by S. A Smith
The crystallization of the civil war into a struggle between Reds and Whites had the effect of firming up worker support for the Red cause, but that is not to say that it was ever solid. Throughout the civil war there were regular stoppages, mostly limited in scope and duration. In 1920 in 18 provinces under Red control there were 146 strikes involving 135,000 workers, most of them provoked by problems of food supply. By spring 1920, over 1 million were on special rations, yet on average these were fulfilled by only a quarter or a fifth. Such stoppages cannot
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be dismissed simply as 'economic', since workers now depended on the state for the fulfilment of their basic needs. The strikes, therefore, inevitably had political implications, which frequently took the form of attacks on the privileges of officials: 'the communists receive high salaries and food rations, eat three dishes in their canteens, while we are given slops as though we were pigs'. Furthermore, the fanatical way in which the regime dealt with strikes further politicized them. In 1920, after the civil war was over, the chair of the provincial party committee in Ekaterinoslav reported:
'In September the workers here rose up against the despatdi to the countryside of food detachments. We decided to pursue an iron policy. We dosed down the tram park, fired all workers and employees, and sent some of them to the concentration camp; those of the appropriate age we sent to the front, others we handed over to the Cheka.'
с о
g This may have been an extreme response, but confiscation of strikers'
I
e ration cards, deployment of armed force, and mass dismissals
jg followed by selective rehiring were standard weapons in the Bolshevik
1 arsenal.
1-
The Bolsheviks saw the hand of the opposition behind any outbreak of worker unrest and their response was invariably to arrest workers known to beSRs or Mensheviks. While it is doubtful that the latter were in a position to instigate worker protest, they we re able to exert political influence. On 10 March 1919 Putilov workers, angry at the absence of bread, passed a Left SR resolution by 10,000 votes to 22, excoriating the 'servile yoking of workers to the factories' and calling for the destruction of the 'commissarocracy'. Yet support for the opposition was basically an expression of anger and frustration rather than of principled commitment. Attitudes were volatile and the same workers could react in different ways at different times. So long as civil war dragged on, it is fair to say that in spite of their deep disaffection, workers showed no desire to jeopardize the operations of the Red Army.
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Thus when ludenich, the White general, threatened Petrograd in autumn 1920, many worked a 16-hour day to defeat him. Moreover, if it only took a handful of oppositionists to give political form to economic discontent, it often simply required the party to send in agitators and extra supplies to dispel support for the opposition. At the beginning of 1920, the Menshevik leader L. Martov conceded:
So long as we branded Bolshevism, we were applauded; as soon as we went on to say that a changed regime was needed to fight Denikin successfully our audience turned cold or even hostile.
Doubtless a minority believed that the regime had comprehensively betrayed the revolution; but the attitudes of the majority were more contradictory. Many ideals of the revolution had bitten deep: workers evinced fierce hostility to burzhui, a strong belief in equality, hatred of privilege- not least when enjoyed by communists - and broad support for the soviet idea. When judged against these ideals, the Bolsheviks were found wanting; yet most workers were not convinced that the opposition provided a credible alternative.
The sailors and soldiers of Kronstadt, an island in the Gulf of Finland, some 30 kilometres from Petrograd, put their lives on the line for the ideals of 1917. On 1 March 1921,16,000 of them passed a resolution calling for the dismantling of War Communism, the devolution of power to freely elected Soviets, for freedoms of speech, the press, and association. There was no express call for the overthrow of soviet power, although once the rebels were under siege some did adopt that aim. Perhaps 12,000 out of 18,000 military and 8,000 to 9,000 adult male civilians out of a total civilian population of 30,000 threw in their lot with the rebels. The Bolsheviks responded decisively. On 7 March military operations to suppress the rebellion began, but effective leadership from professional officers on the island meant that the Reds were repulsed with heavy losses. Only on 17 March were 45,000 Red troops ready to launch an assault; by the following daythe island was in
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Bolshevik hands. Since 700 Soviet troops had been killed and 2,500 injured, reprisals against the rebels were harsh. By summer 1921, 2,103 prisoners had been sentenced to death - though the actual number shot was in the hundreds - and 6,459 sentenced to imprisonment. The Bolsheviks portrayed the rebellion as a 'White Guard plot'. Certainly, White agents sought to exploit the rebellion; but the rebels' dream of local autonomy and their loathing of privilege were anathema to the Whites. Moreover, they turned down a request by Chernov, the SR leader, to visit the island. The Bolsheviks were probably right to think that had the rebels succeeded, it would have led either to the disintegration of the state or to a White restoration. The real choice was still between a Red or a White dictatorship. That said, the Bolsheviks could havedealt with the rebels in a less bloody fashion. It was not clear that they wanted armed confrontation and there was a reasonable chance for compromise, given that the Bolsheviks could have offered an end to War Communism as a quid pro quo. Yet they would brook no compromise. Curiously, their intransigence seems to have arisen less from confidence, even though the rising was poorly timed and ill-prepared, than from insecurity. Knowing how deeply hated they were, the Bolsheviks sensed that any show of weakness would encourage rebels elsewhere. By suppressing the sailors of Kronstadt they bade farewell to the most cherished - and Utopian - ideals of 1917. Henceforward nothing further would be heard of power to the Soviets, workers' self-management, or a democratic army: the nature of the revolution had changed for good.
