In February 1917, the Bolshevik Party had no more than about 8,000 members in the whole of Russia. At the height of the civil war, when Party membership involved personal risk, the ranks were thrown open to the workers, who pushed the membership up to 200,000. But as the civil war grew to a close, the Party membership actually trebled, reflecting an influx of careerists and elements from hostile classes and parties. These elements had to be rooted out. The necessary ‘purge’ initiated by Lenin in 1921 had nothing in common with the monstrous frame-up trials of Stalin; there were no police, no trials, no prison camps; merely the weeding out of petty bourgeois and Menshevik careerists in order to preserve the ideas and traditions of October from the poisonous effects of petty bourgeois reaction. By early 1922, some 200,000 members (one third of the membership) had been expelled.
As early as 1919 the Bolshevik government had also organised the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (known as Rabkrin, from the acronym of its Russian name). Its task was to weed out careerists and bureaucrats in the state and party apparatus. Stalin, given his record as a good organiser, was put in charge of Rabkrin. However, in a short space of time, Stalin’s narrow, organisational outlook and personal ambition led him to occupy the post as the chief spokesman of the bureaucracy in the Party leadership, not as its opponent. Stalin used his position, which enabled him to select personnel for leading posts in the state and Party, to quietly gather round himself a bloc of allies and yes-men, political nonentities who were grateful to him for their advancement. In Stalin’s hands, Rabkrin became an instrument for building up his own position and eliminating his political rivals.
By the end of 1920 the number of state officials had mushroomed from a little over 100,000 to an astonishing 5,880,000. This was five times the number of industrial workers. In the Red Army, such was the shortage of military skill that former tsarist officers were enlisted to fight against the White armies. By August 1920, 48,409 former tsarist officers had been called up as military specialists. These layers had no deep-seated loyalty to the Soviet state. In order to persuade them to provide their services and prevent them from fleeing to the other side, the Bolshevik government was forced to grant them considerable privileges. Also, political commissars were appointed to oversee the loyalty of these officers and provide an essential instrument of workers’ control over these layers.
Lenin’s intention was gradually to involve the whole of the working class in the tasks of running the state: “Our aim is to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, … to ensure that every toiler, having finished his eight hours’ ‘task’ in productive labour, shall perform state duties without pay.” (LCW, Vol. 27, p. 273.) But under the prevailing conditions of backwardness, this proved impossible. The young Soviet state was forced to make use of whatever they could of the leftovers of the old state machine. In March 1918, Lenin told the Party Congress that “the bricks of which socialism will be composed have not yet been made”. (Ibid., p. 148.)
Given the low cultural level, every lever, every toehold would be used to further the revolution. As we have seen, the prevailing illiteracy forced the Bolsheviks to rely on the old tsarist bureaucracy (“slightly anointed with Soviet oil”), administrators, government functionaries, military commanders and factory managers. This was unavoidable, at least until assistance arrived from the West. This would have far reaching consequences later on. But, at that time, there was simply no alternative. When Lenin asked Trotsky during the civil war whether it was best to replace the old tsarist officers, which were controlled by political commissars, with other Communists, Trotsky replied:
“But do you know how many of them we have in the army now?”
“No.”
“Not even approximately?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not less than thirty thousand.”
“What?”
“Not less than thirty thousand. For every traitor, there are a hundred dependable; for everyone who deserts, there are two or three that get killed. How are we to replace them all?”
A few days later Lenin was making a speech on the problems of constructing the socialist commonwealth. This is what he said:
“When comrade Trotsky recently informed me that in our military department the officers are numbered in tens of thousands, I gained a concrete conception of what constitutes the secret of making proper use of our enemy… of how to build communism out of the bricks that the capitalists had gathered to use against us”. (Trotsky, My Life, pp. 464-5.)
In relation to the state itself, Lenin told the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922:
We took over the old machinery of state and that was our misfortune. We have a vast army of government employees, but lack the educated forces to exercise real control over them… At the top, we have, I don’t know how many, but at all events no more than a few thousand… Down below there are hundreds of thousands of old officials we got from the Tsar and from bourgeois society… (LCW, Vol. 33, p. 430.)
As always Lenin explained the harsh truth about the Soviet state apparatus. He never entertained any idealised view of this wretched organ, which had been largely inherited from the past. It was a bureaucratic machine, coloured by a thin socialist varnish. He understood full well that this bureaucracy was not simply a matter of bureaucratic behaviour, excessive red tape, officialdom, etc. Such an approach has nothing in common with the Marxist method. Marxism explains bureaucracy as a social phenomenon, which arises for definite material reasons. In the case of Russia, it arose from the isolation of the revolution in a backward, illiterate peasant country.
Lenin explained the rise of bureaucracy as a parasitic, capitalist growth on the organism of the workers’ state. The October Revolution had overthrown the old order, ruthlessly suppressed and purged the tsarist state but, in conditions of chronic economic and cultural backwardness, the elements of the old order were creeping back everywhere into positions of privilege and power in the measure that the revolutionary wave ebbed back with the defeats of the international revolution. There was a real danger that the revolution could suffer a bureaucratic degeneration. As such, Lenin denounced the growing bureaucratic threat and demanded a ruthless struggle against it:
We threw out the old bureaucrats, but they have come back… They wear a red ribbon in their buttonholes and creep into warm corners. What to do about it? We must fight this scum again and again and if the scum has crawled back we must again and again clean it up, chase it out, keep it under the surveillance of Communist workers and peasants whom we have known for more than a month and for more than a year. (LCW, Vol. 29, pp. 32-3.)
Engels explained that in every society where art, science and government are the preserve of a privileged minority, then that minority will always use and abuse these positions in its own interests. And this state of affairs is inevitable, so long as the vast majority of the people are forced to toil for long hours in industry and agriculture for the basic necessities of life. After the revolution, with the ruined conditions of industry, the working day was not reduced, but lengthened. Workers toiled ten, twelve hours and more a day on subsistence rations; many worked weekends without pay voluntarily. But, as Trotsky explained, the masses can only sacrifice their ‘today’ for their ‘tomorrow’ up to a very definite limit.
Inevitably, the strain of war, of revolution, of four years of bloody civil war, of famine in which millions perished, all served to undermine the working class in terms of both numbers and morale. The disintegration of the working class, the loss of many of the most advanced elements in the civil war, the influx of backward elements from the countryside, and the demoralisation and exhaustion of the masses was one side of the picture. On the other side, the forces of reaction, those petty bourgeois and bourgeois elements who had been temporarily demoralised and driven underground by the success of the revolution in Russia and internationally, everywhere began to recover their nerve, thrust themselves to the fore, taking advantage of the situation to insinuate themselves into every nook and cranny of the ruling bodies of industry, of the state and even of the Party.
Victor Serge recalls his impression of the Soviet apparatus even in the early years:
Of this apparatus, which seemed to me to function largely in a void, wasting three-quarters of its time on unrealisable projects, I at once formed the worst possible impression. Already, in the midst of general misery, it was nurturing a multitude of bureaucrats who were responsible for more fuss than honest work. In the offices of Commissariats one came across elegant gentlemen, pretty and irreproachably powdered typists, chic uniforms weighed down with decorations: and everybody in this smart set, in such contrast with the famished populace in the streets, kept sending you back and forth from office to office for the slightest matter and without the slightest result. (Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941, p. 74.)