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Bourgeois tendencies in the thirties
The most important bourgeois tendencies that Stalin had to fight during the twenties and thirties were Trotskyism (Menshevism covered up in ultra-leftist rhetoric), Bukharinism (social-democratic deviations), Bonapartism (militarist tendencies within the army) and bourgeois nationalism. These four tendencies all continued to have influence in the years 1945--1953.
Let us give two revealing examples.
After the war, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, a young civil servant of Chechen origin working in the propaganda department of the Central Committee, fled the Soviet Union for the U.S. His ideological past shows the links between the various opportunistic tendencies of the thirties and those that surfaced after 1945: `politically I was a follower of Bukharin'
17111725
Alexander Uralov (Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov), op. cit. , p. 8.
However, his book The Reign of Stalin is full of praise for Trotsky, `the lion of the October Revolution', who should have, according to Lenin's `Political Testament', run the Party with Bukharin's help.
17121726
Ibid. , pp. 38, 41.
`Trotsky (was) the friend of the Georgian `nationalists' '.
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Ibid. , p. 79.
Avtorkhanov continued by implying that Trotsky considered that an attempt `in imposing proletarian `socialism' on the most backward agricultural country in Europe' `would likely degenerate into a despotic dictatorship by a handful of anarchic socialists.'
17141728
Ibid. , p. 169.
Avtorkhanov was mostly a partisan of social-democratic ideas. For him, `the Bukharin school' defended free competition between the socialist and capitalist sectors: `socialised heavy industry (would) gradually eliminate the capitalist section ... through the free play of competition.' `One should be able to say to the co-operative peasants, `Enrich yourselves!' .... The rural petite bourgeoisie (the kulaks), being unable to withstand the competition of the co-operatives, would gradually disappear'.
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Ibid. , p. 123.
Finally, Avtorkhanov also defended bourgeois nationalist positions:
`Of all the federated republics, those of the Caucasus had always shown the greatest tendency towards separatism ....
`When in 1921 the Soviet occupied these countries by force, the democrats and the partisans of independence went underground .... There were repeated nationalist revolts in the Caucasus'.
17161730
Ibid. , pp. 144--145.
So we see Avtorkhanov
expressing sympathy for the four main
opportunist tendencies that menaced socialism during the twenties and
thirties:
Trotskyism,
Bukharinism,
bourgeois nationalism and
militarism. His positions in favor of this last tendency were
presented in chapter 7 (page 
).
Avtorkhanov's positions during the war and during the period 1945--1950 are significant. Referring to the Nazi aggression, he wrote that what `90 per cent of the population secretly thought and desired ... (was) the end of Stalin, even at the price of Hitler's victory .... The war against the U.S.S.R., which the German soldiers had won in 1941, was lost for them by the S.S.'
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Ibid. , p. 158.
`Hitler, the tyrant, was nothing but the shadow of Stalin'.
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Ibid. , p. 237.
After having flirted for some time with Hitler, Avtorkhanov, resolute anti-Communist, finally fell into the hands of the Anglo-American imperialists.
`(D)uring the first two years of the war the peoples of the U.S.S.R. went so far as to prefer Hitler to Stalin ....
`They had a unique chance, rarely encountered in history, of playing the two opponents, German and Russian, against one another, and of winning the war without intervening with their own forces .... The thing became possible on the day when Hitler turned his armies against the East ....
`(W)hen Hitler and Stalin were at grips it would have been possible for the Allies ... to contrive matters that when the crowd got back from burying Hitler they would have to follow Stalin's funeral procession.'
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Ibid. , p. 240.
Well received in the U.S., Avtorkhanov became an ardent partisan of U.S. hegemony, which he encouraged to fight against `Communist expansion':
`Faithful to Lenin's teaching, Stalin ... (has) staked everything on world revolution .... The purpose of Stalinism is ... to set up a terrorist world-dictatorship by a single party.'
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Ibid. , p. 242.
`Everyone must today realise that the world is faced by a single alternative --- Stalinism or democracy. In order to settle the question during his lifetime, Stalin has mobilised his fifth columns throughout the world.'
However, for Avtorkhanov, U.S. countermeasures would render these plans obsolete.
`In the end there can be only one solution of the problem for Stalinism --- war.'
17211735
Ibid. , p. 245.
Our second example concerns Tokaev's clandestine organization, linked during the thirties to the Bonapartists, the Bukharinists and the bourgeois nationalists. It continued its activity after the war.
In 1947, Tokaev was in Germany, at Karlshorst. A `comrade standing very high' brought along microfilms with the last pieces of Tokaev's personal dossier:
`Far too much was known .... The hunt was uncomfortably close. And when the indictment was ready, there would figure in it deeds of as long ago as 1934'.
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Tokaev, op. cit. , pp. 354--355.
`(A)t the end of 1947 the revolutionary democrats of the U.S.S.R. came to the conclusion that they must act: better to die honourably than to drag on as slaves .... we liked to think that parties of a Liberal complexion and those belonging to the Second International abroad would try to help us .... We knew that there were national communists not only in Yugoslavia, but also in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltic States, and we believed that they too would support us where they could though we were not communists at all ....
`But the MVD (state security) won in the race. We were too slow to mobilise. Once again we suffered a catastrophe .... Arrests had begun, and the charges ran all the way back to the assassination of Kirov in 1934 .... Others were charged with Buonapartist (sic) conspiracies in 1937 and 1940, with bourgeois nationalism, with the proposed attempt to overthrow the régime in 1941. As the net closed in round us all, I was given the task ... of saving at least a part of our records.'
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Ibid. , pp. 358-359.
After his flight to England, Tokaev published a series of articles in the Western press. He admitted having sabotaged the development of Soviet aviation, and explained it as follows:
`To not try to refrain my compatriots in their insatiable ambition to dominate the world would mean to push them to the fate that Hitler reserved for the Germans.' `It is crucial for the West to understand that Stalin has only one goal: world domination by any means.'
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La Libre Belgique, 4 March 1949, p. 1; 6 March 1949, p. 1.
It is important to remember that after their flight to the West, Avtorkhanov and Tokaev, two representatives of bourgeois tendencies in the Soviet Union, supported the most extreme positions of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie during the Cold War.
Next: Weaknesses in the Up: Stalin against opportunism Previous: Stalin against opportunism
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995