Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  But the most unique—and devastatingly efficient—innovation of these early years was the creation of the hybrid ‘party-state’. Membership in the party itself grew exponentially, from a mere 23,600 members in January 1917 to 750,000 four years later. The party gradually metamorphosed into a hierarchically organized bureaucracy, with the discipline mandated in Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’. At the apex the Central Committee began to specialize in function and policy area to become a shadow cabinet exercising real power. At all levels this party-state system had overlapping competence, with party functionaries in a ‘Bolshevik faction’ making decisions and ensuring implementation. Local party secretaries were plenipotentiaries, directing state institutions and soviets. To control key management positions, the party created the famous nomenklatura system for assigning reliable party members to these posts. The Bolshevik organs gradually marginalized the ‘soviets’ in whose name the revolution had been made; they also eliminated any corporate bodies and social organizations that might temper ministerial power. Hence the key revolutionary institutions of 1917—soviets, factory committees, trade unions, co-operatives, professional associations, and the like—were gradually subsumed into the new bureaucracy or extinguished outright.

  This party apparatus became Stalin’s institutional base in the struggle for power. When the Central Committee created the ‘Orgburo’ (Organizational Bureau) to manage this apparatus in 1919, it was under Stalin’s command. Hence, even before becoming General Secretary in 1922, Stalin controlled major appointments, including those of provincial party secretaries; he thereby shaped the composition of party conferences and congresses, a critical asset in the power struggles of the 1920s. Stalin also was the first head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin), another organ of paramount influence.

  Others, however, discerned here a mortal danger to the proletarian state. Many protested against the privileges of ‘bourgeois specialists’ and their prominent role in the new state. Lenin himself rejected such ‘specialist-baiting’, dismissing fears of bourgeois contamination on the grounds that these people now worked for a socialist state and the working class. Bureaucratization was another cause of concern; ‘Democratic Centralists’, a faction at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, demanded decentralization and shift of power from party apparatchiki to soviet democracy. Another group, the ‘Workers’ Opposition’, defended the autonomy of trade unions and the principle of workers’ control. Predictably, the party hierarchy denounced such dissenters and reasserted ‘democratic centralism’ to command obedience and submission.

  In December 1917, faced with what seemed to be regime-threatening opposition, Lenin created a supreme political police—the ‘Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, known by its Russian acronym Cheka. At its head was a Polish Bolshevik, Feliks Dzerzhinskii, charged with becoming the ‘sword of the revolution’ against ‘class’ enemies, real and imagined. He rapidly made the Cheka a state within a state, arbitrarily meting out revolutionary justice and terror. His empire constructed a network of prisons and labour camps that later became the world’s first concentration camp system.

  A critical turning-point came in January 1918, when the long-awaited Constituent Assembly finally convened in Petrograd. Lenin had permitted elections to the Constituent Assembly, something that the socialists and liberals had endlessly promised but endlessly deferred. Bolsheviks garnered only a quarter of the votes, the PSR emerging the clear victor—but only, the Bolsheviks argued, because the ballot failed to distinguish between left SRs (who supported October) and right SRs (who did not). Well before the Assembly convened, Lenin made clear his hostility towards a ‘bourgeois’ (hence irrelevant) parliament. The result was a single, seventeen-hour session on 5–6 January: after passionate SR and Menshevik fulminations against the Bolsheviks, Lenin simply dissolved the Assembly and forbade further sessions.

  Civil War

  By the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks had extended soviet authority to the Russian heartland but could hardly claim to have a firm grasp on power. For the next three years they would combat and defeat an incredible array of adversaries: White armies of patriots and anti-communists, liberals and SRs, peasant rebels (‘greens’) and urban anarchists, and minority movements spread along the borderlands and inside Russia proper itself. The regime would also combat interventionist forces from Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, and in 1920 became embroiled in a bitter war with Poland. By early 1921, however, the regime had vanquished adversaries, signed treaties with its neighbours, and turned its attention to reintegration and rebuilding.

  The civil war began in the winter of 1917/18. Apart from small bands of patriotic officers (interested more in continuing the war against Germany than in defeating Bolsheviks), the first important ‘White’ leader was General M. V. Alekseev. Together with General Kornilov, in January 1918 he created the Volunteer Army in the Don region: its goal was to cast off the German-Bolshevik yoke and reconvene the Constituent Assembly. Throughout its existence, this army operated within the territory of the Don and Kuban Cossacks—a serious handicap, since the Cossacks had their own agenda independent of saving the Great Russian state. The Don Cossack ataman, General A. M. Kaledin, did offer his services to the White generals, but he was unceremoniously abandoned by the Cossacks when a Red force invaded and elicited popular support. After Kornilov himself fell in battle at Ekaterinodar, command passed to General Anton Denikin—an uncharismatic, but intelligent commander of great personal integrity.

  Other White forces gathered along the Volga and in Siberia. Perhaps most significant was the Czech Legion, tsarist POWs scheduled for repatriation; ordered to disarm, they resisted and soon found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. In Siberia (with its strong tradition of autonomous regionalism and great ethnic diversity), moderate SRs and Kadets created the ‘Siberian Regional Council’ at Omsk. On the Volga, radical SRs under Chernov established the ‘Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly’ (Komuch). These SRs evoked little popular support and deemed White generals a greater menace than the Bolsheviks—a sentiment reciprocated by the military. In September 1918 they met at Ufa in a lame attempt to re-establish the Provisional Government (as a ‘Directory’), but it lacked even a programme, much less an apparatus to implement it. In November 1918 the military ousted the radicals (in a coup marked by executions and brutality that were becoming the norm) and installed Admiral A. Kolchak as military dictator and ‘Supreme Ruler’. Kolchak was emblematic of White leadership: a man of deep personal integrity, courage, and patriotism, but a taciturn and erratic personality completely lost in the world of politics. His forces never mounted a sustained threat; he even failed to obtain diplomatic recognition from the allies (at the instigation of Woodrow Wilson, who heeded Kerensky’s advice). He was finally captured and executed by the Cheka in early 1920.

  The previous year had already marked the high point of the White assault, mounted from the south by A. I. Denikin’s Volunteer Army. He launched the offensive in the spring of 1919, but made the fatal blunder of splitting his army into two units: a smaller force under Baron P. N. Wrangel (which captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June), a larger formation advancing into the Donbas. In the ‘Moscow Directive’ of 3 July Denikin ordered an assault on the capital along a very broad front stretching from Samara to Kursk. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, for Denikin realized that the Red Army was growing more powerful by the hour, and that further Allied support was dubious. He counted on enthusiasm from the momentary flush of victory, as his armies rapidly captured Kursk, Voronezh, Chernigov, and (on 13–14 October) Orel—a town just 300 kilometres from Moscow. Simultaneously White forces under N. N. Iudenich advanced on Petrograd. But White fortunes soon changed: on 18–19 October Semen Budennyi’s Red Cavalry counter-attacked and smashed the White army advancing on Tula; it was only a matter of time before victory followed in the north, the Crimea, and Ukraine. The final denouement came in 1920, as the remaining White f
orces, under General Wrangel, were evacuated to Constantinople.

  Bolshevik victories, which seemed unlikely, were due to several factors. Geography afforded great strategic advantage: the Bolshevik hold on the central provinces permitted shorter lines of supply and communications, whereas White forces were stretched out along the periphery—in the south, along the Volga, in Siberia, western borderlands, and Ukraine. Moreover, Bolsheviks were better prepared to mobilize human and material resources, for their state administration capitalized on the personnel and organizations of preceding regimes. Whites, by contrast, were inept administrators; their camp was a mobile army engaged in field operations, with neither the skill nor the inclination to put down administrative roots.

  Ideology was also important in the Bolshevik victory. The socialist vision had not lost its lustre for many workers, peasants, and white-collar workers. Although Bolshevik social and economic polices unquestionably provoked considerable opposition, the government at least had policies and, more important, provided a public discourse to rationalize these as essential for plebeian victory in a class war. By contrast, the Whites symbolized property and privilege; they utterly failed to articulate an alternative vision acceptable to workers, peasants, and other plebeians caught up in the revolutionary storm.

  Bolshevik nationality policy also contributed to their success. Whereas most (especially patriotic Whites) sought to re-establish the empire, the Bolsheviks recognized the volatility of the nationality question and promised national self-determination—albeit, with the proviso that self-determination be subordinate to the interests of the proletariat. Despite the activities of the Commissariat of Nationalities (led by Stalin), the Bolsheviks actually could only abide and applaud the breakup of the empire. By mid-1918 independent states had arisen in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Finland, and Belorussia; a powerful pan-Islamic movement was sweeping through the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. However much Lenin wished to reconquer the lost territories, this consummate Realpolitiker accepted the status quo, if only temporarily. He also wrapped policy in a theory of ‘federalism’, which granted nationalities the trappings of statehood but within the framework of a Russian socialist state.

  The Bolshevik cause also benefited from the fractious disunity of their adversaries. They were indeed a motley group—radical socialists, anarchist peasants, moderate Kadets and Octobrists, and of course arch-conservative officers from the gentry. Ultimately the main adversary was the White officer corps, which tended to replicate the politics—and mistakes—of 1917. Thus they plainly despised moderate socialists, even in the cause against Bolsheviks. Moreover, White generals such as Kolchak, Iudenich, and Wrangel were miserable administrators and even worse politicians. That was particularly evident in the nationality question: though fighting amidst non-Russian peoples on the periphery, the Whites loudly proclaimed their goal of resurrecting ‘Great Russia’, with all the minority territories. Such nationalistic views, while typical of the officer corps (and indeed the centre and moderate parties in the Dumas and Provisional Government), were naturally opprobrious to aspiring national groups like the Cossacks.

  Intervention by the allies, however much they might have loathed Bolshevism, had little military effect. It could hardly be otherwise: a momentous revolution in the vast Russian spaces could not be channelled, let alone halted or reversed, by the tiny tactical forces of the allied powers. Exhausted by four years of total war, fearful of domestic unrest, the allies provided some men and equipment, but lacked the clear purpose and persistence necessary to stay the course. Nor did they even share common goals. Under Winston Churchill’s leadership, Britain supplied the most money and equipment; its primary aim was to contain German power (and avert a German-Russian alliance) and to prevent Russian advances in Asia and the Near East. For its part, Japan landed troops for the simple purpose of acquiring territory in the eastern maritime provinces. Wilson dispatched American soldiers but eagerly seized on Soviet peace feelers, first at an abortive conference in Prinkipo in late 1918, later in a mission by William Bullitt and the writer Lincoln Steffens to Moscow in early 1919. In the end the allies, having denied unconditional support to the Whites, gradually withdrew from the conflict, having done little more than to reify the myth of hostile ‘imperialist aggression’ against the young socialist state.

  War Communism

  The civil war left a deep imprint on Bolshevik political culture. War made the Red Army the largest, most important institution in the new state: it absorbed vast resources and, to ensure political reliability, deliberately conscripted the most ‘class-conscious’ elements of the working class and party. As a result, the army not only represented a military force but also provided the formative experience for the first generation of Bolsheviks. Not surprisingly, Soviet Russia developed as a military-administrative state, the military idiom and norm permeating government, economy, and society. Civil war reinforced the ideology of class conflict that informed Bolshevik policy, not just propaganda, during these early years.

  Of course, the party still embraced a broad spectrum of opinion and interests. Its radical, impatient wing demanded that socialism be constructed immediately, in a militant fashion. At the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 1918), ‘left-wing communists’ also hoped to ride the wave of history and export the revolution beyond Soviet borders. L. Kritsman, in an influential tract written during the civil war, codified the notion of militant and heroic communist state-building and adumbrated a coherent policy agenda of ‘War Communism’—proletarian and collectivist. Lewis Siegelbaum has demonstrated that this famous term has been used without analytical precision, and that a heady mixture of realism and utopian ideology actually shaped Bolshevik policy from mid-1918 to early 1921.

  Lenin himself reflected this mix of fantasy and common sense. On many issues he was pragmatic and at odds with the radicals—as, for example, in the bitter controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, where he dismissed left-wing communism as an ‘infantile disorder’. Pragmatism likewise informed his concessions to bourgeois specialists (whom he consistently shielded) and his view on trade unions (where he opposed Trotsky’s militant plans to conscript labour). Lenin was also cautious about nationalizing industry in late 1917 and early 1918; his ‘state socialism’, modelled on the German wartime economy, did not entail state take-over of economic life until much later. All this has inclined some historians to distance Lenin from the radicals and to depict his pragmatism as a clear antecedent for the evolutionary, gradualist plan of socialist development known as the New Economic Policy in the 1920s. Indeed, Lenin himself introduced the term ‘war communism’ in 1921 to discredit his opponents.

  Nevertheless, Lenin had not shorn all the radical impulses that brought him power. He was instrumental in establishing the Communist International and pressing its revolutionary mission abroad. He also introduced radical agrarian and food-supply policies. In the spring of 1918, for example, when the new regime faced the perennial grain crisis that bedevilled both the tsarist and provisional governments, Lenin expanded the latter’s ‘grain monopoly’ into a full-scale food supply dictatorship. Similarly Lenin was never comfortable with the original land decree, which closely echoed the SR ‘socialization of the land’—all the more since the countryside was teeming with SR agronomists and surveyors, intent on realizing their own, not the Bolshevik, vision of land reform. Theirs was profoundly non-Marxist, insensitive to ‘class’ or aims of radical transformation.

  That vision, which placed so much faith in the peasantry, was anathema to Lenin. Instead, he propagated a scheme of collectivized agriculture and established some prototype large-scale collective farms, appropriately aimed at the ‘poor and landless peasantry’. Although the chaos of the civil war permitted few such experiments, they provided the precedent and rationale for more Promethean efforts in Stalin’s ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30. More telling still was Lenin’s attempt to foment class war in the villages. At bottom he applied a crude Marxist sociology o
f village society that divided the peasants into a small class of rich exploiters (the infamous kulaki, often simply the most competent farmers), self-sufficient ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki), and the revolutionary and exploited ‘poor peasants’ (bedniaki). To stoke the fires of intra-village revolution, the Bolsheviks created ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ (kombedy) to implement Soviet decrees and to drive the wealthier from power. This policy pitted neighbour against neighbour; it often fostered violence and the settling of old scores that had nothing to do with ‘class struggle’. Moreover, in many blackearth regions peasants viewed Bolshevik commissars, grain detachments, army draft apparatus and the like as worse than any conceivable class enemy. The result was a fierce civil war between organized peasant bands, sometimes called ‘greens’, and Bolshevik forces. Recent research has revealed the extraordinary intensity of this brutal conflict in Tambov and other grain-producing regions as Red Army detachments came to pacify the village. Here civil war persisted long after the Whites had been crushed, providing a primary impulse for the ‘New Economic Policy’ in early 1921.

  War Communism also informed the construction of social orders, with appropriate status and disabilities. In the first constitution (July 1918), labour was a universal duty and defined social status. To the toiling classes of workers and peasants were juxtaposed the ‘formers’ (byvshie), i.e. members of the former exploiting class—nobility, bourgeoisie, clergy, and the like. All these ‘exploiters’ were deprived of civil rights and legally classified as the ‘disenfranchised’ (lishentsy). They had no right to work, but could be mobilized for menial labour or public works. Not all the social terror came from above: murderous pogroms against Jews and spontaneous assaults on clergy and other ‘formers’ were also a regular part of daily life during these violent years.

  These years of terror and discrimination also brought incredible hardship and privation. Despite the banner of historical progress, the country appeared to have reversed course, with a return to a natural economy, barter, wages in kind, and ‘currency’ in the form of eggs, clothing, and other basic necessities. It was the era of the ‘bagmen’ (meshchochniki), petty traders who plied the black market in grain and other goods. The state summarily and sporadically punished the black marketeers, but in fact had to tolerate a sector that still supplied much of the food and basic commodities.