The myth that Soviet communism is "Marxist" and "socialist."

         A famous Russian revolutionist of the late nineteenth century, Vera Zasulich, once wrote to Karl Marx about the special problems of the transition to socialism in her country. He replied bluntly: "The inevitability of socialism is limited to the countries of Western Europe." No Russian socialist, including Bolsheviks, would have disputed that dictum before 1917.

         Marx, Engels, and their followers of all shades took it for granted that socialism or communism (the terms were used interchangeably) could come only to a highly developed capitalist society. This was accepted without challenge by all of the various schools of Marxism. The attempt to bring socialism to a relatively backward country like Russia, overwhelmingly agrarian and in an early stage of capitalist development, was flagrantly anti-Marxist.

         Those making the quixotic attempt were themselves deeply conscious of violating Marxist precepts. Not until some years after they acquired total authority did they begin to revise the long-held doctrine. Unable to change the facts of a premature action, they revised the theory to justify their retention of power.

         The industrial revolution, or the bourgeois revolution as socialists called it, beginning in the late eighteenth century, sounded the death knell of feudalism. The introduction of socialism, in the Marxist view, could not—and should not—even begin until the industrial-bourgeois revolution was completed. Socialism was not a substitute for the bourgeois stage of history. It was the higher stage to follow. (64)

         Socialists, that is to say, never looked upon their proposed system as a method of industrializing economically retarded countries. The full development of capitalism by capitalist means, they agreed, was a pre-condition that could not be skipped. The very idea of "expropriating" an underdeveloped nation seemed to them both heretical and silly, like robbing an empty till.

         Their responsibility would not come into play until after the target nation had been fully industrialized. Socialism, as they saw it, was a system for the equitable distribution of the wealth and goods already piled up in an advanced, affluent society. The working class would expropriate a "going concern" and administer its abundance more justly and rationally. It would abolish private ownership of the means of production, profits, the bourgeois market, etc., and create an equalitarian paradise according to the formula: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. [The Stalin Constitution, still in force, emptied the formula of meaning by changing just one word. "From each according to his abilities," it states, "to each according to his work."]

         Neither Marx nor his disciples offered much guidance on how the changeover from a going capitalism would be managed. Presumably the elimination of profit would automatically cancel out avarice, crime, class conflicts, violence-breeding competition, and even the protracted need for a law-enforcing state. The millennium would emerge full-blown from the debris of a proletarian revolution. But what would happen if a desperately poor, largely agricultural nation, without enough to supply everyone's "needs," undertook socialism? This question was never asked, since it ran counter to all their theories and expectations.

         By Marxist laws of "economic determinism," it was plainly un-Marxist to provoke a socialist expropriation before the country had matured industrially, so that it possessed a substantial middle class and a strong proletariat. In socialist language, the modes of production "determine" the nature of the political state: politics reflect economy, not the other way around. (65) That a purely political event, like the seizure of power in Russia, should "determine" the modes of production was unthinkable. It was based on no historical law, Marxist or any other, but on the arbitrary will of a group of politicians. It pulled the props from under .the "scientific" doctrine of an orderly and inevitable historic progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.

         The conviction that socialism would appear only in some "ripe" bourgeois society is still the essential assumption of all Marxists and near-Marxists—except the communists: a name arbitrarily assumed and now reserved exclusively for the advocates and supporters of Soviet and Chinese-type socialism. It was no less the assumption of the Leninist branch of the Russian socialist movement before 1917 and for a decade after 1917. Not one of its theorists suggested the possibility of socialism in his country before its bourgeois development had been completed. That it would come in Russia before it did in Germany, England, or the United States seemed as unrealistic to Lenin, as to any of his Menshevik competitors.

         When the Bolsheviks found themselves masters of the Russian state, they regarded it as a most un~Marxist historical accident. Accordingly they were extremely skeptical about their chances of retaining control. Most of them favored a coalition regime to supervise the fulfillment of the precondition for socialism, namely the completion of the industrial revolution. Lenin overruled them but only because he looked to a communist revolution in some advanced European nation to resolve his dilemma by providing the economic basis presupposed by Marx.

         Trotsky, in 1937, wrote that Lenin's and his own calculations "were based on the hopes of an early revolution in the West." In the spring of 1918 Lenin declared frankly, "Our backwardness has thrust us forward . . . . We shall perish if we are unable to hold on until we meet with the support of other countries." On another occasion he said: "Our salvation lies in the European Revolution." American and European comrades who visited Soviet Russia in the early years were invariably reproached for the delay in salvaging the Russian Revolution by overthrowing capitalism in their countries.

