The crisis which confronted Leninism in its domestic policy was no less deep and grave. There, too, Lenin's party was marking time at a crossroad, while Lenin was on his deathbed.
Bolshevism had proclaimed the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ in Russia; but it had also conceived that dictatorship as a ‘proletarian democracy’. To put it in simpler terms, Lenin had frankly and without inhibition denied any political freedom to the former possessing and ruling classes and to their parties. His government, like any revolutionary government before it, claimed the right to suppress those who strove, arms in hand, to restore the pre-revolutionary order. This was the meaning of proletarian dictatorship.
But Leninism also committed itself in 1917 and afterwards to respect, to guard, to promote, and to extend in every possible way the political freedom of the working classes, who should have been the real masters in the new State. This was the meaning of ‘proletarian democracy’, which should have supplemented, or rather formed the basis of, the dictatorship.
However, during the civil war, and even more so after it, the political freedoms of the working classes too were gradually curtailed and largely destroyed. This is not the place to explain and analyse this development.[3] Suffice it to say here that towards the end of the Leninist era the dictatorship spoke on behalf of the proletariat but that only a residuum of proletarian democracy had survived. The Bolsheviks had outlawed all rival parties, including the Mensheviks and Anarchists, who had had their main following among the workers, and the Social Revolutionaries, who had drawn their support from the peasantry.
True enough, those parties had, because of their anti-revolutionary attitude, forfeited most or nearly all of their support among the working classes. But in a proletarian democracy, as the Bolsheviks originally conceived it, those parties should have been allowed to go on competing with the Bolsheviks for influence over the masses. This they were not allowed to do.
Lenin had never made a principle of the single party system; yet towards the end of his life the Soviet regime had become just such a system. The abolition of ‘proletarian democracy’ could not leave unaffected the Bolshevik Party itself, which now proceeded to curtail the freedom of expression in its own ranks, for its own members.
The trend was leading from a proletarian democracy towards an autocracy speaking on behalf of the proletariat.
Yet the idea of proletarian democracy had been deeply rooted in the mind of the party. Lenin had proposed each of the successive restrictions of proletarian democracy as an emergency measure, to be cancelled after the emergency was over. During the civil war he outlawed the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, and other minor groups; then he allowed them to come into the open again and to renew activity; and then he drove them finally underground. Internal freedom in the Bolshevik Party survived the civil war; but it began to shrink rapidly soon afterwards. Emergency followed emergency, and the restrictive measures at first designed to be temporary came to stay.
The direction in which the regime was evolving disturbed profoundly important sections of the Bolshevik Party. Towards the end of the Leninist era the party was internally divided over this issue. Some of its leaders and members clamoured for a return to proletarian democracy, although only very few went so far as to demand the restoration of freedom to the defeated enemies of the revolution. Others strove to arrest halfway the drift towards a quasi-socialist autocracy. Still others, from conviction or self-interest or both, promoted the prevalent trend, saying or implying that the restoration of political freedoms would wreck the revolution, and that its safety lay in a further concentration of power at the top, in the Central Committee, in the Politbureau, and eventually in the hands of a single leader. Bolshevism was torn between its democratic past and its undemocratic future.
Lenin's position in this controversy was extremely difficult. He had been responsible for the measures which restricted the freedom of expression even of those who had supported the revolution; and he had also been the standard-bearer of proletarian democracy. He tried to strike a balance between dictatorship and democracy. He himself did not rule his party with an iron rod. He dominated it by the sheer weight of his intellectual and moral authority. At all the party congresses over which he presided, he was openly assailed by many and sometimes very influential opponents. On occasions he was outvoted and then he either submitted to the majority or sought to reverse its decision by constitutional means.