Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (40 page)

If Lenin had been blown off course at the last minute over labour compulsion it did not mean he had abandoned authoritarianism. In other areas it began to strike deep roots and flourish. By the time he came to address the Tenth Party Congress, in March 1921, his last major point of direct impact on Soviet history, it was still in the forefront of much of his thinking.

One of the factors that appears to have led Lenin to change course was the existence of a large ‘Workers’ Opposition’ which was claiming that the working class had already been too tightly bound by the bonds of bureaucracy and that it needed greater freedom of self-expression in order to develop the Revolution. Any suggestion of ultimate bureaucratic bonds – labour conscription – was anathema to them. Lenin’s strategy was to concede on the issue but, at the same time, to obliterate the opposition itself. Alongside the ‘liberalization’ of the economy represented by the adoption of the tax in kind, Lenin was tightening the political and intellectual screws on society and Party. From the Marxist point of view, the processes were interrelated. Economic concessions to ‘capitalism’ presented the danger that pro-capitalist elements might take advantage of the new conditions to organize themselves politically and seek the means to spread their ideas. At the Congress Lenin made it clear that one of its tasks would be, in his phrase, to put the lid on opposition, both within the Party and without.

In his speech opening the Congress, Lenin said the Party had indulged itself in the ‘amazing luxury’ of discussions and disputes. Enemies, ‘their name is legion’, would take advantage of what they perceived as Communist weakness. In the face of this and the fact that, having been defeated on the battlefield, their enemies’ ‘warfare against us has taken a form that is less military but is in some respects more severe and more dangerous’, he called for ‘our efforts’ to be ‘more united and harmonious than ever before’. [SW 3 559–61] The key measures taken at the Congress put these remarks into effect. A ban on factions, presented as a resolution ‘On Party Unity’, made it clear that the Party would not tolerate organized opposition groups within. The Workers’ Opposition was condemned as an ‘Anarcho-Syndicalist deviation’. They had wanted to do the opposite of the labour conscription Trotsky and Lenin had called for. They wanted trades unions to be independent of Party control. The outcome, which partly emerged before the Congress, was that Lenin took a centre position between the extremes. Trades unions became ‘schools of communism’ and ‘a school of economic management’.
⁶
Their task, implicitly, was to present the priorities of the workers’ state to the workers, not the other way round. The resolution ‘On the Tax in Kind’ was also accepted. As the Congress drew to a close, volunteers left the debating chamber and headed to Petrograd and the Gulf of Finland, to participate in the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt which took place on 17 March.

In the year following the Congress some complementary measures were taken, notably the reorganization of censorship functions around a single institution,
Glavlit
; the ‘temporary’ Cheka turning itself into the permanent GPU and a show trial of members of the SR Party. Taken together, the reorientation of 1921–2 constituted Lenin’s last formula for transition. The restoration of partial market relations for agriculture and industry; the rejection of extreme compulsion of labour but a tightening of political and intellectual control and surveillance provided a new balance. Lenin had time to develop his views on the new system but not to see it through. After the Tenth Party Congress Lenin’s personal story became one of diminishing powers, of illness and, on 21 January 1924, of death at his estate in Gorky. His withdrawal from active day-to-day involvement in running the Revolution gave him an opportunity to look at some of the deeper problems. For better or worse, Lenin was unable to resolve any of the remaining issues before his death.

UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS

Lenin spent most of his last years wrestling with three interrelated aspects of the Revolution: how to deal with the increasingly bureaucratic aspects of the system, the way NEP should go and an effort to pre-empt the predictable future crisis of the succession. Taken together his response to these problems represents Lenin’s last attempt to influence, or even control, the way the Revolution was to develop. In dealing with them he reverted to his professorial mode. Lenin the activist had not survived the first stroke.

