Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin
Sarel, Benno
The recent events in Russia, particularly a number of references made at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, have brought back into public discussion issues and problems...
...After the popular wave had ebbed, he found himself stranded in a world absolutely foreign to him, if not hostile from the outset: that of the old Bolshevik committeemen...
...Just such a radical revolution was, however, desired by the most disinherited elements of Russian society...
...Abruptly the Bolshevik militants exchanged illegality for posts close to power: Soviets, official commissions, various com mittees...
...In his ability to communicate with the Russian workers, to grasp the trend of their thought and to translate it into a line of action, Lenin remains a genius as yet unequalled...
...publish...
...Everything combined to help the committee-men regain their privileges...
...It is a fact that Lenin and, following him in caricature, the Stalinists, have always had a tendency to consider the Party as a revolutionary factor per se rather than as a relative instrument...
...The following month the Revolution burst out at Petrograd, and the masses chose the soviet form of representation...
...But immediately after the conference, on the proposal of Lenin, Stalin was co-opted...
...Very rapidly, the former worker acquired the habits of his new environment and detached himself from the factory...
...The Revolution of 1905 surprised the committee-men and put them at a loss, for the burden of activity was now in the street and no longer in the committees...
...Stalin was named Commissar of the Worker's and Peasant's Inspection, and so obtained unlimited rights of supervision over the whole administration of the Soviet Union...
...Then something happened which had already happened so many times in the history of political parties: the interests of the governing apparatus of the Party and those of the mass which it represented came into conflict...
...It was simply that to Lenin it seemed impossible not to take the peasant factor into full account, not to try to take full advantage of it...
...Side by side with the Bolsheviks, he had undertaken a gigantic work which he could not abandon...
...For Trotsky the proletariat would create, must inevitably create its own doctrine...
...His opponents have often accused Lenin of a lack of scruples, of amoralism...
...In matters of organization, the only serious underlying principles for the militants of our movement must be: strict secrecy, rigorous selection of members, preparation of professional revolutionaries...
...Stalinism has a legacy from the anti-democratic aspect of the old Bolshevism...
...Illegality and the surveillances of the Okhrana* certainly counted for much in Lenin's rejection of democratic principles inside his organization...
...Nevertheless, the fact remains that the general tendency of Bolshevism in matters of organization remained the same as that defined so forcefully from the end of 1901 on...
...After this, again on the proposal of Lenin, Stalin was made responsible for the Central Committee's Delegation for the Interior of Russia...
...Can we assert that the practice of the Leninist organization corresponded point by point to the principles set forth at the beginning of the century...
...Taking into account the role which Lenin had assigned to the Party, it could not be otherwise...
...This much is true: in ideological disputes and in clashes between different groups within Russian Social Democracy, Lenin was often rather unscrupulous...
...No doubt this was the view of Trotsky when he joined Lenin's party in 1917...
...They too were ambitious to work fast...
...The Civil War was rampant...
...The peasantry, by its action, could disorganize Czarism, but limited by its narrow horizons it could not manage a decisive attack, and, above all, it was incapable of creating a political program of its own...
...Speaking of Stalin, Trotsky said...
...At the head of this group of combatants, Lenin placed an adequate general staff...
...This was the fundamental law governing the commitee-men...
...His writings are sober, pared down, and utilitarian...
...But the workers themselves, although frequently sympathetic, advanced slowly...
...In 1906, after he had written that the Mensheviks "sold out the workers' votes to the bourgeoisie," the Mensheviks summoned Lenin before a tribunal of the still-united Party...
...His work, the Party and the Soviet State, was to transform itself into an enemy of the Russian workers, and, by a tragic reversal, this degeneration was facilitated precisely by those elements of rigid discipline, cohesiveness, and heroism with which Lenin had invested Bolshevism...
...Lenin advised taking out of the factory the worker who showed ability as an organizer or agitator...
...What is he doing...
