8. The New Course and the 1926 Family Code

May 1922 - April 1926

8.1 Introduction

This chapter describes how the methods adopted by Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev to prevent the promotion of Trotsky, led to the domination of the Stalinist faction, destroyed democracy within the party and debased the Communist International. The slippery slope began with personal slanders, political lies, and suppression of the truth; false reports were circulated with official approval, and news of events which did not support the analysis of the party tops was suppressed. A witch-hunting atmosphere was created to isolate and silence oppositionists, after which physical intimidation soon became the norm.

The course of events in the Soviet Union was determined by historical causes of a far deeper order than the personal qualities of those leading the Bolshevik Party. Tired from their heroic efforts, hungry, downhearted after the defeats of socialist revolutions internationally, and in a predominantly peasant country, there was an inevitable revival of petty-bourgeois tendencies in the proletariat itself which provided an important prop for the bureaucratic apparatus. Lenin had promoted Stalin, valuing him for his organisational abilities, his “firmness, grit and stubbornness, and to a certain extent his slyness”.^[1] When proposing Stalin for Party Secretary he never imagined Stalin taking control of the party as the leading figure in the bureaucratic degeneration. Nor could he have foreseen his absence over a critical period, but as soon as he recognised the danger he turned to Trotsky as his ally.

The chapter ends with the debate on the 1926 Family Code, on marriage, divorce, alimony, and adoption; the last genuinely open discussion in the party and country.

8.2 Stalin Accelerates

Suffering from chronic insomnia, Lenin fell ill on 6 December 1921 and took sick leave until 23 April 1922, when he underwent an operation to remove one of the bullets fired into him by Fanya Kaplan three years earlier. On 24 May he suffered his first stroke and did not return to work until 2 October. It was during those ten months that Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin formalised the arrangement whereby they would become the ruling Troika, though it is clear that for some time they had, with nods and winks, been in a conspiracy against Trotsky, a method quite alien to Bolshevism. This grouping opposed Trotsky’s anti-bureaucratic stance, but the real common motivation was personal – a fear that Trotsky would step into Lenin’s shoes.^[2] The great strength of the Troika was their long and close association with Lenin extending back to before the split with the Mensheviks in 1903. Acting in concert these three dominated the Politburo.

The formation of the Troika marked a qualitative change in the nature of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party; previously the differences that arose within the leadership had been corrected as events proved one side or the other right or wrong, but from now on matters would be decided on a factional basis. It would soon become common practice for loyalty to the majority faction to replace loyalty to the party, and for those opposing the faction to be treated as opposing the party. To show the opposition to be wrong became more important than reaching correct conclusions and projecting a line that matched the needs of the situation. Events that gave the lie to the faction line were hidden from the membership. At the very top of the party personal considerations replaced political, and this gave the struggle between the Troika and Trotsky its bitterness and contributed substantially to the rapid degeneration of the party leadership.

While Lenin was politically inactive, Stalin took advantage of his absence and the Orgburo began the creation of a powerful pyramid of control over the local organisations. First, by requiring local party organs to submit written reports directly to the Orgburo. Then, after July 1922 secretaries were required to present regular reports on local activities to the next higher body in the party and receive instructions from that body to avoid possible errors in important questions. In December 1922, The Circular Letters of the Central Committee commenced. These were written within the Secretariat and usually began with the phrase “The Central Committee decided …”. The decisions of the CC as told to the membership were refracted through the Secretariat, and in a great measure Stalin himself.

Returning after ten months enforced absence, Lenin was seriously disturbed by the growth of an all-pervasive bureaucratic power, the focus of which was the Orgburo. He found that during his absence, Stalin had pursued a policy of one-sided selection of personnel to build a numerous faction; the core of which was the cabal he had created during the civil war, bound together by ties of personal loyalty and greed. However, when Lenin spoke to the Fourth Congress of the CI on 13 November 1922, the adverse effects of his paralysis were obvious in his hesitant, jerky delivery.^[3] He never fully regained his health. On 20 November he delivered what was to be his last public speech, and on 13 December he suffered two serious strokes. Half-paralysed, he was confined to his bed in the Kremlin.

The Orgburo enacted the decisions of the Twelfth Party Conference (4-7 August 1922) on ‘The Improvement of the Living Conditions of the Active Functionaries of the Party’. Senior functionaries, in addition to a salary of up to ten times the national average wage, plus free holidays, housing, and childcare, would receive an added special allowance of goods. This monthly distribution included 12 kilos of meat, 1.2 kilos of sugar, 4.8 kilos of rice, and 100 grams of tea. Functionaries at regional level received 4.6 kilos of meat or fish, 400 grams of sugar, 162 cigarettes, and 3 boxes of matches. The decision whether or not an individual received these perks was, ultimately, in the hands of Stalin. The Secretariat had put in place a system of privileges for bribing and punishing. According to an Orgburo report of 27 September 1922, the number of senior functionaries was about 20,000 persons with another 40,000 receiving additional supplies.^[4]

A new social layer differentiated from the party as a whole had begun to crystalise and was growing rapidly. Party members who challenged the political power of this elite found themselves confronting a system of party and state institutions that defended that power. Adolf Joffe, a revolutionary of many years standing described the new layer as:

… made up of functionaries. They are far more interested in appointments, promotions, privileges [and other] advantages, than in questions of socialist theory or in what happens to the international revolution. … By political realism, … they really mean taking care of their own personal interests.^[5]

On 23 January 1923, Lenin proposed a reorganisation of the party’s central institutions and submitted his suggestions for publication in Pravda and to be placed before the Twelfth Party Congress (17-25 April 1923).^[6] The proposals were little less than a declaration of war on the party machine in general, and Stalin in particular. The attack had two prongs: (i) An attempt to control the backstage activities of the Secretariat and Orgburo by the creation of a much enlarged Central Control Commission composed of party members who were workers and peasants, independent of the party hierarchy, with the authority to call to account violations of legality or morality by party and/or state, and (ii) Rabkrin to be downgraded both in size and importance and placed under the control of the new Control Commission giving the latter the power to call state officials to task.

That Lenin demanded his article be printed in Pravda immediately, implied a lack of confidence in the Politburo. The reaction of Stalin and his allies (Kalinin, Kuibyshev, and Molotov) was the same as in 1917: to suppress Lenin’s article. To hide the censorship, Kuybyshev proposed that a special issue of Pravda containing Lenin’s article be printed but consisting of only one copy. Only after recognising that such a proposal risked Lenin himself putting the article in circulation – in which case his opposition to the Politburo would be impossible to hide – was the decision made to publish the article in Pravda on 25 January.^[7]

Stalin’s response was to roll with the punch, take control of the situation, and use the very measures intended to reduce his control of the party machine, to enhance it. On 29 January, on the recommendation of the Secretariat, the Politburo amended the party statutes to allow a member of the Secretariat, Kuybyshev, to be appointed head of the enlarged Central Control Commission, to ensure its independence and impartiality. The wolf was sent to guard the sheep.

Lenin suffered a series of minor strokes until, on 10 March, a further stroke left him half-paralysed and deprived of speech. At the Twelfth Party Congress Stalin would, on behalf of Lenin, call for an attack on bureaucracy within the party by increasing membership of the Central Control Commission to fifty and combining it with Rabkrin, and enlarging the CC from twenty-seven to forty members. This enabled his supporters to gain a significant majority on both bodies, quite the opposite of what Lenin had intended. Finally, a party school was to be established for the selection, training, and promotion of promising personnel for leadership roles, giving Stalin even greater control over recruitment to the hierarchy of secretaries.^[8]

Each of Lenin’s proposals was used by Stalin as an important step in the further bureaucratisation of the party machine, demonstrating that there is no administrative solution to the problem of bureaucracy. Schapiro quotes Stalin’s summation of the Congress: “I regret that Comrade Lenin is not here. If he were, he would be able to say: ‘for twenty-five years I have been forging a party, and now here it is, complete, great and strong’”, and adds “hypocrisy could go no further”.^[9]

8.3 Stalin and the National Question

In 1917 the national question had been a key factor in winning popular support, and the Bolshevik decision to grant full rights of self-determination, up to and including secession, to Russia’s oppressed minorities convinced many to join the struggle on the side of the Bolsheviks, against the imperialist armies. This is seen as a decisive factor in the Bolsheviks’ victory. In August 1922, Stalin, in his capacity of People’s Commissar for Nationalities, drafted a statement of party policy towards national minorities. The document didn’t contain even the fig leaf of formal independence, Stalin simply designated the government of Soviet Russia as the government of all six republics, and the governmental departments of Soviet Russia (finance, defence, etc.) would swallow the local departments in the other republics.^[10] The Central Committees of the republics were given little more than the status of Regional Committees of the RCP(B).^[11]

As soon as he became aware of what was happening, Lenin circulated a letter to the Politburo with the counter-proposal that the six republics and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic should enter as equals into a union of Soviet Republics.^[12] Stalin effectively suppressed Lenin’s letter, which would have been highly damaging to him, by arguing that his proposals were not in their final form and it was agreed that the discussion at the forthcoming Twelfth Congress on the national question would not refer to them! However, in the wider party, the Stalin faction spread rumours that Lenin was infirm, out of touch, too influenced by the ‘old women’ around him.^[13]

At the Congress, Stalin presented the creation of the USSR as his own grand design, enormously enhancing his reputation. By the end of the Congress, he was irremovable. Facets of his character which had been seen as negative: narrow outlook, empiricist, personal aggrandisement, were recognised by the rising bureaucracy as assets in a potential leader.^[14] A bureaucracy, we should note, that now contained within its ranks many of the ‘apparatchiks’ of tsarism; their professed communism a thin mask behind which lay all the prejudices of bourgeois society.

After the Twelfth Congress the national question was progressively downplayed. In the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) commonly known as the Short Course and edited personally by Stalin, the role of the non-Russian peoples in 1917 was referred to only parenthetically, as one on a list of groups that the Bolsheviks had successfully rallied to the revolution. The ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia’ became just one on a long list of social reforms enacted by the Bolsheviks once in power, effectively eliminating the key role that the national question had actually played in the revolution. The history of the Bolshevik Party became a story about the central party apparatus, at the expense of the non-Russian Party leaders and their organisations that vanished from official history. In 1938, when the Short Course was written, an honest description of Bolshevik history on the national question was incompatible with the bureaucracy’s emphasis on Soviet social and cultural unity, i.e., Russo-centrism. It was at this time that Pravda and Izvestia began to refer to Russians as the first among equals within the Soviet family of peoples.

At the Twelfth Party Congress, the delegates were, in their majority, carefully selected supporters of the General Secretary and recorded the lowest ever proportion of women delegates.^[15] The Congress chastised Zhenotdel for dividing workers in the face of a common class struggle, by encouraging the growth of feminist tendencies. The solution proposed was to reduce conflict with the trade unions, by curtailing the campaigns for equal pay and defence of women’s jobs. Tensions between those who saw Zhenotdel as an organisation for mobilising ‘backward women’ in support of party policies, and those who saw Zhenotdel taking ‘women’s issues’ into the party and Soviets were on the way to becoming unbridgeable and, increasingly, support was withdrawn from the local Zhenotdels.

8.4 The ‘New Course’

Trotsky’s letter of 8 October 1923 to the CC, in which he placed the blame for the industrial unrest over the summer on an erroneous economic policy and bureaucratic inflexibility, was followed on 15 October by the ‘Statement of the 46’ submitted to the Politburo by a group of eminent Bolsheviks. The ‘Statement’ predicted a severe economic crisis due to the empiricism of the leadership, and the hierarchy of appointed secretaries who were killing initiative amongst the members, stopping an objective appraisal being made of the economy, and of measures needed to address the crisis.^[16]

Trotsky’s letter and the Statement clearly represented the opinions of many – if not most – activists within the party. The 5 December joint meeting of the Politburo, CC and Control Commission, unanimously adopted a ‘New Course’ resolution, which was largely drafted by Trotsky. This fully accepted the need for greater party democracy, recognising that the objective situation in which the party found itself had led to a number of negative tendencies which were necessary to combat, including bureaucratisation of the party apparatus.^[17] The solution proposed was a strict and methodical application of workers’ democracy, the freedom for every comrade to examine and discuss openly the principal questions facing the party. Immediately there should be the election of functionaries, and especially of secretaries.^[18] The CC agreed to open a discussion on the need for greater inner-party democracy, to be completed at the Thirteenth Party Conference (16-18 January 1924) of the All-Union RCP(B).

The rank and file of the party embraced the discussion with an intensity not seen since the dispute over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans in 1918.^[19] However, the ringing denunciation of factions that accompanied the ‘New Course’ resolution removed its teeth because, simply, it was impossible to eliminate a national hierarchy of secretaries by individual protest. The right to organise with co-thinkers was necessary. Trotsky’s letter and the statement were condemned as grave political errors, as factional, as dividing and weakening the party at a crucial moment in the world revolution. Nevertheless, a controlled discussion would be opened in the party and in the press, but neither letter nor statement would be distributed.

Refusal to distribute the two key opposition documents was an attempt to rob the debate of focus and enable it to be safely channelled. To the Troika this debate was a safety-valve which, they hoped, would vent the anger being expressed. Control of the party press meant the Troika could determine what was published, and when. For the Secretariat there were three obvious goals: (i) identify opposition ringleaders, (ii) assess the level of opposition and its key demands, and (iii) from the debate, work out what could be done to pacify the largest number of disaffected party members without giving up any real power.

Nevertheless, many oppositionists greeted the decision as an honest response which would give them the chance to win the party to their point of view. But the opposition had been manoeuvred into an impossible position – they could only be effective against the Troika if they went against the party ban on factions and this they would not do.^[20]

Trotsky had missed the 5 December meeting due to continuing illness, but on the basis of the resolution and in good faith, published a series of articles in Pravda (on 4, 6, and 8 December) which, with a number of important additions, were published as a pamphlet in January 1924 entitled The New Course.^[21] It contained an undisguised call to battle against the bureaucracy – for party members to fight for implementation of the ‘New Course’ resolution and to take personal responsibility for realising workers’ democracy. However, the pamphlet was produced in such a ridiculously small quantity that it was practically unavailable.

The response of the leadership was to reduce the discussion to a single question: loyalty to the party. They could achieve that in the press, which was kept on a tight rein, but at public meetings they could not avoid the obvious challenge that free election of officials was necessary to guarantee the freedom of discussion necessary for workers’ democracy; and that logically included the right to form groups. Stalin responded: “It is necessary to set bounds to the discussion, to prevent the party, which is a combat unit of the proletariat, from degenerating into a discussion club”.^[22] Democratic rights in the party were reduced to the right of individual comrades to speak only on their own behalf - which meant internal party democracy became no more than an empty phrase. The Troika used the discussion on extending workers’ democracy in the party to suppress workers’ democracy.

