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however more rational
in
both content and form, continues to obscure
political thought.
It is enough to list these contradictions-and there are many
more-to demonstrate once again not the spuriousness, as some
think, but precisely the reality of the whole process. Without such
contradictions de-Stalinization would have been sheer make-believe,
stage-effect and hocus-pocus, or the lifeless concoction of an obtuse
"political scientist." With them, it is what it is-an authentic historic
development.
Stalinism represented an amalgamation of Marxism with the
semi-barbarous and quite barbarous traditions and the primitive magic
of an essentially pre-industrial,
i. e.,
not merely pre-socialist but pre–
bourgeois, society. Yet it was under Stalinism that Russia rose to the
position of the world's second industrial power. By fostering Russia's
industrialization and modernization Stalinism had with its own
hands uprooted itself and prepared its "withering away." But here
again the complex dialectics of the situation mock at the logical
abstractions and simplifications of the "political philosopher" and
moralist. It is, broadly speaking, the rapid development of its pro–
ductive forces that both enables and compels Soviet society to free
itself from the shackles of Stalinism. But it is also the relative
underdevelopment of the same productive forces that keeps the
heavy residuum of Stalinism in being.
A nation, the urban population of which has grown by as
many as fifty-five to sixtv million people in only thirty years, the
annual steel output of which has risen from five to fiftv million
tons in the same time. and the industrial apparatus of which has
successfullv cooed with the problems of nuclear technology well
ahead of an the old industri al nations of Europe-such a nation
can no longer be ruled by a "rising Sun" and a "Father of the
People" and held in awe by the whole set of Stalinist totems and
taboos which belonged essentially to a much earlier and lower
phase of civilization. With public ownership of the means of pro–
duction firmly established, with the consolidation and expansion of
planned economy, and-last but not least-with the traditions of a
socialist revolution alive in the minds of its people, the Soviet Union
breaks with Stalinism in order to resume its advance toward equality
(lnd socialist democracy.
