Lower down the party ranks the rewards of office were not as great but the same venal attitude was much in evidence. Of course there were comrades who were motivated by the highest ideals, who lived modestly and who practised the egalitarianism which their leaders preached. Lenin himself lived in three small rooms of the Kremlin and was never motivated by financial gain. But there were bound to be many others for whom such ideals were mere rhetoric and whose motivation was more down-to-earth. Bribe-taking, thefts and the sale of public property were endemic within the party. Almost anything could be purchased from corrupt officials: foodstuffs, tobacco, alcohol, fuel, housing, guns and permits of all kinds. The wives and mistresses of the party bosses went around, in Zinoviev's words, 'with a jeweller's shop-window hanging round their necks'. Their homes were filled with precious objects earned as bribes. One official in the Foreign Ministry had two Sevres vases and a silver musket which had once belonged to Peter the Great. Not surprisingly, the most venal comrades tended to be found in the Cheka. After all, it was their job to 'squeeze the bourgeoisie'. Rabkrin (the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate) reported hundreds of cases where the Chekists had abused their power to extract money and jewels from their victims. Prisoners were often released in exchange for bribes. Even the Lubianka, the Moscow headquarters of the Cheka, was riddled with corruption. Bottles of cognac and other precious items would go mysteriously missing, while well-dressed prostitutes were often seen emerging from the secret buildings where these goods were stored.54
Lenin liked to explain the problem of corruption by the idea that impure elements from the petty-bourgeoisie had wormed their way into the Soviet apparatus as it became larger in the civil war. It is true that the lower levels of the state apparatus had many non-proletarians whose commitment to the Bolshevik regime was often mainly one of self-interest. But the problem of corruption was not confined to them. It engulfed the party as a whole, including those who had served it the longest and who tended to remain at its top. In short, the corruption was the result of the unbridled exercise of power.
It was not just a question of the Bolshevik monopoly of power in the Soviets. This had been completed in most of the cities by the summer of 1918 — well before the corruption became endemic. It was also a question of those Soviets being transformed from revolutionary bodies, in which the assembly was the supreme power and controlled the work of the executives, into bureaucratic organs of the party-state where all real power lay with the Bolsheviks
in the executives and the assembly had no control over them. The corruption was a result of the bureaucratization just as much as of the monopolization of power.
This dual process involved a number of simultaneous developments within the party-state. There was no master plan. When the Bolsheviks came to power they had no set idea — other than the general urge to control and centralize — of how to structure the institutional relationships between the party and the Soviets. These relationships grew spontaneously out of the general conditions of the revolution. The local Soviets and party organs were highly decentralized and improvised in nature during the early months of 1918. Many of them declared their own local 'republics' and 'dictatorships' which blindly ignored the directives of Moscow. Indeed it had become so common for the rural Soviets to tear up the decrees of the central government for cigarette paper that when Lenin gave his agitators the Decree on Land to take into the countryside he also gave them old calendars to distribute in the hope that these might be torn up instead of the decree.55 Kaluga Province became proverbial for its resistance to centralized authority in 1918. There was a Sovereign Soviet Republic of Autonomous Volosts in Kaluga. It was the closest Russia ever came to an anarchist structure of power, with the Soviet of each volost empowered to set up border controls in its territory. Thus the agents of the state in Moscow were obliged to obtain a passport from each separate Soviet as they passed from one village to another. Only during the civil war, when they stressed the need for strict centralized control to mobilize the resources of the country, did the Bolsheviks plan the general structure of the party-state.
Their first priority was to win control of the Soviets and other vital organs, such as the trade unions. The Mensheviks and SRs still had a presence in these bodies, albeit as 'non-party' delegates after their parties were banned in the summer of 1918.* All the Communist electoral tactics employed in this century to subvert democratic bodies were first developed in the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks engaged in widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation of the opposition. Voting at Soviet and trade union congresses was nearly always done by an open show of hands so that to vote against the Bolsheviks was to invite harassment from the Cheka, whose presence was always strongly felt at election meetings. With a secret ballot the Bolsheviks would not have won very many elections. 'Soviets without the Communists!' was increasingly the slogan of the workers and the peasants. But the Bolsheviks did away with this 'convention of bourgeois democracy' on the grounds that a secret ballot was no longer needed in the 'higher form of freedom' apparently enjoyed by the Soviet people.
