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Human Rights in the Soviet Union: Including Comparisons with the U.S.A.
338 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 10 reviews
October 23, 2017
A relatively obscure book describing a political phenomenon that no longer even exists - ie the Soviet Union - but nonetheless hugely valuable for its historical insight and as an example of how to conduct a thorough and credible sociological investigation. Too many books defending socialism are elaborate flag-flying exercises; this on the other hand is a meticulous academic work, relying on verifiable sources, that discusses the meanings of 'freedom' and 'human rights' and explores the extent to which they are (were) on offer in the USSR (and, by comparison, in the US). If nothing else, much of the method can be applied in relation to the socialist countries that still exist today.
January 31, 2022
The useful accumulation of facts and figures in this book is seriously undermined by the framework of its Soviet defencist political perspective, which more often than not leads it into interpretive dead ends and to justifying the unjustifiable - or at least rendering it ‘understandable.’
To take one example: the Moscow trials and Great Purge of the 1930s is explained primarily in terms of a war scare and the paranoia that generated, and only to a negligible extent a consciously determined action of the bureaucracy itself to politically and physically liquidate oppositional Communist moods and trends that may have threatened its further consolidation. Indeed, it went even further than that: a fair number of loyal Stalinists were executed as well. How to explain that other than as a means to reinforce an unquestionable leadership faction and cow the whole Party with the threat of death, showing that no-one could hope to escape its scythe if its shadow fell over them?
The author deigns the efforts of the Left Opposition in the 1920s as ‘aggressive’ and extreme, when in fact it was seen by other left Bolsheviks, including those part of the LO (like Smirnov, Sapronov - even Radek for a time) as having tread too softly, as too unwilling to meaningfully confront the bureaucracy and mobilise the party and non-party masses - and that when it did so, it was too late to really be effective as an anti-bureaucratic and democratising force inside the party, let alone in Soviet society as a whole anyway.
The author defines the USSR as ‘real socialism’ making moderate progress towards communism - a supremely ironic analysis given that a mere 7 years later after this book was published, the USSR would collapse and the CPSU would engage in an enormous act of self-liquidation.
The picture the author renders of the CPSU as mighty, strong, and enjoying almost complete legitimacy with virtually the entire population (besides what is viewed as some irrelevant dissidents on left and right) has to be taken with a grain of salt.
References to the mass membership of the CPSU reminds one of contemporary Dengists and other defenders of the Chinese state referring to the nearly hundred million or so CCP members, and their common line ‘what, you think you know better than 100 million Chinese communists?’
The fact that membership of the CCP, much like formerly in the CPSU, is not exactly harmful to advancing one’s career or getting a good job in the ruling bureaucracy and in a wide number of other fields is rarely mentioned or acknowledged by such types, as it would complicate their picture of the CCP and formerly CPSU membership; perhaps imagining as they do, that there is little difference between, say, a CCP member and their motivations for joining the Party in such different dates and times as:
1921, 1927, 1937, 1949, 1956, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2021.
The author asserts that if a Stalin cult had not existed, it would have had to have been invented, because of its ‘effectiveness’ at rallying the population and stabilising it behind a great and wise leader in the wake of the massive disruptions accompanying rapid crash industrialisation and collectivisation. The author fails to draw attention to how the Tsar was promoted and seen as the ‘Little Father’ in much in the same way and for similar purposes, but instead in the service of Tsarism.
Rapid forced collectivisation and industrialisation in the Soviet Union - reminiscent of the development of capitalism but in a much shorter and concentrated historical period - and its inevitable consequences in the immediate term (and sometimes longer term; one only has to examine the continued drag, low productivity, and sluggishness of Soviet agriculture well past that period as compared with other sectors that did rapidly advance for all the bureaucratic mismanagement) is justified in retrospective terms based on a historical assumption, i.e. that the coming to power of the Nazis and the invasion of the Soviet Union was inevitable.
But its pace and the scale of destruction in human lives would appear far less justifiable if the Nazis had never come to power, which was a real possibility; the role of ultra-sectarian Third Period tactics emanating from the Stalinist Comintern played a role, along with a whole variety of other factors (social-Democratic intransigence towards working with Communists, underestimating the Nazi threat, relying on legalism and constitutionalism to confront Nazism, not mobilising the Iron Front, a SPD-linked militia - alongside other forces like the KPD-linked paramilitary Roter Frontkämpferbund and the Sozialistischer Schutzbund of the Socialist Workers Party- to prevent a Nazi takeover) in making the Nazi seizure of power more rather than less of a possibility. The author does not discuss this.