The political developments of the civil war defied every Bolshevik expectation. In October 1917 when the worker A. V. Shotman ventured to doubt whether 'even a cook or housekeeper' could administer the state, as Lenin had claimed in State and Revolution, he rounded on him: 'Rubbish! Any worker will master any ministry within a few days.'Yet in 1920 an exasperated Lenin exclaimed: 'Does every worker really know how to run the state? Practical people know that this is a fairy story.'As the Bolsheviks metamorphosed from a party of insurrection into a party
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of government, their perspective on reality changed. As early as August 1918, in a deliberate pitch to those ready to support any government so long as it could guarantee they would not be shot or robbed on the street, Bukharin wrote an article in Pravda entitled 'Order' (Poriadok). By 1921 the Bolsheviks had built a rudimentary state, but one that was the antithesis of the commune state of which Lenin had once dreamed. By 1920 the basic features of the Communist system were in place: rule by a single party, extreme centralization of power, intolerance of dissent, the curtailment of independent organizations, and readiness to use force to solve political and economic tasks. The efficiency of the state at this stage should not be exaggerated. In practice, it was a ramshackle set of competing party and state structures, permeated by arbitrariness, commandism, and inefficiency, that depended for its functioning not only on peremptory decrees from the centre but on powerful bosses and their cliques at the local level. Nevertheless, against the odds, a revolutionary vanguard, cut off from its mass base, had built a state, using the party apparatus, the army, coercion, and propaganda.
Historians debate the extent to which the party-state came into being as the result of Bolshevik ideology or the pressures of civil war. Some argue that the seeds of Bolshevik tyranny lay in the Marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat; others in Lenin's notion of the vanguard party with its implication that the party knew what was best for the working class. Such fundamental te
nets certainly played a part in bringing an authoritarian party-state into being. Yet the civil war was as much about certain principles being jettisoned as about others being confirmed. The decentralized vision of socialism associated with 1917 -soviet democracy, workers' self-management - was permanently sidelined. State, party, and army- not the Soviets or factory committees - now came to be seen as the bearers of revolution. The fact that ideology evolved in this way suggests that it was not the sole or even paramount driving force behind the creation of the party dictatorship. If the seeds of dictatorship lay in ideology, they only came
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to fruition in the face of the remorseless demands placed on party and state by civil war and economic collapse.
The culture of the party was profoundly changed by civil war. The atmosphere of pervasive violence and destruction, the unremitting popular hostility, sharpened dictatorial and brutal reflexes. The Bolshevik ethos had always been one of ruthlessness, authoritarianism, and 'class hatred', but in the context of civil war these qualities transmogrified into cruelty, fanaticism, and absolute intolerance of those who thought differently. The invasion of foreign powers, the failure of revolution to spread across Europe, bred a mentality of encirclement, of Russia as an armed fortress, as well as an obsession with enemies: The enemy keeps watch over us and is ready at any minute to exploit our every blunder, mistake, or gesture of vacillation.' The fact that the Bolsheviks achieved victory in the war - albeit at a £ punishing cost - strengthened illusions of infallibility. It was such g attitudes that increasingly came to define the party. The change in e culture, though not a direct expression of ideology, was easily justified jg in terms of it. As M. S. Ol'minsky told the Ninth Party Conference in 1 1920: Old Bolsheviks understood that the sacrifice of democracy was d ictated by t he emergency of war;' but many of ou r com rades understand the destruction of all democracy as the last word in communism, as real communism'.
Finally, the civil war saw the hardening conviction that the state was the modality through which socialism would be built. Lenin's ideology - his absolutization of the state as an instrument of class rule - was at the root of this process. But the hypertrophy of the party-state was as much the result of improvisation in the face of crises and unforeseen developments as of wilful intention. Indeed ideology in many respects left the Bolsheviks powerless to make sense of the forces that were shaping their regime, nowhere more so than in their primitive u nderstand ing of' bu reaucracy' .Having el im inated private ownersh ip of the means of production with astounding ease, Lenin became
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convinced that the state alone was the guarantor of progress to socialism. Proletarian power was guaranteed exclusively by the state and had nothing to do, for example, with the nature of authority relations in the workplace. Lenin thus had no inkling that the state itself could become an instrument of exploitation and little insight into how the Bolsheviks themselves could be 'captured' by the apparatus they notionally controlled.
