Charles Bettelheim Class Struggles in the USSR First Period: 1917-1923 [Section 4 -- Part 4]

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  Key to abbreviations, initials, and Russian
  words used in the text

Artel	A particular form of producers' cooperative
Cadet party	The Constitutional Democratic Party
CLD	See STO
Cheka	Extraordinary Commission (political police)
Glavk	One of the chief directorates in the Supreme Council of the National Economy or in a people's commissariat
Gosplan	State Planning Commission
GPU	State Political Administration (political police)
Kulak	A rich peasant, often involved in capitalist activities of one kind or another, such as hiring out agricultural machinery, trade, moneylending, etc.
Mir	The village community
Narkomtrud	People's Commissariat of Labor
NEP	New Economic Policy
NKhSSSRv	National Economy of the USSR in (a certain year or period)
NKVD	People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs
OGPU	Unified State Political Administration (political police)
Orgburo	Organization Bureau of the Bolshevik Party
Politburo	Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party
Rabfak	Workers' Faculty
Rabkrin	See RKI
RCP(B)	Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik): official
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	name of the Bolshevik Party, adopted by the Seventh Party Congress in March 1918
RKI	Workers' and Peasants' Inspection
RSDLP	Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
RSDLP(B)	Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik)
RSFSR	Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic
Skhod	General assembly of a village
Sovkhoz	State farm
Sovnarkhoz	Regional Economic Council
Sovnarkom	Council of People's Commissars
SR	Socialist Revolutionary
STO	Council of Labor and Defense
Uchraspred	Department in the Bolshevik Party responsible for registering the members and assigning them to different tasks
Uyezd	County
Volost	Rural district
VSNKh	Supreme Economic Council
VTsIK	All-Russia Central Executive Committee (organ derived from the Congress of soviets)
Zemstvo	Administrative body in country areas before the Revolution

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   Part 4
     The ideological and political struggles
     inside the Bolshevik Party

    Analysis of the ideological and political struggles which took place in the Bolshevik Party enables us to appreciate the ideological foundations of the party's line and activity, and the nature of the help that the party was able to give to the struggles of the masses -- the latter being the determining factor in all historical transformations.

    This analysis is not merely of "retrospective" interest. It helps us not only to understand the ideological trends which clashed in Lenin's time and had an influence on all the revolutionary struggles of this period, but also to understand better the significance and implications of the ideological struggles which took place subsequently in the Bolshevik Party, in the Communist International, and in the international labor movement, immediately after Lenin's death and much later, and which are still going on today. With such an analysis one can see the conflict between the ideas of revolutionary Marxism -- ideas which are always open to enrichment by practical experience and theoretical reflection -- and bourgeois or petty bourgeois conceptions "presented" in "Marxist" language, that are one of the "sources" of modern revisionism.

    Analysis of the ideological and political struggles that went on in the Bolshevik Party in Lenin's time also enables us to see more distinctly the exceptional position occupied in the party by Lenin, his vital role in the adoption of a revolutionary line. The term "exceptional" is appropriate for emphasizing the fact that, on certain crucial questions, Lenin took up positions that proved to be correct, but was often the only one, or almost the only one, to defend these positions. There was indeed a considerable gap between Lenin's living Marxism

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and the tendency of most of the other Bolshevik leaders to be content with repeating formulas which had already been overtaken by the course of history. To quote only one example, it is well known that Lenin, while still in exile, denounced all policies of "support," even "conditional support," for the Provisional Government formed after the February 1917 revolution. He put forward the slogan of direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat at a time when nearly all the Bolshevik leaders were taking up a much more "cautious" attitude. Only gradually did they rally to the position which had been Lenin's from the outset. It is not easy to explain the special place held by Lenin in the party, even though this place -- which put him not merely at the head of the party but ahead of it -- was confirmed every time that life called for an important reformulation of strategy and tactics or a rectification of the line that had been followed down to that moment. It can be said, however, that the two essential factors which account for it are his distinctive capacity for listening to the masses and the solidity of his theoretical training. These two elements, combined with his political courage, which enabled him to dare to go against the tide, not to be afraid of being momentarily isolated, explain why Lenin was generally in advance of his party -- including in his acknowledgment of mistakes made by the party and by himself.

    Analysis of the ideological and political struggles that developed inside the Bolshevik Party also enables us to appreciate the magnitude of the rectifications which Lenin began to undertake from late 1920 onward, continuing right down to 1923, and which opened up new vistas which the other party leaders accepted only to a very partial extent (this point will be given special consideration in Part Five).

    Before analyzing the most significant aspects of these ideological and political struggles, we must recall some of the changes that took place in the party's relations with the masses. This will be done very briefly, as the fundamental aspects of the matter have already been examined.









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  1. The changes in the Bolshevik Party's
     relations with the masses

    The transformations that took place in the relations between the masses and the Bolshevik Party had their roots in the transformation of social relations and relations between classes. Directly, however, they resulted from the political line followed by the party, the correct or incorrect orientation it gave to its activity, and so from its analysis of the contradictions and its ability to deal correctly with the principal contradiction at each stage of the revolution. A study of the changes in relations between the party and the masses must therefore be linked with a study of the principal tasks facing the party at different moments.

    When we look at the Bolshevik Party's relations with the masses, what is most difficult is to define the principal aspect of these relations. The latter were necessarily very complex. Indeed, these relations were always strongly differentiated. They were not the same with the working class as with the peasantry. And where each of these classes was concerned, relations were different depending on whether advanced elements were involved, or backward elements (more or less dominated by bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology), or intermediate elements. As a general rule, during the years following the October Revolution, the advanced and intermediate elements of the masses supported the Bolshevik Party: if this had not been so, the Soviet power could not have resisted the military offensives of the Whites and the imperialists, and the huge economic difficulties due to the different forms of resistance and sabotage practiced by the bourgeoisie and to the economic chaos caused by six years of war.

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    What was at stake, however, in the relations between the party and the masses, was the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party's ability to expand the ranks of the advanced elements by gradually winning support from those who at the outset had been intermediate or backward elements. This was a continuous struggle, a struggle aimed at wresting from bourgeois influence the fraction of the masses still subject to this influence. It was also a struggle which had its ups and downs, for the mistakes made by the party or by some of its members were reflected in a decline in the backing given to it by part of the masses. Studying the relations between the party and the masses means, therefore, above all, throwing light not upon the support given to the Bolsheviks by the advanced and combative elements, a support without which the Soviet power would have collapsed, but upon the attitude of the intermediate elements; their hesitations and fluctuations (themselves connected with changes in living conditions and with the decisions taken by the Bolshevik Party) determined the greater or lesser degree of solidity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its aptitude for developing from its initial transitory form to a higher form. It is therefore from this angle that we must study the changes in the party's relations with the masses.

    I shall not go over again the period between February 1917 and May 1918, except to recall that during those months the Bolshevik Party's influence over the masses was developing rapidly. Between February and October of 1917, an increasing number of working people, especially in the towns, came to support the Bolshevik Party, participating in the activity of the revolutionary organizations and backing up the initiatives taken by the Bolsheviks. In October, the relation of class forces became such that the power of the bourgeoisie collapsed and gave way to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    In the months that followed, the deeds of the Bolshevik Party in power (especially its help to the democratic revolution of the peasantry and the signing of the treaty of Brest Litovsk) brought it an increased basis of support among the masses, especially among the peasantry, even though the dif-

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ficulties of everyday life -- difficulties connected with the consequences of the war and the maneuvers of the capitalists -- were, of course, exploited by the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties, that is, in the main, by the Mensheviks and SRs. These parties had been so badly discredited by their conduct in the period of the Provisional Government that their influence was not then such as seriously to embarrass the Soviet power -- though this did not apply in certain sectors which, although restricted, were important from the economic standpoint: thus, the Menshevik leaders of the railroad workers' union helped aggravate the disorganized state of transportation.

    After the civil war began, relations between the party and the masses entered a more difficult phase, owing, first of all, to the party's overestimation of the extent to which socialist ideas had penetrated the peasantry, and also to mistakes made in assessing the conditions under which socialist transformation of production relations was possible in the rural areas at that time.



   I.  From the attempted "proletarian offensive"
      in the countryside to the orientation on the
      middle peasant

    In connection with the mass mobilization undertaken by the Bolshevik Party, in and after the second half of 1919, to cope with the White rebellions and foreign intervention, the illusion arose that the situation had become favorable for the launching of a "proletarian offensive" among the peasantry. This was the period when the party thought that the time had already arrived to begin "the real work of building socialism," because it believed that "the majority of the working peasants are striving towards collective farming."[1]

    At that time the party thought it could stir up a revolutionary movement among the poor peasants, and organize them in separate committees, distinct from the soviets. As we know,

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these attempts at a "proletarian offensive" failed. The situation was not yet ripe for it. The revolution in the countryside could not then proceed beyond the democratic stage.

    The first attempt, to be abandoned later, involved the formation of the poor peasants' committees. Launched in June 1918, at the time of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs (who controlled many village soviets), this attempt did not result in a movement with firm foundations among the mass of poor peasants. Only a minority of the latter took part in the movement, and these peasants often pursued narrowly personal aims and attacked the middle peasants. Where the poor peasants' committees became active, they set themselves in opposition to the peasant soviets and sought to form a "second ruling authority," dividing the peasantry at a moment when, in the face of the onslaught of the White and imperialist armies, it was necessary to unite the working class and the peasantry in the same fight.

    Already in November 1918, hesitation and anxiety regarding the consequences of the development of the poor peasants' committees arose in the Bolshevik Party and in the VTsIK. When a congress of the poor peasants' committees of the Petrograd region was held, at which the representatives of these committees asked for all the political powers of the soviets to be transferred to their own committees, Zinoviev (apparently with the agreement of the party leadership) tabled a resolution declaring that, though the committees had fought against the kulaks, in carrying out their task, they "were inevitably obliged to go beyond the limits of the decree of 11 June," with the result that "a dual power was created in the countryside leading to fruitless dispersal of energy and confusion in relations."[2]

    A week later, the Sixth Extraordinary All-Russia Congress of Soviets unanimously adopted a similar resolution.

