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The proletariat burns itself out in the struggle
The bureaucratic Leviathan
The Bolsheviks’ political monopoly
The transformation of the party
Increasing centralisation of power in the party
The fight to defend party democracy
The banning of factions
THE COLLAPSE of industry led to a drastic reduction in the number of workers. The number of industrial workers fell from 3,024,000 in 1917 to 1,243,000 in 1921-2, a decrease of 58.7 per cent. [1]
The drop was particularly sharp in Petrograd. While at the time of the October revolution there were 400,000 factory workers there, this fell to 120,495 by 1 April 1918. Of these 48,910 were unemployed. So the total number of workers employed in Petrograd’s industry was only 71,575. [2]
The decline of the proletariat was not only quantitative but also qualitative, as Lenin explained: ‘Since the war, the industrial workers of Russia have become much less proletarian than they were before, because during the war all those who desired to evade military service went into the factories. This is common knowledge.’ [3] Thus many of the workers of 1921-2 were actually former students or shopkeepers, or their children. The group that was most reduced was the metal workers, the mainstay of the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Members of the working class were forced by the scarcity of food to act like small individualist traders, rather than as a collective, or a united class. It has been calculated that in 1919-20 the state supplied only 42 per cent of the grain consumed by the towns, and an even smaller percentage of other foodstuffs, all the rest being bought on the black market. [4]
In March-April 1919, 75 per cent of the Petrograd workers bought bread on the black market. [5] It was common for workers to stay away from work in order to forage in the countryside. During the civil war factories paid part of the wages in kind. The workers used a portion themselves and sold the rest on the black market. A speaker at the First All-Russian Congress of Councils of National Economy in May 1918 drew attention to this practice, which acquired the nickname ‘piece-selling’:
Bagging [foraging for food by townspeople] is a terrible evil, piece-selling is a terrible evil; but it is an even greater evil when you begin to pay the workers in kind, in their own products ... and when they themselves turn piece-sellers.’ [6]
But the practice persisted, and the Second All-Russian Congress of Councils of National Economy in December 1918 had little option but to turn a blind eye to it, passing yet another resolution in favour of payment of wages to factory workers in kind. Two years later the scandal had grown much worse.
At the Fourth Congress of Trade Unions in May 1921 the disorganisation of industry and the demoralisation of the proletariat were illustrated by a statement that workers in factories were stealing 50 per cent of the goods produced and that the average workers’ wage covered only one-fifth of their cost of living, so that they were compelled to earn the rest by illicit trading. [7] Under these circumstances workers inevitably became middlemen, parasitic on the economy and increasingly inclined to look after their own interests.
On 24 August 1919 Lenin wrote: ‘... industry is at a standstill. There is no food, no fuel, no industry.’ [8] He summed up the disintegration of the proletariat in these words:
The industrial proletariat ... owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed ... dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat. The proletariat is the class which is engaged in the production of material values in large-scale capitalist industry. Since large-scale capitalist industry has been destroyed, since the factories are at a standstill, the proletariat has disappeared. It has sometimes figured in statistics, but it has not been held together economically. [9]
There was a dictatorship of the proletariat, even though the proletariat had disintegrated. As Lenin put it to the Tenth Conference of the party on 26 May 1921: ‘even though the proletariat has to go through a period when it is declassed ... it can nevertheless fulfil its task of winning and holding political power.’ [10]
With some cynicism Shliapnikov told the Eleventh Party Congress: ‘Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] said yesterday that the proletariat as a class, in the Marxian sense, did not exist. Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a non-existing class.’ [11]
Of course, to a vulgar materialist, it sounds impossible to have a dictatorship of the proletariat without the proletariat, like the smile of the Cheshire cat without the cat itself. But one must remember that the ideological as well as the political superstructure never reflect the material base directly and immediately. Ideas have their own momentum. Usually in ‘normal’ times they are a source of conservativism: long after people’s material circumstances have changed, they are still dominated by old ideas. However, this disjuncture between the ideological superstructure and the economic base became a source of strength to Bolshevism during the civil war.
