LET HISTORY JUDGE STALINISM

the Origins and Consequences of Stalinism' (Macmillan £5.75) is the first independent attempt in the Soviet Union to understand the Stalin era which has come out of that country. It is a damning indictment of Stalin and Stalinism which confirms everything which Trotsky wrote about the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers' state. From the great tension under which it is written, its passion drawn from the sufierings of millions of people, is also a testimony to the fact that the conquests of the October 1917 Revolution have not been destroyed. Medvedev writes as a communist intellectual, an oppositionist who is harassed and persecuted for his struggle to tell the truth as he sees it. His book has great merits and deserves a careful study both for what it provides in the way of corroboration for the Trotskyist analysis and what it leaves out. On some crucial questions the book is fundamentally wrong. This series of articles submit Medvedev's book to detailed scrutiny with the aim of pursuing the struggle against Stalinism to the end. It will deal in particular with his errors and omissions and point the way for a more rounded analysis which must begin with the works of Trotsky which are cited in the footnotes. bureaucrat over hundreds of thousands of smaller bureaucrats.' This . passage and those which follow it are particularly interesting because they appear to reflect certain aspects of Soviet reality in the Stalin period. They confirm the view that despite the bureaucratic degeneration, the Soviet Union remained a workers' state.

As Medvedev puts it: "The spread of proletarian ideology and communist morality was most intensive at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, and on the lower levels of society. During the mass repression that followed, all levels of the apparat suffered losses, but the lower suffered less than the upper. Thus, even during the years of the cult, genuinely proletarian Marxist-Leninist cadres and a basically Soviet atmosphere prevailed in most of the primary Party organizations.' Medvedev draws a distinction between the corruption 'sincere error and honest self-deception' lower down. In the middle layers, he says, the situation was more complex. As the repression struck, many of those who moved up were unprincipled careerists and the top ranks were filled by Stalinists, 'cruel, unprincipled men, ready to destroy anything that blocked their way to power. Some used physical methods directly, a type that Stalin preferred for the top leadership of the punitive agencies. Others were criminals Bloody deeds at a desk, torturing, and shooting by pen and telephone' Stalin's absolute was decisive Such men are familiar characters in the accounts of survivors of Stalin's terror. But Medvedev claims that there were other, younger leaders who, while they shared characteristic faults of Stalin's entourage, were not fully informed of his crimes and wanted to serve the people.

It has to be emphasized all the time that Stalin's absolute control of the apparatus of the party, and thus of the state, was decisive. He was able to play on loyalty to the revolution and to the Soviet Union in order to win support and to secure for himself a blind obedience which found its apotheosis in those of his victims who went to their deaths shouting 'Long Live It is unfortunate that Medvedev is either ignora nt of Trotsky 's later writings which is quite possible as they are anned in the Soviet Union) or deliberately disregards them. Medvedev also has a theory of bureaucratic degeneration which he attributes to an abuse of power and the use of corruption of the leading cadres by Stalin to build up support.

In other words he does not trace this degeneration to its social roots, nor does he see the bureaucracy as a definite social layer produced by a complex of historical conditions, establishing its control only through a prolonged and violent struggle against the Opposition and against the Soviet working class.

Medvedev wants to attribute the degeneration, at least in part, to the Soviet masses. He says that Stalin had the support of a majority of the people 'not only because he was clever enough to deceive them, but also because they were backward enough to be deceived'. Medvedev appears to be embarrassed with this explanation, as he does with the explanation of Stalinism by its connection with the Russian peasantry, for whom it was supposed to be a new