The struggle against bureaucracy
Ludo Martens
Trotsky invented the infamous term `Stalinist bureaucracy'. While Lenin was still living, late in 1923, he was already maneuvering to seize power within the Party:
Trotsky invented the infamous term `Stalinist bureaucracy'. While Lenin was still living, late in 1923, he was already maneuvering to seize power within the Party:
`[B]ureaucratization threatens to ... provoke a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard'.
Trotsky, The New Course, p. 72.
In his opposition platform, written in July 1926, his foremost attack was against `unbridled bureaucratism'.
Trotsky, The New Course, p. 85.
And once the Second World War had begun, Trotsky spent his time provoking the Soviet people in `acting against the Stalinist bureaucracy as it did previously against the Tsarist bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.'
Trotsky, Lettres aux travailleurs d'URSS (May 1940). La lutte antibureaucratique en URSS II: La révolution nécessaire 1933--1940 (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1975), pp. 301--302.
Trotsky always used the word `bureaucracy' to denigrate socialism.
Given this context, it might come as some surprise that throughout the thirties, the Party leaders, principally Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov, devoted a lot of energy to the struggle against the bureaucratic elements within the Party and State apparatus.
How did the struggle against bureaucratization and bureaucracy define itself in the thirties?
Anti-Communists against `bureaucracy'
First we should make sure that we agree about the meaning of terms.
As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power, the Right used the word `bureaucracy' to describe and denigrate the revolutionary régime itself. For the Right, any socialist and revolutionary enterprise was detestable, and automatically received the defamatory label of `bureaucratic'. Right from October 26, 1917, the Mensheviks declared their irreconcilable hostility with the `bureaucratic' Bolshevik régime, the result of a `coup d'état', a régime that could not be socialist because most of the country was peasant, a régime characterized by `state capitalism' and by the `dictatorship against the peasants'. This propaganda clearly intended the reversal of the dictatorship of the proletariat imposed under the Bolshevik régime.
But, in 1922, faced with the destruction of the productive forces in the countryside and trying to preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks were forced to back off, to make concessions to the individual peasants, to allow them the freedom to buy and sell. The Bolsheviks wanted to create in the countryside a kind of `state capitalism', i.e. the development of a small capitalism constrained and controlled by the (Socialist) State. At the same time, the Bolsheviks declared war on bureaucracy: they combatted the unchanged habits of the old bureaucratic apparatus and the tendency of new Soviet civil servants to adapt to it.
The Mensheviks sought then to return to the political scene by stating: `You, the Bolsheviks, you are now against bureaucracy and you admit to building state capitalism. This is what we said, what we have always said. We were correct.' Here is Lenin's answer:
`[T]he sermons ... the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature --- ``The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say again.'' But we say in reply: ``Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements.'' '
As can be seen above, Lenin vehemently dealt with counter-revolutionaries attacking the so-called `bureaucracy' to overthrow the socialist régime.
Bolsheviks against bureaucratization
Lenin and the Bolsheviks always led a revolutionary struggle against the bureaucratic deviations that, in a backward country, inevitably occurred within the apparatus of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They estimated that the dictatorship was also menaced `from inside' by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state apparatus.
The Bolsheviks had to `retake' part of the old Tsarist state apparatus, which had only been partially transformed in the socialist sense.
Futhermore, the Party and government apparatus in the countryside posed great problems, throughout the country. Between 1928 and 1931, the Party accepted 1,400,000 new members. Among this mass, many were in fact political illiterates. They had revolutionary sentiments, but no real Communist knowledge. Kulaks, old Tsarist officers and other reactionaries easily succeeded in infiltrating the Party. All those who had a certain capacity for organization were automatically accepted into the Party, as there were so few cadres. Between 1928 and 1938, the weight of the Party in the countryside remained weak, and its members were heavily influenced by the upper strata that intellectually and economically dominated the rural world. These factors all lead to problems of bureaucratic degeneration.
The first generation of revolutionary peasants had experienced the Civil War, when they were fighting the reactionary forces. The War Communism spirit, giving and receiving orders, maintained itself and gave birth to a bureaucratic style of work that was little based on patient political work.
For all these reasons, the struggle against the bureaucracy was always considered by Lenin and Stalin as a struggle for the purity of the Bolshevik line, against the influences of the old society, the old social classes and oppressive structures.
Under Lenin as under Stalin, the Party sought to concentrate the best revolutionaries, the most far-seeing, active, firm and organically tied to the masses, within the Central Committee and the leading organs. The leadership of the Party always sought to mobilize the masses to implement the tasks of socialist construction. It was at the intermediate levels, most notably in the Republic apparatuses, that bureaucratic elements, careerists and opportunists could most easily set up and hide. Throughout the period in which Stalin was the leader of the Party, Stalin called for the leadership and the base to mobilize to hound out the bureaucrats from above and from below. Here is a 1928 directive, typical of Stalin's view.
`Bureaucracy is one of the worst enemies of our progress. It exists in all our organizations .... The trouble is that it is not a matter of the old bureaucrats. It is a matter of the new bureaucrats, bureaucrats who sympathize with the Soviet Government and finally, communist bureaucrats. The communist bureaucrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of Party member.'
Stalin, Speech delivered at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League. Selected Works, p. 286.
After having presented several grave cases, Stalin continued:
`What is the explanation of these shameful instances of corruption and moral deterioration in certain of our Party organizations? The fact that Party monopoly was carried to absurd lengths, that the voice of the rank and file was stifled, that inner-Party democracy was abolished and bureaucracy became rife .... I think that there is not and cannot be any other way of combating this evil than by organizing control from below by the Party masses, by implanting inner-Party democracy. What objection can there be to rousing the fury of the mass of the Party membership against these corrupt elements and giving it the opportunity to send these elements packing?'
Ibid. , p. 287.
`There is talk of crit(i)cism from above, criticism by the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, by the Central Committee of the Party and so on. That, of course, is all very good. But it is still far from enough. More, it is by no means the chief thing now. The chief thing now is to start a broad tide of criticism against bureaucracy in general, against shortcomings in our work in particular. Only (then) ... can we count on waging a successful struggle against bureaucracy and on rooting it out.'
Ibid. , p. 288.
Reinforce public education
First, to struggle against bureaucracy, Stalin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party reinforced public education.
At the beginning of the thirties, they created Party schools to give elementary courses to people in the rural world who had never had a basic political education. The first systematic course about the history of the Party was published in 1929 by Yaroslavsky: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is a well written book. In 1938, a second shorter version, was written under Stalin's supervision: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course.
Between 1930 and 1933, the number of Party schools increased from 52,000 to more than 200,000 and the number of students from one million to 4,500,000. It was a remarkable effort to give a minimum of political coherence to hundreds of thousands who had just entered the Party.
Getty, op. cit. , p. 22.
Regularly purge the Party
One of the most effective methods in the struggle against bureaucratic disintegration is the verification-purge.
In 1917, the Party had 30,000 members. In 1921, there were almost 600,000. In 1929, there were 1,500,000. In 1932, they were 2,500,000. After each massive recruitment wave, the leadership had to sort. The first verification campaign was conducted in 1921, under Lenin. At that moment, 45 per cent of the Party members in the countryside were excluded, 25 per cent in the entire Party. It was the largest purge campaign that was ever done. One fourth of the members did not meet the most elementary criteria.
In 1929, 11 per cent of the members left the Party during a second verification campaign.
In 1933, there was a new purge. It was thought that it would last four months. In fact, it lasted two years. The Party structures, the control mechanisms and the actual control of the central leadership were so lacking that it was not even possible to plan and to effect a verification campaign. Eventually, 18 per cent of the members would be expelled.
What were the criteria for expulsion?
-- Those who were expelled were people who had once been kulaks, white officers or counter-revolutionaries.
-- Corrupt or overly ambitious people, or unrepentant bureaucrats.
-- People who rejected Party discipline and simply ignored directives of the Central Committee.
-- People who had committed crimes or sexually abused others, drunkards.
During the verification campaign of 1932--1933, the leadership remarked that not only did it have a difficult time in ensuring that its instructions were followed, but also that the Party's administration in the countryside was quite deficient. No one knew who was a member and who was not. There were 250,000 lost and stolen cards and more than 60,000 blank cards had disappeared.
At this time, the situation was so critical that the central leadership threatened to expel regional leaders who were not personally implicated in the campaign.
But the carefree attitude of regional keaders often transformed into bureaucratic interventionism: members of the base were purged without any careful political inquiry. This problem was regularly discussed at the highest level between 1933 and 1938. The January 18, 1938 issue of Pravdapublished a Central Committee directive, putting forth one more time this theme of Stalin's:
`Certain of our Party leaders suffer from an insufficiently attentive attitude toward people, toward party members, toward workers. What is more, they do not study the party workers, do not know how they are coming along and how they are developing, do not know their cadres at all .... And precisely because they do not take an individualized approach to the evaluation of party members and party workers they usually act aimlessly --- either praising them indiscriminately and beyond measure, or chastising them also indiscriminately and beyond measure, expelling them from the party by the thousands and tens of thousands .... But only persons who are in essence profoundly anti-party can take such an approach to party members.'
On Deficiencies in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyites and Other Double Dealers. McNeal, op. cit. , p. 183.
In this document, Stalin and the rest of the leadership deal with the correct means for purging the Party of undesirable elements who infiltrated the base. But the text was already outlining a completely new form of purge: the one that would clean out the Party leadership of the most bureaucratized elements. Two of Stalin's preoccupations can be found therein: an individual approach must be adopted towards all cadres and members, and one must know personally and in depth one's collaborators and subordinates. In the chapter on the anti-fascist work, we will show how Stalin himself undertook these tasks.
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