Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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25
The Soviet Union and the road
to communism
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The heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was an image of
itself as a traveller on the road to communism. This image was embedded
in the narrative of class struggle and class mission created by Karl Marx and
first embodied in a mass political movement by European Social Democracy.
When Russian Social Democrats took power in October 1917, they founded
a regime that was unique in its day because of their profound sense that the
country had embarked on a journey of radical self-transformation.
Throughout its history, the Soviet Union’s self-definition as a traveller on
the road to socialism coloured its political institutions, its economy, its foreign
policy and its culture. The inner history of Soviet ideology is thus the story of a
metaphor – a history of the changing perceptions of the road to communism.
In 1925, Nikolai Bukharin’s book Road to Socialism exuded the confidence of
the first generation of Soviet leaders. Sixty years later, the catch-phrase ‘which
path leads to the temple?’ reflected the doubts and searching of the perestroika
era. Right to the end, Soviet society assumed that there was a path with a
temple at the end of it and that society had the duty to travel down that path.
Marxism and the class narrative
The Soviet Union’s vision of the journey’s end – socialist society – was in many
respects the common property of the European Left as a whole. The distinc-
tive contribution of the Marxist tradition to the new revolutionary regime in
Russia was a narrative about how socialist society would come to be. Marxism
described the protagonists whose interaction would result in socialism, their
motivations, the tasks they set themselves and the dramatic clashes between
them that propelled society forward.
Marx shaped the Soviet Union’s constitutive narrative in three crucial ways.
First, the narrative was about classes. The Marxist understanding of ‘class’ is
deeply shaped by seeing classes as characters in a narrative, with motivations,
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The Soviet Union and the road to communism
will, purposes and the ability to perceive and overcome obstacles. The role of
‘scientific socialism’ was to give a strong underpinning to this narrative. The
doctrine of surplus value, for example, demonstrated the unavoidable conflict
between proletariat and bourgeoisie and this in turn gave the proletariat as a
class its essential motivation.
Second, the central episode in Marx’s world-historical narrative portrays the
process by which the industrial proletariat recognises, accepts and carries out
the historical mission of taking political power as a class and using it to introduce
socialism. This central episode is summed up by the phrase ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’. The proletariat needed political power in order to carry out
its mission for two sets of reasons: the defensive/repressive need to protect
socialism from hostile classes and the constructive need for society-wide insti-
tutional transformation. Although a class dictatorship was only possible when
the class in question was in a position to carry out its class interest fully and
without compromise, Marx always assumed that the proletarian class dicta-
torship would rest securely on the voluntary support of the other non-elite
classes.
Third, Marx brought the world-historical narrative home by assigning a
mission here and now to dedicated socialist revolutionaries. ‘The emancipation
of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’
The famous motto of the First International can be understood in two ways.
On one reading, the motto tells revolutionaries from other classes to clear off:
the emancipation of the working class is the business of the workers and no one
else. The motto was understood in this way by the French Proudhonists who
were perhaps the most important constituency within the First International.
On another reading, the motto not only refuses to close the door to non-
proletarian revolutionaries but actually invites them in. If only the workers
themselves can bring about their liberation, then it is imperative that they
come to understand what it is they need to do and that they obtain the requisite
organisational tools. This mission of preparing the working class for its mission
was incumbent upon any socialist who accepted the Marxist class narrative,
no matter what his or her social origin.
Revolutionary Social Democracy: ‘The merger of
socialism and the worker movement’
The basic self-definition of the Bolsheviks was that they were the Russian
embodiment of ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’. Their angry rejection of
the label ‘Social Democracy’ in 1918 was meant to be a defiant assertion of
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continued loyalty to what the label once stood for. When the pioneers of
Russian Social Democracy looked West in the 1890s, they saw a powerful,
prestigious and yet still revolutionary movement. They saw mass worker par-
ties, inspired by the Marxist class narrative, that continued to advance despite
the persecutions of such redoubtable enemies as Chancellor Bismarck. They
saw a set of innovative institutions – a party of a new type – that set out to
bring the message to the workers and instil in them an ‘alternative culture’.
1
The man who gave canonical expression to the elaborated class narrative
of Social Democracy was Karl Kautsky. Kautsky is remembered as the most
influential theoretician of international Social Democracy, but in certain key
respects – particularly in the case of the fledgling Russian Social Democracy –
Kautsky’s role went beyond influence. In 1892, Kautsky wrote The Erfurt Pro-
gramme, a semi-official commentary on the recently adopted programme of
the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This book defined Social
Democracy for Russian activists – it was the book one read to find out what
it meant to be a Social Democrat. In 1894, a young provincial revolutionary
named Vladimir Ul’ianov translated The Erfurt Programme into Russian just
at the time he was acquiring his lifelong identity as a revolutionary Social
Democrat.
In The Erfurt Programme, Kautsky defined Social Democracy as ‘the merger
[Vereinigung] of socialism and the worker movement’. This slogan summarised
not only the proletarian mission to introduce socialism, but also the Social
Democratic mission of filling the proletariat with an awareness of its task.
Kautsky’s formula also provided Social Democracy with its own origin story.
According to the merger formula, Social Democracy was a synthesis. As Kaut-
sky put it, each earlier strand of both socialism and the worker movement
possessed ‘ein St
¨
uckchen des Richtigen’, a little bit of the truth.
2
This little bit
of truth could be preserved, but only if its one-sidedness was transcended.
In this way, the merger formula implied a two-front polemical war against
all who defended the continued isolation of either socialism or the worker
movement. The technical term within social democratic discourse for the
effort to keep the working-class struggle free from socialism was Nurgew-
erkschaftlerei, ‘trade-unions-only-ism’. (Since England was the classical home
of this anti-Social Democratic ideology, the English words ‘trade union’ were
used by both German and Russian Social Democrats to make an ‘-ism’ that was
equivalent for Nurgewerkschaftlerei. To render Lenin’s epithet tred-iunionizm as
1 Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985).
2 Karl Kautsky, Die historische Leistung von Karl Marx (Berlin: Vorw
¨
arts, 1908), p. 36.
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‘trade-unionism’ is really a mistranslation, since it implies that Lenin was hos-
tile towards trade unions rather than towards a specific ideology that denied
the need for a Social Democratic worker party.) A corresponding ‘Nur’ term
could have been coined for bomb-throwing revolutionaries who continued to
think that it was a waste of time to propagandise and educate the working
class as a whole prior to the revolution.
By assigning the task of introducing socialism to the working class itself,
the merger formula implied an exalted sense of a world historical mission.
The most powerful source for this aspect of the Social Democratic narrative
was Ferdinand Lassalle, the forgotten founding father of modern socialism.
The cult of Lassalle that was an integral part of the culture of the German
Social Democratic Party was based on his thrilling insistence during his brief
two years of proto-Social Democratic agitation (1862–4) that the workers, the
despised fourth estate, accept the noble burden of an exalted mission. ‘The high
and world-wide honour of this destiny must occupy all your thoughts. Neither
the load of the oppressed, nor the idle dissipation of the thoughtless, nor even
the harmless frivolity of the insignificant, are henceforth becoming to you.
You are the rock on which the Church of the present is to be built.’
3
Anyone
who pictures Social Democracy as based on dry and deterministic ‘scientific
socialism’ and overlooks the fervent rhetoric of good news and saving missions
has missed the point.
The merger formula also reveals the logic that drove the creation of the
party-led alternative culture. The fantastic array of newspapers, the sport-
ing clubs, the socialist hymns, all under the leadership of a highly organised
national political party – this entire innovative panoply was meant to merge
in the most profound way possible the new socialist outlook with the outlook
of each worker.
Social Democracy’s self-proclaimed mission of bringing the good news
of socialism to the workers meant that it had a profound stake in political
democracy and particularly in political liberties such as freedom of speech,
press and assembly. Political liberties were only a means – but they were an
absolutely essential means. In an image that profoundly influenced Russian
Social Democracy, Kautsky asserted that political liberties were ‘light and air
for the proletariat’.
4
The vital importance of political liberties was a key sector
in the two-front polemical war against both isolated trade-union activists and
3 The Workingman’s Programme (Arbeiter-Programm) (New York: International Publishing
Company, 1899), p. 59.
4 Das Erfurter Programm (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965), p. 219.
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isolated revolutionaries, both of whom tended to ignore or even scorn the
need for fighting absolutism and broadening political liberties.
Indeed, Social Democracy pictured itself, accurately enough, as one of the
principal forces sustaining political democracy in turn-of-the-century Europe.
The reasoning behind this claim is the basis for the political strategy to which
the Russian Social Democrats gave the name of ‘hegemony in the democratic
revolution’. The bourgeoisie does indeed have a class interest in full parliamen-
tary democracy and political liberties, but as time goes by, the bourgeoisie is
less and less ready to act on this interest. The same reason that makes Social
Democracy eager for democracy (political liberties make the merger of social-
ism and the worker movement possible and therefore inevitable) douses the
enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie. Thus Social Democracy becomes the only
consistent fighter for democracy. In fact, some major democratic reforms will
probably have to wait until the dictatorship of the proletariat and the era of
socialist transformation. In the meantime, bourgeois democracy is much too
important to be left to the bourgeoisie.
The defence of democracy was a national task in which Social Democracy
saw itself as a fighter for the here-and-now interests of all the non-elite classes.
In the Social Democratic narrative, the proletariat did not look on all the
other labouring classes with ‘contempt’ (as is often stated). The proletariat
was rather pictured as the inspiring leader of what might be called follower
classes. As Kautsky explained in a section of The Erfurt Programme entitled Die
Sozialdemokratie und das Volk, the leadership role of the proletariat had two
aspects. In the long run, peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie would see that
their own deepest aspiration – to assert control over their productive activity –
could only be attained through the ‘proletarian socialism’ of centralised social
control and not through individual ownership. In the short run, the non-elite
classes would realise – sooner rather than later – that nationally organised and
militant Social Democracy was the only effective defender of their current per-
ceived interests. In the Marxist texts that most influenced Lenin, the dominant
note is not pessimism and fear of, say, the peasants but rather an unrealis-
tic optimism that they would soon accept the leadership of the organised
workers.
Russian Social Democracy
From the point of view of a young Russian revolutionary in the 1890s choosing
a political identity, what was the greatest obstacle to choosing to be a revo-
lutionary Social Democrat? A Social Democrat had to reject the pessimistic
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horror that capitalist industrialisation had inspired in earlier Russian revolu-
tionaries, but this rejection was hardly an obstacle – on the contrary, it was an
impetus for optimistic energy in the face of what seemed by the 1890stobe
inevitable economic processes. The minuscule dimensions of the new Russian
industrial working class also hardly constituted an obstacle, since organising
and propagandising even the relatively few Russian workers offered plenty of
scope for activity.
The greatest obstacle – the crucial distinction between Russia and the coun-
tries where Social Democracy flourished – was the lack of political liberties.The
tsarist autocracy seemed to make ‘Russian Social Democrat’ something of an
oxymoron. The whole meaning of Social Democracy revolved around pro-
paganda and agitation on a national level. What then was the point of even
talking about Social Democracy in a country where even prominent and loyal
members of the elite were prohibited from publicly speaking their mind?
Accordingly, many revolutionaries adopted severely modified forms of
Social Democratic ideas. Some accepted the importance of achieving political
liberty but concluded that a mass movement was a non-starter as a way of
overthrowing tsarism. Others accepted the importance of organising the
working class but felt that political liberties were not so fundamental that
overthrowing the autocracy should be a top priority task for the workers.
The central strand of Russian Social Democracy – the strand that ran from
the Liberation of Labour group (Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Aksel’rod and Vera
Zasulich) in the early 1880s through the Iskra organisation of 1900–3 and then
through both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions that emerged from Iskra –
tried to be as close to Western-style Social Democracy as circumstances would
allow. The guiding principle of Russian Social Democracy can be summed up
as: Let us build a party as much like the German SPD as possible under
absolutist conditions so we can overthrow the tsar and obtain the political
liberties that we need to make the party even more like the SPD!
As worked out by the polemics of the underground newspaper Iskra at the
turn of the century, this basic principle led to the following assertions. The
Russian working class can be organised by revolutionaries working in under-
ground conditions. The workers can understand the imperative of political
liberty both for the sake of immediate economic interests and for the long-run
prospects of socialism. Their militant support of a democratic anti-tsarist revo-
lution will instigate other non-elite classes and even the progressive parts of the
elite to press home their own revolutionary demands. Thanks primarily to the
militancy of the working class, the coming Russian democratic revolution
will have a more satisfactory outcome than, say, the half-baked German
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revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, since it will attain the
greatest possible amount of political liberty. And these political liberties will
allow the education and organisation of the Russian working class on an SPD
scale, thus creating the fundamental prerequisite of socialist revolution, a class
ready and able to take political power.
Compared to the trends they were combating, the Iskra team stands out by
its optimism about the potential of the Russian working class to organise and
become an effective and indeed leading national political force under tsarism.
Iskra believed that this potential could only be realised given the existence of a
well-organised and highly motivated Social Democracy – a lesson they learned
from the astounding success of German Social Democracy. Many readers of
Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? have concluded that Lenin wanted a nationally
organised party of disciplined activists because he had pessimistically given up
on the revolutionary inclinations of the workers. In reality, Lenin wanted an
SPD-type party – one with a national centre and a full-time corps of activists –
because of his optimistic confidence that even the relatively backward Russian
proletariat living under tsarist repression would enthusiastically respond to
the Social Democratic message. Lenin’s opponents were the sceptical ones on
this crucial issue.
It is completely anachronistic to see Lenin assuming in 1902 that the party
could accomplish its task only if it had control of the state and a monopoly of
propaganda. His idea of an effective party in 1902 was an organisation that was
efficientenough to publish and distribute a national undergroundnewspaperin
regularfashion and that was surrounded bya core of activistswho were inspired
by and could inspire others with the good news of Social Democracy. Thus the
key sentence in What Is To Be Done? is: ‘You brag about your practicality and you
don’tsee (a fact knownto any Russianpraktik) what miracles for the revolution-
ary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual.’
5
Given later events, it is difficult to remember that a central plank in the Iskra
platform was the crucial importance of political liberties. Iskra insisted to other
socialists that achieving political liberty had to be an urgent priority. It insisted
to other anti-tsarist revolutionaries that only proletarian leadership in the
revolution would ensure the maximum achievable amount of political liberty.
They drummed home in their propaganda and agitation the vital importance
of what might be called the four S’s: svoboda slova, sobraniia, stachek, freedom
of speech, assembly and strikes. The Social Democratic narrative absolutely
required these freedoms to operate.
5 What Is To Be Done?, in Lenin, PSS, 5th edn, vol. vi,p.107.
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Overthrowing the autocracy was a national task that would advance the
interests of almost every group in Russian society. Following the logic of the
Social Democracy class narrative, Iskra assumed that a socialist party could
and should assume the leadership role in achieving democracy. They engaged
in a complicated political strategy whereby they supported anti-tsarist liberals,
fought with the liberals for the loyalty of the non-elite classes and tried to make
the non-elite classes aware of the necessity of winning as much political liberty
as possible in the upcoming revolution.
Iskra conducted the usual Social Democratic two-front polemical war. The
prominence of What Is To Be Done? means that we see only one front of the
war, namely, the attack against the ‘economists’ who allegedly wanted to keep
the workers aloof from the great merger. In Iskra’s activity (and in Lenin’s
writings) as a whole during this period, the other front in the war was just
as prominent or even more so: the attack against the terrorists who allegedly
believed that an organised mass worker movement was a pipe dream that
would only delay the revolution.
After 1903, the Iskra organisation broke up into two Social Democratic
factions. TheMenshevik/Bolsheviksplithas achieved mythic status as the place
where two roads diverged and taking one rather than the other made all the
difference. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the Menshevik leaders originally
dismissed Lenin as someone who put too high a priority on achieving political
liberties, who would allow Social Democracy to be exploited by bourgeois
revolutionaries and who neglected the specifically socialist task of instilling
hostility between worker and capitalist.
Similarly, Bolshevism prior to the First World War can almost be defined
as the Social Democratic faction most fanatically insistent on the importance
of political liberties. Lenin’s precepts were: Don’t be satisfied with bourgeois
leadership of the bourgeois revolution because the liberals will not push the
revolution to achieve its maximum gains. Don’t be satisfied with the meagre
liberties provided bythe post-1905 Stolypin regime. Searchforthe most radically
democratic allies among the non-elite classes. Preserve at all costs a party base
in the illegal underground that is the only space in Russia for truly free speech.
The class narrative in a time of troubles
In 1914 a group of Bolsheviks – the party’s representatives in the national
legislative Duma – met to compare impressions about the stunning news
that the German SPD had voted in favour of war credits for the German
government. This news shook them profoundly because ‘all Social Democrats
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had “learned from the Germans” how to be socialists’. The deputies agreed on
one thing: the erstwhile model party had betrayed revolutionary socialism.
