On the other hand, Serge maintained against Ciliga that the sociopolitical composition of the non-Party masses at the time of Kronstadt was very far from progressive. “In 1921, everybody who aspires to Socialism is inside the Party ... It is the non-Party workers o f this epoch, joining the Party to the number of two million in 1924, upon the death of Lenin, who assure the victory of its bureaucracy.” The conscious revolutionaries in the leadership of the mutiny “constituted an undeniable elite and, duped by their own passion, they opened in spite of themselves the door to a frightful counterrevolution.” Serge’s comment on the general issue in question, could well be taken as a summing-up of his lifelong attitude to the Revolution: “ It is often said that ‘the germ o f all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning.’ Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs— a mass of other germs— and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse— and which he may have carried in him since his birth— is this very sensible?”
on the question of whether stalinism was an inevitabe outcome of bolshevism