Onward to Communism, 1953–64

Abstract

Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a mighty industrial and military power; he had imposed state control over all areas of life and called the achievement socialism; he had entrenched a highly privileged ruling class with unlimited authority, under himself, to carry out whatever policies he deemed necessary. Yet communism remained remote. To many foreign observers at least, it seemed that the socialist project in Russia had gone wildly and perhaps irreversibly off course. Material abundance was a far cry: living standards were lower than in the 1920s, and the plight of the peasantry was especially pitiable. There had been little progress towards the creation of a ‘new person’ living and working in a communist way. In terms of equality of conditions, there had actually been retrogression since the 1920s. As for Lenin’s vision of a participatory society, a society of mass initiative: nothing could have been further removed from that than the repressed, terrified and abjectly passive society of Stalin’s later years.