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PARTISAN REVIEW
in a Soviet prison) in their book
Russian Purge and the Extraction
of
Confession
in 1951, some of them at least suggest interpretations that make
the repression partially intelligible, however absurd its excesses.
The hierarchical, inegalitarian, despotic society that came out of the
five-year plans bore no resemblance to the image fashioned beforehand
by
the revolutionaries. There could be no resemblance because, according to
the very theory that subordinates social organization to forces of produc–
tion, a sufficient development of the latter was the indispensable condi–
tion of socialist benefits. Since the development of the means of produc–
tion, deceptively baptized "socialism," required still many more five-year
plans, those idealists who would never be reconciled to this fact had to
be
eliminated. Starting from this discrepancy between ideology and reality,
other theories were elaborated: the scapegoat theory (that responsibility
for failures and hardships should be laid on the privileged few); the testing
theory (that Party members must blindly accept any decision, even one
that strikes at them, in order that the indispensable transfer of loyalty from
the ideal to the Party be accomplished); the theory of Caesarean mania for
persecution (that the government must be in anguish when it knows it
is
lying, knows that the masses know it, and that the masses are aware the
government knows they know), and so on.
There is more, however. Reality itself to some extent requires terror.
A fundamental contradiction gnaws at the socialist buildup, that is, at in–
dustrialization under the impetus of the state. If it is legal and moderate,
state-controlled and bureaucratic initiative cannot be favorable to the in–
crease of production and to productivity.
It
can be made to work only
through the method of the Pharaohs or by appeal to individual interest.
The builders' indifference to means and human resources, so long as goals
are attained, takes ultimate form in the recruitment of forced laborers. In
the bureaucratic framework, on the other hand, technical specialists or
managers are the pioneers. They must make the plan work, and they
succeed only by using clandestine networks that spawn on the fringe of
legal channels.
It
is no less risky for them to remain within the bounds of
the law than to transgress it. Terror is perhaps indispensable to avoid a bu–
reaucratic petrification that would obstruct the achievement of the para–
doxical task: developing means of production under state impetus. Were
the regime ever to become stabilized, a hierarchical bureaucracy would
appear, resembling in its exterior forms the Ch'in dynasty, and henceforth
encompassing an industrial rather than a predominantly agricultural soci–
ety.
Is it possible to give the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, that product of in–
dustrialization, all the advantages it already possesses (high salaries, non-
