Notes on the Benediktov Interview

Stalin-era Stalinism and post-Stalin Stalinism (6)

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6

From the introductory note that V. Litov/V. N. Dobrov wrote for the interview published in 1989, we learn how the conversations with Benediktov first came about:

While preparing a programme on Soviet-Indian cooperation as part of my assignment, I could not help myself and began asking Ivan Aleksandrovich questions about a different subject - one that interested me far more. Benediktov, with the reticence characteristic of apparatus officials, at first gave terse and rather dry answers, making it clear that he had no wish to waste time on such idle conversations. Yet he must have sensed the sincerity of my attempt to understand the past, for he gradually began to speak more openly and willingly and even invited me for tea at his spacious flat on Gorky Street, of the kind reserved for the narkoms, [*] so that we could discuss these burning issues. (V. Litov, Stalin ve Hruşçov Hakkında: Benediktov ile Söyleşi [On Stalin and Khrushchev: An Interview with Benediktov], trans. from the Russian by Candan Badem, Yazılama Yayınevi, 4th edn, April 2023, Istanbul, pp. 13-14)

In 1980-81, when these interviews were conducted, alarm bells were already ringing for the Soviet regime: the country was sliding into a deep crisis marked by economic stagnation, bureaucratic inertia, social despondency and political ossification. At the same time, Poland was being shaken by a profound social and political crisis.

In such a critical context, Benediktov - one of the former high-ranking officials of the Stalin era - does not himself, at the outset of the conversation, raise the “burning” issues relating not only to the past but also to the contemporary situation. On the contrary, he initially gives Litov/Dobrov terse and dry answers. In other words, the hard-line Stalinist remedy that Benediktov had in mind, adapted to the final quarter of the twentieth century, emerges not as an active programme of political struggle, but as a retrospective reckoning and a limited prescription for rescuing the regime, articulated in response to persistent questioning from an external interlocutor.

Another detail in Litov/Dobrov’s introduction further accentuates Benediktov’s hesitant and passive stance on the matter:

Ivan Aleksandrovich did not object to the publication of what he had said, but he had serious doubts as to whether this would be possible. (p. 14)

That is all there is to it. In short, Benediktov merely said, “If you can get it published, by all means do so; but I doubt anyone will want to publish what I have said.” This, then, was the attitude of a former senior Soviet official who recognised the deep crisis into which the regime had fallen, who levelled severe criticism at the practices he saw as responsible for that crisis, and who, within the limits of his Stalinist outlook, also had his own proposed remedy: hesitant, passive and conformist.

Try, for a moment, to place this attitude alongside that of Leon Trotsky. The two, needless to say, are not even remotely comparable. The quantitative and qualitative differences between them are not merely vast; they are of an almost galactic order. Benediktov was a retired Stalinist bureaucrat who had come from the very centre of the regime, had lived within its privileged world, still enjoyed considerable material advantages, and had recognised that the regime was facing a grave danger; yet despite all this, he never once considered putting forward his views as an active programme of political struggle.

Indeed, Litov/Dobrov was unable to get the interviews published. Benediktov died in 1983, and the interview did not finally appear until 1989. (See Notes on the Benediktov Interview: Stalin-Era Stalinism and Post-Stalin Stalinism - Part 1)

For six years after Benediktov’s death, no publication in the Soviet Union was prepared to publish his words - a telling indication that this proposed remedy had no chance of becoming an openly espoused political line within the regime. Benediktov’s prescription, which envisaged bringing back the practices of the Stalin period in a form adapted to the 1980s, remained a way out for saving the regime that he kept alive in his own mind, and perhaps shared with those close to him; yet it was not a programme that the Soviet bureaucracy of the time could adopt and put into practice.

Ivan A. Benediktov, removed from his post as Minister of Agriculture in 1953 and appointed Soviet Ambassador to India, presenting his credentials.

For those at the top of the post-Stalin Soviet bureaucracy to adopt such a programme - to install as General Secretary someone who would pursue it - would have run entirely counter to their material interests. To expect them to perform such a death-defying backward somersault could only be a fantasy at odds with historical materialism. After the regimes in Eastern Europe had collapsed one after another like falling dominoes, and once the Soviet Union itself had effectively entered the process of disintegration, the wretchedness of the coup attempt of 19-21 August 1991 was one of the most striking confirmations of this.

Benediktov, who never even entertained the idea of engaging in active political struggle, pinned all his hopes on the appointment of a General Secretary who would revive the regime by reactivating certain abandoned practices of the Stalin period - the very practices examined in this series of articles.

A competent leadership can sharply accelerate a country’s development, while an incompetent one can hold it back just as sharply, and even set it in reverse. Stalin proved the former; Khrushchev, the latter. In essence, everything depends on who will replace the present leadership, which is itself no more than an interim regime. If Stalin and his team were to come to power, we would advance at such a pace that within ten to fifteen years everyone - including that much-praised America - would be left behind. (pp. 119-120)

Stalin, through the counter-revolution he led, rescued the privileged bureaucratic stratum from the grip of Bolshevism; he also protected it from the wrath of the working class and other labouring sections of the population. Yet at the same time, in order to impart at least a measure of vitality and effectiveness to the autarkic regime of “socialism in one country”, he kept the sword of Damocles hanging over this stratum until the end of his life. After Stalin’s death, the bureaucracy largely freed itself from this threat, which had allowed it no peace or comfort, and ten years later attained complete security - indeed, its “golden age”. While expanding its material privileges, it also began to enjoy them without fear and, often enough, with vulgar ostentation.

When the evolution of the bureaucratic caste is analysed from a historical-materialist perspective, it becomes perfectly clear why no “Stalin and his team” could possibly have existed in the Kremlin of the 1980s. The material interests of the post-Stalin Soviet bureaucracy categorically ruled out the re-establishment, over itself, of a nightmarish mechanism of pressure and terror.

Therefore, from the perspective of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the only way left to restore vitality and effectiveness to a regime sunk in deep crisis - and now plainly unable to survive for long in its existing form - was to set radical “market reforms” in motion.

The grave of Ivan A. Benediktov at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.

A dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist, Benediktov would spend the two years following his conversations with Litov/Dobrov in his spacious flat on Gorky Street, of the kind reserved for the narkoms, passively waiting for the realisation of a dystopia whose material basis had long since disappeared and which no longer had any genuine political subject.

[*] “It is an abbreviation of narodny komissar, meaning ‘People’s Commissar’. Until 1946, ministers in the USSR were known as People’s Commissars.” (Translator Candan Badem’s explanatory note, p. 14.)

Concluded