    On December 2, 1918, the VTsIK decided to dissolve the poor peasants' committees, because of the situation of "dual power" which had developed in the countryside.[3] Actually, the uneven development of the class struggle as between regions meant that at the moment when the poor peasants'

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committees were being suppressed in Russia, they were developing in the Ukraine, which had then been reconquered by the Soviet power after the collapse of German imperialism.

    The decision to dissolve the poor peasants' committees was not a "concession" to the kulaks. It was dictated by a desire to avoid a split between the proletarian power and the middle peasants. The weakness of the Bolshevik Party in the rural areas prevented it from being able to give proper guidance to the poor peasants' committee movement, and safeguard it from becoming isolated from the middle peasants. In principle, the latter should have been included in the poor peasants' committees (instructions to this effect were sent out several times by the party leadership) but, in practice, the middle peasants were often treated as though they were kulaks.

    After December 1918, the Bolshevik Party increasingly sought to widen its influence among the middle peasants and, more generally, among the petty bourgeoisie. At the end of November, Lenin had published his article "Valuable Admissions of Pitirim Sorokin," in which, writing of the least proletarian and most petty bourgeois strata of the working people who were turning toward the Soviet power, and of the hesitating and neutral elements, he said: "The slogan of the moment is to make use of the change of attitude towards us which is taking place among them." In this connection he emphasized the need for "agreement with the middle peasant, with the worker who was a Menshevik yesterday and with the office worker or specialist who was a saboteur yesterday."

    While declaring that there was no question of departing from the line of building socialism, or forgetting the past vacillations of the petty bourgeois democrats, Lenin concluded: "When profound world-historic changes bring about an inevitable turn in our direction among the mass of non-Party, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary democrats, we must learn and shall learn to make use of this change of front, to encourage it, to induce it among the various groups and sections of the population, to do everything possible to reach agreement with them . . ."[4]

    The decisions made between December 1918 and March

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1919 were the preconditions for a new attempt at direct alliance with the middle peasants which was launched in March 1919.

    We know that at the Eighth Party Congress, held in that month, Lenin tried to define a new attitude toward the middle peasants, "a numerous and strong section of the population." On this occasion, he said that it was not enough, at the stage then reached by the Soviet revolution, to "neutralise the peasantry," but that it was necessary to "place our relations with the middle peasants on the basis of a firm alliance and so preclude the possibility of a repetition of those mistakes and blunders we have repeatedly made in the past. Those blunders estranged the middle peasants from us, although we of the Communist Party, the leading party, were the first who helped the Russian peasants to throw off the yoke of the landlords and establish real democracy, which gave us every ground for counting on their complete confidence."[5]

    The new party program adopted by the Eighth Congress was clearly oriented toward an alliance with the middle peasants. It expressly recalled that the middle peasants were not part of the exploiting classes, and that therefore no coercion must be used toward them. It called for measures to be taken to help the middle peasants to increase the productivity of their holdings, and said that they should be taxed only to a moderate extent.



   II. Requisitioning and the development of
      the contradictions between the Soviet
      power and the peasantry

    During 1919, and still more during 1920, it proved impossible to put into effective practice the principles laid down at the beginning of 1919 and ratified by the Eighth Party Congress, owing to the increasing disparity between production, agricultural deliveries, and the needs of the front and the towns for agricultural products. In order to cope with this

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disparity, the Soviet power was led, as we have seen, to increase requisitioning, which meant striking, often in an indiscriminate way, at the middle peasants (who were the most numerous body of producers).

    During the civil war, the mass of the peasantry felt the objective necessity of this requisitioning and endured it as a necessary evil. Matters changed markedly after the middle of 1920, when victory became certain. At that moment, the continuation of requisitioning, and even its aggravation in the face of declining agricultural production, provoked serious discontent among many of the peasants, and serious tension developed between them and the Bolshevik Party.

    From June 1920 onward, this tension increased all the more rapidly because the party thought it could pursue the policy of requisitioning indefinitely, seeing in it even a necessary instrument for the "building of socialism," which seemed an immediate task.

    Some of Lenin's writings testify to the illusions that prevailed in those days. Thus, during the Second All-Russia Conference of Organizers Responsible for Work in the Rural Areas, on June 12, 1920, he said that "the proletarian dictatorship should display itself primarily in the advanced, the most class-conscious and most disciplined of the urban and industrial workers . . . educating, training and disciplining all the other proletarians, who are often not class-conscious, and all working people and the peasantry." Discipline must be imposed upon them from outside, without any "sentimentality," for "the working man, as we have inherited him from capitalism, is in a state of utter benightedness and ignorance, and does not realise that work can be done not only under the lash of capital but also under the guidance of the organised worker."[6]

    At that time Lenin looked upon the requisitioning measures as not merely temporary, having to be applied because of war conditions, but as measures that were inherent in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the nature of the relations existing between the proletariat in power and the peasant masses.

    It was characteristic of the illusions associated with "war

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communism" that the Bolshevik Party viewed the requisitioning measures as an integral part of the "frontal attack" on capitalism which it thought it was then conducting. And so, after having been adopted provisionally as measures dictated by circumstances, the requisitioning measures came to be looked upon as normal "socialist measures," and not only by Bukharin -- who then advocated the use of coercion with regard to the peasants, as can be seen in his book The Economics of the Transformation Period [7] -- but also by Lenin.

    When, during the summer of 1920, Lenin read Varga's analysis of the experience of the Hungarian revolution, which stated that "requisitions do not lead to the goal since they bring in their train a decrease of production," he put two question marks in the margin.[8] Soon after reading Varga's work, Lenin expressed approval of what Bukharin said in The Economics of the Transformation Period, where he asserted that the constraint exercised by the proletarian dictatorship with regard to the peasantry could not be considered as "pure constraint," since it "lies on the path of general economic development." Lenin noted in the margin: "Very good."[9]

    In November 1920 Lenin even thought that, as a result of the big increase in the amount of grain that the state had been able to obtain through requisitioning, "We have convinced the peasants that the proletariat provides them with better conditions of existence than the bourgeoisie did; we have convinced them of this by practice." He added: "His [the peasant's] is a wait-and-see attitude. From being neutrally hostile he has become neutrally sympathetic."[10]

    Actually, at that moment the peasants' discontent had been manifesting itself openly for two months already.[11] In September 1920, with the demobilization of the army and the ending of the White Guard menace, there began to appear what was called "peasant banditry," which was simply the expression of profound discontent in the countryside. This "banditry" developed above all in the central and southeastern regions. The province of Tambov was especially affected by a movement of this kind.

    During the winter of 1920-1921, the People's Commissariat

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for Food Supplies was finally obliged to suspend the requisitioning in thirteen provinces, as a result of the troubles that were developing in them.[12] Thereafter, expressions of peasant discontent continued to occur until the official abandonment of requisitioning measures in March 1921.

    Despite this situation, Lenin was still saying, in December 1920, that the constraint applied to the peasants was necessary, and a means of increasing agricultural production. At the Eighth Congress of Soviets, while emphasizing the need for efforts to convince the peasants, especially the working peasants, the poor and the middle sections, he nevertheless said that "in a country of small peasants, our chief and basic task is to be able to resort to state compulsion in order to raise the level of peasant farming," and he urged that "the apparatus of compulsion" be "activated and reinforced."[13]

    These statements were his last of the kind. Departing further and further from this favorable attitude toward the use of compulsion in dealing with the peasants, Lenin carried out an increasingly thorough rectification of his conception of the relations between the proletarian power and the peasantry. We shall see in Part Five how Lenin went about this rectification, its place in the balance sheet he drew up for the five years of the revolution, and the extent to which what he then said influenced the conceptions that prevailed in the Bolshevik Party. For the moment I shall give only a few indications of the beginning of a reevaluation of peasant policy which Lenin undertook in early 1921.



   III.  The peasants' discontent and the
        beginning of a reevaluation of the
        Bolshevik Party's peasant policy

    In January 1921 Lenin met many peasant delegations. He became more and more aware of the mistakes that had been made in the countryside. In February he drafted some theses "concerning the peasants." He proposed to "satisfy the wish

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of the non-Party peasants for the substitution of a tax in kind for the surplus appropriation system (the confiscation of surplus grain stocks)," and to "reduce the size of this tax as compared with last year's appropriation rate." He also proposed to "give the farmer more leeway in using his after-tax surpluses in local trade, provided his tax is promptly paid up in full."[14] On February 17 and 26, Pravda published two articles explaining the need for the measures proposed by Lenin, and the Central Committee appointed a special commission to work out a scheme along these lines. Thus, in the weeks leading up to the Kronstadt rising, Lenin had drawn the party on to a new path, which was to be that of the New Economic Policy.

    On March 7, 1921, the Central Committee examined and approved the scheme worked out by the special commission. On March 8 and 15, Lenin spoke in support of the scheme at the Tenth Party Congress.[15] These two speeches were presented in the form of reports in which Lenin gave a first reevaluation of the policy followed down to that time by the Bolshevik Party. They are of great importance. In them we find explicit admission of the mistakes made, and an explanation of their immediate source, namely, the party's earlier misunderstanding of the state of mind of the peasant masses.

    In his report of March 8, Lenin spoke of the mistakes made not only in the party's "calculations" and "plans," but also "in determining the balance of forces between our class and those classes in collaboration with which, and frequently in struggle against which, it had to decide the fate of the Republic." He went on: "With this as a starting point, let us return to the results of the past."[16]

    The frankness and sharpness of the self-criticism which Lenin made at this time, and which he called on the whole party to take part in, were in accordance with the proletarian revolutionary character of Lenin's style of leadership. The way he oriented himself toward a new political line was typical of this style of leadership. Confronted with a difficult situation due to past errors (not only to these errors, moreover, but also to the exigencies of a military struggle which he had had to conduct under extremely complex conditions), Lenin

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sought and found the elements of a new political line (of a line adjusted to the requirements of a situation that was also new) in the demands of the peasants themselves, in their aspirations.

    It was on that basis, and on that of an analysis, free from whitewashing, of a setback that was admitted to be such, and treated like a scientific experiment, as an objective process the outcome of which was being assessed, that Lenin took a decisive step in the rectification of the Bolshevik Party's relations with the peasantry. As we shall see, it was by carrying further his rigorous analysis of the mistakes made during "war communism" that, between 1921 and 1923, Lenin opened up radically new vistas for the peasant policy of the proletarian dictatorship. In doing this, Lenin effected, in a series of stages, a major rectification of part of his conceptions regarding relations between the proletariat and the peasantry. The thoroughness of this rectification was so great that it forbids us to consider Lenin's earlier writings on peasant problems as still expressing the conclusions at which Lenin had arrived when he drew up the balance sheet of five years of revolution.

    The beginning of this rectification, in the first months of 1921, and its subsequent deepening, did not of course fall from heaven: they resulted from both a concrete and a theoretical analysis of the most serious crisis the proletarian dictatorship had experienced until that time.

    Before discussing this crisis, which had repercussions inside the Bolshevik Party in the form of an ideological and political crisis of unprecedented seriousness, we must briefly recall the way relations had evolved between the Bolshevik Party, the vanguard of the proletariat, and the mass of the workers.



   IV.   The relations of the Bolshevik Party
        with the mass of the workers

    The Bolshevik Party's relations with the mass of the workers were very different, and developed very differently, from its

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relations with the peasant masses. Not only was the Bolshevik Party organically present in the working class, at least in the cities and big industrial centers, where the most militant elements of the working-class masses were to be found, but its ideology, its theoretical conceptions, and its political practice were always closely linked to the proletariat, and especially to its most advanced elements.

    The closeness of these links -- which, obviously, did not rule out the existence of contradictions between the party and more or less extensive sections of the working class, especially in a country like Russia where mistakes in policy toward the peasants inevitably produced negative effects among the proletariat -- corresponded to the Leninist principles regarding the party's style of leadership and its leading role in relation to the working class.


   (a)  The relations between the party and the
        proletariat

    I have considered earlier the Leninist conception of the party, which insists on respect for certain principles where the party's relations with the working-class masses are concerned -- attention to the workers' initiative as a source of instruction for the party; confidence in the revolutionary energy of the proletariat; presence of the party amidst the proletariat and close links (going as far, in Lenin's words, as "merging") with its advanced elements; and the need to allow the working people to convince themselves by their own experience.

    Lenin's revolutionary Marxism included other principles, connected with the party's role as the instrument for working out a political line and as the bearer of revolutionary theory. In this respect, what is essential is the party's role as political guide and theoretical educator. For Lenin, a party which does not fulfill this role is not a revolutionary party: it does not rise above the level of "economism" and "spontaneism," according to which absolutely any initiative or aspiration of the masses is revolutionary. This emphasis on the role of the party as educator and guide is found in the very first of Lenin's major political interventions, especially in What Is to Be

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Done? Bolshevism thereby radically distinguished itself from German Social Democracy, including the latter's revolutionary tendency, one of whose most outstanding representatives was Rosa Luxemburg.

    Thus, in his article "On the Junius Pamphlet," Lenin wrote: "A very great defect in revolutionary Marxism in Germany as a whole is its lack of a compact illegal organisation that would systematically pursue its own line and educate the masses in the spirit of the new tasks . . . "[17]

    The party's appropriate role as educator and guide of the proletariat corresponds to the place which Leninism ascribes to revolutionary theory, and to the acknowledged need to struggle against bourgeois ideology as the dominant ideology. This role implies rejection of the "naive" conception according to which the proletariat is ready at any moment and on a mass scale to engage in revolutionary action. Leninism here links up with Marx's analyses which distinguish between the theory of the proletariat (a theory which draws scientific conclusions from the existence of the proletariat, from the relations in which the proletariat is involved, and from the struggles it wages) and what the proletarians imagine their role and their interest to be in any given situation. We recall what Marx wrote on this point: "The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do."[18]

    These Leninist principles, put into practice by the Bolshevik Party, enabled it to take the lead in the revolutionary movement of the masses, and help the masses to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in October 1917.


   (b)  The leadership practice of the Bolshevik
        Party after the establishment of the
        proletarian dictatorship

    After the dictatorship of the proletariat was established, the actual practice of the Bolshevik Party was far from always in strict conformity with the Leninist principles according to

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which the party should persuade the mass of workers, trust them, and allow them to become convinced of what is correct through their own experience.

    The internal changes in the party, the necessity for rapid action, the disintegration of the proletariat (whose ranks were emptied of the most combative elements, while being penetrated by many bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements), the military emergencies, the disastrous economic situation, the hunger and cold that drove the less advanced section of the working-class mass to despair, did not allow these principles to be fully and constantly applied. They are, moreover, not "fetishes" but guides to action. It is essential that they be respected as fully as possible, but absurd to try to "apply" them in any and every situation. The Bolshevik Party rightly considered that the fact that it had driven the bourgeoisie from power in Russia was an event of world importance, and that, consequently, everything must be done to prevent the bourgeoisie and imperialism (then waging armed struggle) from restoring their dictatorship. This was the meaning of Lenin's slogan: "Everything for the Front!"

    The advanced elements of the proletariat and of the broad proletarian masses were conscious of the objective necessities of the situation. They participated with extraordinary vigor in the struggles being waged on the military and production fronts, showing trust in the Bolshevik Party, and eventually winning victory in spite of extreme material difficulties. This political victory par excellence proves concretely that the most active elements of the proletariat and the popular masses (whose resistance to the imperialist war had, a few years earlier, brought about the downfall of tsardom) gave active support to the Bolshevik Party, and also that the political line and practice of the party were fundamentally correct.

    This fundamental correctness does not mean that no mistakes were made. Once victory had been won over the White and imperialist armies, the mistakes which had been made -- and which were admitted by Lenin when he drew up his critical balance sheet of "war communism" -- entailed not only a worsening of the party's relations with the peasant masses, as has already been explained, but also a falling-off in its

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relations with part of the working class. This unfavorable evolution in relations between the party and the masses led to the political crisis of the winter of 1920-1921.



   V.  The political crisis of the winter of
       1920-1921

    The gravity of the political crisis of the winter of 1920-1921 resulted from the conjunction of discontent among a section of the peasantry, who were subjected to requisitioning, with a dramatic worsening of living conditions in the towns. Since the beginning of 1920, inflation had assumed enormous proportions. In April the food rations officially issued to the urban workers (representing that part of the requisitioned produce which did not go to the soldiers of the Red Army) accounted for only 30 to 50 percent of what was needed for survival, which explains the immense role played at that time by the black market.[19]

    On the black market the prices of many products were, as early as April 1920, forty or fifty times as high as the official prices. Subsequently, the currency was devalued still further, and workers more and more frequently received their pay in kind.[20] This collapse of the currency was one of the factors which contributed to the development of the illusions of "war communism." One aspect of these illusions was, indeed, the identification of the "disappearance of money" with the building of entirely new economic relations leading to the abolition of wage labor.

    The extreme shortage of goods condemned the towns people, and also many peasants, to hunger and cold, while the factories were paralyzed by the lack of fuel. This situation gave rise to serious discontent on the part of the petty bourgeoisie and the less advanced elements of the working class, who blamed the Bolshevik Party for their difficulties and refused to accept that these were the result of several years of imperialist war, civil war, and foreign intervention.

    The worsening of the economic situation lay behind the

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peasant revolts that developed from the end of 1920 onward and the strikes that broke out in February 1921, in Petrograd, Moscow, and other industrial centers. These strikes were not directed against the Soviet power, but were essentially elementary expressions of the discontent of the workers who were suffering from very inadequate feeding. However, the workers' demands also included some anarchist, SR, or Menshevik slogans. Some of the leaders of these political movements thought, indeed, that the moment had come to launch once more an anti-Bolshevik operation. Their hopes actually collapsed very soon. Thus, in Petrograd, the stoppages of work began on February 24, and continued for two days. On February 26, the Petrograd Soviet and the defense committee headed by Zinoviev started a campaign of explanation. At the same time, measures were taken to improve the food supplies available to the factory workers (this was done, apparently, by "raiding" the Red Army's stocks), and suppress the activities of the SRs and Mensheviks who were trying to subvert the Soviet power (a leaflet issued by the SRs called for the Constituent Assembly to be convened, while a Menshevik appeal demanded a "fundamental policy change"). The campaign of explanation undertaken by the Bolshevik Party and the Petrograd soviet clarified the situation: on February 28, the strikes in Petrograd ended, the signal for return to work having being given by the Putilov works, that "workers' strong hold."[21] In the other towns affected, the course of events was similar -- which confirms that the discontent of the striking workers was not general and profound in character, but due essentially to the difficulties of everyday life.

    In the countryside, however, a real political crisis developed early in 1921. It affected part of the armed forces, and had serious repercussions a few days after the Petrograd strikes had ended. The discontent which prevailed at that time in the Kronstadt naval base then took concrete form in the holding of a number of general meetings of the sailors and workers of the naval base, which elected a conference of about 300 delegates. On March 2, 1921, this conference elected in its turn a bureau of five members, presided over by Petrichenko, senior clerk on the battleship Petropavlovsk. Soon afterward,

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this bureau, having been enlarged to fifteen members, proclaimed itself a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and came out in opposition to the Kronstadt soviet.

    Events then followed swiftly. By order of the committee, three Bolshevik leaders were arrested, including the deputy Vasilyev, a genuine revolutionary who had nothing about him of the "bureaucrat" type the committee claimed to be attacking. Pressure was brought to bear on the members of the Bolshevik Party to leave the party, and, in the confused atmosphere that prevailed in Kronstadt, at least one-third of them did this. Some days later, when tension was mounting between the Soviet power and the Revolutionary Committee, several hundred Communists were arrested.[22]

    The program of the leaders of the insurrection was a mixture of various slogans intended to mobilize as wide a degree of support as possible, with the aim of developing a movement that would dislodge the Bolsheviks from power throughout Russia. Certain features of this program were especially significant. It was demanded that the soviets be opened to the SRs and the Mensheviks -- many of whom had entered into arrangements with the counter-revolutionaries, or, where they had come to power locally and temporarily as a result of the retreats which the Red Army had been forced to make during the civil war, had served as "bridges" for the White Guards, whom they were unable to resist even if they had wanted to. The Kronstadt leaders also called for the establishment of "non-party soviets," which was a way of excluding Bolshevik candidates in the event elections should be held in conformity with this demand.

    Among the significant features of the Kronstadt program was the demand for abolition of political commissars in the Red Army, though it was this institution which enabled control to be maintained over the ex-tsarist officers in the army. Not surprisingly, some high-ranking officers of the tsarist army served the Kronstadt rebels faithfully, even though they did not, of course, push themselves to the forefront: this was the case with General A. N. Kozlovsky and the officers under his command.[23]

    On the economic plane, the Kronstadt program called, es-

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sentially, for freedom of trade and respect for peasant property.

    Actually, the content of this program, though significant, was of secondary importance. What was decisive were the social and political forces that backed the Kronstadt movement.

    In order to grasp the nature of these forces, we must distinguish between the leaders of the movement and the masses who were behind them. Relatively little is known about the former. We do know, however, that one of them, A. Lamonov, was a former SR Maximalist and, especially, that the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, S. R. Petrichenko, had belonged to the Bolshevik Party for a few months. He had then left the party and engaged in counter-revolutionary activity, for which he was several times arrested. Later he had tried to join the Whites, but they had rejected his services because he had been a member of the Bolshevik Party.[24]

    As regards the social basis of the movement, it must be said that at the beginning of 1921 the sailors of former times who had been among the strongest supporters of the Bolsheviks during the October days were no longer more than a minority in Kronstadt. The bulk of the forces that supported the Revolutionary Committee consisted of young recruits from the Ukraine, without any political training, who responded readily to the "antiauthoritarian" slogans of the leaders of the Revolutionary Committee. The dominant ideological current among the Kronstadters was, in fact, anarcho-populist, anti-state, and strongly marked by Slavonic nationalism, anti-Semitism, and Orthodox religious feeling. More than once we find among them the "amalgam" propagated by the Whites: "Communist means Jew."[25]

    On the international plane, the Kronstadt movement was fully supported by all the counter-revolutionary tendencies. The actual relations between the Kronstadt leaders and the National Center formed in Paris, mainly by former Cadets, have never been clarified. Some things are certain, however. A few weeks before the revolt, the National Center had drawn up a plan, known as the Secret Memorandum, which assumed that Kronstadt could be used as the base for a new counter-revolutionary onslaught on Petrograd. During the revolt, all

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the forces of this Center, together with the SRs in exile, were mobilized to help it, millions of francs being collected for the purpose in a few days. Finally, when the revolt had been suppressed, eleven of the fifteen members of the Revolutionary Committee (whom the Bolsheviks suspected of being in contact with the National Center and its representatives in Finland) took refuge with counter-revolutionary elements.[26]

    In fact, contrary to the hopes entertained by the leaders of the revolt, it produced hardly any echo in Russia.[27] In the eyes of the masses at large, the Bolshevik Party, regardless of the mistakes it might have made, was still the only bulwark against restoration of the bourgeois order.

    The Bolshevik Party naturally did all it could to stop the revolt from spreading or even from continuing. The location of Kronstadt -- close to Petrograd, on the one hand, and to the counter-revolutionary forces in Finland, on the other -- did not permit protracted "negotiations." It was necessary to crush the revolt before the ice melted. Once the water was free of ice, Kronstadt could be reached by sea by the White and imperialist forces, and this would have meant a direct military threat to Russia's chief city.

    After sending an ultimatum calling upon the rebels to surrender, and receiving a negative reply from the Revolutionary Committee, the Red Army took the offensive. On March 17, the main attack was launched, and by early morning of March 18 all resistance had ceased in the allegedly impregnable fortress of Kronstadt. So ended an especially sad episode of the crisis of the winter of 1920-1921 -- an episode which deserves attention from two standpoints.

    First, the very fact that the revolt could occur confirms that discontent among a section of the masses, especially the peasants (or those who were of peasant origin, like the young recruits in Kronstadt), had then reached the pitch of explosion in some places, so that some of the peasantry were wide open to the petty bourgeois propaganda of the SRs, Mensheviks, and anarchists, or even of men who were supported de facto by the Cadet party, though they employed ultrarevolutionary language.

    Secondly, the absence of any extension of the Kronstadt

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revolt despite the appeals that were issued, shows that in the eyes of the broadest masses, whatever tension there might have been where particular problems were concerned, such as requisitioning, the Bolshevik Party was still the party that had led the revolution and whose capacity for organization had ensured victory in the struggle against the landlords, the capitalists, and imperialism.

    The Kronstadt episode led the Bolsheviks to harden their attitude more than ever against the former "Soviet parties," which now seemed to be conniving with the most reactionary political émigrés and with the Anglo-French imperialists (who backed the National Center). It was now more than ever out of the question to allow these parties to take part again in the work of the soviets. Inside the Bolshevik Party itself there was no hesitation regarding the line to be followed, in the given circumstances, toward the revolt. On this point the party showed remarkable unity. In other forms, however, the discontent that had arisen among the masses produced splits in the party and conflicts between different tendencies. Ideological and political struggle had always been part of the life of the Bolshevik Party, but the gravity of the crisis of the winter of 1920-1921 caused the party leadership to alter the conditions governing the conduct of this struggle. In order to understand the implications of the decisions taken on this point by the Tenth Party Congress, and to appreciate the Bolshevik Party's ideological vitality, it is necessary briefly to recall some aspects of the internal struggles that had taken place in the party; and it will be useful to carry our study of these struggles a little beyond the period of the Tenth Congress.




  Notes

1.	Lenin, CW, vol. 28, pp. 341-344.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Speech to the First All-Russia Congress of Land Departments, Poor Peasants' Committees and Communes". -- DJR]    [p. 349]
2.	A report of this meeting in Petrograd was given by Zinoviev to the Sixth Extraordinary All-Russia Congress of Soviets, the proceedings of which are quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution vol. 2, p. 162.    [p. 350]
page 367
3.	Ibid., p. 163.    [p. 350]
4.	CW, vol. 28, pp. 192, 193-194.    [p. 351]
5.	Lenin's speech opening the Eighth Party Congress, March 18, 1919, in CW, vol. 29, pp. 143 ff.; quotation on pp. 144-145.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's Eighth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.). -- DJR]    [p. 352]
6.	CW, vol. 31, pp. 176-177.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Speech Delivered at the Second All-Russia Conference of Organizers Responsible for Rural Work". -- DJR]    [p. 353]
7.	Bukharin, The Economics of the Transformation Period, p. 159.    [p. 354]
8.	Quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, p. 173.    [p. 354]
9.	Leninsky Sbornik, vol. 11, p. 369. See also Bukharin, The Economics of the Transformation Period, pp. 93 and 216.    [p. 354]
10.	CW, vol. 31, p. 418.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Our Foreign and Domestic Position and the Tasks of the Party". -- DJR]    [p. 354]
11.	Lenin had noted this discontent in October 1920, but he ascribed it not to the system of requisitioning itself but only to the excesses committed in the way requisitioning was carried out.    [p. 354]
12.	See the report of the Tenth Party Congress, p. 231, quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, p. 173.    [p. 355]
13.	CW, vol. 31, p. 505.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's The Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets. -- DJR]    [p. 355]
14.	CW, vol. 32, p. 133.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Rough Draft of Theses Concerning the Peasants". -- DJR]    [p. 356]
15.	See Lenin, CW (3rd ed.), vol.26, for details regarding these main stages in the transition to the NEP.    [p. 356]
16.	CW, vol. 32, p. 173.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's Tenth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.). -- DJR]    [p. 356]
17.	CW, vol. 22, pp. 305-319; quotation on p. 307.    [p. 359]
18.	Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, p. 53.    [p. 359]
19.	The inadequacy of wages and rations was often admitted: for example, by the Fourth Trade Union Congress, held in April 1920, and by the Tenth Party Congress (1921). See the reports of these congresses, pp. 119 and 237 respectively; quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, p. 243, n. 2 and 3.    [p. 361]
20.	Ibid., pp. 260-261.    [p. 361]
21.	Pravda o Kronshtadte, quoted in Anweiler, Die Rätebewegung, p. 311.    [p. 362]
22.	Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, p. 186.    [p. 363]
23.	Ibid., pp. 98-99. On March 2, 1921, Kozlovsky said to the Bolshevik commissar: "Your time is past. Now I shall do what has to be done" (ibid., p. 100).    [p. 363]
24.	Ibid., pp. 94-95. Avrich mentions some facts about other members of this committee.    [p. 364]
25.	Ibid., pp. 172-180.    [p. 364]
26.	Ibid., pp. 106-125 and 208-209.    [p. 365]
27.	Only a few anarchist clubs in Moscow and Petrograd distributed leaflets calling for support of the revolt (Anweiler, Die Rätebewegung, p. 318).    [p. 365]









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  2. The ideological and political
     struggles in the Bolshevik Party
     before the civil war

    The tradition of Bolshevism is a tradition of ideological and political struggle. In 1903, when Bolshevism came into being as a distinct political trend, and one year after the publication of What Is to Be Done? Lenin said that it was essential to "hospitably throw open the columns of the Party organ for exchanges of opinion," and that the party must have at its disposal all, absolutely all, the material needed to form an independent judgment. He condemned those who had an exaggeratedly stern and stiff attitude toward so-called "anarchistic individualism," for he considered it preferable for the party's life to be tolerant, "even if it involves a certain departure from tidy patterns of centralism and from absolute obedience to discipline."[1]

    In 1904 Lenin reaffirmed his conviction that a broad exchange of views, and even battles between tendencies, were essential to party life.[2] The existence of divergent views within the party was inevitable, being an effect of the class struggle, since the party was not an "isolated islet of socialism." It was inevitable that party members should at certain moments fall under the influence of bourgeois ideology: by discussion in the party one could fight to prevent ideological representatives of the bourgeoisie from taking over leadership of the proletarian movement; but in order to do this, one must remain on the terrain of Marxist analysis and not compromise on principles. Once decisions had been adopted, of course, these were obligatory upon everyone, since the party was not a discussion group but an organ of struggle which must be disciplined and obedient to its leading bodies.

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    Lenin's line on ideological struggle was considered by the party as a whole as necessary to the functioning of democratic centralism and to respect for discipline in the application of decisions. This line prevailed not only until 1917 but also in the first years following the October Revolution. Discussions within the party were even exceptionally lively in that period, reflecting the magnitude of the class struggle that was going on in the country.

    The conflicts that took place on the very eve of October and in 1917-1918 found expression in a number of documents, analysis of which enables us to bring out the chief conceptions that existed in the party at that time and to grasp their essential class content.



   I.  The ideological and political struggles
      in the party between February and
      October 1917

    Between February and October, two lines became defined inside the Bolshevik Party. First, before Lenin's return from exile, there was the line of support for the Provisional Government. Whereas Lenin put forward the slogan of revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie and refusal to fight under its orders, a section of the Bolshevik leaders gave conditional support to the Provisional Government.

    This "defensist" line was maintained, from March 14, 1917 onward, by Pravda, which had just been taken over by Kamenev and Stalin. In the first issue of Pravda published under the new editorship, Stalin said that "the rights won must be upheld so as to destroy completely the old forces and, in conjunction with the provinces, further advance the Russian revolution."[3] In the next day's issue, Kamenev expressed an even more clear-cut "defensist" attitude, and on March 16 said that it was necessary to "bring pressure on the Provisional Government to make it declare its consent to start peace negotiations immediately,"[4] which amounted to adopt-

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ing the Menshevik standpoint of "pushing the bourgeoisie from behind," instead of a consistent Bolshevik line of standing at the head of the masses and ahead of them.

    Seven years later, in a speech to a plenum of the Communist group in the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, Stalin referred to this period and admitted his mistake, but tried to justify it by showing that he had not been alone in the attitude he had taken up. "The Party (its majority)," he said, "adopted the policy of pressure on the Provisional Government through the Soviets on the question of peace and did not venture to step forward at once from the old slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry to the new slogan of power to the Soviets."[5]

    Lenin's arrival on April 3, 1917, enabled the revolutionary line he advocated gradually to become victorious, but this did not happen without resistance. Kamenev still declared, the day after the publication of Lenin's "April Theses," which looked toward proletarian revolution: "In so far as concerns Lenin's general scheme, it appears to us inacceptable, since it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois revolution is finished and counts on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution."[6]

    Kamenev soon found himself isolated, with Stalin and Zinoviev rallying to Lenin's theses. Even so, the triumph of the revolutionary line was not yet complete. Thus, in September 1917, there was a majority in the Central Committee in favor of Bolshevik participation in a "democratic conference" formed independently of the soviets, whereas Lenin had put forward the slogan: "All Power to the Soviets." Only Lenin's threat to resign from the Central Committee induced the latter to revoke its decision.

    Soon afterward, Lenin called on the Central Committee to prepare for insurrection. He was supported by a majority of 10 to the minority consisting of Zinoviev and Kamenev. These two waged a public campaign against Lenin's revolutionary line. At the time, Stalin -- who was, seven years later, to present these divergences as a mere matter of "different shades of opinion" -- pronounced the following judgment:

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"There are two policies: one is heading towards the victory of the revolution and looks to Europe; the other has no faith in the revolution and counts on being only an opposition."[7]

    Zinoviev and Kamenev were not expelled from the party, as Lenin had demanded. By a majority of 5 to 3 the Central Committee simply decided (on October 20) to accept their resignation. In practice, even this resignation did not take effect: immediately after the insurrection, Zinoviev and Kamenev were again participating in the work of the Central Committee and entrusted with important political responsibilities.

    After October, the struggle between the two lines continued, of course, but the concrete problems it involved were different.



   II.  The struggles over the problem of a
       "coalition government"

    Among the questions that gave rise to serious divergences was, as we have seen, that of forming a "coalition government." It arose in this way. After the formation, in the evening of the day of the insurrection, of a homogeneous Bolshevik government, the latter came under heavy pressure from the SRs and Mensheviks, who demanded that a "coalition government" be formed, to be made up of all the parties represented in the soviets. The Central Committee agreed to enter into negotiations with the SRs and Mensheviks, but, whereas for Lenin these negotiations were merely a tactical operation (as he put it: "a diplomatic move to distract attention from operations of war"[8]), for Kamenev and Zinoviev they were really intended to lead to the formation of a coalition government.

    A fresh crisis broke out in the party leadership when Lenin proposed on November 1, 1917, to call off these talks. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov opposed this move, which was nevertheless approved by the Central Committee. Kamenev

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and Rykov, who had been the Bolshevik Party's delegates for the negotiations, went so far as to violate the decision by failing to act in accordance with it.

    During the winter of 1917-1918 and the spring of 1918, an extremely profound crisis occurred. Not only did it cause divergences in the Central Committee and in some of the party organizations, it developed on a much wider scale. The period saw the formation of the group of "left Communists." The ideological struggle that broke out at this time was concerned principally with the question of the peace of Brest-Litovsk and with the conception of "state capitalism."



   III.  The struggles in the Bolshevik Party
        and the peace of Brest-Litovsk

    The crisis provoked by the peace negotiations held at Brest-Litovsk, and then by the treaty itself, opened on January 5, 1918, when, by decision of the Central Committee, peace negotiations were begun with German imperialism. It became apparent that the latter would sign a peace treaty with the Soviet power only if immense territories were ceded to it: Poland, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the half of Latvia occupied by the German army.

    Lenin declared for acceptance of these conditions and for the immediate conclusion of a treaty. He was aware of the country's desire for peace. He knew, too, that the disorganized state of the armed forces was such that they could not resist a renewed German offensive. Trotsky was for trying a delaying tactic ("neither peace nor war"). Bukharin favored "revolutionary war" (at a time when no force existed to wage such a war), but finding himself isolated, he supported Trotsky's line, so that Lenin was placed in a minority in the Central Committee (9 votes were cast for Trotsky's line and only 7 for Lenin's).

    Following this decision by the Central Committee, the German army resumed its offensive on all fronts and penetrated deeply into Soviet territory. On January 17, Lenin put

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forward his proposal once more and was again defeated (Trotsky and Bukharin claimed that the German offensive would have the effect on the international labor movement of arousing a revolutionary wave of support for the Soviet power), this time by 6 votes to 5.

    The German army advanced so rapidly that on January 18 the Central Committee held another meeting, and now Trotsky came round to Lenin's view, which was approved by the central committee -- though only by 7 to 5.

    The position maintained for several days by the majority of the members of the CC -- a position which, while outwardly "left," was really nationalist and petty bourgeois -- and the defeats suffered during that period meant that Soviet Russia had now to accept additional demands from German imperialism. To the territories already listed for annexation were added the Ukraine, Livonia, and Estonia. As a result, in the area it controlled, the Soviet power would lose 26 percent of its population, 27 percent of the cultivated land, and 75 per cent of the capacity for producing iron and steel.

    Lenin called for the peace treaty to be signed without further discussion. The Central Committee hesitated. Stalin proposed that the German demands be not accepted purely and simply, but that negotiations be reopened. However, Lenin's proposal was adopted by 7 votes to 4.[9]

    On March 3, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was formally signed -- but the weeks which had passed since the negotiations began showed how deeply the party was divided. Basically, this division counterposed those who agreed with Lenin that maintenance of a proletarian power in Russia was vital for the future of the world revolutionary movement to those who thought it would be better for this power to disappear rather than survive at the price of concessions they considered inacceptable. The signing of the treaty did not put an end to the crisis which had begun in the party, as was shown by the declarations issued by various regional party organizations (which at that time still expressed their disagreements publicly).

    After the Central Committee's decision to sign the treaty,

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the party bureau of the Moscow region voted a resolution declaring that it would no longer recognize the authority of the CC until an extraordinary party congress had been held and a new CC elected.

    The existing Central Committee formally acknowledged the right of those who did not agree with the decision it had taken to express their view. Commenting on the resolution of the Moscow regional bureau, Lenin wrote: "It is quite natural that comrades who sharply disagree with the Central Committee over the question of a separate peace should sharply condemn the Central Committee and express their conviction that a split is inevitable. All that is the most legitimate right of Party members, which is quite understandable."[10]

    The day after the actual signing of the treaty, on March 4, 1918, the Petrograd party committee brought out the first issue of a daily paper entitled Kommunist -- the organ of the "left Communists," who formed an opposition moving openly to ward a split and the formation of a new party.



   IV.  The "left Communists" and state
        capitalism

    After Brest-Litovsk, the "left Communists" directed their attacks increasingly not so much against the line on foreign policy and military problems, as against the concessions which the party leadership thought it necessary to make to that part of the bourgeoisie which agreed to collaborate with the Soviet power. These attacks reflected the pressure brought to bear on the party by a part of the working class wishing to retain the existing forms of organization of the factory committees and of "workers' control," and unwilling to let posts of responsibility or leadership be given to capitalists and bourgeois technicians, engineers, and administrators, in the factories and in the various organs of the VSNKh.

