Even then a degree of debate continued. In the 1920s there was more to the choices facing the Soviet Union than the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. Nikolai Bukharin offered a considered and substantive alternative, defending the New Economic Policy as an evolutionary path towards socialism by allowing the creativity and entrepreneurialism of the masses to be unharnessed within the framework of Soviet power. By the 1930s Bukharin had become 'the last Bolshevik'. However attenuated, the Bolshevik tradition of debate continued even in this period, until Bukharin was finally put to death in 1938.36 The political trajectory of Bukharin, and even to a degree of Kamenev, suggests that a deterministic view of Soviet history is misplaced. In the final period of Soviet power the Gorbachev variant once again took up some Bukharinite themes in order to reinvigorate the tradition of reform communism.37
Thus the question of alternatives and the role of Bolshevik pluralism remains a live one to this day. The root of the question is whether Marxism itself contains the potential for more diverse political practices. In other words, was Marx responsible for Soviet authoritarianism? The question can be posed as 'whether Soviet authoritarianism was a necessary or inevitable consequence of Lenin's attempt to fulfil what he understood as Marx's project'.38 In other words, does the Marxist understanding of the transition from capitalism to socialism inevitably involve a degree of coercion? The Leninist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' subordinated law to power and ruthlessly crushed all opposition, and in the end gave way to the Stalinist dictatorship. This was challenged by Antonio Gramsci's emphasis on hegemony rather than coercion, an idea that was fruitfully developed in the Eurocom- munist challenge to Soviet-style authoritarian communism. In the 1970s Eurocommunists sought to achieve a socialist transformation of society through democratic means, in a manner reminiscent of the earlier critiques of Lenin by Luxemburg and Kautsky. It is questionable whether Eurocommunists achieved a fundamental break with 'the authoritarian traditions of Leninism'.39 The Eurocommunists held the Russian context as chiefly responsible for the degeneration of the revolutionary communist ideal, just as the Left Communists and the Workers' Opposition had held social factors responsible, whereas the problem is far deeper than that. Equally, the 'Bolshevik' critics of Leninist policies had a no less ambivalent attitude towards democracy than did Lenin himself. Even Bukharin is notorious for his statement that under socialism there would be two parties, one in government and the other in jail, and he was zealous in defending the coercive aspects of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.40 Opposition was denigrated as 'bourgeois', which became a malleable concept to describe any opponent. Marxism lacked a sustained theory of the complexity of the modern state, and instead it was reduced to an instrument of coercion. Although Marx was careful to delineate an independent sphere for politics, in the end for him it was an element of the 'superstructure' that was ultimately derived from the material sphere of the means of production. The Marxian tradition of revolutionary socialism lacked a developed concept of the autonomy of politics where agency and decisions can decisively shape historical outcomes.41
The existence of pluralistic alternatives to dogmatic and coercive Leninism repudiates the cultural determinism that suggests that communism could have taken no other path than the one it did because of the character of Russia. Equally, it rejects the ideological determinism, prevalent in totalitarian approaches, that suggests a straight line from Marxism to Stalinism. However, although undoubtedly the Russian Revolution was far broader than its Bolshevik instantiation, and in its turn Bolshevism in the early years of Soviet power was broader than the illiberal Leninism that predominated, they all shared a social reductionist understanding of political contestation and lacked a developed theory of the role of opposition and pluralism within the revolutionary communist movement. Instead, they all shared a view of the politics of transition to socialism that was sharply at odds with the end state of freedom that they sought to achieve. The 'myth of human self-identity' in socialist thought collapsed the distinction between civil and political society. The Marxian ideal of unity was not only unattainable but it opened the way to what came to be known as totalitarianism.42
The Bolshevik challenges to proto-Stalinist features of Soviet rule did not represent a considered theoretical platform that questioned the theory of Leninist dictatorship, but instead sought only to modify some of its practices. The coalition, party and trade union debates demonstrate that there were alternative paths not only in the revolution but also within the Bolshevik party. However, the logic of Leninism tended towards the destruction of socialist diversity and pluralism, although the rationale of that logic adapted to circumstances. In 1917-18 Lenin justified exclusivity because of the logic of political struggle; in 1919-20 because of the exigencies of the Civil War; and from 1920 because of the alleged social determinism prompted by the destruction of the working class and the economic imperative of implementing a strategy of economic development. Lenin's assertion that the working class was destroyed by the end of the Civil War, which justified the intensification of top-down managerialism within the party, was greatly exaggerated. A conscious workers' movement remained, with a sense of purpose and leadership.43 Finally, in conditions of the 'retreat' of the NEP, Lenin tightened discipline within the party and with the ban on factions put an end to a whole era of debate.
Thus Bolshevik pluralism is a contradiction in terms. As long as the Soviet system remained recognisably Leninist, it would lack the conceptual basis for genuine inner-party democracy. Debates and controversies over leadership and policy continued into the 1930s, and were revived after Stalin's death, but only with Gorbachev's perestroika did the fundamental problem of pluralist democracy and civil society in the Soviet system once again come to the fore. By the early 1920s, ideas of democratic socialism and social emancipation gave way to a bureaucratised and violent reality. Compulsion in external interactions and suppression within the party became mutually reinforcing, giving rise to the ferociously coercive Stalinist system. This was not something visited upon the Bolsheviks from outside, as the opposition within the party pointed out, but was part of an intrinsic political process. The potential existence of alternatives only demonstrates the narrowness of the path actually taken.
AFTERWORD
LENIN AND YESTERDAY'S UTOPIA
tony brenton
T
he shadow of the 1917 revolution still looms large.
Every Russian town still has its memorial to Lenin. In Moscow his mausoleum still presides over Red Square and serves as the reviewing stand for the leadership on great national occasions. Stalin, in fact a Georgian, regularly tops or almost tops national polls on who was 'the greatest Russian'. The FSB, lineal successor to the KGB and Lenin's Cheka, still occupies its former insurance building on Lubyanka Square (and there is regular talk of re-erecting the statue of Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka's founder, in front of it). Russia's ruined agriculture and largely obsolescent heavy industry testify to the brutal lunacies of Communist planning. Russia's almost instinctive grab at Ukraine in 2014, with the spate of Western sanctions that followed, testify to the survival of imperial and Cold War instincts that many had hoped were buried in 1991. And, raising our eyes from Russia itself, it is noteworthy that the world's fast rising second superpower, China, is still ruled by exactly the secretive, repressive, single-party system that it inherited from the Soviet Union and ultimately from the 1917 revolution.