In a nutshell

Bureaucracy, as a problem or historical factor, did not play much of a role in the thinking of the Bolsheviks. The analysis of the Bolsheviks was conducted mostly in terms of social classes whereas bureaucracy was not considered a class – or was not supposed to be one. The appearance of bureaucracy as a problem (at first as ‘bureaucratism’ rather than bureaucracy) came with accession to power – and muddled the concepts as well as the realities.

An interplay of perceptions in ideological terms with changing political realities (facts of life) is our story, as well as that of the Soviet system at large.

We need to consider two key stages. The first involved the discovery of the apparatus – and its crucial force – when ex-tsarist government officials went on strike in 1918 against the new regime.

In stage two the state apparatus became a must – and the cooperation of specialists (experts), obviously from the previous regime, was a painful need and precondition for making the state machinery work.

Class composition seemed to be the biggest worry – notably because officials of the old regime, ‘alien’ both ideologically and in terms of class, were known to epitomise bureaucratism.

This was why acquiring ‘their own cadres’ – with the right class origin and ideology to be formed in the regime's own educational institutions – became for the Bolsheviks a crucial task ahead.