Bureaucracy

The bureaucratization of the Russian Revolution is one of its great ironies and one of its great weaknesses. From the outset the Revolution, particularly in its Leninist form, targeted bureaucracy as a key enemy. ‘Abolish the police, the army and bureaucracy’ in
The April Theses
; smash the state, not take it over was the message of
State and Revolution
. Of course it was the tsarist bureaucracy that was to be smashed but there is no doubt Lenin believed that, by following the principles of the Paris Commune such as limiting salaries of officials, instituting the principle of election and recall and organizing rotation of administrative duties, he had found a democratic antidote that would prevent a new parasitic bureaucracy from congealing. As we have seen, as early as 1918 and 1919 bureaucratism, careerism and opportunism had been remarked on by the Party. In a way, bringing them together put those who wanted to deal with the problem on the wrong track. If bureaucratic deformation was caused by a significant minority of individuals in it for their own gain, that is careerists, then the problem could be solved by kicking them out. In other words there appeared to be a handy scapegoat. Lenin was ready to seize on it. On 12 March 1919, a week before the issue came up at the Party Congress, he said at a session of the Petrograd Soviet that ‘We threw out the old bureaucrats but they have come back, they call themselves “commonists” when they can’t bear to say the word “Communist” and they wear a red ribbon in their button-holes and creep into warm corners. What to do about it? We must fight this scum again and again.’ [CW 29 32–3]

The first purges did not, as we have already seen, solve the problem. Instead, the influence of bureaucratism appeared to be spreading from the state institutions to the Party itself. Within a year Lenin was identifying ‘communist arrogance’ (
komchvanstvo
) as a major deformation in the Party. It referred to an increasing heavy-handedness some Party members were showing in dealing with non-Party people. In late November 1920 he told a Party meeting in Moscow that ‘It was only to be expected that red tape in the Soviet apparatus would penetrate into the Party apparatus.’ [CW 31 434–6] In October 1921 he announced ‘Our enemies are communist arrogance, illiteracy and bribery.’ [CW 33 60–79 and Weber 185] At the Eleventh Party Congress in March/April 1922, he went so far as to suggest that the Party was being swamped by the bureaucracy it had created. He even compared the process to a vanquished nation imposing its culture on its conquerors. [CW 33 259–326 and Weber 189]

Lenin, not least because he was constantly prodded by various oppositions over the issue, spent a great deal of time pondering the problem of bureaucratization in his last years. He had no doubt what the administration should look like. In March 1918 Lenin said: ‘Socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party. It can be implemented only by tens of millions when they have learnt to do it themselves. We regard it as a point in our favour that we are trying to help the masses themselves set about it immediately.’ [CW 27 135] In the original version of
Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government
he wrote: ‘There is nothing more mistaken than confusing democratic centralism with bureaucracy and routinism.’ [CW 27 209] To combat these last requires that ‘cooperative organizations spread throughout society’. [CW 27 215] In January 1919 he looked forward to a time when there will be ‘universal training of the working people in the art of governing the state’. [CW 28 393] and, later in the month at the Second All-Russian Trade Union Congress, that ‘the tasks of trades unions are to build a new life and train millions and tens of millions who will learn by experience not to make mistakes and will discard the old prejudices, who will learn by their own experiences how to run state and industry.’ [CW 28 428]

He clearly was aware of how far away from such dreams the actual situation was. In January 1919 he declared: ‘Our enemy today is bureaucracy and profiteering.’ [CW 28 405] In December 1920, with the workers’ opposition coming to a head, he stated that ‘ours is a workers’ state
with a bureaucratic twist to it
’ [CW 32 24] and again, at the Party Congress in March ‘we do have a bureaucratic ulcer’. [CW 32 190]

