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Tony Cliff

State Capitalism in Russia

6. The denial of any legal freedom to the worker

Until the first Five-Year Plan, the worker could freely change his places of work and could migrate, unhindered, from one part of the country to another.

As regards the right to change the place of work at that time the Labour Code said:

The transfer of a hired person from one enterprise to another or his shipment from one locality to another, even when the enterprise of institution moves, can take place only with the consent of the worker or employee concerned.” [19]

As regards the freedom of movement, the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1930 severely criticises the hindrance to the free movemnt of people under teh Tsar. It wrote:

The custom of internal passports, instituted by the autocracy as an instrument of police oppression of the toiling masses, was suppressed by the October Revolution. [20]

But already in 1931 no worker was allowed to leave Leningrad without special permissionand in 1932 this system was adopted in all parts of Russia. An internal passport system much worse than under the Tsar was introduced. No no one could change his place of residence without permission.

As early as September 1930 all industrial enterprises were probibited from employing people who had left their former place of work without permission. In 1932 labour books were introduced. Each worker must give his labour book to the director of the enterprise when he receives employmentand the director can write remarks he likes in it when the worker leaves the job. No worker can be accepted in a new placwe of work without showing his labour book.

Serge writes:

The passport is visaed at the place of work. With each change of employ, the reason for the change is entered into the passport. I have known of workers discharged for not having come on the day of rest to contribute a ‘voluntary’ (and, naturally, gratuitous) day of work, in whose passports is written: “Discharged for sabotage of the production plan”. [21]

On 4 December 1932, the bureaucracy issued another decree designed to subjugate the workers. This time, food supplies and other necessities were put under the sole control of directors “in order to strengthen the powers of directors of enterprises” (Pravda).

On 26 June 1940 a new law prohibited any worker from leaving his job, unless he was physically unfit to work, was accepted into an institution of learning, or was given special permission by a higher authority. Any absence without a satisfactory excuse, even for a day, makes the culprit liable to six months correctual labour – which means a cut of 25 per cent of his earnings during that time. It is symptomatic that a few months after the promulgation of this law a few women wrote a letter to Izvestia suggesting that domestic servants should be subject to this law. Izvestia, in its comment on this question (30 December 1940), although disagreeing with the suggestion, showed no astonishment as to its content in the period of the “transition from socialism to communism”!

As far as strikes are concerned, not only are workers prohibited from calling strikes, but strikers are liable, according to the law, to be sentenced to death for such an offence. [22] One may be sure that outside Russia not one worker in the world observes this necessary “socialist” standard!

A very important factor in the subjugation of the working class was the creation of the forced labour camps, which contained millions of people.

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7. Forced labour

Until the First Five-Year Plan, prison labour had scarcely any significance. Till then not only was the number of prisoners in camps very small (1928: 30,000), but the authorities were opposed compelling them to work. The head of the prison system wrote in 1927:

The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing ‘golden sweat’ from them, the organisation of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement. [23]

At that time the value of the total production of all prisoners equalled only a small percentage of their upkeep.

The situation changed fundamentally, as Dallin proves byx awealth of facts, with the inauguration of the Five-Year Plan. We shall first give some figures regarding the number of prisoners in labour camps:

Kiseliov-Gromov, himself a former GPU official in the northern labour camps, states that in 1928 only 30,000 men were detained in the camps ... The total number of prisoners in the entire network of camps in 1930 he gives as 662,257 ... A GPU official who escaped to Finland in 1930 said in a sworn statement that “734,000 prisoners were employed under the OGPU in teh autumn of 1929.”

