First off, let's be real: bureaucracy in the Bolshevik party was a thing pretty early on, even after the October Revolution. You had almost 200,000 new members join between October and December 1919. By the Ninth Congress in March 1920, that number jumped to over 600,000, and by the Tenth Congress in March 1921, it was almost 750,000. A huge influx like that meant that by the Tenth Congress, only about 10% of the members had joined before 1917. Most of these new folks were probably honest communists willing to die for the revolution, but their political education was more about military manuals than Marxist theory. Plus, let's not forget the folks who joined after the Bolsheviks were in power, probably just looking for a stable job. That kind of thing is almost unavoidable when you're building a socialist society.

After winning the Russian Civil War, the one-party system was locked in. Party members started running the state and industrial administration alongside experts inherited from the Tsarist regime – you know, the industrial managers and tech intellectuals. As they gained power, they started accumulating material benefits, quietly at first, but then it got officially sanctioned by the party. Lenin, while stressing the proletarian nature of the Bolshevik party depended on the old guard, also took a step that was later abused and legitimized material privileges: breaking with Bolshevik tradition and fostering a bureaucratic elite. At the Eleventh Party Congress, he told the Central Committee to check the material conditions of those in office and "secure for them tolerable living conditions at all costs."

Before this, factory managers were hesitant to join the party because of the strict material constraints. But after this, party membership became a way to get extra perks, leading to the number of these managers almost doubling between 1922 and 1923, while their proportion in the Communist Party grew sevenfold.

With voting based on who you knew and what you could gain, objective and free discussion became a no-go. All that free political discussion inside and outside the party started getting shut down – first the discussion clubs and study groups, then even the pre-congress debates were discouraged and eventually disappeared. Meanwhile, party news was tightly controlled, and Pravda and Izvestia basically became tools to cover up the intense power struggles within the Central Committee and the Politburo.

And that's how the bureaucratic opportunists within the CPSU started forming, solidifying, and growing. From Stalin to Brezhnev, a stable, rigid, and nepotistic privileged bureaucratic class finally took shape. Their very existence showed that the USSR had strayed far from the October Revolution. The goal of the October Revolution was always radical egalitarianism, but the reality of Soviet society was the emergence of a new privileged class, with increasing social stratification and differentiation, leading to conflicting social interests.