Schools became coeducational, tuition was abolished, and tests were done away with, along with homework. While supporting school reform, the All-Russia Union of Schoolteachers spoke out against the subordination of schools to the state.
The destruction of the prerevolutionary social fabric (the army, the legal system, administration, the family, the church, schools, political parties, the economy) did not frighten Lenin. He was convinced he had the key to building a new world, a pure Utopia, on a bare, newly cleared surface. The key was the dictatorship of the proletariat.
BIRTH OF A DICTATORSHIP
The dictatorship of the proletariat was part of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party's program from its inception. To Lenin, the model for such a dictatorship, as discussed by Marx, was the Paris Commune. In State and Revolution Lenin said that only a complete ignoramus or bourgeois swindler could argue that the workers as a class are incapable of directly administering the state. After taking power, however, he changed his tune. Clemenceau liked to say that war was too serious a matter to be left to the generals. Lenin soon reached the conclusion that dictatorship of the proletariat was too serious a matter to be left to the proletariat.
Lenin defined the dictatorship of the proletariat first of all as a system that rejected parliamentarism, with its separation of legislative and executive powers. The dictatorship of the proletariat would fuse the executive and legislative functions.36 This meant that the holders of power could pass laws strengthening their own authority without any checks or balances. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Lenin gave this clear explanation: 'The scientific definition of dictatorship is a power that is not limited by any laws, not bound by any rules, and based directly on force."37
Since the proletariat showed itself incapable of exercising such a dictatorship, the vanguard of the working class, the party, had to assume the task. Lenin did not conceal his views: "When we are reproached for exercising the dictatorship of a party... we say, 'Yes, the dictatorship of a party! We stand by it and cannot do without it.'"38 Even before taking power, he had scorned the bourgeois concept of "the will of the majority." "What is needed," he wrote, is "a strength which at the decisive moment and place will crush the enemy's strength."39
Lenin's first contact with the practical reality of power persuaded him of the need for a dictatorship of the party and beyond that—this was a new contribution to Marxism—the dictatorship of a single leader. In March 1918 he justified such a dictatorship by the needs of the modern economy.
Large-scale machine industry—which is precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism—calls for absolute and strict unity of will. . . . But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one. Given ideal class consciousness and discipline on the part of those participating in the common work, the subordination would be something like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra. It may [also] assume the sharp forms of a dictatorship. ... Be that as it may, unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary.40
Four months after the revolution, in March 1918, Lenin spoke of the need for a one-person dictatorship for economic reasons. In March 1919, in a eulogy for Yakov Sverdlov, he stressed the need for personal dictatorship for political reasons. "In this time of violent struggle, as we exercise the workers' dictatorship, we must advance the principle of personal authority, the moral authority of one man [like Sverdlov] whose decisions are accepted by everybody without lengthy discussions."41 Firm authority was a concept Lenin had been attached to for a long time. Trotsky in his pamphlet The Second Congress of the RSDLP: Report of the Siberian Delegation (published in Geneva in 1903) described Lenin's plans.
The state of siege [in the party], on which Lenin insists so energetically, requires the party to have a strong central authority. The practical experience of organized distrust [toward the leadership] requires an iron hand; Lenin makes a mental rollcall of the party's personnel and comes to the conclusion that he and only he has that iron hand.
Lenin did not hide his intentions; Trotsky did not have to guess at them. According to the stenographic record of the Second Congress, when a delegate named Popov referred in his remarks to the omnipresent and all- penetrating spirit of the Central Committee, Lenin raised his fist in the air and called out: 'The fist." The power of the fist, which Lenin had established within his party, was extended to the country as a whole. Thus was born the twentieth-century "philosophy of power."
Upon discovering that reality did not bear the slightest resemblance to his previous conception, Lenin decided to change it by force, first of all by changing other people's conception of it. It is significant that the first decree of the Council of People's Commissars was a decree on the press putting censorship into effect and outlawing magazines and newspapers guilty of a critical attitude toward the new government. Bonch-Bruevich admits that for some, "even some of the Old Bolsheviks," it was hard to accept the fact that "our old program" from before the revolution had called for "freedom of the press," but after the seizure of power this freedom was immediately abolished. Bonch-Bruevich formulates the "new demands of October" this way: "During a revolution there should be only a revolutionary press and no other."42
A good pupil of Lenin and Stalin, Hitler pointed out that the bourgeoisie's weakness in relation to revolutionary Marxism stemmed primarily from a separation between spirit and force, between ideology and terror. In Marxism, said the Fiihrer, "spirit and brute force are harmoniously blended." He added, "National socialism is what Marxism could have become, if it had broken its absurd ties with the democratic order."43 Lenin was the first to discover the secret of blending "spirit and brute force," the practical use of force to carry out a Utopian program, and the use of a Utopian program as camouflage for brute force.
Essential to Lenin's policy, which sought to maintain a minority in power, was splitting the majority, atomizing society.
One of the government's first actions was to wipe out all the ranks, titles, and "social estates" that had existed in old Russia. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions, which had introduced the formal equality of all citizens under the law, the proletarian revolution established inequality as a principle. This was done by the Soviet constitution, adopted in July 1918. One section of the population was completely stripped of its rights. The Russian language was enriched by the word lishenets, "disfranchised person." The lishentsy were people whose income came from a source other than their own labor: individual tradesmen, religious officials, former police collaborators, members of the imperial household, but also "persons who hire labor with the aim of extracting a profit." This referred primarily to peasants who hired others, even if this meant one worker in the spring or fall to help work the land. No less than 5 million people fell into this category. Deprivation of rights affected all family members. For the children this meant above all being prohibited from studying at the university level and having only limited access to secondary school, depending on the number of openings. All peasants had their electoral rights curtailed: in elections to the soviets the vote of one worker had the value of five peasant votes.