...The peasantry, like the middle strata of the towns, was not homogeneous: at one pole it inclined toward the bourgeoisie, at the other toward the proletariat...
...ing to its own laws: a combination between its revolutionary ideology and its position as a social group of petty-bourgeois origin which did not belong to the proletariat except by ideology...
...11 It was clear at the beginning of the century that Russia was on the eve of a revolution...
...And Lenin went on to express his admiration for the stable general staff of the German Social Democracy...
...Trotsky could not choose either one...
...Those workers who entered it thereby cut themselves off from their former class...
...Trotsky was not concerned with complex alliances with diversified classes ten times more numerous than the proletariat...
...It is a fact—as we have seen—that the crucial moments, in 1907 and 1917 when Lenin fought the committee-men and drew on the support of the masses, he was joined in his position by Trotsky...
...And above all, he hoped to escape from this contradiction with the aid of the Western proletariat...
...The professional revolutionaries had a sense of efficiency...
...Ultimately the working class must conquer, and it would be victorious even if Karl Marx had never existed, even if there had been no Ulianov Lenin...
...in the same way, the Soviets of the areas where the units were stationed no longer had any say about the matter...
...The industry created had enabled them to subjugate...
...This is certainly true...
...ed in 1902) Lenin wrote, "The workers...
...In the case of the Party organ Iskra, Lenin "arranged" things so that the secretaryship was held by his wife...
...Lenin there declared that his aim was not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth...
...The life of the professional revolutionaries was very different from that of the workers...
...Often there were divergences, and on occasion Lenin allowed himself to be convinced by his adversaries...
...And in What Is To Be Done...
...This too can be traced to the youth of the Russian working class, to the fact that history had shortened all its respites, and piled on its shoulders from childhood on an adult's task...
...Thanks to them, many workers succeeded in breaking through the official obscurantism, to arrive at a broader understanding of political problems...
...Meanwhile, for the bulk of the proletariat, as for the mass of Bolshevik sympathizers, the situation had changed more in appearance than in reality...
...We can be sure that in some measure this Jacobinism in social issues led him to Jacobinism in questions of organization...
...Stalin was now a leader recognized by all the committee-men, he had been invested by Lenin, and he had arrived at this post by the typically committee-man route of co-option...
...The next step was a boundless confidence in the virtues of the committees, a pride and complacency which were hardly to their credit...
...Petersburg, which marked the beginning of the Revolution, Stalin wrote in a call to arms, "Let us join hands and rally around the Party committees...
...And it was because Lenin foresaw a future uprising of the workers that he again backed up the committees of Russia...
...In comparing Lenin to Marx, Trotsky wrote in 1924 that even if Marx had not been the creator of the First International, he would still have been what he was through his writings, but that Lenin, even if he had not written anything, would have been just as great, because he was the leader of the Russian Revolution...
...One could say that if Lenin represented the Russian worker with his peasant past, Trotsky symbolized the same worker as a part of the world proletariat...
...In short, Lenin, the great revolutionary figure of our century, presented fifty years ago nearly the same program as the Jacobins of the French Revolution...
...They simply showed themselves faithful to their already long tradition of decisiveness in the committees and in the groups...
...Trotsky admitted with Plekhanov and Lenin, in opposition to the Populists, that Russia was moving toward capitalism...
...Lenin's immense will to help the working class of his country through the Bolshevik Party failed to the extent that, the Russian workers remaining isolated, his attempt was to become a grandiose experiment, but one made in a time and an environment not yet ripe...
...Similarly in Russia the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the labor movement: it was the natural and inevitable result of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intellectuals...
...The words in quotes are taken by Lenin from the Central Committee accusation against him.] .. . It is wrong to write about Party comrades in a language that systematically spreads among the working class hatred, aversion, contempt, etc., for those who hold different opinions...
...For feudal Russia, the working class, and in part the bourgeoisie, were destructive elements...
...It was now possible to influence this work only through the Party, and being in the Party meant accepting its law...
...Secret meetings, journeys, conferences, reports to prepare or study, took up the best part of their time...
...Lenin controlled them as well...
...This amendment," said Lenin, "could convey the idea that the development of consciousness occurs spontaneously...
...Trotsky, in his 1905-1910 polemics with Lenin, emphasized that the working class, having played a principal part in the overthrow of feudalism, would proceed of its own accord to the expropriation of the capitalists, its immediate enemies and allies of the feudalists...
...He had underestimated the conservative stability of an organization of long standing...
...This "moral amoralism" fitted in with the tension, the straining toward an objective, which all those who drew near Lenin noticed...
...And Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, notes in her memoirs: "The committee-man was usually a man full of assurance...
...The recent events in Russia, particularly a number of references made at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, have brought back into public discussion issues and problems concerning the history of 20th century radicalism that for a good many years had been confined to specialized circles...
...Most certainly not...
...They were on the way to constituting a new caste within the Party...
...Pressed by strategic needs and by their policy of grandeur, the Czars had made great efforts to modernize the country...
...However, the situation was such that the committee-men were indispensable to the organization...
...1 Lenin believed that the socialist movement alone could endow the workers with political consciousness...
...IV At the center of the complex polemics which Lenin and Trotsky conducted during a period of more than ten years was their disagreement on the motive power of the Russian Revolution...
...But this was not really amoralism...
...If this wave could have combined with a world revolution, as Trotsky had anticipated, the question of Bolshevik bureaucracy would have been relatively unimportant...
...His slogan "All power to the Soviets" signified a break with his idea of a provisional government with the "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants...
...Through the force of circumstances, however, they, themselves non-workers, were led to take over the leadership of the workers, gradually relegating the latter to the status of pawns...
...It was necessary to work fast...
...Little by little, they had become true technicians of the problems of labor organization...
...Second, pressed by political opponents, Lenin later affirmed that these national campaigns against the autocracy in the course of which the professional revolutionaries moved among all classes, were socialist because they were organized by the Party and, the Party was a party of the workers...
...The reaction of Stalin is typical of the state of mind which prevailed in the committees...
...There are no limits to such a struggle set by any Party standards, nor can there be such, for a split implies the cessation of the existence of the Party...
...Lenin did not then consider this measure as anything exceptional...
...From the beginning of 1919 on, Stalin was the only person to be at the same time in the organizational bureau and in the Politburo...
...Trotsky termed the revolution as formulated by Lenin a "Lenten Revolution," a "revolution of abstinence for the working class...
...Thanks to this beginning of a machine, Lenin "worked on" the delegations to the Second Congress, where the split with the Mensheviks occurred...
...Very often illiterate, wrapped up in the cares of their daily life, few among them could rise to the level of political organizers...
...He agreed with Lenin, against the Mensheviks, that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of accomplishing its own revolution...
...The following article, though written before the 20th Congress, provides a useful summary account of the events that have led to the recent revelations...
...And as for those who did succeed, the professional revolutionaries heeded both the advice of What Is To Be Done...
...It was not his conception of the Russian Revolution which proved to be right, but Trotsky's...
...Thanks to the secretaryship, Lenin controlled the connections with Russia, correspondence and arrivals...
...The pro letariat can arrive at an understanding of its historic role neither through its own powers nor as a result of the class struggle...
...by the force of circumstance the administration of this edifice fell to them...
...Translated by CONNIE BUTrINGElt...
...Without the slightest doubt, the old Bolshevik ideology helped somewhat to justify this evolution...
...The bourgeoisie, Lenin explained, was against the Czar...
...Very few days were needed for Lenin to revise his position on practically everything, without, it must be added, formally repudiating his previous stand...
...The Party of professional revolutionaries was to be made up of intellectuals and workers...
...Famine was rife, and the old rule of "every man for himself" had come back into its own...
