Pyatakov, in an excited and emotional manner, replied with a long harangue. Lenin, he said, had become a tired and sick man towards the end of his life:
The real Lenin was the man who had had the courage to make a proletarian revolution first, and then to set about creating the objective conditions theoretically necessary as a preliminary to such a revolution. What was the October Revolution, what indeed is the Communist Party, but a miracle? No Menshevik could ever understand what it meant to be a member of such a Party.7
Pyatakov’s “miracle” was a reasonable description from the Marxist point of view of what the Party, as he thought, was attempting to do. For it was contrary to the natural “Laws of Society” as propounded by Marx: instead of socialism arising as the result of the conquest of political power by a Party representing a large proletarian majority in a country already thoroughly industrialized, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was (in theory) attempting to create by mere will power and organization the industry and the proletariat which should in principle have preceded it. Instead of economics determining politics, politics was determining economics.
‘According to Lenin’, Pyatakov added, ‘the Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion by itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political and even physical, as far as that goes. Such a Party is capable of achieving miracles and doing things which no other collective of men could achieve…. A real Communist … that is, a man who was raised in the Party and had absorbed its spirit deeply enough becomes himself in a way a miracle man’.8
From this attitude, significant conclusions followed:
Tor such a Party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, “the Party”, to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions, and can honestly agree with the Party—that is the test of a true Bolshevik’.
There could be no life for him (Pyatakov continued) outside the ranks of the Party, and he would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it. In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.9
This idea of all morality and all truth being comprehended in the Party is extraordinarily illuminating when we come to consider the humiliations Pyatakov and others were to accept in the Party’s name. For this evaporation of objective standards, though it did not affect all members of the old Party, was widespread. Many had by the end of the 1920s become quite disillusioned with the idea that the workers, let alone the peasants, could play any part in a country like Russia. By 1930, a foreign Communist noted among his students in Leningrad that they thought it entirely natural for the masses to be mere instruments under both Fascism and Communism—the moral distinction being simply one of the respective leaders’ intentions.10 One Trotskyite remarked that there was much to be said for Stalin: “No doubt Trotsky would have done it with more go and with less brutality, and we, who are more cultured than Stalin’s men, would have been at the top. But one should be able to rise above these ambitions…11
Even those who did not go to Pyatakov’s self-immolating lengths no longer felt capable of the intellectual and moral effort of making a break and starting afresh:
They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.12
Even the brave Budu Mdivani is quoted as saying, “I belong to the opposition, that is clear. But if there is going to be a final break … I prefer to return to the Party I helped create. I no longer have the strength to begin creating a new party.”13 As a psychological hurdle, the fresh start was too high. The oppositionists fell back into submission, surrender.
This loyalty to “the Party” has an element of unreality about it. The original Party of 1917 had been decimated by the expulsion of thousands of oppositionists. By the end of 1930, only Stalin, of the original leadership, remained in the Politburo. His nominees, from the ranks of the new men, controlled the elements of power. The Party itself, diluted by the great influxes of the 1920s, had changed in the style of its membership and now contained a rank and file who had regularly, so far at least, acted as reliable voting fodder for the secretaries imposed by Stalin’s Secretariat.
On the face of it, the opposition could well have argued that Stalin’s control of, and claim to represent, the Party was based on no higher sanction than success in packing the Party Congresses, that in fact he had no real claim to be regarded as the genuine succession. But the oppositionists themselves had used similar methods in their day, and had never criticized them until a more skilled operator turned the weapon against them.
In 1923, Stalin was already able to attack such arguments from his opponents by pointing out that appeals for democracy came oddly from people like Byeloborodov and Rosengolts, who had ruled Rostov and the Donets Basin, respectively, in the most authoritarian fashion.14 Even more to the point, in 1924 Shlyapnikov ironically remarked that Trotsky and his followers had all supported the action taken against the Workers’ Opposition at the Xth Party Congress in 1921, so that their claims to stand for Party democracy were hypocritical.15 Kamenev denounced Party democracy in this struggle with Trotsky in revealing terms:
For if they say today, let ud have democracy in the Party, tomorrow they will say, let us have democracy in the trade unions; the day after tomorrow, workers who do not belong to the Party may well say: give us democracy too … and surely then the myriads of peasants could not be prevented from asking for democracy.16
A year later he was asserting, “We object to the Secretariat, uniting policy and organization in itself, being placed above the political organism.” It was too late. And the Stalinists were able to comment tellingly, as when Mikoyan said, “While Zinoviev is in the majority he is for iron discipline…. When he is in the minority … he is against it.”17
When Stalin proceeded to the further step of arresting those responsible for the Trotskyite underground printing press, headed by Mrachkovsky, in 1927, he was again able to refute opposition objections, remarking: “They say that such things are unknown of the Party. This is not true. What about the Myasnikov group? And the Workers’ Truth group? Does not everyone know that Comrades Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves supported the arrest of the members of these groups?”18 Mere truth is a common casualty in all types of political systems, but in nontotalitarian parties this never becomes an overt and overriding principle, remaining sporadic and occasional, and discrediting its authors when exposed. Among the Communists, it was consciously and systematically accepted.