Notes on the Benediktov Interview

Stalin-era Stalinism and post-Stalin Stalinism (2)

PART 1 | PART 2

In the introductory note to “O Staline i Khrushcheve” (On Stalin and Khrushchev), the interview published in Molodaya Gvardiya, V. Litov/V. N. Dobrov states that the conversations with Benediktov were based on several separate meetings held in 1980 and 1981. [*] This is an important piece of information for understanding the context - and therefore the meaning - of the interviews. Benediktov’s words cannot be assessed in isolation from the historical circumstances in which the Soviet Union found itself in 1980-81.

I. A. Benediktov

The years 1980-81 marked a critical juncture in the long-running and deepening crisis of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. At the time, the USSR was still a military superpower. Its nuclear arsenal, its domination of Eastern Europe, its still considerable - though increasingly shaken - influence over the worldwide network of Soviet-aligned “communist” parties, its spheres of influence in the Third World, and its global rivalry with the United States all gave it significant weight within the international system. Yet behind this appearance of military, political and geopolitical strength, economic stagnation, political ossification and social disintegration were steadily accumulating.

The economic and technological modernisation of world capitalism after the Second World War - particularly the advances made in productivity, electronics, automation, transport and communications technologies, and the production of consumer goods in the 1960s and 1970s - had made the structural weaknesses of the Soviet Union increasingly visible. The USSR had significant capacity in areas such as heavy industry, the defence industry and space technology. Yet in terms of labour productivity, the transfer of military and space technologies to civilian production, the quality of consumer goods, agricultural efficiency, and the distribution mechanisms needed to meet the requirements of everyday life, it was falling ever more visibly behind. [**]

This backwardness was not simply a technical or administrative problem. In these years, the fundamental contradiction of the Soviet economy became clearly apparent: the means of production were not privately owned; a nationalised foundation, representing a break with capitalism in terms of property relations, still existed. Yet real control over production and distribution was not in the hands of the working class. Planning had taken shape not as a living, creative and accountable process grounded in workers’ democracy, but as a cumbersome command mechanism in the hands of a bureaucratic caste whose overriding priority was to preserve and expand its own privileges.

The Soviet Union’s relative economic backwardness was also making the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe increasingly vulnerable. Moscow remained their political and military patron; yet it was ceasing to be a sufficiently powerful source of economic support and attraction, capable of covering their widening deficits, modernising their industries and easing social discontent. From the 1970s onwards, therefore, the Eastern European bureaucracies increasingly turned to the banks, governments and international financial institutions of the Western imperialist countries. Through Western loans, they sought to import technology, sustain industrial investment and ease shortages in the supply of consumer goods. But this indebtedness postponed the crisis rather than resolving it; moreover, it made the Eastern European regimes more dependent on the financial mechanisms of the capitalist world economy - mechanisms they claimed, in their official rhetoric, to oppose. By 1980, the crisis that erupted in Poland had become one of the most striking examples of this dependency and economic bankruptcy.

At the same time, developments in foreign policy were also deepening the regime’s crisis. The intervention in Afghanistan had drawn the Soviet Union into a long, costly and politically debilitating war. The 1980 Moscow Olympics, which the Soviet leadership had planned as a display of international prestige, took place in the shadow of the boycotts that followed the intervention in Afghanistan.

The steadily increasing material privileges, especially at the upper levels of the bureaucratic pyramid, were central to this picture. These privileges rested on a bureaucratic status system which, after the great and bloody purges, the pervasive fear and the constant circulation of cadres under Stalin, had become more entrenched, more secure and more permanent during the Brezhnev era. Under Brezhnev, the bureaucracy had largely ceased to be an apparatus that continually produced victims from within its own ranks, as it had under Stalin; instead, it had turned into a ruling stratum that preserved its position, grew old in comfort and luxury, and avoided taking risks.

A cartoon by the French cartoonist Plantu on Brezhnev’s final years. The note beneath it refers to the denial issued by Soviet officials in April 1982 regarding rumours about Brezhnev’s health.

This situation was also plainly visible in the political sphere. Under the leadership of Brezhnev, who by then had visibly deteriorated both physically and mentally, the regime, by the late 1970s, had come to embody stability rather than dynamism, the preservation of the existing equilibrium rather than renewal, and bureaucratic muddling through rather than political vitality. [***] The average age of the Politburo itself seemed to reflect the regime’s general mood. The ruling cadres had grown old, the decision-making mechanisms had become sluggish, and the party and state apparatus had taken on a form that concealed social problems rather than producing creative solutions to them, while giving priority above all to its own continuity. The Kremlin’s “horizon of reform” did not extend beyond speeches by party leaders preaching better administrative control, stricter discipline, more efficient planning techniques or more effective utilisation of cadres - speeches which, in practice, yielded no meaningful results.

The interviews with Benediktov thus took place at precisely such a historical moment. This is decisive for understanding his arguments. In defending and praising the practices of the Stalin era, Benediktov was not merely recalling a style of governance that had been left behind. He was also viewing the stagnant, ageing bureaucratic order of the Soviet Union in 1980-81 - an order fixated on preserving its privileges and suppressing social energy - through the lens of his own past experience.

Benediktov’s praise for the Stalin era cannot therefore be treated simply as personal nostalgia. It also reflects the reactions of a senior bureaucrat - one who had risen under Stalin, been shaped by that administrative style, and built his career within that order - to the signs of decay in the late Brezhnev period. In his eyes, the Stalin years, despite their errors, appeared as a period of discipline, of holding cadres to account, of achieving tangible results, and of making the state apparatus function effectively.

The crucial question here is this: when Benediktov praises the administrative practices of the Stalin era, what exactly is he defending? Is he really defending a more effective, more democratic and more productive form of socialist planning? Or is he defending a harsher, more intimidating and more disciplined version of the bureaucratic apparatus, one that lay beyond the control of the working class?

In the following section, we shall seek to examine Benediktov’s arguments in the light of these questions.

[*] V. Litov, Stalin ve Hruşçov Hakkında: Benediktov ile Söyleşi [On Stalin and Khrushchev: An Interview with Benediktov], translated from Russian by Candan Badem, Yazılama Yayınevi, 4th edition, April 2023, Istanbul, p. 13.

[**] See, Stalin’s “theoretical contribution”; The testimony of Gün Benderli; The testimony of Vera Tulyakova Hikmet; The testimony of Anatoly Chernyaev; The testimony of Anthony Barnett; The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (2); The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (1); Queue etiquette in Stalinist Albania

[***] Brezhnev’s final months: The scandal in Baku

To be continued