The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Until mid-1919, the party retained the informal structure of underground years, but as its ranks expanded, undemocratic practices became institutionalized. The Central Committee remained the center of authority, but in practice, because its members dashed around the country on special assignments, decisions usually were made by the few members who happened to be on hand. Lenin, who was so afraid of assassination that he almost never traveled, served as permanent chairman. Although as the country’s dictator he relied heavily on coercion and terror, within his own cohort he preferred persuasion. He never forced anyone out of the party because of disagreement: if he failed to obtain a majority on some important issue, he only had to threaten resignation to bring his followers into line. Once or twice he was on the verge of a humiliating defeat from which only Trotsky’s intervention saved him. On a few occasions he had to acquiesce to policies of which he disapproved. By the end of 1918, however, his authority had grown to the point where no one would oppose him. Kamenev, who had often taken issue with Lenin in the past, spoke for many Bolsheviks when he told Sukhanov in the autumn of 1918:

  I become ever more convinced that Lenin never makes a mistake. In the end, he is always right. How many times it seemed that he had blundered, in his prognosis or political line—and always, in the end, his prognosis and his line turned out to have been correct.

  12

  Lenin had little patience for discussions, even in the circle of his most intimate associates: typically, during cabinet meetings, he would thumb through a book and rejoin the debate to lay down policy. From October 1917 until the spring of 1919 he made many decisions for the party as well as the government in collaboration with his indispensable assistant, Iakov Sverdlov. Possessed of a filing-cabinet sort of mind, Sverdlov could supply Lenin with names, facts, and such other kinds of information as was required. After he had fallen ill and died in March 1919, the Central Committee had to be restructured: at this time a Politburo was created to guide policy, an Orgburo to take care of administration, and a Secretariat to manage party personnel.

  The cabinet, or Sovnarkom, was made up of high party officials serving in a double capacity. Lenin, who directed the Central Committee, served also as chairman of the Sovnarkom, the equivalent of a Prime Minister. As a rule, important decisions were first taken up in the Central Committee or Politburo and then submitted to the cabinet for discussion and implementation, often with the participation of non-Bolshevik experts.

  In a country of over one hundred million inhabitants, it was, of course, impossible, relying exclusively on the party membership, to “smash” thoroughly a social, economic, and political order built over centuries. One had to harness the “masses”: but since the multitude of workers and peasants knew nothing of socialism or the proletarian dictatorship, they had to be prodded into action with appeals to self-interest most narrowly defined.

  In the Satyricon of Petronius, that unique picture of daily life in ancient Rome, there occurs a passage very relevant to the politics which the Bolsheviks pursued during the initial months in power:

  How would a confidence man or a pickpocket survive if he did not drop little boxes of clinking bags into the crowd to hook his victims? Dumb animals are snared with food and men can’t be caught unless they are nibbling at something.

  It was a principle that Lenin instinctively understood. On taking office he turned Russia over to the populace to divide its wealth under the slogan “Grabi nagrablennoe” (“Loot the loot”). While the people were busy “nibbling,” he disposed of his political rivals.

  The Russian language has a term, duvan, borrowed from Turkish by way of the Cossack dialect. It means a division of spoils, such as the Cossack bands in southern Russia used to carry out after raids on Turkish and Persian settlements. In the fall and winter of 1917–18, all of Russia became the object of duvan. The main commodity to be divided was agricultural land, which the Land Decree of October 26 had turned over to communal peasants. Distributing this loot among households, according to criteria which each commune set for itself, kept the peasants occupied well into the spring of 1918. During this period, they lost such little interest in politics as they had.

  Similar processes also took place in industry and in the armed forces. The Bolsheviks initially turned over the running of industrial plants to Factory Committees, whose workers and lower clerical personnel were under the influence of syndicalism. These committees removed the owners and directors and took over the management. But they also used the opportunity to appropriate the assets of the plants, distributing among themselves the profits as well as matériel and equipment. According to one contemporary, in practice “worker management” reduced itself to the “division of the proceeds of a given industrial enterprise among its workers.”13 Before they headed for home, front-line soldiers broke into arsenals and storehouses, taking whatever they could carry: the rest they sold to local civilians. A Bolshevik newspaper provided a description of this kind of military duvan. According to its reporter, a discussion of the Soldiers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet on February 1, 1918 (NS), revealed that in many units troops demanded the contents of regimental depots: it was common for them to take home the uniforms and weapons obtained in this manner.14

  72. Iakov Sverdlov.

  The notion of national or state property thus disappeared along with that of private property, and it did so with the encouragement of the new government. It was as if Lenin had studied the history of the peasant rebellion under Emelian Pugachev in the 1770s, who had succeeded in seizing vast areas of eastern Russia by appealing to the anarchist and anti-proprietary instincts of the peasantry. Pugachev had exhorted peasants to exterminate all landlords and to take their lands as well as Crown lands. He promised them no more taxes and military recruitment, and distributed among them the money and the grain taken from their owners. He further pledged to abolish the government and replace it with Cossack “liberties”—that is, communal anarchy. Pugachev might well have brought down the Russian state had he not been crushed by Catherine’s armies.15

  In the winter of 1917–18, the population of what had been the Russian Empire divided among itself not only material goods. It also tore apart the Russian state, the product of 600 years of historical development: sovereignty itself became the object of duvan. By the spring of 1918, the largest state in the world fell apart into innumerable overlapping entities, large and small, each claiming authority over its territory, none linked with the others by institutional ties or even a sense of common destiny. In a few months, Russia reverted politically to the early Middle Ages when she had been a collection of self-governing principalities.

