Toward the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU

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The publication of the current issue of our Biulleten coincides roughly with the Sixteenth Party Congress. It is not too difficult to predict what the character of the congress will be. To do this it is enough to know who is convening it and how they are going about it It is a matter of the Stalinist faction — with the support of the GPU and the army, by means of the party apparatus and with the help of the state apparatus-convening a carefully selected and sufficiently intimidated legislative body whose decisions on every fundamental issue have been prescribed beforehand, while the implementation of these decisions will cease to be binding as far as the Stalinist faction is concerned the morning after the congress adjourns. Not a single member of the party who is capable of observing and reflecting will find the slightest exaggeration in what we have said. On the contrary, it is the most objective and accurate diagnosis of what really exists.

The congress is assembling after an exceptionally grave crisis in the country's internal life, which has confronted the Soviet regime with new tasks and new, acute dangers. It would seem that if the party congress were to have any sort of significance, it would be precisely as the forum in which the party passes judgment on the policies of its Central Committee, i.e., on its supreme governing body between congresses. Between congresses, in this instance, means for a period of two and a half years. And what years they were! Years in which all the warnings and predictions of the routed and slandered Opposition were, to the party's surprise, confirmed with a forcefulness and cogency that were staggering. They were years in which it was discovered, according to assertions in the official press, that Rykov, head of the Soviet government, "tried to profit from the economic difficulties of Soviet power"; that the leader of the Comintern, Bukharin, was found to be a "transmitter of liberal-bourgeois influences"; that their co-conspirator had been the chairman of the central council of the trade unions, Tomsky, head of the organization that embraces the entire ruling class of the country.

The three persons just named did not emerge out of the blue. They were members of the Central Committee under Lenin, holding highly responsible positions at that time too. Each of them has behind him two to three decades of party membership. They made mistakes and were corrected by the party more than once. How is it that their "bourgeois-liberal” views have so very suddenly appeared — and at a time when the strength of the dictatorship and of socialism has increased so much that the leadership can pose point-blank the question of the elimination of classes in "the shortest possible time”?

It is not the personal side of the matter that interests us, of course. But in the form of things that seem "personal," the entire party regime, as it has taken shape in the thirteen years since the proletarian conquest of power, is laid bare before our eyes.

The system of bureaucratism has become a system of uninterrupted palace coups, which are now the only means by which it can maintain itself. A week before the split in the Central Committee burst to the surface and yesterday's irreproachable "Leninists" were proclaimed to be bourgeois liberals, renegades, traitors, etc. — to the accompaniment of the hooting of an unruly gang of young rogues, who had among them, however, more than a few venerable old men — a week before this happened the rumor that there were disagreements in the Central Committee was declared to be criminal slander invented by the Trotskyist Opposition. Such is the regime! Or rather, such is one of its most blatant features.

Right now the party is coming into the stretch in its preparations for the congress or, more precisely, the semblance of preparations for the semblance of a congress. One would expect that precisely the question of the Central Committee's policies — its "general line," its internal mode of rule, which is to say, the series of palace coups, coming as rude surprises that hit the party over the head and catch it unawares, not to mention other rude surprises like the "elimination of classes" within the framework of the five-year plan — would have been at the center of the pre-congress discussions. But it is just such a discussion that has been forbidden. Yes, completely forbidden!

Of course, there has not been, and cannot be, the slightest doubt that the apparatus is very attentively following the discussion or, rather, the semblance of discussion, and that behind the scenes it has put every possible measure into operation so as to preserve the domination of Stalin's militarized faction — or, more precisely, so as not to be compelled to use open and general repressive measures in relation to the party. This has been done before, but there was no mention of it. Now, in contrast, coercive measures against the party are being elevated to the level of principle and openly proclaimed from the most authoritative of the party's rostrums. This is unquestionably the latest word, the most recent achievement, of the party apparatus. Such a situation did not exist at the time of the Fifteenth Party Congress.

