Paweł Krawczyk

The first Bolshevik in the beginning of 20th century can be blamed for may things, but wealth accumulation for personal use certainly wasn't one of them. The key figures in the Bolshevik movements may have been merciless war criminals, but their personal needs were at very basic level and they actively tried to highlight this equality with proletarians surrounding them.

For example, this is what Marcel Liebman wrote^1 about the earnings of the Bolshevik leaders during Lenin's times, that is from 1917 through mid-1920's:

Party members were obliged to pay over to the Party any income received in excess of that figure. This was no mere demagogic gesture. When a decision was taken in May 1918 to increase the wages of People's Commissars from 500 to 800 roubles, Lenin wrote a letter, not intended for publication, to the office manager of the Council of People's Commissars, in which he protested against 'the obvious illegality of this increase', which was 'in direct infringement of the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of November 23rd [18th], 1917,' and inflicted 'a severe reprimand' on those responsible. The 'specialists' to whom the new regime felt compelled to make concessions were paid a wage 50 per cent higher than that received by the members of the government.

But during Stalin's period something entirely opposite suddenly happened. Party officials started getting access to entirely new catalogue of privileges — high salaries, numerous extra bonus payments, access to restricted groceries, healthcare, accommodation, holiday homes, luxury transport and holidays at the Black Sea. And all that was happening right as Holodomor famine unrolled in Ukraine and Kuban, killing millions.

Do you think this complete reversal of previous Leninist policies caused any moral discomfort among Stalinist ideologues? Not an inch, revolutionary dialectics to the rescue! In 1934 Stalin delivered this fantastic speech^2 in which the very effort to reduce income disparity across the society was described no more, no less than “bourgeois equalization”!

Secondly, every Leninist knows, if he is a real Leninist, that equalization in the sphere of requirements and personal, everyday life is a reactionary petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of some primitive sect of ascetics, but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines; for we cannot expect all people to have the same requirements and tastes, and all people to mould their personal, everyday life on the same model. And, finally, are not differences in requirements and in personal, everyday life still preserved among the workers? Does that mean that workers are more remote from socialism than members of agricultural communes?

These people evidently think that socialism calls for equalization, for levelling the requirements and personal, everyday life of the members of society. Needless to say, such an assumption has nothing in common with Marxism, with Leninism.

This speech sounds very much like inspiration for George Orwell's “Animal farm” scene where the simple slogan “all animals are equal” gets unexpectedly upgraded overnight to “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”, as illustrated by this 1954 animation:

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Paweł Krawczyk https://krvtz.net/
Fediverse @kravietz@agora.echelon.pl