Marx explained that the class in itself and the class for itself are not one and the same, in other words that the class can be powerful in its position in production and yet not be conscious of this. The other side of the same coin is that a class which loses three-quarters of its economic power can, for a short period, maintain its political dominance through its experience and its established position in society and the state.
But in the not very long run, the economic enfeeblement of the proletariat must in practice lead to a catastrophic decline in morale and consciousness of the people who are supposed to form the ruling class of the new state.
At first the congress of soviets met frequently. Thus in the seven months between 7 November 1917, when power was declared to be in the hands of the soviets, and the adoption of the constitution of 10 July 1918, there were four congresses. As against this, between November 1918 and December 1922 the congress met only annually.
The power of the congress of soviets shifted to its central executive committee (VTsIK). In the constitution VTsIK was subordinate to the congress. In practice, however, the power of VTsIK was whittled away by its own presidium and by Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars.
VTsIK met less and less frequently. At first it was required to meet at least once every two months. At the Seventh Congress of soviets (December 1919) Lenin justified the infrequency of the meetings of VTsIK by the requirements of the war against the Whites. The official requirement was reduced to ‘not less than three times a year’ by provision of the Ninth Congress of soviets.
The outstanding development of the years of the civil war was the concentration of central authority in the hands of Sovnarkom at the expense of both the congress of soviets and VTsIK. Sovnarkom not only enjoyed full executive authority but also unlimited power of legislation by decree. In its first year it passed 480 decrees, of which only 68 were submitted to VTsIK for confirmation. Between 1917 and 1921 Sovnarkom issued 1,615 decrees, VTsIK only 375. [12] At the same time as the congress of soviets was being deprived of its power by Sovnarkom, the process of concentration of authority in the centre at the expense of local soviets was taking place. There was a massive increase in the number of officials. By the end of 1920 there were 5,880,000 state officials – five times the number of industrial workers. [13]
This state apparatus was mostly composed of people with bourgeois origins. It is true that hundreds of thousands of workers had been mobilised by the party to strengthen the new state machine, but they were a minority, and their weight was further weakened by the dominance that technical superiority and higher cultural level gave to the old officials. As Lenin said on 12 June 1920: ‘The Soviet government employs hundreds of thousands of office workers, who are either bourgeois or semi-bourgeois ... they have absolutely no confidence in our Soviet government.’ [14] He told the Eighth Congress of the party in March 1919:
The Tsarist bureaucrats began to join the Soviet institutions and practise their bureaucratic methods, they began to assume the colouring of communists and, to succeed better in their careers, to procure membership cards of the Russian Communist Party ... What makes itself felt here most is the lack of cultured forces. [15]
From 1921 onwards Lenin’s denunciations of bureaucracy became more and more vehement. In a speech on 17 October 1921 to a conference of representatives of the political education departments, he said:
At present bribery surrounds us on all sides. In my opinion, three chief enemies now confront one ... the first is communist conceit; the second – illiteracy, and the third – bribery. [16]
With the same frankness and plainness, in his last speech to the Comintern congress on 13 November 1922, Lenin indicted the bourgeois conservative nature of the existing state machine:
the machine functions somehow; but down below government employees have arbitrary control and they often exercise it in such a way as to counteract our measures. At the top, we have, I don’t know how many, but at all events, I think, no more than a few thousand, at the outside several tens of thousands of our own people. Down below, however, there are hundreds of thousands of old officials whom we got from the Tsar and from bourgeois society and who, partly deliberately and partly unwittingly, work against us. [17]
In large part this had been a result of circumstances: the civil war had shaped all state institutions. In the words of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky:
Today, when a fierce civil war is still raging, all our organisations have to be on a war footing. The instruments of the Soviet power have had to be constructed on militarist lines ... What exists today in Russia is not simply the dictatorship of the proletariat; it is a militarist-proletarian dictatorship. [18]
Prior to the revolution all revolutionaries took it for granted that during the dictatorship of the proletariat more than one workers’ party would continue to exist. Thus Trotsky, on being elected president of the Petrograd soviet on 9 (22) September 1917, said:
We are all party people, and we shall have to cross swords more than once. But we shall guide the work of the Petersburg soviet in a spirit of justice and complete independence for all fractions; the hand of the praesidium will never oppress the minority.
