> In general, I would say that there is a difficulty in separating
> out the subjective failures of Stalinism from the objective
> conditions.
The subjective and objective conditions are internally related.
In contrast to what Marx himself claimed in 1881, the conditions, including the social relations, of the Russian peasant commune were inconsistent with those required for the development of the kind of "subjects" able to imagine and bring about a socialist revolution in Marx's sense. And, in fact, the Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution in this sense. For instance, it wasn't a revolution in which the great majority of the population had, as individuals, the developed capability and will that, when combined with the further development made possible by revolutionary praxis itself, would enable them to "appropriate" capitalist means of production developed elsewhere and to imagine and create through this appropriation a higher communal form from which all barriers to full human development had been eliminated.
Marx's claim that such a revolution would create a labour process that would allow for the kind of individual development that would make it possible to eliminate "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor" is not applicable to the labour process created in Russia. Among other things, those who controlled production took Taylorism as appropriate to its "socialist" organization (which didn't work out as it had in the original capitalist context where it had been developed because, among other things, the subjectivity of Russian peasants was very different from the subjectivity of wage labour in the original context). See, for instance, Zenovia Sochor, "Soviet Taylorism Revisited", in Soviet Studies, April 1981 .
Russian peasant commune conditions were consistent, however, with the development of the kind of "subject" from which Stalinism could emerge. They produced an extreme degree of psychopathology. There's lots of evidence of this. I've pointed before to Christine Worobec's Possessed: Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia. There is an internet available essay by Daniel C. Ryan on this aspect <http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol9/koldun.htm>.
Some time ago, Chris posted an extract from Kara-Murza's Soviet Civilization: From 1917 to the Great Victory, connecting Stalinism to peasant subjectivity.
“When we talk about the repressions, we avoid looking at one obvious, but unpleasant, fact. The repressions of 1937-38 to a great extent were created not by state totalitarianism, but by a profound _democracy_. But not a democracy of civil society of rational individuals, but the archaic one of the peasant commune. This is an enormous dark force, and when it is allowed to carry out its will, innocent heads roll. For it is easy for the peasant commune to believe in plots and the secret power of aliens, of ‘enemies of the people.’ When such hatred, possessing the power of an epidemic, rules the peasant commune, every witch will burn. And the Russian peasant commune is not crueler in this, than, for example, that of Western Europe -- it simply occured there earlier than it did among us.
“In 2000 the newspaper Duel published excerpts from the very instructive memoirs of the lawyer B.G. Menshagin from Smolensk about how trials against ‘enemies of the people’ took place in their regions in 1937. He simply relates, without embellishments, cases from his practice in which he was appointed as a lawyer in such trials. In one instance, eight people -- leaders in the regional cattle-breeding administration, veterinarians, and the secretary of the raikom -- were accused of sabotage. Three confessed; the others did not. One, a science employee of the Moscow VNII or experimental veterinary science, had been sent to the region to diagnose ‘brutsellez’ (CD – I don’t know this word, I think it’s some kind of disease). Animals that have recently become sick show no external symptoms, and the diagnosis is made on the basis of a reaction of the immune system – upon injection with antiserum, an abscess forms, like that in the case of smallpox inoculation.
“This employee and the others were accused of infecting livestock. The witnesses at the trials were milkmaids; in their eyes, these saboteurs had killed the best cows, which they had infected themselves and then sent to the knacker’s yard. One milkmaid said the following at the trial: ‘She is such a good cow! He stuck her and the next day she fell sick! The abscess is big.’ The other milkmaids spoke in the same vein: ‘Oh, she was such a good cow, I’m so sorry for her. He stuck her and she died. He killed the cow.’
“General meetings were called in all the collective farms and sovfarms and the court was presented with a veritable tome of demands. They were all approximately the same: ‘We ask the proletarian court to kill the bastards!’ How was it possible in such circumstances for a lawyer to be asked for his expertise! All eight people were sentenced to be shot. The peasants were genuine in their belief, and the judge and prosecutor were afraid to move against the clearly expressed ‘will of the people,’ which had obtained such an effective strength. The sentence is subject to no appeals! In the given case the wives of the condemned gathered money and sent lawyers to Moscow, where they were received by an assistant of Vyshinsky and quickly received a pardon, but this happened in far from all instance.
“One can imagine that this mass ‘witch hunt’ craze was generated by interfactional contradictions in the Party elite that were made possible by repressions with ritual accusations (sabotage, spying, etc.). But then a separate mass sentiment arose, and it was used by the authorities to solve pressing political tasks. Then, it was necessary to carry out the complicated task of ‘calming things down’ – to pull society out of its passionate mood.”
Ted