John F Murphy Jr. Encyclopedia of Politics. Editor: Rodney P Carlisle. Volume 1: The Left. Sage Reference, 2005.
Few political institutions in history have had the impact of the Soviet Communist Party. For over seventy years, it governed Russia, then the Soviet Union, only one of two Superpowers in the modern world. More than that, the Soviet Communist Party, as the Bolshevik Party, also seized power in Russia in 1917, bringing to an end three centuries of rule by the Romanov Dynasty.
The Bolshevik Party began as part of the Social Democratic Labor Party, which had its first Congress, or meeting, in Minsk, Russia, in 1898. From the beginning, its avowed goal was the overthrow of the Romanovs. Robert Service wrote in his Lenin: a Biography, the party “envisaged that a revolution would be led against the Romanov monarchy by the working class and would result in the establishment of a democratic republic. Yet all but one of the Congress participants were arrested within a few weeks. A functioning party had yet to be created.”
With its program, the Social Democratic Labor Party firmly established itself as a Marxist party, placing itself on the foundations of Marxism as laid out by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. In it, Marx and Engels declared that “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
The Social Democrats built upon a revolutionary tradition in Russia that began as early as the 1870s, with such groups as the Populists. D.M. Sturley, in A Short History of Russia, wrote of how “under the influence of Alexander Herzen and N.G. Chernyshevsky, students and professional people went out to preach revolutionary socialism to the peasants in the countryside. The peasants were quite unresponsive: they wanted land not ideas.” When revolution came to Russia, it would be through the working class, as Marx and Engels proclaimed. While the experiment of the Populists, or Narodniks, from the Russian word for “the people,” failed, they later provided much of the leadership for the more radical revolutionary movements like “Land and Freedom” (1876) and “The Peoples’ Will” (1879), as Sturley noted. It was on these last groups that the later Bolshevik Party based its program of action.
What Is to Be Done?
In 1881, Tzar Alexander II was assassinated, in spite of the reforming character of his reign. His son, Alexander III, instituted an era of repression that would continue after his death in 1894. In March 1887, the revolutionaries attempted an assassination plot against them; one of those executed for complicity in the plot was Alexander Ulyanov. His younger brother, Vladimir, was severely traumatized by the event. As Vladimir I. Lenin, he would found the Bolshevik Party. Lenin made his contribution to the movement’s ideology first in “What Is To Be Done?,” which was published in 1902. Lenin wrote: “they relied on a theory which in substance was not a revolutionary theory at all [and which made it impossible] to link up their movement inseparably with the class struggle that went on within developing capitalist society.”
After the foundation of the party in 1898, Lenin, who had been in exile for political activities in Siberia, became a leading member and editor of the journal Iskra, or The Spark.
In July 1903, the Social Democratic Labor Party would meet in Brussels, and like many revolutionary parties, met with a severe split within its ranks. The schism led to virtually two parties, the Menshevik, or minority group, and Lenin’s Bolshevik, or majority, wing. It was at the Brussels Congress that Lenin split politically with Leon Trotsky, who had worked with him on Iskra. However, their personal relationship seemed untouched and they would be political allies again. Lenin was determined to make himself supreme in the Russian revolutionary movement. At this time, he exemplified the comments of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution: “the ruthlessness, in the proper service of the ideal, went while they were alive into the making of their leadership.”
In 1904, Russia, then under Tzar Nicholas II, who had ascended the throne in 1904, went to war with Japan over imperialist spheres of influence, including Korea and Manchuria. Russia suffered devastating reversals on the battlefield, which led to the Russian Revolution of 1905. When it broke out in January, Lenin was in Geneva, and the uprising took him completely by surprise
David Shub wrote in Lenin that on October 13 “a strange new ‘government’ appeared in St. Petersburg, the Soviet [of] Workers’ Deputies.” The vice-chairman of this soviet, or council, was Trotsky. Both Lenin (who would not return until November) and Trotsky now renewed their political alliance: their personal friendship appears to have been undimmed.
