Why and How the Bureaucracy Arose

Tr is a sad task to recapitulate, even in a condensed form, the sordid history of the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy. But it is no more possible to narrate the history of the Russian Revolution without mentioning the subsequent Stalinist degeneration than it is to write about the French Revolution without attempting to explain the causes and analyse the significance of the overthrow of the Jacobins by the Thermidorians. and the consequent death of ‘Sansculottism’.

STALINISM AND THE WORLD REVOLUTION The Bolshevik leaders were internationalists first and Russians afterwards. Acutely aware of the cultural backwardness of Russia and of the great preponderance of petty commodity production. they believed that it would be a wellnigh impossible task to achieve the transition to socialism without the support of the west European working class. The fate of the Russian Revolution was intimately connected with the failure or success of the revolution in the rest of the world.

The truth of this thesis is amply confirmed by the rise and consolidation of the bureaucracy in Soviet Russia. While it is true that the triumph of the Revolution in Russia precluded the return of the old régime, nevertheless the successive defeats of the European revolution effectively prevented the Soviet workers from obtaining the much-needed technical and financial assistance which would have eased their burden ef toil and given them more time to participate in the administration of men and things. The low level of productivity. the deep disillusionment in the international revolution and the unprecedented burden of industrialization—all these things contributed to the political expropriation of the working class by an ambitious and ruthless caste of parvenu careerists. In this lies the whole secret of Stalin’s success and—incidentally—his so-called ‘greatness’.

‘Apart from the law there is still the level of culture which you cannot subject to any law. The result of this low cultural level is that the soviets, which by virtue of their programmes are organs of government by the foilers, are in fact organs of government for the toilers by means of the advanced stratum of the proletariat but not by means of the toiling masses.”