The era of Stalin 3. The fight against bureaucracy

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

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NEP, collectivization, dispossession of kulaks, cleansing of the party and a number of other topics that are separately already widely covered in various publications. But all these themes are united by the less studied side of history - this is the bureaucracy, with the remnants of its powerful economic privileges, rude, ignorant, indifferent, weighing and measuring, taking bribes and toadies. I. Stalin, when he announced the construction of socialism, made an amendment that it was only necessary to overcome the resistance of the "new bourgeoisie."

“After the war, it is a worldwide phenomenon. In every country, the new bourgeoisie attracts everyone's attention. She is called gates in Germany, nouveau riches in France, goulash barons in Scandinavia.

And everywhere the new bourgeoisie is distinguished by the same characteristic features. She is rude and uncultured, primitive - unceremonious, infinitely - greedy, she hardly assimilates the external differences of "high society" and with naive shamelessness and tastelessness flaunts her new wealth.

But everywhere, with lightning speed, it assimilates the political system of the bourgeoisie, subjugating well-known parties and well-known politicians, and turns them into an opy for protecting and multiplying the acquired capital. In the USSR, the new bourgeoisie merged with Trotskyism and for three years there were numerous discussions with the main direction of retaining positions in power and delaying reforms in every possible way.

But Russia has overtaken the whole world. In Russia, the process of renewal of the bourgeoisie has gone further than anywhere else. In Russia, not only some of the old elements of the bourgeoisie, devastated by the war, gave way to new ones, but the entire class, as if diving under water for a couple of years, is now coming to the surface again, radically, transformed both in composition, character, and political aspirations.

This is what Dmitry Dalin writes in his book After Wars and Revolutions, Grani Publishing House, Berlin, and reveals her world.

“And this new bourgeoisie - there is someone who is not in it! Deserters caught and not caught, clerks who stole goods at moments of requisition, workers who abandoned the machine, having pulled in a previously respectable piece of material, peasants from the suburban, fabulously profiting from milk and vegetables, agents of extravagances, these great cesspools, where mass spontaneous generation of the bourgeoisie takes place, bourgeois officials and "specialists" of all departments, not only ready to take a bribe - but also able to break a good price for services, conductors and machinists who managed to use fantastic differences in prices, street vendors, enterprising doormen, couriers of great persons, criminals, housekeepers, diplomatic couriers, people of all ranks and classes, of all nationalities and genders, bosses and subordinates, investigators and persons under investigation, expropriators and expropriated nobles, bourgeois and peasants, people without a father-mother, without family and tribe, but with that huge reserve adventurism, which is needed to risk his head filling his pockets and go out dry from the depths of the great maelstrom. Over the years, all of them got acquainted with places of detention, were raided and searched, learned conspiracy and cipher, went through fire and water and copper pipes.

But the "new course" is not capitalism, it is only a fundamental victory of the new bourgeoisie. This is the period when the bourgeois elements hidden in it come out of the folds of the communist mantle. They straighten out their members, acquire firms, partners, establish shops and factories for themselves, and, embarking only with great apprehension on capitalist work, consolidate in the meantime into a special class, which, like any class, soon senses where it is pressing its boots. The economic, organizational and political formation of the new bourgeoisie begins only now, before our very eyes.

She is crushed by Bolshevism and in denying it she is ready to go very far. But he is bad from her point of view not because he represents the regime of a harsh dictatorship, the old autocracy inside out, not because he crushes the new bourgeoisie because he does not know and does not want to know freedom for political organizations. If the elimination of terror is in the interests and is now the slogan of all classes in Russia, then the new bourgeoisie is by no means inspired by the ideal of a free democratic state. On the contrary, admiration for "strong power" made great strides among them, despite the experience of Bolshevism.

Arrogant contempt for human dust, from which the new bourgeoisie managed to rise upward, it shares with the Bolshevik doctrine, which drove communism into the resisting mass with whips and cartridges. With him, she shares a dislike for parliamentarism, for - "talkers", for all sorts of principles, and together with him, finally, she believes that "nothing can be done with our people, without a stick it is impossible!"

