Isaac Deutscher - Russia After Stalin

‘Malenkov's government has struck a blow at the political police! [It was pointed out in Chapter X]. If effective the blow must cause a shift in the whole structure of the regime. One of its two props has been weakened, perhaps shattered. On the face of it, this upsets the equilibrium of the regime and tends to increase the importance of the other prop — the army. If the party has deprived itself of the ability to oppose the political policy to the army, the army may become the decisive factor in domestic affairs.’

Paradoxically, the regime now seems to make an attempt to repair that shattered prop, the political police, with the army's help. But for some time to come, until the Beria faction is completely eliminated, the political police will remain in a state of disarray, robbed of its normal striking power; more than ever the government will have to rely for its internal security on the army. It must take some time before the structure of power characteristic of Stalinism is restored, if it can be restored at all. Until then a gap will yawn between the galvanized Stalinist method of government and the un-Stalinist mechanics of power. Across this gap a potential Bonaparte once again casts his shadow.

Nor have the forces vanished which drove the ruling group to decree the reforms of last spring, although at the moment, they may have suffered a severe setback. The reforms could not have sprung merely from Beria's, or from anybody else's, whim and ambition. They met a need felt deeply and widely by the nation. Malenkov and his associates still pay a tribute to the popular mood when they go on declaring that they intend to pursue the course initiated after Stalin's death. The popular mood compels them to tread a twisted path rather cautiously, and it may even compel them to keep part of their promise.

Moreover, the recent reforms corresponded to Russia's new social structure and outlook which, although formed during the Stalin era, have become incompatible with Stalinism.

No shift within the ruling group, no court intrigue, no coup or counter-coup, and not even bloody purges can obliterate these basic factors, which continue to operate against the inertia of Stalinism. If they are not destroyed by a new world war, and if they are not unduly cramped by fear of war, the popular mood and the urges of society will sooner or later force open the road of reform once again. And then they will keep it open more firmly than they did in the liberal spring of 1953.

15 July 1953

I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford University Press, 1949).

See my Stalin .

For this description and analysis I must refer the reader to my forthcoming book The Prophet Armed, which is a biographical study of Trotsky.

Only quite recently Professor Arnold Toynbee brought upon himself some criticism because he described Communism as a Western — or even a Christian — ‘heresy’.

The writer found this letter in the Trotsky Archives at Harvard.

This was, of course, even more true of the anti-communists. Thus the Menshevik Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik wrote after Stalin's death: ‘We, who have known personally and often quite closely the leaders of the Bolshevik Party since 1903, and who have met also Stalin as early as 1906 and later have wondered more than once how it happened that all of us… could so underrate him. Nobody thought of him as an eminent political worker…’ (Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, February-March 1953.)

It is possible to prove from the internal evidence of Stalin's writings that he became acquainted with Marx's Das Kapital only towards the end of his life.

It is interesting to note here the view of Mr. R. Abramovich, the Menshevik veteran who could well celebrate now the fifty years' jubilee of his uninterrupted and increasingly vehement struggle against Bolshevism. In the article from the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, quoted above, Mr. Abramovich (we assume he is its author) writes: ‘Thinking about the past it seems to us that the basic reason of our common, evidently incorrect appraisal of Stalin's personality was that we thought in terms of a democratic system, and strangely enough not only we, the Mensheviks, the opponents of the dictatorship, but also its adherents did so.’(My italics—I.D.)

This is, for instance, how General Ludendorff and General Hoffmann, the outstanding commanders of the German Army in the First World War and Trotsky's enemies during the Brest Litovsk period, described his military achievement.

The present Soviet town population is estimated at 70 millions, nearly 45 millions more than at the beginning of the Stalin era.

Students of Soviet agriculture disagree about the extent of the rise in its output. The most extreme critics put it at 20 per cent higher than before collectivization. The official Soviet figure is over 40 per cent. Whatever the truth, the present output is attained with much less agricultural labour; and so output per man-year has risen much more steeply.

The ‘re-privatization’ of the British steel industry under Mr. Churchill’s government has no bearing on the argument, because that industry had been nationalized de jure rather than de facto only just before the Conservative Party returned to office.

In 1945-6 the author, then a correspondent for British newspapers in Germany, interviewed on this subject hundreds of Soviet ‘displaced persons’. He did not meet a single person among them who reacted otherwise than with amazed indignation to the mere suggestion that public ownership might be replaced by private enterprise in Russia. Only citizens of the countries annexed by Russia in 1939-40 met the suggestion with divided opinions and most often with indifference.

Tito Speaks, by V. Dedijer.

According to Tito, Stalin finally decided to bring Eastern Europe under close Soviet control in 1947, at the time when the Truman doctrine was proclaimed.

As early as the beginning of 1946 the author watched this conflict in Eastern Germany and described it in a series of articles. He watched the same conflict, but in reverse, in the British and American Zones, where Military Governors who had been business-men in civilian life gave vent to their revulsion against the at first faintly-socialist flavour of Allied occupation policy.

The quotation is from a report in The Times (27 June 1950) by a Special Correspondent returned from Peking. This report has been independently checked at another source in fairly close contact with the Chinese communist leaders. The general account of the interplay between domestic Chinese factors and Soviet policy in the Chinese revolution is based on the author's recent study of Chinese communist sources, Maoist and Trotskyist.

From a series of articles on mid-century Russia published in The Reporter (New York), August-November 1951.

These lines were written at the beginning of April 1953.

The Ministry may have aimed even further. The arrest of the doctors may have been intended as a preliminary to the arrest of Malenkov himself. The doctors were said to have speeded the death of Zhdanov. Since it was widely believed that Zhdanov had been Malenkov's rival, it would have been easy at the next stage to point to Malenkov as the chief instigator of the ‘assassins’. But this is only a hypothesis. The special role of the military leaders in the whole affair is, however, not hypothetical, although certainly not all those mentioned in the communique are implicated.