By 1921, even the Executive of the Congress of Soviets was meeting only three times a year. “Sovnarkom” (the Council of People’s Commissars, or government) remained as the effective organ of state power. It consisted of leading Communists, elected to carry out party policy. Naturally they operated within the discipline of the party.
The party remained, in other words, as the nucleus and backbone of the workers’ state. Authority was necessarily concentrated in the hands of the central committee – and, later, the political bureau (“Politbureau”) elected by the central committee – as a result of the extreme centralisation required by the war. But the centralisation of power under Lenin and Trotsky, however uncompromising, at no stage degenerated into systematic bureaucratic imposition from above.

In 1918, for example, the opposition of the “Left Communists” arose out of sharp debates within the party over the question of peace with Germany. For a fortnight they published their own daily paper in Petrograd; in Moscow they won control of the party organisation. But, with the start of the civil war, the Lefts closed ranks with the rest of the party and threw themselves into the struggle.

Even in the red army, critics of Trotsky’s leadership – essentially supporters of guerrilla war – were able to organize themselves as a “military opposition” and campaign for their views. They were defeated through argument and example.

In late 1920 there emerged the so-called Workers’ Opposition, with a program summed up by the capitalist historian Carr as “a hotchpotch of current discontents, directed in the main against the growing centralisation of economic and political controls” (Edward Hallett Carr’s The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923). Their views were carried in the party press, day by day, for months on end. A pamphlet stating their case was circulated at the party congress in March 1921, where the issues were to be fully debated.

The proceedings of the congress, however, were dramatically cut across by the uprising of sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, an island in the Bay of Finland facing Petrograd. In 1917 the Kronstadt sailors had been in the forefront of the revolution. By 1921 this generation had disappeared to the war fronts and been replaced with politically inexperienced peasant conscripts, who came under Anarchist influence. Affected by all the peasants’ grievances, demanding more freedom but without a program for solving the country’s problems, they staged an armed insurrection under the slogan “Down with Bolshevik tyranny!”

This presented a serious threat. Kronstadt commanded the approach to Petrograd. This gave the Whites and the imperialists a unique opportunity to attack a key centre of the revolution. Time to solve the crisis was very short. The sailors refused to surrender. Trotsky with the unanimous support of the party leadership, ordered the attack. After days of bitter fighting, Kronstadt was taken by Bolshevik troops.

The survival of the Soviet Union once again hung by a thread. Would the rebellion spread? To delegates at the party congress, it was clear that firm and united leadership was essential. Public divisions in the party, at this point, would have been seized upon by the enemy to disorient the workers and peasants. It was decided that organised factions within the party had to be dissolved for the time-being.

The Bolsheviks knew that problems could not be resolved by organisational measures alone; in the longer run, unity could only be built on discussion, education and agreement. The denial of tendency rights could only be justified as an emergency measure in grappling with the immediate crisis, to be abolished as soon as the situation was once again under control.

Earlier, emergency measures had also had to be taken during the civil war, such as the exclusion of the Right SRs and Mensheviks from the soviets in 1918 because of their support for the counter-revolutionary forces. Repression, however, was seen by the Bolsheviks as an exceptional and temporary method, forced on them by the imminent danger of reaction.

Even under these critical conditions they remained conciliatory towards their political opponents, on condition that they supported the workers’ state in practice and campaigned for their policies on that basis. At no stage did the Bolsheviks put forward the idea of a “one-party state”, for which there is no foundation in Marxism.

In reality, however, those who supported the revolution overwhelmingly joined the Bolsheviks. The opposition parties were increasingly abandoned to out-and-out enemies of the workers’ state. As late as August 1920 the Mensheviks held their party conference in Moscow and received press coverage. But by 1921 most of the Menshevik leaders had left Russia, to conduct their campaign against the Soviet state from abroad.