The PKI claimed it was organized along Leninist lines, but it wasn’t really. It was a “broad mass party,” in its own terminology, growing far too quickly to maintain the strict hierarchical discipline Lenin himself argued for.14 The party had active members, or cadres, like Sakono’s teacher Sutrisno, who took a pledge to uphold party ethics, and it also ran a number of affiliated organizations, like the BTI, which were meant for mass civilian participation. The industrial counterpart to BTI was SOBSI, the affiliation of union members that included much of the country’s working class, whether
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