The paedagogical clarity of these remarks cannot be denied. But readers
will doubtless have noted the dark irony of the use on four occasions of the
verb ‘eliminate’: in this domain, at any rate, Stalin knew what he was talking
about. The intention is not only paedagogical; it bears the stamp of plain
good sense. For it is true that the October Revolution did not revolutionise
the Russian language. The implicit adversary here is not only Marr, whose
Marxism was belated and naïve, but Paul Lafargue (who is explicitly criticised
at another point in the text), whose text on the language of the French
Revolution was one of the first (and not the least) attempts to think about
language in the light of Marxism.^13 In the context of post-war Stalinist
repression, and the wave of nationalist delirium that had gripped certain
sectors of Soviet science (and which was formulated in the ultra-leftist concept
of ‘proletarian science’), we can understand why Western linguists of all kinds
breathed a sigh of relief: better good sense, even if a bit dull, than pseudo-
scientific elucubrations. But it is sufficient to shift the focus of attention slightly
to appreciate the extent to which Stalin’s text is problematic, for two reasons.
In fact, Stalin adopts as a self-evident truth the architectural metaphor of base
and superstructure, which derives from Marx’s overly famous text in the
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.^14 This metaphor
poses countless problems, not the least of them being the determinist conception
of the superstructure which it seems to propose. Stalin’s good sense therefore
naturalises (which is generally the function of good sense) a complex, debatable
philosophical construct. All the more so in that Stalin’s addition to it, which
represents his theoretical contribution – the existence of a ‘socialist mode of
production’ distinct from the communist mode of production and preceding
it – is even more problematic. Today, we regard it as an unhappy attempt to
theorise and naturalise a particular historical situation: socialism in one
country. And, if it is accepted that Soviet ‘socialism’ is not a mode of production,
the argument about the continuity of the Russian language falls: there is no
reason for it to be profoundly revolutionised if the mode of production has
not radically changed, but only begun to change – that is, if socialism is
conceived as a transition period. Obviously, this does not mean that the
October Revolution did not affect the capitalist bases of Russian society. It
The Marxist Tradition • 77(^13) See Lafargue 1936.
(^14) See Marx 1975, pp. 425–6.