The strategy of ensconcing an administrative class with a vital interest in the regime’s survival is a strategy which conflicts with the stated ideal of social equality.

From Communism by Richard Pipes.  My heading above reflects the echo I see between our chattering class today, so deviant in goals and values from the nation at large.  There are so many Woke appeals to equality but all of them entail placing those in the chattering class in control of everyone else.  The similarities between our hard progressives with their authoritarian Woke/Postmodernist ideology and the history of the Soviets is striking.  

From the outset, Stalin used his office to promote Communists who owed him personal loyalty and on whom he could rely in the struggle for party leadership likely to break out before long because of Lenin’s failing health. It is he who created the institution of the nomenklatura: registers of Communist officials eligible for important executive appointments and rewarded with such privileges as access to special food stores, hospitals, resorts, and even tailors and cemeteries. The policy of creating a privileged elite sustained the Communist regime for the next seventy years by ensconcing an administrative class with a vital interest in the regime’s survival. But, by the same token, it ensured that the Communist ideal of social equality would remain an empty slogan.

No less galling were the Bolsheviks’ disappointments with managing the economy. Socialist literature had assured them that capitalism, driven by profit, was inherently much less efficient than an economy monopolized by the state. They believed that the bigger an enterprise, the better it functioned. They further believed that it was possible to run an economy without resort to money.

All these assumptions turned out to be wrong. Attempts to impose a central plan on the national economy proved futile. Mismanagement of factories, first by workers and then by Communist functionaries who replaced them, drastically lowered productivity. The effort, enforced by the Cheka, to stop private trade also failed in its purpose, as producers and middlemen found ways to circumvent it; the free market, which the Communists saw as the quintessence of capitalism and which they were determined to liquidate, did not vanish but shifted underground. Before long, the shadow economy outstripped the official Soviet one. The hyperinflation that the government deliberately launched by flooding the country with banknotes did achieve its aim of destroying savings: by 1923, prices in the Soviet Union had increased 100 million times over those of 1917. But the abandonment of money made it impossible to keep a proper budget or calculate transactions between Soviet enterprises.

The net result of such amateurish management, aggravated by the civil war, was a catastrophic drop of all productive indices. Overall large-scale industrial production in 1920 was 18 percent of what it had been in 1913; the output of coal dropped to 27 percent and iron to 2.4 percent. The number of employed industrial workers in 1921 was less than one-half of what it had been in 1918; their living standard fell to one-third of its prewar level.4 A Communist specialist described what happened to the Soviet economy between 1917 and 1920 as a calamity “unparalleled in the history of mankind.”

When confronted with such failures, Lenin’s instinct was to resort to the firing squad. Isaac Steinberg, a Left Socialist Revolutionary who for a while served as the Communist commissar of justice, describes a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars in February 1918. Lenin had presented the draft of a decree, “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!,” which contained a clause calling for the execution “on the spot,” i.e., without trial, of a broad category of criminals loosely defined as “enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, [and] German spies.” Steinberg objected to the decree on the grounds that it contained a “cruel threat . . . with far-reaching terroristic potentialities.”

Lenin resented my opposition in the name of revolutionary justice. So I called out in exasperation, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it!” Lenin’s face suddenly brightened and he replied, “Well put . . . that’s exactly what it should be . . . but we can’t say that.”