The Russian Enigma

Description

The book details Ciliga’s time spent in Soviet Prisons and ‘isolators’ following his arrest for belonging to the Trotskyist Opposition, and provides a wealth of important documentary information concerning the miserable conditions in which the working class were reduced to living in, the extent of the ‘criminalisation’ of large swathes of the population, and the various forms in which resistance appeared.What is equally important however, is the intellectual development Ciliga underwent during his time in Russia. He entered The USSR as an ardent Bolshevik, yet he was forced by the pressure of the reality of the situation to recognise that something, somewhere, had gone very wrong. This led him to the Trotskyist Opposition. His time amongst Trotskyist prisoners, however, convinced Ciliga that “Their outlook was not very different to that of the Stalinist Bureaucracy; they were slightly more polite and human, that was all” – indeed Stalin’s Five Year Plans of forced collectivisation and industrialisation were taken directly from the Program of the Opposition. In essence all the Trotskyists wished for was a change of personel at the top of the Soviet State – they thought they could do Stalinism better than Stalin.This realisation of the poverty of the ‘loyal opposition’ led Ciliga to ultimately question even the basis of Bolshevism itself – the thought and practice of Lenin – “The holy of holies.” He realised that Leninism has no conception of working class self-activity, and is in fact a parasite on the back of the workers, using them to gain its own ends. The equation of Communism with nationalisation demonstrates the lack of any real difference between Stalinism, Trotskyism or Leninism – they are all predicated on the idea of State ownership of the means of production not the self-activity of the working class itself. Ciliga recognised the paucity of this vision and that he had to reject Lenin if he wished to remain a revolutionary. To his eternal credit and despite the anguish it caused him, he took this step.