, expelled members began to be rehabilitated and the new recruitment campaign was set in motion. The trial of Bukharin, Rykov and lagod was held in March, 1938 but the defendants had been in custody for just over a year and the trial attracted little publicity. Some arrests continued to be made during 1938 but at the end of the year Ezhovshchina ended completely. Ezhov was relieved of his duties on 8 December at his own request, disappeared from the public eye and was executed. The convictions of former enemies of the people began to be reversed. The NKVD came under attack and a number of its officials were dismissed and arrested for criminal actions. When the Party Congress met in March 1939 the events of the past 3 years were strongly criticized both by Stalin and Zhdanov. The Party rules were changed to strengthen a member’s right of appeal against expulsion and to ban the practice of purging the membership. Many thousands of expelled numbers returned to the Party and their jobs. Amongst them were army officers who on the eve of the war, and in its early stages, took up their commands again.

The Dissidents

In the 1950s and 1960s the events of the 1930s were at the centre of the Western debate about the Soviet Union but now they are the backcloth for other criticisms of the communist system. The focus of Western attention nowadays has been turned to the question of human rights, by which is meant the right to engage in political criticism of the Soviet system and to organize opposition to it, on the one hand, and the right as an individual to emigrate, on the other hand. Two distinct issues are involved here and they are treated separately. The right to emigrate was raised in Chapter Four and is examined in the following chapter “The Jewish Question”. In some circumstances there is overlap where Soviet Jews, in order to further their own specific aims, engage in dissenting action. The dissidents, however, can be examined without the complications of Zionism and anti-Semitism which the Jewish issue raises.

In the Soviet Union citizens are protected from arbitrary arrest by Article 3 of the 1960 Code which provides that no persons can be punished unless they have committed a crime provided for by law. Dissenters, however, can be punished by infringing Articles 70, 190-1 and 190-3 of the Criminal Code, which are designed to protect the Soviet social system from subversion. Article 70 penalizes “agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime or of committing particular, especially dangerous crimes against the state, or the circulation, for the same purpose, of slanderous fabrication which defame the Soviet state and social system or the circulation or preparation or keeping, for the same purposes, of literature of such content”67 Article 190-1 covers acts which constitute a slander of the Soviet state but which do not involve a subversive intent. Article 190-3 introduced in 1966, is directed against group demonstrations and makes punishable “organization of, and likewise, action participation in, group actions which violate public order in a coarse manner”, or “clear disobedience of the legal demands of representatives of authority.”

The scope of the Articles is wide, enabling almost any form of objectionable political activity to fall within their terms. Their application, however, has been strongly influenced by the constant attempts by capitalist countries to isolate and undermine the Soviet Union with the intention of destroying its basis. In this process the experience of the German invasion in 1941 with its devastating effect upon the lives and property of Soviet people has had an indelible effect. Nothing can be understood about Soviet reactions to criticisms and threats, no matter how insignificant they might seem from the outside, without taking their war experiences into account. It is unlikely that they will ever be erased from the collective Soviet memory. Whilst the wounds from the war were healing and the damage to property was being repaired the Cold War began which, with variations in intensity, has never ceased. It would be surprising under the circumstances if the Soviet Union were not sensitive to criticisms.

In terms of their actual operation, the Articles differ little from the catch-all Public Order Acts in Western countries. If the law enforcement authorities in Britain want to suppress dissent there is legislation on hand suitable for all occasions. The British authorities could cover all the contingencies in the Soviet Articles without introducing new legislation. The British police had no difficulty in arresting 10,000 coal miners during the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike for simple public order offences even though many of them were engaged in a variety of acts of political dissent. Legislation does not have to be specifically directed at dissent, as in the Soviet Union, in order to curb it.

Those who are arrested under the Soviet Articles 70, 190-1 and 190-3 are described in the West as political offenders and those who are in consequence imprisoned are termed political prisoners. The status of dissidents, however, is controversial. Those same people have broken the law and are regarded by the Soviet authorities as criminal offenders. The dilemma is common to many countries. Every terrorist is someone’s freedom fighter. In Northern Ireland, Republican supporters regard those Republicans arrested for terrorist offences as political offenders and there has been a long struggle there to obtain the status of political prisoners for the ones who are imprisoned. From the 1972 hunger strike by the Republican prisoner, Billy McKee, a classification of political prisoners, called Special Category prisoners, was recognized in Northern Ireland. These prisoners were identified by the special concessions they received. There were approximately 2000 Republican and 800 Loyalist or Protestant Special Category prisoners by 1976, out of a population in Northern Ireland of 1.5 million. The British government abolished the Category in March, 1976 so that it was no longer possible to identify political prisoners. But they remained and started the ‘blanket protest’ from September, 1976, for the restoration of their political status. As many as 300 Republican prisoners, by 1978, were refusing to wear prison clothes and do prison work on the grounds that they were not criminals. Many Irish Catholics also regard the British Prevention of Terrorism Act as a means of political repression and define the 6,155 people who have been detained under it during the last 12 years as its victims and not as criminals. Yet the British government literally describes those who have been convicted as terrorists, murderers and criminals. Many British coal miners regard those who were imprisoned during the Strike as victims of political repression just as the dismissed printers from News International in London regarded the imprisonment of one of their leaders, Mike Hicks, for alleged assault on a picket line in 1986 as a political act. Quite clearly the Western preoccupation with Soviet dissidents as victims of political repression contains an element of hypocracy.

Although the Western media was always willing to publish details of what it considered to be Soviet violations of human rights its interest was stimulated by the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yury Daniel in February, 1966 and a new emphasis began. The two authors were accused under Article 70 of maligning and slandering the Soviet state in works published abroad. Before their trial, on 5 December, 1965, a group of intellectuals demonstrated in Pushkin Square, Moscow with slogans which stated: “Respect the Constitution, the Basic Law of the U.S.S.R.” and “We demand that the Sinyavsky - Daniel Trial be Public”. Sinyavsky and Daniel were found guilty and sent to labour camps for seven and five years respectively. There was a chain reaction. The demonstrations led to further arrests and trials which then led to more demonstations and so it went on. The writer Alexander Ginzburg wrote a “White Book” account of the Sinyavsky - Daniel trial in a self-published or samizdat form. For this he was arrested on 23 January, 1967. So too was Yuri Galenskov for producing a samizdat almanac Phoenix 1966. The day before Ginzberg’s arrest a group of about 30 people demonstrated in Moscow against the arrest of Galenskov. Two of the demonstrators, Victor Khaustov and Vladimir Bukovsky, a writer, were arrested and sent to labour camps. The trial of the demonstrators was recorded in another “White Book” by a physicist, Pavel Litvinov, who was exiled in south-east Siberia. Samizdat material began to multiply in 1968 and a Chronicle of Current Events was published in samizdat form from April of that year which provided a catalogue of the activities of the dissenting intellectuals and the reactions of the authorities. The events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 both acted as a stimulus to dissent and provoked a stern official response. It was as if dissenters and authorities were both on a treadmill. It moved remorselessly through the 1970s taking with it people, like Vladimir Bukovsky, who had been on it more than once.

The samizdat, typed by the author or a friend, handed around informally, usually reached the West where it was published in an emigré publishing house in Russian or in translation, and often broadcast back to the Soviet Union by Western radio stations. Radio Liberty in Munich, West Germany, which is financed by the US government, has a research staff which specializes in samizdat material and collects and stores it in a Samizdat Archive. It began its collection in the late 1960s but since 1972 the processed contents of the Archive have been available at four American and four European repository libraries, including the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and the British Museum in London. One Western compiler of samizdat estimated that between 1967 and 1971 about 700 documents, articles, stories, plays and books had reached the West.68 Books about Soviet dissent and containing samizdat articles began to appear on Western library shelves. In effect Soviet dissidence became a highly organized business in the West. It had its specialists, regular channels of communication and sources of finance. Doubtless, given the priorities of capitalism, it generated profits too. Some dissidents, in consequence, became household names and very rich at the same time. Many in the West who have never heard of a protesting British or American intellectual know the names of Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, Shcharansky, Bukovsky and Sakharov. A letter from Solzhenistyn to the fourth Soviet Congress of Writers in 1967 protesting against censorship became an international document. The same treatment was accorded to almost any letter written by the physicist, Andrei Sakharov, but in particular to his open letters to the Supreme Soviet in 1971 and to the US Congress in 1973.

The issue of Soviet dissidents was heightened by the Israeli campaign to gain exit for Soviet Jews after the Six Day War in 1967. Those Jews who organized protests or who wrote samizdat documents were arrested and brought to trial under Article 70 in the same way as non-Jews. The process of arrest followed by demonstration followed by arrest was repeated for the Jewish advocates of free emigration. A group of Soviet Jews tried to hijack a plane and fly it to Sweden in 1970. They were accused of treason. Two were sentenced to death but their sentences were later commuted to fifteen years’ imprisonment. After the sentences were announced, a group of British Jews protested outside the Soviet Embassy in London. In this way Western Jewry became involved in the campaign about Soviet dissidents though their concern was always primarily with the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate. In February 1971 a trial of protesting Jews was held in Leningrad; then in May, a third one took place in Riga, the capital of Latvia. The trials, and the demonstrations, fed on each other.

Western organizations, in the main, did not differentiate between dissenting Jews and non-Jews. The International Pen Club, the American Academy of Arts and Science and Amnesty International generated an interest in the West of dissidents in general. Amnesty International, in particular, systematically collected and disseminated data about imprisoned dissidents as “prisoners of conscience”. It published a report in 1975 on Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR: Their Treatment and Conditions, which it updated in 1980. It also published an English translation of the journal, A Chronicle of Current Events, up to 1975.