Dallin comes to the conclsion on the basis of available evidence that thenumber of people in labour camps in 1931 was nearly 2 million. In 1933-35 the figure was about 5 million. He says that in 1942 there were from 8 to 15 million. Ante Ciliga estimates that the number of prisoners is between 10 and 15 million. [24]

Another calculation having a solid basis is that of S. Schwarz. [25] He calculates as follows: in 1939 the number of inhabitants of the USSR was 107.5 million. If not for the war, the population should have increased by 3 million in a year, which means that in seven years it would have increased by 21 million. In the regions annexed to Russia there were, before the war, 24.5 million. If not for the war, the number of inhabitants in these regions should have reached 25.5 million. All the population of the USSR in its present boundaries should have been, if not for the war, 217 million at the beginning of 1946. Now all of the people of 18 years and over, except those in concentration camps, have the vote. From the census of population in 1939 we learn that people aged 18 and over made up 58.4 percent of the population. Let us assume that the percentage in the annexed regions was the same. This means that the adult population would at the beginning of 1946 have amounted to 126.7 million. But the number allowed to vote amounted to only 101.7 million, i.e. 25 million less than there should have been.

The war caused a great loss of life and a sharp decrease in the birth rate. The birth rate is not important for the calculation as it does not affect the number of adults today. What were the war losses? A short time ago, in an interview with the correspondent of Pravda, Stalin said that the number of deaths in the war against Germany amounted to 7 million. [26] It seems that the natural deaths in Russia were not included in this figure. If we assume that the number of adults who died during the war amounted to 7 million above the normal death rate taken according to former years, and we add 1 million - an exaggerated number - for Russians who did not return to their country, there remain 10 million who must exist but have not the right to vote. This must be at least the number in the concentration camps.

If we take a minimum figure of 8 to 10 million people in the forced labour camps, 90 percent of whom are men, we see that they constitute about 16 percent of all adult men.

Forced labour is suitable mainly for manual labour which does not require modern industrial equipment. Lumber work, road and rail constructions, large- scale industrial construction, and irrigation work are undertaken by the camps. The maintenance of a prisoner is much cheaper even than that of a Russian worker. Dallin writes:

Soviet authorities have never indicated precisely how great the cost differential is as between free and forced labour. It has been officially stated, however, that in 1932-33 “the cost of upkeep per prisoner was over 500 roubles a year”. During the same period the average wage in the Soviet Union, according to official statistics, amounted to 1,496 roubles a year. This differential, multiplied by the millions of prison workers and the years of work, is an important element of the government’s industrialisation find. General workers’ wages rose 174 percent between 1926 and 1933 (due in part to the inflationary rise of prices); during the same period the cost of food per prisoner increased by only 90 percent. [27]

Notwithstanding its cheapness, the labour of prisoners, suiting as it does mainly manual labour not using modern techniques, can, because of this, be only secondary to the labour of ‘free’ workers. But seeing that Russia is in the process of primitive accumulation, that it suffers from a lack of capital much more than from a lack of labour power, which makes the life of a toiler in the eyes of Russia’s rulers much cheaper than that of a machine, slave labour is very widespread in the construction of factories, roads, etc. To conclude that slave labour will disappear with time is an oversimplification. A cataclysmic destruction of capital, which could result from a war, might cause the bureaucracy to make a new effort to tap its tremendous resources of cheap human lives. The annexation of backward areas with large populations (such as China) will bring the same result. The difficulties of raising the productivity of labour without improving the conditions of the workers, and the social danger the bureaucracy would face if it raised the self-confidence of the masses by improving their conditions, are also factors tending towards the increase of the number of slaves. Too many factors are involved in this question, however, to be able to predict whether the percentage of people in camps compared with the industrial proletariat will rise or not in the future.

The slave system, which as a prevailing mode was a special stage in human history, reappears in every exploitative society to one extent or another. Slavery existed in the Middle Ages when serfdom was the prevailing form of exploitation. It appeared in the US as part of an economic system which was capitalist par excellence. With the decline of capitalism, especially under conditions of war, the reappearance of slave labour is not excluded. Nazi Germany, which, Dallin writes, sent its experts at the beginning of the war to study forced labour in Russia, applied slave labour to construction works which needed mainly manual labour [28], although of course the main products of the German war industry were produced by free’ workers.

