We have established a link between the Russian revolution and the general European crisis unleashed by the First World War. Some have argued – even categorically so – that without the war, the Tsarist system would have survived. This line of argument is strengthened if we recall that the 1905 revolution seems to have been triggered by Russia’s defeat at Japanese hands. We do not know what would have happened in Russia had there been no world war, or had Russia been able to stay out of it. The latter scenario is of course utterly counter-factual, and the only thing that can be claimed with certainty is that wars, whilst not the only determinate causes, accelerate the collapse of regimes that prove incapable of winning them. The Tsarist regime had already lost wars in the nineteenth century and its defeat in 1905 by Japan – a seemingly much weaker power – was immediately followed by a revolution. Examination of the causes of these defeats leads to the conclusion that Russia was in a state of crisis that could only deepen before and during the major cataclysm of 1914–18. After 1905, nothing had been done to redress the situation and no adequate preparations were made for any subsequent war. Social problems were left to fester and the regime itself (its way of governing) was in an advanced state of decay and had lost contact with reality. If this diagnosis is correct, then it was not the war that toppled Tsarism. It was already undermined by a crisis, and it was this that led to its military defeats and subsequent decomposition. The fact that other, more modern parties and social groups, which should have been able to assume control, failed to prevent the regime’s collapse is further proof of the existence of a grave systemic crisis. This condemned to impotence the narrow Tsarist establishment, the elites who represented alternative middle-class and inter-class sympathies, and also the still embryonic multi-party system brought about by Russia’s development since the beginning of the century. In circumstances of military defeat and an ever more feeble government, the disgruntled soldiers and humiliated officers of a defeated army played a decisive role in the Civil War and the victory of the Reds. This was one of the key features of the whole upheaval of 1917–21 – not to mention the fact that those soldiers were overwhelmingly peasants.
It is important to stress the impact of the military factor in these years. The effects of the First World War and the Civil War were the subject of a roundtable discussion by scholars in Moscow in 1993, which unearthed new data in the archives. Its conclusions are of interest.
A first paradox is that the war, which was initially a unifying factor among considerable sections of society, was also something in whose absence February 1917 would not have occurred. At the outset, the war kept millions of soldiers in the trenches, but as it unfolded it increasingly fractured society. By creating 2 million deserters and arming the nation, it supplied the fuel without which the Civil War would have been impossible. In this respect, pointing the finger at the Bolsheviks makes no sense: they contributed to the downfall of the old regime, but the objective conditions of its collapse were not of their making. More than 15 million soldiers served on the eastern front, around 3 million of them in auxiliary duties – more than the French and British armies combined. They represented the bulk of the nation’s workforce, people aged between twenty and forty and hailing from all social groups – in a word, the country’s lifeblood. On the eve of February 1917 there were 10 million soldiers in the armed forces, 7.2 million of them in the regular army. This means that in two and a half years of war, about 5 million of those mobilized and active had died in combat or as a result of their wounds, or had been taken prisoner, fled, or been invalided out. Almost one in three! These were staggering losses – much higher than anything suffered by the other belligerents.
Russia’s soldiers paid with their blood for their country’s technological backwardness and lack of preparedness. They had to hump heavy loads; they had to toil hard; and they were poorly fed: amid a dramatic shortage of all kinds of supplies, the army received no more than between 30 and 60 per cent of its peacetime requirements. The enormous military losses profoundly altered the socio-political situation in the country. Masses of people now had access to arms and their psychology was that of front-line troops. A large number of regular army officers and category one reservists perished. They were replaced by second and third category reservists, and by men who were over the age for military service and who were not really fit to serve or ready to risk their lives. The highest losses were recorded in the elite units (Cossacks, imperial guard) and among regular officers and sergeants – the army’s backbone. Wartime ensigns and reserve officers had also been hard hit. This was how Tsarism lost its main prop: the army. The monumental mistake made by Kerensky in July 1917, when he threw the troops into a new offensive, contributed still further to the demoralization of this mass of armed peasants, who were soon going to disperse throughout the country with their weapons. They would swell the ranks of all kinds of bands, whether of ‘greens’ (neither red nor white) or mere bandits, while providing the peasantry with the weapons and leadership it needed to seize the land from the landowners and redistribute it. This was a major contribution to turning the crisis into a deepening catastrophe.1
These are important points. Nothing is more dangerous and devastating than a demoralized army collapsing into banditry, and it was on these masses of deserting soldiers that the two sides would draw to conduct the Civil War. If, as we have seen, the NCOs were workers and the soldiers predominantly peasants, the officers derived from the middle classes, the intelligentsia and the nobility. The Whites rallied to their cause officers, cadets, and what remained of the Cossack units; the Reds counted on party members, factory workers, a sizeable contingent of NCOs from the Tsarist army, and even – more surprisingly – many officers.
The fact that defeated soldiers played such an important role in the decomposition of the old regime and the creation of a new one is further evidence that the result of the war was attributable to the regime’s dilapidation, not to misfortune. It also confirms the plebeian character of the revolution. It is puzzling that the authors I have drawn on here refer to the ‘soldiery’ without mentioning that they were peasants. In the introduction to his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky describes it as a predominantly peasant phenomenon, involving the rural masses whether in or out of military uniform.
The picture of post-revolutionary Russia we sketched in Part One (Marxist intellectuals, an enormous mass of semi-literate party members and even cadres, breakneck industrialization, and a leadership cult straight out of an old political repertoire) brings into focus the issue of Russian backwardness.
The key syndrome in this underdevelopment was the chasm (i.e. the historical gulf) between the elites and the bulk of a still rural population. In itself a cause of crises, this distance, which was deeply rooted in Russian history, could only exacerbate the socio-political crises that did occur. The tendency of a state to respond to problems with repression rather than flexibility and compromise is a familiar scenario, and it is not impossible that Stalin reasoned thus.
The other dimension of the same problem was the historical distance between an underdeveloped empire and the developed countries. In such a situation, the problems to be resolved are defined both by the ‘advanced’ countries and by those that have to catch up with them. The more powerful the imperative to quicken the pace, the more crucial the state’s role becomes – especially when this scenario has long been operative in the country’s history. In Russia, the problem was especially acute because of the lack of ‘cohesion’ (tseplenie – a term used by Miliukov) between the various social strata, who geographically inhabited the same territory, but who did not live in the same century economically, socially and culturally. Lenin had clearly identified this problem when he distinguished between five socio-economic strata (or structures), ranging from the landless peasant who still used a wooden plough to the ultra-modern financial and industrial groups in Moscow or Petrograd. These structures (uklady) were used in the USSR itself by critical historians to challenge the thesis defended by party conservatives in the 1960s – namely that the 1917 revolution was a socialist revolution and the system a bona fide developed socialism. These historians, who advanced a different interpretation of 1917, started out from Lenin’s ‘structures’ to show that the Russian revolution was not and could not have been socialist, implying that the ruling conservatives were making false claims. This debate occurred during a conference at Sverdlovsk, and readers will not be surprised to hear that the historians lost their jobs, under pressure from Trapeznikov, whom we have already encountered.
If we regard it as a central feature of Russian economic and social reality in 1917 that the overwhelming majority of the population had not yet entered into the industrial age, we are bound to assign great significance to the surplus dose of backwardness and underdevelopment occasioned by the Civil War. In conditions where merely staying alive was difficult enough, it was normal that the most sophisticated forms of human organization should have been the most vulnerable, while the most basic forms of activity, providing at least some food and fuel, had the best record of survival. As regards economic, demographic, political and cultural indicators, the regime’s starting point in 1921 was in fact some fifty years in arrears. Many landowners and businessmen had been killed during the Civil War; many more had emigrated. The landowning class (about 500,000 people, including family members) and the grande bourgeoisie (125,000 people) had disappeared. A mere 11–12 per cent of former landowners – most of them small ones – remained in the countryside, working in the manner of peasants. The losses in the ranks of the intellectual professions were also heavy. On the eve of the First World War, 136,000 people with a university education were employed in the economy, and an even larger number of semi-professionals. They were mostly hostile to the new regime and it is assumed that a high proportion of them emigrated, although we do not possess precise figures. It is known, however, that a majority of doctors remained and continued to work. But the ravages of war, revolution and civil war were even greater than the numbers betray. As a consequence of the war and the events of 1917, about 17.5 million people (more than 12 per cent of the population) were displaced and lived a precarious existence. Several million more were uprooted in the course of the next few years. Large towns lost many of their inhabitants. Between 1917 and 1920 the combined populations of Petrograd and Moscow fell from 4.3 million to 1.96 million (more than 2 million people emigrated). During the 1921–2 famine, many of those who stayed became refugees in search of food.
Some 3 million soldiers were killed in combat or died of their wounds or disease. Some 13 million civilians died prematurely, mainly because of the 1921–2 famine and a series of epidemics that gripped Russia (particularly the Spanish flu that struck the whole of Europe). In January 1923 the population of the USSR hit its lowest point – some 6 to 9 million below the January 1914 total. The combined events of 1914–21 plunged the Russian population into misery and inflicted colossal losses. Naturally, the economy was also devastated. The output of large-scale industry was only 13 per cent of the 1913 total (iron and steel a mere 4 per cent). Grain output was no more than two-thirds of the 1909–13 level, and that was a miracle which can only be explained by peasant vigour and endurance. Foreign trade had collapsed, and at the beginning of 1921 a disastrous fuel, transport and food crisis supervened. Protest and unrest spread among industrial workers, who were regarded as pillars of the regime.2 Never had the country touched such a nadir. The political effects of this enormous regression generated an ‘archaicization’ of society, with the destruction of many elements of civilization accumulated in the past. The consequences were momentous. There can be no doubt that such conditions were conducive to the formation of a primitive autocracy. In the short term, however, they triggered the New Economic Policy, which in many respects was successful and dictated a redefinition of the regime’s strategy.
In 1917–19, Lenin, who belonged (as we have said) to two worlds, reacted to the crisis of socialism in the West as a disappointed member of the Second International by creating the Third International (1919). Two years later he was facing a West that had begun to recover its strength and a Russia that was more backward than ever and scarcely the site from which to direct a world revolution. Moreover, it was now saddled with the challenge its revolutionary slogans and the creation of the Comintern presented to the West and East. One way or another, everything had to be rethought and placed in historical perspective. True to character, Lenin recognized the depth of the changes in Russia and the world and began to reconsider many aspects of the previous strategy, mapping out an entirely new one. Forced to react to dramatic historical developments, he switched perspectives and strategy. This rules out imputing any inflexibility to his ‘ism’, despite a widespread view to the contrary that is itself utterly inflexible.
The relevant ‘ism’ was largely shaped by abruptly changing historical conditions. The prewar period, when the forthcoming revolution was supposed to be a liberal one; the crisis unleashed by the First World War; 1917 with its very different perspectives; the Civil War and war communism; and finally the NEP – each involved sufficiently divergent conjunctures to require in each instance a change not just of diagnosis but also of strategy and the very goals to be pursued. It may well be that the essence of ‘Leninism’ consisted in Lenin’s ability to conceptualize and initiate these turns. If so, there were at least three different Leninisms, the last of which is especially interesting.
In 1921, with the advent of a period of domestic peace, the revision and adaptation Lenin engaged in involved all aspects of the system to be constructed, including its ideology. On 27 March 1922 he declared to the Eleventh Party Congress (the last one he participated in) that ‘the car is not travelling in the direction the driver thinks he is headed in’. This was a ‘classic’ Leninist declaration – especially when he added: ‘We need to rethink our ideas about socialism.’ This was followed by other public utterances of the same tenor in the course of 1922 and up until May 1923, in what became known as his ‘testament’.3 But already at the Eleventh Congress, frail as he was due to illness, Lenin had advanced a set of new ideas that paved the way for a substantial revision of previous concepts and practices.