Until the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the USA, the American government was not directly involved in the issue concerning Soviet dissidents. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger adopted what Zbigniew Brzezinski called a “stance of moral indifference” towards dissidents which, Brzezinski claimed, was reflected in Kissinger’s advice to Nixon not to receive the exiled Soviet writer Solzhenitsyn.69 Given the consequences of US involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Chile it would indeed have been highly hypocritical if President Nixon had chastized the Soviet Union. There were pressures in Congress on Nixon, however, to take up the cause of Soviet Jewish dissidents. In 1972 a United States Trade Reform Act was passed which embodied the Soviet/American Trade Agreement and opened up the possibility of greatly increased trade between the USA and the Soviet Union. The National Conference on Soviet Jewry had opened a Washington office late in 1972 through which it lobbied American Senators and Congressmen to insert a human rights clause in the Act. The result of the lobbying was the Jackson Amendment which made trade concessions subject to the Soviet “respect for the right to emigrate”. This was followed by the Arms Control Export Act of 1976 and the Harkin Amendment which placed significant restrictions on military and economic assistance to countries which displayed a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” This was the period of detente when the relationship between the USA and the Soviet Union was closer than at any time since the war. The influence of the American Jewish lobby, however, carried the dissident question into the realm of American government. In 1975 the US government had signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, along with the Soviet Union and 33 European nations, which focussed international attention on the issues raised by Soviet Jewish dissidents. Thus when Jimmy Carter became President in January 1977 the American political mood was ready to respond to his ‘human rights’ appeals.

The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe which had been convened in Helsinki on 3 July 1973, continued in Geneva and was concluded at Helsinki on 1 August, 1975. It was signed by President Ford, who had taken over from the impeached Richard Nixon, President Brezhnev and Harold Wilson along with other Heads of State. The Agreement had much to say about human rights and freedoms.7" The context was a recognition of sovereignty. It was accepted by the signatories that they “will . . . respect each other's right to freely choose and develop its political, social, economic and cultural systems as well as its right to determine its laws and regulations.”

Principle VII then stated:

“The Participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development.

Within this famework the participating States will recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practise, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.

The participating States on whose territory national minorities exist will respect the right of persons belonging to such minorities to equality before the law, will afford them the full opportunity for the actual enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms and will, in this manner, protect their legitimate interests in this sphere.

The participatory States recognize the univeral significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States.

They will constantly respect these rights and freedoms in their mutual relations and will endeavour jointly and separately, including in co-operation with the United Nations, to promote universal and effective respect for them.

They confirm the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights and duties in this field . . .”

The Declaration enumerated ways in which co-operation between the States could be facilitated and, under the heading of Human Contacts, stated

“(a) Contacts and Regular Meetings on the basis of Family Ties

In order to promote further development of contacts on the basis of family ties the participating States will favourably consider applications for travel with the purpose of allowing persons to enter or leave their territory temporarily, and on a regular basis if desired, in order to visit members of their families ...”

“(b) Re-unification of Families

The participating States will deal in a positive and humanitarian spirit with the applications of persons who wish to be reunited with members of their family, with special attention being given to requests of an urgent character - such as requests submitted by persons who are ill or old.

It was possible for the various countries to sign the Helsinki Declaration in good faith because each attached its own meaning to the words. In the case of socialist and capitalist countries this meant using contrasting values so that even the very words democracy, individual, freedom and human rights were essentially interpreted differently. There was, then, bound to be conflicting evidence when the achievements of the Declaration were assessed. Nonetheless the immediate consequence in the Soviet Union was an acceleration of the rate of emigration of Jews. The number of Soviet Jews who emigrated rose from 13,363 in 1975 to 51,320 in 1979. From May, 1976, five unofficial groups were formed in Moscow, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia to monitor the application of the Helsinki Final Act. They had a total of about 50 members by 1979,71 some of whom were harassed by the authorities and then arrested as dissidents. Among the members of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group who were arrested were Yury Orlov and Anatoly Shcharansky. From the point of view of bourgeois liberal opinion in the West this situation was unsatisfactory and the agitation against the Soviet Union intensified. Orlov and Shcharansky became widely known in Britain and the USA. By this time, 1978, President Carter was at the front of the human rights campaign.

There is no question that President Carter became a leading protagonist of human rights all over the world because of his own strongly held humanitarian views. His administration, however, elevated the issue of human rights as a prime goal of American policy in order to cleanse America’s tarnished image after Vietnam and the Nixon affair and not for humanitarian reasons. This was made clear by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s anticommunist, anti-Soviet Assistant for National Security Affairs. Brzezinski wrote in his autobiographical account of his work with Carter that:

“Jimmy Carter took office sensing clearly a pressing need to re-invigorate the moral content of American foreign policy. After an almost unending series of revelations about the abuse of governmental power at home and abroad, the American people were dissatisfied with their government. In international affairs, there seemed to be a moral vacuum. The Carter Administration resolved to make a break with the recent past, to bring the conduct of foreign affairs into line with the nation’s political values and ideals, and to revitalize an American image which had been tarnished by the Vietnam experience.

I had long been convinced that the idea of basic human right had powerful appeal in the emerging world of emancipated but usually non-democratic nation-states and that the previous Administration’s lack of attention to this issue had undermined international support for the United States ... I felt strongly that a major emphasis on human rights as a component of US foreign policy would advance America’s global interests by demonstrating to the emerging nations of the Third World of the reality of our democratic system, in sharp contrast to the political system and practices of our adversaries. The best way to answer the Soviets’ ideological challenge would be to commit the United States to a concept which most reflected America’s very essence.”72

The question of human rights was raised in Jimmy Carter’s speeches both when he was a candidate and President. His inaugural speech, in words written by Brzezinski, stated “because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere . . . our commitment to human rights must be absolute”. Then, with Carter’s approval, Brzezinski established what was called a “Global Issues Cluster” on the National Security Staff to deal with human rights issues and thus institutionalized their projection by the US government. This ensured that memoranda on human rights would be produced and that Carter would continually receive policy suggestions. An Inter-Agency Group on Human Rights was formed “to examine bilateral/ multilateral aid decisions from the standpoint of human rights, and to provide guidance on loan support and coordinate policy”.73 This Group gave advice to the Administration to support, abstain from, postpone or oppose the granting of loans to a variety of countries depending on their human rights record. In the first two years the US Administration opposed more than 60 loans to 15 countries. Brzezinski, in his account, emphasized America’s world-wide concern, listing the release of political prisoners in Peru, Chile, Indonesia, and the decline in “disappearances” in Argentina. But there was no question that the US Administration’s primary concern was to isolate the Soviet Union for violations of human rights in contrast to the USA. This reflected Brzezinski’s hawkish attitude to the Soviet Union. He wrote: “By the mid-1970s it became increasingly evident that detente was not the panacea many thought it would be. Mounting public and congressional pressures forced the Executive Branch to make further movement in relations with Moscow contingent on the Soviets’ allowing greater freedom to emigrate and easing their treatment of dissidents.”74 He stated: “I felt strongly that in the US—Soviet competition the appeal of America as a free society could become an important asset, and I saw in human rights an opportunity to put the Soviet Union ideologically on the defensive ... I suggested that by actively pursuing this commitment we could mobilize for greater global support and focus global attention on the glaring internal weaknesses of the Soviet system”.7'1 In a memorandum to Carter, Brzezinski advised: “(i) Scrupulous fulfillment of the Helsinki agreement. Hence it is important that the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the agreement be closely monitored, especially in regard to human rights. Making it unmistakably clear to the Soviet Union that detente requires responsible behaviour from them on fundamental issues of global order . . .”76

In this way ’human rights’ became first a bargaining counter in arms negotiations with the Soviet Union and then, in the hands of President Reagan, an obstruction. The formula was taken up by other Western governments with great enthusiasm and without the slightest sign of hypocracy. Although Brzezinski was not a social democrat, his approach to the Soviet Union appealed to them for it enabled them to pursue anti-Sovietism whilst disclaiming it, saying that their only concern was human rights. It became fashionable for political leaders in the West to carry dossiers about Soviet dissidents with them to meetings with Soviet leaders. The practice was taken up by sections of the European Peace Movement. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, as is shown in a later chapter, gave high prominence to the human rights issue and made satisfactory relations with socialist Peace Movements conditional upon its resolution. The Green Party in West Germany and Codene in France adopted a similar posture. Immense publicity was given when dissidents were released. Anatoly Shcharansky, for instance, was received by the British Prime Minister and the US President after his dramatic release over the Glienicke Bridge, spanning East and West Berlin, on 11 February 1986.

The size of the dissident movement was always relatively small. Peter Reddaway stated in 1974 that only about 2000 names were known from all sources.77 During 1977, Roy Medvedev, one of the best known dissidents remaining in the Soviet Union, stated that the “dissidents do constitute a relatively small circle, usually alienated from the masses . . ,”78 Some estimates include nationalists and Jews with other dissidents while others do not. When Dr Theodore Friedgut, Director of the Soviet and East European Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, attempted to assess the size of the dissident movement in 1974 he found that it was a matter of conjecture rather than measurement, that it included people who had registered no more protest than putting their signatures on a petition and that, in any event, it constituted “at best a tiny percentage of the intelligentsia”.79 The estimates of the number of people who had signed petitions or contributed to samizdat documents ranged from a few hundred to 3,000. The most common estimate was in the region of 1,000 which is the figure Friedgut’s Institute arrived at after examining samizdat sources in Russian.80 Friedgut found that there were regions and institutions m the Soviet Union with no known dissenters. In other regions where there was some dissent it was not indigenous, as in Riga the capital of the Latvian Republic, where the participants “were Russians or Jews, with very few Latvians.” In general Soviet students were disinterested. Friedgut’s view was that dissidents comprised a “small and dwindling band” centred in Moscow.81

It is generally recognized that the dissidents came overwhelmingly from the intelligentsia. “On the whole”, Medvedev stated, “they are intellectuals”.82 “Socially”, Reddaway added, “the movement is overwhelmingly middle-class. Among its informal leaders are a high percentage of people from research institutes, including a disproportionately high number of mathematicians and physicists. Other leaders and supporters are engineers, teachers, lawyers, writers, artists, journalists and students, with a very small number of workers and military men.”83 For a brief period from 1978, the Western media claimed, there were rumblings of dissent in the Soviet trade union movement. A group of workers, describing themselves as unemployed, held two press conferences in Moscow in January, 1978, announcing the formation of a Free Trade Union Association. It claimed to have 110 candidate members but that 200 altogether were ready to join. The organizers made little effort to spread their views among Soviet workers but concentrated on influencing international opinion. They sent an appeal through Amnesty International to the International Labour Organization and trade union centres in Western countries for recognition as a trade union. Amnesty forwarded the appeal with a copy of the Association’s statutes to the ILO. It was taken up by the British TUC, the European Trades Union Congress and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. The principal organizer, Vladimir Klebanov, was a mining engineer so the appeal was discussed by the National Executive Committee of the National Union of Mineworkers at its meeting on 9 March 1978. The NUM decided to raise the matter with the Soviet authorities and the Soviet Miners’ Union. The TUC used its own channels, including the Soviet AUCCTU, to seek clarification. The European TUC had doubts about the objectives of the Association and held judgement until the ILO had stated its opinion. This came in April, 1978 when the ILO concluded that the documents received did not constitute a complaint which it could take up through its constitutional procedures. The issue did not rest there for the Executive Board of the ICFTU in May submitted a formal complaint to the ILO alleging a contravention of the ILO Convention on Freedom of Association. The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party also had the matter on its agenda and wrote to the TUC for information. Given the extensive interest in Britain in the intentions of the group of seven people who held the press conference on 20 January, 1978, it is probable that a similar reaction was occurring in the USA and other capitalist countries.

The British TUC doubted whether the Association could be described as a trade union. It stated that “the material available (indicated) that the members primarily sought to secure redress within the Soviet system for grievances which they maintained had been mishandled or ignored by the Soviet authorities, who harassed them in various ways. Neither the constitution nor the supporting material indicated that the Association was intended to act as a union in an industrial sense . . ,”84 Then the TUC received a reply to its letter to the Soviet All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions which outlined “the Soviet system for dealing with labour disputes and dismissals, mentioned the recent revision of legal provisions affecting labour inspection and dismissals, acknowledged by implication that complaints arose to be dealt with, and stated that a number of trade unions had been formed in the Soviet Union in recent years”. It added that the concept of a trade union implied an association of people of the same occupation or employed in the same enterprise and that the group comprising the complainants claiming to be a trade union could not pretend to pursue trade union objectives.85 These comments, the TUC concluded, were directed at the substance of the matter and settled it.86

The organizers of the press conference which launched the Free Trade Union Association were harassed by the police and arrested, whereupon the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions complained to the Soviet Government of repression and the violation of trade union rights. The Soviet government’s reply stated that the allegations were unfounded because the right to organize collectively was guaranteed by the Constitution, trade unions had extensive rights to defend workers’ interests and the complainants had nothing to do with trade unions or the occupational interests of workers whom they did not represent. This did not satisfy the ICFTU which wanted the Soviet government to detail why Soviet workers could not form trade unions of the Western kind. In Britain, however, there was satisfaction over the case in point, though at the 1978 Trades Union Congress a motion calling for a charter for basic human rights in all countries, but aimed at the Soviet Union, was carried without a debate.

With neither internal nor external support the Free Trade Union Association disappeared from sight. Nothing happened subsequently to change the social character of the dissidents. There was no sign that the Soviet workers felt the need to emulate the Polish workers who had rebelled against the Communist Party and the government by forming Solidarity in 1980 and 1981. The dissident movement remained the “small and dwindling band” of intellectuals including some Jews wanting to emigrate, some religious objectors and a few conscientious objectors. Amnesty International which monitored the arrest of Soviet citizens for taking part in non-violent protests had listed the names of 580 individuals in 1986 “whom it knew or suspected to be prisoners of conscience . . .”88 Early in February, 1987, the number had fallen to 530, of whom about 20 were Jewish protesters and 11 were conscientious objectors. Then Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner were unconditionally released from internal exile. During the second week of February a further 43 dissidents were released. The number who had received pardons rose to between 140 and 150 before the end of February. As all the cases of dissidents imprisoned under Article 70 were under review Amnesty’s total was likely to fall further. A Soviet Commission was established to examine, amongst other things, the implications of Article 70. It was becoming difficult for the West to continue using the issue of dissidents for anti-Soviet purposes.

There are questions, however, which nonetheless need to be raised about dissidence in the Soviet Union. The first one concerns the reasons for dissent and the second the explanation for the Soviet response to it.

There is no sense in which dissidents constitute an opposition in the Soviet Union. They have no unity and the causes of their dissent have no structural basis. There are Jews who wish to emigrate, nationalists who wish to sever from the Soviet Union, religious protestors who desire greater religious freedom, individuals who object to military service and intellectuals with mixed motives. There is very little overlapping between the groups. The physicist, Andrei Sakharov, who in the autumn of 1970 had been a founder member of the Soviet Committee on Human Rights, appealed in May the following year for the right of Jews to emigrate. His identification with the Jewish campaign was epitomized through his relationship with Elena Bonner, who is Jewish and whom he met at a demonstration and subsequently married. Sakharov’s attitude, however, was unusual. Mostly the various groups were divided by antagonisms. There were nationalists in the Ukraine and the Baltic Republics who were both anti- Semitic and suspicious of Moscow based intellectuals. In the main, each group was afraid that identification with any of the others would spoil its case.

But why should only intellectuals be dissidents? Roy Medvedev believed that intellectuals in most countries became the dissidents89 but that is clearly not the case in British history where working-class trade unionists have been most prominent. His explanation as to why others in the Soviet Union did not protest was that they were afraid. This was the view of most Sovietologists, expressed graphically by Theodore Friedgut who described Soviet society as one atomized by fear and suspicion through a system of “active networks of informers, both paid and volunteer.”90 This favourite Western explanation fits the stereotype neatly but it bears no relation either to the history of the Soviet people or people elsewhere. History shows that protest derived from social forces cannot be permanently repressed, though it may be temporarily defeated. Time and time again ordinary people have risen against the most repressive regimes. Russian workers rose against a cruelly oppressive system in 1905 and 1917; it was they who defeated the Western armies which intervened in 1918. In the Second World War no people resisted an invading army as determinedly as Soviet people. It was generally believed until 1976 that physical protest was impossible in South Africa and that, in any event, the black people had neither the will nor the ability to engage in it. Then school children in Soweto showed that the regime was vulnerable to protest. Since 1976 ordinary black South Africans, without facilities and often without organization, have continued and intensified their struggles. Nicaraguan peasants and Chilean workers have taken extreme risks in their struggle for freedom. It is obvious that protest cannot be permanently muted by fear.

Soviet trade unionists do not engage in collective protest against the system because there is no structural reason for it. The intelligentsia, in the main, does not protest either. So what activates the minority that does protest? Firstly there is a close identification between the aspirations of the disaffected segments of Soviet society and Western democratic values.91 In other words some Soviet intellectuals are envious of the lifestyle and individual freedom of Western intellectuals. They derive their impressions of life under capitalism from international conference centres and communications with Western academics who are a privileged élite. Envy, however, is a sandy base for protest because by its very nature it is individualistic.

The fragmented character of dissent is shown by the mixed bag of motives given by dissidents for their actions. Roy Medvedev commented about this in an interview with an Italian journalist in 1977.92 Some writers, artists and film and stage directors, he stated, became dissidents because they resented the restraints which working within collectives imposed on what they described as their natural creativity. Other intellectuals, such as Andrei Sakharov and Valentin Turchin, both theoretical physicists, began to protest because of events unconnected with their working conditions. Sakharov, for instance, criticized attempts to rehabilitate Stalin whom he believed was personally responsible for the purges in the 1930s. Others joined in for selfish, personal reasons. “Unfortunately”, Medvedev stated, “Soviet dissidents don’t always represent only the best elements of the intelligentsia; a lot of people dissent because they’re unhappy with their private or social lives. Many join the ranks out of sheer egocentricity, urging foreign correspondents to broadcast to the whole world their crude proclamations, appeals, and horror stories, full of ferocity.”97 He quoted the story of the Soviet poet Urin who resigned from the Writers’ Union and made statements which were broadcast in Russian from a foreign radio station because the Union refused to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.

