A Revolutionary Life

The son of a priest, Preobrazhensky belonged to Russia’s underground Social Democratic Party from 1903. One of his first actions was to distribute a statement to his fellow students opposing the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. During the 1905 revolution, his group led a general strike in Oryol educational establishments, and he became a full-time party worker in the Urals.

He was a supporter of the party’s Bolshevik fraction from the early days and prided himself on his contacts with Vladimir Lenin. He was rewarded for his political activities in 1909 with jail and exile to Yekaterinburg. Ordered to escape so as to attend a party congress, he evaded what he described as a “blind drunk” police officer and made his way to Novonikolaevsk. He was rearrested there in 1912, only to be freed after a prosecution blunder.

Unlike most veteran Bolsheviks, he was an early supporter of Lenin’s April Theses, which the Bolshevik leader presented after returning from exile in the wake of the February Revolution in 1917. He was the author of a Resolution Against Antisemitism that the All-Russian Soviet Congress unanimously passed in June 1917. Preobrazhensky recalled participating later that year in an “armed demonstration” in the town of Zlatoust during the October Revolution, which made it possible for the revolution to “take control everywhere and nationalize all the mines in the area.”

From spring 1918, he fought against the counterrevolutionary mobilization by the White general Alexander Kolchak. He also opposed the uprising against Bolshevik rule by their erstwhile government partners, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, in protest at the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany, during which he was wounded in the head. Preobrazhensky himself had led, along with Bukharin, the “Left Communist” faction whose supporters rejected the terms of Brest-Litovsk.

He spoke against the abolition of workers’ control over the railways in 1918. As one of the three Bolshevik Party secretaries in 1920, Preobrazhensky almost single-handedly oversaw the functioning of the central apparatus due to the sickness of his fellow officials Leonid Serebryakov and Nikolai Krestinsky. During this period, he circulated a discussion paper on the bureaucratization of the party, but lost his position on the Bolshevik central committee after a debate over the role of trade unions and never returned to the leadership.

Preobrazhensky was the key author of the 1923 Declaration of the 46, the first statement of what was to become the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. He also developed the Opposition’s alternative economic policy, based on the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation,” in opposition to Bukharin’s calls for the peasantry to “Get Rich!”

When Trotsky formed the United Opposition bloc with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky was a key figure in its ranks. After the defeat of the Opposition, he was expelled from the party in October 1927 and deported to Siberia. Yet he reconciled with Stalin in 1929, arguing that the Soviet leader’s shift toward a policy of forced collectivization and industrialization was a triumph for “our course in the countryside,” albeit one that was bureaucratically implemented.

Having been allowed back into the party, Preobrazhensky was expelled again in 1931. An exercise in self-criticism secured his second readmittance in 1934, which proved to be short-lived. The following year, he was expelled once more, this time for good, and arrested.

After his release from prison in 1936, he featured as a prosecution witness in the trial of Zinoviev. He was then rearrested and did not appear, for unknown reasons, at the second Moscow trial, where he was a defendant. After being tried in secret, he was shot the same day; official Soviet biographies stated that he died in 1937 after being “convicted.” Such was a revolutionary life in a revolutionary age.

Brest-Litovsk

Preobrazhensky’s argument for opposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk deserves closer examination. At the time when the treaty was being negotiated, the Russian Revolution was facing a major crisis. The old army was in a state of disintegration, but a new Red force had not yet been formed, while White Guard counterrevolutionaries were mobilizing.

Lenin signed a Decree on Peace on October 26, calling for immediate peace negotiations with the Central Powers. An armistice on December 15 halted the fighting, enabling negotiations to begin at Brest-Litovsk on December 22. Trotsky was the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, and he appointed Adolph Joffe to lead the negotiations. The Soviet negotiating team divided into three factions, partly explaining the drawn-out nature of the talks.

One faction, led by Lenin, was prepared to conclude a deal on any terms, even if it meant an unjust, punitive, and annexationist peace that would surrender large amounts of territory and require the payment of heavy reparations. Lenin argued that such a deal would provide the revolution with the necessary breathing space to gather its forces and prepare for the impending civil war.

The second faction, led by Trotsky, took a “neither peace nor war” stand, refusing to sign an annexationist deal but unwilling to fight either. Preobrazhensky described this as a one-week alternative that would inevitably give way to one of the two fundamental positions: whether or not to accept the deal on offer. Trotsky sought to drag out the negotiations, hoping that revolutionary action in Europe would come to the rescue.

The third faction was that of the Left Communists, led by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, who proclaimed the need for a revolutionary war against an unjust treaty. On February 17, Preobrazhensky wrote that the three tendencies “essentially came down to two: either for signing the annexationist peace or for socialist war.”

He argued that an “annexationist peace” would “inflict the most severe blow to the international workers’ movement,” as it would put “end to the War according to the imperialist method, with annexations and indemnities in the East.” This would “open up the possibility of peace in the West on the basis of a compromise between the bourgeoisies of Germany, England, and France.”