    At this time, as we have seen, the majority of the Central

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Committee decided to change the Soviet power's relations with a section of the bourgeoisie whose skill was considered indispensable for the management and administration of the state-owned factories and for coordinating economic activities. The former capitalist administration of the enterprises was thus partly maintained or reestablished, and concessions were granted in the matter of salaries to the bourgeois specialists and technicians, so as to ensure their collaboration. The principle of one-man management of enterprises was adopted, and it was decided to introduce a system of bonuses, under trade union control, in order to bring about an increase in the productivity of labor.

    The "left Communists" denounced these measures. In the first issue of Kommunist they attacked "a labour policy designed to implant discipline among the workers under the flag of 'self-discipline,' the introduction of labour service for workers, piece rates, and the lengthening of the working day." According to Kommunist, "the introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist management of industry cannot really increase the productivity of labour." It would only "diminish the class initiative, activity and organisation of the proletariat. It threatens to enslave the working class. It will arouse discontent among the backward elements as well as among the vanguard of the proletariat. In order to introduce this system in the face of the hatred prevailing at present among the proletariat against the 'capitalist saboteurs,' the Communist Party would have to rely on the petty-bourgeoisie as against the workers." Consequently, it would "ruin itself as the party of the proletariat."

    The same issue of Kommunist denounced "bureaucratic centralisation, the rule of various commissars, the loss of independence for local soviets, and in practice the rejection of the type of state-commune administered from below." Bukharin recalled that Lenin had written in The State and Revolution that "each cook should learn to manage the State," and added: "But what happened when each cook had a commissar appointed to order him about?"

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    The second issue of Kommunist carried an article by another member of the "left Communist" group, Osinsky, who wrote:

We stand for the construction of the proletarian society by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by the ukases of the captains of industry . . . If the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour, no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power; but the soviet power will then be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (e.g., the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all: something else will be set up -- state capitalism.[11]

    Lenin answered these statements by showing that, at the actual stage of the Russian Revolution at that time, it was not a question of "building socialism," nor, therefore, of undertaking to change in depth the relations of production, but of coping as expeditiously as possible with the growing disorganization of the economy. It was in order to explain this immediate task that Lenin put forward the notion of "state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat."

    The Seventh Party Congress, held at the beginning of March 1918, condemned the line of the "left Communists" and declared in favor of the measures proposed by Lenin. After this congress, the organizational forces which until then had been at the disposal of the "left Communists" in the party collapsed very quickly -- partly as a result of administrative measures, transfers of cadres, and so on. Kommunist ceased to appear every day. Its production was shifted to Moscow, where a few more numbers appeared; but the "left Communists" lost the majority they had held in that city, and also in the Ural region. They gave up the idea of founding a new Communist party, and decided to remain in the Bolshevik Party.

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    A year later Lenin drew a positive conclusion from this crisis, saying: "The struggle that flared up in our Party during the past year was extremely useful. It gave rise to numerous sharp collisions, but there are no struggles without sharp collisions."[12] By then the former "left Communists" had resumed their place in the party, and some were again holding leading positions.

    The crisis experienced by the Bolshevik Party in early 1918 showed the capacity it then possessed for allowing an open ideological struggle to develop within it. The crisis also showed the coming together of ultra-left and petty bourgeois attitudes, in particular where problems of peace and war were concerned, with attitudes which undoubtedly reflected the aspirations of part of the party's working-class base. It was certainly no accident that it was in Moscow, Petrograd, and the Ural region -- that is, in the major industrial centers -- that the "left Communists" found their main support.

    By the end of the spring of 1918, the group of "left Communists" had disappeared as such, but many elements of its political line -- for example, its opposition to administrative centralism, which it sought to replace by greater initiative on the part of the working people, both in the soviets and in the workplaces -- were to reappear again and again, giving rise to new oppositions. I shall return to this point.

    In any case, the problems raised by the "platform" of the "left Communists" sank into the background when the principal contradiction shifted; the outbreak of the White revolt, backed by imperialist intervention, brought to the forefront the problems of armed struggle.

    Before proceeding to analyze the period that opened then, I must emphasize once more the scale of the struggles that Lenin had to carry on, before and after October 1917, in order to win victory for his ideas. This needs emphasis because the extensiveness of the discussions and disputes, and the frequency with which Lenin was put in a minority, show that, contrary to what is alleged in the "official history" of Bolshevism, open ideological and political conflicts were particularly intense at this time. Emphasis is also called for because

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these conflicts show the pressure to which the Bolshevik Party was subjected by the class contradictions developing in Russian society as a whole.

    The foregoing also shows -- and this is important for understanding what was to happen after Lenin's death -- that during the decisive period between February 1917 and June 1918 no group of leaders appeared in the Central Committee who firmly and constantly upheld the same views as Lenin -- at best, some of them rallied more easily or more quickly than others to his views.

    While there was no group of leaders of whom it can be said that they took up more or less regularly the same attitude as Lenin, it is, however, possible to identify two successive tendencies which had serious divergences with Lenin.

    One of these was a "rightist" trend which manifested itself especially between February and December 1917. It included not only Kamenev and Zinoviev, but also, sometimes, Stalin -- that is, the men who were to form the leading nucleus of the party immediately after Lenin's death, what has been called the troika, the "triumvirate," that succeeded him.

    The other tendency developed mainly from January 1918 onward. It included Trotsky, Bukharin, and also Stalin (who supported Lenin on the need to conclude the treaty of Brest Litovsk only at the last moment). This was, above all, the trend of the "left Communists." It commanded larger forces than the previous one, and lasted longer. Positions close to those of this tendency were to be advocated subsequently by various other oppositions.

    With Soviet Russia's entry into a period of armed struggle against White revolt and foreign intervention, however, many problems presented themselves in new forms. We must now consider the principal aspects of the ideological struggles which developed in the Bolshevik Party during the civil war period.




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  Notes

1.	CW, vol. 7, pp. 115-116.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Letter to Iskra ". -- DJR]    [p. 368]
2.	See, e.g., One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in CW, vol. 7, pp. 203 ff.    [p. 368]
3.	Stalin's article in Pravda of March 14, 1917: "The Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies" (Stalin, Works, English edition, vol. 3, p. 1). See also Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 85-86.    [p. 369]
4.	Stalin, Works, vol. 3, p. 8.    [p. 369]
5.	Ibid., vol. 6, p. 348.  [Transcriber's Note: See Stalin's "Trotskyism or Leninism?". -- DJR] The idea that it would have been correct to "go against the tide" was not even mentioned.    [p. 370]
6.	Quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 91.    [p. 370]
7.	Stalin, Works, vol. 3, p. 407. [Transcriber's Note: See Stalin's "Speech at a Meeting of the Central Committee". -- DJR]    [p. 371]
8.	Central Committee minutes, published in 1929, quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 118.    [p. 371]
9.	It was characteristic of the petty bourgeois lack of realism of the "left Communists," whose chief representative at that time was Bukharin, that they refused, in the event of hostilities being resumed, to accept help from Russia's former "allies," France and Britain, whereas Lenin was ready to accept "potatoes and munitions from the hands of the imperialist bandits."    [p. 373]
10.	CW, vol. 27, p. 68.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Strange and Monstrous". -- DJR]    [p. 374]
11.	Quoted in Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, pp. 38-39.    [p. 376]
12.	CW, vol. 29, p. 74.  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "The Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government". -- DJR]    [p. 377]









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  3. The ideological and political struggles
     during "war communism"

    During most of the "war communism" period, ideological and political struggles were less acute than in previous years, the party's attention and efforts being mainly concentrated on problems of defense. The Bolshevik Party was, on the whole, relatively united in its views on these problems, so that they did not give rise to major disputes, especially since those members who differed from the majority usually came into line quickly. There were, however, some acts of indiscipline amounting to a sort of "undeclared opposition" to the policy decided on by the congresses and the Central Committee, and some of the questions raised by the "left Communists" reappeared during this period. Most important, new divisions appeared from 1920 onward, when victory drew near and "post war" problems had to be faced. These new divisions became noticeable at the Ninth Party Congress, and more plainly still toward the end of 1920. Let us first, though, consider the period preceding that year.



   I.  The oppositions of 1918 and 1919

    Even before the White revolt broke out, opposition to Lenin's policy on nationalities made itself apparent. It was not an open opposition, but it became manifest in the party's practical activity. Although this opposition had no immediate effects, it is important to recall it for it reasserted itself, with serious consequences, as soon as the civil war was over.

    One of the first expressions of this trend occurred in April 1918, when a Soviet government for the Ukraine was formed

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under the leadership the Bolshevik N. A. Skrypnik. Although, on April 3, 1918, Lenin sent a message of support to the Ukrainian Soviet government, expressing his "enthusiastic solidarity with the heroic struggle being waged by the working and exploited people of the Ukraine, who now constitute one of the vanguard detachments of the world social revolution," Stalin, who was at that time People's Commissar for Nationalities, opposed the formation of this Soviet government of a Ukraine independent of Russia. Stalin's attitude produced the following reaction from Skrypnik: "We must protest in the strongest possible way against the statement of Commissar Stalin. We must declare that the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Soviet base their actions, not on the attitude of any Commissar of the Russian Federation, but on the will of the toiling masses of the Ukraine, as expressed in the decree of the Second All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets. Declarations like that of Commissar Stalin would destroy the Soviet regime in the Ukraine . . . They are direct assistance to the enemies of the Ukrainian toiling masses."[1]

    Stalin's hostility to the formation of a Soviet republic which was not included within the Russian Soviet Republic did not remain an isolated episode. This was a manifestation of a political conception that was to be reaffirmed on numerous occasions, and subsequently to be supported by the Russian bourgeoisie in emigration and by elements of this class in the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party. It surfaced again in May 1918, for example, when Stalin sent to Stepan Shaumyan, the Soviet representative in Daghestan, where counter-revolutionary armed bands were then operating, instructions which made no distinction between the counter-revolutionary leaders and the peasant masses whom they had misled. These instructions were to act without hesitation and "make examples by reducing to ashes a certain number of villages."[2]


   (a)  The "military opposition"

    After the summer of 1918, another opposition developed which had a "left-wing" look about it, and was known as the

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"military opposition." Not many documents have been published regarding this tendency, although it existed relatively openly and included among its avowed supporters such men as Voroshilov, E. N. Yaroslavsky, A. Z. Kamensky and S. Milin, some of whom were at that time -- and in many cases remained -- very close to Stalin.[3]

    One of the points of the program of the "military opposition" was refusal to accept the recruitment of military specialists to the Red Army. Stalin, though he made no public declaration favorable to the "military opposition," took decisions in 1918 on the Tsaritsyn front, where he was in charge politically, which corresponded to the line of this group, removing a number of officers from their posts in violation of the instructions of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic and those of the CEC and the CC. As a result of these measures, Stalin was eventually himself removed from his position on the Revolutionary War Council of the Southern Front, while S. N. Sytin, whom Stalin had wanted to deprive of his command, was confirmed in his appointment. It is known, too, that Lenin spoke out severely at the Eighth Party Congress (in an unpublished speech) against decisions of the Revolutionary War Council of the Tenth Army, taken at the instigation of the "military opposition," which had resulted in serious losses by the Red forces.[4]

    By and large, however, this opposition played only a comparatively minor role. Its importance was mainly symptomatic. The way it functioned shows that at that time there were, within the party apparatus, elements which were sufficiently well-organized to be able to oppose, for a certain period at least, the decisions of the CC and the Soviet government.


   (b)  The Eighth Congress and the new party
        program

    During the preparations for the Eighth Congress some parts of the earlier "platform" of the "left Communists" continued to be defended by a small number of members who had belonged to that group. Among them was V. Smirnov.[5]

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    Other well-known Bolsheviks, such as Osinsky and Sapronov, defended similar positions.

    At the Eighth Party Congress (March 18-23, 1919), Osinsky demanded that workers be brought on to the Central Committee in sufficient numbers to "proletarianize" it: four years later, Lenin was to make a similar proposal. At the same congress, Sapronov and Osinsky called for the soviets to function more democratically, instead of being reduced to the role of mere organs of ratification ("rubber stamps"). These views were rejected by the congress which declared, on the contrary, for a high degree of administrative centralization. This was the congress which set up the Politburo, the Orgburo, and the Central Committee secretariat.

    The Eighth Congress adopted a new party program, in which Point 5 of the economic section read:

The organised apparatus of social production must primarily depend upon the trade unions . . . Inasmuch as the trade unions are already (as specified in the laws of the Soviet Republic and as realised in practice) participants in all the local and central organs administering industry, they must proceed to the practical concentration into their own hands of the work of administration in the whole economic life of the country, making this their unified economic aim . . . The participation of the trade unions in the conduct of economic life, and the involvement by them of the broad masses of the people in this work, would appear at the same time to be our chief aid in the campaign against the bureaucratisation of the economic apparatus of the Soviet Power.[6]

Actually, this Point 5 had no concrete effect: managers of enterprises were unwilling to allow the trade unions to interfere in management at the very moment when the party was insisting on these managers taking personal responsibility. The adoption of Point 5 seems to have been mainly an echo of the discontent which existed at that time in part of the working class regarding the increasing role played by the bourgeois technicians, engineers, and administrators. The principle set forth in Point 5 was later, moreover, to be viewed as reflecting a "syndicalist distortion": it was to be the point of departure in a conflict between the majority of the Central Committee and

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one of the new oppositions, which demanded that this section of the party program be honored.



   II.  The year 1920 and the party crisis

    It was in 1920, mainly from the time of the Ninth Party Congress (March 29-April 5), that an important political crisis broke out, a crisis that continued, growing more serious and assuming new aspects, until the Tenth Congress. March 1920 saw the appearance of a new "left" opposition in the group calling itself "Democratic Centralism." The composition of this group had little in common with that of the "left Communists," though Osinsky, Smirnov, and Sapronov were included. The "Democratic Centralism" group denounced what they saw as excessive centralization and abuse of authoritarian methods. In 1920-1921 they intervened actively in the discussion in which Trotsky and Bukharin maintained positions differing from those of Lenin, who opposed Trotsky's plan for complete subjection of the trade unions to the state machine.


   (a)  The position of Trotsky and Bukharin in
        1920-1921

    At the moment of the Ninth Congress, the majority of party members were still under the influence of the conceptions of "war communism"; they favored the adoption of measures for the "militarization of labor" and strict subordination of the trade unions to the administrative apparatus of the state. The measures in question did not, however, have the same significance or implications for all the different tendencies which existed in the Bolshevik Party and which were generally represented even in the party leadership. For some, the measures taken at this time were essentially conjunctural, whereas others saw in them decisions of "principle" which should be adhered to even after the war. These divergences gave rise to conflicts which lasted until the Tenth Congress.

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    In 1920 Trotsky was one of the "theoreticians" most resolutely in favor of "militarizing" labor and the trade unions. He denied that the measures discussed by the Ninth Congress were only circumstantial and provisional in character. He saw in them, on the contrary, the expression of lasting needs which pointed in the direction of transforming the trade unions into state organs strictly subordinate to the government, with their leaders appointed by the government and the party. Addressing the Ninth Congress, Trotsky said that "the mass of the workers must be bound to their jobs, made liable to transfer, told what to do, ordered about." "Before it disappears," he declared, "state compulsion will, in the period of transition, reach its highest degree of intensity in the organisation of labour." In a pamphlet written for the congress, he urged that "planned, systematic, persistent and stern struggle be waged against desertion from labour, in particular by the publication of black lists of labour-deserters, the formation of penal battalions made up of these deserters, and, finally, their confinement in concentration camps."[7] At the same congress, Trotsky insisted that the "militarisation [of labor] is unthinkable without the militarisation of the trade unions as such, without the establishment of a regime in which every worker feels himself a soldier of labour who cannot dispose of himself freely; if the order is given to transfer him, he must carry it out; if he does not carry it out he will be a deserter who is punished. Who looks after this? The trade union. It creates the new regime. This is the militarisation of the working class."[8] Radek concluded a speech to the congress with an appeal to organized labor "to overcome the bourgeois prejudice of 'freedom of labour' so dear to the hearts of Mensheviks and compromisers of every kind."[9] He was, however, the only speaker to use such expressions.

    The Ninth Congress did not adopt the line advocated by Trotsky and Radek. It refused to see in coercion and militarization of the workers the supreme form of socialist organization of labor, and declared that militarization of labor could be justified only by war conditions. Point 14 of the resolution on "The present tasks of economic construction" said that "the

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employment of entire labour armies, retaining their military organisation, can be justified only in so far as this is necessary in order to keep the army as a whole in being for military purposes."[10]

    The congress thus declined to follow Trotsky in his idea of the militarization of labor and of the trade unions as measures required for the transition from capitalism to socialism. It even adopted one of the proposals of the "Democratic Centralism" group, for the setting up of a control commission charged with publicizing abuses in the use of coercion, "without regard to the position or function of the persons so incriminated." This was actually a mere sop to the demands of the group: the commission seems never to have functioned.

    Throughout 1920 and early 1921, Trotsky continued to advocate the same ideas, coming increasingly into conflict with the different ideas held by Lenin. Addressing the Third All-Russia Congress of Trade Unions, Trotsky even offered a sort of apologia for forced labor, asking, for example: "Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? . . . This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive . . . Compulsory slave labour . . . was in its time a progressive phenomenon."[11]

    By this retrospective apologia for slavery, Trotsky claimed to show that resort to militarization of labor could be justified throughout an entire historical period -- provided it was decided upon by the Bolshevik Party, the instrument of the proletarian dictatorship. As an advocate of state compulsion, Trotsky opposed those who wanted to allow greater independence to the trade unions, in which they saw one of the forms of expression of proletarian democracy. It is not unjustified to anticipate events at this point by quoting a passage from one of Trotsky's speeches at the Tenth Party Congress (in which, rather than attack Lenin's line, he took the Workers' Opposition as his target):

They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictator-

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ship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy . . . The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship . . . regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class . . . The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy.[12]

    The idea of an "infallible" party, situated outside the class struggle and by its mere existence guaranteeing the perpetuation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was at that time common to Trotsky and Bukharin -- hence the latter's idea of "compulsory self-discipline."[13]

    According to Bukharin, the proletariat imposes discipline "on itself" through the party and the state. He represented the party as both "identical" with the proletariat and at the same time "superior" to it, which in his view justified the coercion exercised by the party upon the mass of the workers, this coercion being identified with "self-discipline." Bukharin argued along the same lines regarding state power, its various organs, and the authority of the technicians appointed by the state.

    To a large extent, it will be seen, the theses of Trotsky and Bukharin were rooted in the idea of the infallibility of the party, of its superiority, "by its very nature," in relation to the masses, of the "guaranteed permanence" of its proletarian character and that of the state which it leads, whatever the party's ideological and political practices may be.

    The theses of Trotsky and Bukharin implied also that the party had been assigned a new role: no longer was it a vanguard with the task of guiding the masses, while remaining alert to their initiatives and their criticisms -- it now had the role of controlling and coercing the masses.