Lenin now made a general recommendation: ‘We must learn from anyone who knows more about something than us’ – whether it be national and international capitalists, humble employees in a commercial firm, or even former ‘white guards’ if they were competent. For the important thing was to demonstrate to the peasantry that the new masters of the country were willing to learn; that they knew how to run the country and to do so to the peasantry’s advantage. This was followed by a stern warning: ‘Either we pass the exam of competition with the private sector, or things will be a total failure.’ Not unexpectedly, he then reverted to the idea of ‘state capitalism’ that he had already toyed with in 1918, and which seemed to him the best solution as long as it was kept within certain limits by the new state. This was a concept that allowed for a degree of realism while retaining a socialist perspective, even if it was postponed to a distant future. In his speech to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on 13 November 1922, Lenin reminded his audience that he had already raised this idea in 1918 (it had been inspired by the German war economy operated by Walter Rathenau). But it now had to be geared to the needs of a social alliance. He still saw Russia’s socio-economic system as composed of five structures, from private peasant farms to state-owned firms (dubbed ‘socialist’). The issue he now raised was whether ‘state capitalism’, which came second in the scale of progressive socio-economic formations, should not take precedence over socialism in the immediate present and future.4
The subject was a complex one, but the aim was clear: Lenin was trying to map out a different long-term perspective in the framework of his appeal to ‘rethink our ideas about socialism’. Given that the party was socialist, whence the need for this line of thought? What existed was a still primitive patriarchal peasantry with some isolated socialist forms at the summit. Although not socialist, ‘state capitalism’ would manifestly represent a real advance for Russia: ‘We have made a revolution, but it is preferable to achieve the state capitalist stage first.’ Lenin returned to the term when explaining the reasons for the introduction of the NEP: ‘state capitalism’ was the best way of establishing an alliance between peasants and government, by offering the peasantry a state that played the role of a major producer and merchant. Russia was not modern enough to proceed directly to socialism; commencing with ‘state capitalism’ was the right course.
Lenin sought feverishly for a non-utopian way of preserving a long-term socialist perspective and ideals, while embarking on a transition towards realistic objectives, whereby the state would become a kind of collective capitalist with the aid of a private sector. In sum, this was a form of mixed economy of the same variety as Trotsky had proposed in late 1921 at a session of the Comintern (or its executive committee), but without using the term ‘state capitalism’. Trotsky explained to his audience that socialism was a distant prospect (several decades away) and that there was only one way for state-owned factories to become socialist: it led through the school of the market economy. Lenin had read this text, published by Trotsky in a small print-run. He found it ‘a superb pamphlet’ and wrote to Stalin and Molotov to request that they publish it in an edition of 200,000 copies. Naturally, they did not.5
The central feature of this thinking was the attention paid to the peasantry and the development of a corresponding strategy. In the texts that make up his ‘testament’, Lenin argued that while a radical policy had been appropriate in the context of the Civil War, it had to be seriously moderated in peacetime: ‘no communism in the countryside’, ‘no summary executions’, socialism is a system of ‘civilized cooperation’ – itself a task and a challenge, given that the bulk of the peasantry was barely literate. But such a declaration also signified that the state was looking for a genuine alliance with the rural world, which would respond to its vital needs and induce the countryside to understand and accept its policies. It also implied a significant rectification of the character of the dictatorial system. Dictatorships are not all established for the same reasons and the differences between them can be enormous – as ‘no summary executions’ attests.
Thus, all the elements were assembled: Lenin was ready to redefine the concept of socialism in accordance with Russian realities, to switch strategy towards the peasantry,6 and clearly to indicate the type of state he hoped to see. His plans for the functioning of the party, and the institutional set-up required to guarantee the ultimate primacy of the party Congress over its elected bodies (starting with the Politburo), are another crucial dimension of his new doctrine. And in this context we should not forget his dramatic call, albeit as yet secret, for Stalin to be removed from his top post.7
Fully to appreciate the scope and depth of the rethinking, we need to return to something that has already been discussed in Part One in connection with the conflict between Lenin and Stalin over the making of the USSR. We saw that it involved a clash between two political camps: between what was still ‘Bolshevism’ – a radical branch of Russian and European Social-Democracy – and a new current that emerged from the Bolshevik Party and which would become known by the name of ‘Stalinism’. It was a decisive battle in which the very nature of the new state hung in the balance: either a variety of dictatorship that rejected autocracy and addressed itself to society as it was (predominantly peasant), negotiating with it as it were, or an autocracy that prioritized violence.
