Judging Stalinism. posted by Richard Seymour

Marc Mullholland comments on an interesting essay by Christopher Hitchens on Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky . (Notice how I moved up in historical standing with each name). Marc makes some comments which I think have considerable merit:

Deutscher's work had an enormous impact on me when I read it years ago. The greatest influence was, I think, the second volume: The Prophet Unarmed. I think this is fairly unusual, as this ‘continuity’ volume recounts Trotsky's losing struggle with Stalin in the 1920s, and moreover showed him at his worst. Trotsky refused to engage whole-heartedly in a vital struggle partly because he was out of his element in the scholastic and bureaucratic intrigues of a tiny and anti-democratic closed elite (an elite he would not repudiate). Partly Trotsky condescended to those whom thought his inferior and preferred to resign in contempt rather than risk the humiliating defeat of his fully mobilised powers.

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So why did I most value The Prophet Unarmed? I approached the biography convinced of the moral and political superiority of Trotsky to Stalin. I have no reason to change my mind on this, and I'm eternally grateful that my ultra-left enthusiasms were in the Trotskyist rather than the official Communist or Maoist modes.

But the very arcane nature of the struggle in the USSR in the 1920s, as a piratical cadre in command of the listing Russian hulk groped for a way forward in ignorance of the disasters to come, highlighted for me the terrible difficulty of plotting one's way though political morality. There were no pain-free options for the Soviets in the 1920s, and Deutscher brought home the 'reasonableness' of Stalin's rejection of dependence on world revolution and his stolid willingness to practically build socialism with the resources at hand.

I could empathise with the Stalinists, the Rightists, and the renegades of the Left Opposition. More to the point I could see that, in the same circumstances, I could not be sure of my own unimpeachable probity. I appreciated anew that the road to hell is paved, if not necessarily with good intentions, then with indeterminacy, caution, uncertainty and fear.

This has effected much of my historical reasoning since, and made me hostile to the moralising 20:20 vision in hindsight of Amis's Koba the Dread and suchlike. My sympathy since has been with the mass of the confused and mistaken, rather than with the sainted individuals who pointed steadfastly to the sun-lit uplands from where we now contentedly survey the wreckage of blasted hopes and dreams...

Like I say, I understood this immediately as, having read the biography myself, I was forced into a similar kind of understanding. Of course, Mulholland is right to decry the solemn, humourless sanctimony of Martin Amis (Amis can't understand why laughter has refused to absent itself in relation to the Soviet Union). But I must say that if we take the idea that Stalinism was "reasonable" in that context, then we invite the reply that, after all, that context was supplied by the revolution. It was the Bolsheviks who took power, built up the Cheka, banned political opposition etc etc. It would be no good arguing that these were responses to the exigencies of civil war - that was an entirely predictable result of the revolution, as Trotsky himself insisted.

Mulholland isn't of course campaigning for a revival of Stalinism, nor does he say that Stalinism was necessary given the objective conditions - only that it was reasonable in the given context, and only that certain aspects of it were reasonable. Still I think he goes too far. It was, perhaps, intelligible - you could see the logic behind it. But there came a point where the project of the Stalinists ceased to be, in any meaningful sense, a "stolid willingness to practically build socialism with the resources at hand". That point, I would argue in conventional SWP fashion, was 1928 - but then I would say that, wouldn't I?