Stalin's Revolution Reconsidered

Abstract

Official Soviet opinion and Western scholarly opinion have sometimes concurred in significant ways. The question of the origins and necessity of Stalin's decade-long from above is a case in point. Until the beginning of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaigns, Stalin's imposed transformation of 1929-39 was officially viewed as the natural, ineluctable, and thus legitimate outgrowth of the Bolshevik revolution itself. Or to express it differently: Stalinism was said to be the authentic continuation of Bolshevism-Leninism. Though for different reasons, this has also been the prevailing opinion among Western scholars for many years, as indeed it probably is today. Criticalminded scholars in the Soviet Union, of course, have been re-examining the main components of Stalin's revolution-all-out heavy industrialization, forcible collectivization, and the great purges-and challenging this interpretation since the late 1950s, first in the legal press and now most vigorously in samizdat publications. Unfortunately, despite a growing body of new and important data, they have been joined in this by very few Western scholars.' Holland Hunter's article on the First Five-Year Plan is therefore important not only because of its specific findings but also because it urges new multidisciplinary research toward a broader reconsideration of the Stalin revolution in general. Professor Hunter's particular conitributions are his lucid analysis of the inherent infeasibility of the industrial plan adopted by the Stalinist leadership in May 1929, and his persuasive discussion of alternatives open to the party. As he suggests, Western scholars have often assumed that the adopted plan was the only one commensurate with the party's goals.2 Though Hunter's analysis is necessarily abstract, his critique of the plan as well as his proposed alternatives would seem to confirm in important respects those actually made by Bukharin during his opposition to Stalin in 1928-29.