5. The Soviet Thermidor¶
Core Argument¶
The Stalin faction’s policy was a series of contradictory zigzags, governed by administrative reflexes rather than foresight. The Left Opposition offered a superior analysis and more accurate predictions, yet it was defeated. Political struggle, the chapter argues, is not a contest of arguments but a clash of interests and forces. Leadership quality is not decisive; each camp demands leaders in its own image. Just as in the French Revolution, the strength of successive leaders derived from their correspondence to the classes that supported them.
Every revolution has been followed by a reaction, and the proletarian character of October did not exempt it from this law. Backwardness made reaction inevitable. After the civil war came weariness, decline, and disappointment. The demobilisation of the Red Army pushed the masses from leadership. The bureaucracy arose as an agent of the proletariat but became an arbiter between classes. International defeats—Germany in 1923, China in 1927—killed faith in world revolution and strengthened the bureaucracy. It exploited workers’ passivity, shattered the revolutionary vanguard, and elevated Stalin, a secondary figure, as its leader. The bureaucracy defeated the Left Opposition, the Bolshevik party, and Lenin’s programme, not with ideas but with its own social weight.
Alongside the theory of socialism in one country, the bureaucracy promoted the idea that in Bolshevism the Central Committee is everything and the party nothing. The “Leninist levy” opened party membership to inexperienced workers and clerks, dissolving the revolutionary vanguard and freeing the bureaucracy from its control. Democratic centralism gave way to bureaucratic centralism; obedience became the chief Bolshevik virtue, and revolutionaries were replaced by chinovniks. Demands for party democracy were hopeless; the Criminal Code was used against the Left Opposition. Party, soviet, and trade union institutions were replaced by an unlimited hierarchy of secretaries. The regime became totalitarian before the word arrived from Germany. Rakovsky described the ruling circles as an unremovable oligarchy replacing class and party. By 1936, the GPU settled all disagreements; the old Bolshevik party was dead.
Parallel political degeneration saw moral decay. Lenin warned at the 11th Congress in 1922 that the new ruling stratum deferred to bourgeois culture. Rakovsky’s 1928 analysis argued the apparatus had failed as protector and educator. Sosnovsky documented the bureaucracy’s adoption of bourgeois morals. The source was the Soviet Thermidor, which freed an uncultured bureaucracy from control and imposed obedience on the masses. The bureaucracy’s real basis is not remnants of the past but present social contradictions: poverty in consumer goods forces queues, requiring a policeman to keep order. The bureaucracy “knows” who gets what. Growth of productive forces has so far strengthened inequality, not socialism, because poverty must first lift enough to create privileges for a minority. The Soviet Thermidor means the bureaucracy has become lord over society, alienated from the masses. Its fear of “speculators” and “gossips” reflects real, newly generated tendencies to personal accumulation and popular resentment against privilege.