ABSTRACT
After the October Revolution, Stalin quickly accumulated an impressive number of positions. Most importantly, he was elected a full member of the Politburo when it was officially established in 1919. His speciality being the national question, he became a People’s Commissar of Nationalities on day one of the revolution. In 1919, he also acquired the People’s Commissariat of State Control, a function that he kept when the commissariat was renamed Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection the following year. He lost that position when he became General Secretary of the communist party in 1922. From the theoretical point of view, during the years before Lenin’s death it was again the questions of nationality that Stalin paid most attention to and that are therefore mainly of interest for our purpose. But in his position of commissar responsible for the proper functioning of the state apparatus he also had to develop an opinion on the question of bureaucracy. Prior to the revolution, Koba/Dzhugashvili’s views on the proletarian dictatorship had been almost anarchistic. In his “Anarchism or socialism?” published in instalments in 1906–07, he responded to the charge that a proletarian dictatorship resulted in Blanquist rule of individuals over the class. He insisted that it would be a “dictatorship of the whole proletariat, as a class.” In this system, “the masses stand at the head of the dictatorship, there is no place here for a camarilla or secret decisions, here everything is done openly, on the street, in meetings, and that is because this is a dictatorship of the street, of the masses.” The essential difference between social democrats and anarchists was not the fact that, in contrast to the latter’s irreconcilability towards the state, the former hoped to preserve that institution temporarily. The real difference was that the anarchists favoured the slogan “Everything for the individual,” whereas the socialists believed in “Everything for the mass.” 1 Dzhugashvili seems to have visualised the proletarian dictatorship as a kind of anarchist self-government, only more disciplined – orderly mob rule.
