development. During recent years, discussion in academic institutions, workers' clubs, and party cells has centred on the seemingly unreal question: How rapidly can the transition from socialism to communism be effected? This was only another way, indeed the only permissible way, of asking when and how the present inequalities would be reduced and eliminated.
Stalin's Politbureau at first put out this slogan about transition to communism in a spirit of self- congratulation and self-advertisement. ‘Look how far forward we have brought you!’ it said to the people. At most it wished to provide the intelligentsia and the workers with a theme for harmless dogmatic debate. But once the debate began it was anything but ‘harmless’. The theme attracted and absorbed the unspoken hopes and suppressed egalitarian yearnings. The intelligentsia and the workers had been officially encouraged to indulge in a vision of the future; and they projected into that vision all their grievances against the present. They began to voice the old egalitarian heresy and other ‘unorthodox ideas’ for the professing of which, whether real or suspected, innumerable men and women had paid with their lives in the late 1930's.
Analysing a great debate on communism which took place at the Economics Institute of Moscow's Academy of Science, the present author wrote in the summer of 1951:[18]
‘Visions of the future have a capricious logic of their own. This is true even in a country whose most eminent liberal historian, Miliukov, once said that its social classes and even its thoughts and ideas had always been the product of official decrees or official inspiration. A government may find it easy and expedient to encourage its subjects to indulge in a certain sort of dream as an escape from ugly realities. It may even prescribe, as the Kremlin now does, what the subject ought to dream. But it finds it much harder to intervene in the actual course of the dream and to make it wholly conform to order. Its subjects may begin to see images long banished and to murmur the most terrible heresies in their sleep…. As speaker after speaker tried to produce an answer [to the question about the transition to communism], the ghosts of banished heresies crowded into the conference hall… at that seat of Stalinist learning, the Economics Institute.’ Incidentally, this debate and the heresies voiced in it came under severe attack in the last months of Stalin's life.
Alongside the collectivization of farming and the forcible training of peasants as industrial workers, the need to enforce inequality invested the Stalinist terror with its prodigious momentum and pervasiveness. The terror matched the resistance which those policies encountered. Only with scorpions could tens of millions be driven into collective farms, multitudes be shifted to new industrial sites, and the vast majority of the people be forced to toil in misery and to suppress in silence the fury evoked by the privileges of a minority. The terror worked ruthlessly, sometimes blindly, but on the whole effectively. It owed its effectiveness to a moral backing as well as to the sheer mechanical weight of repression. The government had identified itself with a great national cause, or, as the Marxist would put it, with an historical necessity. This identification, in the last instance, accounted for the helplessness of the Soviet people against the terror, and for the complicity of the politically decisive elements, the party and the army.
But proportionately to the degree in which the government succeeded in enforcing inequality the necessity for the terror employed to enforce it decreased. The growing awareness of this process, even in the ruling group, has in recent years been reflected in the arguments over the tempo at which the State may ‘wither away’ in the transition to communism. Behind this dogmatic formula loomed the practical and insistent question: When are we going to mitigate the rigours of our criminal codes? When are we going to soften the draconic discipline in our factories, collective farms, offices, and schools? When are we going to sweep away our concentration camps?
Another source of the strength of Stalinism — Soviet Russia's isolation — has also run dry. The emergence of new communist regimes beyond Russia's frontiers has had profound repercussions inside Russia. Stalinism had justified its despotism with the argument that, as the sole bulwark of proletarian revolution, Russia was surrounded by a hostile world. The argument had great power: it disarmed or paralysed innumerable recalcitrant minds. It was, after all, true that twice within living memory German armies had marched towards the Dnieper and the Volga. It was also true that in its first days the revolution had had to struggle for existence against French, British, and even American intervention, against a blockade, a commercial and financial boycott, and a
However, when new communist regimes had formed vast ‘security belts’ around Russia, in Asia and Eastern and Central Europe, it was no longer so easy to invoke isolation and capitalist encirclement as the justification for the harshness of Stalinism. For the first time in decades Russia seemed secure from foreign threats. For a short spell fear of American monopoly in atomic weapons once again appeared to justify in the eyes of the Russian people the Stalinist attitude towards the world. But this fear, too, soon subsided.
Even a regime armed with all the machinery of totalitarian control needs its moral justification. Without this, popular disillusionment and resentment clog and slow down the totalitarian machine. Fear of American atomic supremacy helped to keep the wheels of the machine turning, but they were not turning with their old impetus.
Yet such is the power of inertia that institutions and methods of government outlast the causes that have brought them into being; and they struggle to outlast them. In its last years and months Stalinism fought desperately to keep its hold on Russia. In doing so, it parodied its own previous performances, revealed its own grotesqueness, and betrayed its weakness. Before its extinction Stalinism experienced a spasm of deceptive vigour which contorted its face into a last repulsive grimace.
In these final years the primitive magic of Stalinism made an insolent mockery of Russia. The cult of the Leader assumed so nauseating and nightmarish a quality, especially after the celebration of Stalin's seventieth birthday in 1949, that it is difficult to describe it. For nearly two years the columns of
The same air of bizarre unreality hung over the orgy of nationalism of these last years. The Russian people were constantly and insistently told that they, and they alone, were the salt of the earth; that they, and only they, had made all the great scientific and technological discoveries and initiated all the great philosophical, sociological, and other ideas. If such propaganda had been addressed to an illiterate people one might believe that it could be effective in some measure. But it could not possibly find much credence in a Russia in which the revolution and then Stalinism itself had aroused an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Nationalist self-glorification might have suited the isolated and self-centred Soviet people of the early years of the Stalin era, when, as a rule, it was not indulged in. But such self-glorification was quite out of date in 1950-2, when Russia's destiny had become inextricably bound up with that of the rest of the world. Even from the Stalinist viewpoint, it could not be reconciled with the spreading of revolution abroad. One-third of mankind already lived under communist regimes, and Stalinism spoke as if its realm had been confined to the old Tambov
Equally parochial and anachronistic was the interference of Stalinist dogma with biology, chemistry, physics, linguistics, philosophy, economics, literature, and the arts. This interference, more obtrusive and noisier than at any earlier stage, was reminiscent of the days when the Inquisition decided for the whole Christian world which were the right and the wrong ideas about God, the universe, and man. The intrusion of theological or bureaucratic dogma on the working of the scientific mind belongs essentially to a pre-industrial epoch. In contemporary Russia it amounted to virtual sabotage of science and technology. It was possible only because the rulers who had taken charge of Russia's education were themselves inadequately educated; and Stalin behaved like a half-educated, capricious guardian constantly tampering with the curriculum of his ward and imposing his own fancies and tastes.
But even while Stalin was alive it was easy to see that the primitive magic of Stalinism was losing its last battle. The heresy hunt was never at a standstill and yet it was producing little effect. Its victims did not suffer the cruel fate of their unhappy predecessors of the 1930's. There were no new purge trials in Russia, although such trials were staged in Budapest, Prague, and Sofia. As a rule the ‘deviationists’ were not imprisoned or deported.
