The Revolution Betrayed
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The great French Revolution created its army by amalgamating the new formations with the royal battalions of the line. The October revolution dissolved the tzar’s army wholly and without leaving a trace. The Red Army was built anew from the first brick. A twin of the Soviet regime, it shared its fate in great things and small. It owed its incomparable superiority over the tzar’s army wholly to the great social revolution. It has not stood aside, however, from the processes of degeneration of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, these have found their most finished expression in the army. Before attempting to describe the possible role of the Red Army in a future military cataclysm, it is necessary to dwell a moment upon the evolution of its guiding ideas and structures.
The decree of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of January 12, 1918, which laid the foundation for the regular armed forces, defined their objective in the following words:
“With the transfer of power to the toiling and exploited classes, there has arisen the necessity to create a new army which shall be the bulwark of the Soviet power ... and will serve as a support for the coming socialist revolutions in Europe.”
In repeating on the 1st of May the Socialist Oath – still retained since 1918 – the young Red Army soldier binds himself
“before the eyes of the toiling classes of Russia and the whole world” in the struggle “for the cause of Socialism and the brotherhood of nations, not to spare his strength nor even his life itself.”
When Stalin now describes the international character of the revolution as a “comic misunderstanding” and “nonsense”, he displays, besides all the rest, an inadequate respect for basic decrees of the Soviet power that are not annulled even to this day.
The army naturally was nourished by the same ideas as the party and the state. Its printed laws, journalism, oral agitation, were alike inspired by the international revolution as a practical task. Within the walls of the War Department, the program of revolutionary internationalism not infrequently assumed an exaggerated character. The late S. Gussev, once head of the political administration in the army and subsequently a close ally of Stalin, wrote in 1921, in the official military journal:
“We are preparing the class army of the proletariat ... not only for defense against the bourgeois-landed counter-revolution, but also for revolutionary wars (both defensive and offensive) against the imperialist powers.”
Moreover, Gussev directly blamed the then head of the War Department for inadequately preparing the Red Army for its international tasks. The author of these lines, answering Gussev in the press, called his attention to the fact that foreign military powers fulfill in a revolutionary process, not a fundamental, but an auxiliary role. Only in favorable circumstances can they hasten the denouement and facilitate the victory.
“Military intervention is like the forceps of the physician. Applied in season, it can lighten the birth pains; brought into operation prematurely, it can only cause a miscarriage.” (December 5, 1921.)
We cannot, unfortunately, expound here with sufficient completeness the history of this not unimportant problem. We remark, however, that the present marshal, Tukhachevsky, addressed to the Communist International in 1921 a letter proposing to create under his presidency an “international general staff.” That interesting letter was then published by Tukhachevsky in a volume of his articles under the expressive title: The War of the Classes . The talented, but somewhat too impetuous, commander ought to have known from printed explanations that
“an international general staff could arise only on the basis of the national staff of several proletarian states; so long as that is impossible, an international staff would inevitably turn into a caricature.”
If not Stalin himself – who in general avoids taking a definite position upon questions of principle, especially new ones – at least many of his future close associates stood in those years to the “left” of the leadership of the party and the army. There was no small amount of naive exaggeration, or, if you prefer, “comic misunderstanding”, in their ideas. Is a great revolution possible without such things? We were waging a struggle against these left “caricatures” of internationalism long before it became necessary to turn our weapons against the no less extreme caricature involved in the theory of “socialism in a single country.”
Contrary to the retrospective representations of it, the intellectual life of Bolshevism at the very heaviest period of the civil war was boiling like a spring. In all the corridors of the party and the state apparatus, including the army, discussion was raging about everything, and especially about military problems. The policy of the leaders underwent a free, and frequently a fierce, criticism. On the question of certain excessive military censorships, the then head of the War Department wrote in the leading military journal:
“I willingly acknowledge that the censorship has made a mountain of errors, and I consider it very necessary to show that respected personage a more modest place. The censorship ought to defend military secrets ... and it has no business interfering with anything else.” (February 23, 1919.)
