PARTISAN REVIEW
57
tory has had at its disposal such enormous powers. This concentra–
tion of power is not only a source of strength, however, but also of
weakness, as can be seen from the whole post-Stalinist history of
communism.
Essentially, of course, the nature of the system demands a total
concentration of power. That is why Stalin's power ( and that of his
local
satraps)
was the perfect embodiment of despotic socialism. How–
ever, if it is now impossible to restore that concentration of power,
it is because it is impossible to reconcile two of the values so essen–
tial to the ruling apparatus: unity and security. Conflicts within the
apparatus cannot be institutipnalized because they would threaten
the system as a whole; such institutionalization would, in effect,
legalize factions in the party, making it not too different from a multi–
party system. But groups, cliques, and factions do exist. The ideal is
the absolute tyranny of one tyrant, so impoverished intellectually
and morally as not to be limited by "abstract" principles, but cun–
ning enough to prevent the emergence of groups within the appara–
tus by successive murders and purges, in a perennial climate of un–
certainty and fear. But this is precisely what works against the need
for security within the apparatus, whose members - as can easily
be imagined - do not want to live under conditions in which every
functionary, including members of the Secretariat and the Politburo,
can overnight - and at the whim of his chief - be transferred from
the office to the basement of a police station. Hence, the switchover
from one-man rule to an oligarchy - called collective leadership–
has been in the best interests of the ruling machine, though for the
population, it doesn't make much difference whether the documents
certifying their oppression are signed by one person or a dozen peo–
ple. Oligarchy is not, of course, democracy; though limits to the ex–
tent of terror affects the stability of power and leads to decentrali–
zation (not democratization ), by extending the rights of local party
apparatuses. The party apparatus cannot prevent the emergence of
hidden factions and is constantly weakened by rival bodies. Simi–
larly, a resistance movement develops not in periods when oppres–
sion and terror are most severe, but in periods of relative relaxation
produced by a lack of cohesion within the ruling apparatus:
it
is
to
Lenin that we owe this observation. The present apparatuses are
not as susceptible to ideological stresses as was the Stalinist appara-
