{{no footnotes, date=August 2014 The Lenin Enrolment or the Lenin's call to the party (Lenin Levy) (after

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...

) was an effort from 1923 to 1925 to enroll more members of the

proletariat The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian. Marxist philo ...

into the

Communist party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of '' The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel ...

and incite them to become active in party affairs. In total, over 500,000 were recruited. It came in response to growing criticism of the Communist party as elitist by the rank and file. Even though the party claimed to represent the working class, most of its membership, and particularly its leadership, including Lenin himself, came from the educated classes. The criticism reached a peak at the 10th party congress in 1920 when the "workers' opposition" openly challenged Lenin. Even though Lenin managed to put down the rebellion within party ranks that time, the pressure to make the party more representative of its supposed base could no longer be ignored.

References

* ''EH Carr The interregnum Harmondsworth 1969, p361.'' * Hatch, J. (1989). The "Lenin Levy" and the Social Origins of Stalinism: Workers and the Communist Party in Moscow, 1921-1928. Slavic Review, 48(4), 558-577. doi:10.2307/2499783.
Genesis of bureaucratic socialism
Politics of the Soviet Union 1923 establishments in the Soviet Union

See also

References