Building Soviet Democracy, Breeding Communist Dictatorship

In 1923, Leon Trotsky, troubled by growing “bureaucratism” within the Communist Party commented that “leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs.” This critique highlighted a fundamental dilemma which the Bolsheviks had faced since coming to power in October 1917: how to reconcile the two important loci of authority in the post-revolutionary “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the soviets, representative assemblies of delegates of the working masses, which arose spontaneously during Russia’s revolutionary turmoil, and the vanguard Party, whose historic mission, they were convinced, was to lead the working classes to a communist future. By Lenin’s death in 1924 their fusion into a “party-state” apparatus in both central government and across the localities was well underway. This “abnormal situation,” as Trotsky put it, was not the system of government intentionally established in the first year or two of Soviet power but a by-product of the accumulation of ad hoc decisions and practice. When these developments became apparent, they sparked a debate amongst Soviet leaders about the appropriate “leading and guiding role” of the Communist Party and its relationship to the Soviet apparatus of government, but it proved difficult to untangle the bonds of party and state once fused.