WHAT remained of the Bolshevism of yesteryear at the end of the Civil War? A changed theory with the old vocabulary adapted to changed circumstances. A veteran Parts with a tried and tested hierarchy, but whose ranks were gradually debolshevised by the army of recruits attracted by the magnet of power. At the Eighth Congress in 1919, 313,000 Party members were represented; in March of the next year 611,000 members.
Though the Bolsheviks were victorious, the fundamental basis of traditional Bolshevism was outlived. Nothing of it was left except the organisation of professional revolutionaries—a military conception. It is true that the original phalanx, their ranks decimated, admitted no change, convinced that they were faithful to their original tenets in spite of concessions to expediency. But within a very few years the impossibility of reversing the changes made became clear.
One by one Lenin's fundamental October theses were abandoned—soviet democracy, the suppression of privileges, equality of remuneration, the abolition of the professional police, army and bureaucracy, peasant usufruct of the land, the right of self-determination, Gradually faith in the immediacy of a Socialist world revolution, the imminence of the end of the capitalist regime, and the Messianic belief in the universal spread Of the Russian example faded from the minds of Leninists. Doubt began to assail the minds of the leaders, and conquered the mental passivity of the led. As for the non-political masses, overwhelmed with privation and poverty, they thought of nothing but day to day existence; they fled from the famished towns, and bitterly disputed with the rural authorities for their black bread.
"The dictatorship of the proletariat means that never yet has the proletariat of the capitals and the industrial centres been placed in so terrible a position as to-day," declared Lenin roundly; "the industrial proletariat, in attaining its dictatorship, is enduring unprecedented sufferings from famine." He added that the hunger in Moscow was abominable. Later on, insisting on the same truth, he said: "The dictatorship of the proletariat has imposed upon the ruling class, the proletariat, sacrifices, suffering and poverty, unprecedented in history." Again in 1921 he wrote: "The situation of the working class is very hard; they suffer frightfully." And a year later: "The people think remedies must be found for famine and terrible poverty." At that time relative sincerity in Government declarations was the rule.
Under these tragic conditions, the requirements of food supply and defence took precedence of everything else, to the detriment of theory and programmes. "We have committed many faults, but we had to act as quickly as possible, to reorganise our army supply at all costs...." In these words Lenin sought to excuse his divergences from his political theory, and to warn his followers against making the divergences the rule. But he was referring rather to economic expedients than to the dictatorial measures taken at first against his opponents, then against all classes of malcontents, whether workmen or peasants, revolutionaries or socialists. In publicly admitting his mistakes he did not include in them the abandonment of soviet democracy during the terror. On this point practice contradicted theory without eliciting any retractions from him.
He maintained that the dictatorship was exercised "by the proletariat organised in the soviets directed by the Bolshevik Communist Party." In practice nothing and nobody could withstand or mitigate this monopoly of direction, which came to mean exclusive power.
Rival parties were outlawed, in violation of the Constitution, and the remaining Social-Democrats, who had formerly been invited to sit on the Soviet Executive, were to pass into exile. But Martov and his comrades formed a "legal" opposition, having accepted the October Revolution as historically necessary, abandoned the Constituent Assembly, and even mobilised their members in defence of the Republic. "We will give you legal status, but will reserve power for ourselves only," said Lenin, who, however, kept power in his own hands, but did not legalise the position of his peaceful opponents. The Left Social Revolutionaries, like the anarchists, were ranked as counter-revolutionary. Afterwards the same fate befell the trade unionists, the Zionists and the most inoffensive Tolstoyans.
Liberty of the press and the right of assembly existed only in memory. Lenin's decree promising "complete freedom of the press" had no value except as a museum-piece. Not only the soviets, but the trade unions and the shop committees, were transformed into docile tools of the ruling party. To quote Lenin again: "All the committees of the great majority of the trade unions are composed of communists and merely carry out the Party instructions;" and the party was under the complete control of "a Central Committee of 19, permanent work at Moscow being carried on by two still smaller committees, the Orgbureau (Organisation Bureau) and the Politbureau (Political Bureau), of five members each elected in plenary session; a real oligarchy." Lenin did not shrink from the word "oligarchy" in spite of its implication, and he went on frankly to declare: "Not even the simplest question ... is settled by any of our republican institutions without instructions from the Central Committee of our Party," that is to say from one of the two all-powerful bureaux, from this "real oligarchy."
These words, written in 1921, expressed a profound change in the communists, who were determined to maintain in peace time the system and the so-called provisional methods suggested by civil and foreign wars. Trotsky, defending terrorism in special cases, had declared: "Our task will be easier, every citizen will have more freedom, and the pressure of the proletarian State will be lightened with every step of our advance." The contrary happened. Lenin also promised an early relaxation of the dictatorship, increasing mildness of the political system. But the "oligarchy" established summary methods of government under the state of siege and under martial law, which imperceptibly became second nature to the new Bolshevism.
The death penalty, abolished after the Red victory in agreement with their original intention, was restored three months later and maintained permanently after fighting had ceased at home and on the frontiers. At one time the Bolsheviks, in common with other Social-Democrats in Europe and America, joined with the International in demanding the abolition of the death penalty. Plekhanov's statement in 1903, which they quoted as their authority, only referred to a few exceptional cases. Lenin, referring to the defence of Hyndman, the English socialist, of the death penalty, criticised him for his "bourgeois and Philistine ideas." And when he had recourse to this extreme measure at the beginning of the Civil War, there were numerous protests from the Party—Dybenko went so far as to resign. But after years of practice and custom the only communist voice raised in 1922 against the inclusion of the death penalty in the Civil Code, the corner-stone of the dictatorship, was that of Riazanov.
Between 1917 and 1920 Lenin had successively declared for the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants, then for the dictatorship of the workers and the poor peasants, and then for the dictatorship of the workers. After October he did not hesitate to declare: "Yes, dictatorship of a single party, and we will not yield an inch." He came to the dictatorship of the Communist Party, the only one qualified in his view to interpret the history of the revolution, and finally to the dictatorship of its Central Committee, of its Political Bureau, of an "oligarchy." Such was Stalin's political education.
"At the bitter end, everything will revolve around one man who will, ex providentia, unite all power in himself." Plekhanov's prophecy was not yet accomplished but, in the opinion of many communists, it was on its way to fulfilment. "Dictatorship over the proletariat"—Trotsky's former criticism of Lenin—was the formula adopted by all the opponents of the new regime. The "Old Bolsheviks" of the Right recalled in secret their warnings in October against the "maintenance by political terrorism of a purely Bolshevik Government." Nevertheless Lenin personally was not inclined to personal power or to violence; he yielded to the force of circumstances and the development of a system.
It was the embodiment on the scale of an immense State of the military idea of the close organisation of professional revolutionaries under the orders of the "secret circle of leaders." But during the prolonged anxiety of years in which none dared to hope for lasting security, in economic distress and political and social peril, the democratic habit of the Party inherited from Social-Democracy gave place more and more to an increasingly autocratic centralism. The consequences of six years of civil and foreign war were not easily effaced. The Tenth Congress of the Party had to recognise "the militarisation of the organisation" and took measures to put an end to it, but with what success? Dictatorship and military discipline were essential in the "conditions of the struggle and the positive action demanded by historical facts," Bukharin was to write. "But if our Party...has a military organisation, it must naturally construct Soviet institutions in its own image."
Military exigencies were not the only cause of this evolution. Now, as in the past, economic disorder and peasant anarchy engendered counteracting military methods of organisation, subordination, and command, applied in earlier times by Peter, Alexander I and Nicholas I. Demobilisation might increase the trouble, and consequently an empirical solution was sought in "armies of workers," the utilisation of military units for urgent and elementary civil tasks.
Trotsky based great hopes on this partial application of the principle of compulsory labour, though the Mensheviks had declared that it must be uneconomic and parasitic and doomed to failure; one of them, Abramovich, compared the attempt to the methods employed by the Pharaohs for building the Pyramids, and, in Russian history, to the military colonies of Arakcheyev, who, under Alexander I, sought to mould the peasants to garrison life on the Prussian model, out of admiration for Frederick the Great. But Trotsky maintained that "labour armies had demonstrated their vitality," that "this almost scientific experiment lighted up our path." He rebutted the Menshevik argument by declaring: "The militarisation of labour is only an Arakcheyev method when it is carried out against the wishes of the workers themselves." This was practically an assertion of the identity of the proposal by the "oligarchy" with the workers' wishes, and the statement was liable to be disproved by the event. Trotsky's statement might be paraphrased as "the same methods with other aims." Replying to the Egyptian allusion he put the rhetorical question: "Who are the rulers? The working class or the nobility, the Pharaohs or the peasants?..." But this simplification of the problem did not automatically simplify the solution, and the labour armies had to be dissolved and their failure admitted. Stalin was president of the Council of the labour army in the Ukraine; but left no trace or recollection of his activity.
"Who are the rulers?" No one could have answered Trotsky with certainty at this transitional period of upheaval of the economic and social structure. The Political Bureau certainly ruled behind the facade of the Council of Commissars and the Executive of the Soviets, in the name of a particular conception of the interest of the working-class majority and of historical progress, but how clearly was that conception interpreted and how far could it reckon on the tacit assent of the people in the absence of conscious approval? To form any opinion on these matters some expression, however imperfect, was necessary of the wishes and sentiments of those workers and peasants whose sole representatives the Bolsheviks claimed to be.
Before the October Revolution Lenin had written: "The struggle of parties for power might develop peacefully within the soviets on condition that the latter renounce distortions of democratic principles such as allotting one representative for 500 soldiers and one for 1,000 workmen. In a democratic republic attacks on principle of this kind cannot be tolerated." He developed the thesis in his own fashion: "One workman's vote is worth those of many peasants." Contradictions grew: "We admit neither liberty, nor equality, nor workers' democracy if they are contrary to the theory of the liberation of labour." Who was to be the judge of whether they were contrary? The Party alone, that is to say its officials from the lowest to the highest, its super-imposed committees, its responsible militants constituting what Anglo-Saxons call the "machine" and Germans the "apparatus," and, in the last resort, the Central Committee, its two bureaux, in short a sovereign oligarchy whose members were co-opted.
Ever since the terror, the soviets, originally elected by the workers, then by the active minority, had been nominated directly or indirectly by the Party Committees, except in insignificant villages where there were no communists. But local power did not extend beyond minor municipal business. On instructions from the administration, the preponderance of the Party was ensured by the mechanical control of the machine over all the wheels of the State. Congresses of Soviets developed into meetings strictly regulated by paid officials, and were compelled to obey instructions from above and to vote resolutions automaticaily and unanimously. This metamorphosis of the regime was realised step by step, unconsciously, without premeditated calculation or preconceived plan; it was the result of the general lack of culture, of the apathy of the exhausted masses and the efforts of the Bolsheviks to overcome anarchy.
Lenin soon realised the facts, but he could not devise any other way of preventing counter-revolution in Russia, pending the spread of revolution in Europe. His well-known slogan, "We shall only attain final victory in association with the massed workers of other countries," is reiterated in his important speeches and reports. "The Russian proletariat single-handed cannot bring the socialist revolution to a victorious conclusion, he had written in 1917 in his farewell letter to the Swiss workers. "The complete victory of the socialist revolution is impossible in a single country; it demands as a minimum the active co-operation of several advanced countries, of which Russia is not one," he said at the Congress of Soviets in 1918. "It is obvious that only the proletariat of all the advanced countries taken together can win the final victory," he repeated in 1919. "Victory in Russia alone will not accomplish the revolution, without its extension to other countries," he reiterated in 1919. "Revolution will break out in other countries, or we shall perish," he was to say in 1921 in summing up frankly the ideas of the Bolsheviks in October. "We have always pronounced and repeated this elementary Marxist truth that, for the socialist victory, the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are necessary," he wrote in 1922. Trotsky always held the same opinion. The A.B.C. of Communism, by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, a text-book circulated by the million, said: "The workers' communist movement can conquer only as an international communist movement." The isolation of the Soviet Republic justified, in Lenin's eyes, every kind of coercion for maintaining the "dictatorship of a single party."
That did not prevent him from asserting, "we stand ... for a proletarian State based on the proletariat, whose administrative organs are elected by the proletariat. Our State grants the proletariat all political rights and attracts the peasants to it through the proletariat." In spite of these confused and contradictory statements, the Constitution became an ideal removed more and more from reality. And indeed the privileges "granted" to the proletarians by themselves, by their own State—as against communist principle, which by definition aimed at the extinction of all privileges—could not have been anything else but fictitious in the "terrible situation," the "unprecedented sufferings of the famine," "poverty unequalled in history," inflicted on this same proletariat, as Lenin admits.
Among other reasons this last turn of events had drawn from him the admission: "The peasants have certainly gained more from the revolution than the working class...which proves, indeed, that our revolution was, up to a point, a bourgeois revolution." Had he not in 1906 warmly approved Kautsky for having demonstrated that the Russian Revolution would be neither bourgeois, nor socialist) Not bourgeois, "because the bourgeoisie is not one of the motive forces of the present revolutionary movement in that country," nor socialist, because the revolution "could not in any way enable the proletariat to assume alone the hegemony or the dictatorship." The only Russian Social-Democrat, therefore, to foretell the approaching socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat was Trotsky, violently opposed by Lenin and the Leninists. Now Lenin no longer admitted the contradiction when he spoke almost in the same breath of a bourgeois revolution and the proletarian State, of peasants gaining economic advantages and of the political privileges of the proletariat. He generalised by defining the task of revolutionary dictatorship to be the building of "socialism"....
