Lenin's Political Thought, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution. by NeilHardingReview by: Ronald Grigor SunySlavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 712-713Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496883 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 10:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.105 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:11:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

712 Slavic Review

unconvincing. Nor am I prepared to agree with him in his definition of socialism as a system for accumulation; and even less with his repeated insistence that the Soviet Union is a workers' state.

According to Lane, both Leninism and Stalinism were what Russia needed. At the same time he is careful to argue that they are not relevant for a Marxist revolution in the advanced Western nations. Given this apparent acceptance of Marxism, but rejection of all interpretations critical of Lenin, it is difficult to imagine his views on that score.

ALFRED G. MEYER

University of Michigan

LENIN'S POLITICAL THOUGHT, vol. 2: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION. By Neil Harding. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. ix, 387 pp. $32.50.

In the first volume of this study, Neil Harding elaborated an elegant argument that, far from being a political opportunist or a Jacobin conspirator, Lenin had based his political activities on a consistent theoretical appraisal of socioeconomic developments in Russia. Given the backwardness and the level of capitalist development in the country, Russia was ripe only for a radical democratic revolution and not for a socialist transformation. This analysis, based on the writings of Plekhanov and Lenin's sociohistorical investigation of The Development of Capitalism in Rulssia (1899), was maintained by Lenin up to 1914 when the outbreak of war and the declarations by most European Social Democrats in support of their national governments impelled him to develop a new analysis of the crisis of international finance capitalism and the socialist opposition.

In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin concluded that capitalism had exhausted its historical mission and that Europe was now "rotten ripe" for socialism. From Hilferding and Bukharin, Lenin borrowed and evolved his critique of the imperialist state, which in State and Revolution (1917) emerged as an argument against any accommodation with the bourgeois state and a call for its dismantling and replace- ment by a political formation based on the Paris Commune. Lenin's project for socialism involved the direct participation of the masses in government and economic administra- tion. Harding maintains that this phase of Lenin's practice, which lasted well into the spring of 1918, was not a utopian aberration distinguished from a more typical authoritar- ianism, but in fact the logical outcome of his theoretical position on the nature of monopoly capitalism, which had provided all the essential preconditions for socialism, and the "rapacious" imperialist state, which had "swallowed all the forces of society" and had to be destroyed to permit the free exercise of popular initiatives.

Harding's view of Lenin as "an extraordinarily doctrinaire politician" (by which he means a political actor who unswervingly based his strategy on his prior social analysis) is carried into the period after 1918 when Lenin's predictions regarding the outbreak of a European socialist revolution and the capacity of the Russian workers to organize the revitalization of the economy proved to be mistaken. The civil war and economic collapse led to the "declassing of the proletariat," the physical erosion of the very class on which the Bolshevik state depended. In his later writings, Harding concludes, Lenin continu- ously narrowed the group on which the forces for socialism could rely. First the vanguard of the proletariat was substituted for the workers, then the party for the vanguard, and finally a small group of individuals for a party too culturally backward and careerist for the exalted task at hand. Paradoxically Lenin had become at the end of his life what his Menshevik critics had accused him of being twenty years earlier - a Jacobin, whose last hope for the fulfillment of his revolutionary program rested with the state rather than the people.

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.105 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:11:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews 713

Harding is particularly illuminating on Lenin's views of the state and their relation- ship to Marx, Engels, and Bukharin. He is less fair to the Mensheviks, whose complex and changing analyses of Russia's condition require a much more complete investigation than the schematic presentation offered here. The major weakness of this otherwise stimulating reinterpretation is the thinness of the discussion of the intellectual and political context in which Lenin operated. Nevertheless, Harding's attempt to take Lenin seriously as a Marxist theoretician of remarkable consistency deserves to be read along with the works of Georg Luk'acs, Moshe Lewin, and Alfred Meyer, which remain the best discussions of Lenin as thinker and politician.

RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

University of Michigan

DIE GEBURT DES STALINISMUS: DIE UDSSR AM VORABEND DER "ZWEITEN REVOLUTION." By Michael Reiman. Frankfurt/Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1979. 308 pp.

Michael Reiman's study is a major contribution to the literature of the 1920s that should be brought to the attention of non-German-reading scholars. It joins an already distin- guished list of works by such historians as Alexander Erlich, Moshe Lewin, Maurice Dobb, Robert W. Davies, and Stephen Cohen. Reiman limits his analysis to the critical years from 1927 to 1929 in which Stalin overcame challenges from the organized left opposition and from the moderates of the Bolshevik party. Reiman's major questions are: Why did Stalinism win out? Did the circumstances of the 1920s make Stalin inevitable?

Reiman's analysis of the power struggles from 1927 to 1929 provides the closest substitute possible to an eyewitness account. Reiman's is a painstakingly researched and articulate rendering of the events from the left opposition's open challenge of 1927 to the destruction of the right wing between 1927 and 1929. Stalin's maneuvering, his tactics of attack and concession, his manipulation of appointments, and his search for his own development program are described with analytical force and perception. What Reiman chronicles is an extraordinary tactical campaign: Stalin's ability ultimately to vanquish figures such as Trotskii, Zinov'ev, Tomskii, Rykov, Bukharin and others - with more popular and party support and better access to the media.

The story of Stalin's consolidation of power has been told before, but Reiman is able to shed new light. In addition to the contemporary Soviet, emigre, and foreign press, Reiman has uncovered an important new data source - the "Russian secret documents" preserved in the political archives of the German foreign ministry in Bonn. These documents include the unutilized dispatches directed to the German foreign ministry in the years 1927 and 1928 plus letters, Politburo reports, and directives from major party leaders - Stalin, Kalinin, Rykov, Litvinov, Ordzhonikidze, and others, most bearing top secret classifications. This type of evidence from inside the Politburo is especially important because the bitter innerparty struggles were not allowed to spill over into the press or other writings, except in the form of innuendo and code language. A remarkable feature of the power struggle was the official fiction of party unanimity and the absence of open displays of defiance. These documents eleven of which are appended in transla- tion - shed light on a number of critical Politburo deliberations and debates: the Soviet policy of international cooperation and the foreign trade monopoly; the strength of the left opposition; the Politburo conflict over the Shakhty Affair; arguments over the use of the secret police (OGPU); and internal discussions of the economic and social crisis of 1928 and 1929.

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.105 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:11:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions