When the Mensheviks in their resolution say that compulsory labor always results in low productivity, then they are captives of bourgeois ideology and reject the very foundations of the socialist economy.… In the era of serfdom it was not so that gendarmes stood over every serf. There were certain economic forms to which the peasant had grown accustomed, which, at the time, he regarded as just, and he only rebelled from time to time.… It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nationwide economic plan.
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In sum, forced labor was not only indispensable to socialism but actually beneficial: “Forced serf labor did not emerge because of the ill will of the feudal class: it was a progressive phenomenon.”123
The notion that the worker must become a peon of the “socialist” state—that is, on the face of it, a slave of himself, since he was said to be “master” of that state—embedded in the Marxist theory of a centralized, organized economy and its misanthropic view of human nature, was further strengthened by the extremely low opinion which the Bolshevik leaders had of Russia’s workers. Before the Revolution, they had idealized them, but contact with the worker in the flesh quickly put an end to illusions. While Trotsky extolled the virtues of serfdom, Lenin dismissed the Russian “proletariat.” At the Eleventh Party Congress, in March 1922, he said:
Very often, when they say “workers” it is thought that this means the factory proletariat. But it means nothing of the kind. In our country, since the war, the people who went to work in factories and plants were not proletarian at all, but those who did so to hide from the war. And do we now have social and economic conditions which induce true proletarians to go to work in factories and plants? This is not the case. It is correct according to Marx, but Marx wrote not about Russia but about capitalism as a whole, beginning with the fifteenth century. For six hundred years this was correct, and for today’s Russia it is not correct. Those who go into the factories are through and through not proletarians but all kinds of casual elements.
124
The implications of this astonishing admission were not lost on some Bolsheviks: for Lenin was saying nothing less than that the October Revolution had not been made by or even for the “proletarians.” Shliapnikov alone had the courage to point this out: “Vladimir Ilich said yesterday that the proletariat in the sense in which Marx perceived it does not exist.… Allow me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a nonexistent class.”125
With such a view of human nature in general and Russian labor in particular as Lenin and Trotsky entertained, they could hardly have tolerated free labor and independent trade unions even if other considerations had not spoken against them.
The official reasons for the introduction of compulsory labor were the requirements of economic planning: economic planning, it was argued, not inconsistently, could not be realized unless labor were subject to the same controls as all the other economic resources. The Bolsheviks spoke of the need for compulsory labor obligation as early as April 1917, before coming to power.126 Lenin apparently saw no contradiction in saying that whereas the introduction of compulsory labor in capitalist Germany in wartime “inevitably meant military penal servitude [katorga] for the workers,” under Soviet rule the same phenomenon represented “a giant step toward socialism.”127
True to their word, the Bolsheviks declared the intention of introducing labor conscription on their first day in office. On October 25, 1917, almost in the same breath in which he announced the deposition of the Provisional Government, Trotsky told the Second Congress of Soviets: “The introduction of the universal labor obligation is one of the most immediate objectives of a genuine revolutionary government.”128 Probably most of the delegates thought this statement applied only to the “bourgeoisie.” And, indeed, in the first months of his dictatorship, Lenin, driven by personal animosity, went out of his way to humiliate the “bourgeoisie,” compelling people unaccustomed to manual labor to perform menial chores. In the draft of the decree nationalizing banks (December 1917), he wrote:
Article 6: universal labor obligation. The first step—consumer-labor, budget-labor booklets for the rich, control over them. Their duty: to work as ordered, else—“enemies of the people.”
And in the margin he added: “Dispatch to the front, compulsory labor, confiscation, arrests (execution by shooting).”129 Later it was a common sight in Moscow and Petrograd to see well-dressed people performing menial duties under guard. The benefit of this forced labor was probably close to nil, but it was intended to serve “educational” purposes—namely, to incite class hatred.
As Lenin had indicated, this was only the first step. Before long, the principle of compulsory labor was extended to other social strata: it meant not only that every adult had to be productively employed but that he or she had to work where ordered. This obligation, which returned Russia to the practices of the seventeenth century, was decreed in January 1918 in the “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses,” which contained the following clause: “For the purpose of destroying the parasitic elements of the population and for the organization of the economy, there is introduced the universal labor obligation.”130 Inserted into the 1918 Constitution, this principle became the law of the land and has served ever since as the legal basis for treating anyone shirking state employment as a “parasite.”
The principle of labor conscription was worked out in practical detail at the end of 1918. A decree of October 29, 1918, established a nationwide network of agencies to “distribute the labor force.”131 On December 10, 1918, Moscow issued a detailed “Labor Code” which provided for all male and female citizens between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with some exceptions, to render “labor service.” Those who already held regular jobs were to stay at them. The others were to register with Departments for the Allocation of the Labor Force (Otdely Raspredeleniia Rabochei Sily, or ORRS). These organs had the authority to assign them to any work anywhere they saw fit.
