Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 11:27:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Zarembka <zarembka-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: Godena on Tucker


Louis correctly points to Tucker's concept of Stalin's Russian national
Bolshevism.  I prefer to use the citation in STALIN IN POWER because it
is the more recent of Tucker's thinking (all of Godena's citations are
earlier than the 1990 publication of STALIN IN POWER).  Thus, Tucker
writes

	"...Stalin's was a Bolshevism of the radical right. As such it was
wayward, deeply devitationist, and questionably Bolshevist save insofar
as it could and did lay claim to all that was harsh, repressive, and
terrorist in Lenin's legacy...As a Bolshevism of the radical right,
Stalin's Russian national Bolshevism was akin to Hitler's German
National Socialism.
	"Kinship is not identity.  There were differences, among them the 
fact that Stalin's Bolshevism, despite its covert and after the war
increasingly overt anti-Semitism, did not preach a biological
racism like Hilter's.  But the likenesses were many and deep.  Both
regimes, with the proviso just mentioned in Stalinism's case, were
anti-Communist.  Both were chauvinist, and idealized elements of the
national past.  Both were statist and imperialist.  Both were
enemy-obsessed.  Both were terroristic and practiced torture in their
prisons.  Under both regimes state terrorism was linked with a theory
of international conspiracy: a Jewish anti-Aryan conspiracy in Hitler's
case and an anti-Soviet one in Stalin's.  Both were regimes of personal
dictatorship with a leader cult.  Both featured cults of heroes and
heroism.  Both exalted youth, physical strength, and motherhood.  The
one emphasized what was narodny; the other, what was volkisch.  Both
favored grandiosity in architecture.  Both were anti-liberal,
anticosmopolitian, and antimodernist.  They were both radicalism of the
right.
	"In the nature of its ruler and his autocratic regime, Stalin's 
Russia of mid-1939 was, therefore, readier for the step it was about
to take in foreign policy than its own policy, Communists elsewhere,
and foreign politics and governments realized." (pp. 591-92).


As to the separation between Stalin and Lenin, it is brought out over
and over again in the 1990 book, often directly, sometimes subtlely. 
But Tucker also recognizes connections.  Connections which can be
discussed, argued about, diagreed with and whatever.  But serious
Marxists do that also.  For example, Louis Althusser says that 

	"We cannot in fact accept that everything is solved simply by 
invoking the role of Stalin.  We cannot consider our historical,
political and even theoretical tradition as a pure [italized, P.Z.]
heritage, which was distored by an individual called Stalin, or by
historical period which he dominated.  There is no original 'purity' of
Marxism that only has to be rediscovered.  During the whole testing
period of the 1960s when we, in our different ways, went 'back to the
classics', when we read or re-read Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, trying to
find in them a living Marxism, something which was being snuffed out by
Stalin-type formulae and practices, we were all forced...to admit the
obvious--namely, that our theoretical tradition is not 'pure'; that
contrary to Lenin's hasty phrase, Marxism is not a 'block of steel',
but contains difficulties, contradictions, and gaps..." ("The Crisis of
Marxism", MARXISM TODAY, July 1978, pp. 218).

In my own view it is more important that ever to confront the facts of
the Stalin years and to deeped Marxist theory at the same time.  Tucker
offers us the former, while not helping much with the latter.

In any event, I welcomed Godena's posting because it is the FIRST in
this round of postings to actually discuss the issues of the Stalin
period and not call anyone names.  And I also welcome his citations to
some books I have not seen but will now get ahold of.

Paul

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Paul Zarembka, supporting the  RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY  Web site at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka,  and using OS/2 Warp.
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