The struggle against opportunism

by Nina Andreyeva
General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks

A free translation of part of a talk given in Brussels in 1992 on the
counter-revolutionary role of the kulaks - the hated rural exploiters -
after their land was collectivised, and the hidden hand which led to
counter-revolution.

THE STRUGGLE against opportunism became particularly dangerous when Hitler
came to power in Germany and when it became clear that war was inevitable.
The struggle inside the party became more and more complex after the
assassination of Kirov in 1934. Krushchov and the anti-communists held
Stalin responsible for Kirov’s death. But even if the reasons for the
assassination are not yet fully known, it is now recognised that Stalin was
in no way involved.
Joseph Davies, a lawyer who was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union at the
time, followed the course of the treason trials held in Moscow in 1937. It
was a question, he said, of purging the army and its fifth column once war
had become inevitable.
This purge affected a considerable number of people and led to a certain
amount of confusion. It called into question the legitimacy of the
socialist government.
As the purge has become the central focus of current anti-communist
propaganda, I would like to dwell on it in more detail.
The executive committee of our United Association for Leninism and
Communist Ideals adopted on 27 January 1991 a declaration entitled On the
campaign for the rehabilitation of people condemned for crimes against the
state during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

declaration

In this declaration, we stated that the vocal campaign aimed at
rehabilitating the “victims of Stalinist repression” was nothing more than
one of the key elements of Gorbachov’s perestroika.
The demagoguery of those leading this campaign exposed its social
hypocrisy. In fact, the class struggle that took place during the period
under examination involved considerable losses on both sides but the
actions of that period are described by these elements as completely
arbitrary and based on terror.
The facts concerning those people charged with crimes against the state
have been taken out of their historical context and are being viewed
through the lens of an entirely different period.
Instead, we must look at these problems dialectically, taking into
consideration the class struggle as well as the crimes with which people
were charged. Generally speaking the facts of the period are not presented
in a systematic way, the goal being to get the tears flowing among those
who have a negative attitude to our revolutionary past.
The Trotskyites, those who defend Zinoviev and Bukharin, have characterised
those involved in the actions of this period as “bloodthirsty wolves”.
This is an obvious lie, one which doesn’t need particular refutation
because allegations of this kind have already been answered by thousands of
documents and by eye-witnesses of the time.
The Central Committee of our Party has received hundreds of letters from
different people who were the victims of the terror of the White Guard, the
kulaks, the nationalists and other groups.
The actions undertaken in this period were led by careerists, profiteers,
bureaucrats and intriguers – people with no courage, people who wanted to
see the old methods arise again from the ashes.
Their actions were those, in fact, of armchair revolutionaries – the sort
of people who had the ear of Gorbachov during the perestroika period and
who are now listened to in the period of capitalist restoration which
followed Gorbachov. We can mention names like those of the KGB general
Kalugin, and Sterlingov, who investigated the activities of traitors during
the 20s, 30s and 40s, and who were placed by Gorbachov at the head of the
struggle against “Stalinism”.

wrote

A woman living in Siberia wrote a letter saying that her father had been
denounced in the 1930’s by a local police official identified by the
citizens of the area where he lived as a former officer of Kolchak’s White
Guards [which fought the Red Army in the Civil War].
A week ago we also received a letter from a party veteran living in
Nizhni-Novgorod.
He told us of various happenings at the beginning of the 1930s and wrote
about the events which have become known as “self-dekulakisation”.
It must be said that the rich peasants, the kulaks, had no interest in
co-operating with the Soviet authorities and they harboured a genuine
hatred towards the collective farms. When the kulaks were liquidated as a
class they were transfered to the urban areas. But they often left their
land and arrived in towns where they were under no obligation to be and,
indeed, had not been invited. There were hundreds of thousands of cases of
this. Little importance was attributed to this phenomenon at the time.
During the five-year plans and the building of the collective farm system,
these people went into the factories and the mines, where they tried
different methods of gaining power.
They infiltrated the Party, the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
and also a number of scientific establishments. They succeeded to a certain
extent in spreading their anti-Soviet hatred. They tried hard, as in a game
of chess, to put their pawns in place – and this on an almost hereditary
basis.
As a notable example, we have Dimitri Vokogonov, the former deputy head of
the Soviet Army’s political department. He’s now Yeltsin’s chief military
advisor and he’s still reportedly looking into the death of his father as a
result of “dekulakisation”.
Numerous lies have been spread as part of the inquiries that have been
undertaken and numerous people have attacked the ideas of Lenin, Stalin and
communism itself in their personal memoirs.
Professor Vokogonov has declared that he was at first a Stalinist, then a
Leninist, then a self-styled “anti-Communist” and a victim of
“dekulakisation”. A nephew of Stalin, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, who is a
colonel teaching at the Moscow military academy, explained to me how, after
sitting his exams in Marxism-Leninism, Vokogonov launched an unfounded
personal attack on him just because he was Stalin’s nephew.
The writer of a letter sent to us from Nizhni-Novgorod gives the example of
one of his neighbours, a retired colonel. This man – whose father was
himself a “victim” of dekulakisation – was transferred from his factory to
the NKVD headquarters, where he rose to the rank of major. This former
Chekist has now departed from Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet system and is
demanding an end to the collective and state farms.
Wasn’t it Chekists like this who started the campaign to uncover and
eliminate spies in the collective farms to publicise their own exploits?
How many people of this sort were running around spreading all sorts of
disinformation in the country? They were just paying off old scores. They
got their revenge, and now that’s being characterised as communist terror.
And how many of these people were subject to repressive measures after the
Central Committee plenum in 1939 when the organs of the party began to
analyse activities of this kind?
Former NKVD ministers Yagoda and Yezhov were called to account for their
activities, and they were shot. It was people like them who decided the
freedom or death of thousands of individuals.

