HISTORICAL ASSESSMENT STALINISM

Unce the Left Oppo sition had been broken and defeated and Bukharinite right humiliated, Stalin was able to establish his personal dictatorship the full support of bureaucracy.

The satraps who set themselves up with apartments, cars and dachas thanks to their inordinately large incomes, placed themselves at real sense he pai the boss.

corruption the bureaucracy became the basis for Stalin's dictatorship and the key to his domination over it. When he removed officials because their corruption and incompetence had become too obvious, or because he feared hat they were becomin too owerful or too critical, thos who replaced them were cor bucaee acmplies of stalins rupted all the faster. arbitrary rule.

As Medvedev confirms, while paying lip-service to socialism, the bureaucracy was essentially petty-bourgeois in its outlook (we may ask why he then criticizes Trotsky who had pointed to this as a trend in the mid-1920s?).

*It must be recognized, he says, 'that the people who rose during the mass repression, who made careers out of ersecutions and arrests, were ardly interested in democracy. Uncontrolled dictatorship suited these Stalinists, since they could retain ther power only under such conditions.

Time-serving and complete submission to those above was their defence against those below, the people. Thus the cult of personality was not only a religious [?] and ideological phenomenon; it also had a well-defined class content. It was based on the petty-bourgeois bureaucratic degeneration of some cadres and the extensive penetration of petty-bourgeois and careerist elements into the apparat. Stalin was not merely a dictator, he stood at the peak of a whole system of smaller dictators; he was the head

August