The two currents seemed to be one and the same. In reality, however, there was a deadly antagonism between them, as is demonstrated by the fact that the victor set out deliberately and systematically to destroy his opponents. ‘Bolshevism’ remained part of the party’s jargon, but not of its substance. We must therefore dwell for a while on this political organization before it exited the historical stage.
The question can be answered by briefly examining the political turns effected and methods of action adopted, including their capacity to produce the programme we have just evoked.
We shall set aside the Bolsheviks’ pre-revolutionary activity underground (to the best of my knowledge, there is no recent monograph on this subject). But it was nevertheless an organized political party at the time and continued to operate as such during the Civil War and thereafter. The substance of ‘Bolshevism’ cannot be understood without a close examination of the way it functioned. A comparison between the texts of the early congresses and those of later ones indicates the profundity of the metamorphosis. Leninism was a strategy (or rather, a series of strategies) for transforming society. Bolshevism was a party organization, possessing various structures that ensured its functioning as such. It sought to preserve the popular character of the state in the making and excluded any regressive affinities with earlier forms of despotism. Policy discussions were a normal procedure; the exchanges were often sharp and decisions taken by majority vote. Virtually all the leading figures, and also many lesser ones, had crossed swords with Lenin, often vigorously, on key questions of political strategy. Ideological debates were a normal feature of inner-party procedure, which occurred not only in the restricted circle of the Politburo, but also during sessions of the Central Committee and, more widely, in party congresses and conferences.
Characteristically, even during the Civil War, when party cadres were mobilized and had to come straight from the front for meetings, congresses and conferences were yearly events, as required by party statutes. The minutes offer a clear picture of these gatherings: people not just discussing policy, but battling it out, with reports and counter-reports; the chair silencing a speaker from the majority so as to allow a representative of the minority to exercise his right to express his views or rebut the majority position. However highly respected, Lenin was frequently subjected to strenuous attack and could react irascibly. But that was it: such were the rules. A few years later, these procedures had disappeared without a trace. In view of future developments, it bears repeating that Lenin was not the object of a ‘cult’, either before or after the revolution. But if the term ‘charisma’ can be used without metaphysical connotations, then Lenin possessed it. It took a specially staged operation for his body, notwithstanding the protests of his wife and family, to be embalmed and thus ‘beatified’. This rendered him more dead politically than if he had been given a normal burial.
Founder and leader of the party and the state, Lenin never behaved as a despot or dictator in his party. He enjoyed genuine authority, but so to some extent did other leaders who found themselves in disagreement with him on many occasions, without losing their positions as a result. In the one well-known instance in 1917 when he did want to expel two leaders (Zinoviev and Kamenev) from the Central Committee, he was quietly told by the chairman of the session, Jakov Sverdlov: ‘Comrade Lenin, we do not act like that in our party.’ This is a revealing snapshot: in the course of a meeting where taking power was under discussion, Lenin, who was agitated and conducted himself in a emotional manner, was called to order by another influential leader who was in the chair. This modus operandi, which was constitutive of the Bolshevik tradition, persisted after the revolution. Lenin always operated in the framework of party procedures: he debated and protested vigorously, but accepted that all important decisions should be voted on, as required by party statutes, and was not infrequently outvoted. He was a leader, not a despot. He was a top leader of his party, not its proprietor. He cannot therefore be treated as ‘Russia’s dictator’, and even less so when we recall that during the Civil War the leadership was hyphenated to ‘Lenin-Trotsky’ in the eyes of the world and Russia itself – an interesting phenomenon given that the party’s founder was Lenin and him alone. But Trotsky was a co-leader of the revolution alongside him, and this was accepted by the party and by Lenin himself.