It was a singular reversal of roles: before the revolution the Social Revolutionaries, carrying on the Populist tradition, attributed a socialist character to the future revolution, while the Social-Democrats, both Right and Left (except Trotsky), were preparing for a bourgeois revolution; during and after the revolution both were to perform the exact opposite of what they had promised, except the Mensheviks, who had not gone back on this point, but were to ruin themselves by abdicating on behalf of the liberal bourgeoisie. Chernov and the Social Revolutionaries defended capitalism; Lenin and the Bolsheviks undertook, despite their theory, to impose socialism by force.
The latter were aware, nevertheless, that the great majority of the nation had followed them in October, not for their programme in it entirety, but to secure peace and land. They had no answer to Rosa Luxemburg when she wrote: "Socialism, by its nature, cannot be established by ukase. Their inconsistency was to justify her penetrating remark that "the greatest valeur and the most sublime sacrifices of the proletariat in a single country are inevitably caught up in a whirlpool of contradictions and mistakes."
But while Lenin justified the "dictatorship of a single party," and eventually an "oligarchy," in the name of the socialism which he was trying to establish in a country of whose immaturity he was aware, he replied to Kautsky's complaints by saying that "the soviet power is a thousand times more democratic than the most democratic of the bourgeois republics." He based his remarks on the text of the Constitution, which reserved for the exploited on paper many of the liberties refused to exploiters and parasites. But apart from the fact that the letter of the Constitution remained dead, Rosa Luxemburg had refuted the sophistry in advance, by showing that a franchise limited to workers would only be useful in a society able to assure all its members of useful work, and "a decent life worthy of civilisation." She admitted the impossibility in Soviet Russia of satisfying this primary demand of the toiling masses, who were thus deprived of all rights, and she concluded by citing the Marxian axiom that "it is the mission of the proletariat on attaining power to substitute for bourgeois democracy a socialist democracy, not to destroy all democracy."
But in order to understand Lenin, driven to expedients by the necessity of self-preservation of the Bolshevik State, and compelled to contradict himself by the cruel paradox inherent in the situation of a revolutionary vanguard in power isolated in the midst of a backward country, account must be taken of his absolute disinterestedness in the service of socialism and of his unyielding frankness to the working people whose cause he espoused. So far from idealising either his own acts or those of the helpers sheltered by his prestige, he looked the bitterest reality in the face and called a spade a spade—defeat, retreat, compromise, error, bore their true names. If the policy of the Party sometimes was guilty of demagogy, it was against his will; he waged incessant war on self-satisfaction, and continually encouraged healthy honest self-criticism among his followers, by precept and by example. Less self-deceived than any of his comrades, he was always the first to admit "we have made a mistake." In this connection his words at the beginning of the new regime must be quoted: "We are only beginning our task in Russia and at the moment we are making a bad beginning," and his advice to European workers that they should say to themselves: "What the Russians are doing badly, we shall do better." This was not the first time that he told his followers bitter truths, and it was not to be the last.
THE Political Bureau, the supreme organ of the dictatorship, whose very existence remained unsuspected not only in Russia at large but for a long time among the communist rank and file, was originally a secret insurrectionary Directorate elected by the Central Committee at the instance of Dzerzhinsky, a few days before the coup d'etat. It consisted of seven members: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. The rules of the Party did not provide for it, but experience in action showed it to be indispensable. The difficulty of calling urgent plenary meetings of the scattered Central Committee had given rise before this to a "small Central Committee" of eleven members who shared current responsibilities among themselves.
The seizure of power restored its function to the Central Committee, but the course of events and the exigencies of intensive and varied activity were soon to necessitate the creation of a new Political Bureau composed this time of four members (chetvyorka): Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov and Stalin, bound, before coming to any decision, to consult members of the Central Committee who might be in the Smolny Institute at the time. During the Civil War, Trotsky and Stalin were generally, like most of their colleagues, at the Front; Lenin and Sverdlov carried on the work of the Politbureau or of the Central Committee by themselves, seconded by Krestinsky, and at times by Kamenev, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky or Serebriakov, On important occasions, One body or other was specially summoned. There was no conflict of powers; it was necessary to act quickly and as effectively as possible, to shorten preliminaries and to economise strength by sharing responsibility.
Alongside the Politbureau, there was the secretariat of the Central Committee, conducted at first with the assistance of an energetic fellow-worker, Helen Stassova. This modest task had gained no special position in the hierarchy such as was afterwards confided to an equipage of five persons under the control of Sverdlov. When Sverdlov died, no successor of his calibre was found. Kalinin succeeded him as President of the Executive of the Soviets, while Stalin gradually absorbed his administrative functions at the Central Committee. Stassova continued to act as secretary, assuming an increasingly dictatorial manner which presently led to her being shelved.
As the Party grew in numbers and the dictatorship became stricter, it became necessary to strengthen the permanent administration and to define separate functions. With a membership of five—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev—the Politbureau handed over some of its administrative function to the Orgbureau (created in 1919) with the same number of members. The two bureaux had a common secretariat consisting of Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov. This was the summit of the edifice.
Under this system, the Central Committee properly so-called sat in plenary session at long intervals, and could do no more than ratify the reports and resolutions of its leaders and officials. In reality the Politbureau was gradually to reach almost absolute power, qualified only in decreasing measure by what public opinion was left within the Party ranks, instructed, disciplined and directed by a monopoly press. The Council of Commissars, the Executive of the Soviets, the Council of Work and Defence, the Supreme Economic Council, the Revolutionary Council of War, the Cheka—all the administrative organs of the State, were subject to it in fact, if not by Soviet law, and the Party was the main bulwark of the bureaucracy under which "sympathisers" and "non-party" men filled minor posts.
Trotsky alone of the Five of the Politbureau has published memoirs throwing some light on the personal relations of its members. "When I disagreed with Lenin," he says, "I mentioned it aloud, and, when I thought it necessary, even appealed to the Party." But Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, if they disagreed with Lenin, "which happened much more often than in my case, usually kept silent about it, or, like Stalin, sulked and hid away for a few days in the country somewhere near Moscow." Trotsky declares that differences between Lenin and himself were rare; they understood one another with few words; spontaneously and independently they reached the same conclusions. "Many a time," he says, "Stalin, Zinoviev, or Kamenev disagreed with me on some question of great importance, but as soon as they learned that Lenin shared my opinion, they lapsed into silence." We may regard the readiness of the "disciples" to renounce their own ideas in favour of Lenin's in any way we choose, but this readiness clearly contained no guarantee that without Lenin they were capable of arriving at the same conclusions.
The question arises of the value of Trotsky's testimony, necessarily laid under heavy contribution in any study of the men and the events of this period. Credence can obviously be given to irrefutable documents and to facts well-known and verifiable in Russia and in the international revolutionary movement. It is equally certain to anyone knowing anything of the man and his character that remarks repeated from memory have in no case been invented and may be accepted as genuine except for the exact words. But caution must be exercised in using passages dealing with internal dissensions in which Trotsky, sometimes unconsciously, modifies statements to suit himself and changes the facts, for example, by errors in date. His wilful temper leads him to distort his recollections on lines to which everything is made to conform in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Though he is exact in his memory of ideas, he seems to Suffer from amnesia with regard to his manifest errors and contradictions and his conflicts with Lenin, the importance of which he tends to minimise. Moreover, he remembers only the failings and misdeeds of personages who have broken with him, and only the virtues and services rendered of the very few who have retained faithful to him; he is more impartial if they disappeared too early to have had the opportunity of disavowing him. He is malevolent towards Stalin from a fundamental contempt which does not exclude the truth but which calls for prudence and discretion in using his material.
Trotsky admits that his relations with Lenin were shadowed on the occasion of a discussion on trade unions in 1920. Stalin and Zinoviev obtained, so to speak, legal means of transferring their conflict from the wings to the stage itself. They did their utmost to make use of the situation. It is proved that Stalin cherished jealous and tenacious enmity, dating from friction in the Civil War, against the most brilliant of the revolutionary leaders. But even the reading of Trotsky does not explain Zinoviev's motives. Trotsky does not explain why Lenin's closest auxiliaries showed hostility to him on every favourable occasion. Probably the old rivalries of the emigre period were revived as soon as the counter-revolution was mastered. And Trotsky, rather haughty and distant, convinced of his superiority, could not cause them to be forgotten.
The Party, quite unaware of the dissensions at the top, was surprised by the discussion on trade unions. The weariness caused by the years of civil war and the iron discipline imposed induced a certain intellectual and political torpor, shaken only on the occasion of the annual deliberative assemblies. This time outspokenness in the ranks produced a violent shock.
In 1920, at the Ninth Congress, there were signs of opposition against the dictatorial methods of the Central Committee, and energetic attacks upon the bureaucratic "degeneration" of the "oligarchy." According to Yurenev, the high officials of the Party stifled the right of criticism by getting rid of the protestors by measures amounting to administrative exile. "One is sent to Christiania, another to the Urals, a third to Siberia." Maximovsky denounced the despotism of the ruling bureaucracy and declared: "Fish are said to begin to putrefy from the head downwards. The Party is beginning to suffer at the top from the influence of bureaucratic centralism." Sapronov, becoming more and more the mouthpiece of these views, declared that no notice was taken of the decisions of the Congress of Soviets; commissars took upon themselves the illegal arrest of "whole provincial executive committees." He said from the tribune: "It's all very well to talk of electoral rights, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the tendency of the Central Committee to the dictatorship of the Party; in fact, this leads to the dicatorship of the bureaucracy of the Party." And he asked Lenin whether he believed that the salvation of the revolution lay in mechanical obedience. A workman, Lutovinov, said: "The Central Committee, and especially its Orgbureau, has been transformed from a supreme directing organisation into an executive dealing with the most minute and unimportant matters"; it interfered arbitrarily in the smallest details, and nominated even the most obscure officials. Yakovlev declared that the Ukraine had become a place of exile. "Comrades unwanted for one reason or another at Moscow are deported there."
The Opposition chose solid ground in demanding democratic centralism in accordance with traditional Party theory. But they put themselves at a disadvantage by insistence on parliamentary forms and by the inconsistency of their principal demand—the collective or "collegium" administration of businesses, in spite of the costly lessons of experience which induced Lenin to restore personal technical management. The Central Committee was unanimous in turning down this proposal.
At the end of that year the inextricable difficulties of productive enterprises, of the exchange, and of food supply led Trotsky to raise boldly and fully the question of the place of trade unions in economic life. He had saved the transport industry for the time being by applying to it crude army methods, with a perseverance recognised by Lenin and the whole Patty. Inspired by these first results of the system, he thought it opportune to extend it generally by incorporating the trade unions in the State and transforming them into governmental institutions for industrial purposes. This idea of a "democracy of producers" meant obligatory trade unionism for the workers, and for the trade unions subjection to the political and economic administration of the State, that is, to the Communist Party. Under Trotsky's plan the trade unions would have had no functions, Other than participation in production, in the workers' State. Lenin did not agree. The War Commissar's methods had already caused bitter conflict in the transport workers' union, and threatened the destruction of the whole trade union movement. The failure of the experiments in militarisation was conclusive. The hour had come to alleviate the pressure exercised on the working classes, not to make the yoke heavier. To make the trade unions State organisations would be premature. Lenin summoned to his side his regular co-workers, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kalinin, with trade union leaders such as Tomsky and Rudzutak, and prevented Trotsky from carrying out his plan.
The State of which Trotsky spoke was an abstraction, he said in a heated debate. "Our State is not one of workers, but of workers and peasants"; moreover, "one with many bureaucratic deformities." The trade unions had to defend the workers' interests against a State of this kind. "Such is the sad reality." The notion of a producers' democracy is inconsistent, a syndicalist error. "Production is a continuous, democracy an occasional, necessity." And after referring to the thousands of communist mistakes, he reiterated: "We have committed many mistakes, certainly. Perhaps most of our decrees require modification. I agree absolutely." But that, he thought, was no reason for plunging into Trotsky's infinitely more serious error.
Trotsky was supported by Dzerzhinsky, Rakovsky, Bukharin, Sokolnikov, Pyatakov, Andreyev, and by the three Party secretaries-Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov. For a moment Lenin was in a minority on the Central Committee. Once more he had to manoeuvre, to temporise, to wear down the solid bloc of his opponents. Keeping in the background as much as possible, he used every possible means of checkmating them, including Zinoviev's demagogy and Stalin's astuteness. The discussion soon took a bad turn, and degenerated into venomous polemics. Trotsky was very successful with large audiences, but Stalin and Zinoviev, under the aegis of Lenin, easily counteracted him among officials who were former militants, by lavish promises and by exploiting the various resentments and grievances left by the Civil War.
The Party decided rather by intuitive and personal reasons than by defined principles. The two "platforms" advocated at meetings held by the two sides were not strikingly differentiated; indeed both used many common formulas, democratic truisms, and pedantic and obscure terms. Both sides talked of the great historic mission of the trade unions. But had the time come to incorporate them in the State? The last Party Congress had said so, and Trotsky might make use of it. Lenin did not deny the fact but begged for no hurry in applying the decision. Trotsky maintained that incorporation was already being accomplished. Zinoviev accepted the principle and contented himself with discussing methods. The trade unions are a school of communism, Lenin maintained, and Trotsky did not assert the contrary. This Byzantine controversy, regarded by Lenin as an "inadmissible luxury" and a threat of schism, lasted for several months, rousing passion and even hatred. "The Party is sick, the Party is feverish," said Lenin anxiously.
