Where Is the Soviet Republic Going?

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Since the October Revolution, this question has never left the columns of the world press. At the present moment it is being discussed in connection with my expulsion from the USSR, which the enemies of Bolshevism regard as a symptom of the long- awaited “denouement." That my expulsion has an importance that is not personal but political is not for me to deny. However I definitely would not advise anyone to jump to conclusions on this occasion about a “beginning of the end."

There is no need for a reminder that historical forecasts, unlike those of astronomy, are always conditional, containing options and alternatives. Any claims to powers of exact prediction would be ridiculous where a struggle between living forces is involved. The task of historical prediction is to differentiate between the possible and the impossible and to separate the most likely variants out from all those that are theoretically possible.

To be well founded, any answer to the question of where the Soviet revolution is going would have to be the result of an analysis of all its inner forces and of the world situation in which the revolution finds itself. A study of that kind would have to be a book. In Alma-Ata I began work on such a book, and I hope to complete it in the near future.

Here I can only indicate the lines along which the answer must be sought: Is it true that the Soviet Union is on the verge of annihilation? Have its internal resources been exhausted? What might follow if it were destroyed — democracy? dictatorship? restoration of the monarchy?

The course of the revolutionary process is much more complex than that of a mountain stream. But in both cases what may seem a highly paradoxical change of direction is actually quite normal, that is, in conformity with natural laws. There is no reason to expect schematic or superficial conformity with such laws. One must proceed from the normality of nature as determined by the mass of the water’s flow, the local geological relief, prevailing wind patterns, and so on. In politics that means being able to see beyond the highest upsurges of the revolution to forecast the possibility and even probability of sudden, sometimes prolonged periods of subsidence; and on the other hand, at times of greatest decline, for example, during the Stolypin counterrevolution (1907-1910), being able to distinguish what the preconditions are for a new upsurge.

The three revolutions Russia has experienced in the past quarter of a century in fact constitute stages of one and the same revolution. Between the first two stages twelve years passed; between the second and third — only nine months.

The eleven years of the Soviet revolution in their tum may be broken down into a series of stages, there being two main ones. Lenin’s illness and the opening of the struggle against “Trotskyism” can be taken, roughly, as the dividing line between them. In the first period, the masses played the decisive role. History knows of no other revolution setting such masses into motion as those roused by the October Revolution. Yet there are still eccentrics today who regard October as an adventure. Reasoning in this way, they reduce to nothing what they themselves defend. For of what value is a social system if it can be overthrown by an “adventure”? In reality the success of the October Revolution — the very fact that it held out through the most critical years against a host of enemies — was assured by the active intervention and initiative of the masses of town and countryside numbering in the millions. It was only on this foundation that a government apparatus and Red Army could be improvised. Such, at any rate, is the main conclusion I draw from my experience in this area.

The second period, which brought about a radical change in the leadership, is characterized by an unquestionable reduction in the level of direct mass intervention. The stream is once more contained within its banks. Over and above the masses the centralized administrative apparatus rises higher and higher. The Soviet state, like the army, becomes bureaucratized. The distance between the governing layer and the masses grows greater. The apparatus acquires a more and more self-sufficient character. The government official is increasingly filled with the conviction that the October Revolution was made precisely in order to concentrate power in his hands and assure him a privileged position.

There is no need, I think, to explain that the actual, living contradictions in the development of the Soviet state that we are pointing to do not serve in any way as arguments in favor of the anarchist “rejection” of the state, that is, the unadorned and unproductive “rejection” of it in general.

