opposition parties faced a scenario for which their ideologies had ill-prepared them and they fell prey to bitter and debilitating splits. They also largely failed to capitalize on the
10. Derailed train with two Red Army soldiers
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g widespread popular disaffection with the Bolsheviks, evident, for § example, in the Left SRs* failure to oppose the deeply unpopular с committees of poor peasants. This was in part, then, a failure of political 9 leadership. Yet the opposition parties were caught by the dilemma of all
The massive problems of recruiting, feeding, and transporting the Red Army, of squeezing grain from an unwilling peasantry, and of overcoming parochialism and inertia at the local level created
irresistible pressures to centralize decision-making at the apex of the party. Moreover the constant emergencies of war fed the pressure to take instant decisions and to implement them forcefully, with the result that the p arty ca me i ncreasin gly to operate like ana rmy. By 1919 the Central Committee of what was now known as the Russian Communist Party (bolshevik) had become the centre where all key decisions were made before being passed on to Sovnarkom or the Soviet CEC for
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1
n
implementation. The Central Committee was dominated by an oligarchy
consisting of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin, and Bukharin,
but there was never any doubt that Lenin was first among equals. His
moral authority and his leadership skill, in particular his ability to
balance intransigence with compromise, held the oligarchy together.
There were no deep factional splits within the Central Committee,
although a loose group did resent Trotsky's talent and influence. By 1921
the Committee had doubled in size to cope with the growing volume of
business; and since its meetings were relatively infrequent, a Politburo of
five, formed in 1919, dealt with the most urgent business. This met at
least once a week and quickly became the most powerful decision
making body in the party-state. The sudden death from influenza in
March 1919 of la. M. Sverdlov,the party secretary, a man of indefatigable -
energy, led to a rapid expansion of the Orgburo and the Secretariat.*
Given the party's role in directing the different agencies of government, ^ this meant that the responsibility of the Orgburo for assigning personnel ?.
с
gave Stalin, its chair, extensive power.2.
The life-and-death struggle to preserve the state against internal^
counter-revolution and foreign intervention, and the relentless?>
necessity to deal with one emergency after another led to a gradualg-
change in the culture of the party. The paramount need to make fast^
ID
decisions and get things done meant that debate and internal|-
ID
democracy increasingly came to be seen as luxuries. This change in culture was linked at a deeper level to the change in the nature of the party from being a conspiratorial body bent on destroying the old order, to becoming a body seeking to build and manage a state. Gradually, the range of opinion permitted in the party narrowed. By the end of the civil war, it was inconceivable that a Bolshevik should argue - as had been perfectly possible in October 1917 - that other socialist parties should be represented in the Soviets or that freedom of the press should extend to 'bourgeois' publications. At the same time, as debate in a larger public sphere dried up, owing to the clampdown on the press and the elimination of opposition, so the party itself became the arena in which
67
political conflict was played out. Factions such as the Democratic Centralists inveighed against the 'dictatorship of party officialdom' in the vain hope of reconciling centralized decision-making with rank-and-file participation in party and soviet affairs; and the Workers' Opposition rallied against attempts to reduce the trade unions to impotence. Yet the tendency for expeditious decision-making to squeeze out debate and dissent was inexorable. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, against the distant roar of the Kronstadt cannons, factions were banned, supposedly as a temporary measure. The measure was never revoked.
As the party was transformed into the backbone of the new state, so it began to attract people who once would never have dreamed of becoming revolutionaries. Between the Eighth Congress in March 1919 and the Tenth, the party grew from 313,000 to 730,000, still a tiny ? proportion of the population. The proportion of worker members fell g by about a fifth to 41%, but many of these were in fact former workers e who now held positions in the state administration, economic g management, or the Red Army. The rest of the membership was more
The source of the woes and unpleasantness we are experiencing is the fact that the Communist Party consists of 10% convinced idealists who are ready to die for the idea, and go% hangers-on without consciences, who have joined the party in order to get a position.
Krasin was almost certainly exaggerating, but he articulated a widespread sense that the party was being hijacked by careerists. Indeed, it was precisely at this time that rank-and-file members began to attack the privileges enjoyed by 'those at the top'. What these amounted to can be seen from the diary entry for 24 November 1919 of the writer Kornei Chukovsky:
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Yesterday I was at Gorky's. Zinoviev was there. At the entrance I was amazed to see a magnificent car on the seat of which was carelessly thrown a bear skin. Zinoviev - short and fat - spoke in a hoarse and satiated voice.
Meanwhile as the state acquired ever more functions, its apparatus proliferated. By 1920 no fewer than 5.8 million people worked for the party-state. Many had worked inthesamejobs before the revolution and few had much