The Tenth Congress was summoned to effect a composition between the two opposed groups. But more groups appeared in support of the great ones' quarrels. The almost recognised Opposition for Democratic Centralism, represented especially by Bubnov, Boguslavsky, Ossinsky and Sapronov, regarded the two principal groups as representing two tendencies of "one and the same group of former advocates of the militarisation of economic life"; for their part they merely proposed practical measures of reorganisation of the administrative centres of industry and of the trade unions. The Workers' Opposition, with Shliapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai, Lutovinov and others, advocated investing the trade unions not only with the administration as well as With the work of production, they desired also the "syndicalisation" of the State. Riazanov, almost alone in his opinion, denied the trade unions any part in economic life; their sole function Was the defence of corporate interests. Nogin foresaw the disappearance of the trade unions through their fusion with the State economic administration. But attention was concentrated on the propositions advanced by Lenin and Trotsky.
Stalin's visible share in this crisis was limited to one article, Our Differences, in which he paraphrased in simple phraseology, didactically and with many repetitions, Lenin's arguments against the application of bureaucratic, military methods in the trade unions.
After repeating that "our differences are not differences of principle," Stalin goes on to say:
There are two methods: the method of force (the military method) and the method of persuasion (the trade union method). The first by no means excludes all persuasion, but such persuasion is subject to the exigencies of the method of force, which it is intended to supplement. The second method also does not exclude some degree of force, but this force is subject to the exigencies of the method of persuasion, which it is intended to supplement. It is as inadmissible to confuse these two methods as it is to put the army and the working classes into the same bag.
This stylistic example is very characteristic of his writings.
The army, Stalin continues in effect, is made up mainly of peasants; that is why methods of force are necessary, as otherwise the peasants would not fight for socialism. But the workers, "a homogeneous social class, organise themselves voluntarily into trade unions, and are 'the salt of the Soviet State.' " He summarises his argument as follows: "Comrade Trotsky's mistake is to underestimate the difference between the army and the working class, to put military organisations and trade unions on the same level, to try by inertia to transfer the military methods of the army to the trade unions, to the working classes." The article reproaches Trotsky with "following out the same old semi-bureaucratic, semi-military line," and, in a calm and judicial tone giving no idea of the bitterness of the conflict, it argues for the necessity of the "normal methods of proletarian democracy in the trade unions" and for the use of "methods of persuasion."
In March 1921, the Tenth Congress put an end to the interminable argument by supporting Lenin with 336 votes against 50 for Trotsky and 18 for the Workers' Opposition. The resolution adopted was modified a year later, and the disputants agreed that the fevered discussion had no real relation to the problem. Peremptory assurance on one side, categorical certainty on the other—without considering the injury inflicted on the common task.
How came Trotsky and his friends to make the tactical mistake of provoking a pitched battle in which defeat was a foregone conclusion? At the time a struggle for supremacy in the Party meant raising the question of power. Lenin did not so much criticise the principles of the propositions themselves as the method of creating conflicting communist groups, at the risk of schism. The rally of strong personalities round Trotsky alarmed him as a symptom of future danger, and led him to lay a tighter hand on the Party administration and to use only the most docile instruments for the purpose. Instead of strengthening confidence in him, Trotsky had awakened the distrust of former opponents, who now sought to isolate him. All his supporters, except four, were driven from the Central Committee—limited to 25 members and 15 deputy-members, and among the victims were the three too independent secretaries—Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov. They were succeeded by the passively obedient Molotov, with two assistants. Stalin was a member both of the Orgbureau and Politbureau and worked for his future in silence.
The Congress carried on its deliberations in an atmosphere of suspicion and vigilance; the session coincided with an outburst of popular discontent. The Petrograd workers showed signs of revolt, the Kronstadt sailors threatened violence, the Red Army grumbled, there were definite peasant revolts in several districts, notably in the Tambov government. It was not a matter of "growing pains" in the trade unions, but of a real crisis in the revolution. It was no longer a matter of minor defects in the machinery such as were daily noted in the official press, but of a serious disease in the Soviet body politic. Bread, fuel, essential foodstuffs were lacking in town and country. Production, transport and trade were paralysed. In vain the terrorist dictatorship hoped to meet the crisis by requisition and repression; without a rapid change of tack the Soviet Republic would be on the rocks.
The Party had no foresight, but the first flicker of revolt sufficed to show Lenin the mistakes in his policy. While the Congress, knowing that the army could not be relied upon, was mobilising its members to crush rebellion, Lenin prepared his New Economic Policy, substituting taxes in kind for requisitions and restoring a limited freedom of internal trade. A hundred and forty members of the Congress departed for Kronstadt, a dangerous point because of its proximity to Petrograd and the possibility of foreign assistance. Trotsky took charge of the sanguinary business. Three hundred delegates were mobilised at a sitting. Before the vote on the trade unions was taken, the delegates from the peasant districts began to hurry home. "The Congress is fading away," said the President, Kamenev. Stalin delivered his customary discourse on the national question to a distracted audience, a discourse "with no relation to time or space," said Zatonsky. The Democratic Centralist Opposition did not push their argument. The Workers' Opposition, accused of Syndicalist heresy, alone persisted against the majority. The Congress, concerned with Kronstadt and guns, cut short its sittings.
THE economic situation steadily deteriorated from the first days of the revolution onwards. Contrary to their programme, the Bolsheviks had undertaken to introduce socialism—that is communism-without any transition, in a country whose unpreparedness they were the first to admit, at a time when stocks of food in the depopulated towns and the village reserves were exhausted. Driven by the desperate necessities of civil war and by the mystical-romantic strain inherited from anarchism, they destroyed all private enterprise, though they could not replace it by popular initiative; they confiscated the product of individual labour before they had created collectivist production.
The "privileged" classes, workers and soldiers, maintained a bare existence on a wretched ration, while the peasants, many of them half starved and all of them infuriated, defended themselves by concealing supplies, by refusing to sow, and now and then by arms. The "abominations of the Bashi-Bazouks," referred to by Lenin at a Communist Congress, still went on. Official resolutions promising considerate treatment of the peasants proved to be mere empty phrases, as were so many decrees, laws, instructions and circulars, like the Constitution itself. The 1920 harvest could not be other than disastrous. With an industry twenty per cent less effective than before the War, finances wrecked by the unlimited issue of paper-money, and foreign trade reduced to illicit and secret barter, the Soviet economy was evidently insolvent.
Later on Lenin called this War Communism, a formula designed to justify his policy after the event by the extraordinary circumstances of the time. But he contradicted himself once more by admitting the responsibility of the communists for the policy of blind and cruel spoilation. "We have made many mistakes," he said, "and it would be most criminal not to recognise that we went too far." He admitted their failure in this matter. "We have been defeated on the economic front, heavily defeated," he said, and added more precisely: "Our attempt to attain communism straightaway has cost us a more serious defeat than all those inflicted on us by Kolchak, Denikin and Pilsudski." Insisting on past errors, he continued: "Generally we thought it possible... to begin without transition to build up socialism." In fact, at one time his utterances were propagandist and encouraging to prevent despair, at another critical and truthful to destroy illusions or over-optimism.
War Communism was in fact at first a partly unconscious effort, then a conscious and determined one, towards establishing socialism "by assault." The authorised theorists of a party which claimed to follow Marxism had forgotten its least controvertible economic postulates in the madness of political success, as is abundantly proved by their conviction in 1920 that they could dispense with money. At that time Trotsky wrote in a manifesto: "Money wages tend more and more to be replaced by payment in kind; the continual issue of paper-money and its rapid fall in value merely attest the disappearance of the old financial and commercial system." At the end of that year the communist press announced free food for workmen and employees as "a further step towards the abolition of one of the capitalist survivals under the Soviet regime—the monetary system," as the end of the "fetish of money," since the public services—transport, housing, lighting, amusements—were all to be free. (The A.B.C. of Communism provided for the use of money in a socialist society before communism was attained.) Less than a year later Lenin, in a metaphor perhaps inspired by Thomas More, was advising strict care of gold in Russia until the time should come, "when we have conquered the whole world," to build in the public squares lavatories of gold.
Neither the socialisation of banks and of capital, nor the nationalisation of industry, nor the collectivisation of agriculture satisfied the plans of the October victors. Before the coup d'etat, Lenin, replying to the allegations of the bourgeois press that nationalisation and confiscation were equivalent, declared his real intentions with perfect frankness; he said the Bolsheviks on attaining power would nationalise the banks "without taking a kopeck from~ any owner of property," because for the Bolsheviks nationalisation simply meant effective control. Similarly the syndicalisation of industry or obligatory cartellisation "would make no change as regards property and would not take a kopeck from anybody." Lenin repeated "not a kopeck" several times. The suggestion of the expropriation of the peasants was a malicious invention, "for even in case of a real socialist revolution, socialists would not and could not expropriate the small peasant." These various promises ended in the complete socialisation of banking, industry and agricultural production. In the passion aroused by attacks on the revolution, they went on from "the expropriation of the expropriators" to the expropriation of the expropriated.
The seizure by the State of works and factories was no more a part of the Bolshevist than of the western socialist programme. Combating "the infantilism of the Left" in 1918, that is the utopists hoping for immediate, outright socialism, Lenin wrote: "We have already confiscated, nationalised, broken and destroyed more than we can do with." But the hostility of the owners and the technical staffs, the hopeless failure of workers' control, the incapacity of the trade unions in technique and management, the Brest Treaty with clauses protecting German property, pillage and the abandonment of industrial undertakings following on civil disturbance—all were incentives to the adoption of a radical solution. (The State monopoly of cereals was adopted under Kerensky in similar conditions, because no other course was open to him.) Nevertheless, instead of seizing the earliest occasion of demobilising the industrial army, the Bolsheviks were to end by idealising a makeshift, and under pretext of "seizing stolen goods," were to exist by seizing goods that no one had stolen. This negation of their principles, aggravated by misreading their own social theory, led to the terrible miscalculations of which the Kronstadt insurrection was the culminating episode.
The protest of the workers and sailors, originally absolutely pacific, was reflected by the discontent of the Petrograd proletariat, worn out by privation, disappointment and the brutal behaviour of the "Commissarocracy." At the end of February there were a great many strikes in the northern capital, and workers' meetings to demand bread and liberty, reform of the Soviets and the restoration of trade. Socialists of various shades seized the opportunity of shaping the agitation in conformity with their views. The communists replied by arrests, the closing down of factories where there was agitation, the suppression of demonstrations. Zinoviev, President of the Petrograd Soviet, Simply used police methods.
But cold and hunger, lack of coal and the reduction of rations—due partly to the stagnation of the railways—roused the people. The crews of the ships and the garrison at Kronstadt held an important meeting at which Kalinin himself was received With all the honours, with music and bunting. They passed a resolution demanding, in accordance with the Soviet Constitution and the Bolshevik October Programme, free elections for the Soviets; liberty of speech and liberty of the press for workers and peasants, Left Socialists, anarchists, trade unions; the liberation of workers and peasants who were political prisoners; the abolition of the privileges of the Communist Party; equal rations for workers; the right of non-profiteering peasants and artisans to sell their products. A deputation sent to Petrograd was Imprisoned. Zinoviev had no other argument.
Thereupon a provisional revolutionary Committee was elected at Kronstadt, where most of the communists had joined the movement. They merely issued proclamations, but that was enough to alarm Zinoviev, who infected Moscow almost with panic. The Council of Labour and Defence replied by decreeing a state of siege and denouncing the counter-revolution, Social Revolutionaries, the White Guards, the Black Hundreds, French espionage, Russian Generals.... This was conflict, not conciliation. Bloodshed became inevitable. After a fruitless summons to surrender, Trotsky ordered the bombardment of those he had once called "the pride of the revolution."
If the sailors and workmen of Kronstadt had meditated a plot or prepared a plan, they would have waited for the thaw which would make their fortress impregnable and expose Petrograd to the guns of the fleet. But they hoped to win simply by the justice of their claim, and the solidarity of the Russian labouring classes. The sons of poor peasants, most of them destitute, they knew they were the interpreters of the people's grievances. Their political sincerity and their fidelity to the revolution were both beyond doubt. But the heavy "machine" of the Bolshevik Party was no longer sensitive to the purity of the best intentions. Attacked on the ice by the Kursanti (selected cadets), the mutineers defended themselves, becoming rebels in spite of themselves. The Red Army, when ordered to attack the forts, refused to march. It had to be purged, reorganised and strengthened with communists arriving from the Tenth Congress. By a sinister and ironical chance the Kronstadt Commune perished on March 18th, the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune.
Some victories do not inspire boasting. Trotsky devotes just two lines in My Life to the Kronstadt affair, drawing attention to it as a "last warning" to his Party. Too much importance must not be attached to the vulgar diatribes of Bolsheviks anxious to discredit the defeated party, but it is probable that the counter-revolutionaries sought to share in the rising in order to turn its course to their advantage. But who was mainly responsible? Trotsky made it clear enough when he wrote: "The system of famine rations was associated with increasing disturbances culminating in the Kronstadt insurrection." And famine rations were the consequence of the so-called War Communism, tardily abandoned by Lenin after this "last warning."
But the legitimate character of the rebels' claims was implicitly confirmed by the change in policy, proposed by Lenin at the Tenth Congress, the adoption of the New Economic Policy, the N.E.P., which was to correct disastrous utopian measures. The essential requirements of the exhausted population were satisfied by putting a stop to rationing and arbitrary confiscation, by permission to small producers to sell their goods, by reopening the markets—in short by the restoration of limited and controlled capitalism. Even if political aspirations were still brutally crushed, economic relief appeared to mark the first step towards better times.
The N.E.P. brought solace to the country, but caused stupefaction in the Party. The distracted militants obeyed, without understanding. Riazanov was almost alone in daring to protest against Lenin's unusual procedure in brusquely Imposing a volte-face of this kind without preliminary consultation or any chance of consideration. The Workers' Opposition echoed him, but raised no serious objection to the accomplished fact. The gravity of the situation prevailed over formalism. "If we had not transformed our economic policy, we should not have lasted many months longer," Lenin told the next Congress.
