The Russian Revolution полностью

A coalition government

58

(8.6%)

No answer

3

(0.4%)

The responses said more or less the same thing: that if the pro-Bolshevik soviets did not know precisely what kind of government they wanted, none of them envisaged any single party enjoying a political monopoly. Indeed, many of Lenin’s closest associates also opposed excluding other socialist parties from the Soviet Government, and would resign in protest because Lenin and a handful of his most devoted followers (Trotsky, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinskii) insisted on such a course. This was the political reality that Lenin had to face. It forced him to continue hiding behind the façade of “soviet power” even as he was putting in place a one-party dictatorship. The overwhelmingly democratic and socialist sentiment of the population, imprecisely articulated but intensely felt, compelled him to keep intact the structure of the state in the guise of its new nominal “sovereign,” the soviets, while accumulating all the strands of power in his own hands.

But there are good reasons why, even if the mood of the country had not forced him to perpetuate the deception, Lenin would have preferred to govern through the the state and keep the party separate from it. One factor was the shortage of Bolshevik personnel. Administering Russia under normal conditions required hundreds of thousands of functionaries, public and private. To administer a country in which all forms of self-government were to be extinguished and the economy nationalized, required many times that number. The Bolshevik Party in 1917–18 was much too small to cope with this task; in any event, very few of its adherents, most of them lifelong professional revolutionaries, had expertise in administration. The Bolsheviks had no choice, therefore, but to rely on the old bureaucratic apparatus and other “bourgeois specialists,” and rather than administer directly, control the administrators. Emulating the Jacobins, they insinuated Bolshevik personnel into commanding positions in all the institutions and organizations without exception—personnel who owed allegiance and obedience not to the state but to the party. The need for reliable party personnel was so acute that the party had to expand more rapidly than its leaders wished, enrolling careerists, pure and simple.

The third consideration in favor of keeping the party distinct from the state was that such a procedure protected it from domestic and foreign criticism. Since the Bolsheviks had no intention of yielding power even if the population overwhelmingly rejected them, they needed a scapegoat. This was to be the state bureaucracy, which could be blamed for failures while the party maintained the pretense of infallibility. In carrying abroad subversive activities, the Bolsheviks would dispose of foreign protests by claiming that these were the work of the Russian Communist Party, a “private organization” for which the Soviet Government could not be held responsible.

The establishment in Russia of a one-party state required a variety of measures, destructive as well as constructive. The process was substantially completed (in central Russia, which is all the Bolsheviks controlled at the time) by the autumn of 1918. Subsequently they transplanted these institutions and practices to the borderlands.

First and foremost, they had to uproot all that remained of the old regime, tsarist as well as “bourgeois” (democratic): the organs of self-government, the political parties and their press, the armed forces, the judiciary system, and the institution of private property. This purely destructive phase of the Revolution, carried out in fulfillment of Marx’s injunction of 1871 not to take over but “smash” the old order, was formalized by decrees but it was accomplished mainly by spontaneous anarchism, which the February Revolution had unleashed and the Bolsheviks had done their utmost to inflame. Contemporaries saw in this destructive work only mindless nihilism, but for the new rulers it was clearing the ground before the construction of the new political and social order could get underway.

Construction was the difficult part because it required that the Bolsheviks restrain the anarchistic instincts of the people and reimpose discipline from which the people thought the Revolution had freed them once and for all. It called for structuring the new authority (vlast’) in a manner that had the appearance of folkish, “soviet” democracy but actually restored Muscovite absolutism with all the refinements made possible by modern ideology and technology. The Bolshevik rulers saw it as their most urgent immediate task to free themselves from accountability to the soviets, their nominal sovereign. Next, they had to be rid of the Constituent Assembly, to the convocation of which they had committed themselves but which was certain to remove them from power. And finally, they had to transform the soviets into compliant tools of the party.