Party meetings showed the opposition had a good basis of support, at least in the urban centres amongst the younger, more active, and proletarian elements. Support for the Troika came from the hierarchy, the tired, the peasants. On 15 December 1923, Stalin launched, in Pravda, the first public attack on Trotsky which sought to divorce him from Lenin and link him with the Mensheviks – in the context of Lenin’s argument that it was the Mensheviks who had joined the party during and after October 1917 who brought the greatest dangers of degeneration. Konstantinov, an editor of Pravda was removed for protesting that “slander and accusations without foundation are becoming the weapons of discussion of many comrades”, after which the tone became even more malevolent.^[23]

8.5 The Trotskyist Opposition

The debate on the ‘New Course’ took place in the run-up to the Thirteenth Party Conference, and while Trotsky’s New Course may have been a high point of the controversy, it also marked the end of free debate. Thereafter the General Secretary imposed tight control on Pravda, there was no reply to the arguments contained in The New Course, only accusations of ‘opposition to Leninism’. Opposition articles did appear but relatively infrequently and surrounded by articles from supporters of the CC. The apparatus ensured its success in the discussion using precisely those powers the opposition wished to remove.

Leading oppositionists were appointed to posts abroad and many local officials supporting the Opposition were moved perhaps only hundreds of kilometres, just sufficient to change the leadership of the local cell. Antonov-Ovseenko was responsible for party work in the army and, when up to one-third of Red Army cells voted for the Opposition, was removed from his post. Fifteen members of the CC of the Communist Youth – which in its majority supported the Opposition – were relieved of their positions by the Secretariat and were sent ‘on assignment’ to distant localities. Those who took their places set about re-organising in favour of the CC. In some places meetings were re-called as many times as it took to get the desired results.^[24]

To defeat the Trotskyist Opposition, the Troika: 1) Silenced its leaders by suppressing their writings and used party discipline to bar them from speaking at party meetings or public gatherings, 2) Claimed the mantle of Lenin (who was simultaneously raised to a demi-god) and that for years the Opposition had been against holy scripture, and 3) Intimidated those who opposed them with threats of social ostracism, loss of job or place at university and, if they spoke out publicly, being beaten up. A section of the party hierarchy went so far as to claim Trotskyists, particularly Jewish Trotskyists, were to blame for drug-taking, promiscuous sex and the moral degeneracy of the student youth.^[25]

The Opposition did not organise itself as a faction to avoid being accused of breach of discipline. Consequently, the apparatus had little difficulty in isolating the delegates who supported the Opposition and eliminating them through the sieve of elections. In Moscow, for example, the supporters of the Opposition claimed they were in a majority in the party cells, but they attained only 36 per cent of the vote in the district conferences, which was further reduced to 61 votes against 325 in the provincial conference. Murphy claims that recently-available archival information confirms widespread deliberate falsification of the votes.^[26] Even though the Opposition had the majority in several important centres such as Moscow, Ryazan-Penza, Kaluge, Imbirsk and Cheliabinsk, and a majority in most student cells, it finally had only three delegates at the Thirteenth Party Conference.^[27]

The Troika won a complete organisational victory. The Conference condemned the opposition as wanting to destroy the party apparatus. It was criticised for abandoning Leninism and being objectively petty-bourgeois. The remedy for any bureaucratic deformations that might exist was to open the party to the rapid recruitment of more than a hundred thousand factory workers, the so-called Lenin Levy, the reduction of the number of students in the party, the tightening of discipline and rigorously enforcing ‘Lenin’s’ resolution prohibiting factions.

The battle which had just unfolded cast a lurid light on the advance and the depth of the degeneration of the party apparatus. It had openly intervened in the pre-conference discussion, imposing its discipline on the voting by administrative manoeuvres, intimidation and occasionally, even violence. The one hope that remained – Lenin’s possible recovery – would be dashed within a week of the Conference ending. With their defeat at the Conference the Trotskyist Opposition agreed to cease active resistance.^[28]

With the debate on the ‘New Course’ over, Trotsky could not challenge the policies of the Troika publicly without being accused of violating the party ban on factions. However, the publication in late 1924 of his writings of 1917 appeared to offer the opportunity to redress the balance and, simultaneously, to give his opinions on the German October. Trotsky wrote a long preface to the collection in which he argued the events of 1917 were essential to understanding the role of the party in changing the world.^[29]

Trotsky had defended himself and the theory of the permanent revolution in The New Course, but in Lessons of October he went further and described October 1917 in terms which had Lenin discarding the formula of Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry and picking up the banner of a proletarian world revolution beginning in Russia – i.e., adopting a programme that was, in practice, no different to the theory of the permanent revolution. The preface was virtually suppressed, only a small number of copies escaped; few party members could judge it on its own merit. Instead they had to rely on quotations torn out of context contained in the criticisms of his opponents. The objectivity of the debate can be judged by Zinoviev’s response, which was to call for Trotsky’s immediate expulsion from the party.^[30]

Stalin’s initial response was to re-write history to claim that he (Stalin), with Lenin, had provided the leadership of the October Revolution.^[31] Such obvious lies could not be sustained in 1924 when many who had actively participated in the Revolution were still around; but it revealed that Stalin was prepared to build his case on lies – well aware that thousands of party members knew them to be lies. The considered response of the Troika was to condemn Trotsky for being anti-Lenin and a co-ordinated campaign of vituperation was opened in journals and newspapers across the country. The depth and extent of the hostility was precisely because Trotsky’s description of the events of 1917 was based in irrefutable evidence. Poisoning the atmosphere was a good way of avoiding objective discussion.

During 1924, a coordinated attack was launched against the theory of permanent revolution. The bureaucracy was determined not to jeopardise its privileged position by risking involvement in revolutionary politics. Trotsky’s theory was condemned as ultra-left adventurism, and successfully presented in much the same terms as the Theory of the Offensive and a risk to the existence of the Soviet Union. By the time of the Fifth Congress of the CI (17 June-8 July 1924) Trotsky was no longer a threat to the Troika, and the only real bond holding them together had gone.

The campaign against ‘Trotskyism’ was conducted with no less fury abroad. For example, in May 1925 the Communist Party of Great Britain published a ‘Symposium’.^[32] Stalin’s contribution is of special interest. He made three points, each of which would become an important component of Stalinism. Firstly, by careful selection and interpretation of texts he sought to minimise Trotsky’s role in the October Revolution. Secondly, he attacked Trotsky as anti-Leninist for daring to reveal that the leadership body of the Bolshevik Party even under the extreme pressure of the October Revolution was not only democratic but that the CC had over-ruled Lenin’s proposal that the Revolution be launched before the convening of the Second Soviet Congress. He ended with a tirade against Trotsky for disclosing that Lenin was prepared to discuss issues before reaching decisions and was even prepared to change his mind.

8.6 Lenin’s Death and the Lenin Levy

Lenin died on 21 January 1924, but long before he was totally incapacitated, Stalin had instructed all those caring for Lenin to ensure his complete isolation to protect his health, in reality to stop him forming a united front with Trotsky. When Stalin found out that this was not happening, he summoned Krupskaya to the phone and in a coarse and ill-mannered outburst, shouted, swore and threatened her with having to appear before the Control Commission to answer for her actions. Lenin considered Stalin’s behaviour towards Krupskaya so unacceptable that in a ‘top secret’ letter dated 5 March 1923, he demanded Krupskaya receive an apology, adding he had “no intention of forgetting” what had been done.^[33] Stalin’s behaviour towards Krupskaya, a woman of considerable importance in the Communist Party, was indicative and confirmative of his general attitude towards women.

Lenin’s “Testament”^[34] was written between 23-26 December 1922, some weeks after he had agreed with Trotsky to form a bloc against the Orgburo,^[35] shortly after he had asked Trotsky to represent him at the CC on the question of the monopoly of foreign trade, and shortly before he wrote to the Politburo calling for reorganisation of the Control Commission and Rabkrin. No wonder, then, that the Testament warned the party against the possibility of a split with Stalin and Trotsky as the protagonists.

Ten days later, on 4 January 1923, after Stalin’s gross rudeness towards Krupskaya, Lenin added the postscript calling for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary. However, without Lenin’s presence the balance of forces within the party was such that the document was too little and too late. Krupskaya kept the document secret while Lenin was alive, it was not presented to the Twelfth Party Congress where it might have had some impact. She waited till after Lenin’s death and handed the Testament to the Secretariat shortly before the Thirteenth Congress (23-31 May 1924) when Stalin was sufficiently in control to contain its impact. The Testament was not circulated to the delegates, but was instead read out to a meeting of the Elders at the Congress (the leaders of the provincial delegations where Stalin’s group was strongest), and it was declared that the Testament must not be referred to at the plenary sessions. As a matter of form, immediately after the Congress, Stalin offered his resignation to the newly elected CC where his inbuilt majority, supported by Zinoviev, safely rejected the proposal.^[36]

After Lenin’s death, the natural affection, esteem, and respect felt for Lenin by his old comrades was cleverly used by Stalin to transform Lenin into an icon, to present him as a superhuman who never made mistakes and who had never needed to re-appraise his position in the light of events, as happened in April 1917. The party propaganda machine went into a frenzy; Lenin had been correct on every issue, every question, every dispute, and the comrade always at his side had been Stalin. Any significant criticism of Lenin became politically impossible in the world communist movement. The Troika placed Lenin on a pedestal and transformed his writings to holy writ, their claim to be Lenin’s heirs rested on the public perception of their close and uninterrupted association with him: for Zinoviev, the differences of October disappeared and for Stalin collaborations were manufactured.^[37] The Troika did not have the necessary standing in the party to pit themselves against Trotsky, so they had to pit Lenin against him – and this was possible only because Lenin was dead. It greatly helped their cause that Trotsky and Lenin had denounced each other so often, so publicly and in such caustic terms.^[38]

Importantly, it meant Lenin’s change in 1917 from a stage-ist to a permanent-ist perspective was erased, and it was the disputes with Trotsky pre-1915 that were given prominence; not their united action in the October Revolution. Completely wiped out was the dynamic of Lenin’s political heritage – particularly his last fight against Stalin’s control of the party. Instead, Stalin cloaked his moves to increase his domination as carrying out Lenin’s last wishes.

Simultaneously, as decided by the Thirteenth Party Conference, the first steps were taken to tranquillise the party by recruiting, in Lenin’s name, some 200,000 ‘workers’, and some 400,000 into Komsomol. In his second letter to Pravda on 4 December, Trotsky had called for a systematised recruitment of “workers at the bench” sufficient to change the social composition of the party and offset the influence of the party apparatus. His proposal was condemned by the Troika as ‘outrageous’. Now the Lenin Levy would be used to the opposite effect. The Lenin Levy increased party membership by 50 per cent in a few months and marked a profound break from the recruitment methods used during Lenin’s lifetime. Those who made up the Lenin Levy were largely recruited by local secretaries who picked those most suited to their purpose. Most lacked education, were inexperienced and malleable. A detailed analysis of the Hammer and Sickle Metal Factory in Moscow reports that party membership more than doubled to nearly one quarter the workforce, but the quality of the new recruits was such that nearly one in eight had to be expelled soon after for inactivity, non-payment of membership dues and failure to attend meetings.^[39] The prejudices of the local secretaries were reflected in the relatively few women who were recruited, so few that the Thirteenth Party Congress (May 1924) criticised them for having paid “insufficient attention” to the recruitment of women.^[40]

Vladimir Brovkin claims that provincial party committees had enormous difficulties with the recruitment drive, so much so that many failed to fulfil their quotas. It is also claimed that many of the new recruits were more interested in privileges than in politics. A significant proportion were illiterate, 95 per cent in some rural areas, and many retained religious icons in their homes. In the words of the party committee in Bryansk in Western Russia, “The recruits … were incapable of orienting themselves independently on any political and economic questions”.^[41] By 1929, of the 1.5 million members of the AUCP(B), fewer than one in ten had joined before the end of the civil war.

All branches of government were required to employ a minimum number of these new recruits. This kommunizatsiya programme meant that as soon as possible, non-party personnel were replaced by ‘promotees’ who entered every sphere of government, management, and administration. Proper preparations were often lacking so ‘promotees’ were accepted onto the payroll, but often given only the simplest jobs.

To capitalise on the new influx and enable them to be a determining factor in the selection of delegates for the forthcoming Thirteenth Party Congress, the party rules on voting procedures were modified so the Lenin Levy could vote while still probationary members. The Congress opened on 23 May 1924 with a new ritual in which uniformed Young Pioneers ceremonially swore in front of Lenin’s tomb to observe the “commandments of Ilyich”.^[42]

Zinoviev opened the Thirteenth Congress with a speech that for the first time in party history demanded that an opposition admit that their opinions had been wrong.^[43] This innovation was rejected only after an impassioned plea by Krupskaya, who reminded the Congress that, on occasion, Lenin had been in a minority only to be proved right by later events, but it was a significant auger of what was to come.

8.7 Socialism In One Country

In April 1924 Stalin, in a psychological master stroke, dangled before the Soviet people the possibility of independently ending their misery and moving towards prosperity. The ‘Theory of Socialism in One Country’ (TSOC) is at the heart of Stalinism, it is the theoretical justification for the existence of the bureaucracy and its material benefits, a doctrine created in response to tiredness and disappointment. Stalin’s immediate purpose was to counter what was, to the nascent bureaucracy, the ugly conclusion flowing from Lenin’s view expressed many times that the final victory of socialism in Russia alone was “impossible”^[44] and “inconceivable”.^[45] Lenin (and Trotsky) argued that the Russian revolution had to spread to Western Europe or it would eventually succumb to capitalist counter-revolution. Stalin now stated that Russia, by its own efforts, could achieve socialism because of its vast spaces, riches of raw materials and the advantages of a planned economy:

… the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been assured. After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society.^[46]

Stalin turned Lenin on his head, but from now on oppositionists would be presented not only as anti-Leninist but as lacking confidence in the Russian Revolution, as being faint-hearted and pessimistic. “(For Trotskyists) … the only choice that remains for the revolution in Russia is either to rot away or to degenerate into a bourgeois state”.^[47] Stalin’s attack on his opponents was as simple as it was illogical, the “either … or” dichotomy was completely false. The historical legitimacy of the Russian Revolution derived not from attempting to create an isolated socialist Russia, but as the start of the world socialist revolution.

The TSOC was the doctrine of a nationalist, conservative bureaucracy, establishing itself in a battle against socialist internationalism and Marxism. Stalin’s theory was strongly endorsed by Bukharin, the right wing within the party, the kulaks, and urban petty-bourgeoisie, but its core was to provide the theoretical basis for the belief of the new bureaucratic masters, that only foreign invasion would shake their hold on Russia. In its early stages Stalin’s theory was posed defensively, claiming to enhance the world revolution by providing a stable base of support, and couched in terms which excluded achieving the “complete and final victory” of socialism in Russia alone.^[48] It must have sounded like music to the ears of the bureaucrats and officials; we now know it was a siren song.

It is a measure of the growing strength of the bureaucracy that Stalin was able to develop his ideas to such an extent before being challenged. Approval of the TSOC by the Fourteenth Party Conference (27-29 April 1925) was blocked only at the last minute by Zinoviev. Soon after the Conference, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed what became known as the Leningrad Opposition, based primarily on Leningrad and Moscow. At the Fourteenth Party Congress that December, at which 70 per cent of the delegates were from the party apparatus, it was overwhelmingly approved.^[49] Stalin then placed the TSOC as the central issue before the Fifteenth Party Conference (26 October-3 November 1926) to face down Zinoviev. He was eminently successful. The Conference literally howled down objections that the theory rested on an obvious misinterpretation of Lenin. From now on a ‘loyal’ party member unquestioningly accepted Stalin’s interpretation of ‘Leninism’.

The TSOC eliminated Lenin’s requirement of socialist revolutions in “at least several advanced countries” for the achievement of socialism in Russia, instead all that was necessary was to stop imperialist intervention so Russians could get on with the job on their own, at their own pace.^[50] With such a perspective it was just one step to treating the national sections of the CI as bargaining chips to protect the USSR from imperialist attack.

8.8 Stalin and Equality

Zinoviev and Kamenev, party tops in the largest urban centres, were under pressure from a proletariat which saw itself as having to continuously make sacrifices in support of a policy that enriched the kulaks. But to change policy necessitated freedom of discussion and this inevitably set them on a collision course with the party hierarchy.

In 1925, the question of equality acquired special significance. The issue was raised by Zinoviev, in an article in Pravda, entitled The Philosophy of an Epoch, in which he suggested that a major factor motivating the broad masses during the Revolution was the demand for greater equality, something to which they still desperately aspired. But the very basis of the bureaucracy was inequality, and what held them together was defence of their privileges. Stalin’s ‘theoreticians’ declared that Zinoviev was fundamentally contradicting Marxism, since according to the teachings of Marx, at this point in the development of a socialist society an individual would receive from society according to the labour they performed.

It is true that Marx did say in a letter concerning the Gotha Program, that during the first period of socialism aspects of bourgeois inequality would be preserved in the sphere of distribution. This argument was to provide the bureaucracy with a theoretical justification for its special privileges, and power over the masses of toilers. But Marx did not mean a workers’ state would generate new inequalities, rather old inequalities in, for example, the sphere of wages would gradually diminish rather than be suddenly eliminated. In fact, Zinoviev was not challenging this principle, he accepted that wage differentials for various categories of labour would persist. He was making quite another point: that the poles existing in the RSFSR were too extreme and should be brought closer together. This cautious criticism was directed against not only the excessive privileges and extravagances of the bureaucracy but also against the policy that privileged the kulaks and stood in the way of industrialisation.

The bureaucracy responded by presenting the call for greater equality as an attempt to deprive skilled workers of the higher wage rates to which they were fully justified, and asserting the demand for greater social equality was a petty-bourgeois prejudice. The struggle against equality welded the bureaucracy together more strongly than ever, and also to the agrarian and urban petty-bourgeoisie and the labour aristocracy. Inequality became the common social basis, the source, and the raison d’être of these allies. Zinoviev was declared to have sinned against Marxism, against the Gospel of Lenin, as criticising the modest additional earnings of hard-working skilled workers. ‘Marxism’ was used to sanction the bureaucracy chasing a privileged lifestyle. Stalin moved quickly to take control of the Moscow Party, which was re-structured leaving Kamenev as a figurehead with no power base.

Zhenotdel was unavoidably involved in the factional struggles taking place in the party. Nikolaeva, a member of the Rabotnitsa editorial team in 1914 and 1917, and long-time activist in the Leningrad Zhenotdel, was appointed Director of Zhenotdel in May 1924, but when she declared her support for the Leningrad Opposition she was quickly removed from her post. The CC appointed a loyal Stalinist, Aleksandra Artyukhina as Director (1925-1930). At the Thirteenth Congress she was elected a candidate member of the CC, and at the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses a full member. She served on the Orgburo from 1926-1930, after which she was a member of the Central Control Commission. Artyukhina attempted to silence opposition voices within Zhenotdel and mobilise support for the Stalin faction, her aim “a united, solid, disciplined Leninist Party”.^[51]

Artyukhina was concerned that Zhenotdel’s activities fitted with party policy and supported the Stalin line. She mobilised Zhenotdel task forces to assist the besprizornye, locating and feeding homeless children. She succeeded in significantly increasing Zhenotdel’s membership, and the readership of its journals which she used to explain why wage differentials were necessary. Lenin’s call, repeated by oppositionists, for decreasing differentials, for women workers to receive equal pay for equal work had little attraction for Artyukhina.^[52] If she hoped for some reward for supporting Stalin, such as increased importance assigned to Zhenotdel’s work, she was seriously mistaken. In 1928, in Kommunista, she wrote that in the party, “the status of work among women has not only not improved but in the majority of cases has become worse”.^[53]

The Fourteenth Party Congress (18-31 December 1925) was marked by the partisan behaviour of the delegates. Krupskaya opened on behalf of the Leningrad opposition, to highlight that Lenin’s closest comrade, who knew most about his political views, had doubts about the party’s line. She invoked his name to defend opposition groups within the party and compared the current situation to the Stockholm Congress of 1906, when the majority was not correct. So great was the uproar over her remark to the effect that a minority could be right, that she had to withdraw it to be able to continue speaking. It was clear that party democracy had undergone a severe degeneration. The minority was constrained to argue its position within the framework that the majority could not be wrong!

Zinoviev remained in the Politburo, as did Trotsky, while Kamenev was demoted to candidate member, but only because these positions held them hostage for good behaviour. Stalin immediately moved against the Leningrad party and Zinoviev was replaced as chairperson of the Leningrad Soviet by Sergei Kirov. A special commission led by Molotov arrived in Leningrad in January 1926 to root out rank and file oppositionists.^[54]

8.9 The United Opposition

Given the commonality of the platforms of the Trotskyist and Leningrad Oppositions – for more rapid industrialisation, against the restorationist danger represented by the kulak and NEPmen, for better conditions for urban workers, and women in particular, and against the degeneration of the party under Stalin – it was only a matter of time before the two groups formed an alliance. On paper, the strength of the United Opposition (UO) appeared tremendous but by the time of its first declaration in early 1926, it was an alliance that had already been – in its separate parts – decisively defeated within the party.

A key part of the UO’s platform was party democracy, not least because without it any opposition was on a hiding to nothing.^[55] However, Zinoviev’s history of high-handed and authoritarian methods significantly undermined this important element of the UO’s campaign. Similarly, Zinoviev’s reputation undermined the UO arguments for equal pay for equal work, for raising the relative wage rates of women, and against the preferential firing of women.

The leaders of the UO agreed to take the discussion outside the leading circles and to do so clandestinely, to throw off the surveillance of the OGPU. These measures were also necessary because local party secretaries sent out “special brigades” of “shock troops” to disrupt and physically break-up such meetings.^[56] Stalin accused his opponents of breaking the Leninist ban on factions and preparing to split the party. Zinoviev was deprived of his seat on the Politburo for allowing the offices of the CI to be used for oppositional activities. UO members were threatened with expulsion from the party for any continuing activity.

Nevertheless, by September the UO had decided to take their case direct to party cells and began with a meeting of workers on the Riazan-Ural railway, traditionally a militant group. The party cell approved the main points of the UO programme. Outraged, the Secretariat determined to silence the UO. Local party secretaries were tasked with organising gangs of “shock troops” whose function was to boo, cat-call, whistle, interrupt, harangue and to generally disrupt meetings at which members of the UO were due to speak.^[57] The Riazan-Ural cell was re-convened and persuaded to reverse its earlier decision.^[58]

The party was initiating, as a matter of common practice, brutal and hooligan methods of dealing with political opposition.^[59] To halt the witch-hunt and gain a truce during which it could catch its breath, the UO leaders negotiated an agreement as part of which it had to publicly disavow those communists internationally who had been expelled from their own parties for supporting either the Trotskyist Opposition or the UO. The statement appeared in Pravda on 17 October 1926. However, Max Eastman had been in Moscow for the Fifth Congress of the CI in the summer of 1924 and Trotsky had given him a copy of Lenin’s Testament which Eastman published in a book containing an accurate account of the internal struggles.^[60] In September, Bolshevik, published a statement written by the Politburo but with Trotsky’s signature, denying the existence of any such Testament, condemning Eastman as a malicious liar. Trotsky would later claim that he signed in order to avoid a campaign of abuse and repression that would have destroyed any hope of organised opposition to the rising bureaucracy.^[61] However, what we can say is that the action of the Politburo represented the deepest cynicism, contempt for the party and commitment to lies as a means of progressing party discussions, because every member of the Politburo had read and discussed Lenin’s Testament and been present when it had been read to the Thirteenth Congress.

On 18 October 1926, the New York Times published Lenin’s Testament. From 23-25 October the CC met with the Control Commission. Trotsky was kicked off the Politburo and Zinoviev removed as AUCP(B) representative on the CI (he was formally removed as President of the CI at the Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI in November 1926). The joint meeting decided the UO was a “Social Democratic deviation”. Over the following spring and summer there was a systematic campaign for “iron unity” within the party.^[62] At meetings Oppositionists would be shouted down, laughed at, and ridiculed as soon as they stood up to speak. Next, they would be taken before the relevant party bureau which was prepared to spend many hours haranguing them on the danger of factions, suggesting they “openly draw a line between themselves and the Opposition” under the threat of losing their jobs, or worse.^[63]

With the revolutionary, proletarian wing of the party neutralised, Stalin and Bukharin united to protect kulak interests, to legalise the leasing of land and permit the extension of wage labour in agriculture, going so far as to reduce taxes on the kulaks. These new concessions to the peasantry went far beyond the original intentions of the NEP, a necessary compromise to preserve the victory of the proletariat. Bending under pressure from the kulaks, the right wing began to discuss how to protect the mir from, for example, women’s new property rights, alimony and child support, a policy which, if carried through to completion, would lead to capitalist restoration.

8.10 Soviet Women and Problems of Everyday Life

Women and families in Soviet Russia were keenly aware that the Soviet system had brought them major benefits. Changes in the social environment could offset, to a degree, material shortages, thus babies born under the NEP had a life expectancy of a decade longer than babies born into the previous generation. No wonder, then, that women joined the Communist Party in their thousands.

Zhenotdel was active amongst working women. In January 1922 there were about 30,000 female members of the party, and five years later there were over 140,000.^[64] Whereas male recruits were increasingly administrators or functionaries, these new women were in their great majority workers. But the campaigns that were winning women, were winning few friends amongst the trade union tops, traditionally the most conservative section of the party. An April 1922 Zhenotdel investigation found that three-quarters of those registered at Labour Exchanges were women factory workers. Zhenotdel campaigned amongst state, party, and trade union officials to take “immediate and energetic” action to help these women. Two issues, in particular, needed immediate rectification: women who were married were being targeted for sacking, and when they went to register at the Labour Exchange, they were denied benefits because of their marital status.^[65] At first, Zhenotdel was praised for strengthening party work amongst women, but the harder Zhenotdel campaigned, the more the praise gave way to the criticism of bowing to petty-bourgeois feminism.

The antagonism and resistance of many Communist men – both leaders and rank and file – to female activism within the national CPs had been an important question discussed by Communist women at their International Conferences. Delegates claimed that male workers were not eager to involve their female comrades into social and political life, but preferred to see their wives as keepers of hearth and home. Armand was no longer alive, Kollontai had been side-lined, and with Lenin incapacitated, it was Trotsky who led the way on the psychological, social and cultural roots of women’s inequality, arguing for the need to alter the attitudes and behaviour of party cadres before there could be any successful assault on family structures.

Trotsky had addressed the Second World Congress of Communist Women in 1921, and he followed this with a series of over twenty articles, the best known of which are: ‘From the Old Family to the New’ (1923), ‘A Letter to a Moscow Women Workers’ Celebration and Rally’ (1923), ‘Problems of Everyday Life’ (1923), ‘The Family and Ceremony’ (1923), ‘The Transformation of Morals’ (1923), ‘Against Bureaucracy, Progressive and Unprogressive’ (1924), ‘The Protection of Motherhood’ (1925), ‘To Build Socialism Means to Emancipate Women and Protect Mothers’ (1925), and ‘How to Begin’ (1925). Trotsky accepted that the scarcity of resources circumscribed what was possible in freeing women from the chains of housework, nevertheless there was much that could be done. The “conservative stupidity, … servile traditions … (and) sluggish and lazy habits of thought” that existed even within “socialist structures”, were preserving “the old forms of life”, preventing the achievement of what was possible and had to be systematically fought:

To institute the political equality of men and women in the Soviet state was one problem and the simplest. … But to achieve the actual equality of man and woman within the family is an infinitely more arduous problem. All our domestic habits must be revolutionised before that can happen. … As long as woman is chained to her housework, the care of the family, the cooking and sewing, all her chances of participation in social and political life are cut down in the extreme …Without a raising of the standard of the culture of the individual working man and woman, there cannot be a new, higher type of family, for in this domain we can only, of course, speak of inner discipline and not of external compulsion.^[66]

Despite the economic difficulties faced by the Soviet state, Trotsky called on women to push for maximum socialisation of domestic work; for women to consciously fight against inertia and blind habits. In 1923, in his ‘Letter to Moscow Women Workers’ he wrote, “it is necessary that the collective public opinion of all women workers be applied as pressure, so that everything that can be done, given our present forces and resources, will be done.” And followed this in ‘How to Begin’ with, “the primary task, the one that is most acute and urgent, is to break the silence surrounding the problems relating to daily life.”^[67]

8.11 Women and the Communist International

While President of the CI and member of the Troika, Zinoviev had a relatively free hand in the Communist International and acted to silence criticism of the policies and practices of the RCP(B).^[68] During 1923 and 1924 the method chosen was the so-called ‘Bolshevisation’ of national sections, removal of those who were sympathetic to the Trotskyist Opposition, or questioned international policy, and their replacement with those who could be relied on to support the RCP(B) majority. Freed from Lenin’s watchful eye as the latter’s health declined, Zinoviev sought to eliminate supporters of Trotsky in the Comintern, purging many of the best revolutionaries, and paving the way for the total subjection of the Comintern to Stalin a few years later.

