The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  *Kerenskii, Delo Kornilova, 75–76, Revoliutsiia, IV, 143; Martynov, Kornilov, 149–51. Krymov left a suicide note for Kornilov, which Kornilov destroyed: Martynov, Kornilov, 151. No reactionary monarchist, Krymov had participated in 1916 in plots against Nicholas II.

  *Suspicions that the whole Kornilov Affair was a provocation are buttressed by Nekrasov’s uncautious remarks to the press. In a newspaper interview given two weeks after the event he praised Lvov for exposing Kornilov’s alleged plot. Distorting Kornilov’s answer to Kerensky to make it sound as if it confirmed Lvov’s ultimatum, he added: “V. N. Lvov helped save the Revolution: he exploded a prepared mine two days before it was to go off. There undoubtedly was a conspiracy and Lvov only discovered it prematurely”: NZh, No. 55 (September 13, 1917), 3. These words suggest that Nekrasov, possibly with Kerensky’s connivance, used Lvov to destroy Kornilov.

  *Crane Brinton in his Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938, 185–86) observes that it is common in revolutionary situations for ordinary citizens to grow bored with politicking and to leave the field to extremists. The influence of the latter increases in proportion to the public’s disenchantment and loss of interest in politics.

  *Cited in Lenin, PSS, XXXIII, 28. Lenin underscored the concluding sentence.

  * Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b) (Moscow, 1958), 55–62. This, the only presently available record of the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee from August 4, 1917, until February 24, 1918, first came out in 1929. It was meant to discredit Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, whom Stalin had defeated for party control, and for this reason must be used with extreme caution. According to the editors of the second edition: “The texts of the protocols are published in full, without omissions, except for matters of conflict [konfliktnye dela] removed, as in the first edition, for reasons of inadequate explanation of these questions in the text of the protocols” (p. vii), whatever that may mean.

  †It cannot be excluded, of course, that Lenin’s advice was turned down and the fact censored from the published version of the minutes.

  *Lenin, PSS, XXXIV, 281–82. Lenin here inadvertently concedes that on July 3–5 the Bolsheviks had, indeed, attempted a power seizure.

  * Revoliutsiia, V, 23. According to Kerensky, these discussions were secret, but they immediately leaked to the press: Ibid., V, 81.

  *Lazimir later joined the Bolshevik Party. He died in 1920 of typhus.

  †N. Podvoiskii in KL, No. 8 (1923), 16–17. Trotsky wrote in 1922 that even if his life were at stake he would not be able to recall the makeup of the Milrevkom: PR, No. 10 (1922), 54.

  *Lenin mistakenly believed that Zinoviev had joined Kamenev in the interview with Novaia zhizn’: Protokoly TsK, 108.

  *Lenin, PSS, XXXIV, 435–36. Verkhovskii had been dismissed from his post the day before (October 23) for demanding at a cabinet meeting that Russia make immediate peace with the Central Powers: SV., No. 10, June 19, 1921, 8.

  * Dekrety, I, 1–2. Kerensky’s wife was arrested and detained for forty-eight hours the following day for tearing down this declaration: A. L. Fraiman, Forpost Sotsialisticheskoi Revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1969), 157.

  *N. M. Kishkin, a Kadet and member of the last Provisional Government, was placed in charge after Kerensky had left the Winter Palace.

  * Dekrety, I, 20–21; W. Pietsch, Staat und Revolution (Köln, 1969), 50; Lenin, PSS, XXXV, 28–29. Trotsky was the only Jew in the Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks seemed to have been afraid of accusations that they were a “Jewish” party, setting up a government to serve the interests of “international Jewry.”

  12

  Building the One-Party State

  On October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks did not so much seize power over Russia as stake a claim to it. On that day they won from a rump Congress of Soviets, which they had convened in an unlawful manner and packed with adherents, only limited and temporary authority: the authority to form yet another Provisional Government. That government was to be accountable to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress and retire in a month, upon the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It took them three years of civil war to make good this claim. Notwithstanding their precarious position, they proceeded almost at once to lay the foundations of a type of regime unknown to history, a one-party dictatorship.

  On October 26, the Bolsheviks had a choice of three options. They could have declared their party to be the government. They could have dissolved the party in the government. And they could have kept party and government as separate institutions, and either directed the state from the outside or else meshed with it on the executive level, through interlocking personnel.1 For reasons that will be spelled out, Lenin rejected the first and second of these alternatives. He hesitated briefly between the two variants of option three. Initially, he leaned toward variant one: rather than head the state, he preferred to govern as head of the party, which he saw as the incipient government of the world proletariat. But, as we have seen, his associates thought he was trying to evade responsibility for the October coup, which many of them had opposed, and forced him to give it up as well.2 As a result, in the political system that came into being within hours of the coup d’état, party and state retained distinctive identities, meshing not institutionally but personally on the executive levels, first of all in the cabinet (Council of People’s Commissars or Sovnarkom) in which the leaders of the party took all the ministerial posts. Under this arrangement, the Bolsheviks, as party officials, made policy decisions and executed them as heads of the state departments, using for this purpose the bureaucracy and the security police.

