The Thinking Reed

The programme of eradicating barbarism by barbarous methods was objectively engendered by Russian conditions. But this programme concealed within itself an unresolved contradiction, for means always possess this dangerous property: that they may alter the end pursued. In their fight against barbarism by such methods the Bolshevik Party increasingly degenerated, and barbarism, Asiaticism and antidemocratism entered more and more into their ideology — into the consciousness of the mass of Party members, which grew in numbers but not always in moral stature. The Tenth Congress, by prohibiting factions in the Party, barred the last path to a democratic development of Bolshevism. The centralism of their organization, which gave the Bolsheviks cohesion, at the same time predetermined the decline in inner-Party freedom. Yet Asiaticism got its own back on them — not at once but only by degrees.

N. Sukhanov wrote that at first Bolshevik rule was ‘a peculiar sort of democratic absolutism’, but from the earliest days it was in danger of degenerating into bureaucratic absolutism.21 In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt very aptly compared the Bolsheviks’ rule in 1917 with enlightened absolutism.22 Its principal task was to save civilization in Russia — although it must be remembered that in this respect railways were for Lenin much more valuable than spiritual culture, for understandable reasons. The original plan of the Russian Communists was — relying on the power of the working class — gradually to advance towards a new society: democratic, socialist and delivered from the hated Asiaticism. That might have happened, had there not been the civil war. In the words of Giuseppe Boffa, ‘Lenin’s calculation was, to win the majority by unreservedly accepting the most important and widespread demands of the people at the moment when the Party took power.’23 But the new government was unable to avert the civil war, and events passed completely out of its control. The war compelled the Bolsheviks to take a number of measures which they thought would be only temporary but which soon were made permanent. Trotsky later recalled:

Democracy had been narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased. In the beginning the Party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure, obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet democracy, the leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as a principle but as an episodic act of self-defence.24

For Rosa Luxemburg the dictatorship of the proletariat ought to have manifested itself as a new ‘ manner of employing democracy, not its elimination'.25 Kautsky stressed that ‘we cannot mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat anything other than its rule on the basis of democracy.’26 These ideas corresponded fully to those of Marx and Engels. The latter declared that ‘the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was ‘a democratic republic’.27 The Bolsheviks, while not repudiating democratic ideas in principle, saw the dictatorship of the proletariat differently: on the one hand they stressed its temporary and transitional character; on the other, they associated it with severe restrictions on democracy. ‘In its essence’, Trotsky wrote, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organization for the production of the culture of a new society, but a revolutionary and military system struggling for it.’28 If victory for the revolution requires that the state become like an army in the field, there is no time for thoughts about freedom and democracy.