This Bolshevisation killed off independent critical spirit and thought, and destroyed the very capabilities required by the parties of the CI to play the role which the Bolshevik Party had played in Russia. The Fifth Congress of the CI (17 June-8 July 1924) met in Moscow, its purpose being to endorse the victory of the Troika, denounce Trotskyism and replace Trotsky on the ECCI with Stalin. Despite protestations to the contrary, the authority of Moscow was deliberately bolstered by technical, administrative and financial measures as described at the end of the previous chapter in this book.

Given Zinoviev’s hostility to Zhenotdel, it was only a matter of time before he used his position as President of the Communist International to demote the importance of the International Women’s Secretariat (IWS). On 15 May 1925, soon after the formation of the Leningrad Opposition, the ECCI moved to re-organise the IWS, passing a resolution that downgraded it to the Women’s Section of the Executive Committee. Aware of the likely outcry, the ECCI declared that the change was not to be publicised, that “in presentations to a general audience it is good, for tactical reasons, to preserve the name International Women’s Secretariat.” Simultaneously, the ECCI suspended publication of The Communist Women’s International for being too expensive. The headquarters for the re-organised Communist women’s movement were moved from Berlin to Moscow in 1926, confirming the end of the relative independence of the IWS, and giving the Russian Party much greater control over its day-to-day operation.

In December 1925, at the Fourteenth Party Congress of the AUCP(B), Stalin, in alliance with the right wing under Bukharin, defeated the Leningrad Opposition after which Zinoviev was surplus to requirements and quickly removed as President of the International. Bukharin was confirmed as General Secretary of the ECCI in November 1926, the term ‘President’ having been discarded with Zinoviev. Throughout the CI, Zinoviev’s supporters and lieutenants were removed from positions of authority. Between the Fifth and Sixth Congresses, the ECCI was re-stocked with those chosen for their docility rather than ability.^[69] In their official publications the parties of the CI, and the CI itself, vied to praise the Soviet leadership and condemn its opponents. Those communists who resisted with logic, argument, or protest, were summarily expelled.^[70]

The International, rather than being a genuine forum of debate and discussion distilling the lessons of the struggle from all over the world, became a means of imposing the party line of the Russian Party in every country. This shift at an organisational level was justified at the theoretical level by the imperative of defending the Soviet Union. The ECCI was dictating the policy of the CI, getting credit for its successes, and blaming failures on the national sections. The result was that the national CPs learned not Leninist methods, but that Moscow was always right.

From May-June 1926 the Fourth International Conference on Communist Work Among Women was held in Moscow. The subtle change in title from previous International Conferences was meant to reflect the reduced status of the IWS in the Comintern hierarchy. There were eighteen delegates with voting rights and forty-seven observers. The gathering was tightly controlled by the representatives of ECCI: Palmiro Togliatti the Italian, and Ottomar Geschke the German, who chaired the opening and closing sessions. Historians summed up the purpose of the Conference as to establish the authority of ECCI over the activities of Women’s Sections and communist women outside the USSR.^[71]

8.12 The 1926 Family Code

The 1918 Marriage Code had been a historic gain for women worldwide in terms of a “revolutionary, socialist vision of social relations based on women’s equality and the ‘withering away of the state’”.^[72] And, initially, many women took advantage of their new rights – as seen by the rush of women to divorce their husbands. However, with the return home of the troops after the civil war, many bringing new partners with them, the resulting increase in unemployment amongst urban women and the introduction of the NEP, demands for alimony jumped. A new and numerous category demanding alimony was unmarried mothers who, under the 1918 Code, could sue for child support for children resulting from a relationship. By 1925 the courts were being swamped by such demands which became the focus of a major public debate.

With no way of proving paternity, the courts, concerned with finding a father to support the child, invariably took the woman’s word. However, given the level of workers’ wages, awards were too small for the woman to support herself and a child, but large enough to impoverish the man and his new family. It became common for the man, on re-marriage, to request custody of the child as the only way to meet his financial obligations. On the other hand, to avoid payment, single men tended to pack their bags, move to another job, and change their name. Under these conditions, for unemployed women, divorce usually meant financial hardship and misery. The truth was that a woman invariably suffered more than the man in a divorce due to the material limitations of the Soviet state.

Under the NEP, unemployed women had little financial independence. Total freedom in sexual relations had become very much to the detriment of women and their children, because women remained to a great extent economically dependent of men. Until the state could provide adequate birth control, sufficient childcare facilities and employment for women, all attempts to free them from their traditional dependence on the family would never fully succeed. Formal equality under the law was not enough. Questions were raised within the party concerning the fairness of a ‘free union’ when men were so dominant economically. A formal discussion was opened on the need for a new ‘Family Code’.

The most radical amongst the RCP(B) renewed their criticisms of the 1918 Code as being too bourgeois, repeating their demands for an end to state recognition of marriage and payment of alimony. Kollontai argued that the bourgeois family should disappear, that marital relations should not be subject to any legal regulation.^[73] She argued that it was time to replace the 1918 Family Code, that the state should accept responsibility for rearing children, with alimony abolished. Unfortunately, the destitute Soviet state did not have anything like the resources necessary for such a course of action, nor was the great majority of the population ready to accept such radical measures.

The majority view within the party was that proposed by those administering the Code, who were only too aware of the contradictions between its ideals and the reality of divorce in a poverty-stricken, unstable environment. While the discussion on re-drafting the 1918 Code went on, these comrades were having to make decisions on real cases. An unemployed woman without family ties was economically defenceless and needed alimony to survive. The courts were continuously re-interpreting the 1918 Code: thus de facto, wives not mentioned in the 1918 Code, were having their demands for a share of the marital property recognised by the courts. The courts did not base their decisions on whether the couple were formally married but on the basis of labour contributed to the relationship, with housework accepted as being as necessary to the marriage as the husband’s wages. Property gained during a marriage was shared between the spouses even if the wife had never been in paid employment. Alimony was awarded on a similar basis.

The draft of the proposed Code, published in 1925, recognised the realities of life under the NEP, and was little more than a reflection of what was already happening in courtrooms. The divorce process was simplified, removed from the courts, and given to the government office for the registration of births, deaths, and marriages (ZAGS), greater rights were granted to de facto marriages – both hailed as steps towards the withering away of the family. However, the right to alimony was agreed (especially if the person concerned was unemployed or disabled), and the wife was formally given the right to property acquired with her husband’s wages. These were attempts to balance the vulnerability of wives and children against the goal of a ‘free union’, given the constraints imposed by the poverty and backwardness of Russia, and the demands of the NEP. Zhenotdel officially favoured the new draft, arguing that in the real world, women and children needed protection under the law, and that meant alimony and child support not only in the urban centres but also in the countryside.^[74] Trotsky pronounced himself in favour of the new law at a conference of medical workers engaged in maternity welfare work. He argued that such a law gave more protection to women, and so would be for the benefit of the country’s children.^[75]

The October 1925 meeting of the VTsIK was ready to vote the draft into law, but at the last moment decided that as this was such a vital issue for so many people, a national discussion was the correct way to proceed. For an entire year, from October 1925 to November 1926 there was the most amazing national debate. The Soviet press was full of articles, letters, reports, editorials, columns of comment on the nature of the family, alimony, the purpose of law, the exploitation of women and sexual morality. Meetings took place on an unprecedented scale. Zhenotdel organised some 6,000 village meetings. Never had any proposed state policy before or since, in any country, been so freely and thoroughly discussed. The marriage debate came at a watershed moment in the political life of the country and proved to be the last occasion party policy was discussed openly in a democratic fashion.^[76]

The right wing in the party emphasised the harm to the mir that the proposed legislation would cause. The more extreme supporters of this view wanted a Code that strengthened the institution of marriage by having registered marriages recognised as the only legal form. They wanted to safeguard the mir from demands for alimony and child support, and argued that while the government did not have the means to offer women full protection, the only sensible course was to bolster stable marriages.

