The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Introduction
anxious to join our party will increase enormously in the near future. The six months' period probation
for the workers will not be able to dam back this throng, the more so as it will be easy for the petty
bourgeois elements to become workers for the time being. If we are not to deceive ourselves and others,
we must apply the definition of workers solely to those whose life has imparted to them a proletarian
psychology, and who have worked for several years in shops or factories, not for the attainment of
outside aims, but in consequence of general social and economic conditions. To state the matter openly:
it must be recognized that at the present time the proletarian party policy is determined not so much by
its membership as by the unlimited and powerful authority of that thin layer which we may name the old
party guard. "(International Press Correspondence, Vol.6, No.7, p.92.)
It would of course be absurd to attribute to Lenin a superstitious faith in the flawlessness of this Old
Guard. But that it was generally considered as one of the main guarantees against retrogression -- the Old
Guard, that is, as a collective force -- is conclusively attested by precisely that "unlimited and powerful
authority "it enjoyed in the party and through out the working class.
In a country of some 150,000,000 population, the Old Guard of the revolutionary movement constituted
only a very small group, small even in relation to the size of the Communist party. In the first years after
the revolution, when the party had grown to between a third and a half a million members, the Old Guard
rarely composed more than ten per cent of the ranks. Moreover, natural deaths and the fact that the "thin
layer "contributed so many of its members to the fighters killed in the bitter civil war, continually
reduced its numbers. The 1922 census of the party membership, with 886,313 men and women
registered, showed that a total of 45,585 members had joined the party in 1917 or before, and that the
party contained only 10,431 members who had joined in 1916 or before, that is, prior to the outbreak of
the March, 1917, Revolution. The 1925 census, registering 401,481 members, showed only 86,496 who
joined the party not later than 1917, of whom only 8,249 of the pre-1917 period remained. (Jahrbuch fur
Politik, Wirtschraft, Arbeiterbewegung, 1925-1926, p. 487. Berlin, 1926.) It would be safe to say, then,
that ten years after the Bolshevik revolution, there were not more than 5,000 members left in the
communist party who would properly fall into the category Lenin called the party's Old Guard.
Before dealing with the. ultimate fate of this Old Guard, it is necessary to dwell briefly on the questions
relating to it which were raised by Trotsky in 1928. Like Lenin, his appreciation of the Old Guard was
unmingled with superstitious worship of it. It was already evident that the wearing years of supreme
tension through which the revolution and its leaders had passed, years of defending an isolated workers'
republic against almost insuperable internal difficulties and foreign pressure unrelieved by a successful
revolution in the West, were having their effect on the people and on the leading stratum of the party.
Conservatism, routine, adaptation, bureaucratism-all were producing significant changes in the political
mentality of the party, from top to bottom. While underlining the tremendous importance of the Old
Guard, Trotsky opened a drive for war upon bureaucratism and for pumping the restorative blood of the
best forces in the new generation into the arteries of the old. Unless this were done, he emphasized, there
was a danger of the degeneration of the old revolutionary group, a degeneration not unlike that of the old
disciples of Marx and Engels-Adler, Bernstein, Guesde, Kautsky -- who had gradually abandoned their
old positions.
It is important to note that the first "struggle against Trotskyism" in the Russian Communist Party -- the
so-called "literary discussion "of 1923 -- was directed at Trotsky's alleged slanders of the Old Guard. The
entire party apparatus was mobilized to "defend the Old Guard "and to smash Trotsky and his friends
merely because they suggested the possibility, the danger of a degeneration of the ruling group.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf01.htm (3 of 11) [06/06/2002 15:05:49]