Soviet Socialism vs. Democratic Socialism

 

Soviet Socialism vs. Democratic Socialism

August 22, 2022

 

I recently started to read the book Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America, by Rebekah Koffler.[1] Koffler is an ethnic Russian born in the Soviet Union. She refers to having lived in Kazakhstan, formerly one of the Soviet Socialist Republics. She came to the United States and says she is now fluent in both Russian and English. She has worked in the American intelligence community including time as a Russia specialist with the Defense Intelligence Agency. She has some very strange political views. She once worked for General Michael Flynn of Trump administration notoriety. She thinks Flynn was innocent but became the victim of some sort of plot to discredit him. The thinks government people had it in for Donald Trump, and she says nothing against that abhorrent former president. I’m prepared to overlook Koffler’s personal and political nonsense because I believe her thinking about Russia to be, or at least I hope that it is, spot on.[2] There is, however, one thing that she does early in the book with which I must take exception. It is what she says about what she calls “socialism.” I want here to consider the stark difference between what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union called socialism and what democratic socialism has become in western Europe and could become in the United States.

To understand Koffler’s take on socialism we must start with the political ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the ideology on which the Soviet Union was based. Karl Marx (1818-1883) taught that history progresses inexorably through a process he called dialectical materialism. He said all history is the history of struggles between classes of people. The classes are created and characterized by people’s relationship to the economic means of production. The class struggle he saw in Germany and England in the mid-nineteenth century was the struggle between the capitalists, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, that is, the workers, who Marx believed actually created wealth. He said that there would inevitably be a proletarian revolution in which the workers of the world would rise up against the capitalists. They would assume political power and ownership of the means of production that had belonged to the capitalists. They would dismantle the economic, social, and political systems the capitalists had created. Marx said that all of those things (and a great many more, including religion) were simply the means by which the capitalists controlled and exploited the workers to the capitalists’ exclusive benefit. In Marxist thought the proletariat would do away with all of that when it came to power through revolution.

Marx asserted that the proletarian revolution would initiate a two-step process of economic and social development. The goal of the process was the creation of a classless society. Marx called the first step in this process socialism. In this phase of historical development, the workers would establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal of this dictatorship would be the elimination of all class distinctions. Doing that meant equalizing every person’s relationship to the means of economic production. The socialist state would represent the interests of the proletariat as it worked to eliminate economic classes.

Once the socialist state had done away with economic classes, history would have reached its ultimate goal. Marx called that goal communism. For Marx, communism was to be a world in which all are equal. Everyone would relate to the means of production in the same way, namely, through communal ownership. Everyone would live for the benefit of the society rather than only for themselves. They’d do that not because some state forced them to but because in the absence of the exploitation of one class of people by another, doing so would just be how it was.

Marx said that the transition from socialism to communism would result in the “withering away” of the state. States, he said, exist only because of the struggle between classes. Once there were no classes, there would be no need of a state. Indeed, a truly communist society could not produce a state because class conflict creates states, and in the communist society there would be no class conflict.

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was a Russian Marxist. He accepted Marx’s theory that history was moving inevitably toward the classless paradise of communism. However, he didn’t take Marxism quite as he found it. He introduced into Marxist theory a conception of the political party of the proletariat. He said that the political party of the proletariat, which he originally called social democratic and later called communist, would, during the socialist phase of development, act solely on behalf of and for the benefit of the proletariat. It would create and run the dictatorship of the proletariat that characterized Marx’s vision of socialism. It would bring about the evolution of the nation from socialism to communism.

From at least 1918 on, Marxist theory and practice developed in very different directions in Russia and in western Europe. In western Europe, most of the Marxist parties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually gave up the idea of a violent revolution of the proletariat. They came to believe that that revolution was neither inevitable, necessary, nor desirable. The clearest example of this development (or at least the one with which I am most familiar) is the development of the German Social Democratic Party. Early in its being it was all about instigating the proletarian revolution. Some of its members even tried to bring that revolution about in Berlin after Germany had lost World War I. That attempt of course failed. In the 1930s the Nazis severely repressed this party which, if it existed at all, existed only underground.

After World War II however, a remarkable thing happened. The German Social Democratic Party, known as the SPD, from its name in German, Die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, became one of the two most prominent political parties in the Federal Republic of Germany, the official name of what we usually just call West Germany. It came to be a political party that advocated the interests of Germany’s workers, but it did, and does, that advocacy peacefully through Germany’s democratic institutions.

In Germany and in much of western Europe, the social democratic parties, by whatever name they used (in the United Kingdom is the Labor Party), succeeded in creating societies governed through policies that benefit all the people but in particular the workers and the poor. These parties brought about government paid universal health care systems. They established strong national retirement systems. They made public education free or at least affordable. In Germany they helped create a system called Mitbestimmung in which representatives of a corporation’s workers are members of the corporation’s board of directors. These parties conduct electoral campaigns just as other political parties do. When they lose an election they accept the result. They truly are democratic. They are not out to suppress any of the civil freedoms we, and they, so cherish—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc.

