Skrypnik's Suicide

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The suicide of one of the most prominent Stalinists, one of the leaders of the Soviet Ukraine, is an important event in the chronicle of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Skrypnik was an Old Bolshevik with a serious revolutionary past, an active participant in the October Revolution who was chairman of the joint Petrograd factory committees in 1917. Unlike many “Old Bolsheviks,” particularly the current leaders in the Ukraine, Skrypnik was always interested in the international working-class movement and represented the Ukrainian Communist Party in the Comintern.

But in general he harnessed himself in with the bureaucratic team, took part in the persecution of Rakovsky (for whom he personally felt great respect), fought diligently against “Trotskyism,” praised the “leaders,” and except for isolated, purely episodic acts, showed no sort of decisive political independence.

And now all of a sudden it turns out that Skrypnik was conducting a totally false policy, protecting bourgeois nationalists and shielding the Ukrainian counterrevolution. Sent in the capacity of super-commissar to the Ukraine, Secretary of the Central Committee Postyshev opened an attack on Skrypnik which could not fail to astonish Ukrainians by its unexpectedly coarse tone.

That Skrypnik’s policies were wrong, we have no doubt. In the national area less than any other can a correct policy be conducted through the bureaucracy alone, while the party and its ties with the proletariat are stifled. But Skrypnik’s “mistakes” must have gone a very long way if they called for such vicious persecution that the old revolutionary was driven to suicide.

The question arises: Where was the Ukrainian Politburo all this time, of which Skrypnik was continually a member? How was it possible, in this monolithic party, relentlessly purged of deviators, surrounded by continual successes and the victorious liquidation of classes, for a member of the Politburo, unnoticed by the Politburo as a whole, without the slightest reprimand from the party and the press, over the years to spread bourgeois nationalism and its companion, counterrevolution? And how does it happen that the revelation of this fact of no small importance, sent out from the office of the Moscow inspector, fell upon the party like a bolt out of the blue? It was only last year that Skrypnik’s sixtieth birthday was solemnly celebrated as a party holiday!

On the other hand, and this is a puzzle, why did the Stalinist staff need to make Skrypnik the victim in the struggle against bourgeois nationalism? He never contradicted them and was ready in advance to carry out any of the policies dictated from above. The bureaucracy, generally speaking, does not punish “its own” for mistakes, even very serious ones, unless it is required for some reason to serve some sort of side need which is personally important to it.

Thus, Andreyev didn’t suffer in the least for his ruinous collectivization in the Northern Caucasus or for disorders in the rail transportation system. Meanwhile, Yaroslavsky suffered brutally because in his History some statements crept in which were correct (as opposed to all the others), but which were damaging to the dogma of infallibility.

We will permit ourselves to express certainty that the mistakes of Skrypnik were disclosed not because they were mistakes, but in order to punish Skrypnik for some much less principled but more critical crime. For example, if Skrypnik opposed Postyshev, who arrived in the Ukraine in order to shift the responsibility for the consequences of Stalin’s agrarian policy to the local “executors,” this would be more than enough reason to prompt an “analysis” from above of all Skrypnik’s activities and to discover in them what it is possible to find in the activities of every other executive: bureaucratism, opportunism, the protection of counterrevolution.

Whatever happened behind the scenes, however, politically Skrypnik became the victim of that system which he helped to create. And the fact that the Stalinist system needs these kinds of sacrifices shows what kind of contradictions tear it apart even at its very summit.

The sudden joining of Zinoviev and Kamenev to the world of truth and the sudden plunge of Skrypnik into the darkness of error equally expose that lie which eats away at the irresponsible bureaucratic dictatorship.