The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Plekhanov to Lenin: A Critique of Hal Draper

By Robert Mayer

Among Hal Draper’s many contributions to our understanding of Karl Marx’s theory of revolution, one of the most important was his detailed study of the meaning of the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the Marxist tradition. Draper persuasively demonstrated that for Marx this phrase did not have the antidemocratic connotations it acquired in the twentieth century. “For Marx and Engels, from [the] beginning to end of their careers and without any exception, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant nothing more and nothing less than ‘rule of the proletariat,’ the ‘conquest of political power’ by the working class, the establishment of a workers’ state in the first post-revolutionary period.” The slogan “did not refer to particular characteristics, methods, or institutions of pro­letarian rule”—to a type of government—but merely indicated the class content of the future socialist state.¹ For Marx and Engels, Draper argued, the dictatorship of the proletariat did not imply an authoritarian restriction of democracy.

After Marx’s death that phrase acquired a different connotation, and in a 1987 work The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin, Draper traced the transformation of Marx’s terminology into a codeword for despotic one-party rule. He argued that the Russian Social-Democrat G. V. Plekhanov “was the begetter,  Jons et origo, of the career of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the socialist movement,” and that he strongly influenced the interpretation adopted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.² Plekhanov used the phrase more frequently than any other Social-Democrat at the end of the nineteenth century and was the first to include it in an official party program, the one adopted by the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP) at the Second Congress in 1903. What is more, Draper argued, Plekhanov “explicitly conferr[ed] an antidemocratic content on the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.”‘³ For him dictatorship meant a repressive regime, one which restricted the political rights of opponents and monopolized power in the hands of the party leadership. The term no longer referred to the class basis of the socialist state, as it had for Marx and Engels, but “was associated in [Plekhanov’s] mind with special dictatorial measures of suppression, the need for which had appeared to him even before he heard of Marx’s term.”⁴ Lenin then picked up Plekhanov’s language and “carried [his] approach to a logical conclusion—and therefore to a theoretical disaster.” While Lenin’s version of the dictatorship of the proletariat was more extreme than Plekhanov’s, Draper argued, “the conception that linked ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘dictatorship of the party’ was not his invention.”⁵ Lenin was only clarifying what Plekhanov had already intimated.

Draper’s argument about the meaning of dictatorship for Marx and Engels is sound, but his history of that term’s transformation in the Russian movement is seriously flawed. A careful study of G. V. Plekhanov’s writings demonstrates that he did not confer an anti­-democratic content on the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Indeed, Plekhanov consistently distinguished between class dictatorship and party dictatorship and rejected the latter. Although he did bring the phrase into currency by including it in the RSDRP Program, at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Program Plekhanov understood the slogan in Marx’s sense as referring merely to the class content of the future revolutionary state. It was Lenin who reinterpreted proletarian dictatorship in an antidemocratic fashion and made it synonomous [sic] with one-party rule and lawless terror. Lenin did not follow Plekhanov but broke with him and turned Marx’s casual phrase into a justification for authoritarianism.

Draper’s work is but one example of an important trend in Lenin studies, what might be called the “blame Plekhanov” interpretation. In the last several decades a number of scholars have argued that Lenin derived many of his anti-democratic ideas from the “father of Russian Marxism,” G. V. Plekhanov.⁶ I think Plekhanov’s influence on Leninism has been overstated, and in this paper I contest Draper’s claim that Lenin derived his anti-democratic interpretation of proletarian dictator­ship from Plekhanov (or anyone else). On a variety of issues Lenin was a genuine (if unwitting) innovator, and Leninism emerged as a novel form of Marxism between 1900 and 1905 by abandoning crucial elements of Plekhanov’s more democratic theory. The history of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” from Plekhanov to Lenin forms one part of the story of the emergence of Leninism.⁷

Marx, Engels, and Dictatorship

Before turning to Plekhanov’s conception of proletarian dictatorship it will be useful to summarize briefly what the phrase meant to Marx and Engels.⁸ Draper has shown that in the nineteenth century the term ‘dictatorship’ and its cognates did not automatically have the connota­tion of a repressive restriction of democracy. Indeed, at the time of the 1848 revolutions Marx and others called for the “dictatorship of the Democracy,” a government of the majority “that would energetically repress counterrevolution and thus make possible the setting up of a democratic constitution.”⁹ Here it was the majority which exercised power, through representatives, in order to pave the way for a constitu­tional republic.

In this instance ‘dictatorship’ had the connotation of a temporary exercise of extra-legal force, but in the nineteenth century ‘dictatorship’ did not always imply a coercive use of power, whether by a minority or a majority. Often the term simply meant the rule of supremacy of a particular group, without specifying how that group exercised its supremacy. Thus Marx and others could speak of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” during periods of peaceful constitutional rule without implying that the rule of the capitalist class entailed military dictator­ship. The term simply meant that the bourgeoisie was the dominant or hegemonic class in society, the one which effectively controlled the state and dictated social policy.

According to Draper, it was precisely in this sense that Marx and Engels employed the slogan “dictatorship of the proletariat:” “Marx used the term to mean nothing less and nothing more than a workers’ state—what he commonly called the ‘conquest of political power by the proletariat’.”¹⁰ When Marx spoke of the need for dictatorship he was not demanding the exercise of extra-legal force per se, or restric­tions on democracy, but the class rule of the proletariat, through democratic institutions. In order to abolish classes, he argued, the workers must gain control of the state and implement those socialist measures needed to establish a communist society. Not a temporary state of siege, the dictatorship of the proletariat was synonomous [sic] with socialist society per se, a democratic social formation lasting several decades at the least and gradually transforming itself into classless communism. Though it sounds strange to twentieth-century ears, for Marx the dictatorship was a democracy by, of and for the people.

Reference to the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is to be found in a total of twelve publications or letters by Marx and Engels between 1850 and 1891, but most of these were not accessible or even written when Plekhanov first spoke of dictatorship in 1883. Indeed, Plekhanov could only have come across the term in four published works by Marx and Engels. In The Class Struggles in France (1850) Marx contrasted “the class dictatorship of the proletariat” with bourgeois dictatorship and described it as “the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally.”¹¹ Likewise in The Housing Question (1873) Engels spoke of “the necessity of political action by the proletariat and its dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes.”¹² In “Political Indifference” (1873) Marx merely said that the workers should “substitute their revolutionary dictatorship for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”¹³ And in “Program of the Blanquist Commune Refugees” (1874) Engels contrasted the Blanquist dictatorship of “the small number of those who made the coup and who themselves are already organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals” with “a dictatorship . . . of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat.”¹⁴ The latter clearly indicates that for Marx and Engels prole­tarian dictatorship was the antithesis of party dictatorship.

