Rise and Fall of the Leninist State

Introduction

In March 1985, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, a staunch Old Guard conservative and Brezhnev protege, died and was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Immediately after assuming power, Gorbachev announced plans to carry out sweeping reforms within the massive Soviet economic bureaucracy, and introduced free-market methods of monetary incentives and decentralized economic decision-making as methods of rejuvenating the stagnating Soviet economy. Gorbachev referred to this process as perestroika, or “restructuring”.

In 1989, within the space of a few months, the Communist nations of Eastern Europe underwent a series of profound convulsions. Enthusiastically embracing perestroika and glasnost, the East Europeans rose en masse and drove the old Stalinist bureaucrats from power. Within months, the Leninist empire was dead.

The Western powers hailed these actions as a “new revolution”, and happily declared that “communism is dead”. Many leftists and radical theorists were thrown into a panic by the Gorbachev revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, declaring it to be a “crisis of Marxism”.

In these discussions and disputes, the Western press and most leftist commentators on perestroika have accepted the Soviet Union’s assertion that the Revolution of October 1917 that brought the Bolsheviks to power resulted in the overthrow of the capitalist order and its substitution by socialism, and that the Soviet Union was a communist country that operated according to the principles described by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Even those leftist critics who attacked the policies of the USSR have, for the most part, accepted the proposition that the Soviet Union started its development as a socialist country—they simply assert that this development has proceeded “abnormally”.

This book seeks to examine the political and economic history of the Soviet Union from its birth in 1917 to its recent demise. This study will focus largely on the economic factors affecting the development of the Soviet Union, which both Marx and Lenin considered crucial to understanding the development of any human society. This is done not only in order to examine the Leninist state in its own terms, but also because Marx’s emphasis on the economic factors provides the clearest picture of the development of the Leninist state. It is in the economy of the Communist state, not in its politics or ideology, that we find the seeds of its destruction.

Therefore, by examining the economic development of the USSR, we will see, not only why the Russian Revolution progressed as it did, but why it could not have progressed in any other way. We will see clearly the factors which demanded the establishment of the Leninist state, as well as the equally compelling reasons for its downfall.

This work, then, will present historical and economic examples which illustrate the following thesis: The most basic cause of the Russian Revolution was the urgent need to industrialize the economy and to throw off the restrictions of a largely feudalist agrarian economy. In the history of Western Europe, the transition from an agrarian feudal economy to an industrial capitalist one had been carried out by the rising bourgeoisie, acting in alliance with the peasantry and the working class.

The Western path of development had, however, been rendered impossible in Russia by the near-total domination of the Russian economy by foreign financial interests. This foreign domination both hindered the development of a native bourgeois class and limited the economic and political power this class was able to gather.

As a result of the bourgeoisie’s weakness, the task of industrializing the Russian economy fell to the professional middle class, or petty bourgeoisie, which gathered Russia’s meager economic resources and, using a rigid system of planned economic expansion, succeeded in producing the rudiments of an industrialized economy. This process necessitated a program of nationalization and confiscation, placing all economic resources in the hands of the state.

By the 1960’s, however, the rigid central hierarchy which had enabled the economy to expand so rapidly through the 1930’s had begun instead to restrict and limit its future growth. In an attempt to alleviate these problems, Kruschev began a program of relaxing central control over the planning process and of placing economic power in the hands of the individual enterprise managers. Perestroika was an expansion of this process.

This, however, demanded the delegation of more and more autonomy to the lower levels of the economic system, eventually giving the factory managers de facto control over the economy. At this point, decentralized production came to be in conflict with the central planning apparatus. The result was the overthrow of the Leninist centralized economy and the introduction of a capitalist economy based on the free market and private ownership over resources. The Communist state fell, and was replaced by a Western-style democratic republic.

To see where the Leninist state is heading, we must understand from where it has come. We therefore begin our study with an examination of the economic circumstances which produced the Soviet Union.