ABSTRACT
In the early years of the century, Koba Dzhugashvili defended an even more total ideal of party unity than Lenin’s. The latter stood for plenipotentiary power of the Central Committee. In his classically dictatorial concept, democracy signified the right to elect the Central Committee (CC) at the congress. Until the next congress, the membership was for all practical purposes subjected to the leading board. The CC had the right to prevent undesirable debates and to appoint local committees. Dzhugashvili’s adoption of an even more radical model was rooted in an abhorrence of what he considered the feudal tradition. In October 1904, he commented as follows on the way in which the mensheviks and their alleged sympathisers treated differences in the party:
These people – Rosa, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Aksel’rod, Vera Zasulich and the others – seem to have worked out some sort of family traditions, like old acquaintances. They cannot…“betray” each other, and defend each other as the members of a clan of the patriarchal tribes defended each other, without examining the guilt or innocence of their relative. 1
