The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  There was anyway full agreement between Lenin and the Left Communists that the party had to strengthen its appeal to the workers. All Bolshevik leaders looked forward to a time when their own endeavours in basic education and political propaganda would have re-educated the entire working class. But in the interim they had to be satisfied by the promotion of outstanding representatives of the ‘proletariat’ to administrative posts within the expanding Soviet state institutions. Talented, loyal workers were invited to become rulers in their own dictatorship.

  A rising proportion of the civilian state administration by 1918–19 claimed working-class origins. Here the Petrograd metal-workers were prominent, who supplied thousands of volunteers for service in local government. In the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs the removal of tsarist personnel had been started under the Provisional Government and the process continued under Sovnarkom throughout the agencies of administration. Social background counted heavily as a qualification for promotion; but there was also a need for the promotees to be comfortable with paper-work. Soviets at central and local levels discovered how difficult it was to find enough such people.35 The ‘localities’ asked the ‘centre’ to provide competent personnel; the ‘centre’ made the same request of the ‘localities’. But demography told against the hopes of Bolshevism. There were over three million industrial workers in 1917, and the number tumbled to 2.4 million by the following autumn. A predominantly ‘proletarian’ administration was impossible.

  Furthermore, the official percentages were misleading. As small and medium-size businesses went bankrupt, their owners had to secure alternative employment. Jobs for them were unavailable in the economy’s shrinking private sector; but desk jobs in an ever-swelling administration were plentiful: all it took was a willingness to pretend to be of working-class background. Many ‘petit-bourgeois elements’, as the Russian Communist Party designated them, infiltrated the institutions of state after the October Revolution.

  Meanwhile many members of the urban working class proved troublesome. The violence used by Sovnarkom was a shock to popular opinion, and the labour-forces of Petrograd metal and textile plants, which had once supported the Bolsheviks, led the resistance. With some assistance from the Menshevik activists, they elected representatives to an Assembly of Plenipotentiaries in Petrograd in spring 1918.36 The Assembly bore similarities to the Petrograd Soviet after the February Revolution inasmuch as it was a sectional organization whereby workers aimed to obtain civic freedoms and larger food rations. But the Assembly operated in a hostile environment. The workers were tired, hungry and disunited. Among them were many who still sympathized with several Bolshevik policies. The communists were ruthless. In May a demonstration by Assembly supporters at the nearby industrial town of Kolpino was suppressed by armed troops. The message could not have been blunter that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be defended by any means against the demands of the proletariat itself.

  So that the question arose: how new was the world being built by Lenin and Sovnarkom? The RSFSR had facets reminiscent of the tsarist order at its worst. Central state power was being asserted in an authoritarian fashion. Ideological intolerance was being asserted and organized dissent suppressed. Elective principles were being trampled under foot. The tendency for individuals to take decisions without consultation even with the rest of their committees was on the rise.

  Lenin in The State and Revolution had stated that his government would combine a vigorous centralism with a vigorous local autonomy.37 The balance was already tilted in favour of a centralism so severe that the communists quickly became notorious for authoritarian excesses; and, in the light of Lenin’s casualness about the restraints of democratic procedure throughout 1917, this was hardly surprising. The Bolsheviks wanted action and practical results. As proponents of efficient ‘account-keeping and supervision’ they presented themselves as the enemies of bureaucratic abuse. Yet their own behaviour exacerbated the problems they denounced. There was an increase in the number of administrators, whose power over individuals rose as the existing restraints were demolished. In addition, the Soviet state intruded into economic and social affairs to a greater depth than attempted by the Romanov Emperors – and the increased functions assumed by the state gave increased opportunities to deploy power arbitrarily.

  A cycle of action and reaction was observable. As Sovnarkom failed to obtain its desired political and economic results, Lenin and his colleagues assumed that the cause was the weakness of hierarchical supervision. They therefore invented new supervisory institutions. More and more paperwork was demanded as proof of compliance. At the same time officials were licensed to do whatever they felt necessary to secure the centrally-established targets. And, moreover, new laws, decrees, regulations, commands and instructions cascaded from higher to lower organs of authority even though law in general was held in official disrespect. The unsurprising consequence of these contradictory phenomena continued to surprise the Russian Communist Party’s leadership: a rise in bureaucratic inefficiency and abuse.

  Herein lay grounds for a popular disgruntlement with the communists which would have existed even if the party had not applied force against dissenters and if there had been no fundamental crisis in economic and international relations. Citizens were being made to feel that they had no inalienable rights. The state could grant favours, and it could just as easily take them away. Even local officialdom developed an uncooperative attitude towards Moscow. As the central political authorities kept on demanding ever greater effort from them, so administrators in the localities were learning to be furtive. They protected themselves in various ways. In particular, they gave jobs to friends and associates: clientalism was becoming a political habit. They also formed local groups of officials in various important institutions so that a locality could present a common front to the capital. They were not averse to misreporting local reality so as to acquire favour from the central political leadership.

  Thus many of the elements of the later Soviet compound had already been put in place by Lenin’s Russian Communist Party. But not all of them. At least through to mid-1918 the republic was not yet a one-party, one-ideology state; and the chaos in all institutions as well as the breakdown in communications, transport and material supplies was a drastic impediment to a centralized system of power. The Soviet order was extremely disorderly for a great deal of the time.

  Yet the movement towards a centralized, ideocratic dictatorship of a single party had been started. Neither Lenin nor his leading comrades had expressly intended this; they had few clearly-elaborated policies and were forever fumbling and improvising. Constantly they found international, political, economic, social and cultural difficulties to be less tractable than they had assumed. And constantly they dipped into their rag-bag of authoritarian concepts to work out measures to help them to survive in power. Yet their survival would surely have been impossible if they had not operated in a society so little capable of resisting them. The collapse of the urban sector of the economy; the breakdown of administration, transport and communication; the preoccupation of organizations, groups and individuals with local concerns; the widespread physical exhaustion after years of war; the divisions among the opposition: all such phenomena gave the Bolsheviks their chance – and the Bolsheviks had the guile and harshness to know how to seize it.

  And they felt that their ruthless measures were being applied in the service of a supreme good. Bolsheviks in the capital and the provinces believed that the iniquities of the old regime in Russia and the world were about to be eliminated. The decrees of Sovnarkom were formulated to offer unparalleled hope to Russian workers and peasants, to non-Russian in the former Russian Empire, to the industrialized societies of Europe and North America, to the world’s colonial peoples. The Russian Communist Party had its supporters at home. Local revolutionary achievements were not negligible in urban and rural Russia. The party was inclined to believe that all obstacles in its path would soon be cast
down. It surely would win any civil war. It would surely retake the borderlands. It would surely foster revolution abroad. The agenda of 1917 had not yet been proved unrealistic in the judgement of the Bolshevik leadership.

  6

  Civil Wars (1918–1921)

  Civil war had been a recurrent theme in statements by Lenin and Trotski before the October Revolution. Whenever workers’ rights were being infringed, the Bolshevik leaders sang out that the bourgeoisie had started a civil war. What others might dub industrial conflict acquired a broader connotation. After 1917, too, Lenin and Trotski used class struggle and civil war as interchangeable terms, treating expropriations of factories and landed estates as part of the same great process as the military suppression of counter-revolution.