victims

But it wasn’t just innocent victims who died in this period of vengeance,
even though the laws of the time didn’t yet sufficiently respond to Soviet
realities, to the class struggle.
There were also the guilty, and today the enemies of socialism – Yeltsin &
Co – are rehabilitating everyone, including the Whites and the fascists.
This rehabilitation, the “zero option”, is aimed at denying the existence
of a class struggle, at discrediting the idea of defending the interests of
the working class and encouraging revisionist theories that can only serve
the counter revolution.

Hitler

All we’re waiting for now is for someone to say that Hitler was one of the
victims of “Stalinist repression”!
Our party of Bolsheviks holds that we should be able to speak freely of
those people who fought for socialism and who paid with their lives, who
became victims because of the conspiracies operating in that era.
We are against the rehabilitation of those people, though, who collaborated
with traitors and spies. They can never be forgiven.
A wise man warned that saying good things about treason can only lead to
misfortune.
We often receive letters from people who have been in prison. They say
that, according to the “democrats” and their newspapers, only the innocent
were to be found in the camps. But this is just not true.
There were enemies of the Soviet state, convinced opponents of Soviet power
who continued their subversive activities even in the camps.
The author of one letter says that he was in prison for wholly justifiable
reasons.
Another victim of “Stalinist repression” recently came to see us at the
offices of our newspaper and said that he had been in prison for killing
his wife – not as a result of political crimes. He has now been
rehabilitated as part of our current leaders’ bid to extend the base of
support for their restoration of capitalism.
But, in the 1930s, the “quiet” counter-revolution centred around
opportunist elements in the party found no support among the people.
International capital had to place its hopes on military action.
The western countries encouraged Hitler into declaring war on the Soviet
Union.
In the process, the borders of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Belgium,
the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, France and Yugoslavia were all violated.
On the eve of the Second World War, Stalin and Molotov signed a
non-aggression treaty with Germany – thereby gaining a year and a half of
peace.
In Europe, Stalin is now accused of having reached an accord with Hitler,
but this is untrue.
The Soviet Union was merely preparing its defence against the next act of
aggression.
On 22 June 1941, the Germans finally began their attack. For the Red Army
there were losses. But it has to be remembered that these first battles won
us two weeks in which to deploy our troops around Smolensk, Kiev, Odessa
and Murmansk.
This deployment in turn gained us a further four or five weeks of precious
time, without which we would not have been able to win later on.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which is nowadays criticised from all sides,
helped us to acquire new allies who, in 1939, were not ready to unite with us.
Thanks to this treaty, world imperialism was not able to create an
anti-Soviet coalition – even though Hitler’s aggression was supported by
Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Spain.
Militarist Japan decided not to declare war on the Soviet Union. This was a
great victory for Soviet diplomacy, one which prevented a war on two fronts.
When war did come, victory was ours. And Stalin, for us, will always remain
a great leader of the Soviet armed forces, the man who made our victory
possible.
The attempt to put paid to socialism had not succeeded, and so the “quiet”
counter-revolution took the field again during the cold war and during the
period of détente.