The Party followed with docility, but somewhat unwillingly, before expressing its astonishment once more at the clear vision of its leader. But Lenin, in fact, acted late, and was by no means a pioneer. Had not Trotsky, two years earlier, invited the Central Committee, through Stalin, to wipe out the abuses which were overwhelming the "middle" peasants on the Volga and to punish the Soviet officials responsible? Did he not propose, next year, to replace requisitions by a graduated tax in kind, to establish a fair exchange of manufactured goods for agricultural products in order to stop the decay of rural life? Lenin thought to refute him by accusing him of being a "free trader," and the Central Committee rejected his proposal by eleven votes to four. Stalin, as usual, figured among the majority. Two months before Kronstadt, at the Congress of Soviets, the Menshevik Dalin advocated the tax in kind and the right of the peasant to dispose of his surplus. Lenin was not the first to make the proposal, and in this case showed none of the genius claimed for him by his disciples—genius which he really did display in October; what he did show was a supple intelligence quick to recover after a brief divergence into error.
With the N.E.P. Lenin yielded ground on the economic front in order to maintain the political privileges of the Party. He returned to some extent to his true programme and applied the tactic of compromise to relations between classes at home which he had used with success in relations with capitalist countries. In this matter his ideas were clear enough. On the morrow of the Great War he dictated to Chicherin a note to the Allies offering to recognise loans and debts, to give economic and even territorial concessions. In 1921 he advised German Communists to accept the Versailles Treaty as the Bolsheviks had accepted the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. His belief in an inevitable world revolution enabled him to reconcile rigid theory with the devices of concession and compromise. He instinctively conformed to Napoleon's law of war, "the art of which is merely to gain time when one has inferior forces," and who considered principles as the ranges dominating the surrounding valleys.
The complex problems to be solved at home did not lend themselves to the relatively simple solutions adopted in foreign relations. Lenin felt justified in tacking to meet the wind, in circumventing obstacles, in zigzagging back and forth. More than once he emphasised the fact that there were no books teaching how to make a successful revolution, and that, as Marx had not settled all doubtful points, they must learn to help themselves with his help. The N.E.P. was not a sudden idea, but a change of orientation, followed by gropings and discoveries, by a series of decrees successively rectified or completed. It implied the restitution of houses on conditions, the leasing of small and medium-sized enterprises to their former proprietors, the letting of factories, concessions to foreigners, the re-establishment of wages, the rehabilitation of money, the restoration of private trade, and the suppression of free public services. Nobody knew quite how much ground must be abandoned. "We have been defeated in our attempt to attain socialism 'by assault'," explained Lenin, to encourage the shaken morale of the Party, but "not defeat itself, but the fear of recognising it is the greatest danger." Six months later he announced a "further retreat," and within a year the "end of the retreat."
His many scattered and fragmentary definitions of the N.E.P. emphasise now one aspect, now another, as occasion demands. One of the least satisfactory is that which affirms the necessity "of abandoning the immediate building of socialism to revert in many economic matters towards State capitalism." On the subject of State capitalism he directed attention to a pamphlet of 1918 in which he had written: "If revolution is delayed in Germany, we shall have to study German State capitalism, to imitate it as best we can, not to be afraid of dictatorial measures to hasten the assimilation by barbaric Russia of western civilisation, and not to shrink from barbarous methods to fight barbarism"—a rescript more deeply engraved in the memory of his successors, and especially of Stalin, than any other.
It is not easy to find a brief textual statement of his general argument, so important, in the later development of the Bolshevik regime. Quotations from various writings, reports, speeches, and commentaries, give a general idea of it.
First we notice a revision of his view as to the immediacy of an international revolution: "Confident expectation of the world revolution does not imply expecting it at a fixed date ...its development which grows with increasing rapidity may bring revolution in the spring, but it may not." In 1919 he still thought that "the disintegration of German imperialism is leading Germany not only to republicanism but to the socialist revolution." In 1920 he prophesied with conviction that "the day is not far distant when we shall march hand in hand with the German Soviet Government." In 1921 his embarrassment is shown by statements contradictory in themselves, such as: "International revolution is growing. But it would be simple folly to suppose that we are going to receive immediate help in the shape of a lasting proletarian revolution."
On State capitalism, which he considers a great step forward for Soviet Russia, Lenin writes: "it is a capitalism which we can and should admit, because it is indispensable for the peasant masses." He recalls the well-known theory that "capitalism is an evil by comparison with socialism; it is a good thing in companion with the feudal system, or with small scale production." Concessions—"alliance or economic marriages with capitalism"—are necessary in the most backward of great European countries: "concessions are perhaps the simplest, the cleanest, the most exactly defined form adopted by State capitalism in the Soviet economy. Co-operation is also a sort of State capitalism, but less simple, less clearly defined, more complex." Illusions in this matter should disappear. "The rights and liberties of cooperation, in the present state of Russia, mean rights and liberties for capitalism. To hide one's head in the sand, to avoid having evidence of this, would be either foolish or criminal."
Finally he constantly insists on economic alliance with the peasants, indispensable after the military alliance; the only way of accomplishing it is to give freedom of trade, and freedom of trade means a return to capitalism. To refuse this freedom would be "folly and real suicide." For agreement with the peasants "alone can maintain the socialist revolution in Russia, unless there is revolution in other countries." The peasants must be convinced that the communists are "really coming to the help of the small peasant, ruined, destitute, and dying of hunger, in his present horrible situation. Either you must convince him of this or he will send us to the devil.... This is the meaning of the New Economic Policy."
But the Bolsheviks were far from agreement on the historic significance on the N.E.P., which was greeted by their opponents as a Russia repetition of Thermidor. They were disposed to regard it as a Thermidor, carried out by themselves and salutary for the revolution. Lenin said nothing on this point; evidently he had nothing to say to Trotsky's remarks:
The Mensheviks all over the world talk of the Thermidor of the Russian Revolution. But it is not they, but we ourselves who have made this diagnosis. What is still more important is that the Communist Party itself has made concessions to Thermidorian aspirations, to the desires of the small bourgeoisie, the concessions which were necessary for the maintenance of the power of the proletariat without breaking up the system or leaving the helm.
Later on the spectre of Thermidor was to be evoked with less serenity in new circumstances of internal struggle.
It is a common temptation to seek precedents in other revolutions for the better understanding of the stages of a great contemporary political and social upheaval. Parallels occur to the mind in many situations even when they are not strictly alike, for instance between certain personages. Real resemblances are indicated between Nicholas Komanov, Louis Capet and Charles Stuan, between Alexandra Feodorovna, Marie Antoinette and Henrietta Maria. Comparisons, if not drawn too exactly, may well be made between Lenin and Robespierre or Cromwell as the central figure of great revolutions. Circumstances sometimes suggest a parallel with George Washington, and more often with figures in Russian history. But men who "live in the future" are less given to identifying themselves with the shades of past heroes. The Petrograd Soviet in its time played a part somewhat Similar to that of the Paris Commune; the Bolshevik Party to that of the Jacobin Club. Yet neither was to suffer the fate of its forerunner. The Russian Civil War recalls in more than one respect the American Civil War. The "Social-Democratic Gironde" and the "Cossack Vendee" are not meaningless phrases. The destruction of the Levellers and the "enrages" finds parallels in the Soviet Republic. Every revolution has its Moderates and its Extremists. The Terror, a "dictatorship of distress," as the younger Carnot called it, was not a Russian discovery. Other examples are forthcoming. But all comparisons of this kind are only useful in exemplifying the differences and the real characteristics of interesting events in the lives of individuals or groups. But, with all these superficial similarities, history does not repeat, but moves onward. The most striking analogies do not provide material for understanding, much less foretelling, events, unless economic circumstances and historical conditions are taken into account: In this respect differences of social significance are more important than surface resemblances. Therefore the over-eager prophets of a Thermidor, still more of a Brumaire, have now plenty of leisure to meditate on the unique character, which they mistook, of the Russian Revolution.
Lenin was wiser when he faced the dilemma of the liberals who supported the new regime. He stated it correctly: Was the N.E.P. an evolutionary or a tactical measure To this "class truth propounded by a class enemy" he replied frankly. "A development such as that expected by Ustryalou is possible. History has seen all sorts of metamorphoses. ... Great historical issues are decided by the masses." And pending the great conflagrations which are to set the multitudes in motion, the selection of communists and the quality of their work may prevent, he thinks, a temporary expedient from degenerating into an irremediable development, and may pave the way for a future which will be decisive in favour of the revolutionary point of view. The N.E.P., said Lenin, is settled "definitely and for a long time." Therefore the choice of agents was of the first importance. "We must not shrink from recognising that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, responsible communists are not at their posts, do not understand their job and need to learn." Every man in his place. The opportunity for Stalin to take his was at hand.
PERSONAL conflict between revolutionaries has often precipitated the decline of their movement, pre-determined by more deep-seated causes. The Russian Revolution seemed to be an exception in this respect during Lenin's lifetime; neither discords nor reverses were allowed to break the fundamental solidarity of the leaders. The new fact which emerged was the organisation of the founders and leaders of the revolution into a coherent and disciplined party, whose unity was to be the essential element of stability in the regime.
But behind this smooth facade obscure rivalries were undermining the edifice. The discussion on trade unions had disclosed acute enmities, which were not terminated by the N.E.P. In Trotsky's case there was no longer any trace of disagreement with Lenin, who, for his part, was anxious to secure co-operation between former opponents. With Lenin's entourage it was otherwise. Trotsky, though he stood alone in the Politbureau and almost alone in the Central Committee, still seemed formidable to the fraternity of Old Bolsheviks, who were determined to restrict him to certain departments and to lessen his influence by scattering his supporters, so that they might keep their own hands on the key positions in the Party and in the State. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin secretly winked at each other over this plan. To assure its success they sought an effective instrument in the Secretariat of the Central Committee, a position supposed to be limited to technical and executive functions, though in fact its importance was growing imperceptibly because it controlled appointments.
In 1922 they succeeded. After the Eleventh Party Congress, Stalin became General Secretary in succession to Molotov, who was relegated to the post of assistant. The operation passed almost unnoticed, so modest had the duties appeared to be. Nobody objected, except according to Trotsky, Lenin. But Trotsky's memoirs are at fault in the date, which is a year too early, and his statement appears to he contradicted by Lenin's praise of Stalin during the session of the Congress. It is true that contradictions are a constant feature in the words and acts of the Bolshevik leaders. "This cook will prepare only peppery dishes," said Lenin of the new secretary, but no doubt later and among friends.
At that time Stalin was still unknown outside a small circle of militants and officials, but those who had to do with him in their daily work were disturbed by his rise to the top. Krestinsky's remark that he was "an ugly creature with his yellow eyes" expresses an antipathy fairly widespread. Perhaps Lenin under-estimated the ultimate role of a subordinate official of the Politbureau, when he raised no objection to Stalin's nomination. However that may be, his failure to do so left the field open for the moment to the small clique which occupied the strategic points in the administration.
Thus an important event in the revolution was accomplished silently, and its promoters neither understood its Importance nor foresaw its consequences.
At the height of his power, Lenin exercised almost judicial functions of arbitration in disputes between his colleagues, while he was mainly responsible for the direction of the Soviet State and of international revolutionary activity. His bold policy in introducing the N.E.P., following on the success of the Brest-Litovsk tactics, strengthened his reputation for infallibility in communist circles. Thanks to him, the Soviet Republic could celebrate its Fifth Anniversary in peace. No one dared to criticise him openly, though he maintained his habitual modesty of demeanour. If his tone was at times imperative in discussion, it was the expression not of pontifical certainty but of conscious superiority in political experience over his opponents. If he censured his own errors, he did not spare other people's. He might have adopted as his own the well-known saying: "My esteem for myself is small when I examine myself ... but when I compare myself with others it is considerable." Hence the contrast between his intellectual reservations towards great problems and his assurance in controversy. To drive home his points he said sharp things either in the interests of simplification or with the intention of waking up his audience. Nevertheless he showed constant kindliness to less gifted colleagues, endeavouring to keep them up to the mark and to give them their share in the common task. His moral ascendancy in the Party was associated with an anxious solicitude for one and all; he husbanded their strength, sought for mutual understanding and helped them by advice and support. He was prodigal of his own strength.
The qualities which first attracted Lenin to Stalin, says Trotsky, were his "firmness and his practical mind, which is three-quarters cunning." But in the end he had to admit Stalin's "ignorance ... his very narrow political horizon, and his exceptional moral coarseness and unscrupulousness." He says that Lenin sought out Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev for the execution of current business and minor tasks on his instructions and under his control. In the Central Committee, as elsewhere, he needed docile auxiliaries of the type of Rykov and Tsiurupa, who with Kamenev acted as his deputies at the Council of Commissars when he was obliged to save his own strength. This statement is correct but summary, and further explanations are necessary to understand a situation already pregnant with crisis.
The whole system of government depended on the personality of Lenin, whose greatness, under given historical conditions, had created a state of affairs strangely different from that laid down in the Soviet Constitution.
Political, economic and administrative institutions were subject to a parallel series of strictly communist organs at each stage. The Party was superimposed on the State like a lid of the same shape on a pyramid. At the top, the Politbureau held in its hands the threads of all the powers delegated to inferior bodies. As President of the Council of Commissars, Lenin merely put into effect decisions made in the Politbureau under his direction, allotting the work to the departments concerned. Latterly he abandoned this formal task, and Trotsky also ceased to waste time at the Council, now transformed into an executive committee of high officials. A "Small Council" was added, for drafting laws.