In what follows I will show how these innocuous statements were eventually transformed into an elaborate theory of authoritarian party dictatorship by Lenin.

Plekhanov and Dictatorship 1876-1885

Draper claimed that “ideas about the establishment of a dictatorship were standard fixtures in the older Russian movement, from Bakunin to Tkachev and the revolutionary Narodniks, who were well aware of the difficulties of thinking in terms of self-government by the dark peasant masses.” He concluded that “there is no mystery about where Plek­hanov himself a Narodnik only a few years before—had gotten these [authoritarian) notions: this conception of dictatorship had long been the unquestioned orthodoxy of the Blanquist and Bakuninist elements who had long provided most of the training of Russian (and other) revolutionaries.”¹⁵

It is true that Russian Blanquists like P. N. Tkachev and P. G. Zaichnevskii were pessimistic about the ability of the peasants to emancipate themselves and therefore favored the seizure of power by an enlightened minority. But the same cannot be said of the Bakuninist organizations to which Plekhanov belonged in the 1870s before becom­ ing a Social-Democrat. Indeed, the Bakuninists had enormous faith in the ability of the dark peasant masses to govern themselves and to establish socialism if only the yoke of the state could be removed. They did not believe, however, that the intelligentsia could or should remove that yoke by itself or seize power in the people’s name. In the Bakuninist lexicon diktatura was a dirty word since it smacked of statist authoritarianism.¹⁶ The task of the Bakuninist or Populist revolutionary—as opposed to the Blanquist—was merely “to assist in accelerating the revolutionary process” occuring [sic] spontaneously within the people by means of agitation. As the Bakuninist program of Zemlia i Volia stated, “against a class only another class can rise; only the people itself can destroy the system. Therefore the bulk of our forces must work among the people.”¹⁷ The Bakuninist youth were to lend their organizational skills to the imminent peasant insurrection destined to sweep away the Russian state, an insurrection which would establish an agrarian socialist federalism “organized from the bottom up.”

By all accounts Plekhanov was one of the staunchest advocates of this program. Indeed, when the majority of the Bakuninists began to drift from agitation to the terrorist struggle against the autocracy at the end of the decade, Plekhanov refused to join them because he believed that they were abandoning the goal of popular insurrection. As he explained in an 1893 essay,

The history of these disagreements is usually depicted as if the populists of the old school stood for peaceful activity while the terrorists wanted revolution. In fact the argument was about whether to continue the revolutionary or insurrectionary attempts within the people or to give up on the people and limit revolutionary action to the struggle of the intelligentsia against the government.¹⁸

According to Plekhanov, the fundamental principle of Populism was faith in the ability of the masses to liberate themselves. Even before converting to Social-Democracy he swore allegiance to Marx’s proviso that “the emancipation of the people must be the affair of the people itself.”¹⁹ Plekhanov refused to join the terrorists in Narodnaia Volia because they had abandoned this principle and advocated conspira­torial seizure of power by a revolutionary minority.²⁰

With his conversion to Social-Democracy in the early 1880s Ple­khanov came to accept the need for political struggle and a revolutionary conquest of power, but this change did not weaken his commitment to popular self-activity. Indeed, part of the appeal of Marxism for Plekhanov was its very emphasis on independent struggle by the workers themselves. In a 1906 essay he argued that “there is one general feature which establishes a close link between” the Social­ Democrat and the Populist:

Both tie all chances of success to the self-activity of the masses; both are firmly convinced that their own work makes sense only if it awakens the masses. In this regard the Populist has much more in common with the Social-Democrat than, for example, with the Narodovolets. And this has been too little noted up to now.²¹

Marxism, Plekhanov discovered, tempered its call for a seizure of power by insisting that the working class itself must accomplish the act. It therefore avoided the flaw of Populism on the one hand (hostility to political struggle), and of Blanquism on the other (minority revolution).

This was precisely Plekhanov’s point in his first discussion of ‘dicta­torship,’ in the charter work of Russian Social-Democracy, Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883). In the third part of that pamphlet Plekhanov criticized the heirs of Narodnaia Volia, who adhered to a Blanquist-like platform of conspiratorial revolution. As a Social­ Democrat, Plekhanov was no longer an opponent “in principle of such an act as the seizure of power by a revolutionary party,” since that was something “every class striving for emancipation must undertake at a definite stage in social development.” The working class could “be relatively secure against the blows of reaction only when it uses against reaction the mighty weapon of state power.” But Plekhanov hastened to add that “there is no more difference between heaven and earth than between the dictatorship of a class and that of a group of revolutionary raznochintsi.”²² The dictatorship of the proletariat is not the same as the Blanquist dictatorship favored by Narodnaia Volia, Plekhanov insisted. Both would institute a state of siege to guard against counter­ revolution, but in one power would be held by a minority acting in the name of the people while in the other power would be held by the class itself.

Draper argued that Marx coined the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” to educate his Blanquist allies and to wean them from conspiratorial revolution. The slogan was meant to emphasize the self­ activity of the class, not of a committee acting in its name.²³ When Plekhanov spoke of “class dictatorship” in Socialism and the Political Struggle he was doing something similar. He was urging the Russian Blanquists to rely more on the initiative of the working class in the political struggle and to help develop that initiative through agitation, instead of laying plans for a minority seizure of power. The dictator­ship, he argued, required “an advanced working class with political experience and education,” and presupposed that “socialist ideas are spread among the proletariat and that the proletariat is conscious of its own strength.” The goal of Social-Democracy was to make the working class “an independent figure in the arena of historical life, instead of passing from one guardianship to another.”²⁴ Any premature seizure of power by a minority would lack the class base needed to support it and would only perpetuate the immaturity of the class. Socialism would be no good, Plekhanov believed, if the working class did not build it itself. Under a Blanquist “guardianship, the people, far from being educated for socialism, would even lose all capacity for further progress.”²⁵

To be sure, at this time Plekhanov understood dictatorship as a type of transitional government (a state of siege), not in Marx’s sense as an era of class supremacy in general. And this raises the obvious problem of how an entire class can govern, a problem Plekhanov did not address. A party would have to staff the state institutions, clearly, but Plekhanov’s point was that the class must have genuine control over any party acting in its name in order for it to qualify as a class dictatorship. He worried that given its Blanquist philosophy “Narodnaia Volia’s provisional government will not hand over the power it has seized to the representatives of the people but will become a permanent govern­ment,” and that some of the revolutionaries might “wish to use the conspiracy in their own interests.”²⁶ In tsarist Russia it was impossible to guarantee popular control over any party, but Plekhanov “by no means believe[d] in the early possibility of a socialist government in Russia.”²⁷ For him the dictatorship of the proletariat was a distant event, and had to be preceded by a bourgeois revolution and the establishment of parliamentary democracy. A democratic Russia would make it easier to gauge the fidelity of any party to the proletariat and would allow the class to control its agents. Democracy would make possible a genuine class dictatorship.²⁸

