The Rise of

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1uu. reonraznensky MITAINY A 1 The Soviet bureaucracy ow not as the heir of the issian Revolution but out of defeat of European tolutions in 1918-1923. It lerged not as the outcome Bolshevism but only over • bones of revolutionary ilshevik traditions. and inciples, of persecuted shevik cadres liquidated by ices hostile to the litical independence of the Irking class.

These points are crucial to an lerstanding of the origins of the ment-day Stalinist bureaucracy ich inhabits the Kremlin and ly besmirches the name of immunism" by world wide rayals of the working class and most squalid deals with world perialism.

The material breeding ground the bureaucracy was in fact the le economic backwardness of nia - the weakest link in the capitalist powers mationally, and the first to under the strain of Hutionary upsurge.

PEASANT-BASED

The Russian economy was whelmingly peasant-based, with • only a few centres of very dern industry which had always dependent upon foreign estment and technology. The amath of the war, the February • Uctober revolutions, and the Ming protracted wars of avention (throughout which the terialist states attempted itarily to restore capitalism in (ia) together with economic bades, served to dislocate and overish the soviet economy, ting chronic hardship and want. These were material conditions apletely unfavourable to the blishment of communism. sky made this quite clear in tysing the rise of bureaucracy in orution Betrayed: :Marxism sets out from the #opment of techniques as the lamental spring of progress, and tracts the tramme upon the dynamic of productive forces...

material premise of trish should be so high a pient of the economic of man that productive baring ceased to be a •ll not require any goal, detribution of life's goods, in continual abundance, demand - as it does not any reloff family oi t" boarding house - any except that of education, • and social opinion. Speaking Hy. I think it would be pretty ritted to consider such a really a perspective as "utopian" " = 3TTEJ. PP 456)

DANGER FEe: :.:= development of lent of the Janger ...2 ITE ualities - 793.

4 re of the =hsc! Left Oppositionists (left to Tan. Durahun. KT. the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means all the old clap must revive" • (Revolution Betrayed p 56).

As the administrators of this "generalised want" , resting on layers of managers,, technicians, prosperous peasants who benefitted from the concessions in the New Economic Policy, and generally the most conservative strata post-October society, the Soviet which began increasingly to ensconse itself in a position of material privilege and unchallengeable authority represented "the old crap"

APPARATUS

They were the mediators, the regulators, the apparatus men. A far cry indeed were they from the top grade Bolshevik cadres, the best and most valiant of whom had either died in the civil wat or were absorbed into senior posts which isolated them from the masses.

The ebb of revolutionary enthusiasm which follows all revolutions strengthened the growing ranks of budding bureaucrats. The 5 million-strong Red Army was demobilised, and its commanders gradually moved into leading positions in the soviets and the administration.

And all the time a series ot international defeats inflicted on the working class was strengthening the hand of the bureaucrats whose basic beliefs were founded on the one hand on lack of confidence in the working class and on the other on the pursuance of self-interest.

LOW LEVER

ine relatively low specific weight of the working class compared to the mass peasantry in Russia together with the extremely cow cultural level of the masses Tsaris: oppressien. 3÷:00e g:2*: :EN3Lworkers' state and the "administrators" took over.

But central to the predominance of the bureaucracy was the conquest of the Bolshevik Party itself - the vehicle of the October Revolution and the essential organisation for the struggle against The gradual annexation of the Party by non-proletarian social forces began immediately after the October Revolution, but escalated after the victorious conclusion to the Civil War.

From the very outset it was fought by Trotsky, taking up the offensive against the bureaucracy at the request of Lenin, who, though incapacitated by a crippling illness, could see the dangers posed for the The take-over of the Party by the bureaucracy rested (as do all' bureaucracies) upon an attack on the inner democracy of the movement. Trotsky, in 1923, explicitly linked the questions together:

"To pose now the question of party democracy without analysing the membership of the party, from the social point of view as well as from the point of view of age and political standing, would be to dissolve it into a void...

... The conquest of power was followed by a rapid, even abnormal growth of the party. A powerful magnet, the party attracted not oniy workers with little consciousness but even elements plainly alien to its spirit: functionaries, careerists and political hangers-on. In this chaotic period, it was able to preserve its Bolshevik nature only thanks to the internal dictatorship• of the Old Guard, which had been tested in October" (New Course p 4-5).

Most of the careerists were quickly purged from the Party, but the dictatorial regime, which had been consolidated at the Tenth Congress fin constitutional 3men:7e: :wwing factions V-Ovseenko administrators of thể apparatus.

In 1922 Stalin had been elected General Secretary of the Party, the supreme controller of the apparatus. Piece by piece the apparatus proceeded to dismantle the elements of Bolshevism and replacing them with bureaucratism.

"However exaggérated were the forms it sometimes assumed, the bureaucratism of the war period was only child's play in comparison with present-day bureaucratism which grew up in peacetime, while the apparatus, in spite of the ideological growth of the farty, continued obstinately to think and decide for the Party. " (New Course UNANIMOUS A resolution submitted on these questions to the Central Committee and calling for a "new course" was formally passed unanimously.

But in practice no change was made, and . only Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought for its implementation.

They alone called for the reassertion. of inner-Party democracy, Ior an increasing attention to the cultivation of working class cadres (by 1923 only ore sixth of the Party was workers employed in the factories), and a turn to the youth to fight the dangers of bureaucracy:

"It is quite clear that the development of the party apparatus and. the bureaucratisation accompanying this development are engendered not by the factory cells, linked together through the medium of the apparatus, but by all other functions that the party exercises through the medium of the State apparatuses of administration, of. economic management, of military command, of education. In other words, the source of bureaucratism resides in the growing concentration of the attention and the forces of the Stalin industry". (New Course P 13), But instead of carrying out the recommended turn put forward by Trotsky, the "Troika" of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviey who moved into complete control of the Party after the death of Lenin in 1924 announced the "Leninist levy" supposedly to commemorate his death. As Trotsky described it:

"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 expenence, without independence, and yet with the old habit of submitting to the authorities. The scheme was successful. By freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian vanguard, the "Leninist levy." dealt a death 1 blow to the party. of Lenin" Revolution Betrayed. PP 97-98)

Some 200,000 raw recruits were brought in in this way, and the task of the Left Opposition in fighting the bureaucracy made insuperable. All the time the tentacles of the bureaucracy were reaching out and engulfing wider and wider spheres of operation.

In 1927 the platform of the Left Opposition called. for a special law to 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 into the Criminal Code an article against the Left Opposition itself" • (Revolution Betrayed p 99).

MORE POWERFUL The Soviet bureaucracy, then. resting on • national and international social forces more powerful than the revolut Russian proletariat, but at thi same

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But it always had close links with middle class pacifists and do-goodels, and was thus quite unable to face the decisive tests of imperialist war in 1914 and the Feather also, according to his Obituary in The Times, kept la private list of names and records' of Communists and other militants.