In addition, such peasant households as had surplus stocks of wheat and rye continued to refuse to sell them. The state, which maintained its monopoly on the grain trade, tried to barter with them. But to little avail. The warehouses of agricultural equipment had been nearly emptied. Industrial output in general was tumbling. In 1918 the output of large and medium-sized factories fell to a third of what it had been in 1913.37 The multiple difficulties with transport, with finance and investment and with the unavailability of raw materials continued. Enterprises closed down also because of the ‘class struggle’ advocated by the Bolsheviks. Owners retired from production and commerce. Inflation continued to shoot up. In January 1918 a military-style system was introduced on the railways so as to restore efficiency. The banks had been nationalized in the previous December and many large metallurgical and textile plants were state owned by the spring.38
Even so, the decrees to assert control by government and by people were unable to restore the economy. The increased state ownership and regulation were, if anything, counter-productive to the restoration of the economy. The Bolshevik party was menaced by a gathering emergency of production, transportation and distribution which the Provisional Government had failed to resolve. Lenin had blamed all problems on ministerial incompetence and bourgeois greed and corruption. His own attempt to reconstruct the economy was proving to be even more ineffectual.
Within a couple of years the party’s opponents were to claim that Sovnarkom could have rectified the situation by boosting investment in consumer-oriented industrial output and by dismantling the state grain-trade monopoly. Yet they were not saying this in 1917–18. At the time there was a recognition that the difficulties were largely beyond the capacity of any government to resolve. All of them were adamantly committed to the prosecution of the war against the Central Powers. The necessity to arm, clothe and feed the armed forces was therefore paramount. A free market in grain would have wrecked the war effort. The Bolsheviks alone were willing, just about willing, to sign a separate peace with the Germans and Austrians. But they set their face determinedly against economic privatization. What the liberal administration of Prince Lvov had nationalized they were not going to restore to the conditions of an unregulated market.
For they were a far-left political party, and proud of their ideas and traditions: they renamed themselves as the ‘Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’ expressly in order to demarcate themselves from other types of socialism.39 Ideological impatience infused their thinking. Lenin was more cautious than most Bolsheviks on industrial and agrarian policies, and yet he never seriously contemplated denationalization. If he had done, he would not have got far with his party. Victory in the Brest-Litovsk controversy had already stretched the party to breaking-point. Any further compromise with Bolshevik revolutionary principles would have caused an unmendable split. As it was, the Treaty threatened its own disaster. A country which already could not properly feed and arm itself had lost crucial regions of population and production. Could the October Revolution survive?
5
New World, Old World
Bolshevik leaders had assumed that people who supported them in 1917 would never turn against them and that the party’s popularity would trace an unwavering, upward line on the graph. In the Central Committee before the October Revolution, only Kamenev and Zinoviev had dissented from this naïve futurology – and their scepticism had incurred Lenin’s wrath. Certainly there were excuses for misjudging the potential backing for the party. The Bolsheviks had not yet got their message through to millions of fellow citizens, and it was not unreasonable for them to expect to reinforce their influence once their reforms and their propaganda had had their desired effect. Lenin and his associates could also point out that the Constituent Assembly results had underplayed the popularity of the Sovnarkom coalition because the candidate lists did not differentiate between the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Nor had it been senseless to prophesy socialist revolution in central and western Europe. Bread riots had led to upheaval in Russia in February 1917. There were already reports of urban discontent in Germany and Austria and disturbances had taken place in the Kiel naval garrison. The Bolsheviks were right to suspect that the governments of both the Central Powers and the Allies were censoring newspapers so as to hide the growth of anti-war sentiment.
When all due allowance is made, however, the Bolsheviks had not acquired a governmental mandate from the Constituent Assembly elections; and their popularity, which had been rising in the last months of 1917, declined drastically in 1918. It was also clear that most persons in the former Russian Empire who voted for the party had objectives very different from those of Lenin and Trotski. The Constituent Assembly polls had given eighty-five per cent of the vote to socialists of one kind or another.1 But the Bolsheviks were a single socialist party whereas the working class wanted a coalition government of all socialist parties and not just the Bolsheviks or an alliance restricted to Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Workers in general did not demand dictatorship, terror, censorship or the violent dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. Nor did most of the soldiers and peasants who sided with the Bolshevik party know about the intention to involve them in a ‘revolutionary war’ if revolutions failed to occur elsewhere.2
This discrepancy was not accidental. The public agenda of Bolshevism had not been characterized by frankness; and sympathizers with the Bolshevik party, including most rank-and-file party members, had little idea of the basic assumptions and principles of the Central Committee. Yet this was not the whole story. For the Central Committee, while fooling its party and its electoral supporters, also deluded itself that the October Revolution would be crowned with easily-won success. They believed that their contingency plan for revolutionary war was unlikely to need to be implemented. When they replaced ‘land nationalization’ as a policy with ‘land socialization’, they felt that the peasantry would eventually see that nationalization was in its basic interest.3
Also of importance was the need for the Bolshevik leaders to simplify their policies to render them comprehensible to their own party and to society. Open politics had been hobbled in the tsarist period, and the public issues most readily understood by ordinary men and women after the February Revolution were those which were of direct significance for their families, factories and localities. Whereas they immediately perceived the implications of the crises in Russian high politics over Milyukov’s telegram in April and the Kornilov mutiny in August, their grasp of the less sensational issues of war, politics and economics was less sure. Consequently it was vital for the Bolsheviks to concentrate on uncomplicated slogans and posters that would attract people to their party’s side.4 This was a difficult task; for the universal political euphoria at the downfall of the Romanov dynasty gave way to widespread apathy amidst the working class about the soviets and other mass organizations in subsequent months.