The Executive Committee of the Soviets, deprived of the prerogative assigned to it by the Constitution, was a sort of parliament, an occasional assembly of secondary officials committed beforehand to vote automatically for the Bills submitted to it by its Permanent Bureau, but free to discuss minor details. Under the Politbureau there was also the Council of Labour and Defence, whose powers were indefinite, and which tended to handle all subjects; the Supreme Economic Council, intended to deal with production and trade, but absorbed in industry; the Gosplan, charged with estimating national resources, and preparing plans and devising means. All these organisations, with the Commissariats of Finance, Transport, Agriculture, Foreign Trade, Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, the Soviets of the two capitals, and the central committees of the co-operatives and the trade unions, etc., were incessantly competing for bureaucratic authority, since they had no power of initiative, and were for ever in conflict. Lenin was not exaggerating when he declared they had a chaos of authorities of all sorts.
In the chaos he alone had the authority to mediate between the contending bureaux and to ensure the dominance of a clear idea of the general interest. But this role involved the employment by him of agents less and less capable of acting except on his instructions. Stalin in the Party Secretariat, Zinoviev at the Petrograd Soviet, Kamenev at the Moscow Soviet, Bukharin at the Press Bureau, Kalinin at the Executive Committee of Soviets, Kamenev at the Council of Labour and Defence, Rykov at the Supreme Economic Council and later at the Council of Commissars, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin at the executive of the Communist International—this placing of the pieces on the chess board was not ineffectual while a Lenin was there to direct it. Left to themselves, as they had been on several earlier occasions rather unfortunate for their reputation as communists, where would these epigones be?
Two of the principal departments of State—the police and the army—had acquired a measure of autonomy, by reason of the confidence reposed by Lenin in their respective heads.
The powers of the Cheka, theoretically reduced in 1920 and again in 1922 when the Extraordinary Commission was merged in the "State Political Direction" (sic) or G.P.U., were not, in theory, unlimited. The Collegium, presided over by Dzerzhinsky, had to submit its proposals to the Commissariat of Justice. In fact, an official of the Commissariat was ex-officio attached to the Collegium. This was subject only to surveillance in principle by the Politbureau, which deputed one of its members to represent it in exceptional cases. Thus Stalin, as representative of the Politbureau on the G.P.U., continued the police activity he had begun during the Civil War. Of course, neither Lenin nor any of his immediate colleagues could verify, except in rare cases, the statements made by Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, while the Collegium had extensive opportunities of shaping opinion in the Politbureau on questions of repression. Like all political police, the G.P.U. tended to ensure its indispensability by exaggerating dangers, real and supposed. Dzerzhinsky had recourse repeatedly to the classic means of securing sanction for his severity-resignation, because of the impossibility of being responsible for public order and the security of the regime without sufficient powers. Eventually the G.P.U. recovered the omnipotence of the Cheka, contrary to the earlier intention of the Party and to the spirit of the 1922 reforms; it took on monstrous proportions in the Soviet Republic, which Lenin had prematurely defined as a "new type of State, with neither bureaucracy, nor police, nor permanent army."
Trotsky held a place apart. In the Politbureau his agreement with Lenin was decisive. The Party felt itself incarnate in these two men. Their names seemed indissolubly connected in the popular mind, and their persons permanently associated with the supreme responsibility. By comparison with the bureaucratic chaos described by Lenin, the Commissariat for War was a model institution, consulted by the Politbureau on many matters other than military. Trotsky had got together a personnel adapted to his rational, orderly, exact and effective methods of work, and he used them for the successful execution of the most varied missions. Wherever disorder or carelessness demanded salutary intervention, as in the Education Commissariat, fallen into discredit under Lunacharsky, Trotsky was appealed to, in the hope of results similar to those obtained for the war services, the Ural industries and transport. He was esteemed for his intellectual fertility, his active contribution to the press and to the world of thought, as much as for his qualities as a statesman and an organiser. He dominated without effort the congresses of the Third International. And yet he exercised no authority in the governing sphere of the new State, in the "machine" of the dictatorship, corresponding with his many-sided prestige.
The machine, more and more differentiated from the Party as the Party was more and more isolated politically from the State, represented the whole of the varied parts of the bureaucratic Soviet regime built up on the ruins of the former Imperial administration, the product of persisting social conditions. A quarter of a century of industrial progress, still negligible in spite of the modern equipment of the great enterprises financed by foreign capital had left Russia far behind the civilised countries and had not created either a middle class or proletariat to counterbalance peasant barbarism, "the semi-barbarism and the very real barbarism" which Lenin had described as the greatest obstacle to socialism. The presumptuous intelligentsia had been swept away by the revolution, driven to emigrate or scattered over the country; the working class were repeatedly decimated in the Civil War, and partly driven back to the rural districts by famine, partly absorbed in the new bureaucracy. There remained the immense rural population whom Gorky had described as "a great flaccid body, destitute of political education, almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling action," and "brutalised by the conditions of their life, patient to an almost revolting degree, and with a cunning of their own." Unless this human material could be regenerated by vigorous democratic methods which would encourage the development of its best elements, the new regime, in the opinion of sincere, clear-sighted revolutionaries, would be condemned to develop in the bureaucratic and police tradition of the Imperial regime, until the time came for a supplementary revolution. It was the task of the Party, that is to say of its "machine," to give this great inert mass the direction and the impulse to that democratic progress inscribed on its programme. But the democracy promised by primitive Bolshevism was disappearing in the privileged Party as it had disappeared in the enfeebled country. The "machine" was already living its own life, with its interests distinct from the aspirations of the people whose sole interpreter it claimed to be. The concealed opposition which Trotsky encountered in this machine was not fortuitous. If it was not yet openly declared, this was owing above all to Lenin.
To what extent did individual antagonisms vitiate the relations among the "summits" of the machine? Gorky saw fit six years afterwards to add to his report of Lenin's eulogy of Trotsky, some alleged remarks by Lenin: "Still, he is not one of us. With us, but not of us. Ambitious. There is something wrong about him, something of a Lassalle." If corky did not invent this doubtful addition, the date is enough to reduce its significance. In any case, it is clear that to old Bolsheviks like Gorky he was not "one of us" in the sense that he did not fit into any given category. In the same way the men who directly handled the "machine," Zinoviev, Kamenev, and especially Stalin, felt ill at ease with a man who had none of their familiar and sometimes vulgar preoccupations.
In a healthy, normal party acting in accordance with democratic ideas, questions of precedence would not have assumed such alarming proportions. But the Bolshevik Party, as it developed physically, was transformed still more profoundly in the moral and political sense. Arrogating to itself the monopoly of revolutionary conscience, it denied all liberty to the workers alleged to be non-class-conscious, that is, to the whole of the working population not enrolled in its books, and eventually forbade it to its own members for fear that, under popular pressure, they might become the interpreters of grievances of all kinds. As the number of their adherents increased after the victory, the circle of privileged persons enjoying civic rights was more closely drawn together, so as to form a sort of Masonic hierarchy, thus translating into fact Trotsky's old prophecy: "The Party Organisation is being substituted for the Party, the Central Committee for the Organisation, and finally the Dictatorship for the Central Committee." There was not yet any single dictator, because Lenin refused a personal dictatorship and shared power with the Politbureau. But would the equilibrium of the oligarchy be stable without its founder?
At the Eleventh Communist Congress the Party numbered about 515,000 members, instead of the 730,000 at the preceding Congress. A party purge had eliminated about 150,000 on various charges of corruption, bribery, ambition, drunkenness, chauvinism, anti-semitism and abuse of confidence. Many militants resigned in disgust at the passive obedience imposed on the rank and file communists. Most of the new members were inspired by narrow and interested motives. Protests against the internal organisation of the Party were again made at this Congress, which defeated a proposal to exclude the Workers' Opposition; permitted by Lenin, this was the last manifestation of independence against the leading officials.
"The English Parliament can do anything except change a man into a woman. Our Central Committee is more powerful—it has already changed more than one extremely revolutionary man into a woman, and the number of these women has increased incredibly," said Riazanov, reproaching the oligarchy with "violating the most elementary rules of democracy." Stukov criticised the "original privilege," thanks to which Lenin alone was free to do as he liked. "We must," he said, "give other comrades the possibility of speaking freely within the Party without threatening them with damnation for saying to-day what Lenin said yesterday." Shliapnikov cited in his defence Frunze, who "promised to convince me with a machine-gun" a figurative, but significant, remark. V. Kossior commented on the diminution in numbers. "Many workmen," he said, "are leaving the Party. ... The reason is the rule of force, which has nothing in common with real discipline and which is practised among us. Our Party carries wood and sweeps the streets, Votes but decides nothing. The not over-healthy proletariat cannot stand this atmosphere."
But the severest accusation of all brought against the Politbureau was by Lenin a propos of a purchase of jam which exhibited the pusillanimity, the red tape and fear of responsibility of the high Soviet bureaucracy. "How is it," he asked, "that in the capital of the Soviet Republic two inquiries, the intervention of Kamenev and Krassin, and an order from the Politbureau have been necessary for a purchase of jam?" Lenin put it down to lack of education among communists, the necessity of taking action against incapable officials, etc., but omitted the real cause of the evil—the undemocratic Soviet regime. He persisted in justifying in vague terms the exorbitant powers of the Politbureau: "All serious affairs of State should be brought before the Politbureau," forgetting that civic inequality, the lack of guarantee of legal security for most citizens, make every jam contract an affair of State, because the avoidance of responsibility, shifted from lower authorities to higher authorities up to the Politbureau, is the only way of securing impunity. He gives excellent platonic advice. "We must," he says, "learn to tackle the simplest business in a civilised way," but turns a blind eye on an essential cause of the backwardness of civilisation: the suppression of all liberty. He evades the difficulty by using a metaphor: "Our apparatus is bad perhaps, but the first steam engine is said to have been a bad one. Our State machine may be execrable, but it exists, the greatest of all inventions is accomplished, the Proletarian State has been created."
The confusion of the functions of the Party and the State, leading to an accumulation of duties, was strongly criticised, and Preobrazhensky cited Stalin as a case in point: "Take, for instance, Comrade Stalin, a member of the Politbureau and in charge of two Commissariats. Is it conceivable that one individual is equal to the work of two Commissariats, besides that Of the Politbureau, the Orgbureau, and a dozen committees of the Central Committee?" To which Lenin replied in general terms that "there were no men available," and with regard to Stalin, silent in the Congress, that "we must have someone to whom any national representative can appeal and tell his story. Where is he to be found? I don't think Preobrazhensky can point to anyone but Stalin. It is the same for the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. The work is stupendous. But to cope with it there must be a man with authority at the head; otherwise we shall be disgraced and ruined by petty intrigues." These remarks were made a few days before Stalin was nominated to the Secretaryship of the Party. If Lenin really held at that time the bad opinion of Stalin which Trotsky attributes to him, he hid it very well.
The truth apparently is that Lenin's opinion was altered by experience in this as in other matters. He did not always weigh his words, nor attribute such importance to them as not to contradict them on occasion. His intellectual honesty enabled him frankly to revise opinions proved to be erroneous. After the Congress, relations between Lenin and Stalin were modified as relations between Stalin and Trotsky had been at an earlier date. The Commissariat of Nationalities was soon to be abolished. Lenin made an inquiry into the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection which proved devastating to the Commissar. And, as Secretary of the Central Committee, Stalin was soon to be irretrievably discredited in Lenin's eyes.
But, meanwhile, an unexpected event happened, upsetting the personal aspects of the dictatorship. At the beginning of May 1922 Lenin succumbed to his toil; the brain of the revolution showed signs of paralysis. It was merely a first attack of arteriosclerosis, but a definite malady. The Party could not believe that Lenin was lost to them, and Trotsky shared the irrational optimism. Others, devoid of sentiment, had a clearer vision, and calculated coldly on the eventual repercussions of the inevitable loss; they were the three members of the Politbureau, who felt themselves, as a group and as units, inferior to the fourth.
STALIN had begun a secret and unprecedented task in the secretariat of the Party. One by one he rearranged the personnel of the machine, on mysterious considerations known to himself alone.
Only a pretext was needed and often even this could be dispensed with. As a rule, discipline was sufficient reason for nominations and transfers. In the heroic period, the Party preserved its equalitarian principles, the maximum wage, solidarity, and devotion to the cause. But in so vast a country as Russia, with few means of communication, and a dull provincial life, disgrace or advancement was a matter of a few kilometres. Removal from one institution to another might involve moral and material advantages. Then, at various stages in the hierarchy, the particular employment might offer more or less advantages in the present and prospects for the future. "Anybody being good enough for anything, anybody can be moved at any time to any place"—this ironical dictum of a French politician was very applicable to Soviet Russia. At the last Congress, Lenin had said that the choice of men was the crucial point, but without laying down the criteria of choice. Stalin had his reasons.
He never formulated them in so many words, but they may be deduced from a number of circumstances.
The main idea of his Party was crystallised in the simple and almost mystical belief that the interests of humanity should be represented exclusively by an ideal proletariat, this proletariat in its turn by a transcendant Central Committee, and that Committee by its Politbureau. In his capacity of Secretary Stalin might, then, regard himself as the pivot of the Soviet system, a miniature Russian model of the future universal socialist republic, the Party being identified with the State and the immanent dictatorship being incarnate in an irremovable "oligarchy," recruited by co-optation.
This tier upon tier of abstractions of which the topmost only was a tangible reality, the immeasurable power of the Politbureau over 130,000,000 people, had nothing in common with the Marxism which the Bolsheviks religiously invoked as their model. "We took the Marxist doctrine all ready made from western Europe," said Lenin. A conception of this kind "taken" from outside, a synthesis of German philosophy, English economics and French socialism, could not be assimilated in a generation by so backward a people, not even by its vanguard.