Plekhanov repeated these arguments in a more polemical form in his next major work, Our Differences (1885). One of his Blanquist opponents, Lev Tikhomirov, had responded to his earlier argument with the objection that “the worker capable of class dictatorship hardly exists.” Plekhanov’s reply was that “Mr. Tikhomirov does not understand that the worker who is incapable of class dictatorship can become more and more capable of it day after day and year after year, and that the growth of his ability depends to a great extent upon the influence of the people who understand the meaning of historical development.”²⁹ The function of the Social-Democrat was not to make the revolution for the workers but to help them make their own revolution by accelerating the development of their class consciousness. Blanquists like Tikhomirov wanted “to replace the initiative of the class by that of a committee and to change the cause of the whole working population … into the cause of a secret organization,” but his program was inconsistent with Plekhanov’s conception of class dictatorship.³⁰ “If a lawyer can repre­ sent his client in court, no Committee … can represent the working class in history; . . . the emancipation of that class must be its own work.”³¹

In his discussion of this work Draper cited a passage in which Plekhanov criticized the Populist P. L. Lavrov as evidence of the Social­ Democrat’s anti-democratic inclinations.³² Draper, however, garbled Plekhanov’s argument. The latter cited an 1874 article by Lavrov criticizing Tkachev, and Plekhanov sided with Lavrov in opposing “the revolutionary dictatorship of a minority.” Plekhanov observed that “we completely share his opinion on the seizure of power, although we arrived at our conviction by a somewhat different path.” Lavrov rejected minority dictatorship because he believed that “any dictator­ ship spoils even the best people.” Plekhanov doubted that this was always the case, and he may have been thinking of the “incorruptible” Robespierre and Saint-Just. The problem with minority dictatorship is not that power corrupts, Plekhanov argued, but that “the emancipation of the workers must be conquered by the workers themselves.” Even if the minority remained uncorrupted, “there is nothing any dictatorship can do when the working class . . . has not been prepared for the socialist revolution.”³³ Socialism is all about self-activity, Plekhanov believed, and that meant that the workers themselves had to exercise their own dictatorship.

Draper’s assertion that Plekhanov pioneered the interpretation of proletarian dictatorship as party dictatorship is therefore quite mis­ taken. In these founding works of Russian Social-Democracy he drew a sharp distinction between the two and always advocated “class dictator­ship.” Indeed, at the time both sides agreed that one of the things that kept Plekhanov’s group from uniting with Tikhomirov’s (as Engels wanted) was the “disagreement with Narodnaia Volia on the question of the so-called seizure of power.”³⁴ Plekhanov refused to compromise on the core principle of class initiative in the revolution.

Plekhanov and Dictatorship 1885-1900

Plekhanov made no reference to ‘dictatorship’ in the several drafts of the program he penned for the Group for the Emancipation of Labor (GOT) in the middle 1880s. Indeed, between 1885 and 1900 Ple­khanov mentioned the “dictatorship of the proletariat” only twice in print, and both were casual references.³⁵

In an 1890 essay, however, he did speak at length about the Jacobin “revolutionary dictatorship” in the French Revolution, and briefly contrasted it with the future proletarian regime. A Jacobin sympathizer, Plekhanov argued that their “coercive measures were certainly neces­sary in order to save France;” “the revolutionary dictatorship was forced to be stern and ruthless since the external enemies which called it to life were themselves stern and ruthless.”³⁶ By “dictatorship” Plekhanov meant here a government enforcing martial law or a state of siege, measures which he believed were necessary to defend the revolu­ tion against the forces of reaction. Plekhanov even justified the Jacobin terror, since “only terror could preserve the dominance of the pro­ letariat given its position at the time and the completely insoluble economic contradictions.” He added, however, that “if the proletariat had been more developed, if the economic conditions necessary for securing its well-being had existed, then there would not have been any need to resort to terrorist measures.” Plekhanov admired the Jacobins for their determination to push the revolution forward and to employ emergency means to defend their gains, but this did not mean that he thought the socialist dictatorship would also have to resort to terror on such a scale. On the contrary, he maintained that “it can be taken as a rule not admitting of exceptions that the less chance a given social class or stratum has of maintaining its dominance, the more inclined it is to use terrorist measures.”³⁷ The sans culottes turned to terror because their cause was ultimately hopeless; the proletariat would not have to rely on terror because socialism was becoming an objective necessity of economic development. Its dictatorship would therefore require much less coercion.³⁸

Apart from this discussion, Plekhanov simply did not speak of prole­tarian dictatorship in any of his works until 1900. Beyond what he had said in his first Social-Democratic pamphlets Plekhanov did not specu­late, probably because he believed that the dictatorship was a distant event in Russia.³⁹ Thus, with a single exception, there is no evidence for Draper’s claim that Plekhanov understood the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to mean party dictatorship—and there is much evidence to the contrary. The one exception is A. Voden’s 1893 conversation with Engels about Plekhanov’s view of proletarian dictatorship, on which Draper placed so much weight.⁴⁰ According to Voden, when Engels asked “how Plekhanov stood with regard to the question of the dicta­ torship of the proletariat,” he answered that “Plekhanov had repeatedly expressed the conviction that, of course, when ‘we’ come to power ‘we’ would not grant any freedom to anyone except ‘ourselves’ … ” Draper left out Plekhanov’s qualification in the next line, that “it would be extremely desirable, of course, if the Russian Social-Democrats aspiring to seize power could make use of the experience of the German comrades,” but this does not alter the harsh, anti-democratic sentiments reported by Voden.⁴¹

Voden’s reminiscences seem so authentic in many respects that they cannot be dismissed as a fabrication, but three points should be made. First, it is doubtful that either Engels or Voden used the word ‘dictator­ship’ in the original conversation. Given Engels’ own understanding of the term, why would he use it in this way in a casual discussion? Voden related this conversation more than thirty years after it occurred, and he no doubt used the word because in the intervening years “dictator­ship of the proletariat” had become commonplace. It was not common­ place in 1893, not even for Plekhanov.⁴² Second, one wonders why no one else in the movement reported similar conversations with Plekhanov or heard him use the term in this way. Plekhanov made plenty of enemies over the years, but none appear to have ascribed such views to him. And good democrats like Martov, Akselrod and Zasulich—who would have been outraged by such opinions—seem not to have heard them. Third, even if Plekhanov said such things, we should not mistake the exception for the rule. In none of his writings does Plekhanov say anything remotely like this about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, by the turn of the century he was using the slogan in the manner of Marx and Engels, to designate the class content of the socialist state. It no longer even referred to a revolutionary state of siege, let alone one-party despotism.

Plekhanov and Dictatorship 1900-1903

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” resurfaced in Plekhanov’s writings as a result of the revisionist controversy, during which Eduard Bern­stein attacked the slogan as a residue of Blanquism in Marxist theory. Plekhanov was Bernstein’s sharpest critic in the Social-Democratic movement, and he felt obliged to refute Bernstein’s slander about the proletarian dictatorship. His argument in the second preface to the Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto (1900) marked a new stage in his understanding of dictatorship.

Plekhanov claimed that Bernstein misunderstood what Marxists meant by class dictatorship. Citing the French Restoration historian F.A. Mignet, he declared that “the dictatorship of any particular class means … the supremacy of that class, which allows it to dispose of the organized force of society for the defense of its own interests and for the direct or indirect suppression of all those social movements which infringe these interests.” As Mignet had said, ”when a class ‘gains control of institutions,’ the era of its dictatorship sets in.” In other words, a class dictatorship exists whenever some social class effectively controls the institutions of government and is able to dictate its own policy. “In that sense … the French bourgeoisie achieved its dictator­ship as far back as the time of the first Constituent Assembly, and, with certain intervals, has continued enjoying it down to our day.”⁴³ At the time Plekhanov wrote the French government was a parliamentary democracy, yet he called it a form of bourgeois dictatorship. But this meant that the term referred to the class content of a state—not to a particular type of government—just as it had for Marx and Engels. For Plekhanov “dictatorship” no longer automatically implied a state of siege or coercive measures, and it could be completely consistent with democratic practices and civil peace. Indeed, he noted that “parlia­mentary and any other legal political activities … do not contradict the dictatorship of the proletariat; they prepare for it.”⁴⁴ When the working class gains control of the state and is able to make policy on its own, that will be the dictatorship of the proletariat. The class will then be able to “enforce” its will, But Plekhanov cautioned that “force and violence are not one and the same thing.” Laws force us to do things, but they rarely need direct coercion to compel obedience. And while the proletarian revolution may require violence to suppress reaction, Plekhanov insisted that “the dictatorship of a particular class is one thing, while violent action taken by that class in its striving for dictator­ship is something else.”⁴⁵ Dictatorship referred to the era of proletarian supremacy, not to the transitional measures needed to establish that supremacy. In Plekhanov’s mind, therefore the link between dictator­ship and violence had been broken.

This is the theoretical background to Plekhanov’s attempt to include the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the RSDRP Program, and it is important to keep it in mind. After 1900 Plekhanov appears to have understood class dictatorship in the manner of Marx and Engels, contrary to what Draper claimed. Far from conferring an anti-demo­cratic content on the phrase, Plekhanov made it possible to equate democracy and dictatorship since he now defined the latter as mere “class supremacy.” Nor was this usage an aberration for Plekhanov. After drafting the Program in early 1902 (on which see the next section), Plekhanov lectured on it a number of times in emigre circles over the next year and a half. A conspectus of one of those lectures has survived (it was delivered in November 1903, after the Second Congress) and in it Plekhanov repeated the arguments he had made in the 1900 work against Bernstein.⁴⁶ Towards the end of the lecture Plekhanov said that “Here I will dwell … on a place in our Program which at first glance has a somewhat ominous character: [the claim that] a necessary condition of the revolution is the dictatorship of the prole­tariat.”He denied, however, that there was anything insidious about the slogan. Plekhanov noted that

The revisionists are opposed to what is called the violent revolution, while the orthodox are more and more convinced that it cannot be dispensed with. But the character of the supremacy—and dictatorship is supremacy is not changed, or at least is not essentially changed, by the path taken to it. The whole point is that it is necessary. Why? . . . Because when classes exist there are exploiters and exploited and their struggle, and therefore the dictatorship of one class or another. Now there exists the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie … but when the proletariat takes power there will be the dictatorship of the proletariat.⁴⁷

The workers needed to gain control of the state—that is all class dictatorship meant. The proletariat should not rest satisfied with concessions from the bourgeois dictatorship, Plekhanov was saying; it should try to become the hegemonic party in society and win the right to implement its own policies.

At the end of the lecture Plekhanov reminded his listeners that “the fall of absolutism is still far from being equivalent to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”⁴⁸ Proletarian supremacy was not on the immediate agenda for Russia, he argued. It was this proviso, however, which Lenin was soon to revise, with important consequences for the meaning of proletarian dictatorship.

The Party Program and the Second Congress

Draper complained that “neither in 1903 nor after … has anyone explained why the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had to go into the party program only in the case of the Russian party, when even the much-admired German party did not do so.”⁴⁹ But Plekhanov’s justifi­cation for including the slogan was precisely that the German party had been too lenient in dealing with revisionism. He thought the RSDRP should set an example of consistent orthodoxy for the international movement. As he explained in late 1903, “The draft of our Program was worked out precisely during the time of the disputes with the revisionists and, in a certain sense, it bears the impress of those disputes: it answers the questions raised during those disputes.”⁵⁰ Bernstein had raised the issue by characterizing the slogan as Blanquist, and Plekhanov was not about to concede the point to him. He wanted to throw the slogan back in the face of those who feared the revolu­tionary conquest of power by the working class.

The evolution of the Draft Program is worth recounting briefly, for it demonstrates that Lenin was largely responsible for including the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the final version.⁵¹ In his first draft, written in the winter of 1901-1902, Plekhanov argued that in order to start building socialism “the proletariat must have political power in its hands, which will make it master of the situation and allow it to smash ruthlessly all obstacles it will encounter on the road to its great goal. In this sense the dictatorship of the proletariat is an essential political condition of the social revolution.” In his critique of the draft, Lenin at first objected to the extremity of Plekhanov’s language and the inclusion of “dictatorship,” noting that “the social revolution is enough for us.” Plekhanov then submitted a second draft which deleted the slogan, but Lenin now complained that the “reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat contained in the original draft is missing here.” He com­posed an alternative draft which included most of Plekhanov’s original wording, and the two were given to an editorial committee for review. In March 1902 that committee decided “in opposition to George’s draft” that “the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ will be added.” The clause in the final draft read: “A necessary condition for this social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the conquest by theproletariat of such political power as will allow it to suppress any resistance by the exploiters.”⁵² Thus, the inclusion of “dictatorship” in the Program was not Plekhanov’s responsibility alone but was the result of a collective decision by the editorial board of Iskra at the insistence of Lenin.

