The Thinking Reed

Collaboration with the Soviet power has already ceased to be a watchword. For a long time now it has been a reality for the whole of Russia’s intelligentsia. But collaboration does not mean absorption.125

They protested when the official press, ‘in the style of a sort of comical caricature’, depicted them as ‘repentant’ whiners who had at last understood the truth of Bolshevism. No, their attitude had resulted ‘from thinking about the general ideological collapse — which was general, that is, without any exception.’126 The intelligentsia might still have a lot to teach the Bolsheviks. They protested also against being identified with the nationalism of the right-wing Smenovekhists. Essentially, Novaya Rossiya sought to find a third way between nationalism and Communism, proclaiming the slogan: ‘Neither Third Rome nor Third International’.127 Such efforts were very fruitful on the theoretical plane. Thus long before Brzezinski there was formulated in the pages of Novaya Rossiya, in broad terms, a particular ‘theory of convergence’ which contemplated an inevitable rapprochement between capitalism and Communism: ‘As a result we shall get neither Communism nor a revival of the old (capitalist) type of industry, but a completely new economic formula.’128 Their principal interests, however, lay in the political field.

‘The swords of the revolution,’ wrote Lezhnev, ‘before being beaten into ploughshares, are being transformed into the blades of a guillotine. And the guillotine, like any other machine, is subject to the law of inertia.’129 According to Lezhnev, however, the frightfulness of the terror had been left behind. The Bolshevik regime was moving towards liberalization — the New Economic Policy and the cessation of the Red terror proved that this was so — and what was now necessary was to halt the momentum of the civil war. They believed in gradual democratization, in the quickening of free discussion in the Soviets:

The local Soviets will become municipal organs, the All-Union Central Executive Committee will turn into a Parliament, the trade unions will be transformed from general compulsory schools of Communism to voluntary associations of workers and the whole state apparatus, right up to the Council of People’s Commissars, will be emancipated from the Party.130

One cannot say that such a development of events was impossible in principle, but by 1922 it was already improbable. The dominant tendency was towards bureaucratization, not democratization.

The New Bureaucracy

During the civil war a new stratum emerged on the social scene and immediately asserted its rights. This was the Party and state bureaucracy. The early attempts to create a democratic organization of authority in the localities and free elections to Party organs failed to ‘take’ under war conditions. Moshe Lewin writes:

The constantly alarming nature of the situation and the extension of the state of emergency required a constant mobilization of the cadres, their transfer from one front to another, or from a military task to an economic one and vice versa. No democratic procedure would have made these solutions possible, but only authoritarian ones: orders, appointments and dismissals made them possible. These methods, which were sanctioned in no way either by theory or by statute, but which had been practised for three years, became a reality of Party life.131