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On the Tasks of the Biulleten

According to the new party statutes, which have extended the time between party congresses to two years in the interests of the usurping apparatus, the Sixteenth Congress should take place at the end of this year. But as yet nothing is heard about a congress. The pre-congress discussion should already have been opened. But who dares breathe a word of that? As before, it is Pravda alone which discusses; it speaks both for itself and for the Opposition, and it pronounces the final word. The present arbiters of fate choose for congresses moments when there is in essence nothing to decide, i.e., when one crisis of the leadership is over and the next has not yet begun. But it is proving ever more difficult to find such a gap between two crises of the “monolithic” leadership. More than that, even the plenums of the Central Committee are now more and more frequently not held on time, since they cramp the organizational mechanics of the “general secretariat.” The July plenum was omitted completely. We do not yet know whether the November one has taken place. The fact is that plenums are convoked only when it is possible to present them with a fait accompli. The next plenum will be presented only with the liquidation of rights by the apparatus. And probably only after that will the date for the Sixteenth Congress be named.

At a time when industry and the bureaucratic apparatus are announcing the uninterrupted workweek, the party, on the contrary, can schedule the purely formal activity indisputably guaranteed to it even by the mutilated statutes only at longer and longer intervals. Why? Because the apparatus not only feels the party to be a burden, but more and more fears it. And not without reason; the million and a half party members and the two million Young Communist Leaguers, repressed by the apparatus, have really become an enigma — that is without doubt the most terrible feature of the present situation.

They are trying to hypnotize, or rather stun, the party with the five-year plan. We do not deny its significance. But the question is posed as if it were a matter of an abstract economic problem, of finding a dynamic proportionality between the various aspects of the economy. The political side of the matter is reduced to administrative pressure on the kulak and the struggle by the apparatus purely against the right deviation. We do not, we repeat, deny the significance of the kulak problem, and we do not underestimate the danger of the right deviation. But there is a broader question:

What is the real grouping of forces and tendencies in the country, what forces are consciously behind the five-year plan, what does that great silent force, the party, think?

Any bureaucratic dullard will reply emphatically that the whole proletariat, all the poor peasants and all the middle peasants are for the five-year plan; against the five-year plan are the kulaks, the private producers, and the right-wing renegades. This “sociological” answer may be given at any time of day or night. It is for such expositions that the Molotovs and Kaganoviches of this World exist. The unfortunate thing is only that the secretarial theory abolishes the very question of the real mood of various layers of the peasantry, of groupings within the proletariat, formed on the basis of their real life experience, and of the mood of the party itself. Or rather, the bureaucratic “sociology,” following the practice of the apparatus, abolishes the party itself as a living force which from day to day orients itself in a situation, criticizes, thinks about the processes which have taken place politically in the country, warns the leadership of danger, renews the leadership, introduces necessary changes into a set course, ensures timely political maneuvers, is conscious of itself as the pivot of the country, and is always ready to take up the struggle for the positions of October. Is this first, necessary, basic condition present? No. Otherwise why would the Central Committee fear the party, and the general secretariat fear the Central Committee?

The Central Committee does not know the party, since the party does not know itself, since watching the party through secret informers in no way replaces the free expression of ideas within the party, and, finally and above all, since the Central Committee’s fear of the party is supplemented by the party’s fear of the Central Committee.

Nor is correct leadership thinkable without honest political information, just as the construction of railroads is unthinkable without knowledge of the contours of the land. Formal democracy has wide sources and possibilities of information from the point of view of the rule of the bourgeoisie and in the interests of the preservation of that rule. This is one of those strong points of bourgeois democracy which has enabled it to dispense with a regime of police absolutism. Proletarian democracy is faced with much more gigantic tasks than bourgeois democracy. The first condition for correct leadership of the Soviet republic, surrounded by very powerful and experienced foes, is the constant, daily, active information of the leadership, above all, of course, through a fully alive party. The absence of party democracy kills Soviet democracy. This is precisely the state of affairs now. Politics is being carried on with the lights out.

The Central Committee lives on the reports of informers. The party lives on rumors. The main feature of the moods of the party, as is testified by all the letters which get through to us, is an obscure and deeply troubled anticipation of coming events. Of what kind is not clear. The apparatus has broken the party from thinking of itself as a leading force. The party is waiting for the unexpected, both directly from the apparatus and from behind its back.

The objective contradictions and dangers are sufficiently great in themselves. But we do not doubt for a minute that the resources and internal forces of the revolution are incomparably stronger than these contradictions and dangers. The first open attack by the enemy would prove this with absolute certainty. But the twilight from which the party cannot emerge changes and distorts the outline of facts and phenomena. Danger seems greater when it is formless and nameless. The party is now standing face to face not with real dangers, but with their distorted and formless shadows, which are obscuring the real difficulties.

The party must know what is going on around it, and above all within its own ranks. The present anti-Bukharin Pravda answers the question of what is just as little as the Pravda that was controlled by the ill-fated Bukharin. One of the tasks of our publication must be to inform the party. We are not forgetting for a minute that class enemies are listening to us. Unfortunately, Bessedovskys of various degrees of corruption and dishonor (they all, of course, were in the front ranks of the struggle against “Trotskyism”) are now furnishing the class enemy with no little information. The White press is now seething with disclosures, in which through the crust of lies and inventions genuine facts sometimes emerge. Things are incomparably worse for our own party. They are leading it with eyes bound. Breaking the bureaucratic bonds is now a question of life and death for the party and the revolution. This is the goal which our publication must serve. In launching it, we contemptuously step over the slanders of the Yaroslavskys. We do not identify the party with the general secretariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat with Stalin’s zigzags, or the Comintern with the feeble, insolent clique of Molotovs, Manuilskys, Kuusinens, Martinovs, and other wreckers of international revolution. We have more serious criteria. Our policy remains a long-term one.

The Biulleten is far from being what it ought to be and what it will certainly become: the fighting organ of the left wing and at the same time the organ of correct and broad party information. The forced location of this publication abroad in no way contradicts the general goals of the Left Opposition, which we have more than once formulated as goals of reform. Of course, the task of reviving party democracy can be solved only by the genuinely revolutionary core of the party itself. But it is precisely that core which now needs an organ not subject to the Stalinist apparatus, which needs an ideological battering ram against the centrist bureaucracy. This is the role which our Biulleten must fill. Nine- tenths of the solution of the problem depends on our friends, both in the USSR and temporarily abroad. They must find the way to us. Together with us they must find the way for the Biulleten inside the Soviet Union. We need correspondence, letters, articles which describe what is. Only in this way will we be able to predict what will be or what may come. And only the ability to predict can protect the party from fatal confusion at the first big crisis, which will break, as always, unexpectedly for the Stalinist leadership.

We expect from our friends serious, reliable, and systematic efforts in the service of the Biulleten. The obstacles are great, but they can be overcome.

We require cooperation, we need help.

We need full and factual reports.

We need help in getting the Biulleten into the Soviet republic.

We need financial help.

We are confident of the response!