It is interesting to note that when Plekhanov saw the compromise draft he wrote to Vera Zasulich that

I have nothing against the addition regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat. Frei [Lenin] said in my presence in Munich that in my first draft [the phrase] was too ‘noisy’ [kriklivo]. I substituted the expression “power of the proletariat” for the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat:” they are one and the same thing, for in politics one who has power is a dictator. But now it appears that what I said was insufficiently “noisy.” Go ahead and add the “noise.”⁵³

This is further proof that at this time Plekhanov did not think of the dictatorship as inevitably repressive. The term meant “power” or “supremacy” to him—nothing more.

In his commentary to this part of the Draft Program Plekhanov noted that the revisionists’ “arguments against this idea have had some influence even among completely reliable comrades in various coun­ tries.”⁵⁴ What is interesting, however, is that hardly any of the Russian Social-Democrats objected to the term. Even sharp critics of the Program like D. B. Riazanov and A. S. Martynov found it acceptable.⁵⁵ Only V. P. Akimov spoke against it at the Second Congress, and no one else seems to have supported his objections. At the ninth session of the Congress he declared that “in comparison to all other Social-Democratic programs, the paragraph . . . is worded in such a way that . . . the leading organization must push aside the class which it leads and become detached from it.”⁵⁶ Akimov believed that by including the slogan Russian Social-Democracy was reverting to the Blanquist per­spective of Narodnaia Volia. Trotsky then rose to defend the Program’s wording, and in doing so articulated the Plekhanovist view:

[Akimov] forgets that this dictatorship will be possible only when the Social-Democratic party and the working class . . . are most closely identified. The dictatorship of the proletariat will not be a conspiratorial “seizure of power” but the political supremacy of the organized working class comprising a majority of the nation. Rejecting dictatorship, comrade Akimov falls into typical social reformism.⁵⁷

When Akimov again questioned the language of “dictatorship” during the twenty-first session, Trotsky responded: “I want to give Akimov an explanation. During the [era of the ] sovereignty of the ‘people’ the dictatorship belongs to the bourgeoisie. When the socialists are in a majority, then begins the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”⁵⁸ Like Plekhanov, Trotsky understood the term to refer to the class content of a state, not to a type of repressive government. He therefore argued that it should not be confused with Blanquist dictatorship.

This was the full extent of the discussion about proletarian dictator­ship at the Second Congress. Draper, however, mischaracterized the controversial declarations of V. E. Posadovsky and Plekhanov during the sixteenth session as referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat.⁵⁹ In fact the debate at this point was about the Minimum Program of the Party—that is, about the policy to be pursued during the forthcoming bourgeois revolution. The Draft Program called for parliamentary elections after the overthrow of tsarism, and one delegate introduced an amendment to limit the term of office to two years. Debate then arose about whether the Program should express an opinion about such details. During the discussion Posadovsky made the outrageous claim that “all democratic principles must be subordinated exclusively to the advantage of our Party.” Plekhanov agreed with him and declared that “the success of the revolution is the highest law.” He then went on to argue that “if the elections turned out to be unfavorable, we should try to disperse [parliament] not in two years’ time but if possible in two weeks.” These opinions understandably provoked hissing and sharp objections from some of the delegates. E. Ia. Egorov responded that “comrade Plekhanov has not taken into account that the laws of war are one thing while the laws of a constitution are another.” When the vote was taken Plekhanov’s opponents prevailed (22 to 14) and carried the amendment.⁶⁰ At a Party meeting several months later Martov publicly rebuked Plekhanov for not qualifying his remarks.⁶¹

Plekhanov’s declaration at the Congress was definitely anti-demo­cratic, even Blanquist.⁶² However, he was not describing proletarian dictatorship here. Instead his remarks referred to the coming bourgeois revolution, and they unintentionally indicated the difficulty the proletariat would have in exercising “hegemony.” In this instance Plekhanov was indeed condoning the Party’s evasion of the class will, but he did not use the word “dictatorship” to describe it. For him dictatorship did not mean one-party rule.

Lenin and Dictatorship 1902-1906

Given the range of meanings “dictatorship” had acquired by the turn of the century, it was probably a mistake for Plekhanov to have intro­duced the term into the Party Program. However, since proletarian dictatorship was not thought to be on the agenda for Russia any time soon, the slogan should not have caused any major problems—until Lenin began to use it in the context of the bourgeois revolution in 1905. Draper notwithstanding, it was Lenin who transformed Marx’s phrase into a justification for authoritarian rule.

Draper is right that Lenin scarcely used the term or gave it much thought prior to the drafting of the Program in early 1902. He is also right that once Lenin picked it up he immediately began using it in an anti-democratic way.⁶³ In his critique of Plekhanov’s second draft Lenin maintained that proletarian dictatorship would only be necessary if the working class was in the minority and had to use coercion against the petty bourgeoisie. Addressing the peasants Lenin declared that “if you adopt … our standpoint, you can count on ‘indulgence’ of every kind, but if you don’t, well then, don’t get angry with us! Under the ‘dictator­ship’ we shall say about you: there is no point in wasting words where the use of power is required….”⁶⁴ Zasulich objected to this authori­tarian declaration in her notes, but none of the Iskra editors probed further at this time into Lenin’s commitment to democracy, and he himself did not elaborate on his understanding of dictatorship until the early months of the 1905 revolution.

What provoked Lenin to take up the term again and make it part of his permanent political vocabulary was the Menshevik A. S. Martynov’s argument in the pamphlet Two Dictatorships (1905). Martynov, who had made a stinging critique of What ls To Be Done? at the Second Congress, predicted that Lenin would favor “seizure of power and dictatorship in the coming revolution” because he was not a genuine Social-Democrat but an “orthodox Jacobin.” Extrapolating from Lenin’s writings between 1902 and 1904, Martynov admitted that “Lenin himself has still not openly—in print—called for a seizure of power and dictatorship. But he cannot repudiate this goal,” Martynov claimed, because his fondness for Jacobinism “logically leads to it.” “The necessary and logical conclusion from every sort of Jacobinism … is the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship in the coming revolution.”⁶⁵

For Martynov “revolutionary dictatorship” implied “the state of siege of the new society against reactionary encroachments by the old,” the elevation of “the revolution to a temporary law.”⁶⁶ He was therefore using the term in a different way from Plekhanov. Martynov’s argument was that by aligning himself with the Jacobins of 1793-1794—as he had in Steps (1904) Lenin was risking a premature seizure of power by the proletariat, which would have disastrous consequences for the revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship had exceeded the limits of what was possible in the bourgeois revolution and had called forth counterrevolution and caesarism. The proletariat must establish its dictatorship only when socialism had become possible; it must not repeat the error of the Jacobins. When the time was ripe, “the second [or proletarian] dictatorship will resemble the first [or Jacobin dictator­ship] even in its external form very little.”⁶⁷ After all, the Paris Commune had not much resembled the Jacobin regime, Martynov argued, and the proletarian dictatorship would resemble it even less.