Tzar Nicholas eventually reacted with the brutality that would turn so many against him. The “Black Hundreds” were summoned again. Thousands were executed or imprisoned; early Russian film shows the repression carried out by the troops. Trotsky was arrested with other members of the soviet, but Lenin had traveled to Finland on December 24, five days before the final insurrection was crushed in Moscow, with the Moscow garrison reinforced, as Shub wrote, by the “crack [Semenovsky] Guards and artillery from St. Petersburg.” Lenin would remain in exile from Russia until 1917.
When World War I broke out in August 1914, Lenin was living in what was then Austria-Hungary and, as a Russian, was an enemy alien. Even more, as he wrote on August 7, “the local police suspects me of spying.” Eventually, he was released from custody and allowed to leave for Switzerland, which followed its traditional policy of neutrality during the war. As in the war with Japan, Russia suffered terribly, with an autocratic government unable to prosecute a modern war.
Spontaneous Demonstrations
When on February 23, 1917 (March 8 in our modern calendar), demonstrations broke out in the capital city of St. Petersburg among the workers, many from the Putilov factory, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in exile and caught totally by surprise at the spontaneous movement. Seeing an opportunity to seize power after the failed attempt of 1905, they set their eyes on taking over the rebellion to use it for their own political ends.
The tzar was in his front line headquarters when the disorders broke out. As Trotsky would write in The History of the Russian Revolution: “On February 25, a telegram came from the Minister of War that strikes were occurring in the capital, disorders beginning among the workers, but measures had been taken and there was nothing serious. In a word: ‘It isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last!'” All efforts to suppress the growing rebellion failed, because the troops of the St. Petersburg garrison were in sympathy with the demonstrators, including the regiments of the elite Imperial Guard.
A new provisional government took power under the liberal—and ineffectual—Prince Georgi Lvov. Nicholas, who had been a well-meaning if ineffectual ruler, ended the three-century-old Romanov dynasty with his abdication from power on February 28 (March 13).
Meanwhile, Lenin watched with keen interest the inability of the provisional government to control the anarchy growing throughout the country. It was the opportunity he had been waiting to exploit. Real power lay with the soviets, which had been the main ally of his Bolsheviks in 1905.
Comrade Lenin
Lenin arrived in the Finland Station in St. Petersburg—now Petrograd—on April 3. He was greeted by Nicholai Chkheidze, president of the Petrograd Soviet, who said, “Comrade Lenin! In the name of the Petrograd Soviet and of the whole revolution, we welcome you to Russia.” Resolutely, Lenin set forth the Bolsheviks as the only party to lead the Revolution.
Four days later, he published his “April Theses” in the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda. He stressed his most important points in Theses Four and Five: “It must be explained to the masses that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is the only possible form of revolutionary government and that, therefore, our task is, while this government is submitting to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent analysis of its errors and tactics, an analysis especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.”
And in Thesis Five: “Not a parliamentary republic—a return to it from the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies would be a step backward—but a republic of Soviets of Workers, Agricultural Laborers, and Peasants Deputies throughout the land, from top to bottom.”
From April 24 to April 29, Lenin held a conference of his Bolshevik Party to map plans for assuming control not only of the government, but of Russia as well. A few days later, his old comrade Leon Trotsky would arrive; earlier, Josef Stalin had come to Russia. While working together under Lenin in the Revolution, a later power struggle between them would threaten to destroy the revolutionary state that Lenin would build. In June, the first All-Russian Congress of the Soviets would meet—an opportunity that Lenin did not miss as a means of exerting power over the armed workers, soldiers, and sailors, who he already conceived of as the fighting vanguard of his “proletarian revolution.”
Although Lenin would be forced to exile in Finland again on August 9, Alexander Kerensky would have to turn to the soviets to battle the attempted coup d’etat of General Lavr Kornilov in September. Only they commanded the loyalty of enough soldiers and sailors to defeat Kornilov. On August 29, Kerensky appointed himself the new commander-in-chief to deal with the uprising. With the help of the soviets, the putsch was crushed. On September 1, Kornilov was imprisoned.
