In aiming directly at state capitalism Lenin, at the same time, made no attempt whatsoever to present this as socialism, but on the contrary reacted against any such verbal deception.16 State capitalism was what, in his view, would make possible the creation of those foundations of civilization which were necessary preconditions for socialism:
Is it not clear that from the material, economic and productive point of view, we are not yet on ‘the threshold’ of socialism? Is it not clear that we cannot pass through the door of socialism without crossing ‘the threshold’ we have not yet reached?17
As I said earlier, the Bolsheviks interpreted Marxism, in a certain sense, as the ideology of modernization and Europeanization. In this lay both their strength and their weakness, for this simplified ideological treatment of Marxism, while rendering socialism more intelligible to many people in Russia, at the same time obliged them to shut their eyes to some very important scientific conclusions that followed from its discoveries. But this was not the main problem. Berdyaev wrote that Peter I was ‘a Bolshevik on the throne’.18 One can also make this comparison the other way round. Politically, Lenin’s party was to a greater degree the party of Peter I than the party of Karl Marx, since it strove first and foremost to ensure that Russia imitated contemporary forms of Western organization. Lenin said that his followers should
not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of [state capitalism as in Germany]. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods to hasten the copying of it.19
The Bolsheviks were the party of revolution and of order by virtue of their discipline, their unity and their conviction. They were the only party capable of defending the vestiges of European civilization in Russia, modernizing the country and preserving Russia as an independent and unified power. In 1918 Novaya Zhizn' noted with irritation that very many people, even those who did not agree with Bolshevism, were pleased with the way the Bolsheviks were ‘gathering up the land of Russia’, and compared Lenin with Ivan Kalita, unifying the disintegrated Russian state ‘through an unflinching civil war’.20 Socialist democrats of both the Marxist and the Narodnik tendencies were alienated and fragmented and, in general, could not constitute a serious political force in this backward country. The Social-Revolutionary Party existed, as a united party, only on paper. The Whites, despite their use of methods even harsher than those of the Bolsheviks, were unable to establish a unified political order even in the territories which they occupied.
The programme of eradicating barbarism by barbarous methods was objectively engendered by Russian conditions. But this programme concealed within itself an unresolved contradiction, for means always possess this dangerous property: that they may alter the end pursued. In their fight against barbarism by such methods the Bolshevik Party increasingly degenerated, and barbarism, Asiaticism and antidemocratism entered more and more into their ideology — into the consciousness of the mass of Party members, which grew in numbers but not always in moral stature. The Tenth Congress, by prohibiting factions in the Party, barred the last path to a democratic development of Bolshevism. The centralism of their organization, which gave the Bolsheviks cohesion, at the same time predetermined the decline in inner-Party freedom. Yet Asiaticism got its own back on them — not at once but only by degrees.
N. Sukhanov wrote that at first Bolshevik rule was ‘a peculiar sort of democratic absolutism’, but from the earliest days it was in danger of degenerating into bureaucratic absolutism.21 In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt very aptly compared the Bolsheviks’ rule in 1917 with enlightened absolutism.22 Its principal task was to save civilization in Russia — although it must be remembered that in this respect railways were for Lenin much more valuable than spiritual culture, for understandable reasons. The original plan of the Russian Communists was — relying on the power of the working class — gradually to advance towards a new society: democratic, socialist and delivered from the hated Asiaticism. That might have happened, had there not been the civil war. In the words of Giuseppe Boffa, ‘Lenin’s calculation was, to win the majority by unreservedly accepting the most important and widespread demands of the people at the moment when the Party took power.’23 But the new government was unable to avert the civil war, and events passed completely out of its control. The war compelled the Bolsheviks to take a number of measures which they thought would be only temporary but which soon were made permanent. Trotsky later recalled:
Democracy had been narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased. In the beginning the Party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure, obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet democracy, the leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as a principle but as an episodic act of self-defence.24
For Rosa Luxemburg the dictatorship of the proletariat ought to have manifested itself as a new ‘ manner of employing democracy, not its elimination'.25 Kautsky stressed that ‘we cannot mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat anything other than its rule on the basis of democracy.’26 These ideas corresponded fully to those of Marx and Engels. The latter declared that ‘the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was ‘a democratic republic’.27 The Bolsheviks, while not repudiating democratic ideas in principle, saw the dictatorship of the proletariat differently: on the one hand they stressed its temporary and transitional character; on the other, they associated it with severe restrictions on democracy. ‘In its essence’, Trotsky wrote, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organization for the production of the culture of a new society, but a revolutionary and military system struggling for it.’28 If victory for the revolution requires that the state become like an army in the field, there is no time for thoughts about freedom and democracy.
It was these anti-democratic measures, and not their revolutionary ideas, that caused the breach between the Bolsheviks and the intelligentsia. Novaya Zhizn declared more than once that attempts to introduce socialism otherwise than by democratic means could only ‘compromise the idea of socialism’.29 The first clashes between the left-wing intelligentsia and the new rulers were over the question of press freedom. On 28 January 1918 a ‘Revolutionary Press Tribunal’ was established, with the task of dealing with ‘crimes and misdemeanours against the people committed through use of the press’.30 This tribunal was empowered to inflict very severe penalties. However, compared with present-day Soviet notions, what prevailed at the beginning of 1918 was absolute liberalism in censorship matters, for the creation of the tribunal assumed the existence of independent newspapers which would be subject to control, and the absence of preliminary censorship. Regulations for the press were also issued by the Soviets of different towns, and in most of this legislation such disorder reigned that it was impossible to ensure a consistent censorship policy. The activity of the newspapers was governed by a mass of rules and regulations, of which Novaya Zhizn' wrote that they were ‘senseless and contradictory decisions which offered incredible scope for arbitrariness’.31 Such gagging of the press, in the view of the intelligentsia, could only delay ‘the triumph of radiant socialist ideals’.32 But real suppression of press freedom was yet to come.