The 'party democracy' debate in the autumn of 1920 represented the last serious discussion about the need for some sort of public sphere within the party to avoid the bureaucratisation of the revolutionary government. It was rapidly, and possibly deliberately, eclipsed by the trade union debate launched by the Workers' Opposition. Although the latter raised some similar concerns to the party democratisers, above all the condemnation of bureaucracy, the addition of anti-intelligentsia (anti-specialist) themes and above all the claim that workers should run industry roused Lenin's hostility. While the party democratis- ers sought solutions at the level of political institutions, the Workers' Opposition reduced the question of political reform to the class dimension. As the Democratic Centralists had argued earlier, and reiterated in the party debate, the poor functioning of Soviet institutions derived more from problems (as we would now put it) of institutional design than of petty bourgeois elements worming their way in to the ruling system in order to advance their own careers. The portrayal of political issues as a matter of class played into the hands of the Leninists, and allowed the new regime to avoid a serious self-analysis of what it had become, and certainly inhibited the creation of some sort of more pluralistic Bolshevism. When the question was couched in class terms, Lenin was unequalled; it was to political problems of autonomous representation and participation that he had no solution.
War Communism was in crisis by early 1921, with peasant revolts against forced requisitioning in the countryside and urban protests against the continuation of harsh restrictions against markets. The protests climaxed in March 1921 with the revolt of workers and sailors at the Kronstadt naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland, earlier one of the strongholds of Bolshevism. The insurgents rallied under the slogan of 'soviets without Bolsheviks', denouncing the Bolshevik usurpation of the rights of the soviets. They were savagely crushed, in a military operation led by Trotsky.30 Lenin now argued that the Civil War had effectively destroyed the 'conscious' working class, reinforcing his belief that the party had to take up the burden of defending socialism and insulate itself from the degradation prevalent in society. In fact, there remained an active and engaged Moscow proletariat with its own ideas on how to build socialism.31 At the Tenth Party Congress in that month, economic concessions were balanced by the intensification of War Communist political processes. The first measures that were to lead to the New Economic Policy (NEP) were launched, and in particular forced requisitioning from the peasantry was replaced by a fixed tax-in-kind. Lenin admitted that the attempt to continue the organisation of the economy by wartime means had been a mistake. War Communism, he insisted, had been necessitated by the war and dislocation but it was not a viable long-term policy. Lenin hoped both to justify the necessity of War Communism and its repeal.
The party debate was as such never resolved. A cosmetic programme of reform under the label of 'workers' democracy' was instituted, but its effect was only to consolidate the powers of the committees and the party leadership in a process which first saw the use of the term perestroika (restructuring) in the Soviet context. The challenge to War Communist political relationships was met not by compromise but by repression. At the Tenth Congress two decrees condemned the oppositional groupings and imposed a 'ban on factions', a 'temporary' measure that placed sharp limits on inner-party discussion which long remained a cardinal principle of Soviet rule. The NEP was not accompanied by a new political policy, and instead Lenin insisted that during a retreat discipline was at a premium to avoid a rout.
In the early 1920s the vestiges of non-Bolshevik parties were effectively eliminated. The trial of a group of leading Socialist Revolutionaries in mid 1922 presaged the show trials of the 1930s. To compensate for the real and imaginary threats to Bolshevik rule the mystique and power of the party were enhanced all the more. The NEP-style perestroika saw Bolshevik committees tighten their administrative control over local party organisations. Centralisation and conformity within the party were intensified just as they were being relaxed in the economy. In April 1922 Stalin became General Secretary of the party, a post at the time regarded as no more than that of a glorified filing clerk. In a consummate manner he consolidated the party machine and his own power over that machine. His ability to appoint, dismiss and transfer party officials prefigured the ubiquitous nomenklatura mechanism of later years and gave him a powerful weapon in the inner-party debates. A 'circular flow of power' was established whereby Stalin's appointments became beholden to him for their positions.32 The Bolshevik tradition of open contestation was over, and in its place the deadening grip of the Leninist-Stalinist bureaucracy was intensified.
BOLSHEVIK PLURALISM IN PERSPECTIVE
This chapter has examined whether within the Bolshevik variety of revolutionary communism there was the potential for a more pluralistic institutionalisation of revolutionary power, as opposed to the strict monism of the Leninist type. Solzhenitsyn of course always argued against such a proposition, and indeed fundamentally rejected even the liberal revolution of February 1917. For Solzhenitsyn, the overthrow of the monarchy in what was effectively a coup d'etat in the February Revolution set in train a series of consequences whose inevitable denouement was the seizure of power by the most radical wing of the revolutionary movement. This is a powerful argument and it has a deep resonance to this day. However, this chapter has demonstrated that although Solzhenitsyn's overall argument may be valid, we should nevertheless not overlook the diversity within the revolutionary movement. It is dangerously teleological to read back from history an inevitability that in practice may have been shaped by various contingencies. Above all, the story of Moscow suggests that in a different social and political environment, and with a different set of leaders, revolutionary socialism may have assumed more pluralistic forms, at least for its supporters.33
A radical form of the argument would suggest that there was the potential for a more pluralistic form of Bolshevism against Leninist monism. The various oppositions have been described as the 'conscience of the revolution', surviving to challenge orthodoxy and dogmatism all the way up to the final crushing of pluralism within the party in 1929.34 They inherited the tradition established by Plekhanov in his critique of developments in what was to become the Bolshevik party from its establishment in 1903. The dynamic and contentious character of inner-party life in this period demonstrates that it was far from homogeneous and monolithic. It was the peculiarly narrow 'Leninist' version not only of organisational forms but above all of political practice that in the end squeezed the life out of the party, and indeed imposed this narrow and intolerant form on the country as a whole. The virulence and violence of Lenin's character became all the more evident when some of the secret archives were opened after 1991. The new documents expose in gory detail Lenin's 'terror practices'. For example, Lenin admonished the trade union leaders in May 1920 when they called for the administration of unions to be decentralised and for affairs to be run collegially. He mocked the idea but in the end conceded: 'We shall resort sometimes to the collegiate principle, sometimes to individual management', but the next sentence revealed his real views: 'We shall leave collegiality to the weak, the inferior, the backward, the undeveloped. Let them chatter, get sick of it, and stop talking.' As Richard Pipes comments: 'Lenin rarely expressed more bluntly his contempt for democratic procedures.'35