How British intellectuals viewed Stalin: The New Civilisation: Paul Flewers: Review

Paul Flewers is a member of the Revolutionary History editorial board and over the years has contributed numerous articles on different strands of the left and their understanding of the ex-USSR. He expresses a preference for Hillel Ticktin’s analysis of the class nature of the former Stalinist states, reflecting his years in the 1980s as a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party (now deceased).

This book is something of a labour of love. Focusing on Britain, he provides an extremely comprehensive survey of the changing attitudes towards the Soviet Union in the period from the first Five Year Plan in 1929 to the Nazi invasion of 1941, focussed on the leftist intelligentsia, like the Webbs, Victor Gollancz, Victor Serge, George Orwell and Bertrand Russell.

The title of the book, New Civilisation, is taken from the Fabian tome of the same name by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Originally published with a question mark in December 1935, by 1937 the great purges, show trials and Ukrainian famine had convinced them the question mark was an unnecessary qualification and it was taken off! The New Civilisation had indeed been founded under the watchful eye of Uncle Joe.

The Webb’s obsequious blindness to Stalinism’s flaws was by no means unusual in the period, and a running narrative through Flewers’ book is the contrast between the pro and anti-communist flanks of public opinion. Flewers also refers to a more critical “centre ground of opinion” – an odd description for Trotsky, Orwell, EH Carr and Victor Serge.

There is a bewildering assortment of views and counter-views, which leave the reader wondering what the hell was really going on and what any of these various opinions have to do with it in the first place? For example Flewers writes:

“There was a widespread sense that the Soviet Union was here to stay, even if this was only implicitly or reluctantly expressed . . . other observers felt that there would be some sort of convergence between a Soviet economy that accepted certain market measures and a capitalist world . . . The insistence of some [other] observers . . .” (p109)

Take his discussion of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. Flewers first presents it in his discussion as how “fulsome praise for the tremendous changes made in the Soviet Union was not limited to the pro-Soviet lobby.” (p121) A strange way of introducing Trotsky’s devastating critique of Stalinism. He says the book, while a “sharp denunciation of the Stalinist regime”, “opened with a veritable rhapsody to the ‘gigantic achievements in industry.’” This surely implies Trotsky had been misled by the achievements of the five year plan. Yet Flewers concedes that when considering the developments in production made during the first five year plans, the “statistics look impressive”. (p138)

How can the description of “fulsome praise” be in any way appropriate to Trotsky’s analysis, when, as Flewers points out, the Revolution Betrayed explained that inside the USSR “social inequalities were deepening and becoming institutionalised, and it was now ruled by a privileged, totalitarian elite.”

“The Soviet economy contained contradictory trends, as the means of production were in the hands of the state, and were thus socialised and planned, whereas because of the relative backwardness of the society, the distribution of everyday goods was carried out through the market.” (p134)

No he didn’t. When Trotsky referred to the bourgeois method of distribution, he was not suggesting that goods were distributed by the market, but rather that the bureaucracy plundered the output of the economy, siphoning off large parts of it to line its own nest, thus entrenching major social inequalities. The trouble is if a reviewer of this period can’t even get this right, which is, after all, the major theoretical study of the period, made by one of its key figures, then its difficult to have much faith in the rest.

Tue 02, December 2008 @ 17:49