Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
There is some truth to this but it overlooks the fact that the Bolsheviks were distinct from other socialist parties from the very beginning by their top-down, authoritarian party structure, with Lenin in control. As soon as they gained power, they immediately worked to impose this type of management on the entirety of Russian society by crushing first the Duma, then the Soviets, and finally eliminating any autonomy exercised by their own supporters, the labor unions. They also immediately began engaging in electoral chicanery and postponing or rigging elections in their favor. By destroying or subsuming every other institution in society, the party structure became the primary structure of governance, and Russia became a totalitarian state. Most of this took place even before the civil war and was arguably a major contributor to it.
So why did Russia become a dictatorship? Because the Bolsheviks decided it was desirable based on their understanding and development of socialist theory, and other forces failed to stop them for various reasons. It’s pretty much that simple. The civil war and foreign pressures probably strengthened this tendency but I don’t believe it was the primary cause.
And of course, almost every other socialist revolution since that time was inspired by the Bolsheviks since they “succeeded”. So they largely sought to impose dictatorships as well.
Ultimately it all goes back to Marx and his idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat which is one of the crucial flaws of Marxism in my view.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to describe the will of a fully conscious proletariat majority being executed by and with the consent of that class. In other words a democracy unclouded by bourgeois interest and false consciousness.
The problem was that at the time of the Russian revolution the proletariat weren’t the majority, the peasants were, and what proletariat there were lacked full class consciousness. So Lenin used the vanguard party to emulate what a dictatorship of the proletariat would do, but that wasn’t an actual one as Marxist would’ve described.
There has been some debate about exactly what Marx intended by this phrase but regardless his intentions, in my view it was always doomed to be abused in this way. This was pointed out forcefully by Bakunin and other contemporaries of Marx in the socialist movement, and it came to pass exactly as they predicted. Who decides what constitutes “bourgeois interest” or “false consciousness”? The party of course, and who controls the party? The party leadership, or in other words, Lenin, Stalin, or whoever else manages to connive their way onto the throne. This is far from a proletarian democracy, and if that’s what Marx wanted, he ought to have chosen his words far more carefully.
This also dovetails with another key flaw in Marxism which is its class reductionism. Political leaders can and do have distinct interests from the proletariat, even when they may have once belonged to that class. We see this tension clearly in every supposed proletarian government in history, and many others besides. So in addition to the problems of top-down hierarchy, the decision to have Bolshevik leaders be full-time revolutionaries was also a large contributor to their alienation from the people whose interests they claimed to pursue, and the horrific violence they soon inflicted in on them.