Soviet Policy And Its Critics

378 Pages·1939·15.98 MB·English

by  J. R. Campbell

SOVIET POLICY
AND ITS CRITIC.S
by
J. R. CAMPBELL
LEFT BOOK CLUB EDITION
NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC
SOVIET POLICY AND ITS CRITICS
SOVIET POLICY AND
ITS CRITICS
by
J.
R. CAMPBELL
LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1939
First published February 1939
Second impression April 193.9
PRINTED IN GRKAT BRITAIN BY PVRNEL11 AND SONS, LTD, (T.U.)
PAVL'tON (S01alBRSJi1') AND LONDON
FOREWORD
1,HE ORD IN AR y READER of newspapers cannot
fail to note a heightened interest in Soviet affairs, together
with an increase in the activities of hostile critics of the
Soviet Union. Hostile criticism of developments in Russia,
since the Bolshevik revolution twenty-one years ago, has
served the political aims of the reactionary forces in the
world, and has therefore been encouraged and organised
by them. In recent years this criticism has developed as
an integral part of the offensive of the three great Fascist
powers-Germany, Italy and Japan-who have proclaimed
their hatred of the Soviet Union, their contempt of demo
cratic States and their intention to secure a new division
of the territory and markets of the world. They and their
sympathisers and allies in the democratic countries never
lose an opportunity of attacking the Socialist great power
which is the main bulwark against Fascist aggression.
A considerable part of recent criticism has revolved
around the Moscow trials. The accused in these trials
were convicted of murders, wrecking, espionage and plots
to overthrow the present Soviet Government by an
internal coup timed to coincide with an invasion by Fascist
powers. It is difficult for the uninformed newspaper reader
to see these criminals in the light of their political back
ground: to realise that their crimes are only a culminating
point in the struggle which Trotsky and his followers
have been waging against the Bolshevik Party since r 903;
that the real face of Trotskyism during recent years is
revealed not in Trotsky's "Left" criticisms of the Soviet
Union and its leaders, but in the far from Left activities
of himself and his followers; that these "Left" criticisms
have become a screen for crimes against the people of the
Soviet Union and the peoples of the world.
FORE WORD
The author believes that these "Left" criticisms would
not have been accepted or purveyed by any sincere person
in the Labour and progressive movement but for the web
of lies that reaction, in its various disguises, has woven
around both the Soviet Union and the theories of Marx
and Lenin. It is therefore fitting that a Communist, a
responsible member of the Party which bases its policy
and activity on these theories, should describe the struggle
for their application in the fight against the Tsardom and
in the building of a Socialist society after the Bolshevik
revolution of 1917.
In doing so the author believes that he is not only clearing
away lies and misunderstanding, but also exposing the
real basis and aim of the hostile criticism of the Soviet
Union, and in this way serving the cause of peace and
democracy as well as helping the Socialist Movement to
find its bearings in this extremely critical period.
J. R. CAMPBELL.
CONTENTS
Foreword page 5
Chapter I. Trotsky against the Bolshevik Party
9
II. Trotsky and Bukharin - Enemies of
Socialist Construction 42
III. The Victory of Socialism in the Soviet
Union 84
IV. The Trotskyists and the Soviet State 127
V. The New Constitution and the Struggle
Against Bureaucracy I 58
VI. The Political Background of the Trials I 94
VII. The Trials and their Critics 237
VIII. Trotskyism and the War against the
U.S.S.R. 274
IX. Trotskyism and the People's Front 314
Index 375
CHAPTER I
TROTSKY AGAINST
THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY
IT IS DIFFICULT for those who have come into
politics in post-war years to appreciate what a wonderful
change has come over the face of Russia in the last twenty
years. In place of a Tsarist Russia, which was a synonym
for darkness, ignorance, and corruption, we have a State
whose planned economy has eliminated unemployment;
whose economic development is studied by economists
everywhere; whose State medical service is the admiration
of doctors all over the world; whose educational system
has evoked the enthusiasm of all who are interested in
progressive educational developments. Whatever points
of criticism can still be levelled at conditions in the
Soviet Union-and no one is likely to be more critical
than the Russian Communists themselves-the fact
remains that this constitutes the most sweeping trans
formation ever experienced m the position of a
country.
It must never be forgotten that the great majority of
pre-war European Socialist leaders, even of the Left, held
firmly to the opinion that such a transformation as has
