Soviet Policy and Its Critics

SOVIET POLICY AND ITS CRITICS By J. R. CAMPBELL LONDON VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD 1939 FOREWORD The ordinary reader of’ newspapers cannot fail to note a heightened interest in Soviet affairs, together with an in- crease in the activities of hostile critics of the Soviet Union. Hostile criticism of developments in Russia, since the Bol- shevik revolution twenty-one years ago, has served the political aims of the reactionary forces in the world, and has therefore been encouraged and organised by them. In recent years this criticism has developed as an integral part of the offensive of the three great Fascist powers – Germany, Italy and Japan – who have proclaimed their hatred of the Soviet Union, their contempt of democratic States and their inten- tion to secure a new division of the territory and markets of the world. They and their sympathisers and allies in the democratic countries never lose an opportunity of attacking the Socialist great power which is the main bulwark against Fascist aggression. A considerable part of recent criticism has revolved around the Moscow trials. The accused in these trials were convicted of murders, wrecking, espionage and plots to overthrow the present Soviet Government by an internal coup timed to coincide with an invasion by Fascist powers. It is difficult for the uninformed newspaper reader to see these criminals in the light of their political background: to realise that their crimes are only a culminating point in the struggle which Trotsky and his followers have been waging against the Bolshevik Party since 1903; that the real face of Trotskyism during recent years is revealed not in Trotsky’s “Left” criticisms of the Soviet Union and its leaders, but in the far from Left activities of himself and his followers; that these “Left” criticisms have become a screen for crimes against the people of the Soviet Union and the peo- ples of the world. The author believes that these “Left” criticisms would not have been accepted or purveyed by any sincere person 4 SOVIET POLICY AND ITS CRITICS in the Labour and progressive movement but for the web of lies that reaction, in its various disguises, has woven around both the Soviet Union and the theories of Marx and Lenin. It is therefore fitting that a Communist, a responsible mem- ber of the Party which bases its policy and activity on these theories, should describe the struggle for their application in the fight against the Tsardom and in the building of a Socialist society after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In doing so the author believes that he is not only clear- ing away lies and misunderstanding, but also exposing the real basis and aim of the hostile criticism of the Soviet Un- ion, and in this way serving the cause of peace and democracy as well as helping the Socialist Movement to find its bearings in this extremely critical period. J. R. CAMPBELL CONTENTS Foreword page 3 Chapter I. Trotsky against the Bolshevik Party 7 II. Trotsky and Bukharin – Enemies of 35 Socialist Construction III. The Victory of Socialism in the 71 Soviet Union IV. The Trotskyists and the Soviet State 109 V. The New Constitution and the 136 Struggle Against Bureaucracy VI. The Political Background of the 164 Trials VII. The Trials and their Critics 205 VIII. Trotskyism and the War against the 238 U.S.S.R. IX. Trotskyism and the People’s Front 272 Index 325 CHAPTER I TROTSKY AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY It is difficult for those who have come into politics in post-war years to appreciate what a wonderful change has come over the face of Russia in the last twenty years. In place of a Tsarist Russia, which was a synonym for darkness, ignorance, and corruption, we have a State whose planned economy has eliminated unemploy- ment; whose economic development is studied by economists eve- rywhere; whose State medical service is the admiration of doctors all over the world; whose educational system has evoked the enthu- siasm of all who are interested in progressive educational developments. Whatever points of criticism can still be levelled at condi- tions in the Soviet Union – and no one is likely to be more critical than the Russian Communists themselves – the fact remains that this constitutes the most sweeping transformation ever experienced in the position of a country. It must never be forgotten that the great majority of pre-war European Socialist leaders, even of the Left, held firmly to the opinion that such a transformation as has taken place in the Soviet Un- ion was impossible. They based this opinion, not on the desperate situation in which Russia found itself as a result of the World War, but on the backward economic development of the country and the fact that it had still to solve these political problems which Western countries had solved a century or so previously. Their attitude is outlined in a recent book of the well-known Austrian Social Democratic leader, the late Otto Bauer. “The Russian Revolution, developing out of the World War, had placed the Russian proletariat, the proletariat of an economically, socially and culturally backward country, at the head of the world proletariat, because this circum- stance had allowed it to conquer power and to begin the transformation of capitalist society into socialist before the working class in the most advanced capitalist countries. “The International Social-Democracy resisted the rec- ognition of this truth. Had not Marx in his principal work written the sentence: ‘The most industrially developed countries show the lesser developed the image of their own 8 SOVIET POLICY AND ITS CRITICS future’? Had not Marx himself taught that the development of capitalism itself creates the pre-requisites for the transformation of capitalist property into socialist property; that these pre-requisites will only mature, and the Social Revo- lution will only become possible, if ‘the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production that has blossomed with and under it’? Could one then believe that the Social Revolution could actually begin in a country, in which the development of capitalism was much less advanced than in Western or Central Europe or in the United States; that the less industrially developed country could show the others the image of their own future? The international Social Democracy therefore regarded the attempt to build a Socialist society in backward Russia as a utopian adventure. It believed that this attempt would come to grief in a short time, It believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be at the best a transitory phase of a bourgeois revolution, just as the dictatorship of the Paris pre- proletariat in 1792 had only been a transitory phase of a bourgeois revolution. As, in fact, Russian Bolshevism drew back in 1921 in face of the resistance of the peasantry and of hunger in the towns, again allowing capitalist free trade, offering international capital industrial concessions in the Soviet Union, the International Social Democracy believed that the retrogressive movement to capitalism had again commenced and in a few years the Bolshevik dictatorship would be shown to be a transitory phase in a bourgeois revolution. “All these views have to-day been refuted by history itself. In the Soviet Union a Socialist society is developing, whose powers of growth, exemplified in the tempo of the development of its production and the productivity of labour, have exceeded the boldest expectations. Only those who are not able to learn from new facts, from facts of a world historical significance, can to-day hold on to the mis- taken judgments that were comprehensible and understand- able in the years from 1917 to 1921” (Otto Bauer, Between Two World Wars, Prague, 1936). How was such a transformation, declared absurd by the major- AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY 9 ity of Socialist leaders in Europe, made possible? Here was a country where the great majority of the population consisted of the most poverty-stricken famine-infested peasantry outside India and China; where the masses were sunk in the deepest ignorance and supersti- tion; where the most ferocious national antagonisms divided the people – antagonisms deliberately fanned by the ruling class; where the working class with its revolutionary traditions was a tiny island in the midst of the sea of illiterate peasantry. Could such a country, in the teeth of the most frantic hostility of the capitalist States in the world, advance on the basis of its own resources, and build up a civilised Socialist State? It is beyond all doubt that this advance is now attaining its ob- jective, but how this was possible is a question of the utmost impor- tance. How could the great mass of small property owners, peasants and traders be brought within the framework of socialism in field, factory and mine? It must never be forgotten that the Russian Communists were tackling something never before attempted in human history. The revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been bourgeois (i.e., capitalist) revolutions, whose aim had been to smash the absolute monarchy and clear away the remnants of feudalism which were impeding the fullest development of capitalist production and commerce, and to make the capitalist class the ruling class. Once these impediments were removed by the bourgeois revolution, the normal forces of capitalist development did the rest. Before the political revolution the capitalist class were already the masters of industry and commerce. Their economic strength was vastly supe- rior to that of the landlords and the bureaucracy who supported the absolute monarchy.

Load more