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8. The expropriation of the means of production from the peasantry

The October Revolution expropriated the big landlords, the Church and the monarchy. The rural bourgeoisie – the kulaks – were not expropriated, and during the NEP period not only did the kulaks thrive, but many new ones rose out of the middle peasantry. The kulaks, together with the private merchants, exploited the rural poor. Private capitalism continued to rule agriculture until 1928.

Collectivisation changed the situation fundamentally. We shall not discuss the effect of collectivisation on the class differentiation among the agriculturalists, but shall deal with only the following question: How did collectivisation affect the total income received by the agricultural sector of the economy? The most important factor to deal with in answering this question is the influence collectivisation had on the state’s cut out of agriculture, that is, its influence on obligatory deliveries: taxes, payment for work done by Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) and government flour mills.

Thus from 1927/28 till 1936/37 the quantity of obligatory deliveries taken by the state from agriculture rose from 112.2 million centners to 260 million (i.e. by 131.8 percent). The portion of the obligatory deliveries in the gross yield of agriculture rose from 15.4 percent to 34.9 percent, and its portion in the net yield from 18.5 percent to 42.4 percent.

Nearly half the obligatory deliveries consist of direct agricultural taxes while the remainder is made up of payment for the services of MTS and flour mills, over which the government has a complete monopoly.

It is interesting to note that in his book, The Agrarian Question in Russia at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1908), Lenin wrote:

The horseless and one-horse peasants [i.e. the very poor peasants] pay in the form of taxes one-seventh and one-tenth respectively of their gross expenditure. It is doubtful whether serf dues were as high as that. [30]

The agricultural toilers in the “Socialist Fatherland” pay much more than that!

Although the total quantity of products retained by the agriculturists in 1936/37 was lower than in 1927/28 (352.5 million centners and 493.7 million centners respectively) the quantity per household did not decline, and per capita of agricultural population even rose. This happened because the number of households declined from 25 million in 1927/28 to 20.4 million in 1936/37, i.e. by 24 percent, and the agricultural population decreased from 122.4 million to 78.6 million, i.e. a decline of 35.8 percent. [31]

Collectivisation not only transformed those who came into industry into proletarians, but also those who remained in agriculture. The overwhelming majority of agriculturists are in reality, if not in theory, people who do not own means of production-they are compelled to work an ever increasing number of days on the kolkhozes for very low payment. The constant rise in the number of days that every household works in the kolkhoz compared with the quantity of grain per household remaining to it after the obligatory deliveries is shown in the following table:

Collectivisation has resulted in the freeing of agricultural products for the needs of industrial development, the “freeing” of the peasantry from the means of production, the transformation of a section of them into reserves of labour power for industry, and the transformation of the rest into semi-workers, semi-peasants, semi-serfs in the kolkhozes.

Similar general results, although different in some important particulars, were achieved by the English bourgeoisie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the eviction of the peasantry from the land. Marx called this process “primitive accumulation”. [33] He wrote: “The history of this ... is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” [34]

Much more blood flowed during the primitive accumulation in Russia than in Britain. Stalin accomplished in a few hundred days what Britain took a few hundred years to do. The scale on which he did it and the success with which he carried it out completely dwarf the actions of the Duchess of Sutherland. They bear stern witness to the superiority of a modern industrial economy concentrated in the hands of the state, under the direction of a ruthless bureaucracy.

Engels’ prognosis about the future of primitive accumulation in Russia has been fully realised, although in circumstances different from what he imagined. In a letter to Danielson, dated 24 February 1893, he wrote:

The circumstances of Russia being the last country seized upon by the capitalist grande industrie, and at the same time the country with by far the largest peasant population, are such as must render the bouleversement (upheaval) caused by this economic change more acute than it has been anywhere else. The process of replacing some 500,000 pomeshchiki (landowners) and some eighty million peasants by a new class of bourgeois landed proprietors cannot be carried out but under fearful sufferings and convulsions. But history is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in ‘peaceful’ economic development. [35]

Until 1928 the Stalinist bureaucracy vacillated between the Russian proletariat and bourgeoisie – among whom the kulaks played an important part. With the collectivisation the struggle became one between the bureaucracy and the kulaks over the surplus product created by the agricultural toilers. He who controls the surplus product is the ruling class.

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9. The transformation of money into money-capital: an important symptom of the system

In another place in this document we deal with the scope of state bonds [36], which are the main form of money-capital in the hands of individuals. The fact that the relations of production prevailing in Russia make place for the appearance of a form of property which is traditionally capitalist, and which allows for the appropriation of surplus value, is an important symptom of these relations of production themselves. Changes in the quantity of state bonds and deposits in savings banks held by individuals can serve as a barometer of changes in the relations of production:

We have no figures showing the distribution of the national debt between individuals and institutions (factories, kolkhozes, etc) since the outbreak of the Second World War. But according to the minister of finance, Zverev, Russian citizens subscribed 76 billion roubles in the war years to state bonds. If we add to this the state bonds owned by individuals before the war, and their deposits in the banks, we should not be overestimating to say that the total personal savings today amount to 100 billion roubles. In 1928 they amounted to 0.6 billion (a considerable part of which was owned by Nep Men), in 1938 to 25.4 billion – today they amount to 100 billion!

The Five-Year Plan appeared as a turning point between the period that opened up in 1917-18, when all private debts on sums of more than 10,000 roubles were abolished, and the beginning of the period when Soviet millionaires appeared. [37]

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10. The introduction of the turnover tax

The most important source of state income is the turnover tax, which is an indirect tax. Its rate is fixed not by being added to the existing selling price, but by being included in it in advance. Thus for instance a turnover tax of 20 percent means that the tax makes up 20 percent of the selling price. If the selling price of a commodity is 100 roubles, the government will take 20 roubles of this. This is an addition of 20 roubles over and above the cost of production, the profit of the industrial enterprise, the trading organisation, etc, which comes to 80 roubles. An addition of 20 roubles to 80 is an addition of 25 percent. A turnover tax of 30 percent raises the price by 42.8 percent, a turnover tax of 40 percent by 66.7 percent, a turnover tax of 50 percent by 100 percent, a turnover tax of 60 percent by 150 percent, a turnover tax of 75 percent by 300 percent, a turnover tax of 80 percent by 400 percent, a turnover tax of 90 percent by 900 percent.

The rate of turnover tax rose sharply with the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, as the following table shows:

If we assumed that the turnover tax placed an equal burden on all the commodities produced [38], that the industrial enterprises themselves did not get any profits directly from the sale of their products, that there were no other costs of production except wages, and that there were no other taxes except the turnover tax, the rate of exploitation of the workers would then have been at least equal to the ratio of the turnover tax to the net retail turnover, i.e. in 1940 154.2 percent. In reality, of course, it is very much higher than this.

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11. From a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations to the complete liberation of the bureaucracy from popular control

Because of the backwardness and isolation of Russia, the workers’ state there never corresponded with the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat elaborated by Lenin in State and Revolution. In the very first years after October Lenin constantly repeated this. Thus, for instance, in the Eighth Soviet Congress, 30 December 1920, he said:

From our party programme it follows that our state is a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations. We have to paste this – how shall we call it? – sorry label on it. That it the reality of the transition! ... Our present state is such that the organised proletariat must defend itself and we must utilise these workers’ organisations for the defence of the workers against their state and for the defence of the state by the workers.

Two years later his tone became even more admonitory. At the Eleventh Party Conference on 29 March 1922 he said:

This mass of bureaucrats – who is leading whom? The 4,700 responsible communists the mass bureaucrats, or the other way around? I do not believe you can say that the communists are leading this mass. To put it honestly, they are not the leaders, but the led. Something has happened here that recalls the historical events we heard of in our childhood. We were taught: once upon a time a certain people conquered the country of another people and subjected this people. The conquering people was the victor and the people whose country was conquered was the vanquished. That’s obvious. But what happens with the culture of these peoples? Now the question is not so simple. If the culture of the victorious people is higher than that of the vanquished, it imposes its culture on the vanquished. But if the contrary is the case, the vanquished people imposes its culture on the victor. Has not something similar happened in the capital of the RSFSR? Have not the 4,700 communists in this city (almost a whole division, and only the very best comrades) ken vanquished by an alien culture? This might give rise to the impression that the conquered possessed a higher culture. Nothing of the kind. Their culture was miserable, paltry, but nevertheless higher than that of our communist militants, inasmuch as they are capable of managing.

