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Stalin as an Intellectual*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
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During Stalin's lifetime Soviet writing, with his encouragement, presented him as a master theoretician, without a living peer. The more recent tendency on the part of his successors to reduce reference to this and others of his roles has not amounted to a denial of the earlier theme of intellectual greatness. It may therefore be of some importance, even after his death, to investigate Stalin's theoretical writings, not only to clarify his function and accomplishments as an intellectual, but also to gain further insight into Bolshevik and Soviet patterns of thought. A particularly interesting subject for such an investigation is Stalin's last and most widely heralded theoretical writing, the article, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.”
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1953
References
1 Stalin, , “Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.,” Bol'shevik, No. 18 (October 1952).Google Scholar All quotations in this paper are taken from the translation in the Special Supplement to the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, October 18, 1952, with page references indicated in the text.
2 Cf. Nathan Leites and Elsa Bernaut, The Ritual of Liquidation, RAND Research Memorandum RM-977 (forthcoming publication by The Free Press, Glencoe, III.), Ch. 21, on Bolshevik attitudes toward “silence.”
3 Cf. Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, RAND Report R-239 (forthcoming publication by The Free Press), ch. 18, sections 3 and 4, and Leites, and Bernaut, , op. cit., chs. 4, 10, and 13Google Scholar, on Bolshevik disbelief in the stability of intermediate positions.
4 Stalin's process of identifying the omission or elimination of a term with the destruction of the object to which it refers is not, of course, fully conscious. And Stalin is probably deliberately using verbal trickery. But there is almost always more to any manifest content than mere fabrication, and the choice of content of verbal trickery in a way reflects its author's obscure beliefs.
5 In similar fashion, Stalin reifies the Marxist term “expanded reproduction,” i.e., an expanding economy. He affirms that one of the “basic preliminary conditions” for the “transition to communism” is the “constant growth of all social production,” and that this in turn requires “preponderant growth of production of means of production.” This, in turn, “is necessary not only because it [the producers' goods industry] must provide equipment for its own enterprises and for enterprises of all other branches of the economy as well, but also because without it, it is altogether impossible to have expanded reproduction” (p. 14). Stalin overlooks, first, that the last reason is both necessary and sufficient; and, second, that the first two reasons are, together, identical with the last: by an expanding economy (“expanded reproduction”) one means (except in the case of certain technological changes) an economy with expanded equipment in whatever branches the economy is expanding.
6 Cf. Leites, op. cit., ch. 4, section 3.
7 Cf. ibid., ch. II, section 1, for discussion of the relation of this device to the fantasy of communism as the abolition of distinctions.
8 Stalin speaks of “the thesis of the predominant growth of production of the means of production under augmented reproduction”; “the thesis of the surplus product as the only source of accumulation;” “the thesis of accumulation as the only source of augmented reproduction” (p. 17).
9 Stalin's central mistake makes him miss the connection by virtue of which a Marxist could say that the transition to “monopoly capitalism” qualified the theorem of the establishment of an average rate of profit: the mechanism by which this comes about, in Marx's presentation, is free competition. One may also note that Stalin introduces two almost undefined terms, “maximum profit” and “superprofit.” He treats the latter—by the locution “as a rule”—as if it were well defined, but the content of his allusion shows that is not so. The conspicuous role in this passage of words of contemporary Communist mass propaganda, as distinct from terms of Marxist economics, is commented upon below.
10 This and subsequent quotations from Malenkov's speech at the Nineteenth Party Congress are taken from Bol'shevik, No. 19 (October 1952), pp. 58–59.
The degree of adulation of Stalin displayed by a Malenkov (a member of the top group) was, however, smaller than that adopted by a Mikoyan (a member of the next lower group). A detailed analysis would probably show the persistence of the pattern discussed in the article by Leites, Nathan, Bernaut, Elsa, and Garthoff, Raymond, “Politburo Images of Stalin,” World Politics, III (April 1951)Google Scholar, passim.
11 Ibid. Thus Stalin's emphasis on the point that scientific laws “cover processes independently of people's will” appears here particularly clearly as a (no doubt largely unconscious) maneuver in the Bolshevik fight against fantasies of omnipotence. (Cf. Leites, op. cit., ch. 1, section 4.)
12 cf. Leites, op. cit., ch. 6, section 4.
13 Cf. ibid., ch. 4, section 2.
14 Stalin's adherence to the Marxist view of property as the central variable in social life is expressed when he discusses the still persisting “differences” between city and countryside in the Soviet Union (p. 6).
15 Malenkov repeats and stresses Stalin's point (against the economists who oppose it) that in communism “money economy” will disappear, and says that the view that “commodity circulation (tovarnoe obrashchenie) will persist under communism has nothing in common with Marxism” (p. 8).