weapons

Today’s anti-Communists can say what they please, but, despite the fact
that the material standards of its people were not on the same level as
those in the West – the Soviet Union built the weapons and the missiles
which prevented the outbreak of a Third World War.
In spite of all the problems that the Soviet Union faced during this
period, the millions of Soviet citizens were sure of their future. The
courage that the Soviet people had shown in combat against the enemy, their
sense of initiative and their readiness to accept risks – these remained
the traits of a people building a new world. The authority of the Bolshevik
Party and of Stalin was enormous.
At the same time we cannot forget that the Second World War brought with it
inestimable material losses. The best members of the party perished in the
war – some three million of the most active communists.
The war made it necessary for the Soviet people to start occupying itself
with the immediate needs of the people. In the first decade after the
Soviet victory, the socialist authorities addressed the country’s economic
needs – achieving stable levels of production. The Soviet Union sent a man
into space and developed the peaceful use of nuclear power.
In the 1950s, the country was ranked first in the world in terms of
industrial output, and second in terms of labour productivity. It was these
changes which determined the role of the Soviet Union during this period.
There was talk of the “Russian miracle” and the authority of Stalin became
even greater.
Everyone spoke about Stalin, and the country’s successes were all linked
with his name.
But in the 1950s, new and difficult problems of economic development began
to emerge: problems involving management and planning.
During the first five-year plans, quotas were set on a quantitative basis.
Now however, the question arose as to the quality of the goods produced.
The expansion of the state-planning organisation, Gosplan, was not enough
to assure the necessary level of development.
In recent decades, the computerisation of state planning has allowed
significant results to be achieved but, in the 1950s, similar gains were
not registered.

manage

Secondly, while the minister in charge of a number of enterprises used to
be able to manage them personally – or with the assistance of his
vice-ministers – there had emerged by the 1950s too many enterprises for
them to be effectively run from the centre.
For this reason, control of the various enterprises had become very weak.
Even Stalin, as head of the Government, was in a position of having to sign
not individual decrees but whole lists of directions!
Thirdly, under conditions of rapid scientific and technological progress,
it was necessary for enterprises to be able to better adapt. Yet a system
of public expenditure was adopted whereby increased production was based on
the construction of additional factories and workshops rather than on the
modification of existing ones.
In the 1980s, this mechanism was to become one of the main fetters on the
development of productive forces.
Then arose the question of political economy, with theory no longer
corresponding to the reality of the situation.
The extent to which the workers had become directly interested in the
results of their labour had improved but the question remained as to
whether financial considerations remain valid under socialism.
This is a problem that has long been debated among Marxists. In principle
Marxists do not accept market relations, which must be replaced by natural
exchange.
But the question is: at what point should the change-over from one to the
other take place? Right a way after the seizure of state power, or at some
later stage in the transition towards communism?
The New Economic Policy, beginning in 1921, begged the question altogether.
At that point, we returned to the capitalist market, to private property.
There was talk of the restoration of capitalism itself.
The second year of NEP forced everyone to ponder the question as to whether
the capitalist market is still needed in a country in transition to socialism.
I think that Lenin saw the radical change represented by the NEP as a
temporary measure on the road to socialism.
But Gorbachov and the followers of perestroika were able to use it as a
historical precedent justifying their embarking on the transition to a
capitalist market.
The beginnings of a solution to the problem of the market were put forward
by Stalin in 1952, in his book Economic problems of Socialism in the USSR.
Production and exchange are governed by the law of value under socialism,
but not so the means of production themselves.
In this way, it was recognised that the fruits of labour would be
distributed according to work, not capital.
More recently in the process of restoring capitalism, Gorbachov and Yeltsin
have resurrected the capitalist market – with the necessary accompaniments
of private property, exploitation, impoverishment of the workers, and
selling the country’s economy to the International Monetary Fund.
After the death of Stalin his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
was criticised and withdrawn from bookshops and libraries.
But the problems that he discussed remained.
The post-Stalin changes threw the country into a crisis and, if – under
Stalin – the discussion was all about reducing production costs and
improving labour productivity, Krushchov and Brezhnev busied themselves
with the question of profit.
Prices can only be lowered by using new technology and, when people started
talking about profit, this opened the road to all sorts of manipulation and
profiteering in Soviet society.
For example, a factory produces a glass and prices it at a rouble. If a
flower is drawn on the glass, it fetches four times the original price.
Drawing a flower is not difficult for the factory. No new technology is
involved and it’s not necessary to increase productivity. In other words,
profits can be generated without using the results of scientific progress.
In the Soviet Union, during the Krushchov and Brezhnev reforms, fewer
consumer goods were produced to satisfy the workers’ needs but the quest
for profits was on.
This orientation led to a slowdown in economic development and to a
devaluation of the rouble.
Prices were not lowered, as had happened annually during Stalin’s time. In
fact the process of price increases was already beginning.
And there was a slowdown in the improvement of labour productivity. It was
all these factors which determined the results of the competition between
capitalism and socialism in the historical arena. The ideological
complement of these negative processes was the anti-Stalin critique, which
began after the 20th Communist Party Congress.


more features about stalin here