Sukhanov, quoting these words a few years later, commented:
Heavens! What liberal views! What self-mockery! But the point is that about three years later, while exchanging reminiscences with me, Trotsky, thinking back to this moment, exclaimed dreamily:
‘What a happy time!’
Yes, wonderful! Perhaps not one person in the world, not excluding himself, will ever recall Trotsky’s rule with such feelings. [19]
However under the iron pressure of the civil war the Bolshevik leaders were forced to move, as the price of survival, to a one-party system. They could not give up power just because the class they represented had largely vanished while fighting to defend that power.
The fate of the different parties was closely bound up with the development of the civil war. That the openly capitalist parties, above all the Kadets, would be ready to fight to the end against Bolshevik power was obvious. They wanted an open capitalist class dictatorship. The petty bourgeois parties – the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks – were less clear in their positions. On the one hand their leaders rallied again and again to the counter-revolution. On the other they were repulsed by the extremism of the White terror, which did not spare even them. The result was vacillation in the Social Revolutionary and Menshevik camps. This was combined with serious fragmentation within the two parties. In each one section joined the Kadets, another moved cautiously and gradually towards the Bolsheviks, and yet another remained neutral. The positions of the different sections depended very much on the situation on the civil war front. A few Red Army reverses were enough to push the petty bourgeoisie, perpetually hesitant, in the direction of the right.
In suppressing the extreme right, the Bolshevik government faced a dilemma. What were they to do about the petty bourgeois who protested against the ‘suppression of freedom’. This dilemma became increasingly difficult to solve by moderate measures: the Right Social Revolutionaries were practically indistinguishable from the ‘Left’ Kadets, and protested strongly when the latter were suppressed; the Right Mensheviks protested against the suppression of the Right Social Revolutionaries; then again there was no clear boundary between the Right Social Revolutionaries and the moderate Social Revolutionaries, and between these and the Left Social Revolutionaries, and so on. The gradation was continuous. So long as the final outcome of the civil war was not certain, which was for nearly three years, the level of tolerance of both the Bolsheviks and their opponents was very low. As E.H. Carr put it:
If it was true that the Bolshevik regime was not prepared after the first few months to tolerate an organised opposition, it was equally true that no opposition was prepared to remain within legal limits. The premise of dictatorship was common to both sides of the argument. [20]
The severity of civil war conditions, the weakness of the proletariat and the sullen animosity of the peasantry forced the Bolsheviks to greater and greater restriction of the freedom of action of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, of whatever variety. Had it been possible to isolate the Whites as the sole target for attack, the situation would have been very different.
The Bolshevik Party programme adopted in March 1919 made it clear that the restriction of the rights of other parties was only temporary. Thus it stated: ‘ ...the forfeiture of political rights, and whatever limitations may be imposed upon freedom, are necessary only as temporary measures.’ [21] However, the circumstances conspired to demonstrate that sometimes there is nothing more permanent than what is intended to be temporary.
The Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918 was the last at which the opposition was present in strength. At the next congress, held four months later with 950 delegates, there were 933 Communists, eight Revolutionary Communists, four Social Revolutionaries, two Narodnik Communists, one Maximalist, one Anarchist and one non-party delegate. [22]
With the party monopoly of power, the separation of party and state was necessarily only formal, especially as party members were bound by discipline to act as one. In fact the party and the soviets became increasingly fused. This fusion permeated all levels of the administration. Data from some 60 per cent of local soviets in the second half of 1919 showed that party members and candidates made up 89 per cent of the membership of executive committees of guberniia congresses of soviets, 86 per cent of executive committees of uezd congresses of soviets, 93 per cent of executive committees of city soviets in guberniia administrative centres, and 71 per cent of executive committees of town soviets in uezd administrative centres. [23]
The civil war changed the Bolsheviks’ attitude to the issue of single-party monopoly. They turned it from a ‘temporary evil’ imposed by circumstances, into a virtue. Thus in 1923 Trotsky wrote: ‘We are the only party in the country and, in the period of the dictatorship it could not be otherwise.’ [24] The platform of the United Opposition (1927), one of whose main leaders was Trotsky, declared: ‘We will struggle with all our force against the formation of two parties, for the dictatorship of the proletariat demands as its very core a united proletarian party. It demands a single party.’ [25]
The establishment of the Bolshevik Party monopoly led to a deterioration of political life in general, and a decline of the soviets in particular, which was summed up by Victor Serge:
With the disappearance of political debates between parties representing different social interests through the various shades of their opinion, Soviet institutions, beginning with the local soviets and ending with the VTsIK and the Council of People’s Commissars, manned solely by communists, now function in a vacuum: since all the decisions are taken by the party, all they can do is give them the official rubber stamp. [26]
However, it is one thing to assert that the banning of all parties, except for the Bolshevik Party, must have had deleterious consequences. To assert that the Bolsheviks could have acted differently, and could have allowed freedom of parties, is altogether another. In essence the dictatorship of the proletariat does not represent a combination of abstract, immutable elements such as democracy and centralism, independent of time and place. The actual level of democracy, as well as of centralism, depends on three basic factors: the strength of the proletariat, the material and cultural legacy left to it by the old regime, and the strength of capitalist resistance. The level of democracy feasible must be in direct proportion to the first two factors, and in inverse proportion to the third. The captain of an ocean liner can allow football to be played on his vessel; on a tiny raft in a stormy sea the level of tolerance is far lower.
During the civil war hundreds of thousands of workers joined the party, but the effect of the struggle radically changed its social composition. With the primary task the need to run the administration, tens of thousands of worker party members became state officials. A substantial proportion of party members went into the Red Army during the civil war; in 1920 this reached about 300,000 – half the total membership. [27] More than half a million communists saw service with the Red Army during the civil war, of whom roughly half were sent into the army by civilian party organisations and half were recruited by the party while on army service. Some 200,000 communists lost their lives.
One inevitable result was a catastrophic decline in the proportion of party members working at the factory bench. Thus statistics for 1919 show that only 11 per cent of party members were then working in factories; 53 per cent were working as government officials; 8 per cent were party and trade union officials and 27 per cent were in the army. [28]
At the Tenth Congress in March 1921 Shliapnikov deplored the fact that among the metal workers of Petrograd, who before the revolution had been a mainstay of Bolshevism, no more than 2 per cent were party members. The corresponding figure for Moscow was 4 per cent. [29] At the Eleventh Congress (March-April 1922) Zinoviev complained: ‘It is a fact that there are big districts, mines, etc, where there are from 10,000 to 12,000 workers, where we have a party nucleus of only six.’ [30]
To add to the weakness of the party, the proportion of old Bolsheviks in it was extremely small. In October 1919 only 20 per cent of members had been members before the October revolution, and only 8 per cent had joined before February 1917. [31] Zinoviev told the Eleventh Congress that only 2 per cent of the members in 1922 had been party members before February 1917. [32]
In a letter to Molotov on 26 March 1922 Lenin wrote:
If we do not close our eyes to reality we must admit that at the present time the proletarian policy of the party is not determined by the character of its membership but by the enormous undivided prestige enjoyed by the small group which might be called the old guard of the party.