Like all ordinary Bolsheviks—of whom he was typical—Stalin hardly knew anything about Marx except through Lenin, and he adopted the letter of Marxism without comprehending its living spirit. Having accepted as dogma once for all the mixture of conditional truths and proved errors which constituted Bolshevism, the Russian approximation to Marxism, he displayed his inflexible determination in the service of this faith by incorporating himself in the machine to such a degree that for a long time Stalin, the instrument of the machine, and the machine, the instrument of Stalin, were indistinguishable.
He did not invent the passive obedience which he exacted by all sorts of means from his subordinates. He only accentuated to excess the military notion of discipline inherited from War Communism, and erected into a theory by Lenin and Trotsky against their own principles. "The remedy invented by Lenin and Trotsky, the general suppression of democracy, is worse than the evil it was supposed to cure," wrote Rosa Luxemburg as early as 1918. "At a time when political life is being stiffed everywhere," she added, "it is a calamity that life should be more and more paralysed even in the Soviets." This was equally true of the Party itself, reduced in a few years to a state of lethargy. The evolution of Bolshevism in this respect is worth exhibiting at both ends of the curve.
In 1917, at the Executive of the Soviets, the Bolshevik Chudnovsky "ventured" to criticise Lenin, Stalin and Krylenko for their "unparalleled tactlessness and frivolity" in the address to the army enjoining negotiation with the enemy. Lenin replied that "there can be no question of 'venturing' or 'not venturing' the most violent criticism; such criticism was a revolutionary duty, and the People's Commissars did not claim infallibility."
In 1921 at the Trade Unions Congress, at which there were 3,500 delegates of whom only eight were Social-Democrats, a committee nominated by the Central Committee of the Party to "direct the Congress" dictated the resolution to be passed by the "Communist fraction," which nevertheless adopted a resolution of Riazanov's. The Committee instructed Tomsky to defend its resolution, but he faltered, confronted by the strong conviction of his comrades. The Central Committee then decided to disallow the resolution passed, dismissed the bureau of the Congress, sent Tomsky to Turkestan and Riazanov abroad, and intimidated the fraction which was compelled to retract under threat of reprisals. Another special committee in which Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, experts in repression, took part, inflicted a "severe censure" on the exiled Tomsky. On his return, the impenitent Riazanov was forbidden to speak at any meeting or to lecture at the University; he was only permitted to speak at the annual congress of the Party where the congress members are carefully selected, and where conformity is assured.
This one case out of a thousand indicates how roughly humble militants may be called to order, and one may guess how ordinary mortals, outside the privileged communist circle, are likely to be treated. Bearing in mind Lenin's remark that "the vote of a single workman was worth several peasants' votes," and the consideration accorded to the rights of trade unions, there can hardly be any illusions as to the effectiveness of public opinion in the Soviet Republic at the beginning of the N.E.P.
In resigning himself to concessions and compromises in the economic sphere, Lenin thought it necessary to reinforce the dictatorship in the political sphere. "We need the iron hand," he said. Alluding to the abuses perpetrated by "pseudo-communists" in the rural districts, he wrote in 1921: "Clean all that up by terror—summary procedure, the death penalty with no appeal." Presently judicial procedure would appear to be superfluous; the death penalty alone would remain. "Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, openly confessed as such or disguised as non-Party men, we will keep in prison," he continued. A year later the tone is worse: "It's a case of machine-guns for the people called Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries." The weight Of the iron hand was soon felt by all citizens, including trade unionists and communists. In the Party there was henceforward only one valid dogma, that of the Politbureau, an orthodoxy of which Trotsky had once said: "Anyone who denies it should be expelled. Doubt is almost denial. Questioning is almost doubt." But Trotsky had forgotten his youthful polemics, and Stalin had no notion of salvation outside the official and everchanging ideology of his Party, settled from time to time by its accredited leaders.
Recourse to the "iron hand" did not displease Stalin, who was naturally disposed to this method of government. Lenin had not foreseen all the effects of the method carried to extremes and without his instructions. When he returned to work after several months of illness and convalescence he seemed to scent the danger of a misuse of the dictatorship by his disciples.
Lenin saw with uneasiness the evil development of the bureaucracy of which the Party machine was the spinal cord. At first he thought the degeneration of the communists into irresponsible and despotic bureaucrats could be cured by placing them under the supervision of a new Control Commission independent of the Central Committee and the Inspection Commissariat. He thought of a special commission to "fight bureaucracy" to be directed by Trotsky and himself in order to purge and regroup the personnel of the Party. Anxious to secure more initiative and freedom of action for the People's Commissars, he wanted to make Trotsky his deputy and his eventual successor at the Council of Commissars, and to reorganise the governing personnel with this end in view.
In this series of reforms at the top, the political consciousness of communists was not taken into consideration, and the system of the Bolshevik Central Committee remained intact, with its Politbureau, its Orgbureau, and its Secretariat. There was no idea of reviving the life of the Party or of giving back their rights to the workers.
Trotsky seemed to Lenin the safest of his successors, most capable of ruling in the spirit of socialism. All that was needed was to incorporate him in the small body of traditional Leninists, but there the difficulty began. It was unanimously agreed that Trotsky was the most eminent person in the Central Committee both in intellectual eminence and in strength of character. But that did not make him Lenin's natural successor; what he lacked was a special political sense without which no man can claim to be a party leader. Had not his past shown him to be incapable of forming a permanent group or of attaching himself to any section of Social-Democracy? Even in the Communist Party his personality seemed to be autonomous. During the revolution he was able to measure himself with Lenin. But what would he do in the Politbureau without Lenin, and could he associate himself with those Leninists, who thought six of themselves not too many to act as counterpoise to him? Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, the secret triumvirate at the top, were supported by their deputies at the Politbureau, Bukharin, Kalinin and Molotov. With his knowledge of men and his psychological instinct, Lenin soon saw that the obstacle to this future arrangement would be Stalin.
Stalin was the most obscure member of the Politbureau, but the only one who was a match for Trotsky in temperament and in will-power. He easily surpassed his colleagues in ordinary political action by his dexterity in intrigue, his suppleness as a tactician, and the use he made of small means. Too wary to enter into doctrinal controversy, he gained his ends by his chosen methods of "practical work," seizing every opportunity to withstand either Lenin or Trotsky, and to get his way on details. On his favourite subject of nationalities he thought he could escape from Lenin's guidance, and on this point came the definite evidence of incompatibility between the recognised theorist and the misunderstood practical man.
The origin of the rift appears in secret correspondence of 1922. Revision of the Constitution was under consideration, with the idea of transforming the Socialist Federative Soviet Russian Republic into the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, in which the various component nationalities were to have equal rights. On paper Russian hegemony would be done away with, Moscow would become the seat of two Executive Committees of Soviets, that of the Russian Republic and that of the Federated Republic. Stalin opposed the scheme by criticisms correct enough in form. "The co-existence of two Central Executive Committees at Moscow," he said, "of which one would doubtless be an Upper and the other a Lower Chamber, will give rise to friction and conflict." (Strangely enough, he still took constitutional fictions seriously.) Touched on the raw by an allusion of Lenin for his excessive haste, he returned the compliment by reproaching him with dangerous "national liberalism"; according to Stalin, acceptance of Lenin's "liberal" views would give too much importance to minor nationalities and would encourage nationalism in the States. Lenin on the other hand suspected Stalin of the crude pan-Slav chauvinism of a Russian whose nationality was newly acquired. All the theses, dissertations and resolutions they had drawn up in common led only to irreconcilable divergence when confronted with facts.
Among the contradictions of Bolshevism there is none more violent than that between theory and practice in regard to nationalities, and Stalin emphasised it with characteristic roughness.
Harsh historical necessity had substituted for the right of self-determination the right of Bolshevism to dispose of the small neighbouring peoples faced with imperialism and revolution. What the Red Army could not accomplish in Finland and Poland it did accomplish first in the Ukraine, then in the Caucasus, by methods similar to those adopted by the United States in the annexation of Texas. The Georgian Socialists' dream of creating a new Switzerland between Europe and Asia was nothing but a dream in the circumstances. In the elections for the Constituent Assembly in Georgia the Mensheviks scored 640,000 votes, the Bolsheviks 24,000. In spite of this imposing demonstration of popular sentiment expressed with approximate freedom, the Red Army had the last word three years later by helping the 24,000 to dispose of the 640,000 by armed force. All the rest was pure talk.
"The relative stability of the Menshevik regime," wrote Trotsky, "was due to the political impotence of the scattered peasantry," but that argument was still more applicable to the Bolshevik regime in "All the Russias." In 1920 a European socialist delegation visited Georgia, and on his return E. Vandervelde described the enthusiastic throngs of peasant converts to socialism. He recalled a day, at Gori, Stalin's native place, "when a whole village came to meet us, bearing the red banners of the International." A few months later foreign communist delegates visited the same spot and found the red flags honouring another International.
The course of events confirmed Rosa Luxemburg's prophecies and dissipated the sophism of the right of self-determination. When it came to deeds the Bolsheviks trod their principles underfoot by invading Georgia, as the Mensheviks—conscious, in Tseretelli's words, "of the community of interest binding together all the peoples of Russia" under the autocracy—defied the Bolshevik programme by separation from the Soviet Republic.
Lenin's apprehension was not solely due to Stalin's expression of Russian chauvinism, but still more to his increasingly dangerous activities. After the sovietisation of the Caucasus by armed force, the bureaucracy and the police of the victors followed the army. And, just as in Russia and the Ukraine, so in Georgia, the "iron hand" fell heavily on communists, workmen and poor peasants, after having first struck at socialist opponents of all shades. Stalin went to the spot in 1921 to organise the administration after his own fashion.
The Berlin Sozialisticheski Vestnik reported on this mission substantially as follows: Stalin, armed with large powers, arrived in Tiflis, dismissed Makharadze for inadequate firmness and replaced him by Mdivani; similarly Tsintsadze was replaced by Atabekov. (The former was President of the Council of Commissars, the latter President of the Cheka. ) Makharadze apparently refused to imprison respected socialists like Djibladze, and was roughly handled by Stalin. All this was done in the name of the Georgian Communist Central Committee, but really on his own initiative. After summoning a workers' assembly, Stalin delivered a speech outlining a programme, received in hostile Silence, and the meeting was followed by arrests. The People's Commissars of the little "Sister Republics" were unceremoniously dismissed by the General Secretary of the Party, but this was only a foretaste. At that time Lenin agreed, often without knowing the truth. Within less than a year, Stalin was in open conflict with Mdivani, a comrade of his youth, as he had been earlier with Makharadze and with Tsintsadze, the famous boyevik, Kamo's comrade in ambushes and expropriations. For the Georgian communists subjected to Stalin's caprice, there was only one resource, first and last—to appeal from Lenin ill-informed to Lenin better-informed. Five years after the October Revolution the rights of the nations of the former Empire were reduced to a vague hope of the providential intervention of one man. And it was the rights of communists of the first rank that were in question.
The progress realised at this stage must be stated: the Soviet nations of Russia, Asia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus were on an equal footing in their common deprivation of liberty. In complete contrast to the circumstances of the French Revolution, the number of "passive citizens" steadily increased until the category of really "active citizens" was reduced to the equivalent of an Upper Ten Thousand, though on a lower economic level. The masses, levelled downwards, suffered the unwritten law of a new kind of patriciate, divided into several ranks under the Politbureau and its Secretariat. The final corrective to all abuses—Lenin's relative wisdom.
"WE ARE living in a sea of illegality," was one of Lenin's first remarks on his recovery, in a letter from the Politbureau addressed to Stalin. He had recovered his speech, if not the use of all his faculties, and had resumed a limited intellectual activity permitted by his physicians. In the summer of 1922 he followed more important affairs, gave advice and dictated notes from a retreat near Moscow. He was no longer the indefatigable and encyclopaedic Lenin of former times, but he was perfectly clear on controversial matters.
In September he attacked Stalin on the national question after hearing from Mdivani about the Georgian situation. He discussed the matter with both sides and prepared for a formal debate. In October he resumed effective work at the Politbureau and took cognisance of the enhancement of the evils he had noted before his illness: everywhere carelessness, parasitism, the impotence of the "machine."
He had already bluntly commented on the ignorance of communist officials, their beastings (com-boasts), and their lies (com-lies). "Every day," he said, "we hear, I especially on account of my position, so many glib communist lies, so many com-lies, that it's enough to make me sick, violently so, sometimes." The quaint expression "com-boasts" had a great success, so well did it fit the facts. "The communist kernel," he continued, "lacks general culture. If we take Moscow with its 4,700 responsible communists, and the whole bureaucratic machine, which is the directing spirit? I doubt very much whether it is the communists. They do not lead, they are led." The general culture of the middle classes in Russia was "inconsiderable, wretched, but in any case greater than that of our responsible communists."
Signs of degeneration were now obvious not only in the machine but at the top. Military decorations were followed by the Order of the Red Flag of Labour, a pseudo-revolutionary imitation of the honours of a despised society. In Lenin's absence, to the general surprise, Stalin had arranged for the name the Secretary of the Party placed, removed and replaced many militants. Soon Elisavetgrad was to become Zinovievsk. The same personages gave their names to schools, factories and ships. Plenty of officials were ready to flatter those in power. Others showed a mistaken zeal in the wrong quarters—thus Gachina became Trotsk. It is significant that no one dared to flatter Lenin in this way; he would not have tolerated it. At Petrograd, the State printing press had printed a pamphlet by Zinoviev with the profile of the author vignetted like a Roman consul, and Lenin was weak enough to pass it over. Trotsky had not the political sense to object. Riazanov alone protested. The decadent Jacobins of the proletariat were heedless of the famous warning of a bourgeois Jacobin, Anacharsis Clootz: "France, beware of individuals." Barras gave his name to a ship launched at Toulon, but that was under the Directory.
