In the final analysis, the fate of our republic will depend on whether the peasant masses will stand by the working class, loyal to their alliance, or whether they will permit the ‘nepmen’, that is, the new bourgeoisie, to drive a wedge between them and the working class, to create a schism between them and the working class. The more clearly we see this alternative, the more clearly all our workers and peasants understand it, the greater are the chances that we shall avoid a schism that would be fatal for the Soviet republic.45
The nepman or new bourgeoisie had now replaced the liberal bourgeoisie in the role of rival leadership. Although kto-kovo was a late coinage to express what Lenin saw as the class logic of NEP, it also reflected the basic logic of Lenin’s heroic scenario. The kto-kovo scenario is the Old Bolshevik scenario dusted off and applied to the realities of NEP.
And so it appears that Lenin came up with a new scenario that still reflected the optimistic spirit of his original one of inspiring class leadership. But the adjustment did not come without cost. As in the case of international revolution, the new scenario had a built-in anxiety factor that had previously been absent. One of Lenin’s fundamental axioms had always been that individual small-scale production for the market will inevitably give rise to full-scale capitalism. This axiom was not a source of anxiety for the original Old Bolshevik scenario. On the contrary, capitalist transformation of Russia was seen as a progressive factor, creating indefatigable fighters for the democratic revolution and later for the socialist revolution. But circumstances had altered. Now the capitalism created by the ‘petty-bourgeois peasantry’ was a threat to steady steps to socialism and therefore to the whole legitimacy of socialist revolution in Russia.
Lenin expressed this anxiety with great intensity after 1919. It shows up in his diatribes against ‘free trade’ during the civil war. The amorphous but mighty force of peasant capitalism was fighting a war against the grain monopoly – and in so doing it was condemning the cities to starvation. As he expostulated in the summer of 1920:46
The abolition of classes not only means driving out the landlords and capitalists – something we accomplished with comparative ease – it means abolishing the small commodity producers [= those who produce for the market], and they cannot be driven out; we must live in harmony them; they can (and must) by remoulded and re-educated only by very prolonged, slow, cautious organizational work.
They encircle the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat and causes constant relapses among the proletariat into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternate moods of exaltation and dejection… Millions of millions of small producers, by their ordinary, everyday, imperceptible, elusive, demoralizing activity achieve the very results which the bourgeoisie need and which restore the bourgeoisie.47
The retreat associated with NEP only intensified this anxiety. Lenin’s obsessing about the abstract force of ‘petty-bourgeois individual production’ sits uneasily next to his optimistic hopes for class leadership of the middle peasant. Yet both have deep roots in his life-long heroic scenario.
The Cultural Deficit
In late 1920 Lenin’s long-time associate Grigory Zinoviev recalled the hopes placed in 1917 on ‘soviet democracy’. The democratically elected soviets were supposed to be ‘organs in which the creativity of the masses finds for itself the most free and most organized path, the soviets as organs that guaranteed a constant stream of fresh forces from below, the soviets as organs where the masses learned at one and the same time to legislate and to carry out their own laws’.48 Zinoviev contrasted these dreams with the bleak reality that by late 1920 ‘the most elementary demands of democratism’ were being ignored.49
The disappointing record of the soviets as instruments of democratic renewal had one implication that increasingly preoccupied Lenin. The soviets were supposed to abolish ‘bureaucratism’ and to completely remake the inherited state apparatus. But as Lenin became more and more frustrated in his dealings with the state bureaucracy he was forced to search for new ways to combat pervasive bureaucratism.
By 1922 Lenin’s anger about the deficiencies of the state bureaucracy had become an obsession. As he remarked to a colleague in February 1922, ‘departments are shit, decrees are shit. Find people, check up on work – these are everything’.50 All through the year he continued to excoriate the gosapparat (state apparatus) and to trace all its inefficiencies and failures to the original sin of tsarism. Again and again Lenin worries that the party is not controlling the state machinery, but the other way around. The state machinery was ‘like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both.’51
As these remarks show the bureaucracy had become a third source of anxiety, alongside the encirclements by international capitalism and by the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasantry. The new enemy acquired a bitterly ironical labeclass="underline" the ‘soviet bureaucrat’. Back in 1917 this term would have appeared absurdly oxymoronic, since the soviets were viewed as the polar opposite of ‘bureaucratism’. But after 1917 ‘the soviets’ became more and more of a synonym for the state apparatus as distinct from the party. Just like the pre-revolutionary bureaucracy, the personnel of the ‘soviet apparatus’ was made up mainly of middle-class ‘bourgeois specialists’. They were automatically assumed to be hostile to the socialist cause, or perhaps even saboteurs. Lenin now referred to the soviet bureaucracy as a haven for the shattered remnants of the capitalists and landowners.
Why had the soviets failed so signally that they had almost turned into their opposite? Lenin’s diagnosis focused on the cultural deficit of the proletariat and (even more) the narod. Lenin used kultura to mean such things as literacy, elementary habits of organization and other basic skills of modern ‘civilization’ (another term frequently found in his late writings). The cultural level of the ‘soviet bureaucracy’ was also very low, according to Lenin. Yet, worryingly, these bureaucrats had more culture than the workers or even the Communists. Lenin compared the Bolsheviks to barbarians who had conquered a higher civilization. Didn’t history show the very real danger that ‘the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror’, that is, ‘Communists stand at the head of departments, enjoying rank and title, but actually swimming with the stream together with the bourgeoisie’?52