I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the history of the Soviet Union (some of which I’ll make other posts about). One of the things that struck me was how blatantly many of the policies went against the theoretical principles of communism and/or socialism. Now, there are basically two polar opposite opinions on regimes like the USSR or Mao’s China. Side 1 is that their failure means that communism has failed since these societies have utterly discredited the notion and have shown that communism is monstrous. Side 2 is I believe taken by many modern-day communists. This is that these countries were never communist (or socialist). This reminds me of the trope that “Christianity is a great idea, it’s a shame it’s never been tried”. (Of course side 3, that Stalinism and Maoism are just a-ok, that doesn’t merit more than horror and mockery.)
I think for most of my time I leaned towards side 1 but after the reading am warming towards side 2. Not that I believe socialism or communism are the way to go (although most liberal democracies do incorporate some aspects of these even today). It was just the sheer extent to which the societies that claimed to be communist/socialist couldn’t pretend to be. Some blatant examples from the history of the USSR:
As soon as the revolution came in, the Bolsheviks found that they had to pay specialists several times more than manual labourers. While Lenin had apparently lamented this as a necessary evil, Stalin considered the idea of equal pay as a “bourgeous distraction” since socialism is mainly about the abolishing of class as opposed to personal equality. However, income inequality between skilled and unskilled labour may well have been greater in the USSR than in “capitalist” countries at the time.
- During the time of the Gulag, the prisons that people would go to during their “investigations” had a weekly canteen. You could use the money you had on you to buy some small treats to supplement your meagher rations. Because this was the time of the Gulag, many people were nabbed on the street or in the middle of the night and thrown in jail with nothing. There was no way of receiving money from family since often your family wouldn’t even know if you were alive. So, the prisoners came up with a pooling system where every inmate with money was to subsidise those without. Inmates took great care to keep the practice hidden because this socialised sharing system was frowned upon and forbidden by authorities (although they couldn’t do much about it).
- In Stalin’s time, higher education was not free and given the extremely low wages was a luxury for many. Fees were only abolished after Stalin’s death.
- The other obvious thing was the stratification and social immobility of Soviet society. Especially by the 50s, it became extremely conservative and I wouldn’t be surprised if class mobility was less than the USA at the time (not exactly a paragon of economic equality either).
For a worker’s party, the CPSU was very anti-worker. There were many open clashes and strikes in the beginning that were put down with ferocity. These subsided but the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre showed how much discontent was brewing underneath for decades. Under Stalin, the workplace relation laws were particularly draconian. In the name of achieving the 5 year plan, any form of lateness was considered a criminal offense and virtually a form of anti-revolutionary treason. A worker that was dismissed would have a lot of trouble finding any other work because of the centralisation of work records. The idea of the soviet (ie. bottom-up government by the workers) was a joke.
Finally, the relationship with the peasantry was just as problematic (again, funny for a party claiming to represent workers and peasants). There were plenty of riots over collectivisation in the early days that were put down with unapologetic terror. Then there was the possibly tens of millions killed in various man-made famines. Finally, for many decades peasants had no internal passports and were hence tied to their community for their whole lives, a nice reprise of the days of serfdom under the czar.
Once again, these things are very well known, I was just shocked at how blatant it was. Whatever you might think of socialism or communism, the examples that are commonly cited aren’t. The USSR was neither united nor soviet nor socialist — but it was a republic.
9 comments ↓
“Of course side 3, that Stalinism and Maoism are just a-ok, that doesn’t merit more than horror and mockery.”
I think it’s a little more complicated than that, especially regarding Mao. Mobo Gao defends Mao in The Battle for China’s Past; I cannot improve on his scholarship.
Mao certainly was not a saint; leaders of large countries all have (and arguably must have) some capacity for ruthlessness. And there’s always a tension between idealism and expediency; what we do today to solve today’s problems might compromise the revolution, but dying or becoming extinct will certainly doom it.
Remember too that the Soviet Union had been devastated by two brutal wars, WWI and the Civil War, and was facing a resurgent Germany explicitly intent on not just colonialism but literally genocide and the annihilation of the Slavic peoples.
Explanations are not excuses, and I think we should refuse to make excuses for anyone.
But then we have to look at our own Western or American political culture not from the perspective of the privileged middle class or even the relatively privileged citizen working class, but from the perspective of those most brutally exploited: the slaves and the colonized people, not to mention the millions killed in two world wars over who would get to colonize whom. We do not come off looking quite so rosy, even compared to even the worst alleged excesses of Stalin or Mao.
I’m not trying to make a tu quoque argument. Atrocity is atrocity, and is worthy of nothing but condemnation. I just want to highlight the true nature of the struggle, which is not between angels and devils, but between human beings, who are all a mixture of angels and devils.