Preobrazhensky and others who favoured rapid industrialisation, argued against any significant concessions to the peasants. They pointed out that the peasant concept of marriage was the antithesis of the socialist and contended that Soviet law had to be a guide pointing the peasants towards socialism, not determined by what was presently acceptable to petty-bourgeois peasants.

The right wing did gain some concessions. The final version of the Code limited the period for which alimony would be paid, to six months if the spouse was unemployed, and to twelve months if the spouse was disabled. However, in practice, even this limited entitlement to alimony, and childcare provisions proved difficult and often impossible to enforce in the countryside. Alimony was a woman’s right, but research has shown that fewer than one man in ten paid alimony voluntarily.^[77] A slow and cumbersome bailiff system meant that any husband who moved, changed jobs and names could, more likely than not, avoid paying alimony or childcare.

Under the new simplified divorce procedures either spouse could register a divorce in ZAGS, without the consent or even the knowledge of their partner. Although most divorces were initiated by women, the new procedure meant many women found themselves faced with a fait accompli, and then had to start separate proceedings in a court for alimony and child support. Cases were rarely resolved in under a month, a time lag which women could ill afford.

Reflecting the dire economic situation, the new Code removed the prohibition on adoption as inefficient and impractical, and a campaign was launched to persuade wealthier peasant families to adopt.^[78]

The new code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was part of a systematisation of Soviet laws that included a new Land Code. These codes were a mix of existing Russian custom and practice, with the Marxist goal of the eventual withering away of the state. The new code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was enacted in January 1927. An immediate result was that within a year the national divorce rate doubled from 1.5 per 1,000 people to just over 3. In the largest cities the rate almost trebled; in Leningrad from 3.6 to 9.8 per 1,000 people.

The 1926 Family Code was the high-water mark of Soviet policy on the family and of furthering the emancipation of women. The commitment to fully socialised childcare still existed but could only be realised in a limited form due to the severe constraints imposed by a ruined economy. For the time being, the severe shortage of resources imposed limits on the withering away of the family.

Endnotes

[1] L. Trotsky, Stalin, Wellred Books, 2016, p. 151.

[2] R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.

[3] See M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle.

[4] See A. Podsheldolkin, ‘The Origins of the Stalinist Bureaucracy – Some New Historical Facts’.

[5] L. Trotsky, Stalin, Wellred Books, 2016, p. 572.

[6] See V. I. Lenin, ‘How We Should Reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants Inspection’.

[7] See L. Trotsky, ‘Stalin School of Falsification’.

[8] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[9] Ibid, p. 270.

[10] Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Russia and the Ukraine.

[11] R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.

[12] See V. I. Lenin, ‘On the Establishment of the USSR’.

[13] See L. Trotsky, Stalin.

[14] See B. Souvarine, ‘Stalin, a Critical Survey of Bolshevism’.

[15] See C. Porter, Kollontai.

[16] See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923.

[17] See M. Shachtman, ‘The Struggle for the New Course’.

[18] See L. Trotsky, Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25).

[19] See M. Shachtman, ‘The Struggle for the New Course’.

[20] See I. Deutscher, Stalin.

[21] See L. Trotsky, The New Course.

[22] P. Broué, The History of the Bolshevik Party (CP) of the U.S.S.R. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/broue/works/1971/ussr/ch07.htm (accessed 6 February 2023).

[23] Ibid.

[24] See R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.

[25] See S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Sex and Revolution, Soviet Students in the 1920s’.

[26] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.

[27] See P. Broué, History of the Bolshevik Party (CP) of the USSR.

[28] See R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.

[29] See L. Trotsky, Lessons of October.

[30] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[31] See R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.

[32] See Communist Party of Great Britain, The Errors of Trotskyism.

[33] V. I. Lenin, ‘To Comrade Stalin’, March 1923, LCW, Vol. 45, pp. 607-8.

[34] V. I. Lenin, ‘Letter to Congress’, December 1922, LCW, Vol. 36, pp. 594-6.

[35] See L. Trotsky, My Life.

[36] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[37] See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923.

[38] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame’.

[39] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.

[40] M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 78-9.

[41] V. Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, Routledge, 2005, pp. 192-200.

[42] E. H. Carr, The Interregnum 1923-1924, Vol. 4, Pelican, 1969, p. 368.

[43] See ibid.

[44] V. I. Lenin, ‘Report to Council of People’s Commissars’, January 1918, LCW, Vol. 26, p. 470.

[45] V. I. Lenin, ‘Speech on the International Situation’, November 1918, LCW, Vol. 28, p. 151.

[46] J. Stalin, ‘Foundations of Leninism’, April 1924, CW, Vol. 6, pp. 110-11.

[47] J. Stalin, ‘October Revolution and the Tactics of Russian Communists’, December 1924, CW, Vol. 6, p. 394.

[48] Ibid, p. 394.

[49] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[50] V. I. Lenin, ‘Speech on the International Situation’, November 1918, LCW, Vol. 28, p. 151.

[51] C. Eubanks-Hayden, Feminism and Bolshevism: The Zhenotdel and the Politics of Women’s Emancipation in Russia, 1917-1930, University of California, 1979, pp. 280-4.

[52] See M. Ilic, Women in the Soviet Era, Macmillan, 2001.

[53] Ibid, p. 8.

[54] See R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.

[55] See L. Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition.

[56] R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky, Peregrine Books, 1983, p. 301.

[57] V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1942, Oxford University Publishing, 1963, pp. 214-5.

[58] See P. Broué, History of the Bolshevik Party (CP) of the USSR.

[59] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.

[60] See M. Eastman, Since Lenin Died.

[61] See R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.

[62] L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Methuen, 1960, p. 302.

[63] K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory, Berghan Books, 2005, pp. 86-7.

[64] See T. Rigby, Communist Party Membership.

[65] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.

[66] L. Trotsky, ‘From the Old Family to the New’, July 1923, Pravda. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/women/life/23_07_13.htm (accessed 2 February 2023)

[67] L. Trotsky, Women and the Family, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p. 30.

[68] R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.

[69] See L. Trotsky, Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29).

[70] See R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.

[71] See E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy.

[72] W. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 1.

[73] See A. Kollontai, ‘Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations’.

[74] See W. Goldman, ‘‘The “Withering Away” and the Resurrection of the Soviet Family: 1917-1936’.

[75] See ‘The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage’, 1926. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/ (accessed 6 February 2023).

[76] See W. Goldman, ‘‘The “Withering Away” and the Resurrection of the Soviet Family: 1917-1936’.

[77] See ibid.

[78] See W. Goldman, ‘The Debate on the Soviet Family Code’.