The other main source of the history of Bolshevism is the huge body of literature on the subject that was published over decades in the USSR and widely disseminated in the past by the Stalinised Communist Parties abroad. From all this, it is equally impossible to obtain a truthful impression of the history of Bolshevism. Having usurped power in conditions of backwardness where an exhausted working class proved unable to keep control in its hands, the bureaucracy was compelled to pay lip service to Bolshevism and October. In the same way, the bureaucracy of the Second International paid lip service to ‘socialism’ while carrying out a bourgeois policy, and the Pope of Rome pays lip service to the teachings of the early Christian Church. The ruling bureaucracy in the USSR, while placing Lenin’s body in a mausoleum, betrayed all the basic ideas of Lenin and the October Revolution, covering the spotless banner of Bolshevism with filth and blood. In order to consolidate its usurpation, the ruling caste was forced to exterminate the Old Bolsheviks. Like all criminals, Stalin wanted no witnesses who could speak out against him. This fact determined in advance the destiny of history books in the USSR.
It is frequently asserted that Stalinism and Bolshevism are basically the same thing. Indeed, this is what lies behind all the calumnies of the bourgeois historians of Bolshevism. But the democratic workers’ state established by Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917 had absolutely nothing in common with the bureaucratic-totalitarian monstrosity presided over by Stalin and his successors. The victory of Stalin and the bureaucracy, the result of the isolation of the revolution in conditions of crushing backwardness, poverty, and illiteracy, meant the wholesale abandonment of the ideas, traditions, and methods of Lenin and the transformation of the Third International as the vehicle of world revolution to a mere instrument of the foreign policy of the Moscow bureaucracy. In 1943, having been cynically used by Stalin as an instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy, the Communist International was ignominiously buried, without even calling a congress. The political and organisational heritage of Lenin was dealt a heavy blow for a whole historical period. This fact has heavily coloured the view that many people have of the history of Bolshevism. Even well-meaning writers (not to mention the malicious ones) cannot help reading into the past all kinds of elements from the horrors of the later Stalinist regime which are entirely alien to the democratic traditions of Bolshevism.
In order to triumph, Stalinism was obliged to destroy every last vestige of the democratic regime established by October. The Bolshevik Party inscribed on its programme in 1919 the famous four conditions for Soviet power:
1. Free and democratic elections with right of recall of all officials.
2. No official must receive a salary higher than that of a skilled worker.
3. No standing army but the armed people.
4. Gradually, all the tasks of running the state should be performed by everyone in turn. When everybody is a bureaucrat, no one can be a bureaucrat.
These conditions, which are spelled out in Lenin’s State and Revolution, are based upon the programme of the Paris Commune. As Engels explained, this was no longer a state in the old sense of the word, but a semi-state, a transitional regime intended to prepare the way for the transition to socialism. This was the democratic ideal which Lenin and Trotsky put into practice after the October overturn. It had absolutely nothing in common with the bureaucratic and totalitarian monstrosity that replaced it under Stalin and his successors. Moreover, that regime could only be brought about on the basis of a political counter-revolution, involving the physical extermination of Lenin’s party in the one-sided civil war against Bolshevism – the Purge Trials of the 1930s. Let us just cite one figure to prove the point. By 1939, of Lenin’s 1917 Central Committee, only three were left alive: Stalin, Trotsky, and Alexandra Kollontai. The rest, apart from Lenin and Sverdlov, who died naturally, were either murdered or driven to suicide. Kamenev and Zinoviev were executed in 1936. Bukharin, whom Lenin described as “the Party’s favourite”, was executed in 1938. The same fate awaited tens of thousands of Bolsheviks under Stalin. One lone voice remained to denounce Stalin’s crimes and defend the genuine heritage of Bolshevism. That voice was stilled in 1940, when Leon Trotsky, lifelong revolutionary, leader of the October insurrection and founder of the Red Army, was finally murdered in Mexico by one of Stalin’s agents.
To those who persist in identifying Stalinism with Leninism, we are entitled to direct the following question: if the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were really the same, how did it come about that Stalin could only come to power by physically annihilating the Bolshevik Party?
Under Stalin and his successors, everything connected with the October Revolution and the history of Bolshevism was shrouded in a thick fog of distortion by the official mythology that passed for history in the USSR after Lenin’s death. The real traditions of Bolshevism were buried under a thick layer of lies, slanders, and distortions. The relation between the party and the class, and also, crucially, between the party and the leadership, was presented in the form of a bureaucratic caricature. The official Soviet histories present an over-simplified and one-sided picture of the relation between the Bolshevik Party and the mass movement. The impression is created that at every step the Bolsheviks were the commanding force that led and directed the revolution with the ease of a conductor waving his baton before an obedient and disciplined orchestra. From such versions, one can learn nothing about either the Bolshevik Party, the Russian Revolution, or the dynamics of revolution in general. This is, of course, no accident, since the purposes of history under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy was not to teach people to make revolutions, but to glorify the ruling caste and to perpetuate the myth of an infallible leadership at the head of an infallible Party, which had nothing in common with Lenin’s Party, except a usurped name. In the same way all monarchies, but especially a dynasty that has usurped the throne, seeks to rewrite history to present its predecessors in the most superhuman and awesome light. Needless to say, any resemblance to the truth here is purely accidental.
The old Stalinist histories are virtually worthless as sources. To depict the history of Bolshevism as these people did – i.e., as a perfectly straight ascending line, leading irresistibly to the assumption of power – is to leave behind the realm of serious history and enter that of hagiography. I have used only one Soviet history here: the multi-volume Istoriya KPSS (History of the CPSU) published in the USSR under the relatively ‘liberal’ regime of Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is probably the most detailed history of the Party published in the Soviet Union. It is useful for the mass of material it contains, much from unpublished party archives. But basically, it is as one-sided as all the other Stalinist histories, and even the factual information should be treated with care.