6
Six years later, at the Second Congress of the Third International, another
party presented itself as an international model: the Bolsheviks themselves.
This new Bolshevik model, profoundly marked by the intervening six years of
war and civil war, could not have been predicted from knowledge of pre-war
Bolshevism. A party that had put the achievement of ‘bourgeois democracy’
in Russia at the centre of its political strategy now angrily rejected bourgeois
democracy and all its works. A party that had propagandised the crucial impor-
tance of political liberties had become notorious for dictatorial repression and
a state monopoly of mass media.
And yet, despite all these changes, the Bolsheviks claimed to remain loyal
to the old class narrative – indeed, they claimed to be the only loyal ones.
Bolshevism as a factor in world history – as an alternative model for a socialist
party and as the constitutive myth of the Soviet Union – was based on the
Social Democratic class narrative as it emerged from the severe and distorting
impact of an era of world crisis.
Three major developments influenced the new version of the class narra-
tive. The first was the sense of betrayal by Western Social Democracy. The
Western European party leaders had announced in solemn convocation that
they would make war impossible by using the threat of revolution – and now
they not only refused to make good on this threat but turned into cheerlead-
ers for their respective national war machines! The next influence was the
apocalyptic world war. The adjective is hardly too strong: the war seemed to
the Bolsheviks to present mankind with a choice between socialism and the
collapse of civilisation.
The third influence was the Bolshevik experience as a ruling party. The Bol-
sheviks understood the October Revolution as the onset of the central episode
of the class narrative – the long-awaited proletarian conquest of power. All their
experiences in power were deeply informed by this narrative framework. In
turn, the rigours and emergencies of the civil-war period modified their under-
standing of the framework. Just as fundamentally, the very concept of a class
in power was discovered in practice to contain a host of hitherto unsuspected
consequences and implications.
The experience of being a ruling party responsible for all of society meant
dealing with other classes. This necessity intensified a fear already latent in the
6 A. G. Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda. Semnadtsatyi god, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izda-
tel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1992–4), vol. i,p.61.
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class narrative – the fear of becoming infected by contact with other classes
and losing the proletarian qualities needed to accomplish the great mission.
A group often hailed as the conscience of the party, the Worker Opposition
of 1920–1, was also the one that most energetically followed out the resulting
logic of purge, purification and suspicion.
When the Bolsheviks closed down the bourgeois and even the socialist press,
they shocked many socialists into realising their own commitment to ‘bour-
geois democracy’. The short-term justification was that coercion was needed
to complete any revolution, as shown by the record of bourgeois revolutions.
This argument was not as fateful as the decision to create an exclusive state
monopoly of the mass media. This decision paradoxically had strong roots in
the pre-war class narrative. The central reason that Social Democracy required
freedom of speech was to be able to raise the consciousness of its worker con-
stituency, and Social Democrats had always envied the tools of indoctrination
at the command of the elite classes. If one mark of an SPD-type party was the
massive effort to inculcate an alternative culture, then one possible path for an
SPD-type party in power was to create what has been called the ‘propaganda
state’. Grigorii Zinoviev explained why the Bolsheviks chose this path:
As long as the bourgeoisie holds power, as long as it controls the press, educa-
tion, parliament and art, a large part of the working class will be corrupted by
the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and its agents and driven into the bourgeois
camp . . . But as soon as there is freedom of the press for the working class, as
soon as we gain control of the schools and the press, the time will come – it
is not very far off – when gradually, day by day, large groups of the working
class will come into the party until, one day, we have won the majority of the
working class to our ranks.
7
TheBolshevik self-definition as the proletariat in powerimplied that the new
regime had begun the process of socialist transformation. It did not necessarily
imply anything definite about the depth of that transformation at any one
time nor even about its tempo. Unfortunately, there are two deep-rooted
misunderstandings about what the Bolsheviks actually did claim about the
road to socialism in the early years of the regime. The first misunderstanding
is associated with the phrase ‘smash the state’. Many have felt that Lenin’s use
of this phrase in State and Revolution (written in 1917) was a promise (whether
sincere or not) to bring about an immediate end to any repressive or centralised
state. Some writers have gone further and posited a genuine if temporary
7 Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!: Proceedings and Documents of the Second
Congress, 1920, ed. John Riddell, 2 vols. (New York: Pathfinder, 1991), vol. i,p.153.
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