Such was the origin of a type of government that was to breed numerous offspring in the form of left and right one-party dictatorships in Europe and the rest of the world, and emerge as the main enemy of and alternative to parliamentary democracy. Its distinguishing quality was the concentration of executive and legislative authority, as well as the power to make all legislative, executive, and judiciary appointments in the hands of a private association, the “ruling party.” Given that the Bolsheviks quickly outlawed all the other parties, the name “party” hardly applied to their organization. A “party”—the term derives from the Latin pars, or part—by definition cannot be exclusive, since a part cannot be the whole: a “one-party state” is, therefore, a contradiction in terms.3 The term that fits it somewhat better is “dual state,” coined later to describe a similar regime established in Germany by Hitler.4
This type of government had only one precedent, an imperfect and only partially realized one, on which it was in some measure modeled, namely the Jacobin regime of Revolutionary France. The hundreds of Jacobin clubs scattered throughout France, were not, strictly speaking, a party, but they did acquire many of its characteristics even before the Jacobins came to power: membership in them was strictly controlled, requiring adherence to a program as well as bloc voting, and the Paris Jacobin Club acted as their national center. From the fall of 1793 until the Thermidorean coup a year later, the Jacobin clubs, without formally meshing with the administration, seized the reins of government by monopolizing all executive positions and arrogating to themselves the power to veto government policies.5 Had the Jacobins stayed in power longer, they might well have produced a genuine one-party state. As it was, they provided a prototype which the Bolsheviks, leaning on Russia’s autocratic traditions, brought to perfection.
The Bolsheviks had never given much thought to the state that would come into being after they made the revolution, because they took it for granted that their revolution would instantly ignite the entire world and sweep away national governments. They improvised the one-party state as they went along, and although they never managed to provide it with a theoretical foundation, it proved to be the most enduring and influential of their accomplishments.
While he never doubted he would exercise unlimited power, Lenin had to make allowance for the fact that he had taken power in the name of “Soviet democracy.” The Bolsheviks, it will be recalled, had carried out the coup d’état not on their own behalf—their party’s name did not appear on any of the proclamations of the Military-Revolutionary Committee—but on that of the soviets. Their slogan had been “All Power to the Soviets”; their authority was conditional and provisional. The fiction had to be maintained for a time because the country would not have tolerated any one party arrogating to itself a monopoly of power.
Even the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets, which the Bolsheviks had packed with adherents and sympathizers, did not intend to invest the Bolshevik leadership with dictatorial prerogatives. The delegates to the gathering which the Bolsheviks have ever since claimed as the source of legitimacy, when polled on how the soviets which they represented wished to reconstruct political authority, responded as follows:6
All power to the soviets
505
(75%)
All power to democracy
86
(13%)
All power to democracy but without Kadets
21
(3%)
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.