  Such was the origin of a type of government that was to breed numerous offspring in the form of left and right one-party dictatorships in Europe and the rest of the world, and emerge as the main enemy of and alternative to parliamentary democracy. Its distinguishing quality was the concentration of executive and legislative authority, as well as the power to make all legislative, executive, and judiciary appointments in the hands of a private association, the “ruling party.” Given that the Bolsheviks quickly outlawed all the other parties, the name “party” hardly applied to their organization. A “party”—the term derives from the Latin pars, or part—by definition cannot be exclusive, since a part cannot be the whole: a “one-party state” is, therefore, a contradiction in terms.3 The term that fits it somewhat better is “dual state,” coined later to describe a similar regime established in Germany by Hitler.4

  This type of government had only one precedent, an imperfect and only partially realized one, on which it was in some measure modeled, namely the Jacobin regime of Revolutionary France. The hundreds of Jacobin clubs scattered throughout France, were not, strictly speaking, a party, but they did acquire many of its characteristics even before the Jacobins came to power: membership in them was strictly controlled, requiring adherence to a program as well as bloc voting, and the Paris Jacobin Club acted as their national center. From the fall of 1793 until the Thermidorean coup a year later, the Jacobin clubs, without formally meshing with the administration, seized the reins of government by monopolizing all executive positions and arrogating to themselves the power to veto government policies.5 Had the Jacobins stayed in power longer, they might well have produced a genuine one-party state. As it was, they provided a prototype which the Bolsheviks, leaning on Russia’s autocratic traditions, brought to perfection.

  The Bolsheviks had never given much thought to the state that would come into being after they made the revolution, because they took it for granted that their revolution would instantly ignite the entire world and sweep away national governments. They improvised the one-party state as they went along, and although they never managed to provide it with a theoretical foundation, it proved to be the most enduring and influential of their accomplishments.

  While he never doubted he would exercise unlimited power, Lenin had to make allowance for the fact that he had taken power in the name of “Soviet democracy.” The Bolsheviks, it
will be recalled, had carried out the coup d’état not on their own behalf—their party’s name did not appear on any of the proclamations of the Military-Revolutionary Committee—but on that of the soviets. Their slogan had been “All Power to the Soviets”; their authority was conditional and provisional. The fiction had to be maintained for a time because the country would not have tolerated any one party arrogating to itself a monopoly of power.

  Even the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets, which the Bolsheviks had packed with adherents and sympathizers, did not intend to invest the Bolshevik leadership with dictatorial prerogatives. The delegates to the gathering which the Bolsheviks have ever since claimed as the source of legitimacy, when polled on how the soviets which they represented wished to reconstruct political authority, responded as follows:6

  All power to the soviets

  505

  (75%)

  All power to democracy

  86

  (13%)

  All power to democracy but without Kadets

  21

  (3%)

  A coalition government

  58

  (8.6%)

  No answer

  3

  (0.4%)

  The responses said more or less the same thing: that if the pro-Bolshevik soviets did not know precisely what kind of government they wanted, none of them envisaged any single party enjoying a political monopoly. Indeed, many of Lenin’s closest associates also opposed excluding other socialist parties from the Soviet Government, and would resign in protest because Lenin and a handful of his most devoted followers (Trotsky, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinskii) insisted on such a course. This was the political reality that Lenin had to face. It forced him to continue hiding behind the façade of “soviet power” even as he was putting in place a one-party dictatorship. The overwhelmingly democratic and socialist sentiment of the population, imprecisely articulated but intensely felt, compelled him to keep intact the structure of the state in the guise of its new nominal “sovereign,” the soviets, while accumulating all the strands of power in his own hands.

  But there are good reasons why, even if the mood of the country had not forced him to perpetuate the deception, Lenin would have preferred to govern through the the state and keep the party separate from it. One factor was the shortage of Bolshevik personnel. Administering Russia under normal conditions required hundreds of thousands of functionaries, public and private. To administer a country in which all forms of self-government were to be extinguished and the economy nationalized, required many times that number. The Bolshevik Party in 1917–18 was much too small to cope with this task; in any event, very few of its adherents, most of them lifelong professional revolutionaries, had expertise in administration. The Bolsheviks had no choice, therefore, but to rely on the old bureaucratic apparatus and other “bourgeois specialists,” and rather than administer directly, control the administrators. Emulating the Jacobins, they insinuated Bolshevik personnel into commanding positions in all the institutions and organizations without exception—personnel who owed allegiance and obedience not to the state but to the party. The need for reliable party personnel was so acute that the party had to expand more rapidly than its leaders wished, enrolling careerists, pure and simple.

  The third consideration in favor of keeping the party distinct from the state was that such a procedure protected it from domestic and foreign criticism. Since the Bolsheviks had no intention of yielding power even if the population overwhelmingly rejected them, they needed a scapegoat. This was to be the state bureaucracy, which could be blamed for failures while the party maintained the pretense of infallibility. In carrying abroad subversive activities, the Bolsheviks would dispose of foreign protests by claiming that these were the work of the Russian Communist Party, a “private organization” for which the Soviet Government could not be held responsible.