Furthermore. She is united with Bolshevism by the self-confident consciousness that the history of mankind is just beginning with her. It has no roots in the previous regime and was not expropriated by the October coup. On the contrary, had it not been for October, this stratum would not have become the bourgeoisie, but would continue to pull a heavy strap even now, and it would not see millions as its ears.

Because he does not, and indeed cannot, have that indiscriminate hate attitude towards the revolution that animates the ruined elements of the old bourgeoisie. The new bourgeoisie does not belong to the “bloc of the expropriated,” uniting everyone from the bison to the former liberals, who, through the lips of their ideologists, proclaim, in relation to Bolshevism, a simple and frank slogan: “go ahead”!

But she would like the revolution to end from the moment it became a property class. And the new bourgeoisie, of course, is not averse to talking about "when will the Bolsheviks finally fly off." But it is not animated by interventions or blockades; and the needs of real politics force it to follow a completely different path.

This new path consists in the fact that, until it is possible to lay hands on the state power, gradually, step by step, subjugate the most important parts of the Soviet state apparatus to itself. The union of traders with the police, bought at a high price, often saved and saves from the implementation of many inconvenient decrees, from searches and requisitions. Communication with emergency commissions, when successful, provides the same guarantees squared. "Own hand" in the economic councils protects against annoying control and difficult lease conditions. Housing departments in charge of the allocation of premises, transport departments in charge of urban transport, the railway department that manages transportation, etc. almost endlessly - all this is bribed, seduced, rented, and dragged materially and ideologically into the sphere of the new bourgeoisie.

Mechanics, chemists, engineers, lawyers, who lived from hand to mouth on Soviet rations, do not leave even now, for the most part, the Soviet service. But they are already being drawn into the new capitalist world as employees, shareholders, and legal advisers.

With one foot in the government machine, the other in the bourgeois turnover - this is exactly what the new bourgeoisie needs. And behind the mass of specialists and some of the higher patrons of the new course - new generals, and even some of the Chekists - cling to and attach themselves to the Soviet bourgeoisie, without ceasing, however, to be communists of the highest brand. Thus, the thin web of bourgeois interests, thrown into the midst of the Soviet bureaucracy, brings a rich catch. Thus, an interest in a new mode of production subordinates one or another part of the Soviet apparatus to the interests of the new bourgeoisie.

But these successes have their limits. They cannot and cannot go beyond a certain point. The new bourgeoisie can neither subjugate the policy of power, nor put the entire state machine at its service by the methods that I have just mentioned, and which give only some scope for its economic operations. She cannot put up with communism as power - on the one hand. And she cannot force communism to be completely reborn and fulfill its needs - on the other. Therefore, penetrating the communist milieu, corrupting this milieu, the new bourgeoisie prepares the decomposition of communism and the separation of a bureaucratic-bourgeois stratum from it, which, rooted in the revolution, infinitely far from the old regime, will fulfill the needs of the bourgeoisie in the new Russia. The new bourgeoisie needs neither the old regime, nor democracy, nor the Soviet system. But it is ready to work in any favorable conditions and is ready to put up with both the republic and the monarchy if they open up space for capitalist development."

Most of the readers know firsthand the category of people who had the same name in the "dashing nineties" - "new Russians". Contemporaries perceived this phrase with a grin, with a grain of irony, some with envy, perhaps. But the peasantry of the 1920s and 1930s knew only two words: master and kulak, if by the first they meant an intellectual, a state official, a competent owner - a landowner, then by the second, of course, a merchant, a businessman, a grabber in the end. The word "bourgeoisie" was new for the peasants, the word "bureaucracy" was also new and was just beginning to enter the vocabulary of life, therefore the usual word was used - "kulak" and "dispossession".

So the "dispossession" of the 30s is a fight against corruption, speculation, formalism and other attributes of the bureaucracy. The dispossession in this article is a struggle against bureaucracy in the broad sense of the word, as an anti-popular formation of state power.

