The Thinking Reed полностью

As early as 1919 the Bolshevik leaders felt that the development of a bureaucratic dictatorship in the period of war Communism constituted a menace to the fundamental aims of the revolution, but the changes made were by that time irreversible. Democratic life had died in the soviets and the omnipotent bureaucracy, in complete fulfilment of Rosa Luxemburg’s prophecy, had taken possession of all real power — if not in Moscow, at least in the provinces. ‘The Soviet bureaucracy in the localities’, wrote Martov, ‘simply ignores the “liberal” instructions received from above.’132 Thus in 1919 the central leadership was unable to implement its important decision to bring the Mensheviks back into the Soviets. Lenin came up against bureaucratic sabotage which he had no means of combating.

After the civil war ended, bureaucratization not only did not decrease — on the contrary, it was intensified. NEP was not only a period of economic and cultural liberalism, it was also a period of intensified Party dictatorship. Cohen writes:

Whereas during the civil war, despite all the restrictions, the Mensheviks and some small opposition parties still enjoyed some opportunities for legal — or semi-legal — activity, in 1921-22 they were completely suppressed. Lenin and his comrades considered that if they allowed a degree of freedom to alien class elements in the spheres of economics and culture, they must at the same time restrict still further the political freedom of these elements — otherwise, after gaining strength, they would overthrow the Bolsheviks, and that would mean another civil war and a real catastrophe for Russia.

Clearly, this meant restrictions on freedom for the proletariat as well. The Bolsheviks did not take into account the indivisibility of democratic principles, the fact that one cannot restrict the political freedom of one class of society without at the same time restricting that of the others. However, the workers were in no position to protest. Although some small proletarian groups such as ‘Rabochaya Pravda’ did appear at the beginning of the 1920s, they played no role in politics. The Bolsheviks themselves acknowledged that ‘our working class has been atomized’134 and called for measures to combat this situation, but the political steps proposed were hardly such as to bring about a real consolidation of the proletariat. A. Voronsky, for example, speaking of the need to combat ‘the weariness and apathy of the worker masses’, considered that what was necessary for this purpose was, first and foremost, to shut for good and all the mouths of the Menshevik comrades who were declaiming in favour of freedom of the press, and so on. If the workers put political demands to the Bolsheviks, he argued, this was due to ‘apathy’ (!), but if they obediently trudged along whithersoever the Party ordered, without asking any questions, that signified that their ‘spiritual impoverishment’ had been ‘overcome’. Here everything is stood on its head, yet Voronsky himself reproaches the Mensheviks for setting everything ‘topsy-turvy’.135

At first Lenin underestimated the fact that in crushing the freedom of those enemies of the proletariat who had already been vanquished he was at the same time strengthening a new and more dangerous enemy — the bureaucracy. As a result the Bolsheviks, who had regarded themselves as the party of the proletariat, very soon found themselves hostages in the hands of alien social forces. Lenin soon frankly recognized this when he spoke of the relations between the Bolsheviks and ‘the bureaucratic heap’: ‘I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed.’136 As he admitted, the number of bureaucrats not only did not decrease after several ‘cuts’ (!) but even increased. And it was not only a question of numbers.

From the time when Stalin came, first de facto and then formally, to head the Party’s bureaucratic apparatus, the new officialdom was transformed into an independent social and political force. This development was more or less logical. Gramsci wrote later: