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conversion to anarchism that led to a massive attempt in 1917–18 to create

a ‘commune-state’ that was the polar opposite of the ‘dictatorship of the

proletariat’.

The other misunderstanding is associated with the phrase ‘short

cut to communism’. Although the Bolsheviks never used this phrase, scholars

invariably employ it when describing the policies of ‘war communism’ in 1917–

20. According to the short-cut thesis, the Bolsheviks thought that measures put

in place to ﬁght the civil war had accelerated the pace of social transformation

to the point of bringing Russia to the brink of a leap into full socialism.

These two myths obscure the real innovation in the Bolshevik version

of the class narrative – one which the Bolshevik leaders themselves insisted

upon. This innovation was the thesis that a proletarian revolution was neces-

sarily accompanied by a massive, society-wide political and economic crisis. As

Leon Trotsky summed it up in an epigram from 1922: ‘Revolution opens the

door to a new political system, but it achieves this by means of a destructive

catastrophe.’

Far from implying any acceleration of socialist transformation –

as suggested by both ‘smash the state’ and ‘short cut to communism’ – this

quasi-inevitable crisis meant that the new era in world history would be

inaugurated by a series of severe challenges to any meaningful transformation.

Lenin’s use of ‘smash the state’ in 1917 was conducted entirely within the

framework of the class narrative: the proletariat wrests political power away

from the bourgeoisie and uses it to gradually remove the class contradictions

that make a repressive state necessary. In his celebrated epigram about the

cook running the affairs of the state, Lenin promised only that the new regime

would set about teaching the cook how to administer society. ‘Smash the state’

always meant ‘smash the bourgeois state in order to replace it with a proletarian

state’. The new proletarian state might have many of the same institutions and

even many of the same personnel – and yet class rule would have changed

hands and this made all the difference.

Bukharin drew out another implication of the ‘smash the state’ scenario.

If the bourgeois state had to be smashed and the proletarian state had to be

built up, a time of breakdown would have to be endured – and therefore social

breakdown was no argument against revolution. The paradigmatic instance of

this process was the army. Naturallythe old bourgeois army had to disintegrate,

since its use as a weapon against the revolution had to be forestalled, its ofﬁcers

could not be trusted and anyway soldiers in a revolutionary period would

simply no longer obey orders. The army thus falls apart, but ‘every revolution

8 Neil Harding, Leninism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

9 Lev Trotsky, Sochineniia, only 12 vols. published (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo,

1925–7), vol. xii,pp.327–31.

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smashes what is old and rotten: a certain period (a very difﬁcult one) must

pass before the new arises, before a beautiful home starts to be built upon the

ruins of the old pig-sty’. Eventually a new proletarian army arises. This army

would ﬁght according to the standard rules for an effective war machine and it

would recruit as many ‘bourgeois military specialists’ as possible – of course,

under the watchful eye of the commissars appointed by the new proletarian

state authority.

Much confusion will be avoided once we realise that the Bolsheviks saw the

mighty Red Army not as a refutation but as a paradigm of the ‘smash the state’

scenario. When the Bolsheviks took stock as the civil war wound down in 1920,

they were proud that they had successfully defended their right to go down

the road to socialism, and they certainly felt they were moving in the right

direction – but they also realised that the civil war had set them back in a major

way. The Bolshevik economist Iurii Larin told foreign visitors in 1920 that the

real economic history of the new regime would begin after the civil war. In

December 1920 (supposedly the height of the euphoria of ‘War Communism’),

Trotsky put it this way: ‘We attack, retreat and again attack, and we always say

that we have not traversed even a small portion of the road. The slowness of

the unfolding of the proletarian revolution is explained by the colossal nature

of the task and the profound approach of the working class to this task.’

Thus, remarkably, the Bolsheviks had committed themselves to promising

the workers a vast social crisis in the eventofa successful proletarian revolution.

This strand of Bolshevism only makes sense when seen in the context of the

all-embracing disaster of the world war. What reasonable worker or peasant

would refuse the sacriﬁces needed to put into practice the only possible escape

from a recurrence of this tragedy?

The new themes and emphases that Bolshevism brought to the old class

narrative during this time of troubles were not ironed out into a completely

consistent whole. Underneath the aggressive deﬁance, some embarrassment

can be detected on issues such as freedom of speech. Still, the heart of this

new amalgam was the same as the old class narrative: the proletariat’s mission

to conquer state power and to use it to construct socialism, and, just as

important, the inspired and inspiring leadership that ﬁlls the proletariat with

a sense of its mission. This underlying faith that the proletariat could and

would respond to inspiring leadership informed what outsiders could hardly

help seeing as a cynical and manipulative strategy. It was this same faith that

10 Nikolai Bukharin, Programma kommunistov (bol’shevikov) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo VTsIK,

1918), pp. 54–8.

11 Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol. xv,p.428 (2 Dec. 1920).

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became the real constitution of the new regime and a central inﬂuence on its

institutions and policies.

‘Who-whom’ and the transformation

of the countryside

Nowhere is the inﬂuence of the class narrative more evident than in the

crucial decisions made in the 1920s about the best way to effect the socialist

transformation of the countryside. The link between the class narrative and

Bolshevik thinking about the peasantry is the scenario summarised by the

phrase kto-kogo or ‘who-whom’.

Kto-kogo – usually glossed as ‘who will beat, crush or dominate whom?’ – is

widely seen as the hard-line heart of Lenin’s outlook. Eric Hobsbawm writes:

‘“Who whom?” was Lenin’s basic maxim: the struggle as a zero-sum game

in which the winner took, the loser lost all.’

This understanding of kto-kogo

ﬁts in with a standard account of the origins of Stalin’s collectivisation drive

that goes like this: the Bolsheviks tried to force communism on the peasants

during the period of War Communism but found that the task was beyond

their strength. Harbouring a deep contempt and resentment of the peasantry,

they retreated in 1921 by introducing NEP (New Economic Policy), after

which they waited for the day when they would have the strength to renew

their assault on the countryside.

Given the almost folkloric status of kto-kogo as Lenin’s favourite phrase, it

is something of a shock to discover that Lenin’s ﬁrst and only use of the words

kto-kogo is in two of his last public speeches given at the end of his career and

that his aim in coining the phrase was to explain the logic of NEP. After the

Bolsheviks legalised various forms of capitalist activity at the beginning of NEP,

the Bolshevik leaders had to demonstrate – to themselves as well as to their

audience – that permitting capitalist activity could actually redound to the

ultimate advantage of socialism. In speeches of late 1921 and early 1922, Lenin

put it this way: yes, we are giving the capitalists more room to manoeuvre

in order to revive the economy – and therefore it is up to us to ensure that

this revival strengthens socialist construction rather than capitalist restoration.

The question therefore is, who will outpace whom (kto-kogo operedit), who will

take ultimate advantage of the new economic policies? This question in turn

boiled down to a problem in class leadership:

12 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage

Books, 1996), p. 391.

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From the point of view of strategy, the essential question is, who will more

quickly take advantage of this new situation? The whole question is, whom

will the peasantry follow? – the proletariat, striving to build socialist society,

or the capitalist who says ‘Let’s go back, it’s safer that way, don’t worry about

that socialism dreamed up by somebody.’

Lenin pounded this basic point home in a great many formulations and

the phrase kto-kogo would have pass unnoticed if it had not been picked up by

Zinoviev when he gave the principal political speech at the Thirteenth Party

Congress in 1924. Zinoviev glossed the phrase as follows: ‘Kto-kogo? In which

direction are we growing? Is the revival that we all observe working to the

advantage of the capitalist or is it preparing the ground for us? . . . Time is

working – for whom?’