The danger inherent in the situation was very great. ‘A slight conflict within this group will be enough, if not to destroy this prestige, at all events to weaken the group to such a degree as to rob it of its power to determine policy.’ [33]
The central committee, originally a small combat body and in actuality the decision-making body of the party, came increasingly to ratify rather than to make decisions.
At first it was required to meet twice a month, following a resolution of the Eighth Party Congress and the 1919 Party Rules. [34] In 1921 the Tenth Congress modified this requirement to once in two months. [35]
Immediately after the October revolution, the central committee had met very frequently. We have the minutes of 17 such meetings for a period of a little over three months [36], while the minutes of a number of other meetings in the same period have not survived. Subsequently, during the civil war, meetings became less frequent. There were only six between April and July 1918, and between July and November 1918 the central committee did not meet at all. (This was complained of at the Eighth Congress in March 1919). Later the meetings became more regular: between April and October 1919 there were six; between April 1920 and March 1921 there were 29. [37] But these were still far less frequent than those of the politburo.
The central committee met only six times between March and December 1919, while the politburo and orgburo had 29 and 110 meetings respectively. During this period there were also ten joint politburo-orgburo meetings. From December 1919 to September 1920 the central committee met only nine times, while the politburo and orgburo met 77 and 64 times respectively. Between September 1920 and March 1921 – the time of the trade union debate – the central committee met more often, with 24 meetings, almost one a week, while the politburo and orgburo had 26 and 47 sessions respectively. Between May and August 1921 the central committee held nine meetings and the politburo and orgburo 39 and 48. Between September and December 1921 the central committee met five times, while the politburo and orgburo met 44 and 63 times respectively. [38]
In practice the politburo and orgburo increasingly usurped the power of the central committee.
Another party institution whose power continued to increase was the secretariat. To achieve coordination between the politburo and the orgburo, the secretary of the party was a member of both.
The secretariat greatly expanded its staff; from 15 in March 1919 it grew to 80 in November 1919 to 80, in eight departments (general administration, finance, information, organisation, distribution, inspection, peasantry and women’s work). [39] In March 1920 its staff rose to 150 and a year later it totalled 602 – plus a military detachment of 140 as guards and messengers). [40]
One of the most important powers controlled by the secretariat was the appointment of personnel. Since 1920 one of the three party secretaries had been in charge of what was called the ‘accounts and distribution section’ (Uchraspred), which kept account of party manpower and supervised its distribution. In its report to the Tenth Congress it showed that in a period of less than twelve months it had been responsible for the transfer and appointment of 42,000 party members. [41] Uchraspred had become a powerful organ of control over state and party institutions.
Zinoviev explained at the Twelfth Party Congress (1923) that the presidents of the executive committees of provincial soviets were appointed by the central committee of the party and that this was necessarily so. [42] In fact it was the secretariat that had this power of nomination.
There were also widespread appointments in internal party bodies. During the civil war, when local party committees, including those representing large territorial units, expressed opposition to the central committee in Moscow, they were often summarily sacked. In the spring of 1919, for instance, the central committee dissolved the elected central committee of the Ukraine and appointed a new one. Between March 1922 and March 1923 the secretariat appointed 42 secretaries of provincial committees. [43]
Even delegates to party congresses were often nominated rather than elected.
The undermining of inner party democracy did not take place without vigorous protests from party members. K.K. Iurenev, for example, spoke at the Ninth Congress of the methods used by the central committee to suppress criticism, including the virtual exile of the critics: One goes to Christiana, another sent to the Urals, a third – to Siberia’. [44] He said that in its attitude towards the party the central committee had become ‘not accountable ministry, but unaccountable government’.
