Lenin was no less agitated by the emergence of the Left Opposition in early 1918. This movement focused on two crucial issues: the question of war and peace (the Great War was still raging); and the emergence of bureaucratic authoritarianism within the party. As far as they were concerned, the two were connected. They advocated a revolutionary war against Germany that would then link up with the more advanced working class in the West and allow socialist Russia to break out from its isolation. The Left Communists came together as a faction in December 1917, and the peak of their activity was in January and February 1918 as the peace negotiations with Germany dragged on at Brest-Litovsk. They gained the support of some top party leaders, including Bukharin, N. Osinsky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Karl
Radek, as well as the majority of grass roots organisations. Their stance quickly crumbled in the face of the renewed German onslaught from 18 February after the collapse of the peace talks. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March gave up land for peace. At the Seventh Party Congress on 7 March Lenin's hard-headed realism won the vote to accept the draconian terms imposed by Germany. Lenin refused to accept the Left Communist gamble that the Western working class would come to Russia's aid, and in the end Germany's collapse later that year proved him tactically correct.17 Revolutionary elan was no match for the German war machine.
Equally, the social critique of the revolution advanced by the Left Communists, denouncing the 'petty bourgeois' degeneration of the revolution, warning in particular against the danger represented by the great mass of the peasantry, failed to engage with the fundamental political question of the accountability of the new authorities to the nominal subjects of the revolution, the working class. Their critique of Lenin's model of state capitalism, however, was more on target, with Osinsky calling for the 'construction of proletarian socialism by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by orders on high issued by the "captains of industry".'18
The Left Communists, however, were not so keen on the self- expression of the working class as embodied in the 'plenipotentiary' resistance campaign in spring 1918. This was a spontaneous movement to create 'plenipotentiary assemblies' (Sobranie Upolnomochennykh) of workers from the major plants in Petrograd, and the upsurge was also strong in Moscow. The aim was to 'create a broad working class organisation that could lead the masses from the dead end into which the policies of the new authorities have driven them'.19 The word 'soviet' was studiously avoided, having now become tainted, and indeed, by late June the movement had been crushed by the Soviet authorities. Shortly afterwards Russia was embroiled in full-scale domestic conflict.
The Civil War years were accompanied by a series of 'oppositions' within the Bolshevik party, renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (the RKP(b)) in 1918. Four key issues were raised that were at the heart of the new polity: the role of the soviets; the rise of the bureaucracy; the problem of democracy within the party; and relations with workers. The soviets became the foundation stone of the new polity, and in December 1922 lent their name to the new state when it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but since the soviets contained non-Bolsheviks as well as peasants they were treated with suspicion by the Leninist leadership. Soviet democracy quickly became managed democracy, but the question remained about how the party's 'leading role' could be reconciled with meaningful political functions for the soviets.
It was this question that was taken up by the Democratic Centralists from late 1918. They were largely based in Moscow, although their arguments did find support elsewhere. Many of the former Left Communists now moved on to join the critique of the alleged bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, arguing against the imposition of one-man management, the use of bourgeois 'specialists' (the despised spetsy, in other words, the old technical intelligentsia) and in general 'to end bureaucratic methods of soviet construction'.20 The Democratic Centralists argued that the relationship should be based on a division of labour: the party would provide ideological leadership, but the soviets should be integrated as institutions representing the working class. The first Soviet constitution of 10 July 1918 was long on declarations of principle, but left the institutional arrangements for the actual organisation of power vague. Although Sovnarkom was to 'notify' the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of its decisions (Article 39), and the latter had the right to 'revoke or suspend' decisions (Article 40), Sovnarkom was granted a range of emergency powers that in the end voided VTsIK of effective supervisory authority, and this was repeated at all levels.21
The Democratic Centralists hoped to remedy the situation by revising the constitution to safeguard the rights of lower-level bodies from the encroachments of the centre. The Democratic Centralists demanded the introduction of what could be characterised as a type of 'separation of powers' within the regime itself. They called for greater autonomy for local soviets and lower-level party committees. In other words, in keeping with the original aspirations of the Russian Revolution to bring the polity within the ambit of constitutional constraints, they sought to 'constitutionalise' Soviet power. This would mean that the Soviet system really would have a genuine element of independent soviet power, with substantive powers for the soviets. The Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 agreed that the party should 'guide' the soviets, and not 'replace' them, though this formulation left the details vague and the problem of 'substitution' (podmena) remained to the end of Communist rule. A novel form of dual power was established which retained a revolutionary potential. It was therefore not surprising that when Gorbachev began to reform the system during perestroika in the late 1980s, he immediately returned to this idea by reviving the slogan of 'power to the soviets'.22 Party leaders had to reinvent themselves as state leaders by taking up posts in municipal and regional soviets, while Gorbachev himself ultimately shifted the basis of the legitimacy of his rule from the party to the soviets when he was elected president by the newly created USSR Congress of People's Deputies on 15 March 1990. Both during the Civil War and during perestroika the idea of the 'withering away of the state' was postponed to some indefinite future.
The emergence of a rampant bureaucracy took the early Soviet state by surprise. Lenin's The State and Revolution in mid 1917 had suggested that 'any cook' could manage the affairs of state, a view reiterated by Bukharin and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky in their ABC of Communism in 1919: 'There will be no need for special ministers of state, for police and prisons, for laws and decrees ... The bureaucracy, the permanent officialdom, will disappear. The State will die out.'23 As Polan notes, this strand in Lenin's thinking stands in contrast to the rest of his works, which are mostly practical, instrumental and timely. This element is used to restore Lenin's credentials as a 'revolutionary humanist' with a 'fundamentally emancipatory intent'.24 In fact, as Polan demonstrates, the text was replete with authoritarian implications because of its negation of politics as the praxis of contestation over meaningful alternatives. Such a space in the end was denied as much for the adherents of the revolution as for its opponents. More specifically, the problem of unbridled bureaucracy was soon identified, but no coherent response was ever found within the logic of soviet power. The theory of commune democracy held that bureaucracy would disappear of its own accord, as outlined by Marx in his study of the Paris Commune of 1870-71, The Civil War in France, while Lenin insisted it was a social problem and reflected the lack of political culture in Russia. Others argued that it was a legacy of the tsarist regime that would be overcome in time. In fact, the problem was systemic: the attempt to run the whole life of the country from a single centre gave rise to the bureaucracy and its associated stifling bureaucratism. In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Friedrich Engels had argued that under socialism 'the government of persons is replaced by administration of things', but this turned out to be rather more problematic than the revolutionary socialists anticipated.