Lenin 150: Revisiting Lenin’s Understanding of Democracy in post-revolutionary Russia | Sobhanlal Datta Gupta

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The literature on Lenin spanning the Cold War as well as the post-Cold War era has been broadly characterized by two rather opposite viewpoints: deification or demonization of this iconic figure of the twentieth century. The exponents of deification, most of whom are official ideologues of mainstream communist and workers’ parties, highlight Lenin’s two seminal contributions to Marxism: i) the theory of the party and strategy of socialist revolution; ii) the theory of imperialism. While the theory of imperialism is viewed in the context of Marxian political economy, the theory of the party and revolution essentially focuses on how he espoused the cause of a centralized and disciplined party, which would be instrumental in the making of the socialist revolution. Historically speaking, this moment was constituted by the victory of the November Revolution under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Those who have contributed to the demonization of Lenin, predominantly the Cold War historians of the West, harp on precisely the image of Lenin as the theorist of a centralized party, which, they argue, laid the foundation of one-party dictatorship in post-revolutionary Russia. Interestingly, notwithstanding the sharp dividing line that distinguishes the first from the second position, what brings them together is that the standard mainstream interpreters of Lenin somehow underplay the issue of democracy in Lenin’s thinking except simply referring to his call for giving all power to the Soviets. This in a way lends credence to those who accuse Lenin of authoritarianism, his alleged dictatorial ambitions and love for power.

The objective of this presentation is to underscore the point that, while in the pre-revolutionary years Lenin was primarily engaged in theorizing the party, its central text being What is to be Done ?  (1902), in the post-revolutionary era his major concern was the building of socialism by energizing the masses, The State and Revolution (1917) being the intervening text. This, however, does not suggest that his agenda of building socialism implied a negation of the role of the Party. What has remained unattended in the standard discussions on Lenin is how he reimagined the role of the Party in the context of building socialism which called for the assertion of the democratic power of the masses. To be more precise, the central theoretical question that Lenin had to address in the post-revolutionary period was how to bring the masses to the forefront in his project of building socialism and rework the concept of the Party accordingly. While the vanguardist notion of the Party was a contributory factor for the victory of the socialist revolution, did it come in conflict with the notion of the masses in post-revolutionary conditions? In other words, did the imperative of building socialism lead to the problem of incompatibility between the Party and the masses, between vanguardism and democracy?

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If one carefully goes through Lenin’s writings on the period between the months preceding and following the November Revolution, two interrelated issues engage our attention. One refers to his focus on centralization, which was associated with his concept of leading the revolution under the guidance of a centralized Party. The other was his project of building socialism in the post-revolutionary phase under conditions over which the Bolsheviks had very little control. This ranged from backwardness to the counterrevolutionary offensive of the White guards as well as intervention of Western imperialist powers. In this highly complex situation, the task of building socialism had to be initiated in conditions of rigid and stringent political control of the Bolshevik Party. Workers’ democracy as well as Soviet power, that is, the kernel of socialism, the theoretical expression of which was Lenin’s State and Revolution, was thus given a temporary burial under the slogan of War Communism (1918-20). In this period marked by terror and violence, there was hardly any space left for democracy and freedom. In this era of War Communism, preoccupied as it was with the task of repulsing the forces of counterrevolution, Lenin had very little space left for paying attention to the task of building socialism. But the resultant experience of this period convinced many young members of the Bolshevik Party (i.e. Nikolai Bukharin) that the authoritarian model of War Communism was appropriate enough for taking up the project of building a new revolutionary socialist order. In other words, the success of War Communism in thwarting the threat of counterrevolution, it came to be believed, would be replicated in the making of socialism too.

It is on this question that Lenin sharply differed from his colleagues. He was troubled by two problems. First, from the very beginning, he harboured the idea that the survival of socialism would depend on the victory of socialist revolution in the West, notably in Germany, where the working class had a far more advanced level of consciousness in comparison with that of the Russian workers. But the defeat of the German Revolution, the failure of workers’ uprisings in different parts of Western and Central Europe belied the expectations of Lenin. It is precisely for this reason that Lenin so strongly pinned his faith in the formation of the Communist International (Comintern) and its expansion throughout the world. In other words, the sustenance of the post-revolutionary order in Russia would demand international support and solidarity. Second, in terms of production and economic growth the model of command economy, which was the fallout of War Communism, would be a retrograde step. The model that worked for repelling the enemy would not work for laying the foundations of a socialist economy, the cornerstone of which would be worker-peasant alliance. It is this concern which prompted Lenin to opt for NEP. Although it was a strategy of compromise with the market forces in the given historical situation this was the only alternative for generation of production and winning the confidence of the peasantry, the latter having been largely alienated under the spell of War Communism.

Lenin, however, had two other interrelated considerations in mind, while espousing the cause of NEP. One was the imperative of efficiency and management in organizing the new order. The other factor was the reality that the new order that emerged in post-revolutionary Russia was characterized by lack of administrative personnel and, most importantly, the Russian masses severely lacked the kind of culture and consciousness that socialism needed. For alleviation of this problem Lenin had to fall back upon the bureaucracy of the pre-revolutionary era, since administration is a highly technical and skilled job. For Lenin the dilemma was that, while reliance on bureaucracy was a historical compulsion this, in turn, led to bureaucratization which, again, posed a threat to the very project of building socialism. This was Lenin’s first challenge and his panacea for countering this menace was quite unique, namely, the democratization of the Party by linking it to the masses, a plan which looked quite different from the structure of the Party that had been outlined in What is to be done ? His second challenge was resolution of the nationality question, more specifically, the Georgian question, and his trenchant critique of those who handled this question in the Bolshevik Party was clearly indicative of his choice of a democratic and not an authoritarian path in this regard. The third problem that worried Lenin was that as War Communism had largely alienated the peasant masses because of the Bolshevik policy of forcible collection of grains, they had to be reined in for building up a proper worker-peasant alliance, which would constitute the fulcrum of the new order. For Lenin, again, this had to be a democratic path, a path of tolerance, which he labeled as the strategy of cooperation. Commentators like Moshe Lewin [1] and Christopher Read [2], who have extensively dwelt on Lenin’s understanding of the building of socialism in post-revolutionary Russia, broadly focus on all these issues. Besides, they have also discussed Lenin’s treatment of the succession question, his very strong recommendation in his Testament (“Letter to the Congress†) that Stalin should be removed from the post of General Secretary because of his high-handedness and authoritarian inclinations. [3] In the following section I will elaborate these issues in the light of Lenin’s texts, except the succession question, since this is not directly connected with his project of building socialism.

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The first major problem that Lenin had to confront put him in a dilemma. At one level in order to meet the exigencies of administrative efficiency and management he had to rein in the bureaucrats of the old order, had to provide space to the NEP men, keeping in mind the considerations of market economy the opening up of which was the desperate need of the hour. At another level they had to be controlled, put under surveillance and for this he had to take the Party into confidence. This had the inevitable fall out of the Party itself becoming a huge bureaucratic machine in the name of controlling bureaucracy at the governmental level. This was strongly evident in the writings, letters and notes of Lenin in the period 1921-23. In “Purging the Party†(20 September, 1921) he warned of two dangers threatening the Party. One referred to those who had “attached themselves to the Party†for “selfish motives†, who had become “puffed-up commissars†and “bureaucrats.†The other element that Lenin had in mind was constituted by the Mensheviks who had joined the Bolshevik Party after 1918, apparently adapting themselves to the ideology of Bolshevism, but actually who were nothing but turncoats and opportunists. [4] So Lenin’s blunt conclusion was that the Party ‘must be purged of rascals, of bureaucratic, dishonest or wavering Communists, and of Mensheviks who have “repainted†their façade but who have remained Mensheviks at heart.’ [5] Lenin elaborated this problem furthermore in his “The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments†(19 October, 1921) where he unambiguously identified three enemies that had to be overcome in the period of socialist construction. These were communist conceit, illiteracy and bribery. [6]

Both Lewin [7] and Read [8] have made a two-fold allegation that Lenin, while addressing the issue of bureaucratism and corruption in the Party, he did not take the masses into confidence rather he pinned his faith in the very Party which was the source of the evils that it had to combat. This, they argue, was an exercise in elitism or in the conflict between construction of socialism and complete creative freedom of the masses he arrested the latter. This position needs to be contested on two grounds. First, for Lenin the masses, of course, constituted the historical subject who would build socialism but what they lacked was appropriate culture, the right kind of consciousness that was needed for building the most advanced order in human history, namely, socialism. So it was a conflict between the objective necessity that the Russian masses were destined to build socialism and their subjective limitations in accomplishing this task. Second, the masses, therefore, had to be equipped and trained in a culture that socialism demanded. For that the Party would have to act as the agency but it would have to reorient and debureaucratize itself and democratize its own functioning, a project that remained unfulfilled and unheeded. This would make the Party look different from the one we come across in What is to be done ? The central concern of Lenin, therefore, was how to rework the concept of the Party in conformity with the task of building the new socialist apparatus, how to effect an appropriate linkage between the functioning of the Party and the functioning of the state in the new situation that post-revolutionary Russia had to confront. This was not elitism but a call for making the functioning of the Party more democratic, more humane. Lenin’s last writings are reflective of this spirit.

