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The ideological struggle that led to the Bolshevik civil war was not one of “authoritarianism” vs. “communism,” it was a war between Stalin’s centrist faction, which had the broadest support within the Bolsheviks at large, as well as Trotsky’s “left-opposition,” which distrusted the peasantry and felt that socialism was impossible without a revolution in western Europe. What changes do you believe those found guilty in the Moscow Trials and purge in general wished to enact that would have made the USSR “communist?”
Trotsky was kind of on to something, no? Yes, we can all agree that in the short term direct transition to real communism would have been a bridge too far to accomplish in a single generation, especially going from a largely pre-industrial Russia directly to a socialist society. People broadly lack the political will and understanding of how bad capitalism can get until they live under it. That said, there were more effective ways to actually move toward real socialism rather than an iron grip that gradually broke itself with its inefficiency. Unfortunately Stalin and his centrists were exactly the kind of довбойо́би to think they could strong-arm the process. In doing so he ended up undermining the whole project. I honestly do not know that the men murdered in the purge would have had a better answer. But they certainly understood the question a lot better than those holding the “trials.”
I disagree, frankly. Trotsky was, most charitably, someone who genuinely believed that constructing socialism was a doomed effort in the USSR, and that the peasantry would not end up allying with the proletariat. With this reading of Trotsky, he was an active sabateur of the socialist project helping organize very real and legitimate Fifth Column elements terrorizing the Soviet administration and public at large, out of a belief that this was necessary to implement socialism.
The problem is that Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” is wrong. The peasantry became fully aligned with the proletariat throughout the early 1930s, just before the purges. Stalin’s faction took the correct course of action, focusing on building up heavy industry to prepare for a coming resumption of World War. Communism must be global, and cannot be achieved in one country. However, the transition to communism globally must be made by socialist countries.
The Soviet Union was genuinely socialist. Social ownership was the principal aspect of the economy, and the working class did run the state and direct the social surplus. The Soviet Union was actually very efficient up until the Gorbachev era, it wasn’t Stalin that set the seeds for downfall but Khrushchev. The public by and large supported and loved Stalin until several years after Khrushchev’s secret speech, and Khrushchev’s reforms turned a blind eye to black markets forming a capitalist class that was effectively able to form a cohesive bloc. China has capitalists, but it integrates them into their system so as to control them and limit them. The later soviets did not, and this grew ideological withering within the CPSU.
To return to the purges, the assassination of Kirov by the Fifth Column elements prompted response. Regardless of the legitimacy of the trials, the fact of the matter is that there was a Bolshevik Civil War, so to speak. Even if we assume that all sides of it had good intentions, or even if we assume Stalin had bad intentions, it was still the more popularly supported and democratic decision to purge the party of the actual, real threat the Fifth Column presented, which is why Stalin was still so supported by the public until well after his death.
The idea that the Soviet Union was governed by an iron grip is a misconception. There were weaknesses in the Soviet democratic processes, and crisis after crisis effectively limited the extent to which democracy could effectively function. However, I intensely disagree with Trotsky’s suicidal plans, and I believe that the CPSU made the correct decision to reject such plans, and were forced to respond to real internal sabotage that stood to collapse the entire soviet project.
I will have to agree to disagree with you, because defending the path not taken can only be done entirely in hypotheticals and theory for which there is no concrete evidence, that said I firmly disagree with the characterization of the peasantry being fully committed to the socialist enterprise. They were cowed by fear, which is a weak substitute at best, which is why I find the bandwagon argument of “well it was popular” uncompelling. Stalin was a Tsar in all but name and he ruled like it. I have enough family who survived it to know who and what he was. Calling what came out of that period “socialist” is technically true, but socialism is a broad enough term to encompass many different systems, not all of which lead to good outcomes. Petty, punitive, and bigoted administration at many levels made a mockery of any claims of true solidarity among the people.
If you want to truly defend socialist principles, quit trying to sane-wash mistakes and wallpaper over the truth. The USSR was never a good example, let alone an ideal case of socialism in action. Pretending the lessons of the past didn’t happen instead of taking the opportunity to learn from them and do better is the most American thing I can think of. We do not win by stealing from the capitalist playbook.
No, the peasantry were not “cowed by fear,” this is ahistorical. Here’s an excerpt from This Soviet World, written by journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1936:
The soviet model freed the peasantry from a slave-like experience under the Kulak farming. Stalin was no Tsar either, he requested to resign on half a dozen confirmed occasions, only to be rejected. The painting of Stalin as someone worse than, say, Churchill is an invention that came after his death. In his time, he was not feared but loved. An excellent history on the legend of Stalin and how it changed over time is given by Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo.
Nobody ever said the Soviet Union was ideal. What it was, is enormously progressive and a dramatic uplifting for working people. There were many problems with it, but the good outweighed the bad. Learning from the past requires understanding the good and the actual bad, not just accepting capitalist framing of socialist states as correct.
A curated history from the mouths of the elites does not make good data. We can all see how the scions of the plutocrats in the US massage the truth and tell us we have never had it so good while we all know full well this is not the life we are actually living. This is not new, in fact it is as old a practice as history itself and the written word. We find fragments of the truth hidden in every nation from ancient Sumeria to Rome, to our present day. I’ll put my faith in the stories of the small people who lived to tell the tale, thank you. It may not make for as compelling reading, but there’s a truth there you won’t find in official statements and official narratives.
Anna Louise Strong was an American journalist, not an “elite.” She traveled the USSR, US, and PRC, reporting on the ground. Trusting only anecdotes that conform to your own beliefs, rather than historical record and journalism, doesn’t seem to be very effective historiography.
On the contrary, a lot of journalists have a research bias toward institutional narratives crafted by governing insiders. It does make for a lot less work to draw from official sources since they’re the natural convergence point for diverse data sources, but it is subject to elite distortions. They might not consider themselves elite, but those of us in information industries have to work much harder to maintain an unvarnished connection to the vox populi, especially when researching questions the authorities don’t want the answers to, or at least don’t want to become common knowledge. Developing a rich historiography of a stratified society has always been a problem and has always favoured the elite classes, precisely because of sociological forces that suppress an accurate account of the underclasses. And yes, the CPSU just as the CPC are today do in fact constitute an elite class under a Marxist analysis. I’ve met far to many ".ml"s who aren’t even willing to acknowledge that much. I doubt even the CPSU itself would contest that description, describing it as a necessary, if ultimately temporary intermediate step.
Social sciences are nowhere near as clean as you’re implying and the standards of evidence you’re applying demonstrate a weak understanding of the subject. Historians have long acknowledged “history” favours the elite because their records and narratives are the ones that tend to get preserved, and you would know that if you were applying honest academic rigour to the problem.
“Elite class” isn’t a thing in Marxist analysis. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production, administrators in socialism share the same relations to ownership as the rest of the working class. Your skepticism towards journalists and hard data is unfounded, your skepticism of anecdote should be far more so.
You’re directly contradicting yourself in the first paragraph, and your statements on Trotsky’s beliefs are far removed from anything we actually know about the man.
It’s not at all a contradiction. At best, Trotsky genuinely believed he was saving socialism by opposing the soviets and organizing against them, while the soviets were trying to build socialism on a more theoretically correct path. The least charitable reading of Trotsky is that he was just an opportunist that wanted fame, and didn’t actually do anything he said he did to oppose the Soviets.