The question of an international general staff was only a small episode in an intellectual struggle which, while kept within bounds of the discipline of action, led even to the formation of something in the nature of an oppositional faction within the army, at least within its upper strata. A school of “proletarian military doctrine” to which belonged or adhered Frunze, Tukhachevsky, Gussev, Voroshilov, and others, started from the a priori conviction that, not only in its political aims but in its structure, strategy and tactic, the Red Army could have nothing in common with the national armies of the capitalist countries. The new ruling class must have in all respects a distinct military system; it remained only to create it. During the civil war, the thing was limited, of course, chiefly to protests in principle against the bringing into service of the “generals” – former officers, that is, of the tzar’s army – and back-kicking against the high command in its struggle with local improvisations and particular violations of discipline. The extreme apostles of the new word tried in the name of strategic principles, of “maneuverism” and “offensivism” pushed to that absolute, to reject even the centralized organization of the army, as inhibiting revolutionary initiative on future international fields of battle. In its essence, this was an attempt to extend the guerilla methods of the first period of the civil war into a permanent and universal system. A good many of the revolutionary commanders came out the more willingly for the new doctrine, since they did not want to study the old. The principal centre of these moods was Tzaritzyn (now Stalingrad), where Budenny, Voroshilov, and afterward Stalin, began their military work.
Only after the war ended was a more systematic attempt made to erect these innovations into a finished doctrine. The initiator was one of the outstanding commanders of the civil war, the late Frunze, a former political hard-labor prisoner, and he was supported by Voroshilov, and to some extent by Tukhachevsky. In essence, the proletarian military doctrine was wholly analogous to the doctrine of “proletarian culture”, completely sharing its metaphysical schematism. In certain works left by the advocates of this tendency, this or that practical prescription, usually far from new, was arrived at deductively from the standard characteristics of the proletariat as an international and aggressive class – that is, from motionless psychological abstraction, and not from real conditions of time and place. Marxism, although acclaimed in every line, was in reality replaced by pure idealism. Notwithstanding the sincerity of these thought wanderings, it is not difficult to see in them the germ of the swiftly developing self-complacence of a bureaucracy which wanted to believe, and make others believe, that it was able in all spheres without special preparation and even without the material prerequisites to accomplish historic miracles.
The then-head of the War Department answered Frunze in the press:
“I also do not doubt that if a country with a developed socialist economy found itself compelled to wage war with a bourgeois country, the picture of the strategy of the socialist country would be wholly different. But this gives no basis for an attempt today to suck a ’proletarian strategy’ out of our fingers ... By developing socialist, raising the cultural level of the masses ... we will undoubtedly enrich the military art with new methods.”
But for this it is necessary assiduously to learn from the advanced capitalist countries, and not to try to
“infer a new strategy by speculative methods from the revolutionary nature of the proletariat.” (April 1, 1922.)
Archimedes promised to move the Earth if they would give him a point of support. That was not badly said. However, if they offered him the needed point of support, it would have turned out that he had neither the lever nor the power to bring it into action. The victorious revolution gave us a new point of support, but in order to move the Earth it is still necessary to build the levers.
“The proletarian military doctrine” was rejected by the party, like its elder sister, “the doctrine of proletarian culture.” However, in sequel, at least so it appears, their destinies diverged. The banner of “proletarian culture” was raised by Stalin and Bukharin, to be sure without visible results, in the course of the seven-year period between the proclamation of “socialism in one country” and of the abolition of all classes (1924-31). The “proletarian military doctrine”, on the contrary, notwithstanding that its former advocates soon stood at the helm of state, never had any resurrection. The external difference in the fates of these two so-closely-related doctrines is of profound significance in the evolution of Soviet society. “Proletarian culture” had to do with imponderable matters, and the bureaucracy was the more magnanimous about granting this moral compensation to the proletariat, the more rudely it pushed the proletariat from the seats of power. Military doctrine, on the contrary, goes to the quick, not only of the interests of defense, but of the interests of the ruling stratum. Here there was no place for ideological pamperings. The former opponents of the enlistment of the “generals” had themselves meantime become “generals.” The prophets of an international general staff had quieted down under the canopy of the general staff of a “single country.” The “war of the classes” was replaced by the doctrine of “collective security.” The perspective of world revolution gave place to the deification of the status quo . In order to inspire confidence in possible allies, and not overirritate the enemies, the demand now was to differ as little as possible, no matter what the cost, from capitalist armies. Behind these changes of doctrine and repaintings of facade, social processes of historic import were taking place. The year 1935 was for the army a kind of two-fold state revolution – a revolution in relation to the militia system and to the commanding staff.
