) must occur as the completely inevitable result of their joint, closest, and harmonized activity and the training by trade unions of the broad worker masses for the task of administering the state apparatus and all the organs in charge of the economy.
145
This was very much in line with a tradition of Russian history by virtue of which the state, sooner or later, coopted and subordinated to itself all institutions originally formed, sometimes on its own initiative, as independent, self-governing bodies.
Once it had been decreed that individual Factory Committees were subject to the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control, that this council, in turn, had to account to the trade unions and their congresses, and that the proper function of trade unions was to serve as “organs of the socialist state,” the fate of Factory Committees was sealed. The history of workers’ control institutions following the First Congress of Trade Unions is one of relentless decline: they shrank, wilted, and died, one by one. The abortive movement in the spring of 1918 to create a nationwide network of workers’ plenipotentiaries was the last gasp of the movement. By 1919, they were only a memory.
As concerns trade unions, they increased their scope if not their authority as the Civil War neared its climax and the government came to rely on them to enforce labor discipline. The party increasingly assumed the right to appoint trade union officials, removing elected officials of whom it did not approve.146 In 1919 and 1920, state and party resolutions still paid lip service to the principle that trade unions helped run the nation’s economy. But in reality by then their main task was to serve as transmitters of government directives. This is how Trotsky defined the role of trade unions in April 1920:
In the socialist state under construction, trade unions are needed not to struggle for better working conditions—this is the task of the social and political organization as a whole—but to organize the working class for the purpose of production: to educate, discipline, allocate, collect, attach individual categories and individual workers to their jobs for a set period: in a word, hand in hand with the government in an authoritative manner to bring workers into the framework of a single economic plan.
147
The trade unions proved a harder nut to crack than the ephemeral Factory Committees: after the Civil War, in 1920–21, an explosion would occur in Bolshevik ranks over the practice of replacing elected union officials with appointed party bureaucrats. This issue would cause a great deal of internal friction and give Lenin the pretext for outlawing the formation of factions in the Communist Party.
Once it had been established that the function of trade unions was not to defend the interests of their members, but to serve the state, it was logical for membership in them to be made mandatory. Compulsory enrollment was not decreed but introduced gradually in one trade after another, until, at the end of 1918, three-quarters of the working force was subject to compulsory unionization.148 The larger their membership, the more impotent the trade unions became.
The right to strike was considered fundamental to labor’s interests and was reconfirmed as such at the trade unions’ Third All-Russian Conference in June 1917.149 The Communist Government neither then nor later issued a decree outlawing strikes: it was obvious, nevertheless, that the Bolsheviks would not tolerate work stoppages against state enterprises. They were inhibited from outlawing strikes by legislative fiat as long as the overwhelming majority of industrial enterprises were in private hands, but they were not prepared to confirm this right. At the Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918, the trade unionist G. Tsyperovich moved that the “professional worker movement continues, as before, to regard the strike as a means of defending its interests” with the understanding that under “the new conditions of workers’ control of production, [strikes] can be more soundly implemented.” The congress, dominated by Bolsheviks, ignored this resolution.150 In practice, strikes were permitted against privately owned enterprises, as long as these existed, but not in state enterprises. The progressive nationalization of industry had the effect of making strikes unlawful. The implications of the de facto abolition of the right to strike in Soviet Russia are thus defined by one scholar:
The first assumption [of the Soviet Government] was that collective bargaining and the strength of the unions did not rest on the right to call a work stoppage, but on its political relationship with the state and Party. In all cases, the burden of responsibility for avoiding and terminating strikes was now transferred to the trade unions, the very institutions for which the right to strike was vital. The trade unions were left in the impossible position of having to deny the one power that would give them strength and enable them to protect their membership.
151
This spelled the death of trade unionism in Soviet Russia.