As it was, had an imperialist incursion occurred on Soviet soil at the height of crash industrialisation and collectivisation, there is a genuine possibility they could have established a beachhead and further threatened the USSR; the country would not have been in much of a position to resist, with such profound disorganisation and demoralisation in much of the country, especially among the majority peasant population.
The author asserts that one-party regimes with a Communist Party at their head, and operating through a series of linked institutions (trade unions, cultural bodies, etc) is profoundly more democratic than even the most advanced bourgeois democracies.
While the author’s criticisms of the limitations of bourgeois democracies have some merit, this assertion is seriously dubious.
The author thinks he is clever by comparing historical repression under state socialism with that of outright capitalist regimes to make his defence of these regimes more convincing.
But all it really shows, contrary to his intent, is that there was nothing inherent in such systems that could prevent exactly the same thing from happening - including in peacetime - at just as and on a number of occasions more extensively, sometimes on a considerably larger scale.
For all its defects, the Soviet experience did offer a developmental model for anti-colonial movements in economically undeveloped countries once they had come to power. However, after industrialising, mobilising, and educating the population, such regimes, often one-party states, generally made a transition to traditional capitalism after the end of the Cold War, either completely or largely giving up the ghost of the Soviet model and its imitators in most cases.
Indeed, the implementation of this model and those which followed in its wake in various contexts have been called ‘bourgeois revolutions with red flags’ by the eminent Marxist Loren Goldner, a view echoed by the liberal economist Branko Milanovic.
To quote from a review in The Nation about the ex-Yugoslav Milanovic’s latest book, Capitalism, Alone:
‘Milanovic’s approach is to invert the traditional Marxist view: He contends that communism acted as a way station to capitalism rather than the other way around. Communism, he writes, was “a social system that enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism, regain economic and political independence, and build indigenous capitalism,” noting that communist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America did the work instigated by bourgeois revolutions in the West, with the added challenge of overthrowing not only feudal powers but colonial ones. Once in power, communist parties built infrastructure, educated populations, and developed extensive bureaucracies—all of which ultimately paved the way for capitalism once the Cold War ended.’
The perspective of the author repeatedly leads him down absurd blind alleys, such as the historically illiterate and inaccurate assertion that fighting for intellectual freedom is a marginal, anti-Marxist deviation largely confined to the left in English-speaking advanced capitalist states.
It is hard to see Szymanski’s talking about the presumed negative consequences of an excess of intellectual freedom for the ‘ordinary working people’ (such condescension!) as anything but a form of conservatism in the name of communism; with a permanently ensconced enlightened elite ruling over the benighted masses until that elite gradually ushers them into communism.
One can compare what Szymanski argues with the elementary demands of the 1884 Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group, which included calling for ‘unlimited freedom of conscience, speech, the press, assembly and association.’
Plekhanov, the author of such lines, can hardly be accused of being a softie or outside the Marxist mainstream when it came to advocating intellectual freedom; as Victor Serge notes, ‘no one spoke of the coming revolution in more “Jacobin” terms than their [social-democratic forces] leader, Plekhanov.’
This is a deeply flawed book with major interpretative flaws that nonetheless contains useful information; approach with caution.
To take one example: the Moscow trials and Great Purge of the 1930s is explained primarily in terms of a war scare and the paranoia that generated, and only to a negligible extent a consciously determined action of the bureaucracy itself to politically and physically liquidate oppositional Communist moods and trends that may have threatened its further consolidation. Indeed, it went even further than that: a fair number of loyal Stalinists were executed as well. How to explain that other than as a means to reinforce an unquestionable leadership faction and cow the whole Party with the threat of death, showing that no-one could hope to escape its scythe if its shadow fell over them?