It was very different in Russia. The development of “socialism” there began with what the Soviets always called the Great October Revolution.[3] That “revolution” was at first nothing but a coup d’état against the weak Provisional Government that had, however ineffectively, ruled Russia since the tsar’s abdication the previous March.[4] The coup was carried out by a small group of fanatics within the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party known as the Bolsheviks.[5] Its charismatic leader was Vladimir Il ’ich Lenin (1870-1924). From the beginning it was clear that Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks had no intention of creating a true democracy. Lenin claimed that the Bolsheviks represented the most class conscious elements of Russia’s proletariat.[6] Those elements of society were the ones, in Leninist theory, who were entitled to make the country’s decisions. Lenin translated that contention into the exclusive rule of the country by what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin set out to eliminate all opposition. He claimed that any opposition to the Communist Party was counterrevolutionary and therefore to be suppressed. One of his first and most telling acts was the creation of the Cheka, the organization that eventually morphed into the KGB.[7]

Lenin died in January, 1924. I’ll spare you all the details, but before long a man who had been a minor functionary in the Bolshevik party in 1917 consolidated all the power of the Communist state in himself. His name was Joseph Stalin (1878-1953).[8] Under Stalin the government of the Soviet Union became a totalitarian, terrorist regime. It remained that until its dissolution on December 25, 1991, though after Stalin it was never again nearly as harsh and oppressive as it had been under Stalin.

When Koffler talks about socialism and its effects, though she doesn’t recognize this distinction, she is talking about the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union not about the goals of the democratic socialist parties of western Europe. She lists three problems with what she calls socialism and means Soviet communism. First, “socialist societies stop producing wealth altogether.” That statement was more or less true of the Soviet Union. It isn’t true of democratic socialism. Her second problem with “socialism” is that “as scarcity of goods grows, those in charge of wealth redistribution—the state—start taking care of their needs first, rationing goods and services for everyone but themselves.” Eventually, she says, ordinary people are forced to “cheat and steal to survive.” That certainly was true of Soviet communism. It is not true of western democratic socialism.[9]

Koffler’s third problem with what she calls socialism is “the complete state control over the individual.” She writes that in a socialist country the state “tells you what to do, where to live, what to wear, what to say, and what to think. The state censors everything.” There is “no free press, literature, or cinematography. No religion. No presumption of innocence. No equal rights. No private property. Suppression of dissent is routine and brutal. Eventually, people start to self-censor to avoid persecution. You speak and appear to think “correctly.”[10]

Koffler has here described the life of the ordinary person in the Soviet Union. The Soviet state was oppressive in the extreme. Under Stalin in particular no one knew who to trust because people were praised even for reporting family members who had in some way strayed from the Party line. People ended up trusting no one. The country never completely overcame that tragic state of affairs. The state did indeed censor everything. People wrote and published books, but only books that toed the line of communist correctness. Koffler overstates the matter a bit when she says there was “no religion” in the Soviet Union. There was some religion. I experienced some of it myself when I was there. It is true however that the Soviet government severely restricted the exercise of religion. Religious institutions had to function within strict rules set by the state. It was, for example, illegal to take children to church. In fact, some Russian Orthodox priests were actually KGB agents. The Soviet constitution actually did specify legal rights for the people, but one could not raise those rights as a defense in a criminal trial the way we Americans can raise our constitutional rights. The Soviet Union was indeed a place where individualism was suppressed, and there was none of the kind of economic and cultural wealth we experience in the west. None of that is true of western democratic socialism. Western countries with social democratic institutions like Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and others have strong economies and vibrant cultures. The people have freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion. Sweden, for example, is today absolutely nothing like what the Soviet Union was.

It is clear that the Soviet reality into which Koffler was born harmed, indeed scarred, her deeply. In no way do I mean to criticize her because it did. No one in the west is in any position to criticize the way Soviet people developed in and reacted to an environment so foreign to us as to be essentially incomprehensible to us. Koffler’s fault is not in what she says about the Soviet Union. It is her failure to recognize the sharp distinction between western democratic socialism and what the Communist Party called socialism in the USSR. I hope that will not make the same mistake.

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[1] Koffler, Rebekah, Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America, Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 2021.

[2] For those of you who don’t know, I have a PhD in Russian history. I lived in Soviet Moscow (and spent some time in Soviet Leningrad) for the 1975-1976 academic year doing dissertation research.

[3] They celebrated it on November 7. Before the Communists took over, Russia used the older Julian calendar rather than the newer Gregorian calendar most of the rest of the world uses. On the Julian calendar the “revolution” took place on October 25, 1917. On the Gregorian calendar it took place on November 7.

[4] Koffler says, grossly erroneously, that that coup was against the tsar. It wasn’t, and I assume she knows that it wasn’t, though the Soviet Communists did usually depict it as though it had been.

[5] The word Bolshevik comes from the Russian word bol’she, which means larger. The Bolsheviks took that name years before 1917 when they won some dispute within the party. They were, however, actually a minority of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party.

[6] Although Russia’s industrial sector had been advancing rapidly in the decades before the outbreak of World War I, in 1917 Russia was still a predominately agrarian society. Most of the people were peasants not industrial workers. Russia was then not a place where most European Marxists expected the proletarian revolution to take place. Many of them thought that such a revolution wasn’t possible in Russia because of Russia’s agrarian nature.

[7] Of course, at the same time the Bolsheviks were fighting a years long civil war against anti-Communist forces of various types. The Communists eventually won that civil war. The twentieth century would have been very different than it was had they lost.

[8] Stalin was not a Russian. He was from Georgia. His birth name was Dzhugashvili. I was in Georgia briefly in the summer of 1968. By then all trace of Stalin had disappeared from Soviet life—except in Georgia. In Georgia his picture was everywhere. He was, it seemed, a national hero, probably because he had ruled and terrorized the hated Russians for so long.

[9] Koffler, op, cit., xxxiii-xxxiv.

[10] Id, xxxiv.