The exceptional centralisation of power brought about by the civil war was, to the bureaucracy, the natural method of government. It provided the means of protecting their privileges against the threat of future working-class control. The bureaucracy sought to seek out and corrupt elements in the workers’ leadership that were politically weak. Stalin proved to be the key official who proved most consistent and reliable to the bureaucracy.

A ‘People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection’ (Rabkrin) had been established in February 1920, with the task of fighting “bureaucratism and corruption in Soviet institutions”. The secondary figure of Joseph Stalin had been appointed as People’s Commissar in charge of the new department. He was a party member of long standing, no theoretician but a good organiser, but hardly known outside of the party itself.

Rabkrin failed totally in its task. Trotsky criticised it as being made up chiefly of “workers who have come to grief in other fields” and complained of ‘‘an extreme prevalence of intrigue in the organs of Rabkrin which has long become a by-word throughout the country.”

Nevertheless, in April 1922, Stalin was also appointed to the position of ‘general secretary’. It was intended to be only an administrative role to support an expanded Central Committee. However, Stalin discovered he could use the position – and the centralisation of Party decision-making – to install his own followers as branch, district and provincial secretaries. This gave him effective control over the day-to-day implementation of policy and the election of congress delegates. Through Stalin, the bureaucracy’s position was consolidated within the party apparatus.

As Trotsky explains, Stalin brought the bureaucracy “all the necessary guarantees: the prestige of an old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow vision, and close bonds with the political machine… The petty bourgeois outlook of the new ruling stratum was his own outlook. He profoundly believed that the task of creating socialism was national and administrative in its nature.” (The Revolution Betrayed, Chap.5)

These manoeuvres paved the way for a head-on collision with Lenin, Trotsky and the remainder of the Bolshevik leadership. To make matters worse, Lenin was now seriously ill and soon to suffer from series of strokes – he was unable to authoritatively act on his own concerns at the rise of the bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy was hostile and fearful towards Trotsky – next to Lenin the most authoritative and implacable Marxist leader of the party. However, certain “old Bolshevik” leaders – swayed by political narrowness, personal ambitions and loyalties, were also reluctant to see Trotsky, in Lenin’s absence, take his place at the head of the Politbureau.

In December 1922, Zinoviev (then president of the Communist International) and Kamenev (a close associate of Zinoviev) formed a secret faction with Stalin (later known as the “triumvirate”) for the specific purpose of conspiring against Trotsky. This gave them an effective majority in the Politbureau and, as a result, a commanding authority over the central committee and the party as a whole.

Lenin, from his sickbed, sensed the significance of what was happening, and opened the struggle against Stalin and the bureaucracy. In a brief note, later known as his “Testament”, Lenin wrote on December 25, 1922: “Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure he will always be capable of using that power with sufficient caution…”

Ten days later he added a postscript: “Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us communists, becomes unsupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority – namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but … it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.”

Lenin did not spell out the “decisive importance” which he feared that Stalin’s behaviour could acquire. But what could it mean except that Stalin, coming into conflict with the best representatives of Marxism in the party, would find himself the tool of hostile forces – the kulaks, the bureaucracy, the “capitalists” and “profiteers”? This insight alone could explain Lenin’s surprising demand that the general secretary be removed so quickly after his appointment.

But with Lenin on his deathbed, Stalin and his faction behaved with increasing arrogance, abusing their powers in defiance of all the traditions of the party. Matters came to a head with Stalin’s bureaucratic incorporation of the Soviet Republic of Georgia into the USSR and his repression of the local Bolshevik leaders. Lenin, when he found out what had happened, felt that a struggle against this alien tendency in the party could no longer be postponed.

Too ill to attend the twelfth party congress in April 1923, Lenin entrusted Trotsky with the task of defending the Georgian Bolsheviks, delivering a “bombshell” against Stalin. But Stalin retreated, accepting all Trotsky’s criticisms and correcting his formulations on the national question. Trotsky was reluctant at this point to press home a public attack on Stalin, which would have been seen as a “power struggle” for Lenin’s position, and would have raised the danger of splitting the party.

Thus, a confrontation was postponed. Shortly afterwards Lenin suffered a further stroke and was eliminated from political activity until his death in January 1924. Over the next months the tensions in the party exploded around two central issues: party democracy, and economic policy.

At the congress Trotsky had drawn up a balance sheet of the NEP and pointed out the dangerous lag in industrial production. He used a diagram of price changes of industrial and agricultural products to illustrate his point. It had the appearance of an open pair of scissors: agricultural prices showing a downward line, and industrial prices a rising line. By March 1923, industrial prices had reached 140 per cent of their 1913 levels, while agricultural prices had dropped to less than 80 per cent. The problem which this reflected was subsequently called the “scissors crisis”. If industrial production continued to decline and prices continued to rise, Trotsky warned, a break between the peasantry and the proletariat, between the countryside and the towns, would become inevitable.

The congress accepted Trotsky’s arguments for a new turn within the framework of the NEP: to develop the state sector on the basis of a central plan, and to expand industry, to eventually absorb and eliminate the private sector. But this policy change remained a dead letter. The bureaucracy, bound to the “private sector” by ties of common privilege, had no desire to undermine it. In practice they continued as before to rely on the kulaks to increase production for profit.

In July and August there was a wave of strikes as workers vented their frustration against their harsh conditions. The leaders – many of them old Bolsheviks – were arrested on the orders of the bureaucracy. All the signs showed that the sickness in the party was reaching a dangerous level. Trotsky sounded a warning. Imprisoning opponents, he explained, would solve nothing while the immediate causes of the conflict remained: lack of economic planning, and the hold of the bureaucracy over the party.

“This present regime”, Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee on October 8, “is much further from any workers’ democracy than was the regime under the fiercest period of War Communism. The bureaucratization of the Party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions.” He added that the hierarchy of secretaries, appointed from above, “creates party opinion”, dominated the rank-and-file workers, and ensured that critical views were given no genuine hearing.

Within days of Trotsky’s protest, a statement was issued by 46 other leading party members, expressing their criticism of the Politbureau’s course, both economically and in terms of what they called the “completely intolerable” Party regime which “destroys the independence of the Party, replacing the party by a recruited bureaucratic apparatus”. It also called for an end to the ban on factions.

The ‘triumvirate’ and their supporters were thrown into turmoil by the challenge. However, under pressure from the majority of the party (including the army and the youth), the bureaucracy was forced to retreat. In words, they accepted the demands of the Opposition and proclaimed a “New Course” of freedom and democracy in the party – all the while keeping all the strings of power in their hands.

Trotsky replied with an Open Letter to party members on December 8, warning that a “New Course” on paper was not enough, that the party could not be turned back onto the road of Bolshevism unless the rank and file – and the youth in particular – acted to “regenerate and renovate the party apparatus” and “to the right of free and comradely criticism without fear”. It was received with tremendous enthusiasm among the party workers – but by the bureaucracy as a declaration of war.

The debate was to be resolved at the thirteenth conference, meeting in January 1924. The struggle in the Soviet party, however, was decisively cut across by the developments in Germany during 1923.