Lenin's last struggle
Socialist Action1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
THIS WEEK is the 60th anniversary of the death of Lenin. His life and work have been misrepresented for decades by the rulers and ideologues of both East and West. Here PHIL HEARSE looks at Lenin's struggle against bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
NEIL KINNOCK recently said that the Militant tendency in the Labour Party was incompatible with the Party because it was 'democratic centralist, not 'democratic socialist'. Leaving aside the question of the politics of Militant, Neil Kinnock's statement reflects a very common misconception that has been fostered by social democrats, anarchists and cold war warriors alike — that Lenin's method of party organisation was dictatorial and a precursor of Stalinism.
The idea that Stalin merely continued Lenin's work was of course argued for decades by the official Communist Parties themselves. Very few political tendencies have any interest in revealing the historical fact that during the last years of his life Lenin waged a bitter battle against growing bureaucracy inside the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet state, that he proposed a political bloc to Trotsky to fight bureaucracy and that he intended to drive Stalin from his position as party General Secretary.
Furthermore in the 1930s, when Stalin was consolidating his position in the Soviet Union he had to execute all the remaining members of Lenin's Central Committee in order to achieve this.
During the last two years of his life, from 1922 to 1924, Lenin suffered several strokes, which made his political activity intermittent and physically difficult. Yet during this time he waged a bitter and growing struggle against the development of Stalin and the rising power of the bureaucracy in Russia.
The situation in which the Russian revolution found itself at the beginning of the 1920s was one of an economy which had been wrecked by war and the foreign invasions of 1918-20. Russian industry virtually collapsed. While the economic life of the country was dislocated thousands of the best and most self-sacrificing communists were killed in the civil war. The organised working class was itself dispersed as industrial enterprises ceased functioning.
Strangled
Outside Russia the Social Democrats — the equivalent of the Labour Party — in Germany had strangled the revolution. First they had voted for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which the Bolsheviks had been forced to lose one third of Russia's industrial areas to the government of the Kaiser. Then, when the German working class rose up and overthrew the Kaiser's regime in 1918/19, the Social Democrats had allied with the fascists to murder tens of thousands of German workers and maintain capitalism in Germany.
By 1921 the Russian revolution was internationally isolated and blockaded both economically and politically. Around ten million people had died through the direct and indirect effects of the foreign invasions of the country.
In this period the Soviets, the elected worker's committees from which the Soviet government theoretically derived its authority, progressively ceased operating. The Bolshevik government became more and more based on the state apparatus. The apparatus of the Bolshevik party became more and more intertwined with the state bureaucracy, itself composed mainly of the old Czarist bureaucracy. A danger appeared of the creation of a bureaucratic layer whose interests would be separate and apart from the interests of the ordinary workers and peasants.
At the Eleventh Party Congress in March-April 1922 — the last national conference at which Lenin was able to speak — he devoted much of his contribution to warning of the dangers of bureaucratism. But at this stage Lenin saw the bureaucratic threat coming from outside the party, a danger of the state apparatus directing the Communist Party, rather than the other way around.
In his Political Report he spoke of the state bureaucracy as 'that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap'. He asked: 'who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can be truthfully said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed'.
Further he said the state machine 'was like a car that was not going in the direction that the driver desired, but in the direction that someone else desired as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or a private capitalist, or both'.
Until November 1922 Lenin still saw the problem in terms of putting able and responsible communists in key positions to fight the bureaucratic danger. He maintained his confidence in the party apparatus. But in December 1922 there was a sudden change, as Lenin proposed to Trotsky a political bloc to defend the state monopoly of foreign trade, which was under threat inside the party leadership.
Then between December 1922 and January 1923 Lenin dictated a scathing critique of Stalin's handling of the problem of the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union and proposed Stalin's removal from the post of General Secretary. In addition Lenin called for a general reorganisation of the state apparatus, enlarging the party Central Committee to 50 or 100 members and strengthening the role of central state planning.
The struggle inside the party leadership over the state monopoly of foreign trade has to be seen within the context of the New Economic Policy (NEP) which was introduced into Russia in 1921. During the civil war, given the breakdown of normal relations between the town and the countryside, the Bolsheviks had resorted to forcible requisitions of food from the peasantry to feed the towns. With the end of the civil war the Soviet government sought to boost productivity in agriculture and stabilise relations between the workers in the towns and the peasants in the countryside.
To that end they proposed strengthening market relations in the countryside. The peasants would be subject to only a very limited tax paid in agricultural products. The rest of production the
peasants could sell on the market — and keep the profit. As private agriculture reasserted itself, a new layer of wealthy peasants ('Nepmen') came into existence with their own private capital, employing other peasants.