16 Stalin reaffirms the forecast of the disappearance of the state: “… the state will not exist forever. With the expansion of … socialism in the majority of countries of the world, the state will wither away.… The state will disappear but society will remain. It follows that the recipient of public property will … no longer be the state, which will have disappeared, but society itself as represented by its central guiding economic agency” (p. 18).
17 More specifically, Stalin says that the replacement of the present relations between the collective farms and the state by direct exchange, in which the kolkhozes deliver produce and receive certain assortments of industrial products in return, “will make it possible to include … the yield of collective farming in the general system of national planning” (p. 20). In usual fashion, Stalin additionally justifies these, as any other, economic changes by their alleged favorable impact on the “productive forces” (P. 15).
18 It may be significant that, in contrast to Stalin's verbal orthodoxy about the goal (cf. note 16), Beria on one occasion at the Party Congress chose a formulation which might indicate a reduction of faith within the Politburo. He speaks of “the one great goal—the strengthening of the might of our Fatherland and the victory of communism.”
19 On one occasion Stalin seems to abolish in a fashion which is both spectacular and casual the dominant current description of the present phase as one in which the Soviet Union is engaged in a “movement on the road of gradual transition from socialism to communism,” by speaking of “our present economic system, in the first phase of the development of communist society…” (p. 5).
20 The other leaders whose statements we are discussing and who often mention Stalin's article tend to be silent about this aspect of it, showing the late Stalinist aversion to acknowledging the existence of non-conformity. But Poskrëbyshev notes that Stalin discusses “the mistakes and anti-Marxist tendency of some economists.”
21 This enables Mikoyan to summarize Stalin's polemic as follows: “Comrade Stalin … poured cold water on those comrades who have let themselves be carried away, whom our great successes made dizzy.”
22 Stalin's use of such terms as “preposterous balderdash” in a technical-ideological discussion reveals a low opinion of his subordinates, often displayed in other ways (cf. Leites, , op. cit., ch. 1Google Scholar, section 4; and Leites, and Bernaut, , op. cit., chs. 1–4).Google Scholar Elsewhere in his article Stalin states that, in the matter of setting certain prices, “Our managers and planners submitted a proposal which could only astonish the members of the Central Committee.… The authors of the proposal found nothing sensible to say to the remarks of members of the Central Committee. … As a result, the Central Committee had to take matters into its own hands…” (p. 5).
23 Cf. Mosely, Philip, “The Nineteenth Party Congress,” Foreign Affairs, XXXI (January 1953), pp. 349–50Google Scholar, for another discussion of this particular point on agricultural economics.
24 The existence of such views in the Party in the early 1950's seems to confirm the Bolshevik apprehension that remnants—in this case, of “oppositions”—will never die. (Cf. Leites op. cit., ch. 18, section 3; and Leites and Bernaut, op. cit., ch. 10.)
25 In opposing the views which we have just indicated, Stalin takes up a position identical with that assumed by Lenin in 1921 when he defended the introduction of the New Economic Policy. Stalin denies in 1952, as Lenin did in 1921, that the introduction or retention of certain limited aspects of “capitalism” will inevitably lead to its full “restoration” in the Soviet Union, and that the presence of a certain degree of “commodity production” in the Soviet Union is a necessary concession to the peasantry.
26 Cf. Leites and Bernaut, op. cit., ch. 3, section 2.
27 Stalin replies in conventional Marxist fashion that, while the “forms” of “the old categories of capitalism” remain, their “content” or essence has been changed under socialism (p. II).
28 In opposing this attitude, Stalin brings forward the classical Bolshevik point that omnipotence fantasies make for impotence (cf. Leites, op. cit., ch. 6): “Let us suppose for a minute that we took the point of view of the mistaken theory which … proclaims the possibility of ‘creating’ and ‘changing’ economic laws. Where would that lead? It would lead to finding ourselves in the realm of chaos and chance; we would find ourselves slavishly dependent on chance occurrences” (p. 18).
29 In contrast, Stalin alleges about those who currently manifest “left” moods: “… young cadres … are amazed by the colossal achievements of the Soviet regime, their heads are turned by the extraordinary successes of the Soviet system and they begin to imagine that the Soviet regime ‘can do anything,’ that ‘everything is child's play’ to it…” (p. 2).
30 In other situations, Stalin's emphasis has been in the opposite direction: in the early 1930's he stressed the belief that “there are no fortresses which a Bolshevik cannot conquer.” (Cf. Leites, op. cit., ch. 1, section 4.)
31 There is apparently also a corresponding “right” mood-only incidentally treated by Stalin-which affirms man's impotence in the face of scientific laws rather than his omnipotence: “It is said that economic laws are of a spontaneous nature, that their effects are unavoidable, that society is powerless against them” (p. 2).
32 This is an instance of the Bolshevik lack of belief in the existence of middle views.
33 Stalin also opposes what he views as excessive differentiations between “socialism-communism” on the one hand and “capitalism” on the other—possibly yet further disguises of a “left” discontent with the Soviet status quo.