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Communist Party |
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| Civil & Political Society Asymmetrisch Federalisme Nations & Nationality Communist Party | |
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“In its earliest incarnation Soviet government was potentially one of the most democratic in history. It was immediately responsible to the Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VtsIK), which was elected by the congresses of Soviets, which in turn were to be elected from the democratically elected local and regional Soviets.”[1] This rather bold statement about the democratic potential of the earliest Soviet regime provided the inspiration and puzzle to start writing this research paper. But rather than assessing the democratic character of the earliest Soviet regime, we would like to take a look at how the regime became so authoritarian and dictatorial. In his The Soviet Experiment SUNY provides us with a plan. He considers five successive stages that steadily limited the democratic political arena roughly from 1918 until 1923 (some months after Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party). These stages are: first, the exclusion of political participation of the propertied classes; second, the establishment of one party government; third, the elimination of rival political parties and the monopolization of politics by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); fourth, the suppression of dissident and factions within the Communist Party itself; and fifth, the rise of a single faction dominated by Stalin. Of these five steps we would like to take a closer look at the fourth step - roughly ranging from the beginning of 1920s to 1922, a few months after the “Decree on the banning of factions” was issued. Although the second stage seems very important for the establishment of a dictatorship and the last step seems important for the rise of Stalin(-ism), we could consider the fourth stage as both the consolidation of the dictatorship of the CPSU and the solid basis for the rise of Stalin. For example, nobody other then Trotsky was expelled from the party for engaging in ‘factionalism’. But, if this stage is to be considered so important in our opinion, how then did the suppression of dissident and factions in the CPSU come into existence? In other words, what are the factors behind this stage? This is the main research question which we would like to answer in this paper.
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