HONEST, REALISTIC, DISCIPLINED, DEMOCRATIC: THAT WAS LENIN’S BOLSHEVIK PARTY

Late in the evening of November 8, 1917, Lenin mounted the rostrum of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and began his speech with the simple declaration: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order’.

The Bolshevik Party had a firm majority in the most democratic ruling assembly the world had seen. It was leading a revolution that would decisively mould the future of 150 million people formerly ruled by the tsars.

Yet Bolshevism had first taken shape only fourteen years before. Even in February 1917 there were hardly more than 25,000 Bolsheviks inside and outside Russia. By April the party had 80,000 members; 200,000 were reported at its August conference.

On the eve of the October Revelution ‘the masses lived and breathed with the Bolsheviks, they were wholly in the hands of the party of Lenin and Trotsky’. So declared Sukhanoy, himself a Menshevik.

The Bolshevik Party originated as a faction at the 1903 congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The congress had been called to create a centralized organization out of the scattered Marxist circles and groups carrying on revolutionary work in Russia.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks advocated a strongly welded, disciplined party of convinced revolutionaries. The Mensheviks proposed a diffuse organization with its boundaries not clearly defined.

The Bolsheviks wanted to reserve the right of party membership only to those who ‘personally participated’ in one of the party organizations; the Mensheviks supported a looser definition of a party member as one who rendered ‘regular personal assistance’ to the party.

The division between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was described as a split between “hards’ and ‘softs’. The hardness of the Bolsheviks was born out of a firmness of principle, out of thorough conviction.

Those who wanted to go all the way in the fight against oppression and exploitation those prepared—as Lenin put it— to give not just their spare evenings but their whole lives to socialism: these came to Bolshevism.

At the height of tsarist repression, at the beginnings of real revolutionary organization, it was impossible to have the elective principle from top to bottom.

It was necessary for leading committees to have extraordinary powers. Internal relations were determined by the underground nature of the struggle and the need for protection against police persecution and an army of agents provocateurs.

In fact no section of Russian social democracy was able to apply complete inner-democratization if it wished to continue.

Honest, as always, Lenin openly recognized that fact.

The Bolsheviks changed their organizational structure radically according to the stage of struggle. The relationship between inner democracy and centralism was based on what was necessary to build and maintain the revolutionary organization.

Those who see the centralism of Lenin in 1903 as a monster feeding on itself should note his immediate reaction to the radical change in the conditions of activity after the 1905 revolution, when freedom of assembly, of association and of the Press had been seized.

Under these conditions of political liberty it was the Bolsheviks who proposed that the Fourth Congress of the RS-DLP be expedited and ‘at the same time to begin immediately, at once, to apply the elective principle’.

The Bolshevik Party was never a finished mechanical instrument with clockwork responses. It was not a monolithic automaton, In particular, the period between February and October 1917 shows it as a living movement with the inner vitality, the rich pulsating life of a Marxist party winning the masses and leading them to storm the heights of power.

‘The Bolshevik Party steered its course to October through a real collective process. Internal struggle was inevitable as it prepared for its great revolutionary task, as old habits of thought came up against a quickly changing situation. as sections hesitated before the immensity of the revolutionary leap.

Only through internal struggle did its leadership and its ranks gain the determination necessary to carry it through Lenin played a major part in arming the party to measure up to its tasks. His authority grew immensely in this period, because events demonstrated with great rapidity the correctness of his ideas.

When Lenin returned to Russia on April 3, he stepped forward, alone among the Bolshevik leadership, with his ‘April Theses’ directed against the war, against compromise with the Provisional Government and for workers’ power. He was met with hostile bewilderment by leaders overwhelmed by the atmosphere after the February revolution.

‘Even our Bolsheviks show confidence in the Government’, said Lenin to the April conference of the party. ‘Only the fumes of the revolution can explain that. That is the death of socialism . .. if that is your position, our ways part. I prefer to remain in a minority.”

But his iron logic. his clarity of thought, dispersed the confused impressionism at the top of the party. Expressing and developing what the workers in the ranks of the party were feeling. he secured a majority for his theses and turned the party on to the road to power, How foreign was any cult of the individual to a Bolshevik conference was shown. however. in another vote at this April Zinoviev proposed that the Bolshevik Party take part in an international conference called by the Scandinavian social democrats. The motion was adopted by all votes against one— that of Lenin.

The struggles within the party did not end in April. In September Trotsky (who had joined it in July) was in a minority in the leadership in proposing a boycott of the Council of State or Pre-Parliament.

The decision of the central committee to participate was ratified by many local committees, At the, suggestion of Lenin the Moscow regional bureau adopted a resolution against the central committee accusing it of irresolution, wavering and introducing confusion into the ranks of the party, and demanding that it take a clear and definite course towards insurrection.

The base of the party corrected the leadership. City conferences compelled the committees, including the central committee, to make an about-face.

Immediately before the seizure of power itself Kamenev and Zinoviev circulated the party with a long appeal against the decision of the central committee on the insurrection. But the party majority was firm.

The Bolshevik Party achieved victory because, in the words of Trotsky. ‘the compromisers talked themselves out of difliculties. the Bolsheviks went to meet them’.

Its core was grounded in realism, not the ‘realism’ of opportunist politicians, but Marxist realism which sees beyond superficial moods and impressions to the essential tendencies beneath.

The unity of word and deed; a revolutionary programme and the will to carry it out; policies based on scientific objectivity; an abhorrence of demagogy; honesty in explaining advances and retreats; discipline built on political understanding and conviction—that was Bolshevism before the Stalinist degeneration.

GEORGE CUNVIN