Russian revolution. A very short introduction

by S. A Smith

  Between 1918 and February 1922, it has been estimated that 280,000 were killed by the Cheka and Internal Security Troops, about half in the course of operations to mop up peasant insurgents. This suggests that perhaps 140,000 were executed directly by the Cheka - a bloodcurdling number to be sure, but one that should be seen in the context of the 600,000 British and French troops who were sacrificed on the Somme

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  in 1916 in order to advance seven miles. The Red terror was both spectacular- designed to strike terror into the hearts of the populace -and 'bureaucratic' in character. According to Cheka statistics, 128,010 were arrested in the RSFSR (All-Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic) in 1918-19, of whom 42% were released; of the rest who were tried, nearly 8% were shotandthe rest incarcerated or sentenced to hard labour. By contrast, the White terror, which has received far less attention, was usually carried out when officers allowed their men to go on the rampage. In Ukraine at least 100,000 Jews perished at the hands of unruly soldiers of Denikin and the Ukrainian nationalist, S. V. Petliura. In leading Bolshevik circles concern was regularly expressed that the Cheka was out of control; yet periodic attempts to curb it never lasted long, mainly because Lenin refused to accept that institutional checks and balances were necessary to inhibit lawlessness and corruption.

  £ The socialist and anarchist parties proved unable to mount a concerted g challenge to the burgeoning one-party dictatorship. After Kolchak's e coup in November 1918, the SRs distanced themselves from the policy of jg overthrowing the regime by force. Most organizations agreed to make 1 the struggle against the Whites their priority, but were unable to agree on how far they should also campaign against the Bolsheviks. At three moments of crisis in 1918-19, the Bolsheviks briefly legalized the SRs, but the tendency of policy was clear. By 1920 the majority of the Central Committee were in jail. Following the peace of Brest-Litovsk, the Left SRs also moved into opposition to the regime. In July 1918, having assassinated the German ambassador, they launched a quixotic uprising in Moscow, designed to force the Bolsheviks to break with 'opportunism'. This resulted in the party being banned, a ban that was later eased at various times. The Left SRs now succumbed to a bewildering number of splits: by October 1918 their membership had fallen by two-thirds from a peak of nearly 100,000 in June. In Ukraine the Left SRs carried out partisan activity behind Petliura's lines, but disparate groups of 'activists' - led by the redoubtable Maria Spiridonova - refused to let up on the struggle to overthrow the

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  Bolsheviks and to establish a 'dictatorship of toilers'. By 1920, however, the die-hards were in a minority, most of this battered party rejecting armed struggle against the regime. Splits among the Mensheviks were less damaging, but they too suffered a severe decline in membership from around 150,000 in December 1917 to under 40,000 by late 1918. A few joined the anti-Bolshevik governments in summer 1918, but the centre and left factions -the bulk of the membership- rallied in support of the Red Army, whilst seeking to defend the integrity of the Soviets and trade unions. In a few Soviets such as that in Tula, and in a few trade unions, such as those of printers and chemical workers, they maintained their dominance in spite of prolonged harassment by the Cheka. By autumn 1921, however, only 4,000 retained their party cards.

  The Bolsheviks viewed the opposition parties with contempt, as opportunists at best, counter-revolutionaries at worst. Since they believed that only one party - their own - could represent the proletariat, other socialists and anarchists were by definition representatives of the 'petty bourgeoisie'. The decision to ban the opposition parties outright, however, was not simply an expression of ideology, since the Bolsheviks made tactical concessions to them at various junctures, even if not of a substantial or lasting kind. The Bolsheviks believed they were fighting to defend an embryonic socialist state from the forces of world imperialism. Those, like the SRs, who reserved the option of taking up arms against them, or those, like Mensheviks, who professed support for the Red Army yet reserved the right to lambast the regime, were giving succour to the enemy. As civil war intensified, Bolshevik attitudes hardened, so that what began as a pragmatic restriction hardened into a determination to be rid of the opposition parties once and for all. Yet if responsibility forthe creation of one-party dictatorship lies with the Bolsheviks, that does not acquit the opposition of a measure of responsibility for its own fate. After October the opposition parties faced a scenario for which their ideologies had ill-prepared them and they fell prey to bitter and debilitating splits. They also largely failed to capitalize on the

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  10. Derailed train with two Red Army soldiers

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  g widespread popular disaffection with the Bolsheviks, evident, for § example, in the Left SRs* failure to oppose the deeply unpopular с committees of poor peasants. This was in part, then, a failure of political 9 leadership. Yet the opposition parties were caught by the dilemma of all

  M civil wars, which leave little space for third parties. Despite their fury at the government, most workers and peasants identified the struggle of the Reds with defence of the revolution and when the Bolsheviks said that one was either for them or against them, it had a compelling logic

  The massive problems of recruiting, feeding, and transporting the Red Army, of squeezing grain from an unwilling peasantry, and of overcoming parochialism and inertia at the local level created

  irresistible pressures to centralize decision-making at the apex of the party. Moreover the constant emergencies of war fed the pressure to take instant decisions and to implement them forcefully, with the result that the p arty ca me i ncreasin gly to operate like ana rmy. By 1919 the Central Committee of what was now known as the Russian Communist Party (bolshevik) had become the centre where all key decisions were made before being passed on to Sovnarkom or the Soviet CEC for

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  implementation. The Central Committee was dominated by an oligarchy

  consisting of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin, and Bukharin,

  but there was never any doubt that Lenin was first among equals. His

  moral authority and his leadership skill, in particular his ability to

  balance intransigence with compromise, held the oligarchy together.

  There were no deep factional splits within the Central Committee,

  although a loose group did resent Trotsky's talent and influence. By 1921

  the Committee had doubled in size to cope with the growing volume of

  business; and since its meetings were relatively infrequent, a Politburo of

  five, formed in 1919, dealt with the most urgent business. This met at

  least once a week and quickly became the most powerful decision

  making body in the party-state. The sudden death from influenza in

  March 1919 of la. M. Sverdlov,the party secretary, a man of indefatigable -

  energy, led to a rapid expansion of the Orgburo and the Secretariat.*

  Given the party's role in directing the different agencies of government, ^ this meant that the responsibility of the Orgburo for assigning personnel £.

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  gave Stalin, its chair, extensive power.2.

  The life-and-death struggle to preserve the state against internal^

  counter-revolution and foreign intervention, and the relentless£>

  necessity to deal with one emergency after another led to a gradualg-

  change in the culture of the party. The paramount need to make fast^

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  decisions and get things done meant that debate and internal|-

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  democracy increasingly came to be seen as luxuries. This change in culture was linked at a deeper level to the change in the nature of the party from being a conspiratorial body bent on destroying the old order, to becoming a body seeking to build and manage a state. Gradually, the range of opinion permitted in the party narrowed. By the end of the civil war, it wa
s inconceivable that a Bolshevik should argue - as had been perfectly possible in October 1917 - that other socialist parties should be represented in the Soviets or that freedom of the press should extend to 'bourgeois' publications. At the same time, as debate in a larger public sphere dried up, owing to the clampdown on the press and the elimination of opposition, so the party itself became the arena in which

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  political conflict was played out. Factions such as the Democratic Centralists inveighed against the 'dictatorship of party officialdom' in the vain hope of reconciling centralized decision-making with rank-and-file participation in party and soviet affairs; and the Workers' Opposition rallied against attempts to reduce the trade unions to impotence. Yet the tendency for expeditious decision-making to squeeze out debate and dissent was inexorable. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, against the distant roar of the Kronstadt cannons, factions were banned, supposedly as a temporary measure. The measure was never revoked.

  As the party was transformed into the backbone of the new state, so it began to attract people who once would never have dreamed of becoming revolutionaries. Between the Eighth Congress in March 1919 and the Tenth, the party grew from 313,000 to 730,000, still a tiny £ proportion of the population. The proportion of worker members fell g by about a fifth to 41%, but many of these were in fact former workers e who now held positions in the state administration, economic g management, or the Red Army. The rest of the membership was more 1 or less equally divided between peasants (mostly soldiers) and white-collar employees (most of whom worked in the state apparatuses). On the eve of the Tenth Party Congress, L. B. Krasin declared:

  The source of the woes and unpleasantness we are experiencing is the fact that the Communist Party consists of 10% convinced idealists who are ready to die for the idea, and go% hangers-on without consciences, who have joined the party in order to get a position.

  Krasin was almost certainly exaggerating, but he articulated a widespread sense that the party was being hijacked by careerists. Indeed, it was precisely at this time that rank-and-file members began to attack the privileges enjoyed by 'those at the top'. What these amounted to can be seen from the diary entry for 24 November 1919 of the writer Kornei Chukovsky:

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  Yesterday I was at Gorky's. Zinoviev was there. At the entrance I was amazed to see a magnificent car on the seat of which was carelessly thrown a bear skin. Zinoviev - short and fat - spoke in a hoarse and satiated voice.

  Meanwhile as the state acquired ever more functions, its apparatus proliferated. By 1920 no fewer than 5.8 million people worked for the party-state. Many had worked inthesamejobs before the revolution and few had much sympathy for the revolution. The army of typists, filing clerks, cashiers, accountants, storekeepers, and drivers had a low level of education, were inefficient, reluctant to take initiative, and imbued with an ethos of red tape and routinism. Officials tended to throw their weight around, whilst deferring to those above them on the bureaucratic ladder, to scramble for petty privilege, and to defend their narrow departmental turf. In the countryside, where there were fewer officials inherited from the tsarist regime, a new breed of 'soviet' official arose, many of whom had done service in the Red Army. A report from the Penza provincial Cheka in summer 1920 was typical:

  In the countryside we must quench the appetites of those 'commissars' who on going into the village consider it their sacred duty to get blind drunk, and then take other pleasures, such as raping women, shooting, and so forth.