taken place in the Soviet Union was impossible. They based
this opinion, not on the desperate situation in which
Russia found itself as a result of the World War, but on
the backward economic development of the country and
the fact that it had still to solve these political problems
which Western countries had solved a century or so
previously.
Their attitude is outlined in a recent book of the well
known Austrian Social Democratic leader, the late Otto
Bauer.
A1
IO SOVIET POLICY AND ITS CRITICS
''The Russian Revolution, developing out of the World
War, had placed the Russian proletariat, the proletariat
of an economically, socially and culturally backward
country, at the head of the world proletariat, because
this circumstance had allowed it to conquer power and
to begin the transformation of capitalist society into
socialist before the working class in the most advanced
capitalist countries.
"The International Social-Democracy resisted the
recognition of this truth. Had not Marx in his principal
work written the sentence: 'The most industrially
developed countries show the lesser developed the image
of their own future'? Had not Marx himself taught
that the development of capitalism itself creates the
pre-requisites for the transformation of capitalist property
into socialist property; that these pre-requisites will
only mature and the Social Revolution will only become
possible, if 'the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter
on the mode of production that has blossomed with and
under it'? Could one then believe that the Social
Revolution could actually begin in a country, in which
the development of capitalism was much less advanced
than in Western or Central Europe or in the United
States; that the less industrially developed country
could show the others the image of their own future?
The international Social Democracy therefore regarded
the attempt to build a Socialist society in backward
Russia as a utopian adventure. It believed that this
attempt would come to grief in a short time. It believed
that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be at the
best a transitory phase of a bourgeois revolution, just
as the dictatorship of the Paris pre-proletariat in I 792
had only been a transitory phase of a bourgeois revolu
tion. As, in fact, Russian Bolshevism drew back in I 92 r
in face of the resistance of the peasantry and of hunger
in the towns, again allowing capitalist free trade,
offering international capital industrial concessions in
the Soviet Union, the International Social Democracy
believed that the retrogressive movement to capitalism
had again commenced and in a few years the Bolshevik
dictatorship would be shown to be a transitory phase
in a bourgeois revolution.
AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY II
"All these views have to-day been refuted by history
itself. In the Soviet Union a Socialist society is developing,
whose powers of growth, exemplified in the tempo of
the development of its production and the productivity
of labour, have exceeded the boldest expectations. Only
those who are not able to learn from new facts, from
facts of a world historical significance, can to-day hold
on to the mistaken judgments that were comprehensible
and understandable in the years from 1917 to 192I"
(Otto Bauer, Between Two World Wars, Prague, I936).
How was such a transformation, declared absurd by
the majority of Socialist leaders in Europe, made possible?
Here was a country where the great majority of the popu
lation consisted of the most poverty-stricken famine
infested peasantry outside India and China; where the
masses were sunk in the deepest ignorance and super
stition; where the most ferocious national antagonisms
divided the people-antagonisms deliberately fanned by
the ruling class; where the working class with its revolu
tionary traditions was a tiny island in the midst of the
sea of illiterate peasantry. Could such a country, in the
teeth of the most frantic hostility of the capitalist States
in the world, advance on the basis of its own resources,
and build up a civilised Socialist State?
It is beyond all doubt that this advance is now attaining
its objective, but how this was possible is a question of
the utmost importance. How could the great mass of
small property owners, peasants and traders be brought
within the framework of socialism in field, factory and
mine?
It must never be forgotten that the Russian Com
muni:;its were tackling something never before attempted
in human history. The revolutions of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had been bourgeois (i.e., capitalist)
revolutions, whose aim had been to smash the absolute
monarchy and clear away the remnants of feudalism
which were impeding the fullest development of capitalist
production and commerce, and to make the capitalist