Trotsky's Analysis of Soviet Bureaucratization by David W. LovellReview by: David LawThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 307-308Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4209522 .

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REVIEWS 307

leadership and the party's 'little people' against the middle ranks. The assault on bureaucracy combined police investigation from above and democratic, populist criticism from below in an orgy of denunciations.

Getty questions Stalin's alleged complicity in Kirov's murder. He takes seriously Trotsky's intention after 1932 to form a united opposition bloc inside the USSR against Stalin, lending some credence to the allegations made at the show trials. Much of this is provocative but inconclusive. The author himself concedes that this is only an examination of some of the factors shaping the Great Purges. In terms of its time scale and its restricted focus much is omitted. No attempt is made to examine the domestic problems facing the regime nor the tense international environment. The scale of the purges is not assessed. As a result, the Great Purges, divorced from their context and the psychological climate of the time, remain still an enigma.

Getty's study provides no understanding of what or who triggered off the terror. There is no analysis of the shifts in the political power structure which could allow such violence to be unleashed. The change in the party state apparatus, the growing power of Stalin's Secretariat, the rise of the NKVD, the changing role of the judicial organs are all of vital importance. The unprecedented concentration of power in Yezhov's hands - head of the NKVD, chairman of the Party Control Commission, party secretary, candidate member of the Politburo - was impossible without Stalin's approval, and implies a more co-ordinated plan of campaign than Getty allows. In this context the earlier radical assault on bureaucracy launched by Stalin in 1928-32, illustrating many of the themes reworked in I937-38 and betraying already a cynical, Machiavellian use of power, provided an ominous precedent. Politics Department E. A. REES University of Keele

Lovell, David W. Trotsky's Analysis of Soviet Bureaucratization. Croom Helm, London, I985. ix + 82 pp. Bibliography. Notes. Index. ?7.95 (paperback).

SEVENTY small pages of text for a subject as large as Trotsky's analysis of Soviet bureaucratization is short measure, unless, like Lovell, you believe that Trotsky had little worthwhile to say. His argument is that Trotsky and Stalin agreed on much that 'was fundamental to determining the character of the Soviet regime' (p. vii). The implicit premise is that party pluralism was the only authentic basis for opposition to Stalin. Trotsky was no alternative to Stalin: 'what he advocated in opposition would have been anathema to him in power' (p. 64). Furthermore, Trotsky proposed incompatible objectives (socialist industrialization and a reduction in bureaucracy), neglected functio- nal explanations of bureaucracy, and failed to articulate a conception of non- bureaucratic administration.

Lovell has followed a familiar thesis to its logical conclusion to produce the claim that, above all, Trotsky was a moralist. Unless his opposition is to be attributed to simple political ambition, there is little alternative left to those who deny Trotsky's distinction between a healthy and a sick 'proletarian'

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308 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

dictatorship and thereby deny the politics of his struggle. Lovell's charge would have outraged Trotsky, who was consistently scathing towards 'neo- Kantian' socialists. In all his polemics Trotsky maintained that Stalin's regime was to be opposed, not because it was evil, but because it had become a formidable barrier to socialism.

Undoubtedly there was a cultural (aesthetic/moral) dimension to Trotsky's opposition to the Stalin regime and Trotsky often expressed a distaste for the social behaviour of bureaucrats. Lovell presents some aspects of this. He is also correct to question whether Trotsky fully understood Soviet bureaucracy; Trotsky himself agreed that there were major analytical problems. However, to see the source of Trotsky's opposition in morality is to make a separation between ontology and ethics not present in Trotsky's own thought; he believed that revolutionary morality arose from class struggle. The Trotsky presented here is not a readily recognizable Trotsky but a peculiar construction.

The primary task of intellectual history is, surely, not to pronounce judgement but to relate and elucidate. Sympathy need not result in affirmation; Trotsky was wrong on many things. But understanding requires, first of all, a meeting of minds. By treating Trotsky's analysis of Soviet bureaucratization as a series of relatively poor insights, and denying that it was a theory at all, Lovell disrupts and demeans Trotsky's thought. Although provocative and clearly expressed, this essay confuses more than it clarifies. Department of History DAVID LAW University of Keele

Harrison, Mark. Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938-1945. Soviet and East European Studies Series. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. xiv + 3I5 pp. Appendixes. Tables. Bibliography. Indexes. ?25.00.

'Sui generis a war economy', in Oscar Lange's immortal phrase, the Soviet economy has, nevertheless, been studied largely from the point of view of peace-time priorities. What of the sui generis war economy at war? Mark Harrison has given us the first comprehensive monograph on the subject, and in so doing has greatly enriched the specialized literature on the USSR.

In its style Dr Harrison's work bears the imprint of the author's debt to the University of Birmingham's Centre for Russian and East European Studies. The documentation is rich, the treatment precise, and the assessments well- judged. The result is, certainly, very much a monograph, and perhaps only professional historians will want to read every line, appendixes and all. But there is also much that is of interest for the analytical economist, and Harrison's research throws a good deal of light on a number of key dimensions in the development of the Soviet economic planning system.

In enforcing an extraordinarily high degree of centralization within priority sectors, meanwhile 'cutting loose' non-priority sectors, the Soviet war-time planners merely took a basic principle of the first three five-year plans to its logical conclusion. In increasing the general level of tautness in the economy they appeared to be doing something similar, except that here we must query how logical the conclusion was. In the pre-war economy, and particularly in the period of the purges when explicit 'realism' about plan possibilities could

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