Comrade Frumkin Was Right

This is about a forgotten prophet of the twentieth century. In 1951, the case of party member M. S. Frumkin came for investigation to the party control commission in Moscow. Frumkin was accused of adopting "a Trotskyist standpoint on matters of building socialism." 

The scandal arose in the context of a lecture that Frumkin gave on April 11, 1951, to teachers of the USSR transport ministry college for commanders of its armed security forces. The unpromising subject of Frumkin's lecture was "The conditions of material life of society." In the course of the lecture Frumkin remarked:

Transitional forms of production relations can exist not only during the transition from capitalism to socialism but also, conversely, during the transition from socialism to capitalism.

This opaque remark caused uproar. As the investigator commented afterwards, Frumkin had contradicted Stalin's "entirely clear" teaching on the transition from capitalism to socialism; according to Stalin, transitional production relations arose only in the context of movement from a lower form of society to a higher form -- not the other way around. The listeners protested. What was this "transition from socialism to capitalism"? One commented:

Comrade Frumkin's statement contradicts the laws of historical development of society ... it would follow from this formulation that the socialist system should be replaced by the capitalist [system].

Another asked:

Why was so much blood spilt in the struggle for socialism, if a return to capitalism is inevitable?

Instead of recognizing his mistake, however, Frumkin went on to defend it to the listeners, giving three historical examples of transition from socialism to capitalism:

• The fall of the Paris Commune (1871)
• The crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919)
• And the defection of Yugoslavia to the camp of imperialism (1948)

As I read the report (in the Hoover Institution's Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and State collection, RGANI, fond 6, opis 6, file 1643, folios 26 to 28), my interest mounted. These seemed like good examples to me. How would the listeners respond? But they objected: "These examples are incorrect!" Frumkin took a step back: the issue had "not been worked through and was for discussion."

Over the next few weeks Frumkin maintained this position. During this time he was first criticized at a party committee meeting in the college, and then reprimanded by the township party committee "for the political error that he committed and for reluctance to correct it at the proper time."

When the matter came finally to the party control commission, Frumkin accepted his mistake, putting it down to a "slip of the tongue." He claimed that he had confused it with the possibility of a violent capitalist restoration from outside, of the sort that Stalin himself had admitted in a letter "On the Final Victory of Socialism in the USSR," published in Pravda on February 14, 1938. Since Frumkin now accepted his mistake, and had been penalized within the party, the party control reporter proposed no further action.

Who was Frumkin? We are given only a few details. We know his initials but not his given name or patronymic. He was born in Russia in 1903; his family background was working-class. He joined the communist party in 1925. In 1935 he graduated from the Lenin Military-Political Academy in Leningrad. From there he was sent to teach in military schools in Briansk, then Gor'kii.

In 1943 Frumkin was taken into the Red Army where he served until 1946 as deputy chief of the political department of the 153 rifle division. On demobilization he was appointed deputy chief of administration of educational establishments for the RSFSR ministry of trade, and then section chief of the ministry of transport college where the incident took place. By the time of the investigation he had been moved on -- or down -- to be a political instructor in the security establishment of the Moscow-Riazan railway.

In short, Frumkin was a functionary of his time; there were millions like him in everything but that instinct that led him, for a few weeks in 1951, to defend the idea that history could go in reverse. Frumkin would have turned 88 in 1991, so he is unlikely to have lived to see his prophesy come true.

Mark Harrison : 31 May 2009 23:37 |  Tags: History Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem