ABSTRACT
Life in the Bolshevik ranks changed radically in the first year of the New
Economic Policy (NEP). A significant minority of the civil war communists
found themselves alienated from the party, often because they believed that
it was deserting the working class and that the struggle against bureau-
cratism was being lost. Their attempts to articulate opposition thinking,
whether inside or outside the party, met with repression. Others, who in
1920 had built up exaggerated hopes of rapid change, became disillusioned.
But for most civil war communists, the economic recovery meant moving into administrative jobs in the Soviet state machine, for which they were
often unprepared. By the end of 1921, such workers-turned-administrators,
together with soldiers-turned-administrators and administrators-turned-
Bolsheviks, formed a majority in the party. The new party elite began to
build support in this milieu. As the party further consolidated its role in the
state, its base among workers weakened. Its factory-based membership
dwindled to a minority, and those who worked ‘at the bench’, rather than in
management, to a minority of this minority. The discussions on alternative forms of political power and state organization that had raged in 1920 were
sidelined. According to the predominant ideology, the root of the party’s
problems was the influence of petty bourgeois elements. This was to be
tackled by training working-class members in the art of government and
increasing the proportion of members of working-class origin. This thinking
inspired the membership purge of late 1921. But its implementation manifested
the lack of unanimity about the party’s relationship with the state: some tried to
use its anti-bureaucratic rhetoric as aweapon against apparatus privilege, while others saw it as an opportunity to silence dissent.