S. Kosior, secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee — not to be confused with Comrade V. Kosior, the Oppositionist who is now in exile — set the tone, of course, but not on his own initiative. The Kharkov Stalinist group has been playing the role of shock troops in the system of party Bonapartism for some time now. Whenever the party needs to be stunned with the latest word, which other local party secretaries have not yet made up their minds to say or are ashamed to say, the assignment is given to Kharkov. Manuilsky came from there; Kaganovich worked there; that is where the trusty Skrypnik is; there, more than a few baby Moseses have exploded onto the scene like so many rotten eggs; there, at this time, with the Moscow telegraph wire tied to his neck vertebrae as he plays the part of "leader," is the already mentioned

S. Kosior, who from an oppositional poacher under Lenin became a bureaucratic gendarme under Stalin. In a report published by the entire press, Kosior stated that there are elements in the party so criminal as to dare to speak, in closed sessions of party cells, during discussions of party politics, of mistakes by the Central Committee in the implementation of collective farm policy. "We must really let them have it," Kosior declares, and his words are published throughout the party press. "Let them have it” — this coyly worded but vile formula takes in all forms of physical repression: expulsion from the party, dismissal from work, deprivation of a family's living quarters, penal exile, and finally, defamation of character as a result of slander purveyed by one of the local Yaroslavskys. Another member of the Central Committee, Postyshev, also a Ukrainian, has published an indictment in Pravda in the guise of an article — an indictment pieced together out of bits of speeches by certain individual party members who, again, in closed sessions of party cells, "dared" — they dared! — to speak of the Central Committee's mistakes. His conclusion is the same as Kosior's: cut them off. And all this on the eve of a congress ostensibly convened for the precise purpose of evaluating the Central Committee.

The bureaucratic regime is well on its way to establishing the principle of the infallibility of the leadership, which is the necessary complement to its actual non-accountability Such is the situation at the present time.

These facts did not fall out of the blue. They sum up the second, post-Lenin chapter of the revolution, the chapter of its gradual decline and degeneration. The first palace coup, the result of a systematically organized conspiracy, was carried off in 1923-24, after being carefully prepared during the months when Lenin was struggling against death. Behind the party's back six members of the Politburo organized a conspiracy against the seventh. They bound themselves by a pledge of mutual discipline; they communicated by means of coded telegrams with their agents and reliable groups in all parts of the country. The official pseudonym collectively used by the organizers of the conspiracy was the term "Leninist old guard." It was announced that this group, and it alone, was the continuator of the correct revolutionary line. It is appropriate to recall at this time the people who constituted this infallible "Leninist old guard" of 1923-24: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky. Of these six living embodiments of Leninism, two main ideologists of the old guard — Zinoviev and Kamenev — two years later ended up being exposed for "Trotskyism" and, two years later still, were expelled from the party. Three others — Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky — turned out to be "bourgeois liberals" and have in fact been barred from all activity. Undoubtedly, after the congress they will be removed formally as well. No confessions can help them at this point. The cracks in the bureaucratic apparatus will never be closed up; they can only get wider. Thus, of those who composed the "Leninist old guard,” Stalin alone has not fallen under the wheel of the apparatus. And it is no wonder: he is the one who is turning it.

At first, i.e., the day after the first coup (Lenin's illness and Trotsky's exclusion), the principle of "infallibility" of the leadership in a certain sense had a philosophical character in relation to the party: the "old guard," linked with Lenin by its entire past, and now bound by the ties of unshakable ideological solidarity, was allegedly able through its collective effort to guarantee irreproachable leadership. Such was the doctrine of the apparatus regime at that stage. By the time of the Fifteenth Congress, infallibility had changed from a "historical and philosophical” principle into a backstage practical guide that was not yet being acknowledged openly. But by the Sixteenth Congress it has already been converted into an openly professed dogma. Although out of habit the infallibility of the Central Committee is still referred to, it would not occur to anyone to think of it as being any sort of stable collective, since no one takes the present members of the Politburo very seriously; they don't even do so themselves. What is really meant here is Stalin. This is not being camouflaged at all. On the contrary, it is being emphasized in every possible way. The year of his official coronation as the infallible leader accountable to no one was 1929. One of the capitulators gave a general formula for this new stage: It is impossible to be loyal to the party without being loyal to the Central Committee: it is impossible to be loyal to the Central Committee without being loyal to Stalin. This is the dogma of the Bonapartist party. The fact that Pyatakov who considered it possible in Lenin's time to be for the party while being a persistent opponent of Lenin, now construes the concept of the party to mean a plebiscitic grouping around Stalin (those who are for him are in the party and those who are against him are not) — this fact by itself adequately characterizes the course that has been taken by the official party over the past seven years. And not without reason was it said of this same Pyatakov, when he was still in the Opposition, languidly chewing over the scraps of old ideas: "Bonaparte sometimes made his prefects out of such 'has-beens.'"

All of history shows how difficult it is for people to arrive at a general conception of the events in which they themselves participate, especially if those events do not fit in easily with the old, accustomed, "automatic" ways of thinking. Because of this it often happens that honest and sensible people will become sincerely overwrought if someone simply refers out loud to what they are doing, or to what is occurring with their cooperation, and calls it by its right name. And what is occurring is an automatic process, one largely outside of conscious awareness, but no less real for that, in which the party is preparing the way for Bonapartism. Behind the fiction of preparations for the Sixteenth Congress — which is being convened according to Pyatakov's plebiscitary principle (whoever is for Stalin gets to go to the congress) — it is precisely this reality that stands out so threateningly: the unthinking, mindless, automatic laying of the groundwork for Bonapartism.

No indignant cries and hypocritical howls about how the liberals and Mensheviks are saying "the same thing" will stop us from stating what is true, since only in this way is it possible to find the bases of support and the forces for counteracting and repelling the danger. The party has been stifled. It has only one right: to agree with Stalin. But this right is at the same time its duty.. Moreover, the party has been called upon to exercise its dubious right after an interval of two and a half years. And how long will the next interval be? Today who can tell?

Not only every thoughtful Communist worker but also every party functionary who has not been completely Yaroslavskyized and Manuilskyized cannot help but ask: Why is it that as a result of the economic and cultural growth and the strengthening of the dictatorship and of socialism, the party regime is becoming more and more heavy-handed and unbearable? The apparatus people themselves will admit this in private conversation without a moment's hesitation; and how could they deny it? The overwhelming majority of them are not only the conveyors of the Stalinist regime but also its victims.

One of two things is true. Either the system of proletarian dictatorship has come into irreconcilable contradiction with the economic needs of the country, and the Bonapartist degeneration of the party regime is only a by-product of this fundamental contradiction — this is what the class enemies, with the Mensheviks in the forefront, believe, say, and trust their hopes to; or the party regime, which has its own logic and momentum, has entered into a state of acute contradiction with the revolutionary dictatorship, despite the fact that the latter retains its full vitality and is the only regime at all capable of protecting Russia from colonial servitude, guaranteeing the development of its productive forces, and opening before it broad socialist perspectives. This is what we, the Communist Left Opposition, believe. You must accept one of these two explanations. No one has proposed a third. And in the meantime, the progressive degeneration of the party regime demands to be explained.

The regime of the ruling party does not have definitive significance for the fate of the revolutionary dictatorship. Of course, the party is a "superstructural" factor. The processes that take place within it reduce themselves in the last analysis to class relations that change under pressure from the productive forces. But the interrelations between superstructural elements of different kinds, and their relation to the class base, have an extremely complex dialectical character. The party regime is not in and of itself an automatic barometer of the processes taking place outside the party and independently of it.

There is no need to repeat that we have never been inclined to deny or belittle the significance of the objective factors that bring pressure to bear from without on the internal regime of the party. On the contrary, we have pointed them out repeatedly. What they all come down to, in the last analysis, is the isolation of the Soviet republic.

On the political level, there are two reasons for this prolonged isolation: the counterrevolutionary role of the social democracy, which came to the rescue of capitalist Europe after the war and is now shoring up its imperialist domination (the role of the MacDonald government with respect to India); and the opportunist and adventurist policies of the Comintern, which served as the immediate cause of a number of colossal defeats for the proletariat (Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia, China, Britain). The results of the Comintern's mistakes have each time become the source of further difficulties and, consequently, of the regime's further deterioration. But the very betrayals by the social democracy — notoriously an "objective factor” from the Communist point of view — pass by with relative impunity only because they are covered up by the parallel mistakes of the Communist leadership. Thus the "objective factors" themselves, in the sense of the pressure of hostile class forces upon the party, represent to a very great extent — one that cannot of course be measured mathematically — the present-day results of the centrist bureaucracy's erroneous policies of yesterday.

