Not long before his death, Trotsky recalls, Lenin ‘was systematically preparing to deliver… a crushing blow at Stalin as personifying bureaucracy, the mutual shielding among officials, arbitrary rule and general rudeness.’139 It was Stalin whom Lenin saw, not without justification, as the embodiment of all these ‘qualities’.
Lenin’s criticism of bureaucracy has armed later generations of anti-Stalinist Communists with a number of important ideas, but first of all we need to mention the important defects in his approach to the problem. Moshe Lewin writes:
The continual increase in the number of civil servants and in their hold on the life of the country was facilitated by a conjunction of factors inherent in a backward country that had a real need for new administrative bodies and additional administrators, if it was to develop the economy along planned, centralist lines. But this meant — and Lenin did not realize it — that the bureaucracy would become the true social basis of power. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ political power, devoid of any social foundation. A regime must find some other social basis than the apparatus of repression itself. The ‘void’ in which the Soviet regime had seemed to be suspended had soon been filled, even if the Bolsheviks had not seen it, or did not wish to see it.140
The new bureaucracy was created out of various elements. It included both former officials and Communist workers, but the majority of its members came from the petty bourgeoisie. ‘The demobilization of the Red Army of five million played no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy,’ wrote Trotsky later.
The victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were pushed away gradually from actual participation in the leadership of the country.141
The same process went on inside the Party as well. In 1923 Trotsky wrote:
However exaggerated were the forms it sometimes assumed, the bureaucratism of the war period was only child’s play in comparison with present-day bureaucratism which grew up in peacetime, while the apparatus, in spite of the ideological growth of the party, continued obstinately to think and decide for the Party.142
Although Lenin wrote and spoke a good deal about bureaucratization, only Bukharin raised openly the question of the threatening degeneration of the revolutionary government:
The working class is not homogeneous in its composition, in the level of culture, political maturity, technical skill and so on of its members, its component parts. Consequently, it cannot rule, either in political life or — what interests us here — in economic life, as a ‘Novgorod Veche’ with millions of hands: inevitably, it rules through its vanguard, through its administrative cadre, through its leaders.143
Consequently, the working class has to be subordinated to the apparatus. This is necessary, but not without its dangers. ‘If’, writes Stephen Cohen,
during the transition period, a slowly maturing but largely undeveloped proletariat remained politically, culturally and administratively subordinate to a host of higher authorities, then the danger of a perversion of the socialist ideal was very great.144
Bukharin emphasizes that this does not necessarily lead to the restoration of capitalism. He frankly fears that under these conditions ‘a new ruling class’ and a new form of exploitation may emerge, based not upon private but on state property. This honest self-warning, however, constituted only part of Bukharin’s theory. While his general hypothesis was to some extent confirmed by history, his concrete analysis proved quite erroneous.
In the first place Bukharin, in the manner typical of the Bolsheviks, ‘absolutizes’ the Russian situation of his own time. The backwardness of Russia’s working class — its inability, after the revolution, to create an independent democratic organization in the sphere of production — seems to him a law of universal history. If that were so, the danger he mentions would be absolutely insuperable and socialist revolution would be pointless. Experience has shown, however, that in industrially developed countries the workers are capable of creating their own non-Party organizations, that they are fully capable of democratic participation in the management of production, and so on. Bukharin could not know, of course, about workers’ self-management in present-day Yugoslavia or about Poland’s ‘Solidarity’, but in Turin as early as 1920 Italian workers had created their factory committees, which functioned much more effectively than the corresponding Russian organizations of 1917.
Bukharin, while not doubting the need for the working class to be completely subject to the government apparatus and the Party ‘vanguard’, rests his hope entirely on the culture which later on, many years after the victory of the revolution, will enable the workers to ‘mature’ into independent activity. Cultural development is indeed, as we shall see later, one of the most important preconditions for a democratic organization of society, but it is only a precondition. Nobody can learn to swim without jumping into the water, nor can any people become ‘mature’ enough for democracy otherwise than by establishing democracy among themselves, nor can workers be prepared to participate in management except by beginning to participate in it. In general, culture is not some sort of ‘condition’ which one has to attain, but a historical process: ‘developed’ culture of the masses is possible only as both a precondition and a consequence of democracy. And at the same time, as Marcuse wrote, without democracy ‘the revolution is bound to reproduce the very antagonisms which it strives to overcome.’145
Another — and no less dangerous — mistake made by Bukharin sadly confirms Lenin’s opinion of him: that ‘he has never made a study of dialectics and, I think, never fully understood it.’146 Bukharin sees the danger to the revolution’s future not in the Party bureaucracy but in the old intelligentsia, especially the technical intelligentsia. He thinks that the enlistment of intellectual forces educated in capitalist society is ‘quite inevitable and historically necessary’, but that it is ‘fraught with very great danger’. It is from the direction of the intelligentsia that the threat of ‘degeneration of the proletarian state and the proletarian party, comes.’147 He writes:
We must not forget that the intellectual forces which are obliged to work with the proletariat, and even those among them who work conscientiously, bringing essential benefits, nevertheless represent (here I stress: at a particular phase of development) the experience of the old culture… For them socialism is not the regulating principle of their work.
And finally, while recognizing the danger that even that section of the administrative cadre which is drawn from the working class may become separated from the masses, he sees this as happening only under the influence of their colleagues from the old intelligentsia.148 Only through the fault of intellectuals of the old type can the apparatus degenerate ‘into the embryo of a new ruling class.’149 This way of presenting the problem actually prepared the ideological and psychological arguments for Stalin’s subsequent massacres of the old intelligentsia and the Party’s old guard, including Bukharin himself: for he, after all, embodied (‘at a particular phase of development’, of course) ‘the experience of the old culture’. It was precisely the inability of the Bolshevik theoreticians to counterpose, against advancing Stalinism, a consistent programme based on a critical analysis of the experience of the revolution that rendered them quite helpless before the bureaucracy. Those who, in 1921, could not break out of the, theoretical dead end were in 1937 thrust against the wall for execution. Both Lenin and, later, Trotsky also saw one of the principal causes of the increasing bureaucratization in the low cultural level of the masses. Although one cannot refrain from pointing to the defects in Lenin’s analysis of ‘the bureaucratic phenomenon’, it does call for special attention because it constitutes the point of departure from which any analysis of present-day Soviet society must begin.