2. The Rise of Stalinism¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the rise of Stalinism was not the product of individual conspiracy or personal ambition, but the outcome of a profound shift in class forces, rooted in Russia’s backwardness and the isolation of the revolution. Marx’s conception of socialism was scientific, not utopian: it required the material abundance created by capitalism, and a transitional period after revolution—the lower stage of communism—still marked by scarcity and bourgeois right. Without a massive development of productive forces, Marx warned, scarcity would revive class struggle. The workers’ state, or dictatorship of the proletariat, was a democratic semi-state that would begin to wither away, but it initially had to defend bourgeois norms of distribution. Lenin recognised that this state, as a relic of class society, could degenerate without constant democratic control by the working class.
To prevent this, Lenin proposed measures based on the Paris Commune: election and recall of all officials, no standing army, wages no higher than a skilled worker’s, and job rotation. However, Russia’s chronic backwardness—high illiteracy and a weak proletariat—prevented full implementation. The state was forced to rely on hundreds of thousands of ex-tsarist bureaucrats, who sabotaged the regime. By 1920, state officials had mushroomed to five times the number of industrial workers. Lenin openly acknowledged that the state apparatus was a “bourgeois and tsarist hotchpotch”. He explained bureaucracy as a social phenomenon arising from the revolution’s isolation in a backward, illiterate peasant country, not merely red tape. The strain of war, civil war, and famine undermined the working class numerically and morally, while petty bourgeois elements insinuated themselves into the state and Party. By 1922, Lenin realised “bureaucracy is throttling us” and formed a bloc with Trotsky against it, particularly after the Georgian affair. In his Testament, Lenin called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, citing his rudeness and concentration of power. But a third stroke incapacitated Lenin, and power fell to the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, who suppressed the Testament.
The bureaucratic reaction intensified with each international defeat of the working class, especially the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923. Trotsky formed the Left Opposition to fight for workers’ democracy and national economic planning. After Lenin’s death, the troika prevented Trotsky from taking power. The ‘Lenin Levy’ flooded the Party with inexperienced members, swamping the revolutionary nucleus; less than 1 per cent had pre-revolutionary service. Stalin’s belated reply to the Left Opposition’s proposals was a pessimistic draft Five-Year Plan, far below the Opposition’s targets. The ruling group’s policy of supporting kulaks increased class differentiation; by early 1928, a kulak grain blockade threatened famine. The United Opposition was expelled from the Party, and Trotsky was deported. The chapter insists that the struggle was not personal but a conflict of class forces. Stalin embodied the rising bureaucratic layer, which sought order and administration from above. The theory of socialism in one country expressed this petty bourgeois reaction. The decisive factor was the shift in class forces: a weakened working class and a strengthened bureaucracy. Even if Lenin had lived, it would not have fundamentally altered the outcome; a favourable turn in the objective situation was required. Explaining such a profound historical transformation by the cleverness of top intriguers is a variant of the conspiracy theory of history, incompatible with Marxism.