The policies subsequently christened War Communism were meant to raise economic performance to a peak never known: it was the most ambitious attempt ever made until then to rationalize completely production and distribution through the elimination of market forces. Did it produce the desired results? Clearly not. Even the most fanatical advocates of these policies had to admit that after three years of experimentation the Soviet economy lay in shambles. As rapidly as the regime nationalized everything in sight, the illicit free market expanded, threatening to absorb what remained of Russia’s wealth. And there was not that much left to absorb. Russia’s Gross National Income in 1920 fluctuated between 33 and 40 percent of what it had been in 1913. The living standard of workers by then had declined to one-third of its prewar level.152
The facts were indisputable, but their interpretations differed. The Left Communists and other advocates of immediate socialization, standing in the midst of the wreckage they had wrought, facing the prospect of imminent famine, refused to concede failure. In a treatise published in 1920 Bukharin spoke glowingly of the collapse of the Soviet economy. In his view, it was the legacy of “capitalism” that was being destroyed: “such a grand debacle had never happened before,” he boasted. It was all “historically inevitable and historically necessary.” His book, filled with Marxist clichés, contained no facts, statistical or other, on the actual condition of Soviet Russia’s economy: facts that would have demonstrated that the culprit was not “capitalism” but Bolshevism.*
Other Communists found the cause of the economy’s calamitous condition in the survival of the private sector. They had always insisted that socialism could not succeed under conditions of partial nationalization and now felt vindicated: the trouble lay not in the government’s pressing socialism too hard, but in not pressing it hard enough. A typical defense of War Communism in this spirit appeared in Pravda in early 1921, just as it was being abandoned. The author, V. Frumkin, ascribed the shortcomings of Soviet Russia’s economy to the fact that its “entire apparatus lies in the hands of bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements, our class enemies.” This could be overcome only by the formation of “sufficiently large cadres of Red commanders of the economic front,” a task which he perceived as lying in the “more or less distant future.”153
More sober heads realized that, far from being responsible for the failure of socialist experiments of 1918–20, “capitalism” had made such experiments possible in the first place. Essentially, under War Communism the Bolsheviks had been living off the human and material resources accumulated by bourgeois Russia. But there was a limit to those. An analysis published in the summer of 1920 in the leading Soviet economic newspaper concluded: “We have completely exhausted the supplies of the more important resources and raw materials bequeathed to us by capitalist Russia. Henceforth, all economic gains will have to be made from our own current production.”154
This agenda would be adopted in the spring of 1921 under the New Economic Policy: a transitional period of indeterminate duration, modeled on Lenin’s original concept of “state capitalism,” during which the government would retain a monopoly on political power but allow private enterprise a limited role in restoring the country�
��s productive forces. During this period, it would ready cadres of “Red commanders of the economic front.” Once productivity had been sufficiently improved and the personnel stood available, a fresh offensive would be launched to exterminate the “bourgeois” and “petty bourgeois” class enemy for good and then to proceed in earnest with the construction of socialism.
*L. N. Iurovskii, Denezhnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti (1917–1927) (Moscow, 1928), 51. Another contemporary expert who concurs is the Left Communist L. Kritsman (Geroicheskii period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii, 2nd ed., Moscow-Leningrad, 1926): he calls “so-called War Communism the first grandiose attempt at a proletarian-natural economy, the attempt [to take] the first steps of transition to socialism” (p. 77).
*Meshcherskii in NS, No. 33 (May 26, 1918), 7; M. Vindelbot in NKh, No. 6 (1919), 24–32. According to NV, No. 101/125 (June 26, 1918), 3, Meshcherskii was arrested in June. He later emigrated to the West.
* Vechernaia zvezda, April 19, 1918, in Peter Scheibert, Lenin an der Macht (Weinheim, 1984), 219. The reference, of course, is to the unpopular “breathing spell” which the Bolsheviks claimed to have secured with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
†On him: Granat, XLI, Pt. 2, 89–98. He was given a mock trial (along with Bukharin) in 1938 and presumably shot soon afterward for an alleged plot to assassinate Lenin: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (New York, 1968), 398–400.
*According to Hilferding, in 1910 six of the largest Berlin banks controlled most of German industry: S. Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–21 (Cambridge, 1985), 154.