A further problem was that the Bolsheviks were not agreed among themselves. There had been a serious split in the Central Committee over the composition of the government in November 1917, and another in March 1918 over the question of war and peace. At a time when the party’s need was to indoctrinate society, it had yet to determine its own policies. Even Lenin was probing his way. Society, the Russian Communist Party and its central leaders were finding out about each other and about themselves.
The party’s difficulties were especially severe in the borderlands, where Lenin’s regime was regarded as illegitimate. Practically the entire vote for the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly had come from Russian cities or from industrial cities outside Russia that had a large working class embracing a goodly proportion of ethnic Russians. Only in the Latvian and Estonian areas, where hatred of the Germans was greater than worry about Russians, did the Bolsheviks have success with a non-Russian electorate.5 In the Transcaucasus, the Mensheviks of Georgia got together with Armenian and Azeri politicians to for
m a Transcaucasian Commissariat. A Sejm, or parliament, was set up in February 1918. But already there were divisions, especially between the Armenians and Azeris; and an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Armenian nationalists in Baku led to a massacre of the Muslim Azeris. The Ottoman army intervened on the Azeri side in spring.6 By May 1918 three independent states had been set up: Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The communists had been ousted even from Baku, and the entire Transcaucasus was lost to them.
Lenin and Stalin, as they continued to deliberate on this, recognized that their ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia’, issued on 3 November 1917, had gone unnoticed by most of the non-Russian population.7 Over the ensuing weeks they altered their public commitment to the goal of a unitary state, and Lenin on 5 December published a Manifesto to the Ukrainian People which expressed the idea that the future government of Russia and Ukraine should be based on federal principles. In his subsequent Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, which he wrote for presentation to the Constituent Assembly, he generalized this expectation by calling for a ‘free union of nations as a federation of Soviet republics’.8 After dispersing the Constituent Assembly, he came to the Third Congress of Soviets in late January and proclaimed the formation of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR).9
The ‘Russian’ in the title was not Russkaya but Rossiiskaya. This was deliberate. The former had an ethnic dimension; the latter connoted the country which was inhabited by many nations of which the Russians were merely one, albeit the largest one. Lenin wanted to emphasize that all the peoples and territories of the former Russian Empire were being welcomed into the RSFSR on equal terms in a federal system. He was also indicating his acceptance – in marked contrast with Nicholas II – that there were areas of the old empire that were not ‘Russia’. Russians were not to enjoy any privileges under Soviet rule.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 foreclosed the possibility to test this policy in the borderlands on Russia’s south-west, west and north-west. The Ukrainian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian provinces of the former Russian Empire joined Poland under German military control. A puppet government of ‘Hetman’ Pavlo Skoropadskyi was installed in Kiev. Communist party leaders, some of whom attempted to organize a partisan movement, were chased out of Ukraine. In each of the lands occupied by the Germans a balance was struck between the enforcement of Berlin’s wishes and the encouragement of local national sentiment. Political, administrative and economic ties were broken with Moscow and Petrograd, and the Russian Communist Party’s task of reincorporating the lost territory was made the harder. There were problems even in areas where neither the Central Powers nor the Allies were active. The Muslim peoples of central Asia, most of whom dwelt outside cities, had little communication with Russia; and within Russia, by the river Volga and in the southern Urals, the Tatars and Bashkirs had yet to be persuaded that Sovnarkom would not rule the country primarily for the benefit of the Russians.
By the middle of 1918 the triple effect of the October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly’s dispersal and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been to trap the Bolsheviks in a Russian enclave. This was infuriating for them. Apart from Bukharin, Russians were not the leading figures in the Central Committee: Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov were Jews; Stalin was a Georgian, Dzierżyński a Pole; Lenin was only partly an ethnic Russian. They had seized power in Petrograd so as to remake the politics of all Europe, and at home they had intended to transform the Russian Empire into a multi-national socialist state of free and equal nations. This remained their dream. But until the Red Army could impose itself on the borderlands the dream would not come near to reality. The Bolsheviks’ efforts in the meantime would perforce be concentrated in an area inhabited predominantly by Russians.
