Fighting on all Fronts (30 page)

The October Revolution represented the antithesis of the past. If the state had formerly been shaped by the needs of imperialism, now there was a chance of escaping these imperatives in favour of internationalism and socialism. A new society, however, could not survive as an isolated socialist island in a sea of capitalism. Successful international socialist revolution was vital for two reasons.

Firstly, only this could provide the resources needed to improve the lives of the masses rather than merely sharing out poverty equally. Secondly, unless capitalism was undermined the state would again face pressure to defend its vast, economically backward territory from attack. That threat was evident in the foreign intervention and civil war of 1917-1921.

By 1923 hopes of international revolution had passed, ending hopes that isolation would soon be broken. The working class was decimated, leaving a society dominated by the state/party bureaucracy. Once collective control from below had disintegrated a factional struggle developed within the Bolshevik Party itself. Trotsky, who was loyal to the original aim of internationalism, clashed with others who, like the Romanovs, saw their state as jostling for position in a world interplay of states. In the latter camp were Stalin and Bukharin who saw the national state’s interest as paramount.

Though they claimed to be building “socialism in one country”, that phrase was merely a staging post towards imperialism because if survival was not secured by international revolution, it would have to be sustained through military competition. As Stalin put it: “We are 50 or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must close this gap in ten years. Either we shall do it, or they will crush us”.
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Everything was
now “subordinated to the supreme question of the defence of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]”.
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Therefore, in conscious emulation of Tsar “Peter the Great [who] built mills and factories to supply the army and strengthen the defences of the country”,
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Stalin launched a policy of intensive industrialisation in 1929. As before, the method employed was massive exploitation of both the workers and the peasants. From now on the state did not exist to defend the population; the population existed to defend the state.

Military power required the expansion of heavy industry (coal, iron and steel) and that could not wait for light industry (making consumer goods) to develop in parallel. The five-year plan involved spectacular growth in heavy industry. By 1932 output was almost double the pre-war level with particular areas, such as electric power and machine tools, seven and 13 times greater respectively.
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While all forms of capitalism are exploitative, Soviet industrialisation, which put huge demands on labour while offering few consumer goods in return, was particularly brutal.

That was obvious in agriculture. The October Revolution legitimised the peasant seizure of the land and its division into family plots. But Stalin wanted forced collectivisation so as to release labour and food for burgeoning towns, along with earnings from grain exports to buy foreign technology. In the four years to 1933 state procurement of grain doubled while grain exports increased 56 times over.
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But the process was deeply contradictory. Seizure of peasant farms led to resistance and a cut in output. By 1933 the country was in the grip of an appalling famine which cost millions of lives in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

In the towns there were few consumer goods, housing was totally inadequate and from 1929 to 1933 workers’ wages fell by half.
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Disgruntled workers kept labour productivity low and, deprived of the right to strike or protest collectively, discontent was expressed individually through changing jobs. This was economically disruptive. In 1930 the average worker moved workplace every eight months. In 1939 it was every 13 months.
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At one Moscow factory half the workforce quit during the first half of 1936 due to a drop in earnings.
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Forced labour was another feature. At this time there were between 3 and 5 million people in slave labour camps—the notorious
gulag
. Filtzer writes that: “By the time war broke out in June 41 the Soviet working class was in a worse position politically and socially than it had been at any time since the Bolshevik Revolution”.
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To enforce such draconian policies Stalin not only had to repress society in general but also parts of the state itself, starting with the
Bolshevik Party. By 1927 Trotsky’s Left Opposition was destroyed. Then Stalin turned on his erstwhile ally Bukharin and his Right Opposition. The scale of repression was revealed in President Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956: “Of the 139 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee (elected in 1934) 70 percent were arrested and shot… Of 1,966 delegates…1,108 were arrested”.
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Stalinist terror is often portrayed as the arbitrary, irrational result of one man’s obsession. However, it had a double purpose. The gains of October 1917 had to be nullified in order to meet the requirements of imperialist competition. Therefore, as Reiman has pointed out, repression had a horrible logic:

While political terror played an important role, the real core of Stalinism…was social terror, the most brutal and violent treatment of very wide sections of the population, the subjection of millions to exploitation and oppression of an absolutely exceptional magnitude and intensity. The social function of terror and repression explains the apparent irrationality, senselessness, and obscure motivation of Stalin’s penal system. As a social instrument, terror could not be aimed narrowly, at particular persons. It was an instrument of violent change, affecting the living and working conditions of millions, imposing the very worst forms of social oppression, up to and including the slave labour of millions of prisoners.
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The results of this programme were impressive at one level. The first Russian tank model appeared in 1929 and by 1933, 3,000 were produced annually. The Soviet Union developed the equivalent of the Panzer Division two years before Germany. By the mid-1930s “the Soviet Union led the world in production, planning, and fielding of mechanised forces. Perhaps most important, the Red Army was well ahead of its German counterparts”.
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On the eve of war, while Germany marginally outnumbered the Soviet Union in divisions and soldiers, the ratio of Soviet to German tanks was 3.8:1, planes 2.2:1 and artillery 1.4:1.
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And yet Stalinism risked its own core purpose—the defence of the state. Suspicion of virtually every segment of the population, including its own high officials, became a self-destructive process. The repression designed to ultimately strengthen the military spilled over into repression of these very forces. Between May 1937 and September 1938:

