Zinoviev also reckoned that at this juncture preserving workers’ democracy would have a healthy influence on party life. The ‘workers’ opposition’ (composed of party trade-union leaders) deplored its absence and made it a central plank in its list of demands. It even demanded that such a ‘workers’ democracy’ should be strengthened by purging white-collar elements and muzzling the intelligentsia – a rather problematic way to create a viable party! These positions were not acceptable to the party leadership. The cultural level and class consciousness of workers at the time was too low to base party-building exclusively on them.
In fact, the party had no compelling answers to all these questions in the short term. What it could do was make the switch to the NEP without losing control of the process; improve the work of the party and its administrative apparatus; and undertake patient educational work, while excluding dubious elements. All this assumed an increased dose of central control and authoritarianism. Whatever the good intentions, democratic objectives were manifestly unattainable even within the party. Even so, the party’s old guard still hoped to maintain a democratic spirit and modus operandi in its upper echelons.
Members of the old guard remained committed to the pre-revolutionary ethos. For them, party membership was not the route to a cosy career. They had burnt themselves out in the party’s service during the revolution and Civil War and amid the ruins it left behind it. Many leaders were in poor health and their doctors warned them that they could not continue at the same pace. In several cases, they had to be forced by government decision to take leave and seek treatment, often in Germany or elsewhere abroad. It is true that many thousands who joined during the Civil War did not belong to the old guard in the strict sense, but they were still people who were ready to pay a high price for the cause. For the most committed members, in itself power was not a major concern. Membership was a commitment that exacted a personal price – not something that brought a reward.
All these debates occurred just before or during Lenin’s radical rethink, which lasted as long as he could think, speak and dictate. During his dramatic last appearance, at the Eleventh Congress, he vehemently criticized supporters of authoritarian methods – a point that we have not as yet mentioned. In these years, party members participated in numerous public meetings in clubs that existed throughout Moscow and probably elsewhere – meetings where party policy was freely criticized, if not roundly denounced. Some party conservatives railed against such ‘disloyal behaviour’ and appealed to Lenin to put a halt to these infringements of party discipline. During the Eleventh Congress, one of the ‘undisciplined elements’ – Riazanov – was present in the hall and the supporters of a hard line, hoping for Lenin’s backing, reminded him that he had banned political factions within the party in 1921, at a point when it was splintering into different groups and subgroups. Lenin’s lengthy response was unambiguous. He did not refer to the 1921 episode, but offered many past examples of fundamental discussions in the party and asserted that, in the absence of free debate, it would not have survived – and would not now survive.
The key point we are seeking to stress here is the following: Bolshevism was a political party that offered its members the right to express their opinions and participate in the development of its political line, and Lenin was eager to preserve it as such. In his speech to the same congress, he also declared that the party must free itself of administrative tasks and concentrate primarily on political leadership, leaving administration to professional bureaucrats, the forces of ‘state capitalism’, and cooperative organizations.
Such were the essentials of the last version of Leninism. There is no question but that the situation looked alarming to Lenin. In his last appearances, statements and writings, he countered the style and substance of the policy pursued after his death with a firm, lucid ‘No’. And this cannot be erased from historical memory.
As we know, the programme of this major figure, who had led a radical revolution but pleaded for moderation now that power had been conquered, was not implemented. The possibility of reflecting freely on the party’s problems, the currents it contained, or the threats it faced, was the prerogative of the historically specific political formation that called itself ‘Bolshevik’. As long as its various bodies functioned and the decision-making process followed the rules that stipulated the division of authority between them, there was no personal dictatorship either in Russia or in the party. The dictatorship was in the hands of the party, not Lenin. When it did fall into the hands of an individual, the party’s party would soon be over.
A ONE-PARTY SYSTEM?
The bulk of old party cadres were still members and continued to regard themselves as such. But they sooner or later discovered that they were now actually somewhere else. Soon after Lenin’s death, they no longer recognized the party and reacted by leaving it, adapting to the new line, or joining one of the opposition currents (and perishing as a result). We know that the system was kept in one piece, but – as it turned out – at the price of its wholesale transformation, which involved mass terror against the party and a profound change in the spinal column of the party and system alike, which were henceforth dominated by classes dependent on the state.
Mensheviks (from abroad) and a number of internal party critics continued to advance the idea that political monopoly was bound to come into conflict with the inevitable social differentiation occurring inside and outside the party. Dallin anticipated an implosion in the more or less short term. And it might be said that something of the sort did in fact happen under Stalin’s absolute dictatorship. But it was not an ‘implosion’ consequent upon inner-party contradictions. Describing it in the terms and categories of the inner-party controversies of 1902–3, or the beginning of the Soviet period, makes no sense. The political scene had changed utterly. Terms like ‘party’, ‘Bolshevik’, ‘socialist’, and even ‘Leninist’ were still used – but had a quite different content. The pathological character of the top leader and the consolidation of his autocratic power – phenomena foreign to Bolshevism – now defined the essence of the political order. Rapid industrialization and population movements towards the towns generated massive changes, and increasing social differentiation was accompanied by the emergence of new social trends and interests. All this complicated the rulers’ task. Stalin detected a constant threat in these developments and natural differentiation, which were in fact positive phenomena. And throughout his long rule he waged a war rooted in terror against the cadres and broader layers of the population. This was the irrational core of his policy, exacerbated by the paranoiac dimension of his personality.
The Twelfth Congress of March 1923 may be regarded as the last one where the party could still legitimately use its revolutionary name, and the year 1924 as marking the end of ‘Bolshevism’. For a few more years, one group of old Bolsheviks after another was to engage in rearguard actions in an attempt to rectify the course of events in one fashion or another. But their political tradition and organization, rooted in the history of Russian and European Social-Democracy, were rapidly swept aside by the mass of new members and new organizational structures which pressed that formation into an entirely different mould. The process of the party’s conversion into an apparatus – careers, discipline, ranks, abolition of all political rights – was an absolute scandal for the oppositions of 1924–8. But their old party was dead. People should not be misled by old names and ideologies: in a fluid political context, names last longer than substances.