Our task is not, I think, to “pick a side” and then pledge our loyalty to that side. Even if one does consider Stalin and/or Mao to be “true communists”, we can still consider them to be true communists who made some grievous mistakes and sins, just like many true capitalist leaders who made some grievous mistakes and sins.
this post reminds me of one of the few bits of teenage wisdom that I can remember telling friends that I probably still would say the almost exact same way: “the problem with communism [and/or socialism] is that humans are not honest enough to live that way.” I did not have a strong grasp on history/politics (but better than the average teen); it was the 90s and I was starting to pay attention to the world right as the Cold War was ending. I know that I didn’t get the differences between communism and socialism and was likely referring more to the idea of a futuristic Utopian society (my mom loved Star Trek: The Next Generation) – but I think two decades later I still agree with the basic premise of my comment. Also, the comment on Christianity near the end of the introduction conjures up the mental image of “Jesus was a socialist” meme that I’ve seen several times on social media and gets us right back to humanistic ideals (honesty, altruism, benevolence) that clash with the brutal reality of the ‘body cart’ image near the conclusion. Thanks for an interesting read …
Personally I’m not sure about the “communism ignores human nature” idea — you could make a case that all forms of government ignore human nature to the extent that they are imperfect and have produced systematic suffering. I agree, I think these ideas are often found where people don’t understand socialism to the full extent (although as the post argues, you could say that the USSR didn’t either!).
Finally I don’t think Jesus was a socialist even by a loose definition — in fact there are may times where he refers to [spiritual] inequality as a good thing: “For unto everyone that has shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that has not shall be taken away even that which he has.” (Matt 25:29)
Basically it turns out I’m against almost all memes with “socialism” in them!
Larry — sorry, your comment was stuck in moderation for a while.
I don’t know more about Mao than the average non-Chinese person so can’t really comment as of yet. However, from what I understand, while he may not have intended it, Mao presided over the greatest famine in the history of the world and it was largely the outcome of the serious problems in his ideology. This is so serious and the suffering was on such a large scale that I don’t imagine more study changing this particular opinion.
In terms of the devastation of the 2 wars, I was not trying to say that the Soviet system was brutal (I think that’s too obvious to discuss) but that it wasn’t particularly socialist. I don’t think external pressures change much in this direction since it doesn’t seem to have been Stalin and Lenin’s intention to actually have peasants and workers control things from the start. Of course without the wars, the results would have been less devastating.
Finally, in terms of comparing the west to Stalin or Mao, I think any individual western leader (taking everything into account) will look extremely rosy. Even if we (eg) lay every death from the Iraq war at the hands of Bush (an enormous stretch IMO), it wouldn’t come close to a single month of Stalin’s 1937. In terms of including economic exploitation, I haven’t seen much specific info but it’s so nebulous and tenuous that people’s preconceptions tend to be the main source of data (in my experience). But that’s for another day…
I’m not really disagreeing with you. I just want to mention some of the historical and environmental issues that should complicate our analyses.
“Even if we (eg) lay every death from the Iraq war at the hands of Bush (an enormous stretch IMO), it wouldn’t come close to a single month of Stalin’s 1937.”
I don’t think this is accurate. Estimates of the death toll in Iraq (counting, of course, the Iraqi people themselves) of from 500,000 to 1,000,000 (with one estimate of 1,455,000) appear comparable to estimates of the death toll during the Great Purge.
I find the notions of Americans condemning the “atrocities” of others to be ridiculous and nauseating. We have, after all, perpetrated each and every one of the great crimes against humanity: genocide of the American Indians, slavery, wars of aggression and conquest, terrorism (especially in Latin America). We are the only nation that has used nuclear weapons on civilians (not to mention the terror bombings during the Second Imperialist War, including Dresden and Tokyo).
The point is not to play Atrocity Olympics. The point is that trying to construct any kind of historical narrative based on who is more atrocious than whom is an exercise in futility. The person of reason, I think, must simply accept the fact that for most of recorded history, the world has been led by bloodthirsty bastards, who have found no small few bloodthirsty bastards to follow them. I don’t know how or even if we can escape our bloodthirstiness, but I we cannot possibly do so if we excuse our own atrocities even on the shakiest grounds of “we’re not as bad.”
I thought the Great Purge was quite a bit bigger — but in terms of total death toll I think the point stands. However, I’m not sure how mentioning the US at all complicates the ideas from the post since it was never about who was more atrocious than whom. Also, I don’t agree with the reference class: you seem to include yourself in the “we” of slaveholders, but I don’t see why you would, other than a metaphor. If I as a Russian-born say “we starved millions of our own people” when referring to Stalin’s famines I think it would be an odd thing to do.
One should perhaps mention Option 4 – that socialism, even if it starts out with the best intentions, is in danger of sliding into totalitarianism. I met this idea in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, and thought he had some good points, though the danger is not as great as he thought since socialism has apparently flourished in places like Sweden.
Briefly, the idea is that socialism requires:
1 ability to plan the economy centrally
2 state ownership of the means of production, including the media
3 valuing the community over the individual.
#1 is doomed to failure, because economies are too complex and unpredictable The state cannot afford to admit its failure, therefore will have something to hide. Because of #2 it will be able to do so (for a while). Because of #3 it will feel justified in suppressing dissidents by all means necessary.
And there you have a slippery slope.
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