4. The Abolition of the Militia and the Restoration of Officers’ Ranks
I n what degree do the Soviet armed forces, at the end of the second decade of their existence, correspond to the type which the Bolshevik party inscribed upon its banner?
The army of the proletarian dictatorship ought to have, according to the program,
“an overtly class character – that is, to be composed exclusively of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat layers of the peasantry close to it. Only in connection with the abolition of classes will such a class army convert itself into a national socialist militia.”
Although postponing to a coming period the all-national character of the army, the party by no means rejected the militia system. On the contrary, according to a resolution of the 8th Congress (March 1919): “We are shifting the militia to a class basis and converting it into a Soviet militia.” The aim of the military work was defined as the gradual creation of an army “as far as possible by extra-barrackroom methods – that is, in a set-up close to the labor conditions of the working class.”
In the long run, all the divisions of the army were to coincide territorially with the factories, mines, villages, agricultural communes, and other organic groupings, “with a local commanding staff, with local stores of arms, and of all supplies.” A regional, scholastic, industrial, and athletic union of the youth was to more than replace the corporative spirit instilled by the barracks, and inculcate conscious discipline without the elevation above the army of a professional officers’ corps.
A militia, however, no matter how well corresponding to the nature of the socialist society, requires a high economic basis. Special circumstances are built up for a regular army. A territorial army, therefore, much more directly reflects the real condition of the country. The lower the level of culture and the sharper the distinction between village and city, the more imperfect and heterogeneous the militia. A lack of railroads, highways, and water routes, together with an absence of autoroads and a scarcity of automobiles, condemns the territorial army in the first critical weeks and months of war to extreme slowness of movement. In order to ensure a defense of the boundaries during mobilization, strategic transfers and concentrations, it is necessary, along with the territorial detachments, to have regular troops. The Red Army was created from the very beginning as a necessary compromise between the two systems, with the emphasis on the regular troops.
In 1924, the then-head of the War Department wrote:
“We must always have before our eyes two circumstances: If the very possibility of going over to the militia system was first created by the establishment of a Soviet structure, still the tempo of the change is determined by the general conditions of the culture of the country – technique, means of communications, literacy, etc. The political premises for a militia are firmly established with us, whereas the economic and cultural are extremely backward.”
Granted the necessary material conditions, the territorial army would not only not stand second to the regular army, but far exceed it. The Soviet Union must pay dear for its defense, because it is not sufficiently rich for the cheaper militia system. There is nothing here to wonder at. It is exactly because of its poverty that the Soviet society has hung around its neck the very costly bureaucracy.
One and the same problem, the disproportion between economic base and social superstructure, comes up with remarkable regularity in absolutely all the spheres of social life, in the factory, the collective farm, the family, the school, in literature, and in the army. The basis of all relations is the contrast between a low level of productive forces, low even from a capitalist standpoint, and forms of property that are socialist in principle. The new social relations are raising up the culture. But the inadequate culture is dragging the social forms down. Soviet reality is an equilibrium between these two tendencies. In the army, thanks to the extreme definiteness of its structure, the resultant is measurable in sufficiently exact figures. The correlation between regular troops and militia can serve as a fair indication of the actual movement toward socialism.
Nature and history have provided the Soviet state with open frontiers 10,000 kilometres apart, with a sparse population, and bad roads. On the 15th of October, 1924, the old military leadership, then in its last month, once more urged that this not be forgotten:
“In the next few years, the creation of a militia must of necessity have a preparatory character. Each successive step must follow from the carefully verified success of the preceding steps.”
But with 1925 a new era began. The advocates of the former proletarian military doctrine came to power. In its essence, the territorial army was deeply contradictory to that ideal of “offensivism” and “maneuverism” with which this school had opened its career. But they had now begun to forget about the world revolution. The new leaders hoped to avoid wars by “neutralizing” the bourgeoisie. In the course of the next few years, 74 per cent of the army was reorganized on a militia basis!
