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‘Putting the lid on Leninism’

Opposition and dissent in the communist one‐party states

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Leonard Schapiro
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Extract

It will soon be forty years since Lenin decided, to ‘put the lid on opposition’, as he expressed it himself at the dramatic Tenth Congress of his party in March 1921. Much has happened since then, both in the Soviet Union and in the countries which have by imitation adopted the same pattern of one-party government. It is therefore worth reflecting on the reasons which led Lenin to adopt this drastic policy; and to pause to enquire into the results which have flowed from his action—whether he intended them or not.

The bolsheviks took power in 1917 without having (as on so many other vital questions) formulated any precise theory about their future policy towards those who disagreed with them. There was a general acceptance of the need to deal sternly with ‘enemies’ – indeed no revolutionary government could hope to survive for long if it did not do something of the kind.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , 01 January 1967 , pp. 181 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1967

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References

1 In his Preface to Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, New Haven, Conn., 1966, of which he is the Editor.

2 Reprinted in Volume XXIII of the Collected Works of Lenin, Second‐Third Russian Edition, p. 558.

3 The bolsheviks renamed their party the All‐Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) at their Seventh Congress in March 1918.

4 The verbatim account of this Congress has only been published in Russian. A new edition was printed in Moscow in 1963, and this is the edition which I have used for this article. The quotation from Radek is on p. 534. The intelligent anticipation by the two worker delegates, which far surpassed the political judgement of all the intellectuals present at the Congress, and which is referred to later, will be found on p. 525 (Kamensky) and p. 527 (Medvedev).

5 I have dealt in detail with the whole story here summarized in my The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Political Opposition in the Soviet State. First Phase: 1917‐1922. London, Harvard, 1955. The curious reader is referred especially to Chapters VII to XVII.

6 Ibid., pp. 339–42.

7 The main source of this story is Bukharin's account as given to the late B.I. Nicolaevsky in 1936, and printed by the latter in disguised form in the exiled social democrat journal, Sotsialisticheskiy vestnik, under the title Letter of an Old Bolshevik. A translation of this document together with Nicolaevsky's account in 1964 of his talks with Bukharin will be found in Nicolaevsky, Boris I. Power and the Soviet Elite, New York, 1966. For a short summary of the supporting evidence of Soviet sources (including the speech by Khrushchev in secret session in 1956) and of memoirs, see my The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London, New York, 1960, pp. 394–417.Google Scholar

8 Petrenko, F. ‘Kollektivnost’ i otvetstvennost", Pravda, 20 07 1966 .Google Scholar

9 Kardelj, Edvard ‘Notes on Social Criticism in Yugoslavia’, Socialist Thought and Practice, Number 20, Belgrade, 10–12 1965, pp. 3–61.Google Scholar