Neo-Stalinism - Misplaced Pages

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Neo-Stalinism is a political term used in various ways. According to historian Roy Medvedev the term describes rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin, identification with him and the associated political system (Stalinism), nostalgia for the Stalnist period in Russia's history, restoration of Stalinist policies, and a return to the administrative terror of the Stalnist period while avoiding some of the worst excesses.

According to former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, described as a neo-Stalinist by some, the term refers to moderated Stalinist state, without large-scale repressions but with persecution of political opponents and total control of all political activities in the country

History of the term

The American Trotskyist Hal Draper used "neo-Stalinism" in 1948 to refer to a a new political ideology–new development in Soviet policy, which he defined as a reactionary trend whose beginning was associated with the Popular Front period of the mid-1930s, writing that "The ideologists of neo-Stalinism are merely the tendrils shot ahead by the phenomena – fascism and Stalinism – which outline the social and political form of a neo-barbarism”

Frederick Copleston, S.J. portrays neo-Stalinism as a "Slavophile emphasis on Russia and her history": "what is called neo-Stalinism is not exclusively an expression of a desire to control, dominate, repress and dragoon; it is also the expression of a desire that Russia, while making use of western science and technology, should avoid contamination by western 'degenerate' attitudes and pursue her own path."

Political geographer Denis J.B. Shaw considers the Soviet Union as neo-Stalinist until the post-1985 period of transition to capitalism. He identified neo-Stalinism as a political system with planned economy and highly developed military-industrial complex

During the 1960s, the CIA distinguished between Stalinism and neo-Stalinism in that "The Soviet leaders have not reverted to two extremes of Stalin's rule–one-man dictatorship and mass terror. For this reason, their policy deserves the label 'neo-Stalinist' rather than -Stalinist."

Katerina Clark, describing an anti-Khrushchevite, pro-Stalin current in Soviet literary world during the 1960s, described the work of "neo-Stalinist" writers as harking back to "the Stalin era and its leaders... as a time of unity, strong rule and national honor."

As regards Stalinism and anti-Stalinism

In his monograph Reconsidering Stalinism historian Henry Reichman discusses differing and evolving perspectives on the use of the term "Stalinism": "in scholarly usage 'Stalinism' describes here a movement, there an economic, political, or social system, elsewhere a type of political practice or belief-system...." He references historian Stephen Cohen's work reassessing Soviet history after Stalin as a "continuing tension between anti-Stalinist reformism and neo-Stalinist conservatism," observing that such a characterization requires a "coherent" definition of Stalinism—whose essential features Cohen leaves undefined.

Alleged neo-Stalinist countries

Some socialist groups describe modern China as "neo-Stalinist."

21st-century North Korea has been described by Western sources as a "neo-Stalinist state", although it has completely replaced Marxism-Leninism with Juche since first adopting it as the official ideology in the 1970s, with references to Marxism-Leninism altogether scrapped from the revised state constitution in 1992.

By the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov regime was sometimes considered a neo-Stalinist one (esp. regarding his grotesque cult of personality). Islam Karimov's non-communist authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan has also been widely described as "neo-Stalinist."

Soviet Union

In February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality that surrounded his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, and condemned crimes committed during the Great Purge. In 1956 Khrushchev gave a four-hour speech condemning the Stalin regime, however it was criticized for fabricating information and exaggerating claims hugely. Historian Robert V. Daniels holds that "neo-Stalinism prevailed politically for more than a quarter of a century after Stalin himself left the scene," Following the Trotskyist comprehension of Stalin's policies as a deviation from the path of Marxism-Leninism, George Novack described Khrushchev's politics as guided by a "neo-Stalinist line," its principle being that "the socialist forces can conquer all opposition even in the imperialist centers, not by the example of internal class power, but by the external power of Soviet example," explaining that

"Khrushchev’s innovations at the Twentieth Congress. . . made official doctrine of Stalin’s revisionist practices the new program discards the Leninist conception of imperialism and its corresponding revolutionary class struggle policies."

American broadcasts into Europe during the late 1950s described a political struggle between the "old Stalinists" and "the neo-Stalinist Khrushchev."

In October 1964, Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who remained in office until his death in November 1982. During his reign, the truth about Stalinism was suppressed. Andres Laiapea connects this with "the exile of many dissidents, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," though whereas Laiapea writes that "he rehabilitation of Stalin went hand in hand with the establishment of a personality cult around Brezhnev," the political sociologist Victor Zaslavsky characterizes Brezhnev's period as one of "neo-Stalinist compromise," as the essentials of the political atmosphere associated with Stalin were retained without a personality cult. According to Alexander Dubček, "The advent of Brezhnev’s regime heralded the advent of neo-Stalinism, and the measures taken against Czechoslovakia in 1968 were the final consolidation of the neo-Stalinist forces in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and other countries." Brezhnev described the Chinese political line as "neo-Stalinist." American political scientist Seweryn Bialer has described Soviet policy as turning towards neo-Stalinism after Brezhnev's death.

Mikhail Gorbachev took over in March 1985. He introduced the policy of glasnost in public discussions – in order to liberalize the Soviet system. The full scale of Stalinist repressions was soon revealed, and the Soviet Union fell apart. Still, Gorbachev admitted in 2000 that "Even now in Russia we have the same problem. It isn't so easy to give up the inheritance we received from Stalinism and Neo-Stalinism, when people were turned into cogs in the wheel, and those in power made all the decisions for them." Gorbachev's domestic policies have been described as neo-Stalinist by some Western sources.

Post-Soviet Russia

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As of 2008, nearly half of Russians view Stalin positively, and many support restoration of his monuments dismantled in the past. In 2005, Communist politician Gennady Zyuganov said that Russia "should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague."

In June 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin organized a conference for history teachers to promote a high-school teachers manual called A Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006: A Manual for History Teachers, which according to Irina Flige, office director of human rights organization Memorial, portrays Stalin as a cruel but successful leader who "acted rationally", no matter that he executed millions of Soviet citizens. She claims it justifies his terror as an "instrument of development." Putin said at the conference that the new manual will "help instill young people with a sense of pride in Russia", and he argued that Stalin's purges pale in comparison to the United States' atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At a memorial for Stalin's victims, Putin said that while Russians should "keep alive the memory of tragedies of the past, we should focus on all that is best in the country." However in September 2009, the Education ministry of Russia announced that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago", a book once banned in the Soviet Union for its detailed accounts of Soviet oppression, would become required reading for Russian high-school students.

On 4 December 2008, the St Petersburg offices of the Memorial Society were raided by the police. The entire electronic archive of Memorial in St Petersburg, including the materials collected with British historian Orlando Figes for his book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, was confiscated by the authorities. Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate the Stalinist regime. A spokesman for the Russian prosecutor general's investigative unit said that the raid was part of an investigation into an article that incited racial hatred published in the Novy Peterburg newspaper in June 2007. Figes organised an open protest letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other Russian leaders which was signed by several hundred leading academics from across the world. On 2 March 2009, the contract to publish The Whisperers in Russia was cancelled due, according to the publisher, to financial reasons. Figes suspects that the decision was political. In March 20, 2009 the court of Dzerzhinsky District decided that the search in December 4, 2008 in Memorial with confiscation of 12 HDDs with information about victims of political repressions was carried out with procedural violations, and actions of law enforcement bodies were illegal.

In 2009, it was reported that the Kremlin was drawing up plans to criminalize statements and acts that deny the Soviet Union's victory over fascism in World War II or that it liberated Europe. In May 2009, President Dmitry Medvedev described the Soviet Union during the war as "our country" and set up the Historical Truth Commission to act against what the Kremlin terms falsifications of Russian history.

Scholar Dmitry Furman, director of the Commonwealth Of Independent States Research Center at the Russian Academy's of Sciences Institute of Europe, sees Russian neo-Stalinism as a "non-ideological Stalinism" that "seeks control for the sake of control, not for the sake of world revolution."

Neo-Stalinism in the West

Manifestations of neo-Stalinism in British healthcare include "examples of doctors being witch-hunted, bullied or disempowered and the paradoxical negative effects of the Bristol Inquiry and the Shipman report."

Opposite on the spectrum, Britain's Conservative Party logo has been dubbed an icon of the neo-Stalinist fashion, the party chairman extolling it as a design to signify "clarity, strength and unity." It was suggested that the Conservatives resorted to "new-Stalinist imagery in the hope of wooing disillusioned trade unionists."

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Outrage at revision of Stalin's legacy
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- 1. A well developed core-periphery structure, reflecting marked differences in levels of economic development and living standards. This is in part the product of a tendency towards 'incrementalism'–seeking to gain economies by allocating a considerable proportion of resources to those regions which have benefited most from previous investment...
- 2. The inbuilt conservatism of the system and the bias towards heavy industry the continuing importance of traditional industrial regions with 'smokestack' industries, such as the Donets-Dnepr region of eastern Ukraine and the Urals.
- 3. 'Extensive' (ie, resource-demanding) rather than 'intensive' (resource-saving) development, leading to waste of resources and environmental deterioration in the core, growing dependence of the core on the resources of the periphery and pressure to develop the latter in the cheapest and often most short-sighted manner.
- 4. Administration of the economy by sectors and tendencies towards 'narrow departmentalism' to the development of a series of ministerial 'empires', lacking intelinkages, reducing the scope for scale economies, encouraging excessive transportation and leading to the economic overspecialization of many cities and regions, especially peripheral ones...
- 5. The relative neglect of agriculture, transportation, consumer welfare and numerous services...
- 6. A well developed hierarchy of well-being in the settlement structure, whereby, in general terms, the best endowed settlements were the biggest ones with major administrative and political functions...conditions as they became smaller.
- 7. The development of regional economies...greatly influenced by the 'military-industrial complex' with the progress of individual cities, groups of cities and even entire regions (including peripheral ones) very much bound up with the needs of the military machine.
- 8. Continental and inward-looking development induced by the longstanding tendency towards economic autarky. Isolation from the world economy...Only from the 1960s were autarkic tendencies modified, encouraging further economic development along land frontiers, on coasts and at ports., see Shaw, Denis J.B. Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography. Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. ISBN 0631181342, ISBN 9780631181347. Pp. 81-84.
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