But how would these efforts be organized? Like his communist leaders, Lenin asserted that socialism should be built not only through a strongly centralized state but also by dint of the initiative and enthusiasm of the ‘masses’. He liked to quote Goethe’s dictum: ‘Theory is grey but life is green.’ Yakov Sverdlov, the Central Committee Secretary, had two other reasons for encouraging local initiative: the lack of sufficient personnel and the paucity of information about conditions in the provinces. To a party activist he wrote: ‘You understand, comrade, that it is difficult to give you instructions any more concrete than “All Power to the Soviets!” ’ Sovnarkom decrees did not lay down a detailed legal framework. Law meant infinitely less to Lenin, a former lawyer, than the cause of the Revolution. Sovnarkom was offering only broad guidelines for action to workers, soldiers and peasants. The aim was to inform, energize, excite and activate ‘the masses’. It did not matter if mistakes were made. The only way to avoid a blunder was to avoid doing anything.
The effect of the Decree on Land was particularly cheering for the Bolshevik party. Many peasants had been diffident about seizing whole estates before the October Revolution. They wanted to have at least a semblance of governmental permission before so precipitate a step. Lenin’s words released them from their fears. The gentry’s houses and agricultural equipment were grabbed in a rising number of incidents and peasants shared them among themselves.10
Not every region experienced this commotion. In central Asia the old social structure was preserved and property was left with its owners. In Ukraine the proximity of the Eastern front had discouraged peasants from a hasty movement against landowners in case the Central Powers broke through and restored the old social order – and this fear was realized with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. But elsewhere the peasantry sensed that their historic opportunity had arrived. There was solidarity among established households of each village. Where the peasant land commune existed, as in most parts of Russia and Ukraine, its practices were reinforced. In thirty-nine Russian provinces only four per cent of households stayed outside the communal framework. Kulaks were pulled back into it; many of them needed little persuasion since they, too, wanted a share of the land of the dispossessed gentry. The peasants in Russia’s central agricultural region gained control over an area a quarter larger than before 1917; and in Ukraine the area was bigger by three quarters.11
Many a household divided itself into several households so as to increase its members’ claim to land. The unintended consequence was that sons had a say in communal affairs whereas previously the father would have spoken on their behalf. As young men were conscripted, furthermore, women began to thrust themselves forward when decisions were taken: gradually the revolutions in the villages were affecting rural relationships.12 But the main feature was the peasantry’s wish to arrange its life without outside interference. Liberated from indebtedness to the landlord and from oppression by the land captains, peasants savoured their chance to realize their ancient aspirations.
Among the other beneficiaries of this transformation were the soldiers and sailors of Russian armed forces. Sovnarkom had authorized their demobilization in the winter of 1917–18. This gave post factum sanction to a mass flight from the trenches and garrisons that had been occurring since midsummer. Most of the conscripts were peasants who, with rifles slung over their shoulders, jumped on trains and horse-carts and returned to their native villages. Their arrival gave urgency to the process of land reform, especially in places where little had hitherto been known about the Bolsheviks and their Land Decree. Those military units which were not demobilized had much internal democracy. Election of officers was commonplace and soldiers’ committees supervised the activities of the structure of higher command. Many such units were supporters of the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections and fought in the early campaigns to consolidate the October Revolution in Moscow and Ukraine.
They demanded and received good rations, disdaining discipline as a relic of the tsarist regime. Several units were little better than a rabble of boozy ne’er-do-wells who had no homes to return to. Those which were well led and had high morale were treasured by the Bolshevi
k party. The outstanding ones were typically non-Russian. Without the Latvian Riflemen the regime might well have collapsed; and Lenin was in no position to quibble when the Latvians insisted on consulting with each other before deciding whether to comply with his orders.
Workers, too, relished their new status. Palaces, mansions and large town houses were seized from the rich and turned into flats for indigent working-class families.13 The expropriations took place at the instigation of the local soviets or even the factory-workshop committees and trade union branches. The authorities also gave priority to their industrial labour-force in food supplies. A class-based rationing system was introduced. Furthermore, truculent behaviour by foremen vanished after the October Revolution. The chief concern of the working class was to avoid any closure of their enterprise. Most remaining owners of enterprises fled south determined to take their financial assets with them before Sovnarkom’s economic measures brought ruin upon them. But factory-workshop committees unlocked closed premises and sent telegrams informing Sovnarkom that they had ‘nationalized’ their factories and mines. The state was gaining enterprises at a faster rate than that approved by official policy.
The movement for ‘workers’ control’ continued. Factory-workshop committees in central and south-eastern Russia followed their counterparts in Petrograd in instituting a tight supervision of the management.14 Most committees contented themselves with the supervising of existing managers; but in some places the committees contravened the code on workers’ control, sacked the managers and took full charge. There was also a movement called Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) which sought to facilitate educational and cultural self-development by workers. Lenin often worried that both ‘workers’ control’ and Proletkult might prove difficult for the party to regulate. Already in 1918 he was seeking to limit the rights of the workers in their factories and in the 1920s he moved against Proletkult. Even so, the working class kept many gains made by it before and during the October Revolution.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 12