As long as the bourgeoisie holds power, as long as it controls the press, education, parliament and art, a large part of the working class will be corrupted by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and its agents and driven into the bourgeois camp ... But as soon as there is freedom of the press for the working class, as soon as we gain control of the schools and the press, the time will come - it is not very far off - when gradually, day by day, large groups of the working class will come into the party until, one day, we have won the majority ofthe working class to our ranks.[356]
The Bolshevik self-definition as the proletariat inpower impliedthat the new regime had begun the process of socialist transformation. It did not necessarily imply anything definite about the depth of that transformation at any one time nor even about its tempo. Unfortunately, there are two deep-rooted misunderstandings about what the Bolsheviks actually did claim about the road to socialism in the early years of the regime. The first misunderstanding is associated with the phrase 'smash the state'. Many have felt that Lenin's use of this phrase in State and Revolution (written in 1917) was a promise (whether sincere or not) to bring about an immediate end to any repressive or centralised state. Some writers have gone further and posited a genuine if temporary conversion to anarchism that led to a massive attempt in I9I7-I8 to create a 'commune-state' that was the polar opposite of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.[357] The other misunderstanding is associated with the phrase 'short cut to communism'. Although the Bolsheviks never used this phrase, scholars invariably employ it when describing the policies of'war communism' in 191720. According to the short-cut thesis, the Bolsheviks thought that measures put in place to fight the civil war had accelerated the pace of social transformation to the point of bringing Russia to the brink of a leap into full socialism.
These two myths obscure the real innovation in the Bolshevik version of the class narrative - one which the Bolshevik leaders themselves insisted upon. This innovation was the thesis that a proletarian revolution was necessarily accompanied by a massive, society-wide political and economic crisis. As Leon Trotsky summed it up in an epigram from 1922: 'Revolution opens the door to a new political system, but it achieves this by means of a destructive catastrophe.'[358] Far from implying any acceleration of socialist transformation - as suggested by both 'smash the state' and 'short cut to communism' - this quasi-inevitable crisis meant that the new era in world history would be inaugurated by a series of severe challenges to any meaningful transformation.
Lenin's use of 'smash the state' in I9I7 was conducted entirely within the framework of the class narrative: the proletariat wrests political power away from the bourgeoisie and uses it to gradually remove the class contradictions that make a repressive state necessary. In his celebrated epigram about the cook running the affairs of the state, Lenin promised only that the new regime would set about teaching the cook how to administer society. 'Smash the state' always meant 'smash the bourgeois state in order to replace it with a proletarian state'. The new proletarian state might have many ofthe same institutions and even many of the same personnel - and yet class rule would have changed hands and this made all the difference.
Bukharin drew out another implication of the 'smash the state' scenario. If the bourgeois state had to be smashed and the proletarian state had to be built up, a time of breakdown would have to be endured - and therefore social breakdown was no argument against revolution. The paradigmatic instance of this process was the army. Naturally the oldbourgeois army had to disintegrate, since its use as a weapon against the revolution had to be forestalled, its officers could not be trusted and anyway soldiers in a revolutionary period would simply no longer obey orders. The army thus falls apart, but 'every revolution smashes what is old and rotten: a certain period (a very difficult one) must pass before the new arises, before a beautiful home starts to be built upon the ruins of the old pig-sty'. Eventually a new proletarian army arises. This army would fight according to the standard rules for an effective war machine and it would recruit as many 'bourgeois military specialists' as possible - of course, under the watchful eye of the commissars appointed by the new proletarian state authority.[359]
Much confusion will be avoided once we realise that the Bolsheviks saw the mighty Red Army not as a refutation but as a paradigm of the 'smash the state' scenario. When the Bolsheviks took stock as the civil war wound down in 1920, they were proud that they had successfully defended their right to go down the road to socialism, and they certainly felt they were moving in the right direction - but they also realised that the civil war had set them back in a major way. The Bolshevik economist Iurii Larin told foreign visitors in 1920 that the real economic history of the new regime would begin after the civil war. In December 1920 (supposedly the height of the euphoria of'War Communism'), Trotsky put it this way: 'We attack, retreat and again attack, and we always say that we have not traversed even a small portion of the road. The slowness of the unfolding of the proletarian revolution is explained by the colossal nature of the task and the profound approach of the working class to this task.'[360]
Thus, remarkably, the Bolsheviks had committed themselves to promising the workers a vast social crisis in the event of a successful proletarian revolution. This strand of Bolshevism only makes sense when seen in the context of the all-embracing disaster of the world war. What reasonable worker or peasant would refuse the sacrifices needed to put into practice the only possible escape from a recurrence of this tragedy?
The new themes and emphases that Bolshevism brought to the old class narrative during this time of troubles were not ironed out into a completely consistent whole. Underneath the aggressive defiance, some embarrassment can be detected on issues such as freedom of speech. Still, the heart of this new amalgam was the same as the old class narrative: the proletariat's mission to conquer state power and to use it to construct socialism, and, just as important, the inspired and inspiring leadership that fills the proletariat with a sense of its mission. This underlying faith that the proletariat could and would respond to inspiring leadership informed what outsiders could hardly help seeing as a cynical and manipulative strategy. It was this same faith that became the real constitution of the new regime and a central influence on its institutions and policies.
'Who-whom' and the transformation of the countryside
Nowhere is the influence of the class narrative more evident than in the crucial decisions made in the 1920s about the best way to effect the socialist transformation of the countryside. The link between the class narrative and Bolshevik thinking about the peasantry is the scenario summarised by the phrase kto-kogo or 'who-whom'.
356
358
Lev Trotsky
359
Nikolai Bukharin,