Democratic Centralism

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Democratic centralism is the doctrine, espoused by Lenin, according to which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and most other communist parties, was traditionally run. It lays down that conflicting opinions and views should be freely expressed and widely discussed at all levels of the party hierarchy, and that the central committee should take them into account when making any decision, but once a decision has been made, the policy must be unquestioningly accepted and carried out by all party members. Accordingly, the CPSU was organized on strict hierarchical lines, but with considerable control over the committees at each level by the one directly above, thus allowing very little upward flow of views and opinions to take place, while the ‘centralist’ aspect of the doctrine is fully utilized. Were the freedom to argue fully before the policy decision a reality, there would in fact be relatively little difference between democratic centralist communist parties and such organizations as the British Conservative Party, where policy is ultimately made by a party leadership which expects to be loyally supported by all rank-and-file members.

The authority of the CPSU was justified in terms of its own ideology by the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to build communism.

It was in the early days of the party, and especially under Lenin just after the 1917 Revolution, that central control of the party was particularly problematic, and hence from this time that the linking of the two values, democratic participation with central command authority, dates. Democratic centralism’s proven inability to allow the filtering of opinions up, as well as down, the hierarchy, eventually contributed to the downfall of the CPSU. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost opened the prospect of an alternative version of democracy to the people of the Soviet Union, and when a group of ‘hardliners’ attempted to reimpose the traditions of democratic centralism in August 1991, not only they, but also the CPSU itself, were promptly rejected.