The author deigns the efforts of the Left Opposition in the 1920s as ‘aggressive’ and extreme, when in fact it was seen by other left Bolsheviks, including those part of the LO (like Smirnov, Sapronov - even Radek for a time) as having tread too softly, as too unwilling to meaningfully confront the bureaucracy and mobilise the party and non-party masses - and that when it did so, it was too late to really be effective as an anti-bureaucratic and democratising force inside the party, let alone in Soviet society as a whole anyway.
The author defines the USSR as ‘real socialism’ making moderate progress towards communism - a supremely ironic analysis given that a mere 7 years later after this book was published, the USSR would collapse and the CPSU would engage in an enormous act of self-liquidation.
The picture the author renders of the CPSU as mighty, strong, and enjoying almost complete legitimacy with virtually the entire population (besides what is viewed as some irrelevant dissidents on left and right) has to be taken with a grain of salt.
References to the mass membership of the CPSU reminds one of contemporary Dengists and other defenders of the Chinese state referring to the nearly hundred million or so CCP members, and their common line ‘what, you think you know better than 100 million Chinese communists?’
The fact that membership of the CCP, much like formerly in the CPSU, is not exactly harmful to advancing one’s career or getting a good job in the ruling bureaucracy and in a wide number of other fields is rarely mentioned or acknowledged by such types, as it would complicate their picture of the CCP and formerly CPSU membership; perhaps imagining as they do, that there is little difference between, say, a CCP member and their motivations for joining the Party in such different dates and times as:
1921, 1927, 1937, 1949, 1956, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2021.
The author asserts that if a Stalin cult had not existed, it would have had to have been invented, because of its ‘effectiveness’ at rallying the population and stabilising it behind a great and wise leader in the wake of the massive disruptions accompanying rapid crash industrialisation and collectivisation. The author fails to draw attention to how the Tsar was promoted and seen as the ‘Little Father’ in much in the same way and for similar purposes, but instead in the service of Tsarism.
Rapid forced collectivisation and industrialisation in the Soviet Union - reminiscent of the development of capitalism but in a much shorter and concentrated historical period - and its inevitable consequences in the immediate term (and sometimes longer term; one only has to examine the continued drag, low productivity, and sluggishness of Soviet agriculture well past that period as compared with other sectors that did rapidly advance for all the bureaucratic mismanagement) is justified in retrospective terms based on a historical assumption, i.e. that the coming to power of the Nazis and the invasion of the Soviet Union was inevitable.
But its pace and the scale of destruction in human lives would appear far less justifiable if the Nazis had never come to power, which was a real possibility; the role of ultra-sectarian Third Period tactics emanating from the Stalinist Comintern played a role, along with a whole variety of other factors (social-Democratic intransigence towards working with Communists, underestimating the Nazi threat, relying on legalism and constitutionalism to confront Nazism, not mobilising the Iron Front, a SPD-linked militia - alongside other forces like the KPD-linked paramilitary Roter Frontkämpferbund and the Sozialistischer Schutzbund of the Socialist Workers Party- to prevent a Nazi takeover) in making the Nazi seizure of power more rather than less of a possibility. The author does not discuss this.
As it was, had an imperialist incursion occurred on Soviet soil at the height of crash industrialisation and collectivisation, there is a genuine possibility they could have established a beachhead and further threatened the USSR; the country would not have been in much of a position to resist, with such profound disorganisation and demoralisation in much of the country, especially among the majority peasant population.
The author asserts that one-party regimes with a Communist Party at their head, and operating through a series of linked institutions (trade unions, cultural bodies, etc) is profoundly more democratic than even the most advanced bourgeois democracies.
While the author’s criticisms of the limitations of bourgeois democracies have some merit, this assertion is seriously dubious.
The author thinks he is clever by comparing historical repression under state socialism with that of outright capitalist regimes to make his defence of these regimes more convincing.
But all it really shows, contrary to his intent, is that there was nothing inherent in such systems that could prevent exactly the same thing from happening - including in peacetime - at just as and on a number of occasions more extensively, sometimes on a considerably larger scale.
For all its defects, the Soviet experience did offer a developmental model for anti-colonial movements in economically undeveloped countries once they had come to power. However, after industrialising, mobilising, and educating the population, such regimes, often one-party states, generally made a transition to traditional capitalism after the end of the Cold War, either completely or largely giving up the ghost of the Soviet model and its imitators in most cases.
Indeed, the implementation of this model and those which followed in its wake in various contexts have been called ‘bourgeois revolutions with red flags’ by the eminent Marxist Loren Goldner, a view echoed by the liberal economist Branko Milanovic.
To quote from a review in The Nation about the ex-Yugoslav Milanovic’s latest book, Capitalism, Alone:
‘Milanovic’s approach is to invert the traditional Marxist view: He contends that communism acted as a way station to capitalism rather than the other way around. Communism, he writes, was “a social system that enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism, regain economic and political independence, and build indigenous capitalism,” noting that communist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America did the work instigated by bourgeois revolutions in the West, with the added challenge of overthrowing not only feudal powers but colonial ones. Once in power, communist parties built infrastructure, educated populations, and developed extensive bureaucracies—all of which ultimately paved the way for capitalism once the Cold War ended.’
The perspective of the author repeatedly leads him down absurd blind alleys, such as the historically illiterate and inaccurate assertion that fighting for intellectual freedom is a marginal, anti-Marxist deviation largely confined to the left in English-speaking advanced capitalist states.
It is hard to see Szymanski’s talking about the presumed negative consequences of an excess of intellectual freedom for the ‘ordinary working people’ (such condescension!) as anything but a form of conservatism in the name of communism; with a permanently ensconced enlightened elite ruling over the benighted masses until that elite gradually ushers them into communism.
One can compare what Szymanski argues with the elementary demands of the 1884 Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group, which included calling for ‘unlimited freedom of conscience, speech, the press, assembly and association.’
Plekhanov, the author of such lines, can hardly be accused of being a softie or outside the Marxist mainstream when it came to advocating intellectual freedom; as Victor Serge notes, ‘no one spoke of the coming revolution in more “Jacobin” terms than their [social-democratic forces] leader, Plekhanov.’
This is a deeply flawed book with major interpretative flaws that nonetheless contains useful information; approach with caution.
September 23, 2021
"With the slogan of 'human rights' and 'freedom' increasingly lost by capitalists to the Socialist or her means of legitimation will be sought (as they were sought and found in Europe in the 1930s). Nationalist, Christian and Fascist movements (for example, The Moral Majority, the KKK in the US) will probably be revived with the active support of capital, movements which emphasize neither the superiority of capitalism in providing a higher standard of living nor a higher level of participatory rights, civil liberties or economic rights but rather stress intangibles such as the national dignity, Christian morality, or the 'Aryan race', as well as authoritarian leadership principles, such as in Latin America and Asian dictatorships do today... an attempt to revitalise nationalism and mysticism in order to justify ever more repressive capitalism regimes will potentially be characterized in the same manner as Marx categorized the the regime of Napoleon the III in France; 'The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.'
February 11, 2021
While the numbers are a bit outdated now, this book still provides important food for thought.
The first chapter alone is spectacular, and I highly recommend that you take the time out to read jsut that chapter if not the whole book.
This chapter, using the example of emigration rights, makes the argument that human rights are not independent from societal affluence.
The first chapter alone is spectacular, and I highly recommend that you take the time out to read jsut that chapter if not the whole book.
This chapter, using the example of emigration rights, makes the argument that human rights are not independent from societal affluence.
December 30, 2020
The sections on repression in the USSR are a bit hamstrung by having to rely on Khrushchev Era sources which obscure some of the details, but other than that this book is fantastic. An excellent, thorough investigation of the status of rights in the USSR versus the narrative presented by the western ideological state apparatus. Obviously many of his predictions are outdated, but a vital reference work for any Marxist today.
September 16, 2022
absolutely essential read for anyone who wants to have a balanced, detailed view of life in the USSR and what communism looks like in practice. genuinely enlightening. szymanski's model of human rights & political suppression (states will suppress human rights in proportion to the scale of the threat to the basic social/economic fabric at any given point, as deemed by the ruling class) is a powerful explanation of states and societies generally.
February 18, 2023
A great, academic discussion and comparison between the different types of human rights, from those of minorities and women to civil rights. It has little bias using sources from mainly western publications and still finding that socialism is considerably kinder to it's subjects.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 6, 2025
Excellent reference material, but not a book one would necessarily read beginning to end.
April 20, 2017
slightly flawed but absolutely essential reading for all marxists imo
Displaying 1 - 9 of 10 reviews