If the explanation for the systematic deterioration of the regime over the past seven years were simply that there had been an automatic rise in pressure from hostile class forces, that would imply a death sentence for the revolution. In fact, that is not the case. In addition to the pressure of hostile forces from without, which, moreover, have found support in the erroneous policies within the party, the regime is under direct and heavy pressure from an internal factor of immense and continually growing strength: namely the party and state bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has been transformed into a "self-sufficient" force; it has its own material interests, and develops its outlook, corresponding to its own privileged position. Making use of the means and methods with which the dictatorship has armed it, the bureaucracy more and more subordinates the party regime, not to the interests of this dictatorship, but to its own interests, i.e., guaranteeing its privileged position, its power, and its lack of accountability. Of course, this phenomenon grew out of the dictatorship. But it is a derivative which is opposed by other derivatives within the dictatorship itself. It is not that the dictatorship has come into contradiction with the needs of the country's economic and cultural development; on the contrary, the Soviet regime, despite all the mistakes of the leadership, has shown in the most difficult circumstances and continues to show even now what inexhaustible sources of creativity are built into it. But there is no doubt that the bureaucratic degeneration of the dictatorship's apparatus is undermining the dictatorship itself; and as the economic zigzags of recent years have shown, this degeneration can actually bring the Soviet regime into contradiction with the economic development of the country.

Will the bureaucrat devour the dictatorship or will the dictatorship of the revolutionary class get the better of the bureaucrat? This is the problem which confronts us now — and on its resolution the fate of the revolution depends.

Four years ago it was said of Stalin that he had made himself a candidate for gravedigger of the party and the revolution. Much water has flowed under the bridge since that time. The deadlines have drawn nearer. The dangers have multiplied. Nevertheless, we are now further than at any time in recent years from being pessimistic in our forecast. Profound processes are taking place within the party, outside the realm of its formal procedures and demonstrations put on for show. The economic turns and the zigzags of the leadership, the unprecedented convulsions of the country's entire economic organism, the uninterrupted chain of palace coups, and finally the very blatancy of the transition to Bonapartist plebiscitary methods of running the party — all this gives rise to a deepgoing process of differentiation in the party's very foundation, in the working-class vanguard, and in the proletariat as a whole It is no accident that now more than ever the entire official press is filled with howls against "Trotskyism." Editorials, feature stories, economic reviews, prose and poetry, the correspondents' reports, and official resolutions – all these again condemn the already condemned, crush the already crushed, and bury the already buried "Trotskyism." And at the same time, by way of preparing for the congress, four hundred and fifty Oppositionists were recently arrested in Moscow alone. This shows that the ideas of the Opposition live on. Ideas have tremendous power when they correspond to the real course of unfolding events. This is attested to by the entire history of Bolshevism, which the Opposition is continuing under new conditions. "You cannot seal up our ideas in a bottle," we told the Stalinist bureaucracy dozens of times. Now it is forced to the same conclusions.

The Sixteenth Congress will not decide anything. The problem will be decided by other factors: what the inexhaustible revolutionary resources of the proletariat are and what the potential is for activity by its vanguard — which is drawing ever closer to a great test. The Opposition is the vanguard of this vanguard. It accepted a series of organizational defeats as the price of making a number of appeals to the proletarian vanguard. History will say this price was not too high. The more clearly, distinctly, and loudly the Opposition presented its criticisms, forecasts, and proposals, the better it carried out its role. Ideological irreconcilability has been inscribed on our banner. At the same time the Opposition has never, not for even an instant, either in its theoretical criticism or in its practical activities, shifted from the policy line of winning over the party ideologically to a line of winning power against the party. When the Bonapartists tried to attribute plans for a civil war to us, we invariably fired these provocations back in their faces. Both of these guiding principles of the Opposition's activity remain in effect even now. Today, as in the past, we stand on the line of reform. We seek to aid the proletarian nucleus of the party to reform the regime in a struggle against the plebiscitary Bonapartist bureaucracy. Our aim: the consolidation of the proletarian dictatorship in the USSR as the most important factor for the international socialist revolution.

The Opposition has been tested in events of exceptional importance and on questions of unprecedented complexity. The Opposition has become an international factor and as such it is continually growing. That is why we are less pessimistic than ever before. The Sixteenth Congress will work at solving various problems, but it will not resolve the problem. We will listen attentively to the speeches of the delegates at the congress and carefully read its decisions. But even now we are looking ahead, beyond the Sixteenth Congress. Our politics continues to be the politics of the long view.