This strengthening of the bureaucracy which brought about the partial victory of Stalin in 1923 led at a certain point to a change in the quality of the state – from a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations to a bureaucratic state independent of the workers and oppressing them. A survey of the change will be facilitated if we sketch the main lines of this development in a basic part of the state apparatus – the army. We have chosen this sector, as “the army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature”. [39]

The organisation and structure of the army reflect the relations of production and the productive forces of society. The Red Army reflected the backwardness of the productive forces in Russia, the low cultural level, the fact that the proletariat was a small minority of the population, etc. It was therefore never a militia, but was built from the beginning as a compromise between the militia and the regular army, the emphasis being on the latter. Smilga clearly explained at the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party why a militia was impossible in Russia. He said:

The militia system, whose basic characteristic is the territorial principle, is faced with an insuperable political obstacle in the path of its introduction in Russia. Given the numerically weak proletariat in Russia, we are not able to ensure proletarian guidance in the territorial militia units ... Even greater difficulties in the path of the introduction of the militia system arise from the viewpoint of strategy. With the weakness of our railroad system, we should not be able, in case of war, to concentrate forces in the threatened directions ... Furthermore, the experience of the Civil War has incontrovertibly shown that territorial formations were entirely unsuitable, the soldiers deserting and not wishing to leave their villages during offensive as well as retreat. Therefore, the return to this form of organisation would be a crude, wholly unjustifiable error. [40]

The resolution at the Tenth Congress against building the Red Army in teh pattern of a militia was passed in this spirit

The material and cultural backwardness of Russia revealed itself also in the relations between soldiers and officers.

From the beginning the Bolsheviks found it an unavoidable necessity to appoint ex-Tsarist officers, notwithstanding their previous agitation for the substitution of all appointed officers by those elected by the officers. It was impossible to wage the war against the White Armies without tried commanders, and if the choice were left to the officers they would not have elected ex-Tsarist officers.

From the beginning there was a struggle between the political commissars on the one hand, and the Party collective in the army on the other. This conflict converged with another between centralist and decentralist tendencies. Out of these two struggles the political commissars emerged victorious over the Party collectives, and the centre overcame the guerrilla tendencies. The convergence of these two struggles reflected a strengthening bureaucratic tendency in the army.

It was not long before the ex-Tsarist officers began to influence the new commanders of proletarian origin. The Bolshevik, Petrovsky, states:

Within the walls of the military school we encountered the old regime view of the peasant about the role of the officer with respect to the mass of the private soldiers. We had also noticed a certain trend to the upper class traditions of the cadets of the czarist military schools ... Professionalism in the scourge which lashed morally officers of all times and in all countries ... They [the Red Army Commanders] became members of the new officers’ group, and no agitation whatsoever, nor beautiful speeches about the necessity of contact with the masses, would be of any avail. The conditions of existence are stronger than kind wishes. [41]

The commanders, the political commissars, and others with authority in the Red Army, began to use their positions to gain advantage for themselves. Trotsky took them severely to task for this. On one occasion he wrote to the Revolutionary Military Councils of fronts and armies condemning the use of government cars by those in authority for “gay parties right before the eyes of the tired Red Army soldiers”. He spoke angrily of “commanders dressed with extreme elegance, while the fighters go half-naked”. He pointed an indignant finger at drinking bouts that were organised by commanders and political commissars. And he concluded: “Such facts cannot but provoke exasperation and discontent among the Red Army soldiers.” Trotsky’s realistic revolutionary conception throws light on the difficulties of teh situation. In the same letter he expounds his aim: “Without setting the impossible goal of immediate elimination of all and sundry privileges in the army, to endeavour to reduce these systematically to the actually necessary minimum.” [42]

Despite these abuses, however, the existence of the Bolshevik Party with cells throughout the army and the presence of Trotsky at its head, together with the revolutionary enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the mass of soldiers, ensured the maintenance of the proletarian character of the Red Army at the time of the civil war.

