File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_8Aug.94, message 45


Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:24:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Philip Goldstein <pgold-AT-strauss.udel.edu>
Subject: Re: Stalinism, Czarism etc.


	Thanks, Michael Dietz, for the historical analysis of the RUssian 
revolution. My feeling is that Russian historians provide the best 
account of what happened. I recommend, in particular, Moishe Lewin's 
work, including _The Gorbachev Phenomenon_ and _The Making of the Soviet 
System_. He agrees with your argument, that the conditions for liberal 
democracy were clearly absent because the Czars failed to establish a 
civil society, but he says that conditions after the revolution led to 
Stalinism. These conditions include a)the nexus of rural peasants and 
lords. This nexus blocked the formation of capitalist markets and made 
the state-based, development of capitalism necessary. b) the civil wars 
between the mensheviks and the bolsheviks. These wars killed off educated 
workers and destroyed industry. As a result, the peasants, who got land 
under Lenin, retreated into primitive communes which provided little 
goods for the cities, and the party, isolated from the whole society, 
recruited the authoritarian peasants who expected orders, not thought. 
The bureaucrats who fled the revolution also came back into the party, 
Czarist bureaucrats, I mean. Lewin implies that Lenin's NEP, which opened 
Russia to capitalist investment, was a wise policy, but Stalin ended it. 
He began a crash program to industrialize society by terrorizing the 
peasants. Lewin implies that this program echoed Czarist programs -- 
hostility to the peasants, revolution from above. In short, Lewin 
describes the changes and the ruptures between Lenin and Stalin and 
attributes Stalinism to new conditions, not to what you call Lenin's 
conspiratorial practices, I think. Totalitarian theorists, who trace a 
line from Marx to Stalin, agree with you but ignore Russian conditions, 
except to say that they made revolution possible. In any case, no one 
would dispute the claim that liberal democracy and civil society were not 
possible. 


   

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