Hindsight
Ironies of History: Essays on Contemporary Communism.
by Isaac Deutscher.
Oxford. 278 pp. $5.75.
The Forecasts of prophets, politicians, and social scientists have been dealt harsh blows by events of the last decade. Border clashes between the USSR and Communist China and calls to the “fraternal” people of the other side to overthrow its leaders; 400,000 U.S. troops fighting to contain Communism on the Asian continent, while the President of the United States seeks to build bridges to the Communist states of East Europe; desperate struggle in the Chinese Communist leadership even in Mao’s lifetime, with millions of non-Communists involved as they never were in Soviet factional strife: who foresaw such things a decade ago?
Mr. Deutscher does not claim infallibility for the comments and predictions he has made over the past fourteen years and here collected in his new book. Yet he does invite his readers to judge his forecasts, and he himself is proud of them. Thus, when Stalin died:
an epoch of change was opening in the Communist camp. A few of us here in the West, and we were very, very few indeed, saw the coming change and analyzed its first symptoms. We were decried as wishful thinkers and false prophets. . . .
Actually, a close look at the contents of this book reveals more than a little wishful thinking and false prophesy.
The company of those who, like Deutscher, foresaw that Stalin’s death would lead to a crisis in Soviet politics, was not as small as he now remembers it. However, not many shared Deutscher’s view that it was to be fundamentally a crisis of the regime, and not just a crisis of the leadership. “Eventually the crisis can be solved only in one of two ways: through a democratic regeneration of the Revolution or through counter-revolution.” Democratic regeneration, of course, could only come from the working class in its struggle against the bureaucracy; it could not be bestowed by the leadership.
Actually, when Stalin died Deutscher expected little from his heirs, who had “no character, no mind, no political life of their own.” Later, after they had brought about far-reaching “reform from above,” Deutscher acknowledged his error, although with a certain reticence: Stalin’s epigones had shown far more capacity for reform “than was generally expected of them.” On the other hand, the political consciousness of the Soviet people proved less vigorous and healthy than Deutscher had expected. The two errors, fortunately, tended to cancel each other out, so that the hoped-for solution to the crisis remained as before. The Soviet leaders, by initiating de-Stalinization, had given rise to processes which they could not control and which “were certain to transform profoundly the whole moral and political climate of Communism . . . in a spirit of socialist democracy.”
Throughout the first years after Stalin’s death, Deutscher continued to base his hopes on the masses in their opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, despite their tardiness in fulfilling his expectations. Even at the end of 1956, he believed that the day might not be far off when the multitudes would come out in Red Square, not to demand bread, like the leaderless Petrograd masses who toppled the Tsarist regime in February 1917, but to demand equality. The appearance of Sputnik in October 1957, however, altered the basis of his optimistic predictions. Sputnik affected Deutscher almost as powerfully as it did Khrushchev, persuading him that “Soviet progress is now likely to proceed by leaps and bounds,” thus radically altering the political climate. He now foresaw a weakening of antagonisms between bureaucracy and workers, but he did not take this to mean that the motive force for progress was running down; on the contrary, detente between workers and bureaucracy would be accompanied by the further growth of civil liberties.
After Khrushchev’s ouster, seven years later, Deutscher found it necessary to make still another reassessment of the prospects for Soviet development. The bureaucracy had failed to achieve the economic progress on which Deutscher had relied for the furtherance of civil liberties. Again, as before 1957, he condemned it as corrupt. He acknowledged, however, that the conflict between bureaucracy and people had not been exacerbated after Stalin’s death, as he had expected, but rather was greatly mitigated. He was now disturbed and even alarmed: “Society at large is still inarticulate. The working class remains politically mute.” The ruling oligarchy had proved able to shield itself from social control. The reason was, according to Deutscher, that the antagonism between rulers and ruled in the Soviet Union is less fundamental than in other social systems since it is not a class antagonism.
Thus the crisis that followed Stalin’s death had not been fundamental, as Deutscher had expected it to be, and there had been no need to solve it by a democratic regeneration of the revolution. He is, of course, not reconciled to irresponsible rule by the Soviet bureaucracy. But if the revolution remains for him an object of wishful thinking, at least its regeneration is no longer the subject of his false prophesy.
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One reason why Deutscher’s expectations were disappointed is that he counterposed the “masses” to the “bureaucracy” (which he left virtually undifferentiated) and therefore overlooked the crucial significance of divisions within the bureaucracy. Indeed, it is hard to see how fundamental changes in the Soviet regime could come about in the absence of acute factional conflict among the leaders. Such conflict might give rise to a deep struggle among the regime’s chief institutions (the party apparatus and government bureaucracy, at least, and perhaps the army and political police as well). This, in turn, would probably lead to efforts to win support from particular groups among the Soviet public. Only if the outcome of such an institutional struggle were the defeat of the highly disciplined party apparatus, perhaps, would there be a significant widening of participation in Soviet politics, basic decentralization of political power, and broad extension of civil liberties.
No doubt Deutscher is right that there is disaffection among Soviet youth and intellectuals, who want more freedom, and among the workers and peasants, disappointed at the slow and halting rise in their living standards. Doubtless, too, the right of the ruling group to rule has been increasingly called into question as the greater number of their predecessors in the top leadership has come under attack. But such dissidence in Soviet society is not likely in my view to have great political effect unless the rulers are weakened by their own internal divisions.
What are the current prospects for such an internal division? Until now, the post-Khrushchev leadership has maintained an impressive facade of unity, but behind it there has been considerable evidence of sharp factional struggle. Unless such struggle deepens markedly (as I, for one, expect it to), fundamental change in the Soviet political system ought not to be expected in the immediate years ahead.
Deutscher’s title, Ironies of History, reflects his special understanding of history as providing a fulfillment of political ideas in unexpected ways. Thus Stalin, the archenemy in the cold war and the original target of the containment policy, himself practiced self-containment, according to Deutscher, so that the West’s cold-war strategy was really unnecessary. Stalin was also the instrument whereby Trotsky’s economic program was realized, in circumstances where Trotsky himself would not have been effective. But if history made good use of Stalin for its ironic purposes, it had apparently no further use, in 1923, for Lenin. “If Lenin had lived longer he would have had to become either a Stalin or a Trotsky, for these two men embodied two opposed solutions to the dilemmas of the 1920’s. Yet Lenin could probably become neither a Stalin nor a Trotsky—in a sense both these characters were blended in him. Illness and death gripped him while he stood at a crossroads at which he was incapable of choosing any of the roads that led ahead.” One is reminded here of Trotsky’s judgment on Julius Martov and his followers on the day the Bolsheviks seized power. “You are bankrupt. You have played out your role. Go where you belong: to the dustheap of history.” But did Lenin really only have two choices in 1923? And was he really incapable of deciding or just incapacitated by his third stroke? Had Deutscher been more successful in his predictions, he might be more credible when he tells us that the things which did not happen in history could not have happened.
Deutscher may not be responsible for more wishful thoughts and false prophesies than the rest of us, but one wonders why he collected his inside the covers of a book. If he wanted to make his errors an object of instruction for others, he should have provided an introduction that would let his readers know where he went wrong, and why. As it is, the reader must do the job himself and, unless he happens to be preparing a review of the book, he probably won’t.
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