In a remarkable letter dealing with the phenomenon of degeneration in the state apparatus and party, my old friend Rakovsky has shown in very striking fashion that, after the conquest of power, an independent bureaucracy differentiated itself out from the working-class milieu and that this differentiation was at first only functional, then later became social.Naturally, the processes within the bureaucracy developed in relation to the very profound processes under way in the country. On the basis of the New Economic Policy a broad layer of petty bourgeoisie in the towns reappeared or newly came into being. The liberal professions revived. In the countryside, the rich peasant, the kulak, raised his head. Broad sections of officialdom, precisely because they had risen up above the masses, drew close to the bourgeois strata and established family ties with them. Increasingly, initiative or criticism on the part of the masses was viewed by the bureaucracy as interference. The apparatus was able to exert pressure on the masses more easily because, as has been stated, the mood of reaction in the psychology of the masses themselves was expressed by an unquestionable reduction in the level of their political activity. It has happened not infrequently in recent years that workers have heard bureaucrats or the new property-owning elements shout peremptorily at them: “This isn’t 1918 any more.” In other words, the relationship of forces has shifted to the disadvantage of the proletariat.

Corresponding to these processes were internal changes within the ruling party itself. It should not be forgotten for a moment that the overwhelming majority of the millions of party members today have only a vague understanding of what the party was in the first period of the revolution, to say nothing of the prerevolutionary underground. Suffice it to say that 75 to 80 percent of party members joined only after 1923. The number of members with prerevolutionary service records is less than 1 percent. Beginning in 1923 the party has been artificially diluted with a mass of half-raw recruits, whose role it was to serve as pliable material in the hands of the apparatus professionals. This swamping of the revolutionary nucleus of the party was the necessary precondition for the victory of the apparatus over “Trotskyism."

Let us note at this point that the bureaucratization of the party and government establishments produced a high incidence of corruption and arbitrariness. Our opponents point to these with malicious glee. It would have been unnatural for them to do otherwise. But when they try to explain these phenomena by the absence of parliamentary democracy, it is enough to reply by pointing to the long series of “Panamas," beginning with the one which, though not the first, has become a pejorative term for everything of the kind, and ending with the latest “Panama" involving the Paris Gazette and the former French minister Klotz. If someone were to argue that France constitutes an exception and that, for example, in the United States corruption among politicians or government officials is unknown, we would try very hard to believe them.

But let us return to our subject. The majority of this officialdom which has risen up over the masses is profoundly conservative. They are inclined to think that everything needed for human well-being has already been done, and to regard anyone who does not acknowledge this as an enemy. The attitude of these elements toward the Opposition is one of organic hatred; they accuse it of sowing dissatisfaction toward them among the masses by expressing criticisms, of undermining the stability of the regime, and of threatening the gains of October with the specter of “permanent revolution." This conservative layer, which constitutes Stalin’s most powerful support in his struggle against the Opposition, is inclined to go much further to the right, in the direction of the new propertied elements, than Stalin himself or the main nucleus of his faction. Hence the present struggle between Stalin and the right wing; hence, too, the prospect of a new purge in the party, not only of “Trotskyists," whose numbers have grown considerably since the expulsions and deportations, but also of the most degenerate elements within the bureaucracy. Thus Stalin’s halfhearted policies have developed in a series of zigzags, with the consequence that the two wings of the party, left and right, have grown stronger — at the expense of the governing center faction.

Although the struggle against the right wing has not been removed from the agenda, for Stalin the main enemy remains, as before, the left. Today this no longer needs to be proved. To the Opposition, this was obvious some time ago. As early as the first weeks of the campaign against the right wing, in a letter to my cothinkers from Alma-Ata on November 10 of last year, I wrote that Stalin’s tactical objective was, when the moment was right, “when the right wing had been sufficiently terrified, to turn his fire abruptly against the left … . The campaign against the right is only to build up momentum for a new onslaught against the left. Whoever fails to understand this, has understood nothing." This prediction came true sooner and more completely than could have been expected.

When someone involved in a revolution begins to backslide without breaking from the revolution’s social base of support, the backslider is forced to call his decline a rise and pass the right hand off as the left. It is precisely for that reason that the Stalinists accuse the Opposition of “counterrevolution” and make desperate efforts to lump their opponents of the right and left together in one heap. The same purposes are to be served from now on by the use of the word “emigre." In reality, there are two types of emigre today: one, driven out by the mass upsurge of the revolution; and the other, serving as an index of the success being enjoyed by forces hostile to the revolution.

When the Opposition speaks of Thermidor, drawing on the analogy of the classic revolution of the late eighteenth century, it has in mind the danger that, in view of the phenomena and tendencies already indicated, the Stalinists’ struggle against the left wing may become the starting point for a concealed change in the social nature of Soviet power.

The question of Thermidor, which has played such an important part in the struggle between the Opposition and the ruling faction, requires some further explanation.

The former French president Herriot recently expressed the opinion that the Soviet regime, which had relied upon violence for ten whole years, had by that very fact passed judgment against itself. During his visit to Moscow in 1924, Herriot, as I understood him at the time, tried a more sympathetic, though even then not very clear-cut, approach toward the Soviets. But now that a decade has passed, he considers it timely to withdraw his credit from the October Revolution. I confess I do not understand the political thinking of the Radical very well. Revolutions have never issued short-term promissory notes to anyone. It took the Great French Revolution ten years, not to install democracy, but to bring the country to Bonapartism. Nevertheless it remains beyond dispute that if the Jacobins had not taken reprisals against the Girondists and had not shown the world an example of how to deal radically with the old order, all of humanity today would have been shorter by a head.

Revolutions have never yet passed by leaving no traces upon the fate of humanity. But by the same token, they have not always preserved the gains won at the time of their highest upward sweep. After certain classes, groups, or individuals have made a revolution, others begin to profit from it. Only a hopeless sycophant would deny the world-historical significance of the Great French Revolution, although the reaction which followed it was so deep that it led the country to the restoration of the Bourbons. The first stage on the road of reaction was Thermidor. The new officials and new property owners wanted to enjoy the fruits of the revolution in peace. The old Jacobin intransigents were an obstacle to them. The new propertied layers did not yet dare to appear under their own banner. They needed a cover from within the Jacobin milieu itself. They sought out some leaders for the short term in the persons of certain Jacobins of the second and third rank. Swimming with the current, these Jacobins prepared the way for the coming of Bonaparte, who with his bayonets and his legal code solidified the new property system.

Elements of a Thermidorean process, to be sure one that is completely distinctive, may also be found in the land of the Soviets. They have become strikingly evident in recent years. Those who are in power today either played a secondary role in the decisive events of the first period of the revolution or were outright opponents of the revolution and only joined it after it was victorious. They now serve for the most part as camouflage for those layers and groupings which, while hostile to socialism, are too weak for a counterrevolutionary overturn and therefore seek a peaceful Thermidorean switching back onto the track leading to bourgeois society; they seek to "roll downhill with the brakes on," as one of their ideologists has put it.

However, it would be a very great mistake to regard all these processes as having been completed. Fortunately for some and unfortunately for others, that point is still a long way off. The historical analogy is a tempting, and for that reason dangerous, method. To suppose that there is a special cyclical law of revolutions, which compels them always to pass from old Bourbons to new, by way of a Bonapartist stage, would be to think too superficially. The course of any revolution is determined by the unique combination of forces on the national scene and in the whole international situation. It remains no less true that there are certain features common to all revolutions that do admit of analogy and in fact imperatively demand it if we are to base ourselves on the lessons of the past and not to start history over from scratch at each new stage. It is possible to explain in sociological terms why the tendency toward Thermidor, Bonapartism, and Restoration are to be found in every victorious revolution worthy of the name.

The heart of the matter lies in the strength of these tendencies, the way they are combined, the conditions under which they develop. When we speak of the threat of Bonapartism we do not in any way consider it a foregone conclusion, determined by some abstract historical law. The further fate of the revolution will be decided by the course of the struggle itself as the living forces of the society fight it out. There will still be ebbs and flows, whose duration will depend to a great extent on the situation in Europe and throughout the world. In an age like ours, a political trend can be regarded as hopelessly smashed to bits only if it fails to understand the objective causes of its defeat and feels itself to be a helpless chip of wood upon the flood — if a chip of wood could be said to have feeling.