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Chapter 4
NEP: politics and
the economy
In March 1921 Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress that Russia was like a man 'beaten to within an inch of his life*. The Congress, in session as the Kronstadt rebellion was underway, took place against a background of utter devastation in the economy and nation-wide peasant insurgency. Many feared that the regime might not survive. The response of Congress was to endorse a policy that had been urged by some in the party for well over a year; the abandonment of forced requisitioning in favour of a tax in kind on the peasantry, calculated as a percentage of the harvest. This relatively modest step marked the inauguration of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which soon turned into a wholescale repudiation of War Communism. Following the Congress, the Soviet CEC made clearthat grain surpluses might be sold to cooperatives or on the open market (the word 'trade'was still taboo). Rationing and state distribution of subsistence items were soon dismantled; and cooperatives and private individuals were permitted to lease small-scale enterprises. Later, in response to the so-called 'scissors crisis' - which saw the'blades' of industrial and agricultural prices open ever wider to the point where in October 1923 the ratio of the former to the latter stood at three times the 1913 level -the government imposed stringent fiscal, credit, and price measures to cut industrial prices. This entailed slashing public expenditure and subsidies to state enterprises. By 1924 a stable currency had been established in which the ruble was backed by gold. Full NEP was now in place: a hybrid, evolving system that
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combined a peasant economy, a state sector subject to 'commercial accounting', private trade and industry, a state and cooperative network of procurement and distribution, a credit system, and a rudimentary capital market.
In the jargon of the day, the aim of NEP was to cement the alliance
between the proletariat and the peasantry. Lenin spoke of it both as a
'retreat' and as a policy intended to last 'seriously and for a long time'.
In his last writings, penned when he was already seriously ill, he seemed
to sketch a scenario in which the transition to socialism would be a
gradual one, based upon cultural revolution (see Chapter 5) and the
expansion of cooperatives among the peasantry, even going so far as to
concede that 'there has been a radical modification in our whole
outlook on socialism'. Historians argue over the significance of these
valedictory meditations. Some see them as evidence that Lenin hadЩ
come to embrace a semi-liberal, market-based alternative to statist"g
socialism, in which the Soviet Union would evolve gradually from state $
capitalism to socialism. Others point out that neither he nor his party g.
ever deviated from a conception of socialism as the elimination of the «Г
market and complete state ownership of the means of production.%
What is clear is that Lenin came to see NEP as more than a 'retreat', as a J transitional system in which market mechanisms would gradually strengthen the state sector at the expense of the private sector over at least 'one or two decades'. All leading Bolsheviks came to accept that NEP was more than a temporary retreat, but they disagreed violently about the nature and duration of this transition period.
The economic year 1925-6 marked the apogee of NEP, this being the time when official policy, as articulated by Bukharin and backed by Stalin, was at its most favourable to the peasantry, particularly to the kulaks. The leadership announced that taxes were to be lowered and subsequently restrictions on hiring labour and leasing land were relaxed. In 1923-4 the tax in kind had been commuted into an exclusively money tax levied on cultivated land, cattle, and horses. It
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operated on a progressive basis: in 1924-5 one-fifth of households were exempt on the grounds that they were poor peasants and by 1929 this proportion had risen to one-third. Overall, the level of direct taxation on farm incomes increased in comparison with the pre-war period; but since land rents had been abolished, the combined burden of indirect and direct taxes fell from 19% in 1913 to just under 10% in 1926-7. By that year, grain production had recovered to its pre-war level and output of n on-grain products was well above pre-war levels. Yet all was not as well as it seemed. The fundamental purpose of NEP- notwithstanding all the mollifying talk about the peasantry - was to squeeze the rural sector in order to raise the capital necessary for industrial investment. In particular, the government wished to export grain - which in fact accounted for only 35% of net agricultural produce in 1926 - in order to pay for imports of machinery. To its alarm, however, the peasants were still marketing less grain than before the war, preferring to use it to feed £ the growing rural population and rebuild livestock herds. The g government responded by raising procurement targets and moving e from procurement through the market to procurement by state and jg cooperative organs. After January 1928, it behaved as though
grain were 1 state property.
During the period of NEP, the underlying resilience and traditionalism of agriculture made itself powerfully felt. The land revolution had reversed the long-term decline in communal land use, the commune even spreading to new areas such as Ukraine. Agriculture remained woefully primitive, with equipment such as horse-drawn sowing machines, harvesters, mowers, and threshing machines extremely rare. The robustness of the commune was a factor inhibiting mechanization and government efforts to encourage genuine collective farms. Yet it would be an error to conclude that peasant society had sunk back into time-honoured ways. By 1928 nearly half of peasant households were members of consumer cooperatives, and agronomists and land surveyors continued the process, begun by Stolypin, of reorganizing land in a more rational and equitable fashion, mainly to the benefit of
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the neediest households. Peasant attitudes to farming were not monolithic: traditional orientations prevailed, yet the burning question of land had ceased to absorb the younger generation in the way it had their parents. A sample of letters from the 1.3 million sent to the Peasant Newspaper between 1924-6 presents a complex picture. Nearly 60% of letters reflect a preference for collective over individual forms of enterprise but see the gradual development of cooperatives as most in tune with Russian ways; and while not antagonistic to the market, they urge the state to help agriculture through taxation and subsidies. The rest of the letters divide more or less equally into three categories: those that are mistrustful of the state and advocate individual entrepreneurshipastheonly way to improve peasant living standards; those - overwhelmingly from poor peasants - that bemoan continuing inequalities and look to the state to rectify these; and those-whose authors include communists and members of agrarian communes -that are genuinely enthusiastic for collective farms. All this suggests that change was taking place in agriculture. The problem was that it was too slow to sustain the rapid modernization that the regime wished to see.