         Postwar chaos in Germany seemed to hold the key to that desperate hope. Even the sacrifice of his Russian regime, in Lenin's view, would have been an acceptable price for a German communist state. In April, 1919, the Sparticists established a Soviet in Munich, but it survived only until May first. Earlier a Leninist agent, Bela Kun, had captured power in Hungary and proceeded at once with the installation of socialism; despite a ferocious Red' Terror, the Kun regime lasted only a few months. Moscow's hopes were then focused on Italy, where the workers were taking over factories in Milan and other cities. But the new Italian Communist party, set up under the direct tutelage of Soviet agents, merely opened a road to Mussolini and his fascists.

         Another flare-up of hope in Germany came with a communist uprising in Berlin—by coincidence at the same time that Trotsky's Red Army was shooting down the Kronstadt rebels "like partridges," as promised. The dismal failure in Berlin, as much as the disorders and hunger in his own country, finally induced Lenin to adopt the compromise with capitalism called NEP; his own name for it was "state capitalism."

         Even Joseph Stalin, in the initial period, recognized that communist take-over in advanced countries were indispensable to socialism in Russia. In April, 1924, three months after the death of Lenin, he wrote that the bourgeoisie could be overthrown in Russia—they had done it—but "for the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like ours, are not enough— for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several countries." To spare himself embarrassment, the brochure containing this statement was withdrawn from circulation as soon as Stalin became dictator on the premise of "socialism in one country."

         After the completion of his First Five-Year Plan and the forcible collectivization of agriculture, Stalin proclaimed that socialism had been achieved, and ordered the people to be happy. (67) The Seventh Congress of the Communist International solemnly confirmed, on August 20, 1935, "the final and irrevocable triumph of socialism" in the USSR. In contradiction to all Marxist tenets about the fading out of the state after the advent of socialism, it added that "the all-sided reinforcement of the state of the proletarian dictatorship," too, had been achieved.

         The claim that its domain is now socialist has not been revised or questioned by the Kremlin ever since. (In the 1950's, Molotov was lambasted by Khrushchev and his press for implying, in something he had said, that the USSR was not yet entirely socialist.) It is a claim that has been denounced by the Socialist Parties of the major nations. Some of these parties, it is true, went in for occasional "united fronts" with the communists for political expediency, but not one of them recognized the Soviet regime as the embodiment of its socialist vision.

         Just before Khrushchev's visit to England in the mid-1950's, he addressed an appeal for a united front to all socialists in Europe. It was rejected at once and sharply by the Socialist International, which pointed out: "Where the communists are in power, they have distorted every freedom, every right of the workers, every political and every human value the socialists have won in a struggle lasting generations."

         In 1941, Lewis Corey, formerly an active American communist, wrote: "Marxism as a progressive social force is dead." This was not exceptional but typical for socialist thinkers and leaders. The Soviet system has been an albatross around their necks. Either they had to insist that it had nothing in common with their socialism—or renounce socialism. During and after the Stalin era, the socialist movements of the world have sought to dissociate themselves from the bloodstained Muscovite aberration of their faith.

         Their emphasis on freedom is not incidental but inherent in the socialist philosophy. State ownership of the means of production was to be the beginning of a process, not in itself the "triumph of socialism." (68) True, Marx had mentioned the possibility of a transitional "dictatorship of the proletariat," but only in countries where the proletariat was a strong social force. The seminal Communist Manifesto had said plainly that "the rule of the working class was inconceivable until the great mass of them were united in desiring it" and "then they would be an overwhelming majority." Besides, their temporary rule would be balanced by the expected "withering of the state," a concept incommensurable with dictatorship of any kind.

Birth of Totalitarianism

         It was the Bolsheviks, cornered by history, who pulled the dictatorship formula out of context and made it the very foundation of their rule, emptying socialist theory of all its democratic and humanitarian content. The proposition that the so-called proletarian dictatorship would be a permanent fixture—as it has been for fifty years—of anything pretending to be socialism would have scandalized Marx, as it has in fact alienated virtually all Marxists.

         The Bolsheviks at first held \o this basic Marxist view. Lenin had explicitly denied that socialism could be made to jibe with long-continuing dictatorship. We have Trotsky's affirmation of this point. "Lenin, following Marx and Engels," he wrote from the vantage point of twenty years of Soviet absolutism, "saw the first distinguishing feature of the proletarian revolution in the fact that, having expropriated the exploiters, it would abolish the necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus raised above society—and above all, a police and standing army." Instead, he noted, the Soviet state "has grown into a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion. The bureaucracy not only had not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses." Lenin's excuse, as he cited it in 1921, was that "dictatorship is the state of acute war" and that they were "precisely in such a state." But forty-six years later, the dictatorship continues and is committed to continuing until "communism" is finally brought into being. The excuse has worn all too thin. (69) Communism-to-come has merely become a transparent justification for holding on to absolute power.

         It should not be forgotten that Lenin himself, in 1905, had ruled out violent assumption of such power as unacceptable to a Marxist. "He who wishes to proceed to socialism by any other path than political democracy," he said at that time, "must inevitably arrive at absurd and reactionary conclusions, both in the political and economic sense." When he did choose that path a dozen years later he was contradicting not only Marx but himself.

