Soviet writers and historians often utilise discussions of past events to support the current party line and to provide guidance to friendly organisations abroad. The article on the late Mr MN Roy which the Kommunist has carried recently clearly falls in this category. Mr. Roy has been an “unperson” in the Soviet Union since he was placed “beyond the pale” by the Communist International in 1929.
The article is not intended to discuss Mr. Roy’s contribution to the cause of communism in India and abroad. It does not in fact raise the question at all. It is also not meant to discuss the evolution of Mr. Roy’s ideas. It refers only to the single episode of his opposition to Lenin’s thesis on the colonial and national question at the second congress of the Communist International in 1920, and condemns him on this account alone as a petty-bourgeois ultra-leftist.
The treatment of this limited theme is far from objective. If Lenin was convinced, as the writer makes out, that Mr. Roy wrongly under-estimated the anti-imperialist potential of the “bourgeois-democratic” freedom movements in India and elsewhere in Asia because he had not been able to get rid of his “old petty-bourgeois ideological baggage”, why did he enter into serious and private discussions with the latter, encourage him to formulate his views on paper, ask the chairman of the Colonial Commission to present his as well as Mr. Roy’s thesis for discussion and approval, accept modifications in his own formulations at least partly to accommodate the views of the then relatively little known Indian and allow the congress to approve both theses?
Lenin’s views
The writer does not even mention these and other relevant issues because that would involve at least an indirect admission that Lenin himself was far from sure of the correctness of his views on the colonial and national question because he did not have enough direct experience of revolutionary movements in Asia. Such an admission would amount to sacrilege. Moreover it would weaken the effectiveness of the argument.
The article is intended to serve three purposes – discredit the main ideological formulations of Mao Tse-tung, to reaffirm Soviet policy of forming a broad “anti-imperialist” united front with nationalist governments and movements in developing countries and to convince local communist parties there that their struggle has to be directed “not against capital but against medieval remnants” and that the tactics of united front are still valid in former colonies even if they have achieved a fairly high level of capitalist development.
Mr. Roy is accused of two major heresies. First, he held that “the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement does not reflect the aspiration of the masses”. He considered that “the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution in the colonies and backward countries was not obligatory”. He therefore opposed temporary alliance “between the Communist International and bourgeois democracy” and proposed that infant communist parties in Asia make a bid to seize the leadership of nationalist movements.
Secondly, Mr. Roy is said to have held that the fate of the revolutionary movement in Europe entirely depended on the course of the revolution in the East. He is credited with the statement that “world capitalism drew its main resources and its income in the colonies, chiefly in Asia” and that “European capitalism was able in extreme cases to give the workers all the surplus value and thereby win them over to their side, stifling their revolutionary aspiration”.
Hard core
As it happens, the two formulations form the hard core of Maoism. The possibility of combining the bourgeois-democratic and socialist stages of revolution and of communists providing leadership during the first phase formed the basis of Mac Tse-tung’s concept of New Democracy. His view that the centre of revolution has shifted to Asia, Africa and Latin America and that the European working class has been assimilated into the capitalist system and has therefore lost its capacity and will for revolution provide the rationale for Marshal Lin Piao’s famous thesis of the world’s villages – Asia, Africa and Latin America – surrounding the world’s cities – Europe, including the Soviet Union and North America – and storming them. It also justifies Chinese claim to the leadership of the world communist movement on the one hand and of national-liberation struggle in Asia, Africa and Latin America on the other.
The article in the Kommunist cites Lenin’s authority to demolish these two central pillars of Maoism. It quotes an alleged statement by Mr. Y. A. Preobrazhensky with the deliberate intention to identify Mao’s position with that of the Trotskyites in the ’twenties and to accuse him, by analogy, of wanting to be the “grave digger of nationalism” in backward countries. Also the ultra-leftist tendencies and what is graphically described as the “absolutisation of the Eastern route of the world revolution” are both traced to the self-same “petty-bourgeois voluntarist idea of the nature and course of the revolutionary process”. This has now become a standard Soviet criticism of Mao Tse-tung.
Apart from continuing the ideological struggle against Maoism, the article on Mr. Roy strongly emphasises the continuing validity of Lenin’s concept of communist-nationalist alliance on national as well as international scale. Lenin, according to the writer, did not consider the struggle against imperialism either chiefly “Western” or chiefly “Eastern”. He regarded it as a “single world revolutionary process with the working class marching in the van”.
Lenin held the view that “in the epoch of socialist revolution, the national-liberation movement by no means recedes into the past nor does it become reactionary. On the contrary, in the new conditions, a real possibility arises before it for joint revolutionary actions with the countries of the victorious proletariat and with the communist parties”.
It is equally significant that the article recalls that “Lenin warned the communists in the East against the artificial stepping up of the process of organising mass communist parties at an early stage of the proletarian movement”. He held that the presence of five million industrial workers and 37 million landless peasants in India did not “signify the existence of all the prerequisites for organising a mass communist party”. Instead Lenin is quoted as having emphasised that the communists in India “must support the bourgeois-democratic revolution without merging with it.”
It is not fortuitous that the writer should have taken the trouble to prove that the seventh additional thesis adopted by the Comintern in 1920 and published apparently for the first time in 1934 was wrongly translated and that in fact Lenin and the Comintern as a whole regarded “the formation of national revolutionary mass organisations of the working people” as the foremost task for communists. These “non-party organisations” would, according to Lenin, represent a “specific application of the idea of Soviet organisation” in pre-capitalist conditions
United Front
A Soviet writer could have hardly gone further in underscoring the importance the Soviet Government currently attaches to the concept of united front. The classical communist argument that the bourgeois would at some point compromise with imperialism and betray the national-liberation struggle receive one passing reference and is summarily dismissed.
This is not a sudden development. In the dual struggle against the United States and China, the Soviet leaders have had little choice but to try to make common cause with nationalism in the third world. Moreover, developments in some of the so-called national democracies – an intermediate stage on the way to full-fledged socialism – like Ghana and Indonesia have been rather disheartening from the Soviet point of view. It is interesting that the concept of “national democracy” received the minimum attention at the CPSU party congress in 1966 and has not figured much in Soviet propaganda since.
How long will this policy of united front last? Will the competition with China compel Moscow once again to champion ultra-radical movements in the third world? Has the “nationalist” element in Soviet foreign policy finally triumphed over ideological considerations?
It is not desirable to take a dogmatic position on these and related questions. But it does appear that the Russians have lost the penchant for revolutionism, that they tend to think in pragmatic and power terms even if they continue to use an ideological vocabulary, that the Chinese challenge has failed to stop or even slow down the natural evolution of the Soviet Union into what is somewhat inaptly called a status quo power and that the policy of united front abroad accords well with the intensified struggle at home against the “terribly left-wing” positions of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Trotskyites, anarchists and other extremists.
The Times of India, 3 July 1968