Chapter 2: What's "Left"? Part VI

But we do need a way to sort out revolutionary periods and methods from periods and methods where law and bureaucracy and rights must prevail. We need an institutional way to do this, or one will be created at great cost out of necessity when the revolution hits a brick wall, as happened with Stalin's purges. And when one is created ad hoc, it will make it incredibly difficult to follow laws and not personalities from thenceforward.

Stalin's critics have a fairly good argument - he sent some loyal Bolsheviks to their deaths for the crime of disagreeing with the state. What they leave out of this critique is that he had no other choice. The West was continuing its pressure, and with its never-ending capitulations to Hitler it looked more and more like the Soviet Union might have to fight the entire capitalist West at once. Stalin's prewar diplomacy against Hitler with Britain and America went nowhere. He didn't have the tanks and the planes to fight even just Hitler; he didn't even have the factories to build them. So he needed people to build them, and he needed everyone to cooperate as much as possible to get it all done as much ahead of schedule as possible because it may well mean their country if it wasn't.

But he was blocked at every turn with these liberal Bolshevik hangers-on interjecting their utopian dreamings into his hard-headed plan of action. Some of the opportunists like Trotsky saw a chance to replace Stalin by opposing him in the Politburo and gaining a faction behind them thereby, and so they did. (The more effective opportunists, like Khrushchev, tended to embrace Stalin as long as he was useful.) Stalin needed action, and they were simpering about with silly liberal dreaming and nest-feathering instead. They did this for ten straight years until he lost patience, drummed up some fake charges with the help of his own opportunists, and had them shot or exiled. Trotsky was allowed to flee to the West, putting his begging bowl before various fascists and capitalists as an object lesson to the Soviets about the moral bankruptcy of these people, until he was no longer useful for this role and Stalin picked on him in 1944 in Mexico City.

This was a tragedy, this was absolutely necessary, and this broke the Soviet Union in the long run. All three things are true at once. These liberal dreamers were indeed old comrades. Foggy-headed, idealist, utopian, their heads in the clouds, because they fought through levels of false consciousness we can only dream of and even after the revolution were still affected. But they were good comrades by and large, and in a perfect world would not deserve their fate. All the same, Stalin's impatience had a point - if he didn't send some Bolsheviks to die in Siberia, they all surely would've died in Dachau. And because he had to do it sneakily, opportunistically, and Leftbook callout-culturey enough to best Trotsky at his own game, he virtually guaranteed that only opportunists who knew how to manipulate people would rise in his wake. Trotsky warped the institutions of the Soviet state with his petty bourgeois scheming, and Stalin had no choice but to ratify that warping in practice to win.

Stalin had that rare gift of understanding how to rule without using it to his personal benefit; when he died his only real possession of value was his book collection, purchased honestly with his honestly-meager paychecks. His successors would not be so restrained. He assembled a vast apparatus of state power that only answered to one man in order to fight great evil. That machine was necessary, but in the scope of its power it presented opportunity to the worst people in the Soviet Union to reestablish capitalist relations under a red flag after the one man at its center no longer had the best intentions. Such a thing cannot be allowed to happen the next time the red banner is hoisted, and so an institutionalized approach to revolutionary terror, such as enabling laws after we seize control of the government, is the best way to prevent it being misused by opportunists to divert the revolution for personal gain.

On to Chapter 3!