The dissidents were politically divided. They ranged from Solzhenitsyn who demanded the moral regeneration of the Russian nation, meaning the restoration of the hegemony of the Russian Orthodox Church, and whose politics were so reactionary that he offended his American hosts, to Roy Medvedev who wanted a purer version of Leninism. In between were social democrats, liberals, apolitical humanitarians, nationalists, Christian Socialists and Zionists. Their political postures were fluid. Sakharov, for example, moved from neo-marxism in the mid- 1960s to liberal socialism and then liberalism, much to the disquiet of Medvedev who believed that many of Sakharov’s statements and political actions had not been either well thought out or rational.94 Once having taken the initial step of opposing Soviet communism and, by implication, identifying with Western values, they reflected the politically diffused character of Western pluralism. But whereas in the West pluralism is grounded in the capitalist mode of production, in the Soviet Union it has no material basis. The dissidents with their own specific recipes for a backwards political transformation are, therefore, anachronisms and misfits. They represent no problem to Soviet society except insofar as they are used by the West to discredit communism and to justify aggression against its practice. Soviet society undoubtedly possesses its own contradictions with consequential social class formations, but these push it forward to a progressive transformation of communism. The democratization of Soviet society means releasing the social forces which will expedite this transformation. It does not mean espousing bourgeois liberal values for these belong to the Soviet past, not its future.

The Soviet Union has experienced great difficulty in coping with dissent. Because the possession of power by the working class was the pre-requisite for socialist democracy, its preservation became the Soviet Union’s primary consideration. Indeed the preservation of working class power has become the dominant value in the Soviet system and is reflected in Soviet law, the operation of Soviet courts and the forces of law and order in general. In a world environment which posed no threats to the Soviet Union there would have been there an unparalleled extension of workers’ rights. The world environment, however, was implacably hostile. Until the Second World War the Soviet Union was enclosed within an ideological cordon sanitaire, perpetually threatened by subversive and economic destabilization. The Bolshevik Revolution was consistently in danger of being reversed. This situation generated a genuine fear of counter-revolution and provoked a suspicion of dissent. The grievous experiences of the German invasion in 1941 and the subsequent Nazi attempts to eradicate communism from Soviet society confirmed the fears and suspicion. The Soviet state developed, therefore, explicit, complex and inflexible protective mechanisms. A state apparatus was created to uncover, identify, expose and arraign those who threatened the system. But in the style of bureaucracies the apparatus lacked the facility to operate with discernment and discrimination. It was incapable of identifying degrees of dissent and of differentiating, therefore, between that which involved opposition to the system, that which was ineffective and irrelevant and that which was positive for the society. It became sensitive to all kinds of dissent and tended to repress it even when it was cosmetic, the figment of Western imagination and hopes.

An additional complication was created by the fact that the dissidents were primarily intellectuals for throughout Soviet history and beyond into that of Czarist Russia, intellectuals have been regarded with mixtures of suspicion, circumspection and respect. The repressive Czarist state prevented the development in the nineteenth century of a critical philosophy and social science through which Russian society could be analyzed, leaving literature, both prose and poetry, as the only effective means of communicating intellectual criticisms of society. Thus novelists and poets assumed a political significance in the eyes of both the state and the general population. From Pushkin and Lermontov to Tolstoy and Gorky, they were harassed by the police, arrested, exiled. They became national heroes in their own time. Through their works the written word assumed an almost mystical significance as the vehicle for forbidden ideas. It was searched out, avidly read and distilled for its hidden meanings.

The importance of the written word continued during and after the Bolshevik Revolution. All of the principal Bolsheviks were writers of high calibre. Lenin used the written word almost to the limits of its capacity as a means of arguing his case and of politicising others. Revolutionary feelings were expressed by writers such as Mayakovsky whose poems succinctly expressed the substance of the time. Artists too galvanised their talents to symbolize revolutionary aims in posters. As illiteracy was eliminated the Soviet people became avid readers and enhanced the importance of literature, and, thereby, the significance of writers. Literature continued to be a source of analysis, of criticism and of praise.

People who are treated seriously by society must expect to carry responsibilities and obligations. Where there are rewards there are usually costs. A number of Soviet writers have discovered this through their own experiences. Only where intellectuals in general and writers in particular play no serious critical analytical role, as in Britain, or where the system absorbs their criticism like a sponge, as in the USA, is a general freedom of expression permitted. In other words, where intellectuals are harmless because they are ignored or in other ways disarmed, they are free. But it is a spurious freedom.

Political Opposition

Yet despite the institutional restrictions on dissent there have frequently been oppositional factions within the Communist Party, while outside of it criticisms of the administration of communism have been facilitated and encouraged. This reality is in sharp contrast to the Western stereotype which portrays an inherently and totally repressive Soviet society. For this reason and because people find great difficulty in conceptualizing beyond their own experiences, there is a general failure in the West to understand the character and extent of criticism in the Soviet Union.

There have always been different, contending approaches within the Soviet Communist Party to the country’s social and economic problems. Just as there are sharp differences about priorities within capitalist societies so there are arguments within communist societies about the allocation of scarce resources. Indeed the significance and complexity of policy options are greater in the Soviet Union because there, decisions, which are determined by the hidden hand of the market mechanism in capitalist countries, are made consciously through the planning mechanism after a process of analysis and debate. The course taken by a capitalist country results largely from the interaction of market forces whereas whether the Soviet Union industrialises or not, the rate of its development, the allocation of resources between investment and consumption, the development of agriculture are all issues over which there are different views, representing different political positions and reflecting social forces which constitute interest groups in Soviet society.

The history of the Soviet Union is replete with illustrations of intensely contested arguments about policy issues within the Communist Party. During the 1920s the differences were institutionalized in factions. This led Stalin to describe the Sixteenth Congress of the Party in 1930 as “one of the few Congresses in the history of our Party at which there is no opposition of any crystallised kind, able to lay down its line and to counterpose it to that of the Party”.95 For a decade there had been organized but erudite debates about the role of trade unions in Soviet society. This issue was overtaken in 1927, however, by proposals for the First Five Year Plan and the collectivization of agriculture, both of which were opposed by the Right Opposition. There were two contrasting policies of industrialization. The opposition, namely N I Bukharin, Mikhael Tomsky and A I Rykov, wanted to pursue a path of industrialization within the framework of the New Economic Policy which had operated since 1921. Stalin’s proposals, on the other hand, were for accelerated industrialization involving the complete rejection of the NEP. Stalin won the argument within the Party and by the time of the Sixteenth Congress there was no serious criticism of the Party policy. The leaders of the opposition were present but were quiet. Stalin taunted them, though in a good-humoured manner. They were, he said, “afflicted with the same disease as that of Chekhov’s well-known character Belikov, teacher of Greek, “the man wrapped in padding”. That character, Stalin elaborated, “always went about in galoshes and a padded coat, carrying an umbrella in hot and cold weather. ‘Excuse me, but why do you wear galoshes and padded coat in July, in such hot weather?’ Belikov used to be asked. ‘You never can tell’, Belikov would reply, ‘Something untoward might happen; a sudden frost might set in, what then?' Everything new, everything that was outside the daily routine of his drab philistine life, he feared like the plague . . . The same thing must be said about the former leaders of the Right opposition . . . As soon as any difficulty or hitch occurs anywhere in our country they become alarmed, fearing that something untoward might happen . . . they begin to howl about a catastrophe, about the downfall of the Soviet regime”.96

Subsequent policy differences in the Party were not always dealt with in such a polemical fashion. But there was always opposition to the policy of the Party, even during its most difficult years. The Party was never monolithic. The question of how fast the rate of industrialization should be continued to arouse deep feelings though other issues arose and new personalities appeared around Stalin to propagate them. In the mid-1950s no one argued against the notion of centralized planning and collectivization but there were sharp divisions about the rate of development with G K Ordzhonikidze, the Minister for Heavy Industry, favouring caution and V M Molotov arguing for speed.97 From about 1934 the state of the Communist Party became the issue which overrode all others. Andrei Zhdanov wanted to cleanse and rejuvenate the Party through raising the consciousness of its members, using education and propaganda while N I Ezhov argued for its expurgation. There were always Right and Left or Moderate and Radical factions over each important issue.

With the fall of Ezhov from power in 1938, Zhdanov assumed responsibility for the press, agitation and educational departments of the Central Committee. This put him in an advantageous position to argue his case. From the Eighteenth Party Congress in March, 1939, however, the argument was not over the condition but the role of the Party and Zhdanov had a new adversary in the Politburo. At that Congress he was partnered as a Secretary of the Central Committee by Georgi Malenkov who believed that the Party should have direct control over production in contrast to Zhdanov who stressed the ideological work of the Party and insisted that if the communists who manned the state organizations worked consciously as communists there would be no need for direct intervention by the Party. Malenkov’s view was that the Secretariat of the Party should supervise the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) which was responsible for the country’s industrial administration rather than concern itself with achieving theoretical clarity. He believed that ‘political leadership’ was too nebulous when separated from direct involvement in running the economy.