...To escape the contradiction of the first years of regime—a workers' government incapable of ameliorating the lot of workers—Stalin more and more frequently took refuge in the pure and simple denial of the fact that a deepseated workers' opposition existed...
...It is nevertheless impossible to accept this as the whole explanation...
...In the same way, a re turn was made to the system of personal responsibility—the responsibility being that of a director appointed by the administration...
...To freedom of opinion—within the bounds of Marxism—in the heart of the organization, and to the principle of democratic election of its staff, Lenin opposed mutual trust and the spirit of brotherhood-in-arms which should prevail in a professional revolutionary group...
...The limits of the struggle based on a split are not Party limits, but general political limits, or rather general civil limits, the limits set by criminal law, and nothing else...
...During the subsequent reaction, the committee-men were, in the proper sense of the term, the conservative element of the Party, the maintaining element...
...The working class would be the most resolute, because it was the only class which desired to, pass beyond the bourgeois revolution...
...At the same time, the Social Democratic organizations should understand that if their work among the masses is conducted in a serious and comprehensive manner, such institutions can now become superfluous...
...It is, according to Lenin, first and foremost the professional revolutionaries who make up the Party and who have the mission of bringing socialist consciousness to the proletariat: "We must form men who consecrate to the revolution not their free evenings, but their entire lives," unlike the "organization of the workers" which should be broad in scope and based on the trades...
...It follows that for Trotsky the Party could not be what it was for Lenin, the separate (but not isolated) vanguard...
...For Lenin, the professional revolutionaries were more than warriors—they were heroes...
...As for the spontaneous struggle of the workers, "the labor movement isolated from Social Democracy declines and inevitably founders in the bourgeois mire," and "the working class loses its political independence...: . At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, Lenin relentlessly opposed an amendment to the Program stating that the political consciousness of the proletariat increases as the struggle of the oppressed and the contradictions of capitalism increase...
...As we shall see, Lenin in some cases assigned also the Party the task of keeping in check workers and revolutionary peasants...
...But, admitting this, it is certain that the professional revolutionaries accelerated the degeneration...
...One might recall here Marx's own appraisal: "That which is new in my teaching is the demonstration...
...The Soviet was given a purely supervisory role, which continued, however, to be effective for some time longer...
...At every recession of the revolution, at each retreat of the workers, no matter how transistory (e.g., in the month of July-August, 1917) the relative importance of the Party apparatus grew, and again tried to get the upper hand...
...In the existing situation, the slogan "All power to the Soviets of workers and soldiers" meant to the proletariat: struggle, with the prospect of setting up its own power against the bourgeois government...
...whereas Trotsky, a man of the next generation, took more account of capitalist interdependence in an area of imperialism, and oriented himself more on the common destiny of the world proletariat...
...By this time, the professional revolutionaries were no longer anything but "committeemen...
...To be sure, it did distribute land, and this assured it considerable prestige...
...During these meetings there would have been nothing to interfere with the democratic election of local committees...
...But because of this fact, the course he adopted was bound to be contradictory...
...everything dealing with program and policy was for him no more than an ornament of the fundamental organization...
...Their activity had in any case not been submerged in that of the masses, except for a rather short time: two years, perhaps...
...In spite of his excellence as a theorist, Lenin will go down in history as a man of action, and as a man of action representing the Russian working class at its best...
...Like Trotsky, the Bolsheviks were now in favor of the Soviet form of government...
...The whole of society with the exception of the top governmental bureaucracy was waiting for a change...
...The revolution, said Lenin, must set up a provisional government which would expropriate the feudalists, but not the capitalists...
...But now it was no longer possible for him to back out, as he had done a few years earlier with the Mensheviks...
...and the Soviets, whose methods were the reverse of those used by the committees, perished all the faster...
...Trotsky claimed kinship with Leninism, and called to witness his periods of agreement with Lenin to proclaim himself the rightful heir of Bolshevism...
...Its social origin, the fact of having led a life more or less between classes, and the fact of being separated still more from the workers, all combined to make the Bolshevik leaders slip little by little under the influence of classes extraneous to the proletariat...