After the uprising, it became clear that the Bolsheviks and Lenin formed the main threat to Kerensky’s provisional government. Yet, while Lenin and his party loyalists moved to consolidate their control over the soviets, Kerensky did nothing to stop them. With Lenin in Finland, it was Trotsky, coordinating for him in Petrograd, who laid the foundations for the coming Bolshevik surprise.
The last real threat to Lenin’s plans lay in the meeting of the Democratic Conference, which took place on September 14. This was the last chance to build a coalition that could have united opposition to the Bolsheviks. But as John Reed wrote in Ten Days That Shook the World, “there were seventeen [party] tickets in Petrograd, and in some of the provincial towns as many as forty.” Against this fragmented opposition, Lenin presented a united front. When the Conference ended in parliamentary bickering, the last real political opposition to the Bolsheviks collapsed. With the failure of the Congress, Lenin began to plan with the Petrograd Bolsheviks, with Trotsky the main strategist, to seize power in the vacuum left by the failed assembly.
The Bolshevik Surprise
On October 7, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd. Reed described the Red Guard, the revolutionary troops on which Lenin would call: “a huddled group of boys in workmen’s clothes, carrying guns with bayonets, talking nervously together.” But they were dedicated to the soviets.
When, on the night of October 18, Kerensky decided to move against Lenin, he had to go back to the front to seek troops. By then it was too late. On October 25, supported by the revolutionary Red Guards, Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power. Lenin issued a proclamation from his headquarters at the Smolny Institute decreeing the end of the provisional government. The Winter Palace, home of the defunct administration, was stormed by troops loyal to him and the Bolsheviks. The next day, supported by the Council of Soviets, Lenin took power. Reed helped distribute printed flyers which neatly summed up in one line the Bolshevik triumph: “The Provisional Government is deposed.”
Once in power, Lenin moved to establish himself and the Bolshevik Party as the only real source of control in Russia. Unlike in parliamentary governments such as in England or the United States, where a political party would take control of a government after winning an election, Lenin made sure that the Bolsheviks, now more properly called the Communists, were the government in Russia. Within the Soviet Union (as it now would be called), a constitution was promulgated in July 1918. As Basil Dmytryshyn wrote in USSR: A Concise History, “the constitution declared socialism to be the state program not only in Russia but throughout the world as well.” Power in the new state flowed directly down from Lenin through the party to the rest of the country.
War Communism
During the Civil War that raged from 1917 to 1921, Lenin used the “centralism” of the Bolshevik Party as the main organizing force against both foreign powers like the United States, England, and Japan who intervened to end the Revolution and the counter-revolutionary “White” generals like Anton Denikin or Baron Peter Wrangel who sought to destroy the Bolshevik’s Red Army. From November 1918, the “Supreme Leader” of the Whites was Alexander V. Kolchak of the Black Sea Fleet. From the beginning, the Whites were handicapped by competing ambitions and a dreadful lack of coordination of their offensives.
On the other hand, Lenin was favored in having the talents of Trotsky, who served him as commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky and his Red Army defeated each White effort in turn. But as the Civil War worsened, Lenin instituted a policy of pitiless terror toward any he and the party deemed an “enemy of the people.” In December 1918, Lenin had the Sovnarkom, the omnipresent Council of People’s Commissars, the main organ of the new state, decree the establishment of the V-Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage.
Its chief was the expatriate Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky. Soon, its agents, the Chekists, followed Lenin’s orders to institute a reign of terror. When a village refused to meet the demands of “War Communism” in supplying the Red Army, Chekist squads would machine gun the entire village. By March 1921, all enemies of the Revolution had been crushed in the former Russian Empire by Trotsky’s Red Army. Lenin, speaking at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party on March 8, 1921, could say, “The last of the hostile armies has been driven from our territories.”