  The establishment in Russia of a one-party state required a variety of measures, destructive as well as constructive. The process was substantially completed (in central Russia, which is all the Bolsheviks controlled at the time) by the autumn of 1918. Subsequently they transplanted these institutions and practices to the borderlands.

  First and foremost, they had to uproot all that remained of the old regime, tsarist as well as “bourgeois” (democratic): the organs of self-government, the political parties and their press, the armed forces, the judiciary system, and the institution of private property. This purely destructive phase of the Revolution, carried out in fulfillment of Marx’s injunction of 1871 not to take over but “smash” the old order, was formalized by decrees but it was accomplished mainly by spontaneous anarchism, which the February Revolution had unleashed and the Bolsheviks had done their utmost to inflame. Contemporaries saw in this destructive work only mindless nihilism, but for the new rulers it was clearing the ground before the construction of the new political and social order could get underway.

  Construction was the difficult part because it required that the Bolsheviks restrain the anarchistic instincts of the people and reimpose discipline from which the people thought the Revolution had freed them once and for all. It called for structuring the new authority (vlast’) in a manner that had the appearance of folkish, “soviet” democracy but actually restored Muscovite absolutism with all the refinements made possible by modern ideology and technology. The Bolshevik rulers saw it as their most urgent immediate task to free themselves from accountability to the soviets, their nominal sovereign. Next, they had to be rid of the Constituent Assembly, to the convocation of which they had committed themselves but which was certain to remove them from power. And finally, they had to transform the soviets into compliant tools of the party.

  That the Bolshevik Party had to be de facto as well as de jure the engine driving the Soviet Government no Bolshevik ever questioned. Lenin merely uttered a truism when he said at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921: “Our party is the governmental party and the resolution which the Party Congress adopts will be obligatory for the entire republic.”7 A few years later Stalin defined even more explicitly the party’s constitutional primacy when he stated that “in our country not a single important political or organizational question is decided by our soviet and other mass organizations without guiding directions from the party.”8

  And yet, for all its acknowledged public authority, the Bolshevik Party remained after 1917 what it had been before—namely, a private body. Neither the Soviet Constitution of 1918 nor that of 1924 made any reference to it. The party was first mentioned in a constitutional document in the so-called Stalin Constitution of 1936, Article 126 of which described it as “the vanguard of the toilers in their struggle for the strengthening and development of the socialist order” and the “leading core of all the organizations of toilers, social as well as governmental.” To ignore in legislation the most essential was very much in the Russian tradition: after all, tsarist absolutism found its first and rather casual definition in Peter the Great’s “Military Regulation” more than two centuries after it had become the country’s central political reality, and serfdom, its basic social reality, never received legal acknowledgment. Until 1936, the party depicted itself as a transcendental force which guided the country by example and inspiration. Thus, the program, adopted in March 1919, defined its role as “organizing” and “leading” the proletariat, and “explaining” to it the nature of the class struggle, without once alluding to the fact that it also ruled the “proletariat” as it did all else. Anyone who drew his knowledge of Soviet Russia exclusively from official documents of the time would have no inkling of the party’s involvement in the day-to-day life of the country, although that was what distinguished the Soviet Union from every other country in the world.*

  Thus, after the power seizure the Bolshevik Party retained its private character even though it had in the meantime become the complete master of state and society. As a result, its statutes, procedures, decisions, and personnel were subject to no external supervision.
Its 600,000 to 700,000 members, who, according to Kamenev’s statement made in 1920, “governed” a Russia composed overwhelmingly of non-Bolsheviks,9 resembled an elite cohort rather than a political party.† While nothing escaped its control, the party acknowledged no control over itself: it was self-contained and self-accountable. This created an anomalous situation that Communist theorists have never been able to explain satisfactorily, since it can only be done—if it can be done at all—with reference to such metaphysical concepts as Rousseau’s “general will,” said by him to express everyone’s will and yet to be somehow distinct from the “will of all.”

  The rolls of the party grew exponentially in the three years during which the Bolsheviks conquered Russia and placed their agents in charge of all the institutions. In February 1917 it had 23,600 members; in 1919, 250,000; in March 1921, 730,000 (including candidate members).10 Most of the newcomers joined as the Bolsheviks appeared to be winning the Civil War in order to qualify for the benefits traditionally associated in Russia with state service. During those years of extreme privation, a party card assured the minimum of housing, food, and fuel, as well as immunity from the political police for all but the most egregious crimes. Party members alone were allowed to carry weapons. Lenin, of course, realized that most of the newcomers were careerists and that their bribe-taking, thieving, and bullying brought nothing but harm to the party’s reputation; but his aspirations to total authority left him no choice but to enroll anyone with the proper social credentials and willingness to carry out orders without questions or inhibitions. At the same time, he made certain that key positions in the party and government were reserved for the “old guard,” veterans of the underground: as late as 1930, 69 percent of the secretaries of the central committees of the national republics and the regional (oblast’ and krai) committees had joined before the Revolution.11