Stalinist bureaucracy

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PERMANENT REVOLUTION He profoundly believed that the task of creating socialism was national and administrative in its nature.

He looked upon the Communist International as a necessary evil which should be used sofar as possible for the purposes of foreign policy. His own party kept a value in his eyes merely as a submissive support for the machine.

Together with the theory of socialism in one country, there was put into circulation by the bureaucracy a theory that in Bolshevism the Central Committee is everything and the party nothing.

This second theory was in any case realised with more success than the first.

Availing itself of the death of Lenin, the ruling group announced a "Leninist levy" .. The gates of the party, always carefully guarded, were now thrown wide open. Workers, clerks, petty " officials, flocked through in crowds.

The political aim of this manoeuvre was to dissolve the revolutionary vanguard in raw human material, without experience, without independence, and yet with the old habit of submitting to the authorities.

Freed from control The scheme was successful. By freeing the bureaucracy from • the control of the proletarian vanguard, the "Leninist levy" dealt a death blow to the party of Lenin.

Ine machine had won the necessary independence. Democratic centralism gave place to bureaucratic centralism.

party apparatus itself there now took place a radical reshuffling of personnel from top to bottom.

The chief merit of a Bolshevik was declared to be obedience. Under the guise of a struggle with the Opposition, there occured a sweepreplacement of revolutionists with chinovniks (professional governmental functionaries). The history of the Bolshevik party became a history of its rapid degeneration.

Rivalry

The political meaning of the developing struggle was darkened for many by the circumstance that the leaders of all three groupings, Left, Centre, and Right, belonged to one and the same staff in the Kremlin, the Politburo.

To superficial minds it seemed to be a mere matter of personal rivalry, a struggle for the "heritage" of Lenin.

But in the conditions of iron dictatorship social antagonisms could not show themselves at first except through the institutions of the ruling party.

Many Thermidorians emerged in their day from the circle of the Jacobins.

Bonaparte himself belonged to that circle in his early years, and. subsequently it was from among former Jacobins that the First Consul and Emperor of France selected his most faithful servants. Times change and the Jacobins with them, not excluding the Jacobins of the twentieth century.

Only Stalin Of the Politburo of Lenin's epoch there now remains only Stalin. Two of its members, Zinovier and Kamener, collaborators of Lenin throughout many years as emigres, are enduring ten-year prison terms for a crime which they did not commit.

Three other members, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, are completely removed from the leadership, but as a reward for submission occupy secondary posts.

And finally, the author of these lines is in exile. The widow of Lenin, Krupskaya, is also under the ban, having proved unable with all her efforts to adjust herself completely to the Thermidor.

The members of the present Politburo occupied secondary posts throughout the history of the Bolshevik party. If anybody in the first years of the revolution had predicted their future elevation, they would have been the first in surprise, and there would have been no false modesty in their surprise.

For this very reason, the rule is more stern at present that the Politburo is always right, and in any case that no man can be right against the Politburo.

But, moreover, the Politburo cannot be right against Stalin, who is unable to make mistakes and consequently cannot be right against himself.

Demands for party democracy were through all this time the slogans of all the oppositional groups, as insistent as they were hopeless.

The above-mentioned platform of the Left Opposition demanded in 1927 that a special law be written into the Criminal Code "punishing as a serious state crime every direct or indirect persecution of a worker for criticism." Instead of this, there was introduced intr: the Criminal Code an article against the Left Opposition itself.

Recollections

Of party democracy there remained only recollections in the memory of the older generation.

And together with it had disappeared the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the cooperatives, the cultural and athletic organisations.

Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries. The regime had become "totalitarian" in character several yeals before this word arrived from Germany.

"By means of demoralising methods, which convert thinking Communists into machines, destroying their will, character and human dignity. " wrote Rakovsky in 1928, dignity, the ruing circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party."

Since those indignant lines were written, the degeneration of the regime has gone immeasurably farther.

The GPU has become the decisive factor in the inner life of the party. If Molotov in March 1936 was able to boast to a French journalist that the ruling party no longer contains any factional struggle, it is only because disagreements are noW settled by the automatic intervention of the political police. The old Bolshevik party is dead, and no force will resurrect it.

From Leon Trotsky "Revolution Betrayed"—Pathfinder Press edition, pages 94-100.

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PaL lan McCalman reviews • some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution by Christopher Hill, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.