At the same congress, V.N. Maksimovsky counterposed ‘democratic centralism’ to the ‘bureaucratic centralism’ for which the centre was responsible. ‘It is said,’ he commented, ‘that fish begin to putrefy from the head. The party begins to suffer at the top from the influence of bureaucratic centralism.’ [45] Iakovlev stated: ‘Ukraine has become a place of exile. Comrades unwanted for one reason or another in Moscow are exiled there.’ [46] Sapronov declared: ‘However much you talk about electoral rights, about the dictatorship of the proletariat, the striving of the central committee for party dictatorship in fact leads to the dictatorship of the party bureaucracy.’ [47]
Nevertheless, throughout the civil war, the atmosphere of free discussion in party conferences and congresses was maintained. During the debate on the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty the party enjoyed, in the words of E.H. Carr, ‘a freedom and publicity of discussion rarely practised by any party on vital issues of public policy.’ [48] Bukharin’s pamphlet defending ‘Left Communism’ against Lenin’s position was published in May 1918 in one million copies. [49]
In the trade union debate the democratic traditions of Bolshevism remained clear. As Robert V. Daniels, a historian not sympathetic to Bolshevism, put it: ‘The fall of 1920 was the high point of open discussion in the Communist Party and of free opposition to the leaders’ authority.’ [50] Victor Serge wrote of the situation in the party during the civil war:
[The party’s] thinking is ... very lively and free. It welcomes the anarchists and Left Social Revolutionaries of yesterday ...
Nobody is afraid to contradict Lenin or to criticise him. His authority was so little imposed, the democratic manners of the revolution were still so natural, that it was a matter of course for any revolutionary, no matter how recent a recruit, to express himself frankly in the presence of the man who headed the party and the state. Lenin was more than once criticised unsparingly, in factories or conferences, by totally unknown people. He listened to his contestants coolly and replied to them in a commonsense manner.’ [51]
At the Tenth Party Congress, meeting in the shadow of the Kronstadt uprising, Lenin moved a resolution to ban all factions, which the congress approved:
The congress orders the immediate dissolution, without exception, of all groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other, and instructs all organisations to be very strict in ensuring that no manifestations of factionalism of any sort be tolerated. Failure to comply with this resolution of the congress is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party. [52]
To this was added a secret article giving the central committee unlimited disciplinary discretion:
the congress authorises the central committee, in cases of breach of discipline or of a revival or toleration of factionalism, to apply all party penalties, including expulsion.
Members of the central committee could themselves be expelled from the party by a two-thirds vote at a combined meeting of the central committee and the party control commission. [53]
The banning of factional activity was not regarded as an absolute measure. When Riazanov proposed an amendment to rule out elections to the central committee on the basis of separate groups, each standing on its separate platform, Lenin objected:
We cannot deprive the party and the members of the central committee of the right to appeal to the party in the event of disagreement on fundamental issues ... Supposing we are faced with a question like, say, the conclusion of the Brest peace? Can you guarantee that no such question will arise? No, you cannot. In the circumstances, the elections may have to be based on platforms. [54]
That the banning of factions did not mean the banning of all inner-party opposition was clear not only from this exchange between Lenin and Riazanov, but also from the fact that the resolution On Party Unity itself invited dissidents to state their views in the Bolshevik press as well as in special discussion sheets.
