‘The swords of the revolution,’ wrote Lezhnev, ‘before being beaten into ploughshares, are being transformed into the blades of a guillotine. And the guillotine, like any other machine, is subject to the law of inertia.’129 According to Lezhnev, however, the frightfulness of the terror had been left behind. The Bolshevik regime was moving towards liberalization — the New Economic Policy and the cessation of the Red terror proved that this was so — and what was now necessary was to halt the momentum of the civil war. They believed in gradual democratization, in the quickening of free discussion in the Soviets:
The local Soviets will become municipal organs, the All-Union Central Executive Committee will turn into a Parliament, the trade unions will be transformed from general compulsory schools of Communism to voluntary associations of workers and the whole state apparatus, right up to the Council of People’s Commissars, will be emancipated from the Party.130
One cannot say that such a development of events was impossible in principle, but by 1922 it was already improbable. The dominant tendency was towards bureaucratization, not democratization.
During the civil war a new stratum emerged on the social scene and immediately asserted its rights. This was the Party and state bureaucracy. The early attempts to create a democratic organization of authority in the localities and free elections to Party organs failed to ‘take’ under war conditions. Moshe Lewin writes:
The constantly alarming nature of the situation and the extension of the state of emergency required a constant mobilization of the cadres, their transfer from one front to another, or from a military task to an economic one and vice versa. No democratic procedure would have made these solutions possible, but only authoritarian ones: orders, appointments and dismissals made them possible. These methods, which were sanctioned in no way either by theory or by statute, but which had been practised for three years, became a reality of Party life.131
As early as 1919 the Bolshevik leaders felt that the development of a bureaucratic dictatorship in the period of war Communism constituted a menace to the fundamental aims of the revolution, but the changes made were by that time irreversible. Democratic life had died in the soviets and the omnipotent bureaucracy, in complete fulfilment of Rosa Luxemburg’s prophecy, had taken possession of all real power — if not in Moscow, at least in the provinces. ‘The Soviet bureaucracy in the localities’, wrote Martov, ‘simply ignores the “liberal” instructions received from above.’132 Thus in 1919 the central leadership was unable to implement its important decision to bring the Mensheviks back into the Soviets. Lenin came up against bureaucratic sabotage which he had no means of combating.
After the civil war ended, bureaucratization not only did not decrease — on the contrary, it was intensified. NEP was not only a period of economic and cultural liberalism, it was also a period of intensified Party dictatorship. Cohen writes:
At the same time that the Party-State began relinquishing its control over much of the country’s economic life, it moved to solidify its political monopoly. Dangers inherent in the economic concessions were to be counterbalanced by political safeguards.133
Whereas during the civil war, despite all the restrictions, the Mensheviks and some small opposition parties still enjoyed some opportunities for legal — or semi-legal — activity, in 1921-22 they were completely suppressed. Lenin and his comrades considered that if they allowed a degree of freedom to alien class elements in the spheres of economics and culture, they must at the same time restrict still further the political freedom of these elements — otherwise, after gaining strength, they would overthrow the Bolsheviks, and that would mean another civil war and a real catastrophe for Russia.
Clearly, this meant restrictions on freedom for the proletariat as well. The Bolsheviks did not take into account the indivisibility of democratic principles, the fact that one cannot restrict the political freedom of one class of society without at the same time restricting that of the others. However, the workers were in no position to protest. Although some small proletarian groups such as ‘Rabochaya Pravda’ did appear at the beginning of the 1920s, they played no role in politics. The Bolsheviks themselves acknowledged that ‘our working class has been atomized’134 and called for measures to combat this situation, but the political steps proposed were hardly such as to bring about a real consolidation of the proletariat. A. Voronsky, for example, speaking of the need to combat ‘the weariness and apathy of the worker masses’, considered that what was necessary for this purpose was, first and foremost, to shut for good and all the mouths of the Menshevik comrades who were declaiming in favour of freedom of the press, and so on. If the workers put political demands to the Bolsheviks, he argued, this was due to ‘apathy’ (!), but if they obediently trudged along whithersoever the Party ordered, without asking any questions, that signified that their ‘spiritual impoverishment’ had been ‘overcome’. Here everything is stood on its head, yet Voronsky himself reproaches the Mensheviks for setting everything ‘topsy-turvy’.135
At first Lenin underestimated the fact that in crushing the freedom of those enemies of the proletariat who had already been vanquished he was at the same time strengthening a new and more dangerous enemy — the bureaucracy. As a result the Bolsheviks, who had regarded themselves as the party of the proletariat, very soon found themselves hostages in the hands of alien social forces. Lenin soon frankly recognized this when he spoke of the relations between the Bolsheviks and ‘the bureaucratic heap’: ‘I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed.’136 As he admitted, the number of bureaucrats not only did not decrease after several ‘cuts’ (!) but even increased. And it was not only a question of numbers.
From the time when Stalin came, first de facto and then formally, to head the Party’s bureaucratic apparatus, the new officialdom was transformed into an independent social and political force. This development was more or less logical. Gramsci wrote later:
The prevalence of bureaucratic centralism in the state indicates that the leading group is saturated, that it is turning into a narrow clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or even by stifling the birth of oppositional forces — even if these forces are homogeneous with the fundamental dominant interests…137
The contradictions in the revolutionary government became more and more acute. ‘The Party-State apparatus,’ writes Carmichael,
rapidly solidifying in Stalin’s embrace, was creating its own momentum: this fundamental process no doubt underlay a poignant metaphor coined by Lenin at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922 — the strange feeling he had at the helm of the Soviet government like that that of a driver who suddenly notices that his ‘machine has got out of control’… Lenin was doubtless preoccupied by ‘bureaucratism’ toward the end of his short life.138