  The first to separate themselves were the non-Russian peoples of the borderlands. After the Bolshevik coup, one ethnic minority after another declared independence from Russia, partly to realize its national aspirations, partly to escape Bolshevism and the looming civil war. For justification they could refer to the “Declaration of the Rights of the Nations of Russia,” which the Bolsheviks had issued on November 2, 1917, over the signatures of Lenin and Stalin. Made public without prior approval of any Soviet institution, it granted the peoples of Russia “free self-determination, including the right of separation and the formation of an independent state.” Finland was the first to declare herself independent (December 6, 1917, NS); she was followed by Lithuania (December 11), Latvia (January 12, 1918), the Ukraine (January 22), Estonia (February 24), Transcaucasia (April 22), and Poland (November 3) (all dates are new style). These separations reduced the Communist domain to territories inhabited by Great Russians—that is, to the Russia of the mid-seventeenth century.

  The process of dismemberment was not confined to the borderlands: centrifugal forces emerged also within Great Russia, as province after province went its own way, claiming independence from central authority. This process was facilitated by the official slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” which allowed regional soviets at different levels—region (oblast’), province (guberniia), district
(uezd), and even volost’ and selo—to claim sovereignty. The result was chaos:

  There were city soviets, village soviets,

  selo

  soviets, and suburban soviets. These soviets acknowledged no one but themselves, and if they did acknowledge, it was only “up to the point” that happened to have been advantageous to them. Every soviet lived and struggled as the immediate surrounding conditions dictated, and as it could and wanted to. They had no, or virtually no … bureaucratic soviet structures.

  16

  In an attempt to bring some order the Bolshevik Government created in the spring of 1918 territorial entities called oblasti. There were six of them, each composed of several provinces and enjoying quasi-sovereign status:* Moscow with nine adjoining provinces; the Urals, centered on Ekaterinburg; the “Toilers Commune of the North,” embracing seven provinces with the capital in Petrograd; Northwest, centered on Smolensk; West Siberia, with the center in Omsk; and Central Siberia, based on Irkutsk. Each had its own administration, staffed by socialist intelligentsia, and convened Congresses of Soviets. Some even had their own Councils of People’s Commissars. A conference of the soviets of the Central Siberian Region held in Irkutsk in February 1918 rejected the peace treaty with Germany which the Soviet Government was about to sign and, to demonstrate its independence, appointed its own Commissar of Foreign Affairs.17

  Here and there gubernii proclaimed themselves “republics.” This happened in Kazan, Kaluga, Riazan, Ufa, and Orenburg. Some of the non-Russian peoples living in the midst of Russians, such as the Bashkirs and Volga Tatars, also formed national republics. One count indicates that on the territory of the defunct Russian Empire there existed in June 1918 at least thirty-three “governments.”18 To have its decrees and laws implemented, the central government often had to request the assistance of these ephemeral entities.

  The regions and provinces, in turn, broke up into subunits, of which the volost’ was the most important. The vitality of the volost’ derived from the fact that for the peasants it was the largest entity within which to distribute the appropriated land. As a rule, peasants of one volost’ would refuse to share the looted properties with those of neighboring volosti, with the result that hundreds of these tiny territories became, in effect, self-governing enclaves. As Martov observed:

  We have always pointed out that the popularity of the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” among peasants and the backward segment of the working class can be in large measure explained by the fact that they invest this slogan with the primitive idea of the supremacy of local workers or local peasants over a given territory, much as they identify the slogan of worker control with the idea of seizure of a given factory and that of agrarian revolution with the idea of a given village appropriating a given estate.

  19

  The Bolsheviks made some unsuccessful military forays into the separated borderlands to bring them back into the fold. But by and large, for the time being they did not interfere with the centrifugal forces inside Great Russia, because these furthered their immediate objective, which was the thorough destruction of the old political and economic system. These forces also prevented the emergence of a strong state apparatus able to stand up to the Communist Party before it had the time to consolidate its power.