...It would be impossible to go further, he pointed out, because material conditions in Russia were not ripe for the establishment of socialism...
...but even when they are as technical as the "Letter to a Comrade on the Question of Organization" they radiate enthusiasm by their very compactness, by the extraordinary will to advance which one feels in every line...
...In the meantime, the working class itself began to withdraw, especially after the end of the Civil War...
...Everything about Lenin, his style, his manner of speaking, his action, was marked by his tremendous drive towards the goal...
...As a parallel to this, from 1918 on, a tragic crisis of production obliged the authorities to put into effect in the factories a system of bonuses and piecework salaries, which shattered the solidarity of the workers...
...Lenin believed that the revolution would be above all a peasant revolution, the key to Russia's social problem being the agrarian question...
...From 1918 on, the Soviets of the Red Army units were deprived of all powers of decision...
...In short, Lenin found himself in a terrible contradiction...
...as a general rule the committee-man did not allow any democracy in the Party...
...Until 1917, the soviet idea was of virtually no concern to Lenin...
...To win the Civil War, it was necessary to return to the time-honored methods of individual command...
...The misfortune of the regime of October, 1917, however, was that it lacked the means to realize its intentions...
...Are there any limits to permissible struggle based on a split...
...But Lenin demonstrated that every agrarian revolution is also a bourgeois and national revolution, in the sense that it is not directed against private property as such and that the whole nation more or less participates...
...Trotsky came to Lenin without changing anything essential in his conceptions...
...lesser or more backward peoples than Russia: at the same time, it had introduced a charge of gunpowder into the foundations of society...
...Lenin asked himself, what would be the fate of this bourgeois revolution made against the bourgeoisie, in the absence of a strongly organized Social Democracy...
...In 1905, for example, the Mensheviks from the first took sides with the Soviet of Petrograd...
...The general economic and political causes seem to me decisive...
...As he saw it, the socialist movement and idea had their birth and existence apart from the proletariat: "By their social situation...
...The governing body had a tendency to confuse its own interests with those of the workers...
...To schematize Lenin's thought: the proletariat is no more than an essential element with which a socialist movement prepares to construct workers' power...
...But the soviet system, which was supposed to guarantee the direct participation of the masses in public life, soon broke down, and, for practical purposes, was dead in two years...
...Lenin was for a dictatorship against the partisans of the autocracy, and for this a strong force was essential...
...Even if the Bolsheviks present at Petrograd in February and March wanted a more radical government, they gave it as yet only a bourgeois content, in con formity with the old Leninist formula...
...After the Social Democratic Congress of Stockholm of 1906, when the Revolution was already receding and the Soviets no longer existed, Lenin wrote, in the course of his controversy with the Mensheviks: "The Party has never concealed its intention of making use of certain agencies outside the Party, such as the Soviet, in order to spread the influence of Social Democracy among the working class...
...Furthermore, the necessity of creating by sheer force of will a well-knit, strong, centralized socialist cohort also does not fit in with Trotsky's earlier idea of the Revolution...
...and to maintain the equilibrium between the antagonistic segments of the population, pushing some forward and holding others back, a strong and disciplined party was necessary...
...The Party suffered from a vainglorious pride in its committees, and this was the beginning of bureaucratization," said Trotsky (Stalin...
...that the class struggle leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...The most important contribution which we must ascribe to the credit of Comrade Lenin," said Stalin, "was his furious assault on the absence of any principles of organization among the Mensheviks...
...Unlike Lenin, Trotsky claimed that there were in Russia only two political forces, two social groups capable of concerted action: the Czarist bureaucracy and the proletariat...
...As early as April 1920, on the occasion of Lenin's 50th birthday, Stalin could permit himself to speak with the presumptuous assurance of a man con vinced that he represents an indispensable element...
...he merely stressed again the importance of the peasant element...
...Czarist secret police particularly charged with ferreting out revolutionaries...