†Russian banks, like those of Germany, participated directly in industrial and commercial ventures, and owned sizable portfolios of securities and debentures issued by these enterprises, which lent these notions the semblance of credibility.
*E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, II (New York, 1952), 145. Carr says that “it is difficult to regard any of these figures as anything but guesses.” Indeed, the state budget approved by the Sovnarkom in July 1918 retroactively for the preceding six months fixed expenditures at 17.6 billion and revenues at 2.85 billion: NV, No. 117/141 (July 14, 1918), 1. Another contemporary estimate placed expenditures for the first six months of 1918 at 20.5 billion and revenues at 3.3 billion: Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 537–38.
†Piatyi Sozyv VTsIK: Stenograficheskii Otchët (Moscow, 1919), 289–92. It appears, however, that only a fraction of the desired sums was actually collected.
*A survey of the theoretical foundations of the projected moneyless economy can be found in Iurovskii’s Denezhnaia politika, 88–125. A dominant influence on Bolshevik thinking on this subject was the German sociologist Otto Neurath.
†S. S. Katzenellenbaum, Russian Currency and Banking, 1914–24 (London, 1925), 98n. In view of this evidence it is not possible to agree with Carr (Revolution, II, 246–47, 261) that Bolshevik fiscal policies which led to the total depreciation of Russian currency were the result not of plan or policy but of responses to desperate needs.
*It is surprising how little note financial markets took of this irresponsible fiscal policy and, indeed, how readily they accommodated themselves to Bolshevism. According to contemporary newspapers (NV, No. 102/126, June 27, 1918, 3), in June 1918 one could buy U.S. currency in Russia at the rate of 12.80 rubles for one dollar, which was the same rate as in early November 1917.
† Reproductions of Russian currency for the revolutionary period can be found in N. D. Mets’s Nash rubV (Moscow, 1960). According to Katzenellenbaum, the earliest Soviet currency came out in mid-1918 in Penza (Russian Currency, 81).
*In fact, prices increased 100 million times.
*M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, I (Tübingen, 1947), Pt. 1, Chap. 2, 12. These strictures were directed at Otto Neurath, who believed he had worked out a system of keeping accounts without reference to money.
*Lenin, Khronika, VIII, 243, 267. While most of the economic planners of this period fell afoul of Stalin and were shot, Larin, a victim of childhood polio, had the good fortune in 1932 to die a natural death.
*The organization of defense industries is not clear. In August 1918, the Supreme Economic Council set up a Commission for the Production of Articles of Military Ordnance under the direction of Krasin. This commission received and passed on to industrial enterprises orders from the military which were mandatory. In time, responsibility for supplying the armed forces came under the Council of Defense (Sovet Oborony).
*Litvinov in Pravda, No. 262 (November 21, 1920), 1. Professor Scheibert (Lenin, 210) mistakenly deciphers the acronym Glavanil to mean “Vanilla Trust.”
*Kritsman, Geroicheskii period, p. 162. Figures in Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR v 1958 godu (Moscow, 1959), 52–53, show a 69 percent decline in overall industrial production in 1921 compared with 1913, and a 79 percent decline in heavy industrial production.
†A. Aluf, cited in S. Volin, DeiateVnosf menshevikov v profsoiuzakh pri sovetskoi vlasti, Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, Paper No. 13 (New York, 1962), 87. By 1918, of course, which is here taken as the base year, the number of employed workers had declined considerably compared with 1913–14.
*Buryshkin in EV, No. 2 (1923), 141. The figures for the Supreme Economic Council are 318 employees in March 1918 and 30,000 in 1921.
*Possession of a card entitling one to the lowest ration (paëk) served the Cheka as a means of identifying members of the “bourgeoisie.” The holders of such cards were natural victims of terror and extortion.
*The notion that man works only to avoid starvation Trotsky took from Marx, who had found it in the writings of the Reverend J. Townsend on the Poor Laws: Das Kapital, I, Chap. 25, Sect. 4.