The role of the Party had been an important issue from the outset in 1917 but it took on a new emphasis with the introduction of centralized planning and complete state ownership in 1929. It was present during the 1930s but submerged by the concern about the Party membership. When that issue was settled the question about how to run the economy became paramount. The different perspectives were reflected in the main Central Committee journals and in the editorials of Pravda. It was, however, a matter which affected the whole Party apparatus for it determined the relationship between the local Party secretaries and managers of every enterprise in manufacturing industry and agriculture. It was of particular concern to the new generation of low and middle level functionaries who had taken office in the wake of the purges and the Ezhovshchina. By the same token the level of consciousness of those officials was the reason for Zhdanov’s concern.98

The dispute between Zhdanov and Malenkov continued for a decade, until Zhdanov’s death in 1948. Its outcome changed with circumstances. In times of crisis, as during war, when there was uncertainty about the country’s political direction or when, in confusion, the political direction became threatened, then the Politburo came down on the side of Malenkov. When circumstances eased or when the needs of the situation demanded that production should be given priority over everything else and that Sovnarkom should be allowed to get on with its job unimpeded by Party supervision, as in the immediate post-war years, then Zhdanov got his way and the Party production branches were run down. After Zhdanov’s death Malenkov restored the influence of the Party in production but that did not end the matter. Malenkov himself became a casualty of the dispute but, ironically, for protecting the state apparatus and over-riding the authority of the Communist Party. When Stalin died, Georgi Malenkov became the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Prime Minister, and was responsible, therefore, for the economic administrative apparatus of the state. At first Malenkov held both this post and that of First Secretary of the Party but he soon relinquished the Party post.99 Nikita Khrushchev succeeded him as First Secretary and advocated the views which Malenkov had held in the arguments with Zhdanov. Khrushchev, from the outset, attempted to extend the Party’s managerial role-- “to give the lead to the ‘managerial’ rather than ‘ideological’ elements within the party, to its cadre of working executives rather than its political- ideological overseers, to the territorial party machines and not the central apparatus”.100 Thus Khrushchev wanted to increase the authority of the Party at the regional and local levels and in this matter too he was opposed by Malenkov who sought to improve the efficiency of industry through further centralization.

The principal policy issues in the Politburo after 1953, apart from the role of the party, were about whether to give priority to consumption or industry and in what ways to develop agriculture. Malenkov was in the minority on both issues. He favoured increased investment in the light industries and in developing the established agricultural regions. As he had been responsible for Soviet agriculture during Stalin’s last years and the harvest yields in 1954 were low, his agricultural policy had been tested and failed. He took the blame for the failure and resigned from his position as Chairman of Council of Ministers in 1955 to be demoted to that of Minister of Electric Power Stations, though until 1957 he remained a member of the Politburo. Khrushchev took a different view about agriculture and advocated opening up ‘virgin lands’ in northern Kazakhstan, western Siberia and south east European Russia as the primary means of increasing production. This policy was applied and, at first, showed signs of success. In 1956 there was a record harvest. Khrushchev’s political position was strengthened but opposition in the Politburo grew because of other policies he pursued.

There was, first, the policy of ‘De-Stalinization’ introduced at the Twentieth Congress of the Party in 1956. In practice this involved the rehabilitation of many people who had been arrested and sentenced from the mid-1930s onwards. The process inevitably cast suspicion on a number of existing Communist officials, including 3 or 4 members of the Politburo, including Molotov, Kaganovitch and the veteran Civil War commander Voroshilov, who opposed the policy. Others disliked it because they did not accept the condemnation of Stalin made by Khrushchev. “It was no secret to Khrushchev”, Roy Medvedev wrote, “that he had opponents in the Presidium, but they were not united: the intrigues and feuds of the Stalin period still divided them. Yet discontent with his activities mounted at all levels of the Party and state apparatus as a result of his political and economic initiatives in the first half of 1957.”101 The opposition was united by Khrushchev’s proposal to decentralize the management structure of the economy. From the beginning of 1957 he rushed through plans to abolish a number of central Ministries and substitute them with territorial Economic Councils. The opposition in the Politburo coalesced in June 1957 and a motion to dismiss Khrushchev was passed. The attempt was foiled, however, by the Central Committee of the Party which comprised many Regional Party Secretaries who had benefited from the decentralization. The Politburo members who led the opposition, Molotov, Kaganovitch and Malenkov, were described as the anti-Party group. They lost their seats on the Politburo and were dismissed from their posts. They were each given other jobs. Molotov became the Ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov was made the director of a large electric power station in Siberia while Kaganovitch worked as a manager of a factory. But their removal did not resolve the issues which were the basis of their opposition. Agricultural policy was a running sore. The ‘virgin lands’ policy had both encountered problems and created others. Nearly half of the area of the ‘virgin lands’ was damaged by soil erosion by 1964 due to the hurried efforts to get results. The maize harvest failed and livestock production fell. There were food shortages and the Soviet Union was compelled to import grain for the first time. Khrushchev was assessed by his own predictions. In 1957 he had declared that in about five years the Soviet Union would catch up with the USA in her production of meat, milk and butter per head of the population. Khrushchev had been popular with most of the population in 1957 when the first attempt to unseat him was made but by 1964 he was unpopular both with the general public and with Party leaders. There was much dissatisfaction with the methods and results of his leadership amongst a majority of Regional Party Secretaries and state functionaries on the Central Committee who had supported him in 1957. The Central Committee confirmed his dismissal as First Secretary of the Party in October 1964 after hearing 15 charges levied against him.102 Leonid Brezhnev, a secretary of the Central Committee, succeeded Khrushchev as First Secretary and remained in that position until his death in 1982.

The changes in the Soviet leadership which have been described so far in this section have usually been attributed by Western observers to “bitter manouvres . . . for influence and power” between contenders. This, for instance, was how Brzezinski described the dispute between Zhdanov and Malenkov.103 This conclusion stemmed from the assumption made about the Soviet Union that it is a monolithic totalitarian society. It is perceived as being led by a dictator who imposes his own personal style of stability. Thus any movement in the government of the society is assumed to be derived from the actions of the leader. Policy is deemed to be the consequence of decrees from above rather than social forces from below. Struggles amongst the leaders is for the succession and not about policies. The leader imposes stability by the use of his dictatorial powers. Merle Fainsod typified this approach in his work on the Soviet Union. In his comments about Khrushchev he stated: “Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, tolerates no derogation of his own authority, permits no opposition to raise its head within the Party, and insists that the Party function as a unit in executing his will.”104 He added that “Like Stalin before him, Khrushchev monopolizes control of the media of mass communications, saturating the channels of public opinion with party propaganda and permitting no outlet for political programs which challenge his own”. Thus political opposition in the Party becomes simply a means for the First Secretary to channel his changing whims. It exists purely at his discretion. He treats the Politburo and Central Committee as if they were puppets at the end of string he was holding. By the same token the First Secretary is attributed with the responsibility for all events which flow from the political centre. In this setting there can be no seriously sustained political opposition. When factions are identified then they are tolerated only in so far as they serve the interests of the First Secretary, to enable him to play one against the other.

This functionalist interpretation of Soviet politics held away during Stalin’s spell as Soviet leader after the war. When Khrushchev took office it was amended to take account of the obvious factional struggles in the Party. The focus was still on power rather than policy but it was not just power for power’s sake. Some consideration was given to the issues behind it. The work of Robert Conquest typified this new approach. It was, however, only an amendment of the static totalitarian view of Soviet society to bring it more into line with observed reality. There was no recognition in it of the causal importance of the contradictory forces which made up society’s structure. The amended approach was analogous to structural functionalism in the field of sociology which emerged to take account of the conflict in society which was seen to exist but which was not recognized by functionalist sociological theory. The revised theory was more plausible than the old one but retained its conceptual inadequacies. It focussed on people who were seen as individuals; it was concerned with personalities as the determinants of behaviour; in its analysis of Soviet politics, therefore, it was unable to escape from the Politburo and the formal Soviet political structure. There is no doubt that the formal decisionmaking framework of the Communist Party is an important influence on Soviet politics and that within it the position of the First Secretary is pivotal. But the communist leader interacts with the forces within the Communist Party and responds to its contradictions. The Communist Party is in a similar context in the wider society. The contradictions in Soviet life permeate all levels of political activity and are reflected in contrasting political attitudes. It is impossible for any Soviet leader to fail to respond to them.

The two decades which followed the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev were marked by relative internal stability. There was an increase in dissent and the emergence of the Jewish Question but there were no serious political challenges to the leadership. For much of the time there was a collective leadership within the Politburo comprising Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary of the CPSU, A.N. Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers and N.V. Podgorny, President of the Supreme Soviet USSR. The Politburo itself became more widely representative of interests within Soviet society rather than a collective of individuals who had emerged through the party apparatus. In other words, its members tended to be there because of the positions they held rather than for their personal qualities. For this reason there was a high degree of stability in the membership of the Politburo after 1965. Changes became dependent upon ill-health or deaths. The institutions of government, involving the Party and the state organs, became more integrated and bureaucratized. Thus from the mid-1960s the Soviet Union possessed a complex but unified system of government which did not depend on individual traits and which, in consequence, provided little scope for political factions.105

The integration of the political decision-making process narrowed the perspectives of the individual decision-makers and lessened their impact. There were fewer political leaders with the grand visions of the future of communism than there had been in the inter-war years. And those who were concerned about the future rather than just the day to day events were circumscribed by the bureaucratized system of policy-making. Quite clearly Yuri Andropov, the Chairman of the K.G.B. and long-standing member of the Politburo was in this position, as he revealed during his brief tenure as First Secretary of the C.P.S.U. on the death of Brezhnev in 1982. The general effect was that politics became much less flamboyant after Khrushchev.

But there were other more profound reasons for the absence of political discord during the Brezhnev period. The main issues before the society were no longer the great dividing ones of choosing the correct path to communism and resource allocation between investment and consumption or manufacturing industry and agriculture. They were instead a variety of non-divisive tasks such as quality control, distribution, new technology and work incentives which had administrative and technological solutions. The primary aim was to make Soviet society work under the prevailing structures along a pre-determined path. There was no political disagreement about this.

The world environment facilitated for the first time nonspectacular decision-making in the Soviet Union. Detente may in retrospect have been illusory but at the time it afforded the Soviet Union time and opportunity to get on with menial but important tasks such as replacing the housing stock, constructing kindergartens and improving educational facilities. The questions were not whether to build homes or tractors but how big the homes should be; not whether to build cars or tanks but how many cars to build. World events, of course, had an effect upon Soviet behaviour but none was seriously divisive. The Soviet intervention in Czecho-Slovakia in 1968, the international campaign to get Soviet Jews the right to leave and the increasing activities of Soviet dissidents generated political arguments but not political divisions.

Underlying these issues was a need by Soviet society for a spell of political quiescence as a part of the healing process after a series of traumatic events culminating in the war. Just to do familiar things in the ordinary course of events, no matter how inefficient or how politically circumscribed they were, was therapeutic for the society as a whole. In psychological terms it was a re-charging process through which communism in all of its apparel became quietly and completely accepted as a way of life. There is no doubt that the Brezhnev period of mundane politics was as necessary for the progress of the Soviet Union as the events which have followed. Unfortunately it carried with it a number of characteristics which have had negative effects upon the development of the Soviet economy. The attempt to correct those effects has aroused political opposition again.

Mr Mikhael Gorbachev, the First Secretary of the C.P.S.U since 1985, has described the negative features of the Brezhnev period in detail and has pronounced the policies to counter them. The features were inertia, an unwillingness to come to grips with the socio-economic issues, the emergence of an ossified concept of socialist relations, the treatment of reality as if it were static, a weakening of the economic tools of government, defects in the planning mechanism and the emergence of an ideology and mentality of stagnation which affected the operation of the Communist Party, the organs of government, the work ethic, culture, literature and the arts. The list was long and the criticisms were uncompromising.106 Bureaucratic inertia, which lay at the base, led to corruption and crime. Some Party officials, Gorbachev stated “abused their authority, suppressed criticism, sought gain, and some of whom even became accomplices in, if not organisers of, criminal activities.”

The solution submitted by Gorbachev on behalf of the Politburo lay in democratizing Soviet society. This has two aspects, namely ‘perestroika’ meaning restructuring, and ‘glasnost’ or openness. He outlined the implications of the policy. “The main purport of our strategy is to combine the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution with a plan-based economy and set the entire potential of socialism going. Reorganisation is reliance on the creative endeavour of the masses, all-round extension of democracy and socialist self-government, encouragement of initiative and self-organised activities, better discipline and order, greater openness, criticism and self-criticism in all fields of public life, and high respect for the value and dignity of the individual . . . Re-organisation means vigorously ridding society of any deviations from socialist morals, consistent enforcement of the principles of social justice, harmony between words and deeds, indivisibility of rights and duties, promotion of conscientious, high quality work, and overcoming of pay-levelling and consumerism . . . The final aim ... is to effect thoroughgoing change in all aspects of public life, to give socialism the most advanced forms of social organization, and bring out the humane nature of our system . . ,”107 These aims, in short, involve the restructuring of economic mechanisms, the alteration of established administrative practices, the widening of the sphere of decision-making to include ordinary people and the election of senior management. They amount to a radical change in established institutional practices. ‘Glasnost’ reinforces ‘perestroika’ by encouraging the discussion of issues and the criticism of both institutional practices and officials who execute them. The strategies thus threaten the positions of middle-level Party functionaries, senior managers of enterprises and government officials with a pincer-like movement which compels them either to accommodate to the idea of institutional innovation or risk being removed from their posts. Many of them, particularly at regional level, are resisting what in effect is a ‘cultural revolution’ but there is opposition to the strategies at all levels from people who either believe that they are wrong for the Soviet Union or are simply suspicious and apprehensive of change like Chekhov’s character, Belikov.

The new democratizing policies are generating a widespread, intense and open debate, with opinions ranging from enthusiastic support to scepticism and outright condemnation. They have emerged through the formal policy-making procedures of the Communist Party. Their first formal presentation was at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February 1986. The broad political strategies to achieve them were formulated at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU which followed the Congress in April. As the implications of the policies emerged so the opposition to them became more overt and obstructive. The next Plenum of the Central Committee, at which it was intended to outline the strategies further, had to be postponed on three occasions because of the opposition to democratization. In the interim there was an extensive reshuffling of the personnel in Moscow concerned with policy formulation. Following the April Plenum, Mikhael Gorbachev stated, “a large part of the Secretariat and heads of department in the CPSU Central Committee have been replaced, practically the entire composition of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers has been renewed.”108 At the Plenum of the Central Committee, eventually held in January 1987 to discuss “Re-Organization and the Party’s Personnel Policy”, Mr Gorbachev stated that he and “other Politburo members and Central Committee Secretaries had many meetings and conversations with Members of the Central Committee, public figures, workers, collective farmers, intellectuals, veterans and young people” in order to assess opinion about the policy. He spoke of the opposition but described it in structural terms. “We see”, he said, “that change for the better is taking place slowly, that the cause of re-organization is more difficult and the problems which have accumulated in society more deep-rooted than we first thought. The further we go with our re-organization work, the clearer its scope and significance become: more and more unresolved problems inherited from the past come out.”109

The way in which ‘glasnost’ is being exercised by Mikhael Gorbachev highlights that kind of Soviet criticism which is largely incomprehensible to the West. The speech which he made to the Plenum of the Central Committee in January, 1987, was in Western eyes, a devastating critique of the Soviet system. “No accomplishments”, he said, “even the most impressive ones, should obscure either contradictions in societal development or our mistakes and failings ... at some point the country began to lose momentum, difficulties and unresolved problems started to pile up, and there appeared elements of stagnation and other phenomena alien to socialism. All that badly affected the economy and social, cultural and intellectual life . . . The main cause - and the Politburo considers it necessary to say so with the utmost frankness at the Plenary Meeting - was that the CPSU Central Committee and the leadership of the country failed, primarily for subjective reasons, to see in time and in full the need for change and the danger of the intensification of crisis phenomena in society . . . Comrades it is the leading bodies of the Party and the state that bear responsibility for all this.” He listed some problems which they faced such as the use of socialist property to obtain unearned income, the corruption of officials, the spread of alcohol and drug abuse, the rise in crime, defective planning and negative attitudes towards work. His language was trenchant. “Disregard for laws, report-padding, bribe-taking and encouragement of toadyism and adulation had a deleterious influence on the moral atmosphere in society. Real care for people, for the conditions of their life and work and for social well-being were often replaced with political flirtation - the mass distribution of awards, titles and prizes . . .”110

This blistering criticism was not a form of flagellation which carries no lessons and brings no changes, as is the case with the Senate and Congressional Hearings in the USA. Nor was it a statement that Soviet society is in danger of collapse. It was, on the contrary, the use of self-criticism as therapy. It exposed some elements but did not condemn the society. It was a special kind of exhortation which other Soviet leaders have practised. Lenin consistently used speeches to explain and exhort which were models of analytical rigour. They acknowledged mistakes, defects, defeats and setbacks without embellishment in the belief that understanding reality was a necessary condition for action to change it. This correlation implies that if the analysis is deliberately distorted in order to hide unpalatable facts then the policies derived from it will be defective. Objective analysis is inevitably critical. When practised by political leaders it becomes self-criticism. It was such analysis which led Lenin to the New Economic Policy in 1921 and then convinced Stalin to institute the First Five Year Plan and collectivization. It has, in the main, featured in the Central Committee Reports to Congresses of the CPSU though on occasions in the 1970s the analysis was fudged. Gorbachev thus is following the policy of ‘glasnost’ practised by Lenin.

Political self-criticism in the Soviet Union is an activity with some risk but only to the individual leaders. When in 1921 Lenin described the catastrophic food situation which was causing widespread starvation his only motivation was to devise policies to resolve it.111 It was not an admission of failure but a recognition of a particular constellation of forces He did not fear that his Party would be displaced as a consequence though he himself might have been a casualty as Khruschev was in 1964. He did not have to gloss over problems in competition with other Parties or seduce voters with false promises. Nor did he have to defend his own class interests against another. None of the political forces which compel Western political leaders to disguise failure, to project it on to the shoulders of others, to find scapegoats, is present in the Soviet Union. It is this difference of experience which makes the Soviet use of self-criticism largely incomprehensible to people in the West.

Forums for Criticism

The Communist Party is the only legimitate forum for organized political opposition in the Soviet Union. This follows from the fact that it is the only political party and that, therefore, only through it can government policy be changed. Any other kind of opposition must, to be successful, act on the forces within the Communist Party. Although the Party with about 17 million members is large in absolute terms it remains a cadre Party, comprising 15 per cent of the population. It operates therefore in a milieux which is predominantly non-Party. In order to fulfil its primary task of providing political leadership it has to understand that milieux and respond to its pressures. It can only maintain its position in the long-run by having credibility with the broad population. It has, therefore, to produce the political decisions which serve the whole of Soviet society. This does not mean that the Party has to pursue a populist line. It is a leading Party and has to initiate and experiment and, in consequence, on occasions to take unpopular decisions. But unpopular, as well as popular policies must relate closely to the needs of the society. There is no sense in which the Party can lead without being a political sensor and in order to be this there have to be mechanisms whereby criticisms, needs and aspirations of ordinary people can be communicated to the Party.

