John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Despite the unrest in Glasgow and the agitation of British soldiers for faster demobilisation and against deployment to Russia (the former being as strong a motivation for the latter as solidarity with Russian workers), it is not the case that the country was, in the title of Chani Rosenberg’s study of that year, “on the brink of revolution”. Rosenberg and others exaggerate the extent to which strikes in Clydeside and soldiers’ protests against delayed demobilisation reflected wide-spread revolutionary sentiment. On the contrary, the General Election of November 1918, the first in which all men over 21 and all women over 30 could vote, returned a landslide majority for the wartime Tory/Liberal (Lloyd George) coalition. Labour secured 57 seats, but candidates known to have been anti-war or to favour a non-punitive peace treaty with Germany were defeated. Parties to the left of Labour secured less than 1% of the overall vote.

Proletarian revolution may have simmered briefly on Clydeside and in the Welsh mining valleys, but not elsewhere in Britain. Nor did it spread, as Lenin and Trotsky fervently hoped it would, from Budapest to Vienna and Berlin. Lenin’s mishandling and misunderstanding of the two most important parts of his political project, transforming the Russian economy and inspiring European revolution, reveal a truth about the man which is often overlooked–he was a complete amateur in the field in which he operated. He laid down ambitious, impractical schemes and was surprised when they didn’t work. Despite occasional reassessments of economic policy, he never once re-examined or questioned the monopoly of power exercised by the Bolshevik Party. On the contrary, he continued to delude himself that this constituted “Soviet power” and a “Commune State”.

Martov never believed in Lenin’s vision of the Commune State for an instant (not that he did not support such a project, he simply saw no correlation between the rhetoric and the reality). As early as 30th December, 1917 he wrote to his friend N.S. Kristi, who lived abroad, “What flourishes here is such a pseudo-socialism of ‘trenches and barracks’, founded on an all-out primitivisation of life and the cult of the fist […] that one cannot help feeling guilty before every civilised bourgeois”. He concluded, “We are undoubtedly moving through anarchy towards some sort of Ceaserism”. 14That Ceaserism slowly began to emerge, not from imperial triumph but from the depths of the party bureaucracy. The permanent installation in power of one party administering the Dictatorship of the Proletariat meant that there was no possibility of changing political administrations, no accountability through an independent media, no framework of law to hold state organs to account.

Without these safeguards the party-state grew into a vast network of interlocking governmental bodies staffed by an influx of new recruits to the Party. From 240,000 in October 1917, the membership of the Bolshevik (then Communist) Party skyrocketed to 732,000 by March 1921, although in response to complaints from ordinary workers at the abuse of power by party functionaries, the early 1920s saw a “purging” of new elements regarded as suspicious or careerist. The suspicions were justified. There was no mass conversion to Bolshevism after October 1917. Ambitious sons and daughters of the proletariat and peasantry saw the emergence of a new elite and wanted to be part of it. Brovkin records that “among workers, party membership was almost never associated with a set of political views or programmes. It was first and foremost a matter of moving into a different social world”. 15

A party card provided at least the minimum of housing, food and fuel, when most workers received even less. It also afforded some protection against the Cheka. Once they had their party cards new members were on the inside track, low-level functionaries of the only growth industry (aside from the Red Army) in Soviet Russia. As a cynical but popular limerick of the 1920s had it:

In the early months of 1918, the number of state officials–meaning working directly for the Russian Communist Party (RCP) and its organs such as the Commissariats, the Vesenka and the Cheka–was a relatively modest 114,359. A year later the total was 559,841. By the end of the following year, 1920, it had ballooned to nearly six million (5,880,000) officials employed directly or indirectly by the state. 17This was five times as many as the total number of workers employed in Russian industry.

Lenin grew incensed at the many examples of a slow-moving, inefficient bureaucracy weighed down with red tape. In 1921 he wrote to the Deputy Chairman of the Public Works Committee, “The Departments are shit. The Decrees are shit. To find men and check up on their work–that is the whole point”. 18Yet “checking up on their work” required more layers of bureaucracy. In 1919 he created the Workers’ and Peasant Inspectorate (Rabkrin) to do just that. Rabkrin, with its remit to investigate and remove state officials, was the perfect power base for an emerging leader. Lenin chose the loyal yet efficient Stalin as the head of the Inspectorate. Within a year he had turned it into “his private police within the government”. 19

The futility of Lenin’s approach to combating bureaucracy was lost on him. The only way to solve the problem was to dissolve the entire structure of one-party rule. That was not going to happen. On the contrary, the organs of central control continued to grow. The Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 formalised the role of the five-man Politburo, which would take all immediate decisions on implementation of policy and report periodically to the Central Committee. The Congress created two other important bodies: an Organisational Bureau (Orgburo) to “conduct the whole organisational work of the party”, and a Secretariat for the CC, which would organise party congresses,CC meetings, agenda, minutes, rule changes, etc. To avoid the danger of overlapping responsibilities, it was decided that one of the Politburo should also sit on the Orgburo and head the Secretariat. Stalin was again chosen for what looked like dull administrative work.

Power inevitably flowed to these smaller bodies. Between March and December 1919 the Central Committee met only six times, whereas the Politburo met 29 times and the Orgburo 110 times. Under Stalin’s direction, the Secretariat expanded in size from 15 staff in March 1919 to 80 staff by November 1919. Between March 1920 and March 1921 its total staff jumped from 150 to 602, including its own military detachment. One of the Secretariat’s responsibilities was the appointment and transfer of party members. Stalin reported to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 that in the previous year the Secretariat had been responsible for appointing and transferring 42,000 members.

Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. Between 1919 and 1922 he assiduously cultivated new regional and provincial party leaders–often workers and peasants overawed by Marxist theorists like Trotsky and Bukharin–and placed them in influential positions within the ever-growing machine. They owed him. When they came to Moscow to take part in Party Congresses and elect the Central Committee they looked to him for guidance and carried out his wishes. Trotsky, on the other hand, was often so bored by the slow, inane bureaucracy of CC meetings that he sat at the back reading French novels. The small-town delegates did not fail to notice the difference between the Jewish intellectual Trotsky, who told them Russia was “backward” and “uncultured” in comparison to Western Europe, and the rough Georgian Stalin, who avoided abstruse Marxist theory and talked robust common sense about building socialism in the motherland.