Lenin’s Thoughts Concerning Improving and Perfecting the Construction of the Party and State Organs

Lenin’s important elaboration on improving and perfecting the construction of party and state organs.The main elements are: (1) Improving the Party’s leadership and its working style and mechanisms in accordance with the changing situation, as a way to continuously strengthen the Party building. First: strengthening the comprehensive unity and the centralization of the party is one of the basic conditions for victory over the bourgeoisie. Lenin stressed that the proletarian party needs not only a formal unity, but a genuinely solid unity which opposes deviations. For this, first of all, ideological unity must be achieved, differences of opinion and confusion of ideas must be excluded, and the party must be in unity in respect to both in political and practical activities; the party organization must be even more closely united, the stronger the party organization, the less the elements of wavering and unstable elements within the party, and the more effective the party’s influence and leadership over the working masses. For the party organizations to play their role correctly and adequately and fully perform their duties, it is necessary that there must be extremely strict centralization and extremely strict discipline within the proletarian party, and that the Central Committee must enjoy an extentive authority and trust among the of broad mass of party members. In view of the lesson learned from the mutiny of the soldiers in Kronstadt on March 1, 1921, who used the so-called workers’ opposition against the party leadership, Lenin argued that factional activities would weaken unity of action and deepen the division of the party, and therefore stressed that the party must be in unity and that there should be no opposition within the party—this was the political conclusion drawn from the given situation. Then, in March 1921 the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (B) adopted the resolution On the Unity of the Party drafted by Lenin, which advocated immediate dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another all groups or platforms banned the existence of opposition within the party and prohibited any factional activity. Second: emphasis on the democratic elections within the party, improvement and perfection of the party’s cadre system. Lenin always insisted that the party should apply the organizational principle of democratic centralism, the principle that is indisputable. Based on the idea of promoting democracy on the basis of centralization, Lenin repeatedly emphasized that the entire party organization should be built according to democratic principles, that responsible officials, leaders and institutions within the party should be formed by election, that they had to report and be accountable to the party members, and that they could be removed and replaced, so forth. After the victory of the October Revolution, against the historical background of facing armed insurrection at home and interference of foreign armed forces, centralization took precedence over democracy, and a system of direct appointment and selection of party and state cadres at all levels by the Central Organization Bureau and the Secretariat of the Russian Communist Party (B) was formed. This appointment system played a positive role in strengthening the unity and leadership of the Party in the Soviet state and helped winning victory in the civil war, but it also created a series of flaws and problems such as the disorganization of the Party and the widespread bureaucracy in the Party and Soviet organs. Considering these problems, after the end of the çivil war, Lenin repeatedly proposed to replace it with the bottom-up electoral system. In March 1921, the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (B) adopted the resolution “On Party Building”, which stipulated to change the organizational forms and working methods of the Party, to replace the appointment system with the “workers’ democracy in the Party”, and try their best to implement the election system at all levels of the leadership organs as far as possible and advocated the principle of collective leadership, as well as stipulated to replace the appointment system with the recommendation system where the realistic conditions are not available, and advocated the gradually passage to the implementation of the election system within the whole party. On all the most important issues, extensive discussions and debates should be held before the adoption of party decisions that the whole party had to abide by, and mindful intra-party criticism of the party’s shortcomings should be made freely, and that party-wide decisions should be formulated collectively instead of draft proposals by a certain group in the party. Third: reorganization of the party leadership system, clearly defining the correct division of labor between the Party and Soviet government organs, and delineating the boundaries between them in terms of power and duties, so as to avoid and solve the problems such as the absence of separation of functions between the Party and the government and avoid the problem of Party substituting the functions of the government. (2) To reorganize and improve the construction of the Party and state organs in accordance with the changes in Russia’s national conditions, socio-historical conditions and stage of social development. After the victory of the October Revolution, Lenin advocated and led the establishment of a new type of power and governance organs for the newborn Soviet state, namely the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies and its Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars (State Council in P.R. China) were established, which were inspired by the ideas of Marx and Engels and the principles of the Paris Commune. Considering the specific conditions of Russia and due to the crisis of the civil war at that time Lenin gradually modified his original ideas based on the principles of the Paris Commune in the course of leading the construction of the Soviet state, and changed his former idea of state being run directly by the masses of people to state led by the vanguard of the proletariat. Although, the programme of the Party stipulated that the Soviets were the organs of power and administration by the workers; in practice, they became the organ of power and administration by the advanced strata of the proletariat. As a matter of fact, this situation played an important role in strengthening the centralized, unified leadership of the Party, crushing foreign military intervention and the armed insurrection of the domestic counter-revolutionary White bandits, and in recovering and developing the national economy. Although, the Soviet state apparatus was founded on the basis of smashing the old state machinery, it inevitably had some remnants of the old state apparatus, thus, the emergence of imperfections and unsoundness increasingly exposed the problems such as bureaucracy, paperwork, procrastination and inefficiency. Therefore, in his later years, Lenin attached great importance to reorganizing the state apparatus. In his article “On Cooperation” in 1923, he proposed two far-reaching tasks, one of which was to “reorganize the machinery of the state”.

The main ideas in this work were: (1) As the productive forces and culture develop and progress, the Soviet state system must be reorganized and improved accordingly. The economic base determines the superstructure. By stressing this, Lenin, clearly demanded that the state organs must be particularly carefully reorganized and some proper and practical modifications must be carried out in a timely manner, which were related to the leadership of the Party, the stability of the state power and the smooth progress of the cause of socialist construction. (2) The goal of reorganization and improving state organs was to enhance close ties with the people and to improve the quality and efficiency of their work; the basic guideline for the reorganization was that state organs and their staff should be: “Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all”. (3) The main measures Lenin proposed in the reorganization and reconstruction of the state apparatus include: establishing a sound system of inspection and control of the state organs, especially the leading organs, to prevent the abuse of power and degeneration of state cadres, and setting up specialized inspection such as the People’s Commissariat for State Control, the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and the Central Control Commission. In 1922, Lenin’s investigation revealed that there were as many as 120 Commissions under the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense, while only 16 were really necessary, and demanded that every effort be made to reduce the existing Commissions of all kinds and to prevent the establishment of new ones. In 1923, in order to promote the comprehensive reorganization and reconstruction of the state apparatus Lenin further proposed to reorganize the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, which included the reduction of its total staff from 12,000 to 300-400, and proposed to merge the basic departments of this organ with the Central Control Commission, so as to improve the prestige and quality of work of the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and to transform both of them into truly exemplary state organs.