Not only did the decrees on compulsory labor apply to minors (children sixteen to eighteen) but special ordinances permitted children employed in war industries or other enterprises of special importance to the state to be made to work overtime.132
By late 1918, it became common practice for the Bolshevik authorities to call up workers and specialists in various fields for state service exactly as they drafted recruits into the Red Army. The practice was for the government to announce that workers and technical specialists in a specified branch of the economy were “mobilized for military service” and subject to court-martial: those leaving jobs to which they had been assigned were treated as deserters. Persons with skills in critical fields, but not currently employed in jobs where they could use them, had to register and await a call-up. The first civilians to be “mobilized” were railroad workers (November 28, 1918). Other categories followed: persons with technical education and experience (December 19, 1918), medical personnel (December 20, 1918), employees of the river and ocean fleets (March 15, 1919), coal miners (April 7, 1919), postal, telephone, and telegraph employees (May 5, 1919), workers in the fuel industry (June 27, 1919, and November 8, 1919), wool industry workers (August 13, 1920), metalworkers (August 20, 1920), and electricians (October 8, 1920).133 In this manner, industrial occupations became progressively “militarized” and the difference between soldiers and workers, military and civilian sectors, was blurred. Efforts to organize industrial labor on the military model could not have worked well in view of the plethora of decrees on this subject, setting up ever new punishments for “labor deserters,” ranging from the publication of their names to confinement in concentration camps.134
Whatever its formal economic justification, the practice of forced labor meant a reversion to the Muscovite in
stitution of tiaglo, by virtue of which all adult male and female peasants and other commoners could be called upon to perform chores on behalf of the state. Then, as now, its main forms were carting goods, cutting lumber, and construction work. The description of the duty imposed on peasants in 1920 to furnish fuel would have been quite comprehensible to Muscovite Russians:
The peasants were ordered … as a sort of labor service expected of them by the Government … to cut down so many cords of wood in designated forests. Every horse-owning peasant had to transport a certain quantity of wood. All this wood had to be delivered by the peasant to river jetties, cities, and other terminal points.
135
The principal difference between compulsory labor, or tiaglo, in Muscovite Russia and that in Communist Russia was that in the Middle Ages it had been a sporadic duty, imposed to meet specific needs, whereas now it became a permanent obligation.
In the winter of 1919–20, Trotsky conceived an ambitious scheme of “militarizing labor” in which soldiers in uniform would perform productive economic work while civilian workers would be subjected to military discipline. This throwback to the infamous “military colonies” instituted a century earlier by Alexander I and Arakcheev met with skepticism and hostility. But Trotsky persisted and would not be dissuaded. Back from his triumph in the Civil War, full of his own importance and eager to gain fresh laurels, he insisted that Russia’s economic problems could be resolved only by the same rough-and-ready methods which the Red Army had used to defeat the external enemy. On December 16, 1919, he drafted a set of “Theses” for the Central Committee.136 He argued that economic problems had to be stormed with blindly disciplined armies of workers. Russia’s labor force was to be regimented in military fashion: the shirking of duty (refusal to take on assigned work, absenteeism, drinking on the job, etc.) was to be treated as a crime and the culprits turned over to courts-martial. Trotsky further proposed that Red Army units no longer needed for combat duty, instead of being demobilized and sent home, be transformed into “Labor Armies” (Trudarmii). These “Theses” were not intended for publication, but Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, printed them anyway, either inadvertently (as he claimed) or to discredit Trotsky (as others believed). Published in Pravda on January 22, 1920, they unleashed a storm of protests, in which the epithet “Arakcheevsh-china” was commonly heard.
Lenin was won over because of the desperate need to halt the further deterioration of the country’s economy. On December 27, 1919, he agreed to the creation of a Commission on Labor Obligation, with Trotsky, who retained the post of Commissar of War, as president. Trotsky’s program entailed two sets of measures:
1. Military units no longer required at the front would not be demobilized but would be transformed into peacetime Labor Armies and assigned to such tasks as repairing railroad beds, transporting fuel, and fixing agricultural machinery. The Third Army Corps, which had fought in the Urals, was the first to undergo this transformation. Later other units were converted. In March 1921, one-quarter of the Red Army was employed in construction and transport.