  In March 1918, the government approved a constitution for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Lenin entrusted the drafting of this document to a commission of judicial experts, chaired by Sverdlov: its most active members were Left SRs, who wanted to replace the centralized state with a federation of soviets, on the model of the French communes of 1871. Lenin left them undisturbed although their intention ran entirely contrary to his own goal of a centralized state. He who paid scrupulous attention to the least details of administration, to the extent of deciding what soldiers guarded his office in Smolnyi, stayed out of the deliberations of the constitutional commission, and merely scanned the results of its work. It was indicative of his contempt for the written constitution: it suited his purposes to give the state structure a loose, quasi-anarchic façade to conceal the hidden steel of party control.20

  The Constitution of 1918 met Napoleon’s criterion: a good constitution, he said, was short and confused. The opening article proclaimed Russia “a republic of soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies”; “all power in the center and in the localities” belonged to the soviets.21 These statements raised more questions than they answered because the articles that followed failed to clarify the division of authority either between the center and the localities or among the soviets themselves. According to Article 56, “within the borders of its jurisdiction, the congress of soviets (of the region, province, district, and volost’) is the highest authority.” Since, however, each region embraced several provinces, and each province numerous districts and volosti, the principle was meaningless. To further complicate matters, Article 61 contradicted the principle that congresses of soviets were the “highest authority” on their territory by requiring local soviets to confine themselves to local issues and to execute the orders of the “supreme organs of the Soviet Government.”

  The failure of the 1918 Constitution to specify the spheres of competence of the soviet authorities at their different territorial levels merely emphasized that the Bolsheviks did not view the matter as a serious inhibition. Even so, it strengthened centrifugal tendencies by giving them constitutional sanction.*

  To gain full freedom of action, Lenin had to rid himself quickly of accountability to the Central Executive Committee (CEC).

  On Bolshevik initiative, the Second Congress of Soviets dismissed the old Ispolkom and elected a new one, in which the Bolsheviks held 58 percent of the seats. This arrangement guaranteed that the Bolsheviks, who voted as a bloc, could carry or defeat any motion, but they still had to contend with a vociferous minority of Left SRs, SRs, and Mensheviks. The SRs and Mensheviks refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the October coup and denied the Bolsheviks the right to form a government. The Left SRs accepted the October coup, but they retained all kinds of democratic illusions, one of which was a coalition government composed of all parties represented in the soviets.

  The non-Bolshevik minority took seriously the principle, to which the Bolsheviks paid only lip service, that the CEC was a socialist legislature which had final say on the composition of the cabinet and its activities. These powers it enjoyed by virtue of a resolution of the Second Congress of Soviets which had been drafted by Lenin himself:

  The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies resolves: To constitute for the administration of the country prior to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to be known as the Council of People’s Commissars.… Control over the activity of the People’s Commissars and the right of replacing them is vested in the All-Russian Congress of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies and its Central Executive Committee.

  22

  Nothing could be clearer. Nevertheless, Lenin was firmly determined to throw this principle overboard and make his cabinet independent of the CEC or any other external body. This he achieved within ten days after becoming head of state.

  The historic confrontation between the Bolsheviks and the CEC occurred over the insistence of the latter that the Bolsheviks broaden the Sovnarkom to include representatives of the other socialist parties. All the parties opposed the Bolsheviks’ monopolizing of the ministerial posts: after all, they had been chosen by the Congress of Soviets to represent the soviets, not themselves. This opposition surfaced and assumed dangerous forms three days after the Bolshevik coup, when the Union of Railroad Employees, the largest trade union in Russia, presented an ultimatum demanding a socialist coalition government. Anyone whose memories reached to October 1905 would have remembered the decisive role which the railroad strike played in the capitulation of tsarism.

  The union, which had hundreds of thousan
ds of members dispersed throughout the country, had the capacity to paralyze transport. In August 1917 it had supported Kerensky against Kornilov. In October, it initially favored the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” but as soon as its officers realized the uses which the Bolsheviks made of it, they turned against them, insisting that the Sovnarkom give way to a coalition cabinet.23 On October 29, the union declared that unless the government was promptly broadened to include other socialist parties, it would order a strike. This was a serious threat, for the Bolsheviks, in preparation for Kerensky’s counteroffensive, needed trains to move troops to the front.

  The Bolsheviks convened the Central Committee. Lenin and Trotsky, busy organizing the defenses against Kerensky, could not attend. In their absence, the Central Committee, apparently in a state of panic, surrendered to the union’s demands, conceding the necessity of “broadening the base of government through the inclusion of other socialist parties.” It also reconfirmed that the Sovnarkom was a creation of the CEC and accountable to it. The committee delegated Kamenev and G. Ia. Sokolnikov to negotiate with the union and the other parties the formation of a new Soviet Provisional Government.24 This resolution, in essence, meant a surrender of the powers won in the October coup.

  Later that day (October 29), Kamenev and Sokolnikov attended a meeting, convened by the Union of Railroad Employees, of eight parties and several intraparty organizations. Following the resolution of the Bolshevik Central Committee, they agreed to have the SRs and Mensheviks enter the Sovnarkom on condition that they accept the resolutions of the Second Congress of Soviets. The meeting designated a committee to work out the terms for the restructuring of the Sovnarkom. Its ultimatum met, late that evening the union ordered its branches to call off the strike but to remain on the alert.25