The Russian Revolution (18 page)

To most Communists it seemed obvious that if something important had to be done, it was best to do it through the party. Of course, the party's central apparat could not compete with the huge government bureaucracy on a day-to-day administrative level-it was far too small. But at local level, where the party committees and the soviets were both building from scratch, the situation was different. The party committee began to emerge as the dominant local authority after the Civil War, with the soviet falling into a secondary role not unlike that of the old zemstvo. Policy transmitted through the party chain of command (from the Politburo, Orgburo, or Central Committee to the local party committees) had a much better chance of being implemented than the mass of decrees and instructions that came down from the central government to the uncooperative and often chaotic soviets. The government had no hiring and firing powers over soviet personnel, and it did not have much effective budgetary control either. The party committees, on the other hand, were staffed by Communists who were obliged by party discipline to obey instructions from higher party organs. The party secretaries who headed the committees, though formally elected by their local party organizations, could in practice be removed and replaced by the Secretariat of the party's Central Committee.

But there was one problem. The party's apparat-a hierarchy of committees and cadres (who were really appointed officials), topped by the Central Committee's Secretariat-was to all intents and purposes a bureaucracy; and bureaucracy was something that Communists disliked on principle. In the succession struggle of the mid-192os (see below, pp. 107-9), Trotsky tried to discredit Stalin, the party's General Secretary, by pointing out that he had built a party bureaucracy and was manipulating it for his own political ends. However, this criticism seemed to make little impact on the party as a whole. One reason was that the appointment (rather than election) of party secretaries was much less of a departure from Bolshevik tradition than Trotsky claimed: in the old days of the pre-1917 underground party, the committees had always relied heavily on the leadership of professional revolutionaries sent out by the Bolshevik Centre; and, even when the committees came above ground in 1917, it was more common for them to forward urgent requests for `cadres from the Centre' than to insist on their democratic right to choose their own local leadership.

In more general terms, however, it seems that most Communists simply did not regard the party apparat as a bureaucracy in the pejorative sense. To them (as to Max Weber), a bureaucracy operated by applying a clearly defined body of law and precedent, and was also characterized by a high degree of specialization and deference to professional expertise. But the party apparat of the 1920S was not specialized to any significant degree, and (except on security and military matters) it did not defer to professional experts. Its officials were not encouraged to `go by the book': in the early years, there were no compilations of party decrees to fall back on, and later, any secretary who stuck to the letter of an old Central Committee instruction rather than responding to the spirit of the current party line was likely to be rebuked for `bureaucratic tendencies'.

When Communists said that they did not want a bureaucracy, they meant that they did not want an administrative structure that would not or could not respond to revolutionary commands. But, by the same token, they wanted very much to have an administrative structure that would respond to revolutionary commands-one whose officials were willing to accept orders from the revolution's leaders and eager to carry out policies of radical social change. That was the revolutionary function that the party apparat (or bureaucracy) could perform, and most Communists instinctively recognized it.

Most Communists also believed that the organs of the 'proletarian dictatorship' ought to be proletarian, meaning by this that former workers should hold the responsible administrative jobs. This may not have been quite what Marx meant by proletarian dictatorship, and it was not quite what Lenin intended either. (The workers `would like to build a better apparatus for us,' Lenin wrote in 1923, `but they do not know how. They cannot build one. They have not yet developed the culture required for this; and it is culture that is required."') Nevertheless, it was taken for granted in all the party's debates that an institution's political soundness, revolutionary fervour, and freedom from `bureaucratic degeneration' were directly correlated with the percentage of its cadres that came from the working class. The class criterion was applied to all the bureaucracies, including the party apparat. It was also applied in the party's own recruitment of members, which would necessarily affect the composition of the Soviet administrative elite in the future.

In 1921, the industrial working class was in a shambles and the regime's relationship with it was in a state of crisis. But by 1924, economic revival had eased some of the difficulties, and the working class was beginning to recover and grow. It was in that year that the party reaffirmed its commitment to a proletarian identity by announcing the Lenin Levy, a campaign to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers as party members. Implicit in this decision was a commitment to continue creating a `proletarian dictatorship' by encouraging workers to move into administrative jobs.

By 1927, after three years of heavy working-class recruitment, the Communist Party had a total of over a million full members and candidates, of whom 39 per cent were currently workers by occupation and 56 per cent had been workers by occupation when they joined the party.13 The difference between these two percentages indicates the approximate size of the group of worker-Communists who had moved permanently into administrative and other whitecollar jobs. For workers who joined the party in the first decade of Soviet power, the odds on subsequent promotion into administrative work (even excluding promotions after 1927) were at least 50:50.

The party apparat was a more popular destination for rising working-class Communists than the government bureaucracy, partly because the workers felt more at home in a party environment and partly because educational deficiencies were less of a problem for a local party secretary than, say, a department head in the government's Commissariat of Finance. In 1927, 49 per cent of the Communists in responsible positions in the party apparat were former workers, whereas the corresponding figure for Communists in the government and soviet bureaucracy was 35 per cent. The discrepancy was even more marked at the highest levels of the administrative hierarchy. Very few of the Communists in the top government jobs were working class, while almost half the regional party secretaries (heads of oblast', guberniya, and krai organizations) were former workers.14

The leadership struggle

While Lenin lived, the Bolsheviks acknowledged him as the party's leader. Nevertheless, the party did not formally have a leader, and it offended Bolsheviks to think that it necessarily required one. In moments of political turbulence, it was not unheard of for party comrades to rebuke Lenin for trading too much on his personal authority; and, while Lenin usually insisted on having his way, he did not require flattery or any particular show of respect. The Bolsheviks had nothing but contempt for Mussolini and his Italian Fascists, regarding them as political primitives for dressing up in comic-opera uniforms and swearing loyalty to Il Duce. Furthermore, they had learned the lessons of history, and had no intention of letting the Russian Revolution degenerate as the French Revolution had done when Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor. Bonapartism-the transformation of a revolutionary war leader into a dictator-was a danger that was often discussed in the Bolshevik Party, usually with implicit reference to Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army and hero of Communist youth during the Civil War. It was assumed that any potential Bonaparte would be a charismatic figure, capable of stirring oratory and grandiose visions, and probably wearing military uniform.