In December 1927, the 15th Party Congress took place, two days of the Congress were devoted to the report of the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection, which reported on the numerous bureaucratic manifestations of the Soviet apparatus. So, in order to receive the cargo from the customs, the document for receiving the cargo had to go through 23 persons to undergo 110 different operations. In the people's courts, minor cases often last from 2 to 8 months. In Vyatka lips. The indisputable land management case is passed by 13 instances.

And here are the facts reported to the 15th Party Congress by Comrade Stalin: “Here's a peasant who has traveled 21 times! in one insurance institution in order to achieve the truth and yet, did not achieve anything. Here is another peasant, an old man of 50-60 years old, who walked 600 versts in order to achieve clarity at the district council, and still did not achieve anything. And here is an old woman for you, a peasant woman of 50-60 years old, who walked 500 miles, traveled more than 600 miles on horseback at the invitation of the People's Court, and still did not achieve the truth. There are a lot of such facts. It is not worth listing them. But this is a shame for us, comrades!

“The congress instructs all party bodies to ensure the expansion of the work of the court in the field of combating bureaucracy, steadily bringing to the people's court workers of the state and economic apparatus guilty of criminal mismanagement, unacceptable excesses, bureaucratic attitude towards the fight against bureaucratic perversions, while preventing no relief of sentences or refusal to conduct a judicial investigation due to worker-peasant origin, previous merits, connections, etc."

One of the most effective means of improving the apparatus and combating shortcomings was public criticism, the most decisive scourging of all the abscesses of the apparatus, and the party of the working class used this means in every possible way.

Nowhere in the world under capitalism is there, and cannot be, such ruthless self-criticism as in the Soviet Union. Almost 400,000 army of worker-sellers (correspondents) is involved in cultural construction, at the same time helping to root out bureaucratic perversions. Any issue of numerous newspapers is replete with facts of bureaucratic collisions against the people's representatives and facts of revelations.

1927 PETROPAVLOVSK. There were found gigantic abuses among judicial and investigative workers of the province, who work in the majority in remote auls. Judges and investigators were in close contact with the bays and aksakals (kulaks and landowners), took bribes, made acquittals for mercenary purposes.

One not judges - Baksov, without looking through, stopped a thousand cases at once. Judge Bizhanov traveled through the auls, selected horses, and arranged hunts instead of court hearings.

The investigation has already been completed. The trial is coming soon. But the case was dismissed and arrested 48 percent of all Kazakh forensic investigators, as well as many beys.

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1928 Moscow. In the criminal - judicial collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the case of mutual credit societies is being heard. There are 42 people in the dock. The accused can be divided into 3 groups - the leaders of the Moscow and commercial and industrial society of mutual credit, who violated state interests by their actions in favor of large private capital, large speculators - private traders who illegally used public funds through mutual credit societies for their speculative operations, and a group of Narkomfin employees RSFSR and Gosbann for bribes that contributed to the concealment of these crimes.

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The year is 1928. Saratov Prosecutor's Office, 17 judicial officers were convicted of bribery and other crimes, brought to trial …

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The year is 1929. Kiev. 113 employees and 49 private merchants, owners of hotels and restaurants were brought to trial. Kiev provincial militia, infected with bribery from top to bottom.

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The year is 1929. Rostov-on-Don 53 police officers were recruited. The court sentenced 35 people. from 5 to 1 year of imprisonment. 18 is justified.

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The year is 1929. Novosibirsk. Convicted 30 people for banditry. Supervised by the executive committee and the district committee of the party.

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The year is 1929. Astrakhan. At least 200 people were involved, including 90 employees of the apparatus, 40 party members. Bribery, mutual guarantee.

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1930 Samarkand, 26. Today in Samarkand, the hearing of the case of a group of Uzbek judicial workers accused of bribery and corruption and systematic perversion of the class essence of the Soviet court began in Samarkand in a visiting session of the USSR Verhsud.

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1930 KHARKOV, April 14. An extraordinary session of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR began this afternoon with a hearing on the case of abuses and embezzlements revealed by the GPU authorities in the forestry of Ukraine. There are 127 people in the dock. All of them were charged under various articles of the criminal code, providing for undermining state industry and trade for counter-revolutionary purposes, bribery, forgery and the use of their official position, etc.

