TROTSKY
371
we perish"-would be realized. But realized in ways that neither
Lenin nor Trotsky had foreseen.
The Bolshevik party could preserve itself as master of a be–
leaguered state within the limits of a shrunken Russia, but in doing
so it underwent large transformations in political ideology, social
character and moral quality. In a country where all the means of
production are owned by the state, and the state is totally in the
grip of the only legal party, major changes in the nature of the party
are equivalent to a social revolution creating new relationships be–
tween rulers and ruled.
Both the Russian economy and the Russian people were ex–
hausted. To prevent economic collapse or social explosion, Lenin
proposed as part of the- NEP major concessions to an already hostile
peasantry; but this in turn helped bring into existence a whole new
conservative stratum of "rich" and middle peasants. When the mass
of soldiers, demobilized after the civil war, came back drained of
their revolutionary or patriotic fervor, the conservative tendencies
within the villages were further reinforced.
So too in the cities. The workers were sapped of their social
energy, some having fallen into demoralization and others turning
against the regime. Many of the most devoted Bolsheviks had died
during the civil war; others had been worn out; and still others,
lacking the iron will of a Lenin or a Trotsky, displayed the character–
istics of officials everywhere, with vested interests of their own which
set them in increasing opposition to the workers in whose name they
ruled. Apart from large amounts of economic help, what the coun–
try needed most was the ventilation of ideas, a gust of freedom to
bring new life and strength; but after 1921 the Bolsheviks refused
to allow any party but their own to function legally and thus con–
tributed heavily to their own degeneration. Ruling as a minority
dictatorship, though at times with mass support, the Bolshevik re–
gime had planted the seeds of counter-revolution at the very moment
the revolution triumphed. Each repressive measure taken by the
dictatorship, even when truly the consequence of an emergency cre–
ated by civil war or economic collapse, further undermined the
ideological claims to which many of its supporters were devoted and
helped create within the regime a cancerous social growth flourish–
ing upon deprivation, cynicism and brutality.