    It was in his book The Economics of the Transformation Period that Bukharin developed in a systematic way the non-dialectical conceptions on which he claimed to base his political views. Now the Bukharin who in 1918 had opposed the appointment in each enterprise of a single manager, personally responsible for the way it was run, saw in the establishment of one-man management "a form of proletarian administration of industry, compressed and consolidated", and

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for him "the militarisation of the population . . . constitutes a method of self-organisation of the working class and organisation of the peasantry by the working class" -- so that, in certain circumstances, the dictatorship of the proletariat can take the form of "a military-proletarian dictatorship."[14]

    Furthermore, Bukharin saw in the distribution of rations in kind, instead of wages in money form, the disappearance of wage labor, and this, for him, justified the conscription of labor. He considered that during the period of transition the monetary system would collapse, and, with it, the commodity system in general, this being made manifest through devaluation of the currency.[15]


   (b)  The theses of the Workers' Opposition^[16]

    Whereas Trotsky was expressing support for extremely accentuated centralization and militarization, a different tendency was developing in the party. This tendency extended the ideas of the former "Democratic Centralism" group which, enlarging its membership through the entry of party members like Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, who had not belonged to "Democratic Centralism," now took its stand on Point 5 of the economic section of the program adopted in 1919 by the Eighth Party Congress. It denounced the development of authoritarian practices in the party and in the state machine, and also the ascendancy of many bourgeois elements.

    Workers' Opposition advocated a radical alteration in the party line -- handing over the management of industry to the trade unions. (The expression "trade unionization of the state" was used to describe this policy.) The Workers' Opposition wanted the factory committees to play a big role, and it also called for a much more egalitarian policy on wages.[17]

    As Lenin saw it, the theses of the Workers' Opposition reflected a "trade-unionist" (that is, a "syndicalist-economist") outlook alien to Marxism, which ignored the leading role of the party of the proletariat.

    The theses of the Workers' Opposition were widely dis-

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cussed in January and February 1921. They were published in Pravda on January 25, and circulated in pamphlet form by their supporters. On the eve of the Tenth Congress (March 8-16, 1921), the Workers' Opposition possessed seemingly firm footholds in the party organizations in a number of industrial areas -- Moscow, the Donets Basin, etc. -- but it was a minority in the party as a whole, and poorly represented at the congress.


   (c)  Lenin's fight against the ideas of
        Trotsky and Bukharin

    During the months leading up to the Tenth Party Congress, a huge political battle was waged. One of the first episodes in this battle took place on November 8-9, 1920, at meetings of the Bolshevik faction at the Fifth Trade Union Conference and in the Central Committee. Trotsky said that it was necessary to continue applying the measure that had been taken during the civil war, and even to extend them, regardless of the fact that they had been emergency measures. He defended the view that the Soviet state should be able to remove from their posts, by a simple decision from "above," those trade-union leaders whose ideas on problems of discipline and wages differed from the ideas of the majority in the Central Committee. He thus declared in favor of "statization of the trade unions," aimed at turning the latter into instruments for increasing production and the productivity of labor. He wished to see reasserted, even in the new conditions that were emerging at the end of 1920, the right to replace any trade-union leaders who did not agree that the task of the trade unions was to serve production. On November 8, 1920, Trotsky clashed with Lenin, who recalled that the measures adopted by the Ninth Congress had been exceptional in character and that the new features of the situation, which was no longer dominated by war emergencies, must be taken into account. Lenin's view carried the day by a narrow margin. By eight votes to six, Trotsky's view was defeated and Lenin's resolution adopted. This resolution de-

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clared that "a gradual but steady transition must be effected from urgency procedures to a more even distribution of forces," and that it was necessary to "extend to the entire trade union movement those methods of the broader application of democracy, the promotion of initiative, participation in the management of industry, the development of emulation, and so forth . . . "[18]

    The Central Committee adopted a resolution directed against the positions supported by Trotsky. This condemned "the degeneration of centralisation and the militarising of labour into bureaucracy, arrogance, petty functionarism and pestering interference in the trade unions." A commission was set up to study relations between the party and the trade unions, with Zinoviev as rapporteur.[19]

    The divergences in the Central Committee reached such a pitch that it was decided, at the beginning of December 1920, to open a broad public discussion. The entire party leadership -- Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Stalin, Shlyapnikov, and many others -- took part in the discussion.

    Important episodes in the political battle included two meetings held in December 1920. On December 24, Trotsky spoke to a gigantic gathering of trade unionists and delegates to the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets. Six days later, a meeting took place at which several party leaders spoke, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Bukharin, and Shlyapnikov: the speeches were published in 1921 under -- the title The Role of the Trade Unions in Production. A week after this second great meeting, Zinoviev addressed another gathering in Petrograd.[20] Throughout January 1921, Pravda published nearly every day an article about the problems of militarizing labor and "statizing" the trade unions.

    Gradually, Lenin's arguments (which were supported in this discussion by Zinoviev and Stalin), together with the evolution of the objective situation itself, weakened the position of the group represented by eight members of the Central Committee (Trotsky, Bukharin, Andreyev, Dzerzhinsky, Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky, Rakovsky, and Serebryakov). They found themselves no longer supported by more than a dwindling minority, while the Workers' Opposition took up attitudes

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which were radically opposed to Trotsky's -- but which were not in accordance with Lenin's views, either.

    The battle of the winter of 1920-1921 provided the occasion for Lenin to denounce the dogmatic stereotypes which Trotsky and Bukharin were employing to "justify" their positions. Lenin thus broke openly with a problematic which was not merely that of Trotsky and Bukharin, but which had implicitly also been that of nearly the entire party, namely, the problematic which identified the Soviet state with a "workers' state."

    In December 1920, without as yet carrying through this break to completion, and without using the formulations he was to produce later, Lenin set forth a certain number of basic propositions. The most important of these criticized the one-sided character of the theses of Trotsky and Bukharin, which "reduced" the Soviet state to a "workers' state", whereas the real nature of the Soviet state was extremely complex.[21]

    The nature of this state was such as to oblige the workers to have organizations of their own which were sufficiently independent of the party in power to be able to "protect the workers from their state."[22] About a year later, Lenin returned to this problem, when, on January 12, 1922, he put before the Central Committee a resolution (which was adopted unanimously) on "The role and functions of the trade unions under the New Economic Policy."[23] The resolution pointed out that there could be an "antagonism of interest" between the working class and the management of Soviet state enterprises, and that "strike struggle" might be justified by the necessity facing the workers of combating bureaucratic distortions and survivals from the capitalist past.[24]

    Lenin's fight against the line of Trotsky and Bukharin (and of some other leaders of the Bolshevik Party) is of substantial importance. It shows that the divergences between Lenin and those two members of the Political Bureau were based on what he called "our different approach to the mass, the different way of winning it over and keeping in touch with it."[25]

    The discussion brought to light divergences that went even deeper, affecting, at bottom, the whole question of what was meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky and

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Bukharin conceived the Soviet state in a mistakenly abstract way, as being, so to speak, the "pure expression" of proletarian dictatorship, whereas, Lenin sought to elucidate the dual nature of the Soviet state, a "workers' state" insofar as it was led by a proletarian party (and insofar as this party remained proletarian), yet also a "bourgeois or petty-bourgeois state" by virtue of a number of its features -- its dependence on bourgeois administrators, technicians, and specialists, and the political relations that largely prevailed in the work of its administrative organs. Lenin did not shrink from adding that the "workers' state," in the true sense, was "an ideal we shall achieve in 15 or 20 years' time, and I am not sure that we shall have achieved it by then"[26] -- the prospect of achieving it being dependent, of course, on the disappearance of those features which made it impossible to call the Soviet state of 1921 a workers' state.

    This discussion gave Lenin the opportunity to recall that the fundamental problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that of the struggle to consolidate proletarian power -- and, therefore, the struggle to win the masses -- and not, as Trotsky maintained, the struggle for production. In his pamphlet Once Again on the Trade Unions, Lenin made this observation, the significance of which transcends by far the limits of the particular polemic of that period: "Trotsky and Bukharin make as though they are concerned for the growth of production, whereas we have nothing but formal democracy in mind. This picture is wrong, because the only formulation of the issue (which the Marxist standpoint allows ) is: without a correct political approach to the matter the given class will be unable to stay on top, and, consequently, will be incapable of solving its production problem either."[27]




  Notes

1.	This telegram was sent to the Soviet government by N. A. Skrypnik, head of the Soviet government of the Ukraine, on April 6, 1918. It was mentioned by the old Bolshevik A. V. Snegov during
page 393
	a discussion organized by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on June 26-28, 1966, and is quoted in Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 16.    [p. 381]
2.	Reproduced in Pravda, September 20, 1963.    [p. 381]
3.	D. Yu. Zorina wrote, a few years ago, an article which has remained unpublished, "On the Problem of the Military Opposition." See Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 15.    [p. 382]
4.	See Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 14-16, n. 26-28.    [p. 382]
5.	Smirnov and other former "left Communists" were among the accused in the trials of 1936-1937 -- alongside others who in 1918-1920 were among the chief opponents of the views advocated by that group.    [p. 382]
6.	K.P.S.S. v Rezolyutsiyakh, vol. I, p. 422 (translated in appendix to Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p. 447).    [p. 383]
7.	Trotsky, Sochineniya, vol. 15, pp. 126, 132, 138.    [p. 385]
8.	Report of the Ninth Party Congress, 1934 ed., p. 101; quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, pp. 214-215.    [p. 385]
9.	This part of Radek's speech was published in Izvestiya of April 2, 1920. It is not without interest to note (as does Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, p. 215) that Radek's speech was not included in the official report of the congress, on the pretext that it would be published as a separate pamphlet (see congress report, p. 277). Actually, no such pamphlet ever saw the light.    [p. 385]
10.	K.P.S.S. v Rezolyutsiyakh, vol. I, pp. 487-488.    [p. 386]
11.	Congress report, published in Moscow in 1920, pp. 84-97; quoted in Brinton, The Bolsheviks & Workers' Control, p. 64.    [p. 386]
12.	Quoted in the footnotes of Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition.    [p. 387] <