A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

And yet, though docile in terms of politics, the massed ranks of the Bolshevik Party were by no means easy to control. It was partly a problem of corrupt local cliques taking over the provincial party cells. In Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, everything was run by the local mafia of Bolshevik officials in alliance with the black-marketeers. They defied Moscow's orders and for several months sabotaged the efforts of its agent, a young Anastas Mikoyan, sent down by the Orgburo to impose control. But to a certain extent the whole of the party apparatus had also developed as a clientele system with many of the leaders at national level each controlling their own private networks of patronage in the provinces or in individual branches of the state. Lunacharsky filled the Commissariat of Enlightenment with his own friends and associates. Even Lenin gave several Sovnarkom posts to his oldest friends and relatives: Bonch-Bruevich and Fotieva, both close associates from his Geneva days, were made secretaries; Krupskaya was appointed Deputy Commissar for Education; Anna Ul'ianova, Lenin's sister, was placed in charge of child welfare; while her husband, Mark Elizarov, was made People's Commissar of Railways. But of all the party patrons, Stalin was by far the most powerful. Through his control of the Orgburo he was increasingly able to place his own supporters in many of the top provincial posts. The effect of all these placements was to transform the party into a loose set of ruling dynasties, each of them organized on their own 'family' or clan lines. It was thus inclined to break up into factions.⁶⁶

Lenin failed to understand the nature of his own party's bureaucratic problem. He could not see that the Bolshevik bureaucracy was fast becoming a distinct social caste with its own privileged interests apart from those of the working masses it claimed to represent. He responded to the abuses of the bureaucracy with administrative measures, as if a few minor technical adjustments were enough to eradicate the problem, whereas what was needed, at the very least, was a radical reform of the whole political system. Most of his measures proved counter-productive.

First, he tried to stop the build-up of corrupt local fiefdoms by ordering the party's leading cadres to be regularly moved by the Orgburo from post to post. Yet this merely widened the distance between the leaders and the rank and file and thus weakened the accountability of the former. It also increased Stalin's private patronage as the head of the Orgburo.

Then Lenin ordered periodic purges to weed out the undesirables who were attracted to the party as it grew. The first purge was carried out in the summer of 1918: it halved the membership from 300,000 to 150,000. During the spring of 1919 a second major purge was implemented which reduced the membership by 46 per cent. And once again, in the summer of 1920, 30 per cent of the members were purged from the party. Most of these purges were carried out at the expense of peasants and non-Russians, who were deemed the weakest link in social terms. The frequent call-up of party members to the Front also served as a form of purge since it encouraged the less than committed to tear up their party cards. The effect of all these purges was to destabilize the party rank and file (only 30 per cent of those who had joined the party between 1917 and 1920 still remained in it by 1922) and this was hardly likely to encourage loyalty.⁶⁷

Finally Lenin ordered the regular inspection of the apparatus. It was reminiscent of the tsarist regime with its own constant revisions which Gogol had satirized in The Government Inspector. A whole People's Commissariat known as Rabkrin was constructed for this purpose. Formed in February 1920 with Stalin at its head, it combined the two functions of state inspection and workers' control which had previously been carried out by separate bodies. Lenin's idea was to fight red tape and improve efficiency through constant reviews of all state institutions by the inspectorates of workers and peasants. In this way he thought the state could be made democratically accountable. But the result was just the reverse. Rabkrin soon became a bureaucratic monster (and another base of Stalin's growing patronage) with an estimated 100,000 officials, the majority of them white-collar workers, in its local cells by the end of 1920.⁶⁸ Instead of helping to cut down the bureaucracy, Rabkrin had merely increased it.