Anytime a Marxist talks about Stalin they fall into a trap. In certain contexts, merely mentioning his name produces an impression of regression, of a Marxism forever stuck in the past, entrapped by the problems and dramatis personae of the 1930s. Any attempt on the part of the Marxist to situate Stalinism in the complexities of the period or to think Stalin as a form of politics – as a program governed by a (bad) Idea – is immediately denounced as advocacy or as an attempt to rationalize the inexcusable. At most dinner tables, the only acceptable thing that can be said about Stalin is that he was monstrous or mad; no matter how careful a Marxist is to assure an interlocutor that they too remain outraged by the gulag their desire to contextualize Stalinism as a historical phenomenon is read as a strange kind of pleading – as a desire to be forgiven for a crime they themselves have committed (or would have had they been given the chance). Of course, avoiding the topic entirely only worsens the situation: silence is understood at best as simple ignorance and at worst as conscious complicity in atrocity. Douglas Greene’s thoughtful new book, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism and the Fate of the Soviet Union, tackles this trap head on.
Greene’s book is fascinating because it approaches anticommunism as a discourse with Stalin understood as a signifier charged with a bewildering array of historical meanings and values. This is already a radical gesture because anticommunism is so basic a part of the common-sense of the present that to approach it as a discourse is to immediately subject it to a process of estrangement. Greene’s book, then, is something like a genealogy of anticommunism, one that surveys an extremely wide-ranging field of conservative, liberal, and socialist (as well as institutionalized communist) reactions to the slow Stalinization of Bolshevism. Included here are Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler; George Orwell’s influential socialist critique of totalitarianism; the canonical Cold-War histories of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes as well as the canonical thinkers of the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism. At the heart of the book is an inquiry into what Greene calls the ‘dialectics of Saturn’, the idea that revolutions, in their desire to radically change the world, marshal intensities and speeds that inevitably ‘devour their own children’ (282). The dialectics of Saturn, which is central to anticommunist discourse, decrees that any attempt to do away with the world as it is, to radically improve or re-invent it, will always wind a path to horror – to a Stalinist hellscape plagued by famines, gulags, and unbound mental emptiness. Greene’s thesis is that the dialectics of Saturn invoked by liberals and conservatives to de-legitimate critiques of capitalism strangely mirror the worst forms of Stalinized historical materialism, a state-sanctioned philosophy of history that framed the victory of communism as inevitable : both imprison history in necessity and abandon the unfinishedness of the present, constructing an image of the future as little more than a repetition of the past. Where the liberal sees inevitable failure, the teleological Stalinist saw unavoidable success: both, argues Greene, are guilty of subscribing to philosophies of history that are ‘fatalistic and ahistorical’ (281). Both, in other words, turn history into prophecy.
Greene’s method is similar to the one used by Domenico Losurdo in his excellent book on liberalism, although Greene’s views on Stalin differ considerably from those of Losurdo. Rather than constructing his object on the basis of an externally fixed set of terms and concepts – an approach to historical phenomena that we might be tempted to call bourgeois – Greene allows it to emerge dialectically out of the tension between clashing viewpoints. What we get, then, is less a birds-eye account of Stalinism than a chronicle of the way it has been encountered on the ground: not Stalin as such, but Adorno’s Stalin, Orwell’s Stalin, Koestler’s Stalin and so on. There is an admirable athleticism to the sheer number of perspectives Greene has assembled here. Sometimes this diversity is a bit overwhelming: the reader is occasionally led to wonder just where all these perspectives are headed and whether there is any real analytic thread holding them together. We get a great deal of analysis from other thinkers, but not a whole lot of it from Greene himself (there are large block quotes on almost every page of the book). This problem, however, is overcome by Greene towards the end of the text as it becomes clear just whose version of Stalinism he favors, which is that of Leon Trotsky. This is what prevents the book’s commitments to dialectical perspectivism from devolving into eclecticism or relativism. He makes clear that there are certainly better and worse explanations of the period and that for him the historical materialist account of Trotsky is the most useful and nuanced because it locates Stalinism in the dynamic complexity of history rather than simply casting moral judgement on it.
Greene organizes accounts of communism into three core categories: ‘bolts from the blue’, ‘historical necessity’, and ‘historical materialism’. ‘Bolts from the blue’ are perhaps best understood as non-explanatory explanations. They connect events to origins that lie in nothing but themselves: they are causes floating outside of history in a space entirely of their own making. At the same time, such accounts function to subtly justify capitalism as ahistorically natural and just. The examples he uses to illustrate this category are Churchill’s image of communism as pestilence (a kind of suddenly spreading moral gangrene); Nazi invocations of Judeo-Bolshevism (in which the birth of communism is seen as the direct outgrowth of Jewish depravity); Orwell’s impressionistic socialist critique of Stalinism as nothing more than power seeking power (a drive as old as human beings); as well as those thinkers, ranging from Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest to J.L Talmon and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who read Stalinism primarily through the lens of totalitarianism. This latter notion was certainly the capitalist West’s most successful (but also theoretically spurious) ideological export. For these thinkers, totalitarianism as a phenomenon emerges ready-made out of the heads of power-crazed Leninist ideologues; where the ideas in these heads came from or why they might move people to think and act in radically new ways is never asked and certainly never historicized. These views see no difference, development or complexity between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin – just an endless repetition of the same. Moreover, when anticommunists point to Stalinism as originating in the psychological aberrance, moral badness or Machiavellian political skill of Stalin (another iteration of the “bolt from the blue”) they transform history into little more than a pile of random contingencies.
The second category explored by Greene includes thinkers within the anti-capitalist tradition who framed Stalin as historically inevitable. For true believing party members, Stalin was the fatherly political visage of an economic and technological determinism ostensibly derived from Marx himself. Capitalism would evolve everywhere into a Stalinized state socialism with the same inevitability that automobiles would eventually replace travel on horseback. The Party, outfitted with the science of historical materialism, could commit trivial errors, but never truly find itself on the wrong side of history. For non-Stalinist leftists like Brecht, Lukács, Merleau-Ponty, Bloch and Sartre, Stalinism was a tragedy, but one that was (at least at certain moments in their work) seen as inevitable and as still deserving of their support. Threatened by an expansionist fascism, deprived of the world revolution it had desperately hoped for, the USSR had built the first state in history governed directly by peasants and workers It had done so, moreover, in the context of decidedly non-Marxist conditions of cultural backwardness and economic underdevelopment. However imperfect and contradictory it might be, the Soviet Union remained on the right side of history. Things could not have been otherwise. For Greene, this comes very close to justifying the inexcusable.
The third category of responses to Stalinism Greene organizes under the sign of “historical materialism”. Though other historical materialist accounts are (presumably) possible, Greene here turns to Trotsky as the thinker he sees as offering the most convincing analysis. The revolution had undergone a bureaucratization and a loss of vigor as a direct effect of its abandonment of socialist democracy as well as the combined effect on its prospects of economic backwardness and a hostile geopolitical environment. The strength of Trotsky’s explanation lies not just in its empirical robustness – that is, in the complexity and dynamism it grants to its picture of the period – but also in the political fidelities that guide it – that is, in the kind of future it leaves open. Trotsky refuses to locate the origins of Stalinism in the black swan of a Bad Great Man and instead offers a sophisticated analysis of the national and international conditions and class relations that led to the birth of Stalinism both as a political economy and form of governance. He at the same time insists that there were always other options – that communism did not have to fall into the paranoid nationalism of socialism in one country, that it could have combined industrialization with a genuine worker’s democracy, and that bureaucratization and violence were never inevitable.
It isn’t entirely clear what role Greene sees revisionist historians like Stephen Cohen, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Arch Getty, Moshe Lewin and Ronald Grigor Suny playing here. Although all of them offer far more nuanced historical maps than those provided by Conquest or Pipes, Greene decidedly prefers Trotsky’s account to theirs and doesn’t explicitly locate any of their works under the sign of historical materialism. This makes sense for Cohen and Fitzpatrick, whose liberal biases come through very clearly in their work, but it might not for Lewin and Grigor Suny. Perhaps in each of these historians Greene’s worry is that the revolution and its problems have largely been consigned to the past. As a communist, however, Greene makes clear that our perspective on the dialectics of Saturn is not an “antiquarian concern” or a merely ‘academic exercise’ but a matter of ultimate concern to us all: ‘how the question is answered’, he writes, ‘will determine whether or not human emancipation remains possible’ (xx).
No text that I know of offers a more comprehensive map of 20th century responses to Stalinism than Greene’s Dialectic of Saturn. Where Grigor Suny’s excellent account of the historiography of the USSR, Red Flag Unfurled, is a book intended for experts, Greene’s book can be read by anybody. For students of the Russian Revolution, but with little prior knowledge Greene’s text can be read alongside Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes (bad, but symptomatic) A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky’s remarkable The Revolution Betrayed, and China Mieville’s sensorially gripping October.
Reviewed by Andrew Pendakis