The Russian Revolution (17 page)

in no other way than execution by firing squad of a very large number of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds in Shuya, and to the extent possible, not only in that city but also in Moscow and several other clerical centers.... the greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.7

At the same time, the question of discipline within the Communist Party was being re-examined. The Bolsheviks, of course, had always put a strong theoretical emphasis on party discipline, going back to Lenin's 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? All Bolsheviks accepted the principle of democratic centralism, which meant that party members could freely debate issues before a policy decision was reached, but were bound to accept the decision once a final vote had been taken at a party congress or in the Central Committee. But the principle of democratic centralism did not in itself determine the party's conventions regarding internal debate-how much debate was acceptable, how sharply the party's leaders could be criticized, whether the critics could organize `factions' or pressure groups on specific issues, and so on.

Before 1917, internal party debate meant for all practical purposes debate within the emigre community of Bolshevik intellectuals. Because of Lenin's dominant position, the Bolshevik emigres were a more unified and homogenous group than their Menshevik and SR counterparts, who tended to cluster in a number of small circles with their own individual leaders and political identities. Lenin strongly resisted any such development among the Bolsheviks. When another powerful Bolshevik personality, Aleksandr Bogdanov, started to build a group of disciples who shared his philosophical and cultural approach in the post-1905 emigration, Lenin forced Bogdanov and his group to leave the Bolshevik Party, even though the group did not really constitute a political faction or an internal party opposition.

The situation changed radically after the February Revolution, with the merging of the emigre and underground Bolshevik contingents in a larger and more diverse party leadership, and the enormous increase in total party membership. In 1917, the Bolsheviks were more concerned with riding the wave of popular revolution than with party discipline. Many individuals and groups within the party disagreed with Lenin on major policy issues, both before and after October, and Lenin's opinion did not always prevail. Some groups solidified into semi-permanent factions, even after their platform had been rejected by a majority on the Central Committee or at a party congress. The minority factions (consisting largely of Old Bolshevik intellectuals) did not usually leave the party, as they would have done before 1917. Their party was now in power in a virtually one-party state; and leaving the party therefore meant quitting political life altogether.

Despite these changes, however, Lenin's old theoretical premises on party discipline and organization were still part of Bolshevik ideology at the end of the Civil War, as was clear from the Bolsheviks' handling of the new, Moscow-based international communist organization, the Comintern. In 1920, when the Second Comintern Congress discussed the prerequisites for admission to the Comintern, the Bolshevik leaders insisted on imposing conditions clearly based on the model of the pre-1917 Bolshevik Party in Russia, even though this meant excluding the large and popular Italian Socialist Party (which wanted to join the Comintern without first purging itself of its right wing and centrist groups) and weakening the Comintern as a competitor with the revived Socialist International in Europe. The `21 Conditions' for admission adopted by the Comintern required, in effect, that the member parties should be minorities of the far left, recruiting only highly committed revolutionaries, and preferably formed by a split (comparable with the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903) in which the party left had demonstratively separated itself from the `reformist' centre and right wing. Unity, discipline, intransigence, and revolutionary professionalism were the essential qualities of any Communist party operating in a hostile environment.

Of course, the same rules did not necessarily apply to the Bolsheviks themselves, since they had already taken power. It could be argued that a ruling party in a one-party state must, in the first place, become a mass party, and, in the second place, accommodate and even institutionalize diversity of opinion. This was, in fact, what had been happening in the Bolshevik Party since 1917. Factions had developed within the leadership on specific policy issues and (in violation of the principle of democratic centralism) tended to remain in existence even after losing the final vote. By 1920, the factions participating in the current debate on the status of trade unions had become well-organized groups that not only offered competing policy platforms but also lobbied for support in the local party committees during the discussions and election of delegates that preceded the Tenth Party Congress. The Bolshevik Party, in other words, was developing its own version of `parliamentary' politics, with the factions playing the role of political parties in a multi-party system.

From the standpoint of later Western historians-and indeed any outside observer with liberal-democratic values-this was obviously an admirable development and a change for the better. But the Bolsheviks were not liberal democrats; and there was considerable uneasiness within the Bolshevik ranks that the party was becoming fragmented, losing its old purposeful unity and sense of direction. Lenin certainly did not approve of the new style of party politics. In the first place, the trade-union debate-which was quite peripheral to the urgent and immediate problems facing the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Civil War-was taking up an enormous amount of the leaders' time and energy. In the second place, the factions were implicitly challenging Lenin's personal leadership in the party. One faction in the trade-union debate was led by Trotsky, the biggest man in the party next to Lenin despite his relatively recent admission to membership. Another faction, the `Workers' Opposition' led by Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, claimed a special relationship with the party's working-class members which was potentially very damaging to the old core leadership of emigre intellectuals headed by Lenin.

Lenin therefore set out to destroy the factions and factionalism within the Bolshevik Party. To do this, he used tactics that were not only factional but downright conspiratorial. Both Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan, a young Armenian member of Lenin's group, later described the gusto and single-mindedness with which he set about the operation at the Tenth Party Congress early in 1921, holding secret meetings of his own supporters, splitting the big provincial delegations pledged to opposition factions, and drawing up lists of oppositionists to be voted down in the Central Committee elections. Lenin even wanted to call in `an old Communist comrade from the underground who has type and a hand printing press' to run off leaflets for secret distribution-a suggestion that Stalin opposed on the grounds that it might be interpreted as factionalism.' (This was not the only time in the early Soviet years that Lenin reverted to the conspiratorial habits of the past. At a dark moment of the Civil War, Molotov recalled, Lenin summoned the leaders and told them that the fall of the Soviet regime was imminent. False identity documents and secret addresses had been prepared for them: `The party will go underground.i9)

Lenin defeated Trotsky's faction and the Workers' Opposition at the Tenth Congress, securing a Leninist majority on the new Central Committee, and replacing two Trotskyist members of the Central Committee Secretariat with a Leninist, Molotov. But this was not all, by any means. In a move that stunned the factional leaders, Lenin's group introduced and the Tenth Party Congress approved a resolution `On party unity', which ordered the existing factions to disband and forbade any further factional activity within the party.

Lenin described the ban on factions as temporary. This may conceivably have been sincere, but it is more likely that Lenin was simply giving himself room to back off if the ban turned out to be unacceptable to party opinion. As it happened, this was not the case: the party as a whole seemed quite prepared to sacrifice factions in the interests of unity, probably because the factions had not sunk deep roots in the party rank-and-file and were regarded by many as a prerogative of intellectual frondeurs.

The resolution `On party unity' contained a secret clause allowing the party to expel persistent factionalists and the Central Committee to remove any of its own elected members who were judged guilty of factionalism. But there were strong reservations about this clause in the Politburo, and it was not formally invoked during Lenin's lifetime. In the autumn of 1921, however, a full-scale purge of the party was conducted on Lenin's initiative. That meant that in order to retain party membership, every Communist had to appear before a purge commission, justify his revolutionary credentials, and if necessary defend himself against criticism. The main alleged purposes of the 1921 party purge were to weed out `careerists' and `class enemies'; it was not formally directed against supporters of the defeated factions. Nevertheless, Lenin emphasized that `all members of the Russian Communist Party who are in the slightest degree suspicious or unreliable ... should be got rid of' (that is, expelled from the party); and, as T. H. Rigby comments, it is difficult to believe that no Oppositionists were among the almost 25 per cent of party members judged unworthy."

While no prominent Oppositionists were expelled from the party in the purge, members of the opposition factions of 192o-1 did not all escape without punishment. The Central Committee's Secretariat, now headed by one of Lenin's men, had charge of appointments and distribution of party personnel; and it proceeded to send a number of prominent Workers' Oppositionists on assignments that kept them far from Moscow and thus effectively excluded them from active participation in leadership politics. The practice of using such `administrative methods' to reinforce unity in the leadership was later greatly developed by Stalin, after he became General Secretary of the party (that is, head of the Central Committee's Secretariat) in 1922; and scholars have often regarded it as the real death knell of internal democracy within the Soviet Communist Party. But it was a practice that originated with Lenin and arose out of the conflicts at the Tenth Party Congress, when Lenin was still the master strategist and Stalin and Molotov were his faithful henchmen.

The problem of bureaucracy

As revolutionaries, all Bolsheviks were against `bureaucracy'. They could happily see themselves as party leaders or military commanders, but what true revolutionary could admit to becoming a bureaucrat, a chinovnik of the new regime? When they discussed administrative functions, their language became full of euphemisms: Communist officials were `cadres' and Communist bureaucracies were `apparats' and `organs of Soviet power'. The word `bureaucracy' was always pejorative: `bureaucratic methods' and `bureaucratic solutions' were to be avoided at all costs, and the revolution must be protected from `bureaucratic degeneration'.

But all this should not obscure the fact that the Bolsheviks had established a dictatorship with the intention of ruling over the society and also transforming it. They could not achieve these objectives without administrative machinery, since they rejected from the start the idea that the society was capable of self-rule or spontaneous transformation. Thus the question was, what kind of administrative machinery did they need? They had inherited a large central government bureaucracy whose roots in the provinces had crumbled. They had soviets, which had partly taken over the functions of local government in 1917. Finally, they had the Bolshevik Party itselfan institution whose previous function of preparing and carrying out a revolution was clearly inappropriate to the situation after October.

The old government bureaucracy, now under Soviet control, still employed many officials and experts inherited from the Tsarist regime, and the Bolsheviks feared its capacity to undermine and sabotage their revolutionary policies. Lenin wrote in 1922 that the `conquered nation' of old Russia was already in the process of imposing its values on the Communist `conquerors':

If we take Moscow, with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: Who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed.... [The] culture [of the old bureaucracy] is miserable, insignificant, but it is still on a higher level than ours. Miserable and low as it is, it is higher than that of our responsible Communist administrators, for the latter lack administrative ability.1 i

Although Lenin saw the danger that Communist values would be swamped by the old bureaucracy, he believed that the Communists had no alternative to working with it. They needed the technical expertise of the old bureaucracy-not just administrative expertise, but also specialized knowledge in fields like government finance, railway administration, weights and measures, or geological surveying which the Communists themselves could not hope to supply. In Lenin's view, any party member who did not appreciate the new regime's need for `bourgeois experts'-including those who had worked as officials or consultants to the old regime-was guilty of `Communist conceit', meaning an ignorant and childish belief that Communists could solve all the problems for themselves. It would be a long time before the party could hope to train a sufficient number of Communist experts. Until then, Communists had to learn to work with the bourgeois experts and, at the same time, keep them under firm control.

Lenin's views on the experts were generally accepted by other party leaders, but they were less popular with the Communist rankand-file. Most Communists had very little concept of the kind of expertise required at the higher levels of government. But they had a clear idea of what it meant at local level if minor officials from the old regime had managed to work their way into similar jobs with the soviet, or if a chief accountant happened to disapprove of the local Communist activists at his plant, or even if the village schoolteacher was a religious believer who made trouble for the Komsomol and taught catechism in school.