Who Are The Rulers in Russia?

Who Are The Rulers in Russia?

What is this historical monstrosity, this illegitimate child of the mating between a “socialist-utopian” revolution and the murky past of Russia?

What is this historical monstrosity, this illegitimate child of the mating between a “socialist-utopian” revolution and the murky past of Russia? Students of Stalinism rack their brains, trying to find new labels for a new historical phenomenon or to fix it with old labels. State capitalism, a modern Asiatic despotism, socialism, or as the late Marxist theoretician, Rudolf Hilferding, held, a totalitarian society without precedent and free from the economic laws and trends of development which characterize the non-Stalinist world? Students of Russian society have approached this problem primarily through study of its economic system, but with little success, and mainly because in Russia the relation between economics and politics “stands on its head.” It is directly the opposite of what Marx considered the causal relation between economics and politics in capitalist society, namely, that the political structure is a dependent variable of the economic order.

Sociological study of Russia may prove more fruitful. What groups and classes, if any, constitute Russian society? Who are the “rulers” and what is the relationship between ruler and ruled? These are the fundamental questions with which we shall here be concerned.

I

Like all historically known societies, Russian society is stratified. This means that it consists not only of distinct groups which are the products of the social division of labor and varying patterns of life, but that these groups can be placed in an hierarchical order. Although Russian society conforms to this definition, the problem of stratification in the Soviet Union remains complicated and controversial.

As a result of the “plebeian” October revolution, Russian society became levelled, relatively uniform and primitive in structure. The urban population consisted primarily of pauperized plebeians, destitute artisans, traders, white collar workers and only a small proportion of industrial workers. In the village radical agrarian reform brought about a similar levelling. The bulk of the Russian peasantry consisted of “medium” peasants, and even during the later years of the NEP the differentiation within the Soviet village developed rather slowly. When the party line of this period emphasized the “danger of the kulaks” it did so for obvious political reasons. ¹* Maneuvering between a pauperized urban and a flattened rural population, the Bolshevik Party was able to preserve its “Jacobin” character, that is, with the disintegration and atomization of all the classes it could maintain a relative independence from any of them. At the same time, in keeping with the egalitarian tendency of the revolution, the party tried not to make of itself a privileged caste, limiting the income of its members to that of the skilled workers and in its general attitude trying to orient itself toward the r...