Martynov’s prediction turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, for it was only after reading this pamphlet that Lenin began to call for a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peas­ antry” in the current revolution. Although Draper missed it, this was the real turning point in the history of “dictatorship of the proletariat,” for it made seizure of the dictatorship an immediate practical task and ensured that the term would become a part of everyday discourse. During the course of 1905 Lenin used the slogan far more often than any other Marxist ever had, including Plekhanov. From this point forward it became a fixture of Bolshevik rhetoric and an important Party slogan.

Lenin’s application of the term to the role of the working class in the current revolution was a real innovation. Before 1905 everyone assumed that the principal aim of proletarian dictatorship was to establish socialism. Now, however, Lenin was arguing that working-class dictatorship could also be used to carry though the bourgeois revolution and establish a democratic republic, even though socialism was not currently feasible in Russia.⁶⁸ Curiously enough, a proletarian state was needed to create a fully consistent bourgeois society, since the Russian bourgeoisie itself was said to be unwilling to make its own revolution. Lenin’s argument here was analogous to his assertion in What ls To Be Done? that class consciousness had to be brought to the proletariat from without by the radical intelligentsia—in both instances an external agent was needed to help an incapacitated class achieve its télos.⁶⁹

But more importantly, Lenin’s slogan redefined the Social-Demo­cratic conception of proletarian dictatorship. For Plekhanov dictator­ship referred to an era of class supremacy and not to the transitional measures needed to usher in that era. For Lenin, on the other hand, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship was precisely a type of transi­tional state standing between one era and the next. Its aim was to defeat the forces of reaction after a successful uprising and pave the way for democracy, and for this reason Lenin emphasized the suppressive tasks of the dictatorship. As he declared in Two Tactics (July 1905), “a provisional revolutionary government must act dictatorially,” and “the task of such a dictatorship is to destroy the remnants of the old institu­tions.” Dictatorship means “the forcible suppression of resistance and the arming of the revolutionary classes of the people.”⁷⁰ For Lenin dictatorship implied above all violence and repression, a regime born of insurrection and engaged in a civil war against counterrevolution. In an April 1906 pamphlet he insisted that “dictatorship means unlimited power based on force, and not on law. In civil war any victorious power can only be a dictatorship.”⁷¹

What Lenin did in 1905, then, was to alter the image of proletarian dictatorship in Social-Democratic theory. For Plekhanov the aim of the dictatorship was to implement socialism after power had been secured. This could be done peacefully through democratic institutions. For Lenin the aim of the dictatorship was to seize power and to defend it by force of arms. Suppression was therefore crucial to his conception. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” had become a type of regime which used coercive force to restrain opponents and was little different from military dictatorship.

In a sense Lenin had reverted to Plekhanov’s earlier conception of dictatorship as a state of siege, but unlike Plekhanov Lenin failed to distinguish between class dictatorship and party dictatorship. Indeed, in the March 1905 article in which he first called for dictatorship Lenin disparaged Menshevik appeals to class initiative as an excuse for refusing to organize an uprising. He declared that “the slogan ‘worker self-activity’ is again being misused by those who worship the lower forms of activity.” “Repetition of the word ‘class,'” Lenin insisted, is “used to justify the lagging of the Social-Democrats behind the demands of the proletariat.” Like the Economists before them, the Mensheviks were opportunistic tailists who used “democracy” and “class initiative” to excuse their failure to provide leadership. Lenin concluded that “we have to fight against the reactionary fear of ‘timing’ the uprising and the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.”⁷²

In this and other articles written in response to Martynov’s pamphlet, Lenin consciously used arguments he had first made in What Is To Be Done? three years before. Martynov, he claimed, was once again worshipping spontaneity and thereby corrupting the working class with his democratic rhetoric. Repeating a theme from the second chapter of What Is To Be Done?, Lenin observed that “There is independent activity and independent activity. There is the independent activity of a proletariat possessing revolutionary initiative, and there is the independent activity of an undeveloped proletariat held in leading­ strings.”⁷³ Reliance on the spontaneity of the working class did not necessarily lead to class consciousness or revolution. Indeed, in the absence of Party leadership by the conscious vanguard spontaneity could very well lead to working-class corruption and dependence on the class enemy. Spontaneity had to be combated or at least guided, Lenin had taught in What Is To Be Done?, and this required an activist party “able correctly to gauge the moment when discontent and resent­ment among the mass of the workers is mounting” and to organize the insurrection.⁷⁴

Instead of renouncing the party-class relation articulated in What Is To Be Done?, Lenin reconfirmed it in early 1905 as he began calling for a revolutionary dictatorship. On this theoretical basis, however, the distinction between class and party dictatorship vanishes. The argument of What Is To Be Done? was Blanquist in its implications—as Martynov, Akimov, Trotsky, Plekhanov and others pointed out in 1903-1904—because it effectively substituted party for class. Thus as soon as Lenin began to call for the Party to assume “direct leadership of the uprising” he was preparing the way for the conversion of the class dictatorship into a party dictatorship.⁷⁵ Unlike Plekhanov’s version of Social-Democracy, Lenin’s was simply unable to distinguish between the two.

Even before Lenin began to call for proletarian dictatorship in 1905, Plekhanov was already warning that the Bolsheviks “obviously confuse the dictatorship of the proletariat with dictatorship over the proletariat.

… In their Bonapartist plan for a ‘centralized’ organization there is no place for the proletariat . . . . Their plan is only a new version of the Nechaev dictatorship.”⁷⁶ Now agreeing with Martynov’s critique of What Is To Be Done? at the Second Party Congress, Plekhanov was convinced that Lenin had lost faith in the initiative of the class and had become a Blanquist.⁷⁷ The Bolsheviks treated the masses as an adjunct to the revolution, as a force which made it possible for the Party to seize power but which could not carry the revolution through on its own. “Like the Blanquists, they do not understand that the political education of the masses … constitutes the chief precondition for the success of the revolution and the chief task of the revolutionary.”⁷⁸ Given his pessimistic theory of working-class consciousness, Lenin’s regime could only be a party dictatorship, not a genuine class dictator­ship. It would escape the control of the class in whose name it carried out the uprising. Plekhanov certainly believed, against Draper, that the conception which linked “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “dictator­ship of the party” was Lenin’s invention, the logical consequence of the latter’s anti-democratic version of Russian Social-Democracy.⁷⁹

Conclusion

In 1905 Lenin viewed the dictatorship as a temporary measure, neces­sary only until a democratic republic had been founded. At one point he spoke of it (rather optimistically) lasting just several months.⁸⁰ In 1917, on the other hand, Lenin went over to Trotsky’s strategy of permanent revolution and now described the proletarian dictatorship as a transitional regime only gradually withering away with the triumph of communism. No longer a provisional revolutionary government, the dictatorship had become a permanent state of siege defending the gains of the proletariat against internal and external enemies.