Bolshevism was a party, but it was also an ethos. Discussion could range far and wide. We shall offer a few examples of the issues debated in party bodies and in public. Thanks to the publication of the Central Committee minutes from August 1917 until February 1918,8 the debate about whether to take power in 1917 and, if so, with or without allies, is well known. Another example: in December 1920, Osinsky-Obolensky – a leader of the ‘democratic centralist’ oppositional current – published an article in Pravda. The party was still militarized and he himself was performing military duties at the front. However, victory now seemed assured and Osinsky believed it was time to tackle impending difficult issues. According to him, one of these was the task of reviving the party as a political organization once the military phase was over. He therefore proposed constitutional rules that would enable majorities to pursue their chosen policies, while allowing minorities the right to criticize and take the helm if the previous line proved a failure. Otherwise – and this was a warning to the leadership and ordinary membership alike – the party would perish as a political organization. Even though a paper shortage often reduced the main party daily to a single sheet, the article was published in Pravda.
A further example of debate on sensitive subjects was the post-mortem on the failed push on Warsaw, conducted during a party conference in late 1920. Part of the debate occurred in closed session (and there are no published minutes). But the other part was staged in public, and it was here that a party leader like Radek could taunt Lenin (the minutes confirm it) with a ‘We told you so’. Along with other leaders, he had warned that Polish workers would not rally to the Russian troops and that the counter-offensive on Warsaw was an error. I do not know who the main instigators of the Polish adventure were, but Lenin had endorsed the idea in the hope of rousing the German Left. He certainly did not enjoy Radek’s taunting remarks, but was obliged to listen to them. Trotsky too was opposed to the operation (this probably accounts for Radek’s ‘we’) and made it known at the Eleventh Congress without anyone contradicting him – something that was entirely acceptable in these years. In short, the left wing of the party had been against the operation and Lenin had erred.
Even graver issues were aired in open public discussion or broached in the party press: the evidence is available in the minutes of party congresses and conferences. Lenin was not alone in reacting to the problems that plagued the party. It was a poorly organized ruling party, acutely aware of its weaknesses and the low level of its cadres and press. It was also debilitated by a proliferation of internal squabbles and ‘cliques’, particularly in ruling circles at local and central levels. A major issue was the development of a growing, deeply resented gulf in power and privileges between those at the top and those at the bottom. This was an especially disquieting phenomenon in an egalitarian party of ‘comrades’, most of whom suffered material poverty. The problem was openly debated in party organizations and the party press; and the leadership, conscious of the depth of the malaise, sought to do something about it.
But an outcry from the base was not the only source of the debates forced upon a sometimes reluctant leadership. They themselves raised political and social problems and discussed them publicly, pointing to the dangers the party was exposing itself to. Witness the reflection by Zinoviev, a Politburo member, at the Eleventh Congress. Shortly before, Lenin had sounded the alarm about the disappearance of the ‘working class’ during and after the Civil War. According to Zinoviev, this was no longer the problem: the working class was being reconstituted, was leaving the countryside where it had sought refuge, and was ready to join the party. What worried him was the influx into the party of barely literate workers and many candidate members from other classes. He supported a temporary suspension of recruitment in order to exorcize the dangerous spectre of a process of degeneration – a kind of Thermidor from within (my term). Menshevik emigres were forecasting this as an imminent prospect and Zinoviev cited them to this effect – something unthinkable a few years later.
Increasing social differentiation within the party, on account of the influx of new members, was leading to the emergence of various ideological and political trends. This was the thesis defended by David Dallin, a Menshevik leader, in a book he had just published in Berlin.9 To his mind, there was no political and social life in Russia outside the party and army; and he therefore reckoned it impossible to eliminate Bolshevism from without. Contrariwise, this could happen as a result of spontaneous processes occurring inside the party. Dallin anticipated all manner of splits, plots and intrigues. Elements of the peasantry and various groups of workers and petty bourgeois were slowly acquiring a sense of their own interests. The intelligentsia was reacquiring its natural capacity for generating ideological currents (democratic, imperial, revisionist). All these would surface in due course ‘and political history will be full of their political battles’. All of this was cited by Zinoviev and features in the congress proceedings. Dallin mocked the naive idea that a purge (in the traditional sense of expulsion from the party) could alter anything when it came to the inevitable expression of the centrifugal forces in society. Zinoviev would not appear to have disagreed with him. He declared himself convinced that ‘there is, in fact, a molecular process in the party, which is not simply a reflection of internal struggles, but echoes everything that is occurring in the country more widely – the whole spectrum of the ongoing class struggle’. All manner of elements foreign to the world of work were penetrating the party, but he still hoped that the ‘proletarian core’ would endure, maintain the party’s original ideological commitment, and prevent alien elements getting the upper hand.