         Rosa Luxemburg, leader of the German communist Spartacus League, only weeks after the Petrograd putsch, pledged that communists in her country "will never take over governmental power in any other way than through the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian masses in all Germany, never except by virtue of their conscious assent to the views, aims and fighting methods of the Spartacus League." In this she reflected the opinion of thousands of communists around the world who saw the seizure of power by a small and unauthorized minority as unsocialist and anti-Marxist.

         This is the opinion still held, to an overwhelming extent, by socialists the world over—including, if the truth were known, more idealistic socialists inside Russia. It is not accidental that among the first to be "liquidated" wherever the communists take control are socialists and non-communist Leftists and trade unionists. These are the people who saw Lenin's, then Stalin's, "socialism" as an outrageous distortion of the ideal, a vulgarization of their cherished purposes.

         And this is how they still see it. Moderation of the terror in recent years may reconcile some foreign observers to the Soviet system. But not honest socialists. Logically they cannot accept a one-party dictatorship, which outlaws personal freedoms, scorns economic equality, and countenances forced labor, as anything but a caricature of their hoped-for system, an insult to Marxism.

         Knowledgeable liberals, of course, are equally clear on this score. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for instance, said in 1962, on the basis of the Soviet experience: (70)

         The Soviet rulers, to make their grotesque distortion of socialism palatable to their own people and to supporters abroad, have resorted to an extraordinary piece of verbal jugglery. Unable to surmount physical realities, they have fallen back on new definitions—drawing a sharp line between communism and socialism.

         Communism is their word for the original dream, now postponed to a far future. Socialism is their label for the existing mess of political coercion, bureaucracy, wide inequalities, thought control, and the rest in today's Russia. Socialism used to mean what they now call communism. Moscow has twisted it into a cover-word for a sort of ante-chamber to communism, in which any contradiction or betrayal of Marxism passes muster.

         The semantic trickery, however, doesn't fool socialists, to whom socialism still means what it has always meant. Neither does it fool honest communists, and there are honest communists. One of them has just given witness to this—from the grave as it were. The late Professor Eugene Vargas was for decades the most influential Soviet economist. After his death, a startling essay was found among his papers and it has been published in an underground literary-political almanac, Phoenix 1966, the editors of which were promptly arrested. (71) In it Vargas declared that real communism is inconceivable without "socialist democracy and a free and independent citizenry." Unless "the serious perversions of socialist democracy" in the Soviet Union are corrected, he wrote, "this country will never achieve any communism in twenty years or even a hundred years. It is only a parody of communism that can survive in such conditions."

         Paradoxically, the only people (other than the communist faithful) who unreservedly acknowledge that the existing situation in the USSR is true socialism are the implacable enemies of socialism, the defenders of free economy. They not only admit that it is the real thing, they insist on it.

         Brushing aside the caveats of non-communist Marxists, they say in effect: "What we see in Russia is socialism, full-blown and undeniable. That is the inevitable end product of Marxist fallacies. No matter how'" honestly you may disown the Soviet reality, it is inherent in a system that puts political and economic power into the same hands, that outlaws private ownership, individual initiative, and a genuinely free market." They deny, moreover, that "democratic socialism" is possible, however sincere the intentions of its advocates may be, because a state monopoly of both political and economic life could not function without dictatorial powers and the suppression of criticism.

         If the society evolved in Soviet Russia is neither Marxist nor socialist, then what is it? Social scientists and laymen alike for decades have searched for a name to compass the unprecedented phenomenon. State capitalism, state socialism, the bureaucratic state? None of these makeshifts has proved adequate. In the end we have had to accept a word that, in this sense, did not exist before- the rise of Soviet communism—namely totalitarianism.

         Common usage equates it with tyranny, despotism, and other synonyms for an omnipotent state. But this is mistaken and, in addition, a lot too kind to the Soviet reality. The worst despotisms, past or present, have not necessarily been totalitarian. Tsarist absolutism, for instance, or dictatorships of the Latin American varieties, have not been total. (72) They left areas of free decision to the individual and tolerated some - institutions—economic, religious, or cultural—outside the state. Their claims on the citizen might be all embracing in political matters, yet they exempted some elements in his private life.

         Totalitarianism, in its fascist and communist variants alike, grants no such margins for private activity, dissent, or conscience. No enterprise or organization, not even a chess club or literary circle, is tolerated without state surveillance and dictation. The new kind of dictatorship compasses politics, economics, the arts, science, education, everything. It tells its subjects what they can and cannot do, say, think, feel, or believe.

         Kremlin communism aspired not only to a total transformation of society but of the human being, through the "engineering" of a "new Soviet man," It thus became totalitarian, and in the process set a pattern for other ideologies seeking their own species of total transformations. Whatever the Kremlin's successes and failures in these fifty years, they tell us more about the nature of totalitarianism than the nature of Marxist socialism.