In November of the same year, Lenin intervened by letter against a decision of the Central Committee on the State monopoly of foreign trade, a monopoly establishing socialist protectionism in the shelter of which nationalised industry was beginning to recover. Krassin, Commissar of Foreign Trade, explained clearly one of the advantages of the system: "The interests of the capitalist countries—and of individual capitalists in each country—are conflicting, and, thanks to the unity and concentration of our commercial system, it will not be difficult to arrange matters so as to interest any capitalist group or firm, with which agreement on certain conditions is possible." But Stalin and his colleagues shortsightedly adopted a resolution against the trade monopoly, under the influence of Sokolnikov and in the absence of Lenin and Trotsky. Without its unquestioned advisers, the Central Committee showed itself incapable of taking any step without going wrong. Pressure from Lenin, Trotsky and Krassin was necessary to make them reverse their decision.
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, the two leaders of the revolution shared between them the main topic: Five years of the Russian Revolution and the prospects of World Revolution. As at former Congresses, they gave the young international organisation the best of their ideas, ripened by experience and adjusted to the hard lessons of historical fact. Once more Lenin reminded them that "we have committed many follies, and shall commit many more," giving as the reason Russian ignorance and isolation, and the inefficiency of the "machine." "At the top," he said, "we have perhaps ten thousand—I don't know how many—of our own people; in the lower ranks hundreds of thousands of former Tsarist officials." He concluded by strongly insisting on the necessity of study: "We must first learn to read and write, and to understand what we have read." Study—he recurred to this recommendation, his constant theme, under various aspects, until he died.
In November he delivered a last address to the Moscow Soviet, emphasising one aspect of the N.E.P., the offer to capitalists of advantages which would compel any State whatever to conclude an arrangement with them. He advised communists to learn the arts of reckoning and of trade, he condemned the "machine," and demanded its reconstruction—"the old machine persists, and our immediate task is to rebuild it otherwise." More than ever, he concluded, the N.E.P. is our watchword, and the "Russia of the N.E.P. will develop into socialist Russia."
In December, he dictated letter after letter on the foreign trade monopoly, and entrusted Trotsky with the task of defending their common idea at communist meetings. Simultaneously he was anxiously occupied with the question of nationalities, which took an unexpectedly serious turn in the conflict provoked by Stalin in Georgia, and with the problem of renewing and reorganising the "machine." He saw in Stalin's personality the incarnation of the deviations, the development of which threatened the future of the revolution. The most urgent task seemed to him to be to prevent Party schism, the cause of which he discerned, and for that purpose to maintain the stability of the directing group in the Central Committee. On December 25th he wrote a confidential note, every word being carefully considered, for the next Party Congress, in which he feared he might not be able to take part:
I think that the fundamental factor in the matter of stability—from this point of view—is such members of the Central Committee as Stalin and Trotsky. The relation between them constitutes, in my opinion, a big half of the danger of that split, which might be avoided, and the avoidance of which might be promoted, in my opinion, by raising the number of members of the Central Committee to fifty or one hundred.
Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand Comrade Trotsky, as was proved by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the question of the People's Commissariat of Ways and Communications, is distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities—personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee; but also by his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs.
These two qualities of the two most able leaders of the present Central Committee might, quite innocently, lead to a split; if our Party does not take measures to prevent it, a split might arise unexpectedly.
Thus Lenin hoped to prevent the disastrous consequences of the open feud between Stalin and Trotsky simply by increasing the membership of the Central Committee. At the last Party Congress, the Eleventh, membership of that committee had been increased to 27 members and 19 deputy members. The Control Commission had five members and two deputy-members. This was not enough as counterpoise to the "two most able leaders," one of whom was isolated from the machine, and the other unknown outside it. But the influence of the Central Committee decreased as its numbers grew. Its increased dimensions compelled it to delegate its powers to the Politbureau, which had all the means at its disposal for the creation of a clientele of its own in the ancient acceptation of the term. Lenin, looking at political phenomena from the angle of power, was blind to this; he no longer conceived of reform except as emanating from the top. This note, long kept secret, but gradually becoming partially known in the upper circles under the name of Lenin's Testament before it was divulged abroad, goes on briefly to characterise four other personalities.
"The October episode of Zinoviev and Kamenev was not, of course, accidental," says Lenin, advising that it ought as little to be used against them as the earlier non-Bolshevism of Trotsky. He gives an apparently self-contradictory opinion on Bukharin, "the most valuable and biggest theoretician of the Party"; but his "theoretical views can only with the very greatest doubt be regarded as fully Marxist, for there is something scholastic in him (he has never learned, and I think never fully understood, the dialetic)." Finally, Pyatakov is distinguished "in will and ability, but is too much given over to the administrative side of things to be relied on in a serious political question." Here "administrative" means "bureaucratic," in Pyatakov's as in Trotsky's case.
In this remarkable document Lenin gives careful appreciations, and expresses himself in subtle nuances. But his intention is clear enough; it is to induce modesty in his near colleagues by indicating their weaknesses, so that they may not continue the old grievances; at the same time he describes Trotsky as the most capable; as regards Stalin, he contents himself with a warning against the tendency of the Secretary of the Party to abuse his powers. But, a little later, he thought it necessary to emphasise the warning, and to give it categorical expression. On January 4th he added a few lines, this time without any diplomacy:
Stalin is too rude (grub), and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority—namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of preventing a split and from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky which I discussed above, it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.
Between December 25th and January 4th, fresh information on the Georgian business had roused Lenin's indignation and made him regret not having attacked Stalin more energetically and actively. Stalin had made use of Dzerzhinsky and Ordjonikidze to maintain his oppressive policy in the Caucasus which Lenin considered a disgrace to the regime, Ordjonikidze having gone so far as to use violence on a Georgian comrade. Lenin, outraged, wanted to exclude him from the Party and to make Stalin responsible for his subordinate.
On December 30th he writes in one of his confidential notes that "if Ordjonikidze so far lost control as to use physical force, as Dzerzhinsky has told me, that shows into what a morass we have sunk." He describes the Russian State machine as "borrowed front Tsarism and barely touched by the Soviet world." It is a "bourgeois and Tsarist mechanism." Under these conditions the liberty of the nationalities to "leave the Union," provided by the Constitution will be a "scrap of paper, impotent to defend the races of Russia against these true Russians, chauvinist Great Russians, essentially cowardly and cruel like the typical Russian bureaucrat." Have we taken, he asks, the necessary measures to protect the persecuted races from their tyrants? To ask the question was to answer it. And after these transparent allusions to Stalin, he mentions him by name: "In this matter Stalin's hastiness and bureaucratic enthusiasm, and his spite against the notorious 'social chauvinism' played a fatal part: generally speaking spite is a most evil factor in politics." He accuses Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, both of them Russians by adoption, of "true-Russian" nationalism, observing that Russians by adoption are worse than native Russians when they become chauvinist.
The next day Lenin supplemented this note, insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between the intolerable nationalism of the oppressor country and the excusable nationalism of the oppressed country. "He who has not understood that distinction certainly knows nothing about the attitude of the proletariat on the national question." After this direct hit at Stalin, he explains the urgency of giving the smaller races not only formal equality, but compensation for the outrages they have suffered during centuries. "The Georgian who neglects this aspect of the matter and accuses others of 'social chauvinism' (when he himself is not only a real 'social chauvinist' but an uncivilised rascal in the service of a Great Power), is really attacking the solidarity of the proletarian class...." Thus were Stalin and Ordjonikidze definitely judged by their master.
On that same day, December 31, Lenin wrote a third note drawing practical inferences from the general considerations just stated. Among others—"Ordjonikidze must receive exemplary punishment"; and "the enormous mass of unjust and prejudiced verdicts of Dzerzhinsky must be revised"; finally, "Stalin and Dzerzhinsky must be held politically responsible for this nationalist Great Russian campaign."
Lenin did not stop there. He dictated another article against Stalin's policy on the national question. "He was very much worried about it and was preparing to intervene on this question at the Party Congress," wrote his secretary to Kamenev. "Just before his last relapse he told me that he would publish this article, but later on. After that he fell ill without having given definite instructions." The article was shown to Trotsky, on whom Lenin relied for the defence at the Congress of their common point of view.
Meanwhile the "chaos of all kinds of authorities" and its disastrous effects on economic life made Lenin extremely anxious, and he wrote to the Politbureau in support of a proposal of Trotsky's. The latter attributed the disorder and wastefulness to the want of planning. As early as 1920, generalising his experience with transport, he had advocated a unified economic plan to correlate, control and stimulate the activities of the various offices responsible. He would have liked to amalgamate the commissariats dealing with economic questions, and to assure unity of direction by the Council of Labour and Defence—the Supreme Economic Council having become virtually the Commissariat of Industry. But this project involved the use of "labour armies," the failure of which had its repercussions on the notion of any general plan. The Gosplan, a State planning institution, created to co-ordinate partial plans, had no influence. Trotsky proposed to extend its competence and strengthen its powers, to make it an economic general staff under the Council of Labour and Defence. The electrification scheme, drawn up at the end of the Civil War, did no more than meet immediate needs within narrow limits. The Gosplan would draw up and keep up to date a methodical scheme for the direction of production, distribution and trade. Lenin now approved Trotsky's "sensible idea" with some reservations on detail. The very Lenin who at the beginning of the revolution had said "There is not and there cannot be any concrete plan for the organisation of economic life. Nobody can produce one. The masses alone can do it, thanks to their experience...." It remained to realise it in the face of rival institutions.
Lenin knew he was so ill that he had to think of the revolution in the future without himself, but he did not sufficiently realise the gravity of his position to use his last reserves of Strength to the best advantage. He hoped to take a personal part in the Twelfth Congress of the Party and himself to secure the adoption of the salutary measures he had in mind. His thoughts evidently revolved round a main point, the reform of the bureaucratic machinery of the State, and dwelt insistently on two or three questions the importance of which was insufficiently grasped by the Party—general education, the relations between nationalities, co-operation.
He published Leaves of a Journal on the stagnation in public education, that is, "public ignorance" in the Soviet Republic, censuring empty phrases about "proletarian culture" and urging efforts first of all to reach the "ordinary level of a civilised State in Western Europe." On January 25th, Pravda published his article, "How to reorganise the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection." There was no mention in it of Stalin, for the Bolsheviks avoided discussing their private affairs in public, but the criticism of the Inspection was directed against him personally and injured him among the initiated. Improvement was necessary in the State machine, "a survival to a large extent of the former bureaucracy," and "with only a superficial new coat of paint." Lenin proposed to elect from 75 to 100 new members to the Control Commission, which should meet the Central Committee in periodical Party conferences and should be amalgamated with the reorganised Inspection. Unconsciously he was accelerating the movement towards a complete confusion of authorities, the annulment of all effective control and the autocratic omnipotence of the Politbureau.
In February he dotted the "i's" in an article entitled "Better less, but better," overwhelming for Stalin. "Our condition is so sad, not to say so repugnant, as regards the State machine," that reorganisation from top to bottom is essential. The lack of elementary education is the most serious matter for Russia. "To renew our State machine, we must set ourselves—first, to learn; secondly, to learn; thirdly, to learn." The Inspection ought to be the instrument of this renewal. But in what condition had Stalin left his Commissariat? "Let us speak plainly. The Inspection has now no authority at all. Everybody knows that there is no worse institution that our Inspection.... I ask any present leading official of the Inspection or anybody in touch with it to tell me honestly what use such a Commission is to us." Then follows a minutely detailed scheme of reorganisation, covering some years of work.
Discredited both as Commissar of Nationalities and at the Inspection, Stalin did not think he was directly threatened in his position as Secretary of the Party. But he instinctively prepared to resist. At his suggestion the Politbureau not only opposed Lenin's scheme, but objected to the publication of the article. The "machine" understood the allusion to the Party bureaucracy and stood on its defence. Lenin grew impatient; Krupskaya telegraphed; Trotsky intervened. A certain Kuibyshev, a colleague of Stalin's, suggested printing the article in a single copy of Pravda, to quiet "the old man." In the end the Politbureau gave way, and the article appeared in the ordinary way, on March 4th.
Next day Lenin addressed himself to Trotsky: "I beg of you to look after the Georgian affair at the Party Congress. The 'persecutions' carried out by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky must be considered, and I do not trust their impartiality. On the contrary. If you agree to undertake the defence, my mind will be at rest." On the following day he wrote to Mdivani, Makharadze and others: "I am following your business with all my heart. Disgusted with Ordjonikidze's brutality and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, I am preparing notes and a speech on your behalf."
Fresh machinations by Stalin in Georgia decided him to have done with it. "Vladimir Ilyich is preparing a bomb for Stalin at the Congress," said his secretary on that same day, March 6th, repeating Lenin's own words. Feeling that his health was worse, he sent Trotsky the material for his "bomb," an article and notes on the national question. Trotsky wanted to inform Kamenev. Lenin sent word: "Under no circumstances." Why? "Kamenev will immediately show everything to Stalin, and Stalin will make a rotten compromise and then deceive us." But a few minutes later, finding speech already difficult, Lenin feared he would be able to do nothing, and, on second thoughts, sent Kamenev a copy of his letter to Mdivani. "Vladimir Ilyich is worse, and hastens to do all he can," explained the secretary. The sick man put all his strength of will into a last mental effort, but sclerosis of the arteries increased rapidly. There was an interview between Trotsky and Kamenev. The latter was coming away from Lenin's house, where Krupskaya had told him: "Vladimir has just dictated to the stenographer a letter to Stalin breaking off all relations with him." It was Lenin's last letter.
