If you look into the concluding chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare the next attempt of the French Revolution: not to transfer from one set of hands to another the bureaucratic-military machine, as was done until now, but to smash it.98
Nothing that Marx wrote on the strategy and tactics of revolution etched itself more deeply on Lenin’s mind. He often quoted this passage: it was his guide to action after taking power. The destructive fury which he directed against the Russian state and Russian society and all their institutions found theoretical justification in this dictum of Marx’s. Marx provided Lenin with a solution to the most troublesome problem confronting modern revolutionaries: how to prevent the successful revolution from being undone by a counter revolutionary reaction. The solution was to liquidate the “bureaucratic-military machine” of the old regime in order to deprive the counterrevolution of a ground in which to breed.
What would replace the old order? Again referring to Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, Lenin pointed to such mass-participatory institutions as communes and people’s militias that offered no haven to cadres of reactionary civil servants and officers. In this connection, he predicted the ultimate disappearance of the professional bureaucracy: “Under socialism, all will govern in turn and quickly become accustomed to no one governing.”99 Later, when the Communist bureaucracy grew to unheard-of proportions, this passage would be flung in Lenin’s face. There is no question that Lenin was unpleasantly surprised and greatly worried by the emergence in Soviet Russia of a mammoth bureaucracy: it was probably his main concern in the final year of life. But he was never under the illusion that the bureaucracy would vanish with the fall of “capitalism.” He realized that for a long time after the Revolution the “proletarian dictatorship” would have to assume the shape of a state, with all that this implied:
In the “transition” from capitalism to communism, repression is still necessary, but it is already the repression of the minority of the exploiters by the majority of the exploited. A special apparatus, a special machine of repression, the “state,” is still necessary.100
While working on State and Revolution, Lenin also addressed the economic policies of a future Communist regime. This he did in two essays written in September, after the Kornilov Affair, when Bolshevik prospects unexpectedly improved.101 The thesis of these essays is very different from that of his political writings. While determined to “smash” the old state and its armed forces, Lenin favored preserving the “capitalist” economy and harnessing it in the service of the revolutionary state. We shall discuss this subject in the chapter devoted to “War Communism.” Here suffice it to say that Lenin derived his economic ideas from reading certain contemporary German writers, notably Rudolf Hilferding, who held that advanced or “finance” capitalism had attained a level of concentration at which it became relatively easy to introduce socialism by the simple device of nationalizing banks and syndicates.
Thus, while intending to uproot the entire political and military apparatus of the old, “capitalist” regime, Lenin wanted to retain and use its economic apparatus. In the end, he would destroy all three.
But this lay in the future. The immediate problems involved revolutionary tactics, and here Lenin found himself at odds with his associates.
In spite of the willingness of the socialists in the Soviet to forgive and forget the July putsch and despite their defense of the Bolsheviks against the government’s harassment, Lenin decided that the time for masking his bid for power under Soviet slogans had passed: henceforth, the Bolsheviks would have to strive for power directly, openly, by means of armed insurrection. In “The Political Situation,” written on July 10, one day after reaching his rural hideaway, he argued:
All hopes for the peaceful evolution of the Russian Revolution have disappeared without trace. The objective situation: either the ultimate triumph of the military dictatorship or the triumph of the decisive struggle of the workers…
The slogan of the passage of all power to the soviets was the slogan of the peaceful evolution of the Revolution, which was possible in April, May, June, until July 5–9—that is, until the passage of actual power into the hands of the military dictatorship. Now this slogan is no longer correct, because it does not take into account the completed passage [of power] and the complete betrayal, in deed, of the Revolution by the SRs and Mensheviks.102
In the original version of the manuscript Lenin had written “armed uprising,” which he later changed to “decisive struggle of the workers.”103 The novelty of these remarks was not that power had to be taken by force—the Bolshevikled armed workers, soldiers, and sailors who had taken over the streets of Petrograd in April and July hardly staged a festival of song and dance—but that the Bolsheviks now had to strike for themselves, without pretending to act on behalf of the soviets.
The Sixth Bolshevik Congress held at the end of July approved this program. Its resolution stated that Russia was now ruled by a “dictatorship of the counterrevolutionary imperialist bourgeoisie” under which the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” had lost its validity. The new slogan called for the “liquidation” of Kerensky’s “dictatorship.” This was the task of the Bolshevik Party, which would rally behind itself all anti-counterrevolutionary groups, headed by the proletariat and supported by the poor peasantry.104 Dispassionately analyzed, the premises of this resolution were absurd and its conclusions deceptive, but its practical meaning was unmistakable: henceforth the Bolsheviks would wage war against the Soviet as well as against the Provisional Government.
Many Bolsheviks were unhappy over the new tactic and the abandonment of pro-Soviet slogans. On another occasion that month, Stalin tried to put their minds at ease by assuring them that “the party is indubitably in favor of those soviets where we have a majority.”105
But it was not long before the Bolsheviks, noting a general cooling of interest in the soviets, changed their minds once again: for this growing apathy gave them an opportunity to penetrate and manipulate the soviets for their own ends. Izvestiia, the official soviet organ, wrote at the beginning of September that
in recent times one can observe indifference toward work in soviets.… Indeed, of the more than 1,000 delegates [of the Petrograd Soviet] only 400 to 500 attend its meetings, and those who fail to turn up are precisely representatives of parties which until now had formed a soviet majority106
—that is, Mensheviks and SRs. The same complaint could be read in Izvestiia one month later in an editorial called “Crisis of the Soviet Organization.” Its author recalled that when the soviets had been at the peak of popularity the “interurban” (inogorodnyi) department of the Ispolkom listed up to 800 soviets in the country. By October, many of these soviets no longer existed or existed only on paper. Reports from the provinces indicated that the soviets were losing prestige and influence. The editorial complained of the inability of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies to get together with peasant organizations, which resulted in the peasantry remaining “entirely outside” the soviet structure. But even in localities where the soviets continued to function, as in Petrograd and Moscow, they no longer represented all “democracy” because many intellectuals and workers stayed away:
The soviets were a marvelous organization to fight the old regime, but they are entirely incapable of taking upon themselves the creation of a new one.… When autocracy fell, and the bureaucratic order along with it, we erected the soviets of deputies as temporary barracks to shelter all democracy.