372
IRVING HOWE
A new social stratum-it had sprung up the very morning after
the revolution-began to consolidate itself: the party-state bureau–
cracy which found its roots in the technical intelligentsia, the factory
managers, the military officials and above all the Communist func–
tionaries.
It
was narrow in outlook, provincial and boorish in tone,
primitive in culture.
It
was committed to a nationalist perspective,
and instinctively authoritarian in method. It looked upon the work–
ers as material to be shaped, upon intellectuals as propagandists to
be employed, upon the international Communist movement as an
auxiliary to be exploited, and upon Marxist thought as a crude
process for rationalizing its new ambitions.
To speak of a party-state bureaucracy in a country where in–
dustry has been nationalized means to speak of a new ruling group
or class which parasitically fastened upon every institution of Rus–
sian life. That many members of this new party-state bureaucracy
were unaware of the significance of this process seems obvious; it
was, in many respects, an historical novelty for which little provision
had been made in the Marxist scheme of things. Years later, in
1928, the Bolshevik leader Bukharin, who had joined with Stalin
to defeat Trotsky and was then himself shattered by Stalin, remarked
that the disasters of the post-revolutionary period were all due to a
"single mistake": the identification of the party with the state. There
were people in the "rubbish-can of history" who had been saying
that for some time.
At precisely which point the revolutionary dictatorship of Lenin–
ism gave way to the totalitarianism of Stalin is hard and perhaps
profitless to say. This transformation-a gradual counter-revolution–
began during or shortly after the revolution itself, in the inner
structure of the Leninist regime; came to its decisive moment in the
mid-twenties; and reached full expression in the thirties, with the
mass deportation of peasants, the Moscow trials and the blood purges.
Having consolidated its power, the new bureaucratic class proceeded
to exploit the opportunities for centralized economic planning that
are peculiar to a nationalized economy; it undertook a "primitive
accumulation of capital" so cruel and bloody as to make the earlier
accumulation of bourgeois society seem a model of humaneness.
Of this whole process Trotsky was a powerful critic, from the
publication in 1923 of his brochure
The New Course,
in which he