...and the crying need of their own ranks, and took them out of the factory...
...It is certain that, under these conditions, Trotsky's organizational concentrations had to be different from those of Lenin...
...When they directed a strike, they most often worked clandestinely, and above all had to avoid compromising themselves...
...Lenin asked in letters which are now prize targets for criticism...
...III To the youth of the Marxist movement in Russia corresponded the youth of its combatants...
...Here, of course, Trotsky was mistaken...
...And from the standpoint of efficiency, Stalin was certainly the man for the job in 1912...
...It was with this prospect that Lenin "pushed" Stalin: "Where is Stalin...
...without a dozen talented leaders, leaders tried and taught by long experience, in close agreement with each other, and knowing perfectly their respective roles, no class of contemporary society can carry on the fight unswervingly...
...He alone maintained that the dynamics of the Russian Revolution would bring the proletariat to power, and that the latter, as part of the world proletariat, could maintain itself in power only within the framework of a revolution spreading to the principal capitalist countries...
...I do not adhere to the theory advanced by certain critics of Bolshevism who believe that the professional revolutionaries are the source of the degeneration of the USSR...
...Once these conditions are met, we shall have something more than "democratisms": we shall have complete fraternal confidence between revolutionaries...
...In his memoirs Victor Serge gives a most striking description of how this police, the Cheka, tended from the very beginning to make itself independent, how, like all police forces, it grew bigger and then drummed up "business" to justify its own importance...
...A Central Committee was elected of which he was not a member...
...Lenin himself later admitted that the non-application of democratic principles in the organization had been exaggerated...
...by virtue of their past, they were entitled to a place of honor in the edifice erected by the Revolution...
...The committee-men's state of mind continued to live on, half hidden in the midst of the new situation, which was dominated by the activity of the masses...
...They not only had a separate (and necessarily separate) role from that of the working class, but they constituted, as it were, a profession above the classes...
...It should not be forgotten that, well before the illness and death of Lenin, Stalin already held the key positions of the Party apparatus, and that their relative importance grew every month...
...In regard to the time limit, i.e., the necessity for Lenin to create a disciplined party quickly, before the outbreak of the revolution, it would be well to specify that nobody else would have been able to accomplish this task as well as Lenin himself...
...We must see to it that he lives at the expense of the Party, that he is able, when necessary, to take part in illegal action, or move to another locality: otherwise he will not acquire much experience...
...But since it was weak and fearful when confronted by the workers' demands, and too bound up with the imperial bureaucracy, it would betray its own revolution along the way...
...We must not forget for an instant that the Party committees alone can lead us properly, that they alone can illuminate for us the way to the promised land...
...But, calling on Leninism, adopting the Leninist formula of the Party, Trotsky introduced into his doctrine a grave element of contradiction, which played a part in preventing him from clearly analyzing and separating himself from the regime of Stalin...
...In his famous April thesis, Lenin for the first time put forth the dictatorship of the proletariat as a task of the revolution in Russia...
...he was still too little known...
...While inevitably becoming separate at various points, they ultimately tend toward unity, the workers' struggle assimilating to itself the theory, the latter enriching itself through the movement, both continually crystallizing within the organization which is itself rising, changing shape, and constantly strengthening theory and movement...
...From this point of view we can understand Trotsky's joining of the Bolshevik Party after the February Revolution...
...Mostly intellectuals of petty-bourgeois origin, their devotion to the socialist cause was boundless...
...At first he favored the primacy of Iskra: but when he lost control following Plekhanov's change of front, Lenin found arguments in favor of the primacy of the Central Committee...
...The working class would have been able to formulate the ideas of which it had need, the methods indispensable to it, by itself, but this work would have been slower...
...The ossification and bureaucracy which already existed in the Party committees were engulfed and weakened by the popular wave...
...What had the government done for it...
...it was in their name that Trotsky, who like Lenin did not hesitate to support the Soviet, gained admission...