Zinoviev also reckoned that at this juncture preserving workers’ democracy would have a healthy influence on party life. The ‘workers’ opposition’ (composed of party trade-union leaders) deplored its absence and made it a central plank in its list of demands. It even demanded that such a ‘workers’ democracy’ should be strengthened by purging white-collar elements and muzzling the intelligentsia – a rather problematic way to create a viable party! These positions were not acceptable to the party leadership. The cultural level and class consciousness of workers at the time was too low to base party-building exclusively on them.
In fact, the party had no compelling answers to all these questions in the short term. What it could do was make the switch to the NEP without losing control of the process; improve the work of the party and its administrative apparatus; and undertake patient educational work, while excluding dubious elements. All this assumed an increased dose of central control and authoritarianism. Whatever the good intentions, democratic objectives were manifestly unattainable even within the party. Even so, the party’s old guard still hoped to maintain a democratic spirit and modus operandi in its upper echelons.
Members of the old guard remained committed to the pre-revolutionary ethos. For them, party membership was not the route to a cosy career. They had burnt themselves out in the party’s service during the revolution and Civil War and amid the ruins it left behind it. Many leaders were in poor health and their doctors warned them that they could not continue at the same pace. In several cases, they had to be forced by government decision to take leave and seek treatment, often in Germany or elsewhere abroad. It is true that many thousands who joined during the Civil War did not belong to the old guard in the strict sense, but they were still people who were ready to pay a high price for the cause. For the most committed members, in itself power was not a major concern. Membership was a commitment that exacted a personal price – not something that brought a reward.
All these debates occurred just before or during Lenin’s radical rethink, which lasted as long as he could think, speak and dictate. During his dramatic last appearance, at the Eleventh Congress, he vehemently criticized supporters of authoritarian methods – a point that we have not as yet mentioned. In these years, party members participated in numerous public meetings in clubs that existed throughout Moscow and probably elsewhere – meetings where party policy was freely criticized, if not roundly denounced. Some party conservatives railed against such ‘disloyal behaviour’ and appealed to Lenin to put a halt to these infringements of party discipline. During the Eleventh Congress, one of the ‘undisciplined elements’ – Riazanov – was present in the hall and the supporters of a hard line, hoping for Lenin’s backing, reminded him that he had banned political factions within the party in 1921, at a point when it was splintering into different groups and subgroups. Lenin’s lengthy response was unambiguous. He did not refer to the 1921 episode, but offered many past examples of fundamental discussions in the party and asserted that, in the absence of free debate, it would not have survived – and would not now survive.
The key point we are seeking to stress here is the following: Bolshevism was a political party that offered its members the right to express their opinions and participate in the development of its political line, and Lenin was eager to preserve it as such. In his speech to the same congress, he also declared that the party must free itself of administrative tasks and concentrate primarily on political leadership, leaving administration to professional bureaucrats, the forces of ‘state capitalism’, and cooperative organizations.
Such were the essentials of the last version of Leninism. There is no question but that the situation looked alarming to Lenin. In his last appearances, statements and writings, he countered the style and substance of the policy pursued after his death with a firm, lucid ‘No’. And this cannot be erased from historical memory.
As we know, the programme of this major figure, who had led a radical revolution but pleaded for moderation now that power had been conquered, was not implemented. The possibility of reflecting freely on the party’s problems, the currents it contained, or the threats it faced, was the prerogative of the historically specific political formation that called itself ‘Bolshevik’. As long as its various bodies functioned and the decision-making process followed the rules that stipulated the division of authority between them, there was no personal dictatorship either in Russia or in the party. The dictatorship was in the hands of the party, not Lenin. When it did fall into the hands of an individual, the party’s party would soon be over.