Klara Zetkin, for example, remembers, what Lenin told her in a conversation:

So that art may come to the people, and the people to art, we must first of all raise the general level of education and culture. And how is our country in that respect? You are amazed at the tremendous cultural work we have accomplished since the seizure of power. Without being boastful we can say that we have done much in this respect, very much. ... Of course we are carrying on a vigorous campaign against illiteracy. We are setting up libraries and “reading huts†in the small towns and villages. We are organizing educational courses of the most varied nature. We arrange good theatrical production and concerts, we send “educational tableaux†and “traveling exhibitions†over the country. But I repeat, what is all that to the many millions who lack the most elementary knowledge, the most primitive culture! While in Moscow to-day ten thousand—and perhaps to-morrow another ten thousand—are charmed by brilliant theatrical performances, millions are crying out to learn the art of spelling, of writing their names, of counting, are crying for culture, are anxious to learn, for they are beginning to understand that the universe is ruled by natural laws, and not by the “Heavenly Father†and his witches and wizards. [9]

Again,

And what are our prospects for the future? We have established splendid institutions and taken really good steps to enable the proletarian and peasant youths to learn to study, to gain culture. But here again the tormenting question arises: What is that among so many? Still worse! We have far too few kindergartens, children’s homes, elementary schools. Millions of children are growing up without instruction without education, they are growing up in the ignorance and lack of culture of their fathers and grandfathers. How much talent will be wasted, how many aspirations crushed. That is a cruel crime against the happiness of the growing generation and a robbery of the wealth of the Soviet State which is to develop into a Communist society. It is a grave danger for the future. [10]

 In “Pages from a Diary†(2 January, 1923) Lenin wrote:

At a time when we hold forth on proletarian culture and the relation in which it stands to bourgeois culture, facts and figures reveal we are in a very bad way even as far as bourgeois culture is concerned. As might have been expected, it appears that we are still a very long way from attaining universal literacy, and that even compared with tsarist times (1897) our progress has been far too slow. This should serve as a stern warning and reproach to those who have been soaring in the empyreal (sic !) heights of “proletarian culture†. It shows what a vast amount of urgent spade-work we still have to do reach the standard of an ordinary West-European civilized country. It also shows what a vast amount of work we have to do today to achieve, on the basis of our proletarian gains, anything like a real cultural standard. [11]

The same concern for lack of culture was again expressed by Lenin in “Our Revolution† (16 January, 1923), as he wrote:

If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism (...), why cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way and then, with the aid of the workers’ and peasants’ government and the Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations ? [12] (Emphasis original)

To meet this gap the Party had to be reined in but this required self-purification, debureaucratization and democratization of the Party itself. Lenin realized that it was not an easy job to accomplish since this involved the task of reorienting the Party in a completely new spirit. Lenin very clearly put forward a number of recommendations in this regard in the last writings of his life (1921-23). These involved, according to Lenin, the following steps which touched upon simultaneously the reorganization of the state and the Party. First, he proposed an outreach of the Party meaning thereby expansion of contacts between the Party and the non-Party masses. Here it is evident that Lenin aimed at instituting the sovereignty of not the Party but the masses and stated in unambiguous terms that the Party had to learn from the masses. He pointed out that suggestions coming from the non-Party proletarian masses, non-Party peasant masses were extremely valuable, since the “working masses have a fine intuition, which enables them to distinguish honest and devoted Communists from those who arouse the disgust of people earning their bread by the sweat of their brow,...†[13] While admitting that it is not necessary to submit to everything the masses say because they too, “in time of exceptional weariness and exhaustion resulting from excessive hardship and suffering ---- yield to sentiments that are in no way advanced†[14], he said that it was very important to take the suggestions of the non-Party working people into consideration, which would yield good results, would strengthen the Party as vanguard. [15] The Party would thus act as the agency which would learn from the masses and meet their demands and aspirations.

Second, his proposal of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin), which would oversee the functioning of the Soviet state apparatus, characterized as it was by many bureaucratic distortions, was adhered to but Lenin, extremely unhappy as he was with its functioning, recommended its complete overhaul. He was already quite frustrated with the performance of the members of the Political Education Department of the Party, as they had very little awareness of the scale of bribery and corruption that had infected the Party. [16] The Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, which was supposed to act as a surveillance mechanism, itself turned out to be ineffective bureaucratic machinery, serving virtually no purpose. So Lenin prescribed a two-fold reorganization, namely, its amalgamation with the Central Control Commission of the Party and reduction of its own size. So his first proposal was that the Congress (he had in mind the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress) should elect 75-100 new members to the Central Control Commission of the Party, who should be workers and peasants and would have to be screened as members of the Central Committee, since they would enjoy the same rights as members of the Central Committee. His second proposal was drastic reduction of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection to 300-400 persons, who needed to be “specially screened for conscientiousness and knowledge of our state apparatus. They must undergo a special test as regards their knowledge of the principles of scientific organization of labour in general, and of administrative work, office work, and so forth, in particular.†[17] A quick look at these recommendations at once suggests that Lenin was actually pleading for a Party-state, which perhaps was the need of the hour in the extraordinary situation that post-revolutionary Russia was passing through. In this scenario the revamped Central Control Commission would primarily play a political role in the reorganization of the state apparatus, while the managerial, administrative functions would be overseen by the Rabkrin. But this was not enough. Lenin was quite sceptical of the growing authority of the Central Committee which also needed to be checked and this necessitated the pro-active role of the Central Control Commission. So he proposed the reform that, while the members of the Central Control Commission would have to attend meetings of the Politbureau, “they should not allow anybody’s authority without exception, neither that of the General Secretary nor of any other member of the Central Committee, to prevent them from putting questions, verifying documents, and, in general, from keeping themselves fully informed of all things and from exercising the strictest control over the proper conduct of affairs.†[18] This whole idea of reorganization was rooted in Lenin’s understanding that the state machinery that the Bolsheviks had at their disposal was useless, a relic of the past. The enormous task of reorganization, the central axis of which could have been the Rabkrin, was severely impeded by Rabkrin itself, as it played “entirely into the hands of our Soviet and Party bureaucracy. Let it be said in parentheses that we have bureaucrats in our Party offices as well as in Soviet offices.†[19] In this connection Lenin identified two factors in order to combat the problem of reorganization of the state apparatus. First, he focused on the workers who were “absorbed in the struggle for socialism†, but what they lacked was education and culture. Second, what they further lacked was education and training, that is, the technicalities of administration, and, therefore, they had “to learn, learn and learn†from the experience of advanced countries. [20]

Third, as Lenin became increasingly sceptical of the functioning of Rabkrin, in his “Letter to the Congress†(1922-23) he made recommendations for democratization of the Central Committee in two ways. First, he suggested induction of new members in the Central Committee, ranging from a few dozen to hundred. [21] Second, those who would be inducted should represent the rank-and-file workers. In the following lines Lenin justified this step in a remarkable manner:

In my opinion, the workers admitted to the Central Committee should come preferably not from among those who have had long service in Soviet bodies (in this part of my letter the term workers everywhere includes peasants) , because those workers have already acquired the very traditions and the very prejudices which it is desirable to combat.

 

The working-class members of the C.C. must be mainly workers of a lower stratum than those promoted in the last five years to work in Soviet bodies; they must be people closer to being rank-and-file workers and peasants, who, however, do not fall into the category of direct or indirect exploiters. I think that by attending all sittings of the C.C. and all sittings of the Political Bureau, and by reading all the documents of the C.C., such workers can form a staff of devoted supporters of the Soviet system, able, first, to give stability to the C.C. itself, and second, to work effectively on the renewal and improvement of the state apparatus. [22]

This is how Lenin demonstrated his democratic temper, his ultimate faith and confidence in the creative potential and learning capacity of the ordinary workers and peasants, whose induction in the Party’s leadership would make it a viable instrument for advancing the cause of socialism.

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Another issue that irked Lenin was the Party’s inept handling of the nationality question. He was convinced that the project of building socialism involved the participation of all nationalities of the Russian Federation, notwithstanding the fact that the Russians perhaps were historically destined to play a bigger role. That he uncompromisingly decried Russian chauvinism is evident from the following note of Lenin (6 October, 1922):

I declare war to the death on dominant nation chauvinism. I shall eat it with all my healthy teeth as soon as I get rid of my accursed bad tooth.

 

It must be absolutely insisted that the Union Central Executive Committee should be presided over in turn by a

 

Russian,

 

Ukrainian,

 

Georgian, etc.