And after the October Revolution Lenin himself began to admit that the class dictatorship really was a party dictatorship. Responding to leftist critics at the Tenth Party Congress (1921), Lenin declared that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is not possible in any other way but through the Communist Party.”⁸¹ The Party was the vanguard of the class itself and so of course the class dictatorship had to be a party dictatorship. Unlike Plekhanov, Lenin simply refused to recognize the distinction. Indeed, in Left-Wing Communism (1920) he asserted that “the mere presentation of the question . . . testifies to the most in­ credibly and hopelessly muddled thinking.”⁸² Those who saw a rift between class and party only wanted to weaken the latter and corrupt the proletariat. They were consciously or unconsciously counterrevolu­tionary and therefore had to be repressed. The dictatorship had been established to deal with their kind.

Now it was obviously not the word “dictatorship” which led to Lenin’s authoritarianism. Evidence of his anti-democratic tendencies was there several years before the term found its way into the Party Program. What Lenin did was to exploit Marx’s slogan in order to justify departures from democracy and constitutional rule. Given the range of meanings the term had acquired by the turn of the century, Lenin was able to point to Marx and Engels and say that they too must have believed in lawless violence and restrictions on liberty. Plekhanov made this possible in the sense that he brought “dictatorship” into use in Russian Social-Democratic circles, but Lenin did not derive his understanding of proletarian dictatorship from Plekhanov. In his final essay, written shortly after the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, Plekhanov remarked that

I am reminded of what Victor Adler said to me half-jokingly and half-seriously: “Lenin is your son.” I replied: “If he is my son, he is obviously illegitimate.” I think that the Bolsheviks’ tactics are completely illegitimate conclusions drawn from those tactical positions which I preached, relying on the theory of Marx and Engels.⁸³

As in his theoretical discussion of working-class consciousness, Lenin ignored what Plekhanov had said about the dictatorship of the proletariat and went his own way. While using a similar vocabulary, Lenin articulated a new version of Marxism in Russia: one less democratic and more Blanquist.

NOTES

1 Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 3: 213.

2 Draper, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 81.

3 Ibid., p. 71.

4 Ibid., pp. 65, 40, 71.

5 Ibid., pp. 83, 93.

6 See for instance Samuel Baron, Plekhanov (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963); Jonathan Frankel, “Voluntarism, Maximalism; and the Group for the Emancipa tion of Labor (1883-1892)” in Revolution and Politics in Russia, ed. A. & J. Rabinowitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 55-74; and Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977-1981). Harding’s work in particular has influenced recent interpretations of the relationship between Lenin and Plekhanov.

7 Draper’s work is the only extensive historical study of the slogan in the literature. Less useful studies include Darrell Hammer, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in Lenin and Leninism, ed. B. Eissenstat (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1971), pp. 25-42; Gregory Varhall, The Development of V. I. Lenin’s Theory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (University of Notre Dame, 1982); and John Ehrenberg, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (New York: Routledge, 1992).

8 In this section I rely heavily on Draper’s account in the third volume of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. It is corroborated by Bertram Wolfe, Marxism: One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine (New York: Dial Press, 1967), pp. 165-210; and Richard Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974-1980), 1: 284-336.

9 Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 3: 64.

10 Ibid., 3: 1.

II Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1970-1989), 7: 89, 33, 62.

12 Ibid., 18: 266,268.

13 Ibid., 18: 300.

14 Ibid., 18: 529. As we will see, Plekhanov’s language in Socialism and the Political Struggle suggests that he was familiar with this particular statement.

15 Draper, Marx to Lenin, pp. 78, 40, 65.

16 In the 1873 manifesto “To the Russian Revolutionaries,” for instance, the Bakuninists declared that “we are enemies of the so-called revolutionary dictatorship, the provi­sional government.” See Archives Bakounine, ed. A. Lehning (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961-1981), 5: 178,180, 41, 55.

17 See Kravchinskii’s article in Narodnicheskaia Ekonomicheskaia Literatura (Moscow: Sots-Ekon Lit, 1958), pp. 322,326.

18 Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1922-1927), 9:19.

19 Ibid.,1: 134.

20 See also P. B. Akselrod, Perezhitoe i Peredumannoe (Berlin: Grzhebin, 1923), pp. 325-326.

21 Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 24: 128. See also P. B. Akselrod’s remarks in “Gruppa ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’,” Letopisi MarkYizma 6 (1928): 82-83.

22 Ibid., 2: 77.

23 Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 3: 212-213.

24 Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2: 76-77.

25 Ibid., 2: 81. Plekhanov went on to warn about the danger of a “patriarchal and authoritarian communism” administered by “a socialist caste” resulting from a Blanquist seizure of power.

26 Ibid., 2: 81-82.

27 Ibid., 2: 78.

28 In Our Differences Plekhanov argued that “a widespread working-class movement presupposes at least a temporary triumph of free institutions. … ” Democracy must precede the socialist revolution. See Ibid., 2: 343.

29 Ibid., 2: 269.

30 Ibid., 2: 279; see also 2: 328-329, 341-342.

31 Ibid., 2: 166,288.

32 Draper, Marx to Lenin, pp. 65-67.

33 Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2: 294-295; see also 3: 94-95.

34 See Tikhomirov’s 3 August 1883 letter to Lavrov and Lev Deich’s 30 September 1883 letter to Akse!rod in Gruppa Osvobozhdenie Truda, ed. L. Deich (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1923), 1: 245, 181-182. See also D. Blagoev’s letter to GOT in Boris Nicolaevsky, “Programma Pervogo v Rossii S. D. Kruzhka,” Byloe l 3 (1918): 49.

35 For these insignificant references see Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 4: 272 and 24: 337.

36 Ibid., 4: 60-61.

37 Ibid., 4: 62-63.

38 There is one curious reference to the proletarian regime in the essay missing from the later German and English versions. Plekhanov declared: “Taking power in its hands, (the proletariat] will make good use of it to quickly achieve its economic goals, and then having created a social order conforming to its needs, it will hasten to pass to ‘legality.’ Would it be difficult for itto respect laws dictated by its own interests?” See Ibid., 4: 64.

39 There are several passages in Plekhanov’s 1892 pamphlet on the famine in Russia which appear to justify extra-legal action by the Party at the initiative of the masses, but these refer to the Party’s role in the forthcoming bourgeois revolution. See Ibid., 3: 414, 422-424.

40 Draper, Marx to Lenin, pp. 39-41; Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 3: 323-325.

41 A. Voden, “Na Zare ‘Legal’nogo Marksizma’,” Letopisi Marksizma 3 (1927): 67-

82, and 4 (1928): 87-96, esp. 94-95.

42 Akselrod, for instance, wrote in his 1923 memoirs that he had defended “the idea of the class dictatorship of the proletariat” in an essay on the Commune written in the early 1880s. In fact he did not use the word diktatura in that essay. See Akselrod, Perezhitoe, pp. 414,419.

43 Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 11: 317-318 (Plekhanov’s emphasis).

44 Ibid., 11: 318. I agree with Hammer that “it would have been consistent with [Plekhanov’s] views to expect that the socialists might come to power by legal means.” See Hammer, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” p. 31.

45 Ibid., 11: 319-320, 325-326. See also Plekhanov’s 1893 (?) essay “Force and

Violence” in Ibid., 4: 249-257..

46 The document, entitled “Nasha Programma i Nashi Sovremennye Zadachi,” is discussed in Filosofsko-Literaturnoe Nasledie G. V. Plekhanova, ed. M. T. Iovchuk (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 1: 296.

47 Ibid., l: 88-89. Once again dictatorship meant the era of proletarian supremacy,

not the transitional regime needed to usher in that era.

48 Ibid., 1: 89.

49 Draper, Marx to Lenin, p. 73 (Draper’s emphasis). Note that at the Austrian Social­ Democratic Party Congress in November 1901 Jacob Brod argued that the slogan should be included in the revised party program. His suggestion was rejected by Victor Adler.

50 Nasledie G. V. Plekhanova, l: 87. At the International Socialist Congress in 1901, for instance, Plekhanov opposed Kautsky’s plank on the conquest of power for yielding too much to the revisionists. See Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 12: 108-111, 460.

51 The best accounts of the drafting of the Program are Jonathan Frankel, “Introduc­tion” in Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism 1895-1903 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 60-73; and Dietrich Geyer, Lenin in der russischen Sozialdemokratie (Ki:iln: Bi:ihlau Verlag, 1962), pp. 287-293.

52 See “Materialy k Vyrabotke Programmy RSDRP 1903g,” Leninskii Sbornik 2 (1924): 17-18, 28, 80-81, 92, 142. The compromise draft spoke of “class dictator­ship” only in a parenthesis. Lenin, however, questioned this wording in his critique, and the passage was then altered in the final draft to read “dictatorship of the proletariat.” See Ibid., 2: 126.

53 Ibid., 2: 95.

54 Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 12: 226. The commentary, published in August 1902, does not clearly explain what Plekhanov meant by the term.

55 Riazanov willingly used the term in his book-length critique of the program. See Materialy dlia Vyrabotki Partiinoi Programmy (Geneva: Bor’ba, 1903), 2: 49-51, 222. Martynov denied Lenin’s accusation at the Second Congress that he objected to the slogan. See Vtoroi S’ezd RSDRP: Protokoly (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1959), pp. 129,283.

56 Vtoroi S’ezd, p. 127. See also Akimov’s account in Vladimir Akimov, pp. 133-153, 170-171.

57 Ibid., p. 136.

58 Ibid.,pp. 254-255.

59 Draper, Marx to Lenin, pp. 69-71.

60 Vtoroi S’ezd, pp. 180-182.

61 Martov declared that “These words evoked indignation from some of the delegates, which could easily have been avoided if comrade Plekhanov had added that, of course, it is impossible to imagine such a tragic state of affairs in which the proletariat would have to trample on such political rights as freedom of the press in order to consolidate its victory.” Plekhanov’s unrepentant reply was “Merci!” See Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 13: 363.

62 But see Plekhanov’s January 1918 defense of his statements at the Second Congress in God’ na Rodine (Paris: Povolozky, 1921), 2: 265-266 (“Buki Az-Ba”). Here he claimed that the masses, not the Party, had the right to disperse a counterrevolutionary constituent Assembly.

63 Draper, Marx to Lenin, pp. 81-83. Lenin mentioned the slogan twice in What Is To Be Done? (1902) but did not elaborate. See V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1958-1965), 6: 17, 46n.

64 Leninskii Sbornik, 2: 83n.

65 Martynov, Dve Diktatury (Geneva: RSDRP, 1905), pp. 10, 15. Plekhanov appar­ently encouraged Martynov to write this pamphlet. See S. V. Tiutiukin, Pervaia Rossiiskaia Revoliutsiia i G. V. Plekhanov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), p. 155.

66 Ibid., p. 16.

67 Ibid., pp. 49-50.

68 Parvus, for instance, called for the proletariat to seize power as early as January 1905, but in a November 1905 essay he cautioned that “this is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose task is to alter the fundamental form of productive relationships in the country.” The idea of a non-socialist proletarian dictatorship made no sense to him since ‘dictatorship’ implied not force but the implementation of a class program. The proletariat’s dictatorship consisted not in repressing its enemies but in revolu­tionizing the mode of production. See “Nashi Zadachi” in Rossiia i Revoliutsiia (St. Petersburg: Glagoleva, 1906), p. 203.

69 Trotsky, among others, found Lenin’s conception of the “democratic dictatorship” very strange. Later in 1905 Trotsky himself began to call for the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but he believed that this dictatorship would be forced to introduce socialist measures since socialism was in the class interest of the proletariat. Lenin, on the other hand, envisioned “a proletariat in possession of state power imposing a bourgeois­ democratic limitation upon itself.” Trotsky called this “class asceticism” “hopelessly idealistic” since it implied that the working class could choose not to be socialist. See Trotsky, “Our Differences” in 1905, trans. a. Bostock (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 314-316. See also his 1906 pamphlet Results and Prospects.

70 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 11: 122, 119.

71 Ibid., 12: 288, 318, 320. Draper’s book is better at documenting Lenin’s increasingly ferocious descriptions of dictatorship over the years.

72 Ibid., 9: 297.

73 Ibid., 9: 261.

74 Ibid., 9: 259-260.

75 On Party leadership in the uprising see Ibid., 10: 112-113, 116, 121.

76 Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 13: 91.

77 See the August 1904 Iskra article “Rabochii Klass i Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Intelligentsiia” in Ibid., 13: 116-140, esp. 134, 140.

78 Ibid., 15: 152.

79 Plekhanov repeated these criticisms after his return to Russia in 1917. See God’ na Rodine, 1: 81-82; 2: 30-34, 246,267.

80 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 10: 31.

81 Ibid., 43: 42-43.

82 Ibid., 41: 22-24; see also 41: 236-240.

83 Plekhanov, God’ na Rodine, 2: 268.