The Russian capitalist class

If Russia is a capitalist country how is it that its ruling class does not adopt the same idle, luxurious and pleasure-hunting habits as the capitalists of Western countries? This is a problem that puzzles many people, although the answer is a relatively simple one.

Before 1917 Russia was mainly a country of small farming. Only a few million out of a population of 180,000,000 were employed in industrial production, and of these only a portion was employed in modern factories (largely owned by foreign capital) similar to the most highly developed factories in the West. Thus there were a relatively small number of modern factories, employing large bodies of workers, existing like oases in a desert of backward conditions.

When the war broke out in 1914 hundreds of thousands of peasants (who provided nearly all the soldiers) were forced to leave the farms and fight on distant fronts. This, together with Russian defeats, internal troubles and the ravages of German and allied armies, brought chaos in to agriculture and industry, reducing to a minimum the capacity of the country to meet even the elementary needs of its large population. This was the appalling position when the Bolsheviks captured power in 1917 and set about their task of converting Russia into a first-class Capitalist State.

When production is so low that there is no surplus above bare needs (and in Russia in the early years, as well as at intervals later, there was not even enough necessaries to go round, thousands dying of starvation) all of the population must work. There is a division of labour that is portentous. One part of the population, the vast mass, must be employed in the actual production of the necessaries of life whilst another part, the relatively small minority, must look after the direction of affairs. This latter work was taken over by the Bolsheviks and was both arduous and nerve-racking. Owing to tradition, Russia’s immaturity and other influences, this direction of affairs involved the building up of a bureaucratic machine employing thousands of people in unproductive activities such as propaganda, secret police and so forth. The more Russian industry expanded the greater grew this bureaucratic machine, the larger the mass of people who were interested in its continued existence ana expansion and the richer the prizes for those at the top.

Slowly and painfully, with many setbacks and false starts, Russia got upon the road to large-scale production. In this process the surplus over bare needs (and often even more than that) was ploughed back into industry to help on expansion. As industry developed, little by little some of the surplus, instead of being ploughed back, was diverted, under various subterfuges, to increase the comfort of the class that was directing affairs, until the surplus skimmed off reached a point where this class could enjoy a certain amount of luxury whilst the mass still lived at a low standard. But the ruling class and its hangers-on was itself expanding into a huge bureaucracy whose very size and precarious position still limited the possibility of even those at the top enjoying a life of idleness.

However the bureaucracy is sorting itself out into grades. A relatively small group which includes those who have acquired wealth directly through agriculture, industry and the professions—the “Soviet millionaires”—now enjoy the luxuries of the wealthy in the West; splendid houses in town and country, fine motor cars, costly furs, sumptuous feasts and a host of privileges provided by the surplus labour extracted from the Russian workers. What this means to even the small fry of the Russian bureaucratic machine is indicated by the following quotation: —

“Comrade Eudoxia Uralova laughed long and loud. I had asked this Russian delegate to the United Nations whether she cooks.
‘I am Byelo-Russia’s Minister of Education,’ she said. ‘I have no time for cooking. I have two servants, a cook and a maid.’
Comrade Uralova is a cheerful, friendly woman of 43. She received her Cabinet appointment for her work in advancing social and educational progress.
In Minsk, the Byelo-Russian capital. Comrade Uralova lives in a six-room flat with her husband, a Red Army colonel. They have no children.
Each day she eats a full ‘British type’ breakfast at 8.30. From nine till ten she takes a piano lesson, then is driven to her office by a chauffeur. ‘I have my own car,’ says Comrade Uralova, ‘but am not a good driver, so I keep it for pleasure trips.’ (Evening Standard, 19.1.1946.)

The class that took over the direction of affairs in Russia has grown into a privileged and wealthy class. A capitalist class similar to the Western model is emerging, based on the State ownership of industry, and this class sees in the idle parasites of the West the goal of its ambition and the picture of its future. It is between this class and the mass of the population that the class struggle in Russia is waged. The constant purges, the segregation of sections of the population, the limit on emigration, the frenzied propaganda against the West and the imperialist expansion programmes are all echoes of this class struggle.

GILMAC