  In that year the Commissariat of State Control received tens of thousands of complaints about bribery, speculation, embezzlement, drunkenness, and sabotage mainly on the part of officials in the township Soviets.

  By 1920-1 there was a crisis of morale within the Communist Party. Disaffection at the trend towards authoritarianism, exemplified in the suppression of debate and the Secretariat's riding roughshod over lower-level organizations, merged with disaffection at the careerism and corruption rampant in the party-state in an anguished debate

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  At the beginning of September this year in the blessed town of Sergiev-Posad in Moscow province, P. V. Krutov, an old party worker and member of the militia from Bulakvoskaia township, was arrested as he was returning from a visit to the district militia headquarters in Sofrino and thrown into the guard house of the county military commissariat. This was on the whim of some 'boss' who, when asked 'Who goes there?', said 'I'm arresting you,' supposedly because he thought Krutov was a deserter who had the wrong documents. Having sat for several hours in the guard house, not knowing what was happening, comrade Krutov managed to persuade a non-party Red army soldier to bail him out so that he could personally explain to his communist comrades what had happened, and ask them to defend his honour as a Communist Party member. He went at once to the county deserters' commission where, he supposed, the documents taken from him must be. But what a genuinely 'communist defence' lay in store for him!! The chairman of the Sergiev desertion commission, the communist Kalmykov, at first tormented comrade Krutov by keeping him waiting, as happens everywhere. Then he ordered him to collect his documents from room 26, but they weren't there. When Krutov reappeared at Kalmykov's office to request his documents, Kalmykov turned into a veritable tsarist gendarme, bawling at Krutov: 'You were told to wait there. GET OUT OF HERE!' That's how 'committed communists' throw their weight about here in the provinces and consciously and precisely resurrect tsarist ways of behaviour.

  Letter from S. Kriukov, Red Army soldier and party member no. 219258, to the newspaper Bednota, 20 September 1920

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  about the nature and causes of'bureaucracy' in the new order. Both leadership and the Democratic Centralists saw it as stemming from the entry into the party-state of 'class aliens' and both agreed that the key to solving the problem lay in the promotion of workers to positions of responsibility. Neither side, however, appreciated that the major cause of 'bureaucracy' lay in the massive expansion of the party-state itself. Nor did they appreciate that proletarians promoted into official positions would not necessarily behave differently from those who had once worked for the tsarist administration, since bureaucrats derive motivation from the technical functions they perform. Where leadership and opposition parted company was over the latter's call for greater internal partydemocracy asacounterto bureaucracy. When the leader of the Democratic Centralists called for the Central Committee to be made more accountable, Lenin retorted:

  Soviet socialist democracy is not incompatible with one-person management or dictatorship. A dictator can sometimes express the will of a dass, since he will sometimes achieve more alone and thus be more necessary.

  It was a position from which he was never to retreat. Since 1917 Lenin had come to believe that centralization of power was imperative if the revolution was to be safeguarded; the most that could be allowed was for the masses to monitor those who ruled on their behalf.

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  Chapter 3

  War Communism

  After October the economy galloped from crisis to near collapse. By 1920-1 industrial output was one-fifth, average labour productivity one-third, and coal production and consumer goods production one-quarter of 1913 levels. Plummeting output, compounded by the Allied blockade and disorganization of the transport system, placed severe constraints on the Bolsheviks' room for manoeuvre. To mobilize the battered forces of industry and agriculture to meet the needs of war, they set in place policies that were retrospectively labelled 'War Communism'. These policies comprised an extremely centralized system of economic administration; the complete nationalization of industry; a state monopoly on grain and other agricultural products; a ban on private trade and the restriction of monetary-commodity exchange; rationing of key consumer items; and the imposition of military discipline on workers. Historians debate whether these policies originated in the Bolshevik intention to move as rapidly as possible towar
ds communism, or whether they were principally dictated bythe exigencies of economic collapse and civil war, rooted in expediency rather than ideology.

  The Bolsheviks came to power intent on imposing state regulation on the economy, but uncertain as to how far it could be transformed along socialist lines. The Central Council of Factory Committees pressed for a Supreme Economic Council to regulate the economy and state finances, established on 2 December, together with an 'active'form of workers'

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  control of production as an integral element of this system of economic

  regulation. The Decree on Workers' Control passed on 14 November -

  the third most popular of the Bolsheviks' founding decrees after peace

  and land -was obsolete within weeks as the Bolsheviks decided that the

  rising tide of economic chaos required that the factory committees be

  integrated into the more centralized apparatus of the trade unions.

  Initially, Lenin seems to have thought that socialist measures were on