The milieux of the Communist Party is a collectivist one. The ethos of the system is collectivism. All persons act through collectivities at work and in their leisure. The society resolves its economic and social problems, ranging from the anti-social behaviour of an individual in a block of flats to the macro-social issues, such as the character of the education system, through discussion. There are facilities for meetings everywhere, in Palaces of Culture, trade union offices, at work where every factory or shop has a ‘Red Corner’ where workers meet before or after work to debate issues and air their grievances. No major changes in legislation are made without wide-ranging debates. As was stated earlier, the alterations to the Soviet Constitution were preceded by wide-ranging discussion throughout the country. The new 1936 Constitution stipulated that the USSR Supreme Soviet should establish a Labour Code to introduce uniformity between the various Republics. This was not done until 1970 when the draft of the ‘Fundamental Labour Legislation’ was published in the press for a nationwide discussion. Workers in factories and offices, teachers and scientists, trade unionists and management, engaged in discussions and submitted amendments to the Draft Bill Commission. The 1936 process of nationwide consultation was repeated when the Constitution was revised for the second time in 1977. “The Constitutional Commission of the USSR Supreme Soviet consisted of experienced Party and Government officials and representatives of the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the people’s intelligentsia. Prominent scientists, specialists and representatives of state bodies and public organizations took part in drafting the Constitution. The draft was considered twice at Plenary Meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The draft Constitution was put up for nationwide discussion which lasted nearly four months at about a million and a half meetings at factories, collective farms, in units of the armed forces and in residential neighbourhoods. It was discussed at trade union plenary, actif and general meetings, the Young Communist League, co-operative societies and organizations of creative workers. All the Soviet Union’s Communists participated in the discussion. There were more than 450,000 open Party meetings at which over 3,000,000 people took the floor. The draft was examined at sessions of all the Soviets, from rural Soviets to the Supreme Soviets of constituent republics, that is, by more than 2,000,000 deputies representing the entire Soviet people. The Constitutional Commission, the press received an endless stream of letters from all parts of the Soviet Union . . . Upwards of 140,000,000 people, that is, more than four-fifth of the country’s- adult population, took part in discussing the Draft Constitution . . . About 400,000 proposals clarifying and amplifying the wording of articles of the Constitution were put forwards . . .”112 Not a single law on education is adopted without a preliminary nation-wide discussion. The 1973 Draft Fundamental Legislation on Public Education was published in the press and discussed for four months. 120 million people participated in the discussion of the 1984 Draft Reform of General and Vocational Schools, a particularly contentious proposal of which was that to lower the age at which children start primary school from 7 to 6 years.

The means used to enable ordinary people to submit their views about major changes in the law are, on the one hand, collective organizations such as trade unions, the Young Communist League and Cooperative Societies, where collective opinions are expressed and, on the other hand, letter writing to the Communist Party, government departments, trade unions and the press through which both collective and individual views are communicated. The means, however, are constantly available and are continually used as forums for criticism. Trade unions are the most influential means for they are mass organizations with close relations with the Communist Party, access to government ministries and, under the 1977 Constitution, the right to make direct proposals for legislation. More than 99 per cent of the labour force belong to trade unions, giving them, in 1987, a membership of nearly 140 million. The rate of membership participation is high. Indeed the quorum for local union meetings is two-thirds of the total member-ship. The topics discussed at the meetings cover all facets of union activity and range from work situation problems to kindergarten facilities, education, housing, tourism, industrial health provisions, social security and foreign policy. Workers, however, have other opportunities to discuss their work situations and to criticize management. They meet in Work Collectives to discuss the problems at their immediate respective points of production and in Standing Production Conferences for matters at the enter-prise level. Through these various means workers raise issues of bureaucracy, managerial inefficiency, corruption and defective planning. Many managers have been dismissed as a result of complaints lodged by individual workers backed by collective support.

The extensive and persuasive character of group discussion should be a clue to the character of Soviet society. It is not possible to combine a high level of universal education with a system of decision-making and consultation based on collectives and, at the same time, prevent debates which will lead to criticism. This was learned early on by totalitarian states. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco Spain, South Africa and other contemporary totalitarian regimes in Asia and South America have all been compelled to ban every kind of public gathering, even conversation by more than 2 or 3 people in the streets, in order to preserve their totalitarianism. If people are allowed to meet then surely they will talk and criticize. It does then seem perverse of the Soviet Union, if it is trying to muzzle criticism, to encourage group discussions.

A long-standing formal means for communicating individual complaints are the Committees of People’s Control. These were started as Complaints Bureaus in April 1919 under the People’s Commissariat of State Control, to receive, investigate and check complaints and statements by workers and peasants. In 1932 Stalin described the Bureaus as a means of countering bureaucracy and red-tape. Since 1932 they have changed their designation but not their purpose. They have become particularly active under the ‘glasnost’ policy of Mr Gorbachev.

Letter writing to the press, trade unions, the Communist Party and governmental departments is a particularly important forum for enabling Soviet people to express their opinions. It has always been regarded as a serious channel of communication both by ordinary people and the government and has become protected by law. At the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the Russian Communist Party in September, 1920, a Special Control Commission was formed on Lenin’s initiative to deal with written complaints sent to the Party. The resolution stated that “not a single complaint should be left unanswered . . .” In 1921 non- Party people were advised to criticize the Party if necessary. The Special Control Commission was told in 1923 to handle complaints “in a Party spirit” with no arrests or searches. From 1924 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party began to concern itself with letters to newspapers. For instance, in 1926 it ruled that “letters sent to the press by workers and peasants should be treated as serious sources of information about complaints by information departments of Party Committees”; while the following year those who handled the complaints were warned not to be “guilty of a condescending, patronizing attitude to the complainants” for if they were they would be taken to court and prosecuted. Readers Conferences were set up to discuss complaints. Newspapers were given guide-lines for handling letters expeditiously and were admonished if they failed. For instance in 1936 the editors of two newspapers, the Northern Caucasian Bolshevik and The Star, were dismissed for handling letters incompetently, humiliating writers and forgetting that “there is a living person behind every letter”. The Supreme Soviet in 1981 stipulated that all complaints and letters to State, Public Bodies, Enterprises, Establishments and Offices should be replied to within one month and those which could be answered without a follow-up should have a reply within 15 days. In consequence, trade unions, the Communist Party and newspapers have established departments to deal with letters. Each letter is filed; every letter gets an answer. Many are collective ones. In 1983, 6,000 collective letters were sent to the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. The newspapers Trud, Pravda and Izvestia receive in the region of one million letters each year.

Comparisons:

There is a similarity between democracy in the Western capitalist countries and the Soviet Union in that, at bottom, it is about ordinary people running their own lives. After that there are profound differences. The Soviet Union starts off with a structure which has no major class or power divisions. The working class is the only class and the problem is finding ways in which it can permeate the decision-making process directly and through representatives. The extent to which that is done is the measure of Soviet democracy.

Soviet society is a collectivist one so that its democracy cannot be gauged by the degree of individual freedom to criticize, oppose and subvert. Individuals achieve their freedom through that of the collectives to which they belong. Their interests, therefore, are subordinate to collective ones. But this subordination does not mean that individuals play no part. On the contrary, they constitute the collectives and the quality of their deliberations and interactions determines the level of collective achievement. Thus democracy in the Soviet Union has a positive connotation. It is not simply about the right to attack and discard but also about the task of building and improving.

The manner in which the Soviet Union has tackled this task has been significantly influenced by its own environmental conditions. Throughout most of its history it has been compelled to act as if it were under siege, guarding against external attacks and internal subversion. This situation generated a climate of suspicion, the visible signs of which were restrictions on the right of expression and punishment in corrective labour camps or internal exile for those who violated them. The Soviet Union’s own democratic processes were an inevitable casualty. The country went through phases of fluctuating intensity about its security. Its concern was high during the Civil War, during the period leading up to the Second World War, during the War itself and its immediate, Cold War, aftermath. Restrictions on the freedom of expression varied as the concern about internal security changed. But they were never absolute and during some periods were insignificant. The need to be alert about threats to the system, however, gave rise to institutions whose task it was to regulate dissent, thus bureaucratizing repression. Bureaucracies have the tendency to respond automatically to signs without sensitivity about the nature of the issues. In the Soviet context this meant that dissent was sometimes repressed even when it was marginal and in no sense a threat. This has happened during the last two decades when dissidents have been neither numerous nor united in intent.

The question which arises is whether the action which has been taken against dissidents has given character to the whole of Soviet society as commentators in the West suggest. Is a society repressive because it harasses a marginal group of protesting intellectuals? Quite clearly repression is repression whatever the numbers or special positions of those affected. The circumstances of repression, however, cannot be ignored. Nor, in relation to those circumstances can the marginal character of repression be disregarded.

In other words, the combined effects of the transformation from capitalism to socialism and the intense resistance of international capitalism to the transformation made it impossible for Soviet society to develop logically on the premise of socialism. There were bound to be distortions, even mutations, in the practice of administering society. None of these consequences, however, have been shown to be endemic to Soviet society for they have changed in quality and eased in intensity. In this respect the marginal character of dissidents does have a relevance. The historical experience of the Soviet Union indicates that its treatment of dissidents has not been a function of internal structural conflicts but mainly of international circumstances. Given a propitious international environment the Soviet Union would have practised a tolerance of dissent consistent with socialist values.

A wholly different picture of the character of Soviet society emerges if human rights are viewed in their wider and more appropriate sense, as is described below in chapter seven. Then the right to dissent is put alongside other rights such as the right to live, to work, to be educated and to be healthy. If poverty is regarded as tyranny and unemployment is treated as a denial of human rights, then the Soviet Union scores against all capitalist countries. But, it can be argued, making comparisons between the defects of different societies is invidious. It does not correct a wrong because others have committed it too; even if they have committed it doubly. But by comparing the records of the accusers it may help to understand their motives and their priorities. The major Western capitalist countries would be lowly placed on a league table of broadly based human rights. The USA has a record of consistent discrimination against its black population and a systematic denial of even basic human necessities to the Native Americans. Its intervention in Vietnam caused approximately 4 million casualties while in Chile the democratic system as well as many lives were the casualties of American interference. No American can accuse the Soviet Union of human rights violations without applying double standards. Then what of US allies? What penance is required of West Germany for its genocidal treatment of its Jewish inhabitants and the Jews in Europe in general? Moreover, through the policy of Berufsverbote it denies employment to people because of their political beliefs. Turkey, a member of NATO, applies a particularly brutal form of political discrimination involving torture and long prison sentences. The complete leadership of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Union (DISK) was arrested in 1981 for engaging in normal trade union activities. The government demanded death sentences for all 51 members of the union executive. By 1986 as many as 1,477 trade unionists were standing trial: South Africa, America’s close political ally has an indescribable record of violence against black people. Britain, of course, has a colonial history which reaches into the present through discrimination against black immigrants and its own black citizens. Its contemporary treatment of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland through the operation of jury-less Diplock Courts and on the English mainland through the Prevention of Terrorism Act seriously stains its own record. The selection of the Soviet Union for special denunciation by such countries seems rather suspicious. But, perhaps, before a conclusive judgement can be made the Soviet Jewish question and the wider human rights issue should be examined.

FOOTNOTES

1. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 230.
2. ibid, p. 246 and p. 248.
3. The Soviet Impact on the Western World, op cit, p. 5.
4. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 249.
5. ibid, p. 242.
6. ibid, p. 243.
7. See The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, by E H Carr, Penguin Books, vol. 2.
8. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 172. Speech to the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) March, 1921.
9. ibid, pp. 185-6.
10. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party of Bolsheviks was renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in March 1918 in order, Lenin stated, to conform to the terminology formulated by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto.
11. This was recognised by Soviet critics of the Communist Party such as Roy . Medvedev. See his work Let History Judge.
12. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 30, p. 327. A speech made on 2 February 1920. 13. A History of the USSR by Andrew Rothstein, p. 106.
13. ibid, p. 245.
14. See Origins of the Purges by J Arch Getty, p. 112.
15. Szymanski, op cit, pp. 228-229.
16. Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 3, November, 1982, p. 46.
17. "On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929-56” by S G Wheatcroft, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXIII, No. 2. April, 1981, p. 266.
18. Gulag Archipeligo, 1973, (Fontana edition) p. 595.
19. The Great Terror, p. 713.
20. "Analysis of Forced Labour Statistics” by S G Wheatcroft, Soviet Studies, April. 1982, p. 227.
21. The Great Terror, p. 706.
22. "An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labour, 1929-56", Soviet Studies, Vol. 33. January. 1981. A polemic developed between Wheatcroft and Rosefielde over the question of Soviet labour camps. They differed over the role of forced labour in the industrialization of the Soviet Union and over the size of the camp populations from 1929 until Stalin's death. Wheatcroft consistently accused Rosefielde of exaggerating the significance of forced labour and the size of the camps. The Slavic Review, The American Quarterly Journal of Soviet and East European Studies, took up the questions in its autumn issue, No. 3, in 1985. It allowed Wheatcroft and Rosefielde to make comments on each other's position and then invited two specialists in Soviet demography, Barbara A Anderson and Brian D Silver, to review the debate in an article called "Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR". The issue by that time had become a straight-forward demographic one, namely, ‘what was the loss of Soviet population due to forced labour camps and collectivization?' This led to a further question about the amount of excess mortality between 1929 and 1963. The authors covered Conquest’s intervention in the debate and reviewed the main analysts of Soviet population statistics. In a closely argued article they concluded with a gentle reprimand for those who made unwarranted assumptions about the data and supported Wheatcroft's approach. The main goal of the article, Anderson and Silver stated had "been to demonstrate the sensitivity of estimates of excess mortality to assumptions about the "normal" trends in fertility and mortality. If one were able to make defensible assumptions about these trends, one might reduce the range of uncertainty about the extent of excess mortality. But a considerably greater effort to defend assumptions, to verify the quality of extant demographic data, and to determine what the actual demographic trends were is needed before more precise estimates of excess mortality during the 1930s can be made. Stephen Wheatcroft's work has been very helpful in moving scholarship in that direction. We hope that increased awareness of the sensitivity of any estimates to the assumptions will help scholars to avoid making or tolerating unwarranted interpretations of the data.” (Slavic Review, No 3, Vol. 44, pp. 535-6).
23. ibid, p. 65.
24. ibid, p. 60.
25. ibid. p. 51.
26. Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917-1967, by T H Rigby. Princeton, New Jersey, 1968. p. 214.
27. The Great Terror, p. 754.
28. Let History Judge, p. xxxii.
29. Smolensk Under Soviet Rule by Meric Fainsod, 1958, p. 3.
30. ibid, p. 12.
31. Quoted by Wheatcroft in Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXV, 1983. p. 232.
32. Szymanski, op cit, p. 247.
33. ibid. p. 229.
34. Getty, op cit. p. 40.
35. The most detailed Western source for Communist Party membership changes is Rigby, op cit.
36. ibid. pp. 178-179.
37. Getty, op cit, p. 54.
38. Quoted in Getty, op cit, pp. 67-68.
39. ibid, p. 55.
40. ibid, p. 66.
41. “Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics” by S G Wheatcroft, Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXV. No. 2. April 1983, p. 227.
42. Getty, op cit. p. 88.
43. ibid, p 89.
44. ibid, p 110.
45. Up to 1936 only the city and village soviets were elected by direct election. Other levels comprised of delegates elected from the body at the next level down. See A History of the USSR, by Andrew Rothstein, pp. 238-248.
46. Getty, op cit, pp. 137-149.
47. ibid, p. 158.
48. ibid, p 164.
49. Rothstein, op cit. p. 252.
50. Sec Getty, op cit, p. 168 for details of the situation in the Western Region.
51. ibid, p. 178.
52. Let History Judge, p. 365.
53. ibid, p. 351.
54. Rigby, op cit, p. 211.
55. Stalin: A Political Biography, 1949. p. 384.
56. ibid, p. 212. Similar figures arc found in "Analysis of Forced Labour Statistics" by S G Wheatcroft, Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXV, No. 2. 1983, pp. 226-7.
57. Szymanski, op cit, p. 241.
58. Rigby, op cit, pp. 217-219.
59. Getty, op cit, p. 175.
60. ibid, p. 206.
61. Stalin: The Man and his Era, 1973, p. 419.
62. ibid, pp. 418, 420 and 421.
63. ibid, p. 422.
64. Getty, op cit. p. 203.
65. ibid, p. 203.
66. Dissent in the USSR, ed. by Rudolf L Tökés, 1975, p. 60.
67. Uncensored Russia by Peter Reddawav, 1972, p. 20.
68. Power and Principle. Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977-1981 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1983, p. 150.
69. Sec How to Secure Peace in Europe by Denis and Cynthia Roberts 1985. for the full text of the Helsinki Declaration and an informative interpretation of it.
70. Prisoners of Conscience In the USSR: Their Treatment and Conditions. An Amnesty International Report, 1980, p. 20.
71. Brzezinski, op cit. p. 124.
72. ibid. p. 126.
73. ibid, p. 124.
74. ibid. p. 149.
75. ibid, p. 150.
76. The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, edited by Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, 1975, p. 128.
77. On Soviet Dissent by Roy Medvedev, 1980, p. 2.
78. Tökés, op cit, p. 123.
79. ibid, p. 124.
80. ibid, pp. 126-127.
81. Medvedev, op cit, p. 2.
82. Reddaway in The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, op cit, p. 128.
83. TUC Report, 1978, p. 259.
84. ibid, p. 60.
85. Documents relating to the case including biographical details of some of those involved were published in Workers Against the Gulag, edited by Viktor Haynes and Olga Semyonova, Pluto Press, London, 1979.
86. I travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union in 1982 talking with trade unionists and found no sign of the unrest which was manifest in Poland.
87. Amnesty International Report, 1986, p. 310.
88. On Soviet Dissent, op cit, p. 6.
89. Tökés, op cit, p. 128.
90. Reddaway, The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, op cit, p. 131.
91. On Soviet Dissent, pp. 2-7.
92. ibid, p. 5.
93. ibid, p 4.
94. J Stalin Works, Vol 13, p. 1.
95. ibid. pp. 13-14.
96. Getty, op cit, pp. 14-17.
97. See “The Origins of the Conflict Between Malenkov and Zhdanov: 1939-1941” by Jonathan Harris, Slavic Review, vol. 35, No. 2. 1976, pp. 287-303.
98. Khrushchev, The Years in Power by Roy A Medvedev and Zhores A Medvedev, 1977, pp. 2-7.
99. Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership by Carl A Linden, USA, 1966, p. 30.
100. Khrushchev by Roy Medvedev, Oxford, 1982, p.112.
101. ibid, pp. 235-245.
102. The Permanent Purge, op cit, p. 23.
103. How Russia is Ruled by Merle Fainsod, Harvard, USA, 1963, p. 583
104. For an interesting examination of the structure of the Soviet Government see Politics and the Soviet Union by Mary McAuley, Penguin Books, 1977.
105. See Mr Gorbachev’s speech to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, January 27th 1987, Moscow News, Supplement to issue No. 6, (3254), 1987.
106. ibid.
107. ibid.
108. ibid.
109. ibid.
110. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp. 441-449.
111. Constitution of the Socialist State of the Whole People by Alexander Kositsin, Moscow, 1979, pp. 11-12.