Notas acerca da Fortaleza Vermelha

Rühle sobre a sua visita a URSS.

Russia was suffering in all of its limbs, from every disease

The Russian tactic is the tactic of authoritarian organisation. It has been so consistently developed and in the end carried to extremes, by the Bolsheviks to the fundamental principle of centralism that it has led to over-centralism.

Centralism is the organisational principle of the bourgeois-capitalist age. With it the bourgeois state and the capitalist economy can be built up. Not however the proletarian state and the socialist economy. They demand the council system.

On the contrary: these methods produce in an advanced proletariat such as the German exactly the opposite result. They strangle initiatives, paralyse the revolutionary activity, impair the combativeness, reduce the personal feeling of responsibility.

The necessary freedom therefore will however never be won in the coercive system of centralism, the chains of bureaucratic-militaristic control, under the burden of a leader-dictatorship and its inevitable accompaniments: arbitrariness, personality cult, authority, corruption, violence.

1 The communists are duty-bound to set themselves up in a rigid centralist, iron-hard, militaristic, dictatorial organisation.

2 The communists are duty-bound to take part in parliamentary elections, and to enter parliament to carry out a new type of revolutionary parliamentary work there.

3 The communists are duty-bound to remain in the trade unions so as to help the revolution to victory in these revolutionarily-transformable institutions.

(Otto Rühle. Report from Moscow, 1920)