Structure of Bolshevik Party

[gorillafuck]

How did the structure and organization of the Bolshevik Party change during the course of the Russian civil war? Answers from any tendency welcome unless it's just saying unsubstantiated stupid crap.

[Comrade_Stalin]

From my understanding, the Structure of the Bolshevik Party is based on Decmocratic Centralism.

1. That All Directing bodies of the party, From top to bottom, shall be elected.
2. That Party bodies shall give periodical accounts of their activities of their respective Party organizations;
3. That there shall be strict Party discipline and the subordination of the minority to the majority,
4. That all decision of higher bodies shall be absolutely binding on lower bodies and on all Party members.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism

Over time the size of the party changed, and so did the numbers of levels in the party. Province and Local level are add as the size of the party increase.

The goverment of communist party copy the default party Structure normally. Which is a National Congress which elects a committee which elects a ruling council. You can still see this with the Chinese goverment where the lower levels elect the higher ones.

[ComradeOm]

The Bolshevik Party effectively 'won itself to death' in 1917. By October 1917 it was a mass democratic party (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-revolution-bolshevik-t105275/index.html) and contained within it the most militant and revolutionary segments of the working class. On the transfer of power to the Soviet however, the Party, like almost every working class organ in the country, saw an exodus of members into the new Soviet bodies. The need to construct a new state apparatus, plus the small matter of fighting a civil war, drained the Party of its most capable members. Far from the October Revolution creating some sort of 'dictatorship of the party', by early 1918 the Party was effectively dead at the grassroots level. Dues were not collected, meetings not held, agitation completely ceased

This "colossal attrition of personnel", as Rabinowitch calls it*, effectively severed the link between the masses and the leadership that had proven to be such a strength in 1917. Attempts to reorganise to meet this problem failed; for example, in Petrograd the powerful Petersburg Committee was reduced in size and on a new electoral basis (in order to streamline its operations) but this was to be balanced by a new 'Delegates Soviet' directly elected by the district committees. However the Delegates Soviet did not work as planned and the result was a loss in internal party democracy**. When the Party's apparatus was reconstructed at factory level over the coming years, it was to be on a very different basis

Inner-party democracy did survive for longer at the higher party levels but it was only a matter of time before the rot reached the leadership as well. The Civil War didn't help matters (there's a plausible case for it 'militarising' the Party) but I would trace the root of the disease to the collapse of the Party, and indeed the dissolution of the Russian proletariat, over the winter of 1917-18

*The Bolsheviks in Power

**This example should give some idea as to the fluidity of the Party's structures during the period in question. While its possible to sketch the pre-Revolution party structure, there's no template for exactly how it operated during the Civil War years - this varied heavily by both region and period