One of the paradigms developed by Marx and Engels was that the impending proletarian revolution would proceed in several stages before the state would "wither away" of its own accord. One of these stages was what Marx termed the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Basing his analysis on the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, Marx argued that the proletarian revolution would have a strong entity, but one that worked to erase class differences and acted as a meritocratic state. The dictatorship of the proletariat was though only a way station on to the end utopia of communism which would be a stateless and classless global society. This idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat became one of the linchpins for the Soviet Union's justification of its very existence. Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev contended that the strong central state was only a means to a communist end.
Some of this use of Marxian thought by Soviet leaders was a ex post facto justification for a strong state. Part of the problem was that while Marxist theory provided broad hypotheses for the trajectory of a revolution and historical development, few Marxist theorists provided little to no practical advice for running a state. Lenin's 1903 book The State and Revolution posited that the state was a byproduct of class antagonisms and that would have not much of a future after the revolution. Lenin though did little to contribute to the end of the state as helmsman of the nascent USSR. He instead entrenched a degree of state institutions and bureaucracies that made the state far more powerful. This was partly a tactical response to the wider geopolitical context of the USSR. While Marxists had predicted that a revolution would spread like wildfire among the world's proletariat once it had started, there was no global upheaval. Would-be bolshevik revolutions in Germany and Hungary were very short affairs soon snuffed out. The idea that the USSR could become like the Paris Commune, a brief affair squashed by counterrevolution, was something that likely lurked in the back of the minds of many Soviet leaders. The advent of fascism in Italy as well as militaristic governments in Japan and Poland all underscored the importance of maintaining a strong state to prevent 1917 from becoming like the Commune.
The emergence of the fascist threat became a further justification for a strong state. The general interpretation of fascism that emerged within the USSR's official discourse was that dictatorships like Hitler's were the last gasp of monopoly capitalism. In this schema, capitalist leaders sold out to a strongman to hedge against the threat of both the USSR and an internal proletarian uprising. This was a useful explanation for the massive growth of the Soviet state under Stalin, but it lasted beyond 1945. Capitalist states all had the potential to become fascist in this schema; and Eastern bloc propaganda often stressed the continued presence of former Nazis like Hans Globke within the Western states' governments as evidence of this possibility. Given the losses suffered from the German invasion, strengthening the Soviet state further also had a degree of logic to it for both the Soviet leadership and the wider population.
A number of Marxists and other leftists though did look at the Soviet leadership's justifications for the strong state as self-serving and retroactive. There is a degree of merit to these charges and one of the consistent themes of critique of the USSR was that its strong state was an end onto itself. Stalin in a 1938 meeting with his cief propagandists joked:
It’s often asked: What’s the deal? Marx and Engels said that as soon as proletarian power is established and nationalizes the means of production, the state should wither. What the hell? It does not wither? Its death is overdue. We’ve lived twenty years, the means of production have been nationalized, and you don’t want to wither.
The surviving notes of the meeting show Stalin was joking here and he went and said that 1917 was a fundamentally different turn of events that neither Marx nor Engels could have prophesied. The Soviet regime had birthed a new form of power and one that was very different than the Commune. This was in line with earlier statements of his which argued that strengthening the state was an integral component of preparing for its abolition. The revolution needed to be secured against hostile counterrevolutionary forces and that meant both a strong military as well as forcing industrialization. Critics of the USSR then and since have noted that even with the fascist threat, this is a justification for strong state power that is self-sustaining.
However, there is also evidence that a number of Soviet leaders believed their actions in building the state were for this end. Stalin's personal copy of State and Revolution has his personal notations disagreeing with Lenin's notions of all states being class-repressive. Lenin too did not fully abandon the idea of building a state that would be abolished. The very structure of Soviet government was also embedded with strong meritocratic and social leveling tendencies- in theory- in which promotion was determined by class background and abilities. Open access to education, promotion within the factory, and membership within the Party were open to all with the right class background. Shortages were endemic within the planned economy throughout the USSR, but there were no hyper-rich either.
Nonetheless, the promise of Communism was an albatross around the neck of the Soviet leadership after Stalin. Khrushchev, for example, predicted that Communism would arrive by 1980 in the Soviet sphere, a bold declaration that soon became the butt of many jokes. Brezhnev was canny enough to avoid such prognostications, but his leadership saw a considerable degree of rot and corruption set in as Soviet elite within the state received access to special luxuries. While these items were not on the scale of a Western billionaire- they could be things like fur coats, Western stereos (Putin was reportedly very fond of these while a KGB officer in Germany), or automobiles- it was a source of disgruntlement among the wider population that suffered from shortages and had to wait in long lines. One of the many Brezhnev jokes that circulated at the time had the Soviet leader showing off his dacha and limousine to his mother who asks, "son, this is nice, but whispers what if the Bolsheviks come back?" Gorbachev's reforms and restructuring of the Soviet state were in many ways trying to get back to the ideal of a state that would create a society that would render it superfluous. He opened up the Party structure to more people, tried to loosen the intertwined relationship between the Party and state organizations, and restructured the Supreme Soviet into a more powerful institution rather than as a toothless rubber-stamp for the Politburo.
The existence of the state, and a very powerful one to boot, was a contradiction to Marx's predictions of it withering away. For all of their claims that circumstances necessitated a strong government, successive generations of Soviet leaders recognized that the notion of a state withering away was a problem. The formula that emerged to explain this reality- that a strong state would build a society that would no longer need it- was at its core a contradictory one. The contradiction was livable when there was a clear threat like the Third Reich, but this became harder for the state to sell after Hitler was defeated. The failure of the postwar Soviet state to provide its citizenry with the promised ease and higher quality of life the dictatorship of the proletariat promised meant that assurances of a utopian Communism without the state receded into the realm of fantasy rather than being an actual tangible goal.
Sources
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. New York: Penguin, 2017.
Miller, Chris. The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
White, James. Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.