AT THE moment when its founder was losing consciousness, on the eve of the Twelfth Communist Congress, the Soviet Republic, more firmly established, was recognised de facto by six and de jure by twelve States. In the ranks of the Powers it took a place implicitly granted the year before at the Genoa Conference, and then renewed commercial relations, concluded treaties, and sent missions and ambassadors to foreign Powers. It was even able to contract the semblance of an alliance with Turkey and an entente with Germany. Thanks to the antagonism between the United States and Japan, the vast areas conquered under Tsarism in Asia up to the Pacific coast were returned. There was no longer any immediate threat on the frontiers. The Red Army passed to a peace footing.
At home the last rebel bands were broken up in the Ukraine and in the Near East; Soviet rule was everywhere established and consolidated. Two years of the N.E.P. were already reviving the forces of production, in spite of the great famine of 1921 which surpassed in horror the similar calamity of 1891, and struck down from 15 to 20 million human beings, half of them children, and even gave rise to cases of cannibalism. The population, decimated by war, revolution, counter-revolution and famine, resumed the vigorous increase common to backward countries, and numbered more than 133 millions at the census of March 1923.
But the economic thermometer fell sensibly in spite of the first good effects of the N.E.P. Public revenue, or rather the total value of production, had fallen from 11 milliard roubles in 1913 to 5.3 milliards in 1922; agricultural production from 6.7 to 4 milliards, industrial production from 4.4 to 1.3 milliards. (Other statistics give rather higher figures, but in identical proportions.) The relative share of small artisans in industrial production had greatly increased; it represented more than one-half in 1922, whereas in 1913 it was less than one-fifth. The explanation is to be found in the larger fall in large and medium industrial undertakings.
In the country 51 million dessiatins were sown in 1922 as against 82 million in 1916 and more than 100 in 1913. The gross grain harvest was 2.8 milliard poods in 1922 as against 3.8 milliards in 1914 (and about 6 milliards in 1913). The reduction was still greater for industrial crops, hemp and flax, sugar-beet and cotton. There was a corresponding fall in livestock: 124 million head of cattle in 1923 as against 183 million in 1916. Export had ceased. The peasantry as a whole were still in want, in spite of the division of the expropriated land and the abolition of the former dues.
More than three-quarters of the arable land and pasturage were cut up into small holdings, lessening in proportion to the increase of "souls," the multiplication of "hearths"; the scattered strips did not permit of intensive cultivation. Generally speaking the routine of the mir continued to exist side by side with the fictitious soviet, together with the periodical redistribution of strips and the triennial survey. In many villages, individual holdings had diminished, for lack of any State or landowners' estates to be nationalised. In theory there were no longer landless peasants. But in fact there were such, and millions had no horse to draw their mediaeval wooden plough.
Social equalisation to a "medium" level between the kulak, supposed to be rich, and the bedniak, undoubtedly poor-such was the result of the revolution for the peasant at this time. There were no even approximate statistics for the kulaks, "hose relative prosperity was dissimulated in various ways.
Enterprises of a socialist character were said to cover about two per cent of the cultivated land, divided between 4,000 sovkhoz (Soviet domains, State farms), and 13,000 kolkhoz (collective undertakings—artels, co-operative farms, agricultural communes).
In the towns, where works, factories and workshops employed only about half the labour employed before the War, the average wage had fallen from 32 roubles a month to 7 roubles in 1922, rising in 1923 to 16 roubles. But most of the workers, divided into 17 categories according to their skill, received less than the medium wage. Serious unemployment, which could not be computed, was aggravated by the competition of masses of the lower middle class and by the influx of surplus peasants. Relief of unemployment was practically non-existent.
Industry and transport were working at a loss, with exorbitant costs of production. The consumer paid three times as much as in former times for manufactured goods, absolutely necessary and of the poorest quality. Lack of goods produced uncontrollable speculation in which even the Co-operative and State shops shared. There appeared the greedy and crafty N.E.P. man, the incarnation of a new trading class formed to meet every risk and danger. Very soon retail trade was mainly in private hands.
But the State, controlling heavy industry, transport, foreign and wholesale trade, had nothing to fear from this limited revival of capitalism. The monopoly of political power in the hands of the Communist Party enabled it to regulate legislation and finance in favour of socialised enterprise in the competition opened up by the N.E.P. Concessions granted to foreign capitalists were few and might remain very small. Lenin was not wrong in justifying retreat, "difficult especially for revolutionaries accustomed to advance," by saying "having conquered so vast a territory, we had space to retreat without the loss of essentials."
The October Revolution had not only destroyed the material survivals from the Middle Ages, slavery and feudalism, as Lenin said modestly in 1921. There remained a great positive inheritance as a basis for the creation of the most democratic republic in history and for taking the first steps towards a socialist regime. The internecine differences of a hostile world gave Soviet Russia more than one respite, and offered great possibilities for taking advantage of international division of labour and for safeguarding her subversive independence by exploiting the rivalries inherent in a society based on competition. The future then would depend largely on the heirs, on the ability of their victorious party to become a constructive party, and, as Lenin wished, to associate in their grandiose effort, the whole of the working people.
Clandestine pre-revolutionary activity and the Civil War were a bad preparation for the Bolsheviks' future task. Former conspirators, agitators and destructive agents had to turn into the omniscient technical experts of a new economic and social order in an undeveloped country, described by Bukharin as a "gigantic laboratory," in which a willing personnel had to be improvised at the same time as the instruments of production. They had to learn by experience. Lenin did not leave behind him infallible recipes, but only general directions and advice which might be useful to his followers when left to themselves.
"Above all don't let us be afraid of constant self-criticism, of correcting our mistakes and frankly avowing them." This open sincerity towards himself and the workers and peasants should have survived as a cardinal principle of his theory and practice. "We are not afraid of mistakes. Men have not become saints because the revolution has begun," he wrote in his Letter to the American Workers. This is no rhetorical phrase. He often quoted a sentence of Marx on the "part played by stupidity in revolutions," knowing no other antidote to this poison than self-criticism, of which he gave examples in the fight against "com-lies" ~nd "com-boasting." In the costly apprenticeship stage "we must not be afraid to admit and to study our mistakes in order the better to repair them."
He was as conscious as anyone of the gap between his schemes and their realisation. "Up till now, we have been drawing up Programmes and making promises. The world revolution could not be started without programmes and promises. The essential thing is cool consideration of where and when mistakes have been made, and the knowledge of how to begin over again." He did not confess his errors either to encourage them or to wash his hands of them. "We have certainly committed errors and suffered failures, many of them. But was it possible to realise a type of State new in history without mistakes and failures? We shall not cease to correct our errors and to seek a better application of Soviet principles—by trying to correct ourselves."
Nevertheless Lenin seems to have been blind to one most important phenomenon—the organic transformation of the Party on which his hopes and his optimism were founded, a Party which he thought was the "real vanguard of the vanguard class."
At the beginning of 1923 the Party had 485,000 members, nearly all of whom were members of the bureaucracy. A never ending purge eliminated the bad elements. "No profound and powerful popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of mud, without adventurers and rogues, without swaggering and noisy elements," said Lenin, before admitting, at the time of the N.E.P., that "a ruling party inevitably attracts careerists and industrial speculators who deserve to be shot." But the purge was apt to hit the best brains, those least docile and most refractory to the passive obedience which was gradually substituted for discipline by consent. Subjected to a hierarchical system aggravated by the force of inertia and by economic distress, the Party lost the habit of thinking for itself and acting of its own accord. The Politbureau's methods of government and the administration of the Secretariat intensified the torpor consequent on the tension of revolution and war. As in France in 1793, where sections and districts were bureaucratised by the division of functions and the lassitude of the sectionaries, so the average Bolshevik militant became enslaved to the Soviet State for the sake of a job. In this period of unemployment and privation, the Party membership card was as good as social insurance. Selection on the ground of fidelity and ability gave way to advancement for the careerist.
In this new caste with its petty privileges there were subdivisions: at the bottom a plebs to be mobilised on occasion for the worst and most thankless tasks; at the cop intellectual work and the little perquisites of power fell to the aristocracy of the so-called "responsible officials"; for the intermediate classes, the main anxiety was to avoid disgrace, to get a foot on the ladder. Civic rights were reserved to registered communists; they enjoyed relative security and had easier access to the seventh rank in wages, better lodging, a less uncertain future.
"It is useless to deny that many militants are mortally weary. They have to attend 'Saturdays' twice or four times a month, out of working hours; excessive mental strain is demanded; their families live in difficult conditions; they are sent here to-day and there to-morrow by the Party or by chance; the result is inevitably psychological exhaustion." These words of Zinoviev, true in 1920, were not less true in 1923, but only of a decreasing number of the lower ranks. As the regime acquired greater stability, the others had increasing advantages, intrinsically small but valuable by contrast with the surrounding poverty. The "Saturdays" in question disappeared. The "great initiative" hailed by Lenin, voluntary Saturday work, rapidly degenerated into compulsory work, and was admitted to be an illusion. In the same speech Zinoviev, repeating Lenin's words, demanded, "criticism, great freedom of criticism within the Party. We have always asserted it in theory; now is the time to put it into practice:" But at each Congress, at each Conference, the same phrases, never translated into fact, were used to calm the same discontent.
The remnants of the earlier freedom of criticism fell to the Upper Ten Thousand, to the new political patriciate. "With what human cargo did the Communist Party enter the revolution?" asked the exiled Menshevik, Dalin. "Not more than five or ten thousand, a third of whom were intellectuals. That is the original capital producing so large a dividend." This ten thousand constituted the upper stratum of the amorphous Society grown up in penury. The symptoms of decadence had not obscured their revolutionary mentality, and a chosen few kept intact the spirit of traditional Bolshevism, maintained a communion of ideas with communists of no rank, with obscure units scattered among the labouring masses. How many were to persevere in the original path? Only experience would show.
The Party, then, is a complex which escapes summary definition, in which old forms exist side by side with new types, where habits are met by innovations. Discussion between the various ranks of the organisation becomes more and more rare. At the top, a few men give orders which the machine executes as it pleases. The regular offices transmit the instructions. All initiative, all driving power comes from above. Official institutions, which but yesterday were consultative assemblies, now merely register decisions from above. The Party Statutes are treated in the same way as the Constitution. Many Congress decisions never get farther than the paper they are written on, especially if their tendency is towards the restoration of liberty. Committees of all sorts abound, there are ramifications of the Party in towns, cantons, districts, provinces, federated countries. The committees become more numerous, jostle one another and build up a many-storied machine which retards the movement of the heavy State machine. The executive institutions of the Soviets, on an analogous but even more complicated model, are each under the orders of the corresponding Party institution. Generally the directing element is identical in the two. In factories. State institutions, dwelling-houses, schools, trade unions, consumers' co-operative societies, the army, the militia, the police —communists are grouped into cells and sections which delegate their authority. The Union of Communist Youth, the Comsomol, with its 400,000 members, has its own cells everywhere. Where communists are not numerous enough, "sympathisers" act as auxiliaries. This extraordinary network extends irresistibly. A system of administration and government altogether unforeseen, but explicable by Gorky's remark that "we live in the midst of a mass of persons destitute of any political or social education."
"The Party will endeavour to guide the activity of the soviets, but not to supplant them"—a vain resolution passed in 1919, but, like many others, never applied, and confirmed many times since, without thereby becoming any more applicable. The decisions adopted at the last Congress under Lenin's inspiration —to restore a certain amount of power to the People's Commissars, to reduce the machine to the minimum—these had the same fate. The Party had guided the revolution, had won the Civil War, had mastered anarchy, forged the mechanism of power, and breathed life into an embryonic economy. Its driving power was to carry it beyond the objectives originally fixed. Time was needed to assimilate the new conditions. Six months after Kronstadt did not Russia suffer the ravages of a terrible famine which could not be made good all at once the next year? Only in 1923 did the N.E.P. create circumstances propitious for a return to normal constitutional methods. But Lenin was no longer there to direct the operation implied in his latest writings. Some hoped that he would once more surmount his physical disability. Meanwhile it was for the Politbureau to put into force the popular democracy formulated in the theory and the programme of Bolshevism.
Now if the Party was "entirely apart from and above everything," according to Bukharin's tremendous admission, the Politbureau in its turn, in relation to the Party, was "entirely apart from and above everything." The interest of the cause, popular aspirations, revolutionary progress, became for it so many abstractions divorced from reality. By its isolation it lost all sense of the situation and any power of interpreting it in the light of principles. Its opinions were based on reading official reports and police dossiers. As early as 1922, when Lenin and Trotsky sanctioned the theatrical trial of the Social Revolutionary Party, their only knowledge of the terrorist deeds to be condemned was derived from the biased information of the Cheka. In the Communist International, bloody deeds were and are fomented without the knowledge of the regular Executive Committee. For one affair such as that of Georgia in which Stalin almost succeeded in deceiving the Central Committee, how many others were prepared and decided on the word of officials. With Lenin laid aside—and even if his last counsels had been followed—if Stalin had been removed from the Secretariat and the Central Committee enlarged to a hundred members as the unknown Testament suggested, there would have been no fundamental change without giving back to the Party, the trade unions and the soviets the right to make their voices heard. But that does not seem to have entered the minds of the people at the top, and the voices from below were stifled.
At the beginning of the revolution Gorky had said opportunely, "The old order of things is materially destroyed, but it lives on morally among us and in us. The hundred-headed hydra of ignorance, barbarism, stupidity, treason and villainy is not slain." The warning remained necessary when the N.E.P. was introduced. Bolshevik theorists, it is true, were expected to abolish in five years the spiritual inheritance of the past, the centuries old atavism of oppression and servitude. Driven by extraordinary conditions to extraordinary measures, they only proposed action in the direction of their ultimate aim, and for that purpose to harmonise sooner or later the means and the end. But they had to take care, while there was yet time, to avoid the tendency to follow the line of least resistance in making a virtue of necessity, in perpetuating a dictatorship of distress, and in losing their raison d'etre in order to keep themselves in power.