With the partial victory of the bureaucracy in 1923 the debauchers of commanders, their bourgeoisification, their comandeering approach to the soldiers, was transformed from a limited and exceptional phenomenon to a normal one. A further factor began to appear at this stage which weakened teh control over the commanders. The central positions in the Party cells in the different units began to be occupied by the commanders themselves. Thus the Political Department of the Republic notes in the autumn of 1926 that two-thirds of all positions in the Party apparatus in the army were in the hands of commanders. The same people, therefore, who commanded the soldiers had simultaneously to be the political leaders of their defence against theese very commanders

Even so, we still cannot speak of an absolutely independent officers’ caste. we shall give three facts to prove this:

(1) The living conditions of the commanders were arduous and not in any fundamental different from those of the soldiers. Thus writes White:

In 1925 only 30 per cent of the commanding personnel were housed in a manner regarded by Frunze [People’s Commissar of War] at all as tolerable. Seventy per cent had housing facilities below that level. Frunze spoke of various localities where several commanders with their families had only one room among them. In other words, each family had only part of a room at its disposal.

The reserve commanders, when called for re-training outside of the ranks of the army, were remunerated for the work on a basis which could not look attractive to a Chinese coolie. Those employed or belonging to the peasantry were paid five kopeks per hour, which the unemployed among them were paid nine kopeks an hour, for the time they were engaged in their studies.” [43]

Wollenberg, who was himself a commander in the Red Army, gives these facts:

In 1924 the pay of a corps-commander was 150 roubles a month, corresponding roughly to that earned by a well-paid metal worker. It was thus 25 roubles a month below the “Party maximum”, i.e., the largest monthly salary that a Party member was allowed to accept in those days ... There was at that time no special officers’ mess. The meals of officers and men were prepared in the same kitchens. Communist officers seldom wore the badges of their rank when off duty, and frequently dispensed with them even when on duty. At that time the Red Army acknowledged a relationship of superior and subordinate only during the performance of a military duty, and in any case every soldier knew his commanding officer with or without badges of rank.

Officers’ servants were abolished. [44]

(2) The soldiers were allowed to and did protest against their commanders. Their complaints were submitted to the Military Prosecutor’s Office. The number of such complaints was: in 1925 (average per month) 1,892; in 1926 1,923; in 1927 2,082. [45] existed.

(3) Wollenberg, who was at that time in teh Red Army, says that only in 1931-33 did the “natural and free relations between officers and men” disappear. He brings a number of facts to prove this.

White, on the basis of numerous data, came to the same conclusion, though he puts the turning point a little earlier – the Army Statutes of 1928. He writes that this was “the real dividing line, and ... what followed was the development of a trend already well established”. [46] The statutes made the army command a life career, and White justifiably speaks of them as the “Magna Carta of the commanding personnel”, “something akin to the Petrine Table of Ranks”. [47]

Already in 1929 there began the “gradual transformation of Red Army Houses into Officers’ Clubs” [48] began. The officers’ salaries started rising while the soldiers’ continued to be a mere pittance.

In this period the value of the rouble declined very sharply, but this has affected the officers much less than the ordinary civilians. One of the reasons for this was the establishment for the officers of the Voentorg, a co-operative consumers’ system. It created retail shops, organised communal feeding, barber shops, laundries, and tailoring and bootmaking establishments. In 1935 it had 1,700 stores, about 1,000 industrial establishments, and 800 restaurants with a turnover of one and a half billion roubles. [49]