  Increasingly the Bolshevik Central Committee used the term in a more conventional way to signify a series of battles between two sets of armies. Yet the military challenge was still expected by Sovnarkom to be easily surmountable; Lenin and his Central Committee, remembering the rapid defeat of the Kornilov mutiny, assumed that they would quickly win any serious conflict. One substantial campaign had been waged when Bolshevik-led forces invaded Ukraine in December 1917; but otherwise the tale had been of scrappy engagements since the October Revolution. A skirmish with a Cossack contingent in the Don region in late January 1918 resulted in a Soviet victory that was celebrated by Lenin over the next four months as marking the end of civil war.1 The Bolsheviks began to build a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army from February; but their intention was not merely to fight internal armed enemies: Lenin wanted a vast force to be prepared in time to be sent to the aid of the anticipated uprising of the Berlin working class.2

  As he discovered in May 1918, this assumption was erroneous. The Socialist-Revolutionary leadership fled to Samara on the river Volga to establish a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (or Komuch), which laid claim to be the legitimate government of Russia. A socialist Volga confronted socialist Moscow and Petrograd, and fighting could not permanently be forestalled. Komuch as yet had a weaker military capacity even than Sovnarkom. But this was not the case with other Russian opponents of the communists. Generals Alekseev and Kornilov had escaped to southern Russia where they were gathering a Volunteer Army for action against the Bolsheviks. In mid-Siberia a contingent of Imperial officers was being formed under Admiral Kolchak, who had commanded the Black Sea fleet. General Yudenich invited other volunteers to his banner in the north-west. The forces of Alekseev, Kornilov, Kolchak and Yudenich soon became known as the White armies.

  The German forces remained the dominant power in the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire, and Lenin asked for their help for ultimately, Sovnarkom’s declared eventual purpose was to overthrow Kaiser Wilhelm II.3 For the Brest-Litovsk Treaty angered the British into dispatching an expeditionary contingent to Archangel and Murmansk, to protect Allied military equipment on Russian soil. British diplomats also probed whether they could tempt the Bolsheviks or any other Russians back into fighting the Germans. Other threats, too, were emerging. The French landed a naval garrison in Odessa on the Black Sea. The Turks were on the move on the frontiers of the ‘Russian’ Transcaucasus. Japanese forces occupied territory in the Far East, and the American contingent was not far behind them. Russia had been reduced to a size roughly the same as medieval Muscovy. Seemingly it would not be long before a foreign power reached Moscow and overthrew the Bolsheviks.

  In the capital the Bolshevik Central Committee members put on a brave face. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries agitated against them, continuing to put the case against official communist policies. Even leading supporters of Lenin in the Brest-Litovsk controversy began to ask whether the treaty with the Central Powers had brought any benefit. G. Sokolnikov, who had signed the treaty on Lenin’s behalf, declared that it was not worth the paper it was printed on.4

  The military situation of the Bolsheviks deteriorated in the same weeks. A legion of Czech and Slovak prisoners-of-war was being conveyed along the Trans-Siberian railway to the Far East for further shipment to Europe in compliance with an earlier agreement with the Allies. These troops intended to join the struggle against the Central Powers on the Western front. But there had always been distrust between the Czechoslovak Legion’s leaders and the Bolsheviks. Trotski, who became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs in March 1918, dealt with them abrasively. Then the Chelyabinsk Soviet unilaterally tried to disarm the units of the Legion as their train passed through the town.5 The Legion resisted this action, and travelled back to the Urals and the Volga to pick up the rest of its units. By the end of May it had reached Samara, crushing the Bolshevik local administrations on the way. Komuch persuaded it to forget about the Western front and join in the common effort to overthrow Sovnarkom.

  In central Russia there was panic. Although there were only fifteen thousand Czechs and Slovaks, they might well prove more than a match for the nascent Red Army. Sovnarkom and the Cheka could not guarantee security even in Moscow. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee was planning an insurrection against Bolshevism. Its other tactic was to wreck the relationship between the Soviet and German governments by assassinating Count Mirbach, Germany’s ambassador to Moscow. Yakov Blyumkin, a Left Socialist-Revolutionary member of the Cheka, procured documents sanctioning a visit to the embassy. On 6 July he met Mirbach in the embassy and killed him.

  Lenin, fearing that Berlin might rip up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, visited the embassy to express his condolences. The British increased their efforts to support anti-Bolshevik organizations and overthrow Sovnarkom.6 Tension mounted in Moscow. The Latvian Riflemen received orders to arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Their preliminary duty was to liberate Dzierżyński from the hands of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who had taken him hostage. The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic was clearly not yet a properly-functioning police state if this could happen to the Cheka’s chairman. The Latvians succeeded in releasing Dzierżyński and suppressing the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries; and the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which was taking place at the time, passed all the resolutions tendered by the Bolsheviks. Already on 9 May a Food-Supplies Dictatorship had been proclaimed, and armed requisitioning of grain was turned from an intermittent local practice into a general system. The removal of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Congress eliminated the last vestige of opposition to the new policy.

  While Lenin, Sverdlov and a shaken Dzierżyński imposed their authority in Moscow, Trotski rushed to the Volga where the Czechoslovak Legion took Kazan on 7 August 1918. Komuch was poised to re-enter central Russia. Trotski’s adaptiveness to the role of People’s Commissar for Military Affairs was impressive. Not all the orators of 1917 had managed an effective transition to the wielding of power; but Trotski, having dazzled his diplomatic adversaries at Brest-Litovsk, was turning his talents with equal success towards the Red Army.

  Temperamentally he was as hard as a diamond. Like Lenin, he came from a comfortable family and had been a brilliant student. Trotski’s real name was Lev Davydovich Bronshtein. He was a Jew from southern Ukraine, whose farming father sent him to secondary school in Odessa. His flair for writing and for foreign languages revealed itself early; but so, too, did a restlessness with the kind of society in which he had been brought up. He drew close to the clandestine populist groups which approved of terrorism. But by late adolescence he was a Marxist and by 1900 he was in Siberian exile. He made a dramatic escape by sleigh a couple of years later, joining Lenin in London and working with him on the émigré Marxist journal, Iskra. At the Second Party Congress in 1903, however, Trotski denounced Lenin for provoking the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

  In organization, Trotski had agreed with Menshevik criticisms of Leninist organizational ideas, which he predicted would result in a dictator placing himself in authority over the Central Committee. He meant this satirically, and was not to know that Stalin would one day realize the prophecy;
but his hostility to Bolshevik divisiveness was sincere at the time. Trotski was already a distinctive figure among Marxists. While opposing the Bolsheviks on organizational

  questions, he stood close to them on strategy. His theory of revolution in Russia squeezed the schedule for the introduction of socialism to a shorter span of time than even Lenin would accept: in 1905 Trotski was calling for the installation of a ‘workers’ government’.

  It was in September of the same year that he distinguished himself as the firebrand deputy chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. Within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party he refused to show allegiance to either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks; and, after returning abroad in 1907, he tried to unify the factions. Unfortunately Trotski was arrogant even when doing his best to reunify the party. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks thought Trotski was a windbag whose personal ambition mattered more to him than his radical political strategy. Yet they could not deny his talents. Trotski was a master of Russian literary prose, being incapable of writing an inelegant paragraph. His knowledge of the history of European politics and diplomacy was extensive. In 1912 he had covered the war in the Balkans as a correspondent for the Kiev Thought newspaper and therefore had an early insight into military affairs.

  Trotski returned from North America in May 1917 and was horrified to find the Mensheviks collaborating with the Provisional Government. Needing to belong to a party if he was to have any influence, he accepted Lenin’s invitation to join the Bolsheviks. His fluency of tongue and pen were a great asset. He was a handsome fellow, a few inches taller than the average Russian, and he had quick reflexes in dangerous situations. It was he who had saved the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, despite their political differences, from being torn apart by a mob in midsummer 1917.7 Trotski himself spent weeks in prison after the ‘July Days’, but turned his detention to effect by writing Pravda articles that coruscated with contempt for the Provisional Government. On his release in late August, he had revelled in being the Bolshevik party’s spokesman in the Petrograd Soviet.