The Tenth Party Congress

The Russian Communist Party’s Tenth Congress in March 1921 marked the end of this radical political utopianism. Here, the party’s leaders - if not the rank and file - understood that they had narrowly won power by violent means.

Bolshevik leaders reluctantly embraced a three-pronged approach. In the political sphere, they outlawed oppositional political parties, even on the left (they had already banned moderate and right-wing political parties shortly after October 1917). Instead of embracing greater internal democracy with­in the party as many delegates demanded, its leaders prohibited factions, such as the so-called Workers’ Opposition.⁸ The Bolsheviks adopted the theory of “democratic centralism,” in which “the dominant faction in any debate could define any minority opinion as a deviation, and force any mi­nority to submit to the will of the majority” as the party’s internal operating system.⁹ The Soviet state officially became a one-party state; even within the Communist Party itself, the inner circle barred all challengers.

In the economic domain, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which replaced the disastrous fever of “war communism” and which sought to transform, through evolutionary means, the remnants of the old economic order into a semi-socialist system. Under this policy, the Soviet state retained control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, such as the major industries, railways, banks, and foreign trade. Individuals could now own land in the countryside, small industries, and the retail trade. The Soviet state abolished grain requisitioning and introduced taxes in kind, which allowed the peasants to sell their surplus on the open mar­ket.

In the sphere of the relationship between the Russians and non-Russians, the Tenth Party Congress announced the complete equality of all non­Russian languages and cultures with the Russian language and culture, but did not address the tsarist legacy of Russification or how to overcome it. Two years later, at the Twelfth Congress in 1923, the party leadership in­troduced the policy of indigenization (korenizatsiia), a radical preferential policy to win over the non-Russians. The emergence of a moderate nation­alities policy became closely intertwined with its moderate policy towards the peasants. In the view of most Bolsheviks, the USSR’s peasant question and the national question represented the primary components of the new Soviet state’s backwardness.

Much like the second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Tenth Party Congress represented an important turning point in the history of the recently founded worker’s state. This meeting established political and economic controls at the top, proscribed all non-communist political parties, and lim­ited political discussions within the Communist Party itself. At the same time, it abandoned war communism’s extreme controls over the peasantry.

Although the Bolsheviks, a working-class party, managed to pacify the peasants, its leaders recognized that this victory remained a temporary rev­olutionary respite. The New Economic Policy, in effect, recognized the im­portance of the interests of the twenty-five million peasant households in the political economy of Soviet Russia and its allied republics. Concomitantly within this economic policy, Bolshevik leaders acknowledged the cultural and national diversity of the Soviet republics by including the policy of in- digenization. Both policies became closely intertwined in the 1920s.