Lenin also went out of his way to emphasise that there was substance in the Workers’ Opposition’s criticisms of the situation in the party and state. He referred to ‘the services of the Workers’ Opposition’. In the resolution on party unity he included the following:
the congress at the same time declares that every practical proposal concerning questions to which the so-called Workers’ Opposition group, for example, has devoted special attention, such as purging the party of non-proletarian and unreliable elements, combating bureaucratic practices, developing democracy and workers’ initiative ... must be examined with the greatest care and tested in practice. [55]
Even in the darkest days of the civil war, factions had not been banned in the Bolshevik Party. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were harassed, now outlawed, now allowed to come out into the open. Such policy changes were dictated by the circumstances of the war, and by the vacillations of these parties. But at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 not only were these parties outlawed, but so also were factions inside the ruling Bolshevik Party. There was a feeling among the Bolsheviks that there was no alternative. Perhaps the attitude of the party was best summed up in Radek’s words to the congress:
In voting for this resolution, I feel that it can well be turned against us, and nevertheless I support it ... Let the central committee in a moment of danger take the severest of measures against the best party comrades, if it finds this necessary. Let the central committee even be mistaken! That is less dangerous than the wavering which is now observable. [56]
In general one can say that at this time Trotsky was an enthusiastic supporter of the claims of authority and centralisation in the party. He seems to have been less sensitive than Lenin to the dangers inherent in the situation – only later, in 1923, does he become aware of the bureaucratic threat. But while Trotsky supported this accumulation of bureaucratic power, he was not himself centrally involved in it. The party and state apparatus was increasingly falling under the control of Stalin and his faction – a fact that was to become immensely important after the departure of Lenin.
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1. I.S. Rosenfeld, Promyshlennaia politika SSSR (Moscow 1926), page 37.
2. Brügmann, pages 215-6.
3. Lenin, Works, volume 33, page 256.
4. Kritzman, page 217.
5. Kritzman, page 218.
6. Trudy I vserossiiskogo sezda sovetov narodnogo khoziaistva (Moscow 1918), page 434.
7. Chetvertii vserossiiskii sezd professionalnykh soiuzov (Moscow 1921), page 119.
8. Lenin, Works, volume 29, page 555.
9. Lenin, Works, volume 33, page 65.
10. Lenin, Works, volume 32, page 412.
11. Odinnadtsatii sezd RKP(b), page 109.
12. G.V. Vemadsky, A History of Russia (New York 1944), page 319.
13. W. Pietsch, Revolution und Statt: Institutionen als Träger der Macht in der Sowjetrussland (1917-1922) (Cologne 1969), page 137.
14. Lenin, Works, volume 31, page 178.
15. Lenin, Works, volume 29, page 183.
16. Lenin, Works, volume 33, page 77.
17. Lenin, Works, pages 428-9.
18. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (London 1969), page 240.
19. Sukhanov, pages 528-9.
20. Carr, volume 1, page 183.
21. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, page 436.
22. Serge, Year One, page 336.
23. T.H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-1967 (Princeton 1968), pages 470-1.
24. Trotsky, The New Course, page 27.
25. Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia (London 1928), page 94.
26. Serge, Year One, page 264.
27. Rigby, Communist Party Membership, pages 241-2.
28. Izvestiia TsK RKP(B), 28 March 1920.
29. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), pages 29-30 and 76.
30. Odinnadtsatii sezd RKP(b), page 422.
31. Izvestiia TsK RKP(B), 24 March 1920.
32. Odinnadtsatii sezd RKP(b), page 420.
33. Lenin, Works, volume 28, page 257.
34. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, volume 1, pages 442 and 463.
35. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, volume 1, page 525.
36. CC Minutes, pages 126-251.
37. Pietsch, page 153.
38. R.H. McNeal (editor), Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Toronto 1974), volume 2, page 13.
39. Vosmaia konferentsiia RKP(b) (Moscow 1961) page 221.
40. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), pages 56.
41. Izvestiia TsK RKP(B), 5 March 1921.
42. Dvenadtsatii sezd RKP(b) (Moscow 1923), page 207.
43. Izvestiia TsK RKP(B), March 1923.
44. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), page 52.
45. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), page 54.
46. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), pages 62-3.
47. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), pages 56-7.
48. Carr, volume 1, page 188.
49. A.G. Löwy, Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht (Vienna 1968), page 111.
50. R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1965), page 129.
51. Serge, Year One, page 366.
52. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, volume 1, page 529.
53. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, volume 1, pages 529-30.
54. Lenin, Works, volume 32, page 261.
55. Lenin, Works, volume 32, page 243.
56. Desiatii sezd RKP(b), page 540.
Last updated on 29 July 2009