* From 1918 to 1922 the ban on the Mensheviks and the SRs would be briefly lifted from time to time. But even during these periods the Bolsheviks would persecute their activists.
And with the system of open voting — which was the tradition of the Russian village commune — there were very few elections they could lose. Even the artists of the Marinsky Opera, hardly a bastion of Communism, voted unanimously for the Bolsheviks in the Soviet elections of 1919.
The enforcement of voting by party slates also worked to the advantage of the Bolsheviks. As the only legal party within the Soviets, they alone could meet as a caucus to co-ordinate strategy, whereas other parties and factions remained divided on the Congress floor. It meant that, even as a small minority, the Bolsheviks could often win elections in the local Soviets by presenting themselves as the only party capable of being held responsible for the actions of the central government. With a bare majority the Bolshevik slate in its entirety would often form the Soviet executive rather than seats being allocated according to the strength of the different factions. It was a case of winner takes all.
Once in command of the Soviet executives, the Bolsheviks aimed to centralize power under their control. Soviet congresses were seldom called and, in their absence, power was exercised by the Soviet executives along with their permanent departmental staffs, which were appointed in each policy area. The socialist opposition called this the ispolkomshchina, or executive dictatorship. During the revolutionary period the Soviet executives had been largely made up of peasant and worker volunteers. But they were now increasingly made up of full-time professional bureaucrats paid by the central party-state and only seldom re-elected. Plough-pushers were giving way to pen-pushers.
Increasingly, the work of the Soviets was driven by the party apparatus. The party was expanding its control into both the administrative and the political branches of the state. Until 1919, the party as such had all but disappeared as its forces entered the Soviets. The Central Committee barely existed — Lenin and Sverdlov did most of its work together on the back of an envelope — and had only the weakest connections with the local party cells. Some Bolsheviks even suggested that the party had served its purpose and could be abolished now that it controlled the Soviets. It seemed to many of the Bolsheviks that the party cells were, in Nikolai Krestinky's words, no more than the 'agitation departments of the local Soviets'. All this changed in the spring of 1919. For one thing, the sudden death of Sverdlov, who had stood at the head of both the party and the Soviet bureaucracies, suggested the need for separation between the two structures. For another, it now appeared to the Bolsheviks, struggling to cope with the chaotic Soviet apparatus in the civil war, that the party structure could be used to introduce more centralized forms of Soviet control.
Following the Eighth Party Congress in March the central party apparatus was built up in preparation to take over control of the Soviets. A five-man Polit
buro was established (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev and Krestinsky) to
decide party policy. The staff of the Central Committee was increased five-fold during the course of the following year, with nine departments and various bureaux appended to it to formulate policies in various areas, together with a Party Secretariat and a special Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) to allocate party forces throughout the country. A strict centralism was imposed on the local party cells: their members were now told to carry out the orders of the higher party bodies rather than those of the Soviets. Since the chairmen of the local Soviets were invariably party members — and often the chairman of the local party cell — this effectively subordinated the whole of the Soviet apparatus to the party. The Bolsheviks began to talk of the Soviets and other public bodies, such as the trade unions, as 'transmission belts' of party rule. It was a phrase that Stalin would make famous.
