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.
That the Bolshevik Party had to be de facto as well as de jure the engine driving the Soviet Government no Bolshevik ever questioned. Lenin merely uttered a truism when he said at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921: “Our party is the governmental party and the resolution which the Party Congress adopts will be obligatory for the entire republic.”7 A few years later Stalin defined even more explicitly the party’s constitutional primacy when he stated that “in our country not a single important political or organizational question is decided by our soviet and other mass organizations without guiding directions from the party.”8
And yet, for all its acknowledged public authority, the Bolshevik Party remained after 1917 what it had been before—namely, a private body. Neither the Soviet Constitution of 1918 nor that of 1924 made any reference to it. The party was first mentioned in a constitutional document in the so-called Stalin Constitution of 1936, Article 126 of which described it as “the vanguard of the toilers in their struggle for the strengthening and development of the socialist order” and the “leading core of all the organizations of toilers, social as well as governmental.” To ignore in legislation the most essential was very much in the Russian tradition: after all, tsarist absolutism found its first and rather casual definition in Peter the Great’s “Military Regulation” more than two centuries after it had become the country’s central political reality, and serfdom, its basic social reality, never received legal acknowledgment. Until 1936, the party depicted itself as a transcendental force which guided the country by example and inspiration. Thus, the program, adopted in March 1919, defined its role as “organizing” and “leading” the proletariat, and “explaining” to it the nature of the class struggle, without once alluding to the fact that it also ruled the “proletariat” as it did all else. Anyone who drew his knowledge of Soviet Russia exclusively from official documents of the time would have no inkling of the party’s involvement in the day-to-day life of the country, although that was what distinguished the Soviet Union from every other country in the world.*
Thus, after the power seizure the Bolshevik Party retained its private character even though it had in the meantime become the complete master of state and society. As a result, its statutes, procedures, decisions, and personnel were subject to no external supervision. Its 600,000 to 700,000 members, who, according to Kamenev’s statement made in 1920, “governed” a Russia composed overwhelmingly of non-Bolsheviks,9 resembled an elite cohort rather than a political party.† While nothing escaped its control, the party acknowledged no control over itself: it was self-contained and self-accountable. This created an anomalous situation that Communist theorists have never been able to explain satisfactorily, since it can only be done—if it can be done at all—with reference to such metaphysical concepts as Rousseau’s “general will,” said by him to express everyone’s will and yet to be somehow distinct from the “will of all.”
The rolls of the party grew exponentially in the three years during which the Bolsheviks conquered Russia and placed their agents in charge of all the institutions. In February 1917 it had 23,600 members; in 1919, 250,000; in March 1921, 730,000 (including candidate members).10 Most of the newcomers joined as the Bolsheviks appeared to be winning the Civil War in order to qualify for the benefits traditionally associated in Russia with state service. During those years of extreme privation, a party card assured the minimum of housing, food, and fuel, as well as immunity from the political police for all but the most egregious crimes. Party members alone were allowed to carry weapons. Lenin, of course, realized that most of the newcomers were careerists and that their bribe-taking, thieving, and bullying brought nothing but harm to the party’s reputation; but his aspirations to total authority left him no choice but to enroll anyone with the proper social credentials and willingness to carry out orders without questions or inhibitions. At the same time, he made certain that key positions in the party and government were reserved for the “old guard,” veterans of the underground: as late as 1930, 69 percent of the secretaries of the central committees of the national republics and the regional (oblast’ and krai) committees had joined before the Revolution.11
Until mid-1919, the party retained the informal structure of underground years, but as its ranks expanded, undemocratic practices became institutionalized. The Central Committee remained the center of authority, but in practice, because its members dashed around the country on special assignments, decisions usually were made by the few members who happened to be on hand. Lenin, who was so afraid of assassination that he almost never traveled, served as permanent chairman. Although as the country’s dictator he relied heavily on coercion and terror, within his own cohort he preferred persuasion. He never forced anyone out of the party because of disagreement: if he failed to obtain a majority on some important issue, he only had to threaten resignation to bring his followers into line. Once or twice he was on the verge of a humiliating defeat from which only Trotsky’s intervention saved him. On a few occasions he had to acquiesce to policies of which he disapproved. By the end of 1918, however, his authority had grown to the point where no one would oppose him. Kamenev, who had often taken issue with Lenin in the past, spoke for many Bolsheviks when he told Sukhanov in the autumn of 1918:
I become ever more convinced that Lenin never makes a mistake. In the end, he is always right. How many times it seemed that he had blundered, in his prognosis or political line—and always, in the end, his prognosis and his line turned out to have been correct.12
Lenin had little patience for discussions, even in the circle of his most intimate associates: typically, during cabinet meetings, he would thumb through a book and rejoin the debate to lay down policy. From October 1917 until the spring of 1919 he made many decisions for the party as well as the government in collaboration with his indispensable assistant, Iakov Sverdlov. Possessed of a filing-cabinet sort of mind, Sverdlov could supply Lenin with names, facts, and such other kinds of information as was required. After he had fallen ill and died in March 1919, the Central Committee had to be restructured: at this time a Politburo was created to guide policy, an Orgburo to take care of administration, and a Secretariat to manage party personnel.
The cabinet, or Sovnarkom, was made up of high party officials serving in a double capacity. Lenin, who directed the Central Committee, served also as chairman of the Sovnarkom, the equivalent of a Prime Minister. As a rule, important decisions were first taken up in the Central Committee or Politburo and then submitted to the cabinet for discussion and implementation, often with the participation of non-Bolshevik experts.