The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The Russian workers’ and peasants’ government represents the first buds that have appeared as a result of the coming proletarian socialist spring. The Russian Revolution has many enemies. Her paths are hazardous and thorny…. The frosts may damage the first buds, but they will never stop the triumphant march of spring….

  Shrivelling, decaying bourgeois society is entering the New Year with, in one of the world’s largest countries, a socialist workers’ government allied with the poorest peasantry, a government whose every word is like a thunderous tocsin spreading the news of a worldwide revolutionary fire.61

  The enemies were preparing for one last battle and weaving their “international cobweb,” but “before an army ablaze with the enthusiasm of world liberation, the cannons would fall silent.” The Third Congress of Soviets, which had legitimated the Bolshevik takeover and the dissolution of the Assembly, was the focus of “that bubbling, seething, genuinely revolutionary ferment of existence, which was capable of igniting worlds and working miracles.”62

  Once in power, the Bolsheviks did what all millenarians do: waited for the inevitable while working to bring it about. The Marxist blueprint was no more specific than any other, but the basic goal of turning society into a sect was accepted by all true Bolsheviks (as Sverdlov understood the term). As usual, this included attacks on private property, trade, money, the family (especially inheritance, but ultimately all forms of kin loyalty), and “the rich” (determined according to an oft-revised table of social elements). The main principles were inherent in the Bolshevik version of Marxism; the disagreements over scale, timing, and sequence came down to the central question of any apocalyptic prophecy: they who have ears, will they hear?

  As Voronsky wrote on the day the news of the uprising in Petrograd reached Odessa, “the achievement of the sacred goals of the revolution … is only possible with the cooperation and assistance of the masses themselves and their independent creativity.” The Revolution was not the embodied creativity of the masses—it was a transcendental event that required their cooperation and assistance. “In this terrible hour of judgment, when the fate of the country is being decided, let us all, as one man, take the solemn oath of loyalty to the new revolutionary government.” The government equaled the Revolution in the same way that Moses equaled the exodus. Loyalty to the prophet was the key to the fulfillment of the prophecy. Bolshevik eschatology was based on the assumption that the masses would stream toward the appropriate room in the appropriate building. In October 1917, the masses had acquitted themselves gloriously. The question was whether they would continue to do so.63

  The answer was not always or perhaps not at all. When, during the German offensive of spring 1918, the time came to create an army ablaze with the enthusiasm of world liberation, the cannons did not fall silent. And when the government needed to “organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service” (as Lenin had outlined in The State and Revolution), the sea turned back into a swamp. At the Einem Candy Factory, according to its early Soviet historian, “The attitude of the underdeveloped workers—and they were in the majority—toward the factory committee was so distrustful that some workers would come to the committee office during work hours to argue and curse over irrelevant things and insult the factory committee and its members…. During the most important and intense working hours, the members of the factory committee had to waste their time on explanations, arguments, and debates—all the more so because everyone felt that they had the right to abuse the committee, citing ‘equal rights,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ etc.”64

  Throughout 1918, the new state-sponsored factory committee struggled with the owner, the shareholders’ board, and the workers as raw materials continued to disappear, production to drop, and other factories and shops around the Swamp to close down. “Against the background of the difficult economic situation, the discontent of the underdeveloped workers with low consciousness kept growing while work discipline kept falling; some workers would only show up in the morning and then again in the evening in order to punch their time cards. At the same time, drunkenness and the theft of both raw materials and finished products became rampant.”65

  With the introduction of rationing, what little sugar remained in circulation ended up in the hands of private traders and confectioners, and most mechanized candy factories went out of business. The state’s war on private entrepreneurs drove them (and their sugar) farther underground or out of existence altogether; much of Einem’s equipment broke down; and most of the sober workers left for their native villages. On December 4, 1918, the candy industry was nationalized. Einem became “State Candy Factory No. 1,” run by the Main Candy Trust; the former owner, Vladimir Heuss, became a salaried “bourgeois specialist”; and the chairman of the board, Adolf Otto, left for Finland. Boris Ivanov, who had been appointed by Sverdlov to preside over the nationalization of the flour industry, was sent to the Astrakhan fisheries to work as an “agitator.”66

  All the debates and “oppositions” among the Bolsheviks were ultimately about whether the bubbling and seething ferment around them was a sea or a swamp. The most consistent optimists and imminentists among the Bolsheviks were the leaders of the Moscow distict party organization (and graduates of Moscow University): Bukharin, Osinsky, Osinsky’s brother-in-law, Vladimir Smirnov, and a few of their friends and followers. Having defined themselves as “Left Communists,” they lost to Lenin’s appeasers on the question of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, but won briefly on the factory-committee front. (Osinsky was the first chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, with Bukharin and Smirnov on the board.) In 1919, as the “independent creativity of the masses” and the Bolshevik pursuit of the “goals of the revolution” continued to diverge, Osinsky and Smirnov led the “Democratic-Centralist” opposition to the “one-man rule principle.” Since Communism was about spontaneously desiring the inevitable, trust in the independent creativity of the masses equaled confidence in the imminence of the millennium. As Osinsky wrote to Shaternikova on the day of the February Revolution, the shortest path to the “insatiable utopia” of natural morality lay through immersion in the “sacred fury” of the masses. At the time of the revolution, all Bolsheviks (officially renamed “Communists” in March 1918) believed that Communism would arrive very soon. The Left Communists believed that it would arrive even sooner.

  On January 7, 1918, Lenin wrote that the triumph of the socialist revolution—beginning with a “period of ruin and chaos” and ending with a decisive victory over all forms of bourgeois resistance, was a matter of “several months.” In early spring 1919, he wrote that “the first generation of fully trained Communists without blemish or reproach” would take over in about twenty years (and that, in the meantime, bourgeois specialists would have to keep working, whether Osinsky liked it or not). And in fall 1919, Bukharin argued that it might take “two to three generations formed under completely new conditions” for Communism to become fully developed, the state to wither away, and “all law and all punishments to disappear completely.” There was, of course, room for argument about what constituted a complete victory of the socialist revolution, a Communist without blemish or reproach, or a fully developed Communist society, but, in the meantime, “very soon” had to keep moving, and the “Left” had to keep losing. Time, if nothing else, had to be appeased.67

  One very large section of “the masses”—the peasantry—made too close an identification with popular creativity doctrinally suspect at the outset and practically impossible as the revolution unfolded. Osinsky’s Left Communism collapsed over the peasants’ unwillingness to give up their produce (as class solidarity would have dictated). In agriculture, he wrote in 1920, “the most important aspect of socialist construction is massive state coercion.” Peasants were to be told when to sow, what to sow, and where to sow. They were to be forced to work wherever their work was needed. “The militarization of the economy and the implementation of universal labor conscription should begin in a
griculture.” Any attempts to shirk compulsory labor were to be met with “repressive measures” ranging from penal detachments to revolutionary tribunals. As Bukharin explained, violence against the peasants made good theoretical sense insofar as it represented a “struggle between proletarian state planning, which embodies socialized labor, and the peasant commodity anarchy and unbridled profiteering, which stands for fragmented property and market irrationality.”68

  Violence generally made good theoretical sense. All the Bolsheviks expected it as part of the revolution, and no one could possibly object to it in principle. Marxism was an apocalyptic movement that looked forward to the times of woe on the eve of the millennium, and the Bolsheviks, of all Marxists, defined themselves in opposition to appeasement. As Marx had written, in a passage made famous by Bukharin, “We say to the workers: ‘You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves.’” And as Bukharin wrote two and a half years into the age of civil wars and national struggles, “only such a class as the proletariat, the Promethean class, will be able to bear the terrible torments of the transition period in order, at the end, to light the torch of Communist society.” Lenin had called for civil war long before October; warned of the “ruin and chaos associated with civil war” right after October; and, in June 1918, urged the workers to launch “that special war that has always accompanied not only great revolutions but every more or less significant revolution in history, a war that is uniquely legitimate and just, a holy war from the point of view of the interests of the toiling, oppressed, and exploited masses.” In a July 1918 article titled “Prophetic Words,” he cited Engels’s prediction of a “world war of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.”69

  The Marxist version of the “iron scepter” rule of the saints was known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” According to Lenin, Marx’s formula was a summary of the “historic experience of all revolutions” in the matter of a “complete suppression of all the exploiters as well as all the agents of corruption.” Every Bolshevik knew that the road to Communism must pass through dictatorship, “but,” wrote Lenin in April 1918, “dictatorship is a big word, and big words should not be thrown about carelessly. Dictatorship means an iron rule, a rule that is revolutionarily bold, swift and ruthless in suppressing both exploiters and hooligans. But our rule is excessively mild, frequently resembling jelly more than iron.”70

  The opposition of hard iron to something resembling jelly was central to Bolshevism. The swamp could take many forms and seep into many spaces. The new rulers had to overcome “all manner of weakness, hesitation, and sentimentality” within themselves in order to win the war of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Arosev’s friend Skriabin had become “Molotov” (from “hammer”), Sverdlov’s housemate Dzhugashvili had become “Stalin” (from “steel”), and Sverdlov himself, in Lunacharsky’s words, “had found—probably instinctively—a costume that fit his appearance and inner character: he started going around clad from head to foot in leather.” According to Trotsky, “from him, as the central organizing force, that costume, so befitting the temper of the age, spread very widely. The comrades who knew Sverdlov in the underground remember him differently, but in my memory, the figure of Sverdlov will always be covered in black armor.”71

  One comrade who remembered Sverdlov differently was Kira Egon-Besser, who wrote of his “mild humor,” his “faith in people,” and their embrace when he came back from exile. A year had passed since then.

  Once, in the winter, on a gloomy, foggy St. Petersburg day, Yakov Mikhailovich came over to say goodbye before moving to Moscow. My mother and I were at home alone. Yakov Mikhailovich looked tired and thin. I noticed a change in his face. Later, when I looked at the last photographs of him (all photographs distorted his inimitable face, often lit up by a lovely smile), I understood: it was his lips that had changed. They had tightened somehow, and his expression had become stern and preoccupied. The leather jacket he was wearing imparted an unwonted hardness to his appearance. That was our last meeting.72

  Sverdlov in 1918

  One of Sverdlov’s housemates from those days, Varlam Avanesov, had accompanied Sverdlov to Moscow and become a top official of the secret police (among other things). The other, the young Vladimir Volodarsky, had become, according to Lunacharsky, the most hated Bolshevik in Petrograd—not because he was the new regime’s chief censor but because he was ruthless. “He was suffused not only with the thunder of October, but also with the thunderous salvoes of the red terror that followed. We should not try to hide this fact: Volodarsky was a terrorist. He was absolutely convinced that if we hesitated to strike our steel blows to the head of the counterrevolutionary hydra, it would devour not only us but the hopes of the world awakened by October. He exulted in struggle and was ready to face any danger, but he was also ruthless. He had something of Marat in him.”73

  Volodarsky was assassinated on June 20, 1918. Sverdlov had arrived in Moscow the previous March, soon after saying goodbye to Kira. On one of his first evenings in the new capital, he appeared in the Moscow Soviet, which still thought of itself as the city’s House of Revolution.

  The meeting of the presidium had ended, many of the members had left, and the Soviet had settled into its usual nighttime routine—with telephones ringing, typewriters clattering, executive committee members on duty sitting at their desks, and soldiers from the guard scurrying to and fro.

  Suddenly, a man clad from head to foot in a kind of black leather shell arrived on the scene. There was something efficient and vigorous in Sverdlov’s trim figure. Small and slender, he looked very young. His gestures and movements were full of energy and vitality, and he had an impressive bass voice.

  It was not a very friendly meeting, however. With barely a hello, Yakov Mikhailovich began scolding everyone he found in the Soviet for not taking care of the new arrivals and for their poor choice of buildings and insufficient preparation. The comrades Sverdlov was dressing down were people he had known in exile and had continued to be friends with after October, but that was the kind of person Sverdlov was: business always came first.74

  “That man,” wrote Lunacharsky, “was like a diamond that had to be exceptionally hard because it was the pivot around which an intricate mechanism constantly rotated.” That mechanism was the dictatorship of the proletariat, and dictatorship meant “iron rule, a rule that is revolutionarily bold, swift, and ruthless in suppressing both exploiters and hooligans.” The exploiters and hooligans, by contrast, were always soft: the fat moneybags, the shuffling old men, the wavering appeasers, and the intellectuals who could not tell ends from beginnings. As Lenin wrote two months after the October takeover, “this sloppiness, carelessness, messiness, untidiness, fidgetiness, the tendency to substitute discussion for action and talk for work, and the tendency to take on everything and accomplish nothing are characteristics of ‘the educated,’” most of whom are the “intelligentsia lackeys of yesterday’s slaveowners.” All these people—non-people, anti-people, enemies of the people—were creatures from under the “murky, dead film” of Voronsky’s swamp. Lenin was at his most biblical and “Barebonian” when he talked about “those dregs of humanity, those hopelessly rotten and dead limbs, that contagion, that plague, those ulcers that socialism has inherited from capitalism.” The revolution’s “single common goal” was “to purge the Russian land of all harmful insects: fleas—thieves, bedbugs—the rich, and so on and so forth.”75

  The first step was to identify the two armies of Armageddon. Speaking at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee on May 20, 1918, Sverdlov said:

  When it comes to the cities, we can say that the Soviet revolutionary rule is strong enough to withstand the various attacks by the bourgeoisie. With reg
ard to the villages, we cannot, by any means, say the same thing. That is why we should seriously consider the question of social differentiation in the village—the question of the creation of two opposing hostile forces; the objective of setting the poorest strata of the peasantry against the kulak elements. Only if we succeed in splitting the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, only if we succeed in inciting the same civil war that was recently being waged in the cities, …—only then will we be able to say that we’ve done for the village what we’ve been able to do for the cities.76

  The next step was to put special seals on their foreheads. In The Economics of the Transition Period, Bukharin singled out nine main groups to be subjected to “concentrated violence”:

  1) the parasitic strata (former landowners, rentiers of all kinds, bourgeois entrepreneurs not directly involved in production; trade capitalists, traders, brokers, bankers);

  2) the unproductive administrative aristocracy recruited from the same strata (the top bureaucrats of the capitalist state, generals, archbishops, etc.);

  3) the bourgeois entrepreneurs as the organizers and directors (managers of trusts and syndicats, the “operators” of the industrial world, the top engineers, the inventors directly connected to the capitalist world);

  4) the skilled bureaucrats—civilian, military, and clerical;

  5) the technical intelligentsia and intelligentsia in general (engineers, technicians, agronomists, veterinarians, doctors, professors, lawyers, journalists, most teachers, etc.);

  6) the officers;

  7) the well-off peasantry;

  8) the middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie;

  9) the clergy, even the unskilled kind.77

  “Concentrated violence” included arrests, searches, killings, censorship, forced labor, suppression of strikes, takeover of property, confiscation of produce, and confinement in concentration camps. The targets were identifiable by their marks of social status and defined according to a flexible class taxonomy ultimately derived from the kings who had committed adultery with the Whore of Babylon and the merchants who had grown rich from her excessive luxuries.78