Month: February 2018

During Lenin’s years in power, from October 1917 until his death in January 1924, a number of groups took shape within the Russian Communist Party-the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition are the best known-which criticized the Bolshevik leadership for abandoning the principles of the revolution. The revolution, as sketched by Lenin in The State and Revolution and other works had promised the destruction of the centralized bureaucratic state and its replacement with a new social order, modeled on the Paris Commune of 1871, in which the direct democracy of the workers would be realized. The cardinal feature of this “commune state,” as Lenin called it, was to be its repudiation of bureaucratic authority. The workers themselves would administer the government through grass-roots organizations, of which the soviets were the foremost example. Workers’ control, through factory committees and trade unions, would function similarly in economic life, replacing private ownership and management with a system of industrial democracy and self-administration in which the rank and file would shape their own destiny. Mistakes would be made, Lenin conceded, but the workers would learn by experience. “The most important thing,” he declared, “is to instill in the oppressed and laboring masses confidence in their own power.”‘ Such was Lenin’s vision before October. Once in power, however, he saw things from a different perspective. Overnight, as it were, the Bolsheviks were transformed from...