For Preobrazhensky, Soviet power would remain “under the constant threat of violence from the German counter-revolution” in the wake of such a peace: “Retreat in the face of German imperialism would be only the beginning of a general retreat along the whole battle-front, and liquidation of the Revolution.” He insisted that a revolutionary war, “no matter how badly we are prepared for it,” was “inevitable and has already begun.”

He followed this up on February 21 with another article arguing that the authority of Soviet socialism rested “not in words, but in deeds” through the waging of “an irreconcilable struggle against the imperialists of all countries, taking a direct path to its goal and not betraying its principles under any conditions, even the most unfavourable.” A peace deal along the lines of Brest-Litovsk would “compromise the very idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, showing that even the workers’ power is capable of betraying its principles and surrendering its positions without a fight when threatened by the armoured fist of its enemies.”

Preobrazhensky published further articles making the case against Brest-Litovsk, to no avail. The treaty was signed on March 3, 1918. On March 19, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Moscow ratified the conditions for peace by a vote of 724 to 276, with 118 abstentions, as a panicked Soviet government conceded to a threatened German offensive.

In practice, the treaty lasted just eight months until the collapse of Germany’s own armed forces sparked by the Kiel naval mutiny, followed by the abdication of the Kaiser and Germany’s surrender to the Allies on November 11. The Bolshevik legislature annulled the treaty two days later.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is not easy to adjudicate the rights and wrongs of the issue so long after the event. It is arguable that the collapse of the treaty in a mere eight months vindicated the position of the Left. That collapse might have come sooner if the Bolsheviks had opposed its annexationist terms. The replacement of principle by expediency certainly set a terrible precedent for subsequent events.

Primitive Socialist Accumulation

Preobrazhensky’s preface to The New Economics explained that it consisted of a “historical” section, involving “a brief review of socialist and communist conceptions of socialism,” and a “theoretical” section that discussed his methodology for studying the Soviet economy and the basic laws regulating its development.

His editors M. M. Gorinov and S. V. Tsakunov have described this work as “perhaps one of the most important results of the development of Marxist thought in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.” Richard B. Day, the translator of many lost works by Soviet economists of this period,  notes that Preobrazhensky’s economic work evinces “a rigorous commitment to scientific integrity that sustained him through years of heated debates with N. I. Bukharin and abusive denunciations from lesser-known party functionaries.”

Preobrazhensky’s theory analysed the smychka alliance between the countryside and cities, or the peasant farmers and the urban workers, during the 1920s. The Soviet government introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) after the collapse of War Communism in 1921. It restored commodity production in the countryside, and the production of food and raw materials recovered.

Meanwhile, the replacement of workers’ control with market prices for state-owned factories improved efficiency by raising productivity. However, as Preobrazhensky explained in his pamphlet From NEP to Socialism, this meant that “large-scale state industry began to work for the market” to a considerable extent.

The output of peasant farms recovered faster than that of the factories, and the expansion of rural production encouraged a shift of investment resources from urban industry to the countryside, exacerbating the trend toward relative disparities in the rate of productivity growth. The price of peasant produce fell, and the relative price of factory-produced goods  rose. This disparity led to what was known as the “scissors crisis.”

At the same time, the government monopoly of foreign trade prevented peasants from directly selling their products on the world market. Preobrazhensky wanted to protect Soviet industry from the competition of cheaper foreign commodities. He insisted that the monopoly of foreign trade must “fence off Soviet territory from the disintegrating operation of the world law of value.”

Unable to sell on the world market, the peasants began to hoard food and raw material products. Preobrazhensky sought to alleviate the goods famine by accelerating what he called “primitive socialist accumulation.” He proposed taxing or, in a controversial turn of phrase, “exploiting” the peasantry by forcibly underpaying for raw materials and food.

This would, he argued, produce a surplus to be invested at first in heavy industry, providing domestically manufactured equipment for light industry. By raising productivity in this manner, the Soviet authorities could reduce the prices of consumer goods and restore the smychka.

Preobrazhensky’s theory of primitive socialist accumulation was not in this sense incompatible with Stalin’s vision of “Socialism in One Country.” His version of socialist transition emphasized the national development of the planned economy outside of the international capitalist system and the capitalist law of value. While he sought democratic reform, his priority — and the prerequisite for socialist transition in his view — was the economic development of a noncapitalist, centrally planned economy.

There were essentially two solutions to the crisis facing the Soviet economy in the late 1920s. One was a move toward the free market, as advocated by Bukharin, permitting international trade, abolishing the state monopoly of trade, and overseeing a form of state capitalism. The other was increased taxation of the peasantry for investment in industrial development and the implementation of state planning, as advocated by Preobrazhensky.

In 1928, having previously defeated the Left Opposition, Stalin broke his alliance with Bukharin and chose the second path, based on collectivization in the countryside, forced industrialization, and state planning. Preobrazhensky welcomed Stalin’s attack on the kulak as a triumph for “our course in the countryside” and a vindication in his decade-long struggle over the call for primitive socialist accumulation. In doing so, he had reconciled himself to the triumph of expediency over principle.