 

Absolutely !  [23](Emphasis original)

But Lenin was quite aware of the fact that this understanding was not shared by even the closest of his colleagues in the Bolshevik Party, notably Stalin and Orjonikidze, who were in charge of handling the nationality question. In his extremely perceptive note entitled’ “The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation†’, which constituted a part of his “Letter to the Congress†, Lenin made two key observations. First, he warned against the danger of great Russian chauvinism vis-à-vis other nationalities, as this would alienate them. He thereby touched upon the lack of “a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully†[24], the crux of the argument being the following:

It would be unpardonable opportunism if, on the eve of the debut of the East, just as it is awakening, we undermined our prestige with its peoples, even if only by the slightest crudity or injustice towards our own non-Russian nationalities. The need to rally against the imperialists of the West, who are defending the capitalist world, is one thing. There can be no doubt that about that and it would be superfluous for me to speak about my unconditional approval of it. It is another thing when we ourselves lapse, even if only in trifles, into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities, thus undermining all our principled sincerity, all our principled defence against imperialism. [25]

Second, extremely perturbed as Lenin was by the report that he received from Dzerzhinsky on how Stalin and Orjonikidze handled the Georgian question by using violent measures, he squarely blamed both of them for their reckless action. He castigated Stalin for ‘his haste and infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious “nationalist-socialism†’26 [26], the latter being a pejorative expression to identify any kind of nationalist aspiration. He, in fact, recommended that exemplary punishment be inflicted on Orjonikidze and stated unhesitatingly that the “political responsibility for all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky†, the latter being responsible for adopting a “light-hearted attitude.†[27] For Lenin, however, it was not simply a blame game. He reflected on a larger issue that is, why was it that his colleagues were inclined to adopt such punitive measures against non-Russians. The answer lay, in his opinion, in the bureaucratic, alien, useless state apparatus which the Bolsheviks had inherited from the past, which he described as “a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch†, “slightly anointed with Soviet oil†, his comrades having become part of this structure. In other words, the nationality question too was part of the larger project of democratization of the state apparatus in the post-revolutionary phase.

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Apart from the question of combating bureaucracy and building up of the new state apparatus and the nationality question the third problem that Lenin had to confront was that of winning the confidence of the peasantry, which had been alienated in the period of War Communism. Taking lessons from the wrong policy that had been adopted in regard to the peasantry in this period, Lenin warned in “Pages from a Diary†that the countryside was not prepared for the acceptance of communist ideas, since it was not materially and culturally ready to digest this idea. The theoretical argument was that the peasantry was not yet inclined to part with the idea of considering the produce as its own property and so what was necessary was to establish contacts between the urban workers and rural masses, forging thereby a kind of comradeship. [28] In other words, the focal point of Lenin was that the project of building socialism in the NEP era would have to be worked out by enlisting the support of the peasant masses and that it would have to be ensured by adopting the strategy of cooperation and not coercion, as had been mistakenly done in the period of War Communism.

This was elaborated by Lenin in another extremely profound essay “On Cooperation†(6 January, 1923), where he underscored the necessity of inducting the peasants in the work of cooperative building, a project that had yet to be tested on the Soviet soil but the potentialities of which had not been tapped. But the peasants themselves, Lenin lamented, were not culturally oriented to accept this idea, especially in a set up at the centre of which stood the old, useless state machinery of the past epoch. To cite Lenin’s words:

Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch --- to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants. And the economic object of this educational work among the peasants is to organise the latter in co-operative societies. If the whole of the peasantry had been organised in co-operatives, we would by now standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organization of the entire peasantry in co-operative societies presupposes a standard of culture among the peasants (precisely among the peasants as the overwhelming mass) that cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution. [29]

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This image of Lenin that emerges in the context of building socialism in post-revolutionary Russia is thus altogether different from the mainstream perception. Here Lenin is not pleading for centralism but democratization. Considerations of management and efficiency overrule party centralism. He indulges in brutal self-criticism, as he is confronted by three challenges: a revolution that has taken place by default in a country where the cultural backwardness of the masses emerges as a constraining factor; a Party that is infected with bureaucracy and corrupt practices which threatens to jeopardise the gains of the revolution; a state apparatus that is useless, while a new apparatus appropriate for building socialism is yet to be born. It is a desperate situation in which a sick man, a dying man, is engaged in a lone battle to save the revolution, to build socialism, to unfold democratic practices in the period 1921-23. These were the most critical years in Lenin’s life and the image of Lenin that emerges contests the familiar image of Lenin that mainstream Marxism presents. Till now, this new Lenin has remained almost hidden, undiscovered, unattended. In the hour of crisis which the Left faces today we perhaps require a deep exploration of this new Lenin whereby it might be possible to open up new frontiers in our search for building a brave new world of the future.

Author:

Former Surendra Nath Banerjee Professor of Political Science, University of Calcutta