The Lenin’s State-Commune as an Instrument for Construction of the Distorted World

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to provide the teachers of secondary and higher education with information about the theoretical ideas of the Bolshevik Party leaders about building a society deprived of private ownership of means of production, commodity-money relations and free market in Russia and Ukraine conquered by them. The “expropriation of expropriators” carried out in 1918–1920 had caused a violent civil war, and attempts to repair the functioning of the economic country apparatus on a non-market basis were completely unsuccessful. In 1921 the Lenin government, while maintaining state-owned large industries and transport, recognized the need of the preservation of private enterprise, commodity-money relations and the free market. The previous policy that threatened economic collapse was masked by the concept of “war communism”, that is allegedly war-torn emergency measures of a temporary nature.

Scientific approaches. The author deconstructs the concepts of revolutionary Marxism of the European revolutions’ époque of the mid-nineteenth-century and Leninism, which were linked in a single concept of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet times. The revolutionary Marxism was a utopian doctrine, with the postulate of the emergence of nationwide property through “expropriation of expropriators” at its center. The main idea of Leninism was the creation of a state with two power verticals – the party and the Soviet ones. Based on the so-called “democratic centralism” principle, the party vertical was independent of the voters and provided the dictatorial authority of the leaders. Based on the same principles, the Soviet vertical was formed in elections, which were fully controlled by the party committees. Such a state structure provided the leaders’ political dictatorship under the outer shell of a constitutionally regulated democratic order. Unlike the Marxist utopia, the creation of a state-commune, as V.Lenin called it, was quite a real matter, though the previous history of mankind did not know a two-channel state structure.

The scientific novelty. V.Lenin used utopian ideas of the revolutionary Marxism to justify the expropriation of society by a state controlled by him. Under the mask of national ownership, the possession, use and disposal of all means of production by the Soviet state complemented the political dictatorship of the Bolshevik leaders by an economic dictatorship. The powerful state-commune has involved the society into the distorted world of communist socialism, which supposedly had to move into the second phase of communism with the distribution of material and cultural goods according to needs.

The main conclusion of the author: born in the fire of the Russian Revolution of 1917, communosocialism had nothing in common with the European socialism. It was a mutilated by the Bolshevik counterrevolution mutation of the so-called “unconscious socialism”, espoused by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which were the most powerful force in those revolutionary events. Due to the merger of the doctrinal extremism of the Lenin’s party and the spontaneous extremism of the masses, the Bolsheviks managed to oust the representatives of rival parties from the Soviets. Lenin’s party and councils became one political force, which made possible the phenomenon of the Soviet power. It was the undoubtedly power of workers’ and peasants’, but it was aimed at building of the distorted society that was contrary to the fundamental interests of workers and peasants.