Review: 'The Road to Terror' and 'Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin'

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 12:35

Marx noted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that the bourgeois crisis of mid-nineteenth-century France was resolved in the cry: “Rather an end with terror than terror without end.” Stalinism was an end with terror, as a new book of light commentary and heavy reproduction of documents confirms.

In The Road to Terror, Getty and Naumov assemble a wide array of top-secret dossiers, letters, police reports, confessions, confirmations and transcripts of meetings recently made accessible by the opening of previously closed once-Soviet archives. They detail Stalin’s role as architect of the terror and its purges throughout the 1930s, culminating in the trials and self-liquidation of the entire old guard of Bolshevism in 1937-1938.
They also establish the insecurities and loyalties that conditioned a pathology of political capitulation that structured the nomenklatura’s sorry suicide in these dismal days of revolution's unambiguously final, decisive defeat.

Getty and Naumov are too politically and interpretively oriented to the surface phenomena to do much more than skim over the dimensions and character of the terror, but the 200 documents they reproduce are an invaluable addition to the English-language evidence on Stalinism’s campaign of brutal suppression. In that historical process lay the obliteration of Soviet civil society and of the possibility of proletarian democracy that Lenin, Trotsky, and the original Bolsheviks struggled to create out of the contradictions and chaos willed to them by Tsarism and coercive capitalist containment during World War One.

They failed, and the tragic result was Stalinism’s terror-driven end. Fifty years later the defeat of democracy was re-enacted in the almost farcical contest pitting the Stalinist reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, against the market puppet and clown prince of democracy, Boris Yeltsin.

Stalinism’s suffocation of any possibility of proletarian democracy — and more than a half century of degenerative constraints on institutions such as trade unions or discourses of political opposition and alternative — reduced socialism and its philosophical and strategic orientation to little more than textualisations of ritual adherence. And so the struggle for a new proletarian order in 1985-1995 Russia was stillborn.

Gill and Markwick explore the farce of this stillborn democracy, detailing the new terror without end that reigns in a Russia where “bourgeois” denotes a style of rapaciousness rather than a formed class and civil society is up for grabs, to be bought outright or secured through violence. “Profits”, declared one commentator with characteristic abandon, “it’s too early for that — we’re still dividing up the property.” And that property was the collective enclosure of the Revolution of 1917, however degenerated, the social inheritance of a working class that never managed to see its way out of the blind alleyways and truncated terrain of socialism’s original primitive accumulation.

The struggle for democracy in twentieth-century Russia has occurred twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Whether this second, market-society defeat, farcical in its Yeltsin deformity, will prove more debilitating, on a world historic scale, than the first revolutionary effort of 1917, squashed by Stalinism, remains an open question.
Gill and Markwick are not sanguine about the possibilities for Russian democracy and they tend to put their eggs in the basket of the good leader, someone other than Yeltsin. Their book is dated in this respect, but Marxists will appreciate that the way out of tragedy/farce lies, not with a President, but with larger class forces. These have yet to be mobilised in the new Russia. When they are democracy’s demons will be vanquished, its proletarian promise realised.

Bryan Palmer

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