The bulk of old party cadres were still members and continued to regard themselves as such. But they sooner or later discovered that they were now actually somewhere else. Soon after Lenin’s death, they no longer recognized the party and reacted by leaving it, adapting to the new line, or joining one of the opposition currents (and perishing as a result). We know that the system was kept in one piece, but – as it turned out – at the price of its wholesale transformation, which involved mass terror against the party and a profound change in the spinal column of the party and system alike, which were henceforth dominated by classes dependent on the state.
Mensheviks (from abroad) and a number of internal party critics continued to advance the idea that political monopoly was bound to come into conflict with the inevitable social differentiation occurring inside and outside the party. Dallin anticipated an implosion in the more or less short term. And it might be said that something of the sort did in fact happen under Stalin’s absolute dictatorship. But it was not an ‘implosion’ consequent upon inner-party contradictions. Describing it in the terms and categories of the inner-party controversies of 1902–3, or the beginning of the Soviet period, makes no sense. The political scene had changed utterly. Terms like ‘party’, ‘Bolshevik’, ‘socialist’, and even ‘Leninist’ were still used – but had a quite different content. The pathological character of the top leader and the consolidation of his autocratic power – phenomena foreign to Bolshevism – now defined the essence of the political order. Rapid industrialization and population movements towards the towns generated massive changes, and increasing social differentiation was accompanied by the emergence of new social trends and interests. All this complicated the rulers’ task. Stalin detected a constant threat in these developments and natural differentiation, which were in fact positive phenomena. And throughout his long rule he waged a war rooted in terror against the cadres and broader layers of the population. This was the irrational core of his policy, exacerbated by the paranoiac dimension of his personality.
The Twelfth Congress of March 1923 may be regarded as the last one where the party could still legitimately use its revolutionary name, and the year 1924 as marking the end of ‘Bolshevism’. For a few more years, one group of old Bolsheviks after another was to engage in rearguard actions in an attempt to rectify the course of events in one fashion or another. But their political tradition and organization, rooted in the history of Russian and European Social-Democracy, were rapidly swept aside by the mass of new members and new organizational structures which pressed that formation into an entirely different mould. The process of the party’s conversion into an apparatus – careers, discipline, ranks, abolition of all political rights – was an absolute scandal for the oppositions of 1924–8. But their old party was dead. People should not be misled by old names and ideologies: in a fluid political context, names last longer than substances.
That Russia was not ready for any form of Marxian socialism was a self-evident truth to every Marxist. However, the mass of new members set no store by such theoretical considerations. They joined the party to serve the cause offered them, including that of thoroughly erasing the original Bolshevism. For a while, the impossible socialism served as a fig-leaf. Yet the events and trends we are studying cannot be described as the ‘failure of socialism’, because socialism was not there in the first place. Devastated Russia was fit neither for democracy as Miliukov understood it, nor for socialism, as Lenin and Trotsky knew full well. In these conditions, the original cadres found themselves flooded by masses of newcomers who shared neither their ideology nor their ethos. The ruling party, denounced throughout the world by the enemies of socialism and Bolshevism, reinvented itself for new tasks and realities, while retaining the original labels.
Viewed in this optic, Lenin’s last writings represent an attempt to refound Bolshevism in order to prevent the emergence of a totally different creature. Lenin realized that his opponents were inspired by the pre-capitalist forms of an absolutist state; and that Russia’s political culture, the character of the cadres formed in the Civil War, and the influx into the party of poorly educated new members with little or no political experience conduced to this regression. The country’s backwardness and the imperative of accelerating its economic growth likewise afforded fertile ground for the construction of a no-nonsense ‘strong state’ – something that could win over, or even serve as an ideal for, people dedicated to their country, whatever its current policies. This is even more true when the backwardness is hampering a country with an imperial past and potential and the pressure being exercised on it by more advanced countries is strong, prompting a commensurate popular mobilization in its defence. In such an atmosphere, the formation of a ‘despotic regime’ was not immediately perceived as altogether different from the construction of a ‘strong state’. Lenin had grasped the difference, called it by its name, and identified the real culprits. To put it mildly, however, most of his erstwhile companions from the heroic years did not get the point. And Bolshevism exited the stage soon after the death of its founder.