Lenin died in January 1924. But his health had been in serious decline since the middle of 1921, and thereafter he was only intermittently active in political life. A stroke in May 1922 left him partially paralysed, and a second stroke in March 1923 caused further paralysis and loss of speech. His political death, therefore, was a gradual process, and Lenin himself was able to observe its first results. His responsibilities as head of the government were taken over by three deputies, of whom Aleksei Rykov, who became Lenin's successor as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in 1924, was the most important. But it was clear that the main locus of power was not in the government but in the party's Politburo, which had seven full members including Lenin. The other Politburo members were Trotsky (Commissar for War), Stalin (General Secretary of the party), Zinoviev (head of the Leningrad party organization and also head of the Comintern), Kamenev (head of the Moscow party organization), Rykov (first deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars), and Mikhail Tomsky (head of the Central Council of Trade Unions).

During Lenin's illness-and indeed after his death-the Politburo pledged itself to act as a collective leadership, and all its members vehemently denied that any one of them could replace Lenin or aspire to a similar position of authority. Nevertheless, a fierce though rather furtive succession struggle was in progress in 1923, with the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin pitted against Trotsky. Trotsky-the odd man out in the leadership, both because of his late entry into the Bolshevik Party and his spectacular performance since-was perceived as an ambitious contender for the top position, though he strongly denied it. In The New Course, written late in 1923, Trotsky retaliated with the warning that the old guard of the Bolshevik Party was losing its revolutionary spirit, succumbing to `conservative, bureaucratic factionalism', and behaving more and more like a small ruling elite whose only concern was to stay in power.

Lenin, removed from active leadership by his illness but still able to observe the manoeuvring of his would-be successors, was developing a similarly jaundiced view of the Politburo, which he began to describe as an `oligarchy'. In the so-called `Testament' of December 1922, Lenin surveyed the qualities of various party leaders-including the two he identified as outstanding, Stalin and Trotsky-and, in effect, damned them all with faint praise. His comment on Stalin was that he had accumulated enormous powers as General Secretary of the party, but might not always use those powers with sufficient caution. A week later, after a clash between Stalin and Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, over Lenin's sickbed regime, Lenin added a postscript to the Testament saying that Stalin was `too rude' and should be removed from his position as General Secretary. 15

At the time, many Bolsheviks would have been surprised to find Stalin ranked as Trotsky's equal in political stature. Stalin had none of the attributes that the Bolsheviks normally associated with outstanding leadership. He was not a charismatic figure, a fine orator, or a distinguished Marxist theoretician like Lenin or Trotsky. He was not a war hero, an upstanding son of the working class, or even much of an intellectual. He was a `grey blur', in Nikolai Sukhanov's words-a good backroom politician, an expert on the internal working of the party, but a man without personal distinction. It was generally assumed that Zinoviev rather than Stalin was the dominant member of the Politburo triumvirate. Lenin, however, was in a better position than most to appreciate Stalin's capacities, for Stalin had been his right-hand man in the internal party struggle of 1920-I.

The triumvirate's battle with Trotsky came to a head in the winter of 1923-4. Despite the existence of a formal ban on party factions, the situation was in many ways comparable with that of 1920-1, and Stalin followed much the same strategy as Lenin had done. In the party discussions and election of delegates preceding the Thirteenth Party Conference, Trotsky's supporters campaigned as an opposition, while the party apparat was mobilized in support of `the Central Committee majority', that is, the triumvirate. The `Central Committee majority' won, though there were pockets of support for Trotsky in the party cells of the central government bureaucracy, the universities, and the Red Army.16 After the initial voting, an intensive assault on the pro-Trotsky cells induced many of them to defect to the majority. Only a few months later, when delegates were elected in the spring of 1924 for the forthcoming Party Congress, Trotsky's support seemed to have evaporated almost completely.

This was essentially a victory for the party machine-that is, a victory for Stalin, the General Secretary. The General Secretary was in a position to manipulate what one scholar has labelled a `circular flow of power'.17 The Secretariat appointed the secretaries who headed local party organizations, and could also dismiss them if they showed undesirable factional leanings. The local party organizations elected delegates to the national party conferences and congresses, and it was increasingly common for the secretaries to be routinely elected at the top of the local delegate list. The national party congresses, in turn, elected the members of the party's Central Committee, Politburo, and Orgburo-and, of course, the Secretariat. In short, the General Secretary could not only punish political opponents but also stack the congresses which confirmed his tenure in office.

With the crucial battle of 1923-4 behind him, Stalin proceeded systematically to consolidate his gains. In 1925, he broke with Zinoviev and Kamenev, forcing them into a defensive opposition in which they looked like the aggressors. Later, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined Trotsky in a united opposition, which Stalin defeated with ease: their supporters found themselves appointed to jobs in distant provinces; and, while the opposition leaders could still take the floor at party congresses, there were so few oppositionist delegates present that the leaders seemed irresponsible frondeurs who had totally lost touch with the mood of the party. In 1927, the opposition leaders and many of their supporters were finally expelled from the party for breaking the rule against factionalism. Trotsky and a number of other oppositionists were then sent off to administative exile in distant provinces.