So long as Germany remained disarmed, and moreover “friendly”, the calculations of the Moscow general staff in the matter of western boundaries were based on the military forces of the immediate neighbors: Rumania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, Finland, with the probably material support of the most powerful of the enemies, chiefly France. In that far-off epoch (which ended in 1933), France was not considered a providential “friend of peace.” The surrounding states could put in the field together about 120 divisions of infantry, approximately 3,500,000 men. The mobilization plans of the Red Army tried to insure on the western boundary an army of the first class amounting to the same number. In the Far East, under all conditions in the theatre of war, it could be a question only of hundreds of thousands, and not millions. Each hundred fighters demands, in the course of a year, approximately 75 men to replace losses. Two years of war would withdraw from the country, leaving aside those who return from hospitals to active service, about 10 to 12 million men. The Red Army up to 1935 numbered in all 562,000 men – with the troops of the GPU, 620,000 – with 40,000 officers. Moreover, at the beginning of 1935, 74 per cent, as we have already said, were in the territorial divisions, and only 26 per cent in the regular army. Could you ask a better proof that the socialist militia had conquered – if not by 100 per cent, at least by 74 per cent, and in any case “finally and irrevocably”?
However, all the above calculations, conditional enough in themselves, were left hanging in the air after Hitler came to power. Germany began feverishly to arm, and primarily against the Soviet Union. The prospect of a peaceful cohabitation with capitalism faded at once. The swift approach of military danger impelled the Soviet government, besides bringing up the numbers of the armed forces to 1,300,000, to change radically the structure of the Red Army. At the present time, it contains 77 per cent of regular, or so-called “ kadrovy ” divisions, and only 23 per cent of territorials! This shattering of the territorial divisions looks too much like a renunciation of the militia system – unless you forgot that an army is needed not for times of peace, but exactly for the moments of military danger. Thus, historic experience, starting from that sphere which is least of all tolerant of jokes, has ruthlessly revealed that only so much has been gained “finally and irrevocably” as is guaranteed by the productive foundation of society.
Nevertheless, the slide from 74 per cent to 23 per cent seems excessive. It was not brought to pass, we may assume, without a “friendly” pressure from the French general staff. It is still more likely that the bureaucracy seized upon a favorable pretext for this step, which was dictated to a considerable degree by political considerations. The divisions of a militia through their very character come into direct dependence upon the population. This is the chief advantage of the system from a socialist point of view. But this also is its danger from the point of view of the Kremlin. It is exactly because of this undesirable closeness of the army to the people that the military authorities of the advanced capitalist countries, where technically it would be easy to realize, reject the militia. The keen discontent in the Red Army during the first five-year plan undoubtedly supplied a serious motive for the subsequent abolition of the territorial divisions.
Our proposition would be unanswerably confirmed by an accurate diagram of the Red Army previous to and after the counterreform. We have not such data, however, and if we had we should consider it impossible to use them publicly. But there is a fact, accessible to all, which permits of no two interpretations: at the same time that the Soviet government reduced the relative weight of the militia in the army to 51 per cent, it restored the cossack troops, the sole militia formation in the tzar’s army! Cavalry is always the privileged and most conservative part of an army. The cossacks were always the most conservative part of the cavalry. During the war and the revolution, they served as a police force – first for the tzar, and then for Kerensky. Under the Soviet power, they remained perpetually Vendean. Collectivization – introduced among the cossacks, moreover, with special measures of violence – has not yet, of course, changed their traditions and temper. Moreover, as an exceptional law, the cossacks have been restored the right to possess their own horse. There is no lack, of course, of other indulgences. Is it possible to doubt that these riders of the steppes are again on the side of the privileged against the oppressed? Upon a background of unceasing repressions against oppositional tendencies among the workers’ youth, the restoration of the cossack stripe and forelock is undoubtedly one of the clearest expressions of the Thermidor!
