0;liberal” situation was permanently changed by the demands of the Civil War. By the eighth Party Congress in March 1919, Lenin decreed in his seventh point that:“The Party finds itself in a situation in which the strictest centralism and most severe discipline are an absolute necessity. All decisions of a higher body are absolutely obligatory for lower ones. Every decree must be implemented…In this sense outright military discipline is needed in the Party in the present epoch. All party enterprises which are suitable for centralization (publishing, propaganda, etc) must be centralized for the good of the cause. All conflicts are decided by the corresponding higher party body.” As will be shown later, it was precisely in this Leninist trend of centralization that the true seeds of Stalinist dictatorship were sown. One of the most overlooked political legacies of Lenin, was the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a geopolitical entity on the 1st of January 1923. This was one rare issue where there was a practical disagreement between Lenin and Stalin in regard to a matter of policy, while the former was still alive. Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, wished to deprive the Soviet republics of even their formal independence by turning them into autonomous republics within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Under his model, Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia would be part of an enlarged RSFSR. Service remarks that Lenin thought Stalin’s project smacked of Russian imperial dominance and his counter proposal was to federate the RSFSR on equal terms with the other republics. As we know it was this proposal that came to pass. Lenin’s first move in the sphere of economics was the decrees on land and on workers’ control of industry which abolished private property in productive resources (above all in land an...
