If ever there was a moment the Communist Party could have halted the movement to capitalism in its tracks this was it. The working class was rapidly recovering from the disorientation and trauma caused by the collapse of Stalinism and the movement in the direction of capitalism. It was drawing its own conclusions from the frightful collapse of the economy, living standards and culture that had resulted. In this situation, the Stalinists played a criminal role. In comparison with the conduct of the Russian Stalinists, the betrayal of the Social-Democratic leaders in 1914 was child’s play.
If a genuine Bolshevik party had existed, it would have already been on the eve of taking power. But there was no such party. After repeated purges, the content of the old Communist Party had been completely transformed to the point where it had nothing in common with the Bolshevik Party except the name. It was really not a party at all, but an organ of the state composed of 19 million members, among whom were undoubtedly a layer of honest workers, but in the main consisted of an army of opportunists, thieves, stooges and careerists of all kinds. This had nothing in common with the party of Lenin and Trotsky, which had been destroyed in the Purges.
The process of transforming the party into a bureaucratic tool had begun after Lenin’s death, as Edward Crankshaw points out:
Immediately after Lenin’s death this process was accelerated. In the process of building up his own position and packing the Party with people who could be relied upon to support him, Stalin, as First Secretary and very much at grips with Trotsky, proclaimed the so-called Lenin Levy. This was in effect a mass enrolment of new members designed to swamp Stalin’s opponents. Thus, at the 12th Party Congress in 1923 membership stood at 386,000; a year later, at the 13th Congress, it had risen to 735,881. By 1929, with Stalin supreme and preparing to liquidate his senior colleagues, this figure had doubled: there were 1,551,288 Party members.
The next development was a most astonishing change in the composition of the membership. Between 1930 and 1934 the Party ceased to be a workers’ organisation. In 1930 actual workers formed nearly 49 per cent of the membership; in 1934 this proportion, as reflected in the Party Congress, had dropped to 9.3 per cent. Hand in hand with this went the virtual monopolising of the Party by the rising boss class. Thus in 1923 only 23 per cent of all the factory directors in the Soviet Union were Party members. By 1936 the figure was close to 100 per cent. And so it continued until, in the year of the German invasion of Russia, there were nearly three million Party members, most of them engaged in administration of one kind and another. (Edward Crankshaw, op. cit., pp. 63-4.)
And the author correctly concludes:
When we reflect that the old Party had been almost wiped out by Stalin during the purge years of the middle thirties, the Party functionaries all down the line were used regularly and deliberately as scapegoats for the mistakes and excesses of the higher leadership, it is clear that the post-war Party was very different from the body through which Stalin climbed to supremacy and had not the faintest resemblance to the original Party of Lenin. (Ibid., p. 64, my emphasis.)
The CPSU was a gigantic network for patronage and an arm of the state. The Party was responsible for the appointment of 600,000 key jobs and a further one million reserve jobs in the state and industry. Membership of the Party was a necessary path to a successful career. In the early days of the Soviet Union, access to prominent positions in the state was still open to talented children of working class families. This was a major difference with the West. But as time went on, this was increasingly less the case. The best jobs were reserved for the children of bureaucrats. This was a symptom of the senile decay of Stalinism, a kind of creeping arteriosclerosis. At the top stood the Soviet elite, increasingly divorced from the reality of the life of the working class in society.
These elements were held together, not by conviction or ideology, but by the Party’s link to the state feed-bag. Once this link was destroyed, it disintegrated overnight. As the political arm of the bureaucracy, it was shattered by these events. Whole swathes of ‘Communists’ deserted the Party for openly bourgeois or nationalist groupings, as rats swarm off a sinking ship.
The CPRF, which had emerged from the wreckage of the CPSU, was in a strong position to give a lead, but that lead never came and never could come from the mouth of people who had long ago abandoned any conception of fighting for socialism. Despite its huge resources, the CPRF, at the moment of truth, was unable to connect to a wide layer of the population, which was looking for a genuine democratic socialist alternative. Their policy was confined to manoeuvres and intrigues in the ‘corridors of power’ in order to form a coalition government with the representatives of the oligarchy. Despite everything, the CPRF still retained a powerful base, as Kolganov and Buzgalin pointed out:
With its 500,000 members, the CPRF was the largest political party in Russia. But as the election campaign showed, the party’s bureaucratism, together with its orientation toward ‘people of the past’ and pragmatic-minded petty bureaucrats dissatisfied with Yeltsin, made it a weak organisation, incapable of devising any effective response to the propaganda and ‘dirty tricks’ of the authorities. In circumstances where the mass media were monopolised by Yeltsin, the idea of carrying on agitation ‘from door to door’ was not in itself a bad one, but the members of the CPRF were unable to implement it in practice. They had no idea of how to perform such work, and could not find a road to people’s hearts – except for the hearts of people already inclined to support Zyuganov. The experience of the elections showed that Zyuganov does not have anything even remotely resembling a ‘Lenin Guard.’
The strengths, including its massive size and the presence within its membership of tested, experienced cadres from the Soviet Communist Party, were turned into weaknesses. Disciplined rank and file ‘party warriors’ turned out to be of little use in the conditions of a multi-party system marked by struggle between various ideologies and interests. Meanwhile, the experienced cadres had experience only of bureaucratic kowtowing, not of political propaganda work.
That was an understatement. Although there were elements in the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party that were in favour of a ‘return to Lenin’, the ‘Reiss wing’ was so small as to be virtually insignificant. It played no role in the decisive events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Stalinist wing that wanted to maintain the old system – a system that was manifestly collapsing – showed itself to be weak, indecisive and completely bankrupt in the face of the onslaught of the pro-capitalist wing.
The truth is that the CPRF was a communist party in name only. Zyuganov had no quarrel with the market economy. He did not want to go back to the old system of bureaucratic planned economy, because he knew that he could not hold the line. The workers would inevitably, after a period, call into question the privileges of the bureaucracy and move to take power into their own hands.
If the CPRF had pursued anything like a genuine Leninist policy, the whole perspective would have been different. But the leadership of the CPRF failed to organise a serious opposition because they did not want to do anything that would rouse workers outside parliament. After decades of totalitarian and bureaucratic methods, the Party leaders had no idea how to appeal to the masses, even if they had wished to do so. And they did not wish to do so.