30
PARTISAN REVIEW
Or rather, it was libertarian in words and only for a short time, during the
brief period of Soviet democracy which extended from October, 1917, to
the summer of 1918. Then it pulled itself together and resolutely entered
on the path of the old "statism"-authoritatarian, and soon totalitarian.
It
lacked the sense of liberty.2
It
is easy to explain-and even to justify-this development of Bolshe·
vik Marxism by referring to the constant mortal danger, the Civil War,
the superbly energetic defense of the public safety by Lenin, Trotsky, Dzer·
zhinsky. Easy and just to recognize that this policy, in its early stages, made
certain the victory of the workers-and a victory won in the face of diffi·
culties that were truly without precedent. But one must realize that
later on
this policy brought about the defeat of the workers by the bureaucracy. The
Bolshevik leaders of the great years lacked neither knowledge nor intelli·
gence nor energy. They lacked revolutionary audacity whenever it was nee·
essary to seek (after 1918) the solution of their problems in the freedom
of the masses and not in governmental constraint. They built systematically
not the libertarian Communist State which they announced, but a State strong
in the old sense of the word, strong in its police, in its censorship, its
monopolies, its all-powerful bureaus. In this respect, the contrast is striking
between the Bolshevist progr?m of 1917 and the political structure created
by Bolshevism in 1919.
S
After victory had been won in the Civil War, the Socialist solution of
the problems of the new society should have been sought in workers' de-
o
mocracy, the stimulation of initiative, freedom of thought, freedom for
working-class groups-and not, as it was, in centralization of power, re–
pression of heresies, the monolithic single-party system, the narrow ortho–
doxy of an official school of thought. The dominance and ideology of a
single party should have preshadowed the dominance and ideology of a
single leader. This extreme concentration of power, this dread of liberty
and of ideological variations, this conditioning to absolute authority dis–
armed the masses and led to the strengthening of the bureaucracy. By the
time Lenin and Trotsky realized the danger and wished to retrace their
steps-timidly enough, at first: the greatest reach of boldness of the Left
Opposition in the Bolshevik Party was to demand the restoration of inner–
Party democracy, and it never dared dispute the theory of single-party
government-by this time, it was too late.
2 Let us pay tribute to Rosa Luxemburg who, as early as 1918, brought against the
Bolsheviks this serious charge.
3 I have laid bare the underlying concepts and data in
Lenin:
1917
and
The Year
I
of the Russian Revolution.
Nothing better typifies the mistakes of the Bolsheviks than
such things as the plan for the regulation of the distribution of food written out, in
minute detail, in Lenin's own hand; Trotsky's plan for the militarization of work; the
economic schemes published by Bukharin on the eve of the NEP; the fatal stubbornness
of the Central Committee, which persisted in following the policy of "War Commun·
ism" while the nation was plainly dying from it; and finally the suppression by the
Communist Party of all other revolutionary workers' parties and groups.
