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Leninism Becomes Stalinism
Autocracy, bureaucracy, terror Autocracy, bureaucracy, terror and militarism all reached their culminations under Joseph Stalin. He converted the party into a reflection of his personal will, made the secret police a state within the state, and during World War II became the first political leader to award himself the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Carrying the logic of Marxist-Leninist vigilance and militancy to grotesque extremes, Stalin presided over the extermination of at least 20 million "class enemies," "enemies of the state," "enemies of the people" and "traitors."
Liberal Marxists like Roy Medvedev, a Soviet historian who is frequently harassed by the authorities, indignantly reject the suggestion that Marxism was in any sense to blame for the terrors of Stalinism. But it is hard to deny that Marxism—particularly as interpreted by Lenin—provided many of the concepts, attitudes and institutions that made Stalinism possible. Ex-Communists such as Arthur Koestler, author of the famous anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon, have argued persuasively that Communism is corrupt and corrupting because of the brutal way that power is often attained and maintained. As the absolute embodiment of both power and corruption, Stalin represented an extreme but not an aberration.
His successors have substituted collective leadership for autocracy and done away with the bloody manifestations of his tyranny. But they have continued to rely heavily on what is essentially a Leninist-Stalinist conception of party and state.
If anything, centralized bureaucracy is more pervasive than ever in the U.S.S.R. The present leaders have refined and extended the quintessentially Soviet notion of nomenklatura (nomenclature). That is, the Communist Party leadership prerogative to dispense patronage and designate virtually every important manager in every sector of society—from industry to academe, from culture to science, from the customs service to the diplomatic corps. The result, concludes Historian Billington, is "bureaucratic state socialism," in which the party has a permanent monopoly on power.
That monopoly is now being passed from one generation to the next. Nepotism and cronyism are rampant in the Soviet Union and in many of the East bloc satellites. The offspring of party leaders are assured the best education and the best jobs.
The result is not just what Yugoslavia's Communist-turned-critic, Milovan Djilas, denounced 24 years ago as a "new class"; it is a new aristocracy. Among its most visible and prestigious members are the military. According to Johns Hopkins University Kremlinologist Dimitri Simes, "The Soviet military elite has become a privileged and self-perpetuating caste. As just one indication, 70% of the Odessa High Artillery Military School graduates a few years ago were sons of active duty officers."
The Soviet leaders have