Underneath the policy differences between Stalin and Bukharin resided more fundamental differences. Bukharin thought that class struggle was only needed until the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Though Stalin did not (as many have asserted) maintain that the class struggle in general intensified as socialism developed, he did argue that class struggle would intensify specifically as the country moved from the NEP toward collectivization.28 Bukharin viewed the NEP concessions to the peasants, the market, and capitalism as a long-term policy; Stalin viewed them as a temporary expedient that the revolution had to jettison when able. During the grain crisis of 1927-28, Bukharin wanted to rely on the free market and to encourage peasants to grow more grain by offering them more consumer goods. Even with the threat of impending war, Bukharin opposed speeding up industrialization if it meant adversely affecting the peasants. For Stalin, impending war provided an additional reason for speeding industrialization even if it meant exacting surplus from the peasants to finance it, and he dismissed Bukharin as one of the “peasant philosophers.”29
The differences between Bukharin and Stalin permeated other issues besides political economy, notably the national question. One of the most striking features of Lenin’s and Stalin’s approach to the national question was the considerable attention they devoted to it. Lenin read dozens of books in different languages on the history and problems of various national groups, prepared hundreds of pages of notes, and wrote at least twelve major speeches, reports, or sections of books on this question.30 Lenin made novel refinements in Marxist theory with regard to the importance of national liberation struggles and the right of nations to self-determination.31 Stalin, too, devoted considerable attention to the national question, on which he wrote numerous speeches and reports.32 Moreover, after the revolution, Stalin served as Commissar of Nationalities and dealt with numerous difficult national problems, on which he and Lenin occasionally disagreed. Under Lenin, Stalin presided over the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, and over several modifications in the Union that eventually embraced fifteen republics and numerous autonomous regions. Under three decades of Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union also used the wealth and know-how of the more advanced Russian republic in order to build up the industry, mechanize the agriculture, and raise the educational and cultural level of the outlying republics. These policies brought liberation and advancement to those who had been systematically oppressed in what Lenin called the czarist “prison of peoples.”33 None of this is to say that Lenin and Stalin solved all problems. Indeed, insofar as industrializing involved overrunning some of the outlying republics with Russian citizens and polluting some of their waterways, the policies of Stalin and his successors created new national grievances. Still, the attention that Lenin and Stalin gave to the national question contrasted sharply with the comparative neglect of Bukharin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev.
The different importance the two tendencies attached to the national question reflected a deeper difference. As with political economy, what distinguished the left wing tendency from the right wing pivoted around struggle. For both Lenin and Stalin, Communists had to engage with nationalism as an important independent variable in the equation of revolution. The proletarian revolution faced the greatest peril if it ignored either the importance of the national aspirations of oppressed people or the danger of big power chauvinism and narrow, petty bourgeois nationalism. Between 1914 and 1919, a major dispute occurred between Lenin and Bukharin precisely on this question. Bukharin rejected appeals to nationalism as classless and unMarxist, and he consequently failed to foresee the upswing of national liberation movements after World War I. By contrast, Lenin argued that nationalism in colonial and non-colonial areas had a revolutionary potential and that if socialist revolutionaries sincerely fought for national self-determination, the mainly peasant nationalists in oppressed nations would join forces with the proletarian revolution. Bukharin’s biographer Stephen F. Cohen said, “Bukharin’s failure to see anti-imperialist nationalism as a revolutionary force was the most glaring defect in his original treatment of imperialism.”34 The Russian revolution’s success in winning the support of oppressed nations in the czar’s empire vindicated Lenin’s approach and even changed Bukharin’s opinion.
During the NEP, Stalin faced a different problem than had Lenin before 1919. The NEP encouraged the development of petty capitalists, or what Stalin called the “middle strata” consisting of the peasantry and “petty toiling population of the towns.” These middle strata constituted nine tenths of the population of the “oppressed nationalities,” and they were particularly susceptible to nationalist appeals. The development of nationalism in these strata constituted a real threat to the consolidation of the proletarian dictatorship whose basis was “mainly and primarily of the central, the industrial regions.” Consequently, Stalin urged a struggle against “the nationalist tendencies which are developing and becoming accentuated in connection with the New Economic Policy.” Stalin’s main opposition on this point came from Bukharin, who in 1919 had made an about-face from opposing self-determination to embracing it. By 1923, Bukharin not only supported the NEP and the petty capitalists created by it but also advocated a hands-off approach toward this class’ growing nationalism. Stalin noted that Bukharin had gone from one extreme to the other, from denying the right of self-determination to supporting it one-sidely.35 What remained the same, however, was Bukharin’s failure to accord nationalism sufficient importance, his failure to appreciate either its potential support of—or its potential danger to—the revolution, and his reluctance to struggle with nationalists who opposed socialist development.
Stalin went a long way toward the creation of a fair and viable multinational state, but his policies also had a problematic side. During World War II, in his determination to thwart narrow nationalism among the backward elements on the periphery, Stalin relocated entire populations, attacked Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans,” and gave Russians domination of the Party and state.36
From the mid-1930s to Stalin’s death in 1953, the policies of forced collectivization, rapid industrialization, and centralized planning through a series of five-year plans held complete sway. Certainly, the trial and execution of Bukharin and other leaders, and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of rank and file Communists, many of whom were innocent of any wrongdoing, had much to do with the comparative reticence of opposition voices. It would be wrong, however, to assume either that Stalin eliminated all diversity of thinking or that repression alone accounted for the dominance of Stalin’s views. The widespread acceptance of Stalin’s approach to building socialism resulted mainly from its obvious success in bringing the Soviet Union within a short period out of semi-feudal backwardness into the front ranks of the industrialized nations.
Bahman Azad gives a succinct summary of the accomplishments. In the first two five-year plans, industrial production grew at an average annual rate of 11 percent. From 1928 to 1940, the industrial sector grew from 28 percent to 45 percent of the economy. Between 1928 and 1937, heavy manufacturing output’s share of total manufacturing output grew from 31 percent to 63 percent. The illiteracy rate dropped from 56 percent to 20 percent. The number of graduates from high school, specialized schools and universities jumped. Moreover, in this period, the state began providing free education, free health services, and social insurance, and after 1936 the state gave subsidies to single mothers and to mothers with many children. These accomplishments, Azad notes, were “impressive and historically unprecedented.”37