Thus the kto-kogoscenario was indeed built around the class struggle, but the

enemy class was not the peasantry but NEP’s ‘new bourgeoisie’. Victory would

be achieved by using the economic advantages of socialism to win the loyalty

of the peasantry. This scenario was not a product of NEP-era rethinking, but

rather a variant of the class leadership scenario operative during the civil-war

era. Basing themselves on the peasant scenario of Marx, Engels and Kautsky,

the Bolsheviks saw the peasants as a wavering class but a crucial one, since the

fate of the revolution would be decided by which class the peasants chose to

follow. As the Bolsheviks saw it, they had been compelled during the civil war

to place heavy burdens on the peasantry. Nevertheless, when push came to

shove, the mass of the peasantry realised that the Bolsheviks were defending

peasant interests as the peasants themselves deﬁned them and therefore gave

the Bolsheviks just that extra margin of support that ensured military victory.

This scenario meant that, far from looking back at the civil war as a time

of fundamental conﬂict between worker and peasant, leaders like Bukharin

urged Bolsheviks to look back at the successful military collaboration of the

civil war as a model for the economic class struggle of the 1920s.

Ofﬁcial Bolshevik scenarios assumed that complete socialist transformation

of the countryside – large-scale collective agricultural enterprises operating

as units in a planned economy – would not be possible without an extremely

high level of industrial technology. The transformative power of technology

was symbolised by the slogans of electriﬁcation and tractorisation that Lenin

coined prior to NEP. This task of economic transformation was so gargantuan

that many Bolsheviks assumed it would not occur until a European socialist

13 Lenin, PSS, vol. xliv,p.160. For uses of kto-kogo, see vol. xliv,pp.161, 163 (speech of 17

Oct. 1921) and vol. xlv,p.95 (speech of 27 Mar. 1922).

14 Trinadtsatyi s’’ezd RKP(b) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963), pp. 45, 88.

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revolution released resources unavailable to Russia alone. As good Marxists,

the Bolsheviks felt that the use of force to create fundamentally new pro-

duction relations (as opposed to defending the revolution) was not so much

wrong as futile. Precisely in 1919, when the Bolsheviks were putting extreme

pressure on the peasantry in order to retain power, can be found Lenin’s most

eloquent denunciations of any use of force in the establishment of communes

or collective farms.

The kto-kogo scenario is thus an application of an underlying scenario of

class leadership of the peasants to the new post-1921 situation of a tolerated

market and a tolerated ‘new bourgeoisie’. The Bolshevik understanding of the

dynamics of this situation was based heavily on pre-war Marxist theories of the

evolution of modern capitalism. According to Bolshevik theorists, these evo-

lutionary trends were immanent in any modern economy, whether capitalist

or socialist – although of course the socialist version would be more demo-

cratic and less socially destructive. General European capitalist trends could

thus serve the Bolsheviks as rough guides to their own near future. One such

trend was the steady movement towards organised and monopolistic forms

and the consequent self-annulment of the competitive market. The Bolshe-

viks also took over Kautsky’s assertion that the city was always the economic

leader of the countryside. These two factors together implied a steady pro-

cess of ‘squeezing-out’ (Verdr

angung, vytesnenie) of small-scale forms by more

efﬁcient and larger ones – petty traders by large-scale trading concerns, small

single-owner farms by large-scale collective enterprises (which could be either

capitalist or socialist).

These perceived trends informed the Bolshevik scenario of class leadership

during the 1920s. The Bolsheviks had no doubt that the countryside would

eventually be dominated economically by large-scale, urban-based and society-

wide monopolistic institutions. The perceived challenge was not here but in

the kto-kogo question: what class would be running these institutions? To use

another term coined by Lenin at the same time as kto-kogo: what kind of smy-

chka would be forged between town and country? Smychka is usually translated

‘link’ but this can be misleading if it is taken to imply that the Bolsheviks were

unaware prior to NEP of the need for town–country economic links. The

smychka slogan is speciﬁc to NEP because it evokes the economic aspect of the

kto-kogo struggle against a tolerated bourgeoisie for the loyalty of the peasants.

As Bukharin put it in 1924: ‘The class struggle of the proletariat for inﬂuence

over the peasantry takes on the character of a struggle against private capital

and for an economic smychka with the peasant farm through co-operatives and

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state trade.’

The Bolsheviks assumed that ‘the advantages of socialism’ – the

efﬁciencies generated by large-scale, society-wide institutions in general and a

fortiori by the planned and rationalised socialist version of such institutions –

would steadily come into play and fund the class leadership struggle by pro-

viding economic beneﬁts to the peasants.

Stalin presented the mass collectivisation of 1929–30 as the triumphal out-

come of Lenin’s kto-kogo scenario. Kto-kogo acquired its aura of hard-line coer-

cion from Stalin’s use of it during this period: ‘we live by the formula of Lenin –

kto-kovo: will we knock them, the capitalists, ﬂat and give them (as Lenin

expresses it) the ﬁnal, decisive battle, or will they knock us ﬂat?’

Yet Stalin’s

claim to embody the original spirit of kto-kogo contains some paradoxes. Lenin

and the Bolshevik leaders who picked up on his phrase had used kto-kogo to jus-

tify an economic competition with the Nepmen whodominatedtrade activities –

a competition that would result in new forms of agricultural production only

after an extremely high level of industrial technology was available. Stalin used

kto-kogo to justify a policy of mass coercion against peasant kulaks to implant

collective farms long before industry reached a high level.

These paradoxes make the often-heard claim that Stalin was simply carrying

out Lenin’s plan a bizarre one. Nevertheless, a close reading of Stalin’s speeches

in 1928–9 shows that the rationale – and perhaps even the real motivation –

for his radical strategy was strongly based on the narrative of class leadership.

His key assertion was that ‘the socialist town can lead the small-peasant village

in no other way than by implanting collective farms [kolkhozy] and state farms

[sovkhozy] in the village and transforming the village in a new socialist way’.

This was because class leadership would be qualitatively different within the

collective farms from what it would be in a countryside dominated by single-

owner farms:

Of course, individualist and even kulak habits will persist in the collective

farms; these habits have not fallen away but they will deﬁnitely fall away

in the course of time, as the collective farms become stronger and more

mechanised. But can it really be denied that the collective farms as a whole,

with all their contradictions and inadequacies but existing as an economic fact,

basically represent a new path for the development of the village – a path of

socialist development as opposed to a kulak, capitalist path of development?

15 Nikolai Bukharin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1990), p. 256.

16 Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1947–52), vol.

xii,p.37, see also vol. xii,p.144.

17 Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. xii,pp.162–5 (Dec. 1929).

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The role of the collective farms as an incubator of the new peasantry helps

account for de-kulakisation, the most brutal aspect of Stalin’s strategy. If the

kulaks were not removed from the village or, even worse, they were allowed

into the collective farms, they would simply take over and continue to exercise

leadership in the wrong direction. As Stalin lieutenant Mikhail Kalinin put it,

excluding the kulaks was a ‘prophylactic’ measure that ‘ensures the healthy

development of the kolkhoz organism in the future’.

In Kalinin’s defence of Stalin’s murderous form of class leadership, we still

hear a faint echo of the original meaning of kto-kogo: ‘You must understand

that de-kulakization is only the ﬁrst and easiest stage. The main thing is to

be able to get production going properly in the collective farms. Here, in

the ﬁnal analysis, is the solution to the question: kto-kogo.’ Nevertheless many

Bolsheviks were appalled by Stalin’s version of kto-kogo. In the so-called ‘Riutin

platform’ that was circulated in underground fashion among sections of the

Bolshevik elite in 1932 (it is unclear how much of the 100–page document

was written by Martemian Riutin himself ), it is argued that the Leninist path

towards liquidation of the class basis of the kulak meant showing the mass

of peasants ‘genuine examples of the genuine advantages of collective farms

organised in genuinely voluntary fashion’. But Stalin’s idea of class leadership

of the peasants had the same relation to real leadership as Japan’s Manchuria

policy did to national self-determination. As a result, ‘pluses have been turned

into minuses, and the best hopes of the best human minds have been turned

into a squalid joke. Instead of a demonstration of the advantages of large-

scale socialist agriculture, we see its defects in comparison to the small-scale

individual farm.’