36,761 men were purged in the army and more than 3,000 in the nav y… All military district commanders were removed, 90 percent of the district chiefs of staff and deputies, 80 percent of corps and divisional
commanders, 90 percent of staff officers and chiefs of staff. A sharp fall in the intellectual quality of officers resulted. By the beginning of 1941 only 7.1 percent of commanding officers had a higher military education…and 12 percent of officers and political personnel had had no military education at all. By the summer of 1941, about 75 percent of officers and 70 percent of political officers had been in their posts for less than a year.
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This not only removed valuable experience. US historians conclude that those who survived realised that “in contrast to the German belief in subordinate initiative…any show of independent judgment was hazardous to their personal health”.
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Thus: “The bloodletting…tore the brain from the Red Army, smashed its morale, stifled any spark of original thought, and left a magnificent hollow military establishment, ripe for catastrophic defeat”.
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Stalin’s domestic policies had both prepared the Soviet Union for an inter-imperialist conflict and damaged its chances of success. It possessed mountains of military equipment but had destroyed the skilled people who could deploy it. This did not go unnoticed. Hitler commented: “This guy is a lunatic! He is destroying his own army!”
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The same contradictions obtained in the sphere of foreign policy. The millions of foreign Communists who made up the Communist International (Comintern) identified the Soviet Union as the embodiment of socialism and Stalin was perfectly prepared to subordinate their energy and enthusiasm to his imperialist goals.

In 1929 he needed left cover to carry through counter-revolution at home and so adopted an insane policy called “the Third Period line”. This led the powerful German Communist Party to categorise the German Socialist Party as “social fascist”. To divide the working class at a time when the real fascists, the Nazis, were making a bid for power was an awful mistake. The error became clear after Hitler became German chancellor in 1933 and wiped out the Communists. Stalin had helped an aggressive imperialist committed to
Lebensraum
(“living space” in the east) gain command of Europe’s strongest economy.

Now that the Soviet Union was under increased threat the question was, who were its real allies? Although the prospects of international revolution had receded for the time being, grassroots opposition to imperialist policies was still the best means of avoiding a war for
repartition of the world. Stalin did not see it that way. He was now a player in the imperialist game and saw his future as playing one state off against the other. This was the genesis of the Popular Front, a policy diametrically opposite to the Third Period. Launched in 1934, it consisted of seeking an alliance with Britain and France against Germany. To achieve this Stalin was prepared to sacrifice the revolutionary potential of the mass uprising in Spain against Franco and his Nazi/fascist backers. A workers’ victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) would have boosted the confidence of anti-imperialism everywhere. The Popular Front policy prevented that. During the Second World War the interests of the resistance movements led by Communists would also be sacrificed.

Despite the switch to a popular front policy Soviet appeals for friendship were ignored by the British and French governments. This was epitomised by the fate of Czechoslovakia, the last surviving parliamentary democratic state in Central or Eastern Europe. When Hitler threatened invasion an alliance of the Soviet Union and the West would have confronted Germany with war on two fronts. But the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler at the Munich Conference of September/October 1938, handing over the key defensive region of the Sudetenland. In March 1939 the rest of Czechoslovakia was dismembered.

If one imperialist camp was uncooperative, Stalin concluded, why not collaborate with another? The result was the Hitler-Stalin pact, signed on 23 August 1939. It is true this mirrored the Chamberlain-Hitler pact of Munich,
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but that is not a justification. Making Poland the victim after Czechoslovakia was no improvement. Yet Volkogonov argues: “Looking back, the Non-Aggression Pact appears extremely tarnished, and morally an alliance with the Western democracies would have been immeasurably more preferable. But neither Britain nor France were ready for such an alliance. From the point of view of state interest the Soviet Union had no other acceptable choice”.
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And that is precisely the point. Once the force that could oppose imperialism, the international working class, was abandoned for “state interest” in the imperialist game, the outcome could only be a self-serving admixture of fear, cynical greed and shared imperialist interests.

Alongside public phraseology of non-aggression secret protocols made it a pact for war of conquest.
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As Stalin said, the non-aggression pact was “cemented by blood”.
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While Germany seized western Poland, the Soviet Union would be authorised to occupy what remained as well as the Baltic states and Romanian territory. This added 23 million people
to the Soviet Union’s population of 170 million.
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It also meant that during the Second World War the Nazis found numerous collaborators in the (formerly Polish) Western Ukraine, the Baltic states, Romania and Finland.
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On the first anniversary of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact the official Soviet newspaper,
Pravda
, admitted it assisted Hitler’s war strategy: “this pact has made things easier for us; it has also been of great advantage to Germany, since she can be completely confident of peace on her Eastern borders”.
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Exploiting this confidence for his own ends, Stalin used Germany’s preoccupation with the Second World War to launch an ill-fated war with Finland. Not for nothing did Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, tell the Supreme Soviet on 31 October 1939 that: “the new Soviet-German relations are built on a strong basis of mutual interests”.
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It is easy to imagine the demoralising effect on anti-fascists everywhere of Molotov welcoming the subjugation of Poland, “that monster child of the Versailles treaty”.
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And later on as the Wehrmacht stormed across Western Europe
Pravda
put forward an extraordinary explanation for who was at fault: “the German armies have achieved considerable successes. They have occupied the greater part of Holland… We can see how great is the responsibility of the Anglo-French imperialists who, by rejecting Germany’s peace offers, set off the Second Imperialist War in Europe”.
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When Germany came to invade the Soviet Union, it descended upon an imperialist competitor which had partly wasted its advantage at home and damaged potential for resistance to Nazi war plans abroad.