Founder and leader of the party and the state, Lenin never behaved as a despot or dictator in his party. He enjoyed genuine authority, but so to some extent did other leaders who found themselves in disagreement with him on many occasions, without losing their positions as a result. In the one well-known instance in 1917 when he did want to expel two leaders (Zinoviev and Kamenev) from the Central Committee, he was quietly told by the chairman of the session, Jakov Sverdlov: ‘Comrade Lenin, we do not act like that in our party.’ This is a revealing snapshot: in the course of a meeting where taking power was under discussion, Lenin, who was agitated and conducted himself in a emotional manner, was called to order by another influential leader who was in the chair. This modus operandi, which was constitutive of the Bolshevik tradition, persisted after the revolution. Lenin always operated in the framework of party procedures: he debated and protested vigorously, but accepted that all important decisions should be voted on, as required by party statutes, and was not infrequently outvoted. He was a leader, not a despot. He was a top leader of his party, not its proprietor. He cannot therefore be treated as ‘Russia’s dictator’, and even less so when we recall that during the Civil War the leadership was hyphenated to ‘Lenin-Trotsky’ in the eyes of the world and Russia itself – an interesting phenomenon given that the party’s founder was Lenin and him alone. But Trotsky was a co-leader of the revolution alongside him, and this was accepted by the party and by Lenin himself.
Bolshevism was a party, but it was also an ethos. Discussion could range far and wide. We shall offer a few examples of the issues debated in party bodies and in public. Thanks to the publication of the Central Committee minutes from August 1917 until February 1918,[8] the debate about whether to take power in 1917 and, if so, with or without allies, is well known. Another example: in December 1920, Osinsky-Obolensky – a leader of the ‘democratic centralist’ oppositional current – published an article in Pravda. The party was still militarized and he himself was performing military duties at the front. However, victory now seemed assured and Osinsky believed it was time to tackle impending difficult issues. According to him, one of these was the task of reviving the party as a political organization once the military phase was over. He therefore proposed constitutional rules that would enable majorities to pursue their chosen policies, while allowing minorities the right to criticize and take the helm if the previous line proved a failure. Otherwise – and this was a warning to the leadership and ordinary membership alike – the party would perish as a political organization. Even though a paper shortage often reduced the main party daily to a single sheet, the article was published in Pravda.
A further example of debate on sensitive subjects was the post-mortem on the failed push on Warsaw, conducted during a party conference in late 1920. Part of the debate occurred in closed session (and there are no published minutes). But the other part was staged in public, and it was here that a party leader like Radek could taunt Lenin (the minutes confirm it) with a ‘We told you so’. Along with other leaders, he had warned that Polish workers would not rally to the Russian troops and that the counter-offensive on Warsaw was an error. I do not know who the main instigators of the Polish adventure were, but Lenin had endorsed the idea in the hope of rousing the German Left. He certainly did not enjoy Radek’s taunting remarks, but was obliged to listen to them. Trotsky too was opposed to the operation (this probably accounts for Radek’s ‘we’) and made it known at the Eleventh Congress without anyone contradicting him – something that was entirely acceptable in these years. In short, the left wing of the party had been against the operation and Lenin had erred.
Even graver issues were aired in open public discussion or broached in the party press: the evidence is available in the minutes of party congresses and conferences. Lenin was not alone in reacting to the problems that plagued the party. It was a poorly organized ruling party, acutely aware of its weaknesses and the low level of its cadres and press. It was also debilitated by a proliferation of internal squabbles and ‘cliques’, particularly in ruling circles at local and central levels. A major issue was the development of a growing, deeply resented gulf in power and privileges between those at the top and those at the bottom. This was an especially disquieting phenomenon in an egalitarian party of ‘comrades’, most of whom suffered material poverty. The problem was openly debated in party organizations and the party press; and the leadership, conscious of the depth of the malaise, sought to do something about it.
But an outcry from the base was not the only source of the debates forced upon a sometimes reluctant leadership. They themselves raised political and social problems and discussed them publicly, pointing to the dangers the party was exposing itself to. Witness the reflection by Zinoviev, a Politburo member, at the Eleventh Congress. Shortly before, Lenin had sounded the alarm about the disappearance of the ‘working class’ during and after the Civil War. According to Zinoviev, this was no longer the problem: the working class was being reconstituted, was leaving the countryside where it had sought refuge, and was ready to join the party. What worried him was the influx into the party of barely literate workers and many candidate members from other classes. He supported a temporary suspension of recruitment in order to exorcize the dangerous spectre of a process of degeneration – a kind of Thermidor from within (my term). Menshevik emigres were forecasting this as an imminent prospect and Zinoviev cited them to this effect – something unthinkable a few years later.
Increasing social differentiation within the party, on account of the influx of new members, was leading to the emergence of various ideological and political trends. This was the thesis defended by David Dallin, a Menshevik leader, in a book he had just published in Berlin.[9] To his mind, there was no political and social life in Russia outside the party and army; and he therefore reckoned it impossible to eliminate Bolshevism from without. Contrariwise, this could happen as a result of spontaneous processes occurring inside the party. Dallin anticipated all manner of splits, plots and intrigues. Elements of the peasantry and various groups of workers and petty bourgeois were slowly acquiring a sense of their own interests. The intelligentsia was reacquiring its natural capacity for generating ideological currents (democratic, imperial, revisionist). All these would surface in due course ‘and political history will be full of their political battles’. All of this was cited by Zinoviev and features in the congress proceedings. Dallin mocked the naive idea that a purge (in the traditional sense of expulsion from the party) could alter anything when it came to the inevitable expression of the centrifugal forces in society. Zinoviev would not appear to have disagreed with him. He declared himself convinced that ‘there is, in fact, a molecular process in the party, which is not simply a reflection of internal struggles, but echoes everything that is occurring in the country more widely – the whole spectrum of the ongoing class struggle’. All manner of elements foreign to the world of work were penetrating the party, but he still hoped that the ‘proletarian core’ would endure, maintain the party’s original ideological commitment, and prevent alien elements getting the upper hand.
8
These remarkable minutes are available in English in
9
D. Dallin,