I feel that despite good research and the heavily factual nature of the Cosmonaut podcast’s first episode on Stalin there are several omissions along with a glaring lack of a Marxist analysis of Stalinism. There is no mention of the ballooning of privileges of bureaucrats and their increasingly lavish lifestyles under Stalin in the 1930s (particularly first with the increase in the party maximum in 1929 and finally its removal in 1932, the party maximum or partmaximum restricted the wages of all party members, another example being privileges given to OGPU leadership especially those in charge of the labour camps) and Stalin’s use of privileges to court middle cadres (a fact which he himself admitted as proven by a quotation of Stalin from Jean-Jacques Marie’s biography). It began with the resolution of June 1922 (at a time when privileges even for the top leaders were quite limited as proven by accounts of Eugene Varga ,Vadim Rogovin, and Marie), Stalin as general secretary had started to give more privileges to party and state bureaucrats, increasing further in 1923 with preference given to the children of bureaucrats for admission to schools and starting with the 12th Party Congress various gifts being given to functionaries at every party congress.
There is also no mention of the Lenin levy leading to a huge increase (which was opposed by Lenin in 1922) in party membership in 1924 along with a significant drop in the quality of its membership. Also, increasingly party members were being appointed to positions in the state bureaucracy by the late 1920s signifying a fusion of party and state bureaucracies. Trotsky had carried forward Lenin’s resolute and consistent opposition to bureaucracy and bureaucratism (which Lenin increasingly saw as a danger for the Soviet state, as evidenced by Jean-Jacques Marie’s biography of Lenin) and both of their positions on the New Economic Policy (as evidenced by a letter from Lenin and from the similarity of Lenin and Trotsky’s thesis at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern), state monopoly of foreign trade, national question, Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (Rabkrin), Russification of the Comintern, and granting of legislative functions to the Gosplan converged in late 1922 (Lenin also protested the absence of Trotsky from the commission responsible for anti-religious activities and the expropriation of Church property and pushed for him to present a report at the fourth congress of Comintern) and early 1923 (although some differences remained on questions like the increase in number of members of the Central Committee).
One can see from the part on collectivization that there is not enough of a focus on the necessity of collectivization (especially to provide a sustained agricultural surplus for industrialization and to prevent recurrent famines) while also lacking enough criticism of the rushed methods of collectivization and the repressions conducted during it like blacklisting of villages, imprisonments and death sentences handed under the infamous “Law of Spikelets” and the chaos created by dekulakization (which ended up targeting middle peasants in many cases) and forced collectivization being led by a state-sponsored movement of poor peasants (which caused numerous excesses) while admirably mentioning the resistance to collectivization and the hoarding of grain along with crop burning. Neither is there any mention of the drought, floods, and plant diseases that damaged crops and played a huge role in the 1932-1933 famine (while correctly mentioning other less-violent methods of collectivization which would have been more suitable to the situation). Stalinism was also heavily peppered with voluntarism (as shown by the exaggerated expectations from the First Five-year Plan and its reliance on Stakhanovism which also engendered a privileged stratum of workers favourable to the Stalinist bureaucracy) and as dekulakization and Stalinist terror against the already defeated former ruling classes had shown in 1937-1938 (exemplified by Order No. 00447) was a distorted form of class struggle.
Sadly, there is no mention of the Trotskyist opposition (involving many Trotskyists who had previously capitulated to the party in 1927-1928) forming a bloc with Zinovievists, Safarov-Tarkhanov group, and Sten-Lominadze group (a fact revealed by late Trotskyist historian Pierre Broue) in 1932 (even after arrests in late 1932 some members of the Trotskyist opposition at large planned to hold a conference of Trotskyists from across the USSR in 1933). This bloc was discovered only in 1936 and its late discovery was deemed a great failure of the NKVD. This discovery was one of the reasons for unleashing the terror of 1937-1938. Also, the involvement of Trotskyists and members of the former Workers Opposition in those circulating the Ryutin Manifesto was unmentioned. All this demonstrated along with the strike in Ivanovo region that there was significant Marxist opposition to Stalinism in 1932-1933. Neither is there any mention of Stalin’s constant fear and increasingly relentless persecution of Trotskyists (who, along with their leader Trotsky, declared political revolution as the only salvation in 1933) as shown by their exile, purges, labour camp sentences, the three Moscow Trials and the trial of military officers, the Vorkuta massacre and the label of KRTD (Counter-revolutionary Trotskyist Activity) almost certainly leading to death and signifying the inferior treatment of political opposition during middle and late 1930s.
Another facet of Stalinism that remained beyond the contours of the episode was the Stalinist focus on getting young, pliant, and more efficient bureaucrats to replace the powerful, old, and corrupt leaders and those who saw or participated at any point in opposition to Stalin (it could be said that Stalin feared fierce internal opposition during a war or even an oppositionist revolution against his rule). There is also the fact that the main initiative of the terror of 1937-1938 lay with Stalin, his politburo, and Yezhov as proven by recent works of Oleg Khlevniuk, however, it indeed spun out of their control and part of the reason for the terror was Stalin’s fear of his internal (both real and perceived) and external enemies uniting, especially in the face of war with the internal opposition acting as a fifth column. Many former oppositionists were exterminated during the terror of 1937-1938. This is not to deny that the episode does a good job in terms of exploring the paranoia during the great purge and the terror not being reducible to moral categories like evil or totalitarianism and demonstrates how the Stalinist authorities were responding to events (at least in part) rather than acting solely on their whims. Also admirable is the acknowledgement of the flaws of the moderate Stalinists vs extremist Stalinists narrative spread by bourgeois historians before the opening of the Soviet archives along with the episode’s critique of Stalinist foreign policy and industrialization. There is also no mention of the economic zigzags undertaken by the Stalinist leadership be it the chaotic transition from NEP to a fully planned and collectivized economy or his “neo-NEP” in 1934 despite the appreciable mention in the episode of Stalinist zigzags in terms of its focus shifting between legality and repression during different periods of rule.
–Tavish Hari
