Filtzer Donald A. - The crisis of Soviet industrialization: selected essays

Thanks must go, first and foremost, to Michel Vale, a colleague and friend of many years, who helped me to initially organize this project and gave me intellectual encouragement to learn Russian and to make a proper study of the Soviet Union, and Preobrazhensky in particular. Without his further practical assistance in editing some of the translations when my time was short, I do not think this book would ever have been finished. Thanks also to Hillel Ticktin, editor of the journal Critique, who, in addition to providing important theoretical guidance in the course of supervising my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Glasgow, also helped iron out some of the thornier terminological problems in the texts. Despite the intellectual debt I owe to both these people, it goes without saying that they bear none of the responsibility for whatever shortcomings remain in this volume.

Finally, acknowledgement is due to Alec Nove and Alexander Erlich for helpful criticisms and comments on the Introduction and notes to this collection, or on my Ph.D. thesis, that directly or indirectly found their way into the present volume.

by Donald A. Filtzer

With the revival of interest in Marxist ideas over the past ten or so years, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, one of the leading political and intellectual figures to emerge from the Bolshevik Revolution, has become known to a far wider circle than just the occasional specialist in Soviet history. For the first time, English-speaking scholars who did not know Russian were able to assess firsthand Preobrazhensky's contribution to the early years of Soviet economic theory and the relevance of his discussions of Soviet industrialization to problems facing the contemporary neocolonial world. Unfortunately, since then we have had only one other translation of an important Preobrazhensky work, From NEP To Socialism. A glance at the bibliography of Preobrazhensky's major writings at the end of this book will show a significant body of valuable material that remains accessible only to those who read Russian. We hope, of course, that the present book will go some way toward filling this gap, but we by no means consider our effort sufficient.

As we have had cause to note in a previous essay,encompassed such problems as the development of working-class culture in postrevolutionary society, the history of socialist thought, the theory of money and questions of finance and inflation under the capitalist and Soviet systems, the theory of capitalist crises, and, of course, the theory of economic development in the USSR.

The volume and theoretical sophistication of his writings appear all the more impressive when it is remembered that he was truly a self-made scholar, having had only a high-school education and having been a full-time (and leading) Bolshevik militant from his mid-teens onward. Nor can anyone doubt his political courage and skill, for it was precisely the years of intense political struggle inside the Bolshevik Partya struggle in which Preobrazhensky played one of the two or three leading roles within the Trotskyist Oppositionthat saw his most abundant and fruitful intellectual output. This is not to gloss over Preobrazhensky's sudden political collapse, when after years of fighting against Stalin's growing incursions on Party democracy and against the catastrophic policies of Party leadership, he was one of the first Oppositionists to break under the strains of exile and isolation and make his peace with the man Trotsky had so aptly called the "gravedigger of the revolution." Such acts are to be explained, perhaps, but never justified.

Preobrazhensky was born in 1886 in the town of Bolkhov in Orel Province. His father was a priest, and Preobrazhensky was to attribute much of his early radicalism to his reaction against what he termed "all the religious quackery" he could see going on around him. Although he attended the gymnasium, he did not continue his studies on leaving school. He had already become a political militant by the age of 15, and with a friend had founded his own political school journal. Soon, however, Preobrazhensky graduated to more sophisticated political activity. At 17 he joined the Russian Social Democrats, and by 1905 had already led a general strike of educational institutions in Orel. It is worth reflecting on this early history, because it indicates that Preobrazhensky was a completely self-taught scholar and theoretician. The types of clandestine literature he read during these early days in politics were to greatly influence his later theoretical preoccupations: the history of culture, general and revolutionary history, and basic works in political economy. It is equally notable that unlike many other great Bolshevik leaders of erudition, Preobrazhensky did not spend time abroad, nor even in the "cultured" metropolises of Petersburg and Moscow, but had his political activity confined to organizing work in the Russian provinces.

In the years following, and through the time of the Civil War, Preobrazhensky was assigned by the Bolsheviks to the Urals, where he was to do most of his political workby and large in positions of responsibility. He spent these years constantly on the run from the tsarist police, and was apprehended, jailed, or exiled, on more than one occasion. When the February revolution broke out in 1917, Preobrazhensky was part of a Bolshevik minority that did not support Prince Lvov's provisional government, and was one of the early supporters of Lenin's April Theses.From this early date Preobrazhensky was to find himself on the left of intra-Party disputes.