For the Bolsheviks the introduction of the NEP was a necessary retreat. The strengthening of capitalism in the countryside unless severely controlled threatened the creation of a rural class opposed to socialism.
It was in this context that the debate over the monopoly of foreign trade erupted. In October 1922, the Central Committee, in Lenin and Trotsky's absence, passed a resolution aimed at weakening the monopoly. Its removal would have enabled Russian capitalists to establish direct links with the capitalist world market, determining imports and exports on the basis of their own profits rather than the needs of the socialised economy. Lenin supported the monopoly of foreign trade and his opponents were Stalin and Bukharin.
Lenin appealed to Trotsky for a common bloc to defend the existing state monopoly. During their meeting on 12 December he proposed to Trotsky a bloc not only on the monopoly question, but against 'bureaucracy in general' and against Stalin's Orgainsation Bureau in particular. Lenin was losing confidence in the party machine controlled by Stalin.
After the dispute on the state monopoly of foreign trade, Lenin's next clash with Stalin was over the 'nationalities' question — the relations between Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other nations in the Soviet state. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was only established on 30 December 1922. Before this there was only a loose federation between the Russian Socialist Republic and five other national republics. Stalin, who was in charge of the nationalities question, proposed a new federation in which central power would reside in Moscow. This was rejected by the Georgian Bolshevik leaders (a nation in the South West of the USSR) who thought it would undermine their position in Georgia, and that it was a violation of the right to national self-determination.
Stalin and his hatchet man Ordzhonikidze subjected the Georgian Bolshevik leaders to abuse, 'exile' in Moscow and even physical violence. When Lenin found out the facts of Stalin's action he again formed a bloc with Trotsky to defend the right of the Georgians to autonomy and self-determination. Kamenev noted 'Illich is going to war to defend independence'. This time Stalin attempted to fight.
Lenin now prepared to launch a fight at the 12th party congress, scheduled for March 1923, but which was delayed until April. Fotieva, Lenin's secretary, told Trotsky: 'He (Lenin) does not trust Stalin and wants to come out against him in front of the whole party. He is preparing a bomb'.
The basis on which Lenin proposed to intervene in the party congress was against bureaucratism in the party, defence of the rights of nationalities, and the importance of state planning in face of the rise of the 'nepmen'. He provided Trotsky, from his sickbed, with notes and correspondence to use in the fight if he was too ill to attend himself.
In the event, Lenin was recovering from a new stroke. The party congress was dominated by the emerging triumverate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Trotsky, making a major error, compromised with them, rather than detonating the 'bomb' which Lenin had prepared. As a relative newcomer to the Bolshevik Party Trotsky felt that, without Lenin's presence, he was unable to challenge the 'old Bolsheviks'.
Removed
Lenin was now effectively removed from the inner-party fight. But in his last writings, and especially his article Better Fewer, But Better he returned repeatedly to the question of bureaucratism. He proposed a 'purging of our government machine', especially the Workers and Peasants Inspection. This body, he argued, had been set up to control bureaucracy, but had become one of the prime culprits.
The proposals in Better Fewer, But Better have to be put in context with his 'Testament', written in December 1922-January 1923. His proposal in this document that Stalin be removed as General Secretary because of his rude and overbearing behaviour represents a growing awareness that the Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev faction was the political representation of growing bureaucratism. Lenin's last political alliances and struggles were aimed at blowing up this bloc, and rooting out the cancer of bureaucratism.
At the end of 1923 46 party leaders published a platform against the growth of bureaucracy.
The statement heralded the beginning of the Left Opposition, forerunner of the Trotskyist movement. This was the real continuation of Lenin's last struggle.
In 1927 Lenin's widow, Krupskaya, ventured the opinion that if Lenin had lived he would be in one of Stalin's prisons. Lenin did indeed intitiate the struggle against bureaucracy in the USSR, but this struggle was too brief and too difficult for him to fully grasp the topic theoretically or carry it through to its end. The Bolsheviks had the privilege and the 'misfortune' to lead the first successful socialist revolution in the world. They had no previous experience to guide them. But from the time Lenin characterised the USSR as 'a worker's state with bureaucratic deformations' in 1918 he showed how grave a danger he regarded the processes that led finally to Stalin's rule.
It was not Leninist organisation which created bureaucracy but the isolation of the revolution, the poverty of the economy, and the ravages of civil war and foreign invasion. Lenin fought the rising Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia — a bureaucracy later hailed as 'realistic', and even as an ally, by capitalists and reformists around the world.
Lenin's programme remained that of control of the state by the masses and control of the party by its membership. That is the very essence of democractic socialism.