Special houses with all conveniences were built for the officers. A decree of 22 September 1935 restored the personnel ranks: lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, brigadier, commander of division, commander of army corps, army commander marshal etc. Permanent orderlies were assigned to the officers. Fraternisation between officers and soldiers was prohibited. The soldiers had to salte not only commissioned officers, but also teh non-commissioned officers (June 1940). To assure the permanence of teh military hierarchy, even people in the reserves are divided into the same ranks as the army has, and they have the right to wear their military uniforms. Privates, and non-commissioned officers have to give up their seats to officers in buses, tubes and trams. The disciplinary rights of the officers go further than any army, except perhaps the Prussian, has known. V. Ulrich, who was president of the Moscow frame-up, describes the character of the disciplinary statutes of 12 October 1940 in these words:

The disciplinary statues considerably extend the right of commanders as regards the use of force and firearms. Comradely relations between soldiers and officers are no more. The “hail fellow well met” spirit in the relationships between a commander and a subordinate can have no place in the Red Army. Discussion of any kind is absolutely prohibited among subordinates. [50]

An article in Pravda of 6 October 1940 throws light on yet another aspect of these statues:

Grievances may be introduced only personally and individually. Submission of group grievances for others is prohibited. No more group declarations, no more joint discussions – whether concerning an order, bad food, or any other topic – all this comes under the heading of ‘insubordination’ and for it a soldier may be shot on the spot without so much as a court-martial, hearing or investigation, if a superior officer solely and personally so decides. [43]

The hierarchy in the army has reached a stage where the officers are absolutely independent of the soldiers.

Again the Five-Year Plan marks the turning point. Then the organisation and structure of the army began to change fundamentally. From a workers’ army with bureaucratic deformations it became the armed body of the bureaucracy as a ruling class.

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We have seen that the inauguration of the Five-Year Plan has been a turning point in the development of the relations of distribution, in the relations between accumulation and consumption, between the productivity of labour and the standard of living of the workers, in the control over production, in the legal rights of the workers, in the institution of forced labour, in the relation of agriculturalists to the means of production, in the tremendous swelling of the turnover tax, and finally, in the structure and organisation of the army, which is a main sector of the state machine. The reality of industrialisation and collectivisation turned out to be in absolute contradiction to the hopes the masses had in them, and even to the illusions which the bureaucracy themselves held. They thought the Five-Year Plans would take Russia many strides forward to teh building of socialism. This is not the first time in history that the results of human actions are in outright contradiction to the wishes and hopes of the actors themselves.

Why was the First Five-Year Plan such a turning point?

For the first time the bureaucracy now sought the rapid creation of the proletariat and accumulation of capital, in other words, as quickly as possible to realise the historical mission of the bourgeoisie. A quick accumulation of capital on the basis of a low level of production, of a small national income per capita, must put a burdensome pressure on the consumption of the masses, on their standard of living. Under such conditions, the bureaucracy, transformed into a personification of capital, for whom the accumulation of capital is the be-all and end-all, must get rid of all remnants of workers’ control, must substitute conviction in the labour process by coercion, must atomise the working class, must totalitarianise all social-political life. It is obvious that the bureaucracy, which became necessary in the process of capital accumulation, and which became the oppressor of the workers, would not be tardy in making use of its social supremacy in the relations of production in order to gain advantages in the relations of distribution. Thus industrialisation and technical revolution in agriculture (“collectivisation”) in a backward country under conditions of siege transforms the bureaucracy from a layer which is under the direct and indirect pressure and control of the proletariat, into a ruling class, into a manager of “the general business of society: the direction of labour, affairs of state, justice, science, art and so forth”.

Dialectical historical development, full of contradictions and surprises, brought it about that the first step the bureaucracy took with the subjective intention of hastening the building of “socialism in one country” became the foundation of the building of state capitalism.

Notes

19. Quoted in D.J. Dallin and B.I. Nicolaovsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, (London 1948, p.193.

20. V. Serge, Russia Twenty Years After, New York 1937, p.66.

21. Ibid., p.68.

22. Labour Law, Item 13, Article 58.

23. Quoted in D.J. Dallin and B.I. Nicolaovsky, op. cit.

24. A. Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London 1940, p.249.

25. Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, A Few Statistics.