The higher party organs tended increasingly to appoint their own special commissars to Soviet positions hitherto elected from below. By 1920, the Central Committee was making about 1,000 such postings a month. The provincial party organs made similar postings at the district and volost level. Os'kin's in Tula was one of the most notorious practitioners of this 'appointmentism'. Its aim was to increase the Centre's control over the local apparatus by sending down its most loyal and trusted comrades to take command of it in military style. But this was sometimes counter-productive. The roaming commissars were prone to alienate the local activists by riding roughshod over their interests. This gave rise to growing protests among the Bolshevik rank and file against the party's 'militarization', which resulted in the atrophy of the local party organizations and their alienation from the leadership. Perhaps even more importantly, the frequent use of such appointments also meant that many Soviets were ruled by party bosses wholly alien to the local region and thus perhaps more inclined to the abuse of power. Semen Kanatchikov was a typical representative of this nomadic commissar class. Although a native of Moscow province, he was appointed by the Central Committee to senior posts in Tomsk, Perm, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, the Tatar Republic and Petrograd during the course of the civil war. For nearly two years, he did not see his wife and two little children, whom he left in hiding in Barnaul. This 'appointmentism' could only add to the growing sense, both among the people and the party rank and file, that Soviet power was something alien and oppressive.56
* * * Not surprisingly for a party-state that aimed to control the whole of society, the Soviet bureaucracy ballooned spectacularly during the first years of Bolshevik rule. Whereas the tsarist state had left much in the hands of private and public institutions, such as the zemstvos and the charities, the Soviet regime abolished all of these and assumed direct responsibility for the activities which they had performed. The result was the bureaucratization of virtually every aspect of life
in Russia, from banking and industry to education. From 1917 to 1921 the number of government employees more than quadrupled, from 576,000 to 2.4 million. By 1921, there were twice as many bureaucrats as workers in Russia. They were the social base of the regime. This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy. Moscow, in Lenin's words, was 'bloated with officials': it housed nearly a quarter of a million of them, one-third of the total workforce in the city by the end of 1920. The centre of Moscow became one vast block of offices, as committees were piled on top of councils and departments on top of commissions.57
Perhaps a third of the bureaucracy was employed in the regulation of the planned economy. It was an absurd situation: while the economy came to a standstill, its bureaucracy flourished. The country was desperately short of fuel but there was an army of bureaucrats to regulate its almost non-existent distribution. There was no paper in the shops but a mountain of it in the Soviet offices (90 per cent of the paper made in Russia during the first four years of Soviet rule was consumed by the bureaucracy). One of the few really busy factories was the Moscow Telephone Factory. Such was the demand of this new officialdom for telephones that it had a waiting list of 12,000 orders.58
This correlation — empty factories and full offices — was not accidental. The scarcer goods were, the harder it became to control their distribution, since the black market thrived on shortages, so that the state increased its intervention. The result was the proliferation of overlapping offices within the economy. Apart from the central commissariats (e.g. food, labour, transport) and their local organs in the Soviets, there was the network of organs subordinate to the VSNKh, the All-Russian Council for the Economy, including its local economic councils, the manufacturing trusts and the special departments for the regulation of individual commodities (Glavki). Then there were also the ad hoc agencies set up by the regime for military supply, like the Council of Labour and Defence or such acronymic monsters as Chusosnabarm (the Extraordinary Agency for the Supply of the Army), which in principle could over-rule the other economic organs. Of course, in practice, there was only confusion and rivalry between the different organs. The more the state tried to centralize control, the less real control it actually had. Lower down the scale, at factory level, the bureaucracy proved just as ineffective. For every 100 factory workers there were 16 factory officials by 1920. In some factories the figure was much higher: of the 7,000 people employed at the famous Putilov metal plant, only 2,000 were blue-collar workers; the rest were petty officials and clerks. Such were the material advantages of a white-collar job, not least access to food and goods in short supply, that such parasites were bound to grow in number as the economic crisis deepened. All the strike resolutions of these years complained about factory officials 'living off the backs of the workers'.59
Lenin liked to claim that the problem of bureaucratism was a legacy of the tsarist era. It is true that the Soviet bureaucracy inherited the culture of the tsarist one. But by 1921 it was also ten times bigger than the tsarist state. There was some continuity of the personnel, especially in the central organs of the state. Over half the bureaucrats in the Moscow offices of the commissariats in August 1918 had worked in some branch of the administration before October 1917. Many of the central organs also employed armies of young bourgeois ladies, most of whom had never worked before, to do the petty paper work. One eye-witness recalls them walking by their hundreds every morning through the snow from the Moscow suburbs to the centre of the city. There they worked all day in unheated offices, their wet shoes and clothes never drying out, before walking back to the suburbs to help feed their hungry relatives. Otherwise, however, the lower you went down the apparatus the more it was dominated by the lower classes entering officialdom for the first time. The majority of these elements, especially in provincial towns, came from the lower-middle classes — what Marxists called the 'petty bourgeoisie': bookkeepers, shop assistants and petty clerks; small-time traders and artisans; activists of the co-operatives; engineers and factory officials; and all those who might have once worked as technicians or professionals in the zemstvos and municipal organs. As for the workers, in whose name the regime had been founded, they represented a very small proportion of those who entered the Soviet bureaucracy: certainly no more than 10 per cent (based on those with blue-collar occupations before 1917). Even in the management of industry workers made up less than one-third of officials. It is reasonable to conclude that most of these lower-middle strata were attracted to the Soviet regime less by their own revolutionary ideals than by the relatively high wages and short working-hours of its officials. It was certainly a more attractive prospect than the cold and hunger that awaited those from the older bourgeoisie who chose instead to turn their backs on it. The typical day of a Soviet official was spent gossiping in corridors, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, or standing in queues for the special rations that went only to the Soviet elite.60
In the countryside the influence of the Soviet regime penetrated further than the tsarist had. During the civil war the majority of the Soviet executives at volost level were transformed from democratic
organs of peasant revolution into bureaucratic organs of state taxation. In the Volga region, where this process has been studied, 71 per cent of the volost Soviet executives had at least one Bolshevik member by the autumn of 1919, compared with only 38 per cent in the previous spring. Two-thirds of all the executive members were registered as Bolsheviks. This gave the regime a foothold in the volost townships: in the volost Soviet executives, which like their counterparts at the higher level concentrated power in their own hands at the expense of the Soviet congress, the Bolsheviks could count on a more or less reliable body to enforce the food levies
and mobilizations. Having lost control of the Soviet, the peasants retreated to their villages, rallied round their communes and turned their backs on the volost Soviet. The growing conflict between the peasantry and party-state was thus fought on the same battle-lines — between the villages and the volost township — as the conflict had been fought between the peasantry and the gentry-state.61
The key to this process of Bolshevik state-building was the support of that young and literate class of peasants who had left the villages in the war. Os'kin was a typical example. In the Volga region 60 per cent of the members of the volost Soviet executives were aged between 18 and 35 (compared with 31 per cent of the electorate) and 66 per cent were literate (compared with 41 per cent). This was the generation who had benefited from the boom in rural schooling at the turn of the century and had been mobilized during the war. In 1918 they had returned to their villages newly skilled in military techniques and conversant with the two great ideologies of the urban world, socialism and atheism. The peasants were often inclined to view them as their natural leaders during the revolution on the land. The old peasant patriarchs, like Maliutin in Andreevskoe, were generally not literate enough to cope with the complex tasks of administration now that the gentry and the rural intelligentsia were no longer there to guide them. To many of these peasant soldiers, whose aspirations had been broadened by their absence from the village, the prospect of working in the Soviet appeared as a chance to rise up in the world. After the excitement of the army it could often seem a depressing prospect to have to return to the drudgery of peasant farming and to the 'dark' world of the village. By working in the Soviet and joining the party they could enhance their own prestige and power. They could get a clean office job, with all its perks and privileges, and an entry ticket into the new urban-dominated civilization of the Soviet regime. Throughout the peasant world Communist regimes have been built on the fact that it is the ambition of every literate peasant son to become a clerk.
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 Page 106
