As the Civil War came to an end in 1920, two interrelated but separate debates challenged the Leninist structure of power. The 'party debate' focused on inner-party democracy and covered such issues as free speech within the party, the rights of party cells, the functions of the committees, and the role of leadership. The polarisation of society between the verkhi (upper tier) and the nizy (the masses) had been internalised within the party, with the verkhi now represented by higher party officials, and the nizy by the party's rank and file. As one of the eyewitnesses to the period, Alfred Rosmer, put it, 'The regime which bore the name "war communism" had been born with the war and should have died with it. It survived because there were hesitations as to the sort of organisation which ought to replace it.'25 The trade union debate focused on the proper relationship between the party and the trade unions, and in general the role of the organised working class under socialism.
Moscow activists made a fundamental contribution to both the 'party' and trade union debates. The party debate raised some fundamental questions about participation and democracy within the party. It balanced 'party revivalism' with some of the themes of the
Democratic Centralists, notably more trust in the soviets. Through the summer of 1920 the criticism of the RKP(b) Moscow Committee gathered strength, with the party revivalists accusing it of bureaucratism and lack of leadership, whereas the trade union debaters were more concerned with maintaining the party's class hegemony over all other political institutions. The Moscow party revivalists were led by E. N. Ignatov, a veteran of the various Democratic Centralist oppositions. He denounced the party's 'pettifogging supervision' over the district committees and condemned the repression visited upon party activists with independent views.26 By late 1920 the whole party organisation in Moscow was involved in vigorous debates in the belief that the end of the Civil War would finally provide an opportunity to return to what they believed to be the genuine principles of revolutionary socialism. In other words, they appealed to some sort of idealised Bolshevism against the harsh strictures of Leninist practices as they had developed since the party had come to power. The spirit of reform affected all social organisations. The Moscow Soviet took to meeting in factories to overcome the gulf that had opened up with workers, and the trade unions also sought to shed the bureaucratic spirit.
The welter of reform proposals in the end, however, did little to overcome the deadening practices of Leninist democratic centralism. Too often responses to political problems were sought in social measures, such as the appointment of workers to key posts. The myth of some innate worker purity did little to create the conditions for genuine party pluralism. In the end, the opposite effect was achieved. The party apparatus was strengthened and the independent grass-roots renewal movement quelled. Kamenev at the head of the Moscow Soviet was one of the most enthusiastic reformers. He had bravely condemned the excesses of the Cheka and the practices of the Red Terror, and he now sought to achieve an internal metamorphosis of the practices of Soviet power. He criticised the class analysis of bureaucracy, noting that even if all the 'bourgeois specialists' were sacked, the bureaucracy would not disappear. Against such superficial views, he stressed the gulf between the poverty and backwardness of the country and the creation of a complex and ramified system of state management in the absence of the existence of the basic elements able to sustain such a structure.27
However, all Kamenev's well-meaning innovations were caught in the systemic traps of the Leninist power system. As the veteran Men- shevik politician Boris Dvinov puts it, in conformity with the classic Menshevik argument that the attempt to impose 'utopian socialism' in a backward country with a tiny proletariat inevitably created a monstrous bureaucratic mechanism:
The problem for Kamenev, and some of the other Bolsheviks who at this stage wavered in favour of 'proletarian freedom', was how to preserve the soviets as meaningful political institutions given the fact that decisions were taken elsewhere. How could serious debate take place without opposition and with the soviet simply a party fraction. Hence Kamenev's attempts to breathe some life into the soviet by creating sections, the idea of non-party deputies, and the closer links with the factories.28
A rather different take on the problems of socialist governance was reflected in the 'trade union' debate. This focused on the role of worker organisations and advanced plans to curb the power of the bureaucracy. The Workers' Opposition led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai insisted that more rights should be vested in the direct expression of workers' organisation. They called for a national congress of producers to take direct control of economic management. Kollontai criticised the bureaucratic regulation of all aspects of social existence, which even included attempts to instil partiinost (the 'party spirit') in dog-lovers' clubs. She urged the initiative of the workers to be encouraged, and insisted that 'wide publicity, freedom of opinion and discussion, the right to criticise within the party and among the members of the trade unions - such are the decisive steps that can put an end to the prevailing system of bureaucracy'. The proposed remedy was catastrophically simplistic: 'In order to do away with the bureaucracy that is finding its shelter in the soviet institutions we must first get rid of all bureaucracy in the party itself', and that could be achieved by 'the expulsion from the Party of all non- proletarian elements', while the democratisation of the party would be achieved through the 'elimination of all non-working class elements from all administrative positions'.29 Trotsky adopted the opposite tack, and argued that War Communist practices should be taken to their logical conclusion. He called for the unions to be incorporated into the economic apparatus. Lenin ultimately took a middle path: the unions were to remain independent and act as 'transmission belts' for party policy and as educators of the working class rather than the organisers of production.