92 of the accused pleaded guilty unconditionally or in part. 35 defendants persist, contrary to obvious evidence and facts. one

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1930 In the case of workers of the Vologda Provincial Federal District and private traders, over 100 people were brought to criminal responsibility. In corruption cases, the budget received less than 3.5 million rubles.

At the same XV Party Congress, Comrade Ordzhonikidze cited a number of striking examples that characterized the shortcomings of our apparatus. These shortcomings, or rather, the evil of our institutions, is bureaucracy, red tape, swollen staff, bureaucratic rude attitude towards the visitor, swollen reporting and correspondence, incorrect organization of the case, etc. And he cited a number of figures.

Here are the data: in the people's courts of the RSFSR for 1926 it is finished! 1,427,776 criminal cases. 1,906,791 people were involved in these cases. A huge percentage - 34.6 of these cases were dismissed and 25.4% - were acquitted. And people, as pointed out by t. Ordzhonikidze, nevertheless, they summoned people, dragged people around, did not think in advance, did not figure it out properly, should they be prosecuted or not.

Ukraine in this respect is not lagging behind the RSFSR. In 1925-26, 438,783 defendants, 2,074,470 witnesses, in civil cases 1,5 million and 5,869 experts were summoned to the Ukrainian SSR for criminal cases. In total, thus, in the Ukrainian SSR was summoned to judicial institutions during the year 4.011. 366 people, or 15% the entire population. And most of these cases turned out to be trifling.

Therefore, the party carried out periodic cleansing of the administrative apparatus. The People's Commissariat of Finance, thanks to the precise definition of what the individual parts of the People's Commissariat and employees should do, destroyed 150 structural divisions and thereby abolished 98 command posts, that is, “heads” and “deputies”. In the People's Commissariat for Trade, 180 structural divisions and 90 command posts were abolished. On the Moscow-Kursk railway. the road had 126 links of the apparatus and 209 administrative persons; 68 administrative persons were left and only 70 independent units (departments, units, divisions).

Only a proletarian party, clearly aware of the purpose of the Soviet state and the strength of its apparatus, is capable of so mercilessly, boldly and comprehensively revealing shortcomings in the work of the apparatus.

This task completely coincides with the main task of our socialist creativity, with the cultural revolution, which began with the Great October Revolution and which gradually expanded. During the period of industrialization, all kinds of courses appeared, the legality was acquired with experience of working in collectives, as well as a general cultural level.

The cultural revolution takes place without noise, sometimes imperceptibly seizing the very bottom of the city and village - workers and peasants. Even at the beginning of the formation of Soviet power, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs sent a telegram to all Provincial Soviets with the following content:

“The Commissariat of Internal Affairs has information from many public organizations that some press organs, not only the bourgeois press, but also the Izvestia provinces, uyezd Soviets, publish orders of the Soviet government, decrees, instructions and other resolutions of the Nar Council. Komissarov was very late and not completely, making only chronicler notes.

The Soviet government, as the power of workers and peasants, makes decisions and issues decrees exclusively in the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, which must be timely and detailed informed of all steps taken by its government.

In pursuance of this, the People's Commissar int. Affairs instructs all Soviets of Deputies to oblige and strictly monitor that all resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars, central commissariats and local Soviets of Deputies are published in full and on time in the official department of all bodies on the first page.

Newspapers that do not want to publish the decisions of the Soviet government should be closed immediately and the editors brought to the revolutionary court for disobeying the government of the workers and peasants."

The openness and accessibility of every citizen of the country to all laws and orders of the government, so that he could independently poke a bureaucrat into the law and demand the implementation of the law or order.

The Soviet government followed the path of rationalizing the state apparatus, decisively reducing the cost of maintaining the apparatus, improving it, gradually involving all the laboring masses in management and control, all of which facilitated the fight against bureaucracy.

So in the five years 1923 - 1928. annual management costs accounted for 14% of the budget, in the first five-year period 1928 - 1932. - 5%, the second 1933 - 1937. - 4.3%, subsequent years - 4.1%.