New Purges in Russia¶
Core Argument¶
New Purges in Russia
This chapter analyses the wave of purges sweeping the Soviet Union in the immediate post-war period as a direct expression of the class struggle within a degenerated workers’ state. The core argument is that the Kremlin’s campaign against corruption, incompetence, and nationalist ideology in the arts, industry, and agriculture is not a move toward socialism but a manoeuvre by the Stalinist bureaucracy to restore its own equilibrium by scapegoating lower-ranking officials for policies dictated from above. The masses, having endured wartime privations greater than any other belligerent, now confront a bureaucracy that maintains inflated living standards while the population remains on the verge of hunger. The disgust this generates is exploited by Stalin to purge the lower strata, deflecting popular anger away from the Kremlin itself.
The chapter draws on extensive evidence from the foreign press and Soviet sources. Time Magazine is cited reporting that the Stalinogorsk Coal Trust inflated production figures, claiming 544 tons daily when real output was only 150 tons. Le Monde notes that Attorney-General Gorechenine has launched investigations, while Pravda insists the party must re-establish national discipline. The expulsion of writer Mikhail Zoschenko and poetess Anna Akhmatova from the Union of Writers on charges of ‘apoliticism’, alongside attacks on the cinema industry and the Arts Committee, demonstrates the ideological clampdown. In agriculture, a decree signed by Stalin and Zhdanov, reported in The Times, exposes mass misappropriation of collective farm land, inflated managerial staff, and the pilfering of collective property by local officials. The chapter argues that during the war, when industry produced almost exclusively war material, the bureaucracy was forced to tolerate individualist and small-capitalist tendencies among peasants who seized land in return for bribes. Now, with tractor and combine production partially restored, the bureaucracy turns on these neo-kulaks to restore collective farming, gaining support from the majority of workers and peasants.
The historical context is Lenin’s insistence that wage differentiation and privilege are capitalist distinctions incompatible with socialism. The chapter polemicises sharply against the Communist Party’s Labour Research, which in July 1946 praised increased wage differentiation as a stimulus to efficiency. It also attacks Stalin’s revision of Marxism: in an interview with Alexander Werth of the Sunday Times, Stalin claimed that ‘communism in one country’ is perfectly possible. This, the chapter argues, abandons Lenin’s and even Stalin’s own earlier position of socialism in one country, and serves a dual purpose—reassuring Anglo-American imperialism that the bureaucracy does not threaten world revolution, while offering the Russian masses a hollow perspective to justify further sacrifices. The real solution, the chapter concludes, is not Stalinist despotism but the overthrow of the bureaucracy and the restoration of workers’ control, which requires the aid of the international working class.