Now, Lenin faced his greatest struggle: rebuilding a land and people ravaged by seven years of war. Indeed, the first challenge came at Ninth Communist Party Congress, which from March to April 1920 challenged the centralization of authority that had taken place during the Civil War. Lenin, never a slave to revolutionary ideology, tactically maneuvered to thwart the danger from within his own party. Now, during the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, who had manned the cruiser Aurora the day of the attack on the Winter Palace, rebelled. Although Trotsky put down the revolt ruthlessly in March, it was clear to Lenin that his new government was in jeopardy.
Famine stalked the land: many Russians became cannibals to survive. Lenin responded with almost a counterrevolution of his own. Beginning in the same month, the “War Communism” began to be drastically dismantled by the Tenth Party Congress, some of whose delegates had actually been in the attack on Kronstadt. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced, which began to bring capitalism back to the new socialist state. Nevertheless, Lenin in his “On Party Unity” declaration at the Tenth Party Congress emphasized the centralism of the party. He wrote that “fractionalism of any kind … shall entail absolute and immediate expulsion from the party.”
Just as the new communist state began to emerge, Lenin became seriously ill in December 1921. His health continued to deteriorate. While still alive, he saw the power struggle begin that almost ripped his new state apart, between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin had spent the Revolution and Civil War years cultivating allies within the party. However, as Roy Medvedev wrote in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, “in 1922, Stalin was the least prominent figure in the Politburo,” the governing body of the party. But, on May 26, 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke and gradually lost control of the state and the party. Stalin moved to fill the power vacuum, as Lenin did so with Kerensky in October 1917.
Gradually, Lenin turned against Stalin, who openly insulted Lenin’s wife, N.K. Krupskaya. In one secret letter, cited by Medvedev as being written between the end of 1922 and 1923, Lenin said that “Comrade Stalin, on becoming General Secretary [of the party], concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure he always knows how to use his powers carefully enough.” Clearly, he was beginning to see Trotsky as his heir. In March 1923, he would suffer another stroke. On January 1, 1924, Lenin died, apparently from a massive heart attack. Instead of the USSR’s future being in the ever-inventive mind of Lenin, the country would soon be in the ruthless hands of Stalin.
Rise of Stalin
By 1927, Trotsky was purged from the party, and Stalin would be the undisputed leader, or vozhd, of both the party and the state. By this time, the party had taken on the organizational form which, with few variations, would continue until the fall of the Communist Party regime in Russia in 1991. As Philip G. Roeder wrote in Soviet Political Dynamics: Development of the First Leninist Polity, “all party members must belong to a primary party organization (called a cell until 1939), which is usually organized in his or her place of work.” Roeder commented “the role (or function) of the Communist Party in Soviet society has been central to the transformation of that society. As the ultimate authority on Marxism-Leninism, the party propounds the dogmas that legitimate the policies of the Soviet regime and defines its objectives.”
In actuality, as seen in the reign of Stalin, the party was very much at the control of the leader. In 1934, Stalin initiated a series of political purges that completely vitiated the party leadership and body of the membership. He especially wanted to remove the “Old Bolsheviks,” those senior party members who had served under Lenin and (at least in his eyes) had a similarly valid claim to party leadership. [It should be noted here that this article does not discuss the governmental organization of the Soviet system, but exclusively that of the Communist Party. Although the party controlled the Soviet state, the Soviet government and Communist Party existed as two different political units.]
The annual Communist Party Congress was the meeting in which—invariably presided over by the general (or first) secretary—the party membership was given a view of the state of the country and the party. In a very real way, it functioned as the Russian version of the State of the Union address which the president of the United States delivers each January.
It was in the Twentieth Party 1956 meeting that Nikita Khrushchev officially denounced the excesses of Stalin, who had died in 1953. (Drafts of his speech, however, had been circulated to the press earlier.) The Party Rules in force in 1988 noted in Article 31 that the Party Congress “is the supreme body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
Under Stalin, the real power in the party began to reside in the office of the general secretary. Roeder observed that “actual power has gravitated with time toward the Secretariat and Politburo [Political Bureau] as the Congress and Central Committee have come to play less vital roles in the direction of the party.” Although having lost real power in the party, the Central Committee presided over the party between Party Congresses. The Party Rules declared that the Central Committee “directs all the activity of the party and of local party agencies … [and] creates various agencies, institutions, and enterprises of the party and directs their activity.”
