Lenin Enrollment

Background

The party called itself the vanguard of the proletariat, and its own social composition was always contested. The Workers' Opposition pressed for "proletarianisation" of the apparatus. A party census of 1922 found that only 15 percent of members worked in manual industrial jobs and that only 12 percent of new recruits were workers by actual employment. A general purge cut the membership roughly in half in 1921–1922, and although the worker share among delegates to the 12th Congress of 1923 rose from 37 percent at the 10th Congress of 1921 to 53 percent, the result was still judged insufficient. Trotsky backed mass admission of workers in a letter of 8 October 1923, and the issue became entangled with the Left Opposition's charge of bureaucratism.

Decision and course

On 5 December 1923 the Politburo and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission resolved to bring 100,000 workers into the party, and the Thirteenth Party Conference approved the decision. The Central Committee plenum of 29–31 January 1924 then adopted the resolution "On the admission of workers from the bench," directing recruitment first at workers and also at poor and middle peasants. Lenin's death on 21 January 1924 attached his name to the campaign, and it was officially launched on 15 February.

Between 22 January 1924 and the plenum's closing date of 15 May, more than 350,000 applications were filed and some 241,000 were accepted. The workers' share in the party rose from 44 percent in January 1924 to 60 percent by May; about 92 percent of those admitted were workers and 13 percent were women. Over the two years 1924–1925 the party took in 638,070 people, of whom 439,715 (68.9 percent) were workers by social situation. Membership went from 446,089 on 1 January 1924 to just over a million by January 1926. The English Wikipedia article, however, gives the number of recruits as more than 608,000 while a later passage in the same article states 638,070, so the published figures diverge.

In his report to the 13th Congress on 24 May 1924 Stalin said 60 percent of the new members were politically illiterate. The educational problem was acute: a Central Committee plenum of 2 April 1924 created a special commission to educate the recruits, its work was deferred because the 13th Congress, which opened on 23 May, had to be prepared for, and only on 9 June did the Orgburo constitute the commission, under Kaganovich and including Krupskaya. In the Kazakh party organization the number of Kazakh communists rose from 1,539 in 1924 to 11,634 on 1 January 1926, but 4,432 of them (38 percent) could not read and write.

Assessment

What matters in the inner-party struggle is whom the enrollment strengthened. A February–March 1924 plenum gave candidate members a decisive vote, which, on one account, delivered a majority to the Zinoviev–Kamenev–Stalin triumvirate at the 13th Congress and sealed Trotsky's defeat. Kaganovich, in his memoirs, claims Zinoviev tried to inflate the campaign, demanding up to a million admissions in 1924.

But the reading that treats the enrollment purely as a factional maneuver or a planned stroke by Stalin has been contested. Other accounts emphasize the leadership's genuine alarm at the party's deproletarianisation and its wish to increase the party's weight in the factories at a time when raising productivity was high on the agenda. E. H. Carr called the enrollment a 180-degree reversal of the Central Committee's course that replaced Lenin's elite party with Stalin's mass party.

It is also worth noting that the worker recruits were not simply pliant. Kaganovich complained that they saw themselves as representatives of the workers and pressed workers' demands; Moscow research likewise found the new members less pliable and more insistent on their fellow workers' interests than might have been assumed. Whether they opposed Stalin should be judged in light of the fact that the enrollment occurred after the Left Opposition had been broken.