Soviet Union required. To do this they had to eliminate or subordinate to themselves all other socialist, labour, and even democratic liberal groups.
The greatest triumphs enjoyed by the Bolsheviks outside of Russia were not the overthrow of any capitalist State but the destruction of working-class and socialist unity in all countries where affiliated sections of the Communist International could gain a foothold. Sometimes this was accomplished by boring from within and the well-known Trojan-horse tactics; sometimes by open splits and organization of parallel political parties and trade unions: sometimes by both. The net effect was the weakening of powers of resistance to forces of domestic reaction, particularly to the large industrialists and land-owners as well as the dispossessed middle classes subject to growing Fascist influence, who were uncompromisingly hostile to the Soviet Union.
In this connection the cases of Italy and Germany are particularly instructive, for they reflect two stages in the influence of the Bolshevik régime on the working class of the West.
While Lenin was still alive the Bolsheviks hoped to force the “inevitable” birth of proletarian dictatorships in the west. But to force it, they had to take leadership. In doing so they abandoned the remarkable tactical flexibility they showed on their home ground and laid down dogmatic prescriptions for action in all other countries based on their own historical experience. This meant smashing existing socialist movements that had other policies and approaches. In Italy, the powerful and militant Italian Socialist Party was disorganized and split by the Communist International at the very time when Mussolini’s cohorts, although still weak, were girding themselves for a general offensive against labour and the Italian democracy.
Lenin’s strategy, however, both within Russia and without, especially in dealing with other working-class groups in relation to which the Bolsheviks were a minority, all flowed from his conception of the nature of a revolutionary party. He could not have abandoned it without rejecting the cardinal principle of Bolshevism, viz. the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party over the proletariat as a condition precedent for the dictatorship of the proletariat.[1]
After the succession of revolutionary miscarriages in the
- ↑ For an elaboration of this, see Chapters Seven and Eight in my Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy, New York, 1940.
