Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1974 diary (1)

The Kremlin’s proxy mass organisations and bureaucratic corruption

Anatoliy Chernyaev, one of the Soviet Union’s senior apparatchiks, notes in his 1974 diary that, as he puts it, “the Bulgarians (Ivan Ganev), the Czechs (Vladimir Iancu), the Poles (Bogush Suyka), and the Germans (Bruno Mahlow)” took part in a two-day “secret Communist meeting” - to which he adds the following note:

Financing the Peace Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions and others, because every year they have a deficit that almost exceeds the original budget. They burn it on their mistresses, various “events,” trips and a lavish lifestyle – these professional fighters for peace. (p. 49)

From these two sentences, the following conclusions can be drawn:

• In those years, the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and several other international organisations-which persistently claimed to be independent-were in fact covertly financed by the Soviet Union.
• The leaders of these organisations showed little regard for budgetary discipline, running annual deficits that nearly matched their total budgets.
• These organisations-above all the Peace Council-were marked by serious corruption at the top, with leading figures freely squandering the funds channelled to them on personal indulgences and lavish lifestyles.

1 July 1952. At the World Peace Council Congress held in East Berlin, Pablo Picasso’s dove appears above the stage alongside a banner reading “Germany must be a country of peace”. To the right of centre, Nâzım Hikmet stands out, wearing a light-coloured jacket and striking an imposing pose

Chernyaev, writing these lines in a sarcastic tone, does not concern himself with whether the corruption in question carried any structural significance beyond the individual immorality and decay of the organisations’ leading members. For him, the note represents nothing more than an irritating, yet entirely routine, observation.

However, to grasp the corruption that took place within the Kremlin’s proxy international mass organisations-financed and steered behind closed doors-we must turn to Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy: his assessment of the social origins of the bureaucratic caste, the material privileges it enjoyed, and its role in shaping foreign policy.

The Kremlin’s proxy mass organisations-the World Federation of Trade Unions, peace councils, and cultural associations-were integral components of an international bureaucratic network. Funds channelled from state resources, along with conferences, travel, hospitality, and international contacts, served a dual function: both to bolster the Kremlin’s international legitimacy vis-à-vis the imperialist countries and to reward international figures who, through their prominence and leadership within these organisations, lent direct or indirect support to the Kremlin’s foreign-policy line.

The sharp turn in the Kremlin’s foreign policy under the Stalinist counter-revolution-the shift from the perspective of “world revolution” towards accommodation with the international status quo, that is, the imperialist world system-went hand in hand with the financing of these organisations not as instruments of revolutionary internationalism, but as tools for generating influence and legitimacy in line with the foreign-policy interests of the bureaucratic caste.

Undoubtedly, the Soviet state was compelled to conduct diplomacy, secure allies, and establish spheres of influence in a world dominated by the imperialist powers. However, bureaucratic corruption transformed this necessity into a regime of privilege grounded in secrecy, entirely beyond the control of workers and other labouring strata. Managers, diplomats, and party officials were remunerated in ways that socially separated them from the working class, granted access to special forms of consumption, and rewarded accordingly; the proxy organisations, in turn, became materially dependent on state largesse, and it was under these conditions that their leaders sank up to their necks in corruption.

Another destructive effect-one that Anatoliy Chernyaev does not mention (and, as a Stalinist bureaucrat, it is hardly surprising that he does not dwell on it)-is that the privileged lifestyles of the “professional peace fighters” eroded genuine anti-imperialist and anti-war consciousness. Such corruption, once inevitably perceived by workers and other labouring strata, weakened their willingness to struggle, fostered distrust, and severed the link between political discourse and material reality. In this way, it became a dynamic that steadily blunted revolutionary potential.

Finally, the phenomenon to which Chernyaev points is by no means confined to the Soviet Union of the 1970s, nor is it merely a matter of the past. Today, in both capitalist and so-called “socialist” countries, state-funded NGOs, official trade-union centres, and international umbrella organisations often continue to function as vehicles of state policy and as elements of patronage-based proxy networks.

Source: Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1974), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya.