Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The problem of obtaining increasing supplies of food from fewer peasants without offering them consumers’ industrial goods in exchange could not, according to Stalin, be worked in a peasant regime based on freedom of commerce, as under the NEP of 1921-1927, or in one based on individual farmers, as in the “War Communism” of 1918-1921; the former of these required that the peasants be given goods in exchange while the latter could be made a failure by peasant refusals to produce more food than was required by their own needs. The NEP could not find a solution to this problem. In spite of the closing of the scissors in 1923-1927, industrial prices remained higher than farm prices, peasants were reluctant to supply food to the cities since they could not get the cities’ products they wanted in return, and the amount of peasants’ grain which was sold remained about 13 percent of the grain raised in 1927 compared to 26 percent in 1913. Such a system might provide a high standard of living for the peasants, but it could never provide the highly industrialized basis necessary to support “Socialism in a single country.”

The new direction which Russia’s development took after 1927 and which we call “Stalinism” is a consequence of numerous factors. Three of these factors were (1) the bloodthirsty and paranoiac ambitions of Stalin and his associates, (2) a return of Russia to its older traditions but on a new level and a new intensity, and (3) a theory of social, political, and economic developments which is included under the phrase “Socialism in a single country.” This theory was embraced with such an insane fanaticism by the rulers of the new Russia, and provided such powerful motivations for Soviet foreign and domestic politics, that it must be analyzed at some length.

The rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky in the mid-1920’s was fought with slogans as well as with more violent weapons. Trotsky called for “world revolution,” while Stalin wanted “Communism in a single country.” According to Trotsky, Russia was economically too weak and too backward to be able to establish a Communist system alone. Such a system, all agreed, could not exist except in a fully industrialized country. Russia, which was so far from being industrialized, could obtain the necessary capital only by borrowing it abroad or by accumulating it from its own people. In either case, it would be taken, in the long run, from Russia’s peasants by political duress, in the one case being exported to pay for foreign loans and, in the other case, being given, as food and raw materials, to the industrial workers in the city. Both cases would be fraught with dangers; foreign countries, because their own economic systems were capitalistic, would not stand idly by and allow a rival Socialistic system to reach successful achievement in Russia; moreover, in either case, there would be a dangerously high level of peasant discontent, since the necessary food and raw materials would have, to be taken from Russia’s peasantry by political duress, without economic return. This followed from the Soviet theory that the enmity of foreign capitalist countries would require Russia’s new industry to emphasize heavy industrial products able to support the manufacture of armaments rather than light industrial products able to provide consumers’ goods which could be given to the peasants in return for their produce.

The Bolsheviks assumed, as an axiom, that capitalistic countries would not allow the Soviet Union to build up a successful Socialistic system which would make all capitalism obsolete. This idea was strengthened by a theory, to which Lenin made a chief contribution, that “imperialism is the last stage of capitalism.” According to this theory, a fully industrialized capitalistic country enters upon a period of economic depression which leads it to embrace a program of warlike aggression. The theory insisted that the distribution of income in a capitalistic society would become so inequitable that the masses of the people would not obtain sufficient income to buy the goods being produced by the industrial plants. As such unsold goods accumulated with decreasing profits and deepening depression, there would be a shift toward the production of armaments to provide profits and produce goods which could be sold and there would be an increasingly aggressive foreign policy in order to obtain markets for unsold goods in backward or undeveloped countries. Such aggressive imperialism, it seemed to Soviet thinkers, would inevitably make Russia a target of aggression in order to prevent a successful Communist system there from becoming an attractive model for the discontented proletariat in capitalistic countries. According to Trotsky, all these truths made it quite obvious that “Socialism in a single country” was an impossible idea, especially if that single country was as poor and backward as Russia. To Trotsky and his friends it seemed quite clear that the salvation of the Soviet system must be sought in a world revolution which would bring other countries, especially such an advanced industrial country as Germany, to Russia’s side as allies.

While the internal struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was wending its weary way in 1923-1927, it became quite clear not only that world revolution was impossible and that Germany was not going either to a Communist revolution or an alliance with the Soviet, it also became equally clear that “oppressed colonial” areas such as China were not going to ally with the Soviet Union. “Communism in a single country” had to be adopted as Russia’s policy simply because there was no alternative.

Communism in Russia alone required, according to Bolshevik thinkers, that the country must be industrialized with breakneck speed, whatever the waste and hardships, and must emphasize heavy industry and armaments rather than rising standards of living. This meant that the goods produced by the peasants must be taken from them, by political duress, without any economic return, and that the ultimate in authoritarian terror must be used to prevent the peasants from reducing their level of production to their own consumption needs, as they had done in the period of “War Communism” in 1918-1921. This meant that the first step toward the industrialization of Russia required that the peasantry be broken by terror and reorganized from a capitalistic basis of private farms to a Socialistic system of collective farms. Moreover, to prevent imperialist capitalistic countries from taking advantage of the inevitable unrest this program would create in Russia, it was necessary to crush all kinds of foreign espionage, resistance to the Bolshevik state, independent thought, or public discontent. These must be crushed by terror so that the whole of Russia could be formed into a monolithic structure of disciplined proletariat who would obey their leaders with such unquestioning obedience that it would strike fear in the hearts of every potential aggressor.

The steps in this theory followed one another like the steps of a geometrical proposition: failure of the revolution in industrially advanced Germany required that Communism be established in backward Russia; this demanded rapid industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry; this meant that the peasants could not obtain consumers’ goods for their food and raw materials; this meant that the peasants must be reduced by terroristic duress to collective farms where they could neither resist nor reduce their levels of production: this required that all discontent and independence be crushed under a despotic police state to prevent foreign capitalistic imperialists from exploiting the discontent or social unrest in Russia. To the rulers in the Kremlin the final proof of the truth of this proposition appeared when Germany, which had not gone Communist but had remained capitalistic, attacked Russia in 1941.