*N. Bukharin, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, Pt. 1 (Moscow, 1920), 5–6, 48. The second part, which was to have provided empirical data (p. 6), never appeared.
16
War on the Village
By the spring of 1918, the communes had distributed to their members the properties they had seized since the February Revolution. There was little subsequent distribution: the demobilized soldiers and industrial workers who arrived late rarely managed to secure allotments. But the peasant who expected to be able to enjoy his loot in peace would soon be disabused. To the Bolsheviks, the “Grand Repartition” of 1917–18 was only a detour on the road to collectivization. They laid claim to the harvest of 1918 by virtue of edicts which appropriated for the state all the grain over and above what the peasant required for his consumption and seed. The free market in grain was abolished. The peasant, bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, fought back ferociously in defense of his property, rising in rebellion that in numbers and territory involved exceeded anything seen in tsarist Russia. It was to little avail. He was about to learn that “to rob” and “to be robbed” are merely different modes of the same verb.
Perhaps the greatest paradox of the October coup d’état was that it sought to establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country in which workers (including self-employed artisans) constituted at best 10 percent of those gainfully employed, while fully 80 percent were peasants. And, in the view of Social-Democrats, the peasants—except for the minority of landless agricultural laborers—formed part of the “bourgeoisie” and, as such, were a class enemy of the “proletariat.”
This perception of the class nature of the self-employed (or “middle”) peasant was at the heart of the disagreement between the Social-Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries, the latter of whom classified peasants along with industrial workers as “toilers.” Marx, however, had defined the peasant as a class enemy of the worker and a “bulwark of the old society.”1 Karl Kautsky asserted that the objectives of the peasantry were contrary to those of socialism.2 In a statement on the agrarian question which it submitted in 1896 to the Congress of the Socialist International, the Russian Social-Democratic delegation referred to peasants as a backward class, closed to socialist ideas and best left alone.3
Lenin shared this assessment. “The class of small producers and small cultivators …,” he wrote in 1902, “is a reactionary class.”4 However, in line with his general policy of drawing into the revolutionary process every group and class that for one reason or another had a quarrel with the status quo, he made allowance for the “petty bourgeois” peasantry helping the “proletarian” cause. In this respect—and it was a question of tactics only—he differed from the other Social-Democrats. Lenin assumed that rural Russia was still in the grip of predominantly “feudal” relations. To the extent that the peasantry struggled against this order, it performed a progressive function:
We demand the complete and unconditional, not reformatory but revolutionary abolition and destruction of the survivals of serfdom; we acknowledge as the peasants’ those lands which the gentry government had cut off from them and which to this day continue to keep them under de facto slavery. In this manner we become—by way of exception and by virtue of special historic circumstances—defenders of small property. But we defend it only in its struggle against that which has survived of the “old regime” …
5
It was from such purely tactical considerations that in 1917 Lenin took over the SR land program and encouraged Russia’s peasants to seize privately owned landed property.
But once the objective of this tactic—the collapse of the “old regime” and its “bourgeois” successor—had been attained, the peasant, in Lenin’s eyes, reverted to his traditional role as a “petty bourgeois” counterrevolutionary. The danger of the “proletarian revolution” in Russia drowning in a sea of peasant reaction obsessed Russian Social-Democrats, conscious as they were of the role which the French peasantry had played in helping suppress urban radicalism, especially in 1871. Bolshevik insistence on spreading their revolution to the industrial countries of the West as rapidly as possible was in good measure inspired by the desire to avoid this fate. To leave the peasants in permanent possession of the land was tantamount to giving them a stranglehold on the food supply to the cities, the bastions of the Revolution. Lenin noted that European revolutions had failed because they had not dislodged the “rural bourgeoisie.”6 For some of Lenin’s more fanatical followers, even the landless rural proletarian, whom Lenin, following Engels, was willing to see as an ally, could not be relied upon because he, too, was “after all, a peasant—that is, potentially a kulak.”7
The Russian Revolution Page 110