was that of the decision of the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 to abolish organized factions—a decision which Trotsky later agreed helped lay the juridical basis for Stalin’s despotic regime. It was typical because it was proposed and adopted as an emergency exception, a deviation from the desirable degree of democracy, justified only by the life-and-death needs of the moment; and having been adopted for this reason, it became accepted as the norm. The question of a one-party state went through a similar evolution.

Wherever you look into Soviet politics during this period, you see “exceptions” turning into norms. The steel wire was refusing to snap back; it had stretched, and stayed stretched. This was the molecular process of internal degeneration.

If every concept and institution of workers’ democracy wasrefuses to accept the idea that it is the duty of the trade unions to take upon themselves state functions.57

Here the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was made the ideological ground of the expulsion—for the first time, I believe. Even worse was the real reason: Lozovsky had refused, as head of the trade unions, to go along with the Central Committee’s perspective of integrating the trade unions into the state machinery.58 Later Lenin himself approached this same position, in the so-called Trade-Union Controversy of 1920; Lozovsky was later readmitted to the party; but a considerable weight had been hung on the steel wire.

In an unpublished piece of the same month, Lenin remarked: “What dictatorship implies and means is a state of simmering war, a state of military measures of