...Lenin did not believe, as did Rosa Luxemburg, that the struggle of the workers should merge with the socialist consciousness to form one superior category, but rather that the consciousness incarnated in the Party should remain apart and ahead of the workers' struggle, prepared to lead the way...
...As a matter of fact Lenin, who had an excellent grasp of reality, showed himself more flexible at decisive moments than any of his collaborators...
...His convictions and his attachment to the cause of the Russian proletariat were so genuine, and everything else was so naturally subordinated to them, that his "amoralism" seemed to him to correspond to a "higher" morality...
...But as a whole it would "go along" in the fight against the government, and its assault, coupled with that of the workers, should be decisive...
...He was separated from the latter by the essential question of the tactics to be adopted toward the bourgeoisie, but the Menshevik organizaton was more democratic, more flexible, and more organically bound up with the workers than was that of the Bolsheviks...
...But, great as he was, Lenin was a product of his time and his environment, and subject to error...
...and also because it would be necessary to take into account the peasant, who would consider himself satisfied once his thirst for land was appeased...
...His article on "Lenin as Organizer of the Party" is of value in judging the state of mind of the committeemen after the end of the Civil War, when the administration was no longer threatened...
...As late as January 1917, on the occasion of the commemoration of the Revolution, of 1905, Lenin made a speech at Zurich in which he barely mentioned the part played by the Soviets...
...When he lost control of that also, he convoked a Bolshevik conference which baptized itself the Congress of the Party...
...Events proved him right: things were moving toward the proletarian revolution...
...he knew the enormous influence which the committee had on the masses...
...following the massacre of January 9, 1905, at St...
...This surprising attitude, after the support granted the Soviets the preceding year, can become clear only in the light of the Leninist conception of the Party as the only form of organization capable of assuring continuity of the work, because it alone could be disciplined, centralized, and "united" (the expression is Lenin's) to socialist theory, the latter existing, as we have shown, outside the spontaneous movement of the masses...
...The committee-men had every right to consider themselves a key element of Bolshevism: since the beginning of the century, they had assured the continuity of the movement, they had borne the burden of the repression, and during the Civil War they had been in the front ranks...
...It seemed certain to him that without a disciplined cadre this revolution, made by diverse and fragmented segments of society, each bound to its own narrow milieu, was in danger of dissipating itself...
...But] aside from the influence of Social Democracy, there is no conscious activity of the masses...
...To lead the workers and to maneuver among the other classes, the most rigid discipline and efficiency were indispensable...
...This signified, moreover, that the new workers' power—being no longer worker-peasant—would no longer apply a bourgeois program, as the Leninist formula of 1905 had forecast...
...Marx and Engels were bourgeois intellectuals...
...Two facts are here worth noting: First, Lenin did not envisage having his political experiment performed on the working class except through professional revolutionaries, who could not truly be called workers themselves...
...This formulation is indeed of such a nature as to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent and indeed, as contrasted with the formulation that convinces and corrects, it "carries confusion into the ranks of the proletariat...
...What was the use of the collectivization of the factories, when there were neither raw materials, nor—often—any competent technicians...
...By about 1905, these stages had been completed...
...that was all that could be done at the time...
...They held secret meetings with the Bolshevik group of the union, or with some workers in their confidence...
...In organizational practice Trotsky was closer to the Mensheviks...
...In the meantime, the corps of professional revolutionaries reacted accord...
...could not yet have Social-Democratic consciousness...
...The alternatives which were offered him by the committee-men were to submit, or to break with the Party and the Soviet government, which were now merging together...
...But one may and must write in that strain about a seceded organization...
...Trot sky expected that the Menshevik Party would be forced to abandon its oppor tunism once the dynamics of revolution had brought the working class and the bourgeoisie into irremediable opposition...
...The Soviet regime ought simply to have perpetuated and organized the power which the Revolution had placed in the hands of the masses...
...there was no place for long argumentation...
