a) The ‘Lenin Levy’

Fearing the level of support that Trotsky’s arguments about the ‘New Course’ were receiving, the party bureaucracy resorted to vote-rigging to exclude Opposition delegates from the thirteenth conference in January 1924, where the inner-party debate was to be decided. In Moscow, for example, the Opposition had majority support in most of the branches. In the regional elections, despite ruthless weeding out of Opposition supporters by Stalin’s appointed secretaries, 36% of the vote still went to the Opposition. Yet, at the provincial level, this vote was mysteriously halved. From the whole of the USSR, only three Opposition delegates managed to get into the conference! Nevertheless, Pyatakov and Preobrazhensky were able to speak, spelling out the Opposition’s criticisms on both economic policy and party democracy, stressing that “Bolshevism by its very nature contradicts bureaucratism”.

Then came the news of Lenin’s death on 21 January. The mass of workers and youth were plunged into even deeper gloom, while the bureaucracy immediately felt themselves in a stronger position. The triumvirate now set out to defeat the Opposition’s power base among the party activists. Supposedly in tribute to Lenin, they threw the party open to workers – had not Trotsky criticized the fact that only 15 percent of the membership were workers? Between February and May 1924 some 240,000 workers were admitted.

This so-called “Lenin levy” was, in fact, a mockery of the method of party-building that Lenin had developed and the concerns that he had raised. As the party congress had explained in 1919: “The Communist Party is the organisation which unites in its ranks only the vanguard of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry – that part of these classes which consciously strives to realize in practice the communist program”.

Flooding the party with raw recruits went directly counter to this task – but it served another purpose. The “Lenin levy”, the triumvirate calculated, would in the first place provide them with voting fodder to swamp the Opposition. Inexperienced members, confronted with unfamiliar problems, will tend to follow the lead they are given. Very few would feel able to challenge the Politbureau.

“We must utilise the very best of what there is in our social system, and utilise it with the greatest caution, thoughtfulness and knowledge, to build up the new People’s Commissariat … first, the advanced workers, and, second, the really enlightened elements for whom we can vouch that they will not take the word for the deed, and will not utter a single word that goes against their conscience…. We must follow the rule: ‘Better fewer, but better’.” ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Lenin, March 1923. (Full text)

“The gates of the party, always carefully guarded, were now thrown wide open. Workers, clerks, petty officials, flocked through in crowds. The political aim of this manoeuvre was to dissolve the revolutionary vanguard in raw human material, without experience, without independence, and yet with the old habit of submitting to the authorities. The scheme was successful. By freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian vanguard, the “Leninist levy” dealt a death blow to the party of Lenin. The machine had won the necessary independence. Democratic centralism gave place to bureaucratic centralism. …The chief merit of a Bolshevik was declared to be obedience” (Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, Chap.5)

b) The Stalinists try to rewrite history

As in Russia, there was strong support for the Opposition in the Communist parties internationally. The central committees of the mass-based French and Polish parties, for example, protested against the attacks on Trotsky. The triumvirate could not tolerate this. Zinoviev, as Comintern president, ruthlessly abused his position, disbanding the leading bodies of national parties to get rid of Trotsky’s supporters – under the slogan of “Bolshevization”!

They also set out to rewrite history and cover Trotsky’s name in mud. He was reviled as a Menshevik (after the confusing split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903 Trotsky had, for a few months, found himself in the Mensheviks’ camp before the political differences between them became clear) and also as an ultra-left! In particular his theory of permanent revolution was seized on to demonstrate his “petty-bourgeois deviation from Leninism”.

In fact, Trotsky’s fundamental disagreement with the Mensheviks (see Lessons One and Two) was precisely the basis for his political alliance with Lenin in 1917 and after. Lenin and Trotsky had come to reach identical conclusions about the need for the Russian working-class to lead the struggle for power, as a first step towards worldwide revolution.

Lenin had made this clear in his ‘April Theses’ on his return to Russia in 1917, when he successfully reorientated the Bolsheviks away from the mistaken policies being pursued by the leadership of Stalin and Kamenev – which had effectively just been to try and put leftward pressure on the Provisional Government while postponing the struggle for Soviet power to an indefinite future.

“The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies is the revolutionary leader of the insurrectionary people; an organ of control over the Provisional Government. On the other hand, the Provisional Government has in fact taken the role of fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people. … It is not to our advantage at present to force events, hastening the process of repelling the bourgeois layers … In so far as the Provisional Government fortifies the steps of the revolution, to that extent we must support it; but in so far as it is counter-revolutionary, support to the Provisional Government is not permissible”. (Stalin, speaking to a Bolshevik Party Conference, 29 March 1917) (Full Text)