The Thinking Reed

The prevalence of bureaucratic centralism in the state indicates that the leading group is saturated, that it is turning into a narrow clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or even by stifling the birth of oppositional forces — even if these forces are homogeneous with the fundamental dominant interests…137

The contradictions in the revolutionary government became more and more acute. ‘The Party-State apparatus,’ writes Carmichael,

rapidly solidifying in Stalin’s embrace, was creating its own momentum: this fundamental process no doubt underlay a poignant metaphor coined by Lenin at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922 — the strange feeling he had at the helm of the Soviet government like that that of a driver who suddenly notices that his ‘machine has got out of control’… Lenin was doubtless preoccupied by ‘bureaucratism’ toward the end of his short life.138

Not long before his death, Trotsky recalls, Lenin ‘was systematically preparing to deliver… a crushing blow at Stalin as personifying bureaucracy, the mutual shielding among officials, arbitrary rule and general rudeness.’139 It was Stalin whom Lenin saw, not without justification, as the embodiment of all these ‘qualities’.

Lenin’s criticism of bureaucracy has armed later generations of anti-Stalinist Communists with a number of important ideas, but first of all we need to mention the important defects in his approach to the problem. Moshe Lewin writes:

The continual increase in the number of civil servants and in their hold on the life of the country was facilitated by a conjunction of factors inherent in a backward country that had a real need for new administrative bodies and additional administrators, if it was to develop the economy along planned, centralist lines. But this meant — and Lenin did not realize it — that the bureaucracy would become the true social basis of power. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ political power, devoid of any social foundation. A regime must find some other social basis than the apparatus of repression itself. The ‘void’ in which the Soviet regime had seemed to be suspended had soon been filled, even if the Bolsheviks had not seen it, or did not wish to see it.140

The new bureaucracy was created out of various elements. It included both former officials and Communist workers, but the majority of its members came from the petty bourgeoisie. ‘The demobilization of the Red Army of five million played no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy,’ wrote Trotsky later.

The victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were pushed away gradually from actual participation in the leadership of the country.141

The same process went on inside the Party as well. In 1923 Trotsky wrote: