ABSTRACT
The need of the party elite, and ultimately the ruling class-in-formation, to
remould the party into an administrative machine through which to cen-
tralize control of the state and economy, was the underlying determinant of
change in the party in 1923-24. The party’s political functions – a legacy of
its history and of 1917 – now took second place. The disputes of early 1923
pitted the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party’s (CC’s) leading tri-
umvirate (Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev) against senior Bolshevik eco-
nomic decision-makers, and centred, first, on the division of political power between party and soviet bodies, and, second, on economic policy issues,
and the degree to which industrial growth should be prioritized. But in the
‘party crisis’ of late 1923, brought on by the economic crisis and the for-
mation of the opposition alliance led by Trotsky, Preobrazhenskii and
Sapronov, these issues took second place to a more wide-ranging dispute
about the exercise of power and the role of the party rank and file. The
discussion eventually zeroed in on the question of ‘appointism’. The trium-
virate was happy to include no end of democratic slogans in resolutions, but the right of the party elite and its apparatus to appoint officials – threatened
by the opposition’s demand for immediate and regular elections – was a
bridgehead it would not surrender. The appointment system was central to
the administrative machine that the party elite required the party to
become.