When the Central Committee had proved too unwieldy to cope with the civil war, the Politburo was officially created at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919. Party decisions in the Politburo were expected to be made by consensus. However, during Stalin’s era the vozhd made the decisions. Roeder points out that, aside from Stalin “only four of the other nine Politburo members in 1931” survived the purges he initiated three years later. By the time the Stalinist frenzy had abated, perhaps the best idea of the total number of victims—executed or imprisoned—would come from Stalin himself. Dmytryshyn said that at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Stalin admitted that membership in the party from 1934 to 1939 “dropped from 1,874,488 to 1,588,852” members. From 1952 to 1966, the Politburo was known as the Party Presidium.
Khrushchev and Gorbachev
After the death of Stalin in March 1953, the Politburo began to reassert some authority within the party organization. Although he was ultimately succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, the latter never held the same power as had his vozhd. Indeed, when Khrushchev (who served as first secretary) was overthrown, it was largely due to dissatisfaction with his economic and foreign policy within what was collectively called the party leadership. Decisions were reached within the Politburo by consensus and with the help of essential advisers, as Roeder noted, including “members of the Central Committee, the state apparatus, the Academy of Sciences, as well as other experts and affected parties.”
On March 10, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary. Within the first year of his taking office, he had the impetus for reform to push him beyond the range of the troglodytes in the party, armed forces, and secret police who still yearned for the days of Stalin, “The Boss.”
In 1986, Gorbachev began a massive attempt to reconstruct the Soviet economy at the Party Congress in February. One of the facts that emerged was that, Stephen Kotkin notes, defense expenditures amounted to “a stunning 20 to 30 percent” of the Soviet annual budget. This was at a time when, increasingly exposed to the Western economy, Soviet citizens wanted a more consumer-based lifestyle.
Indeed, Gorbachev opened the era of perestroika, the attempt to radically reconstruct Russia’s economy, and of glasnost, wherein the government would mount an “open door” campaign to open up the dark past of the Soviet Union. Fearing that the Communist Party might not be able to carry out his perestroika, at the July 1988 Party Congress, Gorbachev unveiled a plan to bring back the soviets, by which the party had first swept into power in 1917.
In effect, Gorbachev was now hoping for support for his new revolution “from the bottom up.” However, as Kotkin points out in Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, by attempting to marginalize the Party Central Committee and bureaucracy, Gorbachev was also undermining the government that kept the Soviet Union together. The sheer size of the Communist Party could have made it an effective means for reform, but Gorbachev may have been concerned with the influence of the “Stalinists” who were against him; if so, indeed his fears would prove prescient.
In 1989, he attempted to open a Congress of People’s Deputies, another step away from the centralism of the old Soviet Union. As the Library of Congress Country Study on Soviet Russia states, “In 1989 the Congress of People’s Deputies stood at the apex of the system of soviets” and was the “highest legislative organ in the country.” Created by amendment to the Constitution in December 1988, the “Congress of People’s Deputies theoretically represented the united authority of the congresses and soviets in the republics. In addition to its broad duties, it created and monitored all other government bureaucracies.”
However, the “old guard,” which desired a reversal of course, attempted a coup on August 19, 1991, when Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, were on holiday in the Crimea. On the same day, the old guard military officers and KGB set in motion a plan to seize power from Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. After two days of near chaos, the planned putsch collapsed, and its ringleaders, especially KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Marshal Dmitri Yazhov, were arrested on August 21. As David Remnick assessed the failed attempt: “the conspirators had launched the putsch to save the Soviet empire and their positions in it. Their failure was the finishing blow.”
However, after the coup, Gorbachev was eclipsed by Yeltsin, whose brave stand against the coup in Moscow had marked him as the leader of the evolving Russian state. At the end of August, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party. In September 1991, the Congress of People’s Deputies met for the last time. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was officially dissolved, in its place would exist the federated Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, would be the first to enjoy a peaceful retirement.