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A still more deadly blow to the principles of the October revolution was struck by the decree restoring the officers’ corps in all its bourgeois magnificence. The commanding staff of the Red Army, with its inadequacies, but also with its inestimable merits, grew out of the revolution and the civil war. The youth, to whom independent political activity is closed, undoubtedly supply no small number of able representatives to the Red Army. On the other hand, the progressive degeneration of the state apparatus could not fail in its turn to reflect itself in the broad circles of the commanding staff. In one of the public conferences, Voroshilov, developing truisms in regard to the duty of commanders to be models to their men, thought it necessary just in that connection to make this confession: “Unfortunately, I cannot especially boast”; the lower ranks are growing while “often the commanding cadres lag behind.” “Frequently the commanders are unable to answer in a suitable manner” new questions, etc.
A bitter confession from the most responsible – at least formally – leader of the army, a confession capable of evoking alarm but not surprise. What Voroshilov says about the commanders is true of all bureaucrats. Of course the orator himself does not entertain the thought that the ruling upper circles might be numbered among those who “lag behind.” No wonder they are always and everywhere shouting at everybody, and angrily stamping their feet, and giving order to be “at your best.” In simple fact, it is that uncontrolled corporation of “leaders” to whom Voroshilov himself belongs which is the chief cause of backwardness and routine, and of much else.
The army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature. The trade of war is too austere to get along with fictions and imitations. The army needs the fresh air of criticism. The commanding staff needs democratic control. The organizers of the Red Army were aware of this from the beginning, and considered it necessary to prepare for such a measure as the election of the commanding staff.
“The growth of internal solidarity of the detachments, the development in the soldier of a critical attitude to himself and his commanders ...” says the basic decision of the party on military questions, “will create favorable conditions in which the principle of electivity of the commanding personnel can receive wider and wider application.”
Fifteen years after this decision was adopted – a span of time long enough, it would seem, for the maturing of inner solidarity and self-criticism – the ruling circles have taken the exactly opposite turn.
In September 1935, civilized humanity, friends and enemies alike, learned with surprise that the Red Army would now be crowned with an officers’ hierarchy, beginning with lieutenant and ending with marshal. According to Tukhachevsky, the actual head of the War Department,
“the introduction by the government of military titles will create a more stable basis for the development of commanding and technical cadres.”
The explanation is consciously equivocal. The commanding cadres are reinforced above all by the confidence of the soldiers. For that very reason, the Red Army began by liquidating the officers’ corp. The resurrection of hierarchical caste is not in the least demanded by the interests of military affairs. It is the commanding position, and not the rank, of the commander that is important. Engineers and physicians have no rank, but society finds the means of putting each in his needful place. The right to a commanding position is guaranteed by study, endowment, character, experience, which need continual and moreover individual appraisal. The rank of major adds nothing to the commander of a battalion. The elevation of the five senior commanders of the Red Army to the title of marshal, gives them neither new talents nor supplementary powers. It is not the army that really thus receives a “stable basis”, but the officers’ corps, and that at the price of aloofness from the army. The reform pursues a purely political aim: to give a new social weight to the officers. Molotov thus in essence defined the meaning of the decree: “to elevate the importance of the guiding cadres of our Army.” The thing is not limited, either, to a mere introduction of titles. It is accompanied with an accelerated construction of quarters for the commanding staff. In 1936, 47,000 rooms are to be constructed, and 57 per cent more money is to be issued for salaries than during the preceding year. “To elevate the importance of the guiding cadres” means, at a cost of weakening the moral bonds of the army, to bind the officers closer together with the ruling circles.
It is worthy of note that the reformers did not consider it necessary to invent fresh titles for the resurrected ranks. On the contrary, they obviously wanted to keep step with the West. At the same time, they revealed their Achilles’ heel in not daring to resurrect the title of general, which among the Russian people has too ironical a sound. In announcing the elevation to marshals of the five military dignitaries – choice of the five was made, to be it remarked, rather out of regard for personal loyalty to Stalin than for talents or services – the Soviet press did not forget to remind its readers of the tzar’s army, its “caste and rank worship and obsequiousness.” Why then such a slavish imitation of it? In creating new privileges, the bureaucracy employs at every step the arguments which once served for the destruction of the old privileges. Insolence takes turns with cowardice, nd is supplemented with increasing doses of hypocrisy.
However surprising at first glance the official resurrections of “caste and rank worship and obsequiousness”, we must confess that the government had little freedom of choice left. The promotion of commanders on a basis of personal qualification can be realized only under conditions of free initiative and criticism in the army itself, and control over the army by the public opinion of the country. Severe discipline can get along excellently with a broad democracy and even directly rely upon it. No army, however, can be more democratic than the regime which nourishes it. The source of bureaucratism, with its routine and swank, is not the special needs of military affairs, but the political needs of the ruling stratum. In the army, these needs only receive their most finished expression. The restoration of officers’ castes 18 years after their revolutionary abolition testifies equally to the gulf which already separated the rules from the ruled, to the loss by the Soviet army of the chief qualities which gave it the name of “Red”, and to the cynicism with which the bureaucracy erects these consequences of degeneration into law.
The bourgeois press has appraised this counterreform as it deserves. The French official paper, Le Temps , wrote on September 25, 1935:
“This external transformation is one of the signs of a deep change which is now taking place through the Soviet Union. The regime, now definitely consolidated, is gradually becoming stabilized. Revolutionary habits and customs are giving place within the Soviet family and Soviet society to the feelings and customs which continue to prevail within the so-called capitalist countries. The Soviets are becoming bourgeoized.”
There is hardly a word to add to that judgment.
5. The Soviet Union in a War
M ilitary danger is only one expression of the dependence of the Soviet Union upon the rest of the world, and consequently one argument against the utopian idea of an isolated socialist society. But it is only now that this ominous “argument” is brought forward.
To enumerate in advance all the factors of the coming dogfight of the nations would be a hopeless task. If such an a priori calculation were possible, conflicts of interest would always end in a peaceful bookkeeper’s bargain. In the bloody equation of war, there are too many unknown quantities. In any case, there are on the side of the Soviet Union immense favorable factors, both inherited from the past and created by the new regime. The experience of intervention during the civil war proved once more that Russia’s greatest advantage has been and remains her vast spaces. Foreign imperialism overthrew Soviet Hungary, though not, to be sure, without help from the lamentable government of Bela Kun, in a few days. Soviet Russia, cut off from the surrounding countries at the very start, struggled against intervention for three years. At certain moments, the territory of the revolution was reduced almost to that of the old Moscow principality. But even that proved sufficient to enable her to hold out, and in the long run triumph.
Russia’s second greatest advantage is her human reservoir. Having grown almost 3,000,000 per year, the population of the Soviet Union has apparently now passed 170,000,000. A single recruiting class comprises about 1,300,000 men. The strictest sorting, both physical and political, would throw out not more than 400,000. The reserves, therefore, which may be theoretically estimated at 18 to 20 million, are practically unlimited.
But nature and man are only the raw materials of war. To so-called military “potential” depends primarily upon the economic strength of the state. In this sphere, the advantages of the Soviet Union by comparison with the old Russia are enormous. The planned economy has up to this time, as we have said, given its greatest advantages from the military point of view. The industrialization of the outlying regions, especially Siberia, has given a wholly new value to the steppe and forest spaces. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union still remains a backward country. The low productivity of labor, the inadequate quality of the products, the weakness of the means of transport, are only to a certain degree compensated by space and natural riches and the numbers of the population. In times of peace, the measuring of economic might between the two hostile social systems can be postponed – for a long time, although by no means forever – with the help of political devices, above all the monopoly of foreign trade. During a war the test is made directly upon the field of battle. Hence the danger.
Military defeats,although they customarily entail great political changes, do not always of themselves lead to a disturbance of the economic foundations of society. A social regime which guarantees a higher development of riches and culture, cannot be overthrown by bayonets. On the contrary, the victors take over the institutions and customs of the conquered, if these are beyond them in evolution. Forms of property can be overthrown by military force only when they are sharply out of accord with the economic basis of the country. A defeat of Germany in a war against the Soviet Union would inevitably result in the crushing, not only of Hitler, but of the capitalist system. On the other hand, it is hardly to be doubted that a military defeat would also prove fatal, not only for the Soviet ruling stratum, but also for the social bases of the Soviet Union. The instability of the present structure in Germany is conditioned by the fact that its productive forces have long ago outgrown the forms of capitalist property. The instability of the Soviet regime, on the contrary, is due to the fact that its productive forces have far from grown up to the forms of socialist property. A military defeat threatens the social basis of the Soviet Union for the same reason that these bases require in peaceful times a bureaucracy and a monopoly of foreign trade – that is, because of their weakness.
Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution.
It may be answered that “imperialism” is an abstraction, for it too is torn by contradictions. That is quite true, and were it not for those contradictions, the Soviet Union would long ago have disappeared from the scene. The diplomatic and military agreements of the Soviet Union are based in part upon them. However, it would be a fatal mistake not to see the limits beyond which those contradictions must subside. Just as the struggle of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties, from the most reactionary to the Social Democratic, subsides before the immediate threat of a proletarian revolution, so imperialist antagonisms will always find a compromise in order to block the military victory of the Soviet Union.
Diplomatic agreements, as a certain chancellor with some reason once remarked, are only “scraps of paper.” It is nowhere written that they must survive even up to the outbreak of war. Not one of the treaties with the Soviet Union would survive the immediate threat of a social revolution in any part of Europe. Let the political crisis in Spain, to say nothing of France, enter a revolutionary phase, and the hope propounded by Lloyd George in savior-Hitler would irresistibly take possession of all bourgeois governments. On the other hand, if the unstable situation in Spain, France, Belgium, etc., should end in a triumph of the reaction, there would again remain not a trace of the Soviet pacts. And, finally, if the “scraps of paper” should preserve their validity during the first period of military operations, there is not a doubt that groupings of forces in the decisive phase of the war would be determined by factors of incomparably more powerful significance than the oaths of diplomats, perjurers as they are by profession.
The situation would be radically different, of course, if the bourgeois allies received material guarantees that the Moscow government stands on the same side with them, not only of the war trenches, but of the class trenches, too. Availing themselves of the difficulties of the Soviet Union, which will be placed between two fires, the capitalist “friends of peace" will, of course, take all measures to drive a breach into the monopoly of foreign trade and the Soviet laws on property. The growing “defensist” movement among the Russian white émigrés in France and Czechoslovakia feeds wholly upon such calculations. And if you assume that the world struggle will be played out only on a military level, the Allies have a good chance of achieving their goal. Without the interference of revolution, the social bases of the Soviet Union must be crushed, not only in the case of defeat, but also in the case of victory.
More than two years ago, a program announcement, The Fourth International and War , outlined this perspective in the following words:
“Under the influence of the critical need of the state for articles of prime necessity, the individualistic tendencies of the peasant economy will receive a considerable reinforcement, and the centrifugal forces within the collective farms will increase with every month ... In the heated atmosphere of war, we may expect ... the attracting of foreign allied capital, a breach in the monopoly of foreign trade, a weakening of state control of the trusts, a sharpening of competition between the trusts, conflicts between the trusts and the workers, etc. ... In other words, in the case of a long war, if the world proletariat is passive, the inner social contradictions of the Soviet Union not only might, but must, lead to a bourgeois Bonapartist counterrevolution.”
The events of the last two years have redoubled the force of this prognosis.
The preceding considerations, however, by no means lead to so-called “pessimistic” conclusions. If we do not want to shut our eyes to the immense material preponderance of the capitalist world, nor the inevitable treachery of the imperialist “allies”, nor the inner contradictions of the Soviet regime, we are, on the one hand, in no degree inclined to overestimate the stability of the capitalist system, either in hostile or allied countries. Long before a war to exhaustion can measure the correlation of economic forces to the bottom, it will put to the test the relative stability of the regimes. All serious theoreticians of future slaughters of the people take into consideration the probability, and even the inevitability, of revolution among its results. The idea, again and again advanced in certain circles, of small “professional” armies, although little more real than the idea of individual heroes in the manner of David and Goliath, reveals in its very fantasticness the reality of the dread of an armed people. Hitler never misses a chance to reinforce his “love of peace” with a reference to the inevitability of a new Bolshevik storm in case of a war in the West. The power which is restraining for the time being the fury of war is not the League of Nations, not mutual security pacts, not pacifist referendums, but solely and only the self-protective fear of the ruling classes before the revolution.
Social regimes like all other phenomena must be estimated comparatively. Notwithstanding all its contradictions, the Soviet regime in the matter of stability still has immense advantages over the regimes of its probable enemies. The very possibility of a rule of the Nazis over the German people was created by the unbearable tenseness of social antagonisms in Germany. These antagonisms have not been removed, and not even weakened, but only suppressed, by the lid of fascism. A war will bring them to the surface. Hitler has far less chances than had Wilhelm II of carrying a war to victory. Only a timely revolution, by saving Germany from war, could save her from a new defeat.
The world press portrayed the recent bloody attack of Japanese officers upon the ministers of the government as the imprudent manifestation of a too flaming patriotism. In reality, these attacks, notwithstanding the difference of ideology, belong to the same historic type as the bombs of the Russian Nihilists against the tzarist bureaucracy. The population of Japan is suffocated under the combined yoke of Asiatic agrarianism and ultramodern capitalism. Korea, Manchukuo, China, at the first weakening of the military pincers, will rise against the Japanese tyranny. A war will bring the empire of the Mikado the greatest of social catastrophes.
The situation of Poland is but little better. The regime of Pilsudski, least fruitful of all regimes, proved incapable even of weakening the land slavery of the peasants. The western Ukraine (Galacia) is living under a heavy national oppression. The workers are shaking the country with continual strikes and rebellions. Trying to insure itself by a union with France and a friendship with Germany, the Polish bourgeoisie is incapable of accomplishing anything with its maneuvers except to hasten the war and find in it a more certain death.
The danger of war and a defeat of the Soviet Union is a reality, but the revolution is also a reality. If the revolution does not prevent war, then war will help the revolution. Second births are commonly easier than first. In the new war, it will not be necessary to wait a whole two years and a half for the first insurrection. Once it is begun, moreover, the revolution will not this time stop half way. The fate of the Soviet Union will be decided in the long run not on the maps of the general staffs, but on the map of the class struggle. Only the European proletariat, implacably opposing its bourgeoisie, and in the same camp with them the “friends of peace”, can protect the Soviet Union from destruction, or from an “allied” stab in the back. Even a military defeat of the Soviet Union would be only a short episode, in case of a victory of the proletariat in other countries. And on the other hand, no military victory can save the inheritance of the October revolution, if imperialism holds out in the rest of the world.
The henchmen of the Soviet bureaucracy say that we “underestimate” the inner forces of the Soviet Union, the Red Army, etc., just as they have said that we “deny” the possibility of socialist construction in a single state. These arguments stand on such a low level that they do not even permit a fruitful exchange of opinions. Without the Red Army, the Soviet Union would be crushed and dismembered like China. Only her stubborn and heroic resistance to the future capitalist enemy can create favorable conditions for the development of the class struggle in the imperialist camp. The Red Army is thus a factor of immense significance. But this does not mean that it is the sole historic factor. Sufficient that it can give a mighty impulse to the revolution. Only the revolution can fulfill the chief task; to that the Red Army alone is unequal.
Nobody demands of the Soviet government international adventures, unreasonable acts, attempts to force by violence the course of world events. On the contrary, insofar as such attempts have been made by the bureaucracy in the past (Bulgaria, Esthonia, Canton, etc.), they have only played into the hands of the reaction, and they have met a timely condemnation from the Left Opposition. It is a question of the general direction of the Soviet state. The contradiction between its foreign policy and the interests of the world proletariat and the colonial peoples, finds its most ruinous expression in the subjection of the Communist International to the conservative bureaucracy with its new religion of inaction.
It is not under the banner of the status quo that the European worker and the colonial peoples can rise against imperialism, and against that war which must break out and overthrow the status quo almost as inevitably as a developed infant destroys the status quo of pregnancy. The toilers have not the slightest interest in defending existing boundaries, especially in Europe – either under the command of their bourgeoisies, or, still less, in a revolutionary insurrection against them. The decline of Europe is caused by the very fact that it is economically split up among almost 40 quasi-national states which, with their customs, passports, money systems, and monstrous armies in defense of national particularism, have become a gigantic obstacle on the road of the economic and cultural development of mankind.
The task of the European proletariat is not the perpetuation of boundaries but, on the contrary, their revolutionary abolition, not the status quo , but a socialist United States of Europe!
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Last updated on: 20.4.2007