A Study On Lenin's Idea And Practice Of Anti-Bureaucracy

After the Russian October Revolution of 1917, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party established a new Soviet state system. It is an ideal highly democratic society and has essential difference to all national systems in the history. However, the Soviet system was born out of the tsarist autocracy. It is hard to avoid traces of the old system on political, economic, and cultural aspects. With the development and practice of socialist revolution and construction, the biggest drawback of the Soviet state-bureaucracy is gradually exposed, which caused the revolutionary leader Lenin's attention. The academic study of bureaucracy in the Lenin's period is more emphasis on starting from a style point of view at present, while less emphasis is given to the research on the systematic bureaucracy in this period. In regard to this, the bureaucracy during the reign of Lenin is an object of this study. By focusing on exploring the emergence, development, and drawback of bureaucracy in the new-born Soviet system, this study is in an attempt to compensate for the deficiencies and gaps in research.Marx and Engels argued that socialism is a society built on the highly developed capitalist politics, economy, and civilization. In the practice of building the Soviet socialist regime, Lenin further realized that, since the Soviet state power was not directly based on a highly developed society in the aspects of economy, culture, science and technology, therefore, from the beginning, this system was not able to avoid the growing of bureaucracy. At the same time, Lenin thought that Soviet is an organization established by people, is a new state organ, and a continuation and development of the Paris Commune of experience, so that he designed the future political system after the Russian Revolution. No doubt this idea is the further development of Marxism. However, Russia is a country of vast land and strong feudal autocratic traditions which is different from a democratic tradition of the Western developed countries. Shortly after the October Revolution, Russia is facing the armed intervention from imperialist countries and the civil war turbulent period for three years. When Lenin put his own vision on the Soviet system into a reality, he began to constantly modify the problems so as to meet Russia's practical conditions. Thus, party politics replaced the previous idea. This change conformed to the Russia's national conditions and can be used for reference to the country which farmers account for the majority.In Lenin's view, the Soviet system is the new country of fundamentally different nature compared with the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat, in its class nature, is incompatible with the bureaucracy, and to its historic mission, it is to completely eliminate all forms of bureaucracy. This can not be said that once the proletariat seized power, we can immediately eliminate bureaucracy. On the contrary, early in the new countries, the Bolshevik Party and state organs exhibited the phenomena in the amazing performance of drag, procrastination, bureaucracy and incompetence which resulted in disastrous consequences. Lenin put forward power controlled by party or power taken over by party, i.e. to build a "party government". The state and government organs, social groups, are more subject to the party's authority in the superior-subordinate relationship. Thus, it is inevitable that the phenomenon of government and party committee jointly, or party on behalf of the government appeared. Meanwhile, the deteriorating international environment, the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin recognized that as long as the highly centralized system is continually used, the party can perform their duties. "Party government" leadership system began to form. The development of this system initiated the bureaucracy which appeared more and more prominent in all aspects of the Soviet system.Bureaucracy in the Soviet system had its many factors. First of all, Russia was a nation of predominant small-scale peasant economy and rather backward economic development. The new Soviet state did not build on the base of the fully developed large-scale mechanized industry. The socio-economic situation contributed to the economic factors of emergence of bureaucracy in this new nation. Secondly, although the October Revolution broke the bureaucratic machine of tsarist bourgeois and landlord, and abolished the old bureaucratic system, but bureaucracy did not disappear overnight with overthrow of the old regime. Long period of tsarist Russia under the system of absolute monarchy, so many remnants of the feudalism, the lack of developed capitalist democratic tradition of Western countries, are the historic and political factors to produce bureaucracy in the new Soviet regime. Third, Russia was a backward country which farmers accounted for the majority. The long authoritarian rule by the Tsar formed the Russian culture of respect to the authority and imperial power, i.e. the sense of obedience to authority and power instead of obeying the law. In fact, this presented an important small-peasant mentality. Because of Russian undeveloped commodity economy, farmers are essentially decentralized, individualistic, of selfish nature. They lived for generations in a self-sufficient economy, isolated from each other, and lack of education, which determined that they were not able to effectively supervise the new Soviet state organs and their staff. This historical and traditional cultural backwardness provided the breeding ground for bureaucracy. Finally, although the Soviet system is a revolutionary creation of the Russian working class, is the cause of building a new society which is controlled by the revolutionary masses themselves, in the revolutionary practice, it is developed into the proletariat advanced class on behalf of the people to manage state. This made people lack of activeness and participation and resulted in excessive power centralization of the Bolshevik Party, which is its own institutional factors of producing bureaucracy.In the practice of building the Soviet socialist regime, Lenin paid much more attention to the elimination of serious phenomenon of bureaucracy developed in a very short time in the new type of party and state organs and made great efforts to perform detailed theoretical study on the issue. He put forward socialist democracy, strengthening the party and the state monitoring system, improving the socialist legal system, absorbing the masses to participate in state administration, going deep into practice, maintaining close contact with the masses, improving the cadre system and implementing a strict responsibility system, streamlining the party and government bodies and meetings, promoting the scientific and cultural level of workers and farmers, and realistic, practical measures and means, etc. Meanwhile, Lenin had recognized bureaucracy in the institutional aspect. In order to expand the social basis of the Bolshevik Party, he explored the multi-party system of cooperation, attached importance to the value of the State Duma (Parliament) in the political practice at the time. Lenin asked to properly handle the issues of substitution of the Party for the government, clear division of the duties of the party (or the central committee) and the Soviet regime.From a historical development, it should not be underestimated that the significance of the great experiment of which Lenin and the Bolshevik Party had turned the scientific socialist theory into practice. However, the new Soviet state can not set up a complete scientific system of the political system well in a short time, its realization in the form of development and improvement requires a long historical process, and institutional vulnerability is inevitable. This is because any experiment is a price to pay especially social experiment. It involves complicated social relations, much more complicated than a natural science experiment. Not only Lenin's theoretical exploration but practical measures in combating the Soviet Union bureaucracy process have many important enlightenments on the reform of our contemporary political system of socialism with Chinese characteristics undoubtedly.