The Testament was concerned to avoid a split between Trotsky and Stalin. The solution proposed—an increase in the size of the Central Committee—was futile. In his last articles Lenin went on to attack “bureaucratic misrule and wilfulness,” spoke of the condition of the State machine as “repugnant,” and concluded gloomily, “We lack sufficient civilization to enable us to pass straight on to Socialism although we have the political requisites.”
“The political requisites…”—but these were precisely the activity of the Party and governmental leadership which he was condemning in practice. Over the past years he had personally lauched the system of rule by a centralized Party against—if necessary—all other social forces. He had created the Bolsheviks, the new type of party, centralized and disciplined, in the first place. He had preserved its identity in 1917, when before his arrival from exile the Bolshevik leaders had aligned themselves on a course of conciliation with the rest of the Revolution. There seems little doubt that without him, the Social Democrats would have reunited and would have taken the normal position of such a movement in the State. Instead, he had kept the Bolsheviks intact, and then sought and won sole power—again against much resistance from his own followers.
It is clear from the reports of the meeting of the Central Committee nine days before the October Revolution in 1917 that the idea of the rising was “not popular,” that “the masses received our call with bewilderment.” Even the reports from most of the garrisons were tepid. The seizure of power was, in fact, an almost purely military operation, carried out by a small number of Red Guards, only partly from the factories, and a rather larger group of Bolshevized soldiery. The working masses were neutral.
Then, and in the Civil War which followed, by daring and discipline a few thousand comradesfn1 imposed themselves on Russia, against the various representatives of all political and social trends, and with the certain prospect of joint annihilation if they failed. The “Old Bolsheviks” among them had the prestige of the underground years, and the evident far-sightedness which had led them to form such a party gave them a special cachet: the myth of the Party, and the source of its leading cadres right up to the mid-1930s, was the underground struggle. But the vital force which forged in those concerned an overruling Party solidarity was the Civil War, the fight for power. It transformed the new mass Party into a hardened and experienced machine in which loyalty to the organization came before any other consideration.
When the Civil War ended, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries quickly began to gain ground. The rank and file of the trade unions turned away from the Bolsheviks. And as the failure of the first attempt to impose strict State control of the economy became obvious, Lenin began to realize that to continue on those lines would lead to ruin. He determined on the economic retreat which was to be the New Economic Policy. But with this admission that the Bolsheviks had been wrong, the way was open for the moderate parties, to which the workers were already turning, to claim political power.
At the Xth Party Congress, in May 1921, Radek, with rather more frankness than Lenin, dotted the i’s by explaining that if the Mensheviks were left at liberty, now that the Communists had adopted their policy, they would demand political power, while to concede freedom to the Socialist Revolutionaries when the “enormous mass” of the peasants was opposed to the Communists would be suicide.5 Both had now to be either fully legalized or completely suppressed. The latter course was naturally chosen. The Menshevik Party, which had operated under enormous disadvantages but had not been completely illegalized, was finally crushed. The Socialist Revolutionaries followed, receiving the death blow at a trial of their leaders in 1922.
Within the Communist Party itself, centers of discontent, to some degree linked with the workers’ feelings, had built up: the Democratic Centralists, led by Sapronov, and the Workers’ Opposition, led by Shlyapnikov. The former stood for at least freedom of discussion within the Party, and both opposed the increasing bureaucratization—though as so often with Communist opposition, Lenin was able to ask Shlyapnikov and his supporters why they had not been such keen opponents of Party bureaucracy when they themselves held Cabinet posts.
At the Xth Party Congress, Lenin had suddenly introduced two resolutions forbidding the formation of such groups, or “factions,” within the Party. From then on, the Secret Police took on the suppression of the even more radical opposition groups which refused to disband. But its chief, Dzerzhinsky, found that even many loyal Party members regarded those who belonged to such groups as comrades and refused to testify against them. He went to the Politburo to obtain an official decision that it was the duty of every Party member to denounce other Party members who were engaged in agitation against the leadership. Trotsky pointed out that of course it was an “elementary” obligation for members to denounce hostile elements in Party branches.
The illegal “Workers’ Truth” group started issuing, at the end of 1922, proclamations attacking the “new bourgeoisie,” speaking of “the gulf between the Party and the workers,” of “implacable exploitation.” The class, they added, which was supposed to be exercising its dictatorship was “in fact deprived of the most elementary political rights.”6 And in fact the Party, which had crushed opposition parties and had openly denied the rights of the nonproletarian majority in the name of the proletarian class struggle, was now on the brink of a breach of its last meaningful link to a loyalty outside itself.
When the Constituent Assembly, with its large anti-Bolshevik majority, was dispersed by force in January 1918 almost as soon as it met, Lenin had openly proclaimed that the “workers” would not submit to a “peasant” majority.
But as early as 1919 he found it necessary to remark that “we recognize neither freedom, nor equality, nor labor democracy [my italics] if they are opposed to the interests of the emancipation of labor from the oppression of capital.”7 In general, the working class itself began to be regarded as unreliable. Lenin insisted that “revolutionary violence” was also essential “against the faltering and unrestrained elements of the toiling masses themselves.”8 The right-wing Communist Ryazanov chided him. If the proletariat was weighed down with unreliable elements, he asked, “on whom will we lean?”9
The answer was to be—on the Party alone. Early in 1921 it had become obvious that the workers opposed the Party. Karl Radek, addressing the War College cadets, put the case clearly:
The Party is the politically conscious vanguard of the working class. We are now at a point where the workers, at the end of their endurance, refuse any longer to follow a vanguard which leads them to battle and sacrifice…. Ought we to yield to the clamors of workingmen who have reached the limit of their patience but who do not understand their true interests as we do? Their state of mind is at present frankly reactionary. But the Party has decided that we must not yield, that we must impose our will to victory on our exhausted and dispirited followers.10