Trotsky explains the rise of

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The Bolshevik Party prepared and insured the October victory. It also created the Soviet state, supplying it with a sturdy skeleton.

The degeneration of the party became both cause and consequence of the bureaucratisation of the state. It is necessary to show at least briefly how this happened.

The inner regime of the Bolshevik party was characterised by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory.

The party took watchfül care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy.

Freedom of criticism Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democrac!

The g:een doctrne hat Bijter 10e 70: 1e 013 the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?

Democratic support The farsightedness of the Bolshevik leadership often made it possible to sotten conflicts and shorten the duration of factional struggle but no more than that.

The Central Committee relied upon this seething democratic support. From this it derived the audacity to make decisions and give orders. The obvious correctness of the leadership at all critical stages gave it that high authority which is the priceless moral capital of centralism.

The regime of the Bolshevik party, especially before it came to power, stood thus in complete contradiction to the regime of the present sections of the Communist International. with their "leader" appo ted om shore. making --:73.*1h istrative rust was already visible on the party; every Bolshevik, not excluding Stalin, would • have denounced as a malicious slanderer anyone who should have shown him on a screen the image of the party ten or fifteen years later.

The very centre of Lenin's attention and that of his colleagues was occupied by a continual concern to protect the Bolshevik ranks from the vices of those in power. However, the extraordinary closeness and at times actual merging of the party with the state apparatus had already in those first years done indubitable harm to the freedom and elasticity of the party regime.

Democracy had been narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased.

Soviets

In the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets.

The civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition parties were forbidden ore after the other. This measure obviously in conflict with the spirit of Sove demorary. the leader o: Bol• 0: 99 1 = ....: che che novelty and immensity of its tasks, inevitably gaye rise to inner disagreements. The underground oppositional currents in the country exerted a pressure through various channels upon the sole legal political organisation, increasing the acuteness of the factional struggle.

At the moment of completion of the civil war, this struggle took such sharp forms as to threaten to unsettle the state power.

Prohibit factions

In March 1921, in the days of the Kronstadt revolt, which attracted into its ranks no small number of Bolsheviks, the tenth congress of the party thought it necessary to resort to a prohibition of factions-that is, to transter the political regime prevailing in the state to the inner life of the ruling party.

This forbidding of factions was again regarded as an exceptional measure to be abandoned at the first serious improvement in the situation.

At the same time, the Central Committee was extremely cautious in applying the new law, concerning itself most of all lest it lead to a strangling of the inner lite of the party.

However, what was in its original design merely a necessary concession to a difficult situation, proved perfectly suited to the taste of the bureaucracy, which had then begun to approach the inner life of the party exclusively from the viewpoint of convenience in administration.

Already in 1922, during a brief improvement in his health, Lenin, horrified at the threatening growth of bureaucratism, was preparing a struggle against the faction of Stalin, which had made itself the axis of the party machine as a first step towards capturing the machinery of state. A second stroke and then death prevented him from measuring forces with this internal reaction.

The entire effort of Stalin, with whom at that time Linoviev and Kamenev were working hand in hand, was thenceforth directed to freeing the party machine from the control of the rank and file members of the Never concerned In this struggle for "stability" of the Central Committee, Stalin proved the most consistent and reliable among his colleagues.

He had no need to tear himself away from international problems; he had never been concerned with them.

The petty bourgeois outlook of the new ruling stratum was his own outlook.

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SOCIA LIST PRESS, Thursday