26. Pravda, 14 March 1946.

27. D.J. Dallin and B I Nicolaovsky, op. cit., p.88.

28. Ibid., p.86.

29. After deduction of seeds from gross yield.

30. V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol.I, p.179.

31. The fact that the quantity of agricultural products per capita retained by the peasants after making obligatory deliveries rose does not mean that the conditions of the mass of agriculturists improved, because first of all the differentiation in distribution among the agrculturists at the same rime rose very sharply, to the disadvantage of the masses. We cannot deal with this here. But any analysis of the statistics of Russian agriculture will inevitably lead us to the conclusion that Victor Serge reached from his direct contact with Russian toilers: “The vast majority of the peasants live more poorly than before the collectivisation, that is, on the whole, at a level lower than pre-war” (V Serge, op. cit., p37).

32. A technical term denoting a period not exactly equal to the physical labour day: in skilled work it is higher than it, in unskilled tower.

33. In one fundamental point the process connected with collectivisation is dissimilar to the process which took place in Britain. In Britain the eviction of the peasants brought into existence a surplus of agricultural products which was sold in the towns. In Russia the overwhelming majority of the surplus of agricultural products is appropriated by the government as taxes without anything king given in exchange.

34. K Marx, Capital, op. cit., vol.1, p.786.

35. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, op. cit., pp.509-510.

36. Are Government Bonds the Harbingers of a Transformation of the Form of Property?, p.70.

37. The interest paid in Russia on a million roubles is as much as the wages of ten workers. In England a capitalist who wants to receive interest equal to the wages of ten British workers must put an amount of about £250,000 in the bank. But while the British capitalist must pay income tax, in Russia the income received from state bonds is free of tax!

38. In reality there is an extremely small turnover tax on means of production (the income from the turnover tax on producers’ goods makes up less than 10 percent of the total turnover tax, although means of production make up two thirds of total production). At the same time the most elementary daily necessities are burdened with a high turnover tax. Thus in 1934 the rate of tax on wheat and rye was 75 to 76 percent of the gross selling price, i.e. about 300 percent of the net price. (In 1931 it was only 8 percent on wheat and rye, but in February 1933 it was raised to 30 percent, and in August of the same year to 76 percent.) On meat it is 63 to 69 percent of the gross selling price; butter and eggs 70 to 75 percent; dairy products 50 to 62 percent; sugar 84 to 87 percent; tea 86 percent; coffee 86 percent; soap 62.3 percent; kerosene 67 percent; alcohol 90 percent; tobacco 80 percent; textile knit goods 74.2 percent; boots and shoes 70 to 86 percent of the gross selling price.

39. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p.211.

40. Quoted in D.F. White, The Growth of the Red Army, Princeton 1944, p.189.

41. Ibid., pp.63-64.

42. Ibid., p.121.

43. Ibid., p.223.

44. E. Wollenberg, The Red Army, London 1940, pp.182-183.

45. Ibid., pp.185-188.

46. D.F. White, op. cit., p303.

47. Ibid., p.304.

48. Voroshilov’s speech at the Eighteenth Congress of the Party, 1939.

49. D.F. White, op. cit., pp379-380. This turnover throws some light on the extent of the officers’ privileges. The number of officers in 1937 was 80,000 (we have not got the figure for 1935, but it was definitely lower). The turnover of the Voentorg per officers’ family was thus about 20,000 roubles a year. The prices in the Voentorg shops are much lower than in other shops, thus adding to the value of this sum. This sum does not include all the goods and services the officers’ family consumes: travelling, education, entertainment, etc not being included-200,000 roubles, however, is a large enough sum on its own. The average of annual wages and salaries in 1935 was 2,265 roubles (and, as we have noted, the majority of workers earn much less than this average).

50. Red Star, 22 October 1940, quoted in Word, September 1941.

51. To ensure the esprit de corps of the officers, officers’ schools have been established, starting at kindergarten age. Dancing lessons are obligatory at the War Colleges, and ‘noble’ sports such as polo and tennis have been introduced.

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Last updated on 5.1.2004