We have traced the path of kto-kogo starting with Lenin’s coinage of the

term to express the logic of NEP and ending with Stalin’s contested claim

that mass collectivisation was the decisive answer to the kto-kogo question:

who will win the class allegiance of the peasantry? Kto-kogo establishes a link

between Lenin and Stalin but it also demonstrates the inadvisability of turning

that link into an equation. Most importantly, kto-kogo refers us back to the

narrative of class leadership and the basic assumptions guiding the Bolsheviks

as they tackled their most fateful task, the socialist transformation of the

countryside.

18 Pravda, 21 Jan. 1930.

19 The title of the ‘Riutin platform’ was ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship’;

it can be found in Reabilitatsiia: Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-kh godov (Moscow: Biblioteka

zhurnala Izvestiia TsIK, 1991), pp. 334–442.

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From path to treadmill: the next sixty years

Out of the turmoil of the early 1930s emerged the system that remained intact in

the Soviet Union until near the very end: collective farms, centralised industrial

planning, monopolistic party-state. The construction of this system entailed

a fundamental shift in the nature of the authoritative class narrative. Stalin

ofﬁcially declared that no hostile classes still existed in the Soviet Union, nor

were there any substantial numbers of still unpersuaded waverers. This new

situation meant that although there still existed a long road ahead to full

communism, the heroic days of class leadership were over.

In one sense, the new class narrative of the early 1930s remained unchanged

for the next six decades. Within its framework, there were various attempts to

realise ‘the advantages of socialism’, either in frighteningly irrational attempts

to rid the system of saboteurs or more reasonable attempts to tinker with the

parameters of the planning system. This ‘treadmill of reform’ (as the economist

Gertrude Schroeder famously described the process) was bathed in an atmo-

sphere of constant celebration about the achievements and prospects of the

united Soviet community as it journeyed towards communism. But under-

neath this resolutely optimistic framework we can discern a real history of the

changes in the way people related to the narrative emotionally and intellectu-

ally – a history in which uncertainty and anxiety play a much greater role. By

focusing on certain key moments in the presentation of the authoritative class

narrative, we can provide an outline of this history.

In March 1938, the big story in Pravda was the trial of the Right-Trotskyist

bloc – the last of the big Moscow show trials at which Bukharin, Rykov and

other luminaries were condemned as traitors and sentenced to death. But

alongside transcripts and reports ‘from the courtroom’ were continuing stories

on topics such as Arctic exploration, the party’s attempts to apply the plenum

resolution of January 1938, campaigns to fulﬁl economic targets and the crisis-

ridden international situation.

The Moscow show trial was intended to dramatise the need for ‘vigilance’

and for a ‘puriﬁcation’ of Soviet institutions from disguised saboteurs and

spies. The terror of 1937–8 was paradoxically explained and justiﬁed by the

premiss that there no longer existed hostile classes and undecided groups in the

Soviet Union. Therefore, if the ‘advantages of socialism’ were not immediately

apparent, the problems were not caused by the understandable interests of an

identiﬁable group – and certainly not by structural problems – but only by

individual saboteurs who were wearing the mask of a loyal Soviet citizen

or even party member. Stalin insisted that the danger of isolated saboteurs

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was potentially immense. Class leadership was therefore no longer described

as persuading wavering groups to follow the lead of the party but simply as

‘vigilance’, as ripping the mask from two-faced dvurushniki or ‘double-dealers’.

But on the same Pravda pages as the trial coverage were other stories that

stressed the damage done by the vigilance campaign. In January 1938, the

Central Committee passed a resolution that tried to cool down the prevailing

hysteria – and yet the leadership proved singularly unable to move past the

metaphor of the hidden enemy within:

All these facts show that many of our party organisations and leaders still to

this day haven’t learned to see through and expose the artfully masked enemy

who attempts with cries of vigilance to mask his own enemy status . . . and

who uses repressive measures to cut down our Bolshevik cadres and to sow

insecurity and excessive suspicion in our ranks.

Pravda also printed resolutions from economic ofﬁcials that say in effect:

‘Yes, we know we have problems fulﬁlling our plan directives, but what can you

expect, with all those wreckers running around? But now the wreckers have

been caught and we promise to do better.’ One can perhaps see in these stories

the beginnings of a new approach to improving poor economic performance:

tinkering with reforms rather than catching wreckers.

March 1938 was also the month of the Nazi takeover of Austria. Pravda

stories about international tension were used to underscore the necessity of

vigilance. But the shadow of the looming war also strengthened the desire of

many to move beyond the internecine paranoia of the puriﬁcation campaign.

The pages of Pravda were not exclusively devoted to the anxiety-provoking

evils of two-faced wreckers, super-vigilant party ofﬁcials, poor economic per-

formance and international tension. Its pages in March 1938 were also ﬁlled

with a symbolic triumph of Soviet society: the return of Arctic explorers Ivan

Papanin and his team from a dangerous and heroic expedition. As Papanin

and his men travelled closer and closer to the capital, the stories about them

became bigger and bigger. With exquisite timing, they hit Moscow only a few

days after the trial closed and several issues of Pravda were entirely devoted to

the ecstatic welcome they received. A smiling Stalin made an appearance in

order to greet the heroes.

This sense of a triumphal progression after overcoming heroic difﬁculties

was for many participants – including the top leaders – as much or more a part

of the meaning of the 1930s as the traumas associated with collectivisation or

20 Richard Kosolapov, Slovo tovarishchu Stalinu (Moscow: Paleia, 1995), pp. 151–2, 148–9.

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the puriﬁcation campaign. This way of remembering the 1930s should be kept

in mind when we approach the speech given by Andrei Zhdanov in Septem-

ber 1946 which denounced the alleged pessimistic outlook of the great literary

artists Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. More than just a clamp-

down on literature, this speech served as a signal that the political leadership

was going to try to re-create the triumphal mood that it remembered before the

war. The complex of hopes and illusions, disappointments and strivings gener-

ated in Soviet society by the anti-Nazi war stood in the way of this project and

were therefore perceived as an unsettling and dangerous threat. Thus the key

passage in the speech – undoubtedly reﬂecting Stalin’s own preoccupations –

is: ‘And what would have happened if we had brought up young people in a

spirit of gloom and lack of belief in our cause? The result would have been

that we would not have won the Great Fatherland war.’

Zhdanov presented the Soviet Union as a traveller on a long journey in

which the present moment lacked meaning. ‘We are not today what we were

yesterday and tomorrow we will not be what we are today.’ Writers were

enlisted as guides and leaders on the journey whose job was ‘to help light up

with a searchlight the path ahead’.

In this version of the constitutive Soviet narrative, ‘class’ has almost dropped

out while ‘leadership’ remains. Thankfully, the spotlight is not directed towards

searching out hidden enemies. Yet an atmosphere of doubt and anxiety

emanates from the speech: can we meet the difﬁculties ahead if the com-

ing generation does not see itself as participants in a triumphal progression?

Thus the core of the attack on Akhmatova was her concern with her own

‘utterly insigniﬁcant experiences’, her ‘small, narrow, personal life’ – a tirade

in which ‘personal’ (lichnyi) is a synonym for ‘small’ and ‘narrow’. The Stalin

era is often called the era of the ‘cult of personality [lichnost’]’, but it might just

as well be called the era of the fear of a personal life.

When the Stalin era came to an end in early 1953, things immediately started

to change, and the leadership came face to face with a task which it never really

solved: how to account for these changes within the framework of the overar-

ching narrative? The key problem was brought up as early as June 1953 at the

Central Committee plenum during which the Politburo (called Presidium dur-

ing this period) announced and justiﬁed to the party elite the arrest of Lavrentii

Beria, head of the NKVD. The archival publication of these deliberations in

1991 showed how the leadership had to face up to an embarrassing question (as

21 The Central Commmitte Resolution and Zhdanov’s Speech on the Journals Zvezda and

Leningrad, bilingual edn (Royal Oak, Mich.: Strathcona Publishing Company, 1978),

pp. 19–20, 35–6, 16.

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