The debate heated up from 1920 onwards and remained thereafter at the forefront of Lenin’s soon-to-be-declining attention. In explaining why things were not working out and bureaucratic deformations remained Lenin was still not above reaching for the simplistic excuse of looking for obvious scapegoats. In December 1922 he described the state apparatus as something ‘which, in effect, we took over … from the tsar’. [Weber 194] Astonishingly, in his last but one article, ‘How to Re-organize the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection’, he stated that, apart from the Foreign Ministry, ‘our state apparatus is to a considerable extent a survival of the past and has undergone hardly any serious change. It has only been slightly touched up on the surface.’ [SW 3 769] A week or so earlier he had written that the state apparatus was something ‘which is utterly useless, and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch’. [
On Cooperation
, SW 3 764] This quotation suggests Lenin’s concern was deepening in that he was now calling the state apparatus ‘utterly useless’. Elsewhere he made the same point. In a letter of 21 February 1922 he had written, unequivocally: ‘The departments are shit; decrees are shit.’ [CW 36 566] Purges and selection of personnel were a favoured solution for Party and state. The Party must be purged of ‘rascals, of bureaucratic, dishonest and wavering communists and of Mensheviks’.
⁷
In connection with the comment about decrees and departments he also said ‘the centre of gravity’ should shift ‘from writing decrees to
selection of people
and
checking fulfilment
… To find men and check up on their work – that is the whole point.’ [CW 36 566] To do this he proposed further development of the system of what one might call superinstitutions which were developing. In the absence of reliable, that is politically conscious, personnel to fulfil the required tasks, it was necessary to create supervisory institutions which embodied that consciousness in order to check on the rest. Not the rest of the masses but the rest of the supervisors.
⁸
Institutions like the Cheka and political commissars had arisen from the same problem, one is tempted to say contradiction, of the Revolution.

Around 1920 and 1921 Party Control Commissions, and a Worker Peasant Inspectorate to supervise the state apparatus, were set up. It was in these waters that Stalin learned to swim so adeptly that he was made General Secretary of the Party in 1922, the leading organizational post in the Party. An interesting feature of the Control Commissions, illustrating the point about consciousness, was that different Party generations were defined with different degrees of trust. The Central Control Commission needed members who had been in the Party before 1917 and lower ones required 1917 members and only at the lowest level were post-1917 members accepted. Such definitions were the closest the Party could come to an objective measure of consciousness. It worked on the not unreasonable assumption that those who had been in the Party longest were the most reliable.
⁹
From this time onwards Party
stazh’
(length of service) was an increasingly important feature of a Party member’s personal profile.

Lenin’s last years produced a number of reshuffles of the same worn out pack of cards. They seem astonishingly inadequate to the problem even as Lenin defined it. He suggested that 60 per cent of members of the Soviet Central Executive Committee should be ‘workers and peasants not occupying any official posts in government bodies’. [CW 42 420] He said ‘we are convinced that our machinery of state, which suffers from many defects, is inflated to twice the size we need’, but offered no solution except further study of the problem. [CW 33 394] In
Letter to the Congress
he proposed that the Central Committee should be vastly expanded from 27 to ‘50 or 100’ members. [SW 3 737] The State Planning Commission should be granted legislative functions. [SW 3 742–5] The Central Control Commission should be enlarged and amalgamated with the Worker Peasant Inspectorate. Members of it should be present at Politburo meetings. [SW 3 769–70 and 772] His final article, ‘Better Fewer but Better’, showed a continuing preoccupation with tinkering with control mechanisms. His suggestions were to ensure the Control Commission was staffed with ‘irreproachable communists’ [SW 3 777] and, poignantly, almost his last published words were that ‘only by thoroughly purging our government machine, by reducing to the utmost everything that is not absolutely essential in it, shall we be certain of being able to keep going.’ [SW 3 786]

The deeper problems giving rise to bureaucracy were never recognized and yet Lenin’s discourse on bureaucracy frequently came close to identifying them. For instance, in calling for the selection of ‘irreproachable communists’ for control duties, he said, without the slightest realization of the irony, that ‘a great deal has yet to be done to teach them the methods and objects of their work.’ [SW 3 777] Even the supervisors of the supervisors needed supervising! Here was the unrecognized core of the problem. Everything had to come from the centre. All Lenin’s reforms were simply ways of trying to make the centre’s grip more effective. To start out with such a requirement was bound to lead to ‘bureaucratism’. In another revealing comment, at the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin had complained that, although the Party had ‘quite enough political power’ and adequate ‘economic power … to ensure the transition to communism’ there was one vital ingredient lacking, ‘culture among the stratum of communists who perform administrative functions’. The result was that ‘if we take Moscow, with its 4700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine [that is the political-economic apparatus], that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much if it can be truthfully said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed.’ [
Political Report of the Central Committee of the RCP(B)
, Eleventh Party Congress, 27 March 1922, SW 3 692]