2. Concurrently, all workers and peasants were made subject to military discipline. At the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, where this policy provoked intense controversy, Trotsky insisted that the government had to be free to use civilian labor wherever it was needed, without regard to the personal preferences of the workers, exactly as in the armed forces. “Mobilized” labor was to be assigned to enterprises requesting it through the Commissariat of Labor. In 1922, looking back at this experiment, an official of this commissariat stated: “We supplied labor according to plan and, consequently, without taking into account the individual peculiarities or wishes of the worker to engage in this or that kind of work.”137
Neither the Labor Armies nor militarized labor fulfilled the expectations of their protagonists. Soldier workers produced only a fraction of the output of trained civilians; they also deserted in droves. The government faced insurmountable technical difficulties in attempting to administer, feed, and transport the militarized labor force. Hence, this prototype of Stalin’s and Hitler’s slave-labor organizations had to be abandoned: industrial mobilization was abolished on October 12, 1921, and the Labor Armies one month later.138
The experiment discredited Trotsky and weakened him in the struggle for the succession to Lenin not only because it had failed but because it made him vulnerable to charges of “Bonapartism.” For indeed, if Russia’s economy had been militarized, officers subordinate to him would have acquired a dominant role in the civilian sector. “Trotskyism” as a term of abuse gained currency in 1920 in connection with this scheme.139
In a regime based on compulsory labor there was, of course, no place for free trade unions. There were logical reasons why such unions could not be allowed, since in a “worker” state the workers by definition could not have interests separate from those of their employer. As Trotsky once put it, the Russian worker was “obligated to the Soviet state, under its orders in every direction, for it is his state”140—in obeying it, therefore, he was obeying himself, even if he happened to think otherwise. There were also practical reasons why independent trade unions could not be tolerated, inasmuch as they were incompatible with central planning. Hence, the Bolsheviks lost no time in depriving of independence the two main organizations of Russian labor—Factory Committees and trade unions.
It will be recalled that after the outbreak of the February Revolution, with Bolshevik encouragement, Factory Committees spread and gained influence in Russia as organs of workers’ control. In conditions of spreading anarchy, they expanded at the expense of the trade unions, organized nationally by crafts, because the workers found more in common with others employed in the same plant than with fellow workers possessing the same skills but employed elsewhere. Inspired by syndicalist ideas, the Factory Committees gravitated leftward and in the fall of 1917 provided one of the main sources of Bolshevik strength.
But once in power, the Bolsheviks found little use for these committees. Pursuing their private interests and tending to treat industrial establishments as property, they interfered with production and obstructed economic planning. In the weeks that followed the October coup, while they were still insecurely in power, the Bolsheviks continued to curry favor with them. A decree of November 27, 1917, provided for the establishment of Workers’ Committees in all enterprises employing five or more workers. They were to supervise production, determine the minimum output, set production costs, and enjoy access to the accounting books.141 This was syndicalism, pure and simple. But Lenin no more intended workers to run Russia’s industries than peasants to own Russia’s agricultural land, soldiers to run their regiments, or national minorities to secede. All these were means to an end, the end being the conquest of power. Hence, he inserted into the decree on Factory Committees two provisions, little noted at the time, which gave the government the right to abrogate it. One stated that while the decisions of the workers or their representatives were binding on the owners of enterprises, they were subject to annulment by “trade unions and [their] congresses.” Another clause stipulated that in enterprises designated as being of “state importance”—that is, either working for defense or producing articles “necessary for the existence” of the masses—the Workers’ Committees were accountable to the state “for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline.” As one historian observes, these vague provisions soon rendered the decree on workers’ control “not to be worth the paper it was written on.”142
In time, the Factory Committees were emasculated by being subjected to bureaucratic oversight. The decree on workers’ control required each committee to render accounts to the Regional Council of Workers’ Control; these Regional Councils, in turn, were subordinated to the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control. Officials running these supervisory organs received their appointments from the Communist Party and were duty-bound to carry out its instructions.143 These institutions prevented Factory Committees from f
orming their own national organization independent of the state. The decree establishing the Supreme Economic Council (December 1917) gave it authority over all existing economic bodies, including the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control.
The fate of the Russian labor movement, in its anarcho-syndicalist as well as trade union form, was largely settled at the First Congress of Trade Unions, held in Petrograd in January 1918.144 Here, socialist intellectuals, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, criticized the anarcho-syndicalist tendencies of industrial workers and rejected demands for workers’ control as detrimental to productivity and inimical to socialism. Despite heated arguments in favor of workers’ control, the congress, dominated by Bolsheviks, who on this issue had the backing of the Mensheviks and SRs, adopted a resolution shifting the means of exercising workers’ control over production from Factory Committees to the trade unions. Factory Committees now lost many of the powers granted them in November, including that of interfering with financial matters. “Control over production,” the resolution stated, “does not mean the transfer of the enterprise into the hands of workers.”
When the congress turned its attention to trade unions, the Mensheviks parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Since they enjoyed strong support among some of the largest national unions, the Mensheviks favored independent trade unionism. The Bolsheviks maintained that trade unions should serve as instruments of the state, its agents in “organizing production” and “rehabilitating the country’s shattered economic forces.” Among their tasks was “enforcing the universal obligation to work.” “The congress is convinced,” the Bolshevik resolution read, “that trade unions will inevitably become transformed into organs of the socialist state”:
The entire process of the full fusion of the trade unions with the organs of state authority (the so-called process of
ogosudarstvlenie
The Russian Revolution Page 109