A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  * * * Peasants made up the majority of those who flooded into the party. From 1917 to 1920, 1.4 million people joined the Bolsheviks — and two-thirds of these came from peasant backgrounds. Joining the party was the surest way to gain promotion through the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy: fewer than one in five Bolshevik members actually worked in a factory or a farm by the end of 1919. The top official posts were always given to Bolsheviks, often regardless of their skills or expertise. The Ukrainian Timber Administration, for example, was headed by a first-year medical student, while ordinary carpenters, metal workers, and even in one case an organ-grinder, were placed in charge of its departments at the provincial level.62

  The Bolshevik leaders encouraged the mass recruitment of new party members. With constant losses from the civil war, there was always a need for more party fodder. Special Party Weeks were periodically declared, when the usual requirement for recommendations was suspended and agitators were sent out to the factories and villages to encourage and enrol as many members as they could. The Party Week of October 1919, at the height of the White advance, more than doubled the size of the party with 270,000 new members signing up.63

  But the Bolsheviks were also rightly worried that such indiscriminate recruitments might reduce the party's quality. The hegemony of the working class within the party — although always actually a fiction since most of the leading Bolsheviks were from the intelligentsia — now seemed under threat from the peasantry. The mass influx of these lower-class members also reduced the levels of literacy, a crucial handicap for a party aiming to dominate the state administration. Less than 8 per cent of the party membership in 1920 had any secondary education; 62 per cent had only primary schooling; while 30 per cent had no schooling at all. Such was the rudimentary level of intelligence among the mass of the local officials that almost any scrap of paper, so long as it carried a large stamp and seal, could be enough to impress them as a government document. One Englishman travelled throughout Russia with no other passport than his tailor's bill from Jermyn Street which he flaunted in the face of the local officials. With the bill's impressive letter heading, its large red seal and signature, no official had dared to question it.64

  As for the political literacy of the rank and file, this was just as rudimentary. A survey of women workers in Petrograd who had joined the party during the civil war found that most of them had never heard or thought about such words as 'socialism' or 'politics' before 1917. The Moscow Party found in 1920 that many of its members did not even know who Kamenev was (Chairman of the Moscow Soviet). Such ignorance was by no means confined to lower-class Bolsheviks. At a training school for Bolshevik journalists none of the class could say who Lloyd George or Clemenceau were. Some of them even thought that imperialism was a republic somewhere in England.65

  And yet in an important way this complete lack of sophistication was one of the party's greatest strengths. For whatever the abuses of its rank-and-file officials, their one virtue in the common people's eyes was the fact that they spoke their own simple language, the fact that they dressed and behaved much like them, the fact in short that they were 'one of us'. This gave the Bolsheviks a symbolic appeal, one which their propaganda ruthlessly exploited, as a 'government of the people', even if in fact they betrayed this from the start. For many of the lower classes this symbolic familiarity was enough for them to identify themselves with the Bolshevik regime, even if they thought that it was bad, and

  to support it against the Whites (who were not 'one of us') when they threatened to break through.

  No doubt many of these local Bolsheviks were genuinely committed to the ideals of the revolution: political sophistication and sincerity are hardly correlative in politics, as anyone from the advanced democracies must know. Yet others had joined the party for the advantages that it could bring. Bolshevik leaders constantly warned of the dangers of 'petty-bourgeois careerists and self-seekers' corrupting the party ranks. They were particularly disturbed to find out that a quarter of the civil war members in senior official positions had joined the Bolsheviks from another party, mostly from the Mensheviks and the SRs. The counter-revolution seemed to be invading the party itself. Trotsky called these infiltrators 'radishes' — red on the outside but white inside.

  Actually, the Bolshevik leaders had little real idea of what was happening to their own party. They interpreted its growing membership in simple terms of class when the real position was much more complex. The mass of the rank and file were neither peasants nor workers, but the children of a profound social crisis which had broken down such neat divisions. The typical male Bolshevik of these years was both an ex-peasant and an ex-worker. He had probably left the village as a young boy during the industrial boom of the 1890s, roamed from factory to factory in search of work, become involved in the workers' movement, gone through various prisons, fought in the war, and returned to the northern cities, only to disperse across the countryside, during and after 1917. He was a rootless and declassed figure — like the revolution, a product of his times.

  In many ways the new Bolsheviks were far more submissive than the old ones had ever been. It resulted from their lack of education. While they were able to mouth mechanically a few Marxist phrases, they were not sufficiently educated to think freely for themselves or indeed to question the party leaders on abstract policy issues. Many of the workers had been educated in adult technical schools or, like Kanatchikov, at evening classes. They were essentially practical men with a strong bent towards self-improvement. All of them were concerned, in one way or another, with the problems of modernization. They sought to abolish the backward peasant Russia of their own past and to make society more rational and equal. There was nothing theoretical or abstract in their Marxism: it was a practical, black-and-white dogma that gave them a 'scientific' explanation of the social injustice they themselves had encountered in their lives, and provided a 'scientific' remedy. The party leaders were the masters of this science and, if they said the peasants were hoarding grain, or that the Mensheviks were counter-revolutionaries, then this must be so. Only this can explain the readiness of the rank and filers to do their leaders' bidding, even when they could see that the result would be disastrous for their own

  localities. The persistence of the local Bolsheviks with the food requisitions in the Volga region during the autumn of 1920 — in spite of the first signs of impending famine there — is an obvious and depressing example of how this grim and unquestioning obedience, which the Bolsheviks called 'discipline' and 'hardness', had got the better of individual conscience. The good comrade did what he was told; he was content to leave all critical thinking to the Central Committee.

  And yet, though docile in terms of politics, the massed ranks of the Bolshevik Party were by no means easy to control. It was partly a problem of corrupt local cliques taking over the provincial party cells. In Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, everything was run by the local mafia of Bolshevik officials in alliance with the black-marketeers. They defied Moscow's orders and for several months sabotaged the efforts of its agent, a young Anastas Mikoyan, sent down by the Orgburo to impose control. But to a certain extent the whole of the party apparatus had also developed as a clientele system with many of the leaders at national level each controlling their own private networks of patronage in the provinces or in individual branches of the state. Lunacharsky filled the Commissariat of Enlightenment with his own friends and associates. Even Lenin gave several Sovnarkom posts to his oldest friends and relatives: Bonch-Bruevich and Fotieva, both close associates from his Geneva days, were made secretaries; Krupskaya was appointed Deputy Commissar for Education; Anna Ul'ianova, Lenin's sister, was placed in charge of child welfare; while her husband, Mark Elizarov, was made People's Commissar of Railways. But of all the party patrons, Stalin was by far the most powerful. Through his control of the Orgburo he was increasingly able to place his own supporters in many of the top provincial posts. The effect of all these placements was to transform the party in
to a loose set of ruling dynasties, each of them organized on their own 'family' or clan lines. It was thus inclined to break up into factions.66

  Lenin failed to understand the nature of his own party's bureaucratic problem. He could not see that the Bolshevik bureaucracy was fast becoming a distinct social caste with its own privileged interests apart from those of the working masses it claimed to represent. He responded to the abuses of the bureaucracy with administrative measures, as if a few minor technical adjustments were enough to eradicate the problem, whereas what was needed, at the very least, was a radical reform of the whole political system. Most of his measures proved counter-productive.

  First, he tried to stop the build-up of corrupt local fiefdoms by ordering the party's leading cadres to be regularly moved by the Orgburo from post to post. Yet this merely widened the distance between the leaders and the rank and file and thus weakened the accountability of the former. It also increased Stalin's private patronage as the head of the Orgburo.

  Then Lenin ordered periodic purges to weed out the undesirables who were attracted to the party as it grew. The first purge was carried out in the summer of 1918: it halved the membership from 300,000 to 150,000. During the spring of 1919 a second major purge was implemented which reduced the membership by 46 per cent. And once again, in the summer of 1920, 30 per cent of the members were purged from the party. Most of these purges were carried out at the expense of peasants and non-Russians, who were deemed the weakest link in social terms. The frequent call-up of party members to the Front also served as a form of purge since it encouraged the less than committed to tear up their party cards. The effect of all these purges was to destabilize the party rank and file (only 30 per cent of those who had joined the party between 1917 and 1920 still remained in it by 1922) and this was hardly likely to encourage loyalty.67

  Finally Lenin ordered the regular inspection of the apparatus. It was reminiscent of the tsarist regime with its own constant revisions which Gogol had satirized in The Government Inspector. A whole People's Commissariat known as Rabkrin was constructed for this purpose. Formed in February 1920 with Stalin at its head, it combined the two functions of state inspection and workers' control which had previously been carried out by separate bodies. Lenin's idea was to fight red tape and improve efficiency through constant reviews of all state institutions by the inspectorates of workers and peasants. In this way he thought the state could be made democratically accountable. But the result was just the reverse. Rabkrin soon became a bureaucratic monster (and another base of Stalin's growing patronage) with an estimated 100,000 officials, the majority of them white-collar workers, in its local cells by the end of 1920.68 Instead of helping to cut down the bureaucracy, Rabkrin had merely increased it.

  * * * 'How do I live? — that is not a pleasant tale,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina in February 1919. 'Only the Commissars live a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people in order to pay for their courtesans and their unsocialist luxuries.' Gorky was not alone in bitterly resenting the privileges of the Communist elite. Popular anecdotes and graffiti ridiculed the Bolsheviks as the real Russian bourgeoisie in contrast to the phantom one of their propaganda. 'Where do all the chickens go?', 'Why are there no sausages?' — there were a hundred variations of the riddle but the answer was always the same: 'The Communists have eaten them all.' The word 'comrade', once an expression of collective pride, became a form of abuse. One woman, addressed as such on a Petrograd tram, was heard to reply: 'What's all this comrade! Take your "comrade" and go to hell!' Senior officials were bombarded with complaints about Communists living off the backs of the common people'. Workers roundly condemned the new Red elite. One factory resolution from

  Perm demanded that 'all the leather jackets and caps of the commissars should be used to make shoes for the workers'.69

  The Brusilovs had a special reason to be resentful. They were forced to share their small Moscow apartment with a certain commissar — a former soldier whom the general had once saved from the death penalty at the Front — together with his girlfriend and his mother. Brusilov describes the situation vividly:

  Coarse, insolent and constantly drunk, with a body covered in scars, he was now of course an important person, close to Lenin etc. Now I wonder why I saved his life! Our apartment, which had been clean and pleasant until he came, was thereafter spoiled by drinking bouts and fights, thievery and foul language. He would sometimes go away for a few days and come back with sacks of food, wine and fruit. We were literally starving but they had white flour, butter, and whatever else they cared for. The main thing we resented was their hoard of fuel. That was the freezing winter of 1920, when icicles hung on our living-room walls. The primus had long ceased to work and we were freezing. But they had a large iron stove and as much fuel as they liked.70

  Complaints about the Bolshevik elite were also heard in the party itself. There was a groundswell of feeling in the lower party ranks that the leadership had become too distant from the rank and file. Many of these criticisms would come to be expressed by the Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Opposition, the two great factions which rocked the party leadership in 1920—I (see pages 731—2). As one Old Bolshevik from Tula wrote to Lenin in July 1919: 'We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them. The old comradely spirit of the party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one-man rule in which the party boss runs everything. Bribe-taking has become universal: without it our Communist comrades would simply not survive.' Writing to Trotsky the following May, Yoffe expressed similar fears about the degeneration of the party:

  There is enormous inequality and one's material position largely depends on one's post in the party; you'll agree this is a dangerous situation. I have been told, for example, that before the last purge the Old Bolsheviks were terrified of being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this. The old party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion! Today's youth is being brought up in these new

  conditions: that is what makes one fear most for our Party and the Revolution!71

  iii A Socialist Fatherland

  At the age of sixty-six, when most men are planning to play with their grandchildren, Brusilov made the most dramatic change of his entire military career and volunteered to serve in the Red Army. It was no ordinary defection from the old corps of tsarist generals. Brusilov was Russia's most famous soldier, its only hero from the First World War, and as such the last living symbol of a winning aristocratic past. News of his appointment in May 1920 to a Special Conference of Trotsky's Revolutionary Military Council came as a rude shock to all those who looked back with nostalgia to the days before 1917. 'Brusilov has betrayed Russia,' one ex-colonel wrote. 'How can it be that he prefers to defend the Bolsheviks and the Jews rather than his fatherland?' added the wife of an old Guards officer. False rumours circulated that Brusilov had received lavish bribes (two million roubles, a Kremlin apartment) for his services to the Reds. The General collected a drawerful of hate-mail. How, asked one, could a nobleman like him choose to serve the Reds at a time when 'the Cheka jails are full of Russian officers'? It was 'nothing less than a betrayal'. All this weighed heavily on Brusilov's conscience.* 'It was the hardest moment of my life,' he wrote five years later. 'All the time there was a deathly silence in the house. The family walked about on tiptoes and talked in whispers. My wife and sister had tears in their eyes.''2 It was as if they were mourning for their past.

  Brusilov's conversion to the Reds was a case of putting country before class. He had every reason to hate the Bolsheviks, and often called them the Antichrist. They had not only imprisoned him but had also virtually murdered his sick brother and arrested several of his closest friends during the Red Terror. Yet Brusilov refused to join the Whites. Two wounds — his wounded leg and his wounded pride at the White adulation for his old
rival Kornilov — stopped him from going to the Don. He was also still convinced that it was his duty to remain in Russia, standing by the people even if they chose the Reds. Bolshevism, in the old general's view, was bound to be a 'temporary sickness' since 'its philosophy of internationalism is fundamentally alien to the Russian people'. By working with the Bolsheviks, patriots like him could redirect the revolution

  * Brusilov tried to make the release of the officers a condition of his service for the Reds. Trotsky agreed to do what he could but admitted that he himself was 'not on good terms with the Cheka and that Dzerzhinsky could even arrest him'. Brusilov later set up a special office to appeal for the release of the officers — and as a result of its efforts several hundred officers were released (RGVIA, f. 162, op. 2, d. 18).

  towards national ends. It was, as he saw it, a question of diluting Red with White — of 'turning the Red Star into a Cross' — and thus reconciling the revolution with the continuities of Russian history. 'My sense of duty to the nation has often obliged me to disobey my natural social inclinations,' Brusilov said in 1918. Although as an aristocrat he clearly sympathized with the Whites and rejoiced when their armies advanced towards Moscow, he always thought that their cause was both doomed and flawed by its dependence upon the intervention of the Allies. The fate of Russia, for better or worse, had to be decided by its own people.73