...The retreat of the masses was inevitable...
...for was not the provisional government a step toward the popular coalition government which Lenin had foreordained...
...His idea was simple, because it was founded on belief in the capacity of the Russian proletariat to attain power, and on that of the European proletariat to aid in keeping it...
...They formed the vanguard of the mass of workers, who themselves only made up a minority of the nation...
...The dictatorship was to be a popular one ("democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants...
...They were Bolsheviks...
...The latter could come to them only from without...
...Iskra had some salaried agents who circulated in Russia...
...Having decided that a socialist development of Russia was impossible, Lenin drew all the conclusions, and did not wish, either in the country or in the city, for a too radical social revolution which would compromise the chances of a capitalist development...
...Then too, in order to create the new industries, the governing party had been obliged time and again to bleed the peasant and load down the landowning nobility with taxes...
...The professional revolutionaries as a distinct group could not be defined with respect to the class to which they belonged...
...In his "Letter to a Comrade on the Question of Organization" (September 1902) Lenin recommended holding non-periodic meetings of from thirty to a hundred militants, in the forest, for example...
...The second breach in the soviet system, more important than the first, was the creation in 1919 of a political secret police, necessarily beyond the direct control of the Soviets...
...Nor did he indicate that after a period of activity as a professional revolutionary the worker should be restored to his old milieu...
...His rise is symbolic of the rise of the bureaucracy, of which the main leaders were the committee-men...
...Relations between leaders and militants, loyalty to the tradition represented by the leaders, conservatism and maneuvering of the ranks, all these together proved to be stronger than the pressure of the working class: in 1917 the Mensheviks chose alliance with the bourgeoisie...
...Lenin hoped to escape this contradiction by limiting capitalism, by making it follow an "abridged" route, more "rational" and less "harmful...
...On behalf of the workers, it would proclaim the eight-hour day...
...For Trotsky, the spontaneous struggle of the workers, socialist theory, and socialist organization were all organically connected categories, continually reinforcing each other...
...The latter notes in her memoirs that "the operation was delicate...
...From 1920 on the factory Soviets no longer had any real life, and the only ones to come to meetings were the Party members and the inevitable careerists...
...he approved the appointment of a bourgeois government set up by the socialist movement, a capitalism put in place by the working class...
...there were only a few years in which to build up a party, and not a half century as in the West...
...By 1924, Zinoviev said, 10,000 former professional revolutionaries held the key positions in the Party and the State...
...After the Congress, Lenin controlled both Iskra and the Central Committee which remained in Russia...
...During the Revolution, said Trotsky, the masses became their own executive instrument...
...This organizational theory was very similar to that of the "organizational process" formulated by Rosa Luxemburg in her controversy with Lenin...
...For Lenin, this vision of the goal of the proletariat is conceived independently of its spontaneous struggle...
...To these arguments Lenin made no direct reply...
...The workers came to the Bolsheviks, who were the only ones to be against the bourgeoisie...
...Lenin knew that the Mensheviks were sincere revolutionaries, but the revolution was then in full swing, and he considered their tactics injurious...
...In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky said later: "What counted for the peasants was to smoke out the nobility ...afterwards—well, that remained to be seen...
...In What Is To Be Done...
...They maintained communications, arranged for the printing and dissemination of political literature...
...But the world revolution having aborted after immense spasms, the old narrowness and routine of organization decided against Trotsky...
...In 1912 Stalin participated in the Bolshevik conference at Prague...
...Nor can this conception, based like Trotsky's theory of the Russian Revolution on faith in the historical process and in the destiny of the proletariat, be dismissed as fatalist: it left much to the organized will, and besides, neither Rosa Luxemburg nor Trotsky were figures of fatalism and passivity...
...Balanced against these records of service what weight could be carried by the years of "disorder," 1905 and